Occupy why

Ryssdal: Do you suppose that the impact the progressive wing of the modern Democratic Party is having here in , do you suppose that happens without Occupy? Meyer: Hard to see it. So, [Sen. Bernie Sanders] had been making the same speech for 35 years before that.

And Bernie fills in and steps into the breach. And because he did so well in the primaries — he demonstrated the appeal of the sets of policies that he was pushing — other people, candidates for office, stepped in, and you know, picked up the sheet music and started singing it their own way.

Ryssdal: All right. This is a weird question: Do you think the memory of Occupy can help carry the day for them? What Occupy did is it gave them a sense that other people cared about the same thing. It reinforced their passion. And it gave them a strong Progressive Caucus within the House of Representatives.

Occupy affected the people who were involved in it and the people who were watching it. Send us feedback. Note: The source of the -i- in Anglo-French occupier and Middle English occupien, retained in Modern English, is unclear, as continental French has only occuper. The verb occupy, common in later Middle and early Modern English, was very infrequently used in the 17th and first two thirds of the 18th century; it has been suggested that this was due to the sense "to have sexual intercourse with a woman ," which impinged by connotation on the less charged meanings and led to a taboo on any use of the word.

When the socially unacceptable sense fell out of circulation occupy once more became a generally used word. See more words from the same century. Accessed 14 Nov. More Definitions for occupy. See the full definition for occupy in the English Language Learners Dictionary. Nglish: Translation of occupy for Spanish Speakers. Britannica English: Translation of occupy for Arabic Speakers. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!

Log in Sign Up. Polls showed that a wide majority of Americans supported Occupy. Then, almost as quickly as it had arrived, the movement appeared to vanish, leaving behind little except for the language of the 99 and the 1 percent. In the decade since, the wealth gap has only widened. Rewriting the protest playbook, Occupy introduced a decentralized form of movement organizing that enabled hundreds of city chapters to reinforce and strengthen one another yet remain independent—a sharp break from the traditional, hierarchical structure of protest movements of the past.

Pioneering the use of live-stream technology while employing powerful social-media messaging and meme tactics to grow participation both on- and offline, Occupy showed a new generation how to turn social movements into a viral spectacle that seizes control of the public narrative. Read: The triumph of Occupy Wall Street. More deeply, the movement on Wall Street injected activists with a new sense of courage: Confronting power and issuing demands through civil disobedience is now an ingrained part of our political culture.

And in a sense, the protesters have never gone home. Some of the top activists of this generation got their start at Occupy. And now an army of elected populists in both the Senate and House is unifying around her.

De Blasio now leads a national task force of mayors who hope to aggressively tackle the wealth gap in their cities—something scarcely imaginable before Occupy reshuffled the political deck.

Occupy was, at its core, a movement constrained by its own contradictions: filled with leaders who declared themselves leaderless, governed by a consensus-based structure that failed to reach consensus, and seeking to transform politics while refusing to become political.

Ironic as it may seem, the impact of the movement that many view only in the rearview mirror is becoming stronger and clearer with time. Since the Great Recession, shareholder profits, CEO pay, and corporate tax breaks have soared while average household wealth continues to sink, college debt skyrockets, living costs increase, real wages decline, and the middle class struggles to survive.

And while no one in Washington may have the full answer about how to fix income inequality, everyone, it seems, is now grasping for a solution.

Occupy got the diagnosis correct. It also charted the course for concrete legislative reform.