Paris: Kleenex Workers: the French demonstrate for you too!
''BEAT ME, INSULT ME, DOUBLE MY WORKLOAD, BUT PLEASE DON'T SET ME FREE!''
BY BARBARA EHRENREICH
The Progressive - May 2006 Issue - Was it only three years ago that some of our puffed up patriots were denouncing the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," too fattened on Camembert to stub out their Gaulois and get down with the war on Iraq? Well, take another look at the folks who invented the word liberté. Throughout the month of March and beyond, they were demonstrating, rioting, and burning up cars to preserve a right Americans can only dream of: the right not to be fired at an employer's whim.
The French government's rationale for its new labor law was impeccable from an economist's standpoint: Make it easier for employers to fire people and they will be more willing to hire people. So why was Paris burning?
What corporations call "flexibility"-the right to dispose of workers at will-is what workers experience as disposability, not to mention insecurity and poverty. The French students who were tossing Molotov cocktails didn't want to become what they call "a Kleenex generation"-used and tossed away when the employer decides he needs a fresh one.
SPIRAL DOWN INTO STARVATION
You may recognize in the French government's reasoning the same arguments Americans hear whenever we raise a timid plea for a higher minimum wage or a halt to the steady erosion of pensions and health benefits: "What?" scream the economists who flack for the employing class. "If you do anything, anything at all, to offend or discomfit the employers, they will respond by churlishly failing to employ you! Unemployment will rise, and you-lacking, of course, the health care and other benefits provided by the French welfare state-will quickly spiral down into starvation."
French youth weren't buying this, probably because they know where the "Anglo-Saxon model," as they call it, leads. If you have to give up job security to get a job, what next? Will the pampered employers be inspired to demand a suspension of health and safety regulations? Will they start requiring their workers to polish their shoes while hand-feeding them hot-buttered croissants? Non to all that, the French kids said.
NEMESIS THE "ANGLO-SAXON MODEL"
Of course, the French weren't entirely fair in calling their nemesis the "Anglo-Saxon model." It's the specifically American model they have to fear. While France was in turmoil, I was in England, ancestral home of the Anglo-Saxon race, giving a talk when a fellow in the audience asked me how people could be fired without "due process." In the U.K., a person who feels she has been wrongfully dismissed can turn to an employment appeals tribunal and, beyond that, to the courts. I had to explain that in the United States, you can be fired for just about anything: having a "bad attitude," which can mean having a funny look on your face, or just turning out to be "not a good fit."
Years ago, there was a theory on the American left that someone-maybe it was me-termed Worsism: the worse things get, the more likely people will be to rise up and demand their rights. But in America, at least, the worse things get, the harder it becomes to even imagine any kind of resistance. The fact that you can be fired "at will"-the will of the employer, that is-freezes employees into terrified obedience. Add to that the fact that job loss is accompanied by a loss of access to health care, and you get a kind of captive mentality bordering on the kinkily masochistic:
BEAT ME, INSULT ME, DOUBLE MY WORKLOAD, BUT PLEASE DON'T SET ME FREE!
Far be it from me to advocate the burning of cars and smashing of store windows. But why are American students sucking their thumbs while the Bush Administration proposes a $12.7 billion cut in student loans?
Where is the outrage over the massive layoffs at Ford, Hewlett-Packard, and dozens of other major companies?
And is the poverty-stricken quarter of the population too stressed by their mounting bills and multiple jobs to protest cuts in Medicaid and already pathetic housing subsidies?
COMPARED TO THOSE "SURRENDER MONKEYS," WE'RE LOOKING LIKE A LOT OF SOGGY USED KLEENEX.
BARBARA EHRENREICH
FPF-comment: Watch out for so called 'violent demonstrators' which the 'messmedia' in their propaganda will show repeatedly, smashing 'small' cars and similar objects. But you'll not see them smashing Jaguars, Mercedes' or Porsches: they are the 'agent provocateurs' - the Govt's own Gestapo: trying to turn the opinion of the already suffering people against the demonstrators who are fighting for our human dignity. Against the PNAC usurers.
