As seen from Just Above Sunset

Thursday, 22 September 2005

Topic: World View

World Politics: Just More of the Realists versus the Idealists

Last Sunday in these pages - in Germany: The Upcoming Elections - Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis, and Just Above Sunset discussed the situation over there, and the election that day. After you worked through matters regarding the Pamela Anderson photos in the museum in Munich, in the Haus der Kunst, and some comments on the sweet young German girls sunbathing completely in the nude in the middle of the city, matters came down to the implications of the contest between Gerhard Schröder and the American-style conservative Angela Merkel. Who would be the next German chancellor? Would it be Gerhard, or "this Merkel dame," as Ric called her.

There was some interest in that on this side of the Atlantic. As mentioned then, American conservatives need a Teutonic Margaret Thatcher person to prove that what they claim about how the world should be run is right - a sort of anti-Chirac, someone who will get Germany revving up economically to prove their point about cutting taxes for the rich and services to the poor and going to war without any direct threat for abstract reasons. A hero would be nice - or a heroine in this case. They miss Reagan's ballsy British sister in unfettered low-tax screw-the-needy capitalism and elective war (remember Grenada and the Falkland Islands wars?) - so "this Merkel dame" is the darling of the guys who run the United States now. What with the hurricane embarrassment and the nearly three hundred dead in the streets of Baghdad that week, her winning this thing would have raised their spirits.

But it wasn't to be. Neither Schröder nor Merkel won enough votes to form a new government, and both are trying to form coalitions with the outliers, so to speak, to take control, while trading insults with each other. It's quite a mess. Here in Los Angeles BBC-America on its World News show has run man-in-the-street segments from Germany with various ordinary folks saying they fear this mess will mean months and months of trouble. And over at the preferred web site of the American right, "Red State," you get things like Reagan/Thatcher Revolution Once Again Fails to Penetrate Mainland Europe: "It's a shame that the good people of Europe can't seem to get their heads around the fact that high payroll taxes to pay for social programs mean less [sic] jobs. As labor markets become increasingly fluid, these types of policies pushed by the left only hurt. We know that here, but they can't seem to figure it out in Mainland Europe."

Oh well.

But trying to figure out what happened we have William Pfaff, on Friday, 23 September in the International Herald Tribune, with Europeans Thumb Their Noses at the Experts.

Pfaff recounts a mid-July trip when Angela Merkel visited Paris to make a courtesy call on President Jacques Chirac but really to attend a press event organized by Nicolas Sarkozy, who one can see at her French counterpart (the New Yorker has called him "the fake American").

Note this:

The allure of the shared press conference was that European, and especially British and American, press and politicians were fascinated by the notion that Merkel and Sarkozy would both win their elections and join Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain in a new European triumvirate of free-market economies and pro-American governments.

The two were "the new face of Europe," Berlin's Die Tageszeitung wrote at the time. "Since the fiasco of the referendums on the European constitution, there has been a total reversal ... of the old Chirac- Schröder European policy." The rising fortunes of Germany's Christian Democrat-Christian Social alliance announced the impending end of the "Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis," and the return of Berlin to the Atlanticist fold.

Pfaff suggests someone should have told them both not to stage this we're-taking-over kind of rally so many months before the election. Saying you represent the wave of the future before the election can be dangerous, even if that is the Bush-Rove way of doing such things. Yes, there was "a crush of conservative Washington think-tank celebrations of old Europe's imminent return to the path of righteousness." But it wasn't to be. Chirac got sick and Dominique de Villepin went to New York for the UN reform conference, while Nicolas Sarkozy had to stay home and pout. And Angela Merkel couldn't pull of a clear win - she has a three-seat parliamentary advantage that isn't enough to matter. She won't end the welfare state nor toss out taxes on wealth and income replacing them with a flat tax of twenty-five percent on everyone, including the poorest of the poor, nor deregulate the economy so corporations can do whatever they want and make things better for everyone.

She said in July this would happen. Like her neoconservative soul mates in Washington, she was making her own reality by saying it would be so, because she believed it would be so. The reality she now must face is the voters said no, maybe no so fast with all this stuff. And if she manages to form some so of coalition to become chancellor she has to deal with folks who don't agree with her. Stalemate. No major economic reforms.

Reality is like that. She should ask George Bush about such things. He's been bumping up against it lately.

Pfaff, in Europe, says most commentary on the right there, and here too actually, "has expressed exasperated annoyance that the electorate isn't doing what its betters expect of it." It's all in this vein: "Don't the German voters understand that they must undergo structural reform, job losses, benefit reductions and pension restrictions? They don't seem to. They vote against them. They are being slack and selfish. It is very annoying."

