Get News & Views Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
French Unions: We Won't Pay For 'Failures of Global Finance'
French Police, Strikers Clash Ahead of Pension Vote
PARIS – French riot police tear-gassed workers trying to block a fuel depot and broke up a picket at a key refinery serving Paris on Friday, hours before the Senate votes on fiercely-contested pension reforms.
French striking railway workers demonstrate over pension reform in Paris October 21, 2010. France faced another day of strikes and confrontation on its streets on Thursday as the government grappled to restore fuel supply with senators just a few days away from voting on pension reform. The banner reads "renewable strike". (REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes) Police used tear gas to repel 200 demonstrators trying to block a
fuel depot before dawn near the southern city of Toulouse as part of
protests against President Nicolas Sarkozy's bid to hike retirement age
to 62, unions said.
Police moved in a few hours later to clear the entrance to Grandpuits refinery, which serves the Paris region, after an emergency decree ordered strikers there back to work. Three people were injured, unions said.
Fuel distribution firms warned that their plans to resupply filling stations would take longer than planned, but the government insisted that as yet it has no plans to introduce petrol rationing.
Turmoil continued around the country, as students staged another day of protests, workers stepped up fuel depot pickets and unions called two more days of mass strikes and street rallies for next week and the week after.
Hundreds of riot squad officers stood by in Lyon to try to prevent a repeat of Thursday's violence that saw security forces fire water cannon and fight running battles with rampaging youths in the east-central city.
Transport Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said fuel shortages had eased but one in five petrol stations was still without supplies as many families prepared to go on holiday when schools shut Friday for a mid-term break.
For two months France has been in the grip of a wave of protests against Sarkozy's bid to raise retirement age from 60 and the age at which retirees can get full pension payments from 65 to 67.
The protests have become the biggest battle of the right-wing president's mandate and he has staked his credibility on a reform he says is essential to reduce France's public deficit.
The bill has been moving through parliament and Labour Minister Eric Woerth said it would be approved in a Senate vote "in the coming hours", clearing the last major hurdle, which means it could become law as early as next week.
"The law is the law, so the protests, the discontent, the concern ... should end the moment the law is voted," he told France 2 television.
But unions, who say the reforms unfairly penalise workers for the failures of global finance, showed no sign of easing their campaign to bring Sarkozy, whose poll ratings are at an all-time low, to the negotiating table.
On Thursday, at the end of another day of clashes between youths and police in cities across France, unions called for workers to join two new days of nationwide demonstrations next Thursday and on November 6.
"Strengthened by the support of workers, the young and a majority of the population ... the labour organisations have decided to continue and to broaden the mobilisation," the main labour groups said in a joint statement.
More than a million people took to the streets on Tuesday, the sixth day of nationwide action since early September.
An opinion poll published Friday by the BVA institute and broadcast by Canal Plus television, showed that most French voters back the strikes, by a margin of 69 percent to 29 -- but 52 percent oppose the blockade of refineries.
Charles Foulard, head of the powerful CGT union in the refinery sector, insisted the goal of the blockade was not to "paralyse the country" but was "a cry for help to the government to open negotiations."
France's 12 oil refineries have been disrupted by the strikes.
Transport Minister Borloo said the police operation at Grandpuits was not designed to restart refining but to gain access to fuel already stocked there.
In Marseille civil defence troops have been sent in to clear rubbish from the streets of the Mediterranean port where garbage collectors are on strike, and in Toulouse intensified workers are blocking access to dumps.
Rubbish was starting to pile up in some areas of Paris too due to strike action by garbage collectors.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
105 Comments so far
Show AllThe unions are the soldiers of the middle-class. In France these brave men and women are standing up for their middle-class. In America our soldiers go to lunch with the politicians who want to dismantle the middle-class.
Hoa binh
Forward together for a free France and free humanity from the iron grip of casino capitalism.
French workers are fighting for all of us.
Sarko is a liar. The deficit is essential to get rid of the hard times just as it was in the USA in the 1930s. Keep the deficit and get rid of the Sark's booty-- no balancing any budget on the backs of the working people.
AD
Nice to see that CD is not ignoring this important developemnt.
