New America Media - European

The American Dream has Emigrated to Europe

2012-01-19T09:00:00Z

To anyone who grew up in the Cold War, the rhetoric of the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential candidates is strangely familiar. The United States, they warn, is threatened by an alien ideology. What’s startling is that the bogeyman this time around is not resurgent and increasingly hostile Russia, but Western Europe – Washington’s closest and most steadfast ally since the end of World War Two.

According to Mitt Romney, currently the leading G.O.P. contender, “Barack Obama wants us to turn into a European-style welfare state,” a development that would “poison the very spirit of America.”

Newt Gingrich charges that Romney himself is guilty of “looking into European socialist ideas.” Not to be outdone, Rick Santorum fulminates that Western Europe is “being overrun from overseas... and they have no response. They have nothing to fight for. They have nothing to live for."

There’s no question that the European Union is struggling today, beset by many of the same economic problems as the United States (thanks in no small part to the shenanigans of U.S. financial firms). The EU faces a major debt crisis in its laggard Mediterranean states, and has yet to arrive at a workable solution.

Nonetheless, as a resident of Western Europe for more than two decades, I recognize almost nothing in the portrait painted by the men who hope to unseat Obama.

But let’s take their rhetoric seriously and compare the economic performance of the United States to that of a trio of emblematic European nations: Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. With a half-century record of extensive investments in social services and national infrastructure, they are among the principal architects of a system that supposedly leaves Western Europeans with nothing to live or fight for.

The Real Champs of the Capitalist League

In the economic realm, three measures dominate conventional assessments of success and failure: unemployment, foreign trade and sovereign debt, the ratio of government debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

On every count, the achievements of Western Europe leave the United States in the dust.

With some justification, President Obama has expressed pride at the gradual decline of American joblessness from more than 10 percent shortly after he took office to the most recent level of 8.5 percent. But this success pales considerably by comparison with the Netherlands’ 5.8 percent, Germany’s 6.3 percent and Sweden’s 6.7 percent.

Foreign trade is the bellwether of business acumen everywhere on our globalized planet, notably including China, where the vast majority of exports are produced by manufacturers as fervently dedicated to capitalism as New Gingrich and his ultra-free-marketer rival Ron Paul. But the world’s champion exporters over the last ten years are not the Chinese. They’re the Germans, who enjoy an annual trade surplus of nearly $200 billion.

In per capita terms, Germans sold $2,300 more of their products overseas than they bought for every one of the nation’s 82 million citizens. The per capita surplus figures for Sweden ($2,400) and the Netherlands ($2,800) are even higher.

The United States, by depressing contrast, has an annual trade deficit now approaching $600 billion, by far the most dismal on Earth, amounting to a $2,000 loss registered on the bottom line of every American. That number has risen every year since the Republican-governed 1980s, recovering somewhat under Democrat Bill Clinton and then skyrocketing at an unprecedented pace under George W. Bush.

As damning as these figures may be, it is in sovereign debt that the willful ignorance – or outright deceit – of the G.O.P. candidates is most glaring. As a result of endless tax cuts for the wealthy by their party’s predecessors in the White House, tied to endlessly rising expenditures on unfunded Republican-declared foreign wars, the United States has a sovereign debt ratio of 102, not far behind the 118 of universally derided Italy.

In Sweden, allegedly the most dissolute spendthrift in the Republicans’ European socialist welfare nightmare, sovereign debt stands at a paltry 39.7, which translates into the unavoidable conclusion that Swedish Social Democrats are more cautious spenders than all of America’s Republican administrations dating back to Richard M. Nixon. The Dutch come in at a very respectable 62.9, and the Germans at 83, astonishing for a nation that has been rebuilding its entire eastern infrastructure since the Berlin Wall collapsed.

Life is More Than a Cash Register

In the United States, $7,538 was spent per person on health care in 2008, the latest year for which accurate figures are available. The Dutch spent $4,063 that year, the Germans $3,737 and the Swedes $3,470 – an average of less than half the American level of spending, which has continued rising.

This gap cannot be explained away by differences in national wealth. The annual per capita GDP of Germany is $45,000, just a shade behind the United States at $48,000, which is in turn just shy of the Netherlands’ $51,000. Sweden is the leader by a country mile, at a staggering $62,000.

Results? At a fraction of the U.S. cost, adult life expectancy in all three of the European bogeyman nations is higher than in America. At the far end of the demographic curve, the differences are downright appalling. Infant mortality in the United States from 2005 to 2010 was a ghastly 6.81 deaths per 100,000 live births. In Sweden, the corresponding mortality rate is just 2.56, in Germany 3.71 and in Holland 4.42.

Health care standards in Europe are no theoretical matter for me. A doctor in Paris saved my life when I contracted cerebral malaria while on assignment in the southern Balkans. Another doctor in Milan saw me through a terrifying cancer scare a few years ago. Neither of them asked me to empty my wallet. It is taken for granted in Western Europe that high-quality medical attention should be available to everyone, and no politician – including those on the political far right – questions the premise. My Milanese physician co-authored the standard text on gastroenterology now in use in a dozen countries, and did double residencies in surgery and internal medicine at the University of Paris and at Stanford.

