What is your agenda?

Editor,

I can't imagine why Mr. Brooks left unemployment off his list of short-term problems and his list of long-term problems facing the American public. Unemployment is, after all, structural now in the sense that as much manufacturing, computer programming, customer service, and other employment as possible has been and is continuing to be permanently off-shored by the 1% of Americans who own, by virtue of having bought it, policy-making in the by-definition autocratic boardrooms of American business and the halls of American government.

I can't imagine either why Mr. Brooks would refer to the Occupy Wall Street movement as a "sideshow."

Certainly when the 95% of Americans who together own only as much wealth as the richest 5% assemble in the streets to voice their dissatisfaction with Wall Street practices, condoned by a government captured by deep-pocketed campaign contributors and high-priced lobbyists, that have resulted in millions of home foreclosures, indentured servitude for college graduates, mass layoffs of public school teachers, crumbling infrastructure, multi-trillion-dollar military adventures abroad, declining real wages for the last 30 years, the disappearance of defined -benefit pensions, a full-frontal assault on labor unions, skyrocketing healthcare costs, and huge giveaways of taxpayers' dollars to Wall Street banks and other giant corporations, such a demonstration is hardly a sideshow. It is the beginning of an honest, meaning not distorted by corporate media, public conversation about how to correct the corruption and inequality that have come to define business and politics in the United States.

I can't imagine either why Mr. Brooks played the antisemitic card in this op-ed, against Ad Busters, in order to tar with a brush that thousands of demonstrators are entirely unaware of a movement that is inclusive to a fault of every conceivable minority, majority, and individual in its conception and its process.

What is your agenda, Mr. Brooks?

Re: "The Milquetoast Radicals" (10/11/2011)