Disproportionate focus on corruption of national leaders distracts from the systemic theft of Ghana's wealthSlate
The insanity of Macron supporting the “uprising” in Venezuela while sanctioning vicious reprisals against his own people at home is glaringly obvious to all but Macron and his backers....MintPress News
The partnership at the center of European integration is unraveling just when Euroskeptic forces are coming together. If French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel cannot start rebuilding the political center, next year's European Parliament election will produce the biggest victory yet for anti-EU populists.…
Sputnik spoke to Dr. Binoy Kampmark, a Senior Lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne and former Commonwealth Scholar at Selywn College, Cambridge University; who is also a contributing editor to CounterPunch to find out more about the France's role in Syrian conflict as well as about the recent Emmanuel Macron's statements on the topic.Nails it here.
Macron is playing what has been termed a more ‘reserved’ game to his predecessors Sarkozy and Hollande, who both felt that French power should be projected militarily in Africa and the Middle East.…
France is pursuing its role as a revived colonial power, of sorts. It has treasured a role in interfering in Middle Eastern states since its days of empire, and has been aggressively seeking an overthrow of the Assad regime, sponsoring a range of anti-Assad forces.…
The parties of the left and right of Europe disagree with the strikes on ideological grounds (there is, certainly in France, an admiration for the Russian cause in Syria), but they also see little gained in continued involvement on the part of France and European powers in what essentially looks like a revived colonial theatre of conflict....Sputnik International
In an open letter to Macos, Sapir claims that this act again him, seemingly anodyne, is extraordinary. It is representative of the intolerance towards anti-establishment opinion and of the repression that grows inexorably whether in France (the anti-terrorist law very worrying in this regard)(1) or in other countries, like Spain.Liberalism in the West is under threat as elites feel the heat.
This is not a one-off event. Journalist Aude Lancelin was sacked from her deputy director’s role at Nouvel-Observateur (L’Obs) in May 2016. The brutal sacking occurred on the eve of a Board meeting presided over by the paper’s very wealthy proprietors.(2) Her co-deputy Pascal Riché was moved sideways. Mme Lancelin has the misfortune to have a questioning intelligence, and being close to critical thinkers, not least the anti-establishment philosopher-economist Frédéric Lordon (her partner)....
Quite probably of course the very success of my blog, which jumped from 26000 monthly connexions to more than 200 000 monthly connexions could explain why what was thought to be “tolerable” in 2012 is no more by 2017 under Mr Macron’s rule.
This suspension amounts to an act of arbitrariness and an act of politically motivated censorship....
At the centre of Macron’s policy is an attempt to re-assert French influence in its former colonial sphere in Syria, North Africa, and the Sahel. “Two great zones are the focus of our efforts in the struggle against terror: Syria and Iraq on the one hand, and Libya and the Sahel on the other,” he said. He announced that he would “soon” travel to Ouagadougou, the capital of the former French colony of Burkina Faso, which has played a significant role in the French war in neighbouring Mali.Neoliberalism, neo-imperialism, neocolonialism; what else is new?
Macron’s agenda shows that the promises the European bourgeoisies made as they launched the European institutions after World War II—that it would never again fall into war, economic depression, and dictatorship—were false. Unless they are stopped by a conscious political movement of the international working class against war, the imperialist powers are again heading towards military catastrophes on a scale as great, or even greater, than the wars of the previous century.WSWS
Only 40 per cent approve of his performance, the Ifop poll showed, a 14 per cent plunge since July, although another poll has placed his rating as low as 36 per cent.
The dramatic decline since his landslide election victory in May, when he enjoyed a 62 per cent approval rating, will do little to enhance Mr Macron’s standing as he hosts a summit on Monday with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and Italian and Spanish leaders.
The far-Left leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who the poll indicates is seen as the most effective opposition leader by a majority of voters, on Sunday urged his supporters to “take the struggle to the streets”.
