Eau-Oh... (Part III)
Water, money, media, migrants: following the flows & streams
She had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked "poison," it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later. However, this bottle was not marked "poison". — Lewis Carroll
At certain moments of last year, and for some unfortunates all of last year, 20% of the population of France, i.e., 12 million people, had excessively high levels of pesticides and metabolites coming out of their taps.
Meanwhile, in August, more than 100 towns in France had to haul in water by truck as their pipes had run dry because of historic-level droughts.
Meanwhile, too, 33 million six-packs of 1.5l bottles of Cristaline water, which comes from 34 different springs, were purchased in France last year—that’s 7 bottles per second (and about 18% of all bottled water sold in France).
Thank the god Poseidon, right? Bottled water brands provide critical supplies of drinking water in tapped-out times of disaster. At the peak of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, the city was consuming more than 20 million water bottles a day. In California’s Central Valley, suffering its nth straight year of severe drought, thousands rely on bottled water—according to the Washington Post last week, the state “has already tallied a record 1,351 dry wells this year — nearly 40 percent over last year’s rate and the most since the state created its voluntary reporting system in 2014.”
The efforts of the industry to provide crucial drinking water to citizens afflicted by disasters are contingent on a viable commercial market. The commercial market provides them with the capital and resources to respond when needed…To discourage the use of bottled water or question the safety of bottled water does a disservice to an industry that is called upon every year to provide much needed drinking water — Joe Doss, President and CEO of the International Bottled Water Association, 9 September, 2008
Well, yes, but.
Bottle water companies pay a pittance to suck water out of local groundwater, springs and aquifers — turning a precious public resource into a largely unnecessary product — that they then haul off somewhere else and sell for huge profits. In North America, nearly two-thirds of the bottled water sold is municipal tap water — an absurd scam principally run by Coca Cola (Dasani), PepsiCo (Aquafina), and, until last year, when they sold off their US and Canadian water operations, Nestlé, the world leader (with Pure Life, the world bestseller). France and other parts of Europe narrowly avoided being flooded with Dasani bottles, for reasons made comically clear in the long footnote below.1
Spain is the only European market for Aquafina. Pure Life, however, is everywhere (as are Nestlé's spring-sourced brands Vittel and Perrier).
Meanwhile, three, bottling water globally requires around 100 to 160 million barrels of oil for materials, production, and transportation per year. Its energy costs are two thousand times higher than those required to process and deliver tap water.
Meanwhile, four, less than 50% of purchased PET bottles are recycled each year in the EU, and only 17% of this recycled plastic is used to make new bottles.
But you know all this.
Corporate control of public water resources is growing worldwide, including the privatization of municipal water systems as well as the bottling of municipal water and other water sources for sale. In a context of global water scarcity, international organisations such as the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund are promoting the privatisation and commodification of water…. valued exclusively for its monetary or economic value, or in other words, as a consumer commodity… This dependence on growing consumption “facilitat[es] uses of natural resources beyond nature’s carrying capacity”… [and] results in water becoming “disconnected conceptually and politically from its places of origin: particular watersheds, ecosystems, and landscapes”… [which] leads to inequity and a lack of sustainability as corporations focus on profit maximisation through cost-cutting measures at the expense of public interests. —Eileen Schuhmann, Framing bottled water: an analysis of the framing contest between the anti-bottled water movement and the bottled water industry (thesis), 2016
Meanwhile, five, a month ago, nine Paris-region communes in the Val-de-Marne (Arcueil, Cachan, Chevilly-Larue, Fresnes, Gentilly, Ivry-sur-Seine, Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, Orly and Vitry-sur-Seine) voted to “get out of the market and competition logic” by leaving the Syndicat des Eaux d'Ile-de-France (Sedif), the powerful Ile-de-France water distribution syndicate, and creating their own public water authority. Sedif delegates water distribution to the private sector (Veolia, which we looked at in Part II). The publicly owned and operated service (Régie des Eaux de la Seine et de la Bièvre) will provide water for 350,000 users as of 1 January 2024.
Meanwhile — full hexagon — six, 78 percent of mineral water bottles in France contain microplastics. Which is not surprising, as plastic never breaks down, it just splits and splits into smaller and smaller bits found from the Marianas Trench to the top of Mt Everest — and in every breath and gulp we take, not to mention in every one of our veins, hearts, brains, and digestive tracts.
