The Growing Arrogance of Emmanuel Macron

After a few months, it appears that newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron is taking a page or two or three from the Donald Trump platform as well as Trump’s display of vanity. Like a reincarnated but taller version of Napoleon, Macron paraded into the Palace of Versailles a while back announcing extensive new changes to the French political establishment. Macron has broadcast that he plans to reduce the number of delegates in both the upper and lower houses of parliament by a third which for lack of a better phrase is just one phase of him “draining the swamp.” Macron has also channeled his Trumpian policy purview by focusing more and using tougher rhetoric. He is even pushing full steam ahead with his proposed tax cuts even given the $9.1 billion deficit in the French budget. However, the main observable overt behavioral comportment the new French president unfolds is a stuck-up and overbearing arrogance – even more than that of President Donald Trump.

He has other similarities to Trump also including his disdain for and continuous attempts to try and control the press. For example, he seldom speaks to the press and limits his public appearances to staged events in a similar manner as one of his unspoken political idols – Barack Obama. Like Trump, almost immediately after getting into office, he began to focus on fighting terrorism. First Macron created a counterterrorism task force. And has increased spending on fighting terrorism in former French colonies in Africa. But for Macron, all of this is to make him look good and concentrate supreme power and authority, regardless if his actions have substance or not, in his hands alone.

All of this has led some to take note of Mr. Macron of “authoritarian” tendencies.  In an interview, with Le Figaro he described his presidency and himself as the start of “a French renaissance [and] “European one as well,” The 39-year-old former Rothschild banker, has the support of the IMF and EU in his desire to decrease public spending. Then there are his proposed labor reforms, which has turned many of his voting block against him.   If people think that President Trump is arrogant and egotistical, then the same reasoning should fall in line for President Macron. Le Monde has reported that the president believes that his thinking did not "lend itself" to question and answer sessions such as those engendered during press conferences which resulted in him not having one on Bastille Day specifically because his"complex thoughts" may prove too much for journalists, reports say. Thus, in his mind, he Emmanuel Macron is too smart to communicate with, or to the serfs below him who put him in office. This may be why his popularity is even lower than the New USA President.

But if it were just smugness and disdain alone, he may not be perceived as so bad by the French populous.  However, there are other things – policy, that adds to his pomposity. There are his views regarding France’s labor code which he believes destroys jobs. Specifically, Macron’sdesire to harshly restrict payouts from labor boards to fired employees and reduce job protections. This singularly resulted in France’s largest labor unions too take to the streets in protest.  He has also cut social security allowances, housing subsidies, has proposed a partial lifting of the wealth tax and wishes to end local property taxes for 80 percent of those currently paying them starting in 2018. These events also led to widespread protest and this is just on the domestic side. His actions with respect to politics in France are also being severel ridiculed because from afar (not including spending $30,000 on make-up), he appears to put the desires of the EU, like reducing the budget deficit to 3% than for what is best and wanted by the citizens of France. Budget Minister Gerald Darmanin recently announced that the macron administration would cut 13 billion euros in funding for towns, departments and regions by 2022 to meet the EU goals.

There is a growing group of government officials upset by the president. Some say he blames them when policies he has approved are observed as unpopular by the populace. Others feel that he (through his interior minister Gérard Collomb) ignored the needsof migrants when they refused to open a new reception center at Calais for them. Others opposition party members have gone on the record to describe Macron as having "absolutist tendencies." National Front Leader Marine Le Pen said that" the ruling party is "choosing its opposition."

Macron has guaranteed to change by decree (without any input or resistance from the French Parliament) to permanently make the antiterrorism state of emergency standard rule and to reduce the military budget by €850m which some believe led to the resignation of Pierre de Villiers, the head of the armed forces. His decision to address the Congress of the French Parliament ahead of the prime minister'spolicy statement was also viewed as condescending.

