"That notion of shared sacrifice pushed by the government is nonsense. It is predicated on the assumption that during the boom economic times everyone benefitted and they did not," activist Osagyefo Tongogara said, while leafleting near the route of the protest march through Central London.
Tongogara, who supported the general strike, said the measurements the government uses to set public pension rates were changed earlier this year to an accounting methodology that short-changes workers by undercounting the impact of inflation.
Austerity actions, Tongogara said, are increasing rates of poverty, especially among children and the elderly -- an assertion backed by economists and other experts. "The rich continue to off-shore billions of pounds to avoid paying taxes. Tax evasion is illegal for working people but tax avoidance is not illegal for the rich"that is wrong," he said.
Activist Selma James, 81, criticizes Cameron's coalition government for failing to seriously address accelerating income inequities that aggravate existing poverty particularly impoverishment impacting children and the elderly.
"The 1% is pushing us around determining our lives, stealing our money, our resources and our possibilities," James, the founder of London's Crossroads Women's Center, stated in an email interview.
James, the widow of the late Caribbean author/activist C.L.R. James, said actions like the general strike and the Occupy Movement are vital.
Those activities, said James, are a "strength for all to stop suffering in silence and spell out our real conditions of life and the brutality we try to defeat every hour we're alive."
LINN WASHINGTON is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new award-winning independent online alternative newspaper. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, DAVE LINDORFF, LORI SPENCER and CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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