This is a great post by Juan Cole. The piece so definitively explains the situation in France that I am reproducing the entire post on my own blog. The hard-link at juancole.com is here.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005
-- by Juan Cole

The Problem with Frenchness

Readers have asked me for comment about the riots in France that have now provoked emergency laws and a curfew. What I would rather comment on, however, is the myths that have governed many rightwing American comments on the tragic events. Actually, I can only think that the disturbances must produce a huge ice cream headache for the dittoheads. French of European heritage pitted against French of African and North African heritage? How could they ever pick a side?

I should begin by saying how much these events sadden me and fill me with anguish. I grew up in part in France (7 years of my childhood in two different periods) and have long been in love with the place, and the people. We visited this past June for a magical week. And, of course, I've been to Morocco and Tunisia and Senegal, and so have a sense of the other side in all this; I rather like all those places, too. How sad, to see all this violence and rancor. I hope Paris and France more generally can get through these tough times and begin working on the underlying problems soon. At this time of a crisis in globalization in the wake of the Cold War, we need Paris to be a dynamic exemplar of problem-solving on this front.

The French have determinedly avoided multiculturalism or affirmative action. They have insisted that everyone is French together and on a "color-blind" set of policies. "Color-blind" policies based on "merit" always seem to benefit some groups more than others, despite a rhetoric of equality and achievement. In order to resolve the problems they face, the French will have to come to terms with the multi-cultural character of contemporary society. And they will have to find ways of actively sharing jobs with minority populations, who often suffer from an unemployment rate as high as 40 percent (i.e. Iraq).

Mark Steyn of the Chicago Sun-Times commits most of the gross errors, factual and ethical, that characterize the discourse of the Right in the US on such matters.

For instance, Steyn complains that the rioters have been referred to as "French youths."

''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.

This paragraph is the biggest load of manure to hit the print media since Michael Brown (later of FEMA) and his Arabian Horse Society were profiled in Arabian Horse Times.

The French youth who are burning automobiles are as French as Jennifer Lopez and Christopher Walken are American. Perhaps the Steyns came before the Revolutionary War, but a very large number of us have not. The US brings 10 million immigrants every decade and one in 10 Americans is now foreign-born. Their children, born and bred here, have never known another home. All US citizens are Americans, including the present governor of California. "The immigrant" is always a political category. Proud Californio families (think "Zorro") who can trace themselves back to the 18th century Spanish empire in California are often coded as "Mexican immigrants" by "white" Californians whose parents were Okies.

A lot of the persons living in the urban outer cities (a better translation of cite than "suburb") are from subsaharan Africa. And there are lots of Eastern European immigrants. The riots were sparked by the deaths of African youths, not Muslims. Singling out the persons of Muslim heritage is just a form of bigotry. Moreover, French youth of European heritage rioted quite extensively in 1968. As they had in 1789. Rioting in the streets is not a foreign custom. It has a French genealogy and context.

The young people from North African societies such as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are mostly only nominal Muslims. They frequently do not speak much Arabic, and don't have "proper" French, either. They frequently do not know much about Islam and most of them certainly don't practice it-- much less being more virulent about it than Middle Easterners.

Aware of their in-between-ness, young persons of North African heritage in France developed a distinctive identity. They took the word Arabe and scrambled it to produce Beur (which sounds in French like the word for "butter"). Beur culture can be compared a bit to hip-hop as a form of urban expression of marginality and self-assertion in a racist society. It is mostly secular.

Another thing that is wrong with Steyn's execrable paragraph is that it assumes an echt "Frenchness" that is startling in a post-Holocaust thinker. There are no pure "nations" folks. I mean, first of all, what is now France had a lot of different populations in it even in the 18th century-- Bretons (Gaelic speakers), Basques, Alsatians (German speakers), Provencale people in the south, Jews, etc., etc. "Multi-culturalism" is not something new in Europe. What was new was the Romantic nationalist conviction that there are "pure" "nations" based on "blood." It was among the more monstrous mistakes in history. Of course if, according to this essentially racist way of thinking, there are "pure" nations that have Gypsies, Jews and others living among them, then the others might have to be "cleansed" to restore the "purity."

