Are these US protests significant?

[Gandalf]

Not really sure what the right answer is but the American middle class has largely priced themselves out of a job. When my old man (71 yrs old) was a teenager a guy could graduate high school and walk into a job at the local factory/mill/plant where they eventually would earn enough to buy a home, send their kids to college and live a decent life. Whether Americans want to admit it or not they are competing in a global market. Hell even engineering jobs are being outsourced. If your aspirations are to work a blue collar gig then you have to be prepared that Juan in South American and Abu in Southwest Asia will do your job for a lot less. Combine that with the U.S. having the highest corporate taxes in the world and the prospect of a burgeoning middle class re-emerging in the U.S. isn't likely. Of course with the way we Yanks like to sue each other we can never have enough lawyers.

To even go to university these days will set you back at least 50-100,000 dollars. Life is so much harder now and the jobs simply aren't there. Many of those factory jobs have been outsourced to places like China and the workforce has been largely unprotected and not been prepared to adapt to these changes. It is also another reason why young people seem to be turning to the military for security. It seems to me that the country has been run dry by the corrupt financial sector and excessive military spending. We can say that ordinary people have priced themselves out of work, but in truth real wages have stagnated for many decades and we now have ordinary families NEEDING two breadwinners just to stay afloat and even then that is supplemented by endless debt and credit. The population at large has got poorer whilst the rich are richer than ever before.

It is very serious and that is why I was interested to see that protests were starting to break out and I was kind of hoping that this was in some way a small mirror of what is happening in the middle east. I have been hoping that the poor, huddled masses would start to rise for a long time and that desire is not from any desire to see suffering nor pain nor to inflict hate. It is from a basic desire for all people to have a stable means of supporting themselves and their families through this hellaciously difficult thing we call life.