Every movement has a beginning and a cause.
CNBC financial commentator Rick Santelli’s now infamous rant on Feb. 19, 2009 along the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is widely credited as catalyzing the birth of the Tea Party while railing against homeowner relief for the foreclosed-upon poor.
In 2010, America saw the rise of a nativist right-wing political force hellbent on reducing progressive taxes, slashing social services and firing public workers across the country. Republicans swept into state buildings, court houses and town halls throughout the nation during the midterm congressional elections with the intention of shrinking the size of government and expanding the role of the market.
To the Tea Party, the government, not the corporation, was responsible for the financial crisis of 2008. For libertarians, America’s economic recovery was prevented by excessive regulations on the banks and insurance companies that were “forced” to issue out mortgages to the undeserving and unworthy. Conservatives still believe that if only taxes on the affluent are low enough then their wealth will trickle down to the rest of society and prosperity will be universal.
Occupy Wall Street is an intellectual counterattack and emotional reaction to this twisted dogma and warped logic. For those protesting the pervasive structural inequality in America that corrodes our country’s body politic and pollutes our national discourse, from New York to California, they see the corporate Super PACS that bankroll the Tea Party and our two-party system as an infection plaguing our political process, corrupting the nature of American democracy itself.
On Aug. 11, 2011, presidential candidate and Republican front runner Mitt Romney declared over the angry objections of listeners at the Iowa state fair that “corporations are people, my friends.” It is here, from the utterance of such a callous statement, that you can find the historical foundation of Occupy Wall Street.
The philosophical arguments and legal stipulations that blur the obvious moral distinction between people of flesh and blood and profit-driven, cold-calculating corporations are what so many in America and around the world find so offensive.
Corporations are not people, regardless of what Mitt Romney might say or what the Supreme Court may decide. Corporations never rock in a cradle and cannot rest in a grave. Corporations do not have dreams or aspirations — they cannot love or feel and, no matter how hard their defenders might try to convince us otherwise, they will never put the greater good before private profit. Corporations are conceived in the offices of law firms and die in the halls of bankruptcy court. Who sees humanity in this?
If corporations were in fact human, no decent person would be able to defend their actions or condone their policies. Exxon Mobil improves its bottom line by despoiling our waters and polluting our air. Goldman Sachs profits from financial speculation and home foreclosure. Raytheon increases its revenue streams when it sells guns in war zones and supplies dictators with bombs. If these corporations were in fact human would we not prosecute and imprison them?
There is a social cost to private profit. Multinational corporations are self-serving business entities concerned with one thing and one thing only: profit. Profit for shareholders. Profit for creditors. Profit for executives. Truth, justice and peace are all ancillary. To a corporation there is no primary value other than profit, pure and simple.
Of course, markets have vastly improved the living standards of the world’s rich and poor alike. However, this is to say that the social suffering inflicted on the poor, the sick and the elderly by corporations acting in the interest of private parties must be addressed. Environments need protection, unions must organize and candidates shouldn’t be bought. Occupy Wall Street understands this and so too does the rest of the country.