But things are not so simple, and few know that better than Dana Blankenhorn, a long-standing blogger and analyst of IT, of open source software, and of renewable energy. It seems that others outside the US are also curious about what happened to Solyndra, to the point that the Washington correspondent for the left-wing French newspaper Libération, one Lorraine Millot, got in contact with Mr. Blankenhorn while writing an article on the subject, which is here.

It’s an interesting one, and as a favor to Mr. Blankenhorn (whose on-line work I’ve been reading for at least a decade) and as a service both to his readers and mine, I offer a full personal translation (i.e. no Google Translate – I don’t touch that stuff) after the jump.

Solyndra, the President’s Tricky Trap

The American solar collector start-up was just declared bankrupt, two years after having received $500 million from the government.

By Lorraine Millot, Washington correspondent

“Companies like Solyndra open the way to a brighter and more prosperous future,” Barack Obama declared on the company’s premises in Fremont (California) in May 2010. Fifteen months later, Solyndra is bankrupt. Its 1,100 employees learned Wednesday morning, arriving at work, that they had no further need to show up at the factory; they would receive their last check by mail. The loan of 535 million dollars (377 million euros) that the federal government had granted in March 2009 to this start-up which promised super-performing solar-collectors in tube form, not panel, will without doubt never be repaid.

A model enterprise, “a sign of American ingeniousness and dynamism” according to the Head of State in 2010, the Solyndra problem is turning into a nightmare for Barack Obama, at the very moment when he wants to convince people – including Congress, in his address next Thursday – that he can still create jobs (especially “green” ones) even while reducing the public deficit. “We sensed from the beginning that there was something shady going on there” is the attack Republicans Cliff Stearns and Fred Upton, members of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, have already launched while opening a committee investigation into Solyndra.

“Setback.” To make things even worse, the Obama administration is basically suspected of having “favored” this particular start-up in order to reward a big contributor to the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, the millionaire George Kaiser, who was one of Solyndra’s biggest investors. “What happened here, I think, was that they gave money to people who were either contributors or big supporters,” is Cliff Stearns’ accusation.

“If Obama’s intention was to help the economy and create jobs with this loan-guarantee of half a billion dollars, it’s clear that this is a setback, and I suspect that it was even predictable,” observes Sam Wilkinson, analyst for IMS Research. The product that Solyndra tried to bring onto the market was “very good,” this analyst emphasizes – its tubes enabled the capture of sunlight the whole day long, throughout the Earth’s rotation. “The problem is that Solyndra didn’t manage to reduce production costs,” explains the IMS analyst. “Despite all their advantages, Solyndra’s tubes did not justify a price that was far above those of the competition – one of the reasons for that, by the way, being that Chinese companies receive much more public money than American producers . . . ” According to information released by the company itself, Solyndra’s production costs reached $2/watt. The Chinese competition, which has already gained around 60% of the world market, is today at $1.20 or $1.25 per watt instead.

In 2011 the price for solar-panels sunk more than 40%. Before Solyndra, two other American producers were declared bankrupt this year, Spectrawatt Inc. and Evergreen Solar Inc. “It’s still too early to say whether the guaranteed loans granted by the American government to these solar-panel producers are a failure or not, considering that only three or four companies have benefited from them,” is the nuance offered by Shyam Mehta, an analyst for GTM Research. “But it’s certain that the US won’t be able to beat the Chinese at the low-cost game. Not only because Beijing supports its industry much more than Washington does, but there are also all those costs that are lower in China: salaries, electricity, materials . . . ”

“Obsolete.” The 500 million lost by the American government with its Solyndra venture isn’t any big thing compared with the billions which it continues to spend to support nuclear energy and to grant tax-advantages to oil companies, that’s how the situation is set in context by Dana Blankenhorn, a passionate blogger on the subject of renewable energy. The American government’s error lies in having wanted “to play the role of the market” by putting its bets on Solyndra’s technology, rather than devoting its subsidies to research, he judges. “In solar, the technologies change very quickly. The silicon collectors that dominate the market now will perhaps be completely out-of-date soon. The Chinese dominate the market with technologies that are already largely obsolete. Where we can beat them is with new technologies, it’s there that the State needs to invest.” The argument is no doubt true . . . but it is not necessarily what one will hear during the next electoral campaign when the subject of Solyndra – Obama’s “cherished project” – is brought up.

