PATRICE GREANVILLE—The Gilets Janes celebrate their first year anniversary amid media slandering. For many weeks now the people of #France have been brutalised by their own government… limbs, eyes lost, people dead and there has been no media coverage or world outcry. Less than 1 in a thousand Americans have heard about it, and far less understand the issues involved. Meanwhile, if the media—starting with the French media itself, except for Mediapart—”cover” the Gilets at all, it is to badmouth them, Thus the first anniversary of the Gilets demonstrations was headlined almost everywhere as a return of the “casseurs” (vandals and rioters).
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ALEX LANTIER—Vox’s rise is a classic example. While it has surged based on its anti-Catalan propaganda amid the wall-to-wall media denunciation of the independence referendum, no mass movement has emerged in Spain taking up Vox’s calls to deploy the army and execute political “criminals” in Catalonia. Polls confirm that large majorities of Spanish people support a negotiated settlement in Catalonia, despite the anti-Catalan hysteria in the media.
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PAUL STREET—Still, since the Yellow Jackets have risen up against capitalism in a popular and anti-capitalist movement., arch-capitalist FOX wasn’t eager to pay all that much more attention to the street-fighting men and women of France than did the Obama-Macronists at CNN and MSDNC. There’s a very simple reason I had to turn to the Internet to get any decent coverage and commentary on the yellow vests. The problems that have pushed ordinary French people into the streets and to support those ready to destroy bourgeois property are widely present – more present, in fact – in the United States. The U.S. is more plagued than any other rich Western nation by the savage inequality (of both condition and opportunity), plutocracy, corruption, insecurity/precarity, and debasing soullessness of contemporary eco-cidal capitalism – and of a constitutional political set-up that is badly out of step with the needs of its embattled working-class majority.
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When you consider Obama’s record after four years in office–a multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, the continuing “war on terror,” more civil liberties shredded, the Employee Free Choice Act abandoned, deportations on the rise, a deepening assault on public schools–the answer has to be no. The list of broken promises and betrayed hopes goes on and on, outweighing anything that could be described as progress.
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PAUL MITCHELL—What it is, at heart, however, is a superficial, rose-tinted soap opera that adds up to a crude distortion of history. It is a far cry from the reality—profoundly, extensively and subtly criticised by many socialists and artists who lived during the period. The series reflects the protracted decline of drama production and culture generally, the turn away from any interest or engagement with great social problems and the conditions of wide layers of the population.
