“Watching these images, we have all asked ourselves how could French people do this to France?”
It’s almost like people were protesting the system its self… like they feel under represented or something.
anyone who asks that question, especially of French citizens, has brain damage and is unfit to ask more questions.
On the ground in France for Lemmy News International right now.
France is kind of fucked. Politically, the centrist president is termed out of office, and there is no charismatic centrist replacement. The alternatives are the left under a very unpopular candidate and the right under an extremely unpopular candidate.
France has been running a massive deficit for decades and has some of the hightest debt burden on earth. It also has, right now, one of the highest interest rates of any major economy. The only way out is either massive increases in taxation or massive austerity measures.
The centrist government tried tepid austerity measures a short while ago (increase the retirement age from 62 to 64) and was met with absolutely massive protests. Parliament tried to pass a wealth tax (Zucman tax, named after a famous economist) but failed.
The left and the right both plan massive increases in spending if they win the election. If the left wins, that means the wealth tax is back; if the right wins, that means services are going to be cut.
The French political class is absolutely terrified of increasing taxes on the wealthy, because it is afraid wealthy people will leave the country en masse. It is the only realistic way out of the mess, though.
They’re always saying that if America, or one of its states, institutes a Wealth Tax, the Sociopath Oligarchs will all leave that state, or the country (as if that would be a bad thing), and now they’re using that excuse in France.
But if ALL the moral countries do a Wealth Tax, where will the Sociopathic Oligarchs go? The only places for them will be scummy countries that will welcome them, and then the Sociopathic Oligarchs become their problem.
Let’s just make the whole world inhospitable for Sociopathic Oligarchs.
wealthy people will leave the country en masse
I find this so strange, wealthy people actually bring very little into an economy, and most will live wherever the fuck they want, they see taxes as just the price of doing business. It’s only right wing politicians and right wing wealthy people that keep this myth alive.
They cannot take their factories, mines, shops, etc with them. They may take their money, but their money is usually tied to their business. If their business is nationalized, because they left it behind, their wealth suddenly is backed by nothing.
They won‘t leave. They never do. Maybe a hand full of them but they contributed nothing to society anyway but en large the rich never leave in droves over taxes. Their businesses are in this country and they simply can‘t just move it someplace else without huge upfront costs. Even the centrists know this. They‘re just afraid to not be welcomed at lavish events anymore I guess. And some of them are straight up bought I assume. But yeah, tax the rich god damnit. They‘re all bark and no bite.
Remember when “experts” said they’d all leave NYC if Mamdani put on his Pied-a-terre Tax? The result was that more of them actually moved TO NYC.
Actually they didn’t. Most of them had other homes in states with no property taxes, and they called THAT their primary residence, instead of NYC, where they’d have to pay State and City taxes. Most of them didn’t want to leave NYC, so they just owned up to the fact that their NYC home was their primary residence, and now they’ll have to pay a tiny bit of tax.
They could always do that, but given a choice, they’d rather not. Mamdani just removed the choice.
for one, i don’t think that they actually mean “wealthy individuals” but “big companies”, like adidas producing shoes or sth. basically there is absolutely not a single reason why such a big company would be located in country X and not country Y besides economic incentives. realistically, they could produce equally well everywhere in the world, they’re just gonna go wherever labor costs and taxes are lowest. these jobs would be lost if the company leaves.
then again, these companies probably already moved to china 30 years ago. and who’s left probably has a hard time leaving.
also it should be noted that this kind of analysis lacks vision. sure, jobs would be lost. so what, we’re gonna have mass unemployment one way or another. better to accept that and deal with that, instead of clinging to an old economic system that is doomed to fail anyways.
anyways to solve problems, one needs to patiently think about them. since being patient is not spectacular, few are inclined towards it, and even fewer succeed. so we’re not gonna get good answers to any of the world’s problems until somebody who (1) cares and (2) has a good understanding of the world bothers to actually make up meaningful solutions, i figure.
Yeah that ship has probably sailed. And who wants to live in a sycophantic corpo dystopia anyway!
I love the example of adidas because like literal Nazis… but I didn’t know they produced statement handles
They bring very little in compared to their wealth, and comparatively very little tax wise, but lets not pretend like they bring little to the economy itself.
