France: rage of the poor

Simon Assaf reports from Paris as days of rioting have engulfed French cities.
The slums of France have risen in revolt.

Young people have burned cars, and attacked police and government buildings. Their rebellion has engulfed towns and cities from the Mediterranean coast to the German border—and now threatens the survival of the government.
Night after night, rioters have confronted the forces of law and order in what the French police have labelled a “civil war”. The chief of police has even called for the army to intervene.
The right wing minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, who has made no secret of his presidential ambitions, has staked his political career on taming the riots. His failure to rapidly quell the violence has led to growing pressure for him to resign.
The rebellion began on Saturday 26 October. Two teenagers in the Parisian banlieue (suburb) of Clichy-sous-Bois were electrocuted when they tried to hide from police in a power substation.
Their deaths sparked off a night of rioting. On Sunday the CRS riot police flooded the area and fired tear gas into a mosque causing panic among Muslim worshippers celebrating the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
The CRS attack unleashed years of pent-up anger.
In Clichy-sous-Bois and the neighbouring banlieue of Aulnay-sous-Bois the whole community rebelled.
Hanane is a young Muslim woman from Seine-Saint-Denis, which includes the sink estates of Clichy and Aulnay.
“Before, if a young man was picked up by the police, his parents would say, ‘You must have done something,’ or ‘It’s your fault for hanging around the streets at night.’ But now parents are telling their sons ‘Get into the streets and defend our neighbourhood’,” she said.

Poverty
While the media and the politicians are blaming “vandals” for the riots, Hanane says on the first day of the riots in Clichy-sous-Bois the whole community was behind the youths. “During the height of the riot both old and young were leaning over their balconies pelting the police with anything to hand.”
The banlieues of Seine-Saint-Denis have come to represent the belts of misery and grinding poverty that exist on the edges of many towns and cities across France.
In some areas of Clichy-sous-Bois half the population are unemployed. This is an area with no station, by-passed by all the major roads and bus routes through Paris.
Antoine is a teacher who has worked in the run-down schools of Seine-Saint-Denis for seven years. “The sons and daughters of Arab and African immigrants face terrible discrimination,” he said. “Often their CVs would be set aside simply because of their names.
“This racism has bred despair and these youngsters find it difficult to find a route out of poverty.
“Meanwhile they face daily harassment by the police, especially from the anti-criminal brigade, or Bac, plainclothes policemen who rule the banlieues like an army of occupation.”
“The Bac are like cowboys,” said Hanane. “They are the hotheads of the police. They hang around the entrances to tower blocks harassing any youth they see. They are cruel and violent.
“They stop you and ask for your ID papers. If you say anything you get a slap in the mouth. If you resist you get a beating and end up in jail. One lad I know was stopped ten times in one day by the same policemen.
“They knew who he was and they knew he had done nothing but they just provoked him then they pounced on him. This is not an isolated experience. This is unfortunately the daily reality for many people.”
Through the first week of November the government’s response to the troubles was mass arrests and increased repression.
Over 1,000 CRS riot police descended on Seine-Saint-Denis in a massive act of intimidation, but the focus shifted to other towns and cities.
Over the following ten days riots spread to Marseille, Lille, Dijon, and Saint-Etienne. Even the resorts of Nice and Cannes were touched by the revolt.
The increased repression has fuelled deep mistrust and anger among the peoples in the banlieues, Hanane said. “The Bac act with impunity, they know that if they shoot you nothing will happen to them.
“It is for this reason that the two young lads tried to hide in an electricity substation—they were terrified of the police.”
The nightly rioting has almost become a personal battle between Sarkozy and the young “casseurs”, or vandals, as they are known. “This scum,” Sarkozy declared in one of his provocative visits to a banlieue last week, “will be washed off the streets.”
For the youth, the tally of cars torched or buildings attacked has become an affirmation that Sarkozy and the police no longer control their estates.
“But the young are fighting on their own doorstep,” warned Hanane. “The political parties have abandoned them. It is easy to say that these lads are simply destroying their communities, and although I think it is wrong just to torch cars, no one is providing them with an alternative.”
Hanane said that the “community leaders” have no solution to the despair.
“Now the rebellion is not just against the police, but also against the elders in the community, whose only answer is to invite the chief of police and right wing politicians for ‘dialogue’. But it is these people who are behind the racism. Why are we having a dialogue with them?”

