Fin de régime

Macron’s first instinct, after the uprising Saturday, was to go around getting photographed shaking hands with the cops. He of course cold shouldered anybody looking like a gilet jaune – such bad taste! Why, if only they had a good tailor maybe they would be part of the “dialogue”.

Melanchon, at least, did not spend a lot of time patting the boys in blue on the back. Nor decrying the tagging of the Arc de Triomphe. Paris, and the generation of 1968 that is now retired, spent a lot of time patting themselves on the back this year. Those 68 days – weren’t they the cards! And those wonderfully witty graffiti slogans: under the street is a beach, for instance.

Under the street, as we’ve learned since, there’s more street.  I much prefer the tag left Saturday on the Arc de Triomphe that reads, simply: Fin de régime.

Not that I believe that such things are accomplished in a weekend. If Macron actually did, by some miracle, fall, he’d be replaced by another suit. The suits have had a good fifty years since 1968. The rest, not so much. Inequality has skyrocketed, and finally, the people in “deep France” – or the people who work in your shops and restaurants and call you up for debts and drive the trucks that get you your goods – have watched their time for “living”, as opposed to making a living, shrink. Along with their services. The faux “eco” president has fed the inflation of housing prices in major cities and raised taxes on those who can least afford them – and who now have to commute on an increasingly ill funded mass transportation system, or in a car, to get to work. As Jeremy Harding, in a good article in the London Review put it:

“Macron has embarked on an admirable policy to mitigate climate change but he’s failed catastrophically to heed the advice of his former environment minister, Nicolas Hulot, who resigned in August. Hulot said the project would only work with grants, attainable tax incentives and green job creation for less advantaged sectors of the population. Not nearly enough of this is in place, or even in the offing. Meanwhile the people now blocking the roads in France have been left to suck up the blame for climate change. But there are few Jeremy Clarksons among them – the motorheads are mostly the ones who try to power their way through a go-slow – and no gilets jaunes I’ve talked to can afford to trade their elderly diesel vehicles for low-emissions alternatives, even with the subsidies announced in January, which are aimed at more prosperous classes and the car industry.

A recent survey carried out for the European Commission finds that transport is still the main source of greenhouse gas emissions in the EU, and that ‘rural living’ raises the per capita footprint significantly outside the cities. Nevertheless the decisive factor across urban and rural communities alike is how much money we have: the wealthier we are, the larger our footprint, by anywhere from 150 to 450 kg per person per additional €1000 in earnings. This is why wilderness-free Luxemburg has one of the highest carbon footprints in the EU and countries in the former eastern bloc – notably Romania and Hungary – have the lowest. It is inconceivable that Macron, a technocrat and number-cruncher before his entry into politics, is ignorant of these conclusions and similar findings in other climate-change studies. Why has he chosen to comply with the caricature put about by his enemies: Macron, ‘president of the rich’? Probably because he is. But shouldn’t he be bluffing by now? Even just a bit?”

I don’t think Macron is as aware of the numbers as Harding claims – the ignorance of economists when their ideology puts out its hand and says halt as they are looking at “figures” is a perpetual source of merriment and mockery to the rest of us.
Go to Willett's for the rest of the article!