I’ve seen surprisingly little discussion of the French riots over lowering raising the retirement age on the internets. Soon, we’ll see a lot of cluck-clucking about the collapse of their leftist welfare state and the silliness of the protesters; with any luck, we’ll see some Reasonoids pull out the “moochers and looters” phrase. We may also see some “why can’t the American left fight like this” stuff, which will also be annoying, even if the sentiment is understandable.
Five years ago, I might have chuckled myself at these unserious leftists. Now, my attitude is that I hope they continue to fight like hell.
Martin
Lowering? They’re rioting over being able to retire earlier? Fuck, those frenchies are hard workers.
cleek
wingnuts are already using that one in the MSNBC blogs.
shortstop
They’re raising the retirement age, not lowering it. But they’ll still take August off, the lucky bastards.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@Martin:
Yes, they don’t want the moochers and looters to get more time off. (Sorry — I corrected it.)
Nick
My family brought this up yesterday and even the liberals though the French were being unreasonable. I asked them what was reasonable if you don’t want a policy, and they just looked at me with a blank stare.
I do blame Democratic voters for Democrats being afraid of Republicans, because when Republicans attack them and go after their policies, Democrats who attack get blasted by their OWN VOTERS (see Grayson, Conway). If you stand up for yourself, they tell you’re being unreasonable. Nobody backs you up
The French learned a long time ago to stop being reasonable. Bless their hearts.
shortstop
This is a lesson for the U.S. Look what happens when you allow untrammeled immigration of Muslims, who are well known for their lack of industriousness in addition to being underfond of puppy dogs.
Maude
The French Senate raised the retirement age to 62.
Britian and France are in a St. Ronnie phase.
Isn’t the song called I love Paris in the springtime?
Martin
And you gotta love the couple laying down and kissing in the middle of the street. We have old fuckers in lawn chairs with Hitler signs protesting, they have young people daring the police to break up their make-out session. Vive la France!
stuckinred
“Now, my attitude is that I hope the continue to fight like hell.”
Whatchoo talkin bout willis?
Martin
@shortstop: Consider that if we all took August off, it’d knock the unemployment rate in half.
There are lots of ways to stimulate job growth.
Daddy-O
The sentiment is NOTHING if not understandable, DougJ.
Five years ago I was in NYC protesting the RNC and George W. Bush, with half a million others. Did you consider us serious then?
Vive la France!
Daddy-O
@Maude: Amen.
NonyNony
I’m fairly certain that NPR had an editorial segment last Thursday whose upshot was that essentially the protesters in France are unrealistic children and they should just stop their whining and get used to having to retire older. The comparison was made between French public workers and US public workers as well – that US public sector workers should get ready to take big pay cuts because they make more money on average than folks in the private sector.
If NPR is the only one covering the French protests, I guess I’m not too surprised. But I thought FOX News would be all over showing how Frenchie-French it was to care about your pension and that to be a Real American you should be prepared to accept a retirement age of 80 – and if they just raise it to 67, well, you should thank the Rich Overlords for the beneficence.
Martin
@Nick:
I think Germany had a lot to do with that, but however you get there…
Culture of Truth
I see Sarkozy’s disapproval rating is at 70%, which is, I believe, the highest ever recorded.
matoko_chan
go to the social security website, sillies.
any American born after 1960 has a retirement age of 67 right now.
lawl.
Steve
The retirement age that a given country can sustain is an actuarial question that depends upon factors like the growth rate of the economy. As a card-carrying Serious Liberal, I wouldn’t be averse to raising the retirement age in the U.S. if we were at a point where the fiscal condition of our country required it. It’s just that we’re not even close to that point. As everyone hopefully knows around here, we don’t have a deficit because Social Security is unsustainable, we have a deficit because of two wars and two tax cuts. I’m not willing to tell factory workers that they have to toil a couple extra years to pay for those things.
The Bearded Blogger
There’s a saying in spanish, “el que no llora no mama”…. if you don’t cry, you don’t suck tit (said of babies).
Party republicans are aware of this. Democrats are not.
Martin
@NonyNony:
Fuck that.
And that’s supposedly union and hippie overrun California.
The Bearded Blogger
@NonyNony: FOX doesn’t want to give the proletariat any ideas… Instead of showing the protests, they could have a segment on recipes for cake.
Jewish Steel
Sur la pave, la plage!
