It's no accident that this agenda is cynically pushed by business interests who'd love nothing more than replacing the current solidarity based systems (Social Security in the US, Assurance Vieillesse in France, etc...) by "market based" systems that will guarantee them a juicy rent extraction by the way of commissions and other "fees".

As E.Todd was putting it in "After Democracy", at some point the powers that be will just stop pretending and do away with formal representative democracy, merely acknowledging the full replacement of government by governance. The process has been well under way for some time now. There's No Alternative, as we all know.

If any ray of hope is to be found, it seems to me it is in the younger people: high school students who are taking to the streets and re-discovering the art and craft of collective action. Sure they may not stand a chance, but in the (not so) long run their generation will outlive ours.

This is especially true in what we call - sometimes dismissively - "the South countries": look at what's going on in Algeria, Tunisia.. Also look at the South American continent (Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela...); there are plenty of young people out there who have nothing to loose and (and you'll have to read part of my French here) will take none of that shit. [There, got it off my chest]