I was reading some of the comments in Mark Sumner's fp'ed diary on the tea partiers, and it made me wonder: Just who do folks think the 99% are? The 99% seems like a pretty non-exclusive club to me. It's folks with phd's and folks who never finished high school. It's mineworkers and Southern Baptist ministers.
It's not just a few thousand protesters in a park; it's pretty much everybody you like coupled with pretty much everybody you don't like.
I could be misinterpreting, but my takeaway from OWS is that its primary agenda is to point up the growing economic inequity in our country, and to try to start to put a stop to the undue influence exerted on our govt. by the ultra wealthy and by large corporations. In short, to put "the people" back behind "of," "by" and "for."
This is not totally a left/right thing, and could be far less of one. There are plenty of people on the right(I said "people," not pundits or politicians) who are pissed off about the power wielded by large corporations.
And even though a lot of folks on the right have been brainwashed into believing that making the rich richer is the key to everyone's happiness, convincing many of them otherwise shouldn't be that difficult since we've enriched the rich for a few decades now and it hasn't done squat for the rest of us.
So the 99%, in my view anyway, is about getting the opportunity--all of us, left and right--to once again have a real say in how our country is run. And though it might take more convincing with some of the folks on the right, it's not impossible.
& frankly, I'd be thrilled if we were not fighting political battles against Koch, GE, ADM, Bechtel and BP, but instead at odds with regular citizens whom we just happen to disagree with.