Liberté, égalité, fraternité

[hazard]

Interesantan tekst o usponu Makrona i njegovom ,,padu" zbog Žutih prsluka:

 

Jupiter's Rise and Fall

 

Ceo tekst je dobar, objašnjava ko je Makron, koga predstavlja, i kako je uspeo da sa vrlo ograničenom podrškom (ideološki njega podržava oko 20% francuskog društva max.) dođe na vlast, osvoji ogromnu većinu u skupštini i istripuje se da može da radi šta hoće. Meni je najbolji treći deo o tome šta žuti prsluci govore o demokratiji i odnosu većine birača i političke elite:

 

Quote

What happened with the yellow vests movement is that Macron suddenly realized that the reason Hollande didn’t want to go as far as him, was that Hollande was aware of the limits that public opinion places on what even the president can do. Macron completely misunderstood the implications of the fact that he had such a narrow political base and vastly underestimated the constraints that it placed on his action. He thought that, since he controlled both the parliament and the administration, he would just be able to do what he wanted. The yellow vests movement taught him, although I don’t think he really understands it yet, that you couldn’t reform a country against the will of the overwhelming majority of its population.

 

Although they were not given as much free reign as they would have wanted, technocrats have still been in charge for a long time now and the results they have achieved are nothing to boast about, to say the least. Even if they are sometimes right, which they no doubt are, they are clearly not so right that, after several decades of technocratic rule, people are clamoring for more. They’re selling a neoliberal paradise, but nobody is buying. The result is that, as one government after another fails to improve the situation in any meaningful way and the elites refuse to even consider the possibility that actually they might not be as smart as they think, the gap between them and the people keep growing and has now become very large on several crucial issues. In a society where the democratic principle of legitimacy, according to which a government is only regarded as legitimate insofar as people believe it defends what they perceive as their interests, such a gap is simply not sustainable in the long term.

 

It’s particularly striking that, even though the yellow vests movement started more than 10 weeks ago and at this point is openly demanding that Macron resign, 67 percent of the people still support it or have sympathy for it according to a recent poll. In other words, a majority of the French people supports or has sympathy for a movement whose main demand is that the legally elected president step down before the end of his term. Despite what many hysterical pundits seem to think, this is not because people have turned into anti-democratic extremists, but on the contrary because they consider that Macron’s government does not have any democratic legitimacy and, in a very important sense, this is hard to deny. Indeed, as we have seen, only a tiny minority of people are ideologically aligned with Macron. I believe this crisis of legitimacy plays a major role in the current political situation.

 

Although initially the yellow vests movement focused on taxes and the cost of living, the protesters soon started to formulate demands that went far beyond that. In particular, many of them complained about a lack of democracy, a concern they share with the vast majority of the population. According to the latest wave of a survey about political attitudes conducted on a regular basis, 70 percent of the people think that democracy doesn’t work at all or not very well in France. Moreover, this is not something that started with Macron, this figure has been consistently high and trending up for more than a decade. A whopping 85 percent think that political leaders care little or not at all about their opinion. Of course, they are right about that, for political leaders couldn’t care less about what they think, except insofar as they want to get reelected.

 

In fact, it’s not just that political leaders don’t care about their opinion, it’s that they despise it and think it’s dangerous. This is why they increasingly seek to shield the decision-making process from democratic control by various means. The European Union, in which decision makers are far removed from the population to which their decisions apply, is how they achieve that in the realm of economic policy. They do the same thing with immigration by signing treaties on human rights, which are then interpreted extensively by courts, without any kind of democratic control. Independent agencies are set up, filled with experts appointed by the government or even sometimes by other independent bodies, to devise rules that apply to everyone, even though neither the rules themselves nor the composition of those agencies were ever the object of a public debate. People must be protected against themselves by institutions that ensure the decisions will be made by those who know better. In the name of this paternalist conception of politics, democracy is slowly emptied of its substance, as the people have less and less influence on the way they are governed.

 

In order to address this problem, some of the yellow vests proposed to introduce a mechanism of direct democracy, modeled after the popular initiative system in Switzerland. This would allow a sufficient number of citizens to launch a referendum to vote a law or change the Constitution, which at the moment can only be done by the president. In France, a referendum was organized for the last time in 2005, to decide whether the treaty establishing a constitution for Europe should be ratified. It was rejected by almost 55 percent of the voters [...] After that no government wanted to take the risk of being rebuffed again.

 

This proposal sent the sophisticates into a frenzy. Pundits spent the past few weeks explaining that, should such a mechanism of direct democracy be introduced in France, chaos would immediately ensue. This is not the place to refute the dishonest, nonsensical arguments they have used against this proposal, but what needs to be noted here is that it revealed that 1) the elites have a perception of the people that is completely detached from reality and 2) they are convinced that most of the policies they support would never be approved by a majority of the people. For instance, many pundits and politicians claimed that with a mechanism like the Swiss popular initiative system, gay marriage would quickly be abolished, when in fact this has been a minority position in every poll for several years. Indeed, according to the most recent poll on the issue, only 23 percent of the people think gay marriage should be abolished.

