By Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog crossposted with PressTV
But nobody is making a sound about it, and not even Macron.
Maybe they will now: The first union has selfishly broken ranks – French pilots and cabin crews. It’s a “universal” pension system, sure… except for the groups who Macron has to buy off to break the strike.
French President Emmanuel Macron has barely said two words about the general strike, even though it has lasted four weeks and will soon become the longest general strike ever in French history.
And many French don’t even mind. It’s a quirk of the French system I cannot yet explain: they view it as normal that Macron has not commented on the general strike because that is the domain of the prime minister.
French contradictions abound, and they think the mystery makes them appear deep: France’s president is well-known to be closest thing to a constitutional dictator the West has, and yet the PM is supposed to be given much latitude on domestic policy?
I have heard this often, but never seen it action: the idea that Macron’s PM is not beholden to the ideas and orders of his boss on the pension plan is absurd. To me it has always seen like a way for the president to have someone to blame his unpopular policies on.
But Macron has given one press conference in 2.5 years, and he didn’t say the words “Yellow Vest” in public until after 23 Saturdays, and no one seems up in arms about it (besides the Yellow Vests), so… c’est la France.
Macron will probably make a rote plea for unity at his annual New Year’s Eve wishes – the guy is speaking at 8pm, so if all you have going is watching Macron’s press conference then take heart: 2020 can only get better than 2019 for you.
The coverage of the general strike from non-French media reminds me of France’s recent coverage of the resolution (one step below a law) which equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism: there was a decent amount of coverage AFTER the resolution became a fact.
This was obvious to predict, but there is an omertà regarding France’s general strike from Anglophone media – it’s almost as if they don’t want to ruin a good thing. If there was any room for leftism in the West’s “free speech means corporate media own all speech” now would be the time to be up in arms with keyboards in hands. But people repeatedly tell me they can’t find anything about it in non-French sources.
Honestly: This can’t go on in France any longer
Without any exaggeration, the French (and certainly the “French model”, aka “Capitalism with French characteristics) simply cannot sustain more austerity attacks which “re(de)form” it into an Anglo-Saxon model and here’s why: If you take home €2,500 a month in France you have a really good job (especially in 2019). If you take home $2,500 per month in the US (making about $20 per hour) your job is desirable but not really good.
Yes, 42% of Americans don’t even make $15 hour but the point is: the French model is based on low wages. The Swiss, Germans, UK, etc. – they all make much more than rich France.
The reason France accepts lousy wages was their Nordic-level social safety net: so they had guaranteed work contracts (“CDIs”), 2-3 years of decent unemployment, 5 weeks paid vacation legal minimum, cheap schools from 3 months old to PhD, cheap medical care and a good pension. Make no mistake because I know you right wingers will: This is a system which is paid for by the French worker giving up 40% of their pay check every month, and then 10% annually in an income tax. I.e., low wages.
That concept is crucial to understand. A whopping 80% of the pension system is funded by taxes on individuals and bosses, and not the state. The French pension isn’t “unsustainable” at all: if it is “underfunded” it is only on the state side, and only because the state has purposely starved it of funds via funding cuts. With the stroke of a budget pen its minor deficit could be resolved. Baby Boomers will be dropping like flies by the 2030s reducing fiscal stress- the system works, and it can last.
This explains why all neoliberals can really come with to justify junking the ENTIRE system is that it is too “complex”. Why is complexity automatically a negative thing? I’m glad these guys didn’t take up physics. The other reason they deploy is that some people – like manual laborers, those who work in hard and/or dangerous conditions – retire early to avoid death/maiming on the job due to “you’re too old for this” syndrome. They have seized upon the “injustice” of these “special regimes”. All of a sudden neoliberals care about injustice….. Of course the one-size-fits-all, universal system is as regressive (not progressive) as a flat tax, and that’s why no nation does it.