They do spend money where they are. They dine in fine restaurants, they hire private chefs, they have staff for their houses, they buy fancy cars etc. They probably employ thousands of people in various personal support roles (I’m not talking jobs like they run a business and have 10,000 employees, but the cleaning people, the personal assistants, the chauffeurs etc. Things they would have wherever they are even without a business.)
There are entire industries that even cater to them, like if they purchase a mega yacht and france has that industry.
The do something for the local economy, they just pay little taxes besides any local consumption taxes, but taxes is not the entire economy.
Edits to better express what i was trying to say.
Suppose that is all true. At every juncture I would reject the notion that they are creating an opportunity or job that would not otherwise exist (nor, on the whole, paying those workers any better).
There are more than enough restaurants, gardens, houses, private hire vehicles, shipbuilders etc to support those chefs, gardeners, cleaners, drivers and shipwrights without ever having to do with anybody with any wealth.
More expensive items, such as fancy cars, do not create the same number of jobs commensurate with the price increase, they generally make less of them, and increased profit margins go to the benefit of investors, not workers.
I’m not an economist or AI BS user, so there are probably words for these phenomena that idk sry
Staff wise you’re probably right that they don’t get paid much more than the middle/high wages of that area. Like if a personal chef is typically $80k, maybe this one get $100-120k kinda thing, but I doubt it’d suddenly become $200k if we used these as example numbers.
But the businesses like the restaurants that cater to the HNW individuals will bring in more profits as they can charge stupid amounts for the meals. Their staff probably get tipped better, at least if it’s a tipping country, which then ends up in the economy even at the lower staff levels.
For things like the cars, like you said that probably employees less people job wise and the wealth concenrates into the owner of the fancy car shop and a small amount of sales staff, but they also will be able to spend their higher earnings at more expensive places too.
I’m not saying things would just collapse from all of this kind of spending going away, I’m just saying it’s not nothing and it does have an impact.
There are entire industries that even cater to them, like if they purchase a mega yacht and france has that industry.
just as a note, the kind of people to buy mega yachts is mostly those who have maybe €10M laying around because they got lucky sometimes. the truly rich who have billions, barely spend anything, they often live extremely frugal. so they’re not spending and contributing to the economy that way.
The truly rich who have billions definitely still spend money in their economy in other ways I described (fleshed out more in edits as well) but yes they might not all buy the ultra expensive things like mega yachts specifically. They aren’t just sitting at home in a condo alone though.
The hire fancy decorators to decorate it, they buy fancy couches, they most definitely don’t clean it themselves and probably rarely cook for themselves etc.
We can take everyones most hated billionare of the moment Musk - He’s spent hundreds of millions on election stuff alone. I doubt others spend that much, but they will spend millions on things like that. That money does end up in the pockets of things like radio stations, television stations, people going door to door, helps keep people in those areas employed etc. Not for a great cause in this case, and he of course likely paid 0 taxes on it since it’s borrowed money, but its still money being spent that circulates in the economy.
that’s just trickle down but shittier
just tax them, if they leave, take their shit in country and ban their buisness working there
if you want to participate in the benefits pay your fucking share of the cost
I’m not saying don’t tax them. I’m saying the person who said they provide very little to the economy is wrong, because the economy is more than taxes.
liter trickle down economics, we have years of study on this
they get more in subsidies and cost more in externalities than they bring in
tax them heavy or eat them
Isn’t France’s pension system to also blame for this mess? And doesn’t France already have pretty high taxes on the wealthy?
The alternatives are the left under a very unpopular candidate and the right under an extremely unpopular candidate.
Oof, so you’re about to enter the arena the US did in 2016, huh? Reminds me of Clinton vs. Trump.
(Not to say that Mrs. Clinton is in any way a “leftist” politician but Democrats get a pass as being “left” because of our abysmal education over here. The thread is that they were both deeply disliked by large sections of the voting populace, leading to even worse outcomes.)
The French political class is absolutely terrified of increasing taxes on the wealthy, because it is afraid wealthy people will leave the country en masse. It is the only realistic way out of the mess, though.
