Fascism Weaponized French Early Retirement

French retirement used to be at 65 during the “30 glorious years”, the time of reconstruction which followed World War Two [1]. Then Mitterand became president and lowered retirement to 60. This was a trick to weaken the French People. It worked. Mitterand was a fake socialist and true demagogue: as an authentic fascist, having launched his career wih fascism, Mitterand received the francisque medal from his boss the racist dictator Philippe Pétain, a collaborator of Adolf Hitler, who was condemned to death as a traitor upon liberation from Nazism [2]. Mitterand instead of having been tried as a traitor became a politician. The fascist Mitterand is vastly admired in France, a proof of national derangement.

The socioeconomic theory behind lowering to 60 was that the fewer older people worked, the more young people would go to work. The opposite happened: GDP grew less, and so there were fewer jobs overall. Indeed, older workers have expertise, younger workers do not. Left to the young and arrogant, France became incompetent. Mitterand and his right wing PM, Balladur privatized companies that Mitterand and his Communists had just nationalized, by giving their leadership to young people who knew-nothing, yet viewed with awe, as they came from grandes écoles (where their families’ background had made sure to put them).

The practical result was that the French economy crashed and is still crashing. Art 14.5% of GDP France spends twice more on retirement relative to GDP than the USA. Germany spends 10.4%. While tyrannies are doing their best to launch and win a world war, and hundreds of thousands were killed or gravely wounded as a result in Europe alone, Paris spends only 1.9% of GDP on its military… while leaving Africa to be reorganized by China and Putin’s Wagner “Private Military Corporation”…. Paid in part by a French deficit is 5% of GDP… and more borrowing, at ever higher rates, keeps the state going.

As work got decimated in France, the ultra rich rose to prominence and pulled the levers: France is embellished with the world’s wealthiest man, and the wealthiest woman… The former from selling overpriced trinkets (luxury), the latter from rents (and not paying taxes). 

France has also the second highest taxes in term of GDP, just behind Denmark… taxes for the common person, that is. The ultra rich families mostly avoid taxation, having engineered the tax code that way (as in the USA, but even relatively more so). 

17 million French retirees live from sucking the energy of 23 million workers. As recently as 2014, they earned 106%, that is, more, than the average French wage earner. As the country slowly collapses, from the lack of attractivity of compensated work, this strange dependency has bought civil peace. Ah, but there is a war…. And the war is actually related to the weakness of the West and of France in particular: leaving an entire continent such as Africa, to the mercy of dictators Putin and Xi has consequences: all Africans want to move to France (they get generous social benefits)… while, of course, as most of them can’t do so, hating France.

In 1940, Stalin was allied to Hitler, and brand new French planes were not armed because authorities were afraid that the Moscow addicted workers would seize the guns. Consequence? The defeat of May 1940… Which put Mitterand and his ilk in power…

A spectacular spiral of evil.

UlTRA WEALTH IS FASCIST And UNEMPLOYMENT ITS FRIEND:

The power of hyper wealthy families has been growing in France enormously (that can be measured in their size in the financial markets). Following North America and Asia, Europe is controlled by the ultra-wealthy . In 2021, the top countries for the ultra-wealthy were France (30,000), Germany (28,000), U.K. (25,000) and Italy (17,000). Each of them has more than 30 million dollars of net worth, the level at which the 100% Roman Republic wealth tax applied. France, relative to population has nearly 1/3 more ultra wealthy than Germany… No wonder all the strikes…

The power of the ultra-wealthy is inversely related to the power of We The People. So to grow and prosper, the ultra wealthy need to weaken We The People. And how do they do that? As under the Roman Empire, successor to the Roman Republic: they deprive We The People of employment. So send the jobs to China, de-industrialize: in 1946, any little French town had a factory. Now, of the 20 or so so-called French car models sold in France, only one is really made in France. (Similarly US electric cars would not exist without Chinese manufacturing as the fundamental elements of batteries are made there.)

