The agenda of bringing down oppressive governments is easy - i.e. get rid of the guy. The agenda of occupy walls street is hard because we want to maintain stability, but change the way things work. I believe the author is asking the question: "how do you measure success when your goals are vague?" It is good to protest peacefully to vent our frustration, but what do we want to accomplish?

Naomi Klein made this point clear in her speech to the "Occupy Wall Street" crowd when she pointed out her lists of important versus unimportant "things". While it is nice that people don't care what you wear, and do care about your moral compass, these are not the kinds of agenda items that make revolutions or even evolution.

So what are we trying to say here? Since I am not part of the movement, I would like to make some outside suggestions:

1) change the law so that politics become more about the people who vote then the people who have money. This means limitations on corporate donations. This is a very important distinction at a time when the courts are judging law to cover corporate entities. Lets be clear here. Corporations do not have "individual rights" not more that dogs, cats, or monkeys have individual rights under our law. If you dissect the intent of laws, they are to guide societies of moral character. The role of governments is to provide an environment life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Institutions, especially financially driven institutions are fiducially and legally bound to indifference. Their goals are not to pursue happiness, but to maximize profits. This should exempt them from influence over political bodies. Some well meaning individuals will argue that corporations are made of people, and I argue that all those people have the right to vote and donate resources individually.

2) institutional investors should be held to a higher standard than individuals. It is one thing to allow the markets to operate freely. It is another to let institutions that represent the financial wealth of individuals operate without bounds. This is why we find our pensions underfunded and our corporations crippled by fund managers who control the wealth of those corporations. There is a difference between Carl Icaan controlling GM with his own money, and a large pension fund controlling GM with mine.

3) Patent law should encourage innovation, and not put it in the hands of a few oligopolies. The wheeling and dealing of Google, Microsoft, Motorola, Cisco, Apple and others is to cripple competition and reduce the market to only those players who can afford the bargaining chips of an expensive patent portfolio. Using patents to create oligopolies for entire markets do not serve the people or the institutions well.

4) Self funded investment plans such as government pension plans should not be used to balance state or federal budgets. If we didn't skim surpluses or underfund social security or pension plans when times were good, we wouldn't be underfunded when times are bad.

Patent law forces competition into the courts. If you think governments are inefficient, then try understanding how competition is stifled through litigation as a competitive advantage. Right now no one can be successful in the computer, device, or software business without the threat of litigation. Our patent system is broken and we need to fix it.

I personally think that the occupy wall street movement is misguided. Yes the banks brought down the world economy through greed. It will always be hard to regulate markets well enough to prevent innovative individuals from coming up with ways to circumvent regulations. My concerns are with our willingness to expend immense amount of money on military actions with no goals in mind. There will always be egotists with narrow minded views of the world, like DIck Cheney" who will justify expenditures that risk bankrupting the country in the name of security. Without Iraq, the impact of the recent financial collapse would have been easily weathered. If we want to "Occupy wall street" then lets not forget the true source of our financial instability.

Occupying walls street is a noble cause, but lets look for some purpose other than peacefully protesting to vent our feelings.

You can read about it here:

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=occupy+washington+dc...

To paraphrase Elizabeth Warren.....using the infrastructure; highway system, electrical grid, port facilities, etc, that we all paid for. Their workforce was educated and trained in schools that we all paid for, etc.....You T-Party trolls do understand that...don't you.

Mr. Turpin,
'Crowding together in public places' causes this discourse. Let us focus on the influence of money in politics and not our conditioned ideologies.

"Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth." - Teddy Roosevelt. 1902.