Le Pen beats Macron in France as nationalists gain in EU vote

Italy, Australia, Hungary and some others have already been infected.

He's the bastard!

to destroy these democracies from within.

Trump is just a carrier of the virus. The far right and ultra far right around the world are being infected, and every day citizens are coming under their spell. Skynet wasn't fully deployed in just a day.

All I see in stores is products made by Xi's country (made in China).
I am still looking for something made in Russia.
May be I should try a Vodka store.

money is more on Putin as he has alot riding on weakening any governments that he feels threatens him and his power.

U.S. jobless claims dip to 211,000, and they are now near half-century lows. We also saw U.S. consumer sentiment reach a 15-year high.

NATO with Trump antagonizing and alienating our allies.

...and all his major cabinet and white house picks are unqualified drifters hellbent on destroying our governing infrastructure. All thanks to Putin.

Only power Putin has is to employ workers posting on social media to create chaos here in elections. He has no economic power like China has.

...but his deep and methodical information warfare has been devastatingly effective worldwide. He wants to remake the world into an oligarch/mob paradise.

to ignore social media propaganda, and do their own home work on issues. If they did that Putin would be powerless.

Many political as well as commercial players now use targetted social media before, during and after election campaigning... As the Brexit Leave campaign showed, with assistance of US as well as UK origin, this can be illegal, corrupt and corrupting. Has any serious research shown what proportion of this might be of Russian or any other overt or covert State origin, internationally and particularly in Europe?

Wikipedia has a good summary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_Report

is not established in that report. Nor are links to the state.

Nobody seems to be talking about that and the right is crediting Trump for those jobs, which is absurd.

but fail to mention most employed people have no money to support a consumer economy.

#1 Manufacturing
#2 Mining includes liquids & natural gas
#3 Agriculture
#4 Creation of new useful products (example:Microsft Windows)

Every other activity consumes wealth. Doctors for example starve in poor countries. No need for accountants if there are no businesses to need accounting. No need for much retail if few have money to buy things.

Billions and Billions $$$ worth of manufacturing has been exported to cheap labor countries by Billionaires who own corporations and businesses. Result is we have lost millions of middle class jobs and #1 wealth creator.

IMHO that is the main reason why ordinary working middle class people are having a hard time.

All of these far right Europeans were already in politics (with some success) before Trump.

How did this happen? At 71, I'm looking at the downside, but I fear for the future. That said, the "green wave" looks a bit promising. The oligarchs might allow that to a point.

and some don't even care.

Sigh

... nay the world.

I find myself pointing at growing income inequality. But I also wonder if the climate crisis is part of this too. They say that Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war was driven by failing crops. The subsequent immigration to Europe has been a huge factor in this. But even India is going down this route. It’s very scary and difficult to encompass. Like Voldemort is winning.

and that threatens the rich/entitled. Class warfare directed through propaganda.

If people behave this badly at this point, what’s going to happen as the problems intensify? I have read that climate scientists are suffering from Pretraumatic Stress Disorder. I think we all will be experiencing that before too long.

the developed democracies. The resurrection of fascism also cannot be explained by blaming Russia.

It is the decades of neoliberal austerity for the masses amidst the stunning rise of a new gilded elite, the inequality and corruption, that has fueled fascist populists on the right, and they are providing the only alternative to the status quo, as there is no populist left.

And I think that labels such as populism, liberalism, socialism and others can be easily manipulated to mean exactly the opposite of their original intent.

It seems like they study each other to figure out how to structure society to get more riches to get to the head of the pack. They seem disconnected from community and reality. I keep remembering the clip of the Dutch historian at Davos who asked why tax avoidance was a forbidden topic at the conference. I also remember another clip from Davos where the head of Dell laughingly scoffed at high marginal tax rates. He asked where in history that ever worked and the Washington Post economic reporter agreed and said, “Maybe briefly in the 80’s in the US.” That just dropped my jaw. I think there was someone from MIT who mentioned the period of the great compression in the US with 90% marginal tax rates, but he did so by saying he wasn’t advocating for it. They’re literally killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

And a lot of them are preparing escape bunkers to escape from social collapse, I’m guessing partly in response to the climate crisis. Climate change is pressuring the global north with the stresses from the global south and we will be seeing more of that, along with income inequality.

facing this country. And it is caused by greedy Billionaires and international corporations, not necessarily Putin. American corporations only care about the bottom line. If you get hurt working there, they won't even send flowers to your funeral.

