OWS: More Than Just Unemployed Young People

From the very beginning, many of the protesters at Occupy Wall Street have made clear that the events in Egypt’s Tahrir Square and “the Arab Spring” provided inspiration for the Occupy movement.  As a result, one thing I’ve been curious about is how closely the economic and social conditions in the United States that led to the Occupy movement correspond to those that sparked the protests that came to be dubbed the Arab Spring.  

So I was very interested to discover over at Rortybomb that Mike Konczal has a post up comparing the Arab Spring countries to the United States with regard to at least one metric. 

The End of the Stealth War - Redux

As I've mentioned here and here, one of the things that fascinates me about the Occupy Movement is how it has cast the attitude of our economic elite into sharp relief.  It used to be that those who were better off in society tried not to draw too much attention to the fact.  Until recently, doing so was considered gauche; before that, it was considered downright dangerous.

(This might be apocryphal, but I do remember reading years ago that one of the reasons the homes of wealthy Romans were all inwardly oriented about a central open square, with no windows and few doors opening out to the street, was that they didn't want the poor to actually see how well the rich were living.)