Gaullist fights “Tooth and Nail” for Sovereignty

Sophie&Co’s June 9 Interview with Marine Le Pen

Minor edit for TIN by Carolyn Bennett

Marine Le Pen is a French lawyer and politician, a Member of the European Parliament, and Leader of France’s Front Nacional Party (the National Front). I was interested particularly in her insightful comments on sovereignty because I believe them to be instructive of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, its plutocracy over democracy, and its seriously flawed character and practice in international relations.

“Sovereignty is the foundation of democracy,” Marine Le Pen said. “Without sovereignty, there is no democracy. Having the freedom to cast a ballot in a ballot box is one thing; but if the people you elected with your ballot have no power because the actual power was transferred to a supranational body, then we are no longer in a democratic process. … ‘There are two ways of establishing totalitarianism – either all of the powers are united together, or we transfer all the power to a supranational body.’ …”

Marine Le Pen’s Gaullist foreign policy

… [W]e are for leaving NATO, for France leaving NATO, we have a [Gaullist] vision of what international politics must be like. 

We are for developing our relations with Russia, without breaking ties with the United States. 

We believe that France must maintain its relations with all of the world’s great nations, and we do not want [imposed on us] a way of seeing things by anybody. 

We aspire to have the freedom to determine the quality and the level of our international relations.

Defend ourselves against whom? Defense against China? Le Pen is asked and answers, The suggestion “almost makes you laugh.” 

De Gaulle, 1961, at Wikipedia

Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle (November 22, 1890 – November 9, 1970) was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces during World War II and in 1945 secured a seat for France on the United Nations Security Council. De Gaulle led the writing of a new constitution founding the Fifth Republic (1958) and served as its first president (1959 to 1969). 

Charles de Gaulle’s foreign policy strategy as president (Gaullism) asserted France as a major power “independent of ‘Anglo Saxon’ (American and British) influences. He withdrew France from NATO military command—although remaining a member of the Western alliance—and twice vetoed Britain's entry into the European Community. [Wikipedia note] 

Marine Le Pen’s Danger warning of Singular Voice

“[S]uch and such decides who is on the good side and who is on the bad side, and this can change at any moment. 

The good guys of today will be the bad guys of tomorrow, and maybe the bad guys of today will become good tomorrow── if Washington decides that it is to their advantage to make them good.

 It is a shame, since there is a substantial amount of mistakes that have been made at an international level under Washington’s influence, especially in Syria. 

“We were the only ones among the French political parties to oppose intervention in Syria, the first and only ones who, from the beginning, said that we were arming Islamic fundamentalists, who would, if they did win, implement a reign of terror like they did in Libya. This was, once again, because of us. We helped them come to power.

“This is the American method, the international American method: they defend their interests, or they think that they are defending them, since sometimes they make serious mistakes. What is terrible is that European countries no longer have a say in things. There are no more sovereign nations in Europe that can be the voice of reason for peaceful settlement of conflicts, the voice of balance between different interests of different nations.”

Marine Le Pen’s pro-Sovereignty, anti-Trans-Atlantic Free Trade scheme

“[T]his is an opportunity for the United States to carry out military integration, and maybe tomorrow, economic integration, to extend the scope of its influence. The free-trade agreement that the United States want to sign at any price is really just another way to tie the European Union, in a quasi-definitive way, to the United States.

“This is, once again, a loss of independence, not to mention the catastrophic consequences that this free-trade agreement would have for us in terms of agriculture, industry, defense, etc. So this is much more a geopolitical treaty than a purely commercial or economic treaty.”

If within the theoretical concept of a free trade agreement (FTA) ── in addition to eliminating tariffs, import quotas, and preferences on most (if not all) goods and services traded among trade bloc signatories ── people are free to move across countries, it would also be considered an open border” agreement. It may also be considered the second stage of economic integration. [Wikipedia note]

Le Pen says the National Front “formally contests and will fight tooth and nail the “ultra-liberal policy,” the “transfer of sovereignty” implicit in the signing of “the Trans-Atlantic treaty with the United States.” She says she believes the trade agreement “goes against the sovereignty of the people and the economic, social, and international interests of France.”

