Jerome, don't feel down. Feel knurd. It's unpleasant but it works.

What you're doing has nothing to do with Greenpeace/Bové style activism. The "Anglo disease" is about framing the discourse and, interestingly enough, the action is directed towards the media and politicians, not ordinary citizens. In some degree, it's lobbying.

Plus, you have a pretty serious ally in this affair: reality. The Anglo disease is not an important issue because you feel very strongly about it (the ward single-issue activist use to gauge their own importance). It's important because it's real and it's bitting the whole lot of us right now.

That's more what I call citizen expertise: developing and articulating knowledge about important issues outside of the anointed circles so it is possible to tell them "No, you are wrong and here's the proof" when they serve their usual "expert" crap. That works even (and, probably especially well) for highly technical issues.

But you don't go around hectoring passers-by on how immoral they are for not caring deeply about the Anglo disease. That's what Greenpeace and the single-issue activists are doing and then they are all outraged and indignant when the passers-by just answer "whatever".

ATinNM:

In my opinion we have a wide range of expertise with a wonderful potential waiting to be harnessed.  The harness, IMNSHO, is money and, allied to that, is a 'customer.'  The latter solves the former.  If we could find a customer willing to throw ~150,000€ a year for two years we could write a serious of position papers that would destroy the intellectual foundations of the Washington Consensus.  

The idea of a "meta-consultancy" has legs, I think. It has been floated by a number of people. What we really need, though, is someone with sales/fundraising ability to convince potential customers that our expertise is what they need.

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes

make aware the public of a problem, not change how people think about it. Of course the anti-war protests were useless in changing public opinion. Everybody knew there would be a war and it didn't lack awareness.
But there are other issues, which can profit enormously just from awareness.

I guess by the way there are a lot of people, who would oppose protesters and potentially their issues, just because they are "massive and brutal", as you write they should be. If you really can change something, like stopping a war or destructing a nuclear power plant, this can still work, but such protests won't be constructive.

Der Amerikaner ist die Orchidee unter den Menschen
Volker Pispers

Partially so.

But partially it is probably also due to the very simple fact that protests today are substantially more toothless than protests forty or fifty years ago. It used to be that when someone put a hundred thousand pairs of feet on the streets in the capital, it presaged a general strike, extensive blockades, large scale organised sabotage or some other suitably nasty reprisal if their demands were not met - or at least approached.

In other words, the Left used to have the Parliament of the Street with which to oppose the Right's control of the Parliament of the Dollar. Today, the Parliament of the Street has been left to disorganised anarchist rabble with more guts than sense and little in the way of political program or parliamentary representation [2], while the Parliament of the Dollar is still fully operational - and likely more so than back in the bad old days.

It has been postulated - and I think I tend to agree - that rapid and real progress is made not by revolution, but by the credible threat of it. Looking across the history of European democracy, the greatest democratic progress has been in the late 1840s, in the interbellum years and in the immediate aftermath of WWII. In all three cases, revolution was a very real possibility [1], with potentially extremely unpleasant consequences for the elites, were it to happen.

Sadly, though, the credible threat of revolution tends to work best when said revolution is happening to someone else at the time; and revolutions have a way of eating their children...

- Jake

[1] Respectively the Franco-German liberal revolts, the aftermath of the Russian revolution and the way the European communists had been boosted in public opinion by being the only faction to put up a more than half-hearted fight with the fascists during the War.

[2] But do note that they did get a new Ungdomshus.

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

I'll add that I did not go to an anti-GMO demo in order to prance around dressed as the Green Giant. I went in hopes there'd be a significant number of "normal" people like me. I was disappointed.