Tim
(re dailymail.co.uk pics) Why is that nearest squaddie/gendarme wearing a Red Bull jacket? Is that some sponsorship thing to raise money for the police uniforms? Maybe France needs to raise its taxes.
Or just looks cooler with the bluejeans?
Hint: You’re not really undercover if you’re wearing a riot helmet and you’re carrying a plexi-shield and a .5 meter flashball gun.
JohnR
“..I hope the[y] continue to fight like hell.”
Haha! No, of course they’ll surrender soon – they’re only French, after all. Not like us “finish the job no matter what” Real Americans. Also, too.
Edit: “.5 meter flashball gun” (!) .5 meter?! Holy crap, those gendrmes don’t screw around!
Culture of Truth
Strikes are said to be costing France $500 million a day.
jake the snake
Chuckles Krauthammer is already all over the “collapse of the “welfare state””. Find your own link. I refuse to link to that loathesome escrescence.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@NonyNony:
NPR’s already on the latest right wing talking point about the “overpaying” of public sector employees. Like Martin said, fuck that.
Until just a few years ago, public sector employees were always considered underpayed relative to their private sector counterparts. My wife’s late uncle, a GE Vice President and odious Repup always usta give her shit about wasting her talents working for endentured servitude wages at Club Fed.
This is nothing more than the right taking aim at one of the last bastions of the economic middle class in this country.
Again, fuck that. And fuck NPR for, again, showing how it again resorts to lazy reporting. I don’t give a shit how many foreeeen bureaus they operate, much of their domestic reporting still sucks hind tit.
trollhattan
Maybe it’s whatever they’re having for breakfast, but ze French certainly seem better organized than anything we can pull together in the States. Yeah, I don’t see any senior scooters either.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/10/france_on_strike.html
Perhaps this is what it takes to ensure you get the world’s best health care results.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_France
cleek
@Culture of Truth:
which is about 1/4 of what the DoD costs us per day.
WyldPirate
For fucks’s sake DougJ, why ridicule the French and the American left?
A little deja vu from Howard Zinn:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Everything above to the link is from the link. Sorry for the foul-up. Don’t know why blockquotet isn’t working.
It’s worth a read. we are heading down a similar path as to the one 80 years ago. The question is will we learn from our mistakes?
I think not. I think it is setting up more like post WWI Germany here in the US. all it is going to take for a repeat is the right domino to topple over.
edited to fix blockquotes.
Redshift
@NonyNony:
If NPR actually reported that, I’ll have to look up the segment and bitch them out. I’ve lived in the DC area my whole life, it’s well-documented that government workers don’t get paid nearly as much as comparable private-sector workers (the tradeoff is greater job security.) The particular portion of the wingnut ass this bit of truthiness comes from is that there are a lot of low-wage occupations that don’t exist in government service, so if you just take a simple average of everybody, rather than comparing equivalent occupations, you get the “fact” that government workers, on average, make more.
danimal
I’ve gone through the same metamorphosis. The GOP no-compromise, take-no-prisoners style is a big factor. There just isn’t a rational response to right-wing politics in America today except to punch them in the mouths and take it to the street. They won’t listen to reason, so it’s time to unleash the hounds and threaten their false security.
We outnumber them and they won’t listen to Serious Liberals, so it seems that we need to ratchet up the noise and disruption level. Today’s France is tomorrow’s USA.
Poopyman
@Nick: G. B. Shaw would like to back you up on this one, Nick.
Culture of Truth
I’m not criticizing the strikes. Indeed, they’re supposed to be costly, that’s the point.
Joshua
@Redshift: Yea, a federal job in my field with my experience would equal about a 10%-15% pay cut. That’s not an insignificant amount of money. And the ceiling is much lower.
Look, it’s really quite simple: painting government employees as lazy, overpaid, do-nothing slobs who cackle while they steal bags of taxpayer money is a ruling class divide and conquer tactic. When you have struggling people smearing the teachers educating their children, then the elites are winning. It’s not even close.
PurpleGirl
@NonyNony: It already has been raised to 67. They are talking about raising it to 70. This from the Social Security web site:
shortstop
@Martin: My work has me talking to quite a few Europeans who occasionally ask me why Americans insist on working themselves to death. I then have to explain that American vacation/time off policies are neither authored nor enthusiastically endorsed by 9/10s of the workforce.