The Republicans accuse Macron’s party of ignoring opposition when they appointed Thierry Solère of the majority, got an appointment (by secret ballot) that many say should have gone to the candidate of the largest opposition group, Republicans MP Eric Ciotti.  Macron is also rubbing other European leaders the wrong way. Just this past week he questioned the EU’s labor rules which allow firms to send temporary workers from low-wage countries to richer nations without having to pay social charges, causing Poland’s foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski to suggest that the reason why Mr. Macron was attacking other nations was because the French economy under Macron was not as strong as Poland’s economy.

Macron’s ego has lead him to put civil security above liberty. Only Macron’s Interior Ministry, with little review from the judicial branch has any say in searches and seizures and house arrests and the Macron administration can decide to close mosques if what is being said in them is not to their liking subjectively. Then there is way he talks about his populous as Italian psychiatrist Dr. Adriano Segator noted “When he talks about the poor or insults the workers of northern France, reducing them to smokers and alcoholics, when he denigrates women, lowering them to the level of the ignorant.” But this only makes sense. From an economic perspective, he is the classic neoliberal. He wishes to want to lower corporatetaxes and the cost of labor and reduce the amount of regulations that he believes prevents French business from be competitive on the international stage. And like neoliberals in the US, Macron advances fiscal policy that place the needs of public interest and government privatization over the needs and rights of the people.  If Macron isn’t the perfect example of arrogance, no one is.

Much Ado About Kaepernick

I would like to preface this by saying first, please ignore any of the characteristics that some may consider privileged, such as being born in and living during segregation in Memphis in the early 1960s, my IQ of 165 plus, that I speak four languages and read a fifth, and teach statistics and neuroanatomy & behavior. With this out of the way – I don’t give a grass hopper fck about Colin Kaepernick. I do care about him as a person, as I do all people, but I have no interest in his personal life or any other extraneous comportments regarding his existence and/or current circumstances.  I have nothing against him and accept unconditionally that he is a Super bowl caliber quarterback with talents that exceed in my view, 85% of the current first, second and third string quarter backs in the NFL at this moment. However, being good at your job is only a portion of the job description.

Even with this, I do not understand why so many people are upset about him, one man, one man in the top 1 percent of income earners in the USA, not having a job, playing a game called football. Is it because of his afro (which I admit is cool)? Or is it because folks are in their feelings because he selected to take a knee during the national anthem in protest of something he clearly never believed in from the start and that he did for attention anyway? I can say this accurately, for after he noticed NFL owners not looking in his directions, he announced to the public via ESPN that next season he will stand during the National Anthem under the simulacrum that he thinks his method of protest may be taking away from “positive change[s] he believes has been created.”

If he were truthful, he would just admit that he is changing his tune because he misses that loot - them millions from being signed to a NFL team as a quarterback. Back-up quarterbacks make a nice little penny in the NFL. Which is another problem I have, why are folk so mad and want to protest on behalf of a single man? They do not protest about the many former NFL players (many of which are African Americans) suffering from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) - the degenerative brain disease that is hypothesized to be the result of individuals suffering from repeated brain trauma. However, this would make too much sense, protesting for millions of dollars to go to research to understand the etiology and morphology surrounding how Tau proteins form, clumps and diffuse throughout the brain causing neural apoptosis in the process. The money that Kaepernick theoretically would be owed if under contract ($60 plus million) would go a long way for such research. But more than likely the people whom are upset that Kaepernick is unemployed may have Tau proteins of their own spreading throughout their brain given that C.T.E. often affects the pre frontal cortex, an area of the brain essential in executive function, Cognition, working memory, planning and abstract reasoning and the amygdala which is important in emotional control, aggression and anxiety. Cleary these folks are not thinking and allowing emotion to overpower reason.

The truth is Kaepernick is far from broke and more important issues need to be in the forefront than him getting additional millions to by expensive sports cars.  It is estimated that his net worth is between $16 and $22 million by some estimates.  What I believe this is all about is the tendency for African Americans to be preoccupied by mindless self-absorbed celebrity twaddle (living vicariously through the lives of others).  You make his problem your problem and develop a bond, albeit artificially concocted, of outrage rooted in thinking Colin is oppressed just like you – but he isn’t. But in your maniacal (obsessive enthusiasm) psychosis (thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality), you create something that doesn’t exist – he is being black balled. Maybe he is or maybe he isn’t, regardless there is no evidence for either position, just conjecture.