Yeah, but it's the reality. And he says what happened is similar to what happened when French and Dutch voters rejected the European constitutional treaty earlier this year. The voters said no, and the experts said they were uninformed and needed reeducated. They didn't see "the Truth."

But Pfaff suggests they did:

Consider the matter from the point of view of the voter. Ever since the new monetarist economic paradigm emerged from the alchemical laboratories of the University of Chicago, carrying all before it in the business schools of America, economists and chief executives worldwide have assured the public that the truth about economic success has at last been found.

This truth is that old notions of social justice in the workplace, and corporate responsibility to the community, are actually inefficiencies that present obstacles to the pursuit of corporate performance as measured by profits and stock market results.

According to this paradigm, maximum corporate profit produces maximized happiness for all (with certain unavoidable time discrepancies). Combined with deregulation and globalization, it can be relied on to make a better world.

The voter has said, "Yes, that must be so, if you say so." So workers have lost jobs, or had wages fall behind rising living costs, their employment benefits cut (and in the United States, health insurance coverage slashed and pension funds looted by management), all so that new and better jobs would eventually be created, new prosperity generated, and happier and more secure lives assured.

What has happened now, it seems, in Germany and in France, is that voters have concluded that for more than 30 years they have accepted the sacrifices, but where are the rewards? They want to know.

Geez, everyone these days wants answers! Where's FEMA? Where are those WMD and the ties to al Qaeda? If the economy is in great shape, why has poverty here risen steadily for four years, why are more and more folks are without any health insurance (up from forth-two million to forty-five million), and, by the way, where are the good jobs, or any jobs? And if we're winning this war in Iraq, why are so may people dying and why does it look like a civil war there now, and clearly leading to the creation of a client state of Iran there? Picky, picky, picky?

Folks really are hung up on reality. What a shame.

Well, it's just more of the realists versus the idealists. The realists have the upper hand at the moment.

Personal Note: In the late sixties I took an elective course in undergraduate school, in macroeconomics of all things, from one of these University of Chicago guys, a fellow who had studied under Milton Freidman. (He reminded us of that two or three times a week.) I don't recall his name, although I recall the grand unifying theories involved - ah, those "alchemical laboratories of the University of Chicago." None of us were impressed as I recall, but probably because the course was one of those early morning things and he'd always show up needing a shave, his dirty hair sticking out this way and that, his shirttails out, with a massive hangover - and with his mean little dachshund tucked under one arm. The dog growled at us all. This no doubt has colored my view of supply-side economics and money-supply theories of economic growth. Didn't like that dog.

__

Additional Notes on European Matters:

One of Ric Erickson's columns in last weekend's Just Above Sunset - French Confusion - untangled French national politics for our readers - Nicolas Sarkozy, de Villepin and all the others vying for power there, from the left to the right with some in the middle. It's a bit fluid and was updated on Tuesday with more detail from Ric, adding two more players.

Here it is Thursday and Ric adds this:

Readers may have thought the list of real and potential candidates for president of France in 2007 was Gallic satire. But not at all. It is exciting reality.

In fact this list may have been carefully studied by the Elysée, Matignon, the Place Beauvau, and PS headquarters. Today François Hollande, secretary general of the Socialist Party, said, "This is not the moment to announce being a candidate."

This was in response - not apparently to Just Above Sunset or Metropole - but to an article in Paris Match in which Ségolène Royal, president of the regional council of Poitou-Charentes, refused to deny having the idea of being a presidential candidate in 2007. Ms Royal was a minister in the last Jospin government, and is the long-time and current 'companion' of François Hollande.

He went on to say, repeating it tonight on the political question-and-answer period following the TV-news on France-2 TV, that candidates should wait until 'the end of 2006' before declaring. Another member of the PS, interviewed on TV, wondered how many PS candidates there are now. "I guess there must be 18," he said.

Recently on the outs, ex-prime minister Laurent Fabius, was on France-3 TV-news tonight, making a few kind remarks about the Socialist Party. Over the past week the PS leader of the 'non' vote for the European constitution has been moving closer to former comrades, or at least has been seen in the same room with Monsieur Hollande.

To come - possible confirmation of the sentence handed out to UMP leader Alain Juppé, amounting to a 10-year ban from politics. Also, José Bové was in court, facing a heavy fine and possible jail time for destroying some trans-genetic corn. A co-defendent is a leader of the Greens - motto: Allez Les Verts! - and the first mayor in France to marry a homosexual pair; also a potential presidential candidate.

