Monday, April 22, 2019

YELLOW VEST REVOLUTION IN PARIS - WALL STREET WATCHES CLOSELY AS REVOLUTION STIRS IN AMERICA

AMNESTY AND OPEN BORDERS: IT’S ALL TO SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS AND KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
STARING IN THE FACE of AMERICA’S UNRAVELING and the ROAD TO REVOLUTION
It will more likely come on the heels of economic dislocation and dwindling wealth to redistribute.”
 “Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” -- Karen McQuillan  THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
"The kind of people needed for violent change these days are living in off-the-grid rural compounds, or the “gangster paradise” where the businesses of drugs, guns, and prostitution are much more lucrative than “transforming” America along Cuban lines." BRUCE THORNTON
*
There can be no resolution to any social problem confronting the population in the United States and internationally outside of a frontal assault on the wealth of the financial elite. 
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 The political system is controlled by this social layer, which uses a portion of its economic plunder to bribe politicians and government officials, whether Democratic or Republican.

AMERICA FACES REVOLUTION, CIVIL WAR II OR REVOLUTION AGAINST THE RULE BY BILLIONAIRES AND WALL STREET
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"Vast popular hardship and suffering, on the one hand, and almost indescribable wealth and social indifference, on the other. Two parties of the corporate oligarchy, dedicated to war and political reaction. The impossible economic and political conditions must produce sooner rather than later the greatest social upheavals in American history."
 * 
"A series of recent polls in the US and Europe have shown a sharp growth of popular disgust with capitalism and support for socialism. In May of 
2017, in a survey conducted by the Union of European Broadcasters of people aged 18 to 35, more than half said they would participate in a 
“large-scale uprising.” Nine out of 10 agreed with the statement, “Banks and money rule the world.”
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"A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a arrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself."
Yellow Vest Protesters Fueled By Anger Over Notre Dame Funds March In Paris



Yellow vest protesters marched — and set fires — Saturday in Paris to remind the government that rebuilding the fire-ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral isn't the only problem the nation needs to solve.
Francisco Seco/AP
Updated at 3:20 p.m. ET
Yellow vest protests grew violent on Saturday as firefighters battled several fires amid clouds of tear gas in eastern Paris.
Protesters set ablaze a car, motorbikes and barricades near the Place de la République as they took to the streets of Paris and other French cities for the 23rd Saturday in a row, The Associated Press reported. This time they say they are outraged the government could raise more than a billion dollars to help restore the burned Notre Dame cathedral while their demands to fight wealth inequality remain overlooked.
By late afternoon, police were firing tear gas and water cannons to disperse a tense crowd of several thousand people around France's finance ministry. Firefighters acted fast to put out several small fires in the area. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports from the scene that emergency personnel carried out the wounded on stretchers.
French police detained 189 people and took 110 into custody. The Interior Ministry says there were 6,700 protesters in Paris and more than 10,000 across the country.







Protesters were banned from the Île de la Cité, the site of Notre Dame, and other major thoroughfares in the city. Some 60,000 police officers were dispatched across the country.
Protesters are calling Saturday's demonstrations their "second ultimatum" against Macron and his government. The night Notre Dame caught fire, Macron canceled a speech to propose solutions to the Yellow Vest movement. He is expected to hold a press conference on Thursday.
While the number of protesters have dwindled in recent weeks, French officials had warned that the marches could attract more protesters following the shock and sadness of the Notre Dame fire. Many protesters were set off by how quickly French billionaires pledged funds to restore the damaged cathedral, while many working class people in France struggle to pay their bills.


The burning of Notre-Dame is a horrifying manifestation of destructive processes capitalism has unleashed in every country.



These lines find devastating confirmation in the fate of the Paris cathedral. Notre-Dame passed unscathed through over eight centuries since construction began in 1163. It survived the historical upheavals of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune of 1871, World War I and the Nazi Occupation. It could not, however, survive the first two decades of the 21st century and the reign of Emmanuel Macron.

