Shit's On!

Recent comments from around the web:

(The Daily Beast)

robinyates

I hope politicians and bankers worldwide will start to understand the power of the weak, the poor, the disillusioned, the fed up student, the pissed off middle manager who has just lost his job because a director was given an undeserved bonus for failing !

imagineallthepeople

We the 99% include people of all political parties. The 1% controlled political parties are a distraction to keep us apart.

Occupation Wall St: Week 4. What they don’t want you to find out…

By Scallywag • Oct 8th, 2011 • Category: Manners and Etiquette

Week 4; Downtown NYC.
What they did not want you to ever find out is that your generation, the generation born between 1980-1995, actually outnumbers the baby boomers. They knew that if you ever turned your eye towards political reform, you could change the world.
They tried to keep you sated on vapid television shows and vapid music. They cut off your education and fed you brain candy. They took away your music and gave you top ten pop stations. They cut off your art and replaced it with endless reality shows for you to plug into, hoping you would sit quietly by as they ran the world. I think they thought you were too dumb to notice.
Indeed, I thought they had won.
But I watched you occupy the capital of Wisconsin. I see you today as you occupy Wall Street. And I see a spark, a glimmer of the glorious new age that is yours. A changing of the guard, a guard that has stood for entirely too long and needs your young legs to take his place.
I watch you turn away from what is easy and stand up for what is right. I see you understand we as a society are only as strong as our weakest link. I see you wise beyond your years. And I am proud. Give ‘em hell, kids. You are beautiful.
Together we are strong.
- Courtesy of Mal Harrison and Logan Rudd

By Scallywag • Oct 3rd, 2011 • Category: Manners and Etiquette
It’s as if for the first time since the 1970′s American youth is being woken out of its shackles to a deep awareness of the strains of our economic system, the reality that the top one percent of the nation dominates political discourse, exacting profits at the expense of other less mobile classes and side stepping issues that concern them whilst all the while government and the mainstream press pay unparalleled attention to the desires of the money classes.

A Hearty Soup

In New York, London, Athens, Los Angeles, Portland ME and OR and other cities too numerous to mention, the shit's on!  In the U.S. participants are being called "demonstrators", while in London the term has degenerated to "rioters".  Newspaper columnists, political talk show hosts, bloggers et al. are trying to understand the causes that the protesters may be fighting for and/or the outrages they are protesting against.

In this country some say the rise of the conservative right’s tea party and now of a "left wing tea party" points only to differing understandings and solutions of a common ill--social inequality and poverty. Others, like British MP Nick de Bois, point to the fact that the rioters/protesters "had nice cars, nice mobiles" as if these material tokens prove otherwise.

In their article, Could London-style Riots Happen in New York City? (The Nation Magazine October 4, 2011) Sarah Burd-Sharps and Kristen Lewis correctly identify the underlying ill when they dismiss "nice cars and mobiles" as antithetical to poverty.

“... (T)he challenges of being poor in the midst of affluence go far beyond material deprivations. ...

Poverty’s sting comes in large part from sense of powerlessness to change one’s living conditions, a lack of autonomy and control over many crucial decisions and a feeling that one is marginalized or excluded—and thus cut off from choices and opportunities open to others. This sense of being on the outside looking in can lead to lowered expectations, to hostility and even to antisocial and violent behavior. Societies ignore the disaffected and disengaged at their peril.

Do not misunderstand us; there is no justification for violence and destruction. Our point is simply that seeing poverty as a lack of things like cell phones and air conditioners rather than a lack of capabilities like a good education, physical and mental health, strong social networks, political power and more distorts our understanding of why the riots in London  (and elsewhere) happened.

The riots and protests continue, for the cauldron of discontent has been simmering on a back burner for awhile now. As the fire builds the first bubbles of a boil are erupting.  More powerful than "Adder's fork and blind-worms sting" is this soup.

" 2 Witch. For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. 

All. Double, double toil and trouble;  Fire burn, and caldron bubble. " **

From postings on The Daily Beast we read:

**(William Shakespeare Macbeth: Act IV, Scene 1 The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare: The Complete Works Annotated. Howard Staunton ed. New York: Gramercy Books, 1993.)