--- Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
> What????
Wojtek, the social state in Germany has been effectively reduced to an American-style "workfare" regime.
As noted by Professor Uwe Berlit, a judge of the federal administrative court, the Hartz laws represent a fundamental break with the norms of a liberal constitutional democracy. Recipients of ALG II have been reduced to subordinates of the state, forfeiting numerous basic rights in exchange for receiving a bare existential minimum of support.
Meanwhile, a popular documentary soap opera TV show on the TV channel SAT1 features two "investigators" who hunt "welfare cheats", just another weapon in the ideological arsenal to paint recipients of social assistance as parasites upon the social body.
And here in the last fifteen years, the post office and telephone service are to be privatized. The rails are more-or-less privatized, though the government still holds a controlling stake, but the plans for going fully public are still not off the public, just postponed due to the financial crisis.
Many federal states have already introduced students' fees in the higher education system. Of course, with the wretched, anti-working class tripartite secondary school system, it's not like very many working class children get to study anyway.
And I know you have nothing but racist contempt for the swarthy hordes of the southern hemisphere, so I won't even bother to go into the vicious and murderous EU border regime.
It makes me angry and physically ill the way you and Dennis spout ignorant nonsense about European societies, making them out to be social democratic paradise, a picture of reality which was never very accurate to begin with, and is certainly no longer the case since the ascension of neo-liberalism.
For the sake of retaining some shred of credibility, either pick up a newspaper, or at least try to familiarize yourself with the critical leftist milieu of Europe. Otherwise, just shut up. You live in a fantasy world that has no correspondence to actual lived reality over here.