November 18, 2011  Who Are the Occupiers?  By Peter Wood  The
Occupy Wall Street protesters have prided themselves on being
hard to pin down.  Plainly anti-capitalist in spirit, OWS
sometimes seems a dust ball of a movement, gathering into itself
all sorts of stray ideas and activists in a loose
conglomeration.  If you approach the movement by talking to
individual participants, you encounter such a random collection
of malcontents that the word "movement" itself seems overblown. 
I've talked to protesters in New York who thirst for Marxist
revolution, others who want student debt canceled, some intent
on sustainatopian designs, and others just hanging out.  When I
talked to Occupy Anchorage protesters (all three of them), one
wanted to abolish the Fed, one was a clueless young man who
agreed to stand in the cold and hold a sign because an older
friend had asked him to, and the third was friendly but
noncommittal.  But, of course, Occupy really is a movement. 
When I gave a talk about it at the University of