[martythemaniak]

OWS is a protest movement, the core of which is against corporations buying laws. The corporations do this because they want to protect their inefficient business models by enshrining their way of doing things into law. For example, content owners wish to censor the internet so they can keep selling consumers crap, while banks wish to tax everybody when they make a loss on their trades.

OWS is not anti-business, it is anti-corruption, and there's few things more damaging to progress than corruption.

[AJ007]

You would never know that based on the signs being waved and the t-shirts being worn.

[jacoblyles]

Yeah, I thought it was about "End Capitalism Now!" and "Bail out students", or something like that.

[gee_totes]

There wouldn't be the protests and signs being waved if corporations couldn't buy laws.

[brc]

I think I can agree with your points, however, the images of OWS protestors have failed to get this across. In the worldwide spread of the OWS theme, the further you get from Manhattan, the muddier the statements. My local occupy demonstration is a rag-tag collection of the usual suspects with signs calling for socialism.

I guess this is the problem with any protest movement - you have no top-down control, and so any good messages can get lost in the noise. I think the occupy 'brand' is pretty much damaged beyond repair for now, but if the core of the people believes what you say, then it's possible to create a new organisation and leverage from occupy before it's forgotten. But a new organisation would have to be top-down and control the message to get the point across.

For my part, I agree with the points about regulatory capture and corporatism. Large businesses pretend to like capitalism, but in reality, they get terrified of smaller startup companies stealing their lunch money and rendering them irrelevant in a decade or less.

Too big to fail is indeed too big to exist. The role of governments must be to prevent monopolies from forming, not to legislate them into existence.

[sp332]

Even the statements in Manhattan are extremely muddy. That's because the "Wall Street" types have pissed off a huge swath of the populace. It's not just one coherent group that's angry. Lots of unrelated people have come together against a common enemy.