Category Archives: France

Privately Run Public Gulags: Immigrant Detention Camps of America, Britain, and Australia…………..

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The men showed up in a small town in Australia’s outback early last year, offering top dollar for all available lodgings. Within days, their company, Serco, was flying in recruits from as far away as London, and busing them from trailers to work 12-hour shifts as guards in a remote camp where immigrants seeking asylum are indefinitely detained. It was just a small part of a pattern on three continents where a handful of multinational security companies have been turning crackdowns on immigration into a growing global industry. Especially in Britain, the United States and Australia, governments of different stripes have increasingly looked to such companies to expand detention and show voters they are enforcing tougher immigration laws……………But the ballooning of privatized detention has been accompanied by scathing inspection reports, lawsuits and the documentation of widespread abuse and neglect, sometimes lethal ……….

Look for France’s Sarkozy to adopt this idea if his electoral fortunes get worse in the coming months. That should seal his re-election in the ‘new’ France.
This
looks like a definite accelerating trend in the English-speaking major countries now. Private prisons, private security firms for military installations and embassies, and now private detention concentration camps for illegal immigrants. Anybody can tell you that private for profit security companies seek to maximize profits (surprised?) and that the public sector seeks to ensure humane treatment as well as the proper public policy. The twain shall never meet. I know, they say oversight and inspections will take care of that. Harrrrumph.

Cheers
mhg



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Corruption in the French Political Class, or ‘what bears do in the forest’……

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President Nicolas Sarkozy has distanced himself from a suspected corruption scandal that has roiled the French political class after an investigating magistrate began legal action against two of his close allies. Investigators are probing whether a French defense deal in the 1990s with Pakistan involving suspected kickbacks set the stage for a Karachi car bombing in 2003 that killed 15 people – mostly French defense contractors . In a statement Thursday, Sarkozy’s office said his name is not mentioned in any documents ……….

What else is new? Several French presidents have been implicated and investigated for corruption, the last one being Chirac and now Sarkozy. None has been punished. There have been cases of cash paid, other financial benefits, and there have been cases of diamonds and precious stones gifted by African dictators. There are occasionally French politicians who truly feel angry at being accused, perhaps because they are innocent. There was one former French Prime Minister (I met him a couple of times when he was Finance Minister) who felt upset enough about accusations against him to commit suicide about ten years ago. He was unusual in that case and I suspect he may have been innocent.
Now in American politics they have more clever ways of getting the money to the politicians. There are millions of campaign fund donations, and there are more direct benefits through highly-paid speeches to special interest groups, as well as junkets and there are probably other ways as well. Then, for those who behave themselves and mind the interests of the lobbies, there are lucrative jobs waiting after they lose elections.
Now about Sarkozy, the Hero of Libya and aspiring hero of My Gulf. Oh well, you know the common American saying about ‘what bears do in the fores’……
..
Cheers
mhg



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A Tale of Two Arab Despots, a Tale of Two Invasions, a Tale of Two NATO Elections………

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Obama Praises Libya’s Post-Qaddafi Leaders at U.N. President Obama on Tuesday extended to Libya’s transitional leader a diplomatic honor never offered his predecessor, meeting formally with Mustafa Abdel-Jalil at the United Nations and heralding the victory of Libyan rebels who brought an end to the 42-year reign of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi……..

Qaddafi Calls New Libya Government a Propped-Up ‘Charade’. As world leaders at the United Nations were embracing the rebels who overthrew him, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi broke nearly two weeks of silence on Tuesday, denouncing Libya’s new interim government and predicting its quick demise once NATO warplanes end their attacks on his forces…….

Qaddafi is just being Qaddafi: he couldn’t resist crashing the Obama party in New York. He still thinks he can prevail as soon as NATO gets tired and leaves. It is an interesting contrast between two Arab despots that were overthrown by Western forces. Saddam Hussein’s old Iraqi army deserted en masse in 2003, with hardly a bullet being fired against the “Coalition” forces. Saddam himself was found only months later in a hole. On the other hand the Iraqi people did not raise a hand either against or for the invasion.
In contrast the Libyans have had a short civil war which hopefully will not stretch and expand into a West African-style mess. The Qaddafi forces could not actually shoot at NATO forces, since the attacks came from the air, but they did shoot at somebody.
The Iraq invasion probably helped get Bush reelected one year later in 2004. He was reelected because one year was not enough for the American people to realize the costs of that war and the body bags had not started arriving in large numbers. Can the Libyan invasion help reelect Nicolas (Le Weasel) Sarkozy? Yes it can, unfortunately. In recent decades, the French voters have become notorious for talking a good talk and then turning around and electing the worst candidate available. They did that the last time. I suspect they will do so again in 2012.

