Wampum

It is irrelevant that Hugo Chavez did not actually mean to make heating oil, diesel, and gasoline available to Tribal Governments. It is relevant that the idea of Government-to-Government contacts, indifferent to the "domestic dependent" theory of John Marshall, and also indifferent to the "doctrine of discovery" of the medieval papacy, which subordinated non-Christian "discovered" states to one, and only one, exclusive Christian "discovery" state, is available to more serious people.

It is irrelevant that the public policy apparatus of the United States, including the foreign policy apparatus, are in the hands of a criminal conspiracy, and the Government of the United States paralyzed by the Constutional Crisis triggered by the DeLay/Rehnquist subversion of Art. II, Sec. 1, cl 2.

We still have to figure out our relationships, and not just with les banlieues populaires in France, through, or independent of, several preconceptions of race and migration, but also with the progressives in Iran, the secular nationalists in Iraq, the Reconcilliation and Peace movements in Israel/Palestine.

These are not things to be left for Condi Rice and John Bolton until a Constutional means is found to discharge them of their foreign policy responsibilities.

Today [November 13th] José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, proposed that the European Union allocate 50,000,000 euros "dans l'immédiat dans le cadre d'un programme urbain", rising to a billion  euros, because the social conflict in France is a "une affaire européenne".

The social conflict in France is not just a European affair. It is a Transatlantic affair. Not simply because several preconceptions of race and migration are Transatlantic, but because the post-colonial trajectory of France and the cold-war trajectory of the US were joined at birth. John Foster Dulles' offer of two fission weapons to Georges
Bidault may not have been the only time a nuclear weapons state offered nuclear weapons to a non-nuclear weapons state, but Dwight Eisenhower's decision to replace the French colonial rational of the First Indo-China War with the Atlantic Alliance anti-communist rational of the Second Indo-China War leads, not just to Dien Bein Phu, but to Algeria, Morocco, and les gosses de banlieue d'origine africaine ou maghrébine of post-colonial France. The Vietnamese diaspora is comon to France and the United States. The North African settlements in post-War Europe have parallels in post-War North American, though in Europe, 25% of North Africans marry Europeans.

The Chavez rhetorical device put heating oil, diesel, and gasoline, via CITGO, in the alienated urban areas, and in theory, in alienated rural areas. In effect, lowering the high cost of living for the poorest of the North American poor, indifferent to the "soverign" authority of "government" to alienate arbitrarily and without interference "by other Christian Kings". It is targeted foreign aid, and the novelty is that poverty in the US is targeted by aid from Venezuela.

In OpEd essays in the genre "What to do in Iraq, assuming the Constituion were suspended or the Bush/Cheney Regime was unsatisfied by a permanent conflict to advance the Regime's investors", Wes Clark has suggested using the Saudi Monarchy's Army to assist the Punjabi Military Dictatorship to extend its control over the Autonomous Tribal Regions in the Pakistan / Afganistan border area and defeat by military means the Al Quida and Talibans.

There are alternatives to Military Dictators assisted by Monarchs. Secular girls schools are a better answer to an enemy dependent upon distributed madrassa (religious schools), and commited to a campaign of attrition. There are alternatives to promoting central authorities, dictatorial or democratic, at the expense of peripheral authorities.

The political opposition in United States may have nothing to offer the inhabitants of the 751 "zones urbaines sensibles (ZUS)" of Metropolitian France.  The opposition in the United States has no access to public resources and the US is now much poorer than it was only three years ago, and the truth of the "Two Americas" is just as absolute as the truth of "France Divided".

We cannot send crude oil to ELF/Aquitane, ear-marked for below-market distribution in France's ghettos, to raise the standard of living of the poorest of the French poor. We may not be less fantasmal than the rhetorical devices of an ally-in-political-theory (though not in reality-based fact), but we simply don't have the oil or the state. We cannot send lawyers and case managers to defend the thousand-plus who are targeted by a foreign power for prision and deportation, all without due process. Legal systems don't translate easily. We cannot send blankets, tents and MREs to France's ghettos. Pakistan and Kashmir have a greater need for blankets, tents and the money that goes to catastrophic humanitarian relief campaigns, than the product of Franco-France politics that produce structural poverty and structural discrimination in pursuit of an imagined France that has never, ever existed.

What we can do is take a critical look at the "left" of François Hollande, the "left" that signed off on neo-liberalism, rationalizing pensions and benefits, eliminating barriers to the free flow of capital and pollution, and joins the neo-facists in the facade that teens with matches are a match for the armed cadres of the FLN. We can express our solidarity with la révolte légitime des jeunes devienne citoyenne. After all, what is the plan of record for the night after Bush announces {invasion of Syria or Iran, suspension of Habeas corpus, resumption of the Military Draft, reversal of Roe, amnesties for Karl and Dick's cliques, or whatever little device amounts to the third stolen election}? Is it tea and talk?

The penalty for burning a garbage pail or a very used car shouldn't be a non-leathal ratonnade [planned excessive force arrest], a $3,500 fine, two or more months of confinement, followed by deportation for life.