                          

Some may decry this result as yet another instance of the rich and powerful getting away with abusing the poor – after all, there was clearly some sort of sexual contact involved. The problem, though, is the personal credibility of the victim, one Nafissatou Diallo, an emigrant from Guinea. Those needing convincing of this would do well to consult the precise and complete dissection of that credibility assembled on the US affairs blog maintained by the French newspaper Libération named (in English) “Great America.” The piece is called The DKS affair: The lies of Nafissatou Diallo, and it is derived directly from the court document put forward by the New York City’s prosecutors office asking for dismissal.

Here are her biggest untruths, enumerated 1-2-3 as in the piece itself:

1. She changed her story about what actually happened that May 14 morning too many times. After the alleged rape did she go cower in the corridor, as she first told the grand jury? Or did she carry on cleaning another room, before deciding to report the incident? Her self-reported movements do not correspond to what the key-cards of the rooms in question show.
   
2. She had lied before about having been raped. Specifically: gang-raped, back in Guinea, with her daughter allegedly torn out of her arms and watching from the floor near-by. And she told this story in a very moving, seemingly-sincere way – only to disavow it later as merely something she had thought up to better her chances of gaining asylum in the US.
   
3. Similarly, it seems Ms. Diallo’s life is riddled through with other significant falsehoods. She has not reported the very income she earns from the Sofitel, in order to qualify for low-income housing. She entered the US in the first place using someone else’s papers. She has explained some large sums appearing in her bank account as originating from her fiancé, who is in the clothing & accessories business – he has actually been imprisoned for trafficking in marijuana.

There it is, then, all laid out, admittedly from a newspaper from the Left of the French political spectrum, which therefore can be expected to be on DSK’s side. Nonetheless, the operative concept here is that, in the end, DSK’s guilt would have to be established “beyond all resonable doubt” to twelve jurors. That just was not going to happen.

                          

A couple interesting points emerge. One is basically a variation on Barack Obama’s “We are the ones we have been waiting for!” Just as with Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Suu Kyi in her long-term imprisonment has long been the focus of attention for those seeking to democratize Burmese society, so that it’s only her recent freedom that has provided new hope that progress can be made. Yet she takes care to mildly remonstrate against such a preoccupation, saying that success will depend on many others than just her, and particularly on the young people she now sees swelling the ranks of her supporters.

The other is that, from the tenor of the reporters’ questions, it seems that that pro-democracy movement within the country is already divided into a number of factions. Or is it? Could this merely be some sort of military government tactic? That’s what Suu Ky suspects – although she admits she hasn’t yet had enough full exposure to the national political scene to be able to know for sure – and she is anyway relying on all parties being willing to work together to advance at least their broadest, most-important goal of bringing back truly free and fair elections for choosing the government.

                          

This is at least according to an article on the website of the French paper Libération (Internet Explorer: If you can’t make fun of it anymore . . .). There is even a handy table within the piece – from the W3C, in English – that gives a side-by-side comparison of IE9 and four other browsers (or browser-engines: WebKit) in seven categories. IE9 is given a perfect 100% rating in five of those categories.

But remember, HTML5 itself is still in beta and due to be officially issued in the middle of next year, by which time it will certainly have undergone further changes (and maybe even have new categories of things to be judged upon), so things can certainly change. And anyway, this come from a French newspaper – what do they know?

                          

All that Congress stuff is not so often the focus of foreign coverage of American politics, however. Generally, it’s the President foreigners are interested in – the American executive in charge of the country’s relations with other governments, after all – and especially this one who broke once and for all the 200-year-plus color barrier to the office.

So we have, for example, a piece from France’s left-wing Libération (Midterm: Obama launches the final assault). There is a disappointed tone here even as journalist Fabrice Rousselot goes into detail about how Barack Obama (together with Michelle) has stepped up his campaigning in the last weeks before the election, using his electoral support organization Organizing for America to go after young voters especially aggressively and get them to the polls tomorrow. After all, Rousselot also notes how, this time, the President’s campaign is not about “Yes we can”; this time it’s more like “It’s hard, and we have to persevere.” That’s not quite so inspiring as a slogan, and so he doubts Obama will be able to do much to ward off a serious electoral defeat for his party.

Then again, that might be a good thing. Such, at least, is the speculation of Chritoph von Marschall writing in the (also left-wing) Berlin paper Der Tagesspiegel (Liberating defeat for Obama). The President’s lack of progress on the foreign affairs front, the author admits, is even more noticeable than his domestic performance (despite the Nobel Prize): Iran, the MidEast, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo still operating. Is he fated to do even worse in the second half of his term after these elections?

