{"id":3130,"date":"2010-10-17T02:04:25","date_gmt":"2010-10-17T09:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=3130"},"modified":"2010-10-17T02:04:25","modified_gmt":"2010-10-17T09:04:25","slug":"what-america-needs-to-learn-from-france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2010\/10\/17\/what-america-needs-to-learn-from-france\/","title":{"rendered":"What America Needs to Learn from France"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Sarkozy was first elected, I worries that he would try to dismantle the standard of living that social democrats had achieved for France\u2019s citizens.  My fears were well founded as that\u2019s exactly what he is doing, but unlike Americans, who seem content to either sit on their hands or buy into Republican brainwashing and blame the wrong people, the French are expressing their outrage.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"17france\" The battle over a planned overhaul of France’s pension system has intensified as rolling strikes cut the fuel pipeline to Paris airports and shut down most of the country\u2019s oil refineries<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In an attempt to pummel the government into backing down on its controversial plans to raise the retirement age, a broad alliance of unions, leftwing political parties and students are pressing ahead with a series of nationwide protests<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Tens of thousands of people are expected to join the nationwide protests on Saturday, just days ahead of the final government vote on the reforms on Wednesday. Unions are also promising a major strike on Tuesday in a final attempt to stop the legislation.<\/p>\n

The protestors were to march from the Place de la Republique to the Bastille in Paris.<\/p>\n

The country has already endured four straight days of strikes, squeezing fuel supplies, grounding flights, cutting rail services and closing schools and other key facilities<\/strong>\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <Common Dreams<\/a>><\/p>\n

Even in the 1960s, US demonstrators were not so disruptive.  There was violence, but it was almost always police attacking demonstrators.  But then, we had passion that seems to be missing today.<\/font><\/p>\n

If Democrats maintain majorities, I think they will become more responsive to progressive needs.  They no longer have an incentive to support business as usual for corporate criminals, because that constituency has shifted entirely to the Republican camp and is spending hand over fist to put Democrats out of office.  Only a handful of extreme DINOs are getting corporate support these days.  But if Republicans take over the government, we\u2019d better be ready to imitate the French to stop Wall Street from strip mining us.<\/font><\/p>\n

Hats off to the people of France!<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Sarkozy was first elected, I worries that he would try to dismantle the standard of living that social democrats had achieved for France\u2019s citizens.  My fears were well founded as that\u2019s exactly what he is doing, but unlike Americans, who seem content to either sit on their hands or buy into Republican brainwashing and […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}