Meanwhile, um, seven, in 2020, under cover of Covid and with no environmental impact study in place, Volvic dug a sixth borehole into the water table in the Puy-de-Dôme in the Auvergne, where it sources its mineral water. It is now being sued by locals, including Edouard de Feligonde, the proprietor of a trout farm dating back to the 17th century. His pond, famous since Roman times (when it was known as Dragonara — the “springs of the dragon”, because they flowed so loudly), annually produced 60 tons of trout. Now the ponds are dry and the fish are gone.
Meanwhile — full octagon — eight, Danone, which owns Volvic (and Evian, Badoit and La Salvetat), sells 1.75 billion bottles of the brand’s bottles a year. In summer, its busiest season, it fills as many as 250 trucks and five trains a day. And each bottle requires a third of a litre of water to rinse it out before filling. “Since 2017,” says the group, “we have invested €25 million to optimise our use of water for rinsing. This has enabled us to reduce our water consumption by 14%. In four years, we have saved 390 million litres of water.” Well, yes, but meanwhile —
— nontoganally, in October, nearly a hectare of old PVC plastic waste was found secretly buried in a nature reserve near an old Volvic factory near the springs. The storage “predates the takeover of the brand by the Danone group,” says the group, which claims that the PVC in question was used to manufacture bottles between the 1960s and 1990s. Danone bought Volvic from Nestlé in 1993 — a watershed moment for the turbulent spring and mineral water industry in France and elsewhere. As we’ll see a little ways downstream.
Meanwhile,—
It’s still the same old story–
— back at Rick’s, where Ilsa sees Sam at the piano for the first time since —
DISSOLVE TO:
MONTAGE - PARIS IN THE SPRING
— she, he and Rick guzzled four bottles of Mumm Champagne at Le Relais de La Belle Aurore on rue Gomboust (now a mediocre Italian restaurant).
Rick: Henri wants us to finish this bottle and then three more. He says he'll water his garden with champagne before he'll let the Germans drink any of it.
Sam looks at his glass.
Sam: This sort of takes the sting out of being occupied, doesn't it, Mister Richard?
Sam is right. It doesn't take much to see that champagne, unlike, say, FIJI water — don’t get me started on FIJI water — is a necessary product. Especially when it’s an artisanal non-industrial one like this.
CUT BACK TO:
INT. RICK'S CAFE - MAIN ROOM - NIGHT
RENAULT: Emil, please. A bottle of your best champagne, and put it on my bill.
EMIL: Very well, sir.
VICTOR LAZLO: Captain, please...
RENAULT: Oh, please, monsieur. It is a little game we play. They put it on the bill, I tear up the bill. It is very convenient.
ILSA: Captain, the boy playing the piano… somewhere I’ve seen him.
The boy. Sam(bo). Who calls Rick “Mister Richard” and carries his suitcase. And who, Rick, later, despite what he told Ferrari earlier (Eau-Oh, Part 1)—
RICK: Oh, by the way, my agreement with Sam's always been that he gets twenty-five percent of the profits. That still goes.
FERRARI: Hmmm. I happen to know that he gets ten percent. But he's worth twenty-five.
Sydney Greenstreet received USD 3,750 per week for the bit part of Ferrari. Conrad Veidt got USD 5,000 a week for his portrayal of Strasser. Dooley Wilson had much more screen time but received only USD 500 for his portrayal of Sam, and USD 150 of that was pocketed by Paramount Studios, who had loaned him out to Warner Bros.
So? That was 80 years ago. A whole lot of water under the bridge, as Sam would say. Things have changed since Dooley Wilson (whose real name was Albert but was nicknamed “Dooley” because of his portrayal, in whiteface, of an Irishman singing a song called “Mr. Dooley”) received that pay stub from Warner Bros.
