Some are saying this may be what America will turn into. I don’t know…
but Greece is definitely in a state of civil upheaval bordering on war. Back home though, “It is remarkable how passive the American people are about unemployment,” says Edward Wolff, a labor economist at New York University.

Which is to say that in the good ol’ US of A the long-term unemployed aren’t angry at a system that destroyed their livelihood and their future - they’ve just sort of resigned themselves to suffer under the ‘well, that’s the way things go’ mentality.

To quote the nation, yet again:

The unemployed are persistently blamed for their own unemployment, which eases pressure on government to help them. If only they acquired enough education and skill, the argument goes—and it is endlessly repeated—they would be hired. Corporate executives, politicians and many prominent economists push this view, and the unemployed, encouraged to blame themselves, keep silent. Or as Richard Sennett, a New York University sociologist, puts it: “People don’t cooperate with each other. They’ve lost the desire to do so and the skill that cooperation requires, so when things fall apart, they react as if it were their individual failure and are passive about it.”

In closing …

“What we are really doing is asking Americans to tough it out for the next two or three years,” says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented think tank. “And that is going to leave a scar on many people long after the jobs come back.”

So we’ll see what those scars lead to.

http://www.thenation.com/article/164495/why-arent-jobless-flocking-zuccotti-park