[dfxm12]

Unfortunately, this article (and regrettably most of the 99%ers) are missing the point entirely. This isn't about "99% of us don't have enough". It is about "The rich get richer simply because they are rich."

The article states We created the beast that we protest against. We also possess the power to defeat it... We have the means for change, we work hard for it, and WE are the 99%. The problem is we've been working hard for decades and the middle class is getting smaller, and we aren't moving up. Anyone can give an anecdote to the contrary, but this still isn't about "making it", it is about the "haves" getting more, not by virtue of their talent, but rather by keeping others down with their immense resources.

[davidcuddeback]

I agree that this article is missing the point. It seems to oversimplify the protesters' message so that it can be easily dismissed as hypocrisy without debating the issues.

It's also difficult to pin down a single message that the OWS movement is trying to get across. This article paints it as a "down with the machine" movement. The OWS website states that they want "to restore democracy in America" [1]. While democracy is an overloaded word that can mean lots of things to different people, in this context I take it to mean that the protesters feel like the American political system isn't working for them anymore. Although we might cite different causes, an oft-cited cause is corporate interests. It's easy to jump from protesting against corporate interest to "down with the machine," which is what I think this article is doing.

Also on the OWS website, it states: "We use a tool known as a 'people's assembly' to facilitate collective decision making in an open, participatory and non-binding manner." If that's true, there's going to be a lot of ideas proposed and some will seem radical. Attacking the movement based on the ideas of a subset of the protesters avoids dealing with the issues that they're trying to solve.

[1] http://occupywallst.org/about/

[m311ton]

I'm not sure you would find many that disagree with this argument. But this movement, like many others, has been hijacked by people who aren't quite aligned with that message. The purity of it has been disrupted and that becomes the story that is told to the world.

Keeping others down with immense resources is not a new problem to the United States or humanity. Throughout the history of mankind those in power have attempted to use their resources to stay in power and the result is some sort of social, economic, or socioeconomic battle. Ultimately the winning course has always involved reinventing the game in a way that changes the rules and neutralizes the resources of those in power.

The point of the article, which is an opinion not a formal piece of journalism, takes a roundabout way to recommending more reasonable courses of action. The way I see it, if you don't like what the big banks are doing, for example, you do have options to get around dealing with them. If enough people organize around that vision, instead of protesting, you create a much more powerful market force.