Before we go back to Renault’s table, Paramount — once linked to Seagrams once linked to Vivendi— lost a territorial movie-licensing court battle a while back to Canal+, the pay-TV arm of Vivendi:
The ruling is a major victory for the European Film Industry, who are united in their opposition to the Commission’s digital single market plans, which they believe will dismantle the current model whereby independent producers finance their films by selling off exclusive licensing rights country by country within Europe…. A studio like Warner Bros, which has separate territorial deals for its films in different European countries, may find it harder to roll out pan-European or pan-global streaming platforms since the rights to many of their movies will be tied up in other deals. — The Hollywood Reporter, 20 December 2020
Meanwhile, back in this stream, the champagne at the captain’s table wasn’t Mumm (today owned by Pernod-Ricard, the world’s second-largest wine and spirits merchant, who took over part of Seagram’s beverage division when it imploded post-Vivendi). It was probably another bottle of LVMH’s Veuve Clicquot, like the one Renault recommended to the nazis earlier, or maybe, judging from the 18th century-style bottles we see cooling in ice buckets at other tables — another LVMH product, Dom Pérignon, which, until the next vintage — 1943 — was merely regular vintage Moët & Chandon Champagne, transferred into fancier bottles.
For the most part, however, the captain drinks LVMH’s Hennessy. Lots of it. (Almost as much, in fact, as the actor who played him, Claude Raines, who supplemented his snifters with a steady flow of scotch and died, at 78, in 1967, of cirrhosis of the liver.)
At the end of Casablanca, however, after Rick lies to Ilsa, then to Lazlo (or just to himself?) and shoots Strasser, the redeemed Renault, repurified and repatriotised, pours himself a glass of water — the only non-alcoholic drink in the film. As he raises the glass to his lips, he reads the label on the bottle and:
In case that gif clips past too fast—and you’ve never seen Casablanca — that’s a bottle of Vichy Water he just dumped into the bin in disgust. And with it, any alliance to the pro-German Pétainist government headquartered in the spa town where it was bottled.
“Vichy” remains a metonym for the 1940-1944 “régime de Vichy” and its wilful collaboration with the Nazis. Which isn’t entirely fair. The town was chosen by Marechal Pétain and his prime minister Pierre Laval as the seat of the Etat Français not because it was a hotbed of fascism, but because it was not too far from Paris, close to Laval’s home town of Châteldon, already partly run by the French state through the Compagnie Fermière de Vichy (CFV), which ran the town’s spas, water sources and bottling plants, and equipped with a modern telephone exchange, good railway connections and some very posh palace hotels.
Unfair, too, because most collaborators during the war were from the occupied parts of France, especially around Paris. The Vichy region — the Auvergne, was home to the county’s largest force of Resistance fighters, Les Maquis du Mont Mouchet. And, to quote the historian Robert Paxton:
The initial decisions to stop the war, and then to accept the armistice, were taken not in Vichy but in Bordeaux. The men who voted full powers to Pétain on July 10, 1940, in Vichy came from all over France. The people of Vichy bore no more responsibility for this vote than any other Frenchmen.
But no matter. Neither the town, nor its water, stayed binned very long. After the war, Vichy once again became a popular spa town and “colonial capital”, especially attractive to vacationing royalty (including the Sultan of Morocco) and rich French nationals from North Africa. It declined with decolonisation in the 1960s but remains a busy convention and “cure” destination. In 2020, it experienced a “boom touristique” despite the pandemic, drawing more curistes than ever. And last year, UNESCO declared it a World Heritage site, one of the Great Spa Towns of Europe. And last summer, as part of an exhibition in Vichy — “Les Juifs de France dans la Shoah”, Serge Klarsfeld, president of the association of the Sons and Daughters of the Deported Jews of France and vice-president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, chaired a symposium on the Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup of 16-17 July 1942 — just before the end of principal shooting of Casablanca. The darkest moment of the Vichy years, the roundup was a mass arrest of “foreign” Jewish families in Paris by French police and gendarmes. According to records of the Préfecture de Police, 13,152 Jews were arrested, including more than 4,000 children. The conference and the exhibition are the “first steps in a partnership with the Shoah Memorial [in Paris],” said Frédéric Aguilera, the mayor of Vichy, who would very much like the “Vichy regime” moniker to disappear. “We feel every day the weight of words, the weight of an unfair stigmatisation. Vichy remains associated with France’s shame, Vichy is France’s shame.”