I guess all the new rich people moving into New York City isn’t enough proof to them that the wealthy actually like where they live and their whole “we’ll pull up and leave!” is the biggest load of horseshit.
ALSO I would love for these governments just to fucking call that bullshit for what it is, and if they try to fucking leave because of taxes take every fucking penny and piece of property they own in your country and tell them to get fucked and figure it out when they get where they’re going but they’re not taking the wealth they built in this country with them.
Cutting public spending is still an utmost priority but stuff like expanding the road network (increasing budgets for construction, road maintenance, emergency services and healthcare) still don’t have moratoriums.
Wait what the fuck isn’t this exactly what hsppened before they stormed the damn bastille?
History repeats itself ig
I love how the article seems to equate “failure of the state” with police running out of ammo and not ending the violence quickly enough. Not the decades of policies that led to thousands of people feeling like they need to destroy infrastructure.
They’re citing a mayor whose town hall got burned down
Media is complicit with Epstein class
I worked in local television news media for a decade in the early 2000’s.
It’s worse than that: we just don’t even teach these people how to be actual journalists.
I remember working in production, catching a new, state-level important story, with court documents proving as much. I printed it and put it on the desk of several reporters. The producer refused to run the story because they “didn’t see the story on the AP Newswire.” In other words they refused to run the story until a major network ran it first. Three weeks later they ran the story after someone else ran it first.
Recall, I worked in production. I wasn’t a newsie. I had better news instincts than these fucking clowns who went to school for it.
It’s just rubes saying “yes daddy I’ll do whatever you tell me” all the way down.
journalists don’t get paid very much AFAIK, so it’s not a position who is attracting talent. that’s why we see a whole fucking lot of mediocre news articles who fail to comprehend what’s actually important.
that and because it’s not a very “respectable” position in the eyes of the public. have you ever met a child who said “i want to be a journalist” and their parents were joyous? i haven’t. if anything at all, you can expect your parents to give you a lecture of how it’s not a “good” job, you won’t “earn any bread” with it.
The state views inability to control it’s populace as a “failure” because the states we have enabled to become our modern governance have stopped actually giving a shit about their actual constituents and consistently roll out the red carpet for the rich and corrupt. Loss of control is a failure, real democracy is a failure. The real issue is they clearly (and the media as well) don’t have the same goals as the people they lord over.
They have never had the same goals nor given a shit. This is nothing new. This piece of writing is almost 100 years old now:
What is it that every one wants most in life? What do you want most?
After all, we are all the same under our skins. Whoever you be — man or woman, rich or poor, aristocrat or tramp, white, yellow, red or black, of whatever land, nationality, or religion — we are all alike in feeling cold and hunger, love and hate; we all fear disaster and disease, and try to keep away from harm and death.
What you most want out of life, what you fear most, that also is true, in the main, of your neighbor.
Learned men have written big books, many of them, on sociology, psychology, and many other ‘ologies’, to tell you what you want, but no two of those books ever agree. And yet I think that you know very well without them what you want.
They have studied and written and speculated so much about this, for them so difficult a question, that you, the individual, have become entirely lost in their philosophies. And they have at last come to the conclusion that you, my friend, don’t count at all. What’s important, they say, is not you, but ‘the whole’, all the people together. This ‘whole’ they call ‘society’, ‘the commonwealth’, or ‘the State’, and the wiseacres have actually decided that it makes no difference if you, the individual, are miserable so long as ‘society’ is all right. Somehow they forget to explain how ‘society’ or ‘the whole’ can be all right if the single members of it are wretched.
So they go on spinning their philosophic webs and producing thick volumes to find out where you really enter in the scheme of things called life, and what you really want.
But you yourself know very well what you want, and so does your neighbor.
You want to be well and healthy; you want to be free, to serve no master, to crawl and humiliate yourself before no man; you want to have well-being for yourself, your family, and those near and dear to you. And not to be harassed and worried by the fear of to-morrow.
You may feel sure that every one else wants the same. So the whole matter seems to stand this way:
You want health, liberty, and well-being. Every one is like yourself in this respect.
Therefore we all seek the same thing in life.
