Bereft of actresses and heroines, a sadder, poorer world awaits us

RIO DE JANEIRO

An article in this week's edition of The Economist made me hit the roof. The famous British weekly referred to Scarlett Johansson (pictured here) as a "Hollywood actor." I don't know this person intimately but I have seen her in enough movies to state with quite some confidence that she is a woman. In that case she should be referred to as a "Hollywood actress", right?

21st-century, post-modern Anglo-Saxon society, especially the American variety, is driving politically correctness (PC) to absurd levels. For the sake of sexual equality we are asked now to erase all signs of sexual differences, even in language. This is crazy. As there are boys and girls, cows and oxen, roosters and hens, so are there actors and actresses. What is wrong with that?

Gender-equality advocates, the looniest of PC freaks, make the case that here we are referring to positions or roles, and a position can be held by either a man or woman, therefore there should be just a single word for it. Otherwise we would be perpetuating the notion that some roles are still confined to a sex.

This approach is simply wrong for various reasons.

First, English is already largely a gender-neutral language. Player, director, dancer, executive etc. are used equally to refer to a man or woman in that role. This is the result of the language's natural evolution and gender-equality proponents should therefore be happy enough and shut up.

Second, why don't English speakers come out of their self-centeredness and check what is happening in other cultures and languages? Whether Arabic, German or Latin languages, over one billion people have a masculine and a feminine for all these roles. Actually, Latin languages such as French, Spanish and Portuguese have gone the other way to further equality between the sexes: they are insisting that a word which traditionally only existed in the masculine form (French "Président" and Spanish/Portuguese "Presidente") now have a feminine as well since a woman can also hold the position of "President". We now have "Présidente" and "Presidenta", although there are still organizations that refuse to use the term (the French Academy, a refuge of old farts disconnected from everyday life, still insist that a woman elected to the highest office in the land  be called, absurdly "Madame LE Président") and Brazil's most read daily O Globo refers to Dilma Roussef as "Presidente" - check  my blog post on this topic). Sure, there are some languages such as Turkish which don't distinguish between the masculine and feminine genders, but English is not one of them, so why force-engineer a linguistic change which, let's face it, is not going to change facts on  the ground per se? It can't have escaped you that several Latin and Muslim countries have already had female presidents while the US is still waiting for one.

Third, PC freaks are so obsessed with their nutty crusade that they don't realize that their proposal for gender equality perpetuates the old male-dominated system when they insist that the masculine term should be the neutral one. If we wanted true equality, then we should say, "OK, from now on only one word for both. For words X, Y & Z it will be the masculine one; for words A, B & C it will be the feminine one." But no, they want everybody to become actors and heroes. If a woman can be referred to as an "actor" then why can't a man be referred to as a "heroine"?

Fourth, common sense has been completely lost in this fight. If  "ambassadress" has all but disappeared and "Jewess" is no longer used (which it was as some terms naturally become obsolete), "director" has always been the only form  for both male and female holders of that titles: are we going to rewrite history and refer to Russia's Catherine the Great as "The Emperor Catherine"? Should Elizabeth II, a monarch in her own right, insist that, for equality's sake, she now be known as King Elizabeth ? Most people would agreed that is absurd, and yet if gender-equality advocates value consistency they should propose this.

By the way, I have nothing against feminists. On the contrary. I believe that women (among other groups) have been historically discriminated against and that should stop. Yes, I believe in women's rights but also in the right of language to evolve naturally and not become deformed based on any lunatic group's ideals .

Can we come back to our senses? There are many more serious issues in this world (global warming, wars, drought, hunger, Aids etc.) Can we focus our energy on these and not waste our time on preposterous fights? We would do everybody, including good-prose lovers, a great favor.

Good riddance, Sarkozy!

"La France forte" or "Strong France"
was Sarkozy's campaign slogan.

NEW YORK CITY
In one of the most memorable lines of his presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy threw at a French citizen who dared refuse to shake his hand, "Get lost, asshole!" ("Casse-toi, pauvre con!" in the original French- Watch the YouTube video) At this week's second round of the presidential election, the French people returned the compliment sending Sarko packing.

Two years ago, in a blog called "Sarkozy: La France c'est moi" I alerted my countrymen to the dangers of the presidency of the authoritarian and egomaniac bullshitter who tricked us into trusting him with the nation's top job. It took five years but finally the French people saw through him and gave him what Churchill once called, when he was on the receiving end of it, "the order of the boot." And rightly so.

