Larry L. Dill's   New Hope Journal   poems, essays and works in progress
					April In Paris As a public service to travelers headed for France this spring, the New Hope Journal will reprint news stories and other commentaries found elsewhere on the web that we hope will shed light on current social and political conditions in the  embattled French Republic. Our own  first hand report will be published in June.  We leave for Paris on Earth Day, April 22.                  -----Larry L. Dill
			Paris Loves a Riot By David Ng Village Voice March 30, 2006 National pastime, cathartic rite, and hereditary calling all rolled into one, the French labor protest occupies a holy space on the country's social genome, much like baseball or playing the stock market does in the U.S. This week, the kids in France let the world know that the protest gene is alive and well, uncorrupted by years of corrosive globalization and conservative politics. And the world is paying attention. We can roll our eyes at images of rich kids staring down robotic water canons, but we can't deny that France is one of a dwindling number of democracies where dissent is not only tolerated by the government but expected. Everyone from grizzled old farmers to Sharon Stone has denounced the youth labor law that has hurled France into a social tailspin these past weeks. But even those who hate the law are starting to believe that the protests won't accomplish all that much in the end—a revolution in spirit but not substance. The despised document at the heart of the matter (the "CPE," which would enable employers to fire young employees after a two-year trial period) got a big thumbs up from France's constitutional counsel late Thursday, and President Chirac appears likely make it official soon. All this will incite more protests in the days ahead—protests of increasing desperation and futility. A little-talked-about reality of French academia, one that a friend alerted me to, is the fast approaching Easter vacation. (This in a country proud of its secularism.) In the middle of April, students will vacate schools and head home for two weeks of official idleness. By the time they return, the academic year will be almost over and few will be inclined to take up the cause again, if indeed the cause still exists by that time. If French students treasure their right to protest, they may value their right to long vacations even more. During the past few days, I spoke with people around Paris about their reactions to the protests. None thought the CPE was a good law, but neither did they think the protests would amount to much. A friend smartly pointed out that many French are able to retire at 55, which means that people can spend as much time in retirement as they did working. (Some are even pushing to lower the retirement age to 50, or 45.) Naturally, today's youth will foot the bill, even though almost a quarter of those under 25-years-old are unemployed and can't make a living. This is a generational conundrum that goes beyond the current protests, which seem in comparison like arguing over what wood varnish we should use on the decks of the Titanic. Walking through Paris, the protests seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, a phantom presence that would randomly burst forth to everyone's general annoyance and dismay. In the labyrinthine Montparnasse-Bienvenue metro station, a group of lyceens noisily occupied the entire span of a moving sidewalk on a busy Thursday afternoon, pushing out pedestrians while shouting and waving flags. (I was luckily on the opposite sidewalk, though I quickly ran into their spirited cohorts further down, where they were crowding people off the subway platform.) Outside, the police had removed the metal grates that normally cage-in the trees that line city streets. This caused a thick, shit-colored ooze to flow onto the sidewalks (it had rained all week), making walking a disgusting chore for everyone. I asked a journalist acquaintance why they had done this and she said it was to prevent students from removing the grates themselves and hurling them at police. How resourceful! It hadn't occurred to me that they could be used as weapons, but then again, I'm from New York, where what passes for a typical demonstration are a couple hundred people gathered in Union Square, waving anti-Bush banners for an hour or two. On a Friday evening, I caught a play in the east part of the city. Surely there would be no protesters here. No such luck. Following the curtain call, the actors delivered a five minute speech, voicing their concern about a group of "intermittents" (unsalaried workers in the entertainment industry) who had been arrested for protesting their working conditions on the set of the French reality TV show Star Academy. (Think Big Brother meets American Idol, set in an 18th century chateau.) The actors informed us that they would be protesting in front of the prison at Bobigny, where the intermittents were currently imprisoned. Such is the bizarrely inclusive nature of French protests—they accumulate additional, often vaguely related demonstrations into a gigantic, unstoppable snowball. During this Tuesday's protests, farmers from the provinces were marching alongside students, protesting the country's beef policies. Two weeks ago, when the student demonstrations were just getting started, Parisian prostitutes—female, male, transvestite, and transsexual—went on strike to denounce a law that would make solicitation illegal. More carnavalesque parade than political showdown, this week's demonstrations were undeniably photogenic, sweeping, and romantic. But that's about as profound as they are likely to be. France needs a cure for its gangrened social system, but none is at hand. Its students may not find a solution this week or anytime soon, but at least they're in the streets, and for now, that's a start. In France, to the streets over capitalism By William Pfaff  |  April 1, 2006 PARIS  (Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, New York Times) THE MANIFESTATIONS by French students, workers (and would-be workers), with unions and the French left riding on their bandwagon, have amounted to a spontaneous revolt in France against something that I suspect few of the participants fully appreciate. The manifestations superficially are meant to force withdrawal of a minor change in the French government's employment policy, but have taken on a radically different significance. The protests contest a certain form of capitalist economy which a large part, if not the majority, of French society regards as a danger to national standards of justice -- and above all, to equality. