Wampum

Jose Bové's campaign last year wasn't for the presidency, it was for something a little harder to explain. It was for a continuation of the nonist position, but not especially non to the proposed European Constitution, with all its Anglo-American "free market" (pro-capital/anti-union) baggage, but to a manifestation of it -- the 1998 determination by Bruxelles, that is, the Parliment of the European Union, that genetically modified cultigens, in particular Monsanto's MON810, could be grown within the European Union.

France has just invoked its reserved right to ban MON810.

Sarko is president of the Republic, but Bové has caused France to formally declare MON810 unsafe for cultivation, so he, and his wing of the French rural, agricultural, and intellectual left, also won.

We missed the opportunity this cycle to talk about GM cultigens, and closed-cycle patented cultigens, and whether ethanol makes sense, prior to the Iowa caucus. Maybe next cycle we'll have a candidate who can sit when the ethanol anthem is played, and talk about the economics of farming in a market dominated by profit taking on GM cultigens. Or we can go another cycle with ethanol as the solution to "the dangers of foreign oil imports".

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The photo is from Le Monde.

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Ségolène Royal is now offering to head the PS. The parallel universe continues. Absurdly.

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The UMP has swept the first round, and the number of women in office will drop by half, to about 20%. French wine, roast, and cheese will not be affected, so its just a political and policy catastrophe, affecting only the young, the old, women, minorities, and the poor.

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Its not just the color of the helmets of the Occupation Forces, its the identification of Treaty Law with the minds of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, ...

Chirac would not walk into Arab East Jerusalem accompanied by the pro-annexation mayor of non-Arab West Jerusalem, Eduad Olmert. He would not leave Yasser Arafat with no alternative but to die without medical attention in a ruined building surrounded by tanks.

Its not just the momentary specifics of the "Arab-Israeli Conflict", its the full measure of the Likud-NeoCon dream, of armed brilliance in Lebanon, Syria and Iran.

At 11am this morning Jacques Chirac transfered control of the world's fourth largest nuclear weapons inventory to Nicolas Sarkozy. It was Charles De Gaulle's insistence on French strategic independence, on un monde multipolaire et démocratique. Without which, "non" would have been impossible, or simply implausible.

The price of a mess o' freedom fries was profoundly understated.

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Voting's begun in France d'Amérique. In June of last year the French Socialist Party celebrated the defeat of economic neo-liberalism in Europe by purging the leadership of everyone who campaigned against economic neo-liberalism in Europe. Laurent Fabius and everyone else who campaigned for the "non" vote was told to go join the Communists. Laurent Fabius didn't, and remained in the party though he was dismissed from the party's National Executive Committee, and contested the PS primary in April.

During the balloting for the '07 presidential race when we lost power and I lost a good post. I was rhetorically crossing my fingers that the best candidate wouldn't be wiped out in the first round. It didn't even occur to me that the worst candidate would get more than 50% of the vote, eliminating a runoff between the partisans of the worst, and the partisans of the best and the second best. It was worse than I anticipated. Over 60% of the PS voted for a break with the left and for triangulating toward the program of the right. That's how Ségolène Royal became the candidate of the largest party on the left, and the presumed, except for the weeks of suspense when François Bayrou broke the 10% threshold and for a few days, was polling at, or above, without a real political party, Ségolène Royal's own numbers, alternative to Nicolas Sarkozy and the imposition of neo-liberalism on a still socialist France.

The problem isn't so much that the Left is going to lose tomorrow, its that the Left lost last November, when this person managed to suppress the campaigns of Lionel Jospin, Jack Lang, and the others who drove Fabius and the other nonists out of the leadership of the PS, and finally beat both Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius, obtaining more than 50% of the vote, short-circuiting the 2nd-round and any chance of presenting a candidate with less flash, less bling, and more policy depth, and fundamentally, independent of gender, more credible.

