From a Dish reader today:

Second: the idea that nobody knows what these people are protesting about is willfully ignorant. The protesters are there because they believe that the financial institutions that comprise “Wall Street” exercise too much power in the country’s political and social life. That’s it. That’s what the message is. The reason this seems so obvious is because it is so obvious. “But where are their proposals?” I have heard people complain. “Do they want to put a tax on financial transactions, or do they just want to raise the income tax for wealthy people?” Are you kidding? Technocrats don’t make for good activists. Technocrats should be in Congress, or working at think tanks, or helping Congressmen to craft policy. Protests should do three things: they should express anger, through marches and targeted civil disobedience, at a particular political or social situation. They should give people the opportunity to see that other people, even people different from themselves, share that anger. And they should provide a vision of how life would be better if the world were different. Occupy Wall Street is doing all three of those things.