My friends in America worry constantly about the costs and limits of their health care. No one in Europe worries about these things.

There is something else worth mentioning on the subject of anxiety. Even after more than a decade of improvement, the homicide rate in the United States is at just under five murders yearly per 100,000 people. That’s almost six times the figure for both Holland (0.87) and Germany (0.84).

Where the American Dream Went

Egalitarianism, the idea that a level playing field of means and opportunities is a fundamental strength of democracy, has a long and honored legacy in the United States. By any objective standard, that legacy began to ebb in the Reagan years and has yet to recover.

The most authoritative measure of concentrated wealth – and poverty – is a complex formula known as the Gini coefficient, named for Corrado Gini, the Italian statistician who devised it. Put simply, the lower the Gini number, the more equitable a nation’s distribution of income.

As computed by none other than the Central Intelligence Agency, the Gini coefficients of Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden are all at 30 or under, among the world’s lowest. The United States, the CIA says, rates 45 on the Gini scale. That puts it roughly into the same league as Bulgaria, Cambodia, El Salvador, Iran, Madagascar and Rwanda.

The top 10 percent of Swedish incomes are 6.2 times greater than the lowest 20 percent. The top 10 percent of U.S. incomes are 15.9 times those of the lowest 20 percent. In short, the gap between rich and poor, between a level playing field and an unscalable mountain, is more than twice as large in the United States as it is in Sweden – whose privately-held industries manage to generate a significantly larger per capita GDP than their American counterparts. For the record, the gap is also twice as large in America between the top 20 percent and the lower 20 percent.

What this means for the American Dream, with its fantasies of poor boys who become millionaires through diligence and hard work, is documentable. A 2006 report commissioned by the Bonn-based Institute for the Study of Labor found that 42 percent of men raised by households in the lower fifth of U.S. incomes remain there as adults – almost double the number in Europe’s Nordic countries.

“Mobility in Europe,” the chance of climbing out of poverty and up to middle-income levels, “is actually greater than it is in America,” a U.S. presidential candidate lamented four months ago.

The speaker was not Barack Obama, the presumed agent of a foreign ideology. It was Rick Santorum, who later declared that Europeans have nothing to live for.

Image by http://www.shutterstock.com/i

Greek Prime Minister 'Expected to Step Down'

2011-11-06T17:03:45Z

George Papandreou, Greece's prime minister, is expected to resign as soon as a deal for an interim coalition government is agreed, perhaps as early as Sunday night, a senior member from his party said.

The main goal, duration and leader of such an administration must be agreed before Papandreou resigns, PASOK party politician Telemachos Hitiris told Greek state television on Sunday.

"We only have to wait for the prime minister's announcements in the cabinet," he said. "Everything must be done within the day, otherwise tomorrow it will be hell."

Al Jazeera's Jonah Hull, reporting from Athens, described the matter of Papandreou's resignation as "political horseplay," explaining that "the leader of the opposition is insisting that he won't even start [coalition] talks until Papandreou resigns. Papandreou is saying he will...resign after they're concluded."

Papandreou has come under fire at home and abroad for his shortlived plan to let Greek voters decide on the Eurozone bailout deal.

He survived a confidence vote in parliament on Saturday, but politicians from his party have called on him to quit.

Hitiris said elections should be held after Greece meets its obligations to Eurozone partners, pinning the timing to around January or February.

NAM Radio: Democracy Now's Juan Gonzalez

2011-10-28T19:30:00Z

In over 35 years as an American journalist, Juan Gonzalez has done more than leave his mark -- he has played a pivotal and crucial role in changing the face of American journalism.

As co-host of the award-winning Democracy Now!, he and his team proved that not only is it possible to create a national news program that is independent of corporate and power structures, but that millions of Americans will like it and watch it.

He joined New America Now Host Shirin Sadeghi to discuss his new book with co-author Joe Torres of the Washington-based Free Press, called News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.

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NAM Radio: The German American Journey

2011-10-25T21:52:11Z

According to German American institutions, around 40% of all Americans have at least 25% German ancestry. It's a fact they are proud of and which is used to encourage and strengthen relations between Germans and Americans.

But so little of German culture seems to have remained in America. Author Simon Winder has spent years traveling to Germany and Austria. His new book, Germania, is a window into a Germany most Americans have long forgotten. He spoke with New America Now Host Shirin Sadeghi.

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New America Now is the radio program of New America Media. The program is hosted by Shirin Sadeghi and is broadcast on 91.7 FM KALW San Francisco on Fridays at noon and Sundays at 3 pm.

New America Now's Complete Show for October 21 and 23, 2011:

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NAM Radio: A Guide to Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-10T19:30:00Z

While America's airwaves, television screens and front pages have been duly preoccupied with massive street demonstrations and revolutions in the Middle East, the American people have been busy with their own protests.