Immigrants
She added that Sarkozy was appealing to supporters of the fascist Front National in his bid to win the 2007 presidential election, and that he was sending the Bac, the “political children” of Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, onto her estate.
Aziz al-Jawari runs the Tawhid cultural centre in Seine-Saint-Denis. He dismissed out of hand any suggestion that the young rioters were driven by fundamentalist ideas, a frequent accusation in the media.
“They say we are trying to build an ‘alternative France’, and the banlieues have become hotbeds of Islamic radicalism,” he said.
“They say the Arab youth are under the control of ‘foreign forces’. Their logic runs: ‘Islam means terrorism, so all Muslims are terrorists.’
“The young are not rioting because they are immigrants, or because of Palestine, the war on Iraq or even Islam. They are rioting because they are French.
“Their parents may have been immigrants who came to live in a new country.
“They expected little and received even less. But this generation were born here and went to school here. French is their mother tongue.
“They are angry because even though they are French, they are treated as second class citizens.”
“We don’t live in the banlieues out of choice,” said Hanane. “Our parents did not come here and say, ‘We want to be poor and live in ghettos.’ We are forced into these areas by the deep racism in French society.
“I don’t travel into the centre of Paris because I wear a veil and I’m sick of the dirty looks I get. There is an unofficial curfew for young blacks and Arabs.
“If they are caught in the centre at night they will be get trouble from the police. So we have no choice, we have to stay in our areas.
“It is the racists who want a divided France, not the immigrants or the children of immigrants.
“No matter how many generations have lived here, we cannot change the colour of our skin. We cannot become white, so for them we will never be acceptable.”

Article published in Socialist Worker (GB):
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=7742

Leslie Cagan - Remembering Rosa Parks

I woke up this morning to the news that Rosa Parks had died yesterday. She had lived a long, full life and had contributed to the struggle for human dignity, for freedom and justice more than most of us can even imagine doing. Nearly 50 years ago she took one seemingly small step that set off a campaign that shook the south and sent repercussions throughout the nation and around the world. Her refusal to go to the back of the bus was not, as some would tell the tale, because she was physically tired. No, on that day in Montgomery, Alabama Rosa Parks took an action that reflected just how sick and tired she and a whole generation was of being treated like second class citizens.

When Rosa Parks sat in the front of that segregated bus, refusing to give up her seat for a white man, she sent a clear statement about the power of one, the importance of individual action. But her action grew out of a social context and an emerging movement. Right from the beginning, her action was part of something bigger than herself, and the strength of her seemingly singular action was that it was tied to a community and part of a movement. When we recall the bravery of this one woman we must also remember the power of collective action.

Today, I came to work thinking about Rosa Parks and how much we owe her. It is profoundly true that we stand on the shoulders of those who struggled before us, those who chartered new paths and opened up new opportunities.

By the time I was at my desk, I knew it would be impossible to stay with Rosa Parks today. Instead, my attention was quickly moving to the almost surreal death count...would today be the day that we heard of the 2,000 death of a U.S. serviceperson in Iraq? Would today be the day we needed to put out our call and urge tens of thousands of people in every corner of the country to make their opposition to this horrible war as vocal and visible as possible? And yes, by early afternoon the news came through. This war that never should have happened, this war based on lies, this war that has already taken thousands of innocent Iraqi lives - perhaps more than 100,000 lives - is raging every single day.

