Don't mind the :LIB: link, just one million people came out in Paris today, "hundreds of thousands" my arsecheecks.

It's been a wild couple of days in France, firefighters on strike burning tyres to trigger smoke alarms, electricians turning electric counters back to zero and then resealing them (allegedly cutting power to rich knobheads in the meantime), all ports being closed, and all that was just wildcat action in anticipation of the general stikes for today.

This is all to stop the government from raising the retirement age to 64, from where it is now, 62. Some union heads have murmured that in fact, they want it lowered to 60, as retribution.

Obviously the government has a huge hole in the budget because they want an overinflated army and they think this is a good way to pay for it. I don't even want to start pointing out how dumb of a move this is (the marginal productivity of a 62 year old will not be enough to pay for the fucking army's oil changes)

Honestly these are the biggest strikes that have happened in "the West" within my recollection.

edit: the small conservative Alsacian village I visited recently had their sole Burger King go on strike today so that's how "general" these general strikes are

edit2: oh yeah, some of the strikers were blasting the internationale, which is pretty common for this kind of stuff in France, but still, we love it folks, we love it