[extropy-chat] Re: riots in France

Wed Nov 9 14:23:29 UTC 2005

The story below is for anyone who believes that the French riots are 
something peculiar to that country. The prediction here for the US and 
western nations in general is dire. Could be that a similar situation to 
that in France is not so far away from your local neighborhood...
And it won't be 'the Muslims' - because it wasn't 'the Muslims' in France.

It WILL be their local equivalent... Whatever underpaid, under-resourced, 
ghettoised minority is currently do the drudge work in your area for less 
than a living wage - while living in a hovel.

Rather than despising these people and branding them as criminals and 
crazies when, inevitably, they make their stand - we should tackle these 
social problems now.

Contented citizens with full bellies NEVER man the barricades...
Jack Parkinson
French Fires
By Stephen Pizzo, News for Real
Posted on November 9, 2005, http://www.alternet.org/story/27998/
How do you explain the rioting that is happening in France? Two words: cheap 
labor. France, like most other mature Western economies, has embraced cheap 
labor from underdeveloped countries. That flood of cheap labor has, at least 
until now, served both corporations and consumers. Corporate earnings are up 
across the board, for example.

But, you point out, wages are down across the board too. How does that serve 
consumers -- most of whom are working-class folk?

The answer comes as a single, hyphenated word -- Wal-Mart. Cheap labor 
produces cheap goods. How many times have you bought something at a Big Box 
store and said to yourself, I don't know how they can make and sell this 
item so cheaply? Down deep, of course, you really don't care. You're just 
happy you got the gizmo for so little.

And it's not just cheap labor abroad that we're addicted to. In both Europe 
and the U.S., legal and illegal immigration has turned ordinary Americans 
into cheap labor employers as well. Even a working-class stiff can afford a 
gardener, a housekeeper and a nanny these days. You can quite literally pick 
them up right off the street corner.

Want an addition built on to your home? It's almost certain that the only 
reason you can afford one is because the contractor no longer hires union 
carpenters. Instead, he picks up a few Mexican carpenters down on a corner, 
or a hiring hall. They are skilled and hardworking, and they put in a full 
day for a fraction of what a union carpenter would charge. You're happy. The 
contractor's happy.But some former union carpenter now works at the local 
Oil Stop, earning half of what he once made. Then again, that one-time union 
carpenter is still able to make ends meet, thanks to cheap imported goods --  
at least for now.

So far, so good for everyone -- at least it would appear. But there is an 
inevitable price for all this, and the French are paying it now. There 
really is no free lunch, even in France. Two dynamics are now in play, even 
if most Western governments still refuse to acknowledge them.

First, Western economies have been busy for the past 10 years or so stewing 
the golden geese that made them economic powerhouses in the first place ---  
their working middle-classes. Workers' real wages have plummeted as their 
homegrown industries turned to cheaper foreign labor. In the short run, 
those cheap goods coming back into their countries blunted the effect of 
lower domestic wages. But that can't go on forever. Sooner or later, Western 
consumers will run out of both disposable income and available credit. When 
that happens, the middle-class consumer -- the engine that drives every 
Western economy -- will stop pulling the train. (We should see the first 
hint of that here during the coming holiday season.)

Second, low wages paid to immigrants -- many illegal -- create the very 
conditions that sparked the riots in France. Do the math yourself. If 
American workers, who have seen their real wages drop like a rock, are 
beginning to feel the first signs of economic stress, imagine the fiscal 
conditions that face the average low-wage immigrant family. Such immigrants 
already live on the economic razor's edge. What they learn -- too late --is 
that the deck is stacked against them. They cannot join the mainstream of 
these societies, because allowing them to do so would require paying them a 
livable wage. And what purpose would that serve, paying immigrants the same 
as domestic workers? The French, for example, already don't seem to care for 
having all these folks in their country to begin with. The reason they put 
up with them is because they work for peanuts.

France may be the first Western nation to experience the downside of cheap 
imported labor, but it will not be the last. Trapped in ghettos by low 
wages, stuck in low-end jobs by cultural, racial and religious factors, the 
lid eventually blows -- always. When that happens the citizens and companies 
that had benefited from their cheap labor first always go into denial. They 
are shocked, simply shocked! They blame everyone but themselves for the real 
reasons behind the violence. The rioters are "scum, stirred up by radical 
clerics. They are not oppressed, they have no genuine issues. They are just 
criminals."

Yes, some of the rioters we are seeing in France are criminals. But France's 
real problem is that French society has become hooked on a pool of surplus 
immigrant labor. I said "surplus," because that's key to keeping cheap labor 
cheap. The trouble is that surplus of labor also means that, at any point in 
time, there are more unemployed immigrants in France than working ones, with 
more joining that surplus labor pool each day. Tick, tick, tick.

America is lucky in that our flood of immigrants comes largely from Mexico, 
a generally peaceful country populated by peaceful people. (Have you ever 
heard of a Mexican suicide bomber?) France's immigrants, by comparison, 
largely herald from poor Muslim countries, like former French colonies in 
North Africa -- a part of the world where political/social/religous violence 
is the norm rather than the exception.

But the Americans and the French have their thirst for cheap labor in 
common. And sooner or later, social unrest will hit here as well. Here, I 
suspect it will be American workers who got a taste of middle-class life, 
only to have it snatched away from them. Those once well-paid Americans now 
find themselves stranded between the rich, who are getting richer, and the 
working poor, who are getting poorer.

The middle ground upon which they once stood has all but disappeared. They 
may not understand the macro-economic reasons for that, but they know this 
much -- they no longer have the means of moving up the economic ladder, and 
they have no intentions of joining the working poor.

When that realization sinks in, even dirt-cheap toaster ovens at Wal-Mart 
won't help.

Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including "Inside Job: The 
Looting of America's Savings and Loans," which was nominated for a Pulitzer.