Emperor Sarkozy sparks storm

09 January 2008

Emperor Sarkozy sparks storm

Emperor Sarko spoke yesterday. Sarkozy sparks storm with wish to end 35-hour week this year - Expatica:

[Fillon] said Sarkozy had set the course for 2008, "planning to press

ahead with getting our country into line with changes in the world, changes

which we have for so long refused to recognise"...

Sarkozy defeated Socialist candidate Segolene Royale to win the presidency last year with a pledge to reform and modernise a France that many felt had lagged economic progress elsewhere, largely due to the burden of its generous social welfare system.

The neo-liberal discourse down to a T.

However, it is clear that the changes that the rest of the world are undergoing haven't been for the benefit of ordinary people. In country after country, their hard-won rights are being stripped away. Look at the current economic situation in the US, a country entering a new recession. The unions in the US have been effectively killed, first by buying them off, then by breaking them. Most workers get two weeks or less of vacation time a year compared to four, five, or six weeks for their co-workers in other countries, that is if they have any vacation time at all.

Is this the model the French want? It is certainly the model Sarko would like to impose. Of course, it isn't going to cut into his vacation time.

Look at the effects of neo-liberalism on Latin America. Look at the policies of globalization on agriculture, on small business, on the mom and pop corner stores, which mean the health of small communities as their downtowns die off at the hands of the chains like Wal-Mart or Leclerc.

The French have been wise to avoid it. Now Sarko is dragging them into it.

Just look at the reasoing hidden in the final paragraph. France's economic progress is hindered by its generous social programs! That translates as: the rich can't make as much money as they would like because the state is redirecting too much of it to the less fortunate.

Of course, in the neo-liberal economic discourse, that's OK. There should be no state aid for individuals, only for corporations.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive?

If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, not withstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.

"Unitary Executive" = Dictator

"It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that just on the president's say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at O'Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way." Laurence Tribe - Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard University - Source: interview on ABC's Nightline

Masters and Slaves

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war.

The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose - especially their lives.

Eugene Debs, 16 June 1918

The speech was given to about 1,200 people and was later used against Debs to make the case that he had violated the espionage Act. The judge sentenced Debs to ten years in prison

Signs Of The Times - SOTT.NET

09 January 2008