I guess the next question will be why we don’t riot, and I really don’t have a good answer to that.
The Bearded Blogger
@danimal: From your keyboard to the FSM’s meatball-eyeballs
Tim
@JohnR: I realized somebody was going to ding me on that just after edit time had elapsed — I was referring to the length of the weapon, not the diameter of the projectile.
dadanarchist
@Martin
Maybe it’s a reference to French (well, Belgian) ’68-era revolutionary Raoul Vaneigem’s oft-quoted suggestion for revolutionary action:
Vaneigem also proposed that instead of a ‘sit-in’ that workers occupy factories with a ‘fuck-in.’
In all seriousness though, this is why the French are not repeatedly fucked by their political class: unlike in the US, and despite all the Teahadist invocations of Jefferson’s famous phrase (“When people fear their governments, etc.) to the contrary, the French elite and political class fears the French people, while it is obvious that our ruling class has nothing but contempt for us.
The proposal to raise the retirement age to 62 is totally reasonable but I also think the French should fight like hell to block the proposal anyway.
I guess that’s why I’m not a ‘serious liberal.’
PurpleGirl
@Steve: Please include the probability of people being able to hold onto jobs longer — are there jobs that will be filled by older workers. Office workers who hit 50-55 are being let go and they have a very hard time finding employment.
Martin
@shortstop: Unions were *always* the key to organizing worker uprising. Always.
The downside risk to a small subset of the workforce speaking out is that they’re fired and replaced, and there’s no upside. The downside risk to a large subset of the workforce speaking out is that operations are shut down and you don’t get a paycheck, and the upside is that they negotiate with you.
Joe Bauers
I’m not an economist, but I think that (given globalization) as long as there are people in the world willing to work harder than you for less pay than you, you must choose one of:
A) Be so insanely good at what you do that you’re worth paying a premium. This is by definition an option not available to very many.
B) Get used to working harder for less money.
C) Figure out how to get by without a job.
D) Organize a successful global revolution that replaces the capitalist status quo with some alternative system that does away with the race to the bottom by restricting free trade. Good luck.
I hate this, but don’t see a way around it. I sympathize with the French strikers, but where is the money supposed to come from to let them retire at 60 in a world where nobody else is doing it? It can’t simply be wished into existence.
Martin
@dadanarchist:
I agree completely with this. Even reasonable policies deserve to have opposing voices heard. And for every reasonable policy there are numerous reasonable alternatives that might be more politically difficult to implement, until someone comes along and makes clear that your ‘easy’ route is really goddamn unpopular.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@Culture of Truth:
I understand. Have you got links for this info? I’d like to read a bit about the effect of the riots, how Sarkozy is doing politically etc.
Martin
@Joe Bauers:
Taxes? The military? Fuck, there’s a zillion places the money can come from, it’s just a matter of deciding what the suitable trade-offs are.
Church Lady
What if the government said that they would keep the retirement age at 60, but to cover the financial hole that is leaving, would raise everyone’s taxes. They would riot over that. The French just like to riot and are always looking for an excuse.
PurpleGirl
Let’s get the numbers correct:
France’s regular full-pension retirement age was raised to 67 from 65 and the early retirement age was raised to 62 from 60.
That is what they are protesting. Age numbers from the Wikipedia retirement article.
Nick
@Joe Bauers:
I wholeheartedly agre that the issue is stupid and they should raise the retirement age, but I’m more impressed by the fact that the French are willing to shut the country down to prevent it from happening. I wish we did the same for a public option. We might still have not gotten it (France still raised the retirement age) but we would’ve made the path to electing Senators who wanted one wider and clearer, because it was obvious there was a movement for it.
The French left are not going to sit down and moan that they didn’t win or whine that some on the left supported raising the retirement age. They’re going to throw all they got at Sarkozy in 18 months, probably beat him, then do it again, while we’re going to lose Congress to fascists.
Paula
Great for the French populace, but how much of the vehemence has to do with the general fuck-uppedness of Sarkozy’s administration lately? There were deportations of Roma immigrants a mere 3 weeks ago.
Also, Greece had some awesome anti-austerity riots this summer.
Nick
@Church Lady:
France has the best healthcare and education system in the world, higher standard of living than in the US, higher life expectancy, and faster growing economy right now. I’m ok with riots if we can have that.
dadanarchist
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.:
I can’t speak for Culture of Truth, but Arthur Goldhammer’s blog is a really good resources for reading about French politics and political culture. It can be a little inside baseball, and he often links to French-language press, but it is still one of the best places to begin.