 

Of course, they are right that, in many cases, the people would reject their policies, but they don’t seem to think it’s a problem if a small minority governs against the wishes of the vast majority of the people. In fact, not only do they not think it’s a problem, but they clearly think it’s how things should work, provided they take the minority in question to be sufficiently enlightened. Many people are in favor of some kind of epistocracy and I personally think it’s a respectable opinion, even though I also think the arguments used to support it are embarrassingly bad, but if that is what the elites support they should be open about it. Instead they pretend to be democrats and accuse people who refuse that a small minority of people govern against the wishes of the majority of undermining democracy.

 

With this crisis, Macron had the opportunity to strike a historical bargain. He could have agreed to give back some power to the people, allow them to take back a measure of control over some of the issues that have been captured by the elites for decades, in exchange for which they may have been more willing to go along with some of the things he would like to do. But this would have required that he be able to compromise and that he go against the class who put him where he is now, both things he is clearly incapable or unwilling to do except at the margins. The way in which Macron dealt with the yellow vests crisis shows that he is nothing but a mediocre technocrat incapable of rising above his condition and that he never will be anything more. He had a rendez-vous with history and failed to show up.

 

We have now reached a point where the elites can’t do what they want because they have been thoroughly demonetized, yet are not willing to compromise and give back some power to the people, because they have become terrified of the people in the name of which they are supposed to govern. The result is that nothing gets done, which only increases people’s defiance toward politicians because small, piecemeal reforms can’t produce large, visible results, in turn making it even harder to do meaningful reforms since this requires political capital that has vanished.

 

Macron was supposed to save Europe from the populist wave which threatened to engulf it. Instead, after just one year and a half in power and with three and a half more to go before the end of his term, he is already a zombie who can’t set a foot outside of his palace without a massive police presence to keep the population at bay. Moreover, because the measures he announced to quell the yellow vests movement are costly, France is going to violate its European commitments about deficit reduction. But fortunately for him the European Commission already announced that it was going to give France a pass. Italy, whose populist government the Commission doesn’t like, wasn’t so lucky, even though its deficit is actually lower than France and it has had a primary surplus for years.

 

Still, as I noted in the first part of this essay, the yellow vests crisis has changed the balance of power in Europe or rather it has made clear to everyone what was already true before (though somewhat hidden from view by the media’s infatuation with the French president), namely that Germany is alone at the helm and that, like his predecessors, Macron will do what Merkel wants. It’s hard to be the leader of Europe when thousands of your own people want to mount your head on a pike and the others are cheering them on. As the formation of Italy’s populist coalition, which so far is very popular, had already shown, the rumors of populism’s death in Europe were greatly exaggerated and the cognoscenti aren’t going to get rid of it by making ridiculous comparisons with the 1930’s in the hope that it will scare enough people into voting the right way. History is full of people who condemned themselves to irrelevance because they refused to change and most of them were at least as intelligent as today’s elites.

 

[Bojan]

Dobar tekst. U suštini govori o površnosti i potpuno neosnovanoj samouverenosti Makrona (što sam i ranije pominjao u diskusijama). Gafovi koje pravi bi se čak dali i prevazići da nije ovakvog pristupa. Neke diskusije koje smo ovde ranije imali upravo su i otkrivale neke specifičnosti francuskog predsedničkog sistema. Peta Republika je i nastala zbog potrebe za snažnim liderstvom u jednom momentu. De Gol je upravo dao primer kako bi jedan takav sistem trebao da funkcioniše. Jak predsednik bi imao ne samo mogućnost kreiranja državne politike i vođenja zemlje, već i neke kontinuirane veze sa građanima i njihovim potrebama. Morao bi biti osetljiv na kretanje javnog mnenja, ali bi istovremeno bio brana građana od birokratizovane administracije i tehnokratisanja.

 

Poslednji pravi predsednik u tom smislu bio je Širak. Miteran je u nasleđe ostavio jednu odgovornu socijalnu politiku zbog koje se verovatno Francuzi danas ne daju tako lako "reformisati". Kažem verovatno jer nemam neku bližu predstavu kako Francuska izgleda danas. Ali vidim i iz ovog teksta da je od Makrona bilo vrlo nesmotreno što je očekivao da će tako lako zaobići sindikate i strukovna udruženja. Istina je da Makron ima većinu u parlamentu, ali su isto tako parlamentarni izbori manje važni i obično slede, mnogo važnije, predsedničke izbore. Makron i sa 500 poslanika u parlamentu ne bi prošao mnogo bolje kada se javnost okrene protiv njega.

 

Ovde se pominje i Makronova veza sa elitom. Mislim jeste to neka elita, ali nisam siguran koliko on ima bliske kontakte sa pravim industrijalcima. Recimo, Dassaultovi su bliski sa republikancima, dok je Betankurova podržavala Sarkozija.

 

Mislim i da Makronov izbor ne predstavlja (niti je predstavljao) neki veliki kontraudar populizmu.

