> BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has played no part in the pension reforms. But workers targeted the company because of its work for private pension funds, according to protester Françoise Onic, a school teacher who spoke to Reuters.
Uh... this makes no sense. At first I thought it was a coincidence, but nope, it was intentional and targeted.
> “The meaning of this action is quite simple. We went to the headquarters of BlackRock to tell them: the money of workers, for our pensions, they are taking it,” Jerome Schmitt, spokesman for French union SUD, told CNN affiliate BFM-TV.
Again, this makes absolutely no sense. The protesters aren't even aligned on why they are there. If this was about the pensions this moment would be a bit like keying your own car.
Mobs aren’t typically known for being smart or avoiding stupid actions.
What’s weird here is that it seems more like willful stupidity rather than just random mobs burning things due to chaos.
I think it’s some sort of availability bias. Black rock isn’t doing the thing they dislike but they are big and have an office in Paris; therefore, burn it down as an effigy of the system I dislike.
Well, the mobs have at least been pretty peaceful. So much as they have a goal it's to get attention. They probably had a dozen different targets they try to hit in a day, tell any media that show up why they are there, and then move on. Actually having a good reason is unimportant - they are just trying to hack a way into a news cycle.
I don’t like this description. Peaceful protests are peaceful. Pretty peaceful protests aren’t peaceful.
There was a protest in my town recently where a cop car was set on fire and a bunch of windows were smashed. Maybe 200-500 people total but it was described as “mostly peaceful.” While that is true as I think only 10 people were arrested and more were violent, but that’s like 5-10% violent and the rest peaceful. I don’t think that’s earnest and truthful and I’d rather like to know if a group is peaceful or not.
There's a fundamental difference between property and people, and many people consider interpersonal violence as the dividing line between what's peaceful or not. This cannot be decided unilaterally. Using a zero-tolerance approach leads to outcomes like police gassing crowds of thousands of people because one individual flung a water bottle in their general direction.
Oh certainly. A burned car is a different form of violence than someone beaten or killed.
But “mostly peaceful” protests are the bad kind of protests. I think they are more accurately described as light riots or something or mostly peaceful riots. Or some inflection point between a lawful, peaceful protest and a violent protest.
The police actually just kind of watched the protesters smashing and burning stuff and they certainly werent tear gassing people. But I think that they do need to do something to stop violent/mostly peaceful protests and arresting 9 out of 100-200 rioters doesn’t seem to be reducing the number of riots.
While I agree there is a difference between committing acts of violence against people and inanimate objects, I would consider damaging or destroying a person's home or primary means of transportation (perhaps one and the same) as a direct attack upon that person's well-being. It's not accurate to say that a protest is mostly peaceful when random citizens lose their ability to drive to work and subsequently take on unexpected costs that might devastate them financially.
I mean that “mostly peaceful” isn’t a good label as it downplays the important piece that most protests are peaceful. So a “mostly peaceful” is actually a violent protest.
It’s like describing someone charged with domestic abuse as “mostly a loving spouse who almost never beat their spouse.” True, but disingenuous.
In me it seems more of an expression with a general dissatisifaction with the current massive conglomerates that seem to be ossfying into a defacto ruling class.
Blackrock is a massive player that is by some accounts, possibly the largest and most powerful hedge fund in the world, that is doing things like buying up houses to rent out, pursuing ESG initiatives extensively etc.
It's not about the pensions so much as it is an expression of outrage about the powerlessness people are feeling and directing it at what is precieved to be one of the sources of that powerlessness.
I've seen this reported many times even in places like nytimes but never seen actual numbers behind it. I 've read number between 3% and even as high as 20% .
My impression was it was ordinary upper income ppl like high end tech workers , retirees ect that were doing most of the buying and renting. A vast majority of my friends now own rental properties by directly buying them or turning their previous residence into a rental.
We all want one evil villain to blame but reality is much more complicated. Thats why movements like occupy wall st acoomplish nothing. Wouldn't it be easy if the problem can be solved by taking down one evil dude in his castle.