Cheers
mhg



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NATO and the Arab World: Are Happy Days Here Again? When Potentates are Divine and Groveling is Hip…….

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NATO planes are still in the air and bombing targets over Libya, and Moammar Gadhafi is still on the loose. Nonetheless, NATO is taking something of a victory lap in the wake of an operation that broke new ground for the military alliance……….. Throughout the conflict, NATO has insisted that its actions are limited to supporting the U.N. resolution that calls for protecting civilians and enforcing an arms embargo. But NATO certainly pushed the boundaries, and critics say NATO ended up providing close air support for anti-Gadhafi rebels. To most observers, NATO was clearly taking the rebel side in a civil war and backing efforts to oust Gadhafi. Those critics worry that NATO risks becoming an armed service provider for the U.N. and other allies. That job description is a long way from what NATO still insists is its core, founding mission: to protect its members’ territory and population…….”

A few decades after the last European imperialists departed the Arab world, militarily speaking, they are back. The major, the only imperialist powers that ruled the Arabs for decades are back to their old turf. That would be the British and the French. Interesting that the British leader (a minority leader) comes from the Conservative (Tory) Party of Winston Churchill but he is hardly Churchill-esqu, and the French president du jour comes from the conservative ranks as well, but he is hardly de Gaulle-esque. But they are here in Libya and looking speculatively toward Syria (while completely ignoring Yemen and Bahrain).
 
Mr. Cameron is doing an Allenby, or is it a Kitchener? While the strutting Sarkozy is more ambitious, if more delusional, and is apparently going for a Bonaparte. Maybe Berlusconi is also dreaming of the old Roman Province of Africa but he is a bit late. Now we can say that NATO, or various parts of it, control the skies and the seas and the land of almost the whole Arab World, save for a sliver in Gaza and a very iffy Syria that is also teetering, and parts of Lebanon. Now NATO also controls all of the Middle East, save for these mentioned parts and theocratic Iran (remember that Turkey is part of NATO and Israel is practically an honorary member).

All that because the corrupt Arab system, and not just the League of Arab States, has failed the Arab peoples for decades. There was a time, decades ago, when Arabs were hopeful and had expectations of something better. Maybe they were delusional, but they had optimism and hope. In recent years, they have been reduced to bowing to potentates and absolute monarchs and dictators. It is now cool, nay it is hip, in much of the Arab world to bow and grovel to the potentates. One, or perhaps two, of these potentates are increasingly assuming the air of something beyond statesmanship, more like quasi-divinity, egged on by their all pervasive vast dynastic media that control the Arab skies and waves and the squads of thugs and mercenaries.
Cheers
mhg



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Sarkozy and his Celebrity Philosopher Have a Good War, Hit the Shores of Tripoli………

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NICOLAS SARKOZY has had a good war. The armed campaign in Libya was the French president’s biggest gamble, the moment he put his reputation, judgment and leadership on the line. France, along with Britain, carried out the bulk of the air strikes. Unlike President Barack Obama, Mr Sarkozy enjoyed cross-party support for the campaign and popular backing at home. The fall of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi ought therefore to yield some domestic reward. Yet Mr Sarkozy’s poll numbers remain grim, and, little more than six months before France’s presidential vote, his chances of re-election do not, on paper, look good. The Libyan air strikes were not Mr Sarkozy’s first armed campaign. He sent French soldiers into hostile territory in the name of democracy in both Afghanistan and Côte d’Ivoire. But his investment in the Libyan campaign was the most intensely personal. Before anybody else, and unbeknown at the time even to his foreign minister, he stuck his neck out and gave diplomatic recognition to the Libyan rebels, whose leaders he met at the Elysée palace at the urging of Bernard-Henri Lévy, a celebrity philosopher…………..”

