[jheii]

I read an article in The Nation today, which was a trimmed up version of the blog found here: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=76104
Bowing to insurmountable pressure from France's students and labor unions, President Jacques Chirac has repealed the CPE law.
The students won because they put together an extraordinary protest movement. I can tell you that witnessing hundreds of thousands of youth from all different ethnic and class backgrounds marching together, chanting in unison, for seven straight hours, was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. I vividly remember, around the sixth hour of the protest, students chanting "We are not tired! We are not tired!"
The students demanded a total repeal of the law, they vowed to continue protesting until their demands were met, and they won. Victor Vidilles, one of the central architects of the movement, told me, "They are trying to kill the movement. But it's not possible."
Before I left for Paris, I asked whether or not these students should be considered progressive, and I've made up my mind: of course they should. We've been made to believe that any tinkering with free markets will spell doom for civilization, but let's look at the facts. Despite its incredible protections for workers, France is the world's fifth largest economy. Despite its lifetime employment laws, 35-hour work weeks, and 8-week vacations, France has the highest worker productivity in the world.
Yes, France has a real and serious unemployment problem, which needs to be dealth with. But as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research points out, "there are a number of countries with high levels of labor market protections and low levels of unemployment: Austria (5.2 percent), Denmark (4.4 percent), Ireland (4.3 percent), the Netherlands (4.6 percent), and Norway (4.5 percent)." So the solution to dealing with unemployment isn't necessarily to weaken labor market protections (Weisbrot suggests that a core cause of French and overall EU unemployment is related to the fact that the European Central Bank has kept interest rates too high).
The mainstream media-- which seems to have bought, hook, line and sinker, the values of free market fundamentalism-- has labelled these students reactionaries, protectors of an outmoded status quo, conservatives. These students are anything but conservative; they are visionaries. They are struggling to redefine the globalized world. They refuse to inherit a society of savage capitalism in which worker's rights are constantly undermined in the name of efficiency.
They have won the first major victory in what I believe is the great moral struggle of my generation: taming global capitalism.
These students are not delusional. They believe in markets and support globalization and trade. They simply refuse to accept that in order for capitalism to function in society, it must be totally unregulated, unchecked, and unharnessed. And guess what, they are inheriting the future. We are inheriting the future. Like the French students, we cannot allow our goverments to mold our futures without consulting us at all. It's our future, and we must play a role in defining it.
The French students showed us that this is possible.

The CPE contract is essentially the same as standard French contract, except that it creates a longer "trial-period" for under-26 first time workers, meaning that they can be fired from their jobs without much hassle. If allowing employers to let go of employees who they feel aren't doing a satisfactory job is "unchecked capitalism," then I'll go ahead and stick my phallus into Ayn Rand's rotting cunt. If the cause of French unemployment is too-high interest rates, then how come the other EU countires mentioned in the article have managed to keep their unemployment so low, while unemployment in France is hovering at twice what economists consider to be the "natural" unemployment rate (around 5.6%)?

My broader point is expressed in the title of this thread. Why don't people actually think anymore? Why is it that the only thing us human beings seem capable of is using facts and statistics to reinforce a point that someone else has conned us into believing is the only possible answer to all of our questions? Weren't the French and American revolutions supposed to create monuments to everything great that humankind could achieve? When did a refusal to accept inequity turn into ridiculous bitching about minor shifts in the status quo? When did an informed opinion turn into an innate ability to regurgitate propoganda? Somebody help me, please.