> We all want one evil villain to blame but reality is much more complicated. Thats why movements like occupy wall st acoomplish nothing.
Whether the demise of OWS was 100% due to their shortcomings and actions is speculative - a lot of people think the original demise and subsequent massive increase in culture war catching the media's attention (and in turn, dividing the public on yet another contentious issue) was to some degree coordinated...and I am one of those people.
Blackrock never actually directly invested in rental properties. BlackSTONE did, and poor Twitter journalism led people to believe they were the same company.
FWIW: institutional investors buying up single-family-homes (at least in the US) never really worked out. The FHA and VA programs are such huge players in the US loan market that individual investors can still outcompete big guys on financing.
> single-family-homes (at least in the US) never really worked out.
this is mis-information by incompleteness. There are records and there are lies, with a non-zero overlap. Source- investor/accountant with a US California Masters degree in Taxation
The failure of Occupy was in trying to establish a parallel polity and engage in discourse, because there was no plan about what to do next. Prefiguration is a misleading political fantasy.
I have no idea why Blackrock is such a lightning rod for bad financial literacy.
Blackrock is not a hedge fund. They are an asset manager. They take your money and park it into the market for you. To the extent that they exercise any discretion over the market basically comes down to the stock blend they put into their otherwise very boring index fund options.
(BTW, BlackSTONE was the company that was buying up houses.)
> In me it seems more of an expression with a general dissatisifaction with the current massive conglomerates that seem to be ossfying into a defacto ruling class.
Okay, sure. If you want to take down global capitalism, go for it. But functional pension programs rely on bond and investment markets to function. If French politicians are looking for ways to keep their pension programs from collapsing, attacking the mechanisms that service your pension programs dilutes your message.
Just because CNN writes “BlackRock ... has played no part in the pension reforms”, can you not see how the world’s largest asset manager — which manages many private pensions — would obviously have a clear interest in such pension reforms? This isn’t complicated.
The way I see it, if the pension fund has less money there's less to manage and also less to gain from. If the people flee to private investments, they do not necessarily flee to Blackrock.
Isn't this change about the public pension, which is not a fund at all, it's simply a transfer from workers to retirees? Blackrock has nothing to do with that money, except in that if the money becomes insufficient, people might privately invest in Blackrock products to make up the difference.
You might say the same about large quantities of public policy, written by The Experts, with little regard for public sentiment, in this so called "democracy".
Let's hope that the elites aren't too inconvenienced in their walled neighbourhoods by these non-expert's lack of expertise.
Her definition may be agreed upon, but she must not forget that she has not the right to make people uncomfortable. That's why it is called "freedom of speech" and not "freedom of protest".
And she may be excused if she made the same error as many others before her, which consists in confusing the freedom to speak with the right to be listened to.
"making people uncomfortable" describes so many well-accepted uses of freedom of speech, from protest and civil disobedience to any form of speaking truth to power, even most art, media and cultural expression from certain religious points of view, that it only seems useful as a means of oppression. I would argue the opposite - that your comfort is a privilege, not a right.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
You’re saying that someone doesn’t have the right to make someone uncomfortable, is making me very uncomfortable. Do you claim a special right to make me uncomfortable, while believing others should not have that right?
Persuading millions(?) of people to do something is not what I consider to be an easy task. An ordinary person may be a weak link, but a million ordinary people is not.
This would be true if the power relationship could be modeled as a single linear chain. But it's a network, so cutting a single link in the chain is no more effective than cutting a single strand of a fishing net in which one is wrapped. To be effective, that small cut would need to be replicated at scale across the whole market, and that requires humongous amounts of communication, organization, and administration to pull.
Boycotts can be effective, but only when issue and target are very easily and clearly defined (which is not always equivalent to 'honestly'). And the problem with boycotts is that they take a long time to spin up, and if you successfully focus all your boycotting energies on an intermediate target, the boycott coalition tends to fall apart after victory and you have to start over almost from scratch for your next objective.
