As Occupy Wall Street went global today, with protests in more than 80 countries including China, Japan, Indonesia, Italy and England, Andy Dao and Ivan Cash joined the effort, not by marching alongside the protestor, but by distributing dollar bills.
These weren’t any regular dollar bills though. These ones have facts printed on them. Facts that Dao, an art director at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, and Cash, a former Wieden+Kennedy art director, hope will inform the greater public about what is going on in our country.
They are calling their project Occupy George.
“Money talks, but not loud enough for the 99%,” says the intro to their website. “By circulating bills stamped with fact-based infographics, Occupy George informs the public of America’s Daunting economic disparity one bill at a time. Because money knowledge is power.”
The website, occupygeorge.com, provides a way to circulate five different stamped bills over Facebook, Twitter, and Flicker. You can also find a downloadable template on the site, so that you can create your own stamped dollars.
The dollars illustrate facts like "in America the average CEO earns 185 times more than the average worker" (see below).
For those interested in joining the protests, the site also provides a map of Occupy Wall Street events across the country and links to each of the local "Occupy" groups.
Featured on Creativity Online’s homepage today, the site and Twitter handle (@occupygeorge) launched yesterday just in time for today’s protests.
If this catches on, which I think it has the potential to do, these dollar bills could be a really powerful tool in spreading the real message behind Occupy Wall Street, which many are still unclear about.
After all, art has a great amount of power in communicating with the masses. To quote from the philosophy of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, “art is the stutter step that freezes the opponent.”
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| An Occupy George dollar showing the average pay of a CEO versus the average pay of the worker. |
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