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French unemployers are saddled with 50-55% percent "charges sociales" (more or less a payroll tax) that
they have to pay the government on top of an employee's gross salary for the privilege of employing
someone legally in France. Obviously plenty of businesses can't afford that, so the big corporations
go elsewhere to avoid shutting down, and little ones are often family enterprises where family members
"help out" for free. Only the most efficient (or crooked) enterprises can get by paying this tax, and
so the logical result is this huge unemployment rate.
The youth of the Paris suburban ghetto is often second or third generation Arab, but are often not "Muslim"
to the point where religion is of vital importance to them. Oh, they still like to kick their women around
(I know social workers who work in/with the always-full shelters for battered women), and force them to cover
their hair, but that is for control/self-importance rather than because they find some interpretation of the Koran
that they use to justify their behavior. They are pissed at the fact that they have little chance of ever getting a
decent job in France, and so they take out their frustration on their immediate surroundings. Pretty classic stuff,
and wholly predictable. This situation was exacerbated under Mitterand's socialists, although they by no means created it:
this has been underway since the French let in half of North Africa after losing Algeria in 1962. Assimilation should
have begun then. It wasn't, and this is the result. It's not Sarkozy's fault, and Ségolène Royale would have done no better.
Indeed, she was for more of the same policies that created this mess in the first place. Until the tax system is changed,
these kids will NEVER have a shot at decent employment, and the clever ones among them will turn out to be gang bosses of
organized crime, the weak ones will follow them, and the rest will just mope, simmering their hate for their own kids to learn.
A few, a VERY few, will have the determination to get an education, suffer the indignities of discrimination, and make something
of themselves despite their obvious disadvantages. The government may hold them up as shining examples, but the sad fact is that
they will always remain the exceptions to the rule as long as their communities as a whole have no shot at economic betterment.
Zappa put it well:
All that mass stupidity
That seems to grow more every day
Each time you hear some nitwit say
He wants to go and do you in
Because the color of your skin
Just don't appeal to him
(No matter if it's black or white)
Because he's out for blood tonight
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