France news and discussions

[weatheriscool]

France engulfed by protests against raising retirement age from 62 to 64
Source: politiko.al

In a sign of revolt, workers in France are stopping trains, cutting off electricity supplies and taking to the streets, challenging Emmanuel Macron's policies.

Read more: https://politiko.al/english/bota/franca ... ac-i474387

[weatheriscool]

New Record Protests in France: Anger Over Macron Pension Plan (raises retirement age from 62 to 64)
Travel, schools and services were disrupted by nationwide strikes and protests for a sixth time as the battle over the retirement age intensified.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/worl ... tests.html

https://archive.is/qnHHl

Protesters faced off with the police during a demonstration in the northern French city of Rennes.

PARIS — Idle trains, closed ports, empty schools, canceled flights, uncollected trash, shuttered refineries. That was life in France on Tuesday as labor unions attempted to bring the country “to a standstill” and flooded streets in towns and cities around the country with more than a million marchers, protesting President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to raise the legal age of retirement to 64 from 62.

After two months of an uneasy confrontation and five previous demonstrations that have unfurled across the country, neither side has shown any sign of backing down. Many wonder if Tuesday will be the beginning of a reinvigorated movement that could force the government’s hand, or instead become a final yell of frustration — lingering in the air before fading, as Mr. Macron pushes through his change.

“Will either group manage to convince public opinion or not?” asked Chloé Morin, a political scientist and former adviser to two prime ministers. Between the government, the unions and protesters, she added, “you have 67 million French people who are watching this match.”

Unions and authorities provided wildly different estimates of the number of marchers on Tuesday — a record 1.28 million, according to the Interior Ministry, versus a record 3.5 million for the unions, a gap large even for France, where discrepancies between their estimates are common.

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[weatheriscool]

Macron Will Push Pension Reform Bill Through Without Vote, Reports Say
Source: New York Times

PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron, apparently short of parliamentary support for his contentious proposal to increase the retirement age by two years, has decided to push the legislation through without a vote, French news media reported on Thursday.

The move was likely to inflame further opposition to the government’s plan, after weeks of protests and strikes that have disrupted public transportation, left garbage piling up and sparked impassioned debate over the future of the country’s cherished social protection system.

On Thursday — a day after hundreds of thousands marched in cities around France to oppose the plan — the upper house of Parliament, the Senate, approved the bill, which increases the age when most workers are able to retire with a government pension to 64, from 62. But in the National Assembly, the lower and more powerful house, Mr. Macron’s party and its allies have only a slim majority, and it was not clear that they have enough votes.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/03/16 ... =url-share

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

Macron Government on Track to Survive No-confidence Votes
by Cain Burdeau
March 20, 2023

Introduction:

(Courthouse News) — French President Emmanuel Macron's government was on the verge of surviving a parliamentary rebellion on Monday against a controversial move to ram through pension reforms that raise France's retirement age by two years to 64.

French media reported that Macron's opponents were unlikely to rally enough votes to win two no-confidence votes scheduled to take place in the National Assembly late Monday.

Last Thursday, Macron set off a political firestorm when he sidestepped parliament and increased the retirement age by using a constitutional device that allows presidents to enact legislation without the approval of the National Assembly.

He invoked his right to bypass parliament at the last moment because he feared the pension law would be struck down in a parliamentary vote. In response, opposition parties filed no-confidence motions.

Macron's move inflamed street protests, which turned violent at points over the weekend as police clashed with demonstrators in Paris and elsewhere. Dozens of people were arrested in Paris.

Read more here: https://www.courthousenews.com/macron- ... ce-votes/

[firestar464]

The sad thing is that Macron is being forced to sacrifice democracy to save the pension system. The other options, namely reducing pensions or increasing the amount of contributions workers have to make, are even worse

[caltrek]

The sad thing is that Macron is being forced to sacrifice democracy to save the pension system. The other options, namely reducing pensions or increasing the amount of contributions workers have to make, are even worse

There is another option, which in France may not be as applicable as in the United States. That is to raise corporate taxes and/or taxes on the rich to shore up the pension system. Exercising such an option means recognizing a certain reality, that the workers have created a wealth which has been redistributed to the wealthy and to upper management. Recognition of that reality is an important part of understanding why the solution I (and others, at least in the U.S.) propose makes sense.

[firestar464]

Taxing corp profits would be an option, yes. Not the rich people, though, as they actually make most of their money through investments IIRC

[weatheriscool]

Top French court backs unpopular plans to raise retirement age to 64

Source: CNN

France’s top court on Friday approved the government’s unpopular plans to raise the age of retirement by two years to 64, a huge win for President Emmanuel Macron in the face of mass protests across the country.

Pension reform in France, where the right to retire on a full pension at 62 is deeply cherished, is always a highly sensitive issue and even more so in recent months with social discontent mounting over the surging cost of living.

Sweeping protests have paralyzed major services across France year this year over Macron’s proposed changes to the pension system. There have been violent clashes between police and demonstrators.