Early in the Roman Republic, 25 centuries ago, to get more rights, the Roman Plebs went on strike, retiring to a hill. Rome completely stopped functioning. The Plebs got its rights. Why? Because without the Plebs, Rome could’t not work. This is why the tyrannical empire made sure that the Plebs had no work, or at least no important work. In the modern Western world, the employed Plebs is in China, making important devices, and China is where the power is, and the French Plebs has little residual power: it goes on strike, but cars are made somewhere else.

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David Mcmahon: “The socioeconomic theory behind lowering to 60 was that the fewer older people worked, the more young people would go to work“That is a key part of the flawed socialist outlook – they believe in a zero sum economy. In other words, there is a fixed pie, and for young people to work, old people have to exit the workforce. That is inaccurate, in fact reality is the opposite.

PA: Absolutely! I have a friend who is a senior French executive (C suite) long detached in the USA in a fully owned subsidiary company of a major international French company. When he decided to return to France he discovered that all his mentors had gone into “pre-retirement”. So those senior executives retired at a time when their expertise had fully matured! Their US equivalent had 8 years of maximum productivity, leadership and mentorship to contribute. My friend then discovered he had nothing to return to….

I think to call that self-destructive behavior “socialist” is too nice a euphemism. It’s more like vampirism: suck the blood until the victim collapses. Epic failures are multiplying in France and much of the rest of Europe. Some are totally self-inflicted, like the ban on gas fracking in France: French ecologists believe gas is OK, as long as it comes from Putin, Qatar, or Wyoming… Ironically, but as a direct consequence of these nonsensical policies, France is more and more controlled by the… hyper rich… thanks to the stupidification they generate…

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AS FRANCE GOES, SO DOES THE REST 

Some will say: oh, but the retired French just want to party. However, it’s not that simple: France was the core of Western civilization, over a millennium, creating in the process Italy (freed from the Lombards, 8C, and Islamists, 11C), Spain (north freed from Islamists circa 800 CE), Germany (christianized, civilized and unified by Frankish conquest, 400s to 800 CE), England (conquered and re-romanized, 1066 CE), the Netherlands (80 year war against Spain in the Netherlands, part of the 200 year war between France and Spain, which Spain finally lost). 

France is also the geographical core, the crossroads, in more ways than one. 

As France goes, so does the rest (with the notable exception of the US, child of Britain and France, with its own teenage personality…. 

Actually Britain has been going through a similar process of deindustrialization, no better than France (better GDP behavior in the UK was correlated to more input from Russian oligarchs and their ilk… the result of which was the Brexit insanity ). Italy has been even worse.

Right now, the French population is clueless. It has been clueless before in similar sitation of grave danger.

In 1939, courageously, the French government declared war to Hitler who was allied to Francoist Spain, fascist Italy, Imperial Japan and the genocidal Stalin… among others. However, thereafter, France sort of relaxed: the mood, deep down inside was grim, but superficially all about dancing and the good life. It was called the “Drole de Guerre” (Fynny War). 

Well, come Spring, the gory Norwegian campaign started, with victory but severe Franco-British losses to the invading Nazis. Then came the catastrophe of May 1940, when the french army was sent on a foo’s errant, while the Nazi army fueled by Stalin cut it from behind. 

Let it not be the same!

Patrice Ayme 

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[1] For more background see WSJ: The Party Is Ending for French Retirees
All advanced economies face demographic strains, but France’s stand out; now President Macron wants to raise the legal retirement age to 64.

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[2] Pétain  was a complicated figure, and he had a hopeless task. Pétain had to navigate among the fascists (Pétain told Franco not to collaborate with Hitler to the point of letting Hitler’s army through Spain…). After Allied landings in November 1942 in North Africa, Pétain secretly ordered Admiral Darlan, then in Algeria, to merge the French forces in Africa with those of the Allies. But, at the same time, he published official messages protesting the landing.

Pétain’s double-dealing was probably necessary. But Mitterand embraced only one side of the double-dealing, the fascist side (although, like many fascists he proclaimed later it ain’t what it looked like… enough French believed him to elect hi president.)  

The inventor of retirement at sixty, Mitterand, on the right (of course!) receiving from Marshall Pétain, the fascist-in-chief, the highest medal of the Vichy junta. From Travail, Famille, Patrie to Chomage, Famine, Party.

Tags: Fadcism, France, Mitterand, Retirement, Strikes