Link exchange

Still not feeling great so not posting much - just a few recommended readings:

- immigration as response to the crisis - Sarkozy should read it

- do things really look better in Canada? seems so...

- one more nice post from Matt Yglesias on how absurd regulation in DC stifles restaurant choice

- an interesting debate on food safety following the US peanut butter debacle

immigrants

So Sarkozy won because he bashed immigrants. And he still does bash them, as much as he can. Small gestures, hunt every day. Expelling hundreds, thousands of Romanians and Bulgarians in the last month before they joined the EU (and returned legally, after a trip home courtesy of the French taxpayers) just to inflate numbers. Increasing several times over a couple of years the number of years spouses of French citizens have to wait until they become French. And who opposes this? No one it seems.

But why? If the left is the party of the poor, and/or the party of equality, it has a duty to defend the immigrants, which generally are the poorest. It also has a duty to support immigration, because what makes wages so low in poor countries and makes "offshoring" jobs so easy, is that capital can move (which is GOOD, it means poor countries can go out of poverty!) but labour cannot (which is BAD - it means capital has a much stronger negotiating position). If labour could move more freely, wages would go up faster in poorer countries. This is exactly what happened in Eastern Europe since it joined the EU, contrary to what paranoid French afraid of the "plombier polonais" thought...

Well, all this are idealistic reasons. Don't expect anyone to act on them. So what, let's turn to pure power politics. France has long had one of the most "liberal" (precisely, etimologically) citizenship regimes around - if you are born here, you are French. So France has millions of French citizens of (recent) foreign origin. They could easily turn around elections the way blacks did for Barack Obama in many places...But no one bothers to talk to them! Just as any other poorer and generally less educated and less influential minority, they vote less than average. And no one is trying to organize them, mobilize them. No wonder the left has written off so many cities with large immigrant populations, which instead elect solidly far-right mayors (either officially far-right, or de facto). How dumb are our political elites, I wonder?

...the worst right in the world...

Some years ago, a right-wing politician wrote a book called "La droite la plus bete du monde" - the most stupid right in the world. I think I remember his idea was that France was essentially conservative, and somehow the right still managed to lose elections. I can't remember what his solution was, does not matter either. My point is: the right we have now in France, or at least the President and his cabinet, are really among the worst in the world. Granted, they still have Berlusconi to look down to, but soon they won't even have Bush.

I keep fighting against this French disease of misusing and abusing this beautiful word: "liberal" (often additioned with "neo"). I argue with good friends saying Sarkozy is "(neo)liberal". I mean, seriously, people? Even in the French meaning of "supporter of free markets": Sarkozy is more statist than the Socialists, he wants a French sovereign funds to hold "golden shares" in key industrial companies! His few free market proposals are usually withdrawn as soon as anyone screams against who could damage his prospects, say taxi drivers in Paris, even though there are NO TAXIS there at night, on Saturdays etc. Let's not liberalize, it could cost votes. So he is a liberal?

Well, surely he is no political liberal. Even though the cabinet in the meantime backed down and criticized the district attorney who ordered the raid (remember, the cabinet appoints district attorneys in France), the police two days ago raided a high school and went with dogs in classrooms to, apparently, look for marijuana (seems they found nothing of notice). They searched kids, rather brutally. Scared the hell out of them. Just read.
Or the hunt for illegal immigrants, including kids at school. Or the proposed reform whereby 12 years old could now be imprisoned. Or the proposal to lock up psychiatric hospitals completely, as if these were not enough hard for their patients. I mean, liberal? Do words have a meaning?

So if he is no liberal and not even a free-marketeer, what is he? An early 19th century "reactionnaire" (not even a conservative), this is what. Decrease taxes for the rich. Beat the hell out of the poor. Lock up foreigners and expel them, even the children, they are filthy. Scare the "bourgeois" and keep their votes.

Sarkozy is not France. He won (massively) only the "over 60s", and Segolene Royal (narrowly) won all the other age groups. He represents fear. Reaction. Brutal and unjust order. And, yes, sometimes he does do a couple of reforms which make sense (more autonomy for universities, which have less in France than in any other country with a decent higher education system - or a bit less red tape here and there), but this is on a really dark background.

Now, actually voters seem to think that socialists are better at running things, and they elected them massively at the local level. But why do they always run an identity-based campaign, talking only to their own frightened old "petits bourgeois"?

Segolene actually had some good points in her campaign, including not leaving "law and order" to the right, but at the same time talking to the immigrants' children. But she was a lousy campaigner and debater, and is far too much showing her arrogance (all politicians are arrogant - it is a question of showing it), and she does say a lot of nonsense too. Delanoe would have been good - but claiming the liberal heritage sunk him - can you imagine this? several centuries of progress, you just can't claim them as yours! How stupid are these people? Oh, when will we get open primaries?