If France is trying for a record number of presidential candidates, it may already be a world leader.

Even California politics isn't THIS complicated!

Posted by Alan at 18:48 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Thursday, 22 September 2005 18:54 PDT home

Friday, 16 September 2005

Topic: World View

Germany: The Weekend's Election

Tuesday, September 13, this, along with a flood of articles in German, arrived in Hollywood from Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis:

Saw the album of hockey photos.

What's next? All-star curling? Orange County senior horseshoes? The semi-pro donut league?

It's a slow night in Europe so I checked into Der Spiegel up in Hamburg, to see if reading German still makes sense. What's wrong with them? They haven't got their accents coded right. All those 'ä's and 'ö's and 'ü's have to be replaced by hand. I thought they were supposed to 'reform' themselves and do away with that muck because nobody under 29 has any of these letters on their PlayStation 3DIII.

What did I see? Well, Spiegel has a lot of NOLA coverage, also in English. But the big story is that Merkel dame going to blow away Gerhard next Sunday. Maybe not - she's got a finance guru who hot for a flat tax, one size fits all from the unemployed Turks to Prussian steel barons.

Then there's Pamela Anderson's photos in the museum in Munich, until the 15th, in the Haus der Kunst no less. Trouble is it costs 5 euros to get in and there's only about 20 photos, and well, Spiegel says Pamela might not be all real. And, to make matters worse, in the nearby Englischer Garten in the fine beer-garden weather, all the Munich honeys are lying around topless, and being what they are, some are bottomless too - on view for free, and most of them are all real.

I remember seeing this. It was a Sunday, the 31st of October to be exact, and the weather was breathtakingly fine, the sky was Bavarian blue and it was warm warm warm, and everybody was in the beer-garden under the Chineser Turm and the strings were zinging on terrace of the next-door teahouse, and further on all the honeys were stretched out on the grass like fresh trouts in the sun. So cool. Next day the temperature dropped 20 degrees to about five, the sky slate gray huddled overhead, and I started work at Seimens Hoffmannstraße, driving a Bulgarian electric lifttruck outside around in their elektro-kampus. By Wednesday it was snowing. It's not far from the Alps in Munich. And where I was - far, very far, from the Englischer Garten and further from that Sunday, that last day of summer in 1969.

Maybe Pamela is in the right place. There was a disco in the celler there. But there were always more girls in the gardens, up north beside the Schwabing end.

From here in Hollywood, back to Paris -

Curling. When living in Canada, and worn out from a long day at work managing a team of twenty odd computer folks at the locomotive factory, I would sit quietly in my hotel room and watch the all-curling channel. It was an end-of-the-world all-hope-is-gone so-this-is-exile thing. I cannot imagine photographing curling. December 2001 I caught some curling on television in my hotel room in Paris - in German, from Switzerland. A walk across the street to the Flore for a cognac fixed that right up. There was no such place in London, Ontario.

That Merkel dame gets a bit of press here - but such stuff is only for us oddballs who follow world events. Gerhard gets points with us lefties for stepping away from George's war - but otherwise, we know little. Merkel wants a flat tax? Here only the oddest of the right want that, and one of my conservative friends ("If I'm going to pay thirty-percent then the poorest of the poor will pay that too, damn it!).

As for Der Spiegel and diacritical marks, I downloaded a few pages of HTML code for every single one of them imaginable. Painful stuff.

Pamela Anderson's photos in the museum in Munich, until the 15th, in the Haus der Kunst no less. Wow. Yes, but with totally naked young women in the park outside daily, the five-euro ticket price may be too high. As I have mentioned, I dated Pamela Anderson's midwife for a bit a few years ago. Hard to imagine Pamela Anderson as a mom. Also hard to imagine this midwife's medical partner was a famous local OB-GYN, Heidi Fleiss' father no less. But was so.

Will work through the German emails in a bit.

Well, I didn't work through the German articles as I said I would. I was able to read German for about a week, long enough to pass a reading comprehension test in graduate school after a six-week intensive summer class, but that was decades ago. I've lost that all.

But there has been a flurry of comment stateside, like this in SLATE.COM

Das Flat Tax
The conservative economic proposal flopped with American voters. Now Germans are learning to hate it, too.
Daniel Gross - Posted Friday, Sept. 16, 2005, at 12:12 PM PT

His question? Will the flat tax do for Angela Merkel's campaign for German chancellor what it did for Steve Forbes' ill-fated presidential campaigns in 1996 and 2000?

