Thank God for France

Whatever you think about Unions and resetting the retirement age, Mike Whitney zeros in on the larger, more important issue of who's running the country and whose interests are being served, and asks, indirectly, whether there is the will to do anything about it? - Ilene 

Thank God for France

By MIKE WHITNEY, originally published at CounterPunch 

Thank God for France. While American liberals tremble at the idea of sending an angry email 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 Résistance.

Comments

[apberusdisvet]

So I should be absolutely thrilled that in this probably the greatest depression, government workers get mandated pay and pension increases of 5-7% per annum, leading to an almost doubling of my property tax bill over a 5 year period, even though my home has declined in value by almost 60%?

[midtowng]

Wow! Sounds like a great deal...if any of it was true.

I know several government workers and they aren't getting any of those deals. What they are looking at is mandated furloughs, and sometimes layoffs.

[chopper read]

mandated furloughs, and sometimes layoffs.

good riddance. 

[66Sexy]

its a union socialist movement protesting the reduction in government benefits; its the only thing that would get them off their lazy asses. not exactly honorable; not like a anti war demostration.. just the same old selfish shit.

dont mix apples with oranges; or i should say dont mix idealism with socialism.

[IQ 145]

 Precisement, mon Cher.

[knukles]

Ah, mais oui!  Ze action necessaire eest en practice pour le season vacation, when we also do nozing. 

Phhhht! 
Stupide Americaine.

[masterinchancery]

Yes, this post is totally delusional.  The downtrodden populace is not fighting, it is the coddled French govt workers, who of course don't do a lot of work, who are demonstrating to maintain their absurdly overpaid and over pensioned status.  By the way, they continue to be coddled with little response to their lawless actions. These wimps wouldn't last long against an armed public in the US, with plenty of ammunition.

[lawrence1]

And you are another ignorant name-calling, cliche-ridden person who know less than nothing about the subject ... and, worst of all, refuses to learn. Just spout your prejudices, another virgin to new information.

[Commander Cody]

Yeah, everybody wants their piece of the action.  Don't we all?  Maybe you think throwing more and more money at involvent banks and supporting big banksta bonuses as reward for fail is more important than preserving your own piece of the action?  Is wealth transfer from the working class to the oligarchy simply because they control the means right?  If you're not willing to fight for yourself, and particularly what's right for the country, you are not a patriot.  With that said, I'm certainly no fan of big government and that is exactly what is wrong with the USA.

[IQ 145]

 The authors cannot afford to "get a clue"; if they got a clue, it might lead to another clue, and that in turn to an insight into the nature of reality; soon they'd be facing basic facts such as that you can't get something for nothing, and "Socalism is fine, except that you run out of other peoples money to spend"; or "The essence of Communism is a 100% income tax";  this simple facts are so upsetting to their basic world view; which is that "everyone can live off of Unicorn Milk"; that they cannot afford to get any clues.

s

[lawrence1]

Who measured your IQ? Self scoring Im sure. Judging from your vocabulary or faciity with language, you would be lucky to hit 110. You dont know shit about socialism or communism, you just repeat the cliches stuffed in your mind for years.

[chopper read]

I will give the French this: they know that the banking oligarchy is every bit as lazy as they are, and they are calling 'bullshit'.  However, their "solution" of "more benefits" is ANYTHING BUT.