That’s a good resource. I didn’t watch yet, but I googled and read about his point of view. He seems optimistic. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. Maybe we’ll start to see some waking up in the world.

I hadn't heard of him before. His twitter feed is fascinating.

The have the same climate. How can someone blame the climate on falling crops in Syria when crops in Israel are doing just fine. Syria is failing because it is a dictatorship like the other Arab states. Put the blame where it belongs.

Drip irrigation, massive greenhouses, plastic tarping of fields. Massive desalination plants on the coastline and irrigation wells tapped deep. Syria had almost none of that.

They've also secured water rights in the region, both through diplomacy and force. Their preparations paid off when the droughts hit.

Nothing has stopped Syria and the other Arab nations that surround Israel from doing the same thing. Nothing except corrupt dictatorships.

Can also be explained by cultural sense of insecurity fueled by a more diverse population in Europe.

Divide and conquer using xenophobia, economic inequality, religious dogma, nationalism and anything else they can using lies to create fear and prevent liberal democratic groups from rising to power.

No better current examples I can think of than UK's Brexit and Bolsonaro in Brazil........

in Europe.

The right wing oligarchs around the world are involved.

It's going to get ugly.

Yellow vests. Too familiar.

I would actually call what happened a win for normality. Macron, while somewhat popular here in the States and as well photogenic, is nevertheless a right wing, free-markets conservative. True conservative, not this bullshit acting like conservative these days in America. Given that we here are liberals and progressives Macron loss to Le Pen means less to us than the gains by the Greens in particular. The liberals, more a fiscal conservative party like Republicans of old at least claimed to be, are as well no friends of the nationalist. When read in it's entirety I think the results of the EU election give little reason for concern of the fate of EU liberal democratic institutions. I would say the elections show that while nationalism continues to gain small footholds, traditional, post WWII Europe still rules the day and should actually be a more formidable obstacle for the further spread of putin influenced nationalism.
Sadly, however, it seems Britain is lost. That's at least what I got.

I would only add that the EU liberal democratic institutions will have to take the EU Left and Green Left as well as pro-EU regional interests more into account in the immediate future.

pro-EU parties overall held their ground. The nuts made some modest gains, but still only hold a quarter of the seats. The soft middle lost out primarily to more liberal parties.

And...Marie Le Pen is a Nazi is every sense of the word.

Good synopsis at Financial Times, but behind a pay wall....

https://www.ft.com/content/9733a232-7fe1-11e9-b592-5fe435b57a3b

NY Times take...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/world/europe/european-elections-results.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

and Le Pen's hopes are dashed

“France’s Emmanuel Macron, who has staked his presidency on persuading Europeans that the EU is the answer to the challenges of an uncertain, globalising world economy, took a personal hit when his centrist movement was edged into second place by Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration, anti-Brussels National Rally.

But Macron’s Renaissance, built on the ruins of centre-left and centre-right parties, added to gains for liberals at the EU level as turnout bounced sharply across the bloc. Along with a surge for the Greens, that meant four groups occupying the pro-EU middle ground lost under 20 seats, securing 505 seats out of 751, according to a projection by the European Parliament.

That may complicate some policymaking, as a two-party “grand coalition” of the conservative European People’s Party (EPP) and the Socialists (S&D) no longer has a majority. The liberals, with over 100 seats and Greens, with nearly 70, want a big say.

But it also dents the hopes of Le Pen, Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini and others who have been seeking to disrupt attempts to forge closer EU integration. Salvini called the elections a mandate for a shake-up in Brussels.”

https://www.lopinion.fr/edition/politique/resultats-europeennes-2019-rn-en-tete-en-marche-resiste-verts-doublent-188105?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alerte