Posted on 12/13/2018 4:25:11 PM PST by norwaypinesavage
The Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) represent a broad cross section of French rural, working and middle classes. They are butchers, bakers and automobile makers. They are the folks who grow the food, drive the trucks, build the buildings and fix what breaks. They are France. They have had enough....Climate taxes on fuel to pay for inefficient, variable wind and solar power and other climate fantasies are wasteful job killers, and the folks in the yellow vests know it. They refuse to redistribute more of what they earn through their long, hard labor … in the name of global warming.
(Excerpt) Read more at wattsupwiththat.com ...
Will the French government succeed in smearing the earnest, nonviolent people in the yellow vests elsewhere around the world? Doubtful But just about everyone with an agenda is trying to horn in. This includes climate campaigners who are trying to claim the Gilets Jaunes as their own. They’ve posed in yellow vests for the media during carefully staged climate events. Don’t buy it for a second.We spoke with a wide assortment of protesters and asked them point blank, What do you think about climate taxes? “They are BULL SHIT” is among the more genteel exclamations our question engendered. Here are the straight facts.
To repeat, the Gilets Jaunes represent a broad cross section of the French working and middle classes. They are butchers, bakers and automobile makers. They are the folks who grow the food, drive the trucks, build the buildings, police the cities, and fix what breaks. They are France. They are fed up.
Well worth the read.
Bkmrk.
I am so proud of those Yellow Vesters. Never having been a Francophhile as I remember WWII history too well, I have not been impressed since. However, this Yellow Vest group is doing very well. I wonder if we’d ever get enough middle class (do they exist anymore) Americans to do the same. (The american underclass seems to be doing quite well without any intervention...almost everything is free if theya are careful about not exploiting the gratuities. The fmiddle class, however, I bet they are a go-along to get-along group. However, some of us are old, and lots older, and we know there is no more screwing around time available. Protest now. Wear yellow vests, whatever. But tell our government we want Obmamcare to be abandoned so that we can get real insurance. And that is only one example of one problem.
I especially like the way they have donned yellow vests and do not mask their faces. The yellow differentiates them from the anarchy-communist black bloc / antifa. And, unlike the commies, they are happy to let their identity be seen.
When it comes here, yellowjackets can be the American version. Their sting is much worse than bees or hornets.
The working French are not Taxed Enough Already
They are, in fact, Taxed to Death.
There is a major rural vs Urban set of factors as well.
Globalism eliminates the middle class and turns countries into third world banana republics with elitists at the top. France, Canada, Ireland...
I wore mine this morning on my walk
So why'd they elect a left-wing socialist like Macron?
Didn't they know what they were going to get?
Because, as in the U.S., the game has been rigged. The choices they were allowed were limited, their information was limited, their media in cahoots with the government.
Limited? Conservative Marine LePen was on the ballot. She was the French Trump, but the voters chose the leftist Macron instead.
Apparently the French people believe their media a lot more than we believe ours.
If one sets the issue of immigration aside, I think you’ll find that LePen and Macron are just different flavors of Socialist. Macron is more “in bed with” the elites and the big businesses, but I hardly think you’ll find LePen chopping entitlements by half, and so on, which would still leave France more Socialist than even a Bernie Sanders administration with Dem majorities in Congress, in the US.
Without hacking out most of the Socialist “give-aways” / social programs, there’s no way to reduce the “take-aways” (taxes, etc.) That is the “black hole” of socialism which rears it’s ugly head after a while, especially when there is no powerful economic force, such as the energy industry, in the US, to help pay for the largesse. Then add in the effects of lack of reward and incentive for most citizens, on the one hand, and the sense of entitlement on the other, and the “black hole” becomes ever more difficult to escape. LePen might slow down the descent a little?
It really is a LOT like an addiction, and as most any Freeper knows from observation (hopefully only that!), in most cases of addiction, a truly wretched state (”hitting bottom”) must be reached before a true reset can be accomplished. (I don’t know if you know the song “Snowblind”, by Styx — a truly frightening song — but IMO it applies to the trap of socialism almost as well as it does to addiction to cocaine...)
Resetting societies is usually a hell of a mess, with no guarantee “We Won’t Get Fooled Again”. (The Who) But when, not if, France gets to a point similar to what is happening in Venezuela, well, I just hope not too much blood is shed, and crazies don’t get their hands on the nukes.
So why have Freepers been so supportive of LePen all these years? People around here have painted quite a different picture of her.
If she's no better than Macron, then the French were screwed coming and going to begin with. If they're now out there rioting for bigger, better socialism, then they're really screwed.
IMO, LePen is “better” than Macron in some areas. She does at least clearly see the threat of large scale Muslim immigration, and the loss of French “identity”, and is decidedly not a globalist. But, those, and many other parts of LePen’s “nationalist” agenda that are positives, in my and most likely many other FReeper’s views, are not necessarily anti-socialist. Now, I will say that when you get down to the basics that might revive the French economy, her proposals to ease the tax burden on small businesses are promising. The problem, though, is that she also opposes privatization of many portions of the French economy that could be privatized, and she is generally a supporter of the public sector. Economically, all considered, Ms. LePen is to the left of Macron.
This article gives a brief summary:
https://www.ft.com/content/fb0ac974-2909-11e7-9ec8-168383da43b7
Little of LePen’s economic program, outside of immigration curtailment, looks like a bright future to me, particularly given the present state of affairs... Socialism almost always catches up with a country, sooner or later, as it has with France, and then climbing out of it is VERY difficult.
Add to that, there are only a few areas where France is industrially competitive, and they certainly have nothing like the US energy sector to drive them forward.
So, you may be correct. The French people are “screwed”. IMO, mostly they’ve done it to themselves. At least that’s how I see it.
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