California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Peace is Not the Absence of War

by John Lawrence, May `19, 2018

Peace is the active construction of a better world. Sort of like what China is doing with its Belt and Road initiative. The rest of the world is just waiting for the US Empire to finally collapse. The signs of an empire in decline are everywhere. From electing a clown and fool as President to sending children to school in an unsafe environment where any day they could be killed to a sick movie, TV and video game gun culture to a solipsistic, me first economic system which produces a growing class of homeless people.

The EU is seeking to do an end run around the American dollar so as to avoid being in the position of having to obey Trump's bullying commands about sanctions. US influence is waning, it's moral and ethical leadership a thing of the past. France is plotting to finance exports to Iran, and aims to sidestep U.S. sanctions.

Reuters reported:

France will start offering euro-denominated credits to Iranian buyers of its goods later this year, a move to bolster trade while keeping it outside the reach of U.S. sanctions, the head of state-owned investment bank Bpifrance said

France and other European countries have been looking to increase trade with Iran since Paris, Washington and other world powers agreed in 2015 to lift many economic sanctions in exchange for controls on Iran’s nuclear program.

The plan is to offer dedicated, euro-denominated export guarantees to Iranian buyers of French goods and services. By structuring the financing through vehicles without any U.S. link, whether to the currency or otherwise, the aim is to avoid the extraterritorial reach of U.S. legislation.

The move could anger U.S. President Donald Trump, who has threatened to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement reached by his predecessor Barack Obama. Washington has maintained some financial restrictions, leaving private banks - even those based outside the United States - wary of financing deals.

“We put a lot of preparation into this in 2017 and we keep on working, every single day, on the conditions of our entrance into Iran,” Bpifrance’s chief executive Nicolas Dufourcq said on Wednesday, referring to the new loans.

“This is a completely separate flow (of money),” he added. “There is no (U.S.) dollar in this scheme... no one holding a U.S. passport.”

There is a pipeline of about 1.5 billion euros in potential contracts from interested French exporters, Dufourcq told lawmakers on Wednesday.

France, which has had close business ties with Iran since before the fall of the Shah in 1979 and still operates several large factories there including Renault and PSA plants, is not alone in Europe in seeking to deepen trade ties.

A French banking source said Italy, Germany, Austria and Belgium were also working on mechanisms that would shield their companies from the risk of U.S. sanctions. It was not immediately clear how closely coordinated the efforts are.

The dollar became the world's reserve currency because of oil when the Saudis agreed to trade oil only for dollars. But the days of oil being the world's primary commodity are over. Solar and wind energy are cheaper, and their price is going down each and every day. Now oil is becoming the world's most expensive form of energy. So oil's days are numbered. Besides oil can now be traded using the Chinese yuan. So US sanctions will soon be moot, and Trump can fuss and fume all he wants. The rest of the world wants to conduct peaceful business and not be subject to US bullying.

America is destroying itself with its insane gun culture. Guns are ubiquitous on TV, in the movies, in video games. Criminal activity becomes America's form of enjoyment. The thrill of killing becomes America's entertainment whether vicariously or for some in actuality. School shootings are becoming an everyday occurrence. Americans are so bored with life that violence is the only way to perk themselves up. That and drugs. Drugs have become a way of life. They are prescribed in TV commercials, and there is a drug just right for you from cradle to grave.

There is no peace as long as the US surrounds the world with 1000 military bases. The American economy is predicated on war. Major US corporations would go bankrupt unless they could produce Tomahawk missiles and drones. War has been automated to resemble a video game. It's conducted remotely. Kids brought up on violent video games can go right into the military having acquired the necessary set of skills.

While the US sinks deeper into a morass of violence, war and gun culture, the rest of the world is disentangling itself and disengaging from the bankrupt US leadership and the US dollar.

