For the next elections, the two major candidates today are the swaggering Sarkozy, who has borrowed the rhetoric of the extreme right (and Jean-Marie Le Pen) by referring to the residents of the poor suburbs as scum, and the aristocratic Villepin who is still much to the right of the centre.
Neither would in normal circumstances bother to pay much heed to the existence of a substantial and resentful underclass, since such people do not vote for the most part. The traditional left is in disarray, and has been dogged by numerous scandals in the past years. *******************
I thought LOBSTERs might appreciate another view. From the Trotty side of the class line below, compare and contrast with the history prof and the "Wall Street Urinal" piece at the end:
Regards, Mike B)
Dear Sisters and Brothers,
You will find below the English translation of the statement published on Wednesday, November 10, in the French Workers Party's weekly newspaper Informations Ouvrières [Labour News]. This statement is signed by the Permanent Bureau of the National Committee to Reclaim Democracy. The Committee was created on October 16 at the conclusion of a national convention that had been called by all the political organizations, elected officials and trade unionists who had joined together in the struggle for the victory of the "NO" vote to the European Constitution.
As you will see, the Committee's statement is focused on the need for working people across France to unite broadly against the policies of the French government -- and, more specifically, in the struggle to break with the anti-democratic institutions of the European Union -- institutions that were rejected by the French people through their vote on May 29.
The Committee's statement underscores the fact that an effective fightback against the anti-democratic measures taken by the government -- and in defense of youth and immigrant workers -- cannot be taken up as an isolated struggle, but must be part and parcel of the mobilization of the French working class as a whole. The Committee's statement rejects all attempts to divide and isolate the youth, or a section of it.
The events that have unfolded during the past weeks have affected the outlying suburbs of Paris and other cities -- all of which are terribly impoverished boroughs where the majority of the population is from immigrant origin or descent, and where the levels of unemployment are three to five times higher than the national level.
The event that sparked the present developments took place in a suburb in the North of Paris, Clichy-sous-Bois, where the police had been chasing teenagers who were suspected of trespassing on private property -- something, it should be pointed out, that was never proven by the police. Two kids hid in a local electricity sub-station and were electrocuted. The anger over this incident, especially of the youth, is at the origin of the unfolding events.
The backdrop to these confrontations is the 20 years of privatization and deregulation that have dismantled French industry and torn to shreds the French social safety net. Informations Ouvrières provides some telling facts in its same issue of the paper: 380 public hospitals (10% of the total) have been closed in the last ten years as have 20% of the maternity hospitals. During the same period, 10,500 schools -- including vocational schools and special education schools -- have been closed.
It is this wholesale destruction of jobs and of what is known in the United States as the French "Welfare State" -- meaning, its single-payer national healthcare system, free public education for all at all levels (including higher education), mass public housing, mass public transportation, and the list goes on and on -- that is the root cause of the recent events. This most impoverished sector of the French working class has been reduced to an underclass -- with no jobs, no future and no hopes.
The answer, as the Committee's statement underscores, can only be found in a united working class struggle to defeat all the policies implemented by the government at the behest of the European Union and that seek to privatize, deregulate and dismantle the gains made by the French workers and people through bitter struggles -- going all the way back to the French Revolution and the creation of its 36,000 Communes.
The solution lies in the reconquest of political democracy, the forms of which will be determined by the French people themselves.
In Solidarity,
Alan Benjamin
U.S. Committee of the ILC
********************
Statement of the Permanent Bureau of the National Committee to Reclaim Democracy.
The National Committee to Reclaim Democracy, constituted in Ivry during the October 2005 Conference, expresses its deep concern about the announced emergency measures taken by the French government to revive and enforce the April 3rd 1955 law.
Everyone remembers the events that urged the authorities then to pass that law: the war in Algeria.
History has shown that, far from solving the issues that were posed, such a law only made them worse.
Reclaiming democracy cannot be secured by stifling liberties.
Since the beginning of the events that started in Clichy on October 27, observers have steadily underlined the fact that this situation is bound up with political measures taken by the successive French governments which, for over two decades, have relentlessly shredded the social fabric.
A tightly woven social fabric is the result of jobs with a living wage for all; only in this manner does everyone have a place and a future in society; generation after generation. It is employment that has enabled our country's working class to integrate all its generations and its components, whatever their national or ethnic origins.
It is the institutions of the political democracy, especially of the municipalities -- equal civil rights in the Republic, public services available to all -- that have woven the democratic and republican fabric of our country.
If this fabric comes apart today, it is as a result of the policies of deregulation, privatisation and casualisation that hit all the layers of the population, striking first of all the youth.
During our National Ivry Conference, we stressed the fact that these political agendas all stem from the European Union directives which, last May 29th were rejected by the French people.
What does the government dare announce now?
Besides resorting to the 1955 Emergency law, the Prime Minister has announced a slew of new governmental measures that multiply the "free enterprise zones" [where French labour laws are exempted -- Tr. Note] and casual employment, granting subsidies to some charities whose purpose is to take the place of public services and to bring school-leaving age down to 14 instead of 16 and fixing the access to job-training at 14 .
About the latter measure, this should not be understood as apprenticeship or vocational training in the usual sense of the term, leading to a qualification and to a diploma; what it actually means is to make it possible to exploit young people as early as age 14, and using them as free labour.
Do such measures achieve anything else than to continue and worsen a political course followed during 20 years -- a course that has brought about the closure of half the public insurance payment centres in some suburban districts, the closure of EDF [power facility and distribution] offices, the end of schools for children with special needs, the closure of public vocational training secondary schools.
