Several hundred Occupy Wall Street protestors joined some of New York's largest community groups on Tuesday to protest growing inequality in the Empire State and throughout the country.
Their first stop: the front door of the building in which Rupert Murdoch owns a $44 million, 20-room penthouse triplex overlooking Central Park.
The “billionaire's tour” was put together by the types of community organizing groups that have been routinely demonized by personalities on the Murdoch-owned Fox News Channel. Fox was the loudest champion of the 2009 crusade against ACORN, once the largest of New York's community organizing groups. Crowding the front door, marchers echoed the demands of the Occupy Wall Street protests for a more fair and equitable economy, beginning with state and national tax structures.
It is difficult to think of a better symbol of the current system's skew than Murdoch, who has a personal net worth estimated by Forbes at $7.4 billion. Wealthy New Yorkers are set to enjoy lower state taxes if, as expected, the state's so-called “millionaires' tax” is allowed to expire in December -- even as budget shortfalls force layoffs of teachers.
Other stops on Tuesday's tour included the New York homes of industrialist and Tea Party patron David Koch, hedge fund manager John Paulson, and bankers Jamie Dimon and Howard Milstein, who serves as Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Thruway Authority Chairman. The protesters carried a giant fake check made out to “the top one percent” for $5 billion, which is one estimate of how much New York State will lose by letting the millionaire's tax expire.