Off the Top of My Head

US May Bully World to Enforce Sanctions on Iran

by John Lawrence, May 14, 2018

The other signatories to the Iran nuclear deal don't want to pull out of it. Only Trump wants to reneg. He has pulled the US out, but the other countries want to stay in and want Iran to continue complying with the terms of the deal. In order for the US to reapply sanctions to Iran which are financial and economic prohibitions that will make Iran's economy even worse than it now is, the other nations such as France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China have to cooperate with the US in not doing business with Iran, but, since they want to do business with Iran and now the US is an outlier, they may continue doing business with Iran, defying the US. Then the US would be put in the position of applying sanctions to them including US allies Britain, France and Germany.

National Security Adviser, John Bolton, has threatened US allies with sanctions if they don't go along with the US. In effect the US has become the world's bully even toward Europe, our erstwhile ally. "I think the Europeans will see that it's in their interest ultimately to go along with us," Bolton said. It's in nobody's interests to abrogate the Iran deal which will not only cause hardship in Iran but yo the US allies which trade with Iran. Europe, for example, depends on Russian gas. Europeans have billions of dollars in business with Iran at stake. If they are forced by the US to stop doing business with Iran, it's not only Iran that will suffer.

The Guardian reported:

US sanctions on Iran reimposed following Trump’s withdrawal not only block American firms from doing business in the country, but also bar foreign firms that do business there from accessing the entire US banking and financial system.

Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, said on Sunday wealth created in Iran under the terms of the nuclear deal “drove Iranian malign activity” in the region. He declined to rule out sanctions against European firms.

“The sanctions regime that is in place now is very clear on what the requirements are,” Pompeo said on Fox News Sunday.

Trump’s decision to scrap the nuclear deal was sharply criticized by European leaders, who have pledged to uphold their side of the agreement.

Alarm has been particularly high in France, whose energy giant Total last year signed a $5bn deal to extract Iranian natural gas. Airbus, the French-based plane manufacturer, has already begun delivering jets to Iran Air under a multibillion-dollar contract.

Volkswagen, the German automaker, has resumed exporting cars to Iran. Richard Grenell, the new US ambassador to Berlin, warned this week in a tweet: “German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.”

Some European leaders have called for measures to nullify the US sanctions. Bruno Le Maire, the French finance minister, said last week: “We have to work among ourselves in Europe to defend our European economic sovereignty.”

Iran has said it will stay in the deal if the other five countries that signed the deal remain in it. That would expose those five countries to US sanctions. This amounts to a game of chicken and we'll see who backs down first - the US, US allies or Russia and China? Even if the European allies eventually buckle and give in to Trump, Russia and China might defy him. Trump is making the US the bully of the world. Will the rest of the world stand up to the US bully? As Trump says, we'll see.

The Constitution Project: France

by John Lawrence

Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite

From operationworld.org

France's Constitution goes back to the French Revolution of 1789 when France guillotined the King and became a Republic. Article 4 states: "Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man has no bounds other than those that ensure to the other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights. These bounds may be determined only by Law." The current Constitution was adopted in 1958.

This is from Wikipedia:

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (French: Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen), passed by France's National Constituent Assembly in August 1789, is an important document of the French Revolution and in the history of human and civil rights. The Declaration was directly influenced by Thomas Jefferson, working with General Lafayette, who introduced it. Influenced also by the doctrine of "natural right", the rights of man are held to be universal: valid at all times and in every place, pertaining to human nature itself. It became the basis for a nation of free individuals protected equally by the law. It is included in the beginning of the constitutions of both the Fourth French Republic (1946) and Fifth Republic (1958) and is still current. Inspired by the Enlightenment philosophers, the Declaration was a core statement of the values of the French Revolution and had a major impact on the development of freedom and democracy in Europe and worldwide.

The Declaration, together with Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and the United States Bill of Rights, inspired in large part the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The French President is elected directly by a vote of the people much like the US. The French Parliament consists of two Houses: the National Assembly and the Senate. In all elections where there is a single official to be elected for a given area, including the two major national elections (the election of the President of the Republic and the election of the members of the National Assembly), two-round runoff voting is used. For elections to the European Parliament and some local elections, proportional representation voting is used. The Senate is not elected directly by the people but indirectly by elected representatives. It also includes some representatives of French citizens abroad.

