by Chris
The JFK quote comes to mind as I read Macron’s many statements about how he’s allegedly sympathetic to the people in the streets, but the violence has no place in France and cannot be condoned!
Maybe this is just the inevitable condition that Rome eventually ends in, and the technocrats and bureaucrats simply cannot ever resist doing more and more with every passing year, but from my perspective things are inarguably and increasingly working against the common folk.
“People have this feeling that the Paris technocrats are doing complicated things to screw them,”
~Charles Wyplosz, economics professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
It could be that complicated things are being done, but in most cases it’s not very complicated at all. This next chart shows the distribution of the winners and losers of the most recent French budget broken down by income percentile:
Nope, nothing complicated about that chart.
The 79% to 99% bracket is being used as a tax farm to throw some 0.5% bones to the underlings while providing a nearly 6% feast to the top 1%.
Just add a few highly regessive taxes on top of that, then a dollop of zero percent pension raises (because France fudges its inflation statistics too), and you’ve got your revolt.
Of course, same as in the US, ‘the people’ are told the falsehood that the proper way to address their grievances is at the ballot box but eventually people catch on that having the luxury of voting between neoliberal A and neoliberal B is no treat at all.