EAT-Lancet Report is One-sided, Not Backed by Rigorous Science
Nutrition Coalition | January 29, 2019
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Report Based on Fundamentally Weak Science
This report is disturbing on a number of fronts. Most importantly, its diet lacks the backing of any rigorous science. Indeed, it does not cite a single clinical trial to support the idea that a vegan/vegetarian diet promotes good health or fights disease. Instead EAT-Lancet relies entirely on a type of science that is weak and demonstrably unreliable, called epidemiology. This kind of science has been shown to be accurate, when tested in rigorous clinical trials, only 0-20% of the time.[1][2] One wouldn’t bet on a football team with such poor odds, so why bet on the public health this way?
Even the most recent U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which clearly favored a vegetarian diet and recommended it to the entire U.S. public, found, in their review of the scientific evidence, that the power of this diet to fight any nutrition-related disease was “limited”— the lowest rank given for available data.
In the same vein, there is no rigorous (clinical trial) data on humans to show that red meat causes any kind of disease. This data can been seen in a 2-pager that The Nutrition Coalition published last week, in tandem with the EAT-Lancet report.
A One-sided Commission and No Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest
The EAT-Lancet commission was portrayed as the product of 37 scientists from around the world. However, in reality, the authors represented a very narrow range of opinions: 31 out of the 37 (>80%) had established published records as being in favor of vegetarian/vegan or anti-meat diets. This includes seven from a Stockholm think tank (and EAT co-founder) dedicated to reducing/eliminating meat for environmental reasons. Thus, although readers are given the impression that the EAT authors have been objectively convened to comprehensively evaluate the science, the reality is that this group was one-sided from the start. Instead of grappling with the very real scientific controversies that exist on these topics, the group considered virtually none of the science that contradicts their views.
On diet and health, the lead commissioner was Walter Willett, professor at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, and his extensive, significant potential conflicts of interest are published in a separate, 8-page document here.
It is also a matter of concern that none of the authors’ potential conflicts of interest were disclosed by The Lancet, an apparent violation of its standard disclosure policies.
The EAT Diet is Nutritionally Insufficient…
The EAT-Lancet diet is not only nutritionally deficient, it has been likened by some observers to the macrobiotic fad diets popular in the 1970s that resulted in severe protein and nutritional deficiencies.
UK researcher Zoe Harcombe, Ph.D., analyzed the EAT-Lancet diet and found it to provide only 17% of retinol (needed for eye health), 5% of our Vitamin D needs, 22% of sodium, 67% of potassium, 55% of calcium, and 88% of iron. Yet low as these numbers are, they would be worse still if one were to factor in the reality that most of these nutrients are less “bio-available” to humans when consumed from plant rather than animal sources.
The EAT diet is also deficient in Vitamin B12, which can only be obtained from animal foods. EAT’s note in the table below states that animal sources of protein can equally well be replaced with “plant proteins” but does not note that doing so would make the diet far more deficient in B12, which is crucial for the healthy growth and cognitive development of children, as well as the ongoing health of adults.
Thus, this diet is fairly sure to lead to malnutrition and ill health. Read Harcombe’s blog post on the subject here.
… And Inadequate in Protein
EAT-Lancet recommends .8g protein per kilogram of body weight, but many populations, including children, the overweight/obese, and most people over age 40, need more. Thus, the EAT-Lancet diet overlooks the majority of the world’s population.
EAT-Lancet also recognizes that animal foods contain the most complete proteins, ideal for human growth and health yet does not recommend that people consume these superior proteins in significant amounts. Instead, EAT recommends incomplete plant protein sources, such as beans and nuts.
Dietician and Nutritionist Diana Rodgers, points out in a blog post that in addition to being less complete, plant sources of protein come at a high cost, namely much higher calorie counts. She writes,
“To get the same amount [30 grams] of protein in a 4oz steak (181 calories) you’d need to eat 12oz of kidney beans (almost one pound!) plus a cup of rice, which equals 638 calories, and 122g of carbs.
“What about nuts? To get the 30g of protein from almonds, you would need to consume a little over 1 cup of chopped almonds, which is over 850 calories and 75g of fat. YIKES!”
The EAT Diet
This Report is Not for Children, Teen Girls, the Aged, Malnourished, etc…And For Everyone Else, You Still Need to Buy Supplements
Georgia Ede, MD, in Psychology Today, digs into the report and uncovers a number of uncomfortable facts.
Among her findings:
—Although the report says complete proteins cause cancer, it provides no evidence for that statement.
—And:
“The authors admit that it [the report] falls short of providing proper nutrition for growing children, adolescent girls, pregnant women, aging adults, the malnourished, and the impoverished — and that even those not within these special categories will need to take supplements to meet their basic [nutritional] requirements.”
EAT Diet Recommends A Fudge Pop Tart’s Worth of Sugar/Day?
One would think from the report’s language that its recommendations are all about eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, but in fact, EAT advises:
—Only 3% of calories from vegetables. Add the “potatoes/cassava” category, and the total creeps up to 5%
—Only 5% of calories from fruit
This does not appear to be a “more fruits and vegetables” report.
Rather, EAT promotes 8 teaspoons of sugar a day, which is about the equivalent of a fudge pop tart.
It also promotes 14% of calories as “unsaturated fats” which are defined as equal amounts of “olive, soybean, rapeseed, sunflower, and peanut oil.” Other than olive oil, these are all unnatural, industrial products that only entered the food supply about a century ago. Fourteen percent of calories in vegetable oils is far more than the average American now consumes.
Mostly, EAT recommends massive amounts of grains (rice, wheat, corn, soy, etc). According to EAT, these should comprise fully one third, or 32% of daily calories. Some 51% of a person’s daily calories should be consumed as carbohydrates, says EAT, according to Harcombe’s calculations.
Thus, we have a report recommending lots of wheat, rice, corn, soy and more sugar than most national guidelines. This diet is virtually toxic to people with diabetes or pre-diabetes and dangerously high in sugars for people struggling with obesity, heart diseases, fatty liver disease and other nutrition-related conditions.
If not for the public health, then whom does this diet serve?
The Corporate Interests Behind EAT-Lancet
EAT-Lancet was launched simultaneously in 40 cities with a massive PR budget. Who funded all this? All we know is that EAT has an extensive array of corporate partnerships.
Tim Rees of Nutritional Therapy Online created a table of all the EAT-Lancet corporate funders. These include;
—Seven Big Pharma companies, with drugs for many nutrition-related diseases
—About 20 Big Food companies, including Kellogg’s, Nestle, and PepsiCo.
Note that the companies selling highly processed foods, like Nestle and Kellogg’s are essentially vegan. The vast majority of packaged foods sold on the inner aisles of supermarkets—cookies, crackers, chips (crisps), candy, cereals—are made up of the same basic ingredients: soy, corn, grains, sugars, and salt. This is vegan. These companies would presumably like nothing more than to put a big green V on their packages to give them a reason to advertise their foods as healthy.
Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies profit from selling drugs, insulin, and devices that sick people need. Would these companies be backing EAT if this diet were to genuinely improve health, reduce disease, and thus, shrink their profits? It’s hard to imagine.
Moreover, also supporting the EAT-Lancet report are:
—14 chemical companies, including BASF, the “world’s largest chemical company.”
What is the interest of these companies in supporting a report targeting animal agriculture as the main driver of global warming if not—perhaps—to displace attention away from their own polluting activities? Or perhaps they make the pesticides that grow crops.
One cannot know the answer to all these questions, but the massive level of corporate backing clearly raises serious questions about the interests behind this report, especially when there is no rigorous evidence to support the idea that this diet promotes human health and quite a bit of evidence to show that it causes harm.
