Unrest that began in Wisconsin has arrived in Washington. Workers and activists took to the streets and expressed their frustration over the economy, the US government inaction and the widening wealth gap.
Hundreds of people stormed and occupied the offices of the BGR Group, a high-profile lobbying and public relations firm, where Wisconsin Republicans were holding a big ticket fundraising dinner.
“There’s no reason that everyone shouldn’t be able to get a little bit of the pie. There’s no reason that the top 2% should get everything,” said Charles Ensley, a protester who traveled from Missouri to attend the rally.
According to a recent poll, Americans’ level of confidence in the US system of government is the lowest it has been in 35 years. Workers are also expressed their rage at big corporations and lobbyists who are seen as hijacking American democracy.
“We’ll be here until we get the attention of the entire United States, working class families, everyone,” said Roy Ringwood, a member of the Sheet Metal Workers Union. “We’ll be in every state and every city until the recognition is here.”
Analysts say protests like this one sweeping across the US are symptom of the growing unrest spreading across the country. Food prices rose 3.9 percent in February to hit the largest monthly gain in 36 years.
Republican Congressman Ron Paul, chairman of the Committee on Financial Services, held a hearing March 17th on the role the Federal Reserve has played in the skyrocketing food and fuel prices.
“That’s the tragedy of inflation, it redistributes the money to the people who get it first and takes it from those whose wages do not rise,” said Joseph Salerno, Economics Chair at Pace University, who testified at the hearing.
Gasoline costs for the average American household are expected to reach $2,800 this year, the highest in history. Analyst James Grant argued the Fed was to blame.
“What is doubly disturbing is the people who run our government, who run our banks, are prepared to defend away the prices of food and fuel as not important,” Grant explained. “So people are being stretched financially and I think some of them are also galled because they see this dismissive attitude of the Federal Reserve.”
Author and investment banker Lewis Lehrman testified that speculation on Wall Street has brought more hunger to Main Street.
“The American dream is a bust for the moment for a lot of people, but not for the bankers and the speculators on Wall Street,” Lehrman said. “They are nimble enough and they operate in liquid market vehicles like stocks, bonds, commodities so they are able to preserve their wealth in inflationary moments.”
Radio host Alex Jones said Americans simply do not trust their government. He explained globalism is destroying everything, and it has always been their plan to cause unrest in order to eventually bring in global governance by way hindering the middle class.
“It’s all very carefully orchestrated,” he said. “This is NAFTA. This is GATT. This is deindustrialization. This is globalism. This is the out of control regulations, smothering jobs in North America and shipping them to the third world and developing countries like China.”
Jones said this is only the beginning; the unrest is going to get worse. Americans and others will fight back, as unions and the middle class continue to suffer from globalist programs. It has all been planned and set in motion behind closed doors.
“Barack Obama, run by Wall Street, openly called for more taxes because they are going to transfer those taxes off shore to the big mega central banks that are represented here in the US by the private Federal Reserve,” Jones said. “This is economic conquest against the entire world.”
Bankers engineered a global agenda to benefit their goals of a world controlled by oligarchs, he argued.