But back to how this onslaught of “reforms” is just unsustainable: reduced services which used to be covered by the state, increased prices on everything, Housing Bubble II, new jobs are all one-month renewable contracts (CDDs), you have to work until 64 instead of 60 in 2009, your pension is going to leave you barely at poverty level – you cannot have this AND low wages in France.
It is just impossible, logically. Something has to give on one of the ends.
If they are going to make it so that all the state is provides is health care and education and then citizens are on their own – the glorious Apache-killing Arizona libertarian model (with a touch of European class) – then they have to vastly inflate wages.
But nobody is talking in France about raising wages to compensate for the worse pensions, nor for any of the austerity measures.
So this can’t go on.
And yet it will – Macron is tackling the unemployment system next, i.e. later this year. Is there going to be a General Strike Act 2?
If the US and UK are any example – no there won’t be. So this may be the end of “France”. Remember the US and UK prior to Reagan and Thatcher – sure was better back then, or at least far less unequal and unstable.
Can Macron get his wish? To be the youngest (despised) leader in Western capitalist history?
One can picture Macron just white-knuckling it right now – if he can just get break this strike… the dude will go down in right-wing history. Or is it “centrist” history for Macron?
When Thatcher died there was UK police brutality at the street parties celebrating her death. That sounded about right to me. The New York Times scolded us with superstition and expressed their fake shock in their pathetic Taboo on Speaking Ill of the Dead Widely Ignored Online After Thatcher’s Death.” This is a taboo in the West – since when? The West cares about taboos – since when? I know they don’t care about taboos because they need a loan word for this rather crucial social concept – the word itself is Tongan, and the English didn’t get to Polynesia until 1773.
As I led with, French pilots and cabin crews have called off a strike they had planned for January 3 – they got a sweetheart deal from Macron, and you can all go kick rocks for calling them “stewardesses”. The Macron administration has only negotiated en masse with unions for three days out of 26 consecutive strike days – they never wanted to make a broad deal but only a few small deals in order to “divide and conquer” and break the strike.
This has worked every time during the age of austerity. I have written this many times but I will say it again, cuz some of y’all think the Western system is the apex of everything political: This is what “independent” labor unions get you – sold out. The socialist model of “we’re all in one big union” means the workers are truly in the government, not against the government… and against the good of the People, and against their fellow workers, and against their fellow unions and against, against, against it’s called “capitalism” people.
But the West is “freer” than China, Iran, Cuba, etc. Sure, free to be unequal.
Back to France: it’s getting hard, having a commute 2-3 times longer for four weeks. I’m not breaking rocks all day, but it’s grating on people.
That’s really what the “general strike” has amounted to – public transport shutdowns. The burden of the national good is basically all on the backs of rail workers. The unions have only called 3 days of nationwide protest and strikes – this means that even politically-active people have probably only taken 3 strike days of lost wages, whereas “good” rail workers have lost a month. What a stupid system they have here? Plenty of protest marches and big talk but when it’s general strike time (finally!) it’s: “I can’t afford it – let the rail workers do it.”
Truly, before we had the Yellow Vests we only had the rail workers: in the age of austerity they were always the ones (along with some of us journalists) at the front lines getting gassed and beating back cops. They have led every major anti-austerity movement. Nobody really joined them when they tried to prevent the EU-forced privatisation of French rails (Same thing back then in the media: “The rail system is bankrupt!” No it’s not, it was purposely starved of state funding.) They led the huge 1995 strike as well.
Not the stewardesses and their Top Gun flyboys. They have left France in the lurch.
I guarantee that tonight many will have a few glasses of wine and say, “Zees solidarité ees all phony!”, just to appear smart and courageous (the French are always wishing each other “good courage”), and the strike will fall apart.
That’s the France I know – Windbag France, aka Faithless France.
But we have the Yellow Vests now. Maybe General Strike 2 is République Française VI? Tides turn, the moon waxes and wane, the meek inherit a decent pension.