WHETHER IT IS FRANCE OR AMERICA, the practices of fractional reserve counterfeiting, fiat money, and centralized money planning, along with the Welfare State that these enable, are the problem.  Because these frauds exist, "rich" people gain access to free money (leverage) to which others do not have access, all under the guise of "helping the poor".  Of course, this is "The Greatest Lie Ever Told".  If we eliminate these fraudulent practices, then open up regional economies to competing currencies including gold and silver, we will restore liberty in America.  If we do this, over time, those WITH merit at the bottom will win, and those WITHOUT merit at the top will lose.

if Trillions of $USDs were not tied up in U.S. Treasury Bonds supporting the Welfare State, this capital would be in the private sector because it would have no other place to go.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average would be at 100,000 and everyone would have a helicopter in their back yard.  Hurricane Katrina victims, for example, would not need to rely on central planners who currently have a monopoly on both "force" and incompetence.  The abundance of wealth would increase the generousity of fellow Americans to unseen levels, and dwarf financial outpourings towards Haiti's hurricane victims and Bali's tsunami victims by comparison.

instead, we are paying ever-expanding interest payments on nearly $15 Trillion with approximately $160 Trillion in unfunded liabilities to the further enrichment of The Federal Reserve and extended members of the International Banking Cartel. 

The Welfare State cannot exist without keynesian money printing.  keynesian money printing is dependent upon infinite amounts of loans expanding exponentially.  obviously, this is not sustainable.  this is a sick, twisted system of fraud, with the promise of "free lunches" all around and a "chicken in every pot".  Obviously, these promises are on the eve of being broken and leading us ever-closer to economic collapse by the moment.   

Consider this: without a Welfare State, for example, unproductive individuals will not procreate because they will not be able to feed their children; and if they do, their children will starve (barring any philanthropic intervention).  This fact will discourage unproductive, anti-social behavior, and encourage productive behavior.  Productive individuals will be paid in the finite amount of gold/silver and move up the socioeconomic ladder.

conversely, productive individuals will have many children, and their gold/silver will be divided among those children.  If the individual children are not productive themselves, then eventually (perhaps over several generations) they will exhaust their inheritence and move down the socioeconomic ladder.  The trajectory will continue until they demonstrate productive behaviour again so that they may be rewarded with gold/silver. 

Of course, rewards can come in the form of other barter assets and services as well (besides gold/silver), but the outcome is the same.

Importantly, those productive individuals with gold/silver can make individual value judgements as they relate to helping their neighbors in need.  Unlike the Welfare State, they can descriminate between the widow/orphan versus the drug addict. 

A spirit of neighbors rewarding neighbors for that productive behaviour, which perpetuates mankind, and neighbors punishing neighbors for that bad behaviour, which burdens our progress, is the closet we can come to perfecting the organic efficiency and stability of both peaceful free trade and the advancement of civilization within the boundries of earth and beyond.  

Opening up our regional economies to competing currencies, including gold and silver, and eliminating the fraudulent practices aforementioned, will be the greatest step towards restoring liberty in America again where it once flourished.  

Perhaps we can once again inspire a revolution in France that is truly worth their spilt blood.  

[BigJim]

Please enlighten us - we're tired of not knowing shit about socialism and communism, we'd prefer to know some shit about them instead.

Incidentally, it seems to me the French are rioting to keep their overgenerous pensions, not to overthrow fiat currency, fractional reserve banking, and the MIC.

If they were to protest the latter they'd win our respect.

[lawrence1]

They are rioting because their president represents only the interest of the elite and the middle class, like in the US, is getting screwed. Other solutions have been suggested to the pension shortfall, like a tax on all financial transactions, are ignored.  There, like here, the middle class will be called on to sacrifice... austerity for the middle class, not

solutions which would cost the rich something. Here in the US we see no increases in Social Security adjustments to inflation because the statistics are manipulated... just see Shadow Statistics site.  Do you think voting means anything?  Only force, disruption will possible get the elite´s attention?  The French know that if they dont act together forcefully they have no chance of not getting decimated like the American middle class.

As for understanding socialism, I suggest reading James Petras... just google his name. And  consult Wikipedia.

[chopper read]

do you ever read, lawrence1, or do you just flap your gums?

Where is this mythical creature, "capitalism", that you condemn?!  Its certainly NOT in America.  Would you like to know about REAL capitalism, or do you want to keep your blinders as it relates to the fallacies of socialism?