Who Weeps Not, Sees Not: Celebrating Victor Hugo's Les Misérables

From Common Dreams, Friday, June 30, 2017

 

by Abby Zimet, staff writer

 

 

Illustration of the dramatic journey carrying Marius through the sewers.

For a break from the current squalor, we pay tribute to Victor Hugo (1802-1885), who on this date in 1862 published the last chapter of Les Misérables, his extraordinary, riveting, timeless, 1,500 page paean to the wretched of the earth that gave voice to the long-suffering voiceless. The well-known, bare-bones plot of Hugo's masterwork tells the story of Jean Valjean, a peasant and tree pruner who steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving children, is imprisoned for 19 years, and goes on to transform his life and many others' through the political upheaval of revolutionary France even as he is pursued by the vengeful Inspector Javert.

As much activist and legislator as artist, Hugo's own politics evolved over the 20 years he spent writing his masterwork - years spanning the 1848 French Revolution. What began as a furious cry against poverty, brutal police, economic injustice and an inhumane prison system came to explore revolution, class struggle, spiritual and moral growth, and the redeeming power of love. Hugo writes about life and death and everything between: He calls for compassion, equality, solidarity, dignity for women, free education - "the right to the alphabet" - while embarking on long, dense, oddly fascinating digressions about Waterloo - okay we skipped it - and the Paris sewer system, which is pretty cool. He is funny, moving, full of rage and grace, deeply human, always.

At his funeral in 1885 - he asked to be buried in a pauper's casket - over two million people, more than the population of Paris, came to celebrate Hugo's enduring legacy in "a festival of the oppressed." Their fervor affirmed Hugo's longtime claim to the universality of his themes: In a letter to his Italian publishers, he insisted, "Misery concerns us all...In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book of Les Misérables knocks at the door and says: 'Open to me, I come for you.'"

Alas, many of the millions who know Les Misérables as a movie/musical/Disney cartoon have failed to read the book; we just got around to it last year. A word from the newly wise: Read it. It's astonishing, and will enrich your life. It's also stunningly, sorrowfully relevant, now more than ever. So is the final missive Hugo reportedly wrote, days before his death: "To love is to act."

Those Revolting Europeans

Op-Ed Columnist

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: May 6, 2012 in the New York Times

The French are revolting. The Greeks, too. And it’s about time.

Both countries held elections Sunday that were in effect referendums on the current European economic strategy, and in both countries voters turned two thumbs down. It’s far from clear how soon the votes will lead to changes in actual policy, but time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through austerity — and that’s a good thing.

Needless to say, that’s not what you heard from the usual suspects in the run-up to the elections. It was actually kind of funny to see the apostles of orthodoxy trying to portray the cautious, mild-mannered François Hollande as a figure of menace. He is “rather dangerous,” declared The Economist, which observed that he “genuinely believes in the need to create a fairer society.” Quelle horreur!

What is true is that Mr. Hollande’s victory means the end of “Merkozy,” the Franco-German axis that has enforced the austerity regime of the past two years. This would be a “dangerous” development if that strategy were working, or even had a reasonable chance of working. But it isn’t and doesn’t; it’s time to move on. Europe’s voters, it turns out, are wiser than the Continent’s best and brightest.

What’s wrong with the prescription of spending cuts as the remedy for Europe’s ills? One answer is that the confidence fairy doesn’t exist — that is, claims that slashing government spending would somehow encourage consumers and businesses to spend more have been overwhelmingly refuted by the experience of the past two years. So spending cuts in a depressed economy just make the depression deeper.

Moreover, there seems to be little if any gain in return for the pain. Consider the case of Ireland, which has been a good soldier in this crisis, imposing ever-harsher austerity in an attempt to win back the favor of the bond markets. According to the prevailing orthodoxy, this should work. In fact, the will to believe is so strong that members of Europe’s policy elite keep proclaiming that Irish austerity has indeed worked, that the Irish economy has begun to recover.