A global corporation managing $10 trillion in assets is very far from the "weakest link". The protestors would have an easier time just toppling the government.
There's been report a couple of years ago that Blackrock was in cahoot with the french government to privatize part of the pension system during the previous pension reform plan.
The plan was met with strong opposition and was cancelled following COVID. The current plan is quite different and probably not really what Blackrock had in mind initially.
Keep in mind that reliable polls for weeks now has shown that a vast majority of the population opposes the law. What we see here is just the radicalization of the movement following the complete isolation of the government who has refused to discuss the current plan with the unions (labor or business) as it is usually done in France. It was predictable and I fear it could get much worst.
While it’s true that difficult decisions need to be made, it seems that the point of democracy is that such decisions should have popular mandates. This reform doesn’t seem to have anything close to a popular mandate
This is a dumb way of thinking about democracy. People shouldn't quietly let politicians do whatever they want until their term is up, they should let them know that they are unhappy. If the government doesn't provide a way to do this, then there is no other option but to protest.
Government should be afraid of citizens, not the other way around.
Kind of a problem, imagine if a politician was elected to do something, then does something totally different, basically lying.
Who's going to stop him/her?
This worked great during an earlier era. Insisting on 18th century political technology to solve 21st century problems in an era of instantaneous communication is a scam. Elections can be and are manipulated, and insisting that they are the sole legitimate form of political expression is a giant red flag.
Yeah I am not a big fan of "difficult decisions" against your people and the whole TINA thing [0]. Historically it's not great. Democracy is about responsibility. The people is supposed to assume their decisions and if this is what they want it's what they should get. We are not talking a blocking minority here.
Leading against you people works for a while until your rule just become authoritarian. The point of contention here is that Macron says he was elected and discards the conditions in which he was elected. A lot of people voted for him to block the far right lady and not because they were in love with his platform.
It's the third time in 20 years this happens and my gut feeling is, there won't be a fourth time following that pension reform debacle, as a lot of people will just stay home the next time around. I hope I am wrong.
I guess the responsible behavior would have been to get a big tent government instead of a tone-deaf one. But we get the politicians we deserve.
That's why representative democracies, voting on the basis of higher level choices, are effective.
I struggle to imagine a scenario whereby there is ever broad French popular support for raising the retirement age, even if failing to do so bankrupts the country.
Quote in french, sorry: La capacité productive de l’économie serait soutenue par les réformes et les investissements du Gouvernement, qui contribueraient notamment à accroître l’offre de travail et à atteindre le plein emploi: réforme des retraites [...].
This is according to the french government. It is its official position. The purpose is to increase the workforce amount. My guess is that the aim is to allow for a pressure on salaries and eventual reduction in pension dues. The cost of labor reduction has been the common thread of french governments for the last 20 years so it would be coherent.
The pension system is more or less fine. It has been reformed multiple times already. The mass of baby boomers are on the precipice of life expectancy statistics now and besides you will find plenty of other possibilities to reform the system [0] if this is what you want.
The conservative corporate elite have been screaming about bankruptcy for decades in the US due to entitlements, but spending for war and corporate bailouts seems to always pass easily along with the debt level.
Mostly because in France pensions are financed through taxes and managed by the state. If you want to compare apple to apples, you would have to include spending on healthcare, education AND pensions here.
From your link: Ainsi plus de la moitié recette des prélèvements obligatoires est affecté au financement des retraites et de la sécurité sociale.
> There's been report a couple of years ago that Blackrock was in cahoot with the french government to privatize part of the pension system during the previous pension reform plan.
I disagree with that frame. "Report" sounds like there was a whistleblower leak or something like this. "Rumors" would be more accurate.
IIRC the "it's all Blackrock's plan" theories were all based on the fact that Blackrock consulted on the reform on one occasion. People ran with the idea because "Blackrock" sounds ominous as hell.