[enditem] - The link for the story also has a very interesting item (in translation) - ''Not Inevitable'' - By Patrick Sabatier - Libération - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/r3536
Related information concerning the 'whom' and 'why' Paris is burning - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gazxx
FPF - BBC: French demonstrations: 1, 2, 3 ... many! - Url.: http://www.cemab.be/news/2006/03/1054.php
STRONGLY RELATED: THE 'PROJECT FOR A NEW EUROPEAN CENTURY':
* IF YOU UNDERSTAND THIS, YOU'LL UNDERSTAND YOUR LIFE: ''I didn't know what I was looking for when my investigation began, but I knew that what I was being told didn't make sense.'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cvzeb
* US CONGRESSMAN RON PAUL CONFIRMING THE CREATION OF A WORLD GOVERNMENT - "He asked if there was an international conspiracy to overthrow our government: The answer is ''Yes" - Short video - Url.: http://100777.com/media/RonPaul-NewWorldOrder.wmv
* BEING DEMONIZED c.q. 'KILLED' BY THE PNAC CRIMINALS, BECAUSE THEY WROTE THIS: Prof. John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science and Prof. Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government: 'The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy' - Working Paper Number: RWP06-011 - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/fsl7h
* THE 'WHY' OF GLOBAL RESISTANCE - HOW IT IS DONE BY THE PNAC'S CIA JACKALS & THE WORLD BANK's SERIAL KILLER WOLFOWITZ - Confessions of an economic 'hit man'. World Bank insider Perkins explains: "Jackals' are C.I.A. - sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If it doesn't work, they perform assassinations, or try to." - They steal billions for the World Bank, IMF, USAID, UNDP, AID etc. - Perkins web site - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/jvhbu - It's your life too: Must watch Video Url.: www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8171.htm
* THIS IS A VERY INFORMATIVE ARTICLE - AN EYE-OPENER - After working around the globe for more than forty years, I can not find anything wrong with this eloquent description of the state of affairs: ''They seem so harmless, so non-menacing, and yet they are the root of so much of the present evil that mankind is facing today. Just six simple words that carry the weight of the world upon them, six simple words that act as the engine for so much turmoil and unrest.'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gj4x5
* WHO RULES AMERICA - AND OUR LIVES? - Please read the following article with an open mind, and if you don't believe it you can verify it for yourself, as the author suggests. Keep in mind the intense and non-stop psychological conditioning already for ages being used by major media - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/evpf
* 6 MILLION PEOPLE WERE KILLED? - ANOTHER HOLOCAUST - THIS IS ONE OF MANY BY THE PNAC's CIA: John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. ''How 6 million People Were killed in CIA secret wars against Third World countries'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gpcg
* "Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." - George Bush Senior speaking in an interview with Sarah McClendon in December 1992.
* How The Bush Family Made Its Fortune From The Nazis - THE DUTCH CONNECTION - by John Loftus, a former U.S. Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor, the President of the Florida Holocaust Museum and the highly respected author of numerous books on the CIA-Nazi connection including The Belarus Secret and The Secret War Against the Jews, both of which have extensive material on the Bush-Rockefeller-Nazi connection. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/omczx -
* GLOBAL PREDATORS - ‘FRAUDS-R-US’ - The Bush Family Saga - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/elarx
* The 9/11 drama was the 'trigger' used by the PNAC Group, killing Americans to further their inhuman goals: Anybody who after seeing this video - '9/11 revisited' - still believes the version from the 'PNAC pack' - the Washington cabal - is beyond all professional help - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/r5sx4
* The MAD COW MORNING NEWS is one of the absolutely best 9/11 sites on Internet - by Daniel Hopsicker - Url.: http://www.madcowprod.com/01042004.html
* FOX: Video 49 min. - The example how viewers are brainwashed and 'outfoxed' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/b2zzl
* All the more reason to read the FIGHTIN' COCK FLYER - Url.: http://fightincockflyer.blogspot.com/
* THE ONLY SOLUTION? - Help all the troops - of whatever nationality - to come back from abroad! - AND WITH ALL THEIR WEAPONS, WHICH WE ARE FORCED TO PAY FOR BY TAXES - [http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm] - We need them badly at home in many countries to fight with us against our so called 'governments' and their malignant managers - Url.: http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/
The Dutch author this far has lived and worked abroad for more than 4 decades for international media - when they still knew what honest journalism was - as an independent foreign correspondent. Of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the 'Arab World' and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism !
FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
http://forpressfound.blogspot.com/
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/amn3q
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl
-0-
BY BARBARA EHRENREICH
The Progressive - May 2006 Issue - Was it only three years ago that some of our puffed up patriots were denouncing the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," too fattened on Camembert to stub out their Gaulois and get down with the war on Iraq? Well, take another look at the folks who invented the word liberté. Throughout the month of March and beyond, they were demonstrating, rioting, and burning up cars to preserve a right Americans can only dream of: the right not to be fired at an employer's whim.
The French government's rationale for its new labor law was impeccable from an economist's standpoint: Make it easier for employers to fire people and they will be more willing to hire people. So why was Paris burning?
What corporations call "flexibility"-the right to dispose of workers at will-is what workers experience as disposability, not to mention insecurity and poverty. The French students who were tossing Molotov cocktails didn't want to become what they call "a Kleenex generation"-used and tossed away when the employer decides he needs a fresh one.
SPIRAL DOWN INTO STARVATION
You may recognize in the French government's reasoning the same arguments Americans hear whenever we raise a timid plea for a higher minimum wage or a halt to the steady erosion of pensions and health benefits: "What?" scream the economists who flack for the employing class. "If you do anything, anything at all, to offend or discomfit the employers, they will respond by churlishly failing to employ you! Unemployment will rise, and you-lacking, of course, the health care and other benefits provided by the French welfare state-will quickly spiral down into starvation."
French youth weren't buying this, probably because they know where the "Anglo-Saxon model," as they call it, leads. If you have to give up job security to get a job, what next? Will the pampered employers be inspired to demand a suspension of health and safety regulations? Will they start requiring their workers to polish their shoes while hand-feeding them hot-buttered croissants? Non to all that, the French kids said.
NEMESIS THE "ANGLO-SAXON MODEL"
Of course, the French weren't entirely fair in calling their nemesis the "Anglo-Saxon model." It's the specifically American model they have to fear. While France was in turmoil, I was in England, ancestral home of the Anglo-Saxon race, giving a talk when a fellow in the audience asked me how people could be fired without "due process." In the U.K., a person who feels she has been wrongfully dismissed can turn to an employment appeals tribunal and, beyond that, to the courts. I had to explain that in the United States, you can be fired for just about anything: having a "bad attitude," which can mean having a funny look on your face, or just turning out to be "not a good fit."
Years ago, there was a theory on the American left that someone-maybe it was me-termed Worsism: the worse things get, the more likely people will be to rise up and demand their rights. But in America, at least, the worse things get, the harder it becomes to even imagine any kind of resistance. The fact that you can be fired "at will"-the will of the employer, that is-freezes employees into terrified obedience. Add to that the fact that job loss is accompanied by a loss of access to health care, and you get a kind of captive mentality bordering on the kinkily masochistic:
BEAT ME, INSULT ME, DOUBLE MY WORKLOAD, BUT PLEASE DON'T SET ME FREE!
Far be it from me to advocate the burning of cars and smashing of store windows. But why are American students sucking their thumbs while the Bush Administration proposes a $12.7 billion cut in student loans?
Where is the outrage over the massive layoffs at Ford, Hewlett-Packard, and dozens of other major companies?
And is the poverty-stricken quarter of the population too stressed by their mounting bills and multiple jobs to protest cuts in Medicaid and already pathetic housing subsidies?
COMPARED TO THOSE "SURRENDER MONKEYS," WE'RE LOOKING LIKE A LOT OF SOGGY USED KLEENEX.
BARBARA EHRENREICH
FPF-comment: Watch out for so called 'violent demonstrators' which the 'messmedia' in their propaganda will show repeatedly, smashing 'small' cars and similar objects. But you'll not see them smashing Jaguars, Mercedes' or Porsches: they are the 'agent provocateurs' - the Govt's own Gestapo: trying to turn the opinion of the already suffering people against the demonstrators who are fighting for our human dignity. Against the PNAC usurers.