I’m a French historian and I use it as a major resource.
The Bearded Blogger
@Church Lady: The french have good healthcare, great universities at risible costs and a higher general standard of living than the US. Maybe they are doing something right.
The Bearded Blogger
@Nick: You beat me by one minute
The Bearded Blogger
@Nick: You beat me by one minute
Martin
@Church Lady: Kinda like us with invading other countries, eh? We’re just genetically predisposed to it?
Omnes Omnibus
@Church Lady:
Didn’t you forget to add that they smell, they are rude, and they surrendered quickly to the Germans in 1940? They eat snails too, how gross.
Nick
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.: Politically, Sarkozy looks almost DOA. Polls show him losing to the most likely Socialist candidate Martine Aubry, and getting slaughtered by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of IMF. The Socialists killed Sarkozy’s party in the regional elections, they won 22 of the 26 regions, while the left minor parties won two more, one of them being Martinique, leaving Sarkozy’s party with only one region in Metropolitan France, French Guiana and Reunion.
shortstop
What?! Are you guys saying this Church Lady character is not a parody?
eemom
@dadanarchist:
Absolute THIS. It is not a question of “why can’t the American left fight like this” — it is a question of why the American PEOPLE are so fucking stupid that they let themselves be lied to and fucked over, again and again, by the same old liars and fuck-mongers.
ETA: also too, the French people have that little guillotine thingie in their history as a handy reminder of WHY they are not to be fucked with.
Damn I wish I were French.
Chuck Butcher
With the success of the St Ronnie theme of “the rich will take care of us” as a political device and the media’s uncritical reporting of it for decades it isn’t real surprising that it is now “conventional wisdom.” The “center left” either buys it or is afraid of pushing back at it because they’d be treated as soshulists or just the looney left.
The bullshit deification of RR taught me a couple things and at least one of them was that the “center” is FOS and not the least interested in what is actually happening in this nation. Their votes may be important but taking them seriously….
eemom
@Church Lady:
The Greeks like to riot too. We’re also less polite than the French to condescending-ass twits like yourself. So, you know, fuck off.
Earl Butz
@Joe Bauers: I don’t normally address people in these terms, but I will here: Fuck you for being willfully ignorant.
There’s plenty of money. The top 5% of the population in the United States owns 90% of the assets. Same deal in France. The French are brave enough to get out and fight for the minimum of what they deserve.
We aren’t. A nation of bed-wetting pussies is what we are, and we’re getting the government and treatment that we deserve, and we’ll keep getting that until we fucking get a clue and start making life unpleasant for those who already own everything.
Cat
@dadanarchist:
Probably has something to do with them rounding a bunch of the ruling class up and guillotining a bunch of them in the not to distant past.
Scott de B.
Sullivan’s already started.
ruemara
if the media talked about it, our poors might get ideas. so, just mock them as cheese eating surrender monkeys, while we slurp down some nachos in front of the tube as our democracy dies.
and, FUCK NPR.
I make nearly 45% less than a person in my field, because I work in the public sector. Fucking asshats.
JGabriel
DougJ:
But I completely agree with that sentiment!
Oh well, at the rate you’re moving left (and/or the rate the GOP is moving right), a couple more years and you’ll probably be sharing that sentiment yourself.
.
trollhattan
Also, too: here’s another reason to take up pitchforks and torches.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/business/energy-environment/26oil.html?_r=1&hp
Like we couldn’t imagine this day coming. I wonder when they’ll begin telling us the eleven workers are dead because they were at fault?
Omnes Omnibus
@Cat: Several revolutions and even more riots. They don’t always win, but they do make sure that the elites are aware of their existence
Paula
OK, so, before we lionize the French too much I’d like to point out that — like the rest of Europe — their enthusiastic defense of state assistance falls off rather considerably when it comes to that state assistance going to immigrants …
Just for recent history context, it seems appropriate to mention that these rioters are considered from the mainstream middle class wanting to protect their earnings, while the rioters in 2005 were from the low-income, immigrant communities in the outskirts of the cities who were protesting the persistent lack of opportunity and brutal of treatment of their young people. The rioters in 2005 were not exactly praised by the French middle class.