Following for you is an excerpt from Bill Bryson's "At Home"(pages 233 - 235).  It highlights the period in America where there was no income tax or other major 'redistribution of wealth', and there was no centralized (communist) policy for money planning.  Ideas and wealth were pouring into America with this more favorable business environment.  The "gap" between the wealthiest people and the poorest was, of course, boundless, but the additional wealth creation came in from overseas via massive exporting, and, in addition to the entrepreneurial "rich" creating manufacturing jobs, they threw parties and built homes that created jobs, and they funded universities and hospitals to secure their legacies (as the mega-rich very often do).  They also brought art and worldly treasures to our shores that sit in our museums today.  Importantly at this time, ambitious immigrant workers were certainly no less "exploited" than anywhere else in the world and, unlike the restrictive class barriers and lack of upward mobility in Europe, new and existing Americans were becoming millionaires by the tens of thousands.  This growth was not agrarian via slavery (this ended in 1865) or cotton, but rather industrial via steel and ingenuity and, most importantly, via the power of property rights (including virtually no taxes, i.e. "right to your own wealth") and free markets.  This unprecedented growth happened decades before "the roaring 20's" of easy credit, and before the Federal Reserve was ever created. Bill Bryson writes:

"The Eiffel Tower was the most striking and imaginative large structure in the world in the nineteenth cetury, and perhaps the greatest structural achievement too, but it wasn't the most expensive building of its century or even of its year.  At the very moment that the Eiffel Tower was rising in Paris, two thousand miles away in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina an even more expensive structure was going up - a private residence on rather a grand scale.  It would take more than twice as long to complete as the Eiffel Tower, employ four times as many workers, cost three times as much to build, and was intended to be lived in for just a few months a year by one man and his mother.  Called Biltmore, it was (and remains) the largest private house ever built in North America.  Nothing can say more about the shifting economics of the late nineteenth century than that the residents of the New World were now building houses greater than the greatest monuments of the Old. 

America in 1889 was in the sumptuous midst of the period of hyper-self-indulgence known as the Gilded Age.  There would never be another time to equal it.  Between 1850 and 1900 every measure of wealth, productivity and well-being skyrocketed in America.  the country's population in the period tripled, but its wealth increased by a factor of thirteen.  Steel production went from 13,000 tons a year to 11.3 million.  Exports of metal products of all kinds - guns, rails, pipes, boilers, machinery of every description - went from $6 million to $120 million.  The number of millionaires, fewer than twenty in 1850, rose to forty thousand by century's end.

Europeans viewed America's industrial ambitions with amusement, then consternation and finally alarm.  In Britain, a National Efficiency Movement arose with the idea of recapturing the bulldog spirit that had formerly made Britain pre-eminent.  Books with titles like The American Invaders and The 'American Commercial Invasion' of Europe sold briskly.  But actually what Europeans were seeing was only the beginning.  

By the early twentieth century America was producing more steel than Germany and Britain combined - a circumstance that would have seemed inconceivable half a century before.  What particularly galled the Europeans was that nearly all the technological advances in steel production were made in Europe, but it was America that made the steel.  In 1901, J.P. Morgan absorbed and amalgamated a host of smaller companies into the mighty US Steel Corporation, the largest business enterprise in the world had ever seen.  With a value of $1.4 billion it was worth more than all the land in the United States west of the Mississippi and twice the size of the US federal government if measured by annual revenue.  

America's industrial success produced a rollcall of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Morgans, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts and many more basked in the dynastic wealth of essentially in exhaustible proportions.  John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today's money, and paid no income tax.  No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America.  Congress tried to introduce an income tax of 2 per cent on earnings over $4,000 in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.  Income tax wouldn't become a regular part of American life until 1914, and in the meantime any money that was made was kept. People would never be this rich again."

SOUNDS TERRIBLE, DOESN'T IT?   ...I'm so glad we gave up all that individual liberty and wealth for more of your "socialism", lawrence1.  I guess we still just "don't understand" socialism. 

