by Jerome a Paris
Sun Mar 19th, 2006 at 06:26:57 PM EST
a message to our American readers. Adapted from a dKos diary
I've been spending a bit of effort this week-end trying to debunk all the errors and lies spewed by the mainstream media about the French demonstrations. I could only write about 2 or 3 articles, and yet there are hundreds out there telling the same story - and all of them have a much bigger audience than me.
But the most surprising thing was the number of reactions I got from supposed lefties, here and on dKos, telling me in substance "you won't avoid reform with 20% unemployment amongst the youth"; "France's economy is in really bad shape, some labor reform is needed, and these protests are really reactionary" ; "you can't go on having these expectations of cosy jobs for life" ; "why is the State meddling in private contracts"?
A troubling number of American liberals seem to have drunk the kool-aid.
That Kool-aid is the one you should know about, as it's coming out the Thatcher/Reagan revolution, and has been pushed furthest in your country:
- unions are "corpocracies", or "special interests" out to get workers to be paid for doing nothing and they have too much power and need to be brought down to size;
- "flexibility" of the labor market (which really means paying workers less, making them work more - and more inconvenient - hours and giving them fewer rights);
- profits, and profit growth, and stock market value, is the only way to evaluate the success of an economy;
- taxes are bad;
- governments are incompetent and should stay our of business;
Now, many of you would disagree with most of the above points, and rightly blame them for the current economic mess in the US, with stagnating median wages, skyrocketing healthcare costs, rising poverty and extravagant levels of debt despite the apparent strong growth.
And yet, when talking about France, whose policies are to some extent the opposite of all this (unions with important formal roles in the economy, strong protections for workers against abuses by employers, a refusal to judge quality of life by money alone, a high level of taxes, and a major role for the State, which is still trusted to do a number of things for the community), the reaction is pretty often hostile and very much in line with the above talking points:
- how do you tolerate these strikes all the time?
- you need more flexibility to fight that horrible unemployment
- you can't expect to be competitive by clinging to outdated practises - global forces (read uniform requirements for return on capital around the planet) must prevail;
- how do you tolerate such high levels of taxes, and
- how do you tolerate the "big daddy" State meddling in everything?
And the basic message is that the French model has failed, and the US/UK model just HAS to prevail, because that's the way history is going, inevitably.
Even though the statistics show that this is simply not true and that the French economy is not doing so badly, that's not the perception, not here, and not in France either.
The French are gloomy because they are now convinced that their country has failed, and will have to join the nasty "Anglo-Saxon model" or fall on the wayside. They are deeply unhappy with the idea, but they see no other way - the other way was tried, and failed.
Let me tell you was this sounds like: it sounds like Democrats being told that they are weak on national security.
- That they really want to "listen to and understand terrorists" rather than fight their evil ways to death (replace terrorists by unions);
- That they are wimps and they'd rather negotiate on and on and on rather than take decisive steps and use force if necessary, which will make diplomacy all the more effective next time because your words will have the credibility of your tough actions (you must have the freedom to fire people to be strong enough to hire them);
- That they do not accept that, because terorrists are actually evil, civil rights must be curtailed for terrorists so that our rights to safety are protected (when there is strong unemployment, workers must shed the luxury of having any labor rights and should be happy to simply have work);
- That, because there is a war, it is unpatriotic to criticise the executive and want to curtail its powers if you want it to be effective in its fight (it's a tough competitive market, and executive pay should not be curtailed in any way in order to keep the best talent.).
You've been fighting against all these bad faith arguments for a while now, and wondering why so many people do not get it that they were asinine, in bad faith, and worse - ineffective. Well, it's the same with the criticism of French unions and demonstrations and strikes (all called "riots" in the English language press) - they are in bad faith, and they are only used to reinforce the power of corporations over workers and keep workers down.
But in both cases, they work because they rely on little more than the relentless repetition, over and over and over again, of the same unsubstantiated, and sometimes outright false arguments. And that's what most people hear, and that's what they remember: "Democrats are wimps", "the French don't work enough".
So please, next time you read an article about the French "events", don't dismiss them as the fad of pampered coffee-drinking, Gauloise-smoking, out-of-touch privileged people. They are fighting the same fight as you are, and the stakes are just as high.
France, for better or for worse, rightly or wrongly, embodies the resistance to the Thatcher/Reagan model (now morphed into a corrupt and sanctimonious Cheney / Blair version), and you will only weaken your own fight if you dismiss the main international voice against the inevitability of "global forces" and the Tom Friedmanesque "international consensus" on international business (unlimited rights) and governance (to be curtailed) and if you believe all the drivel in the English language press about these demonstrations.
Please go read my deconstruction of three articles about the French protests, one in the Guardian(here), and one in TIME magazine (here), and one in the International Herald Tribune (here). You'll see the same dismissiveness, the same notion (often gleeful) that it's a lost fight against forces larger than France, and the same conviction that France is in a really, really bad shape.
Just like the Dems, France needs optimism - not just criticism of the relentless forces arrayed against them, but a message that our ideas and our values work, and need to be put to work again, for everybody's benefit.
It's our common fight, and that's why I'm writing to you guys so much as well.