The US government should probably break up BlackRock. They are an entity so big they will inevitably cause conspiracy theories (and anti-American sentiments) around the world.
If the politicians were doing their jobs they would limit their power, and ensure antitrust is properly funded while preventing business sector concentration greater than 8%.
Its not a 'theory' if they actually do a lot of shady stuff.
The only actual connection in both articles was that the Blackrock CEO attended a summits about climate change 4 years ago. And that a Blackrock executive was on a pension planning committee 6 years ago.
>Keep in mind that reliable polls for weeks now has shown that a vast majority of the population opposes the law.
I can find plenty of polls about how Macron and his government are unpopular.
But where are the polls about this specific law?
Keep in mind that Macron and his centrist government have always been unpopular and have only managed to win the second round of elections because it is against a far-right populist.
France is such a shit show right now (source: I am French). The president is weak because of his poor result at last election and the the left is using this to create a crisis in the country. It doesn’t matter that the gouvernement is basically bankrupted and that the boomers will need to be fed, housed, payed and healed all the way until they die.
For a 70 millions people country, only 30 millions are considered active and soon we will have 20 millions retirees.
And knowing exactly this, the left is blocking the country, attacking to police and burning dumpsters.
In Switzerland, retirement is at 65 since a while ago and the retirement is financed through capitalization whereas in France, active people pay for retirees.
I let you guess which system proves to be the best for working people and retirees alike…
Switzerland wins because they are few people who make contrarian choices all the time and read the fine print on any international accord to see how they can free ride on the shoulders of all the other signatories.
Big countries like France, Germany, UK etc. they cannot be compared with the Switzerlands, Singapores, Hong Kongs of the world.
Small countries (Ireland, Switzerland, Malta, Liechtenstein, ...) not only cannot project military power but can barely defend themselves under modern conditions. So they nominally adopt a posture of neutrality and pragmatically turn themselves into tax havens or free ports in order to maintain a pseudo-autonomy. This often leads to the populace being little more than a labor pool in the service of a managerial class.
The government made a contract and now they want to change the terms. "You pay into this fund now and we'll pay you back at 55....60....62....."
What you don't do is change the terms without consulting with the constituents. Because that's how you end your political career in the medium term and cause protests in the immediate term.
My take was that Macron was seen as a very unpopular globalist selling out the French people, do you feel this is accurate @srge?
As is the case in many places, particularly the USA (where I currently am) the whole left/right party team sports system is often cited by the media to describe the factions and positions of groups of people. I feel this is breaking down, and that we have various anarchists on both the left and right attempting to destroy a system that isn't serving them. This distorts the perception of more moderate voters and positions.
I'm highly aware of how tenacious the Gillet Jeunes were prior to the pandemic.
> very unpopular globalist selling out the French people
Yes he was a banker before running for office. The left is pushing this narrative a lot. Forgetting that their leader is a millionaire who never worked in the private sector…
I categorize 'the left' as either anarchist/progressives with no practical experience in running anything, the petit bourgeois woke leftist trend fashionistas but with lamentably few actual working class (in some case historically as there are few jobs) moderate left representation.
The same issues are also a crisis in the UK (I'm a UK citizen) - ultra wealthy globalist leadership, straw man opposition, angry, frustrated electorate who feel no one is representing them.
The net worth of every politician is public. Jean-Luc Mélenchon the leader of the left is an actual millionnaire. He always has been a professional politician.
This guy wants to run a country and make it prosper…
Sounds like Biden, career politician! (Although admittedly Biden enabled the vast US credit card usury industry out of Delaware with the private banking sector)
In France, most president were career politicians as well, AFAIK only three of them actually worked in the private sector at some point (Pompidou, Giscard d'Estaing and Macron, all of which were banker prior, in he same investment bank).
So not a lot of diversity, but even if that's regrettable, it's pretty ridiculous to blame Mélenchon for that.
63% of French continue to approve protests [0]
73% of those surveyed approve when opponents of the reform block toll barriers and allow motorists to pass for free [1]
Your opinion does not look representative to me. It looks like French people have a social model that they want to keep.
