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Post by pieter on Dec 10, 2019 14:02:41 GMT -7
French unions stage new pension protests on sixth day of crippling strikeRoughly half the number of people showed up on Tuesday for demonstrations called by France’s unions as had rallied last week in opposition to President Emmanuel Macron's pension reforms.
Unions estimated that some 885,000 demonstrators turned out across France by 5 pm Tuesday, as opposed to the 1.5 million they said protested on December 5. The French Ministry of the Interior put those numbers considerably lower, saying that 339,000 people showed up today and 806,000 last Thursday.
Travellers across France faced a sixth day of turmoil amid massive strike action over the government's controversial plans to overhaul the country's pension system.
Union leaders have rejected the government's overtures and vowed to keep up the fight over the reforms, which are set to be finalised and published on Wednesday.
The unions want Macron to abandon his plan for a single pension scheme that would scrap dozens of individual ones enjoyed by train drivers, sailors, lawyers and other professions.
They are calling on rail workers, doctors, teachers and other public workers to turn the screws on the French president before his government unveils its proposals in detail.
Critics say the planned reform will force millions to work later in life to get the same benefits, but Macron has promised not to touch the official retirement age of 62.
The strike is among the biggest since 1995, when then-prime minister Alain Juppe was forced to abandon an overhaul of the pension system after weeks of industrial action, a defeat from which he never recovered.
Most Paris metro lines remained shut on Tuesday leading to huge traffic jams in and around the French capital.
Just one in five high-speed TGV trains were running, and Air France cut 25 percent of domestic flights and 10 percent of its shorter international flights.
Some Paris museums were again forced to partially close and both opera houses again cancelled performances.
Many people chose to work from home last week and are only now returning to work, making this week a crucial test of public support for the strike.
"Psychologically it's stressful because you don't know if you're going to get where you need to," said Benit Ntende as he waited for a train at Paris' Saint-Lazare station.
"You have to wake up earlier – it's one of the joys of life in Paris."
Some 53 percent of French back the strike or at least have sympathy for the workers' demands, according to a poll published on Sunday in the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.'Monstrosity' The government's pensions commissioner Jean-Paul Delevoye held a final meeting with union leaders on Monday to try to end the strike, but unions appear in no mood for further negotiations.
"I will not negotiate over the implementation of what I describe as a monstrosity that endangers tomorrow's pensioners," said Yves Veyrier, head of the militant Force Ouvrière union.
Last week, transport workers were joined by teachers, firefighters, electricity workers and "Yellow Vest" anti-government demonstrators, who launched weekly protests to demand improved living standards last year.
Hospital interns also planned to walk out on Tuesday to highlight "degraded care" and lorry driver unions said they would take action next week.
The strike has already squeezed retailers in the run-up to Christmas, raising the prospect of another bleak year-end after the unrest caused by the yellow vests in late 2018.
Protestors clash with anti-riot police officers during a demonstration against unemployment and precariousness in Nantes, France, on December 7, 2019 | Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images
"This weekend was catastrophic: Paris was empty, restaurants and brasseries, even fast-food was impacted, with some losing up to 50 percent of their sales," a spokesman for the GNI-Synhorcat alliance of restaurant and hotel owners said.
Jacques Baudoz, president of the Joueclub chain of toy stores, told Europe 1 radio that revenue dropped 20 percent at stores in larger cities.
Macron, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and senior cabinet ministers were set to meet on Tuesday night before presenting the finalised plan.
"If we do not carry out a far-reaching, serious and progressive reform today, someone else will do a really brutal one tomorrow," Philippe told Le Journal du Dimanche.
The outcome of the tussle will hinge on who blinks first – the unions who risk losing public support if the disruption goes on too long, or the president whose two-and-a-half years in office have been rocked by waves of social unrest.(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)I see a CGT flag in this video. The General Confederation of Labour (French: Confédération Générale du Travail, CGT) is a national trade union center, founded in 1895 in the city of Limoges . It is the first of the five major French confederations of trade unions.
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Post by pieter on Dec 10, 2019 14:05:34 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Dec 10, 2019 14:07:13 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Dec 10, 2019 14:10:03 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Dec 10, 2019 14:10:44 GMT -7
Paris today
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Post by pieter on Dec 10, 2019 14:33:32 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Dec 10, 2019 14:36:52 GMT -7
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Post by pieter on Dec 10, 2019 15:15:47 GMT -7
It is clear that the Black Bloc is present in Paris too. I can tell you as a European this violence and vandalism is not done by Union members, but by extreme left demonstrators with an Anarchist, militant communist or Anti-fascist (Antifa) background. A black bloc is a tactic used by groups of protesters who wear black clothing, ski masks, scarves, sunglasses, motorcycle helmets with padding, or other face-concealing and face-protecting items. The clothing is used to conceal wearers' identities and hinder criminal prosecution by making it difficult to distinguish between participants. It is also used to protect their faces and eyes from pepper spray, which is used by law enforcement during protests or civil unrest. The tactic allows the group to appear as one large unified mass. Black bloc participants are often associated with anarchism, anarcho-communism, libertarian socialism, anti-globalization movement or antifascism.
"Alerta alerta, antifascista" people.
