WILL AMERICA BE NEXT TO SEE REVOLUTION?
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!.... We know where they live!
“Underwood is a Democrat and is seeking millions of dollars
in penalties. She wants Trump and his eldest children barred from running other
charities.”
FIGHTING THE RICH, DEMOCRAT AND GOP POLS FOR OUR JOBS
AND BORDERS.
Amnesty is all about keeping wages depressed and
passing the true cost along to what is left of the America middle-class.
The
huge inflow of migrants and asylum seekers forced officials to issue 400,000 work permits in
2017. That is roughly one new migrant worker for every 10 Americans who entered
the workforce that year. The huge inflow has also jammed the immigration
courts, ensuring that new migrants can work for a few years before a judge
decides their case.
The inflow of asylum-seeking
migrants, nonetheless, is far smaller than the inflow of legal immigrants and
temporary visa-workers, which added roughly 2 workers in 2017 for every four
Americans who entered the workforce.
Nationwide,
the U.S. establishment’s economic policy of using legal migration to boost
economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market
with cheap white collar and blue collar foreign labor. That flood of outside
labor spikes profits and Wall Street
values by cutting salaries for
manual and skilled labor that blue collar and white collar employees.
The
cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech
investment, increases state and local tax
burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from
high tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans
and their families, including many who are now struggling with
fentanyl addictions.
Immigration
also steers investment and wealth away from towns in heartland states because
coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in
coastal cities. In turn, that investment flow drives up coastal real-estate
prices, pricing poor U.S. Latinos and blacks out of prosperous
cities, such as Berkeley and Oakland. NEIL MUNRO
French “yellow vest” protesters mount pre-Christmas protest against Macron
On Saturday, tens of thousands of “yellow vest” protesters demonstrated in France, amid a growing strike wave in neighboring Spain and in Portugal, where protesters also donned yellow vests. Thousands of people joined protest marches in France’s major cities, or blockaded highway intersections and France’s borders with Spain, Italy or Germany, to express their opposition to Macron and the European Union (EU).
According to the Interior Ministry, there were 2,000 “yellow vest” demonstrators in Paris, where protesters divided themselves between the Champs-Élysées and Montmartre, after having tricked police into thinking they were marching on Versailles. The authorities had preemptively shut down the Versailles Palace, next to which they stationed water cannons. In the provinces, according to official figures, thousands demonstrated in Bordeaux, Toulouse and Lille, while hundreds protested in Nantes, Marseille and Lyon.
As usual, the security forces reacted with violent repression. In Paris they arrested Eric Drouet, a truck driver who helped launch the “yellow vest” protests on Facebook, alleging that he had a “sort of nightstick.” Another widely circulated video showed a policeman drawing his pistol and taking aim at protesters after throwing stun grenades unprovoked at the protesters.
The mobilization was a rebuke to Interior Minister Christophe Castaner, who last week declared that on the “yellow vest” protests, “It’s enough,” and ordered police to smash highway blockades. After more than a month of protests and violent police repression of demonstrators, however, the movement is still very widely popular. It has 70 percent support in the French public, and various polls say that between 54 and 62 percent of French people want the movement to continue.
Citing Interior Ministry figures—showing 40,000 protesters Saturday, well less than the 125,000 it announced after the first protest on November 17—the French media are all predicting the imminent end of the movement and a return to order.
It remains to be seen whether the dip in participation figures reflects Interior Ministry manipulation, protesters taking a break for the Christmas holidays, or a more lasting move away from the “yellow vest” blockades and protest marches. What is clear, however, is that political opposition and social anger to the entire Macron government and French state machine are continuing to grow in the working class.
The political situation is becoming more explosive. The government has not satisfied a single one of the demands underlying the ‘yellow vest” protests: for social equality, large wage increases, raising taxes on the rich, Macron’s resignation and the end to police repression. From now on, moreover, everyone is aware of the yawning class gulf separating workers from the union bureaucracies and official “left” parties who were surprised and appalled by the protests.
