Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street was a movement that began on September 17, 2011 when a activist group camped out in Zuccotti Park, across the street from Wall Street as a protest to stand against corporate greed, social inequality and the major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process. The group’s slogan – “we are the 99 percent” – hit a nerve across the nation. The banks, the mortgage industry, the insurance industry, etc is referenced as the 1 percent. The group portrays it slogan as a domestic war against the poor that has gone unnoticed for far too long.

Discuss the moral and economic implications in the movement.

Richard Shweder, and anthropologist outlines six clusters of moral concerns of the Occupy movement: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation—upon which many have augured that all political cultures and movements base their moral appeals. In my research, I gathered the main moral foundation was fairness. Next in line is care, then liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. The movement promotes fairness and protest against the 1 percent because of this. They feel the rich got rich by taking more than what they deserved and cheated their way to the top. Secondly, the movement promoted care. During protest, the political liberals showed their compassion and empathy for care by creating signs and holding them in the air while rallying. The movement allowed the protester to express their moral foundation of liberty by using terms such as liberty and freedom. The rally initiated the name change of the park from Zuccottie Square to “Liberty Square”. The remaining three foundations, loyal, authority, and sanctity which tend to be used more by conservatives than by liberals, are not so commonly used, like waving the American Flag. In the rally’s, there were really no signs suggesting respect for authority or order, showing no loyalty or authority. Sanctity,...