France's general strike, if you believe the mainstream media reports, is rooted in the selfish demands of its spoiled population. The issue de jour in the media headlights being the raising of the legal retirement age from 60 to 62. From Aljazeera to CNN the headlines pound out the drum beat that millions are marching to secure their own future and maybe in some cases that's true.What's not mentioned in the mainstream media are the real roots of the french working class's discontent. Like almost all of the capitialist world's banks France's spent the last decade or more drinking the free lunch derivative kool-aid. A series of French governments followed the Reagan-Thatcher-Bush-Clinton-Bush2 de-regulation formula of voodoo economics [main tenet: 'greed is good'] down the toilet. Then, like all their neo-liberal comrades, when their banker's bets went belly up the French borrowed big bucks from the future by selling bonds and printing money which they used to bailout the billionaire bankers. Now France and their comrades are bankrupt financially as well as morally. They can't balance their books and, unlike the US, they can't just keep printing money [quantative easing in the parlance of voodoo economists], so sorry SOB has gotta pay. Guess who?
It ain't goona be the rich, that's for sure. It's gonna be, in every counrty, the working class. The French workers and students know the score, they have a lively underground press not controlled by the corporate oligarchy who has been all over the roots of the story since the deception's inception.
So as the streets of France fill day after day with protesters, as the petrol runs out and the police and army battle to save their bank's bonus binging bastards, enjoy the show being put on by your working class comrades but don't think your government isn't doing the same thing to you, they are. They're selling bogus bonds, printing funny money and mortaging your kid's and grandkid's future to avoid paying the price of their foolish greed themselves. Vive le Presse Libre! Vive le Resistance!