Today the news came about the 2,000th U.S. serviceperson. It is strange to use this as a marker and not, at first, even know the person's name. And no, of course, their life was no more important or precious than the previous 1,999 people from this country who have died, nor more important or precious than any of the Iraqis who have been killed in the daily carnage brought by our government to their nation. And yet it makes sense to mark this date, this death. It makes sense to use it (if I might even think in those terms) as a rallying cry, as a moment to mobilize people. The reality is stark and we simply must use every tool we have available if we are going to become a force that is actually strong enough to stop this war.

All of this - Rosa Parks, the 2000th U.S. death - on the very same day that also happens to be the third anniversary of the founding of United for Peace and Justice. Just 3 years ago about a dozen of us convened a meeting with representatives of 55 organizations to see if it made sense to form a new coalition that would hopefully tap into the antiwar sentiment already expressing itself throughout the country, and a coalition that would offer a vehicle for many groups to work cooperatively and thereby strengthen all of our efforts.

On October 25, 2002 we did not know if this new coalition would work: would other groups join us, would we be able to make a meaningful contribution to the efforts to prevent a U.S. war against Iraq, would we last beyond our initial plans for work? We did last and we have grown. Now, with about 1,300 member groups from every state, we are the largest peace and justice coalition in the nation. We are unique in our ability to maintain a coalition that includes national organizations and community groups, organizations that have been around for decades and groups that have just formed, groups that work against the war on Iraq as their only issue and organizations that have a multi-issue agenda.

In our brief 3 years we have done a great deal of work, and there is much we can feel good about. We've organized some of the largest mobilization's in this nation's history, let alone in this period. We have helped to re-energize public protest, sometimes having to fight for the very right to gather in large numbers in public spaces. Our coalition has helped hundreds of local groups organize, do educational work, mobilize in their own communities. We have built bridges with other social and economic justice movements, lending support when possible and encouraging their involvement in the antiwar movement. We believe our collective work has helped change public opinion in this country, to the point where now in poll after poll it is clear that most of the people want an end to this war.

But for all that has been done, we know full well that our work is far from finished. The war in Iraq is far from over, unfortunately, probably very far from over. And the Bush administration, even with record setting low ratings and publicly embarrassing situations constantly emerging, continues its saber rattling. Who knows what plans they have for Syria or Iran or Venezuela or Cuba or North Korea? It's all too clear what their plans are for our own country - just look at how they handled the crisis in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.

And as this rainy, dreary day comes to a close in New York City, I once again think about Rosa Parks and how much our country has lost with her death. Tonight I will go home with a heavy heart as I think about the senseless nightmare of death and destruction in Iraq and knowing how hard our struggle really is. But I also will go home knowing that too many lives have been taken, too many lives ruined for us to give up or give anything less then every ounce of our energies. Tomorrow they say the sun will come out again in New York, tomorrow always offers the possibilities we long for. Let us learn from our own histories, take stock of the present realities and prepare for what will certainly be a hard road ahead. Let us do all we can to ensure that, in the end, peace prevails and justice triumphs.

Article from zmag.org
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-10/27cagan.cfm

And so it is...

Here comes winter again. The nastiest time of year. Every year we face the clocks going back one hour and eternal darkness. Of waking up in the dark and leaving work in the dark, with only light outside while we work away on our machinery.

As I write this I am sitting in an office in Dublin and will be walking twenty minutes up the road to get to my bed. I have a scarf around my neck and the radiator is blasting warmth, but for some strange reason my feet are bloody freezing.

Earlier today I was at the Four Courts waiting for a judge to confirm whether five men should be sent back to prison for being in contempt of court. I stood outside with a megaphone and banner under my care and the wind was cutting straight through me like a warm knife through butter.

It reminded me of the first ever picket line I was on when I was sixteen (yes I started young). It was the week before Christmas in Belfast and postal workers walked out against crap conditions and bullying managers. I went down as soon as I heard about it, working with some students in the Arts College, and has to be said it was a bitter day.