The Globe-Trotting Billionaires Behind the Report
The founder and executive chair of EAT, vegan Norwegian billionaire, Gunhild Stordalen, says she has a passion for preventing climate change. Shortly after publication of EAT-Lancet, however, she was revealed to be the owner of a $26 million private jet which she and her husband regularly fly to exotic locations around the world—thus emitting vast amounts of their own greenhouse gasses (GHG) and causing some observers to wonder if Stordalen was unwittingly enacting a modern-day version of “let them eat cake.”
The Mirror UK published, “Globe-trotting billionaire behind campaign to save planet accused of blatant hypocrisy.”
On Twitter, one observer did some calculations:
Thanks to Belinda Fettke and her article for this find.
One could ask, further, about the GHG emitted by the whole EAT-Lancet project. Thirty-seven authors from 16 countries were gathered together for at least two scientific meetings, followed in 2019 by at least 5 “launch” meetings by the Commission, as well as a further massive roll-out last week in 35 sites worldwide.
A second EAT-Lancet paper, released January 27th, involved 43 authors from countries around the globe, who were gathered for 9 “workshops” and 3 meetings in various locations worldwide. How much GHG was required to enable all this travel?
Although many researchers claim that planes, trains, and automobiles do not produce as much greenhouse gases as do cows, there are contrary views on this topic. For instance, as the Food and Agriculture Organization recently pointed out, the GHG of livestock have been calculated to include both direct and indirect costs, whereas the transport sector has been analyzed looking only at direct costs. I’m not an expert in the environmental issues here, but this does seem like a worrisome oversight.
One Other Significant Funder of EAT-Lancet: The Wellcome Trust
Among the complex network of funders behind EAT, the Wellcome Trust is a principal one, for the report’s scientific component (as opposed to the worldwide PR). The trust, with $29.2 billion in assets, is funded by the Wellcome family and its pharmaceutical fortune. This family also has a three-generation history in the 7th Day Adventist Church, including a member—the father of the trust’s founder—who was a church elder. The 7th Day Adventist Church promotes vegetarianism as part of its religious beliefs and has pursued an aggressive mission to spread these beliefs and practices around the world. This raises the disturbing question of whether a religious agenda might be informing the EAT-Lancet report.
EAT-Lancet Aggressive in its Policy Recommendations: Wants Near-Vegan Diet for All
EAT-Lancet states that “the scale of change to the food system is unlikely to be successful if left to the individual or the whim of consumer choice.” [Emphasis added.] Thus, the report advocates:
“hard policy interventions include laws, fiscal measures, subsidies and penalties, trade reconfiguration, and other economic and structural measures…. [C]ountries and authorities should not restrict themselves to narrow measures or soft interventions. Too often policy remains at the soft end of the policy ladder.”
Because meat taxes seems to be the intervention of choice, stay tuned for those… and other measures intervening in our daily choices about what to eat.
There’s a Better, Evidence-based Way Forward
In all, EAT-Lancet has every indication of being the product of international industrialist interests, from processed food companies, whose products provoke nutrition-related diseases, to pharmaceutical companies, whose profits are fueled by those diseases, to the world’s chemical companies, whose interests in environmental well-being are elusive. The common cause of these industries appears now to be scapegoating meat for all environmental and health ills. And they have found willing advocates in the committed, idealistic vegans and environmentalists who deeply believe in these solutions.
We should return to the fundamentals of good science. Establishing policy based on weak science leads to unintended consequences as we’ve seen time and again—with the mistaken policies recommending hormone replacement therapy, caps on cholesterol, and more. Such policies actually ended up causing far more harm than good, as the EAT diet seems bound to do.
What does the rigorous science say about the best way to reverse the epidemics of obesity and diabetes (and more) now crippling our nations? The rigorous evidence does not support a near-vegan diet. The answer must include animal foods, since they naturally contain the nutrients needed for healthy human growth and development.
Our way forward should be to gather a group of experts who could objectively identify the rigorous clinical trial data on healthy diets, and then work together to make those diets sustainable.
Footnotes:
[1] 0%, analysis specifically of nutritional epidemiology: https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2011.00506.x
[2] 20%: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16014596
Diesel driving ban in Stuttgart provokes Yellow Vest protests
Press TV – February 3, 2019
Hundreds of Germans have donned yellow vests to match protesters in France, demonstrating in the bastion of Germany’s car industry in Stuttgart against a recent driving ban on older diesels.
The protest came after organizers asked people to hit the streets clad in the yellow high-visibility vests that have defined months of protests in France — themselves triggered by an increase in tax on diesel.
“The French are an example to us, because they dared take to the streets to protect their rights,” organizer Vasilos Topalis told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Stuttgart is home of Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler, Volkswagen subsidiary Porsche and the world’s biggest car parts supplier Bosch.
Since January 1, only diesel vehicles meeting the Euro 5 emissions standard are allowed into Stuttgart, with efforts underway to implement similar driving bans in many German cities.
Topalis said tens of thousands of people are affected by the bans and cannot afford to buy a new car. “What’s happening to people is unjust,” he added.
The protest came as France’s yellow vest protesters returned to the streets Saturday to keep up the pressure on the government and decry the number of people being injured by police during demonstrations.
Multiple protests took place in Paris and other cities to denounce President Emmanuel Macron’s economic policies, which they view as favoring the rich, for the 12th straight weekend of demonstrations.
The government says around 2,000 people have been injured in protests since the movement began Nov. 17 and 10 people have died in traffic accidents related to yellow vest actions.
The protesters paid homage to those injured since the onset of the rallies on November 17.
Protesters and rights groups have denounced the French police’s response to the yellow vests marches as “excessive,” including their use of controversial high-velocity rubber bullets.
France’s Council of State, however, ruled Friday that security forces have a right to use them for crowd control.
Meanwhile, a bill is under debate in the French parliament to strengthen measures against protesters whom they view as troublemakers. Rights groups and opposition lawmakers say the bill goes too far in restricting the right to protest.
The bill would authorize police to prevent people they see as a serious threat to public order from taking part in protests. It would also make it a crime for protesters to conceal their faces during demonstrations.
Brits and the Holocaust
Not to see that Gaza is a concentration camp is a Holocaust denial!
By Gilad Atzmon | January 29, 2019
The British and Jewish press reported yesterday that a poll released to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day found that “1 in 20 British adults does not believe the Holocaust happened and 12% think the scale of the genocide has been exaggerated.”
Nearly half of those questioned said they did not know “how many Jews were murdered by the Nazis and one in five people thought fewer than two million Jews were killed.”
This is proof, once again, that the more they dogmatically insist on trumpeting the primacy of Jewish suffering, the less people are interested in the Jewish plight. The same principle applies to anti-Semitism, the more Jewish institutions bemoan the tragedy, opposition to Jewry grows in the Kingdom and beyond.
Speaking for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, which commissioned the poll, Olivia Marks-Woldman told the BBC that: “without a basic understanding of this recent history, we are in danger of failing to learn where a lack of respect for difference and hostility to others can ultimately lead.” If Marks-Woldman is truly concerned about ‘respect for difference and hostility to others’ she may want to point out what she and the Trust have done to stop the holocaust now taking place in Palestine at the hands of no other than the Jewish State.
Karen Pollack, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said in a statement that the survey showed “the need to increase education about the genocide.” How many more hours should BBC Radio 4 dedicate to the Nazi era and Jewish suffering bearing in mind that we have only 24 each day?
The Jewish press also noted that the poll results are consistent with CNN’s recent findings that one-fifth of Europeans believe Jewish people have too much influence in finance and politics, and one-third said they knew nothing at all or “just a little” about the Holocaust. I wonder if this means that it is time that Jewish institutions examine themselves and try to figure out what is at play here. Why are Europeans ‘denying’ the Jewish past? How is it possible that the more time, effort and money are invested in ‘Holocaust education’ the ‘less educated’ people seem to be?
But here’s the twist. The Times Of Israel reported yesterday that last December “a major European report found nearly 90 percent of European Jews feel that anti-Semitism has increased in their home countries.” Apparently the most common ‘anti-Semitic’ statements Jews heard were “comparisons between Israelis and the Nazis with regard to the Palestinians.”
