Occupy Wall Street (OWS): the mass mind masticates

Two months ago, Israel was protesting ...

Gordon's Notes: Israel's uprising: Is it about the failure of 21st century democracies?

... Israel is our latest example. Like the Wisconsin protests, this is best understood, I think, as a collective protest against a failure of citizenship. It's the middle class beginning to realize that the top 0.5% owns the game. I hope this movement visits America soon...

Israel's "social justice protest" grew from a small start to 100,000 participants in about 16 days. It ended about 6 weeks later. After an inchoate beginning it was classified as a part of the 2011 Israeli middle class protests.

The Occupy Wall Street protests began about 15 days ago...

BBC News - Occupy Wall Street protests grow amid Radiohead rumour

... An estimated 2,000 people have gathered in Lower Manhattan, New York, for the largest protest yet under the banner Occupy Wall Street. Demonstrators marched on New York's police headquarters to protest against arrests and police behaviour. Several hundred people have camped out near Wall Street since 17 September as part of protests against corporate greed, politics, and inequality...

Despite the best efforts of the coward cop and the champagne toasters the OWS numbers are growing slowly. The numbers are unlikely to approach anywhere near the scale of Israel's protests. Adjusting for population size a similar US protest would involve millions.

Unlikely, but not impossible. These social movements are fundamentally chaotic. Why did the Berlin wall fall when it did? Why not five years earlier? We can't say why. We can't say when.

The pressure is building though. Sometime in the next year Americans between 40 and 70 are going to do some basic math. When they run the numbers most of them will realize the lost years from 1999 to 2011+ cannot be made up. Their retirement will be very different from their current life, and very different from what they expected. The mass mind is going to begin to process what hit us all.

Maybe then we'll see some real unrest.

Update:

• Historical perspective on when protests arise. In the last depression unrest appeared two years after the great crash.
• ‘Occupy Wall Street,’ a primer -  Ezra Klein - The Washington Post