Macron—who called workers hostile to his policies “lazy” and contemptuously told unemployed workers to “cross the street’ to get a job—now can only hold onto power hiding behind the armored vehicles and tear gas salvoes of the military police. A helicopter team now stands ready to snatch and rescue him from the Elysée palace, should protesters ever storm his official residence. And any excursion out from the Elysée is forbidden to him, even to the cinema or the bakery, according to Le Monde, because it is “too dangerous.”
As his approval ratings collapse further to around 20 percent, the daily added that “The Elysée is now ruled behind closed doors.”
It is ever clearer that if Macron saluted collaborationist dictator Philippe Pétain in November, after passers-by booed him during his “commemorative tour” of French battlefields of World War I, it is that he saw in Pétain a fellow head of state who also inspires mass anger and loathing. A few days later, just before the first “yellow vest” protest, Macron admitted publicly that he had “not succeeded in reconciling the French people with its elites.” This month, he reportedly told his political advisers that he was the target of the “hatred” of the French people.
The awareness that Macron is hated will not, however, change the policy of the capitalist ruling elite, save to make it more violent and repressive. Targeting Macron, protesters have launched a struggle against an entire European and international regime that imposes the diktat of the banks and the financial aristocracy on the workers. The only way to fight the austerity demands of European capitalism is to mobilize workers across the continent to expropriate the banks and transfer power to the working class.
Despite the manifest opposition of an overwhelming majority of French people, the ruling elite continues to demand austerity and militarism. The Macron government is planning drastic cuts to unemployment insurance, pensions and public sector wages. Pierre-Alexandre Anglade, of Macron’s Republic on the March (LRM) party, declared with a straight face: “This is what we were elected to do, and this must remain our compass.”
From Chad, where he was discussing NATO’s neocolonial war strategy, Macron threatened the protesters yesterday: “It is clear that the most severe judicial responses will be given. Now order must reign, calm and good harmony. That is what our country needs.”
Macron has called for months of “coordination” of policies with the protesters for 2019. Like his promises of a minimum wage increase or his canceling of the initial fuel tax hike, this offer is utterly worthless. Macron has given only crumbs, and in bad faith as well, as it is clear that he intends to take back these crumbs as soon as possible.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced he was suspending all Macron’s concessions to the “yellow vests,” claiming they were too expensive. He flip-flopped a few hours later amid a wave of anger on social media. But these two 180-degree turns in the course of a few hours showed that the government’s promises deserve no confidence whatsoever.
The government is cultivating the “free yellow vest” faction led by Jacline Mouraud, who want to set up dialog with Macron, echoing the “social dialog” between the union bureaucracies, the bosses’ groups and the state, or Francis Lalanne, who is proposing a “yellow vest” list for the European elections. Pollsters are already calculating whether Lalanne’s list might increase the influence of Macron and LRM in the European parliament.
For the “yellow vest” demonstrators, like for the entire working class, there is nothing to negotiate with Macron or with the European Union. Rising class struggles in Europe and internationally, as well as the increasingly bitter political contradictions inside France itself, point rather to the rapid emergence and escalation of a political confrontation between radicalized workers and the reactionary Macron regime.
Why The French Protests Were Going To Happen
No one should be surprised by the protests in France. The antipathy towards the government has been bubbling like some sort of concoction in a mad scientist’s laboratory. The gas tax appears to be the one final volatile element needed to cause an explosion.
What an explosion it was! Protests. Riots. Tear gas. Emergency meetings of government officials and, finally, concessions. France won’t do any tax or utility increases this winter – although it’s still up to the French Legislature to get the bills to President Emmanuel Macron’s desk for his signature.
Macron noted the onslaught of anger directed towards his government, writing on Change.org he was trying to reduce the gap between the people and government but, “I have not yet succeeded. And after 18 months of action, the changes we are making are far from being sufficiently perceptible.”
