Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one’s own culture, this is it.

Matt Taibbi has a moving article in Rolling Stone detailing his slow understanding that the Occupy movement, more than anything else, reflects a desire to opt out…or “drop out,” if you look back to older forebears.

The 2008 crash, of course, birthed a whole generation of new bailout schemes. Banks placed billions in bets with AIG and should have lost their shirts when the firm went under — AIG went under, after all, in large part because of all the huge mortgage bets the banks laid with the firm — but instead got the state to pony up $180 billion or so to rescue the banks from their own bad decisions.

Matt Taibbi has a great Rolling Stone blog post detailing how the Occupy protests aren’t rooted in envy but are rather an understandable reaction to the favoritism lavished upon giant financial firms.

Did you hear about the government spent $16 a muffin at a recent breakfast? You probably did, even though it isn’t true. As Sam Stein shared on Huffington Post, that price actually reflected “a full continental breakfast plus tax.” But instead of searching for context or qualifiers, most media outlets just ran the prepackaged “government wastes your cash” staple and called it a day.

Stein sums it up:

There were 223 stories that mentioned either “$16 muffins,” “$16 per muffin,” “sixteen dollar muffin” or “16 dollar muffin,” according to a LexisNexis search. Of those, 178 reported the issue critically or didn’t even mention the Hilton hotel’s response. Thirty-seven stories offered an explanation for the cost of the muffins or attempted to correct the record. Eight simply played off the issue without taking a side (such as figuring out how one would actually make a $16 muffin).

That’s not to say the government doesn’t waste money. But if you want to know why the public thinks the government wastes more than half of what it spends, stories like this are a good place to start.

Robert Reich’s op-ed in last Saturday’s New York Times has one of the most striking graphs I’ve ever seen as to what’s happened to the American middle class over the past 30 years.