Now Sarkozy has his own favorite American-Style “celebrity” philosopher. Bernard-Henri Lévy as a Gallic Dr. Phil, or Deepak Chopra, or Jerry Springer, or Howard Stern, et al. I would advise Sarko not to strut in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner yet. Wait for the dust in the Libyan desert to settle, wait for the Sahara dust to settle. Remember: your old pal Rommel thought he was heading to Alexandria (then Cairo) when in fact he didn’t get beyond El-Alamein.

The French
are notorious for being skeptic about their leaders, at least they think they are, yet they keep electing snake-oil vendors who almost always have to be investigated for corruption as soon as they leave office. De Gaulle excepted. Maybe they do that so they can quickly get back to their “French” norm and be skeptic about them.
Cheers
mhg



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Africa, the Arab World, the (New) New Colonialism………….

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“The African strongmen are going the way of Nkrumah, and in extreme cases Gaddafi, not Nyerere. The societies they lead are marked by growing internal divisions. In this, too, they are reminiscent of Libya under Gaddafi more than Egypt under Mubarak or Tunisia under Ben Ali. Whereas the fall of Mubarak and Ben Ali directed our attention to internal social forces, the fall of Gaddafi has brought a new equation to the forefront: the connection between internal opposition and external governments. Even if those who cheer focus on the former and those who mourn are preoccupied with the latter, none can deny that the change in Tripoli would have been unlikely without a confluence of external intervention and internal revolt. The conditions making for external intervention in Africa are growing, not diminishing. The continent is today the site of a growing contention between dominant global powers and new challengers……. The contrast with Western powers, particularly the US and France, could not be sharper. The cutting edge of Western intervention is military. France’s search for opportunities for military intervention, at first in Tunisia, then Cote d’Ivoire, and then Libya, has been above board and the subject of much discussion. Of greater significance is the growth of Africom, the institutional arm of US military intervention on the African continent………………
China and India intervene in Africa in an economic and commercial capacity. They are militarily to weak (compared to Western powers) and too ‘distant’. And they are too ‘new’ to the region, as world powers and not ethnically. The West, especially the French have always intervened militarily in Africa, except for a hiatus of a couple of decades. That hiatus was only Anglo-American: the French never stopped, as French presidents continued to send expeditions to prop up their favorite dictators. The West is back in force now, from Somalia, to Libya, to Cote D’Ivoire, to other spots overtly or covertly. Is it a new age of colonialism for the “Dark Continent”?
And speaking of Western intervention: the Arab World is not exactly free of it. From Iraq to Libya to Yemen to Lebanon to Sudan to Somalia and other places, the West is engaged against a host of foes, real or perceived. Like Africa which it overlaps, the feeble and corruptly managed Arab world can’t seem to get its (shit) act together, persistently inviting outside intervention: intervention from the West, Israel, Turkey, and Iran. The whole region is like a vacuum wittingly or unwittingly begging for intervention (prostrate and legs wide open, I’d say if I were rude and crude, which I ain’t). Some of the potentates even hire foreign mercenaries from South Asia and form foreign legions of Colombians and Australians and Blackwater denizens, among others. The Arab world is supposed to have been educating at least three generations since the wave of independence in the 1940s. Yet in the past several decades the Arabs have never been less independent than they are now and arguably never less ably led.

Cheers
mhg



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Libyan Rebels Shoot Khamis Qaddafi for Tenth Time, Turns Out to be Sarkozy Dressed as Beau Geste…..

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Hours earlier, Mahdi al-Harati — the vice chairman of the rebels’ Military Council, the military wing of the National Transitional Council — told CNN that Khamis Gadhafi died after a battle with rebel forces Sunday night in northwest Libya, between the villages of Tarunah and Bani Walid…………CNN News

Later, as The Onion would, or should, report, the Libyan rebels of the TNC announced that they made a “normal everyday honest” mistake about having killed Khamis Qaddafi for the tenth time. They had actually shot Nicolas Sarkozy who was disguised as Beau Geste in the uniform of French special forces sergeant.

Cheers
mhg



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World Revolution Redux? a Wal-Mart World, PIGS of Europe, Arab Spring, Che Guevara……….