As part of the ruling, the Constitutional Council – similar to the US Supreme Court – also refused a first request by opposition lawmakers to hold a referendum on the reform. A last-minute second request put forward Thursday to hold a referendum on the reform remains under consideration.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/14/europe/f ... index.html

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[Powers]

A bit (but explainable) ironic that the protests expected in Russia are happening there instead.

[weatheriscool]

France will deploy 40,000 police officers to quell violence that followed deadly police shooting
Source: AP

By SYLVIE CORBET and ALEX TURNBULL

Published 12:21 AM CDT, June 29, 2023

NANTERRE, France (AP) — A French police officer who shot and killed a 17-year-old driver will be investigated for voluntary homicide, following two days of fires and violent protests that injured scores of officers, officials said Thursday.

Some 40,000 police officers will be deployed overnight to quell violence that engulfed cities and towns in the wake of the shooting.

The killing of 17-year-old Nahel during a traffic check Tuesday, captured on video, shocked the country and stirred up long-simmering tensions between young people and police in housing projects and other disadvantaged neighborhoods around France.

Protesters set cars and public buildings ablaze in Paris suburbs and unrest spread to some other French cities and towns.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/france-polic ... e3df03ec98

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

[wjfox]

[erowind]

The police need to be abolished. This stuff will keep happening until that happens. Radical! Unthinkable?! What solution does anyone from any other political persuasion but anarchism have to offer that has genuinely worked? Oversight committees are failures, body cameras don't seem to stop the problem, even when they provide proof cops have legal immunity. There are plenty of other liberal reforms that have been attempted and none of them work, our slide in authoritarianism continues.

So what comes after abolition if the institution is so rotten that it can't be fixed and must be completely dismantled? Two things, a splitting of roles and democratic nomination. Cops can't be expected to do all of the jobs they are tasked with well. The same people called to a violent crime like murder or assault shouldn't be handling mental health crises or interacting with petty civil disputes and ticketing.

At minimum a few new well funded and well trained jobs are needed, and these are just ones I can think of.

Unarmed mental health care workers who can respond to mental health crises. (Though trained in self defense and given self defense weapons like pepper spray and maybe civilian tasers.)

Traffic directors who do not have the ability to arrest. Infrastructure should be designed to disincentivize reckless driving and over reliance on cars anyways. Morover traffic directors would not ticket for petty offenses such as broken taillights or going 10mph over the speed limit. Their job would solely be to record and report reckless driving or inform a driver of something dangerously broken on their car.

Violent crime responders whose sole job it is to show up to violent crimes, attempt to deescalate and only as a last resort use force. These are the only people who need to be armed and even they don't need armored personnel carriers like modern police have. Any situation that requires an APC should warrant a military response not a civilian one.

There are probably more duties that can be split into different jobs too. Cops are expected to do way too much and often only trained to respond with force to everything with token training in anything else.

But this still doesn't solve the problem of sadists and psychopaths becoming part of a hypothetical violent crime response force, whatever we'd call them. I'll call them "public defenders" for the sake of brevity.

Public defender is not a position that anyone should be able to apply for. Instead a democratic nomination should take place. People in a community should have to nominate other people in their communities for the position and the position should generally be a temporary one served on terms like in the military. If people don't want the job there would have to be some kind of draft--though still with democratic nomination--something like how Switzerland runs their military/civil service.

The whole point of nomination and democratic approval by the community is that only people who are trusted by the community are permitted into the position. Anyone seeking individual power over others as a rule should be denied power, seeking power in of itself is a dangerous trait and one that should be actively discouraged by society. At the very least our peacekeeping forces cannot be allowed to be filled with actual psychopaths.

[weatheriscool]

[raklian]

The police need to be abolished. This stuff will keep happening until that happens. Radical! Unthinkable?! What solution does anyone from any other political persuasion but anarchism have to offer that have genuinely worked? Oversight committees are failures, body cameras don't seem to stop the problem, even when they provide proof cops have legal immunity. There are plenty of other liberal reforms that have been attempted and none of them work, our slide in authoritarianism continues.

So what comes after abolition if the institution is so rotten that it can't be fixed and must be completely dismantled? Two things, a splitting of roles and democratic nomination. Cops can't be expected to do all of the jobs they are tasked with well. The same people called to a violent crime like murder or assault shouldn't be handling mental health crises or interacting with petty civil disputes and ticketing.

At minimum a few new well funded and well trained jobs are needed, and these are just ones I can think of.

I'm not so sure if we'll ever have the collective foresight to put at least some of those into action without some form of aid by a higher intelligence. What you're proposing is very counterintuitive to conventional sensibilities but yet may work. That said, it may be something for which a certain type of AI may play a major role in the future. Ironically, it may need to be equipped with totalitarian tendencies to pull this off as there will be certain segments in the population who won't be willing to acquiesce due to having a mindset that is far out of alignment with the basic facts. In any case, it's going to be a very long, grueling road towards a society where there is acceptable equilibrium between competing philosophies and social norms which are naturally shaped by different experiences.