The burning of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris


Millions of people in France and internationally were stunned and horrified on Monday by the sight of a centuries-old historic monument going up in flames. On Tuesday, as the wreckage strewn across Notre-Dame cathedral was still smoldering, it was clear that Monday’s inferno was caused by a horrific breakdown of fire safety in the cathedral’s restoration work. Responsibility for this lies with French President Emmanuel Macron’s government, and ultimately with the capitalist system.
Europe’s most widely-visited monument, immortalized by Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel Notre Dame de Parisand its film adaptations, has been gutted by a preventable catastrophe. Flames consumed the roof and toppled the spire, whose fall broke open the cathedral’s stone vault, raining molten lead and ashes on art work below. Irreplaceable 13th century stained glass windows lie shattered, the main organ is damaged, and the cathedral’s interior is a blackened hulk.
Aerial view of the fire at Notre Dame
International architecture experts are stressing the costly, technically challenging, labor-intensive nature of fire safety in such projects. Heat from blowtorches or power tools—sometimes transmitted long distances via pipes—start fires in wood or dust far from where work is occurring.
When restoring old buildings, said Gerry Tierney of the San Francisco-based firm Perkins and Will, “You have to have a 24-hour fire watch if there has been any heat-source activity going on, because as soon as it breaks out, you’ve got to have somebody trying to get there as fast as possible.”
Catastrophic fires are typically bound up with cost-cutting on fire safety staffing levels, said the University of South Florida’s Edward Lewis: “In my experience, it starts with human error, which stems from inadequate supervision levels and disregard for fire prevention procedures… On a lot of construction jobs, the ratio between supervisors and workers isn’t adequate.”
Accounts of the fire show that this is what occurred at Notre-Dame. After a first fire alarm sounded in the roof area at 6:20 p.m. on Monday, well after construction workers had gone home, church staff hurriedly checked the vast maze of crisscrossing 13th to 19th century timber holding up the roof. They did not find the fire. At 6:45 p.m., a new fire alarm sounded. This time, within minutes, the extremely old, dry and flammable timber was blazing out of control.
The renovation of Notre-Dame was financed on a shoestring. Two years ago, as church officials sought €100 million for the project, they were forced to mount an international appeal to donors and charities after the French state, which owns the cathedral, shockingly agreed to give only €2 million per year. With the image of the gutted hulk of Notre-Dame now burned into the consciousness of millions of people around the world, it is clear that the resulting levels of fire safety staffing were tragically inadequate.
The burning of Notre-Dame is a horrifying manifestation of destructive processes capitalism has unleashed in every country. The period since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and particularly since the 2008 Wall Street crash, has seen relentless austerity combined with feverish rearmament across Europe. Macron presides over multi-trillion-euro 

European Union bank bailouts, plans to 

spend €300 billion on the army by 2023, and 

billions in tax cuts to the rich.
The spire collapsing at Notre Dame
As a result, every truly vital program is under-funded and every corner is cut. The intended result, deemed perfectly natural by the corporate media and the powers-that-be, is the systematic impoverishment of working people, the slashing of social services, and the de-funding of cultural institutions. At times, however, the reckless, selfish and parasitic character of the policies pursued by the financial aristocracy find expression in the destruction of great monuments of human culture.

The burning of Notre Dame is not in the final analysis separate from such bloody acts of plunder, including the looting of the old city of Palmyra by NATO’s Islamist proxy militias in the Syrian war. It flows from policies carried out by the same ruling class, with the same essential aims.
Macron, despised by workers in France as 

