Darrell Castle talks about the French Yellow Vest Riots and the affect of President Macron's taxation policies on the middle and working class people of France.

Transcription / Notes:

 Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report.  Today is Friday December 7, 2018, and on today’s Report I will be talking about the climate change conference in Europe and the protests over increased taxation that eventually turned into riots in Paris.  First, I pause to remember that today is the 77th anniversary of the Day of Infamy that was the attack by Japanese naval and air forces against the United States base at Pearl Harbor 77 years ago today.

Meanwhile, anti-Macron riots have been taking place across France and threatening to spread across Europe.  It seems that the French people are becoming disenchanted with the promises of the French welfare state.  Perhaps they are, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, running out of other peoples’ money.  The riots have morphed from a working and middle class revolt against high fuel taxes into a general protest against the high cost of living in France and against French President Emmanuel Macron, whose popularity has been falling.

World leaders,  or at least the ones whose countries signed the 2015 Paris climate change agreement, have been meeting recently in Katowice, Poland, a coal mining town in the Silesia region of Poland.  About half of all the coal miners in the E.U. live there.  It’s interesting that they would choose that region for their climate change conference but they did.  The conference is for all the nations to reaffirm their commitment to the goals of the accord and they did except the United States.

The climate change guidelines are really designed to punish the working people of Western Nations since the world’s worst polluters, China and India, are given a pass and the third world nations are to be provided 100 billion annually by the Western nations. Why wouldn’t China and India be cheerleaders for the agreement because it handicaps their competitors and rewards them? The third world is very excited because they profit directly from the labor of workers in the West.

The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, decided that he would bring France into compliance with the agreement prior to the conference and also use France as an example so he imposed punitive tax increases on gasoline and diesel fuel as well as electricity. My understanding is that the tax brought the price of the American equivalent of a gallon of gas to about $7.50.  Macron said his goal was to get people out of their cars and trucks and also avoid a worldwide catastrophe resulting from carbonization of the atmosphere.

Any rational person can take a brief look at those goals and see that they are out of touch with reality.  The French people saw through what was happening to them pretty quickly and took their frustrations to the streets.  The protesters put on yellow vests to show solidarity and emphasize their numbers.  The initial protests had no obvious effect on Macron so the protesters turned them into a riot. Protesters burned cars, a Paris tradition, smashed windows, looted stores, and vandalized the Arc  de Triomphe with graffiti.

More than 100 people have been injured and hundreds arrested.  Macron, of course, said those responsible for the riots would pay.  A French government spokesman blamed the riots escalating from protests on people who hijacked the protests.  When asked why thousands of French police could not prevent the damage especially to a French landmark like the Arc, he said, “yesterday we made a choice—to protect people before material goods.”  The fact is that the police took off their helmets in symbolic sympathy with the protesters.

A spokesman for the protesters said that the fuel tax rise was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.  We’ve had enough, he said, "we have low salaries and pay too much tax and the combination is cre...