Occupy Wall Street

On September 17, 2011, people from all across the United States of America and the world came to protest the blatant injustices of our times perpetuated by the economic and political elites ("Principles of solidarity," 2012). Known as “Occupy Wall Street”, this movement suggested a peaceful occupation of the Wall Street in protest of the deep stratification of the society in relation to income and wealth and unaccountability for world financial crisis.

Occupy Wall Street movement’s moral principle affirms that it is wrong to wreck the world, the health, and hopes of others. The movement suggests that it is immoral for an economic system to forces people to bear the impacts of the recklessness of a few powerful profiteers, to assume the burdens of others’ privilege, and to pay the real costs of destructive industries in the currency of their health and the hopes of their children. And when, to enrich a powerful few, that system threatens to disrupt forever the great planetary cycles that support all the lives on Earth.

Accordingly, every person no matter how rich has the responsibility to honor affirmative obligations of justice and compassion to present and future generations of all beings. In addition the Occupy Wall Street Movement connects the dots on a map of financial recklessness, jobs despair, and concentrated wealth. The dots all connect to one central social pathology, which is funding of elections by powerful centers of wealth mostly corporations, mostly destructive and extractive corporations. Our erstwhile democracy has now developed a futures market in politicians. This created a situation in which the government is fundamentally controlled (Moore, 2011).

According to utilitarianism, an act is correct if it promotes happiness and the same act is wrong in the event that it results to the reverse of happiness. This is not similar to the views held by the movement because their aim is not happiness but fighting for inequalities in the distribution of income. Virtue ethics on the other hand has to do with the character of a moral agent as the main driving force for a ethical behavior and not because of the rules in place (utilitarianism 2012)

The top 20 percent controls about eighty-four percent of the wealth, while the bottom quintile controls just 0.1 percent. The combined net worth of the bottom forty percent, in fact, accounts for just 0.3 percent of the nation's wealth. However, it is not just wealth that matter. Prior to the current resection, in 2007, the U.S. income inequality hit its highest mark since the Great Depression in 1929. This brought joblessness and financial peril to scores of Americans, most of whom are on the wrong side of the wealth divide.

According to the CIA's World Factbook, the United States now ranks thirty-ninth in the world when it comes to income inequality. What that means is that only thirty-eight out of one hundred