The Anglo-Saxon media portrays the French as whiners, trouble-makers, cheese-eating surrender monkeys, socialists, communists, dangerous subversives.
One has to ask the rhetorical question: why?
In reality of course it takes GUTS to go out and take tear gas, beatings, loss of wages - for days on end. These workers are courageous and are fighting for the interests of working people. They are also quite intelligent, as they know exactly what is at stake and what is being done.
The Neo-Liberal IMF-style austerity measures are crashing down on all of us, these folks are heroes, despite what the Corporate Media Propaganda says. This is not just about raising the retirement age, that is just the tip of the iceberg.
There are some great comments here, and of course a few knee-jerk, Fox News style ones as well.
Workers must not be saddled with the costs to pay for the corruption of the international Bankster Mafia. The rentier parasites are getting away with paying nothing, and recieving massive subsidies at the expense of the public and workers. The crime of the century, and few are acting to stop it. The French workers are at least fighting back. Too bad we do not have international worker solidarity (or even class consciousness)
We don't need to read Naomi Klein to know that this is part of the SHOCK DOCTRINE. Remember what happened in Argentina?
Vive les travailleurs de France et du monde!
I could not agree with you more. Well written.
The capitalists, and especially the bankers, profit off of eating the seed corn of civilization (from a crop that millions suffered and sacrificed, through blood, sweat, and tears, to grow), and then when they find the cupboard bare they try to take from others to keep themselves comfortable and dominant for a bit longer.
The French government appears weak because the French people are strong. The US government appears strong because the US people are weak. As others have written here and elsewhere, US citizens often cling to guns because of feelings of inadequacy -- from knowing deep down that they lack the courage to confront those who hold the real power and are most responsible for the bleak future we face.
You mean all those arms "being necessary to the security of a free State" aren't actually fulfilling their intended constitutional purpose? I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
Maybe Americans would be more forthcoming in their own defence if each had his own drone to be launched from a concealed concrete and steel bunker. It would certainly help to overcome those feelings of inadequacy, but I suspect the targetting might be somewhat controversial.
This will end with the upheaval to dwarf all upheavals. The power brokers still think they have it under control, but it will escape them even as they congratulate themselves on their "victory". Hang in there folks ...
I like the French. They know the score.
Tea Party is run by Beck and Koch. Smoke and Mirrors.
Vive la France!
NO PASARAN!!!
Dolores Ibárruri?
May we say that almost half of those polled are in favor of blocking the refineries?
Actually, depending on the poll anywhere from 69 - 71 % of the French public support the strikes and protests despite the inconveniences.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/10/21-4
Here in America we have a lot to learn from the French. Finally, true opposition to corporate greed and corrupt politicians. Lets start supporting our own labor movements here in the U.S.
Don't bother! the so-called labor movment in the US has long since become part of the Corporate Structure. If you gave them any thing they'd likely give it to the DEM'S to keep Pelosi & Reed in Washington, and of course to support Obama, another corporate candidate.
It's time to create a new labor movement from the ground up, with real backing and real democracy. That not only serves labor but is labor. Not a bunch of lazy fatcat college scum, playing at being activests. That must End!
>^^<
I really wish the media would make it more clear that they are attempting to raise the *early retirement age* from 60 to 62, and the normal retirement age from 65 to 67.
But that would make it seem more rational, it might even look like they're not just whining that they don't have it all easy... Americans might even support them!
And we wouldn´t want THAT. Here in Norway too the media has been reporting the same inaccuracy - very frustrating.
I still remember all the hell the French got from this country when they refused to support US adventurism in Iraq. The difference between the French and Americans is that they have the courage to stand up for themselves, and risk injury & possibly death while doing so. I suspect the French people will still be going strong long after our corporate masters have turned this place into a big version of Guatemala. Aside from the men & women dying for nothing in our 10-year old Middle Eastern imperialistic quagmires, most Americans are wimps when compared to the French. Its too bad, because Americans weren't always so cowardly .....
Good post.
RE: Americans weren't always so cowardly .....
