I've been trying to wrap my head around these protests for a while, and I'm hoping I can get critiques of my current understanding of them. Seriously, I want people to pick this apart and demonstrate to me that I'm wrong, if you can in any way. I apologize for the imminent TL;DR, but I haven't yet gotten my understanding down to a single paragraph :)

The best explanation I've heard so far actually came from a friend of mine who has been trying to figure out how to get out to join the protests without losing her job. She works for a large corporate law firm, specializing in finance law, and is honestly probably well on her way to being part of the 1%. She hates it, though, because she's forced to choose between her job and her ethics on a nearly daily basis.

Lax enforcement of regulation - and penalties which often cost only a fraction of the profit gained through unethical or downright fraudulent practices - have caused certain sectors (much of finance and law, for instance) to transition to a dynamic where the only way to survive and get ahead is to cheat. Playing by the rules is no longer a winning strategy.

Education debt comes into the picture here, because it's what holds my friend (and a great many people) in these situations. Once you've trained to work as an investment banker, or a finance lawyer, you often face one of three choices:

1) compete unethically in order to make enough money to cover your massive student loan payments
2) compete ethically and fail, either scraping by in poverty after just making the payments, or not making enough to pay your loans, leading to bankruptcy.
3) leave the industry and declare bankruptcy.

There really isn't a good choice there. Sure, as I've heard people argue here and elsewhere, it's still possible to avoid the whole situation and go to a state or community college. You can get a practical degree, employ yourself in another field, and not end up buried in debt. Lots of people are still doing that. The important thing here is that these choices act as a self-selection mechanism, because if you chose community college or insolvency, you're not going to end up working on wall street. Very soon, the only people left _in_ these industries are those who are trapped in a cycle of compromised ethics and extremely short-term greed.

This wouldn't be a problem if these industries operated in isolation. They'd all just really suck to work in, and the rest of us who didn't go that high-risk route and got a practical degree with little debt could lead our lives happily. Unfortunately, many of these fields (such as corporate law and investment banking) are pervasively intertwined with the rest of our economy, leaving us all dependent on systems which have self-selected for corruption and a myopic focus on short-term greed over long-term reward. They are taking up a larger and larger share of the economy, while simultaneously being corroded by these self-selection mechanisms and therefore becoming more susceptible to catastrophic failure (due to the short-sighted and fraudulent practices). Much of the current disparity in income and unemployment rate can be laid at the feet of this trend.

The problem is not that we somehow have a right to that money or those jobs, it's that if this pattern continues we run the very real risk of the whole economy failing, and that will just suck for everyone. I did things in the way held up as "right" by many of the detractors of the occupy movement. I am out of debt (other than an affordable mortgage) and happily employed in a job I love that pays a wage on which I live comfortably. If, however, systems like finance and corporate law either collapse or survive only by increasingly defrauding all their customers, then I'm going to be a lot worse off, and so is everyone else, regardless of the level of personal responsibility they've displayed. So my understanding is that, all rights and bootstraps aside, the occupy protesters are saying it's probably better if we start working on how to fix this dynamic, instead of just remaining complacent.