Occupy Wall Street Considers a New Economy | Reuters.

But, even as the movement’s grievances are still being articulated, it has begun to move toward educating itself about alternatives to the current top-down, vertically organized market economy – one that has seen income inequality soar to rates unseen since the last Gilded Age and incomes of ordinary Americans – the 99 percent – stagnate or fall. (New figures show that 50 percent of Americans make less than $26,364, the lowest in real dollars since 1999.)

 

The 99 percent -ers have been taking back the political sphere by re-defining the relationship Americans have toward the political process, from passivity to participatory democracy. As David Graeber, one of the original organizers of OWS and author of the recent book, Debt, wrote on the blog Naked Capitalism:

 

It is almost impossible to convince the average American that a truly democratic society would be possible. One can only show them. But the experience of actually watching a group of a thousand, or two thousand, people making collective decisions without a leadership structure, let alone that of thousands of people in the streets linking arms to holding their ground against a phalanx of armored riot cops, motivated only by principle and solidarity, can change one’s most fundamental assumptions about what politics, or for that matter, human life, could actually be like.