This is of course, only Part 1 of the Sarkozy defenestration. Part 2 should be to prosecute him for the various abuses in power (some of which I mentioned in the same blog) and convict him. Hopefully this time we'll have a convicted French president who will serve his sentence, unlike Chirac (see my blog, "Real crime, fake justice") Then we could say that we have made a qualitative jump on the democratic scale by ensuring that justice is meted out to ALL citizens regardless of social status. We would thus show the way to other Western countries to send Blair, Bush & Co to jail for the crimes they have committed and for which they enjoy a scandalous full impunity.

I have seen press reports about how François Hollande "won" the election. That is simply untrue. Sarkozy lost it. Just look at the figures, less than 2% separated each candidate from victory, hardly the mark of a landslide. And yet, considering Sarkozy's disastrous record and abysmal approval ratings, Hollande should have won by a handsome 60% at least. But are we surprised at the poor showing by the Socialist candidate?

Not really. After all, he was not the first candidate for his party's nomination; that was Dominique Strauss-Kahn who was disqualified after that little incident at the Sofitel hotel in this city last year. Hollande was not even the second choice, that was party chief Martine Aubry who dithered so long about running that she finally lost to him. Many Socialist Party activists even toyed with the idea of letting Hollande's former partner, Ségolène Royal, have a second try at the presidency, but thank God they thought better of it at the last moment (I used to think that  the US with George W. Bush and Sarah Palin had a monopoly on idiots running for the presidency, but obviously in France we also have our share.) Unlike Barack Obama who fought tooth and nail to get the job (what he did with it is another issue and will be the subject of a blog come November), François Hollande was just lucky to be the least bad man at the right place at the right moment.

"Sarkozy, Outgoing President!"

So François Hollande won by default. Will he be up to the task? Will he finally solve the crippling debt crisis we have been suffering from for the past several years now? Well, considering that in his thirty years as a party apparatchik, lowly MP or local politician in a sleepy rural town he never displayed any conviction, vision or signed any remarkable policies, that would be quite a miracle. A couple of months ago, I caught him campaigning on a bright Sunday morning in a market close to my Paris home, at the Bastille. Since the debt crisis is the direct result of banking misbehavior, I put the question to him:

"Monsieur Hollande, are you going to nationalize the banks?"

"At any rate, we will reform them," he replied.

"Is that a promise?" I asked grabbing his arm. With Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris smiling that phoney smile of his just behind him, the then-candidate-now-president nodded his head reiterating that policy decision before leaning forward to kiss a kid and shake hands with well-wishers.

In case you don't believe me, here are the videos I made (they are of course in French, I appear at the end of the first video, and in the second you can hear my voice asking the question at 00:40 followed by Hollande's answer.)

So Hollande is on record promising bank reform and to get us out of the debt mess these banks brought us in. After the wasted twelve years with Chirac and five Sarkozy years, it would be great to finally have a president who can deliver.

Unfortunately, considering his record, my advice to you is not to hold your breath. We are used in France (and other Western pseudo-democracies) to being betrayed by our political class. As we say, Plus ça change...

Real crime, fake justice: Chirac gets 2-year suspended jail sentence - UPDATED Feb. 2019

After 25 years of obfuscation,
legal maneuverings and turning a
blind eye, a French court has finally
said it out loud: Between 1995 and
2002 France was ruled by a criminal.
But if you think you will see him behind
bars, don't hold your breath: the
French political class is making sure
that one of its most  (in)famous
members is shielded from such a fate

PARIS
This week's ruling by a French court seems at first of quite earth-shattering importance: for the first time since World War II, a former French head of state is convicted of committing crimes (in this case misuse of public funds) and is sentenced to two years in jail. But look more closely and you realize that this judicial decision is as connected to justice as Alaska is to Madagascar.

The facts go back a good quarter century when Jacques Chirac was not yet president of France, just mayor of Paris (but considering how Paris is actually a midsize version of France, he was for all intents and purposes almost president.) In his Etat dans l'Etat which was his Paris fief, Chirac behaved like a medieval baron, hiring (especially for phoney jobs known in French as emplois fictifs where town hall positions were used to pay people who never carried out a single task for the city, but many for Chirac and friends), firing, using public funds as he saw fit with scant regard to rules and regulations. Why should he? He felt above such mundane things as the law. And subsequent events proved him right. It took decades for the law to close in on him, because the whole legal system in our Western pseudo-democracies is designed to punish harshly the small fry, while members of the elite remain scot-free. Among the examples used to shield Chirac from justice: while president, he made sure a new law on presidential immunity was voted so that he could remain literally above the law, even for crimes committed before he became president - and we make fun of Berlusconi who engineered laws to protect himself from zealous judges.

