The Paris riots continue. And they aren’t centrally controlled.

Although the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has spoken darkly of " organisation" of the riots by drugs barons or Islamist radicals, police chiefs and social workers dismiss such claims. Police intelligence experts say that almost all of the violence is coming from known gangs, with help from other local youths, some as young as 10 or 12. There can be no co-ordination between the gangs in different cités (housing estates), they say, because they detest each other as much as they detest the police.

Open Source War in France

Global Guerrillas says the spark that precipitated the riots was the government attempt to destroy the underground economies by which most of them live.

"Open source war" is Global Guerrilla John Robb’s term for the organizational structure and mode of next gen terrorists.

The decentralized, and seemingly chaotic guerrilla war in Iraq demonstrates a pattern that will likely serve as a model for next generation terrorists. This pattern shows a level of learning, activity, and success similar to what we see in the open source software community. I call this pattern the bazaar. The bazaar solves the problem: how do small, potentially antagonistic networks combine to conduct war?

The spark that took this from a riot to open source war, was the attempt by the French Interior Minister (Sarkozy) to eliminate the parallel criminal economy that provides the main means of economic advancement and status in many of these immigrant communities. This economy is particularly important given the rise of the brutally flat globalized economy, where each individual is in direct competition with everyone else in the world. A crackdown meant economic annihilation. France is clearly unable to offer any meaningful alternative economic opportunity, and these boy/men know it.

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Now, you can run the Firefox web browser off a portable USB drive. JohnHaller.com has this and other portable apps, including calendering, web authoring, and OpenOffice. Most excellent!

Now I can go anywhere and launch my customized version of Firefox with my bookmarks. There’s an amazing number of extensions for Firefox too. I use FireFTP to ftp, and FasterFox to speed things up and to block those annoying Flash popup ads that regular popup blockers don’t stop.

Plus, I’ve got my password program on the USB drive too.

Dunno about you, but with multiple websites and blogs plus dozens of other sites I visit, there’s gaggle of passwords to keep track of. I use security expert Bruce Schneier’s Password Safe. It’s open source, easy to use, and uses Blowfish encryption.

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Ten nights in row, and last night was the most ferocious. This could bring down the government, who seem clueless as what to do. Not that there are any obvious soultions…

Urban violence scaled new heights in France as gangs of youths torched cars, shops and firms in the 10th straight night of violence in poor suburbs of Paris and provincial towns, despite heavy police reinforcements.

Authorities say the rolling nightly riots are being organised via the Internet and mobile phones <well, duh> , and have pointed the finger at drug traffickers and Islamist militants.

Say what? Why would drug traffickers support something that disrupts their business? But they’re certainly an easy target to demonize. Ditto for Islamist militants. This foolish statement implies the riots are orchestrated and planned by some controlling sinister force, and that’s clearly not what’s happening however much law-and-order types looking for a head to cut off might wish. What’s happening is a spontaneous uprising. 

Authorities have so far found no way beyond appeals and more police to address a problem with complex social, economic and racial causes.

"Many youths have never seen their parents work and couldn’t hold down a job if they got one," said Claude Chevallier, manager of a burned-out carpet depot in the rundown Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois.

Well, rather than slime the youth and their parents, solutions to the obvious appalling poverty, racism, and neglect need to be found. Because even the government is saying, that’s the root of what caused it. 

PS Why is France Burning from reporter Doug Ireland who lived in France for ten years is an excellent overview of why it’s happening.

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The rush to privatize water continues unencumbered, despite its unpopularity among residents worldwide who are affected by it. Countries faced with large debts are forced by the World Bank and IMF to privatize water. Water deregulation is a common demand of the World Bank and IMF as part of their loan conditions. In 2000, out of 40 IMF loans distributed through the International Finance Corporation, 12 had requirements of partial or full privatization of water supplies.

They also insisted on the creation of policies to stimulate "full cost recovery" and the elimination of subsidies. African governments, such as Ghana, increasingly give in to pressures for water privatization. In Ghana, the World Bank and IMF policies forced the sale of water at market rate, requiring the poor to spend up to 50 percent of their earnings on water purchases.

As Vandana Shiva writes in Water Wars, "The water crisis is the most pervasive, most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth."

This is from the amazingly comprehensive Water is Life "class website on water privatization and commodification, produced by students of Geography 378 at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, USA, May 2004." They have a huge amount of information and links on water privatization, check it out.

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Scholars are predicting that 50 million people worldwide will be displaced by 2010 because of rising sea levels, desertification, dried up aquifers, weather-induced flooding and other serious environmental changes.

No aid available to "environmental refugees"

According to the United Nations University (UNU), an international community scholars that work on pressing global problems, victims of political upheaval or violence have access through governments and international organizations to assistance such as financial grants, food, tools, shelter, schools and clinics, but "environmental refugees" receive no such aid because they are not yet recognized in world conventions.

The UNU says that environmental problems already have contributed to large permanent migrations and could eventually displace hundreds of millions of people. Meanwhile, Red Cross research shows more people are now displaced by environmental disasters than by war.

Emphasis added. Many of these disasters of course are made much worse because of human-caused problems, like the erosion of the Mississippi delta areas that amplified the effect of Katrina.

Simms argues that because the homes of these displaced people are being gradually destroyed as a result of environmental policies pursued by industrialized nations, it amounts to "environmental persecution", which makes them legitimate refugees deserving of legal protection.

Most of them are poor and/or in remote areas. Which makes them easy for the West to ignore. Plus, if they became refugees because of "environmental policies pursued by industrialized nations" then, when they quite rightfully demand legal protection (and monetary damages), there could very well be serious protests, followed by repressions, more protests, you get the idea…

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