Janet brings us a Canadian News Source on France threatened by Union Socialist Squirrels!
A must read - note, a Canadian news source. I’m not sure of coverage in the US but the Dems won’t like this, therefore main media coverage will be questionable. As usual, underlining, mine.Janet of SCSU Scholars
David Frum: Showdown in Paris
The outcome of the Iranian bomb crisis may depend on a rail strike in France .
A week ago, French railway workers walked off the job to protest government attempts to reform their astounding retirement benefits — including a full pension at age 50. They are supported by other government workers, keen to protect their own privileges.
Today’s strike reminds many of the strikes of 1995, which smashed France ’s previous effort at reform. Back then, newly elected president Jacques Chirac decided that lavish welfare benefits and suffocating regulations were smothering French economic growth. Chirac’s chosen prime minister, Alain Juppe, proposed a modest package of changes.
Strikes erupted. Juppe’s credibility was quickly tainted by news that he had received a sweetheart deal on a government-owned apartment in Paris . Public support for the government crumbled. Chirac lost his nerve, fired Juppe and retracted the reforms. For the next 12 years, Chirac passively presided over the slow decline of French economic competitiveness. He ended his tenure almost universally disrespected and disliked.
France ’s new president, Nicholas Sarkozy, served in Chirac’s later governments and witnessed the consequences of Chirac’s defeat. But as a close student of U.S. politics, Sarkozy may remember something else: A strike does not have to break a presidency. Handled right, it can make a presidency.
In 1981, the administration of Ronald Reagan was presented with a dangerous strike almost immediately upon taking office: an illegal walkout by airline controllers. Reagan responded by firing the controllers and assigning military personnel to keep the airways open.
No president had accepted such a confrontation with labour unions since Harry Truman threatened to draft striking coal miners at the end of the Second World War. Yet Reagan prevailed — and in conjunction with the earlier release of the Iranian hostages, opened his administration with a powerful demonstration of strength and resolve.
Does Sarkozy have this parallel in mind?
Notice that he has carefully prepared this battlefield in advance. The railway unions are striking to maintain contracts absurdly feather-bedded even by the standards of the French public sector. Railway workers won the right to retire at 50 back when they spent their days heaving shovelfuls of coal into open locomotive furnaces. Today they press buttons. The many French workers who toil at more demanding jobs feel little sympathy for the railway workers who have stranded them: Public opinion remains with the government.
In fact, it is precisely because the government is winning that the civil servants have joined the railway workers: They recognize the possibility that Sarkozy might win — and then might turn his attention to them and their nearly equally unjustifiable contracts.
But the civil servants also enjoy little public support. Private sector and small-business French people work very hard. They pay heavy taxes and often receive shockingly poor service in return. They obtain essential services like electricity and gas from unresponsive, government-protected monopolies. They are sick of it all, and they voted for Sarkozy because they wanted change.
If Sarkozy succeeds in mobilizing public opinion to face down this strike, that change can at last begin — and his own political strength will be enhanced.
A strengthened Sarkozy presidency would bring change not only to France and to Europe, but to the greater Middle East as well. In the long-running confrontation with Iran , France has proven itself–even under Chirac–as the firmest of the European allies. Sarkozy has gone further still. He has condemned an Iranian nuclear weapon as unacceptable; and his Foreign Minister has intimated that war might be preferable to a nuclear Iran .
These words, if issued by a French president who has triumphed in a dramatic domestic political contest, would carry weight in the councils of Europe . Iran at long last might believe that it faces not the United States alone, but a coalition of major economic powers, all insistent that the nuclear program stop.
Would that alone suffice to make a difference? Who can say? We can say only that the whole Western world has a stake in Sarkozy’s first great political struggle — and that his success would offer greater security for us all.
Wow, I really get a lot of great stories from Janet over at SCSU Scholars. This one is too wonderful, especially with the Canadian news source. Does this not reflect the socialist squirrel writers strike? Also, remember in E. W. Everson’s day who he was bringing to their knees? You bet, the I. W. W. or International World Workers and the farmer, who the Socialists seduced into overtaking the Republican Party in North Dakota as the Non Partisan League! The Union’s are trying to flex what little muscle they have left to influence the enslavement of good hardworking people and conservative thought into grassroots action.
I really must make a distinction here. I and my great grandfather E. W. Everson, are or where not in a war against those hard working men and women who are enslaved by the unions who prey off the fruits of their labor. No, E. W. Everson and myself are and where fighting for them. You see a Republican, a good conservative demands that the fruit of one’s own labor be unfettered by the legalized extortion of the Union leadership if it can be called that. One’s labor must be unfettered on the open market. Not all organizations are socialist in nature. However, for those that are, there is no sympathy here for their failed leadership. Only sympathy and a hand out to lift up those who are enslaved and need their chains broken. There is not an organization or even government that should take from one’s fruit of their labor before that person’s child is fed. This is an abomination to liberty and freedom!
Yes, I am including our blessed government in this as well. I am of the faith that the government should not deduct anything from one’s payment for labor before the child of that person is fed with that fruit from the parents labor. I am of the thinking that each citizen is more then capable of writing a check to the government to fulfill their individual tax obligation. Some taxes are a necessary evil, but the government or Union Leadership taking theirs before your child eats theirs is simply wrong and inexcusable in my own eyes.
~Teddy Bear