Actually, probably the opposite. Here Von Marschall either draws on his own rather sophisticated study of American presidential affairs or else has access to good academic advisors, as he brings forward the insight that, after all, presidents have much more freedom of action in foreign affairs, and so it has repeatedly been the case that they have devoted themselves to these whenever they have felt stifled on the home front. After all, every president must build his own “legacy” for the history books one way or the other; the presidency is not just a matter of warming some historic seat for four or eight years.

Furthering this line of argument, Van Marschall also points out how there is also greater scope to ignore the demands of his own party in the area of foreign affairs, because of that greater freedom there to do what he sees fit. Supposedly his positions on Afghanistan and Iraq in particular are even closer to what Republicans prefer. Then again, this does not guarantee any sort of cosier cooperation between the Executive and Legislative branches coming in with the new Congress; keep in mind the almost pathological determination by Republicans to oppose anything Obama might want to do, seemingly even if at some fundamental level they agree with it. And Obama will still need a 2/3 vote of the Senate to ratify treaties, including the update to the START nuclear weapons treaty he recently signed with Russia. It’s easy to imagine that that, too (and, with it, American-Russian relations generally), could fall victim to the new congressional intransigence likely to be elected tomorrow and installed at the beginning of next January.

UPDATE: Renowned MidEast expert Prof. Juan Cole of the University of Michigan weighs in with this closer examination (in English) of how a Republican-dominated Congress (even if it’s just the House of Representatives) could still hamper the President’s conduct of foreign policy, e.g. by calling hearings on the planned withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan (and even from Iraq) as a means to pressure him to slow them down.

                          

That article basically calls attention to a recent, publicly-available and English-language study from ING Bank (main writer: Mark Cliffe) entitled “EMU Break-up: Quantifying the Unthinkable.” It’s quite an eye-opener, and Quatremer has performed quite a public service in calling his readers’ attention to it. For the “unthinkable” when it comes to the euro has become quite a bit less so this year, including the two “unthinkable” extremes between which Cliffe structures his report’s analysis: 1) The departure from the Eurozone of Greece (only), and 2) The collapse of the whole thing, with the current member countries simply reverting to their currencies of prior to 1999. Both developments, and various others in-between, have increasingly been raised as distinct real-world possibilities, and not just as horror-scenarios but also as measures to be induced deliberately (particularly the ejection of Greece) as punishment for the fiscal failings of various naughty governments.

The point of the report, though, as Cliffe continuously emphasizes, is not to evaluate the likelihood of either of these two boundary-situations actually happening, but rather to assess the economic and financial consequences if they do. It should make sobering reading for anyone with actual European financial policy responsibility. According to the ING analysis, a Eurozone collapse would have “dramatic and traumatic” effects on the whole world economy, far surpassing the explosive impact of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy of September, 2008, even under the assumption that it would take place under as pre-planned and controlled conditions as possible. Perhaps the best place to look to grasp the impact is the resulting valuations between the old Eurocurrencies which would become “new” again as the Eurozone countries revert to them: Cliffe forecasts Spain, Portugal and Ireland devaluing by 50% against the new Deutschmark, and Greece a full 80%. (“Core” Eurozone countries like Austria and the Benelux would devalue by about 7.5%.) Either these countries’ external debts would multiply by the inverse of these devaluations (e.g. Greece by a factor of 5) if they decided to keep the foreign-currency value of their debts constant – unlikely – or the holders of such debt would suffer the corresponding loss in value. This would then make interest rates – and inflation – in the devaluing countries explode, with the opposite effect (even leading to deflation) in Germany and possibly the other core countries. Meanwhile, the banks in those core countries, having made those loans and suffered such losses, would need to be bailed out by their governments once again. Even the US, whose dollar would skyrocket in value against all the new/old Euro currencies (new aggregate value of around €0.85 to the dollar), would suffer a severe deflationary shock as imports from Europe became so much cheaper and domestic demand thereby took a serious hit.

Overall, Cliffe expects the immediate impact of such a collapse of the Eurozone to be yearly GDP losses for all European countries of between 5% and 9%, lasting for a couple of years at least. The “Greece leaves the Eurozone” scenario is of course rather less severe than that, but still bad: Greece suffers a drop in GDP of 7.5% while other European countries still see their output fall by up to 1% due to a feared “domino effect” extending to other weaker countries on the Euro-periphery and the general chilling effect of such a loss of confidence on trade.

