is Americans sitting on their fat asses with their opposing digits frantically tapping their responses to each other's trival crap while the Europeans passionately take to the streets - once again - to make sure their government understands they are not putting up with whatever it is they are protesting about this week!

Twitter is NOT the salvation of the world. It's yet another navel-gazing ritual among those with nothing better to do! Where I come from the word "twit" does not have a positve connotation. But it fits perfectly with those who obsess about it.

I was in Britain when the miner's strike was broken and I remember crying in the sitting room in front of the television. The north of England was devastated by that loss. It began the pretense there (already well under way here) that everyone could own a council house and be happily middle class without any industry to provide tangible wealth to the country. The fantasy wealth games that followed have left us all (well all but a couple of percent of us) much poorer. And, the governments response to the troubles in Detroit compared to those on Wall Street show we really haven't learned much yet.

...deregulation and privatization were the omnipresent watchwords of the era.

We've all seen how well that worked out.

Somewhere back in the '80s, the world took a wrong turn.

And with that clear, to see that sort of navigation is never again misadventured?

I'm not going to defend Thatcher's handling of the miners' strike - it gutted whole communities, and privatization has hardly been an unalloyed success.

But.

It's not like British unions were innocent victims in all of this. I'm not quite old enough to remember the worst of the early 70s with the power cycling on and off in the middle of winter, and by the winter of discontent we were living in the Netherlands. But the 70s were marked by constant industrial action that was genuinely disruptive to society in general, and the combined ability of local shop stewards to call strikes and the inability of their national leadership to persuade them otherwise meant that any attempts to achieve grand compromises on the Dutch and German models were going to founder.

So it's no surprise that Thatcher took the opportunity to try and break the Miners' strike. One of the challenges of being a public sector union is to fight for your members without alienating the public, that was not a strategic strength of a lot of the UK's union leadership in the 70s and 80s.

Well, the '80s are back - the roots of what exists now. Naomi Klein remembers the 'good old days' too in her book "Shock Doctrine." Thatcher used the bogus Malvinas War patriotism to turn around and attack the labor movement, and crushed the miners strike and Scargill, who was on the left of the Labor Party. And proceeded to privatize water, transport, mining, etc. in depressing old England, handing capital the public goods they so desparately craved. And it happened not just in a 'third-world' country like Argentina, Boliva or Chile, or a 'second world' country like Poland or Russia, but a 'first-world' country. Friedman and Sachs were ecstatic!

Why does capital so want the 'social goods' of the public sector? Because, folks, they cannot make money the old fashioned way - earning it through 1-20% profits. They have to plunder the assets of the people or of nature in order to make a buck anymore.

By the way, I am writing a book on the labor movement in the 80s in the U.S. The good old days!

if only it was just one wrong turn in the 80's. at this point even the GPS has stopped prompting us which direction to turn in.