PAULINE BOCK—A few days before the gilets jaunes’s first anniversary march (or “act 53” of their weekly protests), French newspaper Libération reported that the interior ministry was set to approve a “new national plan for law enforcement” that supports the police’s harsh, aggressive tactics for crowd control — despite the hundreds of injuries this approach has caused.
DIANA JOHNSTONE—For historic reasons, most French people do not share the ardent faith of British and Americans in the benevolence of the invisible hand of the market. There is a national leaning toward a mixed economy, where the State plays a strong determining role. The French do not easily believe that privatization is better, least of all when they can see it doing worse.
Macron is an ardent devotee of the invisible hand. He seems to expect that by draining French savings into an international investment giant such as Black Rock, Black Rock will reciprocate by pumping investment into French technological and industrial progress.
RAMIN MAZAHERI—French unions have done a woeful job leading the strike despite having everything going for them at the beginning. The alleged superiority of the so-called “independent” union model – favored by the West but opposed by any country with a revolution after 1917 – is once again failing the nation, if maybe not their dues-paying members. The general strike is wobbling, and by January 24th the pension bill will be formally presented to the government. It is amazing rapacity, because presenting a bill amid such strikes is obviously rushing it into the safe arms of a system dominated by President Emmanuel Macron.
PATRICE GREANVILLE—The Gilets Janes celebrate their first year anniversary amid media slandering. For many weeks now the people of #France have been brutalised by their own government… limbs, eyes lost, people dead and there has been no media coverage or world outcry. Less than 1 in a thousand Americans have heard about it, and far less understand the issues involved. Meanwhile, if the media—starting with the French media itself, except for Mediapart—”cover” the Gilets at all, it is to badmouth them, Thus the first anniversary of the Gilets demonstrations was headlined almost everywhere as a return of the “casseurs” (vandals and rioters).
RAMIN MAZAHERI—France claims to especially honor human rights… and yet how do we explain the the Yellow Vest repression? This was after we were told to believe that their bombs in Libya, their guns in the short-lived Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and their rapes in the Central African Republic are “humanitarian interventions”. We also were disgusted by the deification of the dangerous magazine Charlie Hebdo, which made millions by publishing Islamophobic pictures but never publish an anti-Jewish one.