Occupy Wall Street shifts from protest to policy phase
Protesters face the difficult and interesting task of leveraging their influence to achieve concrete policy changes addressing their concerns.
How do you know when a protest movement is starting to scare the pants off the establishment?
One clue is when the protesters are casually dismissed as hippies or rabble, or their principles redefined as class envy or as (that all-purpose insult) “un-American.”
Phi Beta Iota: This is the first mainstream media article we've seen with real intelligence. What is actually happening is that the various groups that have structure to begin with (MoveOn, labor, issue NGOs) are trying desperately to force fit the kind of “demands” or “strategy” that media expects to be spoon-fed; push-back is coming from the original actors, who are reluctant to join anything that reeks of the old structure–and to be perfectly candid, MoveOn, labor, and the NGOs are all accustomed to feeding at the two-party trough and they are frightened out of their wits by a populist uprising they can neither understand nor control. Our best guess is that the groups will generally refuse to engage in policy demands, and go for broke: electoral reform and a constitutional convention, which we rate right now as 55% and 15% probabilities.