Me and another friend went down there and tried speaking to these guys, but they didn’t want to know we existed. Despite that we persisted on and tried continuously to know these people. After about two hours of driving rain… I mean rain that was going horizontally instead of dropping from the sky… the manager decided to bring the vans into the depot for the day. Me and Tom looked at each other, confused why the workers themselves weren’t blocking the vans and decided in some action of our own.

The two of us went to the gate where the vans were being let in and stood there, almost getting killed in the process. Tom took one of the numerous copies of Socialist Worker that we had and sat on the bonnet of this van reading it, as soon as I heard the cheer and turned to see what Tom was doing I joined in… albeit laughing at this introduction to working class militancy and struggle.

Immediately this garnered the opening that we needed to start speaking to the workers. When the vans pulled back and went round a side door we had gained respect and people came over and bought the paper and started chatting to us. Instead of being shunned we were treated like old friends, with people shaking our hands. We were given lifts by stewards to other picket lines at the main sorting office and offered coats to combat the cold (posties and firemen have the best coats in the world).

Though saying that, when other members of our party came down after work we were relieved to go to an open fire in a bar and drink lots of tea and coffee and have a good bite to eat. My hands were nearly blue from the cold. But the funny thing is that when I walk down towards that sorting office I still get the occasional postie asking me what the craic is.

But winter is still god awful!

Life on the other side

As some people would know I have recently moved to Dublin, and it has to be said that it is a revelation. I was offered a job with a socialist grouping down here as a student organiser after attending a meeting in Donegal. Its not an easy job, but its doing what I love most, talking and discussing politics with as many people as possible.

There is a lot of shit really starting to hit the fan in the south. At that meeting in Donegal, a small town called Raphoe – basically in the middle of nowhere – over 400 people gathered. The meeting was to talk about police intransigence, corruption and misjustices. There were eight speakers from the platform and a further 30 speakers from the floor with their personal experiences.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. The next issue that grabbed my attention was the Shell to Sea campaign. It started over three months ago and it gravitated around five men who were imprisoned after Shell got a high court order to prevent them protesting.

The reason why they protested was that shell wanted to build a high-pressure pipeline through bogs on land that bordered their own. They were dubbed the Rossport 5 and became heroes in county Mayo, as with Raphoe, in the middle of nowhere. But the pipeline was only a small part of the issue.

The main problem with the exploration and exploitation of the Corrib gas field was that Norway would receive more royalties than Ireland! The Irish government managed to get such a good deal on the gas fields that oil companies could claim back royalties for the cost of exploring the coastline, as well as Ireland having the lowest tax rates in western Europe.

The shell to sea campaign summises the worst in irish society at the moment. The south is a capitalist dream world. It is, apparently, the envy of Europe. Over the last 10 years the economy has grown by 4% annually, something that is very rare in todays world… maybe comparable to a booming economy in east Asia rather than any other European economy.

The low corporation tax means that many major multi-national companies to invest heavily in Ireland. Coca-cola, who employs 400 people here and claims super profits of €…, that means that every coca-cola worker in Ireland produces €…million. Of course many of these workers would be lucky to earn over €30,000. Other corporations have also been attracted to these tax rates, including Intel.

These corporations use a slight trick of the books to get as much profit as possible out of Irelands booming economy. They regularly inflate the prices for components in Ireland while reducing component prices in other factories, thus meaning that the corps can get the maximum return on their investment with the lowest tax paid… lucky for some.

The liberalised economy here has also attracted more dubious characters. The US military, for instance, has been attracted to Irelands largest airport, Shannon. In the first six months of this year nearly 160,000 troops passed through Shannon en route to Iraq and the wider theatre in the Middle East. It means that Ireland has become the hub for the transportation of US troops and maybe the transporting of prisoners to Guantanamo Bay. The big problem is that Ireland is meant to be a neutral country – on the same par as Switzerland.