Calouste
@eemom:
The events that are celebrated by the respective countries as their national holiday:
America: the signing of a document by an assembly of mostly landed gentry and rich merchants.
France: the storming of a symbol of the suppression by the goverment by a popular mob.
Protesting and rioting in France is kind of patriotic, it is how the modern state was born and how it was eventually wrested from the ruling classes (1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1968).
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Let’s make sure we frame this correctly rather than in the propagandistic manner that our mainstream outlets prefer. The proper framing would be, unrest in France due to an attempt by elites to raise the retirement age for some people from 60 to 62 after a massive economic downturn caused by the elites themselves and their financial institutions.
Tom Roud
Well, as a French man living in North America, I just want to tell that I am happy to read such a thread. The strikers are about to lose, but I am confident that something good will come out of this. The only problem I see is that we do not have a French Obama at this point who would be clever enough both to beat Sarkozy and to have a good overall policy.
A word on French universities : most people in France think they are not so good. The government is literally obsessed with the rank of French universities in international rankings (such as Shanghai university’s) and tries to do its best to tweak the system to perform better in these rankings. One of the consequence might be that, overall, the good universities will be far better, but the less good will suffer terribly. This is actually a global trend everywhere in academia : killing the “average” guy to favor the star, as if there was no connection between them.
JGabriel
Re: triple-posting 64-66.
Okay, that’s weird. Something even stranger than usual is happening with WordPress.
I edited the post to correct some grammar error/typo, and yet all three posts are still identical. Also, I’m pretty sure there was only one post when I edited it.
Whatever. I definitely didn’t triple-post by mistake, because I definitely didn’t edit all three of them — that’s some sort of weird WP glitch.
I don’t know if I’m making myself clear: I edited one post. If it was my error, then one of those three posts should be different from the others. Since they’re all identical, the problem is with WP. So, it’s something you guys might want to look into (or have your techs look into, John Cole), especially if it becomes more frequent.
Edited to add: And now the duplicates are gone, so I guess you guys already know about this?
.
JGabriel
Cat:
Hmm… guillotines.
.
debbie
Scanning responses here, there’s more than a few misperceptions. I listened to On Point last week, which had an hour on the riots. Participants are detailed here:
http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/10/france-riots-retirement
Their basic point was that while everyone pretty much understood that the age had to be raised, it was how that would be accomplished that was the problem. Most laborers started working at age 16, while white collar workers start later, after they finish university. Workers wanted some sort of accommodation for the fact that they would end up working longer than others.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@Tom Roud:
Thanks, that is interesting what you say about French universities. I know a lot of French academics and I hear very conflicting things from them about what Sarkozy is doing with them.
PeakVT
@Church Lady: What if the government said that they would keep the retirement age at 60, but to cover the financial hole that is leaving…
Wait, who said that Sarkozy’s claims were even correct? That’s a stupid assumption.
I suppose you think that Social Security is bankrupt, too.
ETA: Would you please also get the facts right. 60 is the current age for reduced benefits; full retirement benefits require waiting until 65. The legislation raised the ages to 62 and 67 respectively.
Tom Roud
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.: well, this is not a simple problem, to say the least. We have this dual system between University/Grandes Ecoles, and I believe that most academics are themselves very confused about what should be done. I think myself the Grandes Ecoles system is too malthusianist(ic ?), but I am pretty sure many French academics would disagree with that, given that many of them come from this system (and not from University, this is one of the paradox) and actually think their own students in Universities are not good. My feeling is that Sarkozy’s decisions are eventually favoring these Grandes Ecoles, and this is the reason why I can imagine some French academics praise him for his action there.
Another cause of the conflicting feedback you get might be that Sarkozy does not know anything about anything (or as your great thinker Donald Rumsfelf told once , he “does not know that he does not now”), and takes most decisions accordingly. It is sometimes difficult to have a real opinion on a randomized President for this matter.
Paula
@Tom Roud:
Just “malthusian” will do. :)
kevina
I think Debbie makes a good point about blue-collar workers starting at 16. It is unfair to them. Also, it is good to know the 60-62 thing is for EARLY retirement.
That said, I have to say that the “Let the banksters/barons/rich/etc. pay for all of it!” line bothers me. I agree that they must bear the biggest burden in times of fiscal crisis, but to suggest that fiscal holes should be closed w/o any pain for the middle and working classes is just emotive silliness. You can squeeze a lot of the upper class, yes, but thinking that taxes on them ALONE can do the trick is flat-out silly.
