At the gates of power: when will the CIA assassinate Marine Le Pen?

[Paul Rigby]

The power of Le Pen

By Robert Peston
Economics Editor, British Paedophile Corporation

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31868293

If you think growth has been pretty lousy since the crash in Britain, until the recent spurt, it may be small comfort that the UK has done well relative to the European Union as a whole.

On the basis of latest published data, the British economy is now a little bigger, 3% or 4%, than at its previous peak in 2008, whereas the EU in the round is still a bit smaller.

And in respect of what matters to most of us, jobs, the eurozone part of the EU has been a spectacular disappointment - unemployment is more than 11%, and around 23% for under 25s (compared with 5.6% and 16% in the UK on a comparable basis).

In the opening months of this year, there has been a mild recovery - though one that is halting (as industrial production figures for January show) and non-existent in the eurozone's second-biggest economy, France.

This is why millions of Europeans do not believe the EU and eurozone is serving their economic interests - and parties opposed to the EU/eurozone economic status quo are on the rise more or less everywhere.

As the tension over renegotiations of Greece's bailout show, it is the rise of populist parties of left and right that pose the greatest current threat to the survival of the euro.

By the way, entente between Syriza and Berlin appears to have evaporated already - negotiations over whether Greece will receive the additional finance it needs, and whether, therefore, the country can avoid default and will be able to remain in the euro, are again approaching a critical juncture.

All of which is a long-winded preamble to my suggestion that at 9 o'clock tonight you might want to take a short break from Comic Relief and watch my BBC Two documentary on perhaps the most important manifestation of popular discontent within the EU and eurozone, namely the rise and rise of the Front National in France (the film is called "Quelle Catastrophe! France with Robert Peston").

The film does two things - it examines why the French economy has been in the doldrums for so long, in spite of having first class infrastructure and some great businesses; and it shines a light on the phenomenon known as Marine le Pen.

Arguably, she is the most important opposition politician in Europe, who has the potential to affect the way of life of all of us.

How so?

Well her party is France's most popular. It topped the polls in last years European elections and is expected to do so again in the first round of local elections on March 22.

Also France's business and political establishment, with whom I have spent a good deal of time nattering in recent weeks, takes it for granted that she will go through to the second round of the French presidential elections in 2017 - and is not remotely confident that a centre-ground candidate of left or right will be able to rally sufficient moderate support to beat her.

So she matters, which is why I interviewed her twice for my film, once before and once after the Charlie Hebdo atrocity.

One important question is whether her repudiation of her party's racist and anti-Semitic past is more than cosmetic (she insists it is - but many argue the party's criticism of Islam is insidious).

Outside France probably what may matter most about her is that she explicitly blames the EU and eurozone for all France's economic woes.

She is in favour of French withdrawal from both, so that she can restrict immigration, impose customs duties on imports, nationalise big businesses when useful, and re-instate the French Franc.

She talks about this as "regaining our economic freedom" and the "exercise of economic patriotism".

When I put it to her that her protectionist policies were chillingly similar to those that reinforced the Great Depression of the 1930s, she said she totally disagreed and that the relevant crisis was the "eurozone that has been the black hole of world growth for 12 years".

Whether or not you think reinstating economic borders is the road to penury, it is very difficult to see how the eurozone could survive a French exit - and the economic shock of even rising fears of French withdrawal would seriously set back a European recovery (the cost of finance would rise sharply, because of the fear that converting strong euros into weak francs would generate huge losses on French assets).

None of which is to say there is a need to panic about this now.

But it does show that unless and until Europe's establishment succeeds in demonstrating that the EU and the eurozone is serving the interests of most people, which they are conspicuously failing to do at the moment, Europe's way of life will be under sustained and serious threat.

