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	This is not only a French Crisis - All of Europe must heed the warning by The Daily Star / The Guardian European Union   November 2005   France is not alone in living above a Volcano, by Michel Rocard. (The Daily Star / Project Syndicate)   As I write this, the French are still reeling from violent clashes with the police that have been going on for weeks in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities. At its peak, cars were being set afire at a rate of nearly 1,000 per night. Why is this happening? How far can it go?   The existence of thousands of unemployed young people, without income or roots, idle and knowing only violence to express their quest for recognition, is not particularly French. Everyone remembers the Watts, Newark and Detroit riots in the United States in the 1960s, and the riots in Liverpool in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s, as well as in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley in more recent years. Likewise, France had riots in Vaux-en-Velin, near Lyon, 20 years ago. So it is important to distinguish what is common to many developed countries and what is specific to France.   All the developed economies have undergone profound changes during the last 30 years. We have gone from managerial to stockowner capitalism, from economies with large doses of state direction to far more deregulated markets, from the active and expansive social policies of the 1960s and 1970s to a world in which such spending is constantly shrinking.   Although wealth has been growing constantly - GDP has more than doubled in the last 50 years - the share of wages in the total has diminished by 10 percent, even while millions of the rich have become much richer. Everywhere, this has meant massive pauperization of the least favored parts of the population. In rich countries, mass poverty, which seemed to have been eliminated around 1980, has reappeared. Access to good education, and even more so to the labor market, is increasingly restricted for many young people, especially those who come from poor or single-parent families or from minority ethnic backgrounds, languages or religions.   These people feel rejected and unrecognized. "Because they want to break us, we will break everything" is the motto that best expresses their mood. There are untold reservoirs of social violence in all of our lands.   But against this shared background, France exhibits some important distinctive features. First, demography: for the last 50 years France has had much higher fertility rates than the rest of Europe - 1.9 children per woman, compared to the European average of 1.6 and the German or Spanish rates of 1.3. In Germany, every generation entering the labor market is smaller than the one exiting it. In France, by contrast, 200,000 to 300,000 more people enter the labor market than leave it in each generation - and this does not include immigration, which, although slowing recently, represents a large number of job seekers. As rates of economic growth have declined, this has meant growing unemployment.   Then there is geography: France"s massive urban concentration around the capital - Paris and its suburbs contain nearly 20 percent of the population - is unique in Europe. The sheer number of confused and disoriented young people has overwhelmed the French system"s capacity to integrate them - even though its capacity in this regard is, in fact, impressive.   Indeed, France has opened its public educational system to an extraordinary degree, refusing all group rights to minorities, but vigorously affirming personal rights, including full access to all social services, regardless of language, religion or skin color. The system is cracking, but only because of the limits of its absorptive capacity, not because of its core principles.   In these circumstances, every French politician has known for the last 20 years that France has been living with a growing risk that isolated incidents might coalesce into a critical mass of violence. The task of social workers and police, therefore, is to try to resolve - quickly and discreetly - each particular incident, in order to dampen the revolt.   What needs to be done also has been well known since 20 years ago, when a nonpartisan report by a cross-party group of big-city mayors unanimously agreed on measures to be taken: efficient repression, highly developed social prevention, a permanent local police presence, and a renewed effort at reintegrating delinquents.   The difficulty with implementing this policy has been that its preventive aspects - social support and reintegration of delinquents - appear to the frightened population living in the affected areas as being "soft on crime" and overly generous. But for the past three years, France has had a government that no longer believes that a socially oriented urban policy works. It believes only in repression and says so openly. As a result, local police forces have been reduced from 20,000 to 11,000, while the national riot police has been reinforced.   France is now experiencing a practical demonstration of this insane and totally inefficient policy, with Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy providing a telling illustration of the new orientation when he described the rebellious young as "scum." It was the proverbial match thrown by a careless smoker into a parched forest. The young responded with a vengeance to Sarkozy"s provocation.   The main risk now is that events in the suburbs of large French cities will serve as an example to other young people, whether in the less urban areas of France or in other European countries, who feel socially excluded and are, perhaps, just as prone to violent outbursts. Solving the problems underlying the French revolt will require time, discretion, mutual respect, community-based social and police work - rather than a centralized, repressive approach - and a lot of money. But France is by no means the only country that should be worried.   (Michel Rocard, a former prime minister of France and leader of the Socialist Party, is a member of the European Parliament).   10th Nov. 2005   "This is not only a French Crisis - All of Europe must heed the Flames", by Timothy Garton Ash. (The Guardian)   Europeans of immigrant descent are speaking to us through a pillar of fire. They need acceptance as hyphenated Europeans   In the Bible, we read that God guided his people out of Egypt with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Now the impoverished youth of France"s outer-city ghettoes are speaking to all of us through a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night. Their pillars are made of burning cars - some 6,000 to date - yet this apparently pointless violence has as clear a message as the one Moses followed. Europe, which to their immigrant parents seemed like the promised land, has turned into a new bondage.   "You know," a young man called Bilal told a reporter at Housing Project 112 in Aubervilliers, "when you brandish a Molotov cocktail, you are saying "help!" One doesn"t have the words to say what one resents; one only knows how to talk by setting fire." So they know what they are doing. They speak through fire.   To say this is not to justify the resort to violence. Nothing in the world can justify the beating to death of an elderly, innocent bystander, Jean-Jacques le Chenadec, a retired car worker who was reportedly just trying to extinguish a fire in a rubbish bin near his home. Nothing. But even as a fragile social peace is, we hope, restored through the drastic means of declaring a state of emergency, we have to start understanding what is being said through the flames.   Some commentators have contrasted peaceful, multicultural Britain with explosive, monocultural France. That seems to me dangerous complacency. Of course, the message of the burning Renaults and Citroëns is directed first and foremost at France"s leaders. No country in Europe has a larger proportion of men and women of immigrant descent, mainly from the African continent and mainly Muslim: an estimated six to seven million of them, or more than 10% of the population.   In few other European countries are those of immigrant descent so heavily ghettoised as they are in impoverished housing estates like No 112 at Aubervilliers. In few other countries could an interior minister denounce the rioters as "rabble" who deserve to be sand-blasted, and yet remain one of the most popular politicians in the land. Indeed, few European countries have a more exclusive metropolitan elite.   Just a few descendants of France"s postwar trans-Mediterranean immigrants appear in public life. Their position was perfectly summed up for me by a recent picture in Le Monde which showed the silver-haired prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, greeting Mr Azouz Begag, the minister for the promotion of equality of opportunity, by patting him on the head. Pat, pat, nice little Azouz. Meanwhile, the social reality of "equal opportunity" is best summarised in the title of a book by a Moroccan-born businessman, The Social Elevator is Broken; I Took the Stairs. The evidence of endemic racism in the French labour market is overwhelming. The British writer Jonathan Fenby tells the story of an entertainer in one of those housing estates who wrote two job application letters to a state television channel. One gave his African name and his real address; the other, a French name and a better address. The first received a refusal, the second an invitation for an interview.   Moreover, France represents the European extreme of attempted assimilation. No other European state has been so aggressively rigorous in its banning of the Islamic headscarf. None has made fewer concessions to cultural difference. As Alain Duhamel observes in his book French Disarray, "the only community France recognises is the national community".   All this is peculiar to, or at least most extremely represented by, the French Republic. But have no illusions: this is a problem that afflicts the whole of Europe. It was second-generation immigrants in peaceful, multicultural Britain who perpetrated the far-worse atrocity of the July bombings in London. Indeed, in the form of their revolt, Bilal and his comrades are in a way speaking old-fashioned French, albeit French without words. For spectacular but not ultimately very bloody protests, with road blocks and barricades, are part of a more than 200-year-old French revolutionary tradition. France"s second-generation immigrant youths burned cars; ours burned human beings. Which would you prefer? And it was peaceful, multicultural Holland which last year saw the ritual murder of Theo van Gogh.   Most west European societies have large, dissatisfied communities of immigrant descent. We brought them here in the first place, partly as the legacy of our retreating European empires, partly as workers to perform the menial jobs native Europeans did not want to do, in the years of impressive economic growth after 1945. We kept them, for the most part, at arm"s length, treating them as denizens rather than full citizens of Europe. In Germany, for example, most of the so-called Gastarbeiter from Turkey were, until recently, not invited to take up German citizenship, even if they had lived there for 30 years. And the post-9/11 "war on terror" has added new grounds for alienation.   