One of the biggest nationwide protests in American history since the days of the Vietnam War is now taking place in America. To learn more about the movement and its players, New America Now Host Shirin Sadeghi spoke with Bert Cannavelli -- the organizer of OccupyThe Nation.com.

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Green Oil in Africa: Development Opportunity or Threat to Food Security?

2011-10-09T23:20:00Z

The famine crisis in the Horn of Africa is bringing into focus the controversial role that bio-fuels play in the African continent. With both Kenya and Ethiopia having leased 700,000 hectares of land to foreign investors, the question now is whether bio-fuels represent new development opportunities, or a new form of colonization.

Both Europe and the U.S. are committed to expanding their clean fuel consumption. In particular, new European legislations that came into force last December require gasoline and diesel in EU Member States to incorporate a minimum 10 percent of low-carbon fuel by 2020. But given the region’s shortage of arable farmland, this ambitious target will lead to a tripling of agro-fuel imports currently supplied from Asia and South America.

As early as 2005, forward-looking investors foresaw this future scenario, and accordingly turned their gaze to the continent with the world’s largest and cheapest share of arable land. Africa’s 807 millions hectares of under-used soil represent 15 times what the International Energy Agency considers necessary to meet the rising global demand for biofuels over the next two decades.

Since then, around 50 Western companies, largely from Europe, have launched a hundred projects in more than 20 African countries, with concessions covering a total area of at least 3.2 millions hectares, roughly the size of Ireland.

Some African governments, meanwhile, have eagerly sought to cash in. In 2006, a twelve-nation bloc formed what has come to be called the “Green Opec,” a joint initiative promoting local production and use of bio-fuels, with funds to be reinvested toward agricultural improvements.

The Sceptics

"There are no plans to build refineries, nor obligations for foreign investors to reserve part of their output for the domestic market," said Jamidu Katima, Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, following that country’s adoption of new bio-fuels guidelines last year.

The rush to grow crops for fuel also bumped up grain prices during the food crisis in 2008, exposing agro-energy raiders to NGO crossfire. In 2009-2010, around 80 percent of the bio-fuels powering British vehicles came from feedstock usable for food or animal feed, according to the national Renewable Fuels Agency.

Investors counter that Jatropha, a shrub native to Central America, is the answer to public criticism, pointing to the crop’s ability to flourish on marginal and arid land unsuitable for agriculture.

And yet, research by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization prove that the heralded “miracle crop” might be less miraculous than investors’ claims. “Growing Jatropha in a profitable way on dry land is a myth,” says Peter Auge, country manager of the British company Sun Biofuels. “Jatropha needs water, fertilizers and pesticides to provide high yields,” he adds.

Auge’s plantation sits on some of Tanzania’s most productive land, receiving no less than “1100mm of annual rainfall, ” as advertised on SunBiofuels’s Web site.

Food Security and Climate Change

Jatropha’s uncontrolled expansion on fertile cropland poses a risk not to only food security, but also to the ultimate climate change mitigation goal pursued by the EU.

Last November, projections by the London-based Institute of European Environmental Policy warned that displaced farmers will be forced to cut trees elsewhere to grow their food. CO2 released from such deforestation could exceed carbon saving requirements from agro-energy supplies in Europe that are set to rise from 35 percent in 2011 to 60 percent in 2018.

“Because we know comparatively less about Jatropha, its advantages could very well be overstated,” says David Omom, Senior Consultant at Pöyry Management Consulting, a London-based energy firm. “If it requires as many resources as other crops, it could end up being as expensive and less environmentally sustainable and may not even be able to supply the European market.”

Higher-than-expected costs have already forced reappraisals among a number of agro-energy majors. U.K.-based D1 Oils froze export plans after the failure in 2009 of its joint venture with British Petroleum, which expressed doubt about Jatropha’s market potential. Last year, GEM Biofuels, operating in Madagascar, suspended trade on the London Stock Exchange for four months. ESV Bio Africa left Mozambique two years ago.

Community Approach

Agro-energy corporate fiascos may affect not only shareholders, but also the livelihoods of local communities. In 2009, Bio Energy Africa pulled out from its bio-ethanol joint venture with the government in Mozambique. The result -- thousands of farmers lost their right to farm the land allocated under the project, and received no compensation for jobs promised to them under the agreement.

Meghan Sapp, Secretary General of the Brussels-based network Partners for Euro-African Green Energy, notes that following the financial crisis, “most large Jatropha monocultures lost competitiveness and financial support.” She adds that more EU funding “should be made available for small-scale, integrated and truly sustainable projects.”

Lorenzo Cotula, Senior Researcher at the International Institute for the Environment and Development, concurs. “Extensive commercial plantations dislocate rural communities from their land. Instead, self-managed bio-fuel production can offer them cheaper energy and complementary sources of income.”

Several investors have shown interest in this community-based approach. “Our farmers in Mozambique are given seedlings to grow Jatropha on their own land with the option to sell the seeds back to us,” says Chris Hunter, director and co-founder of the UK-flagged Viridesco. “We help smaller plantations that cater to the developing world markets, as opposed to big monocultures that service the developed world’s energy needs”.