Perhaps the Holocaust Memorial Trust ought to be reassured by this positive finding. Not only do Europeans and Brits understand the Holocaust, they manage to apply its message in a universal manner. They are disgusted by fascism, racism, ethnic cleansing and oppression and happen to see Israel’s leadership as the Nazis of our time. I accept that this may be offensive for some Jews, but it does indicate that the most important lesson of the Holocaust, the importance of opposition to racism and oppression, is well and widely understood.
Fighting Poverty with a Hate Map?
By Eve Mykytyn | OffGuardian | January 23, 2019
The name, ‘The Southern Poverty Law Center’ (SPLC) is misleading. The SPLC does little to alleviate poverty, its own stated goals are: fighting hate, teaching tolerance and seeking justice. At the moment, the SPLC lists its top activity as attempting to remove confederate statues and symbols. This is consistent with the activity for which the SPLC is best known, its annual hate map in which it locates so-called ‘hate’ groups on a map of the United States. How is it that one of the best funded poverty law centers acts as an arbitrar of hate instead of as an advocate for the poor?
The term ‘Poverty Law’ usually refers to the more mundane practice of representing poor people who are often un or under represented. But the SPLC’s goals are more lofty, here’s how Mark Potok, a Senior Fellow at SPLC described his mission.
It’s not what most in the media think. Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes…Our criteria for a ‘hate group’… have nothing to do with criminality or violence or any kind of guess we’re making about ‘this group could be dangerous.’ It’s strictly ideological. I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them”
Each year, the SPLC advertises over 900 hate groups on its hate map. Author Laird Wilcox says the SPLC “Has specialized [in] a highly developed and ritualized form of defamation … a way of harming and isolating people by denying their humanity and trying to convert them into something that deserves to be hated and eliminated. They accuse others of this but utilize their enormous resources to practice it on a mass scale themselves.”
To begin with, the SPLC uses a very loose definition of a hate group as:
an organization that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”
They bolster this with the false claim that the FBI uses a similar definition of hate crime:
[A] criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.”
But the FBI’s words do not refer to practices or beliefs, they characterize an actual crime which may have been inspired by bias.
Without advocating hate or prejudice I find the SPLC’s categories hilarious. They are: Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazi, White Nationalist, Racist Skinhead, Christian Identity, Neo-Confederate, Black Separatist, Anti-LGBT, Anti-Muslim, General Hate (Anti-Immigrant, Hate Music, Holocaust Denial and Radical Traditional Catholicism) and Other Hate (a grab bag of ‘hateful’ ideologies). Query, if a neo-nazi gets a haircut will he become a racist skinhead or a neo-confederate?
One ‘hate’ group, Radical Traditional Catholicism, are excoriated for blaming Jews for the killing of Christ and “They also embrace extremely conservative social ideals with respect to women.” Is this a hate group? Ultra Orthodox Jews have some pretty vile thoughts about non Jews and also adhere to extremely conservative social ideals for women. Why aren’t the Lubovitches, for instance, on the list?
Holocaust denial is the only hate group defined by simply questioning authority. SPLC claims such groups “only pretend to be interested in historical research.” Instead, even the claim that Jews may have died in ways other than the gas chambers form [hate groups] because they are used simply “to rehabilitate the German Nazis’ image as part of a bid to make the ideology of national socialism more acceptable.” A number of historians investigating World War II might find this assertion surprising.
“The SPLC’s list is wildly inflated,” said Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research at the Anti-Defamation League. The National Socialist Movement, for example, was listed 49 times in the 2015 Hate Map, since the count included each of the NSM’s individual chapters. The SPLC also counts single individuals as a group or chapter. The result is a count totally at odds with Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics. Hate crimes plummeted 24% between 1998 and 2013, according to the FBI. Yet the SPLC claims the number of hate groups in the U.S. shot up by 75% during this same period.
The SPLC has so many categories of ‘hate’ and those categories are political as much as violent. So is there any actual harm from a listing on the hate map?
There was when Floyd Lee Corkins entered the Family Research Council intending to kill as many as possible because “he found us listed as a hate group on the SPLC website,” said executive vice president retired Gen. William Boykin.
We and others like us who are on this ‘hate map’ believe that this is very reckless behavior… The only thing that we have in common is that we are all conservative organizations…”
Gurnee IL is an unlikely location for a hate group. A prosperous suburb of 30,000, the town is careful with its reputation with tourists as it is home to Six Flags Great America amusement park, the Gurnee Mills indoor shopping mall and the water park, Great Wolf Lodge.
But the SPLC bestowed upon Gurnee the label that makes small-town officials sweat. Towns usually earn their reputations as harbors for hate groups in more public ways. They may be unlucky enough to be the place the Klan decides to march and someone later dies (Charlottesville) or be home to the media-trolling Westboro Baptist Church (Topeka, Kansas). But for towns like Gurnee, designation as one of the 917 locales on SPLC’s Hate Map comes without warning or explanation.
When the town asked the self appointed cartographers of hate to remedy the listing they were told, “I know it is disturbing to find hate groups in your community but I don’t think that should be seen as a reflection of what I am sure is a wonderful community.” Sorry, but the map is only updated once a year. “Call back in January.” The town protested that its police had searched and failed to find a hate group in Gurnee. SPLC Intelligence Chief Heidi Beirich would not budge. “Even though the police couldn’t locate them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”
Given the low threshold for inclusion on the list, it is not surprising that other towns were included for questionable reasons. In 2004, Olathe, Colorado earned a white hood icon when a self-proclaimed “international imperial wizard” from Indiana told a Denver newspaper that a chapter in Olathe, “a little Klan klavern,” had asked him to come and speak. Neither he nor any of the town officials could name any of the members. Olathe stayed on SPLC’s list for three years.
Amana, Iowa, was placed on the hate map when someone at the SPLC spotted a chat thread on the Daily Stormer. Someone with the screen name “Concerned Troll” proposed a neo-Nazi “book club” meeting in an Amana café. No one in Amana was able to confirm to the SPLC whether or not the meeting actually took place, but that was enough to earn the corn-carpeted state its only swastika.
But still, Beidich worries more about undercounting than over inclusion. She thinks the undercount groups hide in shadows. She does not explain why listing what are ‘un’ hate groups, by her own criteria, will cause hate groups to emerge from the shadows. In fact, it is not clear why we are not all better off if a ‘hate’ group stays hidden.
French Democracy Dead or Alive?
The Gilets Jaunes in 2019
Gilets Jaunes song performed at French traffic circle: Les Gentils et les Méchants
By Diana Johnstone | Unz Review | January 11, 2019
Paris, France – French Democracy Dead or Alive? Or perhaps one should say, buried or revived? Because for the mass of ordinary people, far from the political, financial, media centers of power in Paris, democracy is already moribund, and their movement is an effort to save it. Ever since Margaret Thatcher decreed that “there is no alternative”, Western economic policy is made by technocrats for the benefit of financial markets, claiming that such benefits will trickle down to the populace. The trickle has largely dried up, and people are tired of having their needs and wishes totally ignored by an elite who “know best”.
President Emmanuel Macron’s New Year’s Eve address to the nation made it perfectly clear that after one unconvincing stab at throwing a few crumbs to the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) protest movement, he has determined to get tough.
France is entering a period of turmoil. The situation is very complex, but here are a few points to help grasp what this is all about.
- The METHODS
The Yellow Vests gather in conspicuous places where they can be seen: the Champs-Elysées in Paris, main squares in other cities towns, and the numerous traffic circles on the edge of small towns. Unlike traditional demonstrations, the Paris marches were very loose and spontaneous, people just walking around and talking to each other, with no leaders and no speeches.
The absence of leaders is inherent in the movement. All politicians, even friendly ones, are mistrusted and no one is looking for a new leader.
People are organizing their own meetings to develop their lists of grievances and demands.