This is an all-European problem. I"m tempted to say it"s the all-European problem; or at least, first-equal with that of creating more jobs. The two are closely related. In many of the housing estates now speaking through fire, unemployment is as much as 40%, while the average age is under 30. Meanwhile, the older, native-European unemployed are strongly represented among the electorate of Jean-Marie le Pen"s National Front, and other anti-immigrant parties across Europe. This has all the makings of a downward spiral.   On all reasonable assumptions, Europe"s population of immigrant descent and Muslim culture will grow significantly over the next decade, both through higher relative birth rates and further immigration. If we cannot make even those who have lived in Europe since birth feel at home here, there will be all hell to pay. Six thousand burning cars will seem like nothing more than an hors-d"oeuvre.   Addressing their socio-economic problems is half the answer, but very difficult, since the key is jobs and jobs are being created in Asia and America more than in Europe. The other half has to do with citizenship, identity and the everyday attitudes of each and every one of their fellow citizens.   Being European should be the overarching civic identity which allows immigrants and those of immigrant descent to feel at home. Indeed, it should, in theory, be easier to feel Turkish-European, Algerian-European or Moroccan-European than it is to feel Turkish-German, Algerian-French or Moroccan-Spanish, because being European is by definition a broader, more all-embracing identity. But it isn"t easier.   Somehow, Europeanness doesn"t work like that. Native-born Europeans can feel French-European, German-European or Spanish-European. Some - we happy few, we band of brothers - even feel British-European. And there are examples of people who definitely do feel, say, Pakistani-British or Tunisian-French. But the direct hyphenation rarely works. To address the greatest problem of our continent, and not just of France, we need to do nothing less than to redefine what it means to be a European.
	Something Stinks in America by Will Hutton The Observer/ Bloomberg UK / USA   Published: October 2, 2005   The most important political event last week for Britain did not take place at the Labour party conference in Brighton, but in Travis County, Texas. District Attorney Ronnie Earle charged the second most powerful man in the United States, Tom DeLay, with criminal conspiracy. DeLay resigned as the majority leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives while he fights the case, a stunning political setback.   American conservatism that has shaped American and British politics for 20 years has been holed below the waterline. It will take a lot more to sink it, but DeLay"s indictment is symptomatic of a conservative over-reach and endemic corruption that will trigger, at the very least, a retreat and maybe even more. One-Nation Tories and honest-to-God Labour politicians can take some succor; the right-wing wind that has blown across the Atlantic for nearly a generation is about to ease. Hypocrisies have been exposed. The discourse in British politics is set to change.   The story begins in the murky world of campaign finance and the gray area of quasi-corruption, kickbacks and personal favors that now define the American political system. American politicians need ever more cash to fight their political campaigns and gerrymander their constituencies, so creating the political truth that incumbents rarely lose. US corporations are the consistent suppliers of the necessary dollars and Republican politicians increasingly are the principal beneficiaries. Complicated rules exist to try to ensure the relationship between companies and politicians is as much at arm"s length as possible; the charge against DeLay is that he drove a coach and horses through the rules.   If DeLay were another Republican politician or even a typical majority leader of the House, the political world could shrug its shoulders. Somebody got caught, but little will change. But DeLay is very different. He is the Republican paymaster, one of the authors of the K Street Project and the driving force behind a vicious, organized demonization and attempted marginalization of Democrats that for sheer, unabashed political animus is unlike anything else witnessed in an advanced democracy. Politicians fight their political foes by fair means or foul, but trying to exterminate them is new territory.   The K Street Project is little known outside the Washington beltway and its effectiveness as a political stratagem is only possible because of the unique importance of campaign finance to American politics. DeLay, together with Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and some conservative activists, notably the ubiquitous Grover Norquist who runs the anti-state, anti-tax lobby group "Americans for Tax Reform", conceived the notion 10 years ago that they should use the Republican majority in the House as a lever to ensure that the lobbyists, law firms and trade associations that inhabit Washington"s K Street, heart of the industry, should only employ Republicans or sympathizers. To be a Democrat was to bear the mark of Cain; K Street was to be a Democrat-free zone.   This, if it could be pulled off, would have multiple pay-backs. Special-interest groups and companies have always greased the palms of American law-makers and because of lack of party discipline, they have had to grease Democrat and Republican palms alike to get the legislation they wanted. DeLay"s ambition was to construct such a disciplined Republican party that lobbyists would not need Democrats, and so create an inside track in which the only greased palms from legislators to lobbyists would be Republican.   Lobbyists, law firms and trade associations should be told not to employ Democrats, so progressively excluding them from access to the lucrative channels of campaign finance. Democrats would become both poorer and politically diminished at a stroke and the Republicans would become richer and politically hegemonic.   