[Paul Rigby]

Marine Le Pen and the "Detoxification" of France's National Front

By Binoy Kampmark
Global Research, March 14, 2015

http://www.globalresearch.ca/marine-le-p...nt/5436537

"I fear for my country, I fear that it will smash itself to pieces against the Front National." Manuel Valls, The Guardian, Mar 11, 2015

It has been on her agenda for some time. Marine Le Pen of the nationalist Front National (National Front) wants France out of NATO, and, by virtue of that, the US out of Europe. It is a form of neutering that doesn't excite the warriors in Brussels, nor the imperial denizens in Washington. After all, NATO needs every military contribution it can get, all part of the grand policing plan Washington, and European belligerents, had had in mind for some time. If Le Pen's presidential ambitions are realised, the security chiefs will have their work cut out for them.

It may seem rich to the observers, but an individual like Le Pen has the US security establishment by its unfortunate goolies. She can throw the book of righteousness back at the CIA and company. They, it has been said, did it abandoned recourse to law, followed brutal interrogation procedures.

Not that torture is something Le Pen is entirely dismissive of. In December last year, she did suggest that it could be useful in some cases, though she subsequently rephrased the issue as one of misinterpretation.[1] "I believe that the people responsible for getting information out of terror suspects that can save civilian lives do a responsible job."

She doesn't want to scrap it entirely from the instinctive use by security forces; but she is content reminding Washington that the CIA was an inappropriately behaved terrier when it came to its own programs. "If indeed everyone is outraged by the tortures used by the US then, let's leave NATO."[2] Torture is a matter of proprietary self-interest its fine until it is practised against you.

Le Pen also causes disquiet in the transatlantic community for one strong propensity: her eyes towards Moscow. For one thing, she is sceptical about Western sanctimony over Ukraine, with its supposed interest in the legality of Kiev's actions. "The settlement of the Ukrainian crisis is a very complicated question. But I think that it was possible to solve it by giving a neutral status to the country" (Pravda, Feb 9).[3]

The conflict, for Le Pen, was a strategic blunder of monumental proportions, an attempt, not merely to move away from the Russian bosom, but to the arms of NATO itself. "Ukraine's aspirations to become a member of NATO lies at the heart of the conflict." The result of the mess: an illegal government in Kiev, the shelling of civilians in Donetsk and Lugansk, and the preponderance of submissive behaviour from "American lackeys".

Ultimately, it is the electoral and political battles of France that will matter most to Le Pen. She is doing well in the polls, humming her way up the scales of electoral favour, and frightening her opponents. One poll suggests that the FN will top the first round of voting in the March 22nd elections, nabbing some 30 per cent of the vote (The Economist, Mar 14). An army of candidates has been readied.

The "detoxification" campaign of Le Pen's National Front has also been taking place with medical proficiency. Much of this has involved a symbolic fratricide, ditching many of the more outlandish claims of her father, Jean-Marie. The Holocaust, for instance, has been deemed the apotheosis of barbarism, something her father found a trifling detail. The closet of conspiracy theories is being emptied.

The changes have worried observers at least those who see trouble on the horizon. In its latest piece on Le Pen,The Economist describes a scene in Picardy with some trepidation. "Retired couples and mothers with pushchairs shove forward; smartphones are thrust into the air to capture the moment. Even before Ms Le Pen arrives on a bright market day, a crowd gathers on the pavement in the hope of catching a glimpse of her. Perhaps she'll be the one to save France,' says a middle-aged woman with chilling sincerity."[4]

Le Pen plays both the clown and the fiend in such commentaries. She is considered "daft" for the most part at least when it comes to her economic policies, be they the promised restoration of the franc, the lowering of the retirement age, or the increase of import tax. But when it comes to eyes that look eastwards, she becomes the fiend, opening doors to the equivalent of Tartar hordes and socially regressive policies. "The nastier stuff includes a desire to build closer ties to Vladimir Putin's Russia; to make sure the French state serves its own citizens better than foreigners; and to bring back the death penalty" (The Economist, Mar 14).