Vichy, Pétain, and the Val d’Hiv Roundup became campaign issues in this year’s presidential elections because of the sputtering Trumpesqueries of the far-right Eric Zemmour, who argued — usually on CNews, which is the news-arm of Canal +, which is owned by Vivendi — that Pétain didn't assist the Germans, but in fact saved the lives of French Jews by only deporting foreign ones; and that the truth of the Dreyfus Affair “is murky, and his innocence is not obvious.” Etcetera. Look this up if you must but your time is better spent taking the counsel of two French graphic artists, Cyril Pedrosa and Quentin Faucompré, who suggest the paranoid complotiste nonsense of Zemmour and the many other grande remplacement “intellectuals” of his ilk — (which include members of Macron’s inner circle) — be replaced with les grand soulagements (“the great reliefs”):
“Replace Zemmour with a hot-water tank.” Why? “A hot water tank is good, it's comfortable, reassuring, round.” Their other slogans: “Replace Marine Le Pen with polenta”, “Replace Macron with little clementine peels”, “Replace 5G with the G-spot” and, my favourite:
Back in the water, things are indeed murky. Last week and a paragraph ago and a few paragraphs before that we mentioned Vivendi, the former water company now media giant owned by Vincent Bolloré, principal shareholder of Canal+, two major publishing groups (Editis and Hachette), numerous newspapers (Prisma Media magazines, JDD, Paris Match), one of the world’s biggest advertising companies (Havas), a sizeable chunk of Universal Music Group (at last sighting 18%) and the radio station Europe 1. He’s the man that gave Eric Zemmour an hour of airtime each evening on CNews for two years before Zemmour quit to run for president, and, subsequently during the campaign period, more prime time coverage than any of the other candidates. He’s currently under fire for his business dealings in several former French colonies in Africa. In 2018, he was indicted for "corruption of foreign agents", "falsification of documents", and "complicity in breach of trust" for his political consulting (through Havas) and the deals he struck with the leaders of Togo and Guinea for port concessions in those countries. This year he sold off all his African port holdings to the Italian-Swiss shipowner MSC. Last week it was reported in Mediapart that he claimed to have received a commitment from Stéphane Noël, the President of the Paris Tribunal, “that he would get off scot-free, avoiding any trial and prison sentence, even before the case was examined in a public hearing. The high magistrate categorically denies this.”
Meanwhile, again, again, again, the very next day, Louis Boyard of La France Insoumise (the semi-far-left French political party) accused Bolloré on the Vivendi boss’s own cable program (“Touche pas à mon poste” (TPMP)) of being one of the “five richest men in France” who are “deforesting Africa, polluting its rivers and taking land from its people.”
Boyard, who represents the now publicly watered Val-de-Marne, was invited on TPMP, which attracts around 1.5 to 2 million viewers a show, to debate the fate of the Ocean Viking.
The Ocean Viking is a Norwegian-flagged vessel operated by SOS Mediterranee, a French NGO. On 11 November, the French government reluctantly allowed it to dock in Toulon after being denied entry to Italian ports by the new far-right government of Giorgia Meloni, in defiance of EU obligations and in contravention of international maritime law. On board were 234 migrants, including 44 unaccompanied minors. Of the adults, 166 were found to have unsubstantiated claims for refugee status. Half the minors have fled from the migrant reception centres where they were being held. The story is not getting much coverage elsewhere but in France and Italy it’s a red-hot topic, with a lot of finger pointing from all sides of the political spectrum. The French centre-to-far right want the migrants shipped back to Africa or to other countries. The left, what’s left of it, see the migrants’ plight as a humanitarian emergency.
Boyard, a former columnist on TPMP, got sidetracked during the debate and launched into Bolloré, for which he was vigorously insulted for 10 minutes straight ("ferme ta gueule", "tocard", "abruti", “bouffon”, "t'es qu'une merde") by the TPMP host, Cyril Hanouna —
— and through the course of the next two weeks by scores of Bolloré-paid pundits. As part of the fallout, Boyard and his party, under Jean-Luc Mélenchon (which Hexagon wrote about last spring) have called for the demonopolisation of French media, 90% of which is owned by nine billionaires.2
These media oligarchs are Bernard Arnault (Les Echos, Le Parisien, Challenges), Vincent Bolloré (Canal +, CNEWS, C8), Patrick Drahi (RMC-BFMTV, L'Express and partly Libération), Xavier Niel (partly Le Monde, l'Obs, Télérama, Courrier International, Nice-matin), François Pinault (Le Point), the Dassault family (Le Figaro), the Mohn family (German (Bertelsmann group) M6, RTL, Gala), Arnault Lagardère (whose group’s principal shareholder is Bolloré, with Arnault holding around 10%) Europe 1, Paris Match, Journal Du Dimanche) and Martin Bouygues (TF1, LCI, TMC). Many of these have or have had a hand in water. And/or wine, arms, aviation, perfume and fashion.