In the village of Commercy, Lorraine, a half hour drive from Domrémy where Jeanne d’Arc was born, inhabitants gather to read their proclamation. Six of them read in turns, a paragraph each, making it quite clear that they want no leaders, no special spokesperson. They sometimes stumble over a word, they are not used to speaking in public like the TV talking heads. Their “Second appeal of the Gilets Jaunes de Commercy invites others to come to Commercy on January 26-27 for an “assembly of assemblies”.
- The DEMANDS
The people who first went out in the streets wearing Yellow Vests last November 17 were ostensibly protesting against a hike in gasoline and diesel taxes that would hit people in rural France the hardest. Obsessed with favoring “world cities”, the French government has taken one measure after another at the expense of small towns and villages and the people who live there. That was just the last straw. The movement rapidly moved on to the basic issue: the right of the people to have a say in measures taken that affect their lives. Democracy, in a word.
For decades, parties of the left and of the right, whatever their campaign speeches, once in office pursue policies dictated by “the markets”. For this reason, people have lost confidence in all parties and all politicians and are demanding new ways to get their wishes heard.
The fuel tax was soon forgotten as the list of demands grew longer. Critics of the movement note that achieving so many demands is quite impossible. It’s no use paying attention to popular demands, because the silly people ask for everything and its opposite.
That objection is answered by what has quickly emerged as the single overriding demand of the movement: the Citizens’ Initiative Referendum (CIR).
- The REFERENDUM
This demand illustrates the good sense of the movement. Rather than making a “must” list, the GJ merely ask that the people be allowed to choose, and the referendum is the way to choose. The demand is for a certain number of signatories – perhaps 700,000, perhaps more – to gain the right to call a referendum on an issue of their choice. The right to a CIR exists in Switzerland, Italy and California. The idea horrifies all those whose profession it is to know best. If the people vote, they will vote for all sorts of absurd things, the better-knowers observe with a shudder.
A modest teacher in a junior college in Marseilles, Etienne Chouard, has been developing for decades ideas on how to organize direct democracy, with the referendum at its center. His hour has come with the Yellow Vests. He insists that a referendum must always be held after a long debate and time for reflection, to avoid emotional spur-of-the-moment decisions. Such a referendum requires honest, independent media which are not all owned by special interests. It requires making sure that politicians who make the laws follow the popular will expressed in the referendum. All this suggests the need for a people’s constitutional convention.
The referendum is a bitter point in France, a powerful silent underlying cause of the whole Gilets Jaunes movement. In 2005, President Chirac (unwisely from his point of view) called for a popular referendum on ratification of the proposed Constitution of the European Union, certain it would be approved. The political class, with a few exceptions, went into full rhetoric, claiming a prosperous future as a new world power under the new Constitution and warning that otherwise Europe might be plunged back into World Wars I and II. However, ordinary citizens organized an extraordinary movement of popular self-education, as groups met to pour through the daunting legalistic documents, elucidating what they meant and what they implied. On May 29, 2005, with a turnout of 68%, the French voted 55% to reject the Constitution. Only Paris voted heavily in favor.
Three years later, the National Assembly – that is, politicians off all parties – voted to adopt virtually the same text, which in 2009 became the Treaty of Lisbon.
That blow to the clearly expressed popular will produced such disillusion that many backed helplessly away from politics. Now they are coming back.
- The VIOLENCE
From the start, the government has reacted with violence, in an apparent desire to provoke responding violence in order to condemn the movement as violent.
An army of police, dressed like robots, have surrounded and blocked groups of peaceful Yellow Vests, drowning them in clouds of teargas and firing flash balls directly at protesters, seriously wounding hundreds (no official figures). A number of people have lost an eye or a hand. The government has nothing to say about this.
On the third Saturday of protest, this army of police was unable to stop – or under orders to allow – a large number of hoodlums or Black Blocs (who knows?) to infiltrate the movement and smash property, vandalize shops, set fire to trash cans and parked cars, providing the world media with images proving that the Yellow Vests are dangerously violent.
Despite all this provocation, the Gilets Jaunes have remained remarkably calm and determined. But there are bound to be a few people who lose their tempers and try to fight back.
- The BOXER
On the 8th Saturday, January 5, a squad of plexiglass-protected police were violently attacking Gilets Jaunes on a bridge over the Seine when a big guy lost his temper, emerged from the crowd and went on the attack. With his fists, he beat down one policeman and caused the others to retreat. This amazing scene was filmed. You could see Yellow Vests trying to hold him back, but Rambo was unstoppable.
It turned out that this was Christophe Dettinger, a French Rom, former light heavyweight boxing champion of France. His nickname is “the Gypsy of Massy”. He got away from the scene, but made a video before turning himself in. “I reacted badly”, he said, when he saw police attacking women and other defenseless people. He urged the movement to go ahead peacefully.
Dettinger faces seven years in prison. Within a day, his defense fund had gathered 116,433 euros. The government shut it down – on what legal pretext I don’t know. Now a petition circulates on his behalf.
- The SLANDER
In his New Year’s Eve address, Macron patronizingly scolded his people telling them that “you can’t work less and earn more” – as if they all aspired to spending their lives lounging on a yacht and watching stock prices rise and fall.
Then he issued his declaration of war:
“These days I have seen unthinkable things and heard the unacceptable.” Apparently alluding to the few opposition politicians who dare sympathize with the protesters, he chastised those who pretend to “speak for the people”, but are only the “spokesmen for a hateful mob going after elected representatives, police, journalists, Jews, foreigners and homosexuals. It is simply the negation of France.”
The Gilets Jaunes haven’t been “going after” anybody. The police have been “going after” them. People have indeed spoken up vigorously against camera crews of channels that systematically distort the movement.
Not a word has been heard from the movement against foreigners or homosexuals.
The key word is Jews.
Qui veut noyer son chien l’accuse de la rage. (French proverb).
As the French saying goes, whoever wants to drown his dog claims he has rabies. Today whoever wants to ruin a career, take vengeance on a rival, disgrace an individual or destroy a movement accuses her, him, or it of antisemitism.
So, faced with a rising democratic movement, playing the “antisemitism” card was inevitable. It was almost a sure thing statistically. In almost any random batch of hundreds of thousands of people, you might find one or two who have something negative to say about a Jew. That’ll do it. The media hawks are on the outlook. The slightest incident can be used to suggest that the real motive of the movement is to revive the Holocaust.
This gently ironic little song, performed on one of France’s traffic circles, contrasts the “nice” establishment with the “bad” ordinary folk. It is a huge hit on YouTube. It gives the tone of the movement. Les Gentils et les Méchants.
It didn’t take long for this merry number to be accused of antisemitism. Why? Because it was ironically dedicated to two of the very most virulent critics of the Gilets Jaunes: May ’68 star Daniel Cohn-Bendit and old “new philosopher” Bernard-Henri Lévy. The new generation can’t stand them. But wait, they happen to be Jewish. Aha! Anti-Semitism!
- The REPRESSION
Faced with what government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux described as “agitators” and “insurrectionists” who want to “overthrow the government”, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced a new “law to better protect the right to demonstrate”. Its main measure: heavily punish organizers of a demonstration whose time and place have not had official approval.
In fact, the police had already arrested 33-year-old truck driver Eric Drouet for organizing a small candle ceremony in honor of the movement’s casualties. There have been many other arrests, with no information coming out about them. (Incidentally, over the holidays, hoodlums in the banlieues of several cities carried out their ritual burning of parked cars, with no particular publicity or crackdown. Those were cars of working class people who need them to go to work, not the precious cars in the rich section of Paris whose destruction caused such scandal.)
On January 7, Luc Ferry, a “philosopher” and former Minister of Youth, Education and Research, gave a radio interview on the very respectable Radio Classique in which he declared: “The police are not given the means to end this violence. It’s unbearable. Listen, frankly, when you see guys kick a poor policemen when he’s down, that’s enough! Let them use their arms once and for all, basta! […] As I recall, we have the world’s fourth army, capable of putting an end to this garbage.”
