Merckx index said:
Seems to me that the Tea Baggers and the French protesters have a lot in common. They both resent the government making decisions designed to ward off economic collapse.
If you mean by that, burning stuff in the streets, I hope it will take a lot more. But the Tea Party is pretty close to that now.
I've seen too many McDo's in France to buy that. Of course there are some important cultural differences, but again, I'm used to people abroad criticizing what we do here, and I'm not going to refrain from criticizing what some people abroad do. Particularly when it is so blatantly obvious that it impacts the world economy, and therefore me.
The day is long gone when people in France can pretend that their economy is insular, isolated from the rest of the world's. How they run it has major implications for what happens over here, and vice-versa. Better get used to that.
as evidenced by lighting fires in the streets?
I find it difficult to believe how much of a blockhead you are. Comparing the French political demonstrations with those of the Teabaggers is utterly moronic. For the simple reason that the former is doing so within a tradition of descending upon the public square based on enlightenment principles of social justice, the latter are a bunch of cultureless idiots who have no concept whatsoever of neither the enlightenment principles, nor social justice and represent the most miopic, egotistical and obtuse side of America.
Burning things on the streets today is a far better option than slavery to the capitalists and their political cronies tomorrow. Potentially this is what is at stake, as the way the entire Wall Street debacle was handled after the great fall. Now I realize from the comfort of your world, such subversive action toward government is utterly terrifying, but as someone else said, the only other alternative is to become sheep. Democracy is a gift for those worthy of recieving it, and at times necessitates being willing to take risks to support a moral cause. The disobedience of the weak and numerous, while the more arduous position, is thus at times by far the more noble choice than easy submissive obedience to the few who are powerful.
In any case the real issue isn't about raising the retirement age, but pension reforms. All over Europe, and not just in France, we are witnessing a systematic dismemberment of a more humane capitalism, because more social and more civil, that was born in the decades following WWII. And this represents a return to a cruder and more savage, because preditory and anti-social, form of capitalism, more in line with the US system and of a more industrial age mentality now utilized by China. The result is a mad, precipitous rush toward broad social spending cuts to redimension the State in the interests of global competitivity. Well if this form of regime capitalism is allowed to assume total control of the State, which is the direction we are headed, then we can also kiss good-bye all the gains in terms of liberty, equality and democracy that many gave their lives for between the XVI-XX centuries. This crisis of Western democracy and capitalism, now in the midst of the globalizzation of the markets, had been accelerated by the "reform" process promised by the deregulatory policies of Regan and Thatcher in the 80's and by the fall of Communism, once seen as both an antagonist and rival.
Sarkozy had been elected with promises like "If you work more, you earn more." In short, an American. Yet the crisis has demonstrated that this is not the case. Indeed what happened is that you simply have to "work more," but there are no gains in the society of today. It as well as the society of the immediate future, will only be paying for the mistakes and greed of yesterday's and today's rich. For this reason it has been devastating to Sarkozy's public immage the president's being aligned so tightly to the world of the rich: always making appearances with finacial bankers and "traders," his party at Fouquet's on the Champs Elissè with billionaire friends, his vacation aboard the billionaire Balloré's yacht; but above all his fiscal policies in favor of the super rich a là Regan have seemed during the crisis like a smack in the face to the working class and the emerging youth society in France. And this goes for the entire present French governmental apparatus and its lawmakers.
In the manifestations of Place de la Rèpublique, Place de la Nation and between Place d'Italie and Les Invalides over the last days, Sarkozy and his policy makers have thus been branded by the angry and struggling masses as "friends of the rich."
30 years to build a more social and civil capitalism, is being dismanteled in just a couple, by the same people who took full advantage of it and who now expect the rising generation to make the hard sacrifices for the their excesses. A new Middle Ages is just over the horizen and this is what the French protesters can't put down without a class and generational gap struggle. And they are doing simply what democratically must be done.