Maybe:

Until recently, Merkel, the leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union party, enjoyed a healthy lead over incumbent Gerhard Schröder, whose Social Democrats are listing after eight years in office and a growing national malaise.

American conservatives hope that Merkel will turn out to be a Teutonic Margaret Thatcher: an up-from-the-bootstraps woman from a right-of-center party, an economic conservative who favors structural reforms of a bureaucratic welfare state. On everything from the war in Iraq to the potential accession of Turkey to the European Union, American conservatives had hoped that by electing Merkel, the German electorate would effectively abandon some of the policies that had recently put it at odds with the United States.

Yes, that's the reason there are any articles at all on this side of the pond. American conservatives need a Teutonic Margaret Thatcher person to prove what the claim about how the world should be run is right - a sort of anti-Chirac, someone who will get Germany revving up economically to prove their point about cutting taxes for the rich and services to the poor and going to war without any direct threat for abstract reasons. A hero would be nice - or a heroine in this case. They miss Reagan's ballsy British sister in unfettered low-tax screw-the-needy capitalism and elective war (remember Grenada and the Falkland Islands wars?) - so this Merkel dame is the darling of the guys who run the United States now. What with the hurricane embarrassment and the nearly three hundred dead in the streets of Baghdad this week, her winning this thing would raise their spirits.

But at the last moment her lead has just about disappeared and Schröder was good in the televised debates. And the flat tax idea bombed. Gross says it has become a millstone around Merkel's neck.

The background:

The first clue that the flat tax is an unwelcome import: The Germans, who have a word for everything, don't have one for the flat tax. They call it the "flat tax."

As a childless professional woman from the East, Merkel is an anomaly in German politics. And she has conducted the campaign in an anomalous way. One of the radical things she did - a move that would strike U.S. voters as perfectly normal - was to look beyond political professionals for advice. In Germany, former CEOs and even academics rarely figure in campaigns or in governments. But Merkel brought on former Siemens CEO Heinrich von Pierer as an adviser. And in August, Paul Kirchhof, a former judge and professor at the University of Heidelberg, was enlisted as shadow finance minister. His task: to come up with a plan to kick-start Germany's large and lumbering economy into higher gear.

The result has been a disaster. Kirchhof had long recommended a serious reform of Germany's progressive and deduction-riddled income-tax system, which has a top rate of 42 percent. His preferred plan is to rip up the tax code, institute a flat 25 percent income-tax rate, and make up for lost revenue by boosting the value-added tax. An analyst for Hypovereinsbank dubbed Kirchhof "the miracle worker."

Ah, there, like here, turning to the theorists is always a bad idea. Remember the Laffer Curve - USC economist Arthur Laffer's idea that the more you cut taxes the more money pours into the government because the economy grows fast due to those lower taxes. Neat idea. Wonderful concept. Since the Reagan administration this has been the core economic theory of the Republican Party. Of course it's never worked, and there is good evidence it never will. But it's a great theory. It sounds like it could be so. See Samuel Johnson on the triumph of hope over experience. Substitute evidence for experience in the phrase. Of course note that the Republican Party is not big on the idea empirical evidence matters - consider global warming (the evidence is mixed, folks), evolution (the jury is still out on that, as Bush has said), democracy in Iraq (it could happen in a sort of way, maybe, if we stay the course), Terri Schiavo was not brain dead at all (Doctor/Senator Frist said so on the senate floor). So with tax cuts. They could fix everything. You never know. And there is talk in the right-wing think tanks that maybe we shouldn't tax income at all, only consumption, with a national sales tax, or a value-added tax (VAT) like some countries have. That way, the richer you are, the smaller the portion of what you pay in taxes! No one pays any income tax and Joe, the struggling Wal-Mart clerk, pays twenty-eight percent extra for a quart of milk, and so do you! Cool.

Is seems the Germans are a tad more skeptical than we are. They, and their leader at the time, thought our Iraq war was a monumentally bad idea. It made no sense to them. Where was the evidence that it would do any good?

But we've moved beyond the Enlightenment - a European thing that actually stared in France, of all places - with its reliance on experiment and evidence. We've moved on to the world of faith-based government, while those Europeans are still stuck thinking real events and facts matter. It's the old-fashioned fuddy-duddy realists versus the bold dreamers and idealists. Merkel is one of the new reality-doesn't-matter types. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld folks love her.

But the problem is she's stuck in a culture that doesn't get it - they don't see things her way:

Germans tend to see progressive income-tax rates as part and parcel of a democracy. The notion that a secretary would pay the same proportion of her income in taxes as a CEO doesn't strike Germans as egalitarian, it strikes them as unjust. What's more, the trade-off of taxing consumption rather than income seems counterproductive in a nation where the lack of domestic demand is a continual problem. Germans need more incentives to consume, not fewer.

