Word: bove
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...Losers ALAN GREENSPAN The god of the greenback cuts interest rates, but the U.S. stock market faints anyway. What do they want? Free loans from Japan? JOSE BOVE McSledgehammer? The anti-globalization Frenchman loses his appeal against a three-month jail sentence for wrecking a McDonald's RICHARD LI After eight years in the limelight, the telecom wunderkind admits he never graduated from Stanford. Is he really Li Ka-shing...
...standing up for Roquefort against hormone-laced beef, Bove clearly touched a national nerve. So much so that McDonald's France even launched a print advertising campaign dissing American beef imports and assuring its customers that under the French Golden Arches, they'd get French meat that came "from the farm" (rather than from some factory or laboratory). Clearly, the plucky little farmer had managed to don the mantle of Astérix, the cartoon character whose mythical David-vs.-Goliath fight against the Roman occupiers symbolizes French national pride. Some 45,000 people from all over the country crowded...
...content with having captured the French imagination. He quickly parlayed his McDonald's raid into a kind of radical celebrity that has made him the most recognizable global icon of the anti-globalization movement. And he didn't do it by staying on his sheep farm. Bove put in a star appearance at the trashing of the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle late in 1999, and last month helped a group of peasants wreck a Monsanto research farm in Brazil, to protest that company's promotion of genetically modified crops. Bove has mounted similar actions against genetically modified products...
...claim to Astérix's peasant style, but in truth Bove is considerably more urbane. Although born in Bordeaux in 1953, he spent most of his first seven years living in Berkeley, California, where his parents studied biochemistry at the University of California. A college activist who came of age during the aftermath of France's May 1968 student uprising, he moved to the country in 1975 with his wife to join a small farmer movement against the planned expansion of a military base. In 1987, he launched his Confederation Paysanne organization, which organizes small farmers to take actions...
...Bove's appeal, like his trial, will provide another occasion for grandstanding against the effects of globalization on the French palate, and on food cultivation more widely. The only difference is that this time, Bove's following is considerably larger, and more global. Because at least among globalization's legions of discontents, Jose Bove has made himself a brand every bit as recognizable as Ronald McDonald. And even if he fails to stop the McDonald's juggernaut, that may one day help him move a lot of product among America's Roquefort-munching classes...