Yet another problem: France has for some time been a capitalist country with a relatively strong economy. Such economies attract workers. There have been massive labor immigration flows into France all along. In the early 20th century Poles came to work in the coal mines, and then more came in the inter- war period. By the beginning of the Great Depression, there were half a million Polish immigrants in France. Their numbers declined slightly in the next few years. There were even more Italians. There isn't anything peculiar about having large numbers of immigrants who came for work. And, few in France in the early 20th century thought that Poles were susceptible of integration into French society. Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, who has made himself unpopular by exacerbating tensions with intemperate language, is the son of immigrants (I guess he does not count as "French" according to Steyn's criteria.)

Steyn wants to create a 1300-year struggle between Catholic France and the Muslims going back to Tours. This way of thinking is downright silly. France in the 19th century was a notorious ally of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and fought alongside Muslims against the Christian Russians in the Crimean War. Among contemporary French, 40 percent do not even believe in God, and less than 20 percent go to mass at all regularly. Many of the French of non-European heritage are also not religious.

The French repaid the compliment of Tours by conquering much of the Middle East. Bonaparte aggressively and viciously invaded Egypt in 1798, but couldn't hold on there. But in 1830 the French invaded Algeria and incorporated it into France. Algeria was "French soil." They reduced the Algerian population (which they brutalized and exploited) to marginal people under the colonial thumb. The French government of Algeria allowed hundreds of thousands to perish of famine in the 1870s. After World War II, given low French birth rates and a dynamic capitalist economy, the French began importing Algerian menial labor. The resulting Beurs are no more incapable of "integrating" into France than the Poles or Jews were.

So it wasn't the Algerians who came and got France. France had come and gotten the Algerians, beginning with Charles X and then the July Monarchy. They settled a million rather rowdy French, Italians and Maltese in Algeria. These persons rioted a lot in the early 1960s as it became apparent that Algeria would get its independence (1962). In fact, European settler colonists or "immigrants" have caused far more trouble in the Middle East than vice versa.

The kind of riots we are seeing in France also have occurred in US cities (they sent Detroit into a tailspin from 1967). They are always produced by racial segregation, racist discrimination, spectacular unemployment, and lack of access to the mainstream economy. The problems were broached by award-winning French author Tahar Ben Jalloun in his French Hospitality decades ago.

(Americans who code themselves as "white" are often surprised to discover that "white people" created the inner cities here by zoning them for settlement by racial "minorities," excluding the minorities from the nicer parts of the cities and from suburbs. As late as the 1960s, many European-Americans were willing to sign a "covenant" not to sell their houses to an African-American, Chinese-American or a Jewish American. In fact, in the US, the suburbs were built, most often with de facto government subsidies in the form of highways and other perquisites, as an explicit means of racial segregation. Spatial segregation protected "white" businesses from competition from minority entrepreneurs, who couldn't open shops outside their ghettos. In France, government inputs were used to create "outer cities," but many of the same forces were at work.) The French do not have Jim Crow laws, but de facto residential segregation is a widespread and intractable problem.

The problem is economic and having to do with economic and residential exclusionism, not with an "unassimilable" "immigrant" minority. (The French authorites deported a lot of Poles in the 1930s for making trouble by trying to unionize and strike, on the grounds that they were an unassimilable Slavic minority.)

On the other hand, would it be possible for the French Muslim youth to be pushed toward religious extremism if the French government does not address the underlying problems. Sure. That was what I was alluding to in my posting last week.

The solution? Recognizing that "Frenchness" is not monochrome, that France is a tapestry of cultures and always has been, and that sometimes some threads of the tapestry need some extra attention if it is not to fray and come apart.