the “president of the rich,” subordinates every 

question to the financial aristocracy’s drive for

self-enrichment. His tax cuts for the rich 

allowed billionaire Bernard Arnault to increase

his personal wealth by over €22 billion last 

year alone.
In the 1938 manifesto “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” drafted jointly by Leon Trotsky and French poet André Breton, the authors wrote: “We can say without exaggeration that never before has civilization been menaced so seriously as today. The Vandals, with instruments which were barbarous, and so comparatively ineffective, blotted out the culture of antiquity in one corner of Europe. But today we see world civilization, united in its historic destiny, reeling under the blows of reactionary forces armed with the entire arsenal of modern technology.”
These lines find devastating confirmation in the fate of the Paris cathedral. Notre-Dame passed unscathed through over eight centuries since construction began in 1163. It survived the historical upheavals of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune of 1871, World War I and the Nazi Occupation. It could not, however, survive the first two decades of the 21st century and the reign of Emmanuel Macron.
Today, the diktat of the financial aristocracy is encountering rising political opposition and militant strike activity by the international working class. Strikes by US teachers and symphony orchestra musicians, wildcat walkouts by Mexican maquiladora workers, and strikes by plantation workers and civil servants on the Indian subcontinent are unfolding as “yellow vests” in France and workers in Algeria mobilize in struggle against Macron and his allies in the Algerian military dictatorship.
Yesterday, two of France’s richest billionaires, Bernard Arnault and François Pinault, announced donations of €200 million and €100 million, respectively, to help rebuild Notre-Dame. Their donations, a small fraction of their immense wealth, were made to head off mounting public anger at their exorbitant wealth. They only underscore the waste and anarchy produced by the billionaires’ domination over public life. These sums, which should have been made available to renovate Notre-Dame before the fire, will doubtless be insufficient to fund what will be a multi-year, multi-billion-euro reconstruction project.
Vast political lessons flow from the devastation of Notre-Dame. Only a few hundred meters from Notre-Dame lies the Louvre museum, created initially by the nationalization of the royal art collections during the French Revolution in 1793, amid the expropriation of the feudal aristocracy and the guillotining of King Louis XVI. The Louvre, the French revolutionaries proclaimed, should be “a sanctuary where the peoples will elevate themselves by becoming conscious of beauty.”
The way forward for the emerging movement of the international working class against the financial aristocracy of the 21st century is a turn towards its revolutionary traditions and a struggle for the expropriation of the oligarchy and the breaking of its stranglehold over social and political life.


Mourning Notre Dame



The news that the Notre Dame Cathedral was on fire knocked the breath out of me. I was amazed at my emotional reaction to the destruction of a building I’ve never visited, a building created by the corrupt medieval Roman Catholic church, a building so old that it should be irrelevant -- but it isn’t.  We’re all heartbroken. Why?
Notre Dame lives in us all. It is romance, danger, and transcendence. It is there as a backdrop for many of the movies, of the plays, of the novels we’ve loved. I can still access the corner of my brain where Quasimodo is laboring up the bell tower steps. It stands tall in the background of Les Miserables, of The Tale of Two Cities, of Le Crime de Sylvester Bonnard –- the first book I read in French.
That takes me back to my high school days and my eccentric, Francophile French teacher whose main curriculum was showing us 3-D color slides of Paris. She’d make us turn in our seats so that we were oriented in the proper direction as we gazed at the shots of the Eiffel Tower, the Bastille, and of course and most often Notre Dame. It sits there as the literal crossroads of France. All distances are measured from a ground-zero plaque on the pavement in front of the cathedral. That place is literally the center of all that is French.
It stands as a monument to Christianity and its foundational role in the stabilization of medieval Europe. It embodies reverence for tradition, for art, for innovation, for beauty, for holiness. It houses nine bells in its almost-twin towers and the lightning rod on the spire -– now totally destroyed –- held relics from St. Denis and St. Genevieve –- Paris’ patron saints. I don’t even believe in patron saints, let alone relics, but I mourn the loss of those tiny bits history.  
History -- time -- is a most frustrating dimension. We retain so little of the past, even though we have this sensation that it’s important, foundational. We have history books, but they tell us little about the daily lives of those who have gone before, of the millions of souls who have knelt in prayer on Notre Dame’s stone floor.  The computer age makes it possible for us to fanatically keep records, but those are more numerical than personal and contain little of what moves us, what worries us, or what brings us joy. One can, however, stand in the midst of such a cathedral, gaze up at its gothic-arch roof and its story-telling stained-glass windows and know that such a building does address those issues. It is three-dimensional time travel, and this fire has just closed that portal.
It is also a peek at devotion, at long-term commitment. The construction of Notre Dame began in 1160 with the demolition of an older church on that site. It wasn’t completed until the 14th century when flying buttresses were added to the apse and choir. We can barely grasp, in our whiz-bang, instant-everything society what it must be like to start building something that won’t be finished for 200 years, to work at completing something that was begun by people long dead. The building was a monument to a slower, more patient, more self-less life.
It also memorialized a worldview where God was everywhere and always had been. That God had power over every aspect of life and one couldn’t just ignore Him. There He was in that magnificent building that quite insistently pointed upward toward heaven. It was still standing, patiently aimed skyward during the French Revolution and its attendant bloodbath. It lived through two world wars. But now, with all of the West struggling to hold onto its meaning and its place in the world, Notre Dame burns.
We know that Europe is in terrible trouble. It is no longer replacing its population --except for the influx of anti-Christian, anti-Semitic Muslim refugees. We know its cathedrals sit mostly empty for mass. We know that most of Europe bows to government, but no longer to the church. France is fraught with violent behavior from those it has tried to help, and by taxes that are draining its economy. And Europe, including Great Britain, is America’s mother. Europe is family. I can trace my lineage back to a watchmaker in Switzerland in the 16th century, a maid from Copenhagen, and to a tailor from Czechoslovakia. Most of us come from Europe and those homelands caught on fire this morning. It isn’t just the loss of an old building, but the loss of our beginnings. Notre Dame stood proud and tall to remind us of that.
But she has been dealt a mortal blow. She may be repairable, but she is not replaceable. The craftsmanship that laboriously built her is no longer available and no one today wants to wait 200 years.  It’s as if all those centuries have been erased.
This fire reminds us that even the most permanent human accomplishments aren’t permanent at all. Even the best we can build can be destroyed. We will be waiting to see what or who caused this disaster, but we also know that we may not be told the truth.
Deana Chadwell blogs at www.ASingleWindow.com. She is also an adjunct professor and department head at Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon. She teaches writing and public speaking.




