foreign trade

Nicolas Sarkosi wants to reinforce European business, using the US example of giving public work to American companies. "Why should Europe forbid what America, the most economically liberal country in the world, permits itself? In this way European taxes would support European companies that have chosen to produce and manufacture in Europe." Sarkozi has also called for tighter immigration controls in Europe.

"The Castle (German: Das Schloß) is a novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist, known only as K., struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle who govern the village for unknown reasons. Kafka died before finishing the work, but suggested it would end with the Land Surveyor dying in the village; the castle notifying him on his death bed that his "legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there". Dark and at times surreal, The Castle is about alienation, bureaucracy, the seemingly endless frustrations of man's attempts to stand against the system, and the futile and hopeless pursuit of an unobtainable goal."Source.

You might take K's frightening bureaucratic predicament as a metaphor for a stateless person. And you might say that a state should welcome stateless persons and make them its citizens. But where do you turn when there are no borders and citizenship has no meaning? Then the Castle is everywhere and we are all here on sufferance.

This article is about principles of citizenship within a state.

Business Europe

French President Nicolas Sarkozi wants to shore up European commerce, taking his inspiration from the American model, by investing public money in European companies.

"Why forbid Europe what the United States - the most economically liberal country in the world - [he says with his tongue in his cheek] - permits itself? This way European taxes will reward European enterprises that have chosen to produce and manufacture in Europe."[1]

The message is that France, which leads the European Union in many policies, will no longer reward outsourcing.

Anglophone nations supine to outsourcing and capital movement

The situation is very different in Australia. Anson Cameron writes in "www.yourjob.gone," (The Age, March 10, 2012), about how the internet has made it possible, not just to outsource waged labour, but to outsource professional skills. He describes Australian small businesses using accountants in India, Australian housewives consulting Chinese-based doctors via the internet, and pretentious home-makers sourcing architectural designs from architects in Delhi. He suggests that law firms in Australia will soon be or are already using lawyers from India and China who specialise in Australian law but charge much less than Australian-resident lawyers. Comparing this process to the situation that arose with the battle of the Australian Maritime Union against Patrick and the Howard Government in the late 1990s, he says,

"There will be no brouhaha over the demise of Australian professionals. No feisty rearguard action. No blood. No barristers. The drift is too natural. Too individual. Too invisible. A movement that consists of a million small decisions made right here in Australia. Careers will just turn off, one by one, without fanfare, the same way a city goes dark at night. Not a compelling spectacle. A point of light dies in Sydney and reignites in Kolkata.

It can't even be argued that this is a tragedy. The teaching job exported to Indira Patel of Kolkata will end more suffering and create more happiness for more people in that distant city than it ever did here. And who can begrudge the export of happiness to those who have seen it least and need it most? So, not a tragedy. Just a sad Australian story." Anson Cameron, "www.yourjob.gone," The Age, March 10, 2012.

Whilst he is correct that most Australians would not mourn the passing of unaffordable lawyers, Cameron's assessment of outsourcing as the export of happiness lacks a crucial consideration. He does not look at the difference in Australian property prices for offices, warehouses, factories, shops and housing which are far higher than the same essentials in China and India. As long as Australian land prices remain astronomical, Australian labour and professionals will not be able to compete on that great "level playing field" beloved to Thatcher, Reagan, Keating and Howard and other rich Anglophone despots of recent times.

In Germany or France, however, even with outsourcing, the provision of public housing and subsidised private housing has meant that the unemployed are able to find cheap shelter. Affordable shelter is their right as citizens or legal residents and a state obligation. This is not the case in Britain, Australia, and the United States. Unemployment is not just a political embarrassment for Western Continental European governments; it costs the public sector immediately in the form of rent subsidies. This is as it should be in a democracy. Why would you privatise housing and lose citizen control over shelter if you had the power to prevent this?

Sarkozi wants tighter immigration controls for Europe

Nicolas Sarkozi also want to revise and reinforce the Schengen borders which have established free movement within Europe and control the entry of immigrants from outside.

"We cannot leave the management of world migration entirely in the hands of technocrats and tribunals."