No they were not. The working class of the pre-war period going back to the 1880's were tough, they bled and many were killed to win the things we take for granted today like the 8 hour day and the weekend. I think the reason why the French are more militant than Americans is that they have a strong connection with their history. Americans are divorced from the history of their own struggles. From the denatured and sanitized history fed to us by corporate media and even our school textbooks (K-12 thru post-graduate levels), we see history as the "great man theory" rather than the truth of the great struggle theory. The ruling class is aware of itself as a class and acts in its own class interests; whereas the bulk of the American population is, and does neither.
very,very good
"If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue..."
–(Maximilien Robespierre)
"Similar skirmishes broke out in other cities."
That is all they are, "skirmishes." An indication that these mosquito bites have progressed beyond 'bottle throwing,' would be concerted, systemic attacks on both institutional and private bourgeois property– on a scale that could not be easily contained–where galvanic participatory energies could be spontaneously mobilized; where the de facto social enervation endemic to advanced capitalism could somehow be catalytically convulsed.
If there is one thing here–that which remains unspoken– is that things can only get worse. As in America, there is no way back.The French, contrary to the Americans, perhaps realize this. Capital cedes no ground once it has been claimed by reaction. There can only be more public immiseration.
In France, it is still too early to tell if state power will be challenged, and there will be a serious legitimation crisis where the facade of stability is breached, by the necessity implicit in events. Obama will–if the crisis becomes institutional in scope– send in imperial troops to abet the restoration of international capitalist hegemony and the dictates of fascism. At that point the dice will have been rolled; the cards will be on the table.
"Revolutionary progress determines its directions when it rouses a powerful self centered counterrevolution by engendering an adversary that can only cause the insurgent party to evolve in its battle against the counterrevolutionaries into a veritable revolutionary party."
–(Karl Marx, as cited by Ulrike Meinhoff.)
Modern capitalist governments are in a constant state of permanent, ever percolating, 'modified' counterrevolution against even the merest possibility of insurrectional events. America is 'counter revolution' incarnate, as a function of itself. It has no options. It has resolved itself into itself; has become what it is.
Perhaps the French penchant and understanding for the complexities and pitfalls of the 'hierarchical,' has the possibility to articulate organizational structures resembling a party, which could coalesce in a time of crisis. That time has not arrived, but dress rehearsals are welcome premonitory 'tremors'.
In America, there is no hope whatsoever, because the people understand nothing, nor in truth, care to. It defaults precipitously to fascism as a direct function of the more advanced dehumanization and alienation exacerbated by technological fetishism, now all but regnant.
When in 1953, Zhou Enlai, The Chinese Prime Minister was in Geneva for the peace negotiations to end the Korean war, a French journalist asked him what he thought about the French Revolution; Zhou replied: "It is still too early to tell."
VashkarKim,
Remember that the information we receive here in the USA is being massaged as much as possible (without being too obvious) to keep us from getting the full picture. There is probably a huge back story of several levels of threats being made by relatives of the politicians compromised by the neoliberal banking cartel. Ostracism is still a powerful societal force and not all French families are uniformly divided by class. Also, have you noticed the press NEVER identifies the owners of some of those burnt cars? That's another story we aren't getting. I doubt those are the random events of a mob even though our press tries constantly to depict the strikes as irrational.
We aren't getting the full story. And that gives me hope that the 'events' you mentioned needed for real changes are, indeed, beginning to take place.
agelbert,
Your points are well taken. Only time will tell if the insurrection becomes generalized where it spills over, or becomes just another evanescent blip, a mirage on the screen. We have no problem with you taking the optimistic view, as it is just as necessary as the pessimistic one.
When in 1953, Zhou Enlai, The Chinese Prime Minister was in Geneva for the peace negotiations to end the Korean war, a French journalist asked him what he thought about the French Revolution; Zhou replied: "It is still too early to tell."
"To punish the oppressors of humanity: that is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity."
–(Maximilien Robespierre)
VasharKim:
"To punish the oppressors of humanity: that is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity."
