New York Times Calls Yellow Vests An "Invasion"

The protesters of France certainly have a nerve. The New York Times editorial board grouses that not only do they lack the requisite leader, a set of specific demands, or a detailed political platform, the Yellow Vests "show no signs of ending their weekly invasions of the capital any time soon."

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines "invasion" as: 1) an act of invading, especially incursion of an army for conquest or plunder and 2) the incoming or spread of something usually hurtful.

The primary implication of the editorial is that working class citizens of France have no inherent right to be in their own capital city of Paris, other than to go shopping or visit tourist spots. The secondary implication is that the Yellow Vests are disease-ridden. 

The newspaper's use of the word "invasion" to describe people who are exercising their civil rights in their own country eerily echoes Donald Trump's own grosser xenophobic rhetoric about the "invasion" of migrants and refugees from what he calls "shithole countries"  -- rhetoric which the more intellectual Times regularly and rightly criticizes.

The problem, the newspaper ever so delicately insinuates, is that the working classes are not only disrespecting class borders, they have now evolved into disrespecting even the semi-porous national borders put in place by the ruling elites for the main original purpose of assisting the free flow of commerce and capital. The fact that transnational corporatism immiserates and alienates people by depressing their wages and outsourcing their jobs is a truth universally acknowledged, even by the elites. But what really frightens the ruling class at this stage of growing unrest is that people are reaching across their national borders --  not to exchange money and goods, but to share their anger and to find common cause with one another.

The divide-and-conquer tactic used by the elites to keep the anger properly directed at anybody but the Lords of Capital is beginning to fray.  

The Yellow Vest movement is not only going pan-European, it even threatens to go global. And the New York Times is on it, invoking the Trumpian border paranoia in that discreet, dog-whistling, classist fashion at which it is so marvelously adept:

The grievances may be specifically French, but the sense of alienation is very much a part of the grass-roots discontent behind the vote for Brexit in Britain and for President Trump in the United States, and the populist movements pulling Europe apart.That was underscored last week when contacts between the Yellow Vests and the populist government in Italy caused a serious diplomatic rift. It happened when Luigi Di Maio, leader of Italy’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement and a deputy prime minister, met with a group of Yellow Vests in France and declared that “a new Europe is being born” of them. An outraged Paris called its ambassador back for “consultations,” the first time that has happened since 1940, when Mussolini declared war.

The third innuendo in the Times editorial is that not only are the Yellow Vests contaminated invaders from both within and without their defined limits and borders, they are also probably fascists. Why else bring up Mussolini and the Five Star movement?

This smear-by-association tactic is also evident in the piece by the op-ed section's David Leonhardt last week, in which he ever so politely slimes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her unpatriotic audacity in engaging in trans-Atlantic phone chat with British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn. She made a shocking effort to find common cause around issues that benefit regular people rather than finding new ways to reward oligarchs and multinational corporations. But the Times can't come right out and act like a snob. Therefore, if they can relentlessly attack Corbyn's left-wing populism by linking it with anti-Semitism,  then it illogically follows that AOC's own lefty-style populism is also fair game for their virtual scolding finger.

Only France's suave centrist banker president, Emmanuel Macron, can save the ruling elites from the unwashed invaders, concludes the Times editorial board. Macron is now bravely and tirelessly going around the country in shirtsleeves, no less, to talk people to death as a sign of his own noble sincerity.

The 41-year-old president is right to stick to his reforms and his vision of European unity, but if they are to survive, he must convince his own heartland that he really feels its pain.

I think what the editorial board means is that if he can only evoke his inner Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, perhaps he can just as glibly and ably convince some of "his" heartland people of his empathy. It's his unenviable task to breathe some new life into the punitive global Neoliberal Project that's been running roughshod over people for the past 40 years and which spurred global wealth inequality to unheard-of levels. In the US alone, the richest 400 billionaires now own as much wealth as the bottom 60 percent, or 150 million Americans, combined.

Meanwhile, the workers of Belgium have gone out on a national strike, shutting down airports, roads, factories and schools right in the financial elite heartland of the European Union.

Workers in Matamoros, Mexico, recipient of a plethora of factories in the 1990s,  thanks to the NAFTA-engendered exodus of good-paying factory jobs from the US, struck for higher wages this past week, and won, after the new liberal president's "pragmatic" minimum wage bait-and-switch failed. The workers demanded that everybody get a raise, not just a select token few. What's more, they disrespected the precious southern border by sending messages of labor solidarity to their protesting counterparts at GM's soon-to-close auto plants in Michigan.

And joining the series of recent nationwide teachers strikes in the United States, Denver educators walked out for a third straight day this week. As in the recent Los Angeles strike, teachers are not just demanding a living wage, but an end to school privatization and corporate control of education, and the tying of bonus pay to corporation-enriching pupil test scores.

There's a reason that the Times and the ruling elites which it represents are subtly and not so subtly denigrating regular people and their social movements. It's because they're scared to death of all this emerging human solidarity that they've actually been reduced to calling the rest of us "invaders."

They're not that far away from Trump, who is the symptom of the real disease of crack-addicted capitalism.