A social model has a cost. The choice is not between work longer or not. It’s between work longer or pay more. Macron choses the former. You may disagree but as the 5th republic allows him, he governs and he choses.
Also, government is not a popularity contest. In fact, maybe we should trust the politicians especially when they are pushing unpopular reforms.
IMO, not all sources of funding are being exploited.
For instance, taxes on property should be restrictive to the point that having a second residence would be a net cost, and a third would be only accessible to multi-millionaires.
Business can be financially penalized to own property as well and force to sell or operate at loss.
Heritage could be better taxed and not just progressively but exponentially and without known loopholes.
There are lots of options.
The protests just make these options look more realistic, this is why the general population approves of the protests.
Prélèvements_obligatoires aren't taxes, it includes pensions and healthcare too, by the virtue of being public-funded, now add private healthcare and pensions () in other oecd countries otherwise it's an apple-to-orange comparison.
> The president is weak because of his poor result at last election and the the left is using this to create a crisis in the country.
Then the weak President probably shouldn't have used article 49.3 provisions to pass the unpopular law. Considering that the outcome of this decision was obvious and that they were warned specifically that this would happen, I'd say the President and his Prime Minister created this crisis.
The people are simply unwilling to let this mismanagement slide.
The people famously love technicalities. Reforms that are not democratic will be met with protest. If you push laws through against the will of the people then expect riots.
Point is.. no one is "taking advantage" of the President. It's entirely self-inflicted.
You're approaching this backwards, probably because you're hoping it will allow you to continue to be dismissive without having to put forward an argument of merit based upon the facts.
You're also missing the obvious. He could have just retired if he believed this so strongly yet was unable to _convince_ the legislature to pass the law. He clearly wants the job more than he wants his popularity. That is a person who cannot be trusted.
Don't even try to argue European politics with the American techbros on this site. They support a violent anti-capitalist revolution in France while fantasizing about gunning down homeless people in San Francisco.
A weak president using executive powers to push through laws that the vast majority of the country opposes is leading to social chaos...who could have predicted this?
France is such a shit show right now (source: I am French). All of that because the president is weak because of his poor result, but he's a narcissist who think he's smarter than anyone else and is unable to even form a majority with the traditional right party who shares most of his agenda.
And because he must always be the smartest in the room, the government has to be a bunch of idiots (this is almost a literal translation of quote from the prime minister, the exact quote being «Un gouvernement composé à moitié de débiles»).
When you govern a country with less than 30% of citizen's approval acting as if none of their opinions on the subject mattered, no shit people are unhappy and start doing stupid stuff…
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadUh... this makes no sense. At first I thought it was a coincidence, but nope, it was intentional and targeted.
> “The meaning of this action is quite simple. We went to the headquarters of BlackRock to tell them: the money of workers, for our pensions, they are taking it,” Jerome Schmitt, spokesman for French union SUD, told CNN affiliate BFM-TV.
Again, this makes absolutely no sense. The protesters aren't even aligned on why they are there. If this was about the pensions this moment would be a bit like keying your own car.
What’s weird here is that it seems more like willful stupidity rather than just random mobs burning things due to chaos.
I think it’s some sort of availability bias. Black rock isn’t doing the thing they dislike but they are big and have an office in Paris; therefore, burn it down as an effigy of the system I dislike.
I don’t like this description. Peaceful protests are peaceful. Pretty peaceful protests aren’t peaceful.
There was a protest in my town recently where a cop car was set on fire and a bunch of windows were smashed. Maybe 200-500 people total but it was described as “mostly peaceful.” While that is true as I think only 10 people were arrested and more were violent, but that’s like 5-10% violent and the rest peaceful. I don’t think that’s earnest and truthful and I’d rather like to know if a group is peaceful or not.
But “mostly peaceful” protests are the bad kind of protests. I think they are more accurately described as light riots or something or mostly peaceful riots. Or some inflection point between a lawful, peaceful protest and a violent protest.
