Obama, are you listening?

Socialist candidate Francois Hollande has won the French Presidential election, defeating incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, yet another political victim of the Eurozone crisis.

French election rules feature a runoff after a first round with multiple candidates. If the unpopular Sarkozy wins a small first round plurality because of a divided field, that isn’t the end of the story. On May 6th the two candidates that did the best in the first round complete in a run-off election. That can’t happen in America, because the rules effectively prevent the success of other parties.

Why does Sarkozy make it a priority to please the unelected Americans at S&P?

You Just Can’t Find Good Help These Days.

Not only were members of Greenpeace able to get past the security guarding at least one, and possibly three, nuclear facilities in France, they were able to plan and execute this operation less than a month after the plant operator, French energy giant EDF, was fined 1.5 million Euros ($2 million) for hacking into Greenpeace computers.

France and Germany have reached agreement on a fiscal plan for Europe that has everything to do with veto power for the European Commission over sovereign budgets and very little to do with the long-term problem of smoothing growth over 17 different countries operating under one monetary union.

On an open mike at a G-20 summit press conference, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Netanyahu a liar, and Obama said the US had more contacts with Israel. So naturally, the right wants Obama to apologize — that is, to lie about telling the truth.

For the financial elites and many of the world’s incumbent political leaders, their world is now safe from actual democracy.

The Obama Administration is frantic about stopping the Palestinian effort to secure a vote on statehood at the UN. Today the President meets with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to try and dissuade him from introducing the statehood resolution at the UN Security Council.

Many are nervous that, without leadership at the top, the reforms DSK attempted at the IMF will wither.