What does last week’s elections in France portend–for that country’s growing social and political polarization, for Europe, and parallels to the US? Listen to my Alternative Visions radio show of April 28 as guest and eyewitness to the election, Alan Benjamin, and I discuss this important event.
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http://alternativevisions.podbean.com
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http://prn.fm/?s=Alternative+Visions
SHOW ANNOUNCEMENT:
The show welcomes back guest, Alan Benjamin, an eyewitness to the recent elections in France last week, to discuss what’s going on in France. Will the right wing, Le Pen party, win in the runoff election coming up in a couple of weeks, or will the candidate backed by the French business and political elite, Macron, win? What are progressives and the left doing in response? Who is the progressive candidate, Melenchon, and how he almost made it to the runoff election. Behind the elections are the deteriorating economic conditions in France, as throughout Europe, and a growing attacks on jobs, wages, healthcare services, pensions and other benefits by French business elites. Benjamin explains the anti-worker law and privatizations of healthcare and education behind the election, driving resistance now taking place ‘from below’ that will aggressively reassert itself after the election. Is France headed for another ‘May 1968’ general strike? What are the parallels to conditions and developments in the US today? Jack Rasmus briefly introduces the show with comments on today’s just released US first quarter 2017 GDP figures, showing only a 0.7% growth rate in the US—a forecast predicted by Jack in the January 2, 2017 Alternative Visions show. (Next week show: Trump’s 100 Days record and what it means plus a deep analysis of Trump’s budget and tax cut proposals)
Excellent post. It clears up the wretched media distortions of May/June 1968 France. De Gaulle made a vicious attack on labor and France exploded in a general strike and de Gaulle resigned. It also identifies the present ongoing treachery of French union leaders who first did not agree upon one candidate and second did not authorize a general strike in 2017. So de Gaulle rises, with a lot of help from the EU, from the grave and completes his vicious attack on labor, single payer healthcare, and public education. It finally presents a clear perspective why the EU is so hated by labor in Europe as well as Great Britain. It puts to rest the fatuous idea that a few US progressives have who advocate a general strike; those progressives have no clue as to the monumental, decades long organizing efforts it requires to create the mass base for a general strike.
Noam Chomsky as well as George Orwell provides some guidance in this terrible situation where labor leaders in the US as well as Europe consistently betray their own constituencies. Chomsky uses the phrase “internalizing the values”to explain why superficially moral people would commit, among other things, horrendous were crimes. He also uses the phrase “cognitive dissonance” to explain why these same superficially moral people are baffled by why they are hated by their own constituencies. Orwell presented the same ideas in his elegant political tale Animal Farm.