This Week in Poverty: Fighting Poverty Through Wall Street Accountability

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http://www.thenation.com/blog/174404/week-poverty-fighting-poverty-through-wall-street-accountability#



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Greg Kaufmann: Why is the Wall Street accountability movement now the focus of your work, and what is the potential you see there?

Stephen Lerner: One of the challenges is that there are so many things wrong right now—that you can be involved in any of a thousand causes. The problem is if they are disconnected it doesn’t add up to anything. So, people who are opposed to poverty have a dozen different things they’d like to move on the Hill, none of which are likely to pass at this time.

So the focus on Wall Street is: How do you connect all of these different battles? And, in fact, are there core things in common that drive them together?

If you look at some of the biggest issues of the day—whether it’s the loss of wealth in communities of color, the housing crisis, the student debt crisis, local and state governments cutting jobs and services because of debt—you can connect all of these issues to the original economic crisis of 2008, and the growing and continued dominance of the Wall Street big banks.

The majority of people in this country are either impacted by student debt, the ongoing housing crisis or the crisis of the public sector. And you can trace so much of it to Wall Street. This means instead of having twenty separate campaigns, you can have one campaign, that says how do we rebalance and reorganize the economy so that it benefits everybody—not just a teeny elite at the top.



Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/174404/week-poverty-fighting-poverty-through-wall-street-accountability#ixzz2TjuLbzyT

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