Collectivize the means of production. Workers of the world uni.... Aw to heck with it.
What's wrong with:
A fairer Tax Code where we rescind the Bush tax cuts.
Do away with loopholes and tax shelters.
Re-regulate not only the financial sector, but energy suppliers.

A modest proposal,
Wedge

It looks like rain today.

Hey kids, here's how your parents responded to that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8b9HEIx5J8

I've become rather impatient with protests because I see too many people there who aren't really interested in getting anything done. People are attracted to protests because it is an opportunity to shout against real and imagined grievances, always a popular activity. But as you've shown, protests don't have much effect on either public opinion or the actions of leadership. If anything, the effect is negative because it makes adherents to a point of view look like fanatics.

I live in Nashville now, and I go to the Metro Council there on a regular basis to lobby. The "one percent" that is the target of these protests comprise a majority of the lobbyists present at council at a given time. More often than not, the same is true in Seattle from what I remember from my time there.

I've asked quite a few other activists about this, and I get nothing but excuses. They are much too busy and cannot be bothered to take the time to learn the intricacies of policy and the legislative process. They don't want to bother talking with elected officials because the electeds won't listen. They won't bother working on campaigns because the campaign process is icky and all politicians are the same anyway. It's no wonder the political system is so stagnant.

Pepper, young and old activists worked for and elected Obama. We may be disappointed, but that doesn't change the fact that he was elected due largely to the efforts of activists.

Activists talk to elected officials. I'm an activist and I've talked with elected officials along with others, young but mostly old. We know too well the intricacies of policy and the legislative process.

As far as protests not getting anything done, these may not. But maybe you're too young to remember Vietnam; those protests by activists were pretty damned effective.

Maybe you should expand your definition of activist. And since you live in Nashville, maybe you should curtail your decisive comments on Seattle matters.

I'm on board the same train as Knute. Already this morning I read nasty posts on McGinn's Facebook page about the arrests & a Portland Business Journal article about the protestors there refusing to get permits. I don't have a lot of sympathy for so-called protestors who, when I see them on TV, appear to be less focused on the matter at hand than on being a part of a counter-culture experience. Having attended Evergreen I'm quite familiar with that stance; but my reaction is more in the realm of let them get their counter-cultures azzes hauled off to jail if they refuse to disperse. (Hey, it's part of the experience, right?) Protest is meaningful only for discrete, highly targeted periods of time. The courts have held to time/manner/place restrictions on free speech for a reason.

I think pepper has a right to comment on the Seattle protesters, sarah. After all, these mantra-chanting minions are, partly, responsible for endangering the Gibson Guitar Company, Nashville, Tennessee. I hope the protesters are strumming plywood guitars when they sing Kumbayah.

In response to Sarah's comments, an activist is anyone who, on a volunteer basis, works to influence policy. That makes me an activist because I have worked on campaigns and lobbied elected officials without receiving any payment. I've even taken part in rallies because a rally, when well-placed and aimed toward a specific goal, can influence policy. But this series of Occupy protests is not well placed and is directed toward goals that are amorphous and unrealistic. This is a series of protests going on all over the country, Nashville included, and here I think the outcome will be the same: some people will have fun but ultimately accomplish little.

Now, perhaps I was a little careless in disparaging a large group of people, but I am well justified in my frustration at the large number of people who say that they want to accomplish things but are unwilling to do the hard, unglamorous work that is required. Or people who think that performing a stunt such as getting arrested is an adequate substitute for the long, grinding political process.

Excellent, wise piece, thanks Knute. I would point out, though, that the Tea Partiers had the advantage of being bankrolled by billionaires, and that explains a great deal of their (actually the Koch brothers') electoral success. Let's not make the mistake of thinking the Tea Party is primarily a grass-roots phenomenon. A second, minor point -- people on the left don't see NPR as being in their camp. Hardly.

Probably too much to hope for, but some of the ringleaders of current populist persuasions may have spent a few hours with authors like John Talbot (Sell Now, The End of the Housing Bubble, 2006), Bethany McLean/JoeNocera (All the Devils Are Here, the Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, 2010), Richard White (Railroaded, the Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, 2011) and Richard Heinberg (The End of Growth, Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, 2011). To name a few.

Pepper is globally right about the recent dearth and mistreatment of activists who truly do sacrifice financial gain. Instead of snipping from the keyboard at a rambunctious American Spring, how about taking the McKibbon approach, or at least focusing on the missing gumption of the rest of us old enough and read-up enough to have at least a clue of what to do next?

Eight years of the most ruinous national leadership in our history, followed by two years of pretty much the same from this administration. A trillion dollars spent on a phony war and several questionable international police actions plus loss of life. Conservative estimates of 2.5 million mfg. jobs and 850K professional service and IT jobs shipped offshore in the last ten years by US companies. And arguably the largest financial crime in the history of the world is perpetrated by our banks and Wall Street. And the only investigation is directed at Gibson Guitars? “Holy fingerboards Batman!”

It's refreshing to hear that someone is finally starting to get upset about things.

Along the lines of my comment, Russ Feingold compares the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/russ-feingold-endorses-occupy-wall-street-this-will-make-the-tea-party-look-like-a-tea-party/2011/03/03/gIQANucZNL_blog.html
“This is like the Tea Party — only it’s real,” Feingold said. “By the time this is over, it will make the Tea Party look like ... a tea party.”

