May and Macron

Macron addressed the French nation yesterday without mentioning the Yellow Vests by name, though it is the protests of the Gilets Juanes that brought "Jupiter" before the television cameras. Macron offered a ceremonial display of contrition coupled with several modest legislative fixes: an increase in the minimum wage and a scrap on the overtime tax as well as the social security tax on pensioners earning less than 2,000 euros a month.

Macron is trying to change the topic. The topic has become Macron's resignation. The protests continue.

In London prime minister Theresa May faced parliament after her ignominious about-face on bringing her Brexit plan to a vote. The Trotskyites are upset with Jeremy Corbyn for not promptly demanding a confidence vote. Corbyn wants to allow May one last tour of the continent, which is where May is presently trying to rallying support.

The story goes that May is trying to secure concessions from EU leadership on the Irish backstop. As The New York Times editorial page summarizes:

By delaying Tuesday’s vote by Parliament, Mrs. May bought some time. But not much, and at high cost. She evidently hopes she can squeeze some concessions out of a European Union summit meeting scheduled for Thursday and Friday that could placate some members of Parliament on the most contentious issue, the open border between Ireland and the British region of Northern Ireland. Both sides are committed to keeping the border open. But since that would mean keeping part of Britain in the union’s single market, the British and union negotiators agreed that as a “backstop,” Britain would remain bound by some rules of the European Union if another solution was not found by the end of a transition period in December 2020. To some supporters of Brexit this is anathema. But as an exasperated member of the European Union Parliament, Guy Verhofstadt, tweeted, “Just keep in mind that we will never let the Irish down. This delay will further aggravate the uncertainty for people & businesses.”

It is all a kabuki. May will return to face the inevitable next week.

Yves Smith is good this morning on the mechanics of bringing about a vote of no confidence within the Conservative Party. Hard-line Brexiteers are apparently only five letters shy of bringing this about. The risk for the hardliners is that if May survives by winning a majority of Tory MPs, she can't be challenged for another year.

There is a possibility that if May loses the confidence vote and Boris Johnson wins the race to succeed her, the coalition government could fall because BoJo is radioactive.

Smith concludes:

May’s plan, to the extent she has one, is disturbingly reminiscent of the strategy of the Greek government in the 2015 bailout negotiations: playing chicken. May is determined to produce a Brexit, and she is confident that it would wind up being hers rather than a no deal. She is running out the clock on the hope that fear of a crash out will lead the EU to relent on the backstop or Parliament to approve her pact. She’s not entertaining a second referendum or Article 50 revocation or any path to Remain. Recall the Telegraph revealed what her possible fallback is: a referendum that does not have Remain as a choice.

Bloomberg confirms this take:

Faced with a Brexit vote she can’t win, Theresa May appears to be gambling that running down the clock to a no-deal departure might change the arithmetic in Parliament. 

A Cabinet ally of May’s, speaking on condition of anonymity, put the prime minister’s strategy more charitably, saying that if the deal can’t go through then the only option is to keep talking — to EU leaders, in the hope they might offer something more, and to lawmakers, in the hope they might ask a little less.

In other words, May will continue to resist bringing her Brexit plan to vote. Corbyn is going to have to request a vote of confidence. The Tories might beat him to it though.

Expect More Violence

The size of the protests are reported to have shrunk for Gilets Jaunes Act IV yesterday, yet the number of arrests more than tripled, from a little over 400 nationwide last week to nearly 1,400. So something doesn't quite add up.

Preventative detention no doubt was employed by the gendarmerie. But that won't stuff the Yellow Vests genie back in its bottle. We're probably looking at more force delivered by the state because the rebellion will continue. (Colonel Cassad thinks so.)

The mainstream media is beginning to shift its coverage of the Yellow Vests from sympathy to fear. More quotes of men and women on the Parisian street expressing consternation at the disruption of daily life.

At least the stories in The New York Times and Reuters both highlighted that the protests have shifted from demands that the fuel tax be repealed, which was accomplished last week, to demands that Macron resign.