In 2014, similar remarks were made by John Vinocur in The Wall Street Journal (May 26, 2014). Vinocur did not even do Le Pen the courtesy of treating her like a political agent of self-will, but "Vladimir Putin's Woman in Paris." Naturally, such accusations had to come with the whitewashing of Ukrainian nationalism and the blunders of its governments. France, argued Vinocur after the European elections, had thrown off its enlightenment robes to embrace "a spectacle of nihilism that damages the West and delights Vladimir Putin."

Political strategists have been putting their heads together in an effort to dampen the FN's momentum. One of them is via the customary accusation of corruption and financial irregularity. President of the European parliament, Martin Schultz, has gone so far as to alert Olaf, the EU's anti-corruption agency, over allegations that 20 people remunerated by the EU budget as parliamentary assistants to FN MEPs were also working for the party structure. As the European parliament has stated, "Assistants paid by the European parliament must perform work directly linked to the exercise of a member's parliamentary mandate" (The Guardian, Mar 11). They will have to much better than that to arrest the seemingly inexorable rise of the French far right.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Notes:

[1] http://www.france24.com/en/20141210-fren...t-usa-cia/

[2] http://rt.com/news/214227-france-nato-le-pen/

[3] http://english.pravda.ru/news/world/09-0...U.facebook

[4] http://www.economist.com/news/europe/216...-operation

[Paul Rigby]

http://rt.com/in-motion/245165-france-el...n-protest/

[Paul Rigby]

http://rt.com/in-motion/245165-france-el...n-protest/

[video=youtube_share;2LS2kLZrBdo]http://youtu.be/2LS2kLZrBdo[/video]

[Paul Rigby]

US neither ally nor friend for France Marine Le Pen

June 24, 2015

http://novorossia.today/us-neither-ally-...ne-le-pen/

The United States is "neither an ally nor a friend of France," member of the European Parliament, leader of France's National Front political party Marine Le Pen said, commenting on reports on eavesdropping on mobile phones of the last three French presidents.

"The revelations made by the WikiLeaks website seem to be very serious," she said. "This eavesdropping poses a direct threat to our national independence, sovereignty and security."

Le Pen demanded harsh response, specifically, "France's withdrawal as of today from the talks on the Transatlantic Economic Partnership." "We should no longer tolerate such practices," she said.

"The French must understand that the United States I am talking about the US government, not about the people is neither an allied nor a friendly country," Le Pen noted. She described France's return to the NATO military command in the past decade as "a serious strategic mistake that had to be corrected."

"The United States is a hegemonic power ready for anything to enhance their control over our country," the politician said. "This is not a new statement, there were periods in history, even recently, when the French government spoke out against this encroachment on our freedoms, independence and honor. The latest scandal should prompt us to rediscover our national interests."

The scandal in connection with the reports of spying on French presidents by the US intelligence agencies broke out on Tuesday evening following the publication of the results of a high-profile journalistic investigation.

The revelations reported by the Liberation daily newspaper and the Mediapart news website together with WikiLeaks indicate that the US National Security Agency (NSA) monitored telephone conversations and intercepted e-mail messages of three French presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicholas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande and their close aides between 2006 and May 2012.

[Magda Hassan]

She described France's return to the NATO military command in the past decade as "a serious strategic mistake that had to be corrected."

France leaving NATO is not part of the plan. The impertinence of it.


Apart from the fact that serious security management would always take precautions against such eavesdropping by any third party surely the French secret service would have done some much closer checking when it became public that Merkel's phone had been tapped? SO much theatre and posturing and going through faux outrage. They are safe with Monsieur Hollande.

[Paul Rigby]

The Police Crackdown in Paris and the Drift towards Dictatorship in France

By Alex Lantier
Global Research, December 02, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

Yesterday, barely two weeks since the November 13 terror attacks killed 130 and led to the closure of large sections of Paris around République Square, violence again erupted in the streets of the city. With 120,000 soldiers and police forces deployed across France, and fully 6,300 police and paramilitary riot police mobilized in downtown Paris alone, République Square was again blocked off by a massive police cordon.