General striking is hard, but just don’t be a stewardess. Excuse me, Airplane Cabin Executive. Gotta love that Western model….
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the upcoming ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism.’
You know, Ramin, I see how Macron & Co are screwing the French people over and over and over again, but there *might* be something good coming from it: a real insurrection/revolution. My contacts in France tell me that cops are also fed up, as is the military, and generally the “corps constitués”. Frankly, I think that it has to be a country in southern Europe which has to take the lead (the northern Europeans are way too Germanic and they believe that “Ordnung muß sein” whereas the southern European have pretty much always lived under the oppression of the north, and they love a good uprising.
Seems to me that when any political system reaches a total inability to reform itself, then it often collapses with great speed. This is what happened to the USSR, this is what is happening now in the USA and this is what I hope will happen in the EU.
The French political system is corrupt to the bone and unreformable. Besides, it is run by both the Grand Orient and the Grand Israel. They will hold unto power until the inevitable blowback happens.
I love and respect the French, and I wish them well. I hope that they will find the moral resources to overthrow their rulers.
Happy 2020 nevertheless, dear Ramin, and thank you for your superb work!
The Saker
I second the thanks to Ramin for his superb work!
btw Saker, what happened to Olie Richardson and stalkerzone?
Ollie Richardson 31. Dez. 2019
My last tweet of 2019. I didn’t write the text, but I certainly agree with it.
🇺🇸 = terrorist organisation.
#iraqProtest
A CNN analyst just stated that the Iraqi government is obligated under
international law to protect the US embassy’s sovereignty.
The international law not apply in these two cases:
1. Takeover of the Venezuelan embassy in DC.
2. The raiding of the Russian consulate in San Francisco and the
Trade office in DC.
And why when protestors torch the Iranian consulate in Basra
is it the will of the people but when the US embassy is also
attaked by protestors it is Iran backed?
https://twitter.com/O_Rich_/status/1106965001309437953
Thanks for the kind Gregorian calendar wishes Saker – the best to you and yours in 2020 and beyond. And thank you for letting me be your superb site’s humble servant.
French cops are fed up, except for the psychos who revel in the chance of weekly violence. The army is very insular though – they ended military service in 2001, and any army like that is – I think – far more susceptible to being young robot Nazis who will follow any order no matter how heinous.
As a French cop told me – they need 10-20 million people in the streets to back down, and that made sense to me. That’s what a revolution will take. There won’t be any cops/army stand down to let Macron be led away in handcuffs, making it easy on everyone else. Revolutions are hard, bloody affairs….
Europe needs French revolutionary-ism for the reasons you mentioned – nobody else will do it. I don’t want to seem to be reducing politics down to ethnic/cultural “reasons”, but France is ethnically half northern european and ethnically half southern european after all… and I think we can all agree that the northern european/Anglo-Saxon culture has become far more dominant – thus France may have far less “French revolutionary-ism” than 200+ years ago.
Or not. We have the Vesters. Things change. All are capable of carrying revolution within themselves and using it to transform the world.
But I am not a negative person who thinks the sky is falling and end times are nigh – I really do sincerely mean that what’s going on in France is unsustainable. They can’t lose money on both ends – it’s simple math! But I mean that it is “unsustainable” in that it is immoral, unjust, difficult on people, won’t produce positive macro results, etc. – how long the French people can take all that… maybe years and years? I sure hope not tho!
2020 will be the year of French Revolution II! We certainly can’t give up on the first day, eh, LOL?!
Best wishes my friend
“This is what “independent” labor unions get you – sold out”.
And those unions are probably the reason why the pilots didn’t act.
Still, the pilots and stewardess are not yellow vests, they like the globalisation and most of them probably like the young and modern Macron. Their strike threat was mostly pure corporatism, not a reaction to the bigger picture, and I do not think it says much about the fate of the ongoing strike.
What might decide it will be the action or no-action of the oil refineries workers.
Thanks for all your good work.
