1. Instead of budget cuts to Social Security, Medicare, pell grants, infrastructure spending etc., we should be paying down our debt by increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations while ending subsidies to oil companies and agribusiness.
2. A public electoral finance system that takes out most if not all private contributors.
3. A massive economic package that targets unemployment and aids the middle class with their debt loads.
4. A constitutional amendment that defines corporations as separate entities from people (if the supreme court refuses to be reasonable, we can force them to be through completely constitutional methods)
5. Massive higher education reform that makes college cheap and affordable for all.
Yes, I'm saying that OWS should adopt a platform that is incredibly simplistic and broad; something that doesn't scapegoat Wall Street to the point where they come off as communists or anarchists but as squeezed middle class Americans looking for pragmatic measures from the government to boost the economy, not a full on revolution or something that comes across as an anti-"fat cat banker" lynch mob. Naturally, this isn't possible because most "members" of the OWS movement are not politicized or very ideological. If you try and tell them that this is an inherently political movement, many would try and deny it.
This protest isn't Mai 1968 or Wisconsin 2011, it's Los Idignados/M-15, the massive protest movement in Spain. M-15 in a nutshell:
"Even though protesters form a heterogeneous and ambiguous group, they share a strong rejection of unemployment, welfare cuts, Spanish politicians, the current two-party system in Spain between the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and the People's Party, as well as the current political system, capitalism, banks and bankers, " political corruption and firmly support what they call basic rights: home, work, culture, health and education."
Sound familiar? While this protest attracted millions of supporters and showed the youth's discontent with the economic state of affairs in a massive way, it was bore zero fruit. Why? Because the protesters weren't politicized. The protesters encouraged others not to vote and to not participate in the system. While one could argue that the PSOE's recent turn to the left was caused indirectly by M-15, for a movement that attracted so much support it was not successful. Like OWS, M-15 had no real goals as a movement. It existed only as a relief valve to blow off steam and signify total discontent with the system.
So if you're looking for a movement, a revolt or a revolution to get behind, this isn't the one. This is no Israeli Tent Protest or Chilean Student Protest, which had very understandable aims and goals. This is M-15. It's protest for the sake of protest. The potential for unions and the mainstream left to back OWS in a huge way still gives this protest hope in my mind but for now, I'll disassociate myself from this pit of conspiracy theorists, libertarians and people who are generally politically apathetic.
This isn't to say that protest is a waste of time, I'd just to like to wait for something with concrete goals, that has organization and strong leadership and that is certainly for the left wing of this country. While I wish Occupy Wall Street luck and hope that they succeed, I predict that it will fail to achieve anything substantial except a nice practice protest for the upcoming Romney regime.