The police actually just kind of watched the protesters smashing and burning stuff and they certainly werent tear gassing people. But I think that they do need to do something to stop violent/mostly peaceful protests and arresting 9 out of 100-200 rioters doesn’t seem to be reducing the number of riots.
It’s like describing someone charged with domestic abuse as “mostly a loving spouse who almost never beat their spouse.” True, but disingenuous.
Blackrock is a massive player that is by some accounts, possibly the largest and most powerful hedge fund in the world, that is doing things like buying up houses to rent out, pursuing ESG initiatives extensively etc.
It's not about the pensions so much as it is an expression of outrage about the powerlessness people are feeling and directing it at what is precieved to be one of the sources of that powerlessness.
I've seen this reported many times even in places like nytimes but never seen actual numbers behind it. I 've read number between 3% and even as high as 20% .
My impression was it was ordinary upper income ppl like high end tech workers , retirees ect that were doing most of the buying and renting. A vast majority of my friends now own rental properties by directly buying them or turning their previous residence into a rental.
We all want one evil villain to blame but reality is much more complicated. Thats why movements like occupy wall st acoomplish nothing. Wouldn't it be easy if the problem can be solved by taking down one evil dude in his castle.
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/22524829/wall-street-housin...
Whether the demise of OWS was 100% due to their shortcomings and actions is speculative - a lot of people think the original demise and subsequent massive increase in culture war catching the media's attention (and in turn, dividing the public on yet another contentious issue) was to some degree coordinated...and I am one of those people.
Taking out one evil dude = one less evil dude = better society.
Do not let perfect be the enemy of good.
FWIW: institutional investors buying up single-family-homes (at least in the US) never really worked out. The FHA and VA programs are such huge players in the US loan market that individual investors can still outcompete big guys on financing.
this is mis-information by incompleteness. There are records and there are lies, with a non-zero overlap. Source- investor/accountant with a US California Masters degree in Taxation
Blackrock is not a hedge fund. They are an asset manager. They take your money and park it into the market for you. To the extent that they exercise any discretion over the market basically comes down to the stock blend they put into their otherwise very boring index fund options.
(BTW, BlackSTONE was the company that was buying up houses.)
> In me it seems more of an expression with a general dissatisifaction with the current massive conglomerates that seem to be ossfying into a defacto ruling class.
Okay, sure. If you want to take down global capitalism, go for it. But functional pension programs rely on bond and investment markets to function. If French politicians are looking for ways to keep their pension programs from collapsing, attacking the mechanisms that service your pension programs dilutes your message.
This is quite a common occurrence and even I get them confused.
If anything, the collapse of the French public pension system would be a net benefit to their business if people start fleeing to private investments.
Sure the workers are screwed in favour of retired people but the fund is increasing with this change.
You might say the same about large quantities of public policy, written by The Experts, with little regard for public sentiment, in this so called "democracy".
Let's hope that the elites aren't too inconvenienced in their walled neighbourhoods by these non-expert's lack of expertise.
And she may be excused if she made the same error as many others before her, which consists in confusing the freedom to speak with the right to be listened to.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment
And if that's not convincing enough, there's literally several hundred years of case rulings that reaffirm one's inalienable right to protest.
What makes me uncomfortable is people blocking streets or services in order to force me to hear them.
Freedom of speech is talking and showing signs on the public square. If I don't like your sign, that's not making me uncomfortable.
that would be ordinary people who invest in index funds like vanguard that hold blackrock.
Quickest way to bring blackrock down is if ordinary Joe chooses to not invest in blackrock shareholder (vanguard).
Boycotts can be effective, but only when issue and target are very easily and clearly defined (which is not always equivalent to 'honestly'). And the problem with boycotts is that they take a long time to spin up, and if you successfully focus all your boycotting energies on an intermediate target, the boycott coalition tends to fall apart after victory and you have to start over almost from scratch for your next objective.
