Our politicians in the United States do not seem anxious to address our very serious economic and fiscal problems, and according to Dalrymple in the Australian, the situation is similar in Europe:
The euro is in danger, and with it the European Union, but President Nicolas Sarkozy and his party, the Union for a Popular Movement, want to pass a law forbidding the public denial in France of the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians. This is not the kind of politicking of which Europe has deep need just at the moment.…Of course he resembles all his European colleagues in his ambitious frivolity: he is neither better nor worse than they. Faced by the greatest economic crisis of the past 60 years or more, they are patently more concerned with their own political survival than in undoing the damage that they and their ilk have wrought in the past decades. A crisis brings out the mediocrity in them.
Read the entire piece here.
Steve, could not agree with you more. In the Italian context I am sure that if you surveyed the % of the population that read the first 5 pages of the newspaper (that concerns politics) the results would paint a desparate picture of apathy. In fact just the other day a report showed that of the 3million people unemployed in Italy, roughly 32% were not even looking anymore. When you have politicians that are earning literally millions (Berlusconi declared 40million as personal earning when in power), you’ve got wonder what the rest of the people have to hope for, where the average salary is somewhere around the 800 Euro mark. Desparate times.