[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/