The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

That sounds like conspiracy theory stuff to me tbh.

If there is no negative information on him to be found in the media, then what are you basing your anger on him on?
Rumors? Conspiracy theories?

France leaving the EU and building borders around it would **** up France as a whole quite hard, don't forget that.
It might even take down the EU with it, bringing chaos over the whole continent, giving psychological support to all these crazy nationalists.

So I can easily see that Le Pen would be a catastrophe even beyond the borders of France.
But Macron? How will he damage France? There is no information on that anywhere, except your anger.

Apocalipsis apart, this guy explains the topic about free speech pretty well:
Because of this new wave of what can be said in public people like trump or le pen will always outperform polls

I respect Cleese for his comedy, but his social views are firmly conservative and rooted in his cultural upbringing.

I mean, how hard is it to recognise that "X explains Y well" is a stand-in for "I personally identify with Y therefore I agree with X"?

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/le-pen-is-in-a-much-deeper-hole-than-trump-ever-was/

I got lost on the second Y...
There are ideas rooted on culture and other on reason, that's the thing that help us to not kill each other

"see! polls ..they do work!" hah! get redy to eat your socks come next may 7!

I'm not forgetting any of that.

the results are : france is fucked

either candidate fucks it.

let's take a look at who macron actually is.

macron is quite the machine-made man for companies :
the french wiki article is a little more helpful here :
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Macron


end of studies : 2004
first job : 2004 (EDIT : I forgot to explain why I even mentioned this. this is a luxury very few have in France)
first job ? General Finance Inspector (IGF) no less. golden boy already (27yo)

from there he has insight as to what advantages businesses can glean (not his job) and uses it to rub them the right way.

but let's get to the interesting bit and why he's a such a muppet of the powerful : he falls under Jean-Pierre Jouyet's (the IGF's big boss) wing (perhaps this was already done or in the making beforehand during his stay at ENA) who trains him and shows him the ropes.

this is important because the latter was :

• He worked for Jaques Delors on the Maastricht treaty
• for Lionel Jospin on transitioning france into €
  
• for Nicolas Sarkozy as European Affairs Minister (mainly working on the issues of debt and budget crisis)
• and Secretary General under François Hollande

(see here on out the prospect of presenting Macron as an "outsider" (yes yes that was the entire campaign trail) is already laughable but wait...)

Jean-Pierre Jouyet sent Macron (rather than any more experienced or deserving or ranked GFI employee) to the Attali commission.

The Attali commission is a Sarkozy mandate to have the CAC40 meet with the state and form economic policies. The Attali commission has been designed to have the power to have it's laws un-repealable over 15-30 years despite the color of the reigning majority (which has been known to alternate every 5 years as I've presented in my earlier post).

So in light of this I'd like to know

how exactly voting is going to help that situation?
And :

if you see now the stakes and why next one or EVEN couple presidents can't necessarily undo what's coming?

(Although Mélenchon WOULD'VE (the more time passes the better of a candidate he seems) his proposition of a sixth republic and end of presidarchy would've actually wiped that slate (of obligations) clean and allowed for a rewrite of those rules)

As a mediator and regulator to such a commission and in his right as a state IGF employee he should report back the dealings of the meeting to the IGF but alongside Jean-Pierre Jouyet he quickly learns that the art of his job actually consists in forgetting his job entirely and getting into working in the CAC40's direction as much as possible (this does have substantially higher pay so it's arguable that he's "working" and therefore doing a "job" or does it count if the technicall term is actually: payoff? I digress...).

such recommendations end up being :

• reduce state jobs
• constant augmentation of retirement age
• crippling of work law
• reduce state investment

doesn't sound like IGF material but okay.


There he meets Serge Weinberg who makes him enter Rothschild & co. He also meets Nestlé's big boss. these two are key.

Macron enters Rothschild & co sept. 2008 as "business banker" ...guess he's no longer looking to regulate.

he suggests to Nestlé that they buy Pfizer's child foods subsidiary. which they do and they make a huge amount of profit and so does macron : his first million.

When Hollande became the "rock-to-replace-Sarkozy" (if this all doesn't ring any bells then you still haven't read my 2017 french politics breif from a few pages back and you should) Jacques Attali and Jean-Pierre Jouyet sent Macron his elevator back and strongly advised he'd be his right hand man.

As Hollande's Joint Secretary-General (and if that wasn't a measure enough of trust he accompanied him to all Euro-meetings) he instigated an increase in joblessness of 30% via two actions : the CICE and the responsibility pact.

the CICE's concept was give any and all (regardless of income. so if you're already blitheringly rich it still counts) french-soil companies extra money with the encouragement that they'd create jobs in return.

the companies took the money (a total of 41 million€ per year) and did not create the jobs.

the released CICE statistics/analysis (over two years) noted none of the expected results : no increase in investment, none on export, none on research and development.