I listen to the radio. I learn that I am holding back my money- making potential and should spend thirty-nine ninety-nine to release my subconscious fears that cause me to make less money. I discover that I have nagging fears about paying my five monthly bills, and should consider getting advice from the experts -- for only nine ninety-nine a month, and that's just pennies a day mind you. I'm not yet good enough, I don't look right, I'm not doing something correctly, but sure enough, for only a small fee, I'll get to be perfect and dandy.

When the courtesy calls come, I hang up the phone. When I get the endless mail concerning pre-approved debt, I toss the letters in the nearby trash can. Sometimes I'll talk to the Indian telephone worker calling from Bank of America to sell me Life Insurance, but only to ascertain from where on the global map the call is coming. I am 36 years old, and have no children or wife. Giving the bank more of my money so they can use it to play with securities and bonds is ridiculous. The only difference between Insurance and Ponzi schemes, is the size of the fund. They use your money to invest and play the stock market, with the understanding that the percentage of claims will always be less than the initial funds growth potential. However, the institutions often separate collection (sales) from investment (profit) to the extent that there is little communication between the 2 operations. And that is why insurance rates have skyrocketed over the last 4 years. We are paying higher premiums for their foolish stock-market escapades.

So when I discover via television advertising that Mr. Greybeard won't get the hottie, or, if the sexy momma likes me only when I use Gilette, you can still betcha I am not moving a millimeter at all to the nearby store. Nope, not at all. I know I'm missing out on all of what each and every one of the rehearsed roles say, but alas, I guess I'm just gonna buck the TV crowd nevertheless. I admit, I've always been a god damn independent, but what these people do is much worse -- they guilt trip you when you don't act like them. Or they try to. As far as I'm concerned, you can just be you, that's good enough for me.

Are these people really paid well to push this pap psyco-babble?

"To measure the vitality of a town, don't look for corporate logos but for signs that the community has some semblance of a soul."

Jim Hightower, 4 November 2005

In other words, the town center is more vibrant without a McDonalds, Starbucks, and B Dalton Bookstore located where a small local business used to be. In the name of progress called corporate profit extraction we have torn the heart of living out of our chest, so that we can receive the advertized version.

When big business replaces small business, lots of middle men get cut out because the market operations and the local business spending shrinks, and becomes reallocated. The above businesses have their own warehouses and financial centers far removed from the thousands (millions even) of retail stores and their locales. Decisions are made by persons who will never meet the people affected by those decisions, and so those persons do not at all weigh upon the factors which go into the decisions. Indeed, the sole weight becomes pure financial gain.

So when Starbucks goes into a new market and buys up the surrounding property, they are doing so to control the competition. When McDonalds sponsors and supports the unhealthy raising of cattle and the bad agricultural practices which enable its world-wide array of supplies, they do so because they want to experience economies of scale. Local businesses sponsor local sources of supply, which is where the restaurants of San Francisco obtain their grass-fed beef. For small proprietors , the demand for economies of scale are not possible at the magnitude of large corporations because they do not have the market power to force or create suppliers that cut costs at the expense of health or quality.

Personally I think no retail or food business should be allowed to cross state lines, and I also think limitations should be placed on how many businesses any one controling group can own. Right now we are just creating an aristocracy, and a polity which is merely the well-funded propaganda arm of the rising aristocracy.

I really liked this exchange, and thought I'd share it with everyone.

Juvi raised his beer. “I hear you, dog.” He then added sincerely, “But I grew up in that park, man. It was hard to see it go. And now ... and now there ain’t nowhere for the young brothers to go hang out except on street corners and in automobiles. I mean shit. It never was about jobs. It was always about ownership. You know they talk about everyone being able to buy a piece of the corporate ownership, but fuck man, I got maybe 10 or 20 grand surplus cash in any given year, hows am I supposed tuh compete with mother fuckers who gots 10 to 100 millions extra in the bank? Sooner or later the little people get priced outta da market and the rich people own everything. Then they start pushing judges and politicians on us, trying to convince everyone that their self-serving philosophy is beneficial. That’s all corporations do for America.”