It has worked. The most influential Washington lobbyist is Barbour, Griffiths and Rogers; it employs not a single Democrat. Last year, in a classic operation, House Republicans let the Motion Picture Association of America (the film industry lobby group) know that appointing a Democrat, Dan Glickman, as its head would mean $1.5 billion of tax relief for the film industry was now in peril. Glickman staffed up the MPAA with Republicans, but the threat remains. In 2003, the Republican National Committee could claim that 33 of the top 36 top-level K Street positions were in Republican hands. Today, it"s even closer to a clean sweep.   Corporations get their rewards. The oil and gas industry now gives 80 per cent of its campaign cash to Republicans (20 years ago, the split was roughly 50-50), and influence on this year"s energy bill was a classic sting. American petrol can now contain a suspected carcinogen; operators of US natural-gas wells can contaminate water aquifers to improve the yields from the wells; the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is open to oil exploration - concessions all created by DeLay"s inside track. And to provide ideological juice, there"s a bevy of think-tanks, paid for from the same web of contributions, cranking out the justification that the "state" and "regulation" are everywhere and always wrong.   But central to the operation is DeLay"s mastery of the party in the House. To get two more Republican votes in his pocket, he organized a gerrymander in Texas to create two more seats in the 2004 election and gave the Republican campaign there some extra campaign money. The trouble was, alleges the DA, the cash from Washington originally came from Texan companies, which are forbidden directly to back individual candidates and that DeLay devised the illegal scheme.   DeLay vigorously insists he"s the victim of a partisan stitch-up, surely a case of the biter bit? Yet the scope for misdirection of political funds is huge. Michael Scanlon, DeLay"s director of communications for six years, is under criminal investigation together with partner Jack Abramoff for the way they used $66 million, paid by 11 casino-owning native American tribes over three years into their K Street operation, and which seems to have financed, among other extraordinary expenditures, a DeLay golf trip to Scotland. Nobody checks too much on how their money is deployed as long as it brings results - access, tax breaks and legislative concessions. DeLay, Scanlon and Abramoff belong to the same culture.   In Congress, moderate Republicans don"t want guilt by association and companies value their reputation. The K Street Project stinks, along with all those associated with it. So far, the US media have been supine. DeLay"s tentacles, and those of Karl Rove, Bush"s top political adviser, have cowed media owners into the same compliance; if they want favors, best advance the Republican cause like Murdoch"s Fox News. American newsrooms are fearful places.   But DeLay"s indictment breaks back the dam. US politics moves in cycles. Once it was Republicans who were going to clean up corrupt Democrat Washington; now Democrats can champion the same cause. Nor can the media afford to be on the side of the Old Corruption; it"s bad for business. The wheel is turning, an important moment both sides of the Atlantic.   30 September 2005   “Bush Cronyism weakens Government Agencies”. (Bloomberg)   The ranks of political appointees in the US government have surged under President George W. Bush after falling during the Clinton administration, sparking concern - especially since Hurricane Katrina - that career professionals are being crowded out of key jobs.   Federal jobs available to political appointees rose 15 percent to 4,496 last year from 2000, according to the 2004 edition of the "Plum Book," which is published by Congress after each presidential election to list positions up for grabs. Those jobs declined 5 percent during President Bill Clinton"s second term, a comparison of the 2000 and 1996 Plum Books shows.   As the Bush administration draws increased scrutiny over the credentials of top-level employees after the hurricane, a review of the record shows the issue goes far beyond the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has borne the brunt of criticism for its fumbling response to the disaster.   "The larger that number becomes, the more likely you"re going to have someone come up with a problem," said Terry Sullivan, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, who studies how the White House works.   "It is quite surprising that Bush turned out to be more politicizing than Clinton," Sullivan said. "The Bush campaign was built around how they were the governors, not the politicians."   Under Bush, political appointees have penetrated deeper into agencies, creating more levels of bureaucracy. The biggest growth has been in jobs that don"t require Senate confirmation, which rose by almost one-quarter between 2000 and 2004.   Focus on FEMA   Michael Brown, 50, a former commissioner of an Arabian horse association, stepped down this month as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under pressure from lawmakers who criticized his lack of emergency-management credentials.   Under Bush, the job of heading FEMA"s recovery division went to a former lobbyist, after previously being reserved for career employees. The chief of staff position was given to a presidential advance man, Patrick Rhode; his Clinton-era counterpart was a career official with more than two decades of experience.   