What's more, they don't like pie-in-the-sky experts:

In the United States, the involvement of professional economists, Wall Street executives, and CEOs in political campaigns and the formulation of economic and tax policies is not only accepted, it's preferred by both parties. Not so in Germany. Although Germany has more than its share of world-beating, world-class companies - Siemens, DaimlerChrysler, SAP, and BMW, to name a few - its CEOs possess little juice. At a moment where there is a wide perception that the political system can't adequately address Germany's economic problems, there is still no room in Germany's political life for a Ross Perot, a Robert Rubin, a Paul O'Neill, or a Larry Lindsey. No wonder German executives are perpetually gloomy.

In the United States, anti-intellectualism generally flows from right to left, with conservative populists ridiculing liberal pointy-heads. In Germany this fall, it's flowing in the opposite direction.

Schröder has dubbed Kirchhof the "professor from Heidelberg." Even Merkel's own CDU has hardly embraced Kirchhof's proposal. Its platform calls for a more modest move on taxes, bringing the top rate down from 42 to 39.

So what does Merkel do? Wednesday she comes out and says, "Our program says nothing about a flat tax."

What?

Ah, just as George Bush (or his advisors) finally realized, sometimes you do what you must. Bush grudgingly ended his vacation early and five days after the event went to New Orleans and did the hug-the-black-folks say-the-right-thing photo op, then three more, then a speech. Sometimes you just have to account for the public's ability to detect bullshit. It's often a dormant ability, but it's there, and it's real.

__

As of Friday night you can find about 4,300 news articles on the Merkel campaign in the English-language press using Google. It's hot. One of the best is the cover story in The New Statesman - far more detailed that any of this above. The war of the realists (the reality-based community) against the idealists (the neoconservatives who run the United States at the moment) has gone worldwide.

Sidebar: In the early eighties I found myself at USC in the same elevator with Arthur Laffer. He's a short guy. We didn't speak. No one speaks on elevators.

Posted by Alan at 22:00 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Saturday, 17 September 2005 08:26 PDT home

Wednesday, 14 September 2005

Topic: World View

Our Man in Paris: Hard Day Night

Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis, offers us this. Wednesday night in Paris - a jazz club in Montparnasse - and a Beatles revival band - and being there -

Hard Day Night

PARIS - Wednesday, September 14, 2005: Yoko Ono urged me to go to the 'Beatles Story' in Montparnasse last spring but it was cold out so I didn't go and, when she asked why not, I said I had to have breakfast with an aunt visiting from Arizona. It's my all-purpose excuse and it doesn't fit some circumstances.

Last week Yoko gave me a DVD of the 'Beatles Story' while telling me they would be at the Petit Journal Montparnasse Wednesday, which is tonight. And the TV-weather news said it s going to be 26 degrees tomorrow, so it must be warm tonight, and to hell with the aunt. Besides, I don't have a DVD player.

The Petit Journal Montparnasse is beside the train station, down the Avenue du Maine, a little more than a five-minute walk away. It isn't a place that looks like anything more than a café on the street beneath a modern building. I went in there and when I doorguy showed up to take the money I said I had been invited by Yoko Ono. He said, d'accord, turn right and up the stairs.

Yoko waved. I went to the booth, blew on her cheeks, and took a seat. It was in a big, low room, in a booth a bit above the main floor. The lower area, the major part, was filled with booths surrounding tables and they were all full. Waitresses pranced around delivering drinks and food, while folks looked at the blue lights on their phones. A few looked like firemen in town for a convention but most looked like the neighbors, if they happened live in the 6th or more likely, the 15th arrondissement.

The booth behind had party-looking girls. They were joined by guys with ponytails. Jacques was sitting with them and then joined me and Yoko. He said he'd written six books about the Beatles, and he's writing the seventh. He said he used to be an agent, but gave it up when TV began using amateurs. We were joined by a guy who used to be the producer of the 'Beatles Story.'
They go off, telling us to save their seats. Yoko orders an orange juice for me and when it comes it's got a bent straw and melting ice cubes. The replica Beatles come on stage and without much ado launch into a couple of hours of replica Beatles' songbook.