Delingpole: Notre Dame’s Near-Destruction Is a Tragedy Which Shames Our Civilisation



Flames and smoke are seen billowing from the roof at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris on April 15, 2019. - A fire broke out at the landmark Notre-Dame Cathedral in central Paris, potentially involving renovation works being carried out at the site, the fire service said.Images posted on social media showed …
Getty Images
JAMES DELINGPOLE
 3,323
6:45

Nothing lasts forever — and that’s what hurts the most about the near-loss of Notre Dame Cathedral: what it tells us about our own mortality, about the unpredictability of the future and about the fragility of even our greatest creations.

The Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, Notre Dame Cathedral… there are man-made wonders so spectacular, so iconic, so revered, that it’s quite unthinkable to imagine a world without them.
Yet now the unthinkable has almost happened. Like a jigsaw puzzle with a piece missing, our universe is never going to look quite the scene.
Though I’d never actually visited Notre Dame it was high on my bucket list — as I’m sure it was on yours. How could it not be?
Together with the Eiffel Tower and the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, Notre Dame was the defining feature of Paris — and the one imbued with by far the most history.
It’s where Henry VI of England was crowned King of France; where Mary Queen of Scots married the Dauphin; where Napoleon I was crowned Emperor.
It’s also of course the setting for Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the subject of paintings by numerous artists including Picasso and Matisse, and the setting for countless movies from An American In Paris to Amelie to the Disney animated feature Ratatouille — where it is invariably used as visual shorthand for the romance of Paris.
You don’t need to be Catholic or even Christian to feel its loss almost as keenly as you would a personal bereavement. Notre Dame was an architectural glory which belonged to the entire world, representing one of the highest pinnacles of human craft and ingenuity.
When Lord Clark made his landmark 1969 documentary series Civilisation and famously asked: “What is civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms, yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it.” Then, turning to Notre Dame behind him, he added: “And I’m looking at it now.”





“What is civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms, yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it.” Turning to Notre Dame, Clarke added: “And I’m looking at it now.”



The enemies of civilisation understand this too. It’s why, amid the tears and heartbreak spreading far beyond Paris to every corner of the world, an ugly minority still found cause to celebrate.


