Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party, the national, independent, inequality-focused political coalition sponsored by labor unions that helped elect Bill de Blasio to the position of mayor of New York City, tells “Democracy Now!” on Friday about the role Occupy Wall Street played in the latest election.

“We are living in the world Occupy made,” Cantor says. “We are the beneficiaries of what they did in terms of making this [about] inequality, which is from our point of view the core issue of our time.”

Republican candidate Joe Lhota was defeated by de Blasio on Tuesday on his message of a “tale of two cities” and a challenge to the police department’s controversial “stop-and-frisk” program. He is the first Democrat to lead the city in two decades. The Working Families Party recently won landmark legislation to tackle student debt in Oregon, fought corporate education reform in Connecticut, and won paid sick days in Jersey City, N.J., where voters also raised the minimum wage to $8.25 an hour and added automatic cost of living increases each year.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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