From the Food and Drug Administration to the Energy Department, positions for career officials at top levels have been eliminated. The FDA"s top lawyer until the Bush administration had been a career official. In 2001, that job went to an appointee, who wasn"t subject to Senate confirmation. Daniel Troy, who got the job, once represented drug and tobacco companies. He left the FDA in 2004 and is now a partner at a Washington law firm.   "Calling the Shots"   "Normally, the chief counsel of the FDA is someone who comes up through the ranks," said Representative Maurice Hinchey, a New York Democrat, who pushed to have Troy removed. "He has a background of interests that are contrary to the interests he"s supposed to have as the chief counsel of the FDA. Essentially, the pharmaceutical industry was calling the shots."   Troy said his post was traditionally a political position that was switched to a career job in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. "General counsels of major agencies are generally political appointees, which promotes accountability," Troy said. "I know of no one responsible who has ever questioned my qualifications."   Under Clinton, the senior policy adviser for science and technology at the Energy Department was a career official who reported directly to the secretary. Under Bush, the 2004 Plum Book shows the secretary"s office entirely made up of political appointees.   Abramoff Link   The Bush administration has also come under fire for its appointments of David Safavian as the White House"s top procurement official and Julie Myers to head the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.   Safavian, 38, quit his White House post on Sept. 16 and was arrested three days later in connection with a land deal involving Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist under indictment who continues to be investigated by a Justice Department task force. Safavian"s procurement experience consisted of a 20-month stint as chief of staff of the General Services Administration, which maintains federal property and buys supplies. The last Clinton-era appointee to the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, Deidre Lee, was previously top procurement official at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and had two decades of experience in the field.   Replacing a Veteran   Myers, 36, the niece of General Richard Myers, the retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is married to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, to whom she would report, the Washington Post reported. She would replace acting agency head John Clark, a 25-year veteran of the field.   Myers has served as assistant commerce secretary and chief of staff to an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, among other positions. From 1999 to 2001, she was a federal prosecutor in New York. In an interview with CBS News, Chertoff said Myers was a "superbly qualified former prosecutor."   The White House doesn"t plan to review the way it fills jobs, said Clay Johnson III, who oversaw presidential appointments when Brown, who then held FEMA"s No. 2 job, was named director in 2003.   "The appointments work done by this president is as fine as has ever been done," said Johnson, who was Bush"s roommate at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and is now deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. "And I believe that Mike Brown was properly selected to be the head of FEMA. He had served really well as the general counsel of FEMA. He served unbelievably well for two years as the head of FEMA."   "Most Qualified"   Johnson, who hired Safavian, said he was the "most qualified person" he interviewed for the procurement job. US Comptroller General David Walker, who heads the Government Accountability Office, Congress"s investigative arm, said "there needs to be more emphasis on the qualifications of individuals that have key positions."   A 2003 commission led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker recommended the president cut the number of jobs available in the Plum Book, which was first published in 1952 to help people find "plum" jobs in the incoming administration of President Dwight Eisenhower.   "Talented and experienced senior career managers find themselves forced further and further away from the centers of decision-making," the commission, a project of the Washington- based Brookings Institution, wrote in its report.   Drilling Down   That"s because the Bush administration increasingly tends to "drill down into government," making ever-lower-ranking officials political appointees, said Paul Light, a commission adviser and professor of organizational studies at New York University.   That layering "slows information coming up from the bottom, creates vacancies in the chain of command at key points in time and, contrary to their hopes, actually weakens the president"s control of government," Light said.   Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a Washington-based group that seeks to bring talented people into government, commended Bush for working to build a government-wide evaluation system for senior executives.   Still, Stier said, "The political positions are infiltrating deep into the system." Carol Bonosaro, president of the Senior Executives Association, a professional group that represents top government executives, calls it "political creep."   The universe of federal political appointees goes beyond Cabinet secretaries and their deputies and principal assistants. Lower-level "Schedule C" and other appointed jobs pay at the civil service scale and don"t need to be confirmed by the Senate. Their numbers grew 24 percent from 2000 to 2004 and are included in the Plum Book, which is formally known as "United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions." "We could do twice as good a job with half as many appointees," Light said.
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