Man dies after setting himself on fire in front of French employment office

A 43-year-old man has committed suicide by setting himself on fire in front of a French employment agency in the city of Nantes, Ouest-France newspaper reports.

Earlier this week, the man sent two emails to local media, warning that he would set himself on fire after finding out that he was no longer eligible for unemployment benefits.


One of the letters said he would use five liters of gasoline to burn himself, according to local daily Presse Ocean.


Local police attempted to contact the man earlier Wednesday morning, but said he did not answer.


"A surveillance was set up today, close to the agency employment center. But this man came from a side street. He was already in flames and out of sight of police," a local officer said.

Police and investigators are currently at the scene


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But never mind, eh, he was only someone's father, son, whatever.

As long as those bankers get richer, because as we all know, in them we trust.

Plus...the trickle down effect.

 

And well said this man.

Lock up the International Bankers that impose this EU/New World Order
to put everyone in crippling debt and keep them there to keep them down.
The EU is just a loan sharking operation, it promised prosperity but its
real aim was to put everyone in poverty, while making the really rich, even
more rich. Smash it, Smash the EU, Dump The Dollar, The Euro and
go say NO to the UN and the One World Government the super rich
have planned and are tyring to fool you into living under.

 

How perfectly horrible.

 

What about the e mails?

 

And stupid, and selfish and unnecessary...

 

Yes... all that too.. but burning has to be a horrible way to die.

 

The bankers put everyone in crippling debt?

Bull(*)(*)(*)(*).

It's the people who want handouts from the government and the Leftist politicians who pander to them to buy votes who created the crippling debt, not the bankers.

Rediscover the virtues of individual freedom and responsibility and get rid of your socialist spendthrifts and you won't have this problem. The enrichment of bankers and all the other people bond-holders who profit from government debt are just a symptom, not the disease.

 

I would imagine its one of the worst. You have to regret such a decision after the moment of combustion.

I am not sure what he thought would actually be accomplished by this act.

 

I don't know either.. Some guy in Tibet did the same this this week.. I just cringe.

 

It certainly never helped anyone obtain a job...

 

Was it the Plutocratic Party?

 

Why do people with so little understanding of what they are talking about, speak with such certainty!?!? The largest reason for the current debt and deficit crises in most countries is the collapse of the banking sector and financial sector more generally. That was the result of bad government policy(government policy that was basically dictated by wall street), and incompetence in the banking sector. Spain for example had no debt or deficit problem AT ALL prior to the financial collapse(debt to GDP was at 36%).

Next up, people can be entirely responsible, but you ignore structural factors, and their ability to limit peoples ability to act. A person can work hard for years, never miss work, always do what they are supposed to, but they are in a downsized industry in a bad economy. They then can't find work, even though they try. That is a very real reality. Yet your solution to a structural problem is "individual freedom and responsibility."??? That is just a nonsensical talking point used to keep people from addressing the real structural problems and limitations rampant in the system. It is nonsense, because it implies unlimited agency and no structural limitations. Even the people who are most extreme on the side of agency, can't be that naive!!

 

17 trillion dollars worth of debt says differently. Buddy, can you spare a dime.

 

I don't know, frodly. Why do you?

That's pure unadulterated bull(*)(*)(*)(*). It's the massive expansion of the size, scope and expense of government that is the largest reason for the current debt crises in the U.S. and elsewhere. Look at the U.S. Debt Clock and the government's unfunded liabilities - we're at over $122 trillion dollars, and what does Obama & Company do? Enact another multi-trillion dollar entitlement program (ObamaCare).

Wall Street didn't pass FDR's "New Deal". Wall Street didn't pass Johnson's "Great Society" programs. Wall Street didn't pass Carter's CRA and it didn't expand it during the Clinton Administration. Wall Street didn't pass ObamaCare. Wall Street didn't stand up before the U.S. Congress last night and demand more deficit spending.

I never addressed the structural issues in the private sector, sport, so don't give me that garbage about presenting it as a solution the structural problems in our country. People who work hard all their lives aren't the people who are responsible for the explosion in entitlement spending since the 1960s. Neither is Wall Street. Neither is the private sector that is already incapable of sustaining the Left's insatiable appetite for more government and more entitlements.

Nice strawman. Once again that's pure unadulterated BS. Addressing individual responsibility is not a distraction from addressing our economy's structural problems, unless you're one of those Obama voters who has trouble chewing gum and walking at the same time.

And your whole argument is nonsense because it doesn't even address the expansion of the size, scope and expense of government and how that produces the skyrocketing deficits, debt and unfunded liabilities that we are confronting. Furthermore, it doesn't even address how that deficit spending results in higher taxes on individuals and the private sector, which inhibits economic activity and growth.