Stefano Valentino is a Rome-based writer and editor with Euroreporter.eu. Read his blog here.

NAM Radio: The Theatre of Armenian Genocide

2011-10-09T23:15:00Z

The Armenian Genocide began in the late 19th century and continued on through the first two decades of the the 20th. It was the first genocide of the 20th century and hundreds of thousands -- some say 1.5 million -- Armenian lives later, the Armenian Genocide had made its mark on history.

What remains is the story of their lives, told by those who came after. Torange Yeghiazarian is the founding director of Golden Thread Middle Eastern Theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her theatre's production of Night Over Erzinga is a sparkling and moving adaptation of one family's story. She spoke with New America Now Host Shirin Sadeghi.

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NAM Radio: Manufacturing Immigrant Hysteria in America

2011-10-05T05:25:00Z

America is a melting pot -- a coming together of different peoples from different countries, religions, ethnicities and ideologies. It began with immigration and it moves forward with it. But it's never been easy being different in America.

Author Jay Feldman's new book takes a look at how difficult it has been for every kind of American minority you can imagine. His book is called Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance and Secrecy in Modern America and he spoke with New America Now Host Shirin Sadeghi about the history of American hysteria.

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Protesters Rush Wall St. Rallying Against Corporate Greed

2011-09-30T17:50:00Z

NEW YORK -- Corporate greed in the midst of increasing national poverty has inspired hundreds of students to camp out near Wall Street in Manhattan for going on over a week.

Occupy Wall Street began its encampment at Zucotti Park, also known as Liberty Square on Saturday, Sept. 17, claiming to represent 99 percent of the people in the country and protesting for an end to the greed and corruption of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.

"The monster that is the corporations is a beast that wants to devour us all-and for maximum profit," Councilman Charles Barron told the Amsterdam News. "The police need to get a brand-new assignment-rather than harassing young Black and Latino males, they need to stop and frisk Wall Street and watch the fraud and corruption just come tumbling out of their pockets."

Occupy Wall Street is a boisterous and seemingly committed group that reflects the beginning of a movement from a bygone era. In their protests, race and class issues are also being brought to the forefront.

"Mic check," said Ted Actie.

"Mic check," repeated the crowd of 100 people at the protest, amplifying his voice without a loudspeaker. The people's mic rang loud and clear.

"Please don't repeat me," said Actie, standing tall, a well-built Black man among a mostly white crowd at the general assembly on Monday.

"I'll be damned if I go on a limb and then get treated as second-class citizen," he said, referencing some of the issues he saw among protestors. "We have a problem just as much as you do. If the police come, they get us first...This right here is not America, it's the new America. Put that sh** to the side...if we're going to change America, we've got to change our mindset, and we all need to work together."

"Solidarity," responded the crowd.

While many have pointed out the mostly white racial makeup of the Wall Street protest, many of the protestors themselves also addressed it and were working to make their desire to diversify a reality.
Tuesday morning, Victoria, a member of the media team who is answering questions via a live feed video, said, "Diversity is on the rise and people are becoming more comfortable-we have lots of liaisons reaching out to different communities." Over time, the rally participants have significantly diversified since the weekend it began and earlier in the week.

"We understand the angst of the people protesting in Manhattan. We as a community and an organization support any action that strives to shed light on an imbalance such as we see being perpetrated by the big companies versus the general population," said activist Wilmon Cousar, CEO of the community based, youth-advocating Transitions Foundation.

"However, there is a constant crisis going on in our community that the mainstream media chooses to ignore unless it is to sensationalize the despair," he continued. "The issue for us is that we are dealing with the economic and gun violence ravaging our community every single day. You are living with the real effects of budget cuts and the pulling of resources and the lack of jobs. There are no pity parties thrown. The people just get on with trying to survive the best way they can.

"For that reason, while you will see the usual Black activist individuals and groups going down to the Wall Street protest, you won't see hundreds of people leaving their inner-city neighborhoods to sit there for days. The consequences for a group of Black men being down there for days are far different from a group of white kids and their Macs," Cousar concluded.

Vowing to stay through any weather, protestors have camped through rain storms and are gathering supplies for the winter.

"God is in the rain," said one protestor, quoting from the revolutionary movie "V for Vendetta" as it began to rain on Sunday.

The movement gained support when a largely Black crowd of about 2,000 people marched from Union Square to Wall Street on Sept. 22 to protest the execution of Troy Davis. Four Black men, two from the City University and two from the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, were arrested during the protests, which were largely ignored by the press.

On Saturday, more people joined in as unions and other groups marched, protesting a slew of issues, including union busting and the execution of Davis, joining Wall Street protestors speaking out against corporate greed. A reported 80-100 people were arrested during these protests, finally giving the protests some media attention.

Most of those who were arrested have been released, and the Wall Street protestors continue to welcome all who join them.

"I am so blessed to be here," said Cornel West during his visit to Liberty Square on Tuesday. The crowd, creating what they call a people's mic, repeated each of his phrases. "Got me spiritually breakdancing on the way here, because when you bring folk together of all colors, of all cultures, of all genders, of all sexual orientations-the elite will tremble in their boots."

