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Jacques Cheminade’s Ideas Are Reaching the French Population

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Jacques Cheminade is now giving two or three interviews per day to major media in France, and there has been a shift into letting the candidate speak, rather than cutting him off after every 15 seconds.

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Indicative of the contents is an interview with Bruce Toussaint of Europe 1 radio on March 26 at 7:44, prime time. A partial translation follows:

Toussaint: Jacques Cheminade, who are you?

Cheminade: I am just what I’ve written in my book, "A World without the City or Wall Street." I want to break the stranglehold of finances in order to fund social expenses. I was very happy to read this morning what Sigmar Gabriel wrote in Libération [about a world without Wall Street and the City].

Toussaint: What is the first measure you would take if elected President of the Republic?

Cheminade: I would say, okay, I’m going to set an example. That is, I would ask a Parliamentary investigative committee, just as Pecora did under Roosevelt in the United States in 1933, in order to examine what happened in this economic and financial crisis, which is far from being over. This investigative committee must have jurisdictional powers, it must have the power of a prosecutor and be able to requisition the accounts of banks. And then we’ll see how to separate, how to cut in two the so-called universal French banks.

Those who speculated, or the investment banking part, will be separated from the deposit and credit part. The deposit and credit side will be protected; the investment banking will not be bailed out. They played on the markets, they gambled and they lost. Too bad for them.

Toussaint: You talk about an issue that has had a profound effect on the French people over the past years, that is, the financial crisis. In 1995, you were one of a handful who spoke about this possibility. But there are other things in your program that are more surprising — I was going to say "stranger." Are you serious with this idea about colonizing Mars and the Moon, if you’re elected? I read that!

Cheminade: Yes, it’s very serious, in the long term. It’s a matter of two generations. We have to commit ourselves to the long term. Today, you know, we have forgotten many things about space. If we hadn’t had a space program, we would not have had an artificial heart, we would not have had such progress in metallurgy...

Toussaint: But wait a minute. Is France supposed to do this, or the world?

Cheminade: France cannot do it alone. France cannot do much alone. But it can do so in a world economy. I’m against globalization, on the financial level, but not globalization as such. France should set an example, and become a catalyzer for a space policy, which is in fact a common aim of mankind.

Toussaint: Okay, but what does that change in our daily lives? for people who might be considering voting for you?

Cheminade: It changes everything. Without space, we wouldn’t have had cell phones or PCs.

Toussaint: I’m talking about colonizing the Moon and Mars.

Cheminade: Well, this is long term.

Toussaint: And what will we do there?

Cheminade: This is a common aim of mankind. If the different peoples work together, and different countries work together on this project, the temptation to wage war on Earth will disappear. It’s a long-term objective.

But it’s also something that should allow us to change our way of producing , our way of knowing, and acting on Earth. But I would add one thing: before we do this, we have to create harmonious development throughout the whole world. We have to develop Africa, for example; that’s one of my proposals.

And I think a Presidential election is first and foremost a vision, a project, and not a matter of how much it costs.

Toussaint: In any case, you have differentiated yourself from the others with those proposals. When we go to your website, cheminade2012.fr, we come across your friends in the world, and there we find the website of Mr. LaRouche. We’ve heard a bit about him over the past days. He’s an American politician who does not hesitate to compare Mr. Obama to Hitler, who says that just like Hitler before him, Obama is going to eliminate the opposition, and you were criticized for this closeness.

Cheminade: I gave my explanations.

Toussaint: That’s right. This is a person who believes in conspiracy theories. Is that the case with you?

Cheminade: No, he’s not a believer in conspiracy theories. He says there are some people who say there is no conspiracy anywhere, and others who see conspiracies everywhere. But there IS an oligarchy, the oligarchy of Wall Street and the City, which exercises domination over the world. And many of the attacks, most of them, come from those quarters who don’t like him at all, because he has always fought them.

Toussaint: There are many people in the United States who have doubts about the way the September 11 attacks were carried out. I just take one of the more representative examples. Is that the case with you?

Cheminade: I don’t want to hold forth on this issue. There are reasons to have doubts, but now it’s the past, it’s over. What happened afterwards is important. The reprisals justified by the attacks afterwards led to this false defense of democracy. So that Bush, who was not really an interventionist in the beginning, became overly interventionist with the neocons who pushed that policy violently. They USED the September 11 attacks to push that policy.

Toussaint: So you have a kind of doubt?

Cheminade: I have a kind of doubt.

Toussaint: But about what, the way it was carried out?

Cheminade: No, about the FBI. Because there many reports from the FBI about what some Saudi nationals in the United States were doing. Those reports went up the ladder, but nothing was done. I think that’s the most serious aspect. Either the FBI is terribly incompetent, but I don’t think so (the FBI even had a dossier on me, and filed a suit against me early on but unsuccessfully; they thought I was an enemy of the United States and I am not). They had a dossier on everything, but nothing was done.

Toussaint: But what about the actual execution of the attacks?

Cheminade: That’s important, because at a certain point, the guard was lowered. How that was done, I don’t know. I don’t have a crystal ball.

Toussaint: On the way it happened?

Cheminade: This is a long story, there were all kinds of analyses. I don’t think this is the appropriate place to talk about it....

Toussaint: I personally don’t have any doubts. What score do you hope to get Mr Cheminade?

Cheminade: I don’t have expectations of that type, but what I hope to create is a movement in which all the adversaries of the world of finance will come together to really fight against it. We can’t do this halfway, just as you can’t be half pregnant.