The result is that in Seine Saint Denis [a suburban district, North of Paris], unemployment rate has soared to 25% but, in some areas, it even reaches 50%, while those young people who do have "jobs" are doomed to shifting from one "training" session to the next one or, for the "lucky" ones, from one short-term contract to the next!
Is such wreckage acceptable? Who can believe this is the way to restoring democracy?
We met in Ivry on October 16th and launched an appeal to set up "Committees for Reclaiming Democracy" across the whole country, especially on the following guidelines:
- Restoration of public services, defence of labour Laws, statuses, collective agreements;
- Defence of the 36,000 municipalities, for a secular, One and Indivisible Republic.
- For the defence of the sovereignty of the nation, breaking with the Maastricht Treaty, its institutions and with the European directives;
- For the Sovereign Constituent Assembly establishing democracy;
- For the free and fraternal Union of all the Peoples of Europe.
At that time we added something that we reaffirm today:
"Does the whole history of our country not show that the unity of the country is rooted in the Sovereign Constituent Assembly, combined with the rights of municipalities?
"Everybody is aware that our country is undergoing an exceptionally serious crisis. On May 29, the people expressed their determination to take their own fate into their hands. Hurdles are numerous and powerful.
"But, just as the NO vote prevailed -- carried by the tide of millions of anonymous votes, challenging all the forecasts of the "powers-that-be" -- in the same way, the present crisis will only be solved by the action of the masses themselves."
We insist: Our committee is deeply concerned by the measures that the government has just announced.
The appeal we are launching -- a call to start reclaiming democracy -- will be understood by all, whatever the various opinions of each and everyone, as a call to reason.
>From the Wall Street Journal
Behind the riots in France lies a surefire recipe
for discontent: a rigid job market and widespread discrimination against young
Muslim men, write Marcus Walker in Frankfurt and John Carreyrou in Paris in The
Wall Street Journal (November 9, page A14). The country's unwieldy
labor-market policies, which protect job holders but have created stubbornly
high unemployment of around 10 percent for France's overall labor force,
particularly hurt youths -- especially those of African descent. When few jobs
are created, it makes those with weaker credentials more prone to being shut
out entirely, says Raymond Torres, head of employment policy at the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Discrimination adds to
the barriers. "These problems would be less severe if the labor market were
more dynamic," he says.
Rioting across France is entering its 14th day. More than 200 towns saw rioting, 12 schools were destroyed and citizen militias continued to form. Scattered reports of arson also were mounting in neighboring Belgium. The riots have centered in the banlieues, the poor, immigrant suburbs of French cities where many struggle to find work. Leaders in France and elsewhere in Continental Europe have often argued that their "social model," based on tempering capitalism with worker protections, avoids the damaging social divisions of free market capitalism as practiced in the U.S. or Britain. But the riots in France have brought new attention to the fact that the Continental model can also create a persistent underclass. That is because labor rules aimed at protecting workers against low wages and layoffs also tend to deter companies from hiring -- especially workers with lower education or from minority backgrounds. High minimum wages, high dropout rates from school, and costly labor rules have given France one of Europe's worse rates of youth unemployment, running at 21 percent for people aged under 25, according to the OECD. Among immigrant youths, the rate is even higher
-- twice as high as among whites, according to one estimate.
-----
The permanent bureau of the National Committee for reclaiming Democracy.
Yves ALLAIN, Mayor of Saint-Michel-de-Plélan (Côtes-d'Armor); Jean-Claude ALZAIS, association official for lodgings (Yvelines);Alec BIZIEN, Medicine professor (Essone); Gilles BOULIN, MRC delegate (Côtes d'Armor); Maurice COLAS, Secretary of the Socialist Party Section of Contrexéville (Vosges); Laurence DELEUZE, Municipal councillor of Tarascon SP (Bouches du Rhône); Jean-Claude DENIS, former municipal councillor of Saint-Maur (Val de Marne; Monique DOMERGUE, Municipal councillor of Talence FCP (Gironde); Philippe ETIENNE, Mayor of Calleville-les-deux-églises Workers' Party (Seine Maritime); Christian FLEURY, Mayor of Bonnétable (Sarthe); Michèle FOIX, Municipal Councillor of Cros-de-Monvert SP (Cantal); Didier FOUCHE, Mayor of Soulitré (Sarthe); Lionel FOURNIER, Municipal Councillor of Villeneuve-d'Aval, metal worker unionist (Jura); Daniel GANDOLFI, Mayor of Le Moutoux (Jura); Daniel GLUCKSTEIN national secretary of the Workers' Party; Johan GOUTTEBROZE, Mayor of Pinay (Loire); Daniel JEANNIN, Mayor of Montenois (DOUBS); Claude JENET, trade union activist (Vaucluse); Danièle LACHNAL, Municipal Councillor of Palaiseau (Essonne); Jean-Charles MARQUISET, trade union activist, local public service (Essonne); Guy PAGES, agricultural workers' union activist (Herault); Alain PECEL, General Councillor, FCP (Loire); Aimé SAVY, Deputy Mayor PRC, Ivry (Val-de-Marne); Christian SAVIDAN, trade union activist, local public service (Maine et Loire); Gérard SCHIVARDI, General Councillor Socialist Party, of Ginestas, Mayor of Mailhac (Aude); Yannick SYBELIN, hospital worker unionist (Loire); Norbert TRICHARD, teacher unionist (Val-d'Oise).
To contact us:
Comité National pour la Reconquête de la Démocratie Politique
C/o Jean-Claude Denis, 36 rue de Bellechasse
94100 Saint Maur
www ; republiqueuneetindivisible.com ;
E-mail : republique.indivisible at fr.oleane.com.
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