Something to think about. 

Sources and notes 

“Marine Le Pen: ‘EU robbed us of all liberties; we should fight to get them back’”

Sophie Shevardnadze, SophieCo,_RT, June 9, 2014, http://rt.com/shows/sophieco/164660-europe-politicans-victims-ukraine

Elections to the European Parliament have brought groundbreaking changes in the structure of EU’s most powerful body: right wing parties along with Eurosceptics, and outsiders just a few years ago, have now taken the political scene.

Front Nacional party in France gets the majority - signifying that people want change; the same with other nations.

What now? Is the European change of course inevitable? What will happen to the Union itself?  [Sophie Shevardnadze asks]

Sophie&Co spoke with special guest Marine Le Pen, leader of the France’s Front Nacional Party.

Also

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade_agreement

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Le_Pen

“Eric Cantor loses U.S. House seat in shock upset” AFP Michael Mathes reporting, June 10, 2014 10:36 PM:

Economics professor at a Richmond, Virginia, college David Brat defeats powerful party insider and U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the former reportedly backed by the Tea Party, the latter the Republican Party. Primary election all 243 precincts reported 55.5 percent Brat, 44.5 percent Cantor. Brat “barely received media airtime, was outspent by Cantor by more than 25 to one.”

http://news.yahoo.com/cantor-loses-us-house-seat-shock-upset-005050699.html;_ylt=AwrBJR4zBJpTo2cAeYrQtDMD

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy


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Cold War with vengeance: U.S. Dem-Repubs pledge allegiance to cont'd violence across Asia, Africa

“Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice,” I’ve had this quote on my desk for years. No matter how you slice it or angle it, what you heard last night is not demonstrative of choice. 

Choice is not given; you must make it. Re-reporting and comment by Carolyn Bennett 

I

f you stand long enough with these entrenched men, you will turn this country back to yesteryear, lose any ground achieved as a civilized people in a civilized world where every human being is protected under the rule of law and in adherence to declarations of human rights. 

If we continue sending the same ilk to Washington ─ if we refuse to imagine above this fray, outside this box, beyond this ideology ─ then America (this America) will do no more than regress and regress and regress into an abyss of worsening mendacity and barbarity. 

Hoodwinked

An RT story observes, and rightly so, that the Democratic-Republican Party “monopoly is failing the American people.” The hoodwinking perpetrated by these parties is indeed “a joke” played on the American electorate. Aided and abetted by mass media, these heavies block choice as an Israeli blockade on peoples of the Gaza Strip; and only ordinary Americans can break the hold.

It is true, as this article puts it, that the political process in the United States is a “corporate-owned sweepstakes with less credibility than a beauty pageant.” And to raise the standard, the American people must engage, uproot this rotten entrenchment, and demand a substantively changed ethos, desperately needed new voices and new ideas. Clean house in Washington.

 

Foreign policy is domestic policy.

 

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ormer Senator Mike Gravel responded to last night’s televised event of a couple of cosmetic characters’ wink-and-nod performance on foreign policy. This is some of what Gravel told Press TV about the Obama-Romney (Dem-Repub.) callous, cowardly, pernicious and careless model of U.S. foreign relations and how it inevitably intertwines with U.S. domestic conditions.

Former Senator
Mike Gravel

Cold War with a vengeance

“I think their foreign policies are very close,” Gravel said.

Barack Obama: admits the United States has been “indirectly” supplying insurgents in Syria.

Mitt Romney: says we should give them more “supplies.”

Gravel says, “This is waging war through an agency, which is how we started the war in Libya. Now we are doing this [in] Syria and look at all the deaths that have occurred.