Ferry called on Macron to make a coalition with the Republicans in order to push through his “reforms”.
Last month, in a column against the Citizens’ Initiative Referendum, Ferry wrote that “the current disparaging of experts and criticism of elitism is the worst calamity of our times.”
- The ANTIFA
Wherever people gather, Antifa groups may pursue their indiscriminate search to root out “fascists”. In Bordeaux last Saturday, Yellow Vests had to fight off an attack by Antifa.
It is now completely clear (as indeed it always has been) that the self-styled “Antifascists” are the watch dogs of the status quo. In their tireless search for “fascists”, the Antifa attack anything that moves. In effect, they protect stagnation. And curiously enough, Antifa violence is tolerated by the same State and the same police who insult, attack and arrest more peaceful demonstrators. In short, the Antifa are the storm troopers of the current system.
- The MEDIA
Be skeptical. At least in France, mainstream media are solidly on the side of “order”, meaning Macron, and foreign media tend to echo what national media write and say. Also, as a general rule, when it comes to France, the Anglophone media often get it wrong.
- The END
It is not in sight. This may not be a revolution, but it is a revelation of the real nature of “the system”. Power lies with a technocracy in the service of “the Markets”, meaning the power of finance capital. This technocracy aspires to remake human society, our own societies and those all over the planet, in the interests of a certain capitalism. It uses economic sanctions, overwhelming propaganda and military force (NATO) in a “globalization” project that shapes people’s lives without their consent. Macron is the very embodiment of this system. He was chosen by that famous elite to carry through the measures dictated by “the Markets”, enforced by the European Union. He cannot give in. But now that people are awake to what is going on, they won’t stop either. For all the lamented decline in the school system, the French people today are as well-educated and reasonable as any population can be expected to be. If they are incapable of democracy, then democracy is impossible.
To be continued…
Priorities? Only 14 MPs showed up to debate ‘extreme poverty’ in the UK
RT | January 9, 2019
Ending poverty doesn’t seem to be a top priority for British MPs, as only 14 of them showed up to attend a parliamentary debate on the UN report urging the government to address the burning problem.
MPs were supposed to debate the findings of a United Nations report on ‘Extreme Poverty and Human Rights in Northern Ireland’ on Monday, but the House of Commons remained almost empty as the debate got underway.
Labour MP Liz McInnes, who did show up, accused the Conservative Party government of showing disdain towards the poor and said that the United States had shown similar disinterest when the UN highlighted poverty there.
“I know that we have a special relationship with the United States, but I think it shames us all that we share that disdain,” McInnes said.
UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty Professor Philip Alston said in November that the level of poverty in the UK risked causing damage to “the fabric of British society” and accused the Conservative government of favoring policies that compounded poverty levels in one of the richest countries in the world. The report said that the level of child poverty in particular in Britain was “not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster.”
Alston said that while the British government focuses on an impending exit from the European Union, it has treated poverty as an “afterthought” — an accusation which seems to be supported by the minimal attendance at Monday’s debate.
There was no sign of Theresa May or even new Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd, who sent a junior minister in her place.
The debate was hosted by Labour’s Shadow Minister for Children, Emma Lewell-Buck MP, who said that 14 million people across the UK live in poverty — one fifth of the population — and accused the government of inflicting “degradation, shame and harm” on the poorest in society.
Conservative MP Justin Tomlinson said the government would consider the report “seriously” but added that it does “not agree with all the points” made by Alston.
Organizer of Macron’s ‘grand debate’ with Yellow Vests defends her ‘shocking’ €176,000 salary
RT | January 8, 2019
Emmanuel Macron’s plan for a nationwide public debate, intended to defuse months of Gilets Jaunes protests, is off to a rocky start. The spotlight has shifted to the extravagant salary of the official in charge of organizing it.
Chantal Jouanno is a former sports minister in the conservative government of Nicolas Sarkozy, and the current chairwoman of the CNDP, an official body for public debates, a role for which she receives an annual salary of €176,000 ($201,000).
The prominent position for yet another well-paid bureaucrat has caused outrage against the backdrop of street protests that were fueled by the disconnect between decisions taken by financially secure public officials, and the impact they have on ordinary citizens, such as the now-cancelled petrol tax.
Jouanno, a former national karate champion, deployed a series of blocks to stave off the discontent.
She insisted she was not specifically being paid for the “unprecedented” public discussions, but for a broader role that she assumed last year, adding that she does not negotiate her salary, which is set by the “CNDP, whoever they are.”
“I think it’s important that people can express their shock with my salary, and if they want to propose a different salary for my role, they are free to do so,” she told France Info TV.
She was also defended by her colleague, Ecology Minister Francois de Rugy, who said that if people wanted political posts to be “filled for free, or the minimum wage, it means society no longer recognizes that there is a scale of responsibilities.” With a self-reported salary of just €114,000 ($130,400) per annum – de Rugy must consider himself to be about a third less responsible than Jouanno.
The French president’s proposal for three months of public consultations and town-hall debates starting from January 15 was a bold gambit, but fraught with risk. As part of the process, the government is sure to receive thousands of ambitious and contradictory demands, which may be at odds with its own past tax and labor reforms, and its planned pension proposals.
The government has already vowed to push back against even widely popular suggestions, such as reintroducing a wealth tax, which was abolished in 2017. However, it has promised that ideas proposed during the consultations will reach the National Assembly as early as April.
It is not yet clear whether the proposed measures will be enough to thin out the ranks of those turning out in major cities, battling police each weekend. Many representatives of the Yellow Vest movement have rejected Macron’s plan, and officials suggested that 25,000 people took to the streets at the weekend, with organizers claiming higher figures.
Labour’s Shadow Chancellor plans to slap new ‘green’ taxes on plane tickets
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 6, 2019
Labour’s John McDonnell is plotting a tax hike on plane tickets and getting rid of duty free at airports, the Treasury warned last night.
The Shadow Chancellor wants to put up levies on flying and increase rates paid on alcohol in the departure lounge, according to comments made by his team.
The changes could double the cost of a plane ticket – making a summer holiday somewhere sunny abroad out of reach for many hard-working families.
Shadow Treasury Minister Clive Lewis has vowed to crackdown on the ability of Briton fly by plane abroad if Labour are elected.
He said: ‘Growth in demand for UK air travel must be limited.’
He argued that they must ‘control and push down demand for flights’.
He called and a useful ‘lever’ to do this.
The current rate of APD sees the average family already paying £81 per year in ‘holiday tax’.
A new frequent-flyer tax and ending the duty-free status of flights and airport shopping are other options being discussed.
A £238 flight would rocket to £505 if all the measures are introduced, pricing many families out of a holiday completely, according to The Sun.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6561361/Warning-Labour-holiday-tax-families.html
Needless to say, the Labour Party assures us that this is not party policy, but we have heard that one before!
To argue that Air Passenger Duty a ‘fiscally progressive tax’ shows just how out of touch Labour are with their own roots. They seem to have the quaint idea that only rich people can afford to fly. It is working class families who will be hit hardest by APD, as they have kids to pay for as well.
No doubt McDonnell sees this as a nice little earner, but it is Clive Lewis who appears to give the game away. UK air travel must be cut, according to him, and to do so it must be priced out ordinary people’s budgets.
Meanwhile, Beijing’s new Daxing International Airport is due to open this autumn.
With eight runways serving 100 million passengers annually, Daxing International will becoming the world’s largest airport.
And China also aims to open 200 more airports by 2035:
The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) published a development report on Monday that aims to add 216 new airports by 2035 and develop a number of regional transport hubs.
According to the CAAC, China had 234 civil airports as of October this year and is expected to have around 450 by 2035, China Daily reports. Further, the demand for passenger transport in China will account for a quarter of the world’s total and exceed that of the US by 2035, making China the largest air passenger market in the world.
