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Paris, October 20, 2010 – The plethora of unwanted strikes and student and youth unrest in Western Europe is a morbid condition. Speaking medically, plethora is an overabundance of blood in the body, connected with the choleric temperament medieval physiology described. The word colère means anger, fury, in French. The rest of the western world has other words to match. It is not pension claims that are driving the current political uproar. It is popular fury at the people who created the present economic crisis and have been rewarded, with everyone else left to face the consequences The demonstrations are obvious nonsense in terms of what they are supposed to be about – early pensions, secure working lives, abundance for all. “France is bored,” Pierre Vianasson-Ponté wrote shortly before all hell indeed broke loose in Paris in the spring of 1968. France soon was no longer bored. To the present day, France’s students and unionized workers have longed to stage something as memorable as May 1968. This is part of the explanation why, today, lycée students (15-18 years old), and even younger pupils from the middle-school French “colleges,” continue to join their university elders and teachers in these manifestations of outrage. The demonstrations have proven to be contagious and even dangerous (the police dread dealing with juvenile rioters, who can be totally uncontrollable). Initially launched by minority unions in France, futile gestures of defiance against the Sarkozy government, mainly motivated by internal union politics, the affair has escaped union control, spreading from France to neighboring states, engaging port, refinery and railroad workers, printers, truckers, factory employees, and one way or another, practically everyone else. These “Events” of autumn 2010, like those of 1968, are the end-mark of an era. Those who claim to be the new era’s reformers, or try to perform as reformers, are incapable of escaping the old system’s claims and its moral structure. Money has taken control. The symbol of this to Americans was the Supreme Court decision in January (Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission) that delivered the American government over to business corporations, all of whose corporate money, including unreported and secret special-interest campaign money, is now declared democracy’s free speech, dominating other forms of speech. A quarter-billion dollars of undeclared money will be spent on the November mid-term elections, thanks to the Supreme Court. Elsewhere in the western world the economic role of speculative money is widely recognized, as are the crimes committed in its service, the fortunes possessed by defaulting money-men who have been rescued by unconsulted taxpayers, and the corporations, run from metropolitan centers, whose legal headquarters are havens which escape oversight and taxation. This is today’s world. Americans have also demonstrated their anger over the result of all of this. But the American way is unique. It is bitterly to attack those who have criticized the system all along and want to change it. It is to urge the vote of still-increased power to those who created the crisis, together with those senators and congressmen who voted for it all, and perpetuate the system. Such is the wonder of American politics, in which only native Americans can recognize the national ideology which says “Hurrah for the Rich who’ve already made it; I’ll make mine tomorrow! Cut taxes for the rich! I’ll be rich one day! Triple the bonuses of the rip-off bankers and brokers of Wall Street -- cleverer than the rest of the world! Champion the corporations who not only ship their manufacturing overseas, but send their accounting headquarters abroad too, so as to be spared the burden of American taxes!” They’re the wise-guys! This is the crisis of the American and British version of capitalism, ruler of the world since Mikhail Gorbachev caused the collapse of Communism by trying to reform it. His Party rivals, fearing the consequences, ousted him and brought down his system, with the result that brigands and looters took over. Americans rejoiced, and decided that it was American capitalism that had “won” the cold war. And if regulated and rational capitalism could do that, unregulated and irrational capitalism could do even better in looting western as well as eastern society, and everyone else – with the consequences we have experienced since the new century began. The unregulated western economic system has demonstrated a moral abandonment and adhesion to greed that shows no sign of ending, whatever the timorous promises made by Barack Obama, and David Cameron – current leaders of the nations from which this disaster has sprung. © Copyright 2010 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved. |
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