After Chirac left office in 2002, the Sarkozy government made sure his predecessor was left alone. Now, we all know that there is little love lost between the two men: Chirac tried every trick in the book to prevent Sarkzoy's ascent, as revenge for the "Dwarf" backing his opponent, Balladur, in a previous election. So why would Sarkozy care about Chirac's fate? If anything he should be happy to see Chirac in jail. Not really. These guys are smart, they know when it is better to put their rivalry on hold and think about higher things. Sarkozy has no interest in a judicial precedent, of having a former French president prosecuted and, God forbid, even convicted, since he knows he would then be the next one (read my blog on Sarko's own abuse of his position.)

So Sarkozy did everything he could to protect Chirac. First, he made sure that the case would drag as long as possible after Chirac left office (five years). Then,  and this is one of the more shocking aspects of the Chirac case, the public prosecutor (who in this pseudo-democracy acts on order from the government - no prize for guessing whose orders) decided to drop all charges against Chirac. Now, that was too much in light of the overwhelming evidence as gathered by all the files seized and the witnesses heard. So, a seemingly courageous judge, egged on by pro-justice militants, said, "I don't care that you drop the charges, Mr Prosecutor, there is enough in this case to convict Mr Chirac." And so he did, to two years in jail. But, and here's the rub, he made sure it was a suspended sentence meaning Chirac would not actually have to go to jail.

Yes, you have heard right. If you are lowly riff raff and get caught stealing, you can be sure you will end up as a guest of the French Republic for a few years. But if you belong to the elite, no such worry. And then you wonder why people laugh derisively at the lofty motto of the state, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. In France, as in all other pseudo-democracies, Lady Justice is far from blind: she has one eye open to recognize VIP's and be lenient towards them. And yet, one of the first decisions of the French Revolution was to abolish all privileges that the mighty had. Two centuries on, privileges for the elite still live on. Now you understand why the "system" made sure the case dragged for how long as possible, so that even if he were to be convicted, Chirac could claim to be too old and sick to serve his sentence. And yet, read the French papers and watch television, and the whole French political class is cheering and saying, "See, we have truly independent justice." They are elated that they have managed to protect one of theirs from the same fate most of them should know: jail.

The great French fable writer, La Fontaine, wrote in the 17th century that:

Selon que vous serez puissant ou misérable, 
Les jugements de cour vous rendront blanc ou noir. 

(Depending on whether you are rich or poor
Court rulings will acquit or condemn you)
Jean de La Fontaine, Les Animaux malades de la peste, 1678.

Lest you believe that my native country is the only one where double standards apply when it comes to justice, I have some enlightening news for you: the same thing happens in other Western mock-demcoracies where the rule of law is supposed to apply. In addition to Italy's already mentioned and notorious  Silvio Berlusconi, Britain's Tony Blair and former US president George W. Bush should be in jail now for war crimes: didn't they wage a war which was found to be completely illegal (says the UN) and unjustified (say themselves after no weapons of mass destruction were found) but killed 100,000 innocent Iraqis (not to mention 4,500 American servicemen)?  Shouldn't these two men, along with a host of Israeli prime ministers and generals, be now in the dock of the International Criminal Court in The Hague? No way, only Arab, Latin American, Asian and African rulers commit crimes, not Western ones. Funny, isn't it, that when it comes to individuals we find in all countries the same proportion of criminals, but not when we deal with politicians. In the West, politicians are angels. Yeah, right!

When Juppé, one of Chirac's underlings, took the rap
for his master, a judge sentenced him to jail. But
the two-tier justice system we have in France and
other mock democracies meant that instead
of spending a single day behind bars Mr. Juppé
went to teach in a Canadian university for a
year (I didn't know Canada accepted criminals as
visiting professors) and after returning to France
he claimed back BOTH his old jobs as mayor
of Bordeaux and foreign minister. Whoever
created politicians left the shame gene out of them.
And as for us citizens who allow this to happen,
well, we have the rulers we deserve.

When Sarkozy succeeded Chirac one of his first announcements was that his administration would be "beyond reproach." A whiff of wrongdoing and you're out, he said to his ministers. Revolutionary, you'd think. Think again. Suffice it to say that the current Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, a close aide to...Chirac, whose prime minister he even was at one point in time, was found guilty of the same crimes as his mentor in 2004 and given a (again suspended!) jail sentence of 14 months. Yes, we currently have a criminal as a foreign minister.  Even in the United States, hardly an exemplary country when it comes to the rule of law (think Guantanamo) and democracy (remember W's "election" in 2000?) any evidence (let alone court ruling) of wrongdoing  would be enough to end a politician's career. Not in France, where the political class wears its proof of corruption as a badge of honor.
Feb. 2019 update: President Macron just nominated Juppé to the highest court in the land, the Constitutional Court. Yes, your eyes aren't playing tricks on you: he who is going to ensure people uphold the country's top law is himself a convicted felon.