It also says that world-class airports will be built in the Yangtze River Delta region, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area and the Chongqing and Chengdu city cluster.
“Service has improved substantially, but existing airports are far from adequate and are unevenly distributed throughout the country,” said Dong Faxin, director of the administration’s development and planning department.
China’s airports are expected to handle 720 million trips by 2020 – up from 552 million last year – according to the the administration.
https://gbtimes.com/china-aims-to-develop-over-200-new-airports-by-2035
Does Clive Lewis really think stopping working class families from flying to Majorca will make any difference to the world’s climate?
Why France’s Yellow Vest Protests Have Been Ignored by “the Resistance” in the U.S.
By Max Parry • Unz Review • January 2, 2019
”The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.”— C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins
In less than two months, the yellow vests (“gilets jaunes”) movement in France has reshaped the political landscape in Europe. For a seventh straight week, demonstrations continued across the country even after concessions from a cowed President Emmanuel Macron while inspiring a wave of similar gatherings in neighboring states like Belgium and the Netherlands. Just as el-Sisi’s dictatorship banned the sale of high-visibility vests to prevent copycat rallies in Egypt, corporate media has predictably worked overtime trying to demonize the spontaneous and mostly leaderless working class movement in the hopes it will not spread elsewhere.
The media oligopoly initially attempted to ignore the insurrection altogether, but when forced to reckon with the yellow vests they maligned the incendiary marchers using horseshoe theory to suggest a confluence between far left and far right supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen. To the surprise of no one, mainstream pundits have also stoked fears of ‘Russian interference’ behind the unrest. We can assume that if the safety vests were ready-made off the assembly line of NGOs like the raised fist flags of Serbia’s OTPOR! movement, the presstitutes would be telling a different story.
It turned out that a crisis was not averted but merely postponed when Macron defeated his demagogue opponent Le Pen in the 2017 French election. While it is true that the gilets jaunes were partly impelled by an increase on fuel prices, contrary to the prevailing narrative their official demands are not limited to a carbon tax. They also consist of explicit ultimatums to increase the minimum wage, improve the standard of living, and an end to austerity, among other legitimate grievances. Since taking office, Macron has declared war on trade unions while pushing through enormous tax breaks for the wealthy (like himself) — it was just a matter of time until the French people had enough of the country’s privatization. It is only a shock to the oblivious establishment why the former Rothschild banker-turned-politician, who addressed the nation seated at a gold desk while Paris was ablaze, is suddenly in jeopardy of losing power. The status quo’s incognizance is reminiscent of Marie Antoinette who during the 18th century when told the peasants had no bread famously replied, “let them eat cake” as the masses starved under her husband Louis XIV.
While the media’s conspicuous blackout of coverage is partly to blame, the deafening silence from across the Atlantic in the United States is really because of the lack of class consciousness on its political left. With the exception of Occupy Wall Street, the American left has been so preoccupied with an endless race to the bottom in the two party ‘culture wars’ it is unable to comprehend an upheaval undivided by the contaminants of identity politics. A political opposition that isn’t fractured on social issues is simply unimaginable. Not to say the masses in France are exempt from the internal contradictions of the working class, but the fetishization of lifestyle politics in the U.S. has truly become its weakness. We will have to wait and see whether the yellow vests transform into a global movement or arrive in America, but for now the seeming lack of solidarity stateside equates to a complicity with Macron’s agenda.
It serves as a reminder of the historically revisionist understanding of French politics in the U.S. that is long-established. The middle class dominated left-wing in America ascribes to a historical reinterpretation of the French Revolution that is a large contributor of its aversion to transformative praxis in favor of incrementalism. The late Italian Marxist philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo, who died in June of this year, offered the most thorough understanding of its misreading of history in seminal works such as War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century. The liberal rereading of the French Revolution is the ideological basis for its rejection of the revolutionary tradition from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks that has neutralized the modern left to this day.
According to its revised history, the inevitable outcome of comprehensive systemic change is Robespierre’s so-called ‘Reign of Terror’, or the ‘purges’ of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. In its view, what began with the Locke and Montesquieu-influenced reforms of the constitutional monarchy was ‘hijacked’ by the radical Jacobin and sans-culotte factions. Losurdo explains that counter-revolutionaries eager to discredit the image of rebellion overemphasize its violence and bloodshed, and never properly contextualize it as self-defense against the real reign of terror by the ruling class. The idea behind this recasting of history is to conflate revolutionary politics with Nazi Germany whose racially-motivated genocide was truly the inheritor of the legacy of European colonialism, not the ancestry of the Jacobins or the Russian Revolution.
Maximilien Robespierre’s real crime in the eyes of bourgeois historians was attempting to fulfill the egalitarian ideals of republicanism by transferring political power from the aristocracy and nouveaux riche directly into the hands of the working class, just as the Paris Commune did nearly 80 years later. It is for this reason he subsequently became one of the most misunderstood and unfairly maligned figures in world history, perhaps one day to be absolved. The U.S. reaction to the yellow vests is a continuation of the denial and suppression of the class conflict inherent in the French Revolution which continues to seethe beneath the surfaces of capitalism today.
In today’s political climate, it is easy to forget that there have been periods where the American left was actually engaged with the crisis of global capitalism. In what seems like aeons ago, the anti-globalization movement in the wake of NAFTA culminated in huge protests in Seattle in 1999 which saw nearly 50,000 march against the World Trade Organization. Following the 2008 financial collapse, it briefly reemerged in the Occupy movement which was also swiftly put down by corporate-state repression. Currently, the political space once inhabited by the anti-globalization left has been supplanted by the ‘anti-globalist’ rhetoric mostly associated with right-wing populism.
Globalism and globalization may have qualitatively different meanings, but they nevertheless are interrelated. Although it is shortsighted, there are core accuracies in the former’s narrative that should be acknowledged. The idea of a shadowy world government isn’t exclusively adhered to by anti-establishment conservatives and it is right to suspect there is a worldwide cabal of secretive billionaire power brokers controlling events behind the scenes. There is indeed a ‘new world order’ with zero regard for the sovereignty of nation states, just as there is a ‘deep state.’ However, it is a ruling class not of paranoiac imagination but real life, and a right-wing billionaire like Robert Mercer is as much a globalist as George Soros.
Ever since capitalism emerged it has always been global. The current economic crisis is its latest cyclical downturn, impoverishing and alienating working people whose increasing hardship is what has led to the trending rejection of the EU. Imperialism has exported capital leading to the destruction of jobs in the home sectors of Western nations while outsourcing them to the third world. Over time, deep disgruntlement among the working class has grown toward an economic system that is clearly rigged against them, where the skewed distribution of capital gains and widespread tax evasion on the part of big business is camouflaged as buoyant economic growth. When it came crashing down in the last recession, the financial institutions responsible were bailed out using tax payer money instead of facing any consequences. Such grotesque unfairness has only been amplified by the austerity further transferring the burden from the 1% to the poor.
Before the gilets jaunes, the U.K.’s Brexit referendum in 2016 laid bare these deep class divisions within the European Union. One of the most significant events in the continent since WWII, it has ultimately threatened to reshape the Occident’s status in the post-war order as a whole. Brexit manifested out of divisions within Britain’s political parties, especially the Torys, which had been plagued for years by internal dispute over the EU. Those in power were blind to the warning signs of discontent toward a world economy in crisis and were shocked by the plebiscite in which the working class defied the powers that be against all odds with more than half voting to leave.
In general, well-to-do Brits were hard remainers while those suffering most severely from the destruction of industry, unemployment and austerity overwhelmingly chose to leave in what was described as a “peasants revolt” by the media. The value of the pound sterling quickly plunged and not long after the status of the United Kingdom as a whole came into question as Britain found itself at odds with Scotland’s unanimous decision to remain. Brexit tugged at the bonds holding the EU together and suddenly the collective standing clout of its member states is at stake in a potential breakup of the entire bloc.
