Does doom await in 2012?

[xchrom]

http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/1346951-does-doom-await-2012

2011 will be remembered as the year in which, for the first time, the European Union gazed into the abyss and named the unnamable. To the surprise of friends and strangers, inside and outside Europe, just when after a decade of introspection and divisions Europe set out to make up for lost time with its eagerness to become a global player at last, a financial and economic crisis that spanned the globe hit the continent with full force and destabilised its main and most successful achievement: the monetary union.

"If the euro falls, Europe falls," Chancellor Angela Merkel announced to the members of her party meeting in Leipzig in November, describing the situation as “the most difficult since the Second World War." And she was right: the consequences of a breakdown of the euro would be so profound that it would be hard to restrict them merely to the currency: they would hit the internal market and the principal common policies, including foreign policy, full on, sweeping away decades of painstaking European integration.

The “Empty Chair Crisis" in the sixties, the "Eurosclerosis" of the seventies, the shadow of Europe’s economic and technological decline vis-à-vis the U.S. and Japan in the eighties, the return of concentration camps and ethnic cleansing in the nineties, and the failed constitutional referenda in France and the Netherlands in the last decade: the European Union has been in crisis before, but none have had an existential character in the literal sense of the word.

"Too little, too late"

What have the consequences of the euro crisis been? The most visible and immediate has the devastation in terms of employment and prosperity, which has provoked widespread wariness about the future of the welfare state. The crisis has also brought into question the democratic self-respect of our societies, subject to market forces over which they detect a lack of control. And although it is too early to outline the psychological impact, history tells us that societies that are afraid and that feel insecure tend to turn in on themselves, become wary of their surroundings, open the door to populism and sacrifice freedom for the sake of greater security.

[Atman]

1. It's gonna happen...which is why no intelligent Republican wants to be President in '12.

I've said this before, I'm saying it again; the clown show running for the GOP nomination is by design. Anyone who's been paying attention knows it's coming. The GOP's best hope for 2016 is to hope this all happens under Obama's watch so that they can blame his policies. This has been a long time coming. The GOP hopes it will happen because it will be the final nail in the coffin of "socialism." Unbridled, unregulated capitalism (otherwise known as Fascism) is the happy ending for them.

[LiberalCatholic]

2. Yes, but,

you are not taking the amount of anger people have into consideration. I think the days of people giving away the shop are over for a while. We are beginning to see the pendulum swing to the left again. People finally get it and when the shit hits the fan they will expect the wealthy to start doing the heavy lifting.