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Well... the Occupy Wallstreeters (OW) obviously aren't serious about it. If they were, one of them would pose as a corporate shill and procede to beat the ever living crap out of a few of their fellows, generating both support for their movement and enhancing the perception that wallstreet is irrepairably corrupt.
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Why are people even irritated about this?
We have protests at funerals that generate less media attention. Corporations, as a group, have been pretty well demonized by public dialogue over the last 5 years or so.
So what if people are protesting on wallstreet?
Wallstreet is the supposed focal point of the group (corporations) that said people are pissed at. it makes alot of sense for them to protest there.

If people really want the protestors to go away, shouldn't the focus be on protests taking place elsewhere (if at all)?

I believe I've found the fringe group that's making the occupy wall street movement look horrible. I can't link because this happened to me earlier today. They were protesting outside the building for the Community Trust Bank. The F-word seemed to be the word of the day for these people, as the word was on almost every sign I could see. One of the protestors shouted it at me as we drove past and another one spit at our car.

Anything to avoid talking about the actual relevance of the movement, right? Scary stories get more hits than honest analysis...

Same thing happened with the tea parties so why should this be any different?

Well, the honest analysis is plenty scary for the people the Tea Party has elected. Their brinksmanship and ambivalence toward default is what got our credit rating lowered - not our actual debts. The delusional insistence that we're drowning in the highest taxes seen when the actual rates are among the lowest in the last 80 years. The aggressive anti-global-warming-realism agenda. In the state houses, anti-immigrant laws that are usually blatantly unconstitutional.

I think you've stumbled on to their true motive, drachefly. The Tea Party politicians plan to crash the economy so hard, that the illegal immigrants will go home on their own.

Leave it to Cracked.com to put things in perspective.
3 types of protesters who are hurting their cause

I guess i am rather cynical when it comes to my believe what sort of protests work.

I would say:
* It is not a good idea as protest group to come up with detailed workable concepts ready to be implemented. Politicans hate to implement stuff they have not invented themselfs. You likely have to wait, until politicans who started their career in your movement come into offices, before your plans will be implemented, and by then propably enough has changed that they will be obsolete. Loosely directed rage can have faster and better results.

* A movement that does not frighten the powers that be, is powerless, period.

Frightening can happen in various ways.

It might be that you frighten with your vote. Thats as i understand the tea party approach. To do the equivalent the occupy movement would need to make the believable threat, that a significant amount of voters would rather vote for a hopeless third party candidate, then for a moderate Democrat, or that they are enough to push their candidates through democratic primaries, and get them elected, building a powerblock in the senate. Given the recent history, they would have to make their threats actually true at least once.

They might place the goverment in a loose loose situation. The demonstrations disrupt traffic, business and violate camping laws, so there is a significant portion of the people, who want them gone. But they are peacefull and just voicing their opinion, so an other significant portion of the people do not want to see protesters manhandled by the police. If theese portions don't align with party lines, the goverment is in a damned if they do, damned if they don't position. So they will not give in to the protestors actual demands, so other protests are not encouraged, but they will propably try to come up with their own ideas, natrually totally independent of the protests, that they hope will pacify the protesting demographic enough, that no new protests come up in the future. I think thats what the occupy movement wants to get at.

Or there might be a good cop, bad cop approach, in most cases not actually planned that way. Have the powers that be frightened enough by the violent radicals, that they throw the moderates some bones, in a divide et impera attempt. Like around here globalisation critics have been always portayed as well meaning, but totally out of touch with reality, so best ignored. Then there were violent anti globalisation protests in Genua, where one protester had been killed. From then on, peacefull intellectual globalisation critics got plenty of space in the media, and some parties started to court them.

* As a political protester, you have to communicate like in a bazar. Like you demand outragous prices and insist all your kids are going to die from starvation, if you don't get it. To take the example with the tiger in the zoo, if you protest for good locks on tiger cages, if you are very successfull propably the zoo will put some new paint on the broken lock. If you demand the extermination of all cat like animals worldwide, they might reluctantly actually put a new lock on the cage.

It's just a Peasants' Protest. Harmless venting of faux anger that is ultimately going to just fade away.

The difference is that real movements had focused anger and determination; like the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the civil rights movements. Real anger and determination focused on specific reforms. This is diffuse anger at best, at "bad guys" and painful economics. And I doubt the majority of the protesters would be willing to stand in the face of riot police (again, unlike the civil rights crowd, the anti-draft crowd or the unionists).

Maybe I'm wrong and we'll see some real anger and focus; so far, however, all I see is a festival.

There's clear signs of a South African presence at the Occupy Wall Street protest (or, at least, of someone who speaks Afrikaans making signs). We've also had people gathering outside the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (see here for photos - one person in image 9 has very cleverly used the flag of Apartheid South Africa to make his point). Not too many, though. It has been reported on in the media, but as protests go, it's a fairly minor one over here.

My favourite sign from the protests so far (seen on a video on Facebook, but I've forgotten exactly where, sorry):

"We demand sweeping, unspecified changes!"



I'm curious why you write 'faux' anger. Even if it's vague and undirected, a lot of people are genuinely angry, don't you think?

A lot of them probably are genuinely angry. But even more, I suspect, are there for the spectacle. There are, for example, many Youtube videos of genuinely angry protesters (albeit often unfocused and incoherent ones). And just as many videos of dudes shrugging and saying, well, I'm here because I think that someone should pay for my stuff...why?...because I shouldn't have to pay for it, or at least I don't think I should...everyone should have good free stuff...

For every shot of some protesters demagoguing the crowd, there's a crowd shot of mostly apathetic people milling around; maybe a few are listening. Compare that to the crowds of the civil rights marcus, or the Vietnam protests in Washington (even as gently mocked in "Forest Gump". Those people were focused, listening and responding. These ones, for the most part, are at an odd sort of block party.

OldCrow, the OWS first gained national recognition when police used force on unforceful protesters. The week after these incidents, 700 people were arrested during a peaceful protest on the Brooklyn bridge. Just last week, a few policemen were caught punching protesters. They're still around. Haven't had the hoses turned on them just yet, no, but they're still there.

And I find it interesting that the protests have grown to a worldwide phenomenon. Looks like an awful lot of people are faux angry at the bankers who traded their lives away on the stock market.



Well, the protests you mention were one or two day events meant to keep a crowd riled up, make their point and leave. OWS is about as many people as possible gathering for as long as they can to show that there is an actual presence in the U.S. (and elsewhere it seems) that disapproves of how corporate corruption has upended the economy. That the people aren't just ignorable numbers. The fact that the people are still there shows their passion, not whether they choose to join every chant.

OWS is a sit-in. A lie-in, even. They're occupying a space for an extended period of time. This automatically gives the activity a different nature than the type of protest where people march between two points waving placards or listen to speakers at a political rally. It's also a leader-less movement. Of course a lot of people are going to appear to be milling around, not doing much of anything. Of course they don't all have their faces fixed in an appropriately photogenic expression of concern and anger for 24 hours a day. They're camping out! And they don't even have loudspeakers!

Why don't I find some photos of soldiers hanging around their base in Afghanistan playing Halo 3 between patrols and use that as "evidence" that they don't seem to be fighting very hard? Honestly, Crow, between the "anti-corporate protesters are hypocrites because they use Facebook" and this, you're not even making sense.