Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Breaking Point

Looming On The Horizon,

I feel tension and deeply uneasy. I'm not alone. People I talk to feel it. Something is about to break, and it is scary..

French President Macron, the Rothschild Banker from Nowhere is over. He has 3.5 years left in his term, but...
On Tuesday, French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe announced that the diesel fuel tax that kicked off the Yellow Vest movement would be suspended—a sign of how seriously the escalating unrest has rattled the administration of President Emmanuel Macron.
Don’t expect the Yellow Vests to stand down now. What began as an automobile-focused, cost-of-living protest undertaken by a coalition of the white, rural working-class and petite bourgeoisie has evolved into a Hydra-headed autumn of discontent, with many objectives, no leaders, and a base that encompasses a cross-section of French life from engineers to paramedics to Parisian high school students. International coverage has focused on the movement’s opposition to a proposed fuel tax increase that was part of Macron’s plan to combat climate change. But that was only the spark. Spurred by everybody’s favorite anti-governmental social network, Facebook, the gilet jaunes crisis is best understood as a revolt against all things Macron...
Whatever Trumpian currents have flowed through their movement—the whiteness, the claim to working-class status, violence against journalists, hatred of the urban elite—this movement has no Trump, and they assign blame for their struggles up the economic ladder, towards Parisian bankers and bureaucrats, rather than down it, towards the country’s impoverished immigrant neighborhoods...
The diffuse, leaderless nature of the movement has made it difficult for the government to respond. On Friday, while Macron was in Argentina for the G20 meeting, Philippe tried to meet with a group of self-appointed gilets jaunes leaders. Only two showed up...
They got the diesel tax suspended. But other Yellow Vests say they won’t stop short of Macron’s resignation. There’s a burgeoning sense among political leaders that Macron’s original sin was reducing taxes on France’s richest citizens by some $3 billion. The unemployment rate remains high. There’s a lot to complain about—and a feeling that now is a time to air your grievances, whatever they are. 
 

Anthropologist and demographer Emmanuel Todd commentated (vid, french) on the riots on a French TV show. Sophia translated his main points:
"The violence comes from Macron. He seems to take pleasure in humiliating ordinary people. With with the Benalla affair, we saw the violence coming out directly, not only from the Elysées, but from the mind of the president.
By refusing to enact a moratorium on the taxes that provoked the protests, the govt is enacting the strategy of chaos whereby if these protests, which are popular now, continue, a layer of the population will rise against them."
Macron might enact a state of emergency but that would only fuel the protests. It is doubtful that Macron's plan of a 'strategy of chaos' will work. The French president gets elected for 5 years. Only 18 month in Macron managed to move a large majority against him. It is unlikely that he will serve out his full term.

Jim Kunstler:
Interestingly, it’s the people of France who are going apeshit at this moment in history and not the much more beaten-down Americans. For all the deformities of the EU, France still maintains a general quality-of-life so far above what is found in the US these days that we look like some left-behind evolutionary dead end here in this wilderness of strip-malls and muffler shops. They live in towns and cities that are designed to bring people together in public. They support small business in spite of the diktats of Brussels. They maintain an interest in doing things well for its own sake. The French are rioting these days not simply over the cost of diesel fuel but because they’ve had enough impingements on their traditional ways of life and seek to arrest the losses.
Americans, by contrast, seem to passively accept their new status as world-class losers. You can deprive them of whatever is meaningful, whatever makes life worth living, and sell them depressing simulacra to replace those things, and they never notice. Even the revolts ongoing in this land only seek to make relations between us worse, for instance the new super-Puritanism that wants to criminalize the most elementary mating ceremonies, like asking for date, or even paying attention to someone of the opposite sex. This is what the Democratic Party, formerly the party of the working people, has dedicated itself to all year. That’s your “Resistance.” They’ve managed to ruin one of the few consolations for being on this planet.

​Charles Hugh Smith is a very bright guy, who lives very frugally, and grows some vegetables.
After 3,701 posts (from May 2005 to the present), here are my observations of the Alternative Media from the muddy trenches.
It's increasingly difficult to make a living creating content outside the corporate matrix. The share of advert revenues paid to content creators / publishers has declined precipitously, shadow banning has narrowed search and social media exposure and the expansion of free content and competing subscription-based publishing has made subscription services an increasingly tough sell.
The most effective ways to silence critics and skeptics is to 1) de-monetize their sites / platforms and 2) restrict their access to the public via shadow banning and search algorithm "adjustments." The two are related, of course; as audiences dwindle, so do revenues and opportunities to sell subscriptions or promote patronage.

​Disappearing From View​

4 comments:

  1. I am also deeply uneasy, mostly about Trump, but also about Brexit, violence in South America, corporate takeovers of all the mom's & pops, police brutality, the flu, etc., but mostly about Trump! This cannot be America #MAGAmaniacs #MAGAbomber #bluetarp There is no shortage of 'them' dare I say wickedness .#babycages

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    1. We all have lots work to do, while we still can. Donald Trump looks like a symptom of what happened to the world when we were looking away for a few decades. It's been bad, but we;ve been sheltered from that somewhat. It would just upset us.

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  2. Exactly. I didn't care a fig about world affairs while Obama was in Office bc his demeanor was so presidential I just assumed we were in good hands and that allowed me to live in my selfish little world with my selfish little interests. That all changed with Trump. I started paying attention and I must confess I Google him every five minutes. I suppose I should thank him for forcing this upon all of us. (Of course, I won't bc my msg would NEVER reach him and then there's the trauma he has inflicted upon so many). Nowadays, I'm much more civically minded. I have hope that we can and do make a difference when we are aware. Even if it's just little people helping other little people vs. corporation and government helping little people. (I mean regular people not the Little People category.) LL

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