The plan was met with strong opposition and was cancelled following COVID. The current plan is quite different and probably not really what Blackrock had in mind initially.
Keep in mind that reliable polls for weeks now has shown that a vast majority of the population opposes the law. What we see here is just the radicalization of the movement following the complete isolation of the government who has refused to discuss the current plan with the unions (labor or business) as it is usually done in France. It was predictable and I fear it could get much worst.
As a country though, difficult decisions must be made since life expectancy is increasing and a lot of baby boomers are retiring.
The left knows this but use the situation to get at Macron and amass political capital for the next elections.
All of this while the country is virtually bankrupt.
Edit: syntax
Next election, they’ll chose differently if they want.
Government should be afraid of citizens, not the other way around.
Leading against you people works for a while until your rule just become authoritarian. The point of contention here is that Macron says he was elected and discards the conditions in which he was elected. A lot of people voted for him to block the far right lady and not because they were in love with his platform.
It's the third time in 20 years this happens and my gut feeling is, there won't be a fourth time following that pension reform debacle, as a lot of people will just stay home the next time around. I hope I am wrong.
I guess the responsible behavior would have been to get a big tent government instead of a tone-deaf one. But we get the politicians we deserve.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative
That's why representative democracies, voting on the basis of higher level choices, are effective.
I struggle to imagine a scenario whereby there is ever broad French popular support for raising the retirement age, even if failing to do so bankrupts the country.
Let's agree to disagree.
> That's why representative democracies, voting on the basis of higher level choices, are effective.
Working 2 additional years is a pretty high level choice I believe.
> even if failing to do so bankrupts the country.
I keep reading about bankruptcy but I believe this is incorrect. Here is the reason why the government imposed that law: https://www.budget.gouv.fr/files/uploads/extract/2022/progra....
Quote in french, sorry: La capacité productive de l’économie serait soutenue par les réformes et les investissements du Gouvernement, qui contribueraient notamment à accroître l’offre de travail et à atteindre le plein emploi: réforme des retraites [...].
This is according to the french government. It is its official position. The purpose is to increase the workforce amount. My guess is that the aim is to allow for a pressure on salaries and eventual reduction in pension dues. The cost of labor reduction has been the common thread of french governments for the last 20 years so it would be coherent.
The pension system is more or less fine. It has been reformed multiple times already. The mass of baby boomers are on the precipice of life expectancy statistics now and besides you will find plenty of other possibilities to reform the system [0] if this is what you want.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR-yJQaa6LE (in french)
The conservative corporate elite have been screaming about bankruptcy for decades in the US due to entitlements, but spending for war and corporate bailouts seems to always pass easily along with the debt level.
Could you elaborate on this? Their debt in 2022 was 113.7% of GDP, compared to the USA's 764.7%.
Mostly because in France pensions are financed through taxes and managed by the state. If you want to compare apple to apples, you would have to include spending on healthcare, education AND pensions here.
From your link: Ainsi plus de la moitié recette des prélèvements obligatoires est affecté au financement des retraites et de la sécurité sociale.
People often misuse the passive voice to lend weight to an argument by clothing it in the language of inevitability, as if policy were weather.
I disagree with that frame. "Report" sounds like there was a whistleblower leak or something like this. "Rumors" would be more accurate.
IIRC the "it's all Blackrock's plan" theories were all based on the fact that Blackrock consulted on the reform on one occasion. People ran with the idea because "Blackrock" sounds ominous as hell.
Its not a 'theory' if they actually do a lot of shady stuff.
Let's agree to disagree. Here are the reports:
https://www.francetvinfo.fr/economie/emploi/carriere/vie-pro...
https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/gestion-actifs/les-r...
And you can find many others.
This frustrates me to no end. Blackrock is probably the second most boring company in the financial space (behind Vanguard).
The only reason people are conspiratorial towards Blackrock is because some journalists back in the day confused them with Blackwater and Blackstone.
