If you're still wondering what is actually going on in America I strongly suggest you read a blog post over at The Burning Platform entitled - Comfortably Numb.
This might be the best summary of what is going on with the economy and society that I've seen to date.
It also explains how both OWS and the Tea Party are essentially protesting the same thing, but they are attacking different heads of the same beast. I've held for a while that as things get worse, both OWS and the Tea Party will come to realize this, and despite their polar opposite views of small gov versus big gov, will actually intersect in a common purpose, that being addressing the corruption that those in positions of power are free to engage in.
While OWS is an amorphous organization, they would do well to create insightful articles such as the one at The Burner Platform (which as far as I can tell is not an off-shoot of OWS or the Tea Party, just a blogger with insightful commentary).
It's through clarity of the issue and clarity in communication that common understanding can be achieved. No surprise, as always, it will be PR that determines the ultimate fate of the US. Slogans are great - 'They got bailed out, we got sold out' - but at some point people have to understand what it is they are truly fighting against. The banks alone did not have the power to cause this mess by themselves, they needed help from the politicians and the Fed to do all this.
Both the Tea Party and OWS each need to better understand the other's positions, because each camp really only has half the story right and as such are fighting against only half the problem.
OWS ignores the government and the Fed and the Tea Party ignores the role of an unbalanced economic structure wherein corporations have gained far too much influence over the political system and supply and demand (primarily by using slave labor out of coutry's like China - if we really believed in Democracy we wouldn't be off-shoring to communist countries.)
Anyway, excellent article and worth the time to read.
One of the graphs I enjoyed was the food stamp graph. People say we aren't in 'recession', that we're in a slow growth recovery (based on GDP). I'm sorry, all you have to do is look at the growing use of food stamps to know the recession has been getting worse over the past three years, not better. Sure, someone might be employed, but if they aren't making enough to eat after paying their other staple bills (rent, gas, electricity, etc.) then the unemployment statistic means nothing.
As I've said, and as Canada supposedly does, we should be using a 'standard of living' metric to judge the state of our lives / countries. Is standard of living going up or down? That's really all that should matter.
This might be the best summary of what is going on with the economy and society that I've seen to date.
It also explains how both OWS and the Tea Party are essentially protesting the same thing, but they are attacking different heads of the same beast. I've held for a while that as things get worse, both OWS and the Tea Party will come to realize this, and despite their polar opposite views of small gov versus big gov, will actually intersect in a common purpose, that being addressing the corruption that those in positions of power are free to engage in.
While OWS is an amorphous organization, they would do well to create insightful articles such as the one at The Burner Platform (which as far as I can tell is not an off-shoot of OWS or the Tea Party, just a blogger with insightful commentary).
It's through clarity of the issue and clarity in communication that common understanding can be achieved. No surprise, as always, it will be PR that determines the ultimate fate of the US. Slogans are great - 'They got bailed out, we got sold out' - but at some point people have to understand what it is they are truly fighting against. The banks alone did not have the power to cause this mess by themselves, they needed help from the politicians and the Fed to do all this.
Both the Tea Party and OWS each need to better understand the other's positions, because each camp really only has half the story right and as such are fighting against only half the problem.
OWS ignores the government and the Fed and the Tea Party ignores the role of an unbalanced economic structure wherein corporations have gained far too much influence over the political system and supply and demand (primarily by using slave labor out of coutry's like China - if we really believed in Democracy we wouldn't be off-shoring to communist countries.)
Anyway, excellent article and worth the time to read.
One of the graphs I enjoyed was the food stamp graph. People say we aren't in 'recession', that we're in a slow growth recovery (based on GDP). I'm sorry, all you have to do is look at the growing use of food stamps to know the recession has been getting worse over the past three years, not better. Sure, someone might be employed, but if they aren't making enough to eat after paying their other staple bills (rent, gas, electricity, etc.) then the unemployment statistic means nothing.As I've said, and as Canada supposedly does, we should be using a 'standard of living' metric to judge the state of our lives / countries. Is standard of living going up or down? That's really all that should matter.
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