that could be expressed in a sentence. The focus was clear and known to everyone both inside and outside the movements in question. There was a single, straight line connecting the desired action to the desired outcome.
Inside the OWS/99% movement there are dozens (if not hundreds) of different, conflicting ideas about what should be done and how, and outside the movement, nobody has the slightest idea what they are about beyond camping out in city parks.
The "movement" is too abstract and too unfocused to accomplish anything whatsoever. It has no single, focused, easy to express and, in theory at least, easy to implement goal: eliminate the practice of openly discriminating against people based on skin color; Allow women to register and vote; Prohibit children from working in factories.
In contrast, the OWS has a laundry list of desired outcomes but nobody has any idea how to arrive at those outcomes. Everyone knew how to arrive at the outcome "give women the vote" because the action was the outcome. OWS has lots of really good outcomes they would like to see, but without concrete steps, nothing will happen. And nobody can agree on which actions need to be taken, or whether those actions will or will not help reach the desired outcomes. They are trying to solve an immensely complex, multifaceted problem with the tools that have only ever worked for single-issue, simple straight-line problems, and never for changing the behavior of large dynamical systems.
The fact is, nobody has any idea how to safely change the behavior of such a huge, complex dynamical system as the world economy, especially not a diffuse band of campers with no special expertise in complex systems theory. The world economy is a chaotic system that could flip from one strange attractor to another even with careful manipulation by people who know something about how the system works. Let politicians or street protestors start forcing changes to the system and the whole thing will break catastrophically. That's like letting a committee of plumbers and shoe salesmen get together to perform open heart surgery. There's no way the patient will survive, let alone get better.
The world economic system has reached a critical point where the only way to fix it is radical simplification, and that will not happen voluntarily. It will, however, happen, and no matter what politicians and bankers and OWS tries to do to exert some control over the changes, the changes will be fast, chaotic, unpredictable, and will result in a radically simpler system that nobody will like, and that might well be even more unbalanced and unfair than it is now if it becomes as simple as a feudal system.
So, no. OWS doesn't have a chance of doing any good. Nor do politicians or economists. It's too late for that. The system is too complex to understand, and too complex to control any more. Radical simplification is the only possible outcome.
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