Thanks to my friend Alain for this. With his country voicing its ire at his use of presidential fiat to avoid a parliamentary vote on raising state pension age from 62 to 64, Emmanuel Macron appeared on TV to defend the move. Here’s what happened when he realised he was flaunting, with his Gallic hand gestures, a £2,000 wristwatch. 1
https://twitter.com/spriter99880/status/1638979083383066657/mediaviewer
Says WSWS, March 25:
Macron is emerging as the direct personification of the rule of finance capital and the focal point of all the ruling elite’s conspiracies against the working class. “L’Etat, c’est moi,” (“The state is me”), said King Louis XIV, the founder of the French absolute monarchy in the 17th century. Nearly 400 years later, Macron imposed his diktat over France by asserting that the financial markets would not tolerate a failure to impose his cuts.
His ability to impose the pension cuts without a vote flows from the semi-dictatorial powers Charles de Gaulle demanded in 1958, amid the French war against Algerian independence and a coup led by pro-colonial forces in the French army. De Gaulle obtained for the presidency vast powers to impose legislation, coordinate police operations and control the army, written into the constitution of the Fifth Republic. This office has now become the cockpit of a dictatorship of the banks against the people.
* * *
The rich man’s Tommy Cooper – ‘Just like that!’
Meanwhile, here’s a recent take from Voltairenet:
https://www.voltairenet.org/article219074.html
“The political suicide of Emmanuel Macron and his desire to see the country collapse with him mask a very deep crisis. It is not by chance that the French successively elected an American agent at the head of the country, Nicolas Sarkozy, who destroyed the independence of France and violated the result of the referendum on the European Constitution by adopting the same text through parliamentary channels; then a petty bourgeois, François Hollande, who transformed the presidency of the Republic into vaudeville; and finally an investment banker who has made the Elysée Palace a reception hall for cocktail parties for American multi-billionaires. Four times (they re-elected Emmanuel Macron), the French took responsibility for this descent into hell.
Today, they have to deal with food and energy inflation of 20 to 25%. There is no longer a doctor in more than half of the territory and the hospitals are closing their emergency services. Above all, everyone notices that nothing is going right: the level of education has very dangerously collapsed, the police can no longer maintain order, the justice system does not have the means to do anything before two years, the army is unable to respond to high intensity warfare. The problems are so numerous that one does not know where to start.”
And you think the French are having it bad?
Here’s Larry Johnson featuring this rant from a guy called Fred Reed*:
https://sonar21.com/the-united-states-has-become-tyrone-biggums/
“Great. Just ever-lovin’pea-pickin’ great. In LA some sixty thousand people–who really knows?–sleep on the sidewalks, in tents, cardboard boxes, sleeping bags, or not much of anything. Others live in their cars. The same in San Fran, Seattle, St. Louis. There being no bathrooms, they defecate as the urge hits, and where. What choice do they have? Some are junkies, others crazy, many just with no jobs or jobs that don’t pay enough for a room.
Meanwhile Biden sends billions to Ukraine, lots of billions, our billions, while America crumbles within. A corrupt, senescent, second-rate lawyer mysteriously empowered to bankrupt his own country to benefit a corrupt, dirtball country of no importance to America.
How is this possible? Why do Americans tolerate it?
Because they have no choice. Americans have no influence over their government except in things that do not matter to that government.
Recently my stepdaughter Natalia, Mexican, went to Austin to visit friends. She returned and pronounced America a truly odd country. All the houses were the same, so how could you find your way home at night? And there were lots of people, she said, living under bridges and on the sidewalks. This she thought strange. She had never seen such a thing in Mexico. In twenty years, neither have I.
Meanwhile Biden sends fortunes to Ukraine. How is this? Couldn’t we have an American President? Just once? Someone who cares about people in his own country? No prospect of this is in sight
In America there are people, lots of them, who don´t have enough to eat, or barely do. Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the rural Deep South. I wonder whether Biden has enough to eat. I wonder whether he cares that many of his citizens do not. No, come to think of it, I don’t wonder. But he cares, cares deeply, about Ukraine.
America crumbles, but Biden is going to rebuild Ukraine. Our trains look like something out of Turner Classic Movies. The passenger versions, across the continent, are nice, slow but appealing as period pieces. Chatanooga Choochoo, all that. They are also primitive and badly maintained. We have had four freight derailments in a month or so.
No, make that five. This morning we read of another, in Arizona. This is Third World, pushing Fourth. But Biden is going to do what it takes, for as long as it takes. For Ukraine.”
* Full version here: https://fredoneverything.org/to-hell-with-ukraine/
Never mind the watch WTF is the rabbit?
Thanks Dave. Was aware of most of this but still, reading it leaves me almost speechless. Wtf indeed.