"They are protesting many different things because there are many different problems," said Shahida Smith, a protestor, on Sunday. "But most of the problems revolve around what we are protesting here: corporate greed. So I think they should definitely come and protest with us."

Many politicians, political figures and even celebrities have joined in the protests or come down to support them in the 13 days they have been based on Wall Street.

Barron visited the Wall Street protest on Tuesday and said, "Power to the people. I'm here today to say, Wall Street-we should tax the rich. Wall Street, pay your fair share. We need schools not prisons. We said bail out the people, send Wall Street to jail."

The crowd was apparently invigorated as he continued to speak.

Amy Goodman, Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore, Lupe Fiasco, Immortal Technique and West all came out over the last week to show support, report on the events and speak to protestors.

"It is going to hit Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Arizona and A-Town...Martin Luther King Jr. will smile from the grave as we are moving step by step toward what he called a revolution," said West on Tuesday.

The protestors at the Liberty Square general assembly have been trying to come to a consensus on the wording of their initial official request to the country, called "Communiqué No. 1." The statement is centred around the idea of asking people around the country to occupy their own cities and begin their own general assemblies with support from Occupy Wall Street.

In response to this call, people in over a dozen big cities, including Chicago, Houston, Boston and Los Angeles have begun to occupy locations in their cities and have started general assemblies.
"We have been here before," Brooklyn-based activist Caleef Cousar told the AmNews. "Our parents fought for basic civil rights throughout the '60s, '70s and even after that. Then we, the children, picked up the baton against things like police brutality, a need for the equitable distribution of resources, better housing and better education.

"We have had rallies and protests, meetings and boycotts," Cousar elaborated. "For some of us, it is second nature. If you live in the inner city, the effects of this corporate greed are omnipresent. You see it in the gentrification, in the hostile police presence, in the increased living expense. Protesting on Wall Street comes behind a long history of us protesting on Main Street."

Meanwhile, as Occupy Wall Street tries to keep the momentum going, organizers have announced that there will be a mass march on Saturday Oct. 1 at 3 p.m., starting at Liberty Square.

NAM Radio: The Rise & Fall of the American Teacher

2011-09-26T08:00:00Z

He's that guy who takes care of your kids all day long everyday. She's the friend they need when they're alone. He's the authority they turn to when they need help. He or she is your child's teacher and teachers are a dying breed in America.

There are currently 3.2 million teachers in America, but in the next few years 1.8 million of them will be up for retirement. Of the other teachers, statistics indicate that 62% of them leave the profession within five years and it has nothing to do with not loving what they do.

Jonathan Dearman was a teacher in San Francisco for 5 years before he left the profession to go into his family business of real estate. He is one of a handful of teachers who are featured in the new documentary American Teacher and he told New America Now Host Shirin Sadeghi what it's like to be an educator in America.

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NAM Radio: Hollywood's Ukrainian American Star Vera Farmiga

2011-09-23T18:45:00Z

She is an Oscar-nominated Actress -- she's that woman who snuggled up to the A-list actor you fantasize about and the lady who played a strong female role you thought no longer existed in Hollywood. Vera Farmiga is also now a director. Her new feature film, Higher Ground takes a look at the religious awakening and confusion of a young woman in small town America. She spoke with New America Now Host Shirin Sadeghi about film, celebrity and what it was like growing up as a Ukrainian-American.

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NAM Radio: Greek-American Comedian Demetri Martin Lets Loose

2011-09-17T08:20:00Z

It's not easy growing up Greek American -- the Americans call you Greek and the Greeks call you American. But comedian Demetri Martin did it and survived to tell the tale.

Martin, a former correspondent for Jon Stewart's Daily Show, and writer for Late Night with Conan O'Brien is a bona fide star in his own right these days, with specials on Comedy Central and starring roles in Hollywood blockbusters like the current film Contagion. He also has published his first book called...quite simply: This is a Book.

He joined New America Now Host Shirin Sadeghi to talk Greek and Greek-Americans just ahead of his two shows at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco on September 17.

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The Invasion of Paris, Then and Now

2011-09-17T08:00:00Z

PARIS -- Viewed from the airless heights where statisticians crunch numbers, the story of the woman I’ll call Lilly Tan is simple. She is an immigrant in France, a single digit among millions for the statisticians, a warning flag to wave at rallies for the xenophobic political parties that grow ever stronger in Europe and North America.

Lilly is a trend. An ominous, unknowable “other” whose identity is summed up in a face and name that aren't “Francais de souche” – authentically French by rootstock and origin, like a certified Burgundy or Bordeaux. A European version of Sarah Palin's “real Americans.”

“I listen to these politicians and their endless ranting and fear-mongering, and I know that on some level they're talking about me,” says Lilly. “But I can't recognize myself in the picture they paint.”

Her counterparts are found in every developed country today: Latino-Americans stopped by police on the streets of Arizona, Pakistanis in Britain whose every gesture is recorded by the world's most comprehensive public surveillance system, Turks and Kurds in a Germany where “multiculturalism has utterly failed,” according to Chancellor Angela Merkel.