The message is that Schengen borders must be better defined and more firmly enforced or France will reestablish her own borders at a national level.[1]

Open-borders ideology characterises Anglophone countries

In Australia - and other Anglophone countries - the message is, however, quite different. As candobetter readers know, Australia has a massive growth lobby. The growth lobby thrives on open-borders capital, open-borders mass migration, open-borders residency and unprotected labour. The mass media (owned by the growth lobby) continuously brain-washes Australians, Canadians, Americans and Britons with the mad idea that growth is good, open borders is good, deregulation is good. The result is that we have lost control over all of the things that governments are elected to safeguard. In losing this control we have lost real citizenship. If we don't have money to buy rights, then, when it comes to the crunch, rights aren't guaranteed where English is spoken.

How are immigration control and protectionism related?

This article began by citing French President Sarkozi's reelection platform of protectionism and immigration control. But, how are immigration and protectionism related?

Loss of local control over rates of immigration means loss of local control over wages. Loss of protection for local business means loss of control over imports and exports, which can then be taken over by transnational corporations which have much greater capital resources than locally based and operating businesses. Such transnational businesses have become vehicles for international capital which cruises the world looking for cheap labour and cheap resources.

Deregulation of capital has caused loss of citizen control over banks, interest and bank charges. Deregulation of foreign investment laws has given international money more control over assets and resources in Anglophone countries than citizens have.

As well as looking for cheap labour and resources, transnational capital looks for cheap land to invest in. It will drive off local landowners - farmers and villagers - in order to gain control of land. (For Australian examples, see articles about Foodbowl Unlimited.) It also seeks to influence the governments that make laws for that land to serve the interests of capital rather than those of citizens. It does this through financial inducements, industrial blackmail, and by getting control of the media which controls what the public hear about politicians.

Having taken control of land (as well as water, power and other essential resources and goods) transnational capital then drives up the cost of that land (and water, power and other resources) by influencing governments to raise immigration rates and cause inflation of land-costs, which then increases the resale profits on that land for owner-developers and the costs for the purchasers and renters (as well as for water, power and other resources).

Transnational capital also invests in agricultural land and reaps the benefits when overpopulation and the commodification of water, power and other vital resources, drives up the costs of food for local people.

Anson Cameron's article "www.yourjob.gone" (mentioned above) suggests that people in poor countries benefit from exported jobs and relatively low wages, forgetting that the people of poor countries are being driven from their land and their businesses through costs inflated by international capital investment, just as Australians are. (See also, Prof John Kozy, "Abstractions Versus the "Real World": Economic Models and the Apologetics of Greed," at http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29270)

In Australia housing used to be subsidised by cheap loans at fixed rates of interest and the federal government also provided public housing for industrial workers, in part to keep wages low but without impoverishing workers, so as to encourage local manufacture. This kind of policy was also once present in Britain, Canada and the United States, but is no longer.

It still prevails however in Western Continental Europe, where France and most other countries benefited from the Napoleonic system and democracy is stronger than in the Anglophone West.

NOTES

[1] Original transcription from France2 News, 12 March 2012:

"Nicolas Sarkosi veut renforcer l'Europe commerciale en s'inspirant du modèle Américaine et privilégier les entreprises nationales pour le marché public.

"Pourquoi ce que les Etats Unis, pays le plus libérale du monde, s'autorise l'Europe devrait se l'interdire? Ainsi bénéficieront de l'argent public Européen les entreprises Européennes qui auront choisi de produire et de fabriquer en Europe?

Sarkosi veut réviser et durcir les frontières de la Schengen

Nicolas Sarkosi veut réviser et durcir les frontières de la Schengen qui établit la liberté de circulation a l'intérieur de l'Europe et contrôle l'entrée des immigrés.

"On ne peut pas laisser la gestion des flux migratoires entre les seules mains des technocrates et des tribunaux."

Le Gouvernement retient donc un gouvernement de Schengen et si la France n'est pas suivie elle pourra rétablir ses propres contrôles.

"Alors la France suspendrait ses participations accord de Schengen jusqu'a les négociations auront abouti.""

Source: France2 Infos, Sunday 11 March 2012.