–(Maximilien Robespierre)
I think I have told you before, and I will tell you this again. Your quotes from Robespierre are like soothing balm to my mind when it is in boiling fury at the plutocratic classes, most of whom are inveterate thieves with demonic consciousness that revels in the bodily and mental horrors they DELIBERATELY inflict on the weak,the sick, the old, the very young and the poor. Whereas Christian hypocrites from the clergy may have shed copious tears for the rapacious, sub-human French aristocracy and courtiers during the French Revolution, and would have worked hard to persuade the masses to forgive and forget and not to hate their former tormentors so as not to not fall into perdition after death, Robespierre who was, IMO, the brightest intellectual light of the french Revolution, would have none of that mumbo jumbo. He knew and had seen both the sycophancy of the Catholic Church towards the aristocracy and plutocracy, which is a deeply ingrained proclivity that continues unabated today among the the Church leaders, and the suppression of the uneducated masses' just demands for bread to be alive by promising them cake and wine in the mythical hereafter. To subdue the fury and revolutionary zeal of the labouring classes, they stoked superstitious dread in ordinary people of a coming punishment from God with his avenging angels striking down the uppity poor for not knowing their proper place among their god blessed betters. They preached that Jesus had blessed the society of Louis IV, king of France and and Marie Antionette, and to destroy it would be tantamount to destruction of the kingdom of heaven. Perhaps a lot of rural masses were persuaded to not support the city revolutionaries but to enlist free of pay in the "godly" army of the king who had the Divine Right to Rule.
I would love to have been present like a Charles Dickens ghost at the sharpest guilllotine in Paris, since, perhaps, there may not be a re-enactment this time because the "liberal" mind in its wimpiness, in America for sure, is, as Robespierre says,inclined towards the barbarism of forgiving an unforgivable evil.
This is like the scene in "Casablanca" where Victor Laszlo tells the Cafe Americain house band to play the Marseillaise and drown out the Nazis. Rick nods his okay. You'll never see anything like that here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
"This is like the scene in "Casablanca" where Victor Laszlo tells the Cafe Americain house band to play the Marseillaise and drown out the Nazis. Rick nods his okay." -- Mordechai
Great reference to a very powerful scene in a great film!
gnken
Wow I wish citizens in the U.S. would get the courage to do what is happening in France. But with the Patriot Act strikers and demonstrators would be charged for Terrorist activity and would loose there jobs and right to vote etc. Nice that France has more liberties than we do.
AFP--All French Propaganda--"... protests against President Nicolas Sarkozy's bid to hike retirement age to 62." The issue is NOT about raising the retirement age as this article explains, http://www.counterpunch.org/johnstone10212010.html
The French unions have the correct analysis and the proper response as does Frech society as a whole. It ought to be very clear to French politicos that a vote for Sarkozy's further welfare for Banksters means political suicide.
"that a vote for Sarkozy's further welfare for Banksters means political suicide."
'Political suicide' means nothing in modern capitalist economies and bourgeois democracies as long as voting for interchangeable politicians is the venue that determines the persistence of the ruling class and the state and police apparatus; it means even less in America, where in fact, it is meaningless. Thus, the perennial 'evergreen' is forever salient and apropos:
"The dictatorship is necessary because it is a case, not of partial changes, but of the very existence of the bourgeoisie. No agreement is possible on this ground. Only force can be the deciding factor"
–(Leon Trotsky)
The Soviet system was every bit as evil as the Capitalist system it aimed to replace. There were many seemless transitions between Tsarist institutions and Soviet, the Gulag system with its prisoner labor and the secret police to name two. The old paradigm is dying, but the new one has yet to materialize and is unlikely to appear for decades more.
You are right that authoritarian, top down dictatorial systems are basically all the same shit regardless of the label of right or left.
However, I believe we have the bare bones of a new system of 'bottom up' true democracy in place with the internet.
It just needs some WORK.
We are not talking about the Soviet system here, so don't put words in our mouth.
Just because we quote Leon Trotsky the reference or the inference, is not to the Stalinist incarnation of the Soviet 'dictatorship,' but to the discrete principle of the dictatorship as a conception vessel of the future, as an necessary antidote to the ineffectuality of bourgeois democracy to deal with the intractable problems which afflict it and dispose it to fascism and the depradations of capitalist barbarity. We are not making comparisons.
