Here’s To The Survival And Growth Of The Occupy Movement

A Commentary by Doug Draper

 “The movement must address itself to restructuring the whole of American society. The problems we are dealing with are not going to be solved until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.”

–         Martin Luther King, 1967

 This past Monday, January 16, I drove around Niagara Square in Buffalo, New York where the Occupy Buffalo encampment was first set up last October and lo and behold, even through some of the frigid weather we’ve been having lately, the encampment was still there.

The Occupy Buffalo encampment in the shadow of Buffalo, New York's city hall. Photo by Doug Draper

That Monday also happened to be Martin Luther King Day in America and I can’t help but believe that the late civil rights leader would be pleased to see this encampment and the fight for economic justice it stands for. There can also be little doubt, given King’s record of perseverance, that he would want to see the Occupy Movement in the United States and Canada that this Buffalo encampment is part of survive and grow.

 I predict that the Occupy Movement will grow in the months ahead because the economic conditions that gave rise to the movement this past fall – the growing wage gap between the rich and almost everyone else, the loss of good-paying jobs, the high cost of living and the diminishing of health care and other essential services – are not going to change.

In fact, there are plenty of reasons to believe, based on report after report in the business pages of the Globe and Mail, New York Times and other newspapers that things are going to get worse for everyone from young going to school and trying to find a job to seniors living off of pensions and health benefits, and for everyone in between.

Indeed, this New Year barely got started when there was the news, that while the top 100 CEOs in Canada, according to figures now available for 2010, received a 27 per cent wage and benefit increase over the previous year, workers at a plant that makes locomotives in London, Ontario were being asked to take a 50 per cent cut in their salaries. The underlying fear, of course, is that if they don’t take the cut to their wages and give up some of their benefits, their jobs, like so many others, will be shipped overseas.

Then you look behind almost any set of figures Statistics Canada puts out on job growth in recent times and find out that a majority of the new jobs are part time or casual, and barely offering an income above the minimum wage. No wonder there is so much despair and fear for the future, including among so many young people who are giving up hope they will ever have the same opportunities generations who came of age in the 1950s, 60s and 70s did. Out of that fear and despair came the Occupy Movement folks.

 Now I will admit that my prediction that the Occupy Movement will grow comes with a some wishful thinking because I believe that this movement must grow to include every person who believes that everyone, not just a very few in this country should have a fair and equal opportunity to a job and a wage that makes for a healthy, prosperous life.

Without a healthy middle class, how can we have health communities? How can we have a healthy economy?  Retailers across Canada and the U.S. bemoaned the fact that this year’s pre-Christmas and Boxing Day sales were pretty flat. “Holiday shoppers resist opening wallets,” read a recent headline in the Globe and Mail’s business pages. Well who is going to be able to afford to buy Christmas gifts without going further and further into debt, let alone purchase cars or homes and the furnishings that go with them, if more people are falling into the poverty zone and we no longer have a prospering middle class?

There are some who see the Occupy Movement as an enemy of capitalism. From my talks with some of the ‘occupiers’ and from everything else I’ve read about them, they are against the kind of predatory capitalism that siphons all of the wealth out of a business for a few and leaves little or nothing for the people who worked there.

 Henry Ford was a capitalist, but he was smart and far-sighted enough to know that if he paid his workers a decent, living wage, they would be able to buy his cars and a home and some of the other comforts of life, and help the whole economy grow. Call it a sharing of wealth, economic justice or whatever you want, but that is the kind of capitalism we need to get back.

 So bring the Occupy Movement on!

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