Lesson: What is Occupy Wall Street?/ExerciseL1

Listening Exercise

Watch the video and complete the text according to what you can understand.

The Occupy Movement suddenly and sustained longer than was first imagined. But now that the Occupy movement is down for the winter, what will it be remembered for? One of their main rallying cries is “we are the 99%”. It's a reference to this fact. Taking the entire of the U.S. you will find that merely 1% own nearly 50% of all our wealth and with wealth comes power and more wealth. In fact, you will that the wealthiest 1% of Americans over the last 40 years have grown increasingly wealthier and wealthier while the remaining 99% stay relatively . And while the 1% have been more power, they haven’t always used it for good of society. Okay then, regardless if you see this as a problem or not, what confusing for some people and plain frustrating to others is that nobody what Occupiers really want. Even Occupiers themselves seem to have different reasons for occupying making people think that they're just being . Movements should have a very clear goal, like “let's elect this president” or “let's create these new laws”. But the Occupy Movement is different. It to be saying things like “let's pay attention to this issue”, “let's have a conversation”, “let's listen to each other, especially the marginalized and see we can agree”. It doesn’t have one charismatic leader but decentralized. It doesn’t have one plain agenda but thousands and thousands of voices connecting together. It is much like the difference between a model of top-down power and the way the internet works. So it seems that Occupy Wall Street is an internet movement. You see, what most people don’t understand is that Occupy Wall Street is not acting like 20th century politics but instead, it seems to prototyping something new and we will to see how it evolves.