> Question for American liberal Pollyanna Europhiles:
Have you ever lived in the US for any length of time?
I take the bus to work every day, in a small university town, replete with secure state jobs and functioning unions, which is far better buffered from the market forces than most American towns. But even here there are shuttered shops, empty houses, dead office buildings. So many of the ordinary people boarding the bus have pain and misery written on their faces: the pain of minimum wage jobs, of no universal healthcare, of punitive drug wars. Oceans of pain, visible only as a kind of low-level, inchoate rage, a kind of neon-blue Cherenkov effect around the radioactive core of neoliberalism. Our elites carefully cultivate this rage, of course, and channel it into official scapegoats -- yesterday Communists, today Muslims, tomorrow Eurasians.
-- DRR