I recommend viewing a fragment of 12 minutes of an interview shot in 1999, with Pierre Bourdieu, talking about which political figures styled as "of the left", are actually "of the right". The 12 minutes were first shown as Gauche/Droite vu par Pierre Bourdieu on Zalea TV, on September 29th, the day that Ségolène Royal announced that she was running for president in the '07 cycle. As a Socialist. The bits are no longer at Zalea, but are still up at Daily Motion.

The student that Pierre Bourdieu chose to discuss, as a professor of sociology, was Ségolène Royal. The "money quote" is here, under a minute, and without the clatter of plates and the rest of the cacophony of a working café.

The bits were posted to DailyMotion, a YouTube like free (for the time being) video stream feed server, and four days later, the dead tree press (Le Monde, Libération, etc.) had copy on the TV-to-feed-to-blogs phenomena.

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Much as I hate having to do the html markup by hand for diacriticals (accents), there are moments when clarity of vision is possible. This is one. The candidate of the right (minus the far right for the present as Le Pen is, as of today, advising his racists to not vote for the candidate of the right in the second round) gave a speech on the 29th in Bercy, and these are extracts of that clear statement of vision:

Mai 1968 nous avait imposé le relativisme intellectuel et moral. Les héritiers de mai 1968 avaient imposé l'idée que tout se valait, qu'il n'y avait donc désormais aucune différence entre le bien et le mal, le vrai et le faux, le beau et le laid. Ils avaient cherché à faire croire qu'il ne pouvait exister aucune hiérarchie des valeurs. D'ailleurs, il n'y avait plus de valeurs, plus de hiérarchie. Il n'y avait plus rien du tout !

Trans: There is only one true culture, only one true hierarchy of values.

L'héritage de mai 1968 a introduit le cynisme dans la société et dans la politique. Voyez comment le culte de l'argent roi, du profit à court terme, de la spéculation, comment les dérives du capitalisme financier ont été portées par les valeurs de mai 1968.

Trans: Not just the civic state, but capitalism too, was destroyed by Chavez, Kennedy, King, and all the rest of those amoral relativists.

Voyez comment la contestation de tous les repères éthiques a contribué à affaiblir la morale du capitalisme, comment elle a préparé le terrain au capitalisme sans scrupule des parachutes en or, des retraites chapeaux, des patrons voyous.

Trans: Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies and their dogs ate Michael Milkin's ethics homework, and that of all his classmates.

Sarko is announcing the restoration of the Italian corporate facist state -- in France. A State that offers cultural safety from the dangers of Jews (cultural and economic), of Gypsies, of Arabs, ... but not from the dangers of the Germans or the English or from across the Atlantic, and the restoration of moral capitalism.

That's the A ticket. Royal's B ticket offers triangulation ... to a destination unknown, but proximal to Vichy.

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The voters in Saint-Pierre and Miquelon began voting today, for the first time before the voters in Metropolitan France.

Le Soir (a Belgian paper and therefore free to publish polling data) has the latest polls by Sofres, IPSOS, IFOP and CSA. All four show Le Pen (National Front) steady at between 10% 15% , the same showing the National Front has had for the past four months, and all four show François Bayrou, the surprise center-right candidate of the Union Democratic Francais, down from a peak of 24% in the first week of March to between 15% and 20%.

The Friday polling data, which can't be published in France under the STFU rule on media manipulation of the election, shows Sarkozy and Royal winning the first round, with the widely anticipated Sarko over Royal outcome of the second round.

Tant pis pour la gauche. The wrong candidate won the primary, triangulation and not knowing what to do before polling data arrives simply isn't very galvanizing.

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Wouldn't it be neat if every candidate, Nader included, got the same amount of paid radio and television media? Wouldn't it be cool if we had run-off voting, so that one could vote "Green" or "Socialist" or "Anarchist" or ... and still vote for the better of the two major parties? Wouldn't it be wicked if the media had to STFU before calling Florida for Bush or Ohio for Bush or where ever the next SCOTUS-promoted fraud steals the election?

