David Cobb, Move To Amend / Lawyer / Democracy Unlimited joins Thom Hartmann. One of the most contentious Senate races this year is in Massachusetts - between Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Scott Brown. How has Warren become the Occupy movement's biggest champion - and isn't her anti corporate personhood message at the center of Occupy's cause?

Happy Birthday Occupy Wall Street. One year ago today...Americans started occupying Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan - and over the next several weeks - hundreds of similar occupations popped up all around the nation. The movement went mainstream - and average middle class Americans were drawn to it because it targeted the two fundamental crises facing not just working people in America - but working people around the world. The first being the corporate coup de tat of our democracy. And the second being the subsequent corporate takeover of the economy - and the emergence of a globalized corporate financial economy that is today collapsing under its own weight. And since one year later - these two crises are still threatening us all - the Occupy Movement is just as important than ever. On the first front - there's a new report, written by an international commission chaired by Kofi Annan, which sends a warning to the world's democracies, specifically the United States, about the corrupting influence of corporations and money in the democratic process. As the report - titled "Deepening Democracy: a Strategy for Improving the Integrity of Elections Worldwide" - states, quote: "Across the world, uncontrolled political finance threatens to hollow out democracy and rob it of its unique strengths."

So, what the heck is going on in the Middle East right now? I submit for your consideration that what we're seeing is actually the logical continuation of revolutions against poverty and dictatorship that we've been calling the "Arab Spring." And it's going to continue - and get worse - until one very specific thing happens. Here's why and how. In a brilliant paper that explains revolutions far better than Marx & Engles, back in 1962 James C. Davies wrote for the American Sociological Review an article titled, "Toward a Theory of Revolution." In it, he proposed that revolutions don't happen because life is intolerable for people, which was basically Marx's theory. He points out correctly that there are countries all over the world and all through history where life was and is terrible, but people don't revolt. Keep in mind that of the 7 billion people on earth right now, about 5 and a half billion of them live on less than $5 a day, and about 3 billion of them live on less than $2 a day. Over a billion of them don't even have access to sanitation or safe drinking water. But they're not revolting. Why is that? Davies proposed that it's not life being terrible that provokes revolutions. Instead, it's all about the gap between what people expect life to be like and what it's actually like. When that gap is small - people live in squalor, but just figure that's the hand life has dealt them - then you don't have revolution. But when that gap is large, when people expect that ...

Marc Harrold, Libertarian Commentator & Erikka Knuti, Democratic Strategist & Neil Munro, The Daily Caller all join Thom Hartmann.