REVOLUTION IN FRANCE - WALL STREET BRACES FOR THE WORST

Macron’s France Rocked by Fourth Day of Transport Strikes over Pensions

Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

BREITBART LONDON

8 Dec 201935

2:30

PARIS (AP) – France’s prime minister is holding special meetings Sunday about the government’s divisive redesign of the national retirement system, amid warnings that strike-related transport troubles will get even worse in the coming days.

Travel tangles continued Sunday as the strikes entered their fourth day, with most French trains at a standstill. Fourteen of Paris’ subway lines were closed, with only two lines – using automated trains with no drivers – functioning. International routes also suffered disruptions.

Monday will be a bigger test of the strike movement’s strength, and of travellers’ patience. Unions are calling for even more people to walk off the job Monday, when commuters go back to work. Many people worked from home or took a day off when the strike began last week, but that’s not sustainable if the strikes drag on.

Warning of safety risks, the SNCF national train network and Paris transit authority RATP warned travellers to stay away Monday instead of packing platforms for the few functioning trains. “On December 9, stay home or find another means of locomotion,” SNCF said in a message to travellers.

Looking ahead to a challenging week, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe is holding meetings Sunday afternoon and evening with government ministers involved in the reform – and with President Emmanuel Macron, according to government officials.

Macron, a centrist former investment banker, argues that the retirement overhaul will make a convoluted, out-dated system more fair and financially sustainable. Unions however see the reform as an attack on fundamental worker rights, and fear people will have to work longer for smaller pensions.

The government says it won’t change the official retirement age of 62, but the plan is expected to include financial conditions to encourage people to work longer, as life spans lengthen.

New nationwide protests are scheduled Tuesday, and the prime minister is scheduled to release details of the plan Wednesday.

Yellow vest activists joined in the anger Saturday, as they added the retirement reform to their list of economic grievances in protests around the country. Police fired tear gas on rowdy protesters at largely peaceful marches through Paris and the western city of Nantes.

A new Gilded Age has emerged in America — a 21st century version.

The wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia, where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.

 

Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires

JOHN BINDER

The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.

In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.

Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.

“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:

At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.

“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”

“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”

While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:

A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]

The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]

Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.

“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”

As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.

The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.