That's how it works in France, and the media in France (but not Belgium or Switzerland) is now in the black-out period until 20h, heure de Paris, Sunday the 22nd, when the results of the first round will be announced.

I've no idea at all how its going to turn out. The standard script is the left and right parties take 30% plus each, and proceed to the second round. Only in this cycle, there is a third choice that is neither somewhat left nor right, and the rules are still the two top vote getters advance to the second tour. So it could be the right vs the somewhat left, or it could be the right vs ... the somewhat right. For that matter, it could be the somewhat right vs the somewhat left.

No one knows how the extreme right will really play. Will they play it straight and go for their historic high of 15% or so, and become a party somewhere between the noise of the under 5% parties (Greens, Other Greens, Communists, Other Communists, Royalists, etc.) and the 30% of the major parties, a "fourth force", and toss their lot in with the right in the second round? Or will they make sure the right dominates the first round, and play early, or will they decide to historically knock out the right, play early and hard, and offer the somewhat right two awkward choices -- win with them or lose without them?

The minor parties on the left have the same choices, but with a quarter of the polling data strength of the single major party of the extreme right.

If everyone plays according to the rules, the polling data has the right beating the somewhat left in the 2nd round by 2xMOE.

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France has a two-round system for its presidential elections, and until last week, it was a given that the two candidates that would make it to the second round would be the triangulation-is-everything winner of the Socialist Party's primary, and the immigrants-are-evil winner of the UMP primary.

If having a choice between two "I'll say any dumb thing to get elected" candidates isn't your cup of tea, you're not alone. This week François Bayrou polled above 20%, the psychological barrier, and even polled above one of the two "I'll say any dumb thing to get elected" candidates. For the past two weeks, when the question was Bayrou or either one of the two, the 2nd round poll question, Bayrou comes out more than a MoE ahead of both.

The photo is a Greenpeace event, a dump of frankencorn in the street at the doors of the party HQ of Mr. immigrants-are-evil.

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The Bové Team announced themselves yesterday. Le Monde had me nearly blow milk out my nose this morning -- the withdrawal of Hulot gave Yoynet a bump of exactly zero points, and this quote: "'La révolution écologiste', incarnant un positionnement plus à gauche, n'est pas crédible quand il est porté par une gestionnaire" by the former national secretary of that party. Bové raises goats and makes cheese and takes part in civil disobedience against the liberal corporatist oligarchy in its chemical and patent seed dependent forms.

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This is an interesting choice of images. José Bové is drawn as a Gaul, right down to the signature mustache, a person stepping out of the pages of Asterix, where, as everyone knows, The year is 50 B.C. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well not entirely! One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders. And life is not easy for the Roman legionaries who garrison the fortified camps of Totorum, Aquarium, Laudanum and Compendium...

If you pop over to RealClimate you'll see that I'm not the only one who uses Asterix to make sly allusions. I'm glad they're back up after the weekend's database corruption.

Its smart to associate the candidate with the tradition of resistance, even in bande dessine (comic book) form.

If you are "of the left" in France, you've got a choice between an HRC triangle-alike, a couple of clapped out Commies, the by-one-tricked-vote Green and ... Bové.

I like candidates who stand for something. I particularly like candidates who take part in civil disobedience, at military weapons materials and commercial electrical generation reactors, who go to a point and remain there. With Bové it is biologically irresponsible, unsustainable and ultimately, unprofitable corporate agriculture. Genetically modified corn and soy in the fields, and bovine growth hormone dosed cattle in the stockyards.

Yesterday his sentence of four months time was confirmed. He was given the option of wearing an electronic bracelet, which he declined, and yes, he'll campaign for President of the Republic from his cell.

Unis Ave Bové beats the hell out of leaving politics to the pro-globalization corporate puppets who actually lost the referendum on the neo-liberal "European Draft Constitution", and here in the Parallel Universe, a good candidate or two is a blessing. Especially today.