“There is as much blood on our hands as there is on [President Bashar al-] Assad’s government.” Sustained by his allies Iran and Russia, Gravel said, President Assad “is trying to maintain himself in power. And we (the United States of America) are trying to bring about a new person in power.”

 

Based on what the Republican and Democratic candidates said last night, Mike Gravel concluded that there is “no change in policy … toward Iran and toward Israel’s control of American foreign policy.” 

We are, he said, “almost back at the Cold War where the United States is waging proxy wars [and] other people are dying.”

Aided and abetted by mass media

The head of the international affairs committee of the Russian Federation legislature (the State Duma), Alexei Pushkov, also commented recently on the carelessly violent pattern in U.S. foreign relations and the press’s collusion with it.  

Iraq to Libya to Syria ─ When the United States “was attempting to justify the war in Iraq, ‘the entire U.S. media claimed the country had nuclear weapons,’ a claim that turned out to be blatantly false [and] today a similar situation is unraveling with regard to Syria:

‘The Americans are taking an absolutely one-sided position and

[t]heir media act as if they were the ideological arm of U.S. foreign policy.’

Reporting on Libya, the U.S. media alleged President Muammar al Qaddafi “was guilty of murdering 6,000 Libyan citizens, ‘but the bodies were never found and the theme was forgotten,’” Pushkov said.

The singular “‘voice of U.S. media is startling’” and demonstrative of a blind allegiance to “‘the policy of national authorities.’”

U.S. war left in
Iraq

Hit and run U.S. hostilities: 

Iraq to Libya

Anti- U.S.
Libya

International dispatches in recent days from Libya have been reporting post-U.S.-invasion atrocities against “innocent civilians” ─ this latest conflict reportedly provoked by the death of Omran Shaaban, a “rebel from Misrata credited with capturing” President Qaddafi. Shaaban reportedly died on September 25 after “two months’ detention in Bani Walid.” Reports from the  town have indicated that innocent civilians are caught in the crossfire of increasing “fighting between pro-government forces and Qaddafi loyalists.”

So today the Russian Federation offered at the United Nations a statement expressing concern about the significant escalation of violence in and around Bani Walid and calling on Libyan authorities “to take urgent steps to resolve the conflict by peaceful means and to preserve the rights of all Libyan citizens.”

United Nations
 Bushwhacked by
USA

The United States then blocked the draft statement, which the Russian envoy found strange indeed. Vitaly Churkin said:

Blocking a draft statement that called to solve the country’s political problems without violence is very strange.

This is a case when it is difficult to explain the U.S. delegation’s actions in rational terms.

W

hat can change U.S. foreign relations of war, its violence against sovereign peoples? Gravel continued.

I know of no change “that could come about in the United States to change our whole attitude of imperialism,” he said, other than bankruptcy ─ where, of course, “the country it is slowly going.”

During the Republican-Democratic Party candidates’ foreign policy performance, Gravel said, “There was some truth in what Obama said:

[w]e cannot be strong in the world if we’re not strong at home economically; and we are not strong economically.

“We waste our economic capability on foreign wars and foreign policies” that do nothing other than kill a lot of people; and we stand above them [and tell them] we can dictate the kind of government they will have.”

Egypt-Libya-Syria

“We are trying to dictate that in Syria, in Libya, and in other countries,” Gravel said.

“We dictated that in Egypt: through our military and through the billions of dollars the United States gives annually to Egypt’s military, we forced [President Hosni] Mubarak out.” It is a pattern employed by the United States government “around the world” including “indirectly” in Syria.

Rights due to Human beings as 

Human beings

Speaking recently on the sidelines of a parliamentary hearing on human rights in America, Alexei Pushkov pointedly observed that the United States itself must “honor human rights before trying to lecture other countries on these principles.”

Universal Declaration of
Human Rights
1947

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’d say that targeted assassinations, wars of aggression, provocation and destabilization of countries and factions, displacement of peoples, torture and detention without charge, trial or counsel, violations of the peace ─ all of these known to have been committed and are still being ordered and committed by U.S. government officials and agents ─ all of these fall within the category of lawlessness and abuse of human rights. 