But it hasn’t. And although you’d never know it from much of the press coverage, Irish borrowing costs remain much higher than those of Spain or Italy, let alone Germany. So what are the alternatives?

One answer — an answer that makes more sense than almost anyone in Europe is willing to admit — would be to break up the euro, Europe’s common currency. Europe wouldn’t be in this fix if Greece still had its drachma, Spain its peseta, Ireland its punt, and so on, because Greece and Spain would have what they now lack: a quick way to restore cost-competitiveness and boost exports, namely devaluation.

As a counterpoint to Ireland’s sad story, consider the case of Iceland, which was ground zero for the financial crisis but was able to respond by devaluing its currency, the krona (and also had the courage to let its banks fail and default on their debts). Sure enough, Iceland is experiencing the recovery Ireland was supposed to have, but hasn’t.

Yet breaking up the euro would be highly disruptive, and would also represent a huge defeat for the “European project,” the long-run effort to promote peace and democracy through closer integration. Is there another way? Yes, there is — and the Germans have shown how that way can work. Unfortunately, they don’t understand the lessons of their own experience.

Talk to German opinion leaders about the euro crisis, and they like to point out that their own economy was in the doldrums in the early years of the last decade but managed to recover. What they don’t like to acknowledge is that this recovery was driven by the emergence of a huge German trade surplus vis-à-vis other European countries — in particular, vis-à-vis the nations now in crisis — which were booming, and experiencing above-normal inflation, thanks to low interest rates. Europe’s crisis countries might be able to emulate Germany’s success if they faced a comparably favorable environment — that is, if this time it was the rest of Europe, especially Germany, that was experiencing a bit of an inflationary boom.

So Germany’s experience isn’t, as the Germans imagine, an argument for unilateral austerity in Southern Europe; it’s an argument for much more expansionary policies elsewhere, and in particular for the European Central Bank to drop its obsession with inflation and focus on growth.

The Germans, needless to say, don’t like this conclusion, nor does the leadership of the central bank. They will cling to their fantasies of prosperity through pain, and will insist that continuing with their failed strategy is the only responsible thing to do. But it seems that they will no longer have unquestioning support from the Élysée Palace. And that, believe it or not, means that both the euro and the European project now have a better chance of surviving than they did a few days ago.

Hollande Beats Sarkozy: Report from Holland

by Frank Thomas

 

I happen to like Sarkozy but have sensed that his gap with the working class is too great. His presidency inherited a costly French governmental bureaucracy, an extensive welfare system, and a sputtering economic growth all leading to: a high public debt level at 85% of GDP and public spending at 55% of GDP; a declining industry; and almost double digit joblessness. His closeness with the rich, brash style, inability to reverse France's tough economic situation as well as the growing public impatience with strict austerity measures brought him down in the election yesterday. 

Hollande's election puts pressure on Merkel in her elections next year as the German public is also growing a little restless with austerity measures. Should Merkel lose, this would represent a dramatic shift of power to the left in Europe with only the UK, Spain and to a lesser extent the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries as the primary conservative-centrist governments in Western Europe. And it remains to be seem whether the very strongly rising Dutch SP socialist party will win big in September as expected, helped by what's happened in France. Then the Dutch coalition government could well shift to the left from its current slight left of center position ... although this doesn´t concern me as the conservative VVD party is still expected to win a major number of the seats in Parliament and will be a strong force in any new coalition formed after the September elections. This is the inherent beauty and balance of the Netherlands's proportional representation governmental system I described in my last writing.

 

Francois Hollande's campaign themes give apoplexy to many people of strict conservative mind (no doubt particularly to the American far right) ... who see his election as a "Big Government Nightmare." I find this very amusing as most people were looking favorably upon the financially sharp Strauss Kahn as the next socialist party premier of France until his women escapades put to ashes his political career. However, Hollande will probably use Kahn´s exceptional financial acumen hopefully to great benefit for the nation.