Today (Thursday, 24 November 2022), La France Insoumise (LFI) presented a package of bills to put an end to “la concentration” in French media and the country’s cultural industry. “Programmes have been suppressed, coverage imposed, massive departures of journalists... In short, pluralism has dried up and the independence of journalists has declined without precedent. Louis Boyard experienced this on Thursday 10 November 2022 on the set of TPMP. A state of affairs that has no place in a democracy, one of the pillars of which is the right to information.”
LFI deputy Sarah Legrain: “With Bolloré, it's a real lack of self-deprecation that leads to censoring a book for a joke about the boss, to firing a comedian for a parody of a show [...], they own the advertising department, so they cut the contracts of a newspaper that published an investigation into Bolloré's misdeeds in Africa, they offer candidate Zemmour half of the speaking time on TPMP during an election period [...].”
Meanwhile, in Vichy…
The Compagnie Fermière de Vichy held on to Vichy water rights until 1954, when the company became a subsidiary of Brasseries et Glacières de l'Indochine (BGI). In 1968, it was sold to the Perrier group.
The Castel group bought BG in the mid-70s, which by this time had changed its name to Brasseries et Glacières Internationales (BGI) and moved most of its holdings out of Southeast Asia after the fall of Saigon. BGI under Castel took control of the Pelforth brewery group in 1980. In 1986, it merged with the French subsidiary of Heineken, then sold its stake back to Heineken’s Dutch mothership in 1988. In 1992, the Swiss group Nestlé bought Perrier, but the European Commission made Nestlé sell off its Vichy waters and a bunch of others to the Castel group for 750 million francs.
In 1993 it launched Cristaline, whose 33 million six-packs were mentioned above.
Castel is one of the biggest beverage companies in Africa. It is the biggest wine merchant in France, and one of the world's leading producers of French wines, along with LVMH and Pernod Ricard. It is the third biggest wine producer in the world. It runs the chain of Nicolas wine shops. It owns the additive-heavy supermarket-level wine brands Malesan, Roche Mazet, Baron de Lestac, Vieux Papes, La Villageoise, Listel, Billette and Kriter. It owns 1,400 ha of vineyards in France and 1,600 ha in Morocco, Tunisia, and Ethiopia. It produces around 650 million bottles a year, 59% for the French market. It makes and bottles Sidi Brahim wines, first in Algeria, then in Morocco and now in Tunisia. The Castel family that run the group is among the top ten fortunes in France. The name Castel features prominently in the Pandora Papers (as does the family of the King of Morocco, and of course Bernard Arnault). The company’s treasury is warped and wefted into an impossibly complex web of tax havens and offshore funds. Much of the patriarch and founder’s success in Africa, especially in West Africa, was due to his business partnership with Omar Bongo, which began in 1965, two years before Bongo became the President of Gabon, a post he held until his death in 2009. Last year, George Clooney’s NGO The Sentry published a report alleging that a subsidiary of Castel had been financing an armed gang in the Central African Republic (CAR) to “protect its monopoly” in that country since 2016. This summer, French anti-terrorism prosecutors opened an investigation into the allegations, and the company’s potential complicity in war crimes. And it is now being reported that, with the exodus of French troops in the region, the Russian mercenary Wagner group are moving in on Castel’s holdings.
Meanwhile, Gabon booted out Veolia in 2019, after 20 years as the country’s water provider, after accusing the group of having polluted many of its waterways. Veolia complained to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID, World Bank Group), and earlier this year was awarded an out-of-court settlement for 45 million euros. Or 29,559,812,994.00 West African CFA francs.
I’d love to steer this bark into the heart of Françafrique and its “colonial currency”, created by France in 1945 and still, bizarrely, the official legal tender in 14 African countries. But it deserves its own three-part post. So. Meanwhile. Vichy. Castel emptied its bottled water division in 2008. The entire fleet, including the Vichy springs and plants, was bought by the Alma group, a holding of the Roxane group, and Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co., a Japanese group specializing in nutrition-related pharmaceuticals, energy drinks, and aripiprazole, a drug approved for the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Among their star products is a “grand cru” water, Chateldon, from Pierre Laval’s hometown, 20 km south of Vichy. It is found in only the fanciest spots as only three million bottles are shipped per year. That’s half the number that Evian (Danone) bottles every day. This, too, is a spit in the ocean compared to the world number, Nestlé Waters, which has 72 brands of bottled water and leaves the others Coca-Cola (Dasani and Smartwater), Danone, PepsiCo (Aquafina) — well behind in its wake.
