When Electro-Motive/Caterpillar locked out workers at its London, Ont. plant on January 1, telling them to take a 50 per cent pay cut or they would close shop, so began 2012, the year the middle-class Canadian job came under heavy fire.

No one eliminates decent paying work and replaces it with low-wage jobs without a supportive narrative to smooth the way. The frame in place today focuses on powerful "union leaders" -- villanized as "union bosses," "the oppressors ... responsible for having forced labour to be exported."

We treated them like royalty.

We rolled out the tax-cut red carpet.

In fact our Prime Minister made a special stop at the London, Ontario Electro-Motive (EMD) plant in 2008, touting the $5 million in tax cuts we gave EMD.

It was all part of the "tax cuts create jobs" rhetoric that Canadian politicians rhyme off by rote.

And EMD, part of the American industrial giant Caterpillar, has been revelling in financial glory.

Occupy Wall Street has opened up public discussion about a problem that keeps getting worse: the gap between the rich and the rest of us -- encapsulated in the Occupy movement's slogan We are the 99%. Here's a roundup of some of the stories emerging on the issue of income inequality this week.

Call it "The Great Disruption" or the "Big Shift": "Two master narratives -- one threat-based, one opportunity-based, but both involving seismic changes." Thomas Friedman writes about it here.

What if revolution came to the U.S. and Canada and nobody noticed?

It's a question I'm pondering because some of the most progressive people I know are sitting back watching 20-plus days of Occupy Wall Street, hearing rumblings of similar events in Canada, and still waiting to see if it will spark into something big, like a movement worth joining.

Journalists keep asking: What is Occupy Wall Street about? What do they stand for? What's becoming clear is that a lot of people are missing a pretty important political and social development:

Americans are standing up to the financial giants whose unethical antics brought an entire world economy to its knees, left their economy in shambles, and still refuse to pitch in with the clean up.