[Peace] Fwd: Joining the Yellow Vests in Champaign (Date and Time change)

[Karen Aram]

...and War and the big one: Capitalism, itself.

BRING A YELLOW VEST and meet in DOWNTOWN CHAMPAIGN AT THE INTERSECTION OF NEIL AND MAIN/CHURCH ST. on Saturday AT 4:00 PM to join us for a peaceful rally in solidarity with our fellow working people abroad and to protest the same things that many of them are protesting.

The French yellow vests (gilets jaunes) protest movement is an erupting movement pointing to the need to oppose neo-liberalism and capitalism in today's society. It started out as a popular protest against a gasoline tax, with close to 500,000 people blockading roads and roundabouts on Saturday 17 November (the day the protests started); and, since forcing French President Emmanuel Macron to back down on implementing the gasoline tax, the protests have turned into a movement with much wider demands. One of the main demands, at the moment, is for President Macron to step down.

Since it erupted three weeks ago, the wave of protests against the so-called “environment tax” on diesel fuel has become a massive anti-government force. This tax was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It came after a spate of cuts in social spending, including on pensions and a big increase in the unemployment rate (with ten million unemployed or under-employed). This was at the same time as the bosses and the rich were given massive new tax breaks.

The protests have opposed other austerity measures, which cut the living standards of working class people. For example, a hundred schools were blockaded by students protesting against president Macron’s education “reforms" which are aimed at increasing school fees and tightening university entrance selection in order to further exclude children from low-income families. And paramedics blocked the approaches to the National Assembly in protest against changes in their working conditions, with at least a hundred ambulances involved.

The gasoline tax would have made it increasingly prohibitively expensive for French people to drive their cars to work. In a society that is always increasingly engineered for car travel, working class people often have very little choice of how to travel to work each day. So the Yellow Vest movement, in many ways, started as a movement against the mainstream propensity for blaming working class people for the climate crisis and forcing workers to make changes instead of forcing the rich and the capitalist class to make the big changes that it will take to stop climate change.

The climate crisis is NOT the fault of the working class, and individual solutions (like changing your light bulbs), are ABSOLUTELY NOT ENOUGH! The recent UN climate report says we have 12 YEARS LEFT TO MAKE DRASTIC CUTS TO CARBON EMISSIONS. And if we don't do so, CLIMATE CHANGE IS ON THE VERGE OF EFFECTIVELY BECOME AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO VERY LARGE PARTS OF THE WORLD POPULATION! So massive systemic changes are needed NOW, not at the snail's pace that has been set forth by the previous international climate agreements, including the Paris Climate Agreement!!

There are large sections of the movement which are explicitly left-wing. Many unions and left-wing organizations have joined and called actions in support of the movement, including former presidential candidate and leader of France Insoumise (France Unbowed) Jean-Luc Melenchon.. But there are also large parts of the right-wing and the extreme racist and xenophobic right-wing which support the protest, like the main far right-wing party, Rassemblement National (formerly the National Front), led by Marine Le Pen.

Here at home, in the US, we face many of the same problems: cut backs on social programs, a mainstream attitude that blames the working class for climate change and pushes individualist solutions (which are not real solutions), and a growing racist, xenophobic far right.

Meanwhile the mainstream US media is barely even covering the Yellow Vest protests, some of the biggest protests in France in 5 decades.

So join us in showing our solidarity with the French protesters and our opposition to these massive ills of society, brought to you by capitalism, itself.

*It is important that there is no intimidation by any member and zero violence or vandalism.

*Record every interaction with authorities, and with any right-wingers who come out to intimidate us.

*Your actions will reflect on the movement and we will not be responsible for aggressive behavior on the part of anyone present.

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