“Put a man in a strait-jacket”, Jim began, his beer grasped firmly in his right hand, “ and call the few who escape entrepreneurs or men of genius. Everyone else is a loser, but at least the strait-jacket makers come out with a lotta money.”

The men laughed.

Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr.

I got this from Atrios, who quotes from a Boston Globe article here.

Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. ruled in a 2002 case in favor of the Vanguard mutual fund company at a time when he owned more than $390,000 in Vanguard funds and later complained about an effort to remove him from the case, court records show -- despite an earlier promise to recuse himself from cases involving the company.

The case involved a Massachusetts woman, Shantee Maharaj, who has spent nearly a decade fighting to win back the assets of her late husband's individual retirement accounts, which had been frozen by Vanguard after a court judgment in favor of a former business partner of her husband.

Her lawyer, John G. S. Flym, a retired Northeastern law professor, said in an interview yesterday that Alito's ''lack of integrity is so flagrant" in the case that he should be disqualified as a Supreme Court nominee.

Maharaj, 50, discovered Alito's ownership of Vanguard shares in 2002 when she requested his financial disclosure forms after he ruled against her appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

...

In 1990, when Alito was seeking US Senate approval for his nomination to be a circuit judge, he said in written answers to a questionnaire that he would disqualify himself from ''any cases involving the Vanguard companies."

...

According to a 2002 court filing submitted by Flym alleging the conflict of interest, ''Alito owned shares worth $390,000 to $975,000 in seventeen Vanguard funds."

Surrounded by piles of legal documents at her temporary home yesterday, Maharaj held up one of the briefs in the case submitted to the Third Circuit and pointed to the listed parties, which included The Vanguard Group Inc., Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Company, and Vanguard/Morgan Growth Fund Inc.

''How could [Alito] not have known Vanguard was a defendant?" she asked. ''He had to have."

It appears that Judge Alito is more "in the mold of Justice Scalia" every day. How could anyone have any doubts? Of course this judge's perspective is tainted with his own fudiciary interest, as well as his own position in the same society over which he finds himself presiding. In the Globe article, Alioto says that he is only "an investor" not an owner, apparently oblivious of his ownership of contractual rights to profit disbursement -- ie. financial gain.

It is infuriating to me, how anyone can say otherwise with a straight-face. Owners might be the big bosses, they might work at the company everyday and know the employees; but how many mom & pop self-proprietor's do people invest their money? Investors put their funds in the stocks and bonds of the financial system and corporation assets. In the narrowest sense, investors want to make a high percentage per year on their initial purchase of dividend- bearing paper. Judicial decisions that cost their investments money directly affect them financially when the corporation has to decrease the dividends.

Antonin Scalia, chief Justice of the Supreme court, went on a duck-hunting expedition with Vice President Dick Cheney weeks before a case involving documents from Cheney's 2001 Energy commmission was to come before the Supreme Court. Judicial Watch sued for those documents and was able to get some of them before a judge issued an injunction and the legal case took the path upon the 2004 Supreme Court case.

One of the documents obtained was a map of all the Iraqi oil fields marked over with 11 oil companies. What was Cheney doing in April of 2001 with all of the large energy companies? Planning for the California Energy Holdup to make a few bucks for his Enron buddies, AND preparing for the Iraq carve-up they were also planning. They knew Al Quada would soon make a terrorist attack, and they were anticipating with salivation how they could best manipulate the event for their own ends.

Yes that's what kind of men we have in the Adminstration. I admit this is rather harsh, but it is also the truth. They said so much themselves in 1997 when they signed a document which laid out their plans to invade the middle east.

This was the same court that cast the deciding vote to enable Bush into office in the first place, despite all of the many shenanegans during the recount process, and the felony lists that disenfranchised 90,000 people, most of which were not even felons because the Republican company (Choicepoint-DBA) that collected the lists were apparently very sloppy. Mind you that all of this occurred in brother Jeb Bush's state of Florida. Kenny Lay's Enron jets flew Congressional staffers to West Palm Beach to scream up a fake popular protest and slow down Democracy when the law was being followed and the votes were being counted. Meanwhile recently appointed new Supreme Court Justice John Roberts was at the time providing the guidelines and legal planning for the Bush team. I'm sure his legal advice was ... non-partisan and unbiased.

