Great reporting by Naomi Wolf on the motivations of the occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters and the resulting violent crackdown:
The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process.
No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.
No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.
[...] Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.
The XKCD comic from this past week really put things in perspective for me. The disparity in the US between the wealthy and poor is staggering; this kind of inequality is what leads to class warfare.