But Don’t Underestimate Our Will!

Somewhat by way of antidote, Quatremer also links to another bank analysis, this one from the French bank Natixis (written in French) by Patrick Artus. His main point: Everyone (especially the “Anglo-Saxon” analysts from New York and London) may be telling you that the financial data point inevitably to the departure of one or more of the “peripheral” countries from the euro and a resulting risk that the whole Eurozone could collapse. But don’t believe them: above all, the euro is a political phenomenon, and these analysts are underestimating the sheer political will within the EU to make sure that none of this happens, as demonstrated by the huge sums of money committed to a Euro Stabilization Fund plus the new willingness of the European Central Bank to purchase public debt, including that coming from Greece.

Actually, going through M. Artus’ Natixis report, one is rather struck by, if anything, his series of graphs which serve precisely to illustrate those “Anglo-Saxon” arguments about how defaults and Eurozone exits would appear to be inevitable! We’d all better hope that he turns out to be correct with the argument his paper is actually trying to make! As for that ING report, its scariest aspect is how the deliberate ejection of certain countries from the euro (Greece at the head of the line) and even the currency’s break-up (usually not completely, but into various sub-groupings) have actually been advanced on occasion as legitimate policy alternatives. That report needs to gain a wide circulation among EU policy makers, to convince them just how disastrous and self-defeating any such measures would turn out to be.

                          

Time now for the tournament to move on, which it has done already with, among other things, England’s narrow 1-0 victory over Slovenia and Landon Donovan’s last-minute goal for Team USA which sent them on to the sudden-death Round of 16 and sent the Slovenians packing for home. For any of those with a more morbid outlook, though – those who tend to linger long while passing the scene of a horrific accident by the side of the road, say – Grégory Schneider of the French paper Libération has some behind-the-scenes details of what happened with the French, including the precise wording of Nicolas Anelka’s to-his-face characterization of his coach during half-time of the France-Mexico game (Get ready: Va te faire enculer, sale fils de pute! It’s pretty bad.) that got him sent home and was the immediate cause of all the trouble.

You see, his teammates didn’t really feel Anelka’s saying that merited what they saw as the extreme measure of actually sending him 6,000 all the way back home. So they went on strike, and Schneider lays out the scene:

Robert Duverne [France fitness coach] had already laid out his cones. It was 16.00 hours yesterday when the players disembarked from from the bus that permitted them not to have to traverse on foot the 400 meters separating their hotel from the Field of Dreams [sic] . . . of the Pezula Hotel, where they had been training for two weeks. All the players went to sign autographs for supporters, massed to the left of the field. All, except their captain, Patrice Evra, in a big discussion with the trainer, Raymond Domemech. And it’s there that the French team abandoned itself to Chaos.

Robert Duverne . . . approaches Evra with the clear intention of giving him a pop in the mouth. Domenech interposes. Duverne, furious, leaves swinging his timepiece. Evra gives the signal for the players to return to the bus, before even the first ball has rolled. They go there as one, and one notices the telling detail: they have on basketball sneakers, whereas they train in cleats. Jean-Louis Valentin, Director-General of the French Football Federation (FFF), emerges from the back of the bus and leaves the scene . . .

. . . and says some nasty stuff about the players (more examples of French profanity, but I think you’ve had enough for today), thereupon declaring that he intends to resign his position and go straight back to Paris himself.

Afterwards, Domenech joins his players on the bus, which doesn’t go anywhere. Instead, he re-emerges after half an hour to stand pasty-white and read to the press a statement from the players protesting at Anelka’s treatment. Remember that it was this Domenech who had been subject to the above-quoted nasty characterization from that same Anelka.

From there it got even worse. The players turned out not to be as unified as they declared; rumors of divisions, possibly along racial lines, soon surfaced. Team captain Evra (fired soon afterwards) noted at a subsequent press conference that things would not have gotten as bad if Anelka’s behavior could have been kept confidential within the team. The fact that it leaked to the outside world he attributed to a “traitor” within the team ranks; yes, he knew who it was, but would not say. Still, he was also willing to admit that Anelka’s behavior towards his coach was “inadmissable.” OK then, the assembled reporters wanted to know, how come the players are insisting that he stay?

