VIVE LA RESISTANCE!

VIVE LA RESISTANCE!

Thank God for France

By MIKE WHITNEY

Weekend Edition

October 22 - 24, 2010

Thank God for France. While American liberals tremble at the idea of sending an angry e mail to congress for fear that their name will appear on the State Department's list of terrorists, French workers are on the front lines choking on tear gas and fending off billyclubs in hand-to-hand combat with Sarkozy's Gendarmerie. That's because the French haven't forgotten their class roots. When the government gets too big for its britches, people pour out onto to the streets and Paris becomes a warzone replete with overturned Mercedes Benzs, smashed storefront windows, and stacks of smoldering tires issuing pillars of black smoke. This is what democracy looks like when it hasn't been emasculated by decades of propaganda and consumerism. Here's a blurp from the trenches:

Headline:

"French Energy Sector Crippled by Nationwide Strike... French energy facilities are close to total disruption in the wake of nationwide strike against the raise of the retirement age.....France has been hit by numerous protests across the country against a controversial pension reform that would rise the retirement age to 62 from 60....On October 22 morning 80 protesters blockaded Grandpuits oil refinery outside Paris, key supplier for Charles de Gaulle and Orly international airport." (The Financial)

Shut 'em down.


Take note, Tea Party crybabies who moan about restoring "our freedoms" while stuffing the backyard bunker with seed corn and ammo. Glenn Beck won't save you from the "mean old" gov'mint. Liberty isn't free anymore. If you want it, get out of the barko-lounger and organize. The amount of freedom that any nation enjoys is directly proportionate to the amount of blood its people spilled fighting the state. No more, no less. The man who is willing to accept the blunt force of a cop's truncheon on his back is infinitely more praiseworthy than the leftist/rightist scribe crooning from the bleachers. The state isn't moved by lyrical editorials or prosaic manifestos. It responds to force alone, which is why it takes people who are willing to "throw themselves on the gears" of the apparatus and stop it from moving forward. Unfortunately, most of those people appear to live in France.

The resistance is steadily building in France. The budding rebellion is cropping up everywhere---"secondary schools, train stations, refineries and highways have been blockaded, there have been occupations of public buildings, workplaces, commercial centers, directed cuts of electricity, and ransacking of electoral institutions and town halls..." And the big unions are calling for more strikes, more agitation, more ferment.

For more than a week, transportation has been blocked across the France due to the protests by students and workers. Sarkozy's popularity has plummeted. 65% of people surveyed don't like the way the French president is handling the strikes. 79% of the people would like to see Sarkozy negotiate with the Union on terms and conditions, but he won't budge. Thus, the cauldron continues to boil while the prospect of violence rises.

"STRIKE, BLOCKADE, SABOTAGE"

This is from an anonymous striker:

"In each city, these actions are intensifying the power struggle and demonstrate that many are no longer satisfied with the order imposed by the union leadership. In the Paris region, amongst the blockades of train stations and secondary schools, the strikes in the primary schools, the workers pickets in front of the factories, people create inter-professional meetings and collectives of struggle are founded to destroy categorical isolation and separation. Their starting point: self-organization to meet the need to take ownership over our struggles without the mediation of those who claim to speak for workers.

We decided Saturday to occupy the Opera Bastille. This was to disturb a presentation that was live on radio, to play the trouble makers in a place where the cultural merchandise circulates and to organize an assembly there. So we met with more than a thousand people at the “place de la nation”, with banners stating “the bosses understand only one language: Strike, blockade, sabotage." (end of communique)

The action was met with predictable police violence and mass arrests.

The pension turmoil is not limited to France either. US pension funds are underfunded by nearly $3 trillion. Will US workers be as willing as their French counterparts to face the beatings (to defend "what's theirs") or will they throw up their hands and appeal to Obama for help?

There's no question that Washington elites have joined with Wall Street to offload the massive debts from the financial meltdown onto workers and retirees. Nor is their any doubt that they will invoke (what Slavoj Zizek calls) a "permanent state of economic emergency" to justify their actions. That will allow them to move ahead with so-called "austerity measures" that are designed to impoverish workers and strip popular government programs of their funding. The trend towards "belt-tightening" merely masks the ongoing class war which is aimed at restoring a feudal system of royalty and serfs.

This is from an article by economist Mark Weisbrot:

"If the French want to keep the retirement age as is, there are plenty of ways to finance future pension costs without necessarily raising the retirement age. One of them, which has support among the French left – and which Sarkozy claims to support at the international level -- would be a tax on financial transactions. Such a “speculation tax” could raise billions of dollars of revenue – as it currently does in the U.K. – while simultaneously discouraging speculative trading in financial assets and derivatives. The French unions and protesters are demanding that the government consider some of these more progressive alternatives."
But the retirement age is not really the issue at all. This is about union busting and "putting people in their place." It's about "who will call-the-shots" and in whose interests will society be run.

The French are fighting back against this "oligarchy of racketeers" and the ripoff system they represent, while, namby-pamby Americans are neutralized by signing their umpteenth petition or venting their spleen at a Palin rally.

VIVE LA FRANCE. VIVE LA RESISTANCE.

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney10222010.html

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THREE CHEERS FOR THE FRENCH STRIKERS!

THREE CHEERS FOR THE FRENCH STRIKERS!