Macron's election in 2017 was the singular spectacular achievement of a collapsing zombie neoliberal world order post-Brexit (post-Ghouta?). He will not go easily. Expect more state violence, if not a state of emergency.

Gilets Jaunes Act IV Tomorrow

Tomorrow the Yellow Vest rebellion in France stages "Act IV."

Macron has promised a major address to the nation next week. He has already capitulated on the fuel tax which sparked the uprising. Prominent Yellow Vest demands now include an increased minimum wage, a more robust retirement and Macron's resignation.

Close to 100,000 police will be on duty Saturday. It's conceivable that another violent weekend could prompt a state of emergency. Macron is running out of options. His approval rating is at 18%. He's promoting the idea that tomorrow will be violent.

Another indication of how dire things are for Macron is a story by Adam Nossiter, Paris correspondent for The New York Times. "How France’s ‘Yellow Vests’ Differ From Populist Movements Elsewhere" could have appeared in Jacobin. It's one of those rare instances where the mainstream mirrors the fringe. What makes it even more noteworthy is that Nossiter, though not as rabid in defense of the zombie neoliberal status quo as NYT's Rome bureau chief Jason Horowitz, puffed Macron shamelessly from the outset of the last presidential campaign. Now, as you can see, things have turned:

The uprising is instead mostly organic, spontaneous and self-determined. It is mostly about economic class. It is about the inability to pay the bills.

In that regard, it is more Occupy than Orban — more akin to the protests against Wall Street driven by the working poor in the United States than the race-based, flag-waving of Hungary’s increasingly authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban.

[snip]

“There’s this social distress that exists more or less everywhere,” said Marc Lazar, a specialist in Italian history at Sciences Po. “Of people who are very worried about the future, not only are they suffering, but they have profound distrust of institutions and political parties. This is what we are seeing everywhere in Europe.”

Comparing the four countries — Britain, France, Italy and the United States — Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer who has studied the demographics of the “left-behinds,” said “the sociology of the people in revolt is the same.”

“These are the people who feel endangered by the current economic model,” which doesn’t “integrate the greatest number,” he said.

[snip]

But [Macron's] base, then and now, was exceedingly small, presaging his current wide rejection by the French, not just by the Yellow Vests. He won only 24 percent of the vote in the first round of voting last year — while his opponents on the far right and far left together won over 40 percent of the vote. Those numbers have now come home to haunt Mr. Macron in a political landscape where nearly eight out of 10 French citizens no longer support him, according to a recent poll.

Occupy never went away. It has always been here since 2011. The Brexit vote got defined as primarily a response to the refugee crisis in Europe, which was less an issue of immigration and more about warfare run amok in the Middle East thanks to United States; but the Brexit vote had just as much to do with the Brussels-backed, German-enforced regime of neoliberal austerity as it did immigration. Now Briton Leavers are waking up to the fact that the people in charge of Brexit have no intention of working towards equality in a new Little England.

I have been telling people that the events in France and England offer a ray of sunshine as we head into winter. Though we seem to be hurtling back to the medieval, with hostage-taking of rival economic royals, the dialectic is churning forward away from zombie neoliberalism.

Gilets Jaunes

After reading the latest from The New York Times on the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) uprising in France, Adam Nossiter's "‘Yellow Vests’ Riot in Paris, but Their Anger Is Rooted Deep in France," one comes away with the impression that the movement will not die down anytime soon.

Alissa Rubin reports the results of Saturday's protest:

More than 260 people were wounded nationwide, at least 133 of them in Paris, according to the prefecture of police. Some were bystanders caught in the fray who needed treatment after exposure to tear gas. About 412 people were arrested nationwide.

The prefect of Paris, Michel Delpuech, said at a news conference late Sunday that the police had been faced with “extreme and unprecedented violence” and that protesters had thrown hammers and steel ball bearings at them.

