Recent riots among Left Bank students in Paris against proposed government changes in labor laws revealingly reflect both strong social and political undercurrents in France. They are political insofar as the intellectual youth of the country are unwilling to easily let go one of the historically hard-earned benefits of their social democracy. And while it may not appear that significant to outsiders—lowering the bar on businesses’ flexibility in the hiring and firing of young workers—it is extremely important to the French who pride themselves on having a democracy by, for and of the people—and not of Corporatism, to which business there, and everywhere, has evolved.

It is social protest in that Europeans, apparently unlike Americans, have a much more organic view of their culture, which simply means they view the corporate entity as something that roots in their society, feeding off its institutions and people, and not vice versa, and is therefore totally beholden to it. In other words, why shouldn’t a rich multi-national corporation absorb a few bad apples? Here, we’ve successfully learned not only to adapt to that but we find that they’re usually at the very top of the corporate food chain as CEO’s or CFO’s.

And, contrarily, in the U.S. we go so far as to permit corporations to assume the same legal stature as a citizen. But then, too, culture, not business, is the business of France.

As well, the two main dangers to any culture from Corporatism (government by and for corporations) are control of the political process and manipulation of the social dialogue. In the America of today, one sees the affects of their monolithic “campaign contributions” on the political scene, reducing the parties to policyless prattling at the uttermost and meaningless reaches of a government turned into a corporate vehicle. They, equally, control the social dialogue…by all but eliminating it. This is done through massive media blitzes, a “corporate” media that any longer is only about profit and not policy, and a public that is both pliant and compliant.

And, of course, increasingly among the financial corporate moguls, the lines separating nations are increasingly blurred, if not altogether gone.

In the money game, true globalization has arrived. Yes, one notes, the students in France are rioting, but what of their leaders? They are yielding, obviously, to those very anti-French forces of Corporatism much as the American Congress and Presidency yield to what are equally obvious anti-American Corporatism forces.

No “respectable” political figures will any more talk about protecting American jobs or purely local business interests as this runs counter to the forces of globalization. In a curious and contradictory vein in contemporary American politics, on the one hand we excoriate the U.N., and on the other allow the prevailing business interests that make their home here do their utmost to undermine the nation. To interpose Biblically, if well beyond the canon, the Rapture—introduced sometime, I believe, around l960—will include only the Corporate Elite, in one scenario, who have no earthly place left to go from their skyscraper perches throughout the world and who are no longer responsible to any of the sad, bereft earthlings below them.