The counting of those votes were all ordered stopped by an unprecedented injunction from the Supreme court. The reasoning laid out in the decision was that it would have unnecessarily disrupted the nation, the people's will be damned.

Can you say Dred Scott? The court could have just as easily ruled that the votes of all Florida be counted, or the court could have voted in favor of democracy. The American people could have waited another 2 weeks so long as the process was fair, and without the legal manuevering and political posturing that occurred by the Bush administration. Bush was already making a pompous show about picking and selecting his cabinet within 3 days of the election. Instead of working out a way to follow Florida Law and count the votes without disarray, the Bush people sued to have the counting of the votes stopped. They would have almost had the Florida State Legislature vote for new electors that would have nullified the counting had not the Supreme Court stepped in with the historic injunction.

The supreme court could have decided and could have made any different amount of decisions based upon many different precidents. The sanctity of the vote could have been upheld. It's not hard to count votes really. The myth about the hanging chads has belittled the history of counting ballots, and ignored the long struggle of Americans to make democracy real. The constitution did not guaranteed the right of all persons to vote. Voting is a legal province of the States, and was only gradually Federalized over the last 200 years, with the civil rights struggles of the 50's and 60's representing the latest in a long struggle over equal rights and representative government. I believe election 2000 was the watershed of a new struggle.

It's called a Coup D'Etat. They stole the election and now they are destroying the nation.

We can't expect them to nominate anyone but people like themselves to the Supreme Court.

I really am a leader. I am . I am.

Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.

"The United States Senate has been hijacked by the Democratic leadership. They have no convictions, they have no principles, they have no ideas."

What a way to complain that Senator Harry Reid motioned to convene a Senate meeting behind closed doors to investigate how the Congress and nation was lied to about the war. I suppose the principle of the truth, and a conviction about ideas concerning good government are alien notions in the addled brain of Senator Frist.

What exactly are your own principles and convictions, Mr. Frist? To attempt to politicize the death of a clinically diagnosed brain dead women. To add rider bills and admendments to non-discretionary bills that favor the corporate lobbyist groups that fund your political campaigns. To sell stock based upon insider information in order to spare your own ass. To profit off of sick people by buying up non-profit hospitals, gutting the staff and the budget at the expense of the rising costs of health care.

Most people don't get their mendacity spewed on the front page like you do, Senator Frist, and none have aided and abetted greater corruption and decay than yourself. Indeed only a pompous ass would presume his lies could spare him from the inevitable truth. You must think Americans are god damn idiots because you can't look at that man in the mirror, so you describe him to us every time you smear and denounce "the opposition."

There is no opposition. That is merely an illusion of our own fears. No one really competes either, but instead, we try to take control over others if not ourselves by "defeating" them. These are but symptoms of a sick mind riddled with mental disease.

I sense a collective purging of the veins, much like the medieval doctors would bleed their patients -- to rid them of the evil spirits who were said to lurk in the blood.

I thought this was cool.

"Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts."

-- Salman Rushdie

It wasn't because of her legal prowess or attention to detail.

From the LA Times

At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued for violating the Voting Rights Act, she said, the council "had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection clause."

But the Supreme Court repeatedly has said that the Constitution's guarantee of the "equal protection of the laws" does not mean that city councils or state legislatures must have enough minority members to match the proportion of blacks, Hispanics and Asians in the voting population.

....Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan...said she was surprised the White House did not check Miers' questionnaire before sending it to the Senate.

"Are they trying to set her up? Any halfway competent junior lawyer could have checked the questionnaire and said it cannot go out like that. I find it shocking," she said.

Could it be related to when she was appointed head of the State Lottery Commission ... ?

