Why OccupyWallStreet?

While individual memory builds up to collective memory, collective memory frames/limits/facilitates individual memory. The "big picture" is sometimes hard to see, but it can be seen. This is a pretty clear look at the present in the frame of the recent past.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The market should peak within three weeks

" If the duration of the current rally were to take the same portion of its ruling cycle that the 1929-1930 rally did, when would it end? The 1929-1930 rally lasted 155 days out of 968 in the cycle (1932 was a leap year), for a ratio of 0.1601. The 16.6-16.9-year span ends between February 19 and June 9, 2016. Applying the 0.1601 ratio to this period of 2541-2652 days from the March 6, 2009 low would give rally durations of 406.81-424.59 days, suggesting a peak in the current rally between April 16 and May 5. Using intraday turning dates projects exactly the same range. As Beautiful Pictures shows, time targeting usually works out to within 3 days. With April 14 already behind us and May 8 a Saturday, we can project a top on this basis between April 15 and may 7, 2010. April 16, by the way, marks the anniversary of the 1930 rally peak. These dates pertain only if the current rally matches its predecessor in percent-of-cycle terms, which is conjecture, but given all the other evid...
Read more

21st Century Nihilism

      “Millions who should be ranged against the American oligarchy are distracted and divided – just as their leaders want.      The biggest beneficiaries of [the four years of] Trump’s charade are the party’s biggest patrons – the billionaire class, including the heads of the nation’s largest corporations and financial institutions, private-equity partnerships and hedge funds – whom a deeply divided nation serves by giving them unfettered access to the economy’s gains.      Their heist started four decades ago. According to a recent  Rand study , if America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the three decades following the second world war, the bottom 90% would now be $47tn richer.      A low-income American earning $35,000 this year would be earning $61,000. A college-educated worker now earning $72,000 would be earning $120,000. Overall, the grotesque surge in inequality that began 40 years ago...
Read more

Political Correctness

There's a history to this. I'll be brief.   The social constructionists in general, in particular one of the originators of this approach, the sociologist, Erving Goffman, have revealed clearly what everybody already knew anyway, but hadn't seen it systematically as a major aspect of the processes of social stratification and the enforcement of existing stratification regimes. What was pointed out is the fact that how you talk about someone, how you talk to them, is a major means of exerting social control over them. Particularly, to insult a person is to demean them, to tell them that they are "less than" and to interactionally maneuver them into the position of subordinate to you. Insult a man and he's either got to fight back or accept the insult, accept a position in the interaction of less respect and less power than you who insults him. This is not a matter of “feeling insulted,” but a matter of self-defense in something like micro-class warfare. (That’s...
Read more