In all, Schneider provides a lot of the juicy stuff, if not all of it, for those who are curious, including a revealing photograph at the top of the piece showing an exasperated Domenech walking alongside Patrice Evra, with outstretched palm, who is apparently trying to explain something. Who knows what we will hear further as a result of Thierry Henry’s meeting with the President? After all, for the French the 2010 World Cup is over, after having (in Scheider’s words) “verged on the grotesque.” All that remains is to try to try to get the whole story of what went wrong, in the interests of the team at future tournaments.

                          

Sure, the President was nowhere near Brussels at the time. Still, in Quatremer’s view it was the key telephone calls he placed to the main decision-makers – mainly France’s Sarkozy and Germany’s Merkel, of course – that made sure something big and decisive would happen. And then it seems he also gave a call on Monday to the Spanish premier, Zapatero, to persuade him to buckle down with some serious government cost-saving measures (that included lowering public employees’ salaries and cutting pensions), and he may have similarly bent the ear of Portuguese premier Socrates as well.

The Libération correspondent’s just-below-the-surface point is that none of Obama’s interventions should have been necessary – quite apart from the fact that he carries no official post or authority within the EU or any of its member-states. It was clearly an emergency situation (and it may still be), but it seems that the European leadership actually in place was itself not equal to the task, and instead had to be persuaded by the US President to do the right things.

Actually, it is not clear that EU leaders would have failed to take appropriate measures absent the President’s calls – it’s also not clear that the measures they did take, despite the huge-sounding €750 billion figure, were sufficient to the emergency – but that is a historical experiment no one really desired to undertake for real. It does seem a more convincing case that Zapatero would not have acted as he did without the American intervention, and also that the official who actual does hold the “EU Council President” title that Quatremer says Obama usurped – namely Herman van Rompuy – was fairly useless throughout. (Quatremer: “If during this crisis the former Belgian prime minister was useful for anything, you’ll have to explain that to me.”)

Another thing that this tale gives the lie to: that Europe’s current economic and financial travails need be no concern to the Americans, something asserted recently by no less than Treasury Secretary Timonthy Geithner. No, says Quatremer in rather dramatic fashion, Obama realized all too well the “risk of unleashing a [financial] tsunami capable of ravaging the planet.”

BTW in recent times I’ve repeatedly picked up glowing praises and recommendations of Quatremer’s blog – written in French, of course. So I think it’s time that I finally start to read it more regularly and have added it to my RSS reader under a label that should ensure that subsequent entries do attract my attention (even though there’s really something wrong with the clunky way he embeds photographs into his posts! Mais ça, ce n’est rien . . .).

                          

The headline link is to a very revealing blogpost by Jean Quatremer, Brussels/European correspondent for the French newspaper Libération – but the link is only to the French original. Herewith my translation of that, after the jump, complete with the links Quatremer uses within his piece (other than when they go to Wikipedia or to general homepage sites):

Goldman Sachs vs. (Everyone vs.) Greece
On 6 February, on this blog, I announced that Greece had been the victim of a speculative attack on the part of a large American commercial bank and American “hedge funds” (speculative funds) which were betting on a payments-default from Athens. Up to that point we could know for sure that there had been speculation, but no one had succeeded in attaching a name to those who were looking to destabilize Greece and the eurozone. At the time, my sources had advised me against citing any names, thus resulting in a somewhat frustrating article, for you and for me. But since then the rumors in circulation have become more precise, and the names have been openly cited in the media, even if – understandably so – with great prudence. The Greek government has itself increasingly implicated them openly. I can therefore confirm to you that, according to mutually-consistent sources, Goldman Sachs and the hedge fund run by John Paulson are said to be the two principal actors in the attacks against Greece and the euro. I already set out in detail for you in my 6 February post the speculative mechanism and so I won’t go back over that.

The most shocking aspect of this affair is without doubt the role played by Goldman Sachs, which, while at the same time advising the Greek government, has also taken up in secret positions against Greece and the euro. This troubling role is illustrated by the recent incident recalled by Der Spiegel of 8 February and the New York Times of 14 February(1): in 2002, the American bank [referring to Goldman Sachs] assisted Greece, for a remuneration of 300 million dollars, in some “creative accounting” operations intended to camouflage part of its debt (I’ll come back to this in a subsequent article). It is not irrelevant to know that at that time Goldman’s European vice-president was none other than Mario Draghi, later to become governor of the Italian central bank, and who just saw the post of vice-president of the European Central Bank slip under his nose. This particular role by Goldman Sachs is illustrated by the fact that the bank has always participated in syndications in Greece (and in Portugal as well): this involving a consortium of banks charged by a government with placing its debt with investors when it cannot be sure of placing it directly on the market by a public emission.