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Weekend Edition

October 22 - 24, 2010

The strikes and demonstrations that have brought France to a near-halt are provoking the usual patronizing commentaries in the United States and United Kingdom. Those pampered French workers, not to mention school kids, are at it again, raising hell just because sensible President Sarkozy points out that the French pension system is simply not affordable and the retirement age must be raised from 60 to 62. It’s time for a reality check, of the sort just being imposed by U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, proposing to carve $128 billion, out of the budget – more than 4 per cent of GDP.

Across Europe the slash-and-burn crowd are in full cry, calling for tighter belts – though not to any stringent degree for those ample ones circling the portly tummies of the richer classes. Cheering them on are the neoliberals here in the U.S.A., urging similar retrenchment, starting with Social Security “reform” – a higher retirement age and reduced pensions. The mainstream press here, starting with the New York Times has been florid with homages to Osborne’s estimable zeal to pare back the welfare state “excesses” of 60 years.

Such portrayals of the French pension system are grotesquely misleading. Diana Johnstone, an American journalist who has lived in Paris for over three decades, has been unique in laying out clearly on our website on October 21 what is actually at stake in Sarkozy’s proposals:

“The retirement issue is far more complex than ‘the age of retirement.’ The legal age of retirement means the age at which one may retire. But the pension depends on the number of years worked, or, to be more precise, on the number of cotisations (payments) into the joint pension scheme. On the grounds of ‘saving the system from bankruptcy,’ the government is gradually raising the number of years of cotisations from 40 to 43 years, with indications that this will be stretched out further in the future.

“As education is prolonged, and employment begins later, to get a full pension most people will have to work until 65 or 67. A ‘full pension’ comes to about 40 per cent of wages at the time of retirement. But even so, that may not be possible. Full-time jobs are harder and harder to get, and employers do not necessarily want to retain older employees. Or, the enterprise goes out of business and the 58-year-old employee finds himself permanently out of work. It is becoming harder and harder to work full time in a salaried job for over 40 years, however much one may want to. Thus, in practice, the Sarkozy-Woerth reform simply means reducing pensions.” (Eric Woerth is the French Labor minister.)

Johnstone points out that the school kids on the streets are not there for the thrill of trashing a car or throwing a rock at the cops. They are well aware of the increasing difficulty of building a career. The trend is for qualified personnel to enter the work force later and later, having spent years getting an education. With the difficulty of finding a stable, full-time job, many depend on their parents until age 30. It is simple arithmetic to see that, in this case, there will be no full retirement until after age 70.

Those supposedly pampered French workers actually achieve productivity levels that are among the highest in the world – higher than the Germans’, for example. France also has a high birthrate, unlike the dismal levels in France in the 1930s, when austerity programs of the sort proposed by Sarkozy produced a population dwindling at disastrous speed. So, the wealth produced by high productivity should be adequate to maintain pension levels.

“Should be” are the operative words here. As in the U.S., the French workers don’t enjoy the rewards of their high productivity in the form of higher wages. Their pay packets stagnate, while the profits from increased productivity are siphoned off into the financial sector. Meanwhile, in order to maintain the high profits drained by the financial sector, and avoid paying higher wages, the jobs vanish overseas, and the likelihood of getting anything close to a full pension dwindles.

The bankers’ agenda both sides of the Atlantic is the same: cut the living standards of ordinary working people; roll back the clock to the 1920s, a decade which culminated in disaster, as the bankers insisted that the only way out of the Depression was fiercer austerity – the Osborne/Sarkozy strategy. It took mass unemployment and the ideas of Maynard Keynes to recover from that madness. Now, the Keynesian recipe is being shredded.

As Michael Hudson wrote here on our site at the start of October, “at issue are proposals to drastically change the laws and structure of how European society will function for the next generation. It is a purely vicious attempt to reverse Europe’s Progressive Era social democratic reforms achieved over the past century. Europe is to be turned into a banana republic by taxing labor – not finance, insurance, or real estate. Governments are to impose heavier employment and sales taxes while cutting back pensions and other public spending.”

In general, it seems the Euro zone has decided the underclass and retirees specifically are like a third world debtor who is required by the World Bank to tighten up. As Joe Paff emailed me from Paris this morning, whither he flew with his wife Karen from SFO Wednesday, without a hitch:
“the ruling class has decided to allow the underclass to hate Muslims as long as they retire a few years later.

“Merkel is the crucial player. She said multiculturalism has run aground and has foundered on the rock of True Religion--- that Germany is fundamentally a Christian country and that the Mussulmen have to join up and shape up or get out. This requires forgiving Sarkozy for rounding up a village of gypsies and shipping them ‘home’ to Rumania. The European Union had dropped its case against Sarkozy in appreciation for his raising the retirement age.”

Contrast the popular eruptions across France against Sarkozy with the sedate atmosphere in the U.K. after Osborne outlined a brutal agenda (presaged by New Labour, to be sure), which will lead to 500,000 public sector job losses, pensions kicking in only at a higher retirement age of 66, plus higher pension contributions, and pain which will strike most fiercely at the poor. Contrary to widespread belief here, levels of unionization in France are not high. But the French have a radical tradition stretching back across more than two centuries to their great revolution. Working people everywhere should raise three lusty cheers for the French strikers and their allies.

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