 

It says he sent two e mails. Surely they should have been followed up RIGHT AWAY, given the nature of them? It was clear that this was still a cry for help stage.

I find the way he chose to end his life gruesome, and without need. That is probably one of the worse ways possible. So, maybe the specific act of doing it that way, has some historical reason attached to it?

 

Let’s remind ourselves how we got here. The roots of the current crisis go some way back. After the 9/11 attack in New York, instability and fear pervaded financial markets. In order to steer the US and world economy out of a tight corner there was a reduction in interest rates and loosening of credit, encouraging people to borrow to sustain demand.

Banks took advantage of this and started to push mortgages. Initially the banks were lending on fairly good terms but then competition set in and those with money found they could expand their wealth by borrowing at low interest rates in order to lend to those prepared to pay higher interest rates.

One of the main groups prepared to pay these higher rates were poorer sections of the population desperate to get somewhere to live and those who were previously regarded as uncreditworthy. As long as house prices continued rising, they seemed a safe group to lend to, since there was always a profit to be made by repossessing their homes if they failed to pay up on time. This lending became known as the “subprime mortgage market”.

Although on the surface this appeared to be a form of secure lending, in reality it was risky. Why? Because by 2006 the US economy began slowing down and profits in the US started to fall. As profits declined, firms got rid of workers and poor American’s could no longer keep up with their rising mortgage payments. Borrowing at one end of the chain could not be repaid. Repossessions led to falling house prices, and the “collateral” that supposedly guaranteed (provided security) against the loans, fell in value as well. An enormous 400 billion US dollars in lending was suddenly not repayable.

A whole host of new institutions emerged that began specialising in the same manner as the banks. They would obtain cheap credit in the environment of low interest rates after 2001, use it to make loans, and then ‘securitise’ them. Other financial institutions would also use cheap credit to buy the new securities. Still other financial institutions would combine several of these securities to create even more complex, “synthetic” Collateralised Debt Obligations, which give their holders the right to interest accruing on the earlier securities, and so on.

In this baroque and opaque world, fuelled by cheap credit, it did not take long before just about all the major financial institutions across the world found themselves holding securities that contained bits of subprime mortgages. What was originally a small sickness within the US economy grew enormously because of the way capitalist credit works. In the end, governments’ were forced to intervene by bailing out vast swathes of the capitalist system as a precursor to saving it.

In spring 2008, Bear Sterns became an early high profile casualty of the crisis on Wall Street which was followed by the next big Wall Street bank to collapse – Lehman Brothers. The meltdown in Greece followed shortly after. Speculators are already looking for the next domino set to topple after Greece. It might be one of the other weak eurozone countries, with Portugal tipped as the most likely, but it might well be Ireland, Britain or even the US, all of whom as of now have a higher projected budget deficit than Greece.

All this is happening despite the fact that the major economies are technically out of recession. The recovery can be characterised in three words: “weak”, “fragile” and “uncertain”. The recovery is weak because the crisis, in spite of its severity, has not resolved the underlying problems the global economy faces. These problems were created by three decades of sustained low profitability. A recent column in the UK’s Financial Times pointed out that after the Second World War profit rates held up at about 15 per cent in the US. By the 19080s it was 10 per cent, and today it is just 5 per cent:

This would appear to indicate that the underlying problems of the global economy are systemic. As another poster to this thread alluded to, Talon, the systemic and structural problems, is an issue you are overlooking. This is not about left or right, liberals and conservatives, but it's a structural problem inherent to the capitalist system itself. So how can this be explained?

Marxism has an explanation. Marx’s basic line of argument was simple. Individual capitalists can increase their own competitiveness by increasing the productivity of their workforce. The way to do this is by using a greater quantity of the “means of production”—tools, machinery and so on—for each worker. There is a growth in the ratio of the physical extent of the means of production to the amount of labour power employed, a ratio that Marx called the “technical composition of capital”.

But a growth in the physical extent of the means of production will also be a growth in the investment needed to buy them. So this too will grow faster than the investment in the workforce. To use Marx’s terminology, “constant capital” grows faster than “variable capital”. The growth of this ratio, which he calls the “organic composition of capital”, is a logical corollary of capital accumulation.

Yet the only source of value for the system as a whole is labour. If investment grows more rapidly than the labour force, it must also grow more rapidly than the value created by the workers, which is where profit comes from. In short, capital investment grows more rapidly than the source of profit. As a consequence, there will be a downward pressure on the ratio of profit to investment—the rate of profit.

