Beyond the Caricatures

 It's easy to poke fun at the Occupy Wall Street crowd. I do it myself. (It's fun.) What's not easy is looking past the obvious to see what's going on at the root of it all. Michael Tracey does just that:

 ""The banks got bailed out / we got sold out" is probably the most common chant I've heard at Liberty Plaza, and I think it best encapsulates the protest's overriding sentiment: that regardless of political persuasion, people are sick and tired of a select few billionaires, in collusion with government, making decisions that hurt the rest of us behind closed conference-room doors. The feeling is fundamentally post-partisan. Everyone knows, on some level, that "Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit"—as one placard put it. And rampant police abuse has only confirmed that something’s got to give.
There is near-consensus that government's bailout-happy genuflection to Wall Street before, during, and after the financial crisis has caused tremendous damage, allowing well-connected and financially insulated bankers to reap record profits while social services budgets are put on the chopping block. Even if demonstrators have yet to hash out a tangible or credible remedy for addressing all this, most agree that identifying the problem must come first."