Main Street

Live from the Wall Street Protests: Connecting Generations

(Seth D. Michaels is in New York City today, reporting live from the Wall Street protests.)

The protests here on Wall Street are easy for the media to caricature, but as they press into their third week, it’s clear they’ve grown, organically, into something that resonates across ages and experiences.

Pat Walsh, a CWA retiree, came to the protest today to show support and link the causes he fights for to the ongoing protest.

“We’ve been fighting against corporate power and the shift in the tax burden from the wealthiest to the middle class – both the Bush tax cuts and cuts at the state level.” This tax shift and resulting cuts in services, he says, helped inspire the kind of anger and middle class discontent that got funneled into the Tea Party movement. He sees the Wall Street protests as part of a movement to address the real causes of this discontent.

For Walsh, the financial industry’s overwhelming power is contributing to problems for workers in other sectors. A company like Verizon, he says, gets pressure from Wall Street to focus entirely on profits, not wages and benefits for workers. “Wall Street’s greed enables Verizon’s greed. They’ve been doing all they can to break unions and slowly deteriorating workers’ ability to organize.”

“We’re here in solidarity,” Walsh said. “These young people here, they’re fighting for their future, for their own jobs.”

Tags: Corporate Accountability, New York, OWS