Home » In France, yellow vest protestors cause highway mayhem

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In France, yellow vest protestors cause highway mayhem — 12 Comments

  1. They have been sabotaging speed cameras for some time and I don’t really blame them. The rural speed limits have been set too low.

    Toll booths I don’t know enough about. The last time I drove in France was ten years ago and I saw none.

  2. In most instances, public toll roads are a double tax. The federal and state gasoline taxes are supposed to pay for roads.

    There are no toll roads in Nebraska. Indiana has a toll road and I think it was sold by the State to a private (and maybe foreign) company. Corrupt Chicago is infamous for its toll roads. Now Rahm wants to build a casino and legalize pot to fund public employee pensions. Chicago sucks.

  3. Toll roads in California, at least those in southern California, follow the original masterplan for freeways but Jerry Brown and his transportation mastermind, Adriana Gianturco, decided not to build those freeways. “Small is beautiful,” you know. Consequently, the local authorities put those routes out to bid for private funding and that is where the toll roads came from.

  4. The European middle class is a more than a few notches down and much closer to the bone than the American middle class.

    I had a Christian friend who went to Europe as part of his Work. He came back and said, “Gosh, their apartments are so small and they have so little money!”

    For a less anecdotal view:

    “If Sweden and Germany Became US States, They Would be Among the Poorest States”
    https://mises.org/wire/if-sweden-and-germany-became-us-states-they-would-be-among-poorest-states

    I’m sure their health care makes up for it.

  5. Am I wrong in seeing parallels between the Yellow Vest protests and the Occupy Wall Street protests a few years ago here in the U.S.? If I am right, the authorities should should get serious and just stop allowing them space to protest, and the movement will die out.

  6. Roy Nathanson: To be sure there are parallels, but the Yellow Vest folks are mostly middle-class/working-class — not the usual American radical melange of rich/upper-middle-class types running things with a lot of slacker/broken/homeless people swelling the crowds as in the Occupy movement.

    Occupy came straight out of hard left, anti-capitalist, anarchist and communist groups. Its website slogan, complete with a red-black color scheme plus an upraised fist, was “The only solution is WorldRevolution.”

    Checking the web tonight, I see Occupy folks have scrubbed most of that from their current web presence. However, I did learn a Google employee came up with the WorldRevolution slogan.

    https://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/09/17/breaking-occupy

  7. Here’s Bill Ayers leading an Occupy teach-in:

    “Bill Ayers Teaches Radical Theory At #OccupyChicago”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E1hKn7v9bs

    This video seems to be put together by a conservative group. It has subtitles and commentary critical of Ayers. The original video I saw has been taken down.

    I doubt the Yellow Vests are calling up the Euro equivalent of Bill Ayers to help them out.

    But make no mistake. Bill Ayers is an extraordinary speaker and organizer. Arguably, he is the man who made Obama. If the radical left has a face, it is Bill Ayers’. To a shocking extent, we live in an America Bill Ayers created.

  8. If the radical left has a face, it is Bill Ayers’.

    And, like so many big names on the left, he is a rich kid. His father was CEO or Board Chairman of Commonwealth Edison, the big public utility in Chicago. Many of the radical left in the 60s were children of wealthy or, at least, upper middle class parents.

    The children never accomplished anything. Other than chaos or blowing themselves up.

  9. I lived in the ‘collar’ counties of Chicago ( Northeastern Illinois ) practically all my life.

    Commenters Cornhead & Huxley & Mike K are correct.

    By the way, for years Ayers was a “distinguished” Professor of Elementary Education at the University of Illinois in Chicago – UIC. Many of his “theories” have been adopted by “educators” all over the country.

    Scare quotes are intentional.

    That helps to explain why public education is such a disaster. It’s a feature; not a bug.

  10. huxley & Mike – in re Bill Ayers:
    When John McCain was running against Obama and declaimed, “We’re not concerned about some old washed-up terrorist,” I yelled at the screen, “Some of us certainly are!”
    I truly believe McCain did everything he possibly could to elect Obama up to not quite including pulling the lever for the Democrat.
    He wouldn’t do that, because he wanted to be president himself, but absolutely nothing he did as a candidate was directed to that end.
    (And I think he hated Trump for grabbing the gold ring that he missed.)

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