I am kind of pleased to see the group of lazy, selfish rich people in our world called something besides the old term, the rich, or called capitalists, or anything else the left used to call them. Thanks to the Occupy movement, we can now call them the 1%, which is a very exact definition, and encourages even those who are ambitious to join them to realize how unreachably distant they are from us.

How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the 1 Percent | | AlterNet.

This story of the struggle of the Norwegians and Swedes to break the power of the 1% over their economies is actually pretty sketchy and does little to inspire hope for ourselves. The best part is that the Scandinavians did manage to do so, and that even conservative people there realize that pumping money from the top, where it does nothing but collect into a diseased swelling that cripples the economy, into the bottom, where it explodes upward in a frictionless orgy of spending and consumption, is the only way capitalism can work efficiently in a world that can no longer expand.

We’re living in a country that has been frantically creating frontiers for over a century to make up for the lack of one in the West. The American dream was born in the age of the possibilities nourished by frontier spaces where lack of money was less of an obstacle than tenacity and hard work. The dream continued as technologies created new frontiers where intelligence could contrive fortunes with only small amounts of money. Now, even though we have come to depend on the idea of constant innovation in technology to further our dream, we have come to a point where only rewarding the clever and the 1% is failing us on a national level. As long as the crush of uncontrolled and unintelligent capitalism, capitalism as primitive and brutish as a lust for efficiency can make it, continues to grind down the majority of our citizens, we can never realize the stability and prosperity these two Scandinavian countries have provided for their people, with far fewer resources. And no frontiers to speak of.

What we need is a Paycheck Party, a labor party for everyone who works, rather than a party for just those who join a union. Together, every worker, rich and poor, stupid or clever, can agree to start lurching towards a sensible economy that pumps money directly from the 1% and into our hot little hands.