Takes me back. To 'Hard Day's Night' playing in the tiny cinema on Occamstra?e in Schwabing in 1964. The word on the street was that the Beatles were finished but I thought the film was fine. Sissy's, across the street, had their stuff on the jukebox, along with the Stones' 'Brown Sugar.' Opened at five and closed at eight; all you could drink in three hours. Beer in bottles and schnapps by the shot. Beyond Sissy's, about 50 other handy joints, from the big gastatten on Leopoldstraße to cellar dives like the Schabinger 7 or jazz in the Domicil. It was before the Drugstore was on the little Wedekindplatz, before it was ruined.

'Beatles Story' is run by Renaud Siry. He's the drummer so I guess he is Ringo. Hell, I know he is Ringo because he's a Café Metropole Club member. He must be Ringo because he's got a château up north. There's Paul, George and John on guitars, and another joker with keyboards. The first set sounds a bit listless. It's the first time I've heard the Beatles live - who knows what they're supposed to sound like? I don't think they're going to do 'Brown Sugar.' Orange juice doesn't remind me of Sissy's anyway.

They take a short pause and some of the audience light cigarettes, but not that many. Yoko goes off to put on her wig, and Jacques hasn't come back, so I sit and twiddle my thoughts.

They must have got pepped up in the back room because they come back plugged in and forceful. They just - they play the songs - they don't add frills or inventions. They are loud. The sound system seems built to handle it. They play what everybody knows, a good deal of it older than many in the room. A calculation tells me, 42 years ago, they were has-beens. The good-time girls in the booth behind sing along, but the mass clapping never takes hold.

Yoko appears onstage and says her seven lines. I saw them, written in pencil, but it was too dark to read. Folks clap for Yoko. Renaud and his crew do all the Beatles' songs everybody knows. Everybody is happy. Without overdoing it they close down and then come back and do their finale, and get a good hand.

It's not like an audience on a cruise ship. This is Montparnasse, in an up place that mostly features alive jazz names, like Manu Dibango, on a street that looks like a business park in Hartford. This Beatles stuff is just for fun. The guys work hard at it and give it a good hit. Putting in Yoko is showing that they care to add something extra. I'm glad Yoko is in it. She puts on a wig but doesn't sing. It's not that Beatles Story.

Links:

Renaud Siry

Petit Journal Montparnasse

Photos: What you expect with 1.4 Megapix, no light, across a smoky room?

Ringo:

Yoko:

Editor's Note: This will appear in the Sunday, September 18 issue of Just Above Sunset - in a slightly different format with the photographs in higher resolution.

Posted by Alan at 18:55 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 16 September 2005 10:28 PDT home

Monday, 5 September 2005

Topic: World View

Labor Day Here and There

Corinne Maier - the author of "Bonjour Laziness: Jumping Off the Corporate Ladder" - has in the New York Times today, Labor Day, this - Working Hard at Nothing All Day. It is a discussion of how Labor Day is an American invention and the rest of the world celebrates such things on the first of May. Of course, Corinne Maier's call to slackers everywhere to goof off, "Bonjour Laziness," was discussed in these pages last September here. That item was about attitudes toward work her and over in Western Europe, with reader commentary from Montreal, London (the one in Canada) and from our Paris readers.

What Corinne Maier has to say this Labor Day?

... it's you Americans who have invented it. We French thank you for that, even if few of us realize that this paradoxical day comes from across the Atlantic. Nonetheless, it was in America, a decidedly pioneering land, where the idea of a shorter workweek, a notion dear to French hearts, was born.

All that began on May 1, 1886. On that historic day, American workers went on strike to demand an eight-hour day; at that time it was habitual to work 10 to 12 hours - quelle horreur! Alas, the strike resulted in the Haymarket tragedy, and European Socialists, shocked, decided to fix May 1 as the day for demanding better working conditions.

Even though the impetus for the May 1 Fête du Travail comes from America, your Labor Day is not celebrated then, but in September. And this difference in date changes everything. For in France, May 1 announces summer, and we also have a saying, "En mai, fais ce qu'il te plaît" - that is, in May, do as you please. The day is also the prelude to a series of warm-weather events that the French dote on: the Cannes film festival, the French Open tennis tournament and especially the Tour de France, even when it's always Lance Armstrong who wins.

The big difference? There Labor Day is "the beginning of a season of pleasures." Here, it's the end of same, sort of.

Other differences -

Americans have picnics and family gatherings; we have the lily of the valley, brought into the city by rural folk who've gathered it in the woods, and protests. Every year, the famous May 1 protest gathers together union members, militants and leftists. This march, though closely covered by the news media, doesn't usually get a lot of attention from the public. There are exceptions, as in 2002, when the threat of the extreme right's coming to power drove a million Parisians into the streets. ...

