Unlike Today's 'Tea Party', Wall Street Protesters Resemble Historical Revolutionaries

"Unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations." --President Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address, March 4, 1837

If this has become a time of renewed patriotism, it's of a fractured sort.  As the TEA Party, in its various forms, protests the encroachment of 'big government' on American life, an entirely different group of patriots has descended upon major financial institutions in New York and the K Street lobbyists in Washington, DC.  According to Mother Jones, protesters backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the organizing group National People's Action (NPA) recently made their voices heard outside Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase.  They were demanding to meet with CEO's from those financial organizations.

These protesters aren't the odd mix of libertarians, neo-conservatives and traditionalists that make up the corporately supported TEA Party movement.  They aren't the new patriots of the Reagan Revolution, indoctrinated by the cult of 'government is the problem', taught to believe that corrupt governance is the disease and not just the symptom of rampant corporate dominance.  Neither are they the tools of corporate lobbyists who would use their well-meaning ire to distract from the legalized bribery that controls our Congress, the White House and even influences the Supreme Court. 

Unlike those who protested health care reform as nothing more than a 'government takeover', these patriots standing up against the financial terrorism of 'too-big-to-fail' banks have more in common with Thomas Jefferson than Ronald Reagan.  Their revolt against the power of the corporation is akin to the original Boston Tea Party, an event that most Americans don't realize was more about the oppression of corporate monopoly than actual taxation.  Though they might not know it, this is the point of which the SEIU and NPA were reminding the American people.  When the government of the United States was first conceived, it was not taxation that frightened the founders but the economic slavery of corporate exploitation; the absence of self determinism imposed by a corporate charter not regulated by individual states, but allowed to grow until it enveloped an entire nation and - potentially - the world.   

With the rain now pouring down, the two-day stand by SEIU and NPA culminated around midday when upwards of a thousand protesters rallied in McPherson Square, then occupied the nearby intersection of 14th St and K Street. In the intersection, under a large cardboard cutout of a Lloyd Blankfein-esque Wall Street executive controlling a politician on a string like a marionette, SEIU president Mary Kay Henry and others spoke to the soaked crowd. "The American people have a deep desire to fix what’s broken with our economic and political system,” Henry said. "That’s why a movement is building across this country to challenge the toxic influence Wall Street and corporations have on our democracy."

In 1773, the colonists in Boston were willing to stand up against monopoly, despite actually paying lower prices for their tea.  Today, we as Americans live for the lowest price.  We will drive those extra miles and buy from giant, job-killing big box stores just to save a buck.  We, as Douglas Rushkoff notes in his eye-opening Life, Inc., have adopted the corporate mentality after centuries of programming, test marketing and social engineering.  Unlike our revolutionary forebears, we are used to monopoly as a way of life.  But the colonists knew something we've forgotten; that free enterprise is only free on a level playing field.

Today, the free market is little more than a myth conjured by the corporate oligarchy to keep the lower and middle classes both hopeful and in their place.  We still believe that we can one day be like Bill Gates, despite all evidence to the contrary.  Americans are still protesting the oppression of government, willfully ignoring the true power behind 'the throne', the artisans of the carefully messaged social constructs that control their lives.  At the dawning of the American Revolution, our founders understood the dangers of corporatism and the economic slavery it would impose on would-be free people.  Today, we're far too willing to accept monopoly as just another sign of success, and that tax breaks and government subsidies to multi-national corporations are well deserved as long as we - the consumers - are assured the lowest prices.

Now, billions of taxpayer dollars, 30% interest rates on credit cards and stock market manipulations have finally opened the public's eyes to the same oppression that Jefferson and the other founders once feared.  This time, however, the corporate mindset and its promises of the 'ownership society' will likely make the rebellion against monopoly an arduous slog.  It may literally take hundreds of demonstrations on Wall Street and the Capitol Mall, tens of thousands of letters and calls to elected officials and several election cycles before Americans reclaim their inalienable right to a government of, by and for the people, instead of the corporation.  Most importantly, though, it will take a change in our own thinking.  We will be forced to look at our nation and the world as citizens instead of consumers, taking that first frightening step toward the actual stewardship of our own lives. 

Until then, here's to the patriots that are at least making their voices heard to the giant banks and hedge funds that dominate the financial landscape.  At least we know that history is on their side. 

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Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property.  Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person.

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