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Europe is in the process of trying to pass a new constitution, and it is going to be a delicate business. Le Figaro reported that, for the first time, more than half of French surveyed were against the new constitution, and the opposition asked Chirac to put his own political weight behind its passage.
Why should this be of interest to the US, and even more so to the opposition to Bush? Because Europe and the Bush are on a collision course, over a deep issue: what kind of world we will live in. It is a global game of chicken over wages and prices.
What is this division? George Bush and Alan Greenspan are pushing a world where materials prices are higher, wages are lower, and the profits of large corporations are higher. They are doing this by running very high budget deficits, having very low interest rates, and using China as a vast engine of deflation to keep wages, and thus consumer inflation in line. This leads to what Professor David Hackett Fischer called a "money drought" in his book The Great Wave. We can see the results: oil has gone from a rock bottom $11 a barrel, to hovering over $55 dollars a barrel. Real wages in the US have barely moved, and yet Wall Street banks are showing record profits. Bush wants everywhere to look just like here: high profits, low wages, and a rush for mining and drilling.
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