Wall Street Protests

There is a word which describes the huge disparity between the so-called 99 per cent and the 1 per cent, and that slips from my 80 year old mind at the moment. Like so many words it has dropped from our vocabulary because it is so much a part of the endemic nature of things that it nearly has no meaning (something like dis ingenious, described in earlier BLOG). Thus the "main stream media" is having a little difficulty putting "a handle" on what is happening around Wall Street (and now throughout the Nation).

In the late fifties, my former wife and I were hitchhiking through the Midlands in England. It was mid afternoon, I was starting to wonder where we would stay that night, and then were picked up by a lorry (truck) driver, Alf Lornley from Leeds. He was on his way home and suggested after a brief conversation that we accompany him, that we could stay with he and his wife and children. We were so pleased that we just accepted and off we went.

For the next two or three days I rode with him in his truck and made coal deliveries. One afternoon we visited a tiny place (two rooms, the aged woman lived in the kitchen and kept warm by the little coal stove), which he described as common for aging people, living on next to nothing. He often gave some of these people small amounts of coal to supplement what they could afford, and he and his wife lived in very modest circumstances to say the least.

How would the one percent understand the situation in this all brick, post industrial city in England, and how would they emphasize and create programs to correct it? What will the rapidly deteriorating conditions for the ninety-nine per cent of Americans be understood and changed by those who insist that "trickle down economics" will change things? The protests go on, as they swell up and proliferate.