What trend-gazing overlooks is a fundamental truth about our world in motion, an epic human drama that cannot be reduced to charts and graphs. The epic is written by millions of individuals, all with distinctive and sometimes heroic sagas specifically their own.

As a reporter who has covered this subject on every continent since the 1970s, I've never met an immigrant who didn't have a complex, personal tale. And that, rather than the numbers, was always the real story.

The Truth Lies in the Details

For the statistical record, Lilly Tan is filed among 350,000 ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia who emigrated here after the war in Indochina. In the common view, offered without embarrassment by many non-Asian Parisians, “they are all alike, you can’t tell them apart.”

In fact, Chinese Paris is a living atlas of the greater Chinese world’s enormous diversity, with several distinct sub-communities clustered in their own neighborhoods. The French press has nicknamed the largest of them, the sprawling high-rise Thirteenth Arrondissement, “Hong Kong sur Seine.”

As it happens, there are very few Hong Kong Chinese in Paris. The Thirteenth has a mixed population from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, further mixed by different ancestral origins in southern China and mutually incomprehensible dialects. On the opposite side of the river, there are two smaller settlements inhabited mostly by natives of Wenzhou Prefecture in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang.

Lilly herself was born and raised in Malaysia, where her grandparents fled during the violent turmoil that beset China in the early 20th century. As a child educated in a convent school, she learned to read and write from French missionary nuns. “When I was eight years old, I began dreaming about the France they described, about its liberty, equality and fraternity,” she says.

But nothing Lilly does, nothing she ever dreamed, can make her Francais de souche. Along with millions of Arab, West African and other Asian Parisians, she is regularly stopped at Metro stations by police, or pulled aside by immigration officers at DeGaulle Airport, and asked for documented proof of legal residence.

Each of the city’s major immigrant groups is burdened by its own particular stereotype. The Chinese are regarded as tribal and money-driven. “They are a very cold people, with no life beyond business, and no interest in our culture,” a retired civil servant told me. “They make a fortune and return home as quickly as they can.”

But at 58, Lilly has worked in French companies for 35 years, the last 30 of them as a French citizen. Inspired by an adolescent crush on the singer and actor Yves Montand, she has memorized dozens of classic French dance hall songs. “Once in awhile, if I drink a bit too much wine at a company party or the wedding of a colleague, I’ll sing a couple of them,” she says.

The performance amazes people, as though a Martian had begun reciting poetry. “How could she possibly know those songs?” they ask.

The question says more about the listeners than it does about Lilly. She speaks French flawlessly, with no perceptible accent, just as she speaks perfect English, Malay and three Chinese dialects. There aren't many professors at the Sorbonne who are her equal in languages.

The closer you look at Lilly Tan, the more the collective statistics that frame trends – and engender stereotypes – dissolve.

There is nothing new about this.

The Sausage and Oyster Invasion

Turn the clock back five or six generations, and the Rue Montogueil, where Lilly lives on the Right Bank, was already a cultural battleground. On one part of the street were Auvergnats, rural folk from south-central France who made their first appearance here hawking country sausages and hams. After a generation of back-breaking work, their children were able to open small delicatessens and cafes.

From the west, in the same years, the sons and daughters of Breton fishermen carried oysters to feed the city's insatiable appetite for fresh seafood. Rue Montorgueil was the epicenter of the trade, and by the 20th century its once-itinerant oyster-sellers were among the city's premier restaurateurs. They also introduced the crepe to Paris.

The Auvergnats spoke an obscure patois that virtually no one in Paris understood. The Bretons' maternal tongue was Celtic. When they became neighbors on the Right Bank, 11 separate language groups were represented in France, broken down into at least 46 major dialects and a hodgepodge of local dialects beyond counting. Only a fifth of the population spoke modern French.

That was the trend 200 years ago, just as it is now: a wave of incomprehensible aliens descending on the city. Fierce personal determination eventually made them synonymous with the French capital’s identity -- her cafes and restaurants, her Auvergnat sausages, her Breton shellfish and crepes.

From time immemorial, Europe’s great metropolises have always been laboratories of constant flux and reinvention, not only for newcomers but also for the “native” cultures that surround them.

At the end of the 19th century, Italian immigrants – including members of my own Sicilian family -- were widely reviled as low-wage invaders who stole French jobs. In 1893, 50 of them were killed in riots near the southern city of Aigues-Mortes. The presumed killers were tried, but acquitted and set free.

By the 1960s, no one came closer to defining French manhood than Lilly Tan’s favorite actor, the late Yves Montand – born “Ivo Livi“ in Monsummano, Italy, a former dockworker whose parents were peasant broommakers.

The End of the UK, or the Start of a New Federation?

2011-09-10T08:00:00Z

The United Kingdom is falling apart. And nobody seems to have really noticed. It’s not the riots and the burning buildings, nor the stumbling stock markets. Those fill every front page.

At a slower, less alarming pace, something more profound is happening: The United Kingdom may well be on the verge of breaking up; actually disuniting its disparate parts.

