more on Katrina, view from afar (Figaro)

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: h_bray () globe com
Date: September 19, 2005 4:22:00 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Katrina, view from afar (Figaro)


This is astonishing stuff indeed.  Where's they find this  
knucklehead?  Is
this what they really believe in France?  Those guys need to get out
more...



Hiawatha Bray




             David Farber
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Begin forwarded message:

From: Adam Aston <adamaston () earthlink net>
Date: September 19, 2005 2:44:24 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Katrina, view from afar (Figaro)


dave, for the IP list, if suitable. long, but worth digesting. - adam

#

Here is a stunning interview, published in Le Figaro (conservative),
where Emmanual Todd (important commentator from the French perspective
on the States, he's a French "Americanist") says amazing things about
catastrophe and neo-liberalism. The counterpoint, or really the view
from afar, is sage ...

Though this was sent to me as you see it, I do apologize for the
sometimes spotty translation, and the poor formatting!


A view from Le Figaro:

http://www.lefigaro.com/debats/20050912.FIG0354.html?083700

Emmanuel Todd: The Specter of a Soviet-Style Crisis
By Marie-Laure Germon and Alexis Lacroix
Le Figaro
Monday 12 September 2005

According to this demographer, Hurricane Katrina has revealed the
decline of the American system.

       Le Figaro. - What is the first moral and political lesson we can
learn from the catastrophe Katrina provoked? The necessity for a
"global" change in our relationship with nature?

       Emmanuel Todd . - Let us be wary of over-interpretation. Let's
not
lose sight of the fact that we're talking about a hurricane of
extraordinary scope that would have produced monstrous damage anywhere.
An element that surprised a great many people - the eruption of the
black population, a supermajority in this disaster - did not really
surprise me personally, since I have done a great deal of work on the
mechanisms of racial segregation in the United States.  I have known for
a long time that the map of infant mortality in the United States is
always an exact copy of the map of the density of black populations.  On
the other hand, I was surprised that spectators to this catastrophe
should appear to have suddenly discovered that Condoleezza Rice and
Colin Powell are not particularly representative icons of the conditions
of black America. What really resonates with my representation of the
United States - as developed in Après l'empire - is the fact that the
United States was disabled and ineffectual. The myth of the efficiency
and super-dynamism of the American economy is in danger.

      We were able to observe the inadequacy of the technical  
resources,
of the engineers, of the military forces on the scene to confront the
crisis. That lifted the veil on an American economy globally perceived
as very dynamic, benefiting from a low unemployment rate, credited with
a strong GDP growth rate. As opposed to the United States, Europe is
supposed to be rather pathetic, clobbered with endemic unemployment and
stricken with anemic growth. But what people have not wanted to see is
that the dynamism of the United States is essentially a dynamism of
consumption.

       Is American household consumption artificially stimulated?

      The American economy is at the heart of a globalized economic
system, and the United States acts as a remarkable financial pump,
importing capital to the tune of 700 to 800 billion dollars a year.
These funds, after redistribution, finance the consumption of imported
goods - a truly dynamic sector. What has characterized the United States
for years is the tendency to swell the monstrous trade deficit, which is
now close to 700 billion dollars. The great weakness of this economic
system is that it does not rest on a foundation of real domestic
industrial capacity.

      American industry has been bled dry and it's the industrial
decline
that above all explains the negligence of a nation confronted with a
crisis
situation: to manage a natural catastrophe, you don't need sophisticated
financial techniques, call options that fall due on such and such a
date, tax consultants, or lawyers specialized in funds extortion at a
global level, but you do need materiel, engineers, and technicians, as
well as a feeling of collective solidarity. A natural catastrophe on
national territory confronts a country with its deepest identity, with
its capacities for technical and social response. Now, if the American
population can very well agree to consume together - the rate of
household savings being virtually nil - in terms of material production,
of long-term prevention and planning, it has proven itself to be
disastrous. The storm has shown the limits of a virtual economy that
identifies the world as a vast video game.

       Is it fair to link the American system's profit-margin
orientation
- that "neo-liberalism" denounced by European commentators - and the
catastrophe that struck New Orleans?

      Management of the catastrophe would have been much better in the
United States of old. After the Second World War, the United States
assured the production of half the goods produced on the planet. Today,
the United States shows itself to be at loose ends, bogged down in a
devastated Iraq that it doesn't manage to reconstruct. The Americans
took a long time to armor their vehicles, to protect their own troops.
They had to import light ammunition. What a difference from the United
States of the Second World War that simultaneously crushed the Japanese
Army with its fleet of aircraft carriers, organized the Normandy
landing, re-equipped the Russian army in light materiel, contributed
magisterially to Europe's liberations, and kept the European and German
populations liberated from Hitler alive. The Americans knew how to
dominate the Nazi storm with a mastery they show themselves incapable of
today in just a single one of their regions. The explanation is simple:
American capitalism of that era was an industrial capitalism based on
the production of goods, in short, a world of engineers and technicians.

       Isn't it more pertinent to acknowledge that there are
virtually no
more purely natural disasters, rigorously defined, by virtue of the
immoderation of human activities? Isn't it the case that the "American
Way of Life" must reform itself? By, for example, agreeing to the
constraints of the Kyoto Protocol?

