BRATTLEBORO — So what was occupying Wall Street about?
For a number of years, we have slowly, quietly watched our freedoms being surrendered to economic power in the form of corporate law and accumulation of wealth buttressed by our non-independent, selective media. Wall Street symbolically represents the intersection of these forces.
Slowly, this loss of freedoms has taken form as the best and the brightest - those formally educated by our universities - sculpted laws to craft corporate hegemony over the law of the land at the expense of individual rights.
Two primary acts demonstrate how this transformation has happened: The legal ruling establishing a corporation as an individual, accompanied by the strange interpretation that wealth is a form of free speech.
Thus, the corporation now has a voice many orders of magnitude stronger than that of a single individual, i.e., creating a virtual superhero capable of overwhelming the legislative process.
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The impact of the first condition gave corporations the protections of an individual without the accompanying accountability for consequences of their actions, since as a disembodied, abstract individual there supposedly is no one to be held accountable.
When a corporation is found guilty of malfeasance, the result is usually a monetary fine, an ordinary cost of doing business, accompanied by a statement of non-guilt. Such impeccably twisted results are now de rigueur for this “individual.”
Should an individual attempt to deny culpability, she or he is considered unrepentant and, therefore, often subjected to a more severe sentencing. A corporation's unrepentant virtual-hero laughs on the way to the bank.
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The impact of the second condition enables corporations to exert influence far beyond that of a lowly individual. The imbalance of this disastrous decision is clearly exhibited when the power of money that corporate lobbyists use to take control of our political institutions destroys any semblance of fairness.
It isn't a very difficult leap of imagination to see how politicians shape the laws to the advantage of the corporation in exchange for the enormous amounts of money corporations contribute to political campaigns.
The lubricity of these contributions greases the rationalizations our legislators use in enacting our laws. The legislative process has been so compromised by money that it is difficult to trust that our government is of the people, for the people.
A secondary consequence of corporate wealth is the ability to unbalance the judicial system by giving the corporation an unlimited potential to defend itself against an individual. The voice of an average individual gets swamped by the voice of the corporation, due to the quality of legal representation that corporate money buys.
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These two conditions herald a much deeper transition in our existence as a nation.
Reason and rationality as a people is at the core of our history as a nation of the people, for the people. The upside of reason and rationality undergirds western democracies.
When reason turns into rationalizing that an individual pursues to justify actions that satisfy desires at the expense of the commonweal, we not only experience the downside of reason utilized by the best and the brightest, we also slowly drift into dissolution.
When the Zuccotti Park demonstrators highlighted this fact two years ago, corporate virtual heroes who reside beyond accountability enlisted the non-virtual arm of the law to squelch this free speech of the masses: virtual reality trumped flesh and blood.
Everything has come full circle, as these comic-book characters now control our government by lining the pockets of our comic-book legislators with another artifact - money.