The target of this deployment, held under the state of emergency imposed after the November 13 attacks by the Socialist Party (PS) government of President François Hollande, was not, however, a group of fighters loyal to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Rather, it was a domestic social protest mounted by ecological groups against the COP-21 ecological summit opening today in Paris.

The state of emergency bans all forms of public protest for three months, and police seized upon this standing ban to stage a brutal crackdown on a crowd of several thousand people. République Square, which had seen vigils for the victims of the November 13 attacks and official appeals for national unity, was filled with tear gas as police shot rubber bullets at peaceful protesters.

Citing acts of violence by a group of 80 masked protesters, police then proceeded to arrest 289 protesters, detaining 174.

Even before the protests, police had used their emergency powers to place two dozen ecological activists under house arrest without trial. This was part of a broader crackdown across France since November 13 that has seen over 100 unidentified people put under house arrest.

The crackdown on protests goes hand in hand with the broader terrorizing of the public by the state. Anyone who goes into the streets is soon confronted with men wearing body armor and carrying assault rifles.

Business groups have already called for employers to use the state of emergency to monitor the workplaces and denounce "radicalized" workers to police.

The World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly warned that the police-state measures implemented internationally under the rubric of the "war on terror" since 2001 were the expression of a fundamental breakdown of democracy. Anyone who thought that these were empty words should examine what has happened in France since the November 13 terrorist attacks.

One must call things by their right names: what is being established in France is a police state dictatorship. Due to the activities of a handful of people who carried out the November 13 attacks, social protest has effectively been banned; police have received arbitrary powers to carry out searches and seizures and the state has given itself enormous powers to detain individuals and dissolve organizations. The PS aims to make this state of affairs permanent, moreover, by passage of a constitutional amendment.

The multi-party organization of the bourgeois political establishment and the maintenance, at least for the present, of the formal routines of elections are no obstacle to the conversion of France into a police state. As the virtually unanimous votes in favor of the state of emergency and of stepped-up bombing of Syria in the French National Assembly show, these policies enjoy the support of all the institutions of the state and all the political parties, including nominally "left" organizations.

Nor has any criticism of the accelerating drift towards authoritarian rule in France emerged from the ruling establishments internationally. Rather, as Washington directs the spying of the National Security Agency at the American people, and Berlin and Tokyo dust off their plans to re-militarize their foreign policy in the face of public opposition, all the major imperialist powers are watching events in France and preparing their own versions of these measures.

This political crisis is uncovering the absence of any constituency for bourgeois democracy in the capitalist class. The driving force behind the PS' assault on democratic rights is not the terrorist attacks of Islamist opposition forces in Syria, who in any case serve the imperialist powers' agenda of regime change against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Rather, it is the extreme social polarization between a super-rich financial aristocracy and broad masses of increasingly exploited and impoverished working people. Austerity policies pursued over seven years of the most devastating global capitalist crisis since the 1930s have thrown tens of millions of people into unemployment and shredded basic social programs across Europe.

Only a month before the Paris attacks, the French bourgeoisie was stunned and horrified when Air France workers confronted executives and union bureaucrats planning mass layoffs and tore the shirts of two Air France executivesan act that received broad support among workers across France and Europe.

Broad popular opposition to austerity and to imperialist war can find no expression in the political establishment, which views the sentiments of the vast majority of the population with hostility and fear. Under these conditions, the social basis for bourgeois democracy is collapsing. The political dynamics of this process were described eight decades ago, at the time of the rise of European fascism, by the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky:

"By analogy with electrical engineering, democracy might be defined as a system of safety switches and circuit breakers for protection against currents overloaded by the national or social struggle. No period of human history has beeneven remotelyso overcharged with antagonisms as ours. The overloading of lines occurs more and more frequently at different points in the European power grid. Under the impact of class and international contradictions that are too highly charged, the safety switches of democracy either burn out or explode. That is essentially what the short circuiting of dictatorship represents," Trotsky wrote.