...what a joke.

[GoinFawr]

What's this 'we' stuff, it's only you that seems incapable of understanding the simplest of definitions.

[chopper read]

right.  good comeback.  i can tell you've taken it all in and given it rational consideration.  and here i thought you were going to bow to the capitalist gods after that.  ha, ha.  

do your thing, bud.  have a great life!

[GoinFawr]

<knocks on wood> maple.

[Azannoth]

"president represents only the interest of the elite and the middle class" - oh so we all should go back to the slums and All be 'equal' ?

[lawrence1]

They are rioting because their president represents only the interest of the elite and the middle class, like in the US, is getting screwed. Other solutions have been suggested to the pension shortfall, like a tax on all financial transactions, are ignored.  There, like here, the middle class will be called on to sacrifice... austerity for the middle class, not

solutions which would cost the rich something. Here in the US we see no increases in Social Security adjustments to inflation because the statistics are manipulated... just see Shadow Statistics site.  Do you think voting means anything?  Only force, disruption will possible get the elite´s attention?  The French know that if they dont act together forcefully they have no chance of not getting decimated like the American middle class.

As for understanding socialism, I suggest reading James Petras... just google his name. And  consult Wikipedia.

[malek]

You're still trying to get a clue?

Tell me one case where something good came out socialism or communism, in the medium to long term.

[lawrence1]

The northern European countries... Dennmark, Sweeden, Holand ... are socialistic democracies which include capitalism ... and they have worked well ... you dont see many of their people wanting to go elsewhere. 

[Azannoth]

Socialism works for Ants and Bees but I'd rather be a dead Hornet than a live worker bee

[GoinFawr]

All the best worker bees are totally lacking any self-awareness. Now buzz off bumbles.

[chopper read]

if your 'qaulity of life' is so much better in Europe, then why are more people killing themselves?  good times!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suicide_rates_map-en.svg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suicide_world_map_-_2009_Male.svg

care to 'reason' anymore?  ...idiot. 

[GoinFawr]

Heh, those maps show the exact opposite of the point you are trying, and failing miserably, to illustrate. It gets funnier every time you post them, actually.

Spamming yourself into submission?

[moregoldplease]

All their population together doesn't add up to Mexico City. Actually the Swedes are wrestling with Islamic hegemony of their urban neihborhoods. So all is not well when social pressure is placed on Social Democracy either.

[GoinFawr]

"All is not well" anywhere; never has been. But a great deal is certainly better, judging by poverty rates, standards of living and level of education in many socialist countries. 

The population/demographics factor creates its own set of difficulties, sure, but the size of a nation's landmass and natural resources per capita must also be factored into the equation you are trying so hard to misrepresent. 

IE you could FIT practically all of Northern Europe into Mexico.

Are we learning yet?

[chopper read]

"All is not well" anywhere; never has been. But a great deal is certainly better, judging by poverty rates, standards of living and level of education in many socialist countries. 

do you ever read, GoinFawr, or do you just flap your gums?

Where is this mythical creature, "capitalism", that you condemn?!  Its certainly NOT in America.  Would you like to know about REAL capitalism, or do you want to keep your blinders on so that you can continue to feel self-righteous from your parents basement in "socialist paradise"?

