And then there's the EU, which should be driving Europe, but is really - in its most effective parts - just a neoliberal outpost of the US.
I think you're wrong in blaming the problem exclusively on the Anglo countries and the former easterners. Europe will not become any less neoliberal if the Atlanticist bloc leaves - it will just become more overtly fascist, in the same way that the Atlanticist countries are already becoming more overtly fascist.
The problem is that working populations are just too damn easy to manipulate and jingo-ise without a countervoice.
The Italians voted in Berlusconi and the French preferred Sarkozy to a socialist. European socialism doesn't exist to any great extent, except possibly as a historical legacy which has put the brakes on certain kinds of neoliberal politics. But it's been a rearguard action across all of Europe.
Throwing things in streets won't get anyone a better health service - there needs to be a fine balance between the active threat of popular outrage and parliamentary action before anything much changes. And both are very limited in Europe.
So - bottom up organisation. Not in the radical single-issue sense - because that's too easily forgotten after the shouting stops and the clean-up crews have gone home - but as a strong lobby group which can influence policy via a combination of local community organisation and national and international media.
I don't think that anything else will have the momentum to do the job. It needs constant pressure from inside each country's political system, constant pressure in the EP and against the Commission, and constant pressure on those elements of the financial industry which consider every other part of the economy their personal fiefdom.
There's a lot that could be done, but a crippled Europe is as much the result of the EU itself as the Anglo countries.
With a more appealing proposition and much better PR and participation, there might even be some interest among the Atlanticists in pushing Europe as a popular project.
On the media, one good thing about the crisis is that slowly but surely legacy media in television, print, were already losing eyeball share. And the crisis will hit them harder than most sectors, as media and advertising are among the most recession prone sectors there are. Not for nothing Sarkozy is now proposing to subsidise newspaper subscriptions for youth. And, it won't work. We get upset when the media bias is so blatant, but we have to remember, the audience is more and more not representative of the public at large, it is older, much more conservative in many ways, but it is not one very important thing: by virtue of the fact they are older, they are not the future.
I strongly suspect new media and indepedent media (don't work in media anymore so no recent studies to back this up, but it was already true 5 years ago) have audiences which skew heavily young. This trend will continue; therefore, old Capital's access to eyeballs will be more and more limited, the ability to manipulate public opinion against its own interests more and more limited.
I personally am far more hopeful today than I was five years ago. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
The crazy oldies are much louder in the media than any progressive voices, and it would be wrong to pretend there's no sympathy among younger demographics. But they're certainly a solid foundation for the neolibs, and once they start dying off there could - possibly - be room for some new ideas.
