[Peace-discuss] Jean Bricomont on yellow vests

[David Green]

Good economic insights--DG

https://therealnews.com/stories/frances-yellow-vest-protests-emerged-spontaneously-without-leadership

GREG WILPERT: It’s The Real News Network, and I’m Greg Wilpert.

France’s president Emmanuel Macron made a major concession to nationwide
protests this week when he decided to postpone fuel tax hikes and promised
to freeze electricity prices. Macron took a while to make the decision, and
just prior to the announcement tried to justify not reversing the tax hike.

EMMANUEL MACRON: You can’t be for the environment on Monday and against the
fuel price rises on Tuesday. You can’t decide on a carbon tax a few years
ago and then denounce the cost of fuel today. Now, I remind you that this
tax was voted in 2009, 2014, 2015, committing political figures of various
persuasions to it.

GREG WILPERT: Macron had to backtrack, though, after France was engulfed in
three weeks of protests of what came to be known as the yellow vests
movement, based on the protesters wearing yellow emergency vests that all
cars in France are required to have. Last weekend the protest turned
particularly violent, when protesters clashed with the police and also
caused over $4 million in damages, destroying storefronts and burning cars.
About 100 protesters and police were said to have been injured, and several
hundred were arrested. There’s a lot of controversy though in France as to
exactly who and what the yellow vest movement represents.

Joining me to help make sense of what is happening in France is Jean
Bricmont. Jean is a mathematical and statistical physicist at the
University of Louvain, and author of several books, including Humanitarian
Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War. He’s based in Brussels, but
joins us now from Paris, where he witnessed the protests up close. Thanks
for being here, John.

JEAN BRICMONT: Thank you for having me.

GREG WILPERT: So on the face of it it seems that the main grievance of the
gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, is that the fuel tax hike is too much,
which is quite understandable. I mean, if you put it in terms that a U.S.
audience would understand, the price of gasoline went up approximately 25
cents per gallon, to around $6 per gallon. That’s nearly three times as
much as what gas costs here in the United States. What would you say about
what these protests are about at the moment?

JEAN BRICMONT: Well, I think this was the trigger mechanism. You know, this
tax hike. The problem is that people are really fed up. And I’ve been
critical of the neoliberal policies ever since they started, with Mitterand
and even Giscard. But I did not expect the level of misery that I hear in
the testimonies of people saying they can’t make ends meet, they don’t have
anything to eat after the 20th or the 25th of the month. People describing
the situation in the hospital, which used to be one of the best medical
systems in the world, being absolutely dramatic. Waiting lines. You know, I
mean, all these things, I mean, just unbelievable how much France seems to
be being destroyed.

And I think the problem is not Macron. Macron, of course, was speaking
publicly like the elites are speaking privately, by showing utter contempt
for the people. And you know, that, of course, made him unpopular. But I
think the problem is much, much deeper, and has to do, I think, with what
we call globalization. I mean, it’s the same thing as in the United States.
I mean, you delocalize, either directly or indirectly. For example, you
probably know–I don’t know if you know those stores, Ikea. It’s a famous
Swedish department store for furniture and things like that. I mean,
everything there is Swedish, but it’s make believe. Everything that they
sell is made in China, or somewhere like that. Some places like that where
the salaries are low. So in fact you see there’s a real problem of
delocaliation. And then people don’t have, you know, they don’t have jobs.
And then their fake jobs, bureaucratic jobs are created artificially. Then
they don’t have the public services that they used to have, especially in
the rural areas. And they need their car to work, and et cetera.

Also, as a parenthesis, you might say, you might notice that France is one
of the least CO2 producing country because of the nuclear energy that they
get their electricity from. It’s much less than Germany, for example. And
the other thing is that the so-called elasticity of the price. So if you
increase the price you have to see how much it will affect the consumption.
Probably not very much. And if you are talking about the few percent of CO2
emissions worldwide, and the other countries don’t decrease them, the
effect of the temperature is going to be absolutely negligible. I mean,
it’s easy to make a computation, even using IPCC figures. So, you know,
this measure is used to fill up the deficit. The problem is really the
deficit.

The deficit, you see, it’s a huge deficit. And it’s the case of all
European countries, and even the United States. I think it’s related to the
lack of production, the fact that you don’t produce what you consume. You
get it from abroad. And then of course you have to create artificial jobs,
and you have to subsidize all kinds of people who don’t have real
productive jobs, and so on. And that’s what builds up the deficit. But the
problem is much, much older than Macron.

GREG WILPERT: Now, there’s a lot of speculation that there are far-right
elements behind the protests. One of individuals who called for them seems
to have been Frank Buhler, who used to be with the National Front, but was
kicked out for being too racist. But on the other hand, more recently one
could see also leftists supporting the protests. So first of all, how did
the protests come about? And secondly, as far as you can tell, who’s
organizing them?

