Just heard on BBC "Do you think Americans are more docile than their European counterparts"?

It's starting to look that way....

nt

Fear of arrest and losing your job (and, subsequently, your health insurance . . . you know, unless you have a money tree in your backyard) combined with a privatized military and 10% of the population controlling 71% of wealth and income makes us weak, mice-like lil' Reaganomic-lovin dumplins who'll do JUST as they're told.

And the worst thing about it is this: If millions of us DO by some miracle "rise up" against the corporate masters, America and the world, thanks to the iron-clad tethering to America's crappity corporations and Wall Street, would be economically destroyed.

have you?

and have taken university and law school courses on the history, development and current activities of the European Union. And I regularly read English language versions of various European news outlets.

You have a steep learning curve ahead of you. You might start by researching the statistics ranking countries on various standards of living, education, health care, etc.

rich not paying their fair share of taxes as the middleclass pays more of theirs and the same issues as in our country. with the islationist exception of gernamy.

If you stop fighting them, they win. No one thinks that Europe is some utopia without any conservatives, bigots or immigrant haters.

The rich there pay a lot more taxes than they do here.

How is Germany isolationist? They trade more than any other country (65% of GDP) in Europe (compared to US' trade at 22% of our GDP) and have a higher percentage of immigrants (12.5% of their population) than the US (11.4%). http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID=402

Overall quality of life and standard of living far greater than ours. By almost every possible imaginable metric, Western European democracies have it all over us. Yes, I'd say they've accomplished quite a bit.

talking about what is happening today. and as those programs are being attacked, and the europeans are far from passive, their way of life is shifting... the same as the passive american.

hence

the point.

because their national wealth has not been squandered on wars of aggression on behalf of Big Oil. The world is in a time of great turmoil and transition as the US empire dies and China and India move ahead. But the quality of life in the EU continues to be much better than in the US

of docile vs not, i stand by my original statement that you are not addressing. has gotten europe no further than passive in u.s. as long as corporate world wide rules, no one can win.

and the people are not passive. and still, it is being attacked. the less than passive are not being successful. which is the point. it is deteriorating. their present day quality of life is not the same as yesterday and is continued to be attacked.

saying it is better than u.s. is not the argument here, nor am i arguing that.

You said that they have nothing to show for their less docile nature, that's absolutely untrue. They've got programs we could only dream of having now. Of course they're being attacked by the right wing, that's what the right wing does. The right wing exists everywhere. The only difference is that here we allow the right wing to have an obscene amount of power. Western European democracies have managed to keep the right wing in check, and such they've got markedly better qualities of life compared to the U.S. That's what happens when people get involved with the democratic process. Germany isn't the only European nation to avoid the pratfalls of the U.S. I'm pretty sure that every Western European democracy has a far more progressive tax code than the U.S. Sure, the wealthy will always try to grab more and more beyond what they've already got, but at least there they're forced to pay closer to their fair share of taxes.

It has nothing at all to do with you not being able to present a comprehensible point or being able to defend that position using facts and logic. It must be that I'm simply not bright enough to understand the brilliance of your grammatically lacking sentence fragments.

and outraged citizens or passive citizens is not creating any answers, behooves none of us. pretending the same issues are not facing europe is delusional.

germany is the model. there is a lot of protectionism in their industry and even that is being threatened today by their rw.

i am all for the people to win this battle, but they have not shifted the direction yet. look at the leaders in those countries and the austerity plans they are putting forth. there are facts. like repugs ignore facts, you, too, ignore them

and reduce your argument to insults

But their lack of passivity ensures that their social programs remain. The French take to the streets when their social programs are under attack. You ask what good it does. It's obviously done a whole hell of a lot of good because those social safety nets are still there. What little remains in the U.S. is being dismantled. You really need to educate yourself a bit about Europe as well as the U.S. I remember you remarking about the U.S. Judicial system and how here, we don't have two tiers of justice and that the wealthy experience the same justice as everyone else. How incredibly laughable. You really think we've got it great here, don't you?

hence, why i dont bother answering most of your posts. then you reduce to insults which is the hieght of laziness and immaturity

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/05/137630989/european-countries-try-to-get-their-fiscal-houses-in-order

don't put the blame on me. But I'm quite certain that you said that in the U.S. Justice system, we don't need to worry about the wealthy having access to a different system than the rest of us. You said that with regard to the DSK case. I wasn't the only one to call you out on that one as well. That kind of ridiculous comment tends to attract attention. And your link does absolutely nothing to bolster your point. Yes, there is no doubt that there is a world-wide recession. Nearly every country is making sacrifices of some sort. The difference here is how the sacrifices are being made. Even Greece, with their clusterfuck of an economic situation will maintain greater social safety nets than here, and they've had decades of mismanagement. The middle class in this country has had 30+ years of sacrifices and now is being asked to give up what little is remaining. It doesn't surprise me that you can't see the differences between here and there. The economic royalists here count on people like you to make their theft all the easier.

Next time see if you can get through an entire post and maybe you'd be qualified to comment on it.

I consider the height of laziness and immaturity to be an adult who refuses to use capitalization or bothers to construct full, cogent sentences. And then I'd add a huge dose of hubris on top of that for daring to insult the intellect of others when they can't make sense of the semi-random words you use to construct a sentence. If you'd like to appear to have more authority on these matters, I'd work on those issues first.

I wonder where these attitudes regarding Europe come from? I was relieved of many of these outdated views when I advanced to grade school. I'd expect freepers to be so incredibly ignorant regarding European democracies, but it utterly shocks me when I see people here with such views.

they would be shutting down the entire country in a general strike, and to be sure, the leadership would be deploying police on a large scale to put down the rebellion, and if that didn't work, they would be tempted to bring in the military. The French government very nearly did that in May 1968 when the French citizenry shut down the country.

People, after years of being told capital accumulation through investment is the answer to long term financial security, saw half their nest egg disappear a couple of years ago and all we did was grumble a bit. Add to that the very real possibility that both Social Security and Medicare will be structurally arranged to lessen those programs' effectiveness with little more than a quiet peep from the public and it looks like we are an incredibly docile bunch.

Take away a couple minutes in a Frenchman's lunch break and they will shut down Paris.

One of the reasons is our consumer culture. We are so busy with our latest electronic gadgets and entertainment gossip that we don't even attempt a serious discussion about the public good. I see it with my grown kids, who are all good Dems. They talk about music and the latest app on their gizmos. Or TV shows. My kids are great but they are distracted by all of this.

thing. The more moneyed the more likely you are to
fight for yourself.

:crazy:

Tea Partiers are not docile - they're furious. But they are acting on pure emotion, without the benefit of education or, in many cases, a functional IQ

Our government is just something we watch on TV. We are spectators to our own culture.

You can take away our Social Security and let us die on the streets in front of the hospitals after having paid into Medicare all our lives, but don't fucking run out of seats at the movies!!!

http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/amplifier/89559/impromptu-rave-turns-into-la-riot-outside-electric-daisy-doc-screening/

Cattle.

We are not as dependent on government as our "European counterparts." Cuts to government programs affect the vast majority of them, while cuts to government programs do not affect the majority of us in the same way.
They get rowdy when government wants to stop giving, we get rowdy when government wants to start taking.