[SuziQ]

Thus Piven asks a question: “So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs?”

Piven's problem is that she's thinking that Americans, even disaffected ones, are like the poor in Europe, or anywhere else around the world. In America, even the most poor are financially head and shoulders above the poor anywhere else in the world. Even those who live in our 'ghettos' are in better shape. So, even though they may be angry about their plight, they don't want to bite the hand that, literally, feeds them.

And now, after a year or two of the Tea Party movement, middle and upper-middle class folks are beginning to understand what has been happening to them over the previous 40 years, as a result of ever encroaching government power, and they don't like it.

[RayChuang88]

The Tea Party movement harken back to the days between 1764 and 1776 when the American colonists protested over the British government trying to pass taxes without the colonists' consent to pay for the cost of the Seven Years' War. Anyone who has read up on American history know that if King George III and Parliament had followed the advice of William Pitt (both Elder and Younger), that mess would have ended in no time flat and the entire North American continent would be a VERY different place indeed today.