Euroscepticism is also by no means a distinctly British phenomenon, as distrust has soared in countries hit the hardest by neoliberalism like Greece (80%), with Spain and France not far behind. In fact, before there was Brexit there was fear among the elite of a ‘Grexit.’ In response to its unprecedented debt crisis manufactured by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Greek people elected the Coalition of the Radical Left, SYRIZA, to a majority of legislative seats to the Hellenic Parliament during its 2015 bailout referendum. Unfortunately, the synthetic alliance turned out to be anything but radical and a trojan horse of the establishment. SYRIZA was elected on its promise to rescind the terms of Greek membership in the EU, but shortly after taking office it betrayed its constituency and agreed to the troika’s mass privatization. Even its former finance minister Yanis Varousfakis admitted that SYRIZA was a controlled opposition and auxiliary of the Soros Foundation.
Apart from suffering collective amnesia regarding the EU’s neoliberal policies, apparently the modern left is also in serious need of a history lesson regarding the federation’s fascist origins. It has been truly puzzling to see self-proclaimed progressives mourning Britain’s decision to withdraw from a continental union that was historically masterminded by former fifth columnists of Nazi Germany. It was in the aftermath of WWII’s devastation that the 1951 Treaty of Paris established the nucleus of the EU in the European Coal and Steel Community, a cooperative union formed by France, Italy, West Germany, and the three Benelux states (Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands). The Europe Declaration charter stated:
“By the signature of this Treaty, the involved parties give proof of their determination to create the first supranational institution and that thus they are laying the true foundation of an organized Europe. This Europe remains open to all European countries that have freedom of choice. We profoundly hope that other countries will join us in our common endeavor.”
The idea of forming a “supranational” union was conceived by the French statesman Robert Schuman, who during the outbreak of WWII served as the Under-Secretary of State for Refugees in the Reynaud government. When Nazi Germany invaded France in 1940, Schuman by all accounts willingly voted to grant absolute dictatorial powers to Marshall Philippe Pétain to become Head of State of the newly formed Vichy government, the puppet regime that ruled Nazi-occupied France until the Allied invasion in 1944. By doing so, he retained his position in parliament, though he later chose to resign. Following the war, like all Vichy collaborators Schuman was initially charged with the offense of indignité nationale (“national unworthiness”) and stripped of his civil rights as a traitor.
More than 4,000 alleged quislings were summarily executed following Operation Overlord and the Normandy landings, but the future EU designer was fortunate enough to have friends in high places. Schuman’s clemency was granted by none other than General Charles de Gaulle himself, the leader of the resistance during the war and future French President. Instantly, Schuman’s turncoat reputation was rehabilitated and his wartime activity whitewashed. Even though he had knowingly voted full authority to Pétain, the retention of his post in the Vichy government was veneered to have occurred somehow without his knowledge or consent.
Schuman is officially regarded as one of the eleven men who were ‘founding fathers’ of what later became the EU. One of the other major figures that contributed to the federal integration of the continent was Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Nuremberg Trials may have tried and executed most of the top leadership of the Nazi Party, but the post-war government that became West Germany was saturated with former Third Reich officials. Despite the purported post-war ‘denazification’ policy inscribed in the Potsdam agreement, many figures who had directly participated in the Holocaust were appointed to high positions in Adenauer’s administration and never prosecuted for their atrocities.
One such war criminal was the former Ministry of the Interior and drafter of the Nuremberg race statutes, Hans Globke, who became Adenauer’s right hand man as his Secretary of State and Chief of Staff. Adenauer also successfully lobbied the Allies to free most of the Wehrmacht war criminals in their custody, winning the support of then U.S. General and future President Dwight Eisenhower. By 1951, motivated by the desire to quickly rearm and integrate West Germany into NATO in the new Cold War, the policy of denazification was prematurely ended and countless offenders were allowed to reenter branches of government, military and public service. Their crimes against humanity took a backseat to the greater imperialist priority of rearmament against East Germany and the Soviets.
In the years following WWII, there was also concern among the elite of anti-Americanism growing in Western Europe. The annual Bilderberg Group conference was established in 1954 by Prince Bernard of the Netherlands, himself a former Reiter-SS Corps and Nazi Party member, to promote ‘Atlanticism’ and facilitate cooperation between American and European leaders. Invitations to the Bilderberg club meetings were extended to only the most exclusive paragons in politics, academia, the media, industry, and finance. In 2009, WikiLeaks revealed that it was at the infamous assembly where the hidden agenda of the European Coal and Steel Community, later the EU, was set:
“E. European Unity: The discussion on this subject revealed general support for the idea of European integration and unification among the participants from the six countries of the European Coal and Steel Community, and a recognition of the urgency of the problem. While members of the group held different views as to the method by which a common market could be set up, there was a general recognition of the dangers inherent in the present divided markets of Europe and the pressing need to bring the German people, together with the other peoples of Europe, into a common market. That the six countries of the Coal and Steel Community had definitely decided to establish a common market and that experts were now working this out was felt to be a most encouraging step forward and it was hoped that other countries would subsequently join it.”
Prince Bernard presides over the first annual Bilderberg meeting in 1954.
At the 1955 conference, the rudimentary idea for a European currency or what became the Eurozone was even discussed, three years before the Treaty of Rome which established the European Economic Community, without the public’s knowledge:
“A European speaker expressed concern about the need to achieve a common currency, and indicated that in his view this necessarily implied the creation of a central political authority.”
The mysterious Bilderberg gatherings are still held to this day under notorious secrecy and are frequently the subject of wild speculation. One can imagine a topic behind the scenes at this year’s meeting would be how to address the growth of anti-EU ‘populism’ and uprisings like the gilet jaunes. Hitlerite expansionism had been carried out on the Führer’s vision for a European federation in the Third Reich — in many respects, the EU is a rebranded realization of his plans for empire-building. How ironic that liberals are clinging to a multinational political union founded by fascist colluders while the same economic bloc is being opposed by today’s far right after its new Islamophobic facelift.
While nationalism may have played an instrumental role in Brexit, there is a manufactured hysteria hatched by the establishment which successfully reduced the complex range of reasons for the Leave EU vote to racism and flag-waving. They are now repeating this pattern by overstating the presence of the far right among the yellow vests. Such delirium not only demonizes workers but coercively repositions the left into supporting something it otherwise shouldn’t — the EU and by default its laissez-faire policies — thereby driving the masses further into the arms of the same far right. Echoes of this can be seen in the U.S. with the vapid response to journalist Angela Nagle’s recent article about the immigration crisis on the southern border. The faux-left built a straw man in their attack on Nagle, who dared to acknowledge that the establishment only really wants ‘open borders’ for an endless supply of low-wage labor from regions in the global south destabilized by U.S. militarism and trade liberalization. Aligning itself with the hollow, symbolic gestures of centrists has only deteriorated the standards of the left participating in such vacuousness and dragged down to the level of liberals.
There is no doubt Brexit and Trump pushed the xenophobia button and could not have come about without it. However, such criticism means nothing when it comes from moral posturers who claim to “stand with refugees” while supporting the very ‘humanitarian’ interventionist policies displacing them. Nativism was not the sole reason the majority voted to leave the EU and many working class minorities also were Brexiters. Of course their fellow workers and migrants are not the true cause of their misery. After all, it was not just chattel slaves who came to the U.S. unwillingly but European immigrants fleeing continental wars and starvation as well — the crisis in the EU today is no different.
Fundamentally, migrants seek asylum on Europe’s doorstep because of NATO’s imperial expansion and the unexpected arrival of Brexit has threatened to weaken the EU’s military arm. Already desperate to reinvent itself and a new enemy in Russia despite its functional obsolescence, the shock of the referendum has inconveniently undermined NATO’s ability to pressure Moscow and Beijing, a step forward for mitigating world peace in the long run and a silver lining to its outcome. It is the task of the left to reject the EU’s neoliberal project while transmitting the message that capital, not refugees, is the cause of the plight of the masses. It is also necessary to have faith in the people, something cynical liberals lack. Racism may historically be the achilles heel of the working class but underlying Brexit, the election of Trump, and the yellow vests is the spirit of defiance in working people, albeit one of political confusion in need of guidance.
