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...to be fair to America, what has gone wrong here is not merely the salient cumulative social catastrophes (Civil War, Vietnam War, Watergate), but also the natural dislocation involved in an advanced nation-- in America's case a very large advanced nation.
Only Russia and China are comparable to the US. Comparable yet obviously different.
To return to the topic, OWS is indispensable to change: who else is going to move things along but youths under pressure from elders stuck in 20th century thinking and doing? Toffler, in a more lucid moment, wrote,
"the young are right to rebel, as they are being made into walking anachronisms."
Next year we are absolutely guaranteed to see rebellion such as has never been seen before. The clincher is, if OWS has been hasty-- as they are accused of being-- then why did they wait until 2011 to mobilize? they were IMO quite patient the last decade.
Now the indicators are saturated to the max.
"In all the ways that really matter, the Occupy movement is a great thing."
Agreed; and BTW what choice does youth have? even if a given youth is well-off, youths in general have less than their elders, and as we all know, wealth = power. So OWS will return next year full force when the weather warms up. Plus the election next year here in the US means the Right will attempt to again recapitulate the '80s-- though the Reagan generation is dead or dying. It's not so much power or emotions on the part of the Right, it is they are rather clueless; they don't know how to smoothly delink the past from the present-future.
Difference between where you live and America is the edginess.
Edginess is not an exact word, but to provide a more specific glimpse than I usually do: an American inner city is more violent than your cities; gang violence esp. Gangs fight and sell drugs in a coercive manner, plus the gangs tend to travel on 'business' to smaller cities... and so forth.
The standard of living is roughly equivalent in our two countries, however the level of coercion and outright violence is unquestionably higher in America. For one thing, it is a very large nation.
China is not comparable because it has not had time to democratize as of yet.
Russia is a riddle in an enigma!
I might agree with you regarding the situation in the ghettos. It's just that I'd say there are significantly more than "a few percent" of the people who are doing rather well, compared to most places. Putting their number at anything below 15%-20% seems ridiculous to me. (Though I guess it's also possible I'm seriously underestimating the amount of people you have in quiet desperation, since I myself live in a welfare state where the situation is better.)
But this is pretty much just nitpicking that I'm engaging in here. In all the ways that really matter, the Occupy movement is a great thing.
... not of course that you are in a third world country, Aleksei. However there are those living the good life, and those at the very bottom living the bad life; the people in between often live lives of quiet desperation.
I sometimes think money is of not much use unless one has a great deal of it.
but is living in a rented apartment in an American ghetto a life or an existence? is it much worse living/existing in a rent-free shack in a third world country?
Don't know- you tell me.
I have a very positive view of the Occupy movement. Most people in it of course don't have a very refined view of the problems (i.e. are mistaken about many of the details of the situation and what should be done), but anyway, it's a positive surprise for me that something got going in the U.S. that actually might lead to some of the biggest problems with your political system getting corrected.
I couldn't pick the "I love it" option though, since it included the childish and simplistic statement that you'd have "a system that benefits only the top few percent". Come on now, it's not *that* bad; there are a lot more people than that even in your comparatively unequal country that prosper very well when compared to most other places on the planet...
One can search for new answers to new problems. Right? If economics never was allowed to change, we would still be feudal. A pre-copernican construction of the solar system worked well enough in it's day. It hindered precise calculation but that was just just overruled. Now we have a different way of seeing it. Things change. The sociopolitical domination of the ruling class under the financial free market DOES cause problems. If now is not the right time to talk about alternatives, when is? OWS is about thinking of new solutions to real problems. What's so horrible about that?
Are you a Ron Paulbot, Jack?
Jack, the Federal Reserve is a secret society influenced by the Illuminati, who would pollute our clean Bermuda Triangle water (purity of essence, POE) by baking Girl Scout cookies to be fluoridated by the secret Jesuit underground adulteraters located under a parking garage in DC. It all started when the Feds suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion-
and the last straw was when FDR took office in '33:
1933! now how's that for a pre-war totalitarian conspiracy?
Now, when MKultra implanted the microchip in Lee Harvey Oswald's brain...
OWS is pure hype about nothing but puerile drivel. Less for you...more for me!! The same crap has been being shoveled by the have-nots for millenia.
It's those Commie vegetarian protesters. What they need to do is get haircuts, watch the Andy Griffith Show and come to our bingo game this Thursday. We serve burgers and hot dogs from 7:30- 8:45
Aunt Bea baked a lemon meringue pie.
One of the first polls here where the results are pretty cut n' dry.
:D
They’re just a bunch of clean hippies who need to do something about rubes who can't get over 1776 and the Floundering Foreskinfathers. But forget I mentioned it, vote for Newt Romney in 2012.
And please make out your tax deductible checks to Newt Romney...
there are some anti-capitalism signs, which I think, is misguided. Everybody loves the fruit-flavored kind of entrepreneural capitalism, but finance capitalism with its addiction to derivative gamblings is worst manifestation of a system that helped humanity to flourish for so long.
What I really wonder is--why did it take so fucking long?
do people still have no clue what credit-default swaps are?
first time overwhelming poll since forever :) voted along with majority. But I also feel things will get back to normal after a while.
@Warren, China is what capitalism would look like without democracy in it's way
http://occupywallst.org/about/
I didn't see anything there about Communism.
@Warren. Gee, I usually complain to myself because the posts to this site are from over-educated academics with no clue what is happening in the real world. Thanks for demonstrating that one can have an interest in geeky techno topics and still be a ranting, tinfoil hat-wearing right winger with no clue what is happening in the real world.
Oh, and the dictionary definition of a poll is "a sampling or collection of opinions on a subject, taken from either a selected or a random group of persons, as for the purpose of analysis." So yes, I'd say that this IS a real poll.
Warren Houghton, governments may suck but they are not the problem. Right now the US government employs only 2/3rds as many people as it did in 1980, most of the higher costs are due to outsourcing of work, paying a contractor to do a job costs on average 2x as much domestically and up to 5x as much for our military, but we still have outsourced about half of government work to private companies, whose CEOs we have to pay millions in the form of added costs on projects. In terms of regulations and taxes, there is far less than 30 years ago. In fact, in 1980 the anti-trust laws stopped being enforced and companies merged and acquired one another at an incredible pace. The consequence of this has been stagnant wages despite a 4x increase in GDP per capita over the past 30 years, a 3x increase in the price index, making life on average 56% less easy to live through, mostly due to the non-competitive markets created by economies of scale, brand loyalty, and and no anti-trust activity to speak of.
Nobody here wants communism, all we want is freedom and prosperity, and we are more than willing to work very hard for it. But when the top 10% of the country go from having 30% of the wealth to having 83% of it, when they go from having no control over our personal freedoms to total control, when they are so big and markets so non-competitive, and hands in the governments pants so deep that they are 100% immune from consumer action, then it is fucking time to bust a move. Restricting big businesses will give everyone but a few board members and CEOs more freedom, and frankly, the freedom of millions is worth more than theirs.
If this is a real poll all of you 58% should be very afraid for your economic and political futures. The big Communist governments have begun to learn the lesson that Capitalism works and Communism doesn't, but the uninformed and misinformed in the Western Democracies seem hell bent on trying Communism/Socialism yet again. Newsflash: It will ALWAYS fail. It doesn't work. And without our history of free market Capitalism you maleducated fools wouldn't have the luxury of complaining about it now.
perhaps I voted first, but I'm happy to see that my POV has 100% support!