We can quibble on WHEN the austerity should start, but when it does, everyone will take at least a little hit. Sorry, but get used to it.
JD Ryan
This one nails it pretty good….
A Study in Contrasts.
Joe Bauers
@Earl Butz:
And a cheerful “choke on a bag of dicks” back at you. You don’t think it matters at all how expensive it becomes to do business in France relative to places where a dollar a day is a good living?
I’m not saying we should happily accept the scraps off the table of our wealthy overlords. I’m saying that as long as it’s this easy for the rich to move themselves and their money to Caribbean tax havens, and their businesses to whatever third world hellhole currently has the lowest wages, a nation can’t simply raise their taxes as if they existed in a vacuum. Whatever the solution to this is, I think it’s got to be some sort of global consensus, and good luck with that.
The story is different in the US, by the way. The French already pay well over 40% of their GDP in taxes, and we pay less than 30%. And their tax brackets are much more progressive than ours. The rich here absolutely deserve higher taxes, and an intelligent and engaged electorate would demand it. If only we had one.
Nick
@Tom Roud:
How is Martine Aubry seen among the left in France? I know she isn’t their “Obama,” but she seems like she the one to beat him at this point. She did push for the 35 hour workweek.
John Bird
Almost no one in America cares about the maintenance of the European welfare state or its widespread popular support there. Which is stupid, because it means we are not paying attention to the closest counterexample to our own development.
(This doesn’t apply if the rhetoric around it involves Arabs or Turks or something, then Fox News cares.)
You answered your own questions here, by the way.
It is not considered serious to fight for pensions or benefits in the United States. When those things go, we believe that it is a burden placed on us from on high – literally – that it is a divine working of the market that none of us can properly understand.
John Bird
@Paula:
Yes, this cannot be emphasized enough.
2005: Brown people raise hell in France over their treatment. The American media cover this well and treat it as an indictment of the welfare state, of immigration, and of Muslims.
Early 2010: The Roma are deported from France en masse, likely illegally under French law. The American media are pretty much silent.
Late 2010: White middle-class raise hell in France over unevenly raising the age on their benefits. The American media barely cover this and treat it as an indictment of the welfare state.
The overall lesson is that American media treat France like a bunch of idiots in policy, except when that policy mirrors our own views (e.g., when they get to expel a bunch of undesirables without public outcry as a substantial plurality of Americans would like to do), which is when we just don’t talk about it.
The thing is, ten years ago an international consensus in many fields would have put American economic and social welfare policy out front of France and claimed France needed to catch up.
Exactly what is the evidence now that OUR system is worth imitating?
Mnemosyne
@shortstop:
As Martin said, it’s because we don’t have powerful unions anymore. There’s a reason the Republicans spent 40 years systematically dismantling the power of unions and demonizing them until blue-collar workers hate them as evil sociaIist agents of Satan — to prevent working people from organizing and doing, well, stuff like they’re doing in France.
Tom Roud
@Nick:
Well the 35 h week is rather a problem for her to win. Sarkozy won last time with two things : a motto “work more to earn more”, and a strong “security” stance ( telling that the left in general and former prime minister Jospin in particular were not tough enough on crime). If Aubry is candidate, all of this will come back for sure because Aubry, as the 35h week lady, is a symbol of the Jospin “work less earn the same” area . The right and the center will keep telling that the 35h week is the cause of all problems in France, and will add that the left is always naive on crime, and this might work. There is also a rumour telling that Aubry does not really want to become President (interestingly just like her father, Jacques Delors, who despite very good polls in 1995, was not candidate in the end).
Political “analysts” think she is too much on the left and not centrist enough to win, and secretely wish that Strauss-Kahn, current head of IMF, will resign, come back as the Messiah, be candidate for the left (and hopefully, end the political career of Sarkozy). Strauss-Kahn was also one of Jospin’s minister, but being currently at IMF has acquired some kind of respectable international aura and has always been one of the most popular “socialist” in the right and the center anyway (because he is a former economist).
Actually, my feeling (from out of France) is that the last socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, might win again the primary on the left : she was really everywhere on TV during the riots, and I think she definitely won credit on the left because of this, contrary to Aubry (another sign that Aubry might not necessarily want to go for it). If this is Royal again, this will be very tough for her against Sarkozy, but Sarkozy really has a rather catastrophic first term, so she might win eventually.
