Reprinted from The Post and Courier
By Eugene Platt

Biting my tongue, I will not be so uncivil as to accuse my hometown newspaper of hypocrisy. However, an innate sense of fairness compels me to point out an extraordinary inconsistency:

On the front page and in huge type at the top of your Nov. 14 editions, you publicly ridiculed school board members who proposed for themselves an annual salary of a relatively modest $15,000. In your Nov. 16 editions, again on the front page but at the bottom and in much smaller type, you report more neutrally a raise of $50,000 for the president and CEO of the State Ports Authority. (He will now be paid a relatively staggering salary of $350,000.)

Where is your sense of values, Post and Courier? Why do you suggest $15,000 is too much for someone charged with developing policy for the education of our precious children, while $350,000 is not much too much for someone overseeing the ever-increasing importation of shoddy items from China, an imbalanced trade that has already cost the jobs of millions of Americans?

Is it any wonder that many who are part of the “99 percent” and who do not receive fat-cat salaries such as that of the State Ports Authority president have begun to push back?

That obscene disparity, as un-Christian as it is un-American, explains the Occupy Wall Street Movement and its offshoots.

While I do not advocate violent resolution to the growing inequities that gnaw at the foundations of our country, I understand how hundreds of thousands of good men and women (including the Iraq war veteran who was shot in the head by police for exercising his constitutional rights at the Occupy Oakland site) have lost patience with a system that is rigged against them and why they may be inching toward a 1776-type revolution.

Eugene Platt,
Member, Steering Committee,
South Carolina Green Party

Gilmore Court,
Charleston