[enditem] - The link for the story also has a very interesting item (in translation) - ''Not Inevitable'' - By Patrick Sabatier - Libération - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/r3536
Related information concerning the 'whom' and 'why' Paris is burning - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gazxx
FPF - BBC: French demonstrations: 1, 2, 3 ... many! - Url.: http://www.cemab.be/news/2006/03/1054.php
STRONGLY RELATED: THE 'PROJECT FOR A NEW EUROPEAN CENTURY':
* IF YOU UNDERSTAND THIS, YOU'LL UNDERSTAND YOUR LIFE: ''I didn't know what I was looking for when my investigation began, but I knew that what I was being told didn't make sense.'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cvzeb
* US CONGRESSMAN RON PAUL CONFIRMING THE CREATION OF A WORLD GOVERNMENT - "He asked if there was an international conspiracy to overthrow our government: The answer is ''Yes" - Short video - Url.: http://100777.com/media/RonPaul-NewWorldOrder.wmv
* BEING DEMONIZED c.q. 'KILLED' BY THE PNAC CRIMINALS, BECAUSE THEY WROTE THIS: Prof. John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science and Prof. Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government: 'The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy' - Working Paper Number: RWP06-011 - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/fsl7h
* THE 'WHY' OF GLOBAL RESISTANCE - HOW IT IS DONE BY THE PNAC'S CIA JACKALS & THE WORLD BANK's SERIAL KILLER WOLFOWITZ - Confessions of an economic 'hit man'. World Bank insider Perkins explains: "Jackals' are C.I.A. - sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If it doesn't work, they perform assassinations, or try to." - They steal billions for the World Bank, IMF, USAID, UNDP, AID etc. - Perkins web site - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/jvhbu - It's your life too: Must watch Video Url.: www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8171.htm
* THIS IS A VERY INFORMATIVE ARTICLE - AN EYE-OPENER - After working around the globe for more than forty years, I can not find anything wrong with this eloquent description of the state of affairs: ''They seem so harmless, so non-menacing, and yet they are the root of so much of the present evil that mankind is facing today. Just six simple words that carry the weight of the world upon them, six simple words that act as the engine for so much turmoil and unrest.'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gj4x5
* WHO RULES AMERICA - AND OUR LIVES? - Please read the following article with an open mind, and if you don't believe it you can verify it for yourself, as the author suggests. Keep in mind the intense and non-stop psychological conditioning already for ages being used by major media - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/evpf
* 6 MILLION PEOPLE WERE KILLED? - ANOTHER HOLOCAUST - THIS IS ONE OF MANY BY THE PNAC's CIA: John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. ''How 6 million People Were killed in CIA secret wars against Third World countries'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gpcg
* "Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." - George Bush Senior speaking in an interview with Sarah McClendon in December 1992.
* How The Bush Family Made Its Fortune From The Nazis - THE DUTCH CONNECTION - by John Loftus, a former U.S. Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor, the President of the Florida Holocaust Museum and the highly respected author of numerous books on the CIA-Nazi connection including The Belarus Secret and The Secret War Against the Jews, both of which have extensive material on the Bush-Rockefeller-Nazi connection. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/omczx -
* GLOBAL PREDATORS - ‘FRAUDS-R-US’ - The Bush Family Saga - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/elarx
* The 9/11 drama was the 'trigger' used by the PNAC Group, killing Americans to further their inhuman goals: Anybody who after seeing this video - '9/11 revisited' - still believes the version from the 'PNAC pack' - the Washington cabal - is beyond all professional help - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/r5sx4
* The MAD COW MORNING NEWS is one of the absolutely best 9/11 sites on Internet - by Daniel Hopsicker - Url.: http://www.madcowprod.com/01042004.html
* FOX: Video 49 min. - The example how viewers are brainwashed and 'outfoxed' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/b2zzl
* All the more reason to read the FIGHTIN' COCK FLYER - Url.: http://fightincockflyer.blogspot.com/
* THE ONLY SOLUTION? - Help all the troops - of whatever nationality - to come back from abroad! - AND WITH ALL THEIR WEAPONS, WHICH WE ARE FORCED TO PAY FOR BY TAXES - [http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm] - We need them badly at home in many countries to fight with us against our so called 'governments' and their malignant managers - Url.: http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/
The Dutch author this far has lived and worked abroad for more than 4 decades for international media - when they still knew what honest journalism was - as an independent foreign correspondent. Of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the 'Arab World' and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism !
FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
http://forpressfound.blogspot.com/
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/amn3q
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl
-0-
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