It’s not the ’60s anymore. The protests of that era were rooted in affluence. Too often in those years, the left cut itself off from the concerns of the white working class and disdained its values. That’s the history the right wants to revive.

-EJ Dionne, Jr explains a key difference.

This is a conversation we haven’t been having for the past 30 years… [W]hite working-class voters are supposed to be riled up against Democrats for policies such as affirmative action and gun control. They’re not supposed to get angry with Republicans for voting to bail out the banks and then flatly ruling out the idea of relief for underwater borrowers.

-Eugene Robinson, “Still Occupied

What is missing from America is a healthy fear in the hearts and minds of the most powerful political and financial factions of the consequences of their continued pilfering, corporatism, and corrupt crony capitalism, and only this sort of movement — untethered from the pacifying rules of our political and media institutions — can re-impose that healthy fear.

-Glenn Greenwald on the importance of OCCUPY

“Most Chinese aren’t angry about rising inequality. It’s not rich versus poor. It’s the system of power and procedural injustices that they’re upset about.”

-Harvard sociologist Martin K. Whyte, who may as well have been talking about Americans, as quoted in the New York Times.

If fatty foods and snacks and drinks sweetened with sugar and high fructose corn syrup are proven to be addictive, food companies may face the most drawn-out consumer safety battle since the anti-smoking movement took on the tobacco industry a generation ago.

-From Bloomberg. Researchers are finding that fatty, sugary foods have similar effects on the brain as addictive drugs.

There’s no calls for some sort of post-industrial personal fulfillment in their labor – very few even invoke the idea that a job should “mean something.” It’s straight out of antiquity – free us from the bondage of our debts and give us a basic ability to survive.

Rortybomb, analyzing the pleas of the 99%

We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

-Paul Krugman explains the basic problem, again.

Our only question is will $1.5 billion in theft be enough for the first real perp walk of an Obama-friendly Wall Street executive?

-Zero Hedge, wondering whether Democratic maven Jon Corzine will be jailed over his apparent criminal actions in the downfall of MF Global.