Across the Western World, the bottom-up idea of how to manufacture genuinely new gdp is being replaced by what can only be described as a tits-up top-down fantasy about how to create wealth by pauperising consumers. France under President ‘Tough Guy’ Macron is our new best friend when it comes to illustrating the madness involved.
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Today (Thursday) leading French national newspaper Le Monde ran a front page lead asserting, ‘Exasperation of the farmers has the Government worried’. It was a headline of two halves, the first of which was an understatement, and the second a complete misreading of the way President Emmanuel Macron and his bankster mates think.
The farmers aren’t just angry about Macronist globalisation, they are furious enough to have joined forces with other protectionist elements in defacing every building they can find that houses national deputies beyond Paris. And the France en Marche crew don’t worry about the effect global free trade deals have on French agriculteurs, they simply look for ways to signal that they do worry.
It takes only a few moments of focused effort for the open mind to grasp that, for example, the new 80 kph speed limit on French trunk roads has zero to do with road safety. It is simply part of a four-pronged strategy under which motorists get caught when breaking from 130 to 80 (because that’s where most of the new cameras are), there are no flashes any more to make them slow down so they get caught more often, the loss of speed is so great, more people pile onto the autoroutes – thus bumping up the income from rising motorway tolls, and then advertising for SNCF says avoid all the traffic and the tolls by taking the train….prior to fattening up said SNCF for privatisation.
It isn’t so much asset stripping as citizen stripping.
But actually, this is about more than France – and infinitely more than the puppet Macron.
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It is sometimes tempting – watching capitalism’s financialisers in action – to betray a grudging and yet oddly profound admiration for the way they have “thought all this through”.
Actually, they have thought through how they get even more obscenely rich out of it all. But hey – come on – don’t give them any credit here: they’ve thought only a minute proportion of it through….and 0% of the social or geopolitical consequences involved. They are people suffering from frontal lobe deprivation syndrome; nutjobs to be pitied, never admired. Not under any circumstances.
This is where I tend to part company with the NWO ‘it’s all a Grand Plan’ conspiranoids: beyond more munnneeee for meeeee, the globalist accountants dreaming up new wheezes for the financialisers are far too naive (and their masters far too psycho) to have any plan. They know what they want right now: the afterwards thing is not their metier.
It is truly informative to view the last forty years in comparison to the previous thirty. The problem with the social democratic State (Reagan and Thatcher told us) was that, between 1949 and 1979, it knew how to collect taxes and redistribute wealth….but not how to create it.
Looking back now at the neoliberal corporate State, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, since 1979, it has been very good at inventing new taxes on mass consumers called something else (National Lottery, privatised industry bills, prescription fees, autoroute tolls, petrol surcharges, VAT increases etc), making service industry profits, giving most of the profits across the board to the better off….but pretty lousy at explaining how the reduced real mass income earners can keep consuming.
As I’ve written before, we have replaced one dysfunctional model with another: neither collectivist socialism nor globalist neoliberalism have a clue when it comes to stimulating the entrepreneurial spirit that renews and eventually revolutionises healthy economies.
This is because both ideologies cleave like limpets to the idea that only big is good.
Anyone with a brain who has worked in corporate life knows that the diametric opposite – in a real live empirical world – is the truth
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Paper fiat currency backed by nothing beyond an untrustworthy central banker’ promise is not wealth. It is debt: illusory IOUs issued by gamblers with a history of fiscal incontinence.
Emmanuel Macron is trying to wipe out past Gallic deficits by mugging ordinary French citizens for their small change, imposing cheap food imports on farmers, and making distribution more expensive. It is classic financial bean-counter stuff: cut costs and increase revenue.
Just about 95% of all the creativity being displayed in the Macronisation of France is about making the numbers look better. Almost none of it is about addressing export goods quality, innovative approaches to tax holidays for entrepreneurs, or greater control over the lunatic ease with which “open border” transient migrants can exploit welfare largesse or evade taxes.
Since the 1970s, the West has swapped naive Leftist misdirected spending for selfish neoliberal theft. Nowhere is the mess more apparent than in contemporary France. Nowhere is the social and professional bitterness about it more likely to erupt than in France.
The frightening part, however, is that – as in the United States with Trump and the UK on Brexit – the Resistance to Macron’s laughably branded ‘centrism’ is split every which way imaginable. On the streets, the President is hated. At the ballot box, there is as yet nobody with any credibility to challenge him.
The Slog 