To describe being an activist in Dublin at the moment is quite difficult. There are hundreds of campaigns and issues which could be taken up, but the forces are not yet strong enough. But there is hope. The Rossport 5 were released on Friday just 24hrs before a national demonstration calling on their release. The message that I am putting forward is that when people stand united change can come about.

Trouble back home

Recently I have moved down to Dublin to take up a new job. But the strangest thing has happened. As soon as I left the north seemed to have erupted. The egotistical side of me said that they shouldn't have missed me that much… especially in loyalist areas.

But there are some serious problems facing Northern Ireland at the moment and it was expressed in the recent upsurge in troubles around those loyalist areas. Unionist leaders and politicians point to issues of resentment, things like the RIR and RUC, 50/50 recruitment to the police, the release of Sean Kelly, the apparent bias of the establishment against protestants with the Parades Commission and the 'well known republican' Peter Haine.
These arent altogether new grievences, but they have found their voices through new lines. Take the Orange Order. For along time they have complained about cultural aparthaid, they alongside others in the north and west belfast parades forum have begun engaging in a strategy to resolve the question of contentious parades. That sounds quite a good idea, but look at who their bed-fellows are… members of unionist parties as well as prominent members of paramilitary organisations.

At the same time the new Love Ulster paper uses similar language at points with one headling declaring that "We are all victims". Like the Parades Forum , the paper has rather dubious links. It is produced by the Shankill Mirror with support from, amongst others, the Orange Order, the UDA and UVF, and the victims group FAIR.
The only case being put forward by leaders within loyalism and unionism is that they have lost out in the Belfast Agreement, becoming second class citizens within their own country. However the recent rioting has highlighted several different things. It has highlighted the amount of alienation within the protestant community, alienated from control over their own destiny and alienated from the Belfast Agreement. But the more progressive sections withinloyalism have to understand that the feeling that the peace process hasn't delivered is felt by both Protestants, Catholics and dissenters.
In north and west Belfast, an area which witnessed most of the killing and the most funerals, the peace process has not delivered. Today north Belfast is one of the poorest areas in the UK, it has also been witness to a devastating spate of suicides in recent years with thelegacy of the troubles leaving some of the highest suicide rates in Britain or Ireland. Simply, the peace dividend, which has seen billions poured into the centre of Belfast, hasn't seeped into the poorest areas.
Instead we have witnessed the loss of 19,000 manufacturing jobs and a new service economy based on intensive low waged labour and in jobs where union organisation is practically impossible.
Neither loyalism nor republicanism has the answer to solving the problems faced by the working class in the north.

Republicanism is based on national liberation, socialists have argued that its all well and good fighting for national liberation, but at the end of the day it means joining the rest of the ruling class at the top table and living in the real world.
Loyalism and unionism is based on the idea that maintaining the union with Britain is the best way to maintain our way of life here, that we have very little in common with people in Dublin, Cork or Galway. This has meant unionism has historically presented protestants as superiorto Catholics leaving a wanton trail of bigotry throughout the history of the northern state.
Socialist reject both of those ideas. One of the main reasons I become involved in socialist politics was that idea of “Our flag is neither green nor orange, but red”. Socialists from my tradition have argued that there is far more that unites a people living on the Shankill Road with someone else living in Clondalkin in Dublin or Tower Hamlets in London than with Ian Paisley Reg Empey or Robert Saulters.

We have argued that the best way to defend our communities against sectarianism is to unite beyond religion and put pressure on trade unions to act.But the situation in the north at the moment shows the real need for one thing above all else. A viable left alternative made up of all those who supports diversity, peace and opposes the privitisation of our public services.

