Number Nine . . . Number Nine . . . Number Nine . . .

Sep 19, 2011 17:34

It looks like AdBusters planned to protest Wall Street like an American Arab Spring, but no one really showed up.

Back in July, Adbusters began promoting a move to occupy Wall Street in protest of the rampant corruption, market manipulation and out of control greed that is destroying our nation today ( Read more... )

swarms & brains, bend overton

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Comments 6

csue_n_moo September 20 2011, 02:16:26 UTC
I read that piece a while ago, but a lot of the points they mention are just the natural result of crushing the middle class for the last 30+ years. It's basically a side-effect of how we all live now.

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peristaltor September 23 2011, 02:02:32 UTC
I'm not so sure. Some of the elements, like over-medication and television, have been around for quite a while. The debt? Definitely. If you can't earn middle-class, charge it. Surveillance? I don't think so.

The author just strikes me as less analytical, more bitter.

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csue_n_moo September 23 2011, 21:46:44 UTC
The over-medication phenomenon is fairly recent. The explosion in available pills for depression, anxiety, and ADD/ADHD in particular. And they keep coming up with new diagnoses to get more kids on the pills. "Oppositional Defiant Disorder"? That describes every child, anywhere, EVER, at some point. (Ask any two-year-old! Hint: the answer will be "NO!!!!")

Middle-class debt is also a relatively recent phenomenon, because families no longer have an "extra" adult (AKA Mom) to send into the workplace to earn a salary to afford a decent house. And the extremely recent housing bubble put an end to all the cheap money people were borrowing via home equity loans.

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peristaltor September 24 2011, 00:49:15 UTC
I'm still torn over the medication. Yes, giving it to kids is recent, but how prevalent is it? I honestly don't know. Before, "Mommy's Little Helper" was taken by the adults. The kids only got theirs by raiding Mom and Dad's supply. ;-)

That said, the other stuff is either pretty much the same as it was in the sixties or an almost direct result of them. You mentioned women in the workplace. What drove them there? Falling wages. What drove those wages down? How about the labor market entry of a whole bunch of Boomers?

The debt is also a bit of a chicken-and-egg. People didn't have a lot of it in the 70s because it wasn't available; it was too expensive. Frontline had a great piece on credit cards, recounting how expensive interest-wise they were until a Supreme Court decision in 1978 opened the door for getting around minimum interest rate laws in various states. The trickle turned into a flood afterward ( ... )

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bleaknemesis September 23 2011, 03:27:30 UTC
You may want to throw video games into the mix. Who wants to go outside to protest when you can stay in a climate controlled environment and destroy zombies!

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peristaltor September 23 2011, 19:09:40 UTC
*raises hand*

Seriously, though, why can't they do both? Ever heard of hand-held devices?

Seriouslyer, though, Steven Johnson addressed the problem in his book Everything Bad is Good for You. Kids who play the games are in many ways better than the kids that don't.

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