JEAN BRICMONT: Well, I pretty much believe it’s spontaneous. You see, I
don’t know who organized it. There seemed to be all kinds of people who
have been doing that by the internet, and so on. I mean when there’ve been
color revolution elsewhere, people don’t necessarily believe that they are
organized. I mean, I think it’s pretty spontaneous.

There’s the business about the far right. It’s very interesting to see that
this is one of the talking point of the media and of the government. They
hunt for some racist remarks somewhere, or some anti-Semitic remark, that’s
even better. But you know, I can put a yellow vest on, go in the street,
and shout heil Hitler, Allahu Akbar, or free Palestine, something like
that, and that will get the media completely crazy. But I mean, it’s
totally unstructured movement. There’s no, you know, they don’t police
their own movement, they can’t expel people from the movement. Anybody can
put a yellow vest. Of course there’s been far-right people there.

But I don’t think it has anything to do with the far right as we know it in
other countries. In fact, it is to be credited to the French that this
movement is largely French and Republican. OK? But of course if you start
thinking that everything that’s French in the sense of being patriotic–they
sing the Marseillaise, they wave the French flag, et cetera–if you
assimilate that to the far right, then of course the Resistance was on the
far right, the French Revolution was on the far right, and any other
movement. And then of course we are going to real trouble, and the left has
been doing that for years, to associate every form of patriotism to the far
right. And that’s one of the reasons why the left is not presenting that
movement. There are people on the left in that moment, and there are people
on the left who try to join the movement.

But the problem is that the left should have been leading this movement for
years, you see, and it hasn’t been doing so. And it hasn’t been doing so
for two main reasons. One is the embrace of the European dream. They all
say well, we’re going to create a social Europe, et cetera. it’s
impossible. OK? Impossible. You can’t change the treaties. The treaties
have been made on a [inaudible] basis. And they have created the euro, that
creates imbalances between economies within the euroone, because there is
no transfer of wealth between the rich countries and the poor ones. And
it’s impossible to have the same currency between countries which used to
have huge fluctuation between their currencies. When de Gaulle introduced
the New Franc, it had the same value as the Deutsche mark. And when the
euro was introduced, it was three Franc for the Deutsche Mark. So you see
the same thing with the Lira in Italy, and so on.

So if you have these fluctuations, then suddenly you say all these
countries have the same value. But how would you do that? It’s a free
market economy. We didn’t go to a planned economy, as far as I know. And
then how do you prevent these fluctuations? You prevent these fluctuations
by austerity measures. That’s what they’ve been doing.

GREG WILPERT: I want to return to the question of the ecological aspect,
which you addressed earlier. As we saw in the clip, Macron has been
defending the tax increase as something that’s needed to develop a green
economy in France. Now, is this appeal to ecology resonating with people in
France at all?

JEAN BRICMONT: I don’t think so. Not very much, no. I don’t think, *because
people, as they say, we are worried about the end of the month, not the end
of the world. *They are worried–I mean, it’s really amazing. I mean, you
can’t do–I mean, I’ve said that for many years. You can’t have any–I mean,
you can have these either, you know, suicidal measures, as we call it. I
mean the [inaudible] or ecological measures. The people aren’t satisfied at
the socioeconomic level. You have to take care of that first. But taking
that, taking care of that first does not mean throwing money at problems,
which is more or less what the left is doing. The left is always saying,
well, you have to, you know, you have to subsidize this, subsidize that;
you have to help this and represent that. No, you have to save the
industrial base.

And that’s actually what de Gaulle did when you came back in ’58, after
another crazy–so then there was the Fourth Republic. And it seems to me
that we are living something like the end of the Fourth Republic without,
of course, a de Gaulle waiting in the wings. *But de Gaulle, of course,
what he did is made a huge loan from the population, not from the bank, and
then used it to build all the modern French economy; namely aeronautics.
You know, space, high-speed railroads, [inaudible], et cetera. There is
nothing comparable now, and nobody has any idea what to do.*

And so we are in really deep trouble. Because of course, I think,
eventually the government will control the yellow vests. I mean, the only
alternative would be a revolution, but there is not going to be a
revolution. It would need for the police and army to turn against the
government. The police is quite fed up, but they are still sufficiently
disciplined to impose their will, you know, to side with the government.
And if things don’t go into revolution, then eventually, of course, it will
die out, this movement, temporarily. But the frustration is enormous.

And I fear, of course, that eventually there will be a French Trump. I can
even give you the name of whom I think will be the French Trump,
Dupont-Aignon. But that’s just a conjecture. But there will be, you know,
because the anger is enormous, and there is no, there is no real solution.
I mean, I don’t think the French Trump would be a solution, either. But it
may appear to be.
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