He was also member of a commitee set up by the French government in 2018 to “think about the reduction in public spendings”[1]…
There's no need for whistleblowers here, all of this was done in public…
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comit%C3%A9_action_publique_20...
I can find plenty of polls about how Macron and his government are unpopular.
But where are the polls about this specific law?
Keep in mind that Macron and his centrist government have always been unpopular and have only managed to win the second round of elections because it is against a far-right populist.
2023-01-18 61% against https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/reforme-des-retraites-la-majorit...
2023-02-02, 64% against https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/lopposition-au-projet-de-reforme...
2023-04-05 68% against https://harris-interactive.fr/opinion_polls/observatoire-de-...
For a 70 millions people country, only 30 millions are considered active and soon we will have 20 millions retirees.
And knowing exactly this, the left is blocking the country, attacking to police and burning dumpsters.
In Switzerland, retirement is at 65 since a while ago and the retirement is financed through capitalization whereas in France, active people pay for retirees.
I let you guess which system proves to be the best for working people and retirees alike…
Switzerland wins because they are few people who make contrarian choices all the time and read the fine print on any international accord to see how they can free ride on the shoulders of all the other signatories.
Big countries like France, Germany, UK etc. they cannot be compared with the Switzerlands, Singapores, Hong Kongs of the world.
What you don't do is change the terms without consulting with the constituents. Because that's how you end your political career in the medium term and cause protests in the immediate term.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/01/11/the-gilets-jaunes-a...
Yes he was a banker before running for office. The left is pushing this narrative a lot. Forgetting that their leader is a millionaire who never worked in the private sector…
That is the most French thing I've heard all week.
This guy wants to run a country and make it prosper…
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/biden-bankruptc...
So not a lot of diversity, but even if that's regrettable, it's pretty ridiculous to blame Mélenchon for that.
Seems Biden only became a millionaire after his stint as VP, from book sales and speaking engagements. Being in Congress doesn't pay much.
I don't care for simplistic reductionism, it reminds me of Le Pen's rhetoric.
63% of French continue to approve protests [0] 73% of those surveyed approve when opponents of the reform block toll barriers and allow motorists to pass for free [1]
Your opinion does not look representative to me. It looks like French people have a social model that they want to keep.
[0] https://www.bfmtv.com/societe/sondage-bfmtv-retraites-63-des... [1] https://www.tf1info.fr/politique/sondage-exclusif-contestati...
Also, government is not a popularity contest. In fact, maybe we should trust the politicians especially when they are pushing unpopular reforms.
Edit: words and clarity
For instance, taxes on property should be restrictive to the point that having a second residence would be a net cost, and a third would be only accessible to multi-millionaires.
Business can be financially penalized to own property as well and force to sell or operate at loss.
Heritage could be better taxed and not just progressively but exponentially and without known loopholes.
There are lots of options.
The protests just make these options look more realistic, this is why the general population approves of the protests.
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prélèvements_obligatoires
Enough said no?
Then the weak President probably shouldn't have used article 49.3 provisions to pass the unpopular law. Considering that the outcome of this decision was obvious and that they were warned specifically that this would happen, I'd say the President and his Prime Minister created this crisis.
The people are simply unwilling to let this mismanagement slide.
Point is.. no one is "taking advantage" of the President. It's entirely self-inflicted.
You're approaching this backwards, probably because you're hoping it will allow you to continue to be dismissive without having to put forward an argument of merit based upon the facts.
You're also missing the obvious. He could have just retired if he believed this so strongly yet was unable to _convince_ the legislature to pass the law. He clearly wants the job more than he wants his popularity. That is a person who cannot be trusted.
This is obvious.
And because he must always be the smartest in the room, the government has to be a bunch of idiots (this is almost a literal translation of quote from the prime minister, the exact quote being «Un gouvernement composé à moitié de débiles»).
When you govern a country with less than 30% of citizen's approval acting as if none of their opinions on the subject mattered, no shit people are unhappy and start doing stupid stuff…