In The USA: the Next Revolution

[motorfirebox]

I don't think regulation would have made much difference; it's a generally overrated factor. It's easy to look back and think that regulation X would have prevented event Y, but in reality once a perverse incentive is in place, it will be followed: close one way, another will be found. Regulation cannot substitute for good policy or compensate for bad policy.

The striking down of the specific regulations I'm talking about was/is a perverse incentive.

There's also a huge chunk of the country who thinks that the whole crisis was caused by bad greedy bankers.

Most people want what they can't have: higher wages and lower prices, lower taxes and more government doleouts. That's a constant. The point is simply that the raving of the polarized extremes contributes nothing to the search for solutions, and to the extent that those closer to the center have to pander to the extremes can actually obstruct the search for solutions.

That sorta exemplifies what I'm talking about. You're proposing that the crash shouldn't be blamed on the banks as if that's a centrist view. To me, that's pretty far right-wing. Centrism doesn't seem like it's an actual position, anymore--lots of people claim to be centrist, but for the most part that seems to be a way of saying that they think they've got their finger on the country's pulse and that their opponents are extremists.

The left is always angry; most of the time nobody notices. It's not a very useful anger, because it's based on ignorance and offers nothing in the way of solutions. I'd guess that most of the OWS core comes from comfortable middle-class backgrounds and that few have ever done anything resembling real work or have experienced anything other than self-imposed hardship. Certainly they'll try to represent themselves as speaking for "the 99%", but do they? I tend to doubt it. We'll see. With some experience of the left, I expect little. They've a remarkable talent for shooting themselves simultaneously in both feet.

The left is frequently aghast, but it has trouble rallying together. I'm talking about a more unifying sense of anger, rather than the individual outrages that normally splinter that half of the spectrum. As for who they represent... you seem to be differentiating between the middle class and the 99%, which strikes me as a pretty major misconception (by "the 99%", I mean the people OWS wants to / claims to champion, not OWS itself). But like I said, I don't think it's useful to try to talk about what the majority of the country wants, because it's too easy to spin that sort of talk into support for whatever side you yourself are on.