The Axis of Feeble

Someone finally gets it:

Castro's reforms envision a growing "non-state" retail and farming sector and more efficient state-run companies. They are expected to be approved at a Communist Party congress in April.

The massive lay-offs have reportedly come under fire during tens of thousands of meetings held across the island as a prelude to the congress.
The program is being described as a "reorganization" of the labor force because in theory laid-off workers are declared "available" and offered other jobs or they can lease fallow state land or become self-employed.

While others STILL don't get it:

Yet despite these failures of the EU project-greater prosperity, peace, and international influence through increased economic and political unification-many liberals in America continue to pursue policies, both domestic and foreign, that are moving the United States closer to the EU paradigm. Indeed, many on the Left approve of the European model as something to emulate. Partly, this reflects the place Europe has traditionally held in the imagination of some Americans. Like the Yankee ingénues in a Henry James novel, they have admired the Old World of sophistication, culture, and civilization that contrasts with the New World of crude, go-getting, frontier brashness. But these days, this admiration more fundamentally reflects the belief that Europe provides a more humane and sophisticated set of social and political values.

Elsewhere in Hypocracy Watch... Is there something to this humaneness-sophistication-superiority PR meme that I'm missing about globalization being an American invention, and being unthinkably bad?

Rumours that Renault is considering plans to delocalise production for some of the models made for its low-cost brand Dacia to Morocco have prompted concern in Romania. "Morocco threatens 'Romanian made' Dacia," headlines Gândul, which reports that there are two reasons why the carmaker could delocalise: first and foremost, "management's exasperation with union demands for annual bonuses of 700 lei (175 euros) and an extra of 500 lei (125 euros) per month;" and secondly, the poor state of Romanian road system, which has made it expensive to export cars from the country. Hourly rates of around five euros per hour that Renault could expect to pay in Tangier are considerably less than the 8 euros per hour it currently pays in Romania. However, the Bucharest daily notes that the plant in Mioveni was nonetheless responsible for 2.5 billion euros in exports in 2010, or 7% of Romania's export revenue. Gândul also points out that Dacia currently employes 150,000 people in Romania, of whom 20,000 work at Mioveni.

And you thought it was their superhuman intelligence, organizational skills, and engineering that made them what they are today.... I suggest that they import Wisconsin's Democrat societal-crash-test-dummies for a while. After all, they're using the rhetoric of unshod children starving in the street were it not for mommie's 6 hour a day, 10 month a year, $87K per year job which a trsined chimpanzee can do on auto-pilot.