                                  

Hollande supports France´s deeply entrenched -- already excessive in my view -- socialist policies. He wants to renegotiate the hard-won European treaty on budget cuts, BUT, he remains a staunch Euro-Federalist (unlike the increasingly popular Dutch SP socialist party). He wants austerity to be tempered with immediate plans to stimulate economic growth and favors increasing France´s already 55% high public spending as a % of GDP. For example, he wants to recruit 60,000 new teachers and lower the retirement age from 60-62 for manual workers who started their work as teenagers. He will pay for this and more and balance the budget by 2017 by: setting a 75% tax rate on income above euro 1.0 million ($1.3 million), increasing taxes on big corporations and implementing a financial transaction tax. He sees the world of finance as his and the nation's real enemy. I couldn´t agree more!

 

All in all it's a gamble with Francois Hollande as it was with Sarkozy. On the positive side, he's a methodical, quiet working professional who wants to only temper austerity actions while taking firm measures to stimulate growth. He's not against financial discipline but wants it spread out more as the Krugmans and Stiglitzes are pleading for which I think makes sense as long as the equal necessity for financial solidity is not compromised. The problem is that France is the one last major power in Europe that has done the least to reform its very costly social net, health and pension systems. 

 

Hollande's support of his country´s socialist policies may be his ultimate downfall. BUT, he has the chance to come with a refreshing new approach to balancing French private and public initiatives to restore financial stability and growth. While I´m a little nervous, one has to marvel at the diversity of social/economic models and governance styles in Europe ... all learning from each other while at same time addressing the priorities, habits and needs relevant to each country's unique historical culture.

 

Margaret Thatcher warned:

 

"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people´s money."

 

But the Iron Lady couldnt fathom that conservative governments can do the same thing with the most recent lesson coming from Pres. Bush Jr. ... who Doubled our national deficit from $5 trillion to $10 trillion in 2008 with his pharmaceutical subsidies and tax reduction policies for the rich causing another ± $2 trillion deficit during Obama´s term.

 

Will Hollande, the socialist, copy Bush, the conservative, in bringing his country to near financial insolvency? I doubt it. There are simply too many structural checks and balances in the mature, broadly represented government systems in Europe for any one man to behave irresponsibly left or right. Even the UK conservative premier, Cameron, whom I much admire along with his co-premier Clegg, is kept in sensble balance by becoming part of his country's first coalition government in 60 years. 

The Globalization of Hollow Politics

Posted on Apr 23, 2012, by Truthdig

AP/François Mori

A supporter wears a T-shirt depicting French Socialist Party candidate François Hollande and the legend “H is for hope,” echoing the Obama campaign of 2008.

By Chris Hedges

I went to Lille in northern France a few days before the first round of the French presidential election to attend a rally held by the socialist candidate François Holland. It was a depressing experience. Thunderous music pulsated through the ugly and poorly heated Zenith convention hall a few blocks from the city center. The rhetoric was as empty and cliché-driven as an American campaign event. Words like “destiny,” “progress” and “change” were thrown about by Holland, who looks like an accountant and made oratorical flourishes and frenetic arm gestures that seemed calculated to evoke the last socialist French president, François Mitterrand. There was the singing of “La Marseillaise” when it was over. There was a lot of red, white and blue, the colors of the French flag. There was the final shout of “Vive la France!” I could, with a few alterations, have been at a football rally in Amarillo, Texas. I had hoped for a little more gravitas. But as the French cultural critic Guy Debord astutely grasped, politics, even allegedly radical politics, has become a hollow spectacle. Quel dommage.

The emptying of content in political discourse in an age as precarious and volatile as ours will have very dangerous consequences. The longer the political elite—whether in Washington or Paris, whether socialist or right-wing, whether Democrat or Republican—ignore the breakdown of globalization, refuse to respond rationally to the climate crisis and continue to serve the iron tyranny of global finance, the more it will shred the possibility of political consensus, erode the effectiveness of our political institutions and empower right-wing extremists. The discontent sweeping the planet is born out of the paralysis of traditional political institutions.