Macron's personal analysis of this (and campaign promise) is to augment this yearly sum.

2012: alongside Hollande (as minister of economy), Macron via system cheats and legal loopholes (e.g. refusing to write the regulation rules for the bill he wrote and presented which was amended, stating required regulation, and passed with regulations pending) effectively rejoined the separated banks of investments and deposit banks.

"wait why were these separated in the first place?"

remember the stock market crash 1929? that's why. The french people therefore had a guarantee that if they didn't personally gamble in any way shape or form they stood to loose nothing in the event of another crash. and even if they did place some money as stocks or what have you, the state had no right nor possibility to use the deposit bank money to cover their own dues (because, as I've explained here before, Fordian-economics being in effect : all countries necessarily gamble).

another post crash measure was to require banks have high base capita to be able to enter the gambling game at all (this was a G20 idea and decree). Macron plans (and has campaigned) to diminish this requirement.

now analyzing this : current French banks have never been better (records within the CAC40). why propose this change at all then? answer: because it allows for higher amounts of gambling thus profit thus what the banks want thus what macron wants.

as for the people? just means bigger impending risk of crash and no revenue increase for them.

come end of Hollande's term. Terrible term assessments are befalling him left right and center. Hollande's minister of economy, Arnaud Montbourg, gets the blame, gets fired ...Emmanuel Macron gets promoted and takes his seat (36yo, never before seen).

this is where another one of the campaign tropes falls apart and to me explains (as I piece this together right this instant) why he claimed to be "neither left nor right" and indeed he isn't he can't see either color, he can only see green and both have it depending on the tide.

he's been working under sarkozy (as right as it gets and calling it far-right is even often true) with the attali commission and personally under Hollande (the dead cat-lady left (because noone had yet realized the french left had been dead, get it?)) gleaning the best from both worlds : high tier business contacts and money.

the mid and bottom section of the wiki article helps make this explicit :
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Macron#Dossiers_industriels
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Macron#Controverses

who got the better part of that deal? hmm? not the state I'd wager.

Wasn't aware of the actual stakes or willingly turned a blind eye? Given current track record, benefit of the doubt is a luxury even he can't afford at this point.

another great decision as minister of the economy.



He under-evaluated his own estate,

Suspected of Favoritism to "Business France",

And he's the one to be the future gatekeeper of "Fiscal-Evasion-Land" what a joke!

there's the confict of interest of the "Le Monde" journal :

when confronted with financial difficulty, Macron (at the time Rothshild employee) proposed to counsel "Société des rédacteurs du Monde", Le Monde's main stakeholder ...free of charge!

using it in a rivalry interest and as such playing secretly against his own socialist political party :

you've seen it all over the world and in america in particular already : the press is no longer paying for itself. ads don't work and partnerships don't either. the only thing that's working is shutting down parts of the company laying off and buying cheap/free sources then concatenating sources. or if you're a free independent press outlet : work at a loss / bait the article and monetize it's full read.

which is the origin of any decent news anymore. everyone else is either leeching off them or making shiit up.

but with this reigning in of the primary french media outlet (Le Monde) to his side of the story he made a good investment.

but it goes deeper :

macron made his first million with the roschield nestlé-pfizer buy recommendation and has since been racking popularity among the millionaire to trillionaire spectrum.
in france 10 millionaires own the whole of french media:

