I take issue with Bob Knutson and the Record-Bee”s Publisher, Gary Dickson, over their characterization of the protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
They seem to be working from the same crib sheet of complaints about them. (Defecating in public, check. Lazy, check. self-indulgent and spoiled, check.) I think both of you share a basic lack of information about the protests and why they are needed. But before I explain why the protests are needed I would like both of you to step away from the FOX News Network propaganda machine and put down your remotes slowly. Please do not make any sudden moves while doing it.
The economy is in the doldrums as we all know. The reported unemployment rate is 9 percent in this country. But this is not the real unemployment rate. The real number, which includes the long-term unemployed that have just given up, is between 15 and 20 percent.
You should think of it like musical chairs. There simply is not enough work for the number of people seeking employment. The chairs are being pulled out one-by-one and when the music stops less people are able find a position. I know it is very appealing to blame the unemployed, which both of you are doing, but that is not helping the situation.
This is the first time since the Great Depression that the unemployment rate hasn”t rebounded after the original recession was over. It is very easy to be patronizing about the people who have had the chair pulled out from under them and assume they deserve it in some way.
Most of them don”t deserve it though and are simply less lucky than the ones who are working.
But the saddest part of it all is the huge inequality of economics between the haves and the have-nots in this country. The top 1 percent control between 20 and 40 percent of the nation”s wealth. And contrary to what the Publisher of the Record-Bee thinks, the vast majority of those people are not great innovators like Steven Jobs was.
No, most of them are just managers and administrative staff on Wall Street and multinational corporations. And the reason they make so much money is because they have gamed the system for their own benefit through deregulation of financial laws and through lobbying. I sympathize with both of you. It “is” awful to have to give up the Horatio Alger archetype of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
I mourn the passing of the country I grew up in where that was the way most of the very wealthy got their money.
The reason we need the demonstrators is because both political parties have abandoned that dream. We need a little creative destruction right now so we can get back the country we used to have.
Eric Habegger
Lakeport
