CNN: French Take to Streets in Protest Against Economic Solutions
By:
TraderMark Thursday, January 29, 2009 12:29 PM
One of my calls for 2009 will be far greater social unrest as those countries without sheeple (i.e. almost everyone ex-USA) will start getting seriously peeved. A reader mentioned this story below so let me throw it on the blog....
p.s. I saw last night that a whopping
3.5% of the stimulus plan is for infrastructure. Now that is laughable based on all the huge moves in the stocks and the "promises" that this is an investment in our future.
CNN: Huge Crowds Join French Strikes
(in a related note, Americans found satiated by thoughts of American Idol, as their government commits somewhere upward of $2 trillion to stimulus + bad bank)
The irony in this is the "safety net" in France is far greater than ours.
- Huge crowds have taken to the streets in France to protest over the handling of the economic crisis, causing disruption to rail and air services. The head of France's biggest union said a million workers had rallied to demand action to protect jobs and wages.
- Schools, banks, hospitals, post offices and courts were also hit as workers stayed at home. Officials said just over a third of teachers and a quarter of postal and power company workers were on strike. Overall, some 23% of the country's public sector workers are thought to have joined the action, which was called by eight major French unions. Bernard Thibault, head of the CGT union, told AFP more than a million workers had taken part in the strike, making it impossible for French President Nicolas Sarkozy to ignore their concerns.
- The protests are against the worsening economic climate in France and at what people believe to be the government's poor handling of the crisis. Opposition Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry said people were out in the streets "to express what worries them: the fact that they work and yet cannot make ends meet, retired people who just can't make it (financially), the fear of redundancies, and a president of the Republic and a government that just don't want to change policy".
- "I'm tired and frozen after waiting half-an-hour on the platform," commuter Sandrine Dermont told AFP as she arrived by train in Paris. "But I'm prepared to accept that when it's a movement to defend our spending power and jobs. I'll join the street protests during my lunch break," she said.
- Many people are furious that Mr Sarkozy said there was no money left to raise wages and consumer spending power, but nonetheless managed to find billions of euros to bail out floundering French banks, says the BBC's Emma-Jane Kirby in Paris.
- With unemployment looking likely to reach 10% next year, she says, the protesters hope he will drop his programme of cost-cutting reforms and focus instead on protecting workers' jobs and wages.
- Mr Sarkozy cannot ignore this demonstration of anger, our correspondent adds. Street protests have repeatedly brought down French leaders and Mr Sarkozy does not want his government added to that list of casualties.
- People had the feeling they were paying for a crisis they were not responsible for, he added.
I'm too lazy of a sheeple myself but I'll do my part by mentioning what other countries are doing ...
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