But my secret nasty blogger hope is that one of the many political scandals around Sarkozy these days will end up being confirmed by justice right before the election, and lead to a French watergate which will completely shatter the right. If even 50% of what is currently revealed by the (serious) Internet press happens to be true (the Woerth-Bettencourt scandal, the Karachi terror attack scandal, etc…), we will have some terrible political crisis in France which might lead to some real change for the best.
Ruckus
Only a little off topic.
James Galbraith thinks we should lower the full retirement age to 62.
This should have the effect of allowing people 62 and older to get out of the job market and relieve some of the stress of finding or keeping a job at that age, along with making some room in the job market for those needing a job.
It sounds like a good idea although we don’t know how much it would cost, but that would be a stimulus and we need all of that we can get.
H/T Atrios
shortstop
@Martin:
@Mnemosyne:
No argument about unions being the driving force behind organized protests, but it isn’t only blue-collar French citizens who demand and command more respect from management than their American counterparts ever try to get. I assume white-collar French workers, especially those past the bloom of yout’, don’t represent a significant part of the rioters (I haven’t followed the coverage that closely), but they do tend to stand with blue-collar workers on issues like these.
It’s no secret that too many American midlevel professionals take the same view of unions and labor reform that Joe the Plumber takes of Obama giving him a tax break: they want to separate themselves from blue-collar workers for status reasons, and by doing so, further empower upper management to continue holding all the cards. What’s the matter with Kansas? What’s the matter with the guy in the cube next door?
Bill Murray
@Joe Bauers: I think you missed one way the wage differences could be taken care of — a tariff that adds on the cost of the wage difference to the cost of the import. This could reduce nearly all labor arbitrage. Of course getting it passed in the face of the incorrect neo-Classical economics that the big money loves to push would be hard in many countries and impossible in the US
Joe Bauers
@Bill Murray:
An interesting idea, and I agree that it would be difficult/impossible. In addition to the big money boys, the Wal-Mart shoppers would complain. It’s difficult to get people to understand that there are costs to being able to save 10% on that toaster.
gil mann
Heard a report about the riots earlier today that confused the hell outta me until I realized they said “dockworkers,” not “dogwalkers.”
burnspbesq
@Martin:
French taxes are already among the highest in the industrialized world. Not much room to go higher. And it would be extremely hypocritical, even by French standards, to run big deficits while teaming up with Germany to advocate bigger penalties for those who violate the Euro-zone fiscal stability pact.
John Bird
@shortstop:
Very relevant point.
White-collar workers here believe they are one step away from becoming millionaires.
What’s more, they believe that if they are not millionaires but are qualified to do white-collar work, then there’s something wrong with them or with the world.
It’s not just that there’s no pride in working for a fair day’s wage in America.
It’s that there’s no pride in working for a guaranteed salary, at least not as long as anyone else who does so is within earshot. That is just weird, considering how enviable those jobs are to most Americans and most people in the world.
The only pride that’s allowed to be expressed without reservation in the media is pride from living off your wealth or celebrity.
It’s present elsewhere but the intensity is peculiar to America: we consider the non-productive classes to be the only smart ones. Not the clever ones, but the only ones worth listening to.
And what’s even more peculiar is how far this extends. Blue- and white-collar workers won’t just support attacks on social welfare when things are going well.
American workers and welfare recipients will ACTIVELY fight AGAINST social welfare for themselves when THEY REQUIRE IT TO SURVIVE, and when all indicators show that THE ENTIRE ECONOMY NEEDS IT TO SURVIVE.
That is a really strange phenomenon, and I don’t think Frank has it half figured out, by his own admission.
futzinfarb
Damn! Guess I’d better start shopping for a new Dell laptop. I planned on running out my time on this old dog.
someofparts
Just sharing comments from Ian Welsh at http://www.ianwelsh.net/praying-for-the-french/
Welsh finishes with these last thoughts –
“Pray for France. Because if they fall, no one is even trying, and if they fall the elites will know they can take anything away from any first world’s nation’s population”
Vive la France indeed people!
someofparts
A French Obama would be the end of the middle class as we know it – there and here.
Of course I obviously do not share the view that Obama is progressive, liberal, or even liberal-leaning.
The UK already has their Obama, aka David Cameron. Just check out all the lovely things he is doing for his country.