Main Street

Live from the Wall Street Protests: An Emerging Community

(Seth D. Michaels is in New York City today, reporting live from the Wall Street protests. We’ll have updates from him as they come in.)

Here in Zuccotti Park, where the Wall Street protests continue to draw hundreds of people every day, something interesting is emerging: a community that is the practical expression of the term “solidarity.”

Without microphones, speakers are amplified by their audience repeating their words. A functioning lending library has sprung up fueled entirely by donations. There’s a well-coordinated food service area featuring a mix of donated pizzas and homemade contributions. While bluegrass music has broken out in one corner, in another a map shows the location of other protests popping up around the country.

It’s a lively, supportive environment that has grown in these past weeks, an organic expression of diverse kinds of discontent that has gelled into, if not yet a movement, certainly a community that has turned the kind of real economic anger felt around the country into an enthusiasm for economic justice.

Tags: Corporate Accountability, New York, OWS

Working America Statement on Wall Street Protests

Working America continues to offer its support and encouragement to the growing protest movement that began in New York’s Zuccotti Park.

It’s obvious what has motivated these protests, and it’s the same thing we hear at the doors we knock on every day:

• a lost decade of stagnant wages, dim job prospects and increasing inequality
• a crisis brought on by a grossly unregulated and unaccountable financial industry, patched up with taxpayer-funded bailouts to the banks that caused it
• the increasing difficulty for working-class and middle-class people to keep a roof over their heads, pay for education and save for retirement
• the erosion of trust in a political system overrun by corporate dollars

In the weeks to come, as we organize for good jobs and a fairer economy in neighborhoods across the country, we hope that the enthusiasm and energy behind these protests continues to develop.

It is crucial to have a strong, public voice making the case for needed reforms to our financial system and accountability for corporations. We thank the Wall Street protestors for adding this voice to the national conversation.

Tags: Corporate Accountability, New York, OWS, statement