Ania K Hosts Jeff J. Brown On France’s Strikes, Inflation And Immigration. Not Much Good News For Europe.

Editor's Note  /  We are lucky to have French-American Jeff J. Brown, an expert on China, the Mideast, France, and other cultures, as one of our editorial pillars. (Jeff is of course a dear friend and the editor-in-chief of the unique China Rising blog, a sister entity to TGP).  His expertise on China, indispensable for any American or Westerner, spanning already three major books and counting, is detailed below. In this episode, Jeff joins Ania K., to chat about the rapidly deteriorating situation in France and the EU/NATO blocs, in general, as self-serving, US-pushed neoliberal imperial policies seem to be finally harvesting the same reaction across the continent among hitherto contained populations: anger, frustration and an almost universal desire for regime change that still lacks a fitting political channel. In France, Czechia, Italy, Germany, and even the UK, we already see growing popular agitation and profound disatisfaction with the status quo, and clear demands for their corrupt and certainly unrepresentative leaders, to resign or change policies forthwith, beginning with the abandonment of the stupid if not downright criminal sanctions against Russia, participation in the manufactured Ukraine war, and membership in NATO. Much of this seems to be coming from "the Right", but historical labels are losing their definitional traction in this 21st century when the confusing effects of endless capitalist propaganda and particularly the new crop of "WOKE imperialist" identity rules, are ironically helping to instinctively unite working class currents of seemingly different polarity.  Right now, says Jeff, the only movement speaking for all French people are the Yellow Vests, who have been savagely repressed by Macron. Unions, typically concerned with narrower economist demands, have played a very marginal role in that slow-mo uprising against the establishment (see our series of reports on this topic by our special editor Ramin Mazaheri, who recently authored a book on the subject, as well as another on China itself. Indeed, established unions usually become de facto stabilising agents of the hated status quo in most bourgeois "democracies". 

—P. Greanville