The signs of this mounting polarization were apparent in incomplete returns Sunday with the far-right National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, winning a staggering vote of roughly 20 percent. This will make the National Front the primary opposition party in France if Holland wins, as expected, the presidency in the second round May 6. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s leftist coalition, the Front de Gauche, was pulling a disappointing 11 percent of the vote. But at least France has a Mélenchon. He was the sole candidate to attack the racist and nationalist diatribes of Le Pen. Mélenchon called for a rolling back of austerity measures, preached the politics “of love, of brotherhood, of poetry” and vowed to fight what he termed the “parasitical vermin” who run global markets. His campaign rallies ended with the singing of the leftist anthem “The Internationale.”

“Long live the Republic, long live the working class, long live France!” he shouted before a crowd of supporters Saturday night.

Every election cycle, our self-identified left dutifully lines up like sheep to vote for the corporate wolves who control the Democratic Party. It bleats the tired, false mantra about Ralph Nader being responsible for the 2000 election of George W. Bush and warns us that the corporate technocrat Mitt Romney is, in fact, an extremist.

The extremists, of course, are already in power. They have been in power for several years. They write our legislation. They pick the candidates and fund their campaigns. They dominate the courts. They effectively gut regulations and environmental controls. They suck down billions in government subsidies. They pay no taxes. They determine our energy policy. They loot the U.S. treasury. They rigidly control public debate and information. They wage useless and costly imperial wars for profit. They are behind the stripping away of our most cherished civil liberties. They are implementing government programs to gouge out any money left in the carcass of America. And they know that Romney or Barack Obama, along with the Democratic and the Republican parties, will not stop them.

The abrasive Nicolas Sarkozy is France’s oilier version of Bush. Sarkozy, along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, has done the dirty work for bankers. He and Merkel have shoved draconian austerity measures down the throats of Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Spain and Italy. The governments of all these countries, not surprisingly, have been deposed by an enraged electorate. And if the new governments in these distressed European states continue to be ineffectual—which is inevitable given the sacrifices demanded by the banks—the instability will get worse.

Politicians such as Obama—and, I fear, Holland—who carry out corporate agendas while speaking in the language of populism become enemies of liberal democracies. Labor unions, environmentalists, anti-war activists and civil libertarians, blinded by the images and lies disseminated by public relations offices, stop watching what these politicians do. They mute their criticism to give these politicians, whose rhetoric is rarely matched by reality, a chance. The result accelerates our disempowerment. It is also, more ominously, a discrediting of traditional liberal democratic values. The longer the liberal class does not vigorously denounce expanded oil drilling, our corporate health insurance bill and the National Defense Authorization Act, simply because these initiatives have been pushed through by the Democrats, the more marginal the left becomes. If Bush had carried these policies, “liberal” pundits would have thundered with feigned outrage. The hypocrisy of the American left is too blatant to ignore. And it has effectively left us disempowered as a political force.

The political theater staged by the Democrats and Republicans, bloated with corporate money, will not work much longer. The game will soon be up. There are four countries in Europe with socialist governments—Belgium, Austria, Denmark and Slovenia. All have had to implement austerity programs. None have effectively defied the power of the banks. This paralysis is a ticking bomb both in the U.S. and abroad. And when it explodes it will be far more deadly than anything cooked up by a group of radical jihadists.

Paris was convulsed by riots led by unemployed youths in 2005, many of them immigrants living in the depressing high-rise housing projects in the poor suburbs of Paris known as banlieues. These riots swiftly spread across France. The French government declared a state of national emergency. Now, the simmering rage of the underclass could easily boil over again. The French unemployment rate of 10 percent is the highest in 12 years, but for those in the banlieues the rate is more than 40 percent. We in the United States have similar numbers, only without France’s health care system or safety net. And public unrest could soon pit the disorganized rage of the dispossessed against organized crypto-fascists such as Le Pen, who once compared Muslims praying on French streets in front of overcrowded mosques to the Nazi occupation.