Here's how Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, on July 17, 2000 !!!, described her initial foray in the morass of Bush's Guard service: [SOURCE: Philadelphia Daily News]

The Bushies' concern began while he was running for a second term as governor. A hard-nosed Dallas lawyer named Harriet Miers was retained to investigate the issue; state records show Miers was paid $19,000 by the Bush gubernatorial campaign.

She and other aides quickly identified a problem--rumors that Bush had help from his father in getting into the National Guard back in 1968. Ben Barnes, a prominent Texas Democrat and a former speaker of the House in the state legislature, told friends he used his influence to get George W a guard slot after receiving a request from Houston oilman Sid Adger. Barnes said Adger told him he was calling on behalf of the elder George Bush, then a Texas congressman.

Both Bushes deny seeking any help from Barnes or Adger, who has since passed away. Concerned that Barnes might go public with his allegations, the Bush campaign sent Don Evans, a friend of W's, to hear Barnes's story. Barnes acknowledged that he hadn't actually spoken directly to Bush Sr. and had no documents to back up his story. As the Bush campaign saw it, that let both Bushes off the hook. And the National Guard question seemed under control.

So far, intriguing...but it gets better, and more complicated. At roughly the same time all of this was happening, Miers was also the Bush-named chair of the scandal-plagued Texas Lottery Commission. The biggest issue before Miers and the commission was whether to retain lottery operator Gtech, which had been implicated in a bribery scandal. Gtech's main lobbyist in Texas in the mid- 1990s? None other than that same Ben Barnes who had the goods on how Bush got into the Guard and avoided Vietnam.

In 1997, Barnes was abruptly fired by Gtech. That's a bad thing, right? Well, on the other hand, they also gave him a $23 million severance payment. A short time later, Gtech -- despite the ongoing scandals -- got its contract renewed over two lower bidders. A former executive director thought the whole thing stunk:

The suit involving Barnes was brought by former Texas lottery director Lawrence Littwin, who was fired by the state lottery commission, headed by Bush appointee Harriet Miers, in October 1997 after five months on the job. It contends that Gtech Corp., which runs the state lottery and until February 1997 employed Barnes as a lobbyist for more than $3 million a year, was responsible for Littwin's dismissal.

Littwin's lawyers have suggested in court filings that Gtech was allowed to keep the lottery contract, which Littwin wanted to open up to competitive bidding, in return for Barnes's silence about Bush's entry into the Guard.

Barnes and his lawyers have denounced this "favor-repaid" theory in court pleadings as "preposterous . . . fantastic [and] fanciful." Littwin was fired after ordering a review of the campaign finance reports of various Texas politicians for any links to Gtech or other lottery contractors. But Littwin wasn't hired, or fired, until months after Barnes had severed his relationship with Gtech.

Littwin reportedly settled with Gtech for $300,000.

Hmm, maybe it's just that Miss Miers is the perfect corporate lawyer, someone who knows who to keep her mouth shut.

These storys come from the Kansas City Star and the Austin American Statesman, but I am quoting from David Sirota. [SOURCE]

With Miers serving as managing partner of the law firm Locke Liddell & Sapp, the firm "helped accounting firm Ernst & Young LLP sell a sham tax shelter" by advising investors that they "'should' be able to beat the Internal Revenue Service in court." Miers' firm "appears to have made $3.5 million on 70 such deals" which a Senate report called called "potentially abusive or illegal."

As I wrote about earlier, under Miers' leadership, Locke Liddell & Sapp was forced to repeatedly pay damages for "defrauding investors" and was building a specialty practice in union busting.

Miers was a Managing Partner at Locke Liddell & Sapp, and should have been at least aware of these illegal practices. They aren't isolated incidents either, and show a pattern consistent with possible intentional practice.

Unless of course, she was made a Managing Partner precisely because she would "not" pay attention to details.

George W. had the same problem in the 1980's when he sat on the corporate board of Harken Energy while the company was selling $10 billion in debts to a faked corporation of insiders so they could make the debt look like a sale. This is also similar to the government contracts Halliburton got while Cheney was the CEO.

Simply put, they know she is corruptible. That's why she was nominated.