The word “secession” conjures up images of splinter groups, fringe corners of far-flung states agitating for the independence of their often imaginary fiefdoms: Bomb blasts in the Basque region; guns in Grozny.

But in generally less dramatic fashion, Scotland has voted for a Scottish National Party (SNP) government, committed to an independence referendum; a long-cherished dream. Signs of a rift were also on display when Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond complained bitterly about broadcasters heading coverage of the riots as "UK riots" when they were, in fact, English ones alone. Claiming the footage would damage Scotland's reputation as a tourism destination, he told BBC Radio Scotland: "We know we have a different society in Scotland, and one of my frustrations was to see this being described on BBC television and Sky as riots in the UK."

But the friction and current constitutional confusion between the two countries harks back much further, to the Jacobite uprisings of the 18th century; the Culloden massacre and 1747 Act of Proscription, a law that banned the wearing of traditional dress, use of Gaelic, bearing of arms or even enjoyment of traditional music in an attempt by the British government to pacify the “unruly” Scottish clans.

It was a process that author Alastair MacIntosh describes as the final internal colonization of the British Isles; one that saw some half a million people forced off their land in what became known as the Highland Clearances, while remaining clan chiefs were incorporated into the British aristocracy, which MacIntosh characterized as “remnant symbols of ‘noble savagery’ that could safely be repackaged into a shortbread tin mélange of British identity.”

That same tin is currently being rattled. And when it is opened it looks set to reveal as many worms as any can. For England without the appendages of its empire – of which Scotland is in many senses the first and last part – is a curiously blank slate; a country without a memory that also, uniquely and alone in the UK, exists without its own parliament and government.

The union, meanwhile, functions as an incoherent and unacknowledged semi-federation. With both Scotland and Wales having been gifted their own limited parliaments by Tony Blair as part of a devolutionary package intended to quell the increasingly vociferous nationalist voices in those countries, fractious separatists were meant to soften their calls for independence.

The decision by Blair’s government however raised more questions than it answered. For with powers for education, health, agriculture and justice handed pretty much wholesale over to the Scottish parliament at Holyrood and the increasing popularity of the Scottish National Party (SNP), a taste for self-rule has turned into a rude good appetite.

Meanwhile back in England, students set to pay through the nose as university fees are “liberalized” are growing increasingly agitated at the free education gifted to Scottish higher education students by their more progressive government. One, 19-year-old Jennifer Watts, has launched a legal challenge against a system whereby Scottish students pay nothing for their university courses, while English students, who share the same UK passport, pay the full fees -- some £36,000 ($60,000) for a four year degree.

Describing the system as “fees apartheid”, she told the Daily Mail that: “I’m absolutely not anti-Scottish but the system is totally unfair. It’s wrong to create such a discriminatory regime that disadvantages English students in this way.”

It’s a plaintive call likely to find an increasingly sympathetic reception from the English public, who must already accept the so-called “West Lothian Problem”, whereby MPs from constituencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can vote on matters that only affect people living in England, while English MP’s with neither their own discrete parliament, nor powers in the devolved parliaments, cannot reciprocate.

Former diplomat and ambassador Brian Barder says the answer – and perhaps the only way to save the UK – is outright federation: “Devolution has moved us half-way, but only half-way, into a federal system, with the Westminster parliament trying vainly to function both as an all-UK federal legislature and simultaneously as a parliament for England, with no definition or restriction of its powers in either
capacity.

“The only durable answer to the many questions this raises is a separate second-tier parliament for England, with the Westminster parliament becoming a first-tier, all-UK federal body exercising defined and limited responsibilities, mainly for foreign-affairs, defense, human rights and regional policy, plus any other powers
voluntarily ceded to the centre by the four national bodies.

“This transfer of full internal autonomy to Scotland and the other three UK nations should satisfy most Scottish and other nationalists, meet the demand for an English parliament, bring government much closer to the people, definitively answer the West Lothian Question – and, best of all, preserve the Union.”

It would also raise some serious questions about what it means to be English, as opposed to British. An increasingly splenetic English nationalism (whether represented by the violent anti-Islamic marches of the English Defence League or the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the English Democrats – who would also repeal the Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights) suggests “Englishness” as an identity or historical narrative is in danger of becoming the sole preserve of the right.

Perhaps the most important question for the English to ask is: What is the problem exactly, that Scottish independence is the answer to? Commentator Gerry Hassan, writing for the Our Kingdom blog, says from Scotland at least, the answer is clear:

“Scots would list the fact that Britain is the fourth most unequal rich country in the world, London that splendid ‘world city’ the most unequal city; and the fossilised, ossified, bankrupt politics of the British state. There is a powerful sense in Scotland that Britain doesn’t work effectively for most Scots, or indeed for most English… but that Scotland has a clear way of doing something about it.”

It’s a debate, or series of questions concerning historic power, national identity and distribution of wealth that will be catapulted into motion when that independence referendum is held. And with little grown-up discussion being held about the issue south of Hadrian’s Wall, few policy makers in Westminster seem prepared for the seismic changes that might soon be taking place to the very fabric of the UK.