Then why should we not all seek it together, by joint effort, helping each other in it?
Why should we cheat and rob, kill and murder each other, if we all seek the same thing? Aren’t you entitled to the things you want as well as the next man?
Or is it that we can secure our health, liberty, and well-being better by fighting and slaughtering each other?
Or because there is no other way?
Let us look into this.
Does it not stand to reason that if we all want the same thing in life, if we have the same aim, then our interests must also be the same? In that case we should live like brothers, in peace and friendship; we should be good to each other, and help each other all we can.
But you know that it is not at all that way in life. You know that we do not live like brothers. You know that the world is full of strife and war, of misery, injustice, and wrong, of crime, poverty, and oppression.
Why is it that way then?
It is because, though we all have the same aim in life, our interests are different. It is this that makes all the trouble in the world.
Just think it over yourself.
Suppose you want to get a pair of shoes or a hat. You go into the store and you try to buy what you need as reasonably and cheaply as you can. That is your interest. But the store-keeper’s interest is to sell it to you as dearly as he can, because then his profit will be greater. That is because everything in the life we live is built on making a profit, one way or another. We live in a system of profit-making.
Now, it is plain that if we have to make profits out of each other, then our interests cannot be the same. They must be different and often even opposed to each other.
In every country you will find people who live by making a profit out of others. Those who make the biggest profits are rich. Those who cannot make profits are poor. The only people who cannot make any profits are the workers. You can therefore understand that the interests of the workers cannot be the same as the interests of the other people. That is why you will find in every country several classes of people with entirely different interests.
From Now and After by Alexander Berkman. Chapter 1: What Do You Want Out Of Life?
Available to read or download in multiple formats, for free, here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alexander-berkman-what-is-communist-anarchism
I would love to know how those people think destroying infrastructure will make things better for them. Especially with presidential elections in May.
Because they’re French. It worked for them in the past. They’ve learned that after just protesting fails, you have to escalate and getting rabidly angry is a classic French stereotype for a reason.
The teens that are looting and starting fires dgaf about making things better
The implication is that the violence will extend to the people in charge if things don’t change.
If people are willing to destroy things that benefit them to enact change, what will they do to the people who are harming them with their policies?
The implication is that the violence will extend to the people in charge if things don’t change.
To Macron? Who will no longer be president in May? Yeah, I’m sure he will fix everything in his lame duck period because he’s scared.
nah dude, read between the lines. it’s obviously a warning to macron and whoever comes after to better do a good job.
Yeah, that’s a nice fantasy.
I guess not everyone in the protests is for burning down things. However the signal is: we dont need fancy buildings if we got no future. Also one view was school runs so long (with very low time ROI for the pupils) it feels like prison. So i can understand why official buildings may b a valid target.
Can’t make any waves now, best just get along… /s
They keep alluding to migrants being the violent ones, am I understanding this correctly? Also they mention this was organized crime basically? Any facts to back that up?
I’m wondering how they actually plan on addressing the root issue here of wealth inequality and cost of living issues… The country’s finances are not doing well from what I can see…
the public broadcaster of Belgium today called them ‘professional rioters’. No follow-up explanation, just casually planting that seed…
I scanned the reddit frontpage today like I occasionally do to see if there’s any news that hasn’t hit the Fediverse yet… and let me tell you, the propaganda bots are out in fucking force because I saw numerous videos of the French protests where it was black masked jerks harassing individuals, stealing, looting. Of course it was in the “usual suspects” of subs like /r/publicfreakout.
At least three posts within the first two pages of results on reddit when you’re not logged in that are nothing but videos and comments dragging the entire protest.
There is a concerted effort to make the claim the students never cared about education, they just wanted to criminally wreck everything. I don’t know who, but someone with a lot of money is pushing this narrative hard.
we have no way of knowing what’s going on, all we know is that there’s at least 1 ethnically french person rioting, at least 1 black person rioting and at least 1 student who’s rioting. among those groups, we don’t know whether it’s (99%, 1%, 1%), (1%, 99%, 1%) or (1%, 1%, 99%).
and frankly i don’t think it matters either.
Just like at every single protest in France. People protest legitimately, a few assholes come in to just break stuff and throw punches, media and politics focus on these.
