Editor:
The critics of the Occupy movement like to say “They don’t know what they want.”
I say they do. They want an end to the glaring disparity between the poor and the rich.
The Conference Board of Canada tells us that not since the 1920s has there been such a gulf between the very rich and the rest of us.
The history of the decades since shows the willingness of weak governments to see the growth of personal wealth of the very powerful and the growing spread of inequity and inequality. Class warfare against the working people who supported economies by their growing tax burden.
During the past three decades we have seen the achievement of those goals of corporations and their government collaborators. One per cent of the population with as much wealth as the poorest 40 per cent of the population.
Growing unemployment and declining opportunities.
Thousands of young people who see very clearly that they are inheriting a world in which the one per cent will be just fine, but one in which they will struggle endlessly and uncomfortably to survive. No mansions, no private aircraft, no yachts, no private islands for the desperate bottom 20 per cent.
Many working at part-time minimum wage jobs, which give them the status of being among the numbers of working poor. What happened to the concept of a living wage for all workers?
That’s what the Occupy people want. They want some greater measure of equality in our society. They want the very wealthy to start paying their way.
They want the billionaires to start paying taxes proportional to the taxes paid by their workers.
The Occupy movement is the most recent expression of the class warfare that has been waged one-sidedly and powerfully by the wealthy for several decades. It has begun and will continue. There are too many who have nothing to lose.
John Dressler
Williams Lake