Originally posted to HuffingtonPost.com on October 14, 2011
By David Rohde
Last Friday morning, a 24-year-old New Jersey woman told me why she joined Occupy Wall Street. Around her, balding activists in their 50s tried to rekindle 1960s-era protests. Young Marxists flew red Che Guevara flags. The young woman, though, was different.
She commuted to the protests, she said, while holding down two part-time jobs. She lived at home and helped her schoolteacher mother, who also worked two jobs, support her jobless, 60-year-old father. She asked to be identified only by her middle name — Susan — because she feared her bosses would fire her for attending protests. She didn’t talk of revolution. She talked of correction.
“Like any great nation and country, there are also hitches in the plan,” she told me. “And things that need to be changed.”
Corporate America has gained the upper hand on the American middle class, she told me. A year after graduating from college, she was working as a part-time manager at two different retail chains in New Jersey. The companies use part-time managers, she said, so they don’t have to pay benefits.
“It’s their policy,” she said, “which is why I’m here.”
Beneath the online vitriol swirling between supporters and opponents of Occupy Wall Street lies a central question: Does Wall Street help or hurt the American middle class? A variety of forces are slowly gutting the middle class — and a paucity of values on Wall Street is one of them.
The problem is not every bank. It is a growing slice of the financial sector that has become a vast, computerized casino where staggering fortunes can be won or lost in minutes, with taxpayers left holding the bag.
Members of the middle class, of course, played as well. They bought houses they could not afford, dallied in day-trading and saved too little during an era of limitless credit.
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David Rohde has been a board member of the Interfaith Center since 2010.
