The Rev. Jesse Jackson attends an #OccupyWallStreet meeting of the Healthcare for the 99 per cent. Working Group at Liberty Square (f/k/a Zuccotti Park) in New York City on December 4, 2011.
The civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson joined the regular weekly meeting of the the Healthcare for the 99 per cent. Working Group of #OccupyWallStreet in New York last Sunday.
At the meeting, the Rev. Jackson spoke about the "exorbitant, exploitative cost of medicine." The Rev. Jackson also spoke about how the issue of healthcare access and affordability has motivated many of the hundreds of thousands of members of the 1199SEIU union to want to become part of the #OccupyWallStreet movement.
The Rev. Jackson discussed how many of the "victims" of the broken healthcare system are absent from the #OccupyWallStreet movement, and he said it was the task of the movement to find a way to motivate them to participate.
Other economic issues that the Rev. Jackson said that the disenfranchised faced were incarceration, joblessness, home foreclosures, and high amounts of student loan and credit card debt. The Rev. Jackson asked members of the working group to consider whether the disenfranchised "occupied" where they are, or whether the disenfranchised needed a physical location in order to occupy. "Is occupy a place or a space ?" The Rev. Jackson made the point that location did not define the new social movement's constituents. He added, "Those are you patients and your friends."
One day after the Rev. Jackson attended a Liberty Square meeting of the Healthcare for the 99 per cent. Working Group, the Rev. Jackson published an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times entitled, "Cost of broken health care system is killing us."