This is followed by the usual comments on how our two nationalities don't have the same attitude toward work. "Americans think the French are lazy, and the French think Americans are interested only in money." There's a nod to the issue that French workers have a higher per hour productivity rate than their American counterparts – "proof that you can work better by working less."

But the key is this:

Americans also forget that going to work every day is often more a chore than a pleasure. You seem more and more disillusioned about work: only a third of you say that you love your jobs. In such conditions, it's not surprising that you spend on average two hours of your workday ... not working. Answering personal e-mail messages, shopping online, playing computer games or chatting with co-workers ... it's so much more pleasant than working, really.

My American friends, there you are caught, red-handed, being lazy. Is that enough to reconcile the Americans and the French? United in indolence, a foundation of sloth in which Labor Day is the cornerstone. Will Laziness Unlimited be the future of work?

Ah, we're not so different, after all.

Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis, reacting to this, has some more, this Labor Day, in an exclusive, "Put Down that Hot Dog and March!"

PARIS - Monday, September 5, 2005: Today is Labor Day in the United States and Canada. Europe borrowed this day and placed it, for reasons of solidarity, on May 1st. On this day workers are supposed to celebrate, and many do so by having a parade to protest about the latest dumb outrages by stupid management. In Paris something is always wrong so there is never no parade, but there are other years when corks are ready to blow and the mechanics and shopworkers, the bus drivers and the train workers, teachers and scientists, the whole bleeding working world takes to the streets to give the big red finger to the MGT. Here are links to the ugly, the bad and good May Days in Paris from 1996 to 2005, as they appeared in MetropoleParis:

• May Day in Metropole Paris 1996 Red Flags On May Day
• 1997 Hide and Seek May Day Parade
• 1998 May Day at République, also see Eyewitness to Paris in May '68, by Jim Auman and 30 Years Later - A Chronology of 'May '68'
• 1999 A Week Asleep
• 2000 Red Flags, Blue Skies, May Day
• 2001 The May Day Issue
• 2002 Parisians Vote for May Day, Massively
• 2003 Day of club meet, 1st missed May Day
• 2004 Four Parades Instead of One
• 2005 Primo de Mayo

As Marx or Lenin or Willy Brandt used to say, 'Workers of the world, unite! You got piss-all to lose!'

Of interest also, see this book review:

The white-collar blues
'Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream'
Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books: 242 pp., $24
Reviewed by Wesley Yang - September 4, 2005 - Los Angeles Times

Excerpt:

… [the book] focuses on the subtler psychological exactions made on the dignity of the middle class. We watch as Ehrenreich posts her résumé at Monster.com and HotJobs, consults "career coaches," labors over her (concocted) résumé and 30-second "elevator speech," attends networking events and "boot camps," and receives a business-professional image makeover.

She skewers the florid inanity of much that she encounters with her characteristic wit, painting a picture of a corporate world "paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking." The world she describes demands absolute obedience (in marked contrast to the "rules-breaking" cant of the new economy-era managerial gurus), which it repays with absolute indifference.

The leader of a job "boot camp" dispenses a putrid mélange of New Age mind-cure that dominates the "transition industry" ("Every unit increase in your personal sense of well-being increases your external performance exponentially," expressed in the style of a formula, "EP/PSWB") and turns out to be himself a psychologically broken man. Workers are urged never to blame their employers or the economy for their straitened condition, lest bitterness infect the "winning attitude" they must at all times exude.

The obfuscatory jargon serves a transparent purpose - to present as inevitable and thus beyond politics the one-sided withdrawal of the social contract that used to assign mutual responsibilities to employers and workers. The white-collar job-seeker faces, she notes, "far more intrusive psychological demands than a laborer or clerk." Browbeaten from all sides to display "cheerfulness, upbeatness, and compliance," submissive employees turn out to be the easiest to fire.

Ehrenreich's next foray, into the faith-based job-networking scene, is both sad and farcical. She is enjoined to "network with the Lord" and is exposed to lecture topics such as "how clutter can be an obstacle to God's grace," with a smattering of racism, sexism and homophobia to wash it all down. One wonders what the Jesus Christ who smashed the money-changers' tables in the Temple would have made of all this.

After seven months of searching, only two "jobs" call her back - both sales positions without benefits, offices or guaranteed salaries. One is for Mary Kay cosmetics, the other for Aflac insurance.

It's hard to know exactly how to apply the lesson of her example.

Been there, done that, and got kicked out for bitterness infecting my "winning attitude" that I was, at all times, supposed to exude. Couldn't do it. Fine.

No work today.