Those who order and or commit these acts must be brought to account before an impartial court of justice and those who promise to commit or suggest that they intend or might commit such acts must be barred from or voted out of public office ─ especially the entrenched, no matter who they are or what their pedigree or lineage.

Sources and notes

“Romney vs. Obama: Where’s the Choice?”  October 4, 2012, http://rt.com/politics/columns/bridge-too/us-presidential-debates-romney-obama/

“Cold war climate pursued by U.S. in Syria at cost of their own economy,” October 23, 2012, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/10/23/268353/obama-romney-debate-promoted-waging-war/

“U.S. media: Ideological arm of American foreign policy – Russia,” October 22, 2012, http://rt.com/politics/us-russia-media-human-rights-violations-956/

“U.S. blocks Russia’s draft statement in UN on peaceful resolution of Bani Walid violence.” October 23, 2012, http://rt.com/news/us-russia-libya-statement-068/

Mike Gravel

A former U.S. presidential candidate (2008) and a former U.S. Senator (1969-1981), Maurice Robert (Mike) Gravel (b. May 13, 1930) is prominently known for his release of the Pentagon Papers, the secret official study that revealed the lies and manipulations of successive U.S. administrations that misled the country into the Vietnam War. After the New York Times published portions of the leaked study, the Nixon administration moved to block any further publication of information and to punish any newspaper publisher who revealed the contents. Speaking on the floor of the Senate, Gravel (a junior senator at the time) argued that his constituents had a right to know the truth behind the war and proceeded to read into the senate record 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page document. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Senator Gravel did not have the right and responsibility to share official documents with his constituents. Gravel then published The Senator Gravel Edition, The Pentagon Papers, Beacon Press (1971). What followed was the court case Gravel v. U.S. and the handing down of a landmark Supreme Court decision (No. 71-1017-1026) pertaining to the Speech and Debate Clause (Article 1, Section 6) of the United States Constitution.

Mike Gravel has been characterized as “a passionate advocate of direct democracy and the National Initiative.” During the 2007-2008 presidential campaign, Gravel ran on these ideas.

The former lawmaker served in the Alaska House of Representatives (1963-66), and as Speaker (1965-66). He then represented Alaska in the U.S. Senate (1969-81) where he served on the Finance, Interior, and Environmental and Public Works committees, chairing the Energy, Water Resources, Buildings and Grounds, and Environmental Pollution subcommittees. In 1971, Gravel waged a successful solo filibuster for five months that forced the Nixon administration to cut a deal, effectively ending the draft in the United States. He was founder and president of The Democracy Foundation, Philadelphia II, and Direct Democracy, nonprofit corporations dedicated to the establishment of direct democracy in the United States, through the enactment of the National Initiative for Democracy by American voters.  Senator Gravel is author of Jobs and More Jobs, and Citizen Power. He lectures and writes about governance, foreign affairs, economics, Social Security, tax reform, energy, environmental issues and democracy.

Senator Gravel served in the U.S. Army (1951-54) and as special adjutant in the Communication Intelligence Services and as a Special Agent in the Counterintelligence Corps. His academic credentials are in economics (B.S., Columbia University) and in law and public affairs (four honorary degrees). Mike Gravel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, of French Canadian immigrants. http://www.mikegravel.us/bio

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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Conspiring in its own regression—U.S. in willful decline

Spiegel Online’s “President of Disappointments” spreads sweeping culpability of a nation mindlessly in peril

Excerpt, editing, end comment by Carolyn Bennett

Poor, oblivious, careless, and clueless

The fiscal and social systems are still designed for a superior economy that derives its prosperity from constant growth in consumption, Ullrich Fichtner, Marc Hujer and Gregor Peter Schmitz write.