1. Vicent Bolloré (11M€ BFF with Sarcozy) owns : Canal+ ; ITélé ; Direct8 ; D17 ; DirectMatin ; Dailymotion (a direct concurrent to youtube)
   (so weird how they slashed those liberal Canal+ programs Guignols ; Petit Journal and Grand Journal (you should google those) basically 100% of why people watched canal+ TV channel ....wait)
2. Patrick Drahi (16.5M€) boss of : SFR-numéricable ; (and owner of ) Libération ; L'Express ; L'Expansion ; BFM-TV ; RMC info talk. (Macron's 16-year BFF and also hugely in debt. chose to resign his functions to avoid conflict of interest lawsuit before his joining of the "En Marche!" political party. huh. why so suddenly interested in politics? perhaps certain presidential decrees can fix his business's situation? oh whoever knows!)
3. BNP : (owns together : Le Monde ; Le Nouvel Observateur ; Courrier International ; Télérama)
   composed of :
   1. Pierre Bergé (180M€ Yves Saint Laurent),
   2. Xavier Niel (7.8M€) boss of : Free ; (owns) Têtu,
   3. Mathieu Pigasse ( Dominique Strauss-Kahn & Laurent Fabius BFF) owns: Les Inrocks ; Radio Nova.
4. Serge D'assault (this guy's worth a google for his hilariously rich and disdainful POV 17.5M€) owns : Le Figaro (used to own 10 other outlets but sold them)
5. Bernard Arnaud (LVMH Louis Vuitton 34.6M€) owns : Les Echos ; Le Parisien ;
6. Martin Bouygues (2.4M€) boss of : Bouygues-Telecom (who's joint general director, Didier Casas, also left his work on hiatus to work in the "En Marche!" political party) ; (owns) TFI ; LCI ; Eurosport ;
7. Françoit Pinault (12.7M€ la redoute, Gucci shareholder) owns : LePoint ;
8. Arnaud Lagardère (290M€) : ELLE ; ParisMatch ; Le Journal du Dimanche ; Europe1 ; Virgin Radio ; HachetteLivre ; Livre de Poche ; Fayard ; calmann-lévy

and 100% of the outlets I cited are currently operating at a loss. You may, as they are and have, ask yourself : "is there a way to fix that?" doubtless you can figure out what solution they found out.

most or all of these media oultets have been basically sucking Macron's diick all campaign long.
(I feel it's safe to say that four meliorative publications in a row counts as sucking diick) :
BFM being the clearest of offensers in this lot in this one a google with the keywords "marcon" and "bfm" ALONE gives you an idea of what we've endured from them for a year now : https://www.google.fr/search?q=bfm macron intox&oq=bfm macron intox&aqs=chrome..69i57.5823j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=bfm macron
(in fact any string of characters along with "bfm" and "marcon" will only give you bfmbuiness or bfmtv links.


keep in mind these are the only organisms in france that realize any popularity polls.

and time and time again they've been shown (BFM in particular who published new polls weekly) to manipulate the poll bases and methods as well as results to present Macron as clear winner.

(which as I've stated before explains why Jon Oliver thought Macron was more popular and such a good idea)

Even in the most absurd moment : right after the televised presidential debate (the one I posted) where even if you don't speak french you can see he's being pwoned left right and center.
Imean look at this **** : http://www.acrimed.org/Grand-debat-un-sondage-pour-BFM-TV-qui-ne
29% for macron are you even serious right now? the linked article starts out by comparing that result of the popularity poll to the other media outlets (admittedly also blowing macron's number out of realistic proportions but being more believable about it by leaving 1st place to the undeniable popularity champion of that debate (I really should just post it again)) .

Just look : everytime he opens his mouth all the other candidates have to do is scream "El-Khomri" (his law he named it after one of his employees to pin it on her) at him and he goes into this little whimpering mimic of "it was a mess up won't happen again"



so again :

why don't you google it instead of blindly calling me out?

this is my turf. I know what the fuckk I'm talking about.

which is just rich considering one of his program's promises (if you actually read it) is to double down on the El-Khomri law and push the changes even further.

Okay, so to summarize:

- Macron is the typical banker-economy-guy who is deep in bed with banks/companies/etc pp
- His business friendly ideas rub you the wrong way. Hard
- You don't like the french media landscape

Fine. Still, even then, assuming you're right:

Macron
- Will **** up your economy via "too economy friendly"

Le Pen
- Racist
- Will **** up your economy via protectionism/pointless borders/etc

Still not a hard choice who is the lesser evil.
Especially since the problems with Macron are, at least to me, not as easily classified as definitely bad.
Yes he may be too business-friendly. But the exact results of laws that try to tinker with the economy are not easy to predict and I am no expert on them, so I can't say for certain what is bad or good in that area. He probably is not 100% wrong on all of it.

Le Pens anti-EU, anti-foreigners, anti-globalism on the other hand is easy to judge as batshit crazy.

I find it very unlikely that ALL polling is faked in favor of Macron. Have a bit more trust in your democracy. Faking polls like that is something not even Erdogan dared to do before his recent "vote".

I really see now why I made a preemptive post about this.

