The Broken Kingdom

A Bedtime Story for the 99 Percent

By Teach The Children
Occupy Wall Street.org
October 12, 2011

Teach the Children. Spread this story. Let them not make the
same mistakes.

Once upon a time, there was a kingdom named Delusia that was
very broken.

The King seemed to have no control at all, and the court jesters
had taken over.

These jesters spent all their time fighting over who was more
right and the Kingdom became neglected.

The powerful nobleman of the Kingdom took advantage of this
to expand their power and wealth.

They paid the jesters lots of money to change the laws of the
land to benefit them and their friends.

Even the jesters who meant well took the money because they needed it to stay in power.

The noblemen bought up all the shops of the local merchants and expanded the size of their shops so that they could make the rules.

Then the noblemen made the merchants fire half of the people
who worked for them and make the rest do all the extra work.

Then the nobleman started to hire people from other kingdoms
to work for even less money.

This put many people in the kingdom out of work.

The ones that still had jobs had to do whatever they were told because they needed to work.

Then the nobleman worked to make the houses cost more money. The people could not afford to buy them anymore.

But the nobleman pretended to be good and lent the people money
to buy houses.

After many of the people owed them money, they made the houses worth less money than ever before.

Now the people were in trouble. They had to work even harder to keep their houses, but many lost their houses.

During the reign of the previous King, two wars had broken out
and were still going on. They were very expensive.

At the same time, the nobleman convinced the jesters to change
the kingdom taxes so that the money the nobleman made from
the pieces of the shops they owned would pay much less taxes
then the taxes people paid from working in them.

This helped the nobleman expand their fortunes and have even
more control of the jesters.

The nobleman bought up all the town criers and threatened the
jesters that they would tell bad stories about them if they did
not do what they wanted, so the jesters did.

All of this strained the resources of Delusia. The people were very upset. Everything cost so much money and they had so little.

All the towns in the kingdom were getting less money from the King, so they had to raise their own taxes and fire people who used to work for the towns.

More people were out of work and there were very few jobs to go around.

The nobleman took advantage of this and started to convince the people to work for free.

They called them volunteers and had the nobleman’s shops start
to say people had to work as a volunteer first before they could
be hired to make money, so even less paying jobs were available.

The people were angry, so the nobleman took advantage. They convinced the people that the problem was taxes from Delusia.

They convinced the people to keep the king and the jesters from raising any taxes.

The nobleman promised they would make more jobs, but only if
they could keep paying less taxes.

They never did create jobs.

They blamed this on the people because the people were not buying anything from the shops.

The nobleman said they could not make more jobs, unless the people bought more from their shops. The people could not buy things because the nobleman had all the money.

Then the nobleman became even greedier.

They moved the managers of the shops to other kingdoms so their shops did not have to pay the taxes of Delusia.

This put more strain on Delusia and it had to borrow money from other kingdoms to pay its bills.

This created much fighting between the King and the jesters which made the people angry.

They blamed it on the King because they could not see how the nobleman had fooled them all to get rich.

Delusia seemed doomed, but then something happened.

A few good nobleman showed how they were paying less taxes
then the people who worked for them.

Slowly the people pushed the King and the jesters to change some rules, so that the Kingdom could be saved.

First, they needed to make it less expensive for the King and the jesters to be elected, so that they do not need to take money from the noblemen and in return owe the noblemen favors.

Then they changed Delusia’s taxes, so that the noblemen paid
their fair share.

The noblemen realized that the only way they could pay less taxes was to hire more people in their shops and make new things.

This created jobs. Those jobs made more money for Delusia.

As Delusia took in more money, it was able to spend more to fix
roads and bridges, and to give the towns to hire teachers, police
and firefighters which created more jobs.

As more people went to work, they spent more money at the shops.

This gave the merchants more money to spend on supplies.

This created even more jobs.

The people were happy and they all lived happily ever after.

http://occupywallst.org/forum/the-broken-kingdom-a-bedtime-
story-for-the-99-perc/