“Has it got a wow finish?” — Rick in Casablanca
In 2007, Cristaline launched this campaign:
Eau de Paris, the City of Paris’s publicly owned public water and wastewater collection company, which the City bought back from Veolia and Suez in 2009 (Jacques Chirac privatised it when he was mayor in the 1980s), sued Cristaline, saying the posters denigrated the quality of tap water. Eau de Paris won the suit.
Paris has pledged to become a zero plastic waste city by 2024. As part of the effort Eau de Paris has distributed glass “gourds” —
—to citizens and tourists, which can be filled for free in Parisian cafés and restaurants, or from the city’s 1,200 fountains and water points, which include 15 sparkling water fountains and the beautiful green cast-iron Wallace fountains.
The Wallace fountains are a by-product of another French-German conflict in Paris —the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71. During the long siege the city’s water systems were destroyed. The poor couldn’t afford to buy water, water-borne diseases spiked. Sir Richard Wallace, an eccentric Englishman, spent a considerable part of his fortune, establishing a network of public fountains around the city. Most are still functioning.
Eau secours…
Meanwhile, Arnault’s daily newspaper Le Parisien, according to the French weekly Le Point (which is owned by François Pinault, Arnault’s principle but much outgunned adversary in the luxury world — who tried to takeover Suez’s water business in 2006 with an 18 billion euro bid) loses roughly 20 million euros each year. The energy crisis and the doubling in the price of paper has hurt its chances of turning things around. LVMH has injected roughly 200 million euros into it since the takeover. Four hundred employees have voluntarily retired. It has gone through many editorial chiefs. The latest, Jean-Michel Salvator, was replaced a couple of months ago by Nicolas Charbonneau, who was the paper’s editor-in-chief in 2009. Salvator positioned the magazine editorially against the policy efforts of Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris—we met her son a couple of weeks ago swimming in the Seine—especially her ‘green’ schemes — more trees, parks, pedestrian-only streets and bicycle lanes, swimmable Seine and canals, reduced car traffic — and favourable to those of President Emmanuel Macron, who is firmly supported by Bernard Arnault. So fa rit’s hard to say whether Charbonneau is moving the paper in a new direction. Meanwhile, Salvator was poised to take over the far-right weekly Valeurs actuelles, which is owned by the the Franco-Lebanese shipowner Iskandar Safa, but has since pulled out.
LVMH is France’s biggest advertiser. It spent USD 5.5 billion on advertising worldwide, putting it just ahead of Alphabet (Google) ( USD 5.4 Billion) and behind:
Procter & Gamble (USD 11.5 Billion)
Amazon (USD 10.9 Billion)
L’Oréal (USD 9.9 Billion)
Samsung Electronics Co (USD 8.6 Billion)
Alibaba (USD 8.4 Billion)
Unilever (USD 8.1 Billion)
Nestlé (USD 7.8 Billion)
Comcast (USD 6.7 Billion)
Not one sou went to Hexagon.
"I use my media to wage my civilisational battles"— Vincent Bolloré
Meanwhile, according to Libération and Wikipedia, “Vincent Bolloré is a traditionalist Catholic and goes to confession twice a week to Abbé Grimaud, a traditionalist priest who lives not far from the Parc des Princes.”
According to La Croix, Bolloré carries images of Catholic saints (notably Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of watermen, sailors and fishermen among others) and a “miraculous medal” at all times. He is said to be particularly attracted to Yvonne-Aimée de Malestroit, a mystic nun who “helped Allied soldiers and French resistance fighters during World War II…. She is said to have disguised some Allied airmen as nuns. She was awarded the French Legion of Honour by General Charles de Gaulle.” She also claimed to have the gift of bilocation — a phenomenon in which a person is simultaneously present in two different places — and who was with his grandfather René Bolloré when he died.
Bolloré’s connections to Opus Dei — “an institution of the Catholic Church whose members seek personal Christian holiness and strive to imbue their work and society with Christian principles” — are well known. His brother makes no secret of his membership in an interview in Bolloré’s L’Express. Neither does Bolloré’s “other candidate” — not Zemmour for French President, but Guinean cardinal Robert Sarah for next Pope. The prelate was barely known in France until Bolloré put him on the cover of his Paris Match in July, which he had just taken from Lagardère.