I'll just keep quoting myself until it sinks in :

you don't have to convince me Le Pen is worse than Macron. that notion was already established in my mind then

your opinion on this is basically worthless as you don't witness this firsthand nor do you manifest the will to go and research it.

it seems like you haven't read my above post but I digress : BFM saturated the net with weekly polls. poling at an impossible rate and being reviewed as having used completely biased methods.

democracy has literally nothing to do with popularity polls. as I've stated: no polling is done by the state ALL polling is done by the aforementioned media outlets which I PAINSTAKINGLY TOOK A WHOLE AFTERNOON DRAWING UP THE LIST OF AND TRACING THE LINKS TO THEIR OWNERS FOR YOU TO NOT READ

I think the problem comes from me going : "ok here's the bit in my post where I post 5 000 intox articles so they get a clear picture of what I'm talking about .... naaaaah it'll make the whole paragraph miles long and noone will be able to read any of my post anymore they'll get it if I just draw up two-three examples"

of course where you get relaxed is where people say you're wrong.

The polls were not far off for the first round of the election? At least that is the impression I got from reading reports on various location all over the internet.
You're the only person in the English/German internet things I read who has this position or even considers the possibility that ALL polls are faked. Which is a pretty wild position to have, you have to admit. Sorry I am skeptical towards that.
But this isn't really an important point of discussion either way. I don't think the polls are faked systematically, you do. We will see the real results on ... I think it was the 7th may?

I realize that, but abstaining from the vote makes you guilty of "letting it happen" if Le Pen wins.

I get that Macron is not the great candidate you'd like to have and that he clearly has faults, but your claims of it all being a conspiracy of the owners of the french media is ... wild.

You need english sources of your claims to make them understandable to me. That google link to google.fr makes no sense to me, I don't understand what it is supposed to show, and chrome doesn't even offer translation of it to me. Even if chrome manages to translate pages it still isn't super helpful for how understandable it'll be and images stay in a language I know zero words of.
I'll also not watch videos I don't understand just to maybe figure out something from the tone.

As it stands your "Macron media conspiracy theory" seems not to have made the jump into media of languages I can make sense of.
That doesn't mean it can't be true. But it means I can't relate to your anger.

You are also the only person I am aware of who paints Melenchon as "pro EU". The rest of the world seems to think he is rather "anti EU".

I'd count systematically faking polls to show your favorite candidate is winning as a very very severe crime against democracy, as the goal clearly would be to influence the election big time.
Like "we're actually a dictatorship"-kind of bad.

If that is really what is going on then France really is fucked hard. I just find it very hard to believe that nobody outside France has picked up on it.
The German media I read isn't known to just copy paste foreign media and none of them mention this topic at all in any form.

and of course they didn't "communicating vessel" into one another...

I'm not saying they're all faked. I'm saying lots were and definitely the ones that made it out of France.

well did I say I wasn't conscious of that? or that I didn't hate it?

to get him elected ? it's actually a pretty reasonable you rub my back i rub yours concept which you seemed to understand when you summed it up cleanly with "in bed with them"

and if you're still distinguishing the media and the money holders here you haven't read me.

oh how fuckking convenient.

is it not enough that the aforementioned articles have his name and favorable picture rather than a linup of all candidates / disfavorable pictures of another candidate and his name in other articles. that kind of universal stuff doesn't really suffer Babylon so that's a vain excuse.
I think one only needs to witness tone and the mass of news articles to already be able to draw conclusions.

I find it telling enough that german/English wiki articles are short and praise him where the french one is already pretty damning and in detail

It's pretty shite of an approach to just go : "oh well this is the one thing I can actually read on this because it's actually translated so it must be the truth. accessorarily that's how truth works. only info worthy of outsource and translation is truth"

again I've posted the video and the time at which he says it himself ("oh but I don't speak french" Well there's a ******* Transcript for deaf and hard of hearing and you can type that into google yourself because I'm sick of doing all the work myself!)
his word is apparently worth less then ...his word ...wait what?

yes this is why operating-at-a-loss / monetizing everything independent news outlets have worked tirelessly to highlight. their outreach and saturation just isn't quite comparable to Mega-conglomerate-multi-million-operation-at-a-loss news.

given the difficulty I'm having getting you or anyone to even look at something in french : I'm don't.
yes things are really really fuckked. and yes to a point that bypasses believablility.

I wouldn't call french news dictatorial-propaganda worthy. but they're definitely same-or-clone and drivel in industrious amounts. and when it comes to macron they're unanimous and in the case of the BFM post-debate clearly further gone then some dictatorships.

Read through the second half again there's bits you're not yet paying enough attention to. If despite it's incredible outreach Guignols still hasn't reached you then I guess now is a good of a time as any to find out about them. they're still relatively well archived. but that what's been for DECADES the polarizing aspect of CANAL+ along with all other tack-ons be slashed in this time is so very telling.
JESUS FUCKK I MEAN WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT FRENCH EVEN WENT THROUGH THE TROUBLE OF TRANSLATING IT'S LATEST EPISODE FOR YOU



Edit: I'm discovering now they have quite the set of translated episodes

Talking about ugly pictures in the media? Check Nigel Farage in... every newspaper ever published. And the media supporting a candidate and poll favouritism... Clinton.