Speaking of America, remember that even there where the rule of law is supposed to prevail, Nixon was found to have committed crimes which led to his having to resign in shame and yet he was never bothered. His successor, Gerald Ford, in a behavior similar to what Sarkozy is doing now for Chirac, pardoned the Criminal-in-Chief thus ensuring he could spend the rest of his life enjoying the spoils of his crimes, in peace.  Well, Ford owed it to Nixon who made him president. And I am not speaking here metaphorically: it was Nixon who made Ford president, not the American people since, as few people remember, Ford was NEVER elected either as president or as vice president: he was appointed by Nixon to replace his previous VP, Agnew, after the latter resigned over (already!) a corruption scandal. The fish rots at the head, as they say.

Interestingly, Ford's outrageous act came at the same time when Chirac became mayor of Paris and was starting to put in place the intricate web of patronage, corruption, phoney jobs (but real salaries and cost to taxpayers.) If he ever worried about whether he might be held accountable one day, he just looked across the pond and the unedifying example of the White House shenanigans, and just shrugged his shoulders saying to himself, "Nothing to worry about."

For a quarter century he was right.  The wheels of justice grind slowly, if at all, when we are dealing with the elite. And yet, had justice done its job in a timely fashion, Chirac would have been caught in the 1980's and jailed (I doubt he could have claimed old age and bad health then) and we would have been spared his presidency which, by all accounts, was an utter failure. There are indeed many advantages to having an efficient justice system rather than the two-tiered parody of justice we currently have.

The struggle for equality, the rule of law, the principle that NO ONE should be be above the law, for a truly blind justice, continues.

The case for a different labor-market reform - not PELMAR

BARCELONA,
Read the mainstream economic press (by which I mean The Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal et al.), listen to pundits from the establishment's think tanks and international organizations (OECD, IMF etc.) and you always hear the same litany again and again: to grow your economy and create more jobs you must reform your labor market. And the reform they have in mind is always the kind that curtails employee rights and benefits, never employers' - let's call it for what it is: pro-employer labor-market reform (PELMAR). With the current economic crisis, which has thrown millions of workers out of their jobs in the developed world, it is time to stop and ponder. Is this medecine the adequate one? Does it guarantee any success? Has it been responsible for increased worker participation in the labor market in the past? How does it dovetail with our Western notions of social progress?

So desperate are the current times that here in Spain (20% unemployment rate), a Socialist government has decided to abandon one of its tenets of employee protection (something not even its conservative predecessor dared consider) and reform its labor market in the sense demanded by the conventional wisdom: relaxing rules on firing employees in the hope that it would encourage companies to hire more easily. The logic is impeccable: if I can fire 'em when I want, why not hire 'em when I want? Before you jump to the conclusion that there is no other solution, it's good to look at the past. When I lived in Spain 15 years ago, unemployment was even higher than now (23%) and yet neither the Socialist administration of Felipe Gonzalez nor its conservative successor under José Maria Aznar embarked on PELMAR, even though European Commission, IMF and World Bank reports all encouraged them strongly to go through the same tired old song of making life even more miserable for employees (but brighter for the bosses) in the hope that more jobs would be created. Well, the next decade and a half saw Spain growing tremendously and the unemployment rate go down from 23% to 8%, even better than France. And this without any PELMAR, with employee rights maintained as intact as before. Now, you might say, OK, Spain is a one-off case, the exception that proves the rule, coincidence is not correlation or causality, they were just lucky.

Well, let's cross the Atlantic and check out Brazil, a country I know well since I spend several months a year there. Brazil's labor rules and regulations are even more stringent than Spain's: many employers consider it a nightmare since, once hired, an employee is almost unfirable (or, to be more accurate, it is costly to do so), and if you do and are taken to court in 90% of cases the labor tribunal will rule against you. And yet, Brazil's unemployment rate has been coming down steadily for the past decade. Yes, just like Spain, and without any need for PELMAR. 

