Spare Change

News from France and Greece: austerity candidates lost. In France, it means the end of Nicholas Sarkozy's governance:

Exuberant crowds filled the Place de la Bastille, the iconic plaza of the French Revolution, to celebrate Hollande's victory. He will be France's first leftist chief of state since Francois Mitterrand was president from 1981 to 1995.

Sarkozy thanked his supporters and said he did his best to win a second term, despite widespread anger at his handling of the economy.

...

Hollande wants to renegotiate a hard-won European treaty on budget cuts that Germany's Angela Merkel and Sarkozy had championed. He wants more government stimulus, and more government spending in general despite concerns from markets that France needs to urgently trim its huge debts.

What does that mean for America? If the European debt deals fall apart, it could hurt Obama's reelection chances. But is it a harbinger of an anti-austerity vote that could cross the Atlantic?

Per Robert Reich, against socialism:

Socialism isn't the answer to the basic problem haunting all rich nations.

The answer is to reform capitalism. The world's productivity revolution is outpacing the political will of rich societies to fairly distribute its benefits. The result is widening inequality coupled with slow growth and stubbornly high unemployment.

...

And this is why a second Obama administration, should there be one, must focus its attention on more broadly distributing the gains from growth. This doesn't mean "redistributing" from rich to poor, as in a zero-sum game. To the contrary, the rich will do far better with a smaller share of a robust, growing economy than they're doing with a large share of an economy that's barely moving forward.

This will require real tax reform -- not just a "Buffett" minimal tax but substantially higher marginal rates and more brackets at the top, with a capital gains rate matching the income-tax rate. It also means a larger Earned Income Tax Credit, whose benefits extend high into the middle class. That will enable many Americans to move to a 35-hour workweek without losing ground -- thereby making room for more jobs.

It means Medicare for all rather than an absurdly-costly system that relies on private for-profit insurers and providers.

It will require limiting executive salaries and empowering workers to get a larger share of corporate profits. The Employee Free Choice Act should be an explicit part of the second-term agenda.

It will require strict limits on the voracious, irresponsible behavior of Wall Street, from which we've all suffered. The Glass-Steagall Act must be resurrected (the so-called Volcker Rule is more ridden with holes than cheese), and the big banks broken up.

And it will necessitate a public educational system - including early child education - second to none, and available to all our young people.

Is there the political will to reform capitalism -- in order to save it?

Moebius

Jean "Moebius" Giraud, the brilliant and uber-influential French graphic artist/comic book auteur has died. This is a huge bummer. His sci-fi visions influenced filmmakers and fans alike, and his Western work is legendary. He just had such a huge imagination and such a clean yet personal style, sparse yet voluptuous, his panels and pages blow open the doors of the reader's imagination.



Tom Spurgeon has the best obit I've yet seen. Just one selection, about his name and Heavy Metal magazine (the American import of Metal Hurlant, how I came upon his work:

Giraud created the powerful "Moebius" handle for the loose, satirical work he had done for the magazine Hara-Kiri in the early to mid-1960s. He simply liked the name, and didn't even know if it referred to a person with whom he might have to share the appellation. In 1975 he resuscitated the name for the new group he co-founded Les Humanoides Associes and their magazine Metal Hurlant. Described by Giraud as a natural reaction to a groundswell of storytelling from comics-makers that had no natural place to put this material -- you can see precedents in some of the short stories Giraud did for Pilote just proceeding these newer comics -- and therefore needed to create a new press to do so, all in the tradition of the French avant garde. That magazine would become the home of two of Giraud's best-remembered series, Arzach and The Airtight Garage. Giraud would later describe the revolution driven by his work and others as one of creative choice rather than content, that the feeling of the artist inhabiting the work was more important than the kind of work being done. He drew a connection to the undergrounds and cartoonists like Robert Crumb, although he felt that the work of he and his peers existed in an entirely different cultural context.

Even his one Silver Surfer story, with Stan Lee scripting, is legendary:



He will be missed.

Those Fun French

If there's one thing that unites Americans it's having a good laugh about the French. Sure, Left and Right split on "Freedom Fries," but when those funny French folks get in their own way, hilarity ensues:

France's World Cup team refused to train Sunday in protest of striker Nicolas Anelka's expulsion from the squad, prompted by a profanity-laced tirade against coach Raymond Domenech the day before.

The latest round of turbulence also led to the resignation of France team director Jean-Louis Valentin, who said he was fed up with the team.

"It's a scandal for the French, for the young people here. It's a scandal for the federation and the French team," Valentin said. "They don't want to train. It's unacceptable."

Before getting in a car and driving off, he added: "As for me, it's over. I'm leaving the federation. I'm sickened and disgusted."

And to overstate the obvious:

"Everyone in the whole world is mocking us now," winger Franck Ribery said on television hours before training even started. "I'm gutted, because we're not playing football any more."

World Cup fever for all!

Varietals

Varieties of scum:

The Rogue Gambler

The Father's Daughter

The Denial Party

Brun Sugar

Once again showing the world politics done right, or at least most entertainingly, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who's wife suddenly divorced him last October (sure, guess why) has gone legit by marrying ex-uber model Carla Bruni.

He's 53 and she's a trophiesque 40, but best of all, the most notorious romance in Bruni's past was with Mick Jagger, which was the homewrecking last straw in his marriage to ex-uber model Jerry Hall. In Bruni's own self-defense:

Bruni has already spoken: "It was a fling. I was in my 20s so I wasn't thinking about a relationship.

"There are so many other women with Mick. I don't think I was responsible for his divorce from Jerry Hall. There were maybe ten other women."

Hey, Mick, satisfaction all down the line, heartbreaker.

So Sarkozy rolls like a Stone, Carla gets respectable, and Steven Taylor fires the best line:

Bill Clinton must be so jealous.¹

Rocks off.