Mark Perenti: How the Free Market Killed New Orleans

The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Armed with advanced warning that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.
They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just as the free market dictates, just like people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.
It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an optimal outcome for the entire society. This is the way the invisible hand works its wonders.
There would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island last year, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.3 million people, more than 10 percent of the country's population, with not a single life lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.
On Day One of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina, it was already clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American lives had been lost in New Orleans. Many people had "refused" to evacuate, media reporters explained, because they were just plain "stubborn."
It was not until Day Three that the relatively affluent telecasters began to realize that tens of thousands of people had failed to flee because they had nowhere to go and no means of getting there. With hardly any cash at hand or no motor vehicle to call their own, they had to sit tight and hope for the best. In the end, the free market did not work so well for them.
Many of these people were low-income African Americans, along with fewer numbers of poor whites. It should be remembered that most of them had jobs before Katrina's lethal visit. That's what most poor people do in this country: they work, usually quite hard at dismally paying jobs, sometimes more than one job at a time. They are poor not because they're lazy but because they have a hard time surviving on poverty wages while burdened by high prices, high rents, and regressive taxes.
The free market played a role in other ways. Bush's agenda is to cut government services to the bone and make people rely on the private sector for the things they might need. So he sliced $71.2 million from the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent reduction. Plans to fortify New Orleans levees and upgrade the system of pumping out water had to be shelved.
Bush took to the airways and said that no one could have foreseen this disaster. Just another lie tumbling from his lips. All sorts of people had been predicting disaster for New Orleans, pointing to the need to strengthen the levees and the pumps, and fortify the coastlands.
In their campaign to starve out the public sector, the Bushite reactionaries also allowed developers to drain vast areas of wetlands. Again, that old invisible hand of the free market would take care of things. The developers, pursuing their own private profit, would devise outcomes that would benefit us all.
But wetlands served as a natural absorbent and barrier between New Orleans and the storms riding in from across the sea. And for some years now, the wetlands have been disappearing at a frightening pace on the Gulf? coast. All this was of no concern to the reactionaries in the White House.
As for the rescue operation, the free-marketeers like to say that relief to the more unfortunate among us should be left to private charity. It was a favorite preachment of President Ronald Reagan that "private charity can do the job." And for the first few days that indeed seemed to be the policy with the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina.
The federal government was nowhere in sight but the Red Cross went into action. Its message: "Don't send food or blankets; send money." Meanwhile Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network---taking a moment off from God's work of pushing John Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court---called for donations and announced "Operation Blessing" which consisted of a highly-publicized but totally inadequate shipment of canned goods and bibles.
By Day Three even the myopic media began to realize the immense failure of the rescue operation. People were dying because relief had not arrived. The authorities seemed more concerned with the looting than with rescuing people. It was property before people, just like the free marketeers always want.
But questions arose that the free market did not seem capable of answering: Who was in charge of the rescue operation? Why so few helicopters and just a scattering of Coast Guard rescuers? Why did it take helicopters five hours to get six people out of one hospital? When would the rescue operation gather some steam? Where were the feds? The state troopers? The National Guard? Where were the buses and trucks? the shelters and portable toilets? The medical supplies and water?
Where was Homeland Security? What has Homeland Security done with the $33.8 billions allocated to it in fiscal 2005? Even ABC-TV evening news (September 1, 2005) quoted local officials as saying that "the federal government's response has been a national disgrace."
In a moment of delicious (and perhaps mischievous) irony, offers of foreign aid were tendered by France, Germany and several other nations. Russia offered to send two plane loads of food and other materials for the victims. Predictably, all these proposals were quickly refused by the White House. America the Beautiful and Powerful, America the Supreme Rescuer and World Leader, America the Purveyor of Global Prosperity could not accept foreign aid from others. That would be a most deflating and insulting role reversal. Were the French looking for another punch in the nose?
Besides, to have accepted foreign aid would have been to admit the truth---that the Bushite reactionaries had neither the desire nor the decency to provide for ordinary citizens, not even those in the most extreme straits. Next thing you know, people would start thinking that George W. Bush was really nothing more than a fulltime agent of Corporate America.

-------Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights) and The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), both available in paperback. His forthcoming The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press) will be published in the fall. For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.

One flew over the Mexican border