I can't help but compare the Occupy Wall Street protests to the movements that sprang up against corporate globalization at the end of the 1990s, most visibly at the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Like today's protests, those demonstrations were also marked by innovative coalitions among students, trade unions and environmentalists.

Here are the things I think today's activists are doing better than we did back then. We chose summits as our targets: the WTO, the International Monetary Fund, the G-8. Summits are transient by nature, and that made us transient too. We'd appear, grab world headlines, then disappear. After the 9/11 attacks, it was easy to sweep us away completely, at least in North America.

I was honoured to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I said had to be repeated by hundreds of people so others could hear (a.k.a. "the human microphone"), what I actually said at Liberty Plaza had to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.

I love you.

And I didn't just say that so that hundreds of you would shout "I love you" back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder.

George Soros has invested $8 billion around the world promoting free speech, civil society, and ways of making governments accountable. Noted for their early work in Eastern Europe, his Open Society Foundations grew out of a philosophical conviction: that political oppression could not co-exist with open debate over the nature of society.

Recently, the multi-billionaire hedge fund operator has found a flaw in his own reasoning, which he has shared with readers of the New York Review of Books. 

Anyone hoping to see the financial titans of Wall Street brought to heel couldn't help but feel glum when Barack Obama defended the latest round of grotesquely large bank bonuses.

"I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system," the president said in a recent interview with BusinessWeek, commenting on the multimillion-dollar bonuses paid earlier this year to Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, and to Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs.