DESPERATELY FINDING FAULT WITH FRANCE

(The following is an expanded version of the original published in the New York Times, electronic edition, March 5, 2009. The original “DESPERATELY FINDING FAULT WITH FRANCE” can be found on http://tyranosopher.blogspot.com/. It is more compact.)

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THE PLUTOCRACY OF THE USA MANIPULATES THE PEOPLE OF THE USA WITH LIES, BY BRANDISHING FRANCE AS AN OMINOUS FATE.

NATIONALISM STUNTS MINDS:
Nationalism is often the worst counsel a nation can have. Nationalism is not just about columns of armed men parading. The most noxious forms of nationalism twist the way minds work.  One sort of nationalism consists into not looking outside of the national box. Not comparing one’s nation to that of others, and to past civilizations, is unwise and disrespectful. The crisis engulfing the USA has been made possible by poor thinking. Its combination with strident nationalism is no coincidence (the peak of this was around 2003, but it could come back stronger as the economy sinks).

In an editorial in the New York Times, “One France Is Enough”, Roger Cohen opines that: “President Obama, in his restorative counterrevolution, must be careful to steer clear of his French temptation.” (March 5, 2009). Cohen explains that: “Nobody in their right mind would give up the manifold sensual, aesthetic and gastronomic pleasures offered by French savoir-vivre for the unrelenting battlefield of American ambition were it not for one thing: possibility.”
Cohen insists: “Americans, at least in their imaginations, have always lived at the new frontier; French frontiers have not shifted much in centuries.”

As a reminder, Roger Cohen was sitting thirty feet from Obama, during Obama’s inauguration. Cohen was also an ardent supporter of the invasion of Iraq, probably an example of shifting of the frontiers, American style. This sort of thinking is rampant in the USA, it is part of a relentless droning by the opinion makers. France is continually brandished as if she were an ominous fate, thus American policy should always go the other way. So what does it mean when the french solution is the best? That the USA will go for the worst?
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OBAMA AT THIS POINT: AS FRENCH AS MARIE-ANTOINETTE?
To claim that Obama is in danger of turning the USA into France is in direct opposition with the observed facts.

If Obama wanted to do turn the USA into France he would have signed two executive orders on the day he became president:

1) Hedge Fund and Private Equity managers to be taxed at the maximal tax bracket, instead of the outrageously low maximal 15% they enjoy now.

2) Citigroup and Bank of America would have been nationalized, their management fired, and they would have been yanked from their holding companies and the derivatives and hedge funds. They would have been recapitalized, and ordered to extend credit as usual.

Obama did not do any such thing. I hoped he would, but he did not. Verily, he did quite the opposite. Actually Obama is clinging to the notion of privacy to the point of ruining the world economy. Baker, Greenspan and Graham, all right wing statesmen, have begged him to nationalize the four giant banks that are blocking the world economy. But Obama clings to his hedge funds managers like a little one to mummy.

What is happening is beyond belief: a vast class of people organized the uppermost parts of the financial and real estate industries of the USA as a racketeering system serving them. They “own” it in that sense. Obama, in total violation of the French spirit of knocking off exaggerated privilege by an upper class that has all the power, insists to keep on transferring to said upper and shadowy class the hard earned income of the People. It is neither egalitarian, nor just, nor rational, three deep characteristics of the French “Cartesian” character. It’s: “Let them eat Credit Default Swaps!”

The credit system of the USA is still frozen, and the world economy is in free fall. Obama is not advised by a Frenchman. Instead he is advised by Larry Summers, a famous misogynist, the greatest advocate, and protector of the Credit Default Swaps.

The Credit Default Swaps have destroyed the world financial system. Germans and French want to regulate them. Summers wanted the Credit Default Swaps free, so they were set free, and they destroyed the world. Summers did this in 1998, when he was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Bush just went along with the way Summers organized the economy and finance. Now Summers is back in person at the helm. It was not to fix his mistakes, but to persist into making more of the same.
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DEMONIZING OTHER NATIONS:
To claim that there is “possibility” in the USA and much less in France is disjoint from the facts. It cultivates anti-French bias. Perhaps companies get created and destroyed in the USA, but so it is in France. Because the USA is bigger, and because of less social legislation, a company such as Wall Mart can grow faster than its French competitor, Carrefour (which is nearly as big, but which allows union membership).