Following, just for you, GoinFawr, is an excerpt from Bill Bryson's "At Home"(pages 233 - 235).  It highlights the period in America where there was no income tax or other major 'redistribution of wealth', and there was no centralized (communist) policy for money planning.  Ideas and wealth were pouring into America with this more favorable business environment.  The "gap" between the wealthiest people and the poorest was, of course, boundless, but the additional wealth creation came in from overseas via massive exporting, and, in addition to the entrepreneurial "rich" creating manufacturing jobs, they threw parties and built homes that created jobs, and they funded universities and hospitals to secure their legacies (as the mega-rich very often do).  They also brought art and worldly treasures to our shores that sit in our museums today.  Importantly at this time, ambitious immigrant workers were certainly no less "exploited" than anywhere else in the world and, unlike the restrictive class barriers and lack of upward mobility in Europe, new and existing Americans were becoming millionaires by the tens of thousands.  This growth was not agrarian via slavery (this ended in 1865) or cotton, but rather industrial via steel and ingenuity and, most importantly, via the power of property rights (including virtually no taxes, i.e. "right to your own wealth") and free markets.  This unprecedented growth happened decades before "the roaring 20's" of easy credit, and before the Federal Reserve was ever created.  Bill Bryson writes:

"The Eiffel Tower was the most striking and imaginative large structure in the world in the nineteenth cetury, and perhaps the greatest structural achievement too, but it wasn't the most expensive building of its century or even of its year.  At the very moment that the Eiffel Tower was rising in Paris, two thousand miles away in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina an even more expensive structure was going up - a private residence on rather a grand scale.  It would take more than twice as long to complete as the Eiffel Tower, employ four times as many workers, cost three times as much to build, and was intended to be lived in for just a few months a year by one man and his mother.  Called Biltmore, it was (and remains) the largest private house ever built in North America.  Nothing can say more about the shifting economics of the late nineteenth century than that the residents of the New World were now building houses greater than the greatest monuments of the Old. 

America in 1889 was in the sumptuous midst of the period of hyper-self-indulgence known as the Gilded Age.  There would never be another time to equal it.  Between 1850 and 1900 every measure of wealth, productivity and well-being skyrocketed in America.  the country's population in the period tripled, but its wealth increased by a factor of thirteen.  Steel production went from 13,000 tons a year to 11.3 million.  Exports of metal products of all kinds - guns, rails, pipes, boilers, machinery of every description - went from $6 million to $120 million.  The number of millionaires, fewer than twenty in 1850, rose to forty thousand by century's end.

Europeans viewed America's industrial ambitions with amusement, then consternation and finally alarm.  In Britain, a National Efficiency Movement arose with the idea of recapturing the bulldog spirit that had formerly made Britain pre-eminent.  Books with titles like The American Invaders and The 'American Commercial Invasion' of Europe sold briskly.  But actually what Europeans were seeing was only the beginning.  

By the early twentieth century America was producing more steel than Germany and Britain combined - a circumstance that would have seemed inconceivable half a century before.  What particularly galled the Europeans was that nearly all the technological advances in steel production were made in Europe, but it was America that made the steel.  In 1901, J.P. Morgan absorbed and amalgamated a host of smaller companies into the mighty US Steel Corporation, the largest business enterprise in the world had ever seen.  With a value of $1.4 billion it was worth more than all the land in the United States west of the Mississippi and twice the size of the US federal government if measured by annual revenue.  

America's industrial success produced a rollcall of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Morgans, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts and many more basked in the dynastic wealth of essentially in exhaustible proportions.  John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today's money, and paid no income tax.  No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America.  Congress tried to introduce an income tax of 2 per cent on earnings over $4,000 in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.  Income tax wouldn't become a regular part of American life until 1914, and in the meantime any money that was made was kept. People would never be this rich again."

SOUNDS TERRIBLE, DOESN'T IT?   ...I'm so glad we gave up all that individual liberty and wealth for more of your "socialism", GoinFawr. 

care to "reason" anymore?   ...idiot. 

[GoinFawr]

Speaking of reading, you ought to try that course of action regarding my comments before you go off blowing another gasket. And get yourself another hit of crack while your at it, you seem to be jonesing pretty badly.

[chopper read]

got it.  thanks.

[Sudden Debt]

I wouldn't want to dock a ship in Boston when it happens :)

[Cecil Rhodes]

"No! Ne'er was mingled such a draught
In palace, hall or arbor,
As freemen brewed and tyrants quaffed
That night in Boston Harbor." 