Each capitalist has to push for greater productivity in order to stay ahead of competitors. But what seems beneficial to the individual capitalist is disastrous for the capitalist class as a whole. Each time productivity rises there is a fall in the average amount of labour in the economy as a whole needed to produce a commodity (what Marx called “socially necessary labour”), and it is this which determines what other people will eventually be prepared to pay for that commodity. So today we can see a continual fall in the price of goods such as computers or DVD players produced in industries where new technologies are causing productivity to rise fastest:

As the rate of return on investment declines in its totality, so it is the weakest companies financially – but not necessarily technologically – that go out of business. In turn, this results in an increase in unemployment. Thus workers are able to purchase fewer goods and services. This inevitably leads to a downward spiral of economic slump and crisis within the system as a whole.

But Marx argued that there were countervailing factors which mitigated against a total collapse of the system. For example, the diversion of investment from the production of goods and services to the production of arms – a process that is governed by states that are in constant competition with one another – provided a very important role in producing the long boom after the Second World War.

Also, Marx argued that profitability could be restored by crisis itself, through what he called “the annihilation of a great part of the capital”. During a recession some companies fail and are bought up by rivals, and others have to sell off parts of their business or dump their stock on the market to meet their obligations. Those companies that survive can take advantage of this, grabbing assets at a fraction of their real value and putting them to highly profitable use in the recovery that follows. Depressed wages and high unemployment also allow capitalists to squeeze more out of workers. A process of “creative destruction” may lead to a boom following a slump:

But this is not some automatic process that pushes the economy back towards some natural equilibrium. The post-war boom followed only after the prolonged horror of the 1930s slump and the destruction of the Second World War, which also forced states to intervene to reorganise whole national economies.

 

Even when good people get together, to give a voice to those with none, look what happens;

Please type “www.calumslist.org” to bypass the Google BAN. Google Why Are You Killing Off This Website Created By Disabled People, Bereaved Families & Friends Trying to Stop Further Disability Deaths? SHAME ON GOOGLE.

http://calumslist.org/

 

Talon . is that a note of ignorance in your posts Could it be that who 've no conception of empathy/understanding for those who're in less fortunate positions are you might be. ?

I'm not american , but from the sideline , what I can observe , + hope , in all fairness , Obama DID NOT CREATE your current problem
, HE INHERITED IT.


If you can , please avoid ranting and try telling me why you think america'c economic situation would have been any better , if Obama was not your President.

What would have been the policies of a Republican President and how would he have handled the present economic situation ?



'''''

 

It's a symptom of the greed and selfish virus, sadly.

http://www.henrymakow.com/werner_sombart_-_the_twentieth.html

 

Jack , I've had a look at that link and reckon its well worth a Bookmark.


Thanks ...

 

Those foreclosures were brought about by liberal, socialist policies instituted by the quasi-government agency Fannie Mae with government oversight in the person of Barney Frank, a radical, socialist Democrat who wanted to make sure everyone could own a home...even low-income folks who couldn't AFFORD it. Now everyone is paying for bad policies...except of course...guys like Barney Frank.

 

Indeed, as I said the current problems stemmed from 2001. However, like I also said, the problems are structural in nature in that they represent a symptom of the capitalist economic system itself. That's why it's important to understand that it's not about Obama or Bush, left or right, liberalism or conservatism. The problem is deeper.

- - - Updated - - -

Nonsense. Read my posts and learn something.

 

Hopefully it may have an unexpected positive.

Could it push people closer together, restore a sense of community?

 

Here is what I was thinking of..

Self-immolation

Self-immolation refers to setting oneself on fire, often as a form of protest or for the purposes of martyrdom or suicide. It has centuries-long traditions in some cultures, while in modern times it has become a type of radical political protest. Michael Biggs compiled a list of 533 "self-immolations" reported by Western media from the 1960s to 2002, though in this work his definition is generalized to any intentional suicide "on behalf of a collective cause.


Self-immolation is tolerated by some elements of Mahayana Buddhism and Hinduism, and it has been practiced for many centuries, especially in India, for various reasons, including Sati, political protest, devotion, and renouncement. Certain warrior cultures, such as in the Charans and Rajputs, also practiced self-immolation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation

 

They can be seen as a type of altruistic suicides for the collective cause. Unlike suicide attacks, self-immolations are not intended to inflict physical harm or material damage.They attract attention and become glorified as martyrdom, because of the perception of great pain, but they do not guarantee death for the burned. While the burning of vital tissue can be very painful during self-immolation, shock or asphyxiation quickly make the event painless, as do the onset of third-degree burns which destroy the nerve endings.



RIP sir.