The campaign has almost 40,000 signatures. Mine was the 8,543rd signature. Rather than start a new category, I'm going to file my '07 cycle presidentials (French) under Gore and Edwards. I've my reasons.

José BOVÉ, Gilles LUNEAU, Pour la désobéissance civique, éd. La Découverte, octobre 2004, 264p., 17,50 euros

Posted by EBW at 08:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The oddest petition (presentation values) I've ever seen was posted on the 6th. Its for José Bové to be the single candidate of a rather difficult to unify French anti-liberal left. The leaderships of nearly every political party lined up behind the "Oui" for the Draft European Constitution, the exception of note was the French Communist Party. Even the leadership of Les Vertes bet on private capital rather than public policy to accomplish a European Green. Yet when the ballots were counted, the "Non" vote had won.

The nonists have been trying to unite to present a single candidate, and so make it to the second round of the French presidentials this year, in a field dominated by a fright-and-order mainstream right male, a triangulating fashionable mainstream left female, and a dozen lesser candidates, including, awkwardly enough, the head of the PCF, who's cadres want ran for movement continuation more than they want a single non-PCF candidate to make it to the second round.

The site of the petition is here. Take a look, if only to see how different things can be. The cms is Spip the flying squirrel (no relation to Rocky), and if you are a national of the French Republic, and neo-liberalism gets you all chocked up, like tear gas on a warm spring day at the picket line, or any morning at an aunti-nuke demo, you may want to consider signing the petition.

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Dominique de Villepin appeared before two juges d'instruction this morning as a witness in the Clearstream investigation. de Villepin is the current Prime Minister of France. Good government requires accountability from the governing, even from "un petit de".

In the parallel universe, where party is nothing and triangulation is everything, Mme. Ségolène Royal is running a campaign staffed only by her people -- no Socialists need apply. She appears to have attention deficit disorder, as she can't engage on an issue for long enough to matter, and the issues of everyone else in the PS leadership, poverty, civil rights, jobs, ... are just other people's ideas. Wierd. It is as if the PS determined that the Party should wither away, not the State, so the right has already won the '07 Presidentials.

Not content with having driven the core of the former Soviet Union from bankruptcy to energy exporter wealth, reversing the "Victory over Communism" celebrated by the Ronald Reagan cult, and re-extending the political control of Moscow over Europe between the Volga and the Vistula via GasProm, he's forced the EU nuclear states (weapons and fuel cycle complete, taken together) to choose between Washington and Moscow, and Moscow won again, so Tehran won't be sanctioned by the UN for enrichment of uranium for use generating electrical power.

He's pretty good as President of Russia.

There's a "for life" job open in Turkmenistan. Santa could transport him there in one of the "rendition program" air assets, which shuttle between Poland and the Steppes of Central Asia, and we could go back to a constitutional form of government, in which even the conservatives don't forget their ideas the moment they utter them, and we all get to rediscover law and goverment, not the fragile imitation of government without law.

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Ali Ammar, one of 17 deputes of the Commission on Foreign Affairs of the National Assembly of Lebanon, from the Hezbollah political party, spoke to the foreign dignataries and press in Arabic. His remarks were translated into French, once for the French political delegation, and once for the French press. Several phrases caught the attention of Ségolène Royal, the candidate of the Socialist Party for President in the '07 cycle. I'm using the second translation.

"Le nazisme qui a versé notre sang et qui a usurpé notre indépendance et notre souveraineté n'est pas moins mauvais que le nazisme qui a occupé la France".

Respectively, these are "the nazism which as spilled our blood and usurped our independence and our soveriegnty is no less worse than the nazism which occupied France", and "zionist entity".

Ségolène Royal issed a statement later to the effect that no such language had been heard, by she or by the French Ambassador, but if she had heard such language she would have walked out of the room.

So if Lebanese, or Palestinians, or Iraqis or ... use a historical reference to express their impression of the conditions under which they exist, by force, and by force paid for in part by France, and in whole by the allies of France, the France of President Ségolène Royal will turn a deaf ear. Good to know in advance.

