New Economy Working Group

"I think why the Occupy movement has struck such a cord, and been so popular, that they are the living embodiment that that story is no longer true," Cavanagh says.

"This tribunal is illegitimate and it shouldn't exist," said John Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies and a rally organizer. "It's an attack on democracy."

John Cavanagh, director of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies spoke to Press TV's U.S. Desk on Wednesday about the impact of the Occupy movement and its future as well as the recent pepper spraying of protesters by the police at UC Davis.

Cavanagh said that in order to understand the current situation, one has to look back to the late 1970s or 1980s where "what you realize is that a lot of the framework for the national conversation in the United States over the past thirty years, was set by the election of Ronald Reagan back in 1980" and the message that the economy was broken due to too much government and that "we need to free corporations and the free market in order to create prosperity. Get government out of the way, get rid of regulations and let the free market reign and this was the dominant philosophy for thirty years and they also argued that, they acknowledged that inequality would probably rise." 

John Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies, said  "The bigger story is we have a country that is broken, that isn’t working for the majority of the people, that is grotesquely unequal.  And when you change a story like that, it has all kinds of ripple effects through society."

Cavanagh points to a recent decision by a major bank to charge customers a monthly debit card fee.  After a backlash from angry consumers, the bank dropped the plan. "The protests came up and the banks acted or reacted," he said. "I think in the banking world there is a lot of discussion right now of what do we need to get these people to go away?"