When looking at the history of inventions, art and ideas, France arguably did much more than the USA, even in recent times. Accusations that are too off base, smack of racism. They are the last thing the USA needs right now. They provide a bigger serving of hubris, while taxing Obama of being French is a complete disjunction from reality. If anything, the USA is suffering from too many decades of following the path that France refused to take. In the present crisis, French methods offer the only hope. They are ineluctable. Bashing them is losing time by bashing the solutions.

Obama is so completely American, it’s not even funny. Obama uses several mental methods that thrive in the USA, but that Europeans know to lead to aggressive nationalism and war. Obama is affected by exaggerated claims of American unicity, a form of nationalism that has blinded the USA in recent decades.

Obama goes around saying that “only in the USA is my story possible”. That is literally true, but only in the sense that only in the USA there was pathological racism based on an obsession with skin color. Even the Greco-Romans would have been shocked. A little while ago, Obama, because of his brown skin, would have been a slave or a janitor. But he is president. It is not because suddenly the USA is out of its racist delirium, that the USA has invented antiracism. The Roman empire had Hispanic, Gallic, Kosovar, African, and Arab emperors. The empress of the Franks who outlawed slavery was English born and raised. Great Britain and France long ago already had Jews leading their governments and/or states (Disraeli, Mac Mahon, Blum). The present French president is the son of a foreigner.

Obama claimed many times that “the USA invented the Internet” (physicists at CERN in Geneva have a different idea). Obama also claimed that “the USA invented the automobile”. As someone who has long known him quipped: “that’s why it has a French name”.

Let’s stop for a moment here. There is an important point here. It has a French name, therefore, the USA invented it. The point is that Americans are trained not to think. They are trained to not exert any critical sense. Hence the claim that the USA is “the country of freedom”, as if there were no others. Never mind that the motto of 1954 talks only of “God” and “Trust”.

This is neo-American logic: I don’t think, therefore I am. Saddam killed his own people, as Bush loved to say, therefore I kill Iraqis too. Now Obama sends 17,000 soldiers to kill and get killed in Afghanistan, without a plan, he admits. But Bush wanted to send twice more, so Obama’s decision of sending half of what Bush wanted is “bipartisan”: half and half. American logic in wonderland, very neo-American.

In truth the first automobile was by Cugnot, a Frenchman, in 1769, as recognized by everybody, including the British Automobile Association. These first automobiles were steam powered. The internal combustion engine was invented by a Swiss around 1800, and ran on hydrogen (!). A whole slew of European inventors perfected it during the nineteenth century. The first car manufacturers in the world were French: Panhard & Levassor (1889) and Peugeot (1891). But lying about technology make the USA feel good about itself, it creates a sense of national unity. Example of an oft told lie: “the USA invented the transistor (1948)”. In truth Germans had invented the first transistors (using Germanium as semi conductor), 15 years earlier.
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PRAGMATISM AND CONSERVATISM ARE ADVERSE TO VISION AND IMAGINATION:
In general the most fundamental science and technology has been invented in Europe, not in the USA. The USA has not produced thinkers of the caliber of Lamarck, Gauss, Hugo, Faraday, Maxwell, Riemann, Darwin, Nietzsche, Einstein, Poincare’, Planck, Boltzman, Hilbert, Bohr, Godel, De Broglie, Dirac, etc. And I am not listing all the French philosophers, nor the numerous less well known European mathematicians and thinkers that played a prominent role. (A lot of the work of Einstein on the Brownian motion, Relativity and the Photoelectric effect depended upon Dutch, British, German, Italian and French predecessors, or helpers not listed here; none of them, though, was American, although America had already a larger population than France.) None of the primary thinkers of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century is American born, and very few Americans are among the secondary thinkers (James and Gibbs come to mind). 

Civilizational class thinking does not blossom in the USA. Civilizational thinking grows out of an appreciation for vision, and what is grand. It grows out of the seduction of revolution. It does not grow from an obsession with peer pressure, money, jobs, and conforming in all ways to what the plutocracy demands.

When one looks at the present USA financial crisis, the greatest heist the world has ever known, one is struck by how far from France the USA has become. Long gone are the times when American revolutionaries would be taught the Enlightenment in Paris (although forced to free their slaves when in Paris, they went back to the USA to create the first official slave state in the West in more than a millennium).

The incapacity of “We The People of the USA” to stop the non sense, while patriotically sending ever more money to those who stole all the money, provokes one to change the meaning of the USA acronym from United States of America into “United Stupid of America”.

France was shaken in recent months by a few enormous warning strikes, putting the government on notice that it better improve the condition of the people soon, American crisis or no American crisis. After 44 days of total strike, the strikers that totally immobilized the big island of Guadeloupe got what they wanted; a boost of 200 Euros monthly to the lowest salaries. The Federal government promised to work hard to make life less expensive in the future, by breaking the predatory grasp of the local wealthy hereditary businessmen. In France the lowest hourly salary is already much higher than in the USA, and education and health care are free.  Ongoing strikes in the islands of Martinique and Reunion will have the same conclusion (because the French Federal government will force the local businessmen to bend). 
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TOO BUSY JOKING:
But why did Obama not nationalize the banks, and why does he prefer to destroy the world economy instead? There again, Obama came up with that very American tendency of making fun at the expense of foreigners. Asked why he did not nationalize the banks, he replied: “Sweden had like five banks”, and he laughed. First, of course, it’s false, it’s a lie meant to create a diversion, sugar coated with a joke: “five banks, ha ha ha”. Foreigners living in the USA are often submitted to this sort of demeaning jokes. They happen when American racism is relaxing, and in need of a diversion. French culture is reduced to wine and cheese. Never mind that the Manhattan project, the construction of nuclear bombs to use against the Nazis, was started in France in January 1938. (It became the “Manhattan” project after the program’s principals fled England, lest it fell to the Nazis, as France just did.) 

In truth, Scandinavia had hundreds of banks, and Nordic politicians did not make stupid jokes at the expense of foreigners. Instead they looked around soberly, and went to work. They looked at what the conservative USA had just done with the Resolution Trust Corporation, under Reagan and Bush Senior, quickly nationalizing 747 banks. They had the solution, and they implemented it. Scandinavia was out of the crisis in two years.

The USA presently has four bank holding companies that are in huge trouble and, together, they make two-thirds of the USA banking market. Thus the USA has four banks, ha ha ha. Never make a joke you will not be the butt of. Sweden is not a plutocracy, the USA is. It is to please the people who have plotted with these four bank holding companies, that Summers is destroying the world economy. Many of the banks and insurance companies’ counterparts and creditors are the richest people in the world. Summers owns a mansion, but Secretary of the Treasury Paulson owns an island. Imagine the strikes in France if those gentlemen tried to rule there!
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FRANCE AS THE GREAT SATAN:
The immensely catastrophic socioeconomic system that is devouring the USA needs no encouragement. The usual trick of the US plutocracy is to claim that France is a disaster for creativity, riches, employment, wealth, and, now, “possibility”!

After that has been established by repeating it enough on all the media of the USA, the servants of the plutocracy then claim that any socioeconomic progress in the USA smacks of France, thus is dangerous and unpatriotic. What is the truth?

In truth, France has mostly recovered from the three enormous wars against fascism that she underwent, on her own territory (1870-1945). She has now been reunited with the land to the east that had been ravaged by the same fascism. For half a millennium, France and Germany were part of the same polity, which dissolved because nobody thought that dissolution could have adverse consequences. Well, it did, and it is over. Europeans are reuniting, not by looking at their neighbors with hostility, and making demeaning jokes about them, but by learning from them. (For example, all European states are enthusiastic about how the extreme welfare state of Denmark has combined extreme free market with extremely low unemployment, and much larger states are trying to duplicate that; instead of joking malevolently that Denmark has only five banks. Which it does not.) 

France is richer per capita ($48,000 per capita, latest numbers, 2008), has better health care, better high technology in roughly all dimensions, has higher productivity per hour, better worker protection, three years of family leave (!) and much longer vacations than the USA. Any claim that French unemployment is higher is mathematically inconsistent with these facts (besides French citizens do not need miserable employment to get health care, and miserable employment, a form of slavery, is unlawful anyway).

What the USA has that France does not have, is the wealthiest class in power, having reduced the middle class to crumbs. To bash foreigners to justify the increasing backwardness of the USA is getting a bit old. The fact that Obama engages in this dark art will not be conducive to constructive problem solving, looking forward.
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Patrice Ayme
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/