Sounds a lot like protests in the USA. Minneapolis remembers black umbrella man setting the AutoZone on fire, giving the cops a chance to regroup, and became something the media focused on and it wasn’t proven he was a white supremacist agitator until later… and the news had moved on by that point and that was mostly only covered by smaller publications. New York Times wasn’t about to give an expose about how right wing agitators helped the police have a police riot. Not once did our media refer to it as a “police riot” even though beating the living shit out of angry citizens because you murdered an innocent is a police riot.
Tbh it’s completely legitimate to be angry at the oligarchy and to attack its capital within reach. Illegal, of course, yet legitimate. The politicians will use any excuse to hunt you down anyway, regardless of how peaceful one’s actions are at the protest. They never play fair.
but someone with a lot of money is pushing this narrative hard.
I mean, presumably many of them. The number one reason bad policy happens is that it makes the rich richer.
Check out the threads about this on r/ArchitecturalRevival and r/Lost_Architecture. Just thousands of comments blaming immigrants. As if only immigrants have just spent weeks protesting the government. I could swear this is a concerted effort to spread this message
They should really be blaming a capitalist system that places zero value on the past.
Like house flippers who remove all personality from houses and turn them into drab, grey, “modern” bullshit that nobody actually likes except losers who don’t have taste of any sort.
I saw the same, there is definitely a campaign going on right now. My guess is trying to rile people up about immigration, fire up the base for the US midterms.
I wish I could disagree with you but it seems US voters are so fucking stupid and racist that immigration in a country halfway across the world is enough to get them angry and motivated to vote.
Musk
Almost assuredly.
Lol, migrants. Everyone’s pissed af because there is no future, rich fucks keep getting richer and everyone else trying to survive. That’s not about migrants
That’s what I was thinking… This article at least twice alludes to it being gangs of migrants or something doing this…
Seems a bit too convenient of an excuse if you ask me…
Nah that’s propaganda. The violent ones are mostly the police, and the occasional dipshit. It started with highschoolers/college kids wanting decent learning conditions. As in, having teachers, chairs to sit on, not wanting rats in classrooms,and school not crumbling onto them.
The answer to that from the government was to send riot police and maim the kids. Then all the media focused on the material damage, and it went downhill from that. The government spends more daily to squash the protest than it would have helping the kids.
Then the yellow jackets started to organise again as well and planned on having a big protest yesterday. It went smoothly for the most part, except for the police (unsurprisingly) pepper spraying protesters left and right before the protests even began. Then it went downhill because of rioters and looters (a sizable portion of them being cops, caught in camera, again, unsurprisingly), and the historic town hall of Limoges burning down (I don’t think we know who started the fire yet).
Basically it’s the government gaslighting us, and blaming us for material violence after 10 or so years of systemic and institutional violence.
Not pepper spraying, using CS gas. Otherwise all correct.
and all it took was action from the “bad” protestors not protesting “the right way”.
Imagine if America had the balls
They won’t. They like bitching and moaning about patriotism and doctrines instead of actually doing something for the greater good.
It’s due to the cult of individualism and a media-ecosystem that re-enforces the “only a single strong man can save the world” idea with endless superhero movies, TV shows, and the like. Doesn’t even have to be superheroes, honestly. Anything where magically problems are solved by the actions of one person.
It has everyone in this mode where they won’t organize not only because they don’t know how but because the lone-hero narrative is so deeply ingrained in the culture (going as far back as The Lone Ranger) that Americans struggle to think outside that narrative. “Organizing” is literally a foreign concept to 99% of us.
Source: Am American. I try to talk about parallel systems and building new governance from the bottom up but literally all anyone wants to do is “buy guns” like that solves anything. Organizing just to take care of each other is too big of an ask apparently, let alone organizing to risk your life for the betterment of society. We can’t even get organized when there isn’t a functional risk to society.
EDIT: Also my personal pet conspiracy theory is that “group projects” in elementary and high school are designed to make people think working in groups is pointless since it’s a group grade and one person can just bail on doing anything… Yeah, because we incentivize bailing as a culture. I wonder why kids are so primed to do it.