How is progressive taxation (neither fair nor equal) and means tested welfare (competition), socialism?
The west has a capitalistic socialist net, and that’s why it fails. The state shouldn’t provide child benefit, student benefit, young person benefit, pension, injury benefit, etc etc, and pay for it with VAT, various grades of income/profit tax, etcetc.
It should fund itself with only a flat income/profit/capital-gains/inheritance tax that covers its operations, provide targeted UBIs for people’s needs (food, bills, housing, health, education, defense ( ~35% of GDP), and the state’s only really human capital intensive job should be to regulate the markets that provide needs into perfect competition (like Switzerland with its health insurers), and the other 65% of the economy should be regulated away from force and deceit.
Current socialism is all about the benefit of the derived demand for state bureaucracy. This bureaucracy however is what swallows up the greatness of socialism. Once a nation breaks from this proper, socialism will show its true colours.
There is no perfect competition for health care in Switzerland. It is mandatory, even if you cannot pay the premiums you will be force to maintain your contracted coverage until you are bankrupt. If you fall behind in your payments you are not allowed to change your healthcare provider.
Of course it is mandatory – otherwise you get pooling (in an unmandatory insurance market, only those that expect to get ill get insured. A company only has population statistics, so would not be able to price insurance accurately if only a sample of the population got insurance).. Car insurance is mandatory in the UK for the same reason. Paying your £2000/year/capita for your NHS is mandatory within the UK too.
The insurers are forced away from monopoly in Switzerland, that was my point. If you fall behind on your NHS tax, I believe you get in some trouble too!
I don’t think you know what socialism is. True, a bureaucratic social safety net in a capitalist economy does not socialism make. LACK of a social safety net in a capitalist economy ALSO does not socialism make.
First principles here: Capitalism is about the ownership of the means of production, ie firms, companies, from factories to software, by private individuals. Private in the sense that they are not, at least inherently, the leaders of the state, and private in the sense that they have no public responsibilities flowing from that ownership.
Socialism is about social ownership of all that stuff. “Social” could mean government or it could mean direct ownership by the workers, like in co-ops, or a few other possibilities. But if you’ve got private billionaires running companies, it is not socialism.
Black cat, white cat. Who cares about possession (the Jains, with aparigraha, were on a good path imo), when the effect of those industries is what matters?
For me, the economic problem is twofold:
“Unlimited wants, limited resources;
Limited needs, limited resources.”
Capitalism can address the first part, socialism the second. (65/35% of GDP split at the current level of technology imo)
Socialism asks for a universal provision of needs. How food gets on every citizen’s plate – so long as it gets there evenly – is less important than if it does.
Ownership of means of production, for the most part, implies a monopoly of the state. Just another monopoly, at least as the history of this idea has showed in the 20th.. maybe there is a better path, but it hasn’t appeared yet imo.
There is the market regulation side, and the redistribution side.
When means of production for needs are owned by the state (not all socialism is statist, but historically, this is where we have been), regulation=monopoly, and redistribution is at the consideration of the monopoly (state).. from the fire into the frying pan imo.
If means of production for needs are regulated away from monopoly, into perfect competition, then there are no monopoly rents. A perfect socialist state could not provide a lower price anyways without loss. (This assumes an effective regulator, but the monopoly version assumes an effective state entity equivalently..)
After a regulator reduces an industry that supplies needs into perfect competition, a targeted UBI (say with cryptotech) offers a much less labour intensive and simpler method for providing needs universally.
Take food in the UK: at Lidl prices, 5% of GDP, £1400/capita, would be enough to provide the 2200 calories the average citizen needs.
Regulate for a store that supplies 500-1000 food items only, no alcohol or drugs, provide a cryptocurrency that is paid weekly or monthly to each citizen (paid for through tax) – currency that can only be spent within such stores.
No system is permanent, the question is whether a statist control of the means of production can survive the corruption of the state as well as a system that regulates the economies of need into perfect competition.