What this means is that the political party dominated by teachers and intellectuals of the left won't be able to use the word "colonialism" or any of its cognates while Mme. Royal is the leader of their party. The political party dominated by workers -- les bleus et les metallos -- the PCF, may continue to be able to articulate a critique of neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism, and the smaller political parties that are doctrinally anti-neo-liberal but non-communist, or differently communist, from les Verts to the MRG, the LRC, ... will also be able to articulate a critique of neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism, should they choose too. Note that the 1 vote margin for Dominique Voynet over Yves Cochet has made it less likely that the leadership of les Verts will position themselves as having a critique of neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism. Pity that.

Sarko and Royal are running neck and neck in yesterday's IFOP-Journal du Dimanche poll. They've been within the MOE for sometime, for the hypothetical second round of the election. In the first round the IFOP-JDD numbers are as follows:

Mme Royal (31%, +2 from two weeks ago) PS
M. Sarkozy (30%, +1) UMP
Jean-Marie Le Pen (12%, +1) Front national
François Bayrou (9%, -2) UDF
Philippe de Villiers (4% +2) Mouvement pour la France
Olivier Besancenot (4% -1) Ligue communiste révolutionnaire
Marie-George Buffet (3%, -1) PCF
Dominique Voynet (2%, =) Verts
Arlette Laguiller (2%, -1) Lutte ouvrière
Corinne Lepage (1% =) Cap 21
Jean-Pierre Chevènement (1% -1) MRC
Frèdéric Nihous (1% =) Jean Saint-Josse

This is a follow-up to Meanwhile ... in France ...

And in case its too subtle, the center-left of France in the '07 presidentials, dominated by Mme. Ségolène Royal, a person with little program or policy, and less accomplishments, other than beating a bunch of men in the PS pre-primary positioning this year and the primary a few weeks ago, and taking the PS into the political and rhetorical landscape of the UMP via "triagulation", and the Democratic Party of the US in the '08 pre-primary positioning, dominated by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, are the two parallel universes.

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I was working on a post this morning on the first round of the Partie Socialiste balloting for the '07 presidential race when we lost power. I was rhetorically crossing my fingers that the best candidate wouldn't be wiped out in the first round. It didn't even occur to me that the worst candidate would get more than 50% of the vote, eliminating a runoff between the partisans of the worst, and the partisans of the best and the second best. It was worse than I anticipated. Over 60% of the PS voted for a break with the left and for triangulating toward the program of the right.

I was disapointed earlier when the better ecologist lost, albeit in a deadlock that took weeks to resolve into a one vote margin for the lesser ecologist, in Les Verts balloting for the '07 presidential race.

Now that PCF has renounced nuclear power, they remain the last palatable choice for a program that rejects neo-liberalism and running to the center (the program of Ségolène Royal, hence the PS), or the pro-business equivalent of "clean coal" (the program of Dominique Voynet, hence Les Verts), or the program of the right, ironically "green flavored" in the last week with the carbon tax proposal.

I invite from the bottom of my heart men and women and organizations of the left, even those who might have voted "yes", to take your place, to participate with us in this noble adventure to construct another Europe, a genuine left wing alternative.

Marie-George Buffet, '07 cycle candidate for President, PCF

The "yes" vote is a reference to the dividing line in Europe, the neo-liberal draft European Constitution. The PS and Les Verts leaderships, along with the right, voted "yes". Fortunately, the rank and file voted "non" and "non" carried the day. Back then the knives came out for Laurent Fabius as he campaigned against the draft European Constitution, he was told to get out of the PS and go to ... the PCF.

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Our peers in France are mulling over 12 minutes of an interview shot in 1999, of Pierre Bourdieu, talking about which political figures styled as "of the left", are "of the right". The 12 minutes were first shown as Gauche/Droite vu par Pierre Bourdieu on Zalea TV, on September 29th, the day that Ségolène Royal announced that she was running for president in the '07 cycle. As a Socialist.