Today, as during the great struggles of the 20th century, class tensions are building up that are overloading the circuit breakers of bourgeois democracy.

A powerful constituency remains for democracy and democratic rights: the working class. The fact that accumulating class tensions lead to such drastic attacks on democratic rights is, however, a stark indication of the revolutionary character of the situation and the urgent necessity of an anti-capitalist struggle based on a revolutionary, socialist perspective.

The original source of this article is World Socialist Web Site
Copyright © Alex Lantier, World Socialist Web Site, 2015

I strongly suspect that a manufactured terrorism spree will prevent a free & fair election in France in 2017, as the heirs of Challe now run French intelligence and its military. It would appear the only way for the US to keep Le Pen out of the Elysee short of assassinating her.

[Lauren Johnson]

Who are the "heirs of Challe"?

[Magda Hassan]

Yes, of course it is all bullshit because commercial sports events and business trade events are still occurring in France. It is not groups of people they are concerned for. It is the type of group that is gathering they worry about. Business if fine to get together but if your not business and want changes stay home or be jailed.

[Paul Rigby]

Marine Le Pen blasts EU leaders, "You've done everything to bring down the government of Syria!"

France's Marine Le Pen says EU and US responsible for "chaos" in Syria.

BY Alex Christoforou

http://theduran.com/marine-le-pen-blasts...-of-syria/

Le Pen sees through the EU lies, she see through the senseless wars promoted by EU bureaucrats, and she s deeply concerned with preserving the France's independence and sovereignty.

Speaking at the European Parliament plenary session in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Marine Le Pen accused the EU of being responsible for the chaos in Syria.

Le Pen leveled devastating truth during her speech, noting that the European Union has been busy trying to overthrow Assad, while Russia was actually fighting terrorists.

"You've done everything to bring down the government of Syria, throwing the country into a terrible civil war, while accusing Russia which is actually fighting Islamic State. Your responsibility could not be concealed."
"You cannot hide your responsibility […] for plunging this part of the world into an absolutely monstrous chaos."

[video=youtube_share;LutrvgnHErE]http://youtu.be/LutrvgnHErE[/video]

Zerohedge reports further…

Le Pen said, alleging that policies advocated by both the United States and the European Union had contributed to the state Syria is currently in, as well as neighboring Iraq.

She also mentioned that conservative policies advocated by both the United States and the European Union contributed to plunging Iraq into chaos. As a reminder, following the presidential veto override of the Sept 11 bill last week, a group of Iraqis are planning to sue US seeking monetary damages for the US invasion of 2003

The eurosceptic politician then moved from the war in Syria to its logical, and intended according to some, outcome Europe's refugee crisis and slammed the bloc's approach toward immigration as "irresponsible," stating that the current migrant policies only increase the number of economic migrants.

"No real measures are taken to curb the crisis. Your irresponsible policy, on the contrary, brings us more and more economic migrants," Le Pen said, adding that only 30 percent of the migrants that had arrived in the EU were from Syria.

Le Pen, who intends to ride the wave of anti-immigrant anger sweeping French society in next year's presidential election, has repeatedly spoken out on the migrant crisis and security issues in Europe and France. France has been hit by a number of deadly terror attacks within the past two years, with a state of emergency declared after the November 2015 attacks in Paris and prolonged following an attack this July in Nice.

European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker said in September that the EU should play a part in Syria peace negotiations and proposed developing a common European strategy for the war-torn Middle East country. However, as RT reports, no developments have so far been made in this regard, despite EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini making a number of calls on the US and Russia to renew their "diplomatic consultations" regarding the war-torn state.

Via: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-06...haos-syria