Consortium News, Topic: Yellow Vests Rise Against Neo-Liberal ‘King’ Macron

By -
Link: Yellow Vests Rise Against Neo-Liberal ‘King’ Macron by Diana Johnstone

"For centuries, the “left” hoped popular movements would lead to changes for the better. Today, many leftists seem terrified of popular movements for change, convinced “populism” must lead to “fascism.” But it needn’t be so"


Excerpt: 
“I’m more worried about the end of the month than about the end of the world.”

After the second Yellow Vest Saturday, November 25, which saw more demonstrators and more tear gas, the Minister in charge of the budget, Gérard Darmanin, declared that what had demonstrated on the Champs-Elysée was “la peste brune”, the brown plague, meaning fascists. (For those who enjoy excoriating the French as racist, it should be noted that Darmanin is of Algerian working class origins). This remark caused an uproar of indignation that revealed just how great is public sympathy for the movement – over 70% approval by latest polls, even after uncontrolled vandalism. Macron’s Minister of the Interior, Christophe Castaner, was obliged to declare that government communication had been badly managed. Of course, that is the familiar technocratic excuse: we are always right, but it is all a matter of our “communication”, not of the facts on the ground.

Maybe I have missed something, but of the many interviews I have listened to, I have not heard one word that would fall into the categories of “far right”, much less “fascism” – or even that indicated any particular preference in regard to political parties. These people are wholly concerned with concrete practical issues. Not a whiff of ideology – remarkable in Paris!"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"MSM Already Using Capitol Hill Riot To Call For More Internet Censorship" by Caitlin Johnstone

By -
Image
  MSM Already Using Capitol Hill Riot To Call For More Internet Censorship The United States received a very small  taste of its own medicine  today as rioting Trump fanatics temporarily  forced their way into the nation’s Capitol building , and now the whole nation is freaking out. I am being generous when I say that America was given a very small taste of its own medicine; unlike the horrific coups and violent uprisings the US routinely orchestrates in noncompliant nations around the world, this one stood exactly zero chance of seizing control of the government, and only  one person was killed . I am also being generous when I say the rioters “forced their way” in; DC  chose not to increase its police presence  in preparation for the protests despite knowing that they were planned, and there’s  footage  of what appears to be cops actively letting them through a police barricade. There was  some fighting  between police and protesters, but contrasted with the  unceasing barrage of pol
Read more

The Deforestation Process

By -
Image
  The Deforestation Process Deforestation is too often reduced to what’s most conspicuous. But deforestation is complex and a lot more than raising beef cattle or growing soybeans. To begin with, despite all the biodiversity especially of plant life, rain forest soil isn’t very fertile. Nope, it’s actually very oxalic. Oxalic soils are acidic. Acidic soils are full of iron, bauxite and other minerals.  So not only are trees in the forest chopped down for their precious hardwood, the soils these trees grow in are mined for minerals including aluminum, zinc, copper, manganese, gold and iron. Do you know where the aluminum in your water bottle came from? What’s one of most electricity intensive things to do? Convert bauxite into aluminum. It’s an electrostatic process to remove oxygen from the alumina (Al2O3). This electricity is also one of the largest costs of producing aluminum. So that’s why hydroelectricity is often used to reduce the costs of refining bauxite to alumina to aluminum.
Read more

Elections: A Trap for Fools. by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1973

By -
  First Published : Jean-Paul Sartre, «Élections, piège à cons»,   Les temps modernes , n° 318, janvier 1973; Source :  Good Morning, Revolution HTML Markup : for marxists.org by  Zdravko Saveski , 2021. In 1789 the vote was given to landowners. What this meant was that the vote had been given not to men but to their  real  estate, to bourgeois property, which could only vote for itself. Although the system was profoundly unfair, since it excluded the greater part of the French population, it was not absurd. The voters, of course, voted individually and in secret. This was in order to separate them from one another and allow only incidental connections between their votes. But all the voters were property owners and thus already isolated by their land, which closed around them and with its physical impenetrability kept out everything, including people. The ballots were discrete quantities that reflected only the separation of the voters. It was hoped that when the votes are counted, th
Read more