After enduring nearly four years of a punishing recession driven by laissez-faire policies crafted in the forges of the George W. Bush era, it appears that the America's Left has finally woken up to the need for popular dissent.
The Occupy Wall Street marches in New York City, which have entered their fourth week now, articulated their initial intention as holding bankers and hedge fund managers responsible for engendering the financial collapse of 2008 and the ensuing economic quagmire.
This week they adopted a more direct tack and one that struck at the very edifice of free-market capitalism that others in the United States have embraced — they plan to occupy the areas where millionaires, maybe even billionaires, reside, in the posh uptown locales of Manhattan.
On Tuesday, somewhere between 400 and 800 protesters from the OWS movement were reportedly planning to move from their downtown into the leafy neighbourhoods many blocks north, as part of a “Millionaires March.”
Targets of this new phase of the protest were said to include the homes of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, billionaire businessman David Koch, financier Howard Milstein, hedge fund maven John Paulson and News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, media reports noted. Fox News reported that the marchers planned to hold oversize cheques that they said demonstrate how much less the wealthy will pay when New York State's two per cent tax on millionaires expires at the end of the year.
“Ninety-nine per cent of the residents of New York are going to suffer from this tax giveaway so the one per cent who already live in absolute luxury can put more money in their pockets,” the media outlet quoted Doug Forand, one of the march organisers, as saying, and he added, “This is fiscally, economically and morally wrong.”
