Monthly Archives: January 2004

Important News For Europe

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OK I’m pushing the point quite hard here, but what I want to emphasise is that a European blog in a global world has a pretty broad reach. The latest round of US employment figures are in, and they are nowhere near as pretty as everyone (including even me) was expecting. Over 400,000 people stopped looking for work due to the fact they considered the jobs weren’t available. The most important thing is that manufacturing industry is expanding production without hiring, in fact jobs were lost, while hours worked went down not up as they should have if the recovery was really gathering momentum.

So the situation is extraordinarily complex, the big Asian wheel keeps on rolling, the US turns round and round but not quite quickly enough, energy leaks out of the system, and we here in Europe catch the backdraft. Which means that today the euro touched another record high of $1.2868 before falling back slightly. Economics as they say is not a zero sum game, so among the possible results are both win-win, and lose-lose. America’s discomfort is not our great opportunity.

Meantime back over here the Parmalat scandal trundles on with the Bank of America offices in Italy being raided, and Grant Thornton expelling its Italian business – which currently has two of its partners in prison – from its global network.
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We’re up for an award again

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Namely Wampum: 2003 Koufax Awards nominations: Best Group Blog. Vote for us if you like.

Thankfully, this time we’ll lose to some very deserving blog, rather than some hateful idiot.

The Koufax awards are great, actually. They make you discover a bunch of excellent blogs. Especially great is the “best series” category.

Incidentally, Scott is nominated in that category, as well as the best writing category, and I think he deserves to win. If you haven’t read his series of posts on Language Rights and Political Theory, you’ve missed out. (That reminds me, I still haven’t written that reply I promised)

Detente with Czech Communists?

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I’m mighty flattered that I’ve been promoted to “guest blogger extraordinaire” even though I’ve been silent the whole of this year so far (due mainly to illness). Sorry about that!

Well, here goes.

Take a look at this Czech press review from today, in which Prague daily Lidove Noviny reports that Miroslav Grebenicek, the Communist Party for over a decade, narrowly missed getting ousted from his position. (He was apparently told he could run for European Parliament if he stepped down.) This might sound like small beans to outsiders, and truth be told, viewed by itself, it is. But it’s one small piece of a much largers story…
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Things That Can’t Go On Forever, Don’t

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Ok, the sun is shining nicely down here in Barcelona right now, so maybe this is a good moment to come out and provoke a storm. The euro: something gives, but what? Actually it is perhaps ironic that I have chosen today of all days to write this, since for once it seems the euro may fall rather than rise: well to someone who is accustomed to marching out of step, this almost seems par for the course. Never mind, tomorrow, or the day after, we will be back to normal, and the seemingly unstoppable rise will continue. The only remaining question really is: where is breaking point, and what will happen when we get there?
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Methinks We’re On The Slippery Slope

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OK you may be in for a bout of solid over-posting. There seem to be some signs in the air that push may be about to come to shove. Tomorrow I will try and do something on financial architecture and the euro. Meantime this is a ‘light’ warm-up post. The efficient cause is today’s news from Portugal, which suggests that the supposed Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson free-lunch-honeymoon (which has to count as one of the worst pieces of ‘justifying what there is simply because it is’ pieces of quackery where there should have been solid science known to recent history) may be about to come to an end. One of those darned ‘catch up’ economies may have just caught up so hard that’s it’s come to a dead halt. The Bank of Portugal has predicted growth of only 0.75% this year, and even that only if there is the anticipated growth in global demand (which I doubt extremely). Those who have read my Parmalat post will have seen that I am already begining to speculate about whether we are about to see the end of growth in the Italian economy, well just remember Portugal is lined up nicely in the queue to see where lunch is going to be served.
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Parmalat: Just Another Scandal?

