Let's get this back on track by considering Harvey's post:
Harvey » Tue Feb 12, 2019 11:30 pm wrote:France is ablaze with protest and dissent. There is, let's just whisper it, a revolution going on. From Google to Bing (including all sites using either as an engine) you wouldn't know it. The English language conspiracy including all Western mainstream media (with a few notable exceptions) are doing their job, to fundamentally distort our perception of reality. The French working class are Russian Nazi's we're told, despite the inherent contradictions.
As many times as we see it, it's always breathtaking to behold directly.
The above is not a local problem, it's global. Having read virtually the same copy attached to a particular story, often varying only in sentence order, across various outlets and languages I know it's as bad now as it's ever been. As wealthy denizens of the West are quietly building underground shelters beneath mansions throughout the affluent suburbs, French working class have had enough. This report came early on from Benn Swann. He does his best to address the oddity, but as much as I like him, he barely scratches the surface, even of the issue he chooses to highlight, 'Carbon Tax sparks off protests'
He can't really get into the more general point, why 'solutions' to climate crisis proposed by the polluting industries and their pet governments are 'consumer led.' The cost of industrial activity is always shunted upon those least able to bear it by those most responsible. From plastic, to fracking, to oil spills, to carbon, to pesticides, to heavy metals, to endocrine disruptors. Like many notionally independent voices Swann appears mindful of the complex swirl of ideas comprising his audience. Generational indoctrination compounded by employability* lead a large segment of his audience to believe that the climate crisis is a 'big government' hoax to raise taxes.** In their world, tax rises are at least as evil as aggressive war and for many, an order of magnitude greater. Even if current tax arrangements disproportionally affect them, tax proposals only affecting the relatively affluent are off the menu as a matter of dietary principle. (That may be changing.)
A generally accepted polluter pays principle remains quite simply unthinkable. Why? Jobs. Peace is unthinkable. Why? Jobs. We can send a man to the moon but we can't process the seeming 'enormity' of redirecting skilled workers toward peaceful (and even lucrative) ends.
Despite government and taxes being responsible for all major infrastructure programs from roads, schools, hospitals, Universities, science and technology R&D, the Internet Interent itself, etc tax is inherently evil. Through public spending on everything from bank bailouts to aviation fuel subsidies, corporations have reaped the benefit of all this investment while successfully demonising government and the taxation system that built it all. House media bang on about 'big government' as the enemy and taxes as a clear obstacle to freedom but neither need be the case. Only international co-operation of state governments hold the solution to our most urgent problems. And despite the body corporate actually owning governments, lock, stock and barrel, spending continues to grow, debt continues to rise and government continues to be the villain.
Here's an interesting pair of graphs:
But 'we can't afford healthcare.'
If government is so intrinsically evil in 'corporate think' why has 'industry' colonised most of it's functions at a knock down price? What do they know that their media representatives apparently don't? Why are corporations charging people far more for services than services used to cost in taxes? In return for far worse and far less universal service? Taxes have not fallen much for average Americans as a result of decades of selling off infrastructure and utilities (paid for in decades of back breaking graft by the people) but these parasites rent it all back to Americans at a premium, while assuring them that benefits are parasitical and that work shall set them free.
The twentieth century, with a few noticeable interruptions, the new deal for example, has been a gradual process of acclimatising the population to accept labour and tax laws which disfavour them absolutely and disproportionately advantage a vanishingly small elite.
Yet:
“In America, anyone can be president.”
“In America, with hard work, anyone can make their fortune.”
That most people demonstrably don't, that incomes and life expectancy are falling while inequality is rising exponentially has been difficult for the majority not to notice. God knows they've tried.
That the world cannot sustain even one America under these unequal conditions is apparent enough, but to sustain an America where everyone squanders resources like a millionaire would require several worlds we don't have. There are now insurmountable contradictions inherent in the cultural beliefs of the nation, in it's history, traditions and stories. It would not be unfair, from a North European perspective, to call this the 'Cult of America.' We've hardly done much better in the UK but there remains a critical distance between most Europeans and their nation states as expressed by corporate and popular culture.
Macron, currently presiding over sweeping privatisation and 'financialisation' of the French economy represents a definite sense of the Reagan/Thatcher and Blair era's combined and accelerated. A fact not lost upon the French working class but which hardly merits any recognition in the view from English language media.