Wow. I am so glad that a member of the baby boomer generation--those wonderful and god-like flowerchildren whose same generation ended up causing many of these problems in the first place once they came into power--can explain this all to us. I guess it just slipped my mind that the '60s were the one and only golden age of social protest. I'm sure that with all of the legendary drug use that was going on at the time that THOSE protesters were completely on the level, too, 24 hours-a-day. And yes, my generation is quite different from yours-- I will never have social security, medicare, or enough saved to retire (I have a PhD and can't get a permanent job--nice, huh?), nor will I ever get on an AARP commercial and demand it as my right. You've taken it all and given nothing back.

Protesting to stop a war is at least coherent and understandable. Furthermore the President and Congress are capable of stopping wars by passing a bill of probably no more than twenty pages. In this case, the message from "Occupy Wall Street" is obscure. Do they mean "Outlaw Collateralized Debt Obligations", or "Restrict Short Selling"?, how about "Eliminate Default Swaps"? "Kill the Quants"? The causes of the financial collapse certainly reside in the financial districts of New York and London but even well-advised Presidents seem to shrink before their financial gurus and issue only the vaguest nostrums. The (over) 2,000 page Dodd-Frank financial-fixit law may help, maybe not; do the protestors know or care? after you occupy Wall Street what do you do with it? it's too complicated to deal with.

I love how all of the editors picks on this site are for the anti protest comments. These protesters hopefully wake up the middle class and poor to realize that our current system is unfair and extremely slanted to the top one percent.

Please don't pigeon-hole Occupy Seattle participants as liberal. There's nothing liberal or conservative about pushing for an end to our system of legal bribery of elected officials, and I would expect conservatives to think our government should stay out of the way and let the free market take care of business failures like the banks we bailed out.

There's really no way to know whether any, some, or all of the people in the local protests have actually done any of the long-slog work in trying to do political work. Anyone who says they haven't, or who implies or downright states that they are the equivalent of trust-fund babies (and I knew some in the 70s) is slapping labels on them without any foundation.

The real irony about this is that the Mayor has now allowed them to stay during the day, as long as they take their tents down to City Hall's plaza at night. Protest by permit isn't real protest, just as--and I agree with several others on this--protest by catch-and-release arrests isn't real protest. Real protest is when you have something to lose, like your job or your housing or your life. I've never done that; I have immense respect for anyone who does. It's too soon to tell if any of these protests across the country will involve that serious level of personal harm. Having recently watched the Freedom Riders film on Ch. 9, I kind of doubt anything like that will happen again in this country.

But still--people out yelling in parks about greedy bankers is better than people wearing their thumbs out on ipods. At least they're thinking.

Sarah90 is basically right but I don't agree that all protest is only authentic if it's high heroism and risky. There are multiple forms of protest and opposition and they should be commended--whatever the points of view. The Civil Rights movement, the anti-Soviet movement, the Arab Spring were not rationally planned out by technocratic thinkers and aging hippies imparting their wisdom to the young. They started in small seemingly irrational ways. They happened because people were pissed off and went into the streets. We do not know where the current protests will take us. Maybe to our future.

I find it amusing that the protesters are being criticized for having the audacity to question the geniuses who run our banks and Wall Street. The countries that weathered the collapse were the ones that admitted that they didn't understand what the hell our visionaries on Wall Street were doing either. Canadian banks are regulated and their “full recourse” mortgages have no provision for getting backwards in a loan. Banks in India and many in Asia didn't lose a dime and simply stated that their regulations didn't allow any sub prime lending nor did they understand how to evaluate the securitized instruments that were created by the Wall Street “quants” and offered to them whether they were insured or not. Many said they were also surprised that all this could occur even after ENRON and the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley. So lucky for them, they were as confused and uneducated as our protesters.

Remember, the only people who consider this a failure are the people who lost their homes, jobs, and futures. The geniuses and the “Quants” who conceived and committed the deed were made whole with your tax dollars and are probably sitting right now in some cigar salon, throwing back another round of scotch and reflecting on what a great country America has become.

I have to agree it's completely unfair to pigeonhole the Occupy Wall Street protesters as leftist. This seems to be a need of the media people to classify everything as left or right as if everything is so easily dropped into one of two boxes.

When it comes to electing people, we have 2 major parties, one is centrist and one is far right, headed toward extreme right.

However, when it comes to issues, which is what the Occupy Wall Street movement stands for, is about an idea, not about people. And issues aren't partisan, or maybe more fairly they can be considered multipartisan.

What the Occupy Wall Street movement stands for is the obscene corrupting influence of money in politics. That is hardly a leftist issue. It's an American issue that nearly everyone in America agrees upon.

jmrolls, I couldn't agree more with what you said, but I do want to make one important correction. Not only are these wars the longest in our nation's history, according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz their costs--largely unpaid for, so far--are $2.5 trillion, and will likely total at least a trillion more by the time we wind them down (if we ever do). To the extent that we have cratered our economy paying for these wars, we have handed victory to the terrorists.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe--bilmes-war-cost-20110918,0,1598244.story

"What the Occupy Wall Street movement stands for is the obscene corrupting influence of money in politics."

They could go a long way toward fixing that, then, by pushing for term limits.

The problem is that you would still have the same organ grinders, just different monkeys.

But it might be one of the few instances when outsourcing something would be good for the country. Let China oversee our SEC, Wall Street and bank oversight. They have a different attitude about business executives who can't adhere to a "do no harm" style of management.

@sarah90, anyone with an interest in Seattle can comment. Your own comment was derisive, not peppers'.

I'm wondering why the protestors just don't go down to the port and push all the containers into the bay, like the original TeaParty. How is this any different, taxation without representation? Representation, in this age is only for those with the $$$$$ to buy it.

that's kind of interesting -- the original Tea Party was about taxation without representation. The Wall Street businesses have representation without taxation.