They're learning fast

OWS is doing it just about right.  All progress begins with a good definition of the problem.  Once you have that, solutions are a LOT easier.  In fact, without understanding the problems, solutions are actually impossible.  So it's all right they are collecting grievances.  Proposed solutions come next.

The best part is that if you just dig a little, a progressive economic agenda is not all that hard to find.  Michael Hudson below has been doing his homework!  (Of course, do a little reading and anyone can nod sagely as if they had seen all this before.)  He claims in the video that a public option in banking will be a structural answer to the power of finance.  Ah yes, the best idea of the Non-Partisan League lives on.

Obama’s Good Cop/ Bad Cop deal with the Republicans
Don’t Let Him Get Away With It: Occupy Wall St
By Michael Hudson 

October 07, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- The seeds for President Obama’s demagogic press conference on Thursday were planted last summer when he assigned his right-wing Committee of 13 the role of resolving the obvious and inevitable Congressional budget standoff by forging an anti-labor policy that cuts Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and uses the savings to bail out banks from even more loans that will go bad as a result of the IMF-style austerity program that Democrats and Republicans alike have agreed to back. 

The problem facing Mr. Obama is obvious enough: How can he hold the support of moderates and independents (or as Fox News calls them, socialists and anti-capitalists), students and labor, minorities and others who campaigned so heavily for him in 2008? He has double-crossed them – smoothly, with a gentle smile and patronizing patter talk, but with an iron determination to hand federal monetary and tax policy over to his largest campaign contributors: Wall Street and assorted special interests – the Democratic Party’s Rubinomics and Clintonomics core operators, plus smooth Bush Administration holdovers such as Tim Geithner, not to mention quasi-Cheney factotums in the Justice Department. 

President Obama’s solution has been to do what any political demagogue does: Come out with loud populist campaign speeches that have no chance of becoming the law of the land, while quietly giving his campaign contributors what they’ve paid him for: giveaways to Wall Street, tax cuts for the wealthy (euphemized as tax “exemptions” and mark-to-model accounting, plus an agreement to count their income as “capital gains” – taxed at a much lower rate). 

So here’s the deal the Democratic leadership has made with the Republicans. The Republicans will run someone from their present gamut of guaranteed losers, enabling Mr. Obama to run as the “voice of reason,” as if this somehow is Middle America. This will throw the 2012 election his way for a second term if he adopts their program – a set of rules paid for by the leading campaign contributors to both parties.
President Obama’s policies have not been the voice of reason. They are even further to the right than George W. Bush could have achieved. At least a Republican president would have confronted a Democratic Congress blocking the kind of program that Mr. Obama has rammed through. But the Democrats seem stymied when it comes to standing up to a president who ran as a Democrat rather than the Tea Partier he seems to be so close to in his ideology. 

So here’s where the Committee of 13 comes into play. Given (1) the agreement that if the Republicans and Democrats do NOT agree on Mr. Obama’s dead-on-arrival “job-creation” ploy, and (2) Republican House Leader Boehner’s statement that his party will reject the populist rhetoric that President Obama is voicing these days, then (3) the Committee will get its chance to wield its ax and cut federal social spending in keeping with its professed ideology. 

President Obama signaled this long in advance, at the outset of his administration when he appointed his Deficit Reduction Commission, headed by former Republican Sen. Simpson and Rubinomics advisor to the Clinton administration Bowles. They were to recommend how to cut federal social spending while giving even more money away to Wall Street. He confirmed suspicions of a sellout by reappointing bank lobbyist Tim Geithner to the Treasury, and tunnel-visioned Ben Bernanke as head of the Federal Reserve Board. 

Yet on Wednesday, October 4, the president tried to represent the OccupyWallStreet movement as supportive for his efforts. He pretended to endorse a pro-consumer regulator to limit bank fraud, as if he had not dumped Elizabeth Warren on the advice of Mr. Geithner – who seems to be settling into the role of bagman for campaign contributors from Wall Street. more

And since symbolic acts are occasionally useful, it might help to wheel a guillotine into a public square so that perhaps the banksters—who are about as socially backward as is possible for the human condition—just MIGHT get an idea of how angry people are.  Here we see that a German has come up with an IKEA-like guillotine that probably could slice a watermelon.  The theatrics that could be worked around this little toy are damn near endless.