France's Inbred Leadership

The International Herald Tribune reports:

There at least 160,000 living alumni of Oxford University, and more than 320,000 people with degrees from Harvard. So exclusive, in contrast, is France's elite École Nationale d'Administration that fewer than 6,000 of its graduates are alive today.

A postgraduate college for civil servants, this school, known as ENA, is key to the way power is concentrated in France, with a small elite controlling large swaths of politics, business, and the country's powerful bureaucracy.

The intimate ties forged among its graduates have frequently been linked to insider machinations; now, in the scandal currently engulfing President Jacques Chirac and the French government - which has unfolded in a bewildering sequence of revelations implicating the top figures of the land in dirty tricks - the "old boy" connections of the principal figures appear to have played a crucial role.

A socialist society means a lack of opportunity for those who don't belong to the right old boy network.French socialists claim they are building an "egalitarian" society when the exact opposite is the case.That's socialism for you.