The dictatorship we envision is indeed the 'new paradigm,' the efflorescence of the term, not an atavistic glance backward into a degenerate barbarism which you fixate on. Zero tolerance for fascism is just that. The term, as we use it, is excised, abstracted as an 'ideal,' not a referential reiteration of a failed historical model, just because Trotsky penned it. It is a theoretical construct of mentation, not meant to be a 'copy cat' of what came before.
Alarmists and hysterical reactionaries often only need to see the word 'Trotsky' to catapult them into visions of gulags and police states, and fail to isolate his work as thought, and see it as a component of a living dialectic. The dictatorship is not always some monstrous vehicle of top down, authoritarian police terror, but that is not saying that those elements can be totally disparaged, despite that Americans have been trained to react to reflexively, thoughtlessly against it.
"That which produces the general good is always terrible." –(Saint-Just).
Those who do not understand the role of force in history in the vision of the larger human liberation serve only reaction.
"The path of total police control over all human activities and the path of unlimited free creation are one...We are necessarily on the same path as our enemies–most often preceding them–but we must be there without any confusion, as enemies. The best will win."
–(Situationist International)
"Who says that revolutionaries even want to destroy the society of coercion at all?"
–(Otto Muehl)
As Alain Badiou says, those who used to oppose parliamentary democracy to Stalinism missed the point that Stalinism was the future of parliamentary democracy. Indeed: "the technological means for controlling the population are already such that Stalin, with his endless handwritten files, his mass executions, his spies with hats, his gigantic lice-ridden camps and bestial tortures, appears like an amateur from another age".
You propose an old wine in a new bottle. Dictatorship is incompatible with Liberty and is to be opposed at all costs. We currently suffer under a form of Dictatorship known as Oligarchy, which is what the French are fighting against. What makes today's Oligarchy different from its predecessors is its transnational character, which has spawned a global resistence and new multipolar geopolitical reality with a deep/shared understanding of the historical basis for the current situation. The most powerful tools used to create this state of affairs are the participatory social-democracy movement--Bottom-up organizations--and new regional multilateral organizations like UNASUR and the SCO, and institutions like the new Bank of the South. Overshoot will force cooperation or elimination--that is the fundamental paradigm shift.
"Dictatorship is incompatible with Liberty and is to be opposed at all costs." –(karlof 1)
Old wine, whether it is in new or old bottles, is generally better wine, as it improves with age. We make our own wine with four other families here in San Francisco. Your adage is not only trite, but untrue. Your conception of 'the dictatorship' is nonsense, as it refuses to grant the term a modernist update.
On the contrary, the bourgeois liberty (ersatz Libertarianism) that you propose is incompatible with real liberty that can only–in reality– be imposed by force, and catalyzed exigently, through force. The French insurgency will have to cross that bridge and not flinch, or else– following the ineffectual proscriptions such as those proffered by yourself– will furnish nothing but fodder for death via fascism. Advanced sections of the working class already know this. To wit:
"Revolutionary progress determines its directions when it rouses a powerful self centered counterrevolution by engendering an adversary that can only cause the insurgent party to evolve in its battle against the counterrevolutionaries into a veritable revolutionary party."
–(Karl Marx, as cited by Ulrike Meinhoff.)
Dictatorship, as creation of the 'new spirit'– in whatever form it takes is a galvanic organizational mechanism– it destroys specious liberty and imposes real liberty by removing the obstacles to it through revolutionary justice. It cannot be actuated merely by contemplating 'deep shared understandings' of the current historical situation, which is more suited for academic discussion. That is nothing but Panglossian nonsense and pious sentimentality, pretty words, with no teeth– a prescription for political suicide– and is truthfully, nothing but cant.
"People do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void."
–(Maximilien Robespierre)
The 'fundamental paradigm shift' is the war against bourgeois liberty and the reactionary institutions that succor it, such as the ones that you named. Indeed, this shift is about understanding why they must be irrevocably destroyed as the situation permits.
The paradigm shift toward a revolutionary 'dictatorship,' not only proposes the death of bourgeois liberty, but demands it as an act of visionary creation. The old conception of 'dictatorship' is your shibboleth, not ours.
