Who's missing at Occupy Wall Street?

The protests occurring in the Wall Street financial district have received a surprising amount of media coverage and have undoubtabley left a mark on the political and social psyche of the United States with their outcry against what they see as the excess of the richest one percent of America. The question that is not on the mind of most Americans, however, is who is missing from these protests.

The images brought to mind of those suffering from the financial collapses of the last few years are mostly blue-collar and middle class American workers who saw their savings and mortgages go up in smoke. This view, however, ignores the hundreds of millions around the world who have lost multiple times what middle class America has had to give up at the hands of wall street greed.

The global financial institutions of the world have, since their inception, failed to meet the needs of developing countries who have just begun to be exposed to the raging wave of globalization. Many of these institutions ( the IMF, WTO, and World Bank being the most prominent) are made up of the same people now sitting in Wall Street offices. These men and women have ripped open emerging markets through removal of tariffs, destroyed the livelihood of millions through unfair trade of artificially cheap subsidized foreign imports, and destroyed infrastructure through a series of preconditioned loans that halt development of roads and schools in favor of industrial production.

Only the nascent super-economies of East Asia have been able to escape the cycle through their aggressive refusal of Western interference in internal affairs. The rest of the world, however, has fallen into a sort of pseudo-imperialism in which the richest elements of Western society are profiting exponentially off the unimaginable poverty of millions. Given it's history of colonial exploitation and the continuing way in which foreign interests are manipulating internal affairs, the chaos in Africa should not come as a surprise so much as a cautionary tale against the dangers of extreme excess in advanced industrial nations.

The missing faces amongst the protesters on Wall Street are the impoverished Sri Lankan factory workers, the poor and repressed of Eastern Europe, and the children dying of AIDS in Uganda. In order to understand the revolutionary fervor that has swept the world thirty years after the process of globalization started accelerating, we need to understand the impact that the one percent have had not only on our own countr, but in every corner of the globe.