      The societies and ecological incorporations of Europe and the
United States differ radically. Europe is part of a very ancient peasant
economy, accustomed to draw its subsistence from the soil with
difficulty in a relatively temperate climate, spared from natural
catastrophes. The United States is a brand new society that began by
working a very fertile virgin soil in the heart of a more threatening
natural environment. Its continental climate, much more violent, did not
constitute a problem for the United States as long as it enjoyed a real
economic advantage, that is, as long as it had the technical means to
master nature. At present, the hypothesis of man's dramatization of
nature is not even necessary. The simple deterioration in the technical
capacities of a no-longer-productive American economy created the threat
of a Nature that would do no more than take back its [natural] rights.

      Americans need more heating in the winter and more air-
conditioning
in the summer. If we are one day confronted with an absolute and no
longer relative penury, Europeans will adapt to it better because their
transportation system is much more concentrated and economical. The
United States was conceived with regard to energy expenditures and space
in a rather fanciful, not well-thought out, manner.

      Let's not point our fingers at the aggravation of natural
conditions, but rather at the economic deterioration of a society that
must confront a much more violent nature! Europeans, like the Japanese,
have proven their excellence with regard to energy economization during
the preceding oil shocks. It's to be expected: European and Asian
societies developed by managing scarcity and, in the end, several
decades of energetic abundance will perhaps appear as a parenthesis in
their history one day. The United States was constructed in abundance
and doesn't know how to manage scarcity. So here it is now confronted
with an unknown. The beginnings of adaptation have not shown themselves
to be very promising: Europeans have gasoline stocks, Americans crude
oil stocks - they haven't built a refinery since 1971.

       So it's not only the economic system you blame?

      I'm not making a moral judgment. I focus my analysis on the  
rot of
the whole system.  Après l'empire developed theses that in aggregate
were quite moderate and which I am tempted to radicalize today. I
predicted the collapse of the Soviet system on the basis of the
increases in the rates of infant mortality during the 1970-1974 period.
Now, the latest figures published on this theme by the United States -
those of 2002 - demonstrated the beginning of an upturn in the rates of
infant mortality for all the so-called American "races." What is to be
deduced from that? First of all, that we should avoid "over-racializing"
the interpretation of the Katrina catastrophe and bringing everything
back to the Black problem, in particular the disintegration of local
society and the problem of looting. That would constitute an ideological
game of peek-a-boo. The sacking of supermarkets is only a repetition at
the lower echelons of society of the predation scheme that is at the
heart of the American social system today.

       The predation scheme?

      This social system no longer rests on the 'Founding Fathers'
Calvinist work ethic and taste for saving - but, on the contrary, on a
new ideal (I don't dare speak of ethics or morals): the quest for the
biggest payoff for the least effort. Money speedily acquired, by
speculation and why not theft. The gang of black unemployed who loot a
supermarket and the group of oligarchs who try to organize the "heist"
of the century of Iraq's hydrocarbon reserves have a common principle of
action: predation. The dysfunctions in New Orleans reflect certain
central elements of present American culture.

       You postulate that the management of Katrina reveals a worrying
territorial fragmentation joined to the carelessness of the military
apparatus. What must we then fear for the future?

      The hypothesis of decline developed in Après l'empire evokes the
possibility of a simple return of the United States to normal, certainly
associated with a 15-20% decrease in the standard of living, but
guaranteeing the population a level of consumption and power "standard"
in the developed world. I was only attacking the myth of hyper-power.
Today, I am afraid I was too optimistic. The United States' inability to
respond to industrial competition, their heavy deficit in
high-technology goods, the upturn in infant mortality rates, the
military apparatus' desuetude and practical ineffectiveness, the elites'
persistent negligence incite me to consider the possibility in the
medium term of a real Soviet-style crisis in the United States.

       Would such a crisis be the consequence of Bush Administration
policy, which you stigmatize for its paternalistic and social Darwinism
aspects? Or would its causes be more structural?

      American neo-conservatism is not alone to blame. What seems to me
more striking is the way this America that incarnates the absolute
opposite of the Soviet Union is on the point of producing the same
catastrophe by the opposite route.  Communism, in its madness, supposed
that society was everything and that the individual was nothing, an
ideological basis that caused its own ruin. Today, the United States
assures us, with a blind faith as intense as Stalin's, that the
individual is everything, that the market is enough and that the state
is hateful. The intensity of the ideological fixation is altogether
comparable to the Communist delirium. This individualist and
inequalitarian posture disorganizes American capacity for action. The
real mystery to me is situated there: how can a society renounce common
sense and pragmatism to such an extent and enter into such a process of
ideological self-destruction? It's a historical aporia to which I have
no answer and the problem with which cannot be abstracted from the
present administration's policies alone. It's all of American society
that seems to be launched into a scorpion policy, a sick system that
ends up injecting itself with its own venom. Such behavior is not
rational, but it does not all the same contradict the logic of history.
The post-war generations have lost acquaintance with the tragic and with
the spectacle of self-destroying systems.  But the empirical reality of
human history is that it is not rational.

       Emmanuel Todd reviews for Le Figaro the serious failures  
revealed
by the storm.  He is also a research engineer at the National Institute
of Demographic Studies, historian, author of Après l'empire [After the
Empire], published by Gallimard in 2002 - an essay in which he predicted
the "breakdown" of the American system.



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