A good friend sent me a document that was released under the US Central Intelligence Agency’s rules about archives. The CIA has established a fabulous ‘Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room’ where all sorts of stuff is released after they deem it benign to current security concerns. The 1985 CIA document – France: Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals – written by CIA operatives, provides an analytical summary of the leading lights in the French left-wing intellectual thought in the 1980s with a view of promoting ….. It is redacted but only marginally. There is no doubt as to what the message is. It helps us understand the forces that were mounted against the progressive Left by right-wing, pro-market forces and how the public was manipulated to reject This is part of the research I am currently doing on the way literature, particularly fiction, is used to advance the neo-liberal ideological position – to make it look as though the ideas about governments running out of money and the like are just extensions of our usual individual experience in families and households. That research will be disseminated in a paper that Louisa Connors and I are giving at the upcoming MMT conference in Kansas City.Bill Mitchell – billy blog
It didn’t take long from Emmanuel Macron to get started on his neo-liberal agenda. That should be no surprise, given he championed the insidious El Khomri Law when he was Minister of Economy and Finance in the second Manuel Valls Cabinet. In a major speech in Paris on Monday (July 17, 2017), Macron, demanded that local governments in France slash spending by 13 billion euros by 2022 as part of an effort to cut the French fiscal deficit. Why they would want to be cutting the fiscal deficit with growth creeping along and the unemployment rate stuck close to 10 per cent, among other problems facing the French nation is another matter. Clearly, they are under pressure from the Excessive Deficit Mechanism given that the overal fiscal deficit remains around 3.5 per cent (above the 3 per cent threshold) and doesn’t look like coming down any time soon. And it is clear that Brussels will not turn a blind eye to France, as it did for Spain when it allowed the deficit to rise to support growth as part of the strategy to get the conservatives re-elected. The elites in the Eurozone have their boy in power in France so no further political support is required. But austerity will not work for France right now.Look for more political unrest in France.
Backlash against painful budget cuts coming from both sides as military, teachers, local authorities push back..
A backlash against budget cuts was to be expected in France, but for the first shots to be fired from the military is unusual, and a sign that Macron should be prepared to be hit from both ends of the political spectrum.Honeymoon over?
President Emmanuel Macron said in remarks published on Wednesday that he saw no legitimate successor to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and that France no longer considered his departure a pre-condition to resolving the six-year conflict.
Macron said he will not allow US “neo-conservatism” to seep into France, and that the focus of French policy will be aimed at achieving “stability” in Syria, rather than getting dragged into a Libya-style conflict.
“What was the outcome of these interventions? Failed states in which terrorist groups flourished. I do not want that in Syria,” the French leader emphasized.RT
While a large majority of FN supporters back a return to the French franc, opinion polls indicate three-quarters of French voters want to keep the euro, including many older voters who fear their euro-denominated pensions could be devalued....Reuters
“Electoral statistics” in France too (the “political laboratory” of Europe for the last two hundred years) confirm that, mutatis mutandis and of course taking into account the peculiarities of the present day, we are entering into a situation comparable to the crisis that shook the Weimar Republic in the interwar period. It is also an indirect, because political, not economic, still strong indication that we are well into the economic crisis that began in 2008 and metamorphosed into a crisis of the EU and that this crisis is not just a usual cyclical one, but a crisis as deep as the crises of 1873-96 and 1929 (those that led to the two world wars of the past, the Russian and Chinese revolutions, Nazism and the American New Deal)....Hang on to your hats. Storm brewing.
The confusion is due to the fact that most of what calls itself “the left” in the West has been totally won over to the current form of imperialism – aka “globalization”. It is an imperialism of a new type, centered on the use of military force and “soft” power to enable transnational finance to penetrate every corner of the earth and thus to reshape all societies in the endless quest for profitable return on capital investment. The left has been won over to this new imperialism because it advances under the banner of “human rights” and “antiracism” – abstractions which a whole generation has been indoctrinated to consider the central, if not the only, political issues of our times.
The fact that “sovereignism” is growing in Europe is interpreted by mainstream globalist media as proof that “Europe is moving to the right”– no doubt because Europeans are “racist”. This interpretation is biased and dangerous. People in more and more European nations are calling for national sovereignty precisely because they have lost it. They lost it to the European Union, and they want it back.
That is why the British voted to leave the European Union. Not because they are “racist”, but primarily because they cherish their historic tradition of self-rule.…The
