@OccupyNews.net:

Not sure whether it's your understanding or your statement of history that's off, but the above is incorrect.  (I don't mean this as an attack, just a correction.)

Glass-Steagal was passed in 1933, and most of what was left of it by 1999 repealed by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB), also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, a version of which (iirc) Clinton may have threatened to veto but ultimately did not, which ultimately passed the senate 90-8 and the house 362-57.  It was pushed hard by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, later Chairman of Citigroup, and thus clearly had administration blessing.  Congress largely drank the plutocracy flavored kool-aid, despite the fact that it was obvious to anyone with a clue that this was tearing down one of the most important protections in the financial system, under the rubric of "greater efficiencies and financial innovations" (now known to include the proliferation of credit default swap trading, hedge funds, unrestricted mortgage securitization, proprietary trading....)

[ https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80... ]

There isn't much of a connection between that and Clinton's surpluses.  If anything, Clinton owes much of that to George P. Shultz's strategem of "making everyone a capitalist" (and also shifting reliance away from social security) by diverting money flows from defined benefit pensions to 401Ks and Roth IRAs, which fueled the 90's stock market bubble when all that money had no where else to go regardless of the actual quality of underlying investments and so would reliably be dumped into a growing bubble on a regular basis.

Of course I'm with you 110% on the need for re-enactment of Glass-Steagall.

A third party or a big independent movement like OWS that participates in electoral politics can run local candidates, and can run challengers to bad incumbents in all kinds of elected offices from city to state to federal.  

I heard a USC poli sci professor expound on NPR (confession: I listen to NPR OCCASIONALLY) that the main way big poltical changes occur in the US is when a powerful grassroots movement puts pressure within one of the main parties and forces its agenda on the political elite running that party. I believe his examples included the tea party favored Republican candidates now in Congress, and pressure from civil rights movement and other movements on the Democrats in the late 60s, early 70s. But the New Deal is probably also a good example.

But I would like to believe that millions more voters becoming independents could result in the 2 party establishments losing their stranglehold on elections and on the issues. So often we have 2 pro-war presidential candidates as well 2 corporate candidates etc.