You will also recall that, on 25 January, Greece managed to place 5-year paper in the amount of 8 billion euros, even though the original intention had been to issue only 3 billion: demand had reached 25 billion euros! Within the syndicate that placed this Greek paper, Goldman Sachs was certainly to be found. Up to that point, nothing out of the ordinary. It’s afterwards that a curious fact cropped up.

After this spectacular success, everyone thought that the markets had calmed down, since they had just shown that they did not believe in a Greek default. And in fact a certain lull ensued. However, since Wednesday it has been stormy again. An article from the Financial Times, the sole paper that market-operators will read, had just confirmed news to the effect that China had refused to buy 23 billion euros of Greek debt, a “private placement” engineered by . . . Goldman Sachs. What was this about? When a government fears that it won’t be able to place its debt, it asks a bank directly to place that on its behalf with one or several investors. It’s a sign of panic. And the fact that Peking is said to have declined the offer is straight-out disquieting. In brief, two reasons for the markets to flee Greece. It will be denied, but the markets will anyway exaggerate the risk premium they assign to Athens on the high side, to boost their profits. Those who arranged the flight win on two fronts: their loans return more, as do their CDS, those insurance policies deemed capable of protecting them against the default of a borrowing State (see my post of 6 February).

The problem is that this flight is astonishing, as this type of operation is assumed to remain totally secret. However, since then the Financial Times has revealed that it was in fact Goldman Sachs’ number two, Gary Cohn, who is said to have traveled in November and in January to Athens to try to convince the Greek government to avail itself of his firm’s services to place 25 billion euros of debt with China. In vain. And by a deliberate action this information was then made public, putting Greece almost on her knees and causing the euro to fall.

According to today’s Les Échos, Simon Johnson, former “chief economist” of the IMF, is calling for the European Commission to launch an inquiry into Goldman Sach’s actions. That does effectively seem to be called for.(2)

(1) This affair is by no means a secret. For example, Mark Brown and Alex Chambers describe the operation in their article published on 1 September 2005 in Euromoney, explicitly titled “How Europe’s governments have ENRONized their debts.”
(2) See also the embarrassing questions he poses to Mario Draghi.

Très interéssant, eh? As I say, go back to the regular English part of Yves Smith’s “Links and Short Takes” posting for today to savor the rest.

                          

We first need to consult the French paper-of-record, and that is still Le Monde, which provides initial coverage in a piece jointly credited to it, the AFP news agency, and Reuters (Obama’s big oral exam on health) and put on-line only a couple of hours after the event itself. Graphically, the article stands out due to the two YouTube videos embedded within it, which feature no dubbing or subtitles or any other concessions to French-only readers but which of course include that electric passage when the president was loudly heckled (Vous mentez!, he shouted – or would have, in French, if he had had any bit of class) by South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson. The main insights of note here come at the very beginning – Barack Obama joue le tout pour le tout, or “Barack Obama is going all-in,” in poker-speak – and at the end: the piece remarks that Obama knows he needs to achieve something this year, as it will be even harder to do so next year, an election year.

That’s fine, but a bit broader coverage is offered by Washington correspondent Laure [sic] Mandeville in Le Figaro, Nicolas Sarkozy’s favorite French daily, in a piece placed on line more than an hour later (Health reform: Obama raises the tone) – including a brief remark about Michelle Obama that she was toute de rose vêtue, or “all dressed-up in rose”! (“Laure” must certainly be a female French name!) More pertinently, Mandeville gives the President’s performance a clear thumbs-up:

The entire Democratic camp was awaiting with impatience this presidential intervention, after a particularly eventful summer marked by violent attacks from Republicans and the president’s fall in popularity. He did not disappoint. Far from being beaten down by a politically-trying month of August, Obama appeared smiling, offensive-minded, and determined to use his political capital to defend a cause which, if it fails, could get the better of his young presidency.

Nonetheless, there remain worries, Mandeville notes, particularly in the financial realm. All of this expanded coverage will cost plenty of money; at the same time, Obama’s contention that costs can be reduced through reduction of waste and abuse strains credulity. Such cost considerations, at a time of ballooning federal government debt, are no doubt the “principal serious lever” left to Republicans for opposing the administration’s plans.