Posted by Alan at 10:12 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
home

Wednesday, 31 August 2005

Topic: World View

Our Man in Paris: Summer Ends
In the News in France

In another item in these pages - The President's Rentrée: When it rains, it pours… - you will find this comment:

Well, the president's vacation is so over. And it was so very French - five or six weeks off, bicycling with Lance through the fields of poppies. But as in France, it's time for the September rentrée - that time the French "reenter" the real world after their long summer vacations – as Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis, puts it, "when the last French holiday-er is supposed to have returned and applied his or herself to the garlic grindstone."

As there, so here. The real world needs some attention.

Ric sends this along on the last day of August:

Paris, Wednesday, August 31 -

Was the president's vacation "so very French?" Bush has taken twenty-eight days - four whole weeks. This used to be normal for French holidays but they probably max at three weeks with two weeks being common these days. While the 35-hour week continues, many take the rest of their allotted time off in short breaks combined with national holidays and long weekends. It spreads the vacation around the calendar, and around the country.

But politicians were hacking away until late July or early August, and now they're back, showing off their suntanned faces. Champion tan goes to Dominique de Villepin, with Nicolas Sarkozy as runner-up. In France most political parties have conventions at the end of August. These are called 'Universite d'Ete,' but they are pure politics. In two weeks the Communists will have their big fête, called the 'Fête d'Humanité,' after the newspaper. Many on the left will take part in this party just outside Paris, for this is to be a hot rentrée. They are calling for the jumbo mother of demos - hoping to put a million on the streets to protest everything about the government.

There are people in France growing their own gasoline. Apparently it is not rocket science. The EU in Brussels has said it is okay to do this, but Paris' tax collectors say that French farmers who put plant gas in their cars are breaking the law. As others have pointed out the price of crude has reached a level where plant gas is cheaper to use. A professor said that sunflower power won't hurt modern motors. Meanwhile, José Bové's gang has been tearing down transgenetic corn again, and fighting with state goons trying to protect it. This is what some people do on their holidays - rip out corn and fight with the police.

Did I say meanwhile? In Paris crummy places where people are lodged while waiting to be assigned less-crummy places to live, are catching fire for mysterious reason. There was the hotel fire six months ago and now there have been two more, within a week. For the first of the two - with about 17 killed, mostly kids - the mayor could not speak. On camera, speechless. Then a few days later it happens again - another shabby temporary lodging breaks out in flames, more kids die. Sarkozy, of course, is on the spot. Says, 'all the crummy places gotta be counted.' Does not say the government is going to have a crash program, to house the 100,000 in Paris on waiting lists. The city has to do it, and is doing it with the means it has. Now the students are returning, all competing for lodgings. Sub-studio rents are hovering around 600 euros a month. A government plan to legalize living spaces the size of broom closets was rejected as inhumane.

All is not somber. On this last day of August the sky is nicely blue and the temperature is about 32 degrees, and there is a little breeze. Of course there's an ozone alert, but so what? It might be the last of the year.

As there, so here.

__

Footnote:

In English from AFP (l'Agence France-Presse):

Tuesday, August 30: Third Fatal Paris Fire Focuses Attention On Immigrants' Plight
Wednesday, August 31: Politicians Swap Accusations Over Paris Fire Disasters

And from Nicholas Long's Internet Press Review in English for Wednesday, August 31, over at RFI - Radio France Internationale:

The front page story in most of the French press is the aftermath of the fire that broke out in a Paris apartment on Monday night, killing seven people, all of African origin. This was the second fatal blaze in a Paris apartment building in four days; the last cost the lives of 27 people, also African, and fifteen others died in a fire in Paris five months ago.

We have a special report coming up in this programme in which Philip Turle talks to some survivors of the latest fire, and asks the question how soon all the unsafe buildings in Paris that need urgent work could be made safe. The papers throw some light on that question. According to LE FIGARO there are some 550 buildings in the capital that the city hall considers so badly degraded that it's set up a company to take them over and repair them by 2007. Half of these buildings are currently undergoing repairs and the building that caught fire on Monday was one of them. The town hall had decided to take it over last year, and had ordered a ban on people living there, and on the landlord collecting rent. The occupants were squatters and the landlord said he had not had access to the building since 1999; he had refused the city hall's offer of 330,000 euros to buy the building, claiming he had had other offers of up to a million euros. A court had ordered the evacuation of the building, but this order had not been carried out by the police.

And so on and so forth...

Trivia: RFI - Radio France Internationale - has its headquarters over in the 16th, on avenue du Président Kennedy, oddly enough.

Posted by Alan at 09:26 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 31 August 2005 09:30 PDT home

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