“But the old days in which everything worked out somehow thanks to the sheer energy of a great country are drawing to a close and America has no plan for its future as a nation still powerful but no longer superior.”

Many problems are simply ignored. Los Angeles, for example, is the biggest Thai city outside Thailand and the world’s third-largest Spanish-speaking city. Three-fourths of all children in the giant Los Angeles school district speak Spanish.

The obvious question— is this or is this not a problem — is neither asked nor answered.

U.S. East/West vs. center-divide

The “spirit of multiculturalism” that prevails in Atlantic and Pacific-coasts cities “is not shared by all.

“In the forests, deserts and mountains, and in states along the southern borders, a new sense of anxiety — and a new racism — is taking shape in the form of new, crude immigration laws.

“Local ethnic conflicts heating up in southern California, Texas, Arizona, Alabama and Florida are hardly ever mentioned in national debates. But these conflicts will not disappear of their own accord.

“The United States is a poor country — at least in much larger parts of it than the world suspects.” Its unsophisticated backwaters are populated by people living in huts and in run-down mobile homes, people lacking the bare necessities and; even more often, lacking so much as an elementary education. There are an estimated 11 million immigrants in the country, about half of them Mexicans. Almost one in four teenagers is unemployed.

“There is no question that America needs a new plan.”

YET

Government malfunctions  

“The 112th Congress of the United States has been the most unproductive Congress since the end of World War II.”

Major national projects and monumental global tasks are sidelined or neglected “because domestic sports scandals or sexual improprieties capture the headlines, because lunatic pastors decide to burn Korans, or because new statistics are released showing that three-fourths of all Americans are overweight, more than 46 million live in poverty and gunshots kill more than 30,000 people a year, suicides included.”

Media collude

In a country where an American television personality’s 72-day marriage or the authenticity of the president’s birth certificate can have a longer-lasting impact on the news in the United States than any environmental policy initiative, that high gasoline prices (less than half the price of gasoline in Germany) are so important to so many people that they could decide an election, that 52 percent of Republicans in Mississippi believe the president is a Muslim, or where 46 percent of Americans believe that man was created precisely as is written in the Bible—can render political debates extraordinarily tedious, boring, mind-numbing.

Media feed flames of vacuous controversy and “controversy gets people watching” the idiot box. If people are angry, they will turn on the television to get angrier. “Confusion is produced where clarity ought to prevail” and a result is further division and disconnect.

Disconnect ensues

People from people

Government from government

Government from governed

“Americans gossip and chatter but no longer talk to one another.” The country’s infrastructure is crumbling. Public schools and large segments of the education system are in disastrous shape, as are many cultural institutions. U.S. administration, especially federal governance in Washington, is in urgent need of renewal.

Compromise is essential yet everyone “gets into the game of painting things in black and white” and because it is difficult to come up with catchy campaign slogans for America’s extremely diverse society, attempts to reach people are getting increasingly crude on all sides.

Watching a show of warring opposites, calculated failure to compromise, wedging (arms, abortions, marriage: god, guns, gays) one against another other, politics reduced to a “black art” whose objective is to suppress truly important issues and focus on the unimportant—a confused people loses interest in public affairs. Many Americans “no longer want to discuss politics.”

If a nation or people entrench themselves long enough in the status quo, they can only trend backwards. The Spiegel Online writers are right.

The United States of America does indeed need a new plan and a new project. But it also needs new blood, a new intelligence, a new ethos, a new consciousness, a new courage. And, sadly, nothing in current Washington—in any branch of government or among their allies and partners — measures up or rises to the critical global and domestic imperatives of our time. It doesn’t have to remain this way.

  

Sources and notes

“The President of Disappointments: How Obama Has Failed to Deliver” (Ullrich Fichtner, Marc Hujer and Gregor Peter Schmitz, translated from the German by Christopher Sultan), Druckversion – Spiegel Online - News – International, June 14, 2012, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/president-barack-obama-has-disappointed-in-his-first-term-a-838648.html

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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