"When you look at the past 50 years of American political thought, it is conservative dominated. I don't just mean the GOP, but I mean the notion that the market is the very first place where we should always look for an answer. And this, in fact, comes from a set of institutions, think tanks, conservative universities, philosophers who are writing about this, who are implementing it globally -- this kind of market-based individual analysis that whenever it sees inequality it asks one question: what's wrong with poor people? Why are poor people poor? And what we see [in Occupy Wall Street] is for the first time a mass-based movement that brings together a set of progressive ideas that has been asking the question when they see inequality, how did rich people get rich? Why are these rich people rich? This can't all be merit. These people can't be that much more meritorious than poor people. And that's a shift of the question." -Melissa Harris-Perry, professor at Tulane and MSNBC contributor, on a shift in thought about economic inequality brought on by the Occupy Wall Street movement