Extreme left anti fascist song, popular in Black Bloc anti-globalist and antifascist circles
The French version of this
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Post by pieter on Dec 10, 2019 15:44:05 GMT -7
Folks,
A few years back I had an extreme market oriented, corporate, commercial, libertarian, blond, blue eyed, Dutch girlfriend who hated everything which was state funded, subsidised, public, leftwing, progressive and liberal. She was a combination of traditional, conservative, Populist, Libertarian and christian in a peculiar way. Of course I was no good, because I worked for a Public local tv station. But I learned a great deal from her. Where I had a private library with history books: Old history (the antiques), Medieval history, New History and the newest history in general sense, and my literature books, biographies of political historical leaders and my art history, art and photo art books, my girlfriends library was a specialist library of everything related to the Financial world, the Financial markets, the corporate world, banks, insurance companies, Multi-Nationals and interesting Dutch companies. She knew a great deal of the world and the USA too. You could say she was a supporter of the Russian-American writer and Libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand (Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum), the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I liked the pragmatism, realism and independence of this girlfriend, but considered her to corporate, capitalist and radical in/on some issues.
Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum; February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982) was a Russian-American writer and philosopher.
Like Ayn Rand, my girlfriend opposed collectivism, statism, socialism, communism and the progressive social liberalism in the Netherlands as well as anarchism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognising individual rights, including property rights. My girlfriend was a walking encyclopedia and dictionary of Financial affairs, the economy and how the corporate business world worked in the Netherlands. She said that there was something very wrong in the banking world, in the macro economical policies of the Western world and in the financial and economical present situation of our economies, societies and monetary systems. This went further than the general knowledge about the mortgage crisis of 2008 and the recession and inflation of the dollar after that. She said that the press and media who are in corporate hands don't tell the whole truth, that there is a lack of financial and economical research (investigative) journalism and this critical reporting about our banking systems, banks, financial markets, central bank policies (your Federal Reserve), and our multi-national and larger corporations.
She also said after that criticism that it might be good that the 'impoverished masses', the underclass of unemployed and disabled (unfit for work) and low wages working class didn't know how bad the state of our major banks, state administrations and the state of our large corporations and multi-nationals is. She said that if the masses knew the real situation, hell would brake loose, worse than Paris today. That all over Europe and maybe in the USA towns, cities, urban agglomerations, rich suburbs would burn, because looting, vandalising, murdering and raping masses of have nots would come and take the possessions of the haves. In other words she said that the poor would attack the rich in their rich enclaves, in the posh area's whith the old and new villa's, in the luxerious suburbs with the expensive apartmentbuildings for the upper class and highclass, in the Yuppie neighbourhoods and thus in the wealthy Middle class area's of cities and towns. The masses will come from the impoverished, shabby and crime ridden working class neighbourhoods. I read somewhere that you have a scary huge underclass in Europe of about 80 million people who live under the minimum wage under poverty. These people can hardly pay their monthly rent, can hardly feed their children and often go to the foodbank, Army of Salvation or churches for food.
My girlfriend was rather extreme and to libertarian, extreme-capitalist, ultra-conservative and corporate for me, but she got a point there. In Europe, the USA, Canada and the rest of the world the gap between the haves and have nots is growing.
Cheers, PieterP.S.- This girlfriend is not longer my girlfriend and she disappeared from Arnhem, Facebook in particular and internet in general.
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Post by pieter on Dec 10, 2019 16:21:58 GMT -7
To me the story of my girlfriend sounded like the Armageddon, American disaster movies and scary worst scenario predictions of conspiracy theorists and apocalyptical thinkers.
Like this movie, but then vice versa
The poor hunting the rich, destroying property and taking everything they can get
Like this, but nation wide and not a black African minority against a powerful white police force, but a coalition of poor whites (white trash/trailer trash), African Americans, Latino's, other migrants against the rich. The rich are the rich WASP elite, rich Roman-Catholics, rich American jews and Muslims, rich Hindu's and Buddhists. The Billionaires, millionaires and the people that earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The people that will rise will be people who earn 10 thousand, 20 thousand, 30 thousand or 40 thousand dollars a year. When they realise that the system will never benefit them. When they realise that they will be the underclass or low class all their lives and when they realise that their situation will deteriorate, they will stand up and rise. Despite the fact that unlike Europe the USA has no strong collectivist movements like communist parties, socialist parties, revolutionary movements and no Anarchist groups, people will rise when they realise that they will become even more poorer. No Federal government, no police force, no army will stop this. When poor people rise they will come from the gutter, the sewers, the underground subways, from ruins, from ghetto's, the projects, the streets, alley's, boulevards, squares, train stations, bus stations, interstate highways, parks, the country side and elsewhere. The poor white trash hill billies will enter the larger liberal cities and try to take what they think belongs to them. Of course this is the worst case scenario. But if the American political, financial and economical elites keep exploiting the poor, these poor will rise. And these poor Americans will know that the American rich will have the Federal administration, the FBI, the American national police forces (state police), the CIA, the National Guards, the NSA, the Office of National Security Intelligence (ONSI), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the United States Department of Homeland Security, the Military Intelligence Corps (MI) and probably privat militia of armed rich Americans against them. But these poor Americans will use their military experience (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan), use guerrilla strategies and tactics and will know or learn to survive in rough terrain, mountains, woods/forests, national parks and destroyed neighbourhoods.
They will use knives, axes, baseball bats, spears, crossbows, robed arms, or collectively purchased arms, produce their own arms, use molotov cocktails, street fighting techniques and other arms/weapons. Let's hope that this will not come so far and that there will be no second bloody civil war of poor vs rich. But Americans should realise that high levels of inequality is not only unethical, inhumane, but also dangerous. If people become to poor they develop illnesses, physical and mental illnesses, and they will have a breaking point when their poverty becomes abject, unlivable and thus when they become fed up with it. Ethnic and racial boundaries will fall, because when you are extremely poor it doesn't matter if you are white, Black, latino or Asian, you are poor.
This gangs of scarry have nots will look like these fellows in that van that come out of the tunnel. This but without a nature disaster or a Nuclear war as a cause of their existence, but due class struggle, the rising of the masses and the Uprising of the Have Not's (the poor)
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