There are several things that are being overlooked.  The first is that the objective of any team, in this case a professional football is to win.  Have anyone thought about what would happen if he was signed by a team.  LeSean McCoy has and notes: "You just got to look at all sides, like if I'm an owner or the GM of a team, do I want to put him on my team? Is he good enough to be on the squad, to even deal with everything that's going on? That's something that I don't really partake in." Right or wrong, Kaepernick will be seen by some as a distraction not worth the attention. Then there is the fact that since his old coach left for the University of Michigan, he has not been the same performance wise.

So, people wake up.  This is not important and please stop comparing this lickspittle to Muhammad Ali, who for the record never begged to get his job back or go to the media and say “I will go and fight the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front, (Viet Cong) if you give me a job boxing again.”   Not to mention Ali was 100 percent African American, not that it matters, but Kaepernick is half white and was raised by a white couple who adopted him. We could be protesting many serious issues but unfortunately mindless celebrity twaddle wins again. Maybe we will realize our errors and protest Baltimore public schools where it was recently revealed that five Baltimore City high schools and one middle school do not have a single student proficient math and English, yet these schools have some of the highest graduation rates in the city. Or the senseless violence in our major urban and mostly black cities. But I doubt it, because the folks protesting a millionaire quarterback not having a job, likely went to public government schools.

Video: The History Of The Racist Democratic Party With Bill Whittle

Video: Cartoon predicts today more than 60 years ago.

Video: Malcolm X and Ali Warning About Liberals and Multiculturalism [VIDEO Starts at 2:04]

VIDEO Starts at 2:04

Why Black Folks Need Confederate Monuments

Some may or may not know that one of my favorite books of all time is 1984 written by George Orwell. To be honest, since about ten years of age, I’ve must have read this book more than 20 times. Each time I read it I come away with something new. To refresh your memory, the main character in the book is a man named Winston Smith. Smith works in the Records Department in the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite history per the desires of the Party that runs the totalitarian government of Oceania. Specifically, he revises old writings, politically inconvenient facts and history to advance the propaganda interests of the Oceania government.  One tool Orwell invents for this purpose was the memory hole.

In 1984, Orwell describes a memory hole is an opening in a wall connected to a tube that is connected to an incinerator. It is employed to destroy any inconvenient or embarrassing fact on historical records that is no longer considered useful for politics. In addition, using the memory hole made it easier for the government to get people to engage in “duckspeak” (speaking without thinking), obviate “oldthink” (thoughts, beliefs or ideas enthused by past events, memories and history in the times before the revolution) and to encourage “blackwhite” (getting folks to believe that 2 + 2 is 5, or that white is black and black is white and to forget that one has ever believed anything different.

Over the past few years, a movement in the African American community has been afloat to remove all historical confederate reminders of the period in which the United States was engaged in a Civil War (1861-1865) and this scares me.  Not because I support the confederacy or do not support the confederacy, but because I support history and learning and pedagogy.  Removing these symbols will do nothing for black folk and make things a lot worse in my view.  First, this is just cosmetic, it will not mean nothing, since when do you get your feeling hurt by looking at a flag or a statue of a many you don’t know historically anything about? Robert E. Lee owned slaves sure, and he ran a plantation before the war, but he historically is no different than Thomas Jefferson or George Washington from this perspective.  Are you upset with the state of Virginia too? Will it be next? After all Virginia was named after the person who introduced slavery to America. Half of the folk so offended likely couldn’t tell you when the civil war was fought without the assistance of google nor have read any book about it or any other American wars for that fact.