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S. Robson “Rob” Walton, Walmart chairman, has a net worth of about $19.7 billion. And he’s only number 9 on the list of 2010’s top 20 richest Americans. Walmart workers, meanwhile, make around $8.75 an hour—about $18,000 a year. They’d have to work over a million years to approach what the chairman of Walmart Stores is sitting on. Alice and Jim Walton each have about $20 billion, and Christy Walton has $24 billion. Last year Jonathan Turley noted that the CEO of Walmart, Michael Duke, makes his average employee’s yearly salary every hour………..

This is not just an American phenomenon anymore, although the gap tends to be wider in America and the third world (including the Middle East where the gap may possibly be the widest now) than in Europe or Japan. From Russia to Ireland, and south to the Middle East, income gaps are widening among working people and their corporate and government leaders. The middle classes, usually the pillars of stability wherever they exist, are being truly squeezed, forcing a very few of them upward, pushing the vast majority of them down the ladder. That is when revolutions erupt: when the middle class, if it exists, is threatened, when very few are at the top and most are at the bottom. Think France 1789, Russia 1917, China 1949, Iran 1979. The now-aborted Arab Spring was at least partly a bread and butter issue, about depots taking away both freedom and a chance at decent living.
Just when we thought Europe was irrevocably in its post-revolutionary stage, we are getting the ‘uprisings’ in Greece and Spain, not to mention the perennial French issue-oriented little ‘uprisings’. Advice to many older Europeans, especially in the PIGS countries: don’t throw away your Che Guevara posters and caps yet.
Okay, I may be exaggerating a bit, barely, so don’t sell the farm yet…..
Cheers
mhg




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How Americans Ruined a Great French Game: DSK, BHL, Le Livre Du Visage…………

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Two French women are filing legal complaints against a junior government minister they accuse of sexual harassment, apparently encouraged to speak up after the recent arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn on sex crime charges. Gilbert Collard, lawyer for the women, said he had submitted the complaints against Georges Tron, the civil service minister, to a public prosecutor this week and he confirmed to Reuters the accusation was sexual harassment. Tron’s lawyer, Olivier Schnerb, dismissed the complaints and said he had been instructed to respond by filing a defamation complaint in return. Tron, who was quoted by Le Parisien daily as saying the accusations were “incredible”, told Reuters he had informed Prime Minister Francois Fillon about the matter……….. France 24

Leave it to those Les Américains to do it again: ruin a great French cultural tradition. First it was the chewing gum they brought with them to the beaches of Normandie, then the music of Rock and Soul (Josephine Baker was just an early outlier and not mainstream in France), then their subverting language through Jerry Lewis films, then the Internet. Facebook? Why not Le Livre Du Visage? Wait, there is even more…….
Now they have set out to destroy an even greater French tradition: men taking their sexual pleasures wherever they find ‘them’. In that they had the help of a black African Muslim woman who did not see a good white thing when it happened to her, could not just lie down and try to enjoy it. Poor, poor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn: who will it be next? Bernard-Henri Lévy?
Cheers
mhg




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Sarkozy Loses an Ally over Muslim Hearings: my Suggestion………

        

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French President Nicolas Sarkozy fired an adviser he had hired to promote “diversity” after the appointee attacked his allies’ approach to Islam and secularism, the former aide told AFP on Friday. “He has just set me free. I am going to campaign to defend the dignity of Muslims in this country,” said Abderrahmane Dahmane, who had served as Sarkozy’s adviser on “diversity.” The sacking came after Dahmane spoke out against a plan by Sarkozy’s UMP party to hold a “debate” on secularism and Islam, at a time of sensitivities over the government’s treatment of France’s six million Muslims. “I have no intention of being fodder for Sarkozy and Cope,” he said, referring to Jean-Francois Cope, the leader of the right-wing ruling UMP party and a strong backer of policies that Muslims have said stigmatise them…………”

Hey, Sarko: you can always hire Peter King or Newt Gingrich as you “diversity” adviser to Muslims. They have some experience in dealing with us. The kind of experience you may prefer while you are looking for a way to weasel your way into another term at the Élysée Palace.
Then there is Brigitte Bardot……..
Cheers
mhg

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