If the yellow vests are today’s sans-culottes, like those which became the revolutionary partisans in the French Revolution, they will eventually need a Jacobin Club. Relatively progressive but ultimately reformist figures like Mélenchon are no such spearhead and will only lead them down the same dead end of SYRIZA. The absence of any such vanguard has forced the working class to take matters into their own hands in the interim. If history is any guide, the gilets jaunes will be stamped out until a new cadre takes the reins whose objective is, as Lenin said,“not to champion the degrading of the revolutionary to the level of an amateur, but to raise the amateurs to the level of revolutionaries.” We also cannot fall into ideological fantasies that we live in permanent revolutionary circumstances or that a spontaneous uprising can become comprehensive simply because of ingenious leadership. Nevertheless, as Mao Tse-Tung wrote, “a single spark can start a prairie fire” and hopefully the yellow vests are that flame.
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. Max may be reached at maxrparry@live.com
Soros ‘person of the year’ indeed: In 2018 globalists pushed peoples’ patience to the edge
By Robert Bridge | RT | December 29, 2018
Since 2015, the proponents of neoliberalism have been pushing ahead with their plans for open borders and globalist agenda without the consent of the people. The last 365 days saw that destructive agenda greatly challenged.
In light of the epic events that shaped our world in 2018, it seems the Yellow Vests – the thousands of French citizens who took to the streets of Paris to protest austerity and the rise of inequality – would have been a nice choice for the Financial Times’ ‘person of the year’ award. Instead, that title was bestowed upon the billionaire globalist, George Soros, who has arguably done more meddling in the affairs of modern democratic states than any other person on the planet.
Perhaps FT’s controversial nomination was an attempt to rally the forces of neoliberalism at a time when populism and nascent nationalism is sweeping the planet. Indeed, the shocking images coming out of France provide a grim wake-up call as to where we may be heading if the globalists continue to undermine the power of the nation-state.
It is no secret that neoliberalism relentlessly pursues a globalized, borderless world where labor, products, and services obey the hidden hand of the free market. What is less often mentioned, however, is that this system is far more concerned with promoting the well-being of corporations and cowboy capitalists than assisting the average person on the street. Indeed, many of the world’s most powerful companies today have mutated into “stateless superpowers,” while consumers are forced to endure crippling austerity measures amid plummeting standards of living. The year 2018 could be seen as the tipping point when the grass-roots movement against these dire conditions took off.
Since 2015, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants into Germany and the EU, a groundswell of animosity has been steadily building against the European Union, perhaps best exemplified by the Brexit movement. Quite simply, many people are growing weary of the globalist argument that Europe needs migrants and austerity measures to keep the wheels of the economy spinning. At the very least, luring migrants with cash incentives to move to Germany and elsewhere in the EU appears incredibly shortsighted.
Indeed, if the globalist George Soros wants to lend his Midas touch to ameliorating the migrant’s plight, why does he think that relocating them to European countries is the solution? As is becoming increasingly apparent in places like Sweden and France, efforts to assimilate people from vastly different cultures, religions and backgrounds is an extremely tricky venture, the success of which is far from guaranteed.
One worrying consequence of Europe’s season of open borders has been the rise of far-right political movements. In fact, some of the harshest criticism of the ‘Merkel plan’ originated in Hungary, where its gutsy president, Viktor Orban, hopes to build “an old-school Christian democracy, rooted in European traditions.” Orban is simply responding to the democratic will of his people, who are fiercely conservative, yet the EU parliament voted to punish him regardless. The move shows that Brussels, aside from being adverse to democratic principles, has very few tools for addressing the rise of far-right sentiment that its own misguided policies created.
Here it is necessary to mention once again that bugbear of the political right, Mr. Soros, who has received no political mandate from European voters, yet who campaigns relentlessly on behalf of globalist initiatives through his Open Society Foundations (OSF) (That campaign just got some serious clout after Soros injected $18bn dollars of his own money into OSF, making it one of the most influential NGOs in the world).
With no small amount of impudence, Soros has condemned EU countries – namely his native Hungary – for attempting to protect their territories by constructing border barriers and fences, which he believes violate the human rights of migrants (rarely if ever does the philanthropist speak about the “human rights” of the native population). In the words of the maestro of mayhem himself: “Beggar-thy-neighbor migration policies, such as building border fences, will not only further fragment the union; they also seriously damage European economies and subvert global human rights standards.”
Through a leaked network of compromised EU parliamentarians who do his bidding, Soros says the EU should spend $30 billion euros ($33bln) to accommodate “at least 300,000 refugees each year.” How will the EU pay for the resettling of migrants from the Middle East? Soros has an answer for that as well. He calls it “surge funding,” which entails “raising a substantial amount of debt backed by the EU’s relatively small budget.”
Any guesses who will be forced to pay down the debt on this high-risk venture? If you guessed George Soros, guess again. The already heavily taxed people of Europe will be forced to shoulder that heavy burden. “To finance it, new European taxes will have to be levied sooner or later,” Soros admits. That comment is very interesting in light of the recent French protests, which were triggered by Emmanuel Macron’s plan to impose a new fuel tax. Was the French leader, a former investment banker, attempting to get back some of the funds being used to support the influx of new arrivals into his country? The question seems like a valid one, and goes far at explaining the ongoing unrest.
At this point, it is worth remembering what triggered the exodus of migrants into Europe in the first place. A large part of the answer comes down to unlawful NATO operations on the ground of sovereign states. Since 2003, the 29-member military bloc, under the direct command of Washington, has conducted illicit military operations in various places around the globe, including in Iraq, Libya and Syria. These actions, which could be best described as globalism on steroids, have opened a Pandora’s Box of global scourges, including famine, terrorism and grinding poverty. Is this what the Western states mean by ‘humanitarian activism’? If the major EU countries really want to flout their humanitarian credentials, they could have started by demanding the cessation of regime-change operations throughout the Middle East and North Africa, which created such inhumane conditions for millions of innocent people.
This failure on the part of Western capitals to speak out against belligerent US foreign policy helps to explain why a number of other European governments are experiencing major shakeups. Sebastian Kurz, 32, won over the hearts of Austrian voters by promising to tackle unchecked immigration. In super-tolerant Sweden, which has accepted more migrants per capita than any other EU state, the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats party garnered 17.6 percent of the vote in September elections – up from 12.9 percent in the previous election. And even Angela Merkel, who is seen by many people as the de facto leader of the European Union, is watching her political star crash and burn mostly due to her bungling of the migrant crisis. In October, after her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) suffered a stinging setback in Bavaria elections, which saw CDU voters abandon ship for the anti-immigrant AfD and the Greens, Merkel announced she would resign in 2021 after her current term expires.
Meanwhile, back in the US, the government of President Donald Trump has been shut down as the Democrats refuse to grant the American leader the funds to build a wall on the Mexican border – despite the fact that he essentially made it to the White House on precisely that promise. Personally, I find it very hard to believe that any political party that does not support a strong and viable border can continue to be taken seriously at the polls for very long. Yet that is the very strategy that the Democrats have chosen. But I digress.
The lesson that Western governments should have learned over the last year from these developments is that there exists a definite red line that the globalists cross at risk not only to the social order, but to their own political fortunes. Eventually the people will demand solutions to their problems – many of which were caused by reckless neoliberal programs and austerity measures. This collective sense of desperation may open the door to any number of right-wing politicians only too happy to meet the demand.
Better to provide fair working conditions for the people while maintaining strong borders than have to face the wrath of the street or some political charlatan later. Whether or not Western leaders will change their neoliberal ways as a populist storm front approaches remains to be seen, but I for one am not betting on it.
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