The forms of 'bottom up' participation and change, can only come to fruition, by first passing through the dictatorship of necessity– which nurtures their nascency– by guaranteeing not only its birth, but its very existence.
The dictatorship–however it is configured in praxis– is simply, the imposition of an adamantine moral 'certainty'– and speaking through one voice– that the existence of fascism cannot be tolerated. Hence, it is not only the removal of any liberty from fascist agency, but presupposes its annihilation– in even its bourgeois forms.
in ol' glorious dixie, aging slaves were liquidated after they became unable to work any further for dixie's "finest people". it did not matter that everything they had produced over their lifetime had been taken away by the finest people and therefore the slaves could only "choose" not to save for retirement (they were irresponsible!).
in the "triumphant great western democracies"TM, older workers are instead told that "there is a pension problem!" after (almost) everything that they produce over the years is appropriated by the modern "finest people" (who, unlike dixie’s finest people, do deserve to pocket everything because they are more creative and work hardest when it comes to... grabbing through shrewd contracting most of what is produced, duh!)
yes, these are the same "better educated", "more creative", and "harder-working" "finest people" whose naturally earned superior neofeudal status was preserved by the bank bailouts of 2008-2009 which were decided ("to save civilization!") by the "democratically elected leaders"TM of the "triumphant great western democracies"TM when the "finest people's" financial-gambling problem (who said they are perfect!?) threatened to ruin them for good.
in other words, the workers who are about to retire have produced humongous amounts of wealth that, however, is off the table as a possibility to support them during their final years "because" this wealth was appropriated fairly and balancedly by the modern neofeudal class of "finest people" who do deserve to grab it all also because they have learned to bribe politicians, journalists, and public intellectuals better than anybody else before in world history (obviously! otherwise we would be celebrating a different and even more deserving group of "finest people"! we should be all be very thankful for the honor of working (living!?) and croaking under such the finest possible leadership (ask karl popper).
A fine posting.
We should build a Guillotine in DC and line up
the inventors of The New World Order, and the
builders of One World Government.The guilty of Nafta.
Somebody please notify Daddy Bush and Slick Willie to appear before the Guillotine.
Un message d'un Francais.
That French Revolution spirit must still be holding on unlike the American one that died a long time ago ! The only way I see the US being like France is if a socialist leader such as Hugo Chavez uses leadership to take over the USA.
The French are not out in the streets merely for a disagreement over a proposed retirement age adjustment, or any other specific entitlement Sarko has on his checklist. But rather, that unlike Americans, the French have a better understanding that
neoliberalism has run its course, and that they are now demanding a new economic approach.
I hope Zarky understands that elegant French term:
coup d’état
I am so proud to be French. Not enough money for good things but plenty of money for the war profiteers. The rich retire the day they are born. The working man is lucky to come out alive if he makes it to retirement. Most are disabled when they retire. Then they just get enough for rent, food and utility bills plus car insurance. Just enough to keep the slaves alive. Meanwhile the rich get richer. Look how many wars these monsters have created. Do you really think they will stop. If the French workers win without or with a revolution the rich will do what they did to Napoleon. Endless war against him. Villify him in history. Slander his good name so the most productive genius in history is seen as crazy. The French may win this battle the question is will people in other countries win their?s. Last time all the world powers attacked France. I am sure it will be done again. Listen already to some of the far right slander going on now. You have working people attacking the French workers. People all around the world should be supporting them. The right wing is so powerful it is almost hypnotic. Repeat nonesense words,chant Hare Krishna mantra to keep you unhypnotized. Hypnosis works like this. Relaxation Suggestion Action This is how right wing churches work. You go into a church. For the first part they relax you with nice music, nice surroundings smiling people. Then the preacher comes up. He starts making suggestions. Do you want to go to heaven? Yes Do you want to see your loved ones again in heaven? Yesssss Do you want to live in paridise forever with your heavenly father who loves you? Yeesssssssss The crowd loves it. Do you want to live in a heaven where you have life everlasting ? Yesssssssss How though, they think. Now the Preacher gets them to act. Do you want this life everlasting? Yessssss So bad do I want this heavenly life? Then come up here in front of the altar and be born again. Yes come up now if you want eternal life. OOOOkkaay Walk up get eternal life as a born again christian That is how it works. I use to study cults and the most powerful cult that I went to was the born again cults of the 1970s and 80s. Believe me it was like a human magnet. Had I not been to other cults first and innoculated myself I do not think I could have resisted. It was so powerful. Why? The speech patterns for this type of brainwashing has been studied and perfected for years. It is just more refined now plus mass media can keep them hooked. Like Manchurian candidates now. Millions of them. To break this hypnosis they must be overwhelmed for a while reindoctrinated and put in a normal environment. Your job is to break the spell. Evil prevails when good men do nothing.