A breakdown of liberal democracy, which seems to be where we are headed, may not bring with it a salutary change. The most retrograde forces within the corporate state, such as the Koch brothers, will lavish racists, homophobes, demagogues, birthers, creationists and gun-carrying, flag-waving idiots with money once the political center crumbles. The left in Europe, and most certainly in the United States, could prove to be too weak to battle against figures like Le Pen or those in the U.S. who rally around the perverted ideologies of the Christian right and the tea party and who receive tens of millions of dollars in corporate backing. The left, in short, may find that it has done too little too late to be an effective counterweight. And widespread discontent could very easily be manipulated by the corporate elites to ensure our enslavement. I watched this happen in the former Yugoslavia. This is the real battle before us. And it has nothing to do with the election charade between Obama and Romney and, I expect, Holland and Sarkozy.

 

Obama, Sarkozy and Taxing Wall Street

Published on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 by CommonDreams.org

by Jeff Cohen

With U.S. media obsessing on the fight here at home among conservatives vying to become president, most of them missed some big news about France, which already has a conservative president.  This week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would take the lead – even go it alone within Europe, if need be – in introducing and pushing a Financial Transaction Tax in his country.

That’s right – the conservative president of France wants to tax the financial traders and speculators.

Referring to the tax as a “moral issue” and blaming deregulation and speculation for the global economic meltdown, Sarkozy has said that traders must “repay for the damage they have caused.”

What does it tell us about U.S. politics that the conservative president of France – on this issue and others – is way to the left of President Obama?  The U.S. president has not publicly promoted a Wall Street transaction tax (even though US financial institutions, not the French, were largely responsible for the global financial crisis).

Sometimes called a “Robin Hood tax,” a Financial Transaction Tax is endorsed worldwide by everyone from conservative European leaders to the Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury to Bill Gates and Ralph Nader.  The tax is a tiny per transaction fee and would barely be felt by middle-class investors or their pensions or 401(k)’s, but it could raise big bucks from high-volume investors and impose a brake on the kind of speculation that tanked the world’s economy.  

French President Sarkozy keeps explaining to the people of France and Europe that a small transaction tax raises billions for countries facing deficits.

Wouldn’t it be something if President Obama went to the American people with such a deficit proposal, instead of putting Medicare on the chopping block?

President Sarkozy invokes the “moral issue” of financial institutions repairing the damage they caused.  What a shock it would be to see President Obama aiming the “moral issue” at Wall Street profiteers and demanding repair of damage, instead of rewarding them with top White House jobs.

After failing to get resistant allies among European countries to join him, Sarkozy is going forward on his own – declaring yesterday: “If France waits for others to tax finance, then finance will never be taxed.”

Can you imagine Obama standing up to a resistant Congress on a Wall Street transaction tax?  He can’t even stand up to his own advisers on the issue, according to Ron Suskind’s insider book on the Obama White House, “Confidence Men.”  Suskind reports that Obama briefly embraced the tax and declared at one meeting: “We are going to do this!”  But after Obama’s top economic adviser (and Wall Streeter) Larry Summers criticized the tax, the idea was buried at the White House. 

That was back in 2009.  But the idea is still alive on Capitol Hill.  A couple months ago, Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. Peter DeFazio introduced a Financial Transaction Tax bill in Congress that would easily raise $350 billion over 10 years.  Rep. John Conyers introduced a similar bill last year – it would tax Wall Street to fund federal jobs programs.

A Wall Street transaction tax is backed by National Nurses United and other unions.  It’s popular with the U.S. public, and would be even more popular if Obama were to campaign for it in 2012. RootsAction.org has gained 50,000 signatures in support of the tax.

You can add your name here to those pushing Obama to (re)embrace the Wall Street tax. 

And don’t get me wrong about President Sarkozy of France.  He’s no great humanitarian.  But he is facing an uphill reelection battle this year and the conservative president understands how popular a financial tax is with voters.

Facing reelection this year, maybe it’s time President Obama came to that same understanding.

Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group FAIR, and former board member of Progressive Democrats of America. In 2002, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC (overseen by NBC News). He is the author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media - and a cofounder of the online action group, www.RootsAction.org.

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