::Sam Adams addressing rabble of men dressed as wampanoags::

"We're gettin' drunk tonight boys, bigtime."

[jstalin]

"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."

We did that in the mid 90s, it was called the michigan militia. Before anyone snickers, we had them shitting bricks in michigan. There's nothing like a massively armed, organized populace. Some groups got co-opted by the conspiracy nuts and racist idiots, but there were a number of them that were strictly libertarian, self-defense mided groups.

[boooyaaaah]

'When the governmnt gets to big for its britches"

News for you ---- the unions are the Government in France ---- an they are to big for their britches

[chopper read]

...always the jabs at the Tea Party.  "just a bunch of uneducated, racist hillbillies".  aren't we clever and elite?  

...unions are always the victims.  "friends of the working man", they are.  their 'leaders' don't possess a single selfish bone!

what a joke. 

[LowProfile]

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.

The reason we DON'T do this in America is because unlike the French, we are heavily armed, so we hold off until there's no other course of action available.

Trust me, you don't want to see Americans doing this shit, and if you think it's likely, I recommend you stock up on Depends(r).

[mark mchugh]

You make a very good point LP.

ilene,

Once again, you've presented some off the beaten path, thought-provoking stuff.  I hadn't spent anytime thinking about what's been going on in France until now.  Thanks.

[NotApplicable]

Some groups got co-opted by the conspiracy nuts and racist idiots...

A.k.a agent provocateurs, likely federally funded.

[Conrad Murray]

Ha, exactly.  These "liberal" nutjobs would like nothing more than to antagonize the right into destroying the livelihoods of innocent shop owners and further decimating municipal budgets through repair costs, so they could point and yell about how crazy and radical the right is.

If the idiots on the left want to go out and burn things in their neighborhoods, fuck em.  AT BEST they will meet LRAD, the Taser Shockwave, and the Hornet's Nest grenade.

Organise and take it to Washington and NY.  Shut down D.C. and Wall Street by blocking off all the streets in and out with cars and people.  Surround the capitol 1 million strong and show your power.  Oh wait, the left can't do that.  Here's all they can accomplish:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkw7n9Qagu8

[moregoldplease]

Too true conrad. I'm guessing it is the left leaners in her that junked you. This editorial is errily similar to "The Coming Insurrection" which is not the most alarming book I have ever read. Why don't the liberals get out and fight the government? It's because they are the government.

[chopper read]

word.  the 'ruling class' and their labor thugs.

[patience...]

Typical conservative anti-union rhetoric. Go ahead and have a revolution, but not in my backyard.

[lawrence1]

Liberal nutjobs, left wing idiots? Instead of focusing on an issue and not returning the name calling so typical for the right wing, the next time someone uses this language with me Im going to kick them in the nuts so hard that they will need a nutjob, so watch your mouth. And what have you done personally, brave one, besides target the left as ineffective? Blame them as the cause of all problems? Much of the right is so steeped in ignorance that they often believe they are part of ruling elites and suck up to big business. And most of the right know nothing of socialism, communism or even capitalism beyond gross, misinformed sterotypes. Education has done its job.

[chopper read]

most of the right know nothing of socialism, communism

oh, lawrence, you are so noble and 'enlightened'.  ha, ha. 

[Azannoth]

And what was the Feds response, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrQtjCPV-oU 'Oklahoma'

[Max Hunter]

REVOLUTION BITCHEZ!!

[MarketTruth]

What country ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. -- Thomas Jefferson

[Beancounter]

Excellent.  I'd expect many would substitute bankerspoliticianslawyers for tyrants at this point.

[Citxmech]

Thanks for posting - the full quote is interesting as it puts the time frame in context.  I particularly find the part about lethargy informative:

"The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, & what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it's motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, & always, well informed. The past which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive; if they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13 states independent 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & What country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure."

  Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to William S. Smith (13 November 1787)