The frustration is still palpable, and no one knows exactly who will end up benefiting from the protests.
American conservative commentators are trying to frame the issue as a rejection of globalism (whatever the blue cow it means this week). The reality is the anger in France started – much like the 2011 Arab Spring – as a rejection of government overreach into the economy.
The clash has been a long time coming and dates back to earlier this decade when the French government was controlled by Nicolas Sarkozy.
Sarkozy’s government attempted major spending cuts and tax increases in 2011 – before he was replaced by the socialist Francois Hollande in 2012. Yet, Hollande discovered the harsh reality you can’t tax and spend your way to prosperity and France’s budget crisis refused to abate – while debt exploded.
“Everything is taxed,” Charline Petit told The Telegraph in 2014 as she explained why her bagel shop was shutting down. “You can’t move without being taxed. Even when you are not making any money, you are taxed. I had to lie about my income to rent an apartment. So then the tax authorities said I had not been declaring enough. I was taxed again. If I stopped working, I would get all kinds of benefits, but as a business person, I get nothing. You are better off unemployed.”
This was the situation Macron was coming into last year when he won the presidency. He attempted some tax reform, but The Economistnoted his budget was rather light on actual spending cuts. His gas tax proposal ended up being the spark which set off the protests and riots of the past several weeks.
His reaction to said protests proves the tenet that politicians are fickle in their promises to the electorate they claim to serve because of the desire for power. Macron is trying to appease everyone by enacting multiple increases in government spending – whether it be giving police a raise for battling protesters or a minimum wage hike “without it costing your employer one more euro.” The government’s hope is this will increase participation in the workforce, and their budget for next year – which was proposed months before the “Yellow Vest” protests – already included a minimum wage hike, “to reach a total of almost €80 per month at minimum wage level by 2022.”
Of course, the question is who will pay for these changes?
“The people,” Mercatus Center Senior Research Fellow Veronique de Rugy declared to me over the phone. “This is what basically taxes, right, because the government won’t pay for it and that’s the problem with subsidies; gotta be paid by someone. And the problem with the French government is it’s too big and needs to be shrunk and not grown.”
This is why de Rugy is disturbed by France’s insistence on giving out more subsidies instead of trying to actually get their financial house in order – even with the repeal of the gas tax.
“These are just band-aid (solutions) because the problem is going to continue over and over and over again until they address fundamental problems with the spending structure,” de Rugy, who is originally from France, noted. “Retirements are very generous to the public sector. Macron knows he needs to change those. But each time there are big, big, big strikes about this…This is not going to address anything. I don’t even know if it’s going to help calming things down now.”
Hence why Macron’s appeasement may not solve anything and, in fact, may exacerbate France’s budgetary problems.
“I think Macron needs to buckle up,” de Rugy declared. “Realize that there’s no way he can placate them in ways that is good for France, so he needs to go on with reforms and accept he won’t be re-elected in five years.”
See previous statement regarding the fickleness of politicians.
The solution – which Macron and the French government seem averse to try – is to heed the words of eminent French economist and philosopher, Frederic Bastiat.
“Reduce taxes. Reduce expenditure in an even greater proportion,” Bastiat wrote in Peace and Freedom or the Republican Budget in February 1849. “And, to clad this financial thought in its political formula, I add: Liberty within. Peace without. This is the entire plan…I grant you only that the attempt is bold. But first, if the gravity of the situation has been clearly established and second, if it has been proved that the tradition means will not extricate us, it seems to me that my thought has at least some right to be considered by my colleagues.”
Bastiat’s theory is obviously daring – but also completely correct. France and Macron would be wise to heed his words (and de Rugy’s “buckle up” declaration) and enact more spending cuts – instead of trying to make everyone happy. He’d risk not being re-elected, but the alternative is more businesses leaving the country and France spiraling into even more chaos.
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