[hazard]

On 22.2.2019. at 0:47, Bojan said:

Ovde se pominje i Makronova veza sa elitom. Mislim jeste to neka elita, ali nisam siguran koliko on ima bliske kontakte sa pravim industrijalcima. Recimo, Dassaultovi su bliski sa republikancima, dok je Betankurova podržavala Sarkozija.

 

Tekst govori o Makronu kao o predstavniku ,,menadžerske klase" i ,,tehnokratske elite" (taj deo nisam preneo, mora da se otvori link, podugačak je tekst, iz tri dela). To nije ista grupa ljudi kao i veliki industrijalci, vlasnici velikih firmi, izdanici starih bogataških familija i sl. To je onaj sloj odmah ispod tih ljudi, u privatnom sektoru, i sloj na vrhu i pri vrhu državnog činovničkog aparata. Tako ja to tumačim.

[Venom]

17 hours ago, hazard said:

 

Tekst govori o Makronu kao o predstavniku ,,menadžerske klase" i ,,tehnokratske elite" (taj deo nisam preneo, mora da se otvori link, podugačak je tekst, iz tri dela). To nije ista grupa ljudi kao i veliki industrijalci, vlasnici velikih firmi, izdanici starih bogataških familija i sl. To je onaj sloj odmah ispod tih ljudi, u privatnom sektoru, i sloj na vrhu i pri vrhu državnog činovničkog aparata. Tako ja to tumačim.

 

[hazard]

 

[Bojan]

On 3.3.2019. at 20:08, hazard said:

 

Tekst govori o Makronu kao o predstavniku ,,menadžerske klase" i ,,tehnokratske elite" (taj deo nisam preneo, mora da se otvori link, podugačak je tekst, iz tri dela). To nije ista grupa ljudi kao i veliki industrijalci, vlasnici velikih firmi, izdanici starih bogataških familija i sl. To je onaj sloj odmah ispod tih ljudi, u privatnom sektoru, i sloj na vrhu i pri vrhu državnog činovničkog aparata. Tako ja to tumačim.

 

Tako se i meni čini. U suštini jedan, u ovom momentu, vrlo nepopularan sloj ljudi koji nikome ne može doneti širu podršku (kao što se u tekstu i kaže - onih 15%), niti se nazire da je u stanju da rešava probleme.

[fonTelefon]

Makaroni dozlogrdili protesti pa sada preti silom i zabranama zutoprslukasima. Kao da mu drzava nema svu potrebnu silu kontra sacice huligana. 

[braca]

Ima drzava silu, samo ima tu vise parametara. Prvo, mislili su da se protest izduvao posto je prethodnih nedelja bilo sve manje i manje ljudi... Drugo, policija je em premorena em imala naredjenje da po svaku cenu izbegava direktne sukobe i "preteranu upotrebu sile", zbog raznih ranjavanja koja su se desavala prethodno... Na primer, prosle subote jedva da su ispalili par komada flashball-a, dok su ih ranije obilato koristili... Trece, sudstvo jos uvek funkcionise nezavisno, pa vecinu uhapsenih ne uspevaju da osude zbog nedostatka dokaza... 

 

Sad su kocnice otpustene, ne bih voleo da sam u kozi demonstranata koji im padnu saka sledece subote... 

  

[fonTelefon]

4 minutes ago, braca said:

Ima drzava silu, samo ima tu vise parametara. Prvo, mislili su da se protest izduvao posto je prethodnih nedelja bilo sve manje i manje ljudi... Drugo, policija je em premorena em imala naredjenje da po svaku cenu izbegava direktne sukobe i "preteranu upotrebu sile", zbog raznih ranjavanja koja su se desavala prethodno... Na primer, prosle subote jedva da su ispalili par komada flashball-a, dok su ih ranije obilato koristili... Trece, sudstvo jos uvek funkcionise nezavisno, pa vecinu uhapsenih ne uspevaju da osude zbog nedostatka dokaza... 

 

Sad su kocnice otpustene, ne bih voleo da sam u kozi demonstranata koji im padnu saka sledece subote... 

  

Toliko je tanka opna demokratije u Francuskoj. Makarona nije nikakav finansijski strucnjak njemu su namestili par poslova da dobije pare i sada ih odradjuje. Svinjarije koje prave po Zapadu moraju im se kad tad olupati o glavu.

[braca]

24 minutes ago, fonTelefon said:

Toliko je tanka opna demokratije u Francuskoj. Makarona nije nikakav finansijski strucnjak njemu su namestili par poslova da dobije pare i sada ih odradjuje. Svinjarije koje prave po Zapadu moraju im se kad tad olupati o glavu.

Ah znaci jedino objasnjenje kako svet oko nas funkcionise su teorije zavere...  nemam volje ni vremena da o tome diskutujem, idi dokazuj da je zemlja ravna ploca

[nezvanova]

kao da je ivicka umesala prste 

 

[maheem]

kad sam video fotku danas na bunjuela me asocirala

 

Edited April 6, 2019 by maheem

[Caligula]

 

vaistinu Bunjuel

[renne]

Gori Notre Dame

[Tsai]

Jbt kakvi snimci, izgorece skroz