Firefighters extinguished nearly 250 blazes that destroyed 112 cars and burned other property, including several buildings. The cost of the damage was being assessed on Sunday.

The French are comparing it to the student-worker rebellion of 1968.

Writing for Jacobin, Aurelie Dianara defines the Yellows Vests as a reaction to Macron's redistribution of wealth to the 1% and the widening immiseration of the working class:

In terms of their demands, the gilets jaunes first of all want to get rid of this “carbon tax.” But behind the anger there is something else. As they and their supporters have repeated over the last two weeks, to justify their actions (which have stirred no little upset), the fuel price issue is something of a “straw that broke the camel’s back.”

The voices heard in recent days express a clear feeling of exasperation, the sense of being the objects of the contempt of (and exclusion by) a political class which they generally reject. Many call for the government and President Emmanuel Macron to resign. They continually insist on his low support and weak electoral legitimacy: after all, in last year’s presidential contest he only scored 24 percent in the first round, and turnout in the runoff hit historic low. “Macron, resign!” is a slogan that thunders through the provinces and along the Champs Elysées.

This feeling of exasperation is the result of years of fiscal and social policies that have gradually strangled the low and middle classes, including in terms of the tax take. Immediately upon reaching office, Macron abolished the Solidarity Wealth Tax (ISF), giving €4 billion to the richest; and has strengthened the Tax Credit for Solidarity and Employment (CICE), a tax cut and exemption program transferring €41 billion a year to French companies, including multinationals. Shortly afterwards, with the 2018 budget bill, Macron established a flat tax that allowed a lowering of taxation on capital, handing another €10 billion to the richest.

At the same time, the government has increased the General Social Contribution (CSG) income tax to be paid by pensioners, while pensions themselves have ceased to be indexed to inflation (and thus to retirees’ ability to buy consumer goods). It has got rid of the subsidized contracts (which allowed large numbers to work on contracts partly financed by public bodies) and lowered by five euros a month the amount of housing contributions (APL) for the most disadvantaged.

As if that were not enough, the new “carbon tax” will weigh five times heavier on the budgets of the middle classes than on that of the upper classes. Yet the government has taken no steps to counterbalance this obviously unequal treatment — for example by giving aid to the families on the most modest budgets.

Building on policies already implemented by presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, the effect has been to produce a further massive increase in inequalities. Over the last two decades the largest fortunes in France have increased tenfold, while according to a recent study by OFCE and INSEE, French families’ average “purchasing power” has fallen by €440 a year since the 2008 crisis. In this context, it is unsurprising that a sense of injustice and humiliation has spread, as well as that of an arrogant “president of the rich.”

This has exacerbated a divide between the people and the privileged elite represented by the president, aggravated by a series of recent financial scandals enveloping recent heads of state. If governments have continued to repeat that tax breaks for the richest and big companies would stimulate investment, the figures tell us otherwise: we are still waiting for the million jobs promised by Hollande and his then-adviser Macron when CICE was launched in 2012.

We must see that the Yellow Vests are a continuation of Occupy Wall Street, the difference being that the movement originated from the exurbs rather than the urban core; also, the Yellow Vests don't dither when it comes to making demands, and the movement is not yoked to the occupation of a prominent public space.

The basic facts of life since the dot-com bubble and burst nearly two decades ago are rising housing costs and stagnant wages. Governments have done nothing to address the problem. Why? Because it is not of problem for the people whom those governments serve: The wealthy.

Eventually though the peasants rebel, even under the paradigm of zombie neoliberalism.

Macron shows no sign yet of recognizing the enormity of the challenge with which he is faced. Zombie neoliberalism has managed to last this long because there has not been a legitimate social democratic crack in its market-worshiping armor. That's about to change in Mexico. In the UK May should be gone before the end of the month.

Faced with a rebellion, what can Macron do? Both Le Pen and Melenchon are calling for the dissolution of the national assembly followed by new elections. Macron will declare a state of emergency first before he dissolves the national assembly.

In any event, this Saturday the Yellow Vests will be on the march again.