In France, workers and students may soon revisit May, 1968. French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the French unions are locking horns over pension reforms. “Workers and students are expected to take to the streets in an escalation of industrial action against government plans to raise the official retirement age to 62, with walkouts bringing disruption to France’s transport network, schools and oil refineries,” the
Guardian reported on Monday. “The announcement that secondary school and college pupils will join the demonstrations against Sarkozy, whose popularity is at a record low, raises the specter of May 1968, when a series of student strikes led to rioting and nearly brought down the government.”
A demo held at the Paris Bastille on October 2. Can you imagine Americans holding such demonstrations in reaction to the bankster financial crisis?
Not only did the general strike of 1968 nearly bring down the government, it almost brought the French economy to a virtual standstill. Groups involved in the strike were generally Luddite in character — they rejected the technocratic state and consumerism — and embraced a leftist ideology that made the French Communist Party look like part of the establishment. Eleven million French workers, roughly two-thirds of the nation’s workforce, went out on strike and forced president de Gaulle to dissolve the National Assembly and take temporary refuge at an air force base in Germany.
The national strike was betrayed by Confédération Générale du Travail (the General Confederation of Labor), one of five major French confederations of trade unions. During elections in June of 1968, the Gaullist party emerged even stronger than before the strike.
More than 40 years ago, French students revolted against capitalism. They were betrayed by socialist trade unions controlled by the French establishment.
The events of May, 1968, were a response to conflicts between students and authorities at the University of Paris at Nanterre. It was not a reaction to economic conditions like the strike that threatens to paralyze France once again.
The French government wants to raise the retirement age to 62 and impose other measures unacceptable to labor unions and students. Sarkozy’s office says he will not back down on measures he believes will help his re-election for a second term in 2012, according to the Guardian. In Le Parisien newspaper the former Socialist prime minister Michel Rocard said there is a “danger to the country” and Jean-Claude Mailly of the Force Ouvrière (Workers’ Force) union told French radio only a large demonstration will force Sarkozy and the government to back down.
Granted, the French socialists and trade unions primarily want to preserve the bankrupt wealth redistribution system in their country and do not oppose the financial system responsible for the coming austerity measures.
The engineered bankster financial meltdown has forced governments across Europe to ready austerity measures.
In Ireland, a proposed austerity package includes public-sector pay cuts of up to 20%, plus reductions in child benefit, tax rises, and nurses, teachers, and police officers being laid off.
Portugal’s sovereign-debt risk has resulted in the country taking money from the EU’s €750bn (£640bn) fund for stabilizing euro.
Spain has slashed €15bn from spending this year and next to reduce deficit by more than 4% of GDP, resulting in cuts to civil service pay, pensions, investment and child benefits.
In June, strikes hit Germany over budget cuts.
Eastern Europe is a basket case. Hungary relies on the globalist loan sharks (the IMF and World Bank) while things in Latvia are so dire the government has shut down hospitals and schools as a condition of the effort to “service” its debt, in other words dance to the tune of the globalist bankers.
Latvia is the textbook example of the damage banksters are capable of inflicting. In the period of two years, the country went dramatically from boom to bust, from the highest growth rates in the EU to the deepest recession. Not to worry, though. Latvians of hardy stock according to the
Guardian: “With memories of Soviet living standards still fresh, however, the public is resilient and Latvia is weathering a crisis on a scale that would have triggered mayhem in western Europe.”
Earlier this month, talk of austerity resulted in a fresh wave of protests from Greece to Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Romania. Greek public sector workers walked out of their jobs protesting against EU and IMF prescribed austerity measures. Civil servants in Greece were the target of the latest demands by the international banksters. “The austerity measures have hit civil servants particularly hard, with wages cut by an average of 15 per cent, in addition to tax hikes and a pension freeze agreed to help restore the country’s finances in return for a 110 billion euro ($154bn) EU/IMF bailout,”
Al Jazeera reported.
Bankster imposed austerity measures will come soon to America. “Americans are not taking to the streets only because nobody has told us that is what is being planned,”
Ellen Brown wrote in March of this year. “The American people, who are already suffering massive unemployment and cutbacks in government services, will have to sacrifice more and pay the piper more, just as in those debt-strapped countries forced into austerity measures by the IMF.”
Brown correctly identifies the culprits behind the plan to destroy the middle class and reduce America to yet another third world hell-hole — the international bankers. She quotes Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s mentor at Georgetown University:
[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.
RT reports on the differences between American and European workers and their response to the bankster engineered economic implosion (see video below). America’s leftist labor union movement was long ago decimated and American jobs exported to slave labor gulags in Mexico and then to China.
RT notes the movement in the United States away from socialist solutions to a reawakening of patriot ideals and the demand for a return to constitutional government. Part of this struggle is the effort to dismantle the Federal Reserve and throw out the international bankers. The Europeans now going out in the street want more government, not less, and this will ultimately result in re-run of the economic catastrophe now underway.
“Permit me to issue and control the money of the nation and I care not who makes its laws,” said the prominent European banker Mayer Amsched Rothchild in the eighteenth century. If the banksters continue to influence and control government, the game will inch forward until they realize their world government controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world.
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