I fear that without these historical reminders, being as lazy as we are with respect to reading and our penchant to watch TV more than we read, we will have forgot about this tragic and painful part of U.S. History and sleep walk back into a similar predicament in future generations. It isn’t like we discuss history with our children anyway especially with this most recent generation.  This is one reason why Marcus Garvey wrote “A people without the knowledge of their history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

Our incessant focus on memory holing history is idiotic and ridiculous.  Why is it that we put more time into complaining about statues and flags than our kids killing each other on the streets of Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans or Memphis every day? Why do we spend more energy on superficial actions when we can go around to any government public school and find more than half of the kids not proficient in ANY subject on grade level? Now these are worth attention, but nope, not sexy or dramatic enough (Deray trained yawl hypocrites well).  I’m not offended or traumatized by any statute or flag.  Why are we as black folk offended and traumatized by historical fact? Will removing them take the historical record away? Will it make more black folk richer? Will less of us live in poverty? Will we start more business? Will it lower STI rates in our community? NOPE – NOT ONE BIT. Because this is misdirected and misguided energy aimed at something that has no tangible impact on any black person in America unless you a puzzy with a soft as wet toilet paper mentally.

It seems as this fake synthetic outrage is becoming a contagious pandemic.  Baltimore City Council has voted to remove four Confederate monuments in the city. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus want to remove all Confederate statues from the Capitol. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), told the Hill that “Confederate memorabilia have no place in this country and especially not in the United States Capitol. These images symbolize a time of racial discrimination and segregation that continues to haunt this country and many African-Americans who still to this day face racism and bigotry.”  Can’t make this up, so now black folks are afraid of ghost and haunted by images and symbols? Even more comedic is that magically, by removing these images and symbols, the past “time of racial discrimination and segregation” will either be forgotten or vaporize and end. Simple ain’t it? Talk about historical revisionism and make-believe.

Bishop James Dukes, pastor of Liberation Christian Center, in Chicago is calling for the removal of a statue of statue George Washington and his and President Andrew Jackson’s name removed from Washington and Jackson parks respectively, because they owned slaves. I suspect cats will be going after all confederate cemeteries and even the Confederate monuments in Gettysburg National Military Park (although Park and State officials say they will never be removed)

What will be next, removing all members of the confederacy or former slave owners from history books? Removing said history books from the libraries’? Preventing people from even writing books on the confederacy or slavery because “these images symbolize a time of racial discrimination and segregation that continues to haunt this country and many African-Americans who still to this day face racism and bigotry?” Will John C. Calhoun, a former vice president and staunch supporter of slavery be next? What about the Dallas Cowboy football team whose blue star is from the Bonnie Blue Flag (a banner of the Confederate States of America at the start of the American Civil War in 1861).  Since many of us black folks do not read as much as previous generations, these two may be safe for as they say “to hide something from a nigg@, put it in a book.”

Yes, one day our kids will not know anything about US history, slavery, the civil war or the deeds of many, good or bad, for the fear of as then Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake noted in signs that confederate monuments were just “part of a propaganda campaign” to “perpetuate the beliefs of white supremacy. “Again, although I am a black man, I will likely be called a racist piece of uninformed white trash, or worse – described as not being woke - for not supporting non-substantive cosmetic actions under the guise of African American self-determination and empowerment. But like the Taliban who destroyed the historical largest standing Buddha’s, in the world in Bamiyan, who had been standing since the century. In Afghanistan, or ISIS, who destroyed the Temple of Baalshamin at the Syrian site of Palmyra because they found the offensive to Allah, similar suggestions about confederate monuments are equally claims of bull shit.

You do not have to agree with me but this is how I see it.  If you do not believe me, just try to take down Auschwitz, Dachau or Buchenwald: Jews will never let it happen because they do not want ANYONE to forget about what happened to them so it will never happen again.  Not us. They write and make documentaries incessantly on every aspect of the Holocaust and you will see at least one every day or weekly on TV around the world.  Whether is on the Kristallnacht or the  Nuremberg Laws or the Jews of Poland or the Jews of Lithuania or the human experimentation they tolerated, they telling their story. Not US.  Instead we get mad and formulate #Noconfederate because we too lazy to write and make our own and/or tell our own historical reality. Like I said. try to take down Auschwitz, Dachau or Buchenwald: Jews will never let it happen because they do not want ANYONE to forget about what happened to them so it will never happen again.  Not us.

Video: African children pay the price for “clean green” electric car battery technology

The Similarities Between The European Union & Soviet Union