Le politburo voudrait aussi applaudir énergiquement notre président qui se démène vraiment pour combler le déficit, puisqu'il vient de toucher un nouvel euro symbolique.
«Et un de plus.» !
Un militant de RESF et de la CNT avait comparé dans un e-mail, adressé au secrétariat du directeur de cabinet du ministre de l'intérieur en décembre 2006, les méthodes de la police française à celles de Vichy. Il a été condamné à 800 euros d'amende pour ce constat, suite à la plainte pour "outrage" du ministre de l'époque (devenu, hélas, président depuis) qui réclamait un euro symbolique (et l'a obtenu). À ce niveau là, c'est très symbolique, oui.
On remarque au passage que quand il s'agit d'affaires pénibles comme des emplois fictifs de la mairie de Paris ou l'affaire Clearstream par exemple, le président ne peut pas avoir affaire avec la justice. Mais parfois, la "justice" passe...
( Et on espère que Babouse n'aura pas de problème avec le dernier dessin de cette série. )
4 commentaires:
Petit moment de bonheur. Quand on veut des infos, il faut lire la presse etrangere...
"In France, the Heads No Longer Roll"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/business/worldbusiness/17france.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=&st=nyt&oref=slogin
enjoy.
C'est pas (plus) accessible, ça disait quoi ?
enjoy (sorry, c'est un peu long)
----------------
In France, the Heads No Longer Roll
Illustration by The New York Times
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and KATRIN BENNHOLD
Published: February 17, 2008
PARIS — OF all the clubs in the world, the Club of 100 in France may be the most exclusive. Its ranks include leaders in business, politics and law, but it’s the admission policy that really makes the Club des Cent, as it is known here, truly remarkable: only when an existing member dies is space made for a new one.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Judges Asked to Widen Inquiry at French Bank (February 16, 2008)
Times Topics: Société Générale
Enlarge This Image
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
The École Polytechnique, which trains top engineers in France, is one of two schools that give graduates entree to the upper tiers of French business.
Officially, the club, now 96 years old, is devoted strictly to gastronomy, and when the group gathers Thursdays for lunch at legendary Paris restaurants like Maxim’s, politics and business are not on the menu. Claude Bébéar, the chairman of AXA, the French insurance giant, and a club member for more than two decades, says that there is “an atmosphere of real friendship; we are very close.”
The same is true of the French business establishment. A close-knit brotherhood — it’s nearly all male — that shares school ties, board memberships and rituals like hunting and wine-tasting, the French business elite is a surprisingly small coterie in a nation of more than 60 million people.
But in the wake of a $7 billion loss attributed to a rogue trader at one of the nation’s leading banks, Société Générale, France’s modern-day aristocracy finds itself in the one place it never wants to be: the spotlight.
While the trader, Jérôme Kerviel, now jailed, wasn’t a graduate of a top school or a member of an elite group like the Club des Cent, Société Générale’s embattled chief executive, Daniel Bouton, is both. And the fact that Mr. Bouton and other top managers of the bank have kept their posts since the scandal erupted nearly a month ago has unleashed criticism here that the French elite is an ancien régime — playing by old rules (largely its own) and quick to shift blame to protect itself.
“Is there a tendency in France for the elites to be made in the same mold and close ranks?” asks Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher and social observer. “Yes, it’s an old French disease.”
In the United States, Britain or Germany, Mr. Lévy adds, “Daniel Bouton would not only have been relieved of his job, but he’d be in a judge’s office being questioned.”
Indeed, the controversy comes at a time of broader tension in both French business and politics, with a new generation fighting for power against an entrenched old guard, says Stéphane Fouks, executive co-chairman of Euro RSCG, one of the largest marketing and communications firms in France.
“At the moment, French capitalism is in a crisis, and it’s creating momentum for a change,” Mr. Fouks says. Within the traditional establishment, he says, “everybody was friends, very diplomatic, and it was a club where at the end of the day, it was always better to find an arrangement.”
Members of the elite make no secret of the rules of the game. “When you are part of a small group, it is difficult to have an attitude of antagonism toward someone else in the group,” says Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former president of France. “In a bigger group, there is less interference of personal considerations.”
Mr. Bouton was not available for comment. But Philippe Citerne, Société Générale’s co-chief executive and a member of its board of directors, said establishment connections have nothing to do with the fact that Mr. Bouton is staying on.
“The board of directors twice unanimously confirmed its confidence in Mr. Bouton,” he said. “There’s no way we could deliver services to 27 million customers in 82 countries if we were a small French club.”
AT least half of France’s 40 largest companies are run by graduates of just two schools, the École Polytechnique, which trains the country’s top engineers, and ENA, the national school of administration. That’s especially remarkable given that the two schools together produce only about 600 graduates a year, compared with a graduating class of 1,700 at Harvard.
“They behave like blood relations,” says Ghislaine Ottenheimer, a journalist and author who has written extensively about the French elite. “There is a sense of impunity because there is no sanction in the family.”
Nevertheless, l’affaire Kerviel and especially the fate of Mr. Bouton — even President Nicolas Sarkozy has suggested that Mr. Bouton should step down — have shaken the French establishment to its core and encouraged those, like Ms. Ottenheimer, who favor change.
“The old system is dying; this is its last gasp,” she says. “Bouton is part of a generation that will soon have to hand control of French capitalism to a more diverse elite.”
Perhaps. But it doesn’t appear that Mr. Bouton is facing an imminent slice of the guillotine — unlike American executives at Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, who were forced to step down last fall after their banks suffered huge losses from the subprime mortgage crisis.
While some analysts and business people expect Mr. Bouton to step down within a year, if not sooner, Mr. Bébéar of AXA says French chief executives have more staying power than their counterparts in the United States.
merci
Enregistrer un commentaire