My criticism of Occupy Wall Street came from George Packer. His argument was that OWS fell apart because they had no concrete demands. I've mellowed a bit - "concrete demands" aren't necessarily the responsibility of the protesting party. Obviously if you have protests, you are making some portion of your constituency unhappy. I think the problem, in a nutshell, was that OWS was screaming "BE MORE LEFTIST" while the Tea Party was screaming "BE MORE FASCIST." The Democrats looked at OWS and went "lol" while the Republicans looked at the Tea Party and went "whee!"

The Yellow Vests protests didn't really have a focus either, until someone threw up a list of demands and they sorta went "yeah, that." I'm just coulda,shoulda,woulda-ing here but the reading I have done since has led me to conclude that the effective thing for the Obama administration to have done would have been to prosecute financial crimes on Wall Street. But they weren't going to do that because (A) they were super-chummy with the criminals on Wall Street (B) they were dependent on the continued cooperation of Wall Street because (C) American governance has been a beard for American corporate interests for 130 years.

I used to hate economics. I used to hate the Business section. I used to despise all this talk of interest rates and shit as if it actually mattered. But fuckin' hell the 4-500 books I've read on history and economics since 2008 have left me with a pretty firm conviction that the apocryphal, anti-semitic Rothschild quote "Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws" is truthy.

I've come around to the idea that the basic problem we face in the United States is our wholesale rejection of Keynes and our adoption of Friedman.

Keynes:

I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organising investment.

Friedman:

Insofar as [a business executive's] actions in accord with his "social responsibility" reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.

That was September 13, 1970. Everything went worse than expected.

So we're at 52 years of "corporations owe you nothing" which, in a capitalist economic system, means "the government owes you nothing." That's really hard to elucidate a cogent response to. Unfortunately believers in Democracy expect the government to respond positively while believers in Money look at the Oligarchs and go "I could do that job no problem."