Occupy Toronto/Occupy Wall Street

It’s October 25, 2011, and the City of Toronto has been occupied for the past week and a half by protests demanding change to our capitalist system. This protest started in New York at Wall Street, the heart of the world economy. The protests at Wall Street have now been there for more than a month. Hundreds and thousands of people came to protest and occupied downtown New York, demanding Wall Steet and the bankers to change their ways. For the first day or two of the protest, the mainstream media did not cover or mention the protestors or their demands. It was only after some high-profile celebrities and academics like Alec Baldwin and Dr. Cornel West showed up to support the protest that the media began paying attention. The question that the media and everyone else was asking was what did the protestors want specifically? What the media and everyone else learned is that the protestors did not have a specific demand that they all agreed on, but what was evident was that they wanted to change the system of capitalism, which they felt failed them. The protestors were young, old, black, white, and they all had different concerns, but they agreed that the system of capitalism was failing them. The protestors called themselves the 99 percent and their anger was towards the 1 percent – the super rich who they claim undermine the system. The message behind Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Toronto is simple: that people feel that the capitalist system we have is set up against them, and that the 1 percent, who Karl Marx called the Bourgeois, the capitalists who own the means of production, the corporations, are benefiting the most and those who work for the capitalists – the wage earners – are taken advantage of. The system we have needs to be changed. We have a system that rewards people who make money from money at Wall Street by reducing corporate tax rates, and banks reward their bankers with huge bonuses while the average person is losing his or her job or is working twice as hard for the same wage. The concerns of the protestors at Occupy Toronto are very legitimate concerns, which we should all pay attention to. The poor and working are falling behind day by day, year by year, while the top 1 percent is making more money than ever. I think it’s time that poor and working people got together to demand that our government be accountable to the people that have elected them – not to Wall Street and big money – and think Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Toronto are examples of the power of the people to stand up to the influence that big money has in government. This movement is a great start.