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin undoubtedly had little notion of the consequences when he launched what seemed to him a small but constructive employment initiative, intended to loosen current structural inhibitions to job creation. He inadvertently opened what many French see as a central question to their national future, just as two years ago they saw in the European constitutional referendum disturbing questions about the future nature of the European Union and about the model of capitalism that would prevail in Europe's future. They are not alone in this concern. A kindred debate about models of capitalism has been a persistent factor in Germany, now suffering labor unrest, and in the European Commission itself, which since EU expansion to 25 members, has tipped away from the traditional European ''social" model. Even in Britain last Tuesday there was the biggest strike since the 1920s on the question of pensions. The French, of course, have been against ''capitalisme sauvage" ever since that rough beast loomed amidst the satanic mills of Britain in the 19th century, subsequently making its trans-Atlantic journey to establish another lair. The essential question is: What capitalism are we talking about? Between the 1970s and now, two fundamental changes have been made in the leading (American) model of capitalism. The first is that the stakeholder, the post-New Deal reformed version of capitalism (in America) that prevailed in the West during the early post-Second World War period, was replaced by a new model of corporate purpose and responsibility. The earlier model said that corporations had a duty to ensure the well-being of employees and an obligation to the community (chiefly but not exclusively fulfilled through corporate tax payments). That model has been replaced by one in which corporation managers are responsible for creating short-term ''value" for owners, as measured by stock valuation and quarterly dividends. The practical result has been constant pressure to reduce wages and worker benefits (leading in some cases to theft of pensions and other crimes) and political lobbying and public persuasion to lower the corporate tax contribution to government finance and the public interest. In short, the system in the advanced countries has been re-jigged since the 1960s to take wealth from workers, and from the funding of government, and transfer it to stockholders and corporate executives. The criticism currently made of Europeans who resist reform is that their policies block managers from downsizing and outsourcing jobs in order to add value to the corporation. I once called this ''CEO capitalism," since corporate chiefs today effectively control their boards of directors and are also the biggest benefactors of the system, subject only to critical attention from investment fund managers, who are interested in maximizing dividends, not in defending workers or the public interest. The second change that has taken place is, of course, globalization. The crucial effect of this for society in the advanced countries is that it puts labor into competition with the poorest countries on earth. Consider classical economist David Ricardo's ''iron law of wages," which says that in conditions of wage competition and unlimited labor supply, wages will fall to just above subsistence. There never before has been unlimited labor. There is now, thanks to globalization -- and the process has only begun. It seems that this European unrest signals a serious gap in political and corporate understanding of the human consequences of a capitalist model that considers labor a commodity and extends price competition for that commodity to the entire world. In the longer term, there may be more serious political implications in this than even France's politicized students suspect. What seems the reactionary or even Luddite position might prove prophetic. A French Lesson for the Ages By Jim Hoagland Sunday, April 2, 2006; Washington Post The French and protests go together like horse and carriage, love and marriage and other natural partners. But look again at the million and more demonstrators who have taken to the streets in France in recent days. In their marching and shouting, there is a hidden message for us all about coming generational and cultural conflicts. France has moved into one of its periodic dangerous seasons, in which a conservative government acts as if its fate and economic future depend on facing down or outlasting massive street protests. Both 1789 and 1968 remind us how such calculations can misfire in France. Protesters have filled the streets this spring to define themselves and their nation more clearly and aggressively than most of the world would ever care or dare to attempt. The young rebels follow the Cartesian rigor taught in the universities that they are boycotting: I protest, therefore I am. This struggle concerns, as so many things in France do, identity. The French are a society of individualists who take pride in an ideology of solidarity. Their idealized concept of social cohesion is under such intense pressure from the forces of globalization that it must be proclaimed in the streets if it is to survive at all. For all its Francocentricity, this labor upheaval sounds echoes of the recent demonstrations staged by Hispanic immigrant groups in the United States and our own debate over alien workers. In most developed countries, the forces of globalization are changing the rules and even the nature of work -- just as demographic patterns are eroding the Industrial Age's implicit social contract between the young and the old. Politicians naturally respond to the challenges posed by the easy flow of goods, people and ideas across frontiers by pretending they can resolve these challenges with isolated exercises of political will and legislation. The harsh anti- immigrant laws proposed by the U.S. House of Representatives defy not only common decency and humanity but the very way the global economy works today. The House legislation proves that change is too important to be left to politicians, as do France's attempts to tinker with the social model that is in deep trouble. These global connections need to be grasped and articulated to divide more equitably the prosperity that globalization brings for some and the burdens of unemployment or low wages that others experience. Hidden in the French protests is a looming conflict between the economic interests of the young, who are just starting careers, and of their elders, who are in or moving into retirements that almost no industrialized country has set aside the funds to finance. The springtime confrontation in France also stems from narrow local factors such as internal power struggles, missteps by President Jacques Chirac's embattled government and wishful thinking that the country's expensive and generous social welfare system can be maintained forever without big sacrifices. This is, after all, a public that has been educated by political leaders of both the right and left to distrust free-market reforms. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin thought that he could do something for France's young when he rushed labor law changes through Parliament. His objective was to cut youth unemployment, which is double France's overall joblessness rate of 10 percent, and to show that the government had swung into action after rioting last autumn by unemployed immigrant youths. But the young concluded that Villepin was doing something to them, not for them. By giving private employers the right to fire workers under 26 without cause within two years of their being hired, the government in effect denied younger workers labor protections that are deeply entrenched for their elders. Chirac offered Friday to soften the legislation's harshest features, but his proposal was rejected as too little too late by protest leaders. Gray-bearded academics and other seniorish citizens have rushed to the streets to join Villepin's political foes and union leaders in showing support for the students. How could they, in good conscience, do otherwise? A broad generational conflict over the allocation of resources is taking shape in many industrial nations as their working populations age. In the United States, the profligacy of galloping budget and trade deficits has convinced many younger workers that they will never have the kind of Social Security protection their parents enjoyed. It is time to forge global and generational social contracts to recognize and mitigate the inequities that a new world of change fosters. By raising their voices, France's young and America's migrants have called attention to that need. More on French Labor Unrest Here Complete Index of of all things French Home Complete Site Index    larrydill@newhopejournal.com www.newhopejournal.com copyright 2004, 2006 by Larry L. Dill