Has the Occupy Wall Street movement had significant influence on policy?

Question

In September 2011 and onwards, Occupy Wall Street and its many spinoffs occupied squares all over the world. The meetings shared some degree of dissatisfaction with present systems, but clear aims were not really formulated, nor were there any clear leaders.

Now, we are more than a year further, and the question is: has anything changed? Apart from initiating limited debate on the financial system and related issues (for example, it triggered me to move part of my savings to an ethical credit union), has the Occupy movement had any lasting political influence?

For example, from this Huffington Post article: Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said:

"[W]e have to be careful not to allow this to get any legitimacy," he warned. "I'm taking this seriously in that I'm old enough to remember what happened in the 1960s when the left-wing took to the streets and somehow the media glorified them and it ended up shaping policy," he said. "We can't allow that to happen."

Indeed, the civil rights movement in the 1960's did influence policy. Is there any evidence that Occupy Wall Street has shaped any policy?

Answer 1

In a purely subjective way, based on my impressions from several visits to the NYC site, I do not think the various OWS happenings changed the minds of a significant number of people. In most instances, there were more curious onlookers and gawkers than actual occupiers. The occupiers did not seem to have coherent agendas. They seemed more to be gathering places for barely connected islands of opinion.

People who were already inclined to think that somehow, somewhere, someone owes them some money did not change their opinion. People who did not think that a sociology major with a concentration of revolutionary organizing was going to pay for $200K in student loans were not impressed.

They did form useful props for politicians who already espoused or supported similar views in the first place.

Answer 2

The unifying idea behind Occupy Wall Street was the "99%" movement, which claimed to consist of absolute majority of population in its demands to the top 1%.

I did not research this so I'm not able to provide references, but it looks that policy changes involved giving green light to various left-wing movements unified based on racial and sexual identity; and to a smaller extent to right-wing movements unified by far-right ideology and ressentiment. Such political movements has fragmented the political landscape and as such removed the focus from the existing political establishment:

When you discuss (and violently fight for) the distribution of opportunities based on race, you are no longer tackling the 99% vs. 1% question - instead, you are only discussing the distribution of much less lucrative amount of power between factions of 99%, all of which only have limited around of relevance across the political landscape - all while excluding the most powerful 1% from the debate entirely.

I've seen some claims (whose validity I can't check) that FBI is actively involved with radical left-wing actionism, such as preventing persecution of activists for crimes or harassing people who try to put a check on left-wing actionism: it is a puzzling development but it may be well explained by the 1% successfully trying to divert attention from itself.

This would also imply that left-wing movements based on racial and sexual identity have much wider bipartisan support than usually assumed, since both of American duopoly parties consist mainly of 1% socio-economic group members.