Peace in our time & an Israeli spring

Well, they're putting the final ribbon on the lawmaking that'll allow a raise in the debt ceiling here in America. My strongest reaction is disgust at all parties involved. My wife has had herself in a fine state of outrage for several days, sending out emails to non-functional Web sites and trying to leave voice mails on filled-up answering machines in the capital of the Republic. This ain't over and all the evil is not yet revealed.
From Al Jazeera, an interesting story on an odd subset of the Arab Spring, an outburst of Israeli displeasure:

Suddenly "tent cities" sprung up throughout the country, with protesters not only railing against the high cost of living, but against the massive shift of wealth from the middle class to the ultra-wealthy. Israelis took to the streets to protest deteriorating health care, a mediocre (at best) public school system, and what can only be described as the wholesale collapse of the public sector in favor of unregulated "free" enterprise.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

… Demonstrators include Jews and Arabs, the secular and religious, and Sephardim and Ashkenazim. Even some elderly Holocaust survivors are in the streets - not surprising given that over a quarter are now living in poverty. That last point is especially jarring. Imagine the Jewish state cutting benefits to Auschwitz survivors while providing economic incentives to billionaires.

Read it all here. Any of that sound familiar – bucks [or shekels] accumulating at the top, poor schools, problematic medical care, laissez-faire capitalism running over the general populace?
Al Jazeera has to be read with a mental filter in place, but so do the NYTimes and the WSJournal.