Credit Occupy in Bernie Sanders’ Surge
For insight into Bernie Sanders’ unexpected surge, go back to 2011, to the then-scorned Occupy Wall Street movement and its drive against the 1 percent and income inequality.
Written off that year as disorganized and ineffective, the Occupy movement has contributed volunteers and—even more important—its powerful message to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. The combination of progressive volunteers and a powerful attack on economic injustice helped Sanders come extremely close to beating Hillary Clinton in Iowa and could be of great help to him in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.
Sanders is favored to win in New Hampshire, a neighbor to his home state of Vermont. He has a substantial lead in public opinion polls. But polls aren’t reliable predictors. In 2008, Clinton staged a furious comeback in the New Hampshire primary and beat Barack Obama there.
“The Occupy movement set the stage for the Sanders campaign,” Lauren Steiner, an Occupy veteran, told me in a phone interview. She is lead organizer for Los Angeles for Bernie, a coalition of more than 30 grass-roots groups. She arranged for former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, to speak at an Occupy Los Angeles teach-in at the group’s City Hall encampment in 2011.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/credit_occupy_in_bernie_sanders_surge_20160204
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it will take time but the signs are there. 
