Don't mind the :LIB: link, just one million people came out in Paris today, "hundreds of thousands" my arsecheecks.
It's been a wild couple of days in France, firefighters on strike burning tyres to trigger smoke alarms, electricians turning electric counters back to zero and then resealing them (allegedly cutting power to rich knobheads in the meantime), all ports being closed, and all that was just wildcat action in anticipation of the general stikes for today.
This is all to stop the government from raising the retirement age to 64, from where it is now, 62. Some union heads have murmured that in fact, they want it lowered to 60, as retribution.
Obviously the government has a huge hole in the budget because they want an overinflated army and they think this is a good way to pay for it. I don't even want to start pointing out how dumb of a move this is (the marginal productivity of a 62 year old will not be enough to pay for the fucking army's oil changes)
Honestly these are the biggest strikes that have happened in "the West" within my recollection.
edit: the small conservative Alsacian village I visited recently had their sole Burger King go on strike today so that's how "general" these general strikes are
edit2: oh yeah, some of the strikers were blasting the internationale, which is pretty common for this kind of stuff in France, but still, we love it folks, we love it
Yeah, it is fun to dunk on people with Frenchness but I wish Americans were half as willing to do something meaningful in the face of degrading quality of life.
Fishing is notoriously volatile. In Alaska at least you usually work for shares of the catch. Which could be tens of thousands, or rarely hundreds of thousands in a good year. Or it could be almost nothing. The fisheries are overexploitated to the point of collapse. Several crab fisheries have been destroyed by bottom trawling. The government departments in charge of fisheries stand accused of over-counting to keep the fisheries open even as stocks become more and more depleted. In Alaska fishing fleets from Seattle sail up in to Alaskan waters and routinely violate Alaskan and federal regulations, fucking over indigenous Alaskan fishermen. It's all fucked.
The government departments in charge of fisheries stand accused of over-counting to keep the fisheries open even as stocks become more and more depleted.
:doomer:
French: Retirement age being increased by 2 years? Fuck you, have fun with your destroyed economy!
Americans: We have a lot of reasonable demands, but Brandon told us we can't strike, so we won't.
This is especially awesome because even the unions feared a radically decreased participation in protests compared to the previous ones on January 19th; instead it was vastly increased. This is likely the largest social movement in France in the last 13 years.
Seeing the movement, even some of Macron's congressmen have expressed doubts in the press about the reform; to the point where :macron: had to let leak suggestions he might dissolve the legislative assembly, likely to reign in his own troops.
dissolve the legislative assembly
In bad country, sham elections are held to give people the illusion of democracy, but the dictator holds absolute power
Oh, that's the least of it. See, for example, article 49.3 of our constitution; I quote:
Article 49 Subsection 3 deals with an administration engagement de responsabilité (commitment of responsibility), which allows the executive branch to force passage of a legislative text unless the opposition introduces a vote de censure (motion of no confidence), which has little chance of passing, since it also entails the dissolution of the legislature pending new elections.
Guess who's been using that one particularly often these last few years ? :macron:
And for the retirement reform, they're digging article 47.1 - which allows to pass a social security budget without a legislative vote after 20 days have passed. Even Macron's congressmen have been making some very pointed remarks about this, because it's basically close to a constitutional exploit. Article on this here if you're curious - in french though.
More like
Americans: retiring before the age of 78 is groomer communism.
A comfortably retired boomer obnoxiously guffawing at you for being mad at the retirement age being raised and telling you to vote harder.
Man I wish I lived in a country that understood the power of collective action and labor rights. That would be rad.
I wish I lived in a country that didn't shoot and bomb all the union workers to death and then memory-hole it.
For real! The desturction of workers and labor history in the US is insane.
Americans don't have 8 hour work days. Unpaid lunch breaks aside, a great deal of jobs have shifts up to 12 hours and longer.
American liberals will always value property over people. It's fuckin pathetic. Some days I think the DNC type liberal are worse than a CHUD. They don't care about conditions for workers so long as the property value doesn't go down. Fuck those dweebs.
cool, now show that same energy to demand your government to stop their imperialism in Africa and the rest of the global south.
Oh silly, you haven’t meet the french left it seems. This country was one of the ideological thought leaders of eurocommunism/trotskyism
The french killed Sankara, and for that they can never be forgiven.
Say what you will about the French. But they do know how to throw a party.
I'd prefer if they kept the party to their own country
Yup. Fucking up as much of Africa as possible is one of the main past time of capitalists over here :france-cool:
Iit's all a bit sus, on one end it sounds nice finally seeing something barely resembling militant labour actions, on the other, the absolute batshit insanest covid denying, yellow peril, "kids these days have too many genders and not enough discipline" meatsuit wearing motherfuckers have been dominating the speeches at these protests and at least in my personal circle, the only peope stoked about this are the absolute shittiest adorno F-scale high scoring motherfuckers that have spent their entire lives complaining about people on welfare, immigrant and lazy unions members that are just afraid of hardwork .
They're also pretty much enjoying a lot free airtime/coverage from the same mainstream media that regularly minimizes or downright demonizes union action.In short, shit sounds strasserite as fuck.
That trot party, MAS, split from the Left Block, apparently because the left block isn’t sectarian enough. And over the weekend, the main face of MAS spent a whole afternoon accusing CGTP of supporting the governments decision to declare minimum services for the education sector which is a straight up lie, it also refused to participate as a united front in a negotiation roundtable with the other unions against the government.
it's so much fucking worse than that, it was born out of the corpse of the 2011 15 October protest/movements, after the Left Block successfully coopted the movement and left the occupy kids who staid overnight to rot with no logistics support whatsoever because they had the gall to self organize (you know, the thing literal tens of thousands of flyer and posters called for) instead of just rolling over and letting the enlightened vanguard speak for them after a good nights sleep at home between protest photo ops, The left block factions turned on themselves for control over the movement assemblies/brand (Because at that point they had successfully hollowed it out from any meaningful organizing/community outreach) and MAS was the winning left block faction that splintered from the party while the party proper went on to launch a rebranded "movement" called "QSLT - Que se lixe a troika" (Screw the (IMF)Troika) which was somehow even more performative and useless, but this time they learned their lesson and assembly participation was invitation only.
The winning faction tried to keep control of the hollowed out 15O brand but eventually rebranded as MAS in 2013, incidentally they've also been aligned with some of the chuddiest, climate/covid denying, terf "leftists" like running Joana amaral dias as a candidate and being super friendly with "baroness" Raquel Varela.
Excluding the union members voting for strike action I have seen no other votes (molotovs) being deposited into ballot boxes (cop cars), but then again, I think it's too early to survey the polling stations. In fact, the clashes with the pigs were minimal, but that's to be expected, the greater the mass action is, the less the police can kettle and do whatever they want with impunity.
If you have a hundred rioters you have a problem
If you have a million rioters the police have a problem.
I’m sorry I can’t support disrespectful politics like this. If they want any real change to happen they should try donating to their local representative and :vote: ing for them in two years
They should vote harder for macron next election and stop this useless partisan noncompliant behavior, why not vote for the lesser evil and hope for a greater good?
Wow, this is so inspiring! I want to see this in the US eventually.
I wonder what it will take for Macron to go back on it.
huge hole in the budget
The pension funding gap is like 0.7% of government revenue (10 billion to ~1350 billion)