The magazine’s six-page article, which describes the 77-year-old Sarah as a “man of influence and peace”, neglects to mention that he thinks “Western homosexual and abortion ideologies” are of “demonic origin” caused by “Western ideological colonialism” and comparable to Nazism and Islamic terrorism.
The Paris Match editors, led by Bruno Jeudy, editor-in-chief of the political and economic departments since 2015, protested the cover. In an open letter they called it a “dangerous choice” that was likely to “harm the image” of the publication, and an “editorial and commercial error, contrary to the line of a newspaper that is not supposed to defend any ideological bias”.
A few weeks later Jeudy was sacked.
More water, more bridges. I need a drink.
RICK How did you get in here? You're under age.
ANNINA: I came with Captain Renault.
RICK (cynically): I should have known.
ANNINA: My husband is with me, too.
RICK: He is? Well, Captain Renault's getting broadminded. Sit down. Will you have a drink?
Annina shakes her head.
RICK: No, of course not. Do you mind if I do?
ANNINA: No.
Rick pours himself a drink.
ANNINA: Monsieur Rick, what kind of man is Captain Renault?
RICK: Oh, he's just like any other man, only more so.
Annina was played by Joy Page, the 17-year-old stepdaughter of Jack L. Warner, then head of Warner Bros. studios. Page was one of the only three Americans in Casablanca, along with Humphrey Bogart and Dooley Wilson. She received good reviews for her performance but Warner didn’t want her in the picture business and refused to sign her to a contract. She made a few films for other studios, then packed it in 1959, after a small role in a forgotten Disney miniseries called The Swamp Fox, starring Leslie Nielsen.
And that’s as good a place to end as any. Thanks for reading. Thanks for supporting independent journalism.
How about another canal swim? C. and L. say the water’s finally cold enough to do a body some good.
In 2004, Coca Cola infamously tried to launch Dasani in Europe, starting in the UK, with disastrous results. Dasani is ordinary tap water which is purified using a Nobel prizewinning process involving “multi-barrier filtration” and “reverse osmosis” and 'a technique developed by NASA to “purify fluids from a spacecraft”. By fluids, NASA essentially meant urine. Coke understandably left this unmentioned in their campaign. But then went one better, with ads featuring the strapline: “WATER WITH SPUNK”.
In America “spunk” means brave and daring.
But spunk means something very different in the UK.
In the UK spunk is the equivalent of the American term “cum”.
But no one took the trouble to find this out.
So the adverts featured a beautiful young model on the beach, creating a spray as she threw her head back.
Alongside was the headline: FULL OF SPUNK.
A different headline told us that the young model: CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT SPUNK.
And yet another headline told us that the product itself was: BOTTLED SPUNK.
The campaign said we should enjoy spunk “at home, in the gym, and everywhere in between”.
It told us spunk was “vitally refreshing and abundantly available”.
And spunk could become “a way of everyday life”. — Dave Trott, The Marketing Society
Coke wanted to charge 95p for half a litre of tap water that costs 0.03p—a 316,600% mark-up. Then it was discovered that the final stage of the Nobel prizewinning filtering process, when ozone is used to sterilise the water, left about twice the legal amount (10 micrograms per litre) of a potentially carcinogenic compound, bromate. The river Thames, from where Dasani was sourcing the tap water (which goes through a nine-part filtration process and is perfectly excellent), contained no bromate. The UK’s Food Standards Agency advised people not to drink it, as the levels of bromate were well above the legal limit. Coke recalled more than half a million bottles, withdrew Dasani from the UK, and cancelled plans to launch in France and elsewhere in Europe.
Libération (partially owned by Patrick Drahi) fact-checked the claim that 9 billionaires own 90% of the media: “To sum up, eight billionaires (Arnault, Dassault, Drahi, Kretinsky, Lagardère, Niel, Pinault and Safa) and two millionaires (Weill and Perdriel) own about twenty French press titles. They account for 81% of the circulation of national dailies, 12% of that of regional dailies and 95% of that of generalist national weeklies.”
Another interesting, diverse essay that glides us through the corporate labyrinth of insatiable acquisitiveness.
It came to light about 7 years ago in BC, under the Christie Clarke Liberals, Nestle was paying $2.25 per 1 million litres for our water-about $600 a year for 265 million litres.