The political figure that Pierre Bourdieu chose to discuss was ... Ségolène Royal.

The bits were posted to DailyMotion, a YouTube like free (for the time being) video stream feed server, and four days later, the dead tree press (Le Monde, Libération, etc.) has copy on the TV-to-feed-to-blogs phenomena.

When Ségolène Royal was in government in 1999 she had responsibility for education and her acts of note were campaigns against pedophilia, hazing and for the re-establishment of civics. The play ground of the moralists, and a vast distance from the enlightenment for children ages 5 and up.

Which got me to thinking. The Congressional Page Program is an educational program. Which do we care more about, Ségolène Royal's issues, or that the curriculum is factual about the nature of the Congress, that is, currently a dictatorship, corrupt incomperable except for the Grant and Harding (elected) administrations, run for and by the aristrocracy?

Is our interest sexual mores or life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness through the creation and preservation of a government by the people?

To see the video, click here.

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Un frère de Ségolène Royal, candidate à l'investure socialiste à l'élection présidentielle de 2007 ...

... à posé la bombe qui fait ça ...

qui à coulé ça ...

... tuant Fernando Pereira.

It will be an interesting election.

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Le Monde reports majorité des mineurs présentés aux juges étaient "inconnus" des tribunaux. [The majority of the 16-17 year olds arrested in the troubles have no priors]. Nicolas Sarkozy, Minister of the Interior, had characterized the protesters as "racailles" of which " 80% seraient connus pour des faits de délinquance." [scum, 80% having criminal priors.] That image sold reasonably well to the French MSM, and for one 24 hour period, even Le Monde "flipped" and sold the official line.

At the court in Bobingny, of 89 minors, only 37 were "known" to the authorities. At Créteil, of 77 minors, only 15 were "known" to the authorities. At Nanterre, of 41 minors, 22 were "known" to the authorities. At Pontoise, only 9 of 42 were "known" to the authorities. Overwhelmingly, the demographic is, other than life-long residence in the suburban projects of Metropolitian France, is between 15-25 (with outliers as young as 10 and as old as 35), weak social support, and no prior criminal or child protective service record.

A total of 3,101 arrests were made since October 29th. Of the 562 over-18s, 422 have already been sentanced to prision and "deportation" proceedings are underway. The sentences range between six and twelve months, with one of 48 months. The trials are effectively mass trials, with a series of accused run through a court room, each receiving an "individual trial".

Update: Nicolas Sarkozy announced yesterday that the arrests are up to 4,700, or 1,540 made since the end of the troubles, and that the arrests will continue.

The American discourse has been entirely captured by the idea of "Islam", which is more sensationally exotic than teens who want something rather ordinary, and what sells papers. More importantly, no critical coverage of the Two Frances plays well with no critical coverage of the Two Americas, which is why that meme only surfaces in the national media when John Edwards had earned media access as a national candidate polling above the pack, and was doing a standup with local media coverage, or when the Edwards campaign did a media buy and put a 30 second impression into a media market.

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Riots in France by Adrien Wing, November 3, in blackprof.com. Thoughtful and under two pages.

The problem with France by Steve Gilliard, November 6th, in stevegilliard.blogspot.com, both a piece from the Euro version of Boonews and some background pieces (and the link to the Vlaams Blok is correctly labeled too).

http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/11/why_is_france_b.html WHY IS FRANCE BURNING? by Doug Ireland, also November 6th, in direland.typepad.com is a long and valuable background piece. html anchor removed because of typepad trackback overhead.

Riots: Not Just For France Anymore by Matt Yglesias isn't about France, which is probably just as well.

If Google is to be trusted, Wampum isn't blogging about Seine-Saint-Denis or Nicolas Sarkozy or Dominic de Villepin or ... France.

If you know of more blogs that aren't either derivative or just plain stupid, stuff the URL in comments.

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