Clearly it's not within any media agenda to delineate Macron's idealogical extremism when they share it. In the second round of French presidential elections the only candidate to offer remotely progressive policies was, confusingly, Le Pen's Front Nationale, strategically occupying the political vacuum of anything notionally resembling 'the left.' Western media exclusion of the left resulted in this 'shock' battle between the far right Le Pen, wearing a social and economic left(ish) clown costume and Macron, urbane in the appearance of socially left(ish) but economically extreme far right. Elite banker Macron. Macron dressed in his dapper but very grey 'centrist' business suit. The freedom of (no) choice had predictable results, generating scenes more reminiscent of the (media embargoed) scenes in Catalonia than the Great Return March, but with Israeli training and tactics behind both. The Catalan independence government are currently awaiting trial for crimes against democracy. Israeli apartheid government with it's new racial laws, is not.
Before all of this, France, within the EU was a lone voice against the insanity of Iraq. Today Italy within the EU is almost a lone voice against the insanity of Venezuela. By the time that French TV stations were allegedly being hacked by ISIS France was already engaged alongside USUK in Syria. The supposed hack of French TV came not long after Charlie Hebdoe (yes,currently demonising the working class in it's pages) but before Bataclan and the explosions in Brussels airport and many more dramatic shootings in Paris immediately before the election. (Recalling events in the two months prior to the 2017 UK General Election.)
All of this reminded us, if we needed reminding, that the morality of those who 'catalyse events' *** is inimical to the continuation of civilisation. Their death wish is more fanatical than any Jihadist precisely because it is invisible not just to the majority, but to themselves.
As Britain seemingly prepared to desert it's appointed role as America's Trojan Horse to Europe, in 2014 and one year before the formation of Cambridge Analytica (owned and directed by literal British aristocracy and Conservative establishment figures but attributed in The Guardian to Russia) a film called Edge of Tomorrow posited an unreasoning alien menace resident beneath the surface of everyday life in Paris. To which the solution was of course a futuristic US military led by Top Gun propaganda veteran Tom Cruise. I noticed what themes were in play but few others seemed to. I wrote about it elsewhere and predicted the broad shape of subsequent events in France.
In retrospect, it seems easy to suggest France was always destined to assume the mantle vacated by Britain in a Europe increasingly dominated by corporate economic doctrines. But increasingly, as we've seen incrementally in Libya, Syria and now Venezuela, France has been pushing America's wider international agenda of complete 'full spectrum dominance.' Comparing the welcome Vladimir Putin could expect at European summits just a few short years ago with today, we might assume this plan is near to fruition but in truth, we are probably no more than a year or more from it's total collapse.
The European population is increasingly appalled by American driven wars while it's media desperately crank out increasingly schizophrenic justifications or condemnations according to their leadership and the inability to either separate or further immerse themselves. Trump can be at once a laughable buffoon in France, but (first under Hollande) then with Macron, France has quietly stepped into the breach left by the UK, even before that hole began to appear, fully capable of laughing at Trump yet following doggedly on America's military and economic leash.
The French working class are having none of it as Europe slides toward a world war of American design and American objectives, at the very moment the neo-liberal order and consumer capitalism has itself reached the final terminus. Either through cataclysmic ecological collapse, world war or by catastrophic economic collapse.
Or perhaps, because others will have seized control and begun the necessary international remedial action on a massive scale.
Once again, Gramsci is speaking directly to the now: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." And the impending break up of an unreformed EU can only accelerate, once any of the first three options above begin to take place.
The latter option includes such actions as:Immediate global demilitarisation (there is no other choice available apart from total ecological suicide)
Massive economic and financial reform
Reforestation on a global scale including massive subsidy to countries like Brazil and Venezuela to preserve their remaining rainforest. This is more than plausible.Globally, more than $2 trillion in annual subsidy goes to fossil fuels. (This figure is from 2015 although up to date and accurate figures are hard to find. The figure may be far higher today)
A complete and immediate change in energy production and use. Plurality of approaches to R&D and implementation.
The roll out of electric transport across the west
Massive social and infrastructure investment in poor, hot regions where the majority of old and dirty technology is incompatible with modification. Building of solar farms, solar powered desalination plants along coastlines, irrigating deserts and rolling out electric transport at cost price to their populations. In return, transport of electricity to the 'first world'
The French may be pointing the way, right now, but the mass of us can neither see them, nor understand what they represent.
* "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
** “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
*** "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." - John Kenneth Galbraith
