FRANCE ARISES, TO A GENERAL STRIKE !
October 18, 2022 -Durt Fibo

Sunday, I wrote about the escalating demands of what was once a middle-class now trying to survive in a supposedly wealthy European land [see my article: STRIKES AND DEMONSTRATIONS FOR A LIVABLE FRANCE; October 16, 2022 -Durt Fibo]. Today the oil refinery strikers have been joined by a transportation strike (half the country’s trains canceled by 6:00 am), and, together with the expected continuation of protests, will reach near critical mass as it all combines with a national-wide General Strike –also starting today. As of this writing, it appears that the the action has already swept in teachers and students at at secondary schools, high schools, and universities; agricultural workers, starting with the farmers’ union in the Confederation paysanne de Maine-et-Loire; health-workers belonging to the CFDT-Santé union; municipal workers; garbage collectors, and virtually every employee with ears to have heard of CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail; General Confederation of Labor). A complete listing of job classifications will likely prove impossible by the end of the strike.

Sunday’s demonstration, organized by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI; France Unbowed), and the younger Nupes alliance (Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale; New Ecological and Social People’s Union), saw around 140,000 people in the midst of Paris raising their voices for realistic wages, an end to climate destruction, and an immediate freeze on the prices of rents, food and utilities. Naturally, they see these issues as interdependent.

Mélenchon emphasized on Sunday both the interconnectedness and urgency of what have become true matters of survival in a life-challenging wreck of a system, telling the crowd: “If you are in difficulty or in misery, it is exclusively because the correlation of forces between those who have everything and those who have little, is in favor of those who have everything. Mélenchon also warned protesters to “not allow themselves to be divided by their skin color, their religion, political affiliation or differences.”

“Another life is possible, free from the spoils of profit,” he explained. “Another world is possible, free from the frenzy of capitalist productivism. With what we are doing today, we are designing a new Popular Front.” In a message sent through the nation after the protest, Mélenchon roused the people for today’s planned action: “You are the strength. Popular unity is the solution to the crisis!”

The French government, meanwhile is rigidly following the previous decades’ transgressions with planned cutoffs of its citizens’ temporary energy subsidies, re-infecting the economy with discredited ‘austerity’ measures, and a proud failure to tax windfall profits.

As a final summation, allow me to reprint the statement I sent out yesterday:

Monday, October 17, 2022 -Durt Fibo:

Dear Ignorant Economists, Treasurers, Journalists and Useless Politicians:

This is not a period of classical inflation caused by over-demand.

For some 5,000 years civilizations have had rules against usury. For even longer they have had and used price controls.

If you can read this, your next assignment is to put this knowledge into action.

People might live.