From the NYT:
The idea behind the 99 percent catchphrase has its roots in a decade's worth of reporting about the income gap between the richest Americans and the rest, and more directly in May in a Vanity Fair column by the liberal economist Joseph E. Stiglitz titled "Of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent." The slogan that resulted in September identified both a target, the "one percent," and a theoretical constituency, everyone else. Rhetorically, "it was really clever," said David S. Meyer, a University of California, Irvine, professor who studies social movements. "Deciding whom to blame is a key task of all politics," he wrote in his blog about the phrase. "It's something that kind of puts your opponents on the defensive," he said in an interview.

For the full story, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/us/we-are-the-99-percent-joins-the-cul...

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