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On a day which sees the Parmalat heat being turned up to full blast, with a looming ‘cara a cara’ between former Chief Financial Officer Fausto Tonna and Parmalat chief legal counsel Gian Paolo Zini, and while in the United States a class action law firm has named investment bank Citigroup Inc and auditing firm Deloitte & Touche Tohmatsu among defendants in a lawsuit against the food group – a lawsuit incidentally filed on behalf of a U.S. pension fund (oh when, oh when will we get class action lawsuits here in Europe) – on such a day it might well be worth asking ourselves one simple question: is this just another one-off scandal?
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The headscarf: Radical Islam’s greatest secret weapon

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When I first came to Belgium, one of the things that genuinely surprised me is how people seem to think Buffy, the Vampire Slayer is a children’s programme. Admittedly, the title doesn’t exactly say “socially relevant drama”, but I doubt that the show’s success on American TV would have been possible without the age 24-55 market. Eventually, I started asking people what it was about the programme that made them come to that conclusion.

In most cases, people never really got past the name. Fantasy on the continent seems to be a very different animal than in the US. For example, when I suggested that Buffy is no more fantasy than Le Fabuleux destin d’Am?lie Poulain, I was greeted with shock. No, no – I was told – Am?lie is magical. The Paris it is set in – the clean one, without the graffitti and street crime – is fictional, of course, and the plot is certainly not realist, but that doesn’t mean it belongs in the same category as vampires.

In a lot of cases, the real problem was linguistic. Buffy in French sounds very childish, spouting verlan and action movie clichés. The wit and prose skill of the original writers is completely lost, and even if you watch it in English on Flemish TV or the Beeb, I guess non-native speakers just don’t get it.

But I had one answer that surprised me. One person thought it belonged in the same category of American TV as Beverly Hills 90210. Why? Because of the clothes Buffy wears. No school would ever let a girl dress like that to class. I had to explain that in California, Buffy’s clothes aren’t even close to excessive.

The Belgian school system places some demands on students that American schools don’t. Personally, I don’t have a real problem with the imposition of a reasonable dress code in school. It is, if anything, one of life’s most minor injustices. Besides, I remember what it felt like to wear clothes from K-mart at a school where designer jeans were de rigueur.

However, I have some problems with this:

Deux s?nateurs veulent interdire le voile ? l’?cole

BRUXELLES Deux s?nateurs de la majorit?, Anne-Marie Lizin (PS) et Alain Destexhe (MR), ont d?pos? une proposition de r?solution qui invite les autorit?s f?d?rales et f?d?r?es du pays ? adopter des textes l?gislatifs portant sur l’interdiction ? l’?cole, et pour les agents de la fonction publique, de signes manifestant une appartenance religieuse.

Anne-Marie Lizin esp?re que le bureau du S?nat mettra sur pied une commission ad hoc qui pourra se pencher sur cette question d?licate, avec comme fil rouge le texte de la proposition de r?solution.

Pour Alain Destexhe, qui s’appuie sur la position de la Communaut? fran?aise, sur l’avis du Centre pour l’?galit? des chances, sur les diff?rentes d?clarations politiques et sur divers arr?ts, rapports ou recommandations tant belges qu’?trangers, le d?bat est clos, il est temps d’agir. Pour le s?nateur MR, il faut se demander ce qu’implique de vivre ensemble en Belgique au 21?me si?cle.

Il s’agit de d?fendre la libert? de conscience et la compatibilit? des libert?s dans l’espace public, ce qui implique un certain nombre de r?serves au sein de l’administration et ? l’?cole. L’?cole doit ?tre le lieu de l’apprentissage d’une conscience critique et de la promotion de valeurs universelles, ajoute-t-il.

Pour Anne-Marie Lizin, ?le voile, c’est la pression sur l’individu au nom d’une religion ?. La s?natrice de Huy estime qu’il est urgent de l?gif?rer au nom de l’?galit? homme-femme et pour soutenir le combat des femmes musulmanes dans chaque pays o? elles disent ?non? ? l’inf?riorit?.

L’initiative des deux parlementaires se fait en toute autonomie. Tant au PS qu’au MR, on ne se prononce pas pour l’interdiction du port du voile ? l’?cole. Le pr?sident du PS Elio Di Rupo a m?me estim? qu’il n’?tait pas opportun de d?battre de cette question en p?riode pr??lectorale. Mais pour Alain Destexhe, ?ne pas en discuter en p?riode ?lectorale revient justement ? alimenter le poujadisme et le vote d’extr?me droite?.

(Read on for the English translation)
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