I'm curios how an American revolution would play out.
We live in an age where the standing armies have weapons that really cannot be stood up against.
For example, imagine several hundred thousand American protesting violently on the mall.
The President could/would call in the National Guard to secure order. These people would have machine guns, small armor personal carriers with medium to light cannon, etc.
They could also fly around Spooky gunships.
No, I think the future revolution in American will be something subtle, peaceful and sublime.
For example, in concurrence together the American people fed up with the rich refuse to serve them any more in any capacity.
Sounds preposterous, but imagine walking into your local grocery store strolling out of your Mercedes and finding none of the people will allow you to buy or remove food from the store.
Imagine a level of disobedience like that ongoing.
t_g
I am proud to be half-French. My mother is French.
What they are fighting for is the injustice of handing out their tax moneys to the banks, who gamble with it and lose, but still get huge salaries and even bigger bonuses and perks.
The other part of their taxes goes to the war-machine, that Sarko has re-mobilized and deployed to suck up to the US warmongers.
No wonder that they are unhappy! Who likes their taxes going to gamblers and thiefs and killers?
I believe it is hard to justify all the wasted moneys on above and then make the people work even longer. Can I use the word "proletariat"? If so, I say don't make them angry, they are overworked as they are, under-compensated and tired. Let them get their fair share of their lives' work!
I say, good on them, to the barricades and get out the guillotines! Let's support them!
All the power to the French workers!!!!!
'Failures of Global Finance' means the Big US Banks' plunder of the world's treasuries.
These 'bankers' should face the ICC.
♦ ~ ♦ ~ ♦
"Fuel distribution firms warned that their plans to resupply filling stations would take longer than planned, but the government insisted that as yet it has no plans to introduce petrol rationing."
♦ ~ ♦ ~ ♦
hm, the allowable age for retirement may not be the driving issue.
While the French working class gets it, the North American gringos spend their time navel gazing about whether evolution or the Bible is correct in interpreting the world. The gringo unions, rather than taking on the system, argue about cheap goods from China and how to re-elect the Democrats. It's obvious just how politically clueless the gringo working class has become to its ultimate downfall and further impoverishment.
The main problem with the USA is it's the most anti working class industrialized country of all. Even the working class really don't like themselves. They are brainwashed with all the media and even the educational system constantly saying those who aren't upwardly mobile are no good, thus anyone who is proud of being a rank and file employee in a factory, mine, retail business, and right on down the line is "nothing." Working class people in other industrial countries are elected to high public offices and have real power. That never happens in the USA not ever. Even when voting for dogcatcher working class people won't even vote for their own. This isn't true in Britain nor any other industrialized country. Hell, John Major who was a British Tory prime minister was once on the dole and it didn't make a bit of difference, and he led his party to victory in 1992. In the social democratic parties in these countries working people are always well represented and have been.
AD
♦ ~ ♦ ~ ♦
"those who aren't upwardly mobile are no good"
♦ ~ ♦ ~ ♦
yeah, and the i-can't-be-happy-till-i-have-more paradigm squashes the mom & pop types, too. if you want a nice little business in your home town and have no desire to take over the word, you're an unmotivated loser.
This 'little' fiasco should be a wake up call to the evils that lurk in the bushes...err...I mean, the evil that the US is and the damage it can bestow on the rest of the world, even on those it's not dropping its bombs on. It's time for the world to get together and stop this monster before it stops the world dead on its tracks.