It's great to have people in the streets. I've been participating, with many other fabulous people in Occupy Wall Street. There is a lot to say about this--leave it for another time. Today, it's all about an exciting connection--the movement in Liberty Square with the fight of postal workers to save their jobs. It is the same fight--and it's been joined.
I got to the postal workers rally at the Varick post office as the workers were gathering. The demand is pretty simple: don't dump a whole bunch of hard working people when the solution is simple--pass H.R. 1351, which would allow the Postal Service to take billions of dollars in pension overpayments to meet the operation's financial obligations.
Here are the workers:
And the message to spread:
One of the things that I had noticed was, until that moment, a lack of connection between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the labor movement...with very few exceptions, you didn't see labor in the house at Liberty Square. I'll have more to say about that some other time.
To say the obvious: Wall Street's greed and incompetence has been an on-going phenomena for several decades. Even if the "good old days", pre-2008 collapse, Wall Street's motivation for larger and larger profits meant underwriting leveraged buyouts and crazy deals that means lots of money for CEOs--and millions of good-paying jobs lost in "restructuring" for the sake of paying off huge debts.
BUT...today was really great. From Canal Street heading north, the Occupy Wall Street movement arrived:
And:
Adding a concise message:
And, then, the Occupy Wall Street movement arrived. Here's a very short snippet of the crowd just minutes after the folks arrived: