I hung out a while yesterday at the Vancouver Occupation, and was impressed with their efforts at radical democracy. Many in the mainstream press have been quick to pile on for how time-consuming decision-making can be under this model, but perhaps they have not spent enough time in legislatures and committee meetings and public consultations. Democracy takes time, so what?

Thanks mostly to the superb campaigning by international development, poverty and environmental activists, there's been remarkable progress in getting Europe to introduce financial transactions taxes, a.k.a. the Robin Hood Tax. Last month, the European Commission presented a proposal for a broad-based financial transactions tax in all 27 members states of the European Union.

An Open Letter from the Top 1%:

We know it's been a while since we talked; it's not that we haven't wanted to, it's just that things keep coming up. Plus we keep hearing how busy you are, working harder and longer, with less and less time for your families. So we understand that you can't always make it down to the Embassy Club -- even though it's really the best time to catch us when we're ready to kick back and relax over a few drinks and shoot the breeze about how to invest last year's bonus.

This is not the stuff of usual protests. Over the past month, a little idea from a Vancouver outfit has mushroomed into a cross-continent movement.

Occupy Wall Street, kicked off by Adbusters in July and coming to Toronto this weekend, has already spread to 70 American cities and is going global as protesters challenge society to rethink how the economy and the government operates, and for whom.

It's an awakening -- a populist call for that "adult conversation" many thought would take place after the global economic calamity of 2008. It didn't then. But it may now, thanks to Occupy Wall Street, in a city near you.

Has the revolution finally arrived?

Chances are you hadn't heard of the Occupy Wall Street movement three weeks ago, when a few hundred mostly 20- and 30-something activists first occupied a park in Manhattan to protest corporate greed and corrupt party politics. For as long as they could get away with it, the corporate media greeted the occupation of the heart of global financial power with an information blackout. Many suspected, not unreasonably, that the occupiers would lose momentum and the movement would simply fizzle out and die.

Wall Street is "occupied." What do the occupiers want? Where to begin? How about here: The top 1 per cent income-earners in North America have appropriated most of the wealth created in the past thirty years. But what do they want, those protesters and their sympathizers?

Here's another fact on their minds. Politicians in North America engineered the good fortune of the wealthy through a systematic assault on the family incomes of everyone else. And simultaneously encouraged access to an ocean of cheap and easy credit.