Imo, statism fails in the same way monopoly fails. There would still be a need to have an effective regulator, but if taxes were flat, redistribution was UBI based, then the only fail point of the state would be its regulation.
In both monopoly and regulatory socialism, only semi-direct democracy is an effective check and balance on representative action, but in the regulatory system, there is just less to control for the electorate, and less to deal with for the representatives.
Consider that the current welfare state requires lawyers, accountants, an excess of taxmen, hiring/firing laws, sex equality laws, minimum wage laws.. None of this would be necessary or reasonable with UBIs for needs, taxed simply.
Bonne année tout le monde, c’est Nussiminen qui parle.
Je suis entièrement d’accord avec Ramin que la situation en France est devenue insoutenable. Et le plus palpitant avec le régime de Macron, c’est son comportement réactionnaire et incompétent qui ressemble celui du régime de Nicholas II en Russie. Si les GJ sont des connaisseurs de l’histoire, ça promet d’être une belle saison pour le maillon le plus faible de l’impérialisme en Europe Occidentale.
Translates (Mod):
Happy New Year everyone, This is Nussimen speaking.
I fully agree with Ramin that the situation in France became unbearable. And the most exciting thing about Macron’s regime is that it is his reactionary and incompetent behavior that resembles that of Nicholas II’s regime in Russia. If the GJS are connoisseurs of history, it promises to be a good season for the weakest link of imperialism in Western Europe.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report of 2018 says that any temperature of 1.5 C. degree above baseline (Industrial Revolution) would still be disastrous. And any temperature above 2.0 C. degrees would be total catastrophe. Well, baseline this summer was 1.84 C. degrees, and reported since by reliable sources at over 2.0 C. degrees, and accelerating.
A brief video review of The UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) held in Madrid last month by Dr. Peter Carter (Director, Climate Emergency Institute) is listed below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_csqI2ZdIfU
I agree with the French policeman who says that we will need 10-20 million people on the streets of France for change to occur. In other words, we will need an awakening to the nature of the greatest war machine upon our planet, our banking system, the curse of usury, a crime scene revealed by the simple question, ‘who supplies the capital for our loans, when the world is drowning in debt?’
Here then is a simple description of the financial problem and a possible financial solution, in a little more than 300 words!
Our banks operate as pawn shops, with a license to create bank credit. When customers take their collateral to the bank, as security for a loan, the banks place this collateral before a banking ‘mirror’, called double-entry bookkeeping, and record the reflection as ‘bank capital’, owned by the bank, capital which can now be deposited into the customer’s account, in the form of a loan, bearing compound interest.
This system has some merit, as the ownership of the collateral has now been transferred to the bank. A $1 loan, at 6% annual compound interest, calculated daily, over 550 years, creates a debt of 214 trillion dollars. The banks consider this to be a modest return upon a reflection in a mirror! When the monetary supply is created bearing 3% annual compound interest, then 40% of the price of retail goods and services will be owed to the debt bankers, and fully 75% of the people’s income will be lost to the four financial demons, those of debt, interest, taxation, and inflation!
This banking system is obviously a fraud, imposed upon the customer, who is forced to accept the interest burden as the ‘price of capital’. The banks impose this deception as they know that not even ‘Shakespearean idiots’ will pay compound interest upon reflections of their own assets! However, these financial crimes demand that our banks be closed down for cartel fraud and racketeering!
The shells of these debt-banks can now become asset-banks, owned by our nation. In asset-banking, the reflection of customer collateral is recorded as an asset, owned by the customer, and loaned interest-free. After all, it is the customer’s collateral which creates the reflection we call ‘bank capital’. A $1 loan, at 0% annual compound interest, calculated daily, over 550 years, creates a debt of $1! This is slightly more humane than the ‘214 trillion dollar debt’ which allows the debt-bankers to ‘steal the world’!
Asset or debt, which monetary system would you prefer?