Fletcher’s ‘poor bashing’ is tiresome
Dear editor,
I wonder why Black Press continues to publish the right wing drivel of Tom Fletcher.
I get it that he does not like socialism, the NDP, poor people, unions, and the “nanny “ state” but it is so boring to read the same predictable bashing of the poor, the unions, the NDP, the social programs that make life more bearable for the poor over and over again.
In his recent article on the social housing we are supposed to accept that poor people are less than human feral creatures who should be working in the woods.
He chooses to ignore the reality that homelessness and unemployment are the direct result of the blind adherence to the neoliberal economic ideology that enables capitalism to reduce wages and costs by moving production to offshore counties like China.
It was the Paul Martin Liberal government that slashed funding for social housing to satisfy the demands of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives to balance the budget.
This same neoliberal economic strategy gave us the 2008 economic crash from which we have yet to recover. So it is not surprising that we have so many homeless people today; we have shipped their jobs overseas and slashed the social programs that would support them.
I strongly encourage fellow citizens to read The Spirit Level Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
It clearly demonstrates that capitalist societies have greater inequality and that a more equal society would benefit everybody. Poverty is directly correlated with poor mental health, lower life expectancy, obesity, poor educational performance, domestic violence, and higher rates of incarceration.
It is clear that greater inequality produces social dysfunction. Tom Fletcher is wrong to put the blame for problems of poverty onto the backs of the poor themselves. It is too bad Black Press doesn’t provide more balance by alternatively presenting left wing commentators such as Murray Dobbin.
David Stevenson
Comox