Aside from the broken social contract, the one thing has united people in all these different regions and countries: disappearing opportunity. We've relied on governments and (mostly large) businesses to remedy our situation, but as has become abundantly clear, no help is coming. The latter was perceived to be reliable out of a mix of national interest-tinged self interest, the former because it is what we elect them to do. Instead, many of these large businesses have become untethered from their home country in this era of frictionless globalized capital, and easy access to low-cost (and in some cases, suffering under Mercantilist regimes) labor. Governments, on the other hand, have succumbed to Neoliberal, non-Ricardian-Free Trade ideology, internal division, pure incompetence, and myopia. Both, of course, have become parties to corruption, influence peddling, and the system of revolving door jobs. These last issues have become a central focus of many extant protest movements (and are the subject of our song "Mussolini's Revenge.")

Now, we've begun to reach a boiling point. Inchoate, at times unfocused, but rapidly coalescing around many of the issues above, this worldwide crisis has been decades in the making, and is the subject of this song. It's particularly focused on the crisis in the US and the attendant "Occupy" protest movement.

Full explanation: www.opir-music.com/blog/lyrics-and-explanations/our-restive-zeitgeist-song-about-protest-movements-around-the-world/