Heavy Lobbyists

Unfortunately, Republicans are not the only ones attempting to derail President Obama’s health care initiative. A more-complete understanding of the difficulties of the issue requires a descent into the house-of-horrors that is the world of American political lobbyists, which Ms. Mandeville is game for and discusses in a parallel article (USA: the lobbies’ weight in health reform).

The easiest way to approach such a subject for a non-US readership is simply to start reciting numbers: 42,000 officially-registered lobbyists trying to influence federal policy and legislation, who collectively are currently spending $1.4 million per day on the campaign over health care reform; the $28 million they spent on TV advertising in the month of August alone. Of course, some are acting to support such reform, but many interests – e.g. the pharmaceutical industry lobbyists, even the American Chamber of Commerce – want to limit any reform or even kill it off entirely. But that’s how the American lobbying system works; Mandeville gets a prime quote from a Washington lobbyist for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez (no less), who says “The beauty of the American political system and of lobbying is that any cause can come defend itself on the Hill [that's Capitol Hill, where the Congress is]. But the ugly side comes from the fact that it’s often he who has the most money who best makes himself heard.”

Indeed. Mandeville is thorough enough to recall for her readers some ugly lobbying figures from the past, such as Jack Abramoff – arrested back in 2006 for his blatant bribery of members of Congress – and Billy Tauzin, who became president of the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying organization PhRMA (earning $2 million per year) immediately after serving as a congressman from Louisiana and playing a key role in the 2004 passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill, which many view as much too generous to pharmaceutical companies. Fast-forwarding to today, Mandeville reports how PhRMA has somehow managed to recruit two former chiefs-of-staff of Max Baucus (she misnames him as “Mark”), the Senator from Montana who has a pivotal role in passing any health care reform legislation. Against this influence-peddling cesspool Mandeville casts Barack Obama as a modern-day Cato the Elder, coming to Washington to destroy the influence of special interests. (I guess Jimmy Stewart and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” aren’t part of her French store of cultural references.) But he has found that the special interests are much harder to fight than he expected, and that the effectiveness of his presidency has truly come to hang in the balance with the struggle he has undertaken.

Accounting for the System’s Gangrene

Finally, to Libération, a rather more left-leaning French daily paper, which among other things does offer the full video of the president’s address with French overdubbing, if you happen to be interested. Rather more valuable towards getting the true French take on the American approach to health care, though, is an analysis written by Bernard Cohen in preparation for Obama’s speech, entitled To the sources of the gangrene. Lede: “American health is totally locked-up by the private insurers.”

The reality about American health care, writes Cohen, is damning: although the country spends 16% of its GDP on it (while France spends 10%), it still ranks only 37th on the World Health Organization’s list of top world health care regimes. 48 million Americans are uninsured; each year at least 85,000 of them travel overseas on “medical tourism” to have an operation and/or receive care that they cannot afford at home. And preventive medicine? Forget about it:

A philosophy and practice totally opposed to that of prevention has imposed itself in America, that of the private insurers which, to protect their profits, keep the threat hanging of rescinding their policies – or simply refuse to honor them – until they can invoke a “pre-existing medical condition.”

Nonetheless – and, rest assured, to the considerable shock on the part of those observing from the other side of the Atlantic – the administration’s attempts to fix this situation met over the summer with crazed accusations of “death panels!” and “socialism!” More broadly, no true progress has been made in the modern era on state assistance for health care, other than Medicare/Medicaid under President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Why, Cohen asks, is it so fearfully difficult to pass a reform that would seem to be so indispensible?

He offers two answers. For one, the health care issue necessarily involves a lot of emotions among the citizenry and, secondly, government involvement somehow touches on their sense of individual liberty. Basically, he explains, you can class the Americans’ hang-up on health care alongside their hang-up about being able to buy (and use) as many guns as they want: they are both things “that, with time, have revealed themselves to be more damaging than enriching.” But that’s just the way that they are, and they simply won’t listen to reason. The same goes in particular for the Democratic Party: although health care reform has for decades been that party’s “grand cause,” now that the time has come when something can be done about it, with a president willing to lead, that party remains disunited. “Today the left wing of the party reproaches [Obama] for having tried to find a way to work with the Republicans, while the right-wing blames him for having offended conservative opinion by raising the specter of collectivism.”