These are the same sort of people who were cheering the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11. They understand, perhaps almost better than we do, the importance of history and culture to our civilisation’s security, wellbeing and sense of purpose.




That’s why, for example, the Taliban went to such lengths to destroy the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Why ISIS, with loving sadism and painstaking care, destroyed the ancient city of Palmyra. The Islamic State understood that no matter how many Yazidis you rape, crucify and enslave, no matter how many innocents you decapitate, nor how many prisoners you shoot, torture or burn alive, it will never have quite the same resonance as a cultural masterpiece obliterated from the map.
On this occasion, it seems likely the fire was an accident caused by one of those infuriating accidents which so often seem to occur in historic buildings under renovation.
But it’s perfectly understandable that on Twitter yesterday there was some speculation that it might have been another act of terrorism.
After all, it happened just as a Muslim migrant was tried for causing extensive damage – especially to the organ and stained glass windows — to the other great cathedral masterpiece of Paris — Saint-Denis Basilica, home of the tombs of former French kings.
There have been many similar incidents.
As Breitbart News has reported:
Vandalism of churches across France has become a major issue, with nine churches across the country vandalised in just 11 days in February. Some of the damage had included thefts, while others featured grotesque acts such as the smearing of faeces on the walls of a church in Nîmes.
Just last month the second largest church in Paris was damaged by fire, which police have said was deliberately started. Dramatic images from the scene showed flames pouring out of a “massive” porch door and stained glass window, although fortunately the Paris Pompiers were able to put out the blaze before it spread to the rest of the building.
What I think should concern us almost as much as these Islamism-inspired acts of desecration is the reluctance of so many liberal Westerners to acknowledge that there’s even a problem here.
Yesterday social media was awash with virtue-signallers apparently more upset by the outrageous suggestion that Muslim terrorism might have been responsible than they were at the actual destruction of the cathedral itself.
This self-righteous buffoon, for example, got himself into a lather — and demanded I should be banned from Twitter — merely because I had retweeted the Paul Joseph Watson tweet above.
It annoyed me not least because I hadn’t even been trying to implicate Muslims in the destruction of the cathedral. Clearly, it was far too early to say and would have been irresponsibly speculative. And for the record, I am glad that Muslims had nothing to do with this, for I think the fall-out would have been horrendous.
The inference was entirely in his hysterical imagination.
This character’s craven, surrender-monkey attitude — don’t report on uncomfortable topics, far better to bury your head in the sand lest passions become further inflamed — is unfortunately characteristic of the mindset that Douglas Murray brilliantly analyses in his bestseller The Strange Death of Europe.
In order to defend our civilisation, Murray argues, the first step is to understand what it is we’re trying to defend — and why it’s worth defending.
Murray reiterates this point in an excellent piece for the Spectator about the Notre Dame tragedy.
He writes:
There will be recriminations, of course. There will be disputes about budgets, and overtime and safety standards and much more. It is worth reading this piece from two years ago about the funding problems that existed around the cathedral’s restoration. But if Notre Dame can burn then all this is as nothing, because it tells us something too deep to bear. As I said a couple of years ago in a book, in some ways the future of civilisation in Europe will be decided by our attitude towards the great churches and other cultural buildings of our heritage standing in our midst. Do we contend with them, ignore them, engage with them or continue to revere them? Do we preserve them?
Though politicians may imagine that ages are judged on the minutiae of government policy, they are not. They are judged on what they leave behind: most of all on how they treat what the past has handed into their care. Even if today’s disaster was simply the most freakish of accidents, ours would still be the era that lost Notre Dame.
Yes. The near destruction of Notre Dame is indeed a terrible indictment of our times. It shows — not that it needed showing — that we are a civilisation in decline. We have grown spineless, decadent, complacent. We are too willing to squander taxpayers’ money on fashionable nonsense like the climate change scare and not nearly prepared enough to spend money where it truly matters, preserving the fabric of our irreplaceable monuments for the enjoyment and edification of future generations.
Let us hope that this narrow escape by Notre Dame acts as a lesson to us all on the things in life that are truly worth fighting for. Somehow, though, I doubt it will.





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