Ed Targett is a reporter for a series of local titles in southeast England. He has a long-standing interest in international affairs and environmental issues. He can be reached on edtargett@gmail.com

Evidence of British & Pakistani Complicity on 9/11

2011-09-07T10:10:00Z

In the hours immediately after the 9/11 attacks, before so many theories muddied the airwaves, there was the clear sense that the scale of the operation would have had to involve at least one foreign sovereign state.

By mid-afternoon, then-CIA chief George Tenet laid the blame squarely on Al Qaeda. Mohamed Atta and 18 other hijackers were identified within 72 hours.

In November 2001, U.S. forces in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, uncovered a videotape which showed Osama bin Laden gloat about his victory.

End of the story--or so it seemed.

Connecting the dots, and the Bush Administration’s seeming failure to do so, obsessed the media for weeks and months to come. Doing so, however, despite officially touted “complexities,” was in fact exceedingly easy, some of the key events having taken place right under official noses in Washington, D.C.

By October 2001, ABC News, Fox and CNN were reporting a fund transfer of $100,000 in early August of that year from Dubai to two Florida bank accounts held by the 9/11 ringleader Atta. On October 6, CNN identified the man who had sent the money—one Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. Yet, when questioned about him, the White House in its news briefings managed to prevent the story from gaining further traction by creating confusion through usage of aliases and alternate spellings for Sheikh’s name.

In his memoir, “In the Line of Fire,” former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf writes, “Omar Sheikh is a British national born to Pakistani parents in London on December 23, 1973. . . . He … went to the London School of Economics but dropped out before graduation. It is believed . . . that . . . he was recruited by the British intelligence agency MI-6.”

The Bush Administration knew that Sheikh had been sent by MI6 to Pakistan to cooperate with its counterpart, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI). Protecting Britain and Pakistan as two “allies” took precedence over disclosing the truth.

Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad, then ISI chief, flew into Washington, D.C., on September 4, 2001. As repeatedly reported, he breakfasted with Republican Congressman Porter Goss and Democratic Senator Bob Graham, both of Florida, at the Capitol on the morning of September 11. Also in attendance was Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Maleeha Lodhi.

They discussed bin Laden and the threat he posed, yet Lt. Gen. Ahmad, in all likelihood, failed to mention that he had been the one to instruct Sheikh to wire the $100,000 to the hijackers.

Sheikh’s activities date back to 1994 when he abducted an American and three British travelers in India, a crime for which he was sent to prison. He was released in 1999 to meet the demands of hijackers who were holding 178 passengers hostage aboard Indian Airlines Flight 814. He is currently in a Pakistani prison, found guilty of the February 2002 beheading of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

In 2008, in the wake of the November Mumbai attacks, he called Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari from his jail cell, pretending to be India’s Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee and threatening him with war. The hoax was taken seriously as Pakistani forces went on high alert. He tried unsuccessfully to play the same prank on then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Sheikh was indicted in the U.S. for the Pearl case and the India abduction in 2002, yet then-Attorney General John Ashcroft who announced the indictments made no mention of his role in 9/11.

Lt. Gen. Ahmad is mentioned in “The 9/11 Commission Report” (with the alternate spelling of Mahmud Ahmed) only twice, principally in regard to his meeting on September 13 with then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who presented him with seven demands of cooperation from the Pakistani government. There is not a single mention of Sheikh and his ties with the ISI and the MI6 in the entire report. Lt. Gen. Ahmad flew back to Pakistan the next day. He was removed from his post in October at the behest of the American government.

There has been no trace of him ever since.

Ten years later, Islam has become synonymous with terror to the delight of 9/11’s true plotters who made dupes of the hijackers and bin Laden while slaughtering thousands of Americans. Since then the “war on terror” has cost 225,000 lives in the Middle East and more than $4 trillion in American taxpayer money according to a Brown University study.

Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq remain among the poorest, most violent and corrupt countries while such oil companies as Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Petronas have signed contracts with Baghdad to ensure themselves humongous rewards for decades to come. Most recently, before any concrete plans for Libya’s economic future were being specified in the wake of Moamar Gaddafi’s fall, declarations were made that oil contracts with Russia and China were to be rescinded and then awarded to NATO countries.

In America today, corporations are wealthier than ever while the majority of Americans, who are profoundly dissatisfied with their government, pay ever-higher energy prices in the thick of an enduring recession. The MI6 and the ISI have succeeded beyond success, reconfiguring global geopolitics to the exact specifications of vested corporate interests.

The United States should rid itself of such toxic “allies” as Pakistan and even Britain, whose governments consider Americans as gauche, gullible and easy to manipulate. Washington should additionally move to restore solvency to Americans by taxing supranational corporations into submission. Belligerence should be replaced by cooperation to foster strong economies and civil societies in the Muslim world.

In the absence of such housecleaning measures, hidden hands that have gotten away with mass murder, calumny and robbery will grow only more brazen and destructive in their monomaniacal quest for world domination.