You want a third case? Well, let's take our pilgrim stick and travel up north, to the world's most powerful and wealthiest country: the US of A, the cradle of PELMAR before PELMAR even existed, corporate paradise and worker hell. Living in the States in the early '90s I was somewhat shocked to see that in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave people could be fired instantly with or without a cause, that many had no health insurance and had to toil double shifts at two jobs just to make ends meet. Sure, employees could go to court in case of wrongful termination but astronomical legal fees make this option all but an impossibility for most workers. Of course, you could (I dare not say "can" anymore) get a job not too long after having lost the previous one, but even this cannot hide the pain involved with stressfully looking for a job over the weekend because you were let go on Friday and needed something on Monday. Not to mention that any new job also means a period of uncertainty, adaptation and learning the ropes, making new friends among new colleagues. But at least the US unemployment rate was half that of Europe, so, you might have said, it evens out. Well, not any longer - if ever. With both the US and Europe facing the same economic crisis, the US unemployment rate has crept up to the same levels as in my native France, home of the 35-hour workweek, 8-week paid vacation, universal health care. Who is now better off? The US worker or the French one?

Still a skeptic? Let's look at the UK, right across from France, and yet in labor matters so close to the US. (Only when Tony Blair came to power was a minimum wage finally adopted.) The British unemployment rate is more or less at the same level as France. But, I'll be generous, I'll consider this current figure a statistical outlier and use the figure of better times, say 5% against France's 10% (higher than the current one, but I said I wanted to be generous to my detractors.) Since both have similar labor sizes (let's say 30 million) let's make a comparison. If France were to implement US/UK-type PELMAR (free firing, no minimum wage, little paid vacation, limited unemployment benefits, curtailed employer-paid health care plan, well, the works) it would see its unemployment reach the UK/US ideal level of a jobless rate of 5%. In other words, in the old system 3   millions French employees (10% of the working population) were miserable (because unemployed) but 90% that is 27 million were happy (because employed and protected). In the new, PELMAR-inspired scheme, only 1.5 million (5%) would miserable, but the 95%  (that is 28.5 million) would now be worse off because, sure they still had jobs, but could be fired at a whim, had fewer vacation days, limited benefits etc. What logic is that that in order to make 1.5 million people better off (and there is little doubt that a job, no matter how badly paid, is better than no job at all) we make 28.5 million worse off? The logic that says, "who cares about employees, as long as somebody else  is going to be better off": the employing companies - and the shareholders who hide behind. (Have you noticed how you always hear calls for labor-market reforms, but never for management reform? Although the financial crisis and the ensuing recession, along with the destructions of companies such as Enron, WorldCom etc. were all because of incompetent, dishonest and irresponsible management, governments, who are in hock to, when not in cahoots with, business, will resist every effort to reform management - we are seeing it now with attempts to water down the restructuring of banking management.)

Are we to go back to Dickens' England and child labor and 20-hour workdays? Have we decided against the idea of progress? If yes, then we have decreed the end of democracy, because a democracy is a system where governments arbitrate among competing interest groups in society. Once you decide that the majority must suffer so that a few can thrive, we are straight back to an ancien régime system.    

The examples I have shown from varied countries show that what drives the unemployment rate up or down is the state of the economy, not labor regulations, so there is no justification to engage in PELMAR. I can see some of you smirk and point to other culprits. One would be the state of public finances: "we are broke, can't afford it." Well, have you considered shifting budget resources from unproductive areas such as defense to more productive ones such as education? The G8 and G20 and GXX leaders love to meet on a regular basis in exotic locations and issue platitudes in their final communiqués. Why not for once do something useful and agree that all will reduce their military arsenals by half, thus liberating resources that could be put to better use for PEOPLE. We could thus finally cash the "peace dividends" that have eluded us since the end of the Cold War.

Other skeptics will then point to another culprit by saying, "Can't do anything about it anyway, it's globalization. If your costs are too high, jobs will flow to India and China." Well, not so fast. The globe-trotter and international person I am is the last one to rant against a globalized world. I am for a win-win globalized system where everybody wins, but not for one where the same old types increase their profits and the others are all worse off. I am also instinctively against government expanding its reach with too much regulation (I've always believed that a good government is a small government, if not no government.) But, if anything, the current financial crisis has shown that too little government regulation can create a worse situation.  (There is also a case to strengthen and enforce government rules against bullying in the workplace, the plague of modern business, which is inflicting untold daily misery on millions of employees all over the world.)

Let's not forget that the aim of public policy and economic growth is to enhance PEOPLE's lives. If economic growth is going to come at the expense of PEOPLE then it's time to question this economic growth. So, Yes to a global system where we all trade freely, where good and services and people can move freely, but where basic PEOPLE's rights are protected. And  No to a globalized PELMAR system  that throws us back to the Middle Ages. What next? Rediscovering the beauty of slavery, the ultimate labor-market reform?