It's so hilarious, now that the French elections are happening, it literally mirrors the US Election. "Oh, the media manipulated polls and collaborated in rigging candidates". "Oh, the politicians are so bad, I'm not going to participate, and if anyone shames me for it, they're a narccisist tool".

Yeah, this is actually happening right now, again.

I am not saying it must be the truth, but it is the only information I can make sense of.
You may be right with all you say, but I cannot verify any of it and you're making claims that sound pretty outlandish to me. Outlandish enough that I'd expect some non-french media to have picked up on it, but I can't see that, making me even more skeptical.

I don't get what those Guignols are about. How does that relate to this discussion?

There are people outside France who speak french. I am not just one of them.

How am I even supposed to tell what is a news article? I can't differentiate between a serious source of news and a tabloid writing nonsense if it is in a language I do not understand. I don't know any of the sites that the google search yielded, so it just tells me nothing, expect google apparently managed to find stuff that contains the words you searched for. Google is pretty good at that, you can probably find "support" for flatearthers that way via Google.

The "media", well some part of it, sure did support Clinton, just as it now supports Macron. Mainly because the alternative was Trump and is Le Pen. Both of which have ... obvious reasons to be against them.

But "poll favouritism" isn't a thing. The whole point of a poll is to get an accurate idea what people think. People who make polls spend a great deal of time trying to make sure they're somewhat correct.

Yeah it is kinda surreal.

well did I say I wasn't conscious of that? or that I didn't hate it?

So even if you hate it: Better have some media conspiracy that is EU friendly and a somewhat reasonable person than Le Pen. Like even if all you say is perfectly accurate the choice is still clear: Prevent Le Pen at any cost.
Yes Macron may suck. But you don't have any choice anymore. Macron or Le Pen.
Pick your poison, welcome to democracy.

@thetrophysystem just don't forget you actively defend trump and voted for him. there's differences call 'em minor if you want but they're there

yes you can.

first off you can research the ties to french media outlets and their owners and even with lesser volume of info everything I listed should check out.

You can check for french (yes french) negative and positive articles (again the negative and positive part should be obvious despite the language barrier) and tally them by volume and publishing date.

and the fact that they're that transparent despite the language barrier alone should be indicative as to their bias.

you can actually do some google work a little bit more in depth on the things I mentioned (such as pro-EU Mélenchon) and you should come up with some sources that start to line up with mine.

heck how in the hell can your sources deny he's been an EU parliament member for 8 years now? : http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/96742/JEAN-LUC_MELENCHON_history.html
how in the hell can he justify returning to it time and time again and working for it if he doesn't believe in it?

In fairness his words throughout the campaign have been harsh towards the EU. as an insider he has a grim picture of the EU.

And he wanted to renegotiate our EU politics and if negotiations failed threaten to leave it or indeed leave it (and even in this eventuality he was only leaving schengen and trade/business and tax policies not the currency (which probably means he never actually was going to go through with that because how do you even do that)). Which I don't support him for but then again : saying he's strictly anti-EU is either a lie by omission or a blatant lie.

but that's all putting aside the fact that most of his program or rather the main part is stepping down as president as he deletes the president's spot altogether and give the power of choice through constant referendum and constituents assembly back to the people.

it's hard to see people voting for leaving € in France.

You're underestimating how hard it is to search for information in a language I don't understand.
How do I even search for "positive articles"?
And even if I could do those searches and were to find "yep the french media is doing a lot positive and few negative reports about Macron" I could still not really conclude much from that.
Maybe he is an awesome guy and has much positive reporting done about him because of that?
Maybe his PR team is really good.
Maybe he is the evil mastermind of a conspiracy.

Can't tell.

Not to mention this in the end is not as important as you make it out to be. Especially not to me, so why would I spent hours doing that kind of deep research?
I am not gonna vote in France either way. You are.
I understand your thoughts now, which is all this thread is good for. I am not gonna be convinced of any conspiracy theories just based on "there are way too many positive articles and way too few polls against him and he is friends with these people". Yeah that may all be. But that is all not proof of anything. Just hints, that you build together into a specific way.

Now do the right thing, whatever that may be...

Some people work to destroy the EU from inside the EU. Not such a bad strategy. So this doesn't say anything.

Didn't @thetrophysystem vote for ... that 3rd party candidate I forgot his name? But not Trump?