Reply #37: girls do not have to wear

[reggie the dog]

tops at the beach here. The human body is not taboo and is open to artistic expression as well. We often protest, sometimes the cops come in and bust up the protests mostly after 10 or 12 hours or so. Often times off duty police march in the protests, not as undercover, but because they are protesting against the government. At the last demonstration there were unions of workers in the public and private sector in the parade in the town I live in, there are 30 thousand people here, and several thousand more in villages a few miles away in the grape fields to the east west and south (alps are to the north). 4 thousand people were at the demonstration. Public workers there were

Train, national forest workers, post office, telephone, electricity, gas, JUDGES IN THEIR ROBES!, police officers protesting to preserve the quality of our schools for their kids too, teachers pre school to high school, off duty soldiers, government bureaucracy workers, university professors, government scientists, (for all of these groups, like all the private sector groups and wildcats too the white and blue collar were represented)

private sector

sheep shearers farmers union from the alps
local grape growers
local wine producers
local farmers
some of the few factory workers still left anywhere near here
the garbage collectors
the water company and I may have missed some there were a shitload of private sector people

OTHER GROUPS

High school and jr. high schools students organized by student unions
Local university students organized by the student unions at the universities
MULTIPLE UNIONS OF RETIRED PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!! HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE OVER 60 WERE WITH US!!!!

WILDCATS

Local hippies, artists, skaters, musicians and other freaky people playing music, riding around on their bikes or skateboards (I was on my mountain bike)

quite a day, the strike was huge and there were 4 thousand people in a town of 3O thousand, and 4 million in the streets in a country of 60 million, ONE OUT OF EVERY 15 PEOPLE IN THE COUNTRY PROTESTED

you know why
WE ARE TIRED
tired of golden parachutes
slashes in public funding and the slow selling off of public resources
we are tired of scandals involving corporate fraud
TIRED OF SWITZERLAND, MONACO, LUXEMBOURG and ANDORRA AND ALL THE STUPID UK ISLES letting French people hide money from our tax collectors in their
we are giving a big FUCK YOU to the government

university professors and students have been on strike for nearly three months now, Guadalupe went on strike for 2 months, Martinique for a month.

You know what, we win and win again. The government is slowly giving concessions.

When they kidnap bosses they win, they get double their severance pay when they are laid off (less bonuses?)

I get off my ass and protest, I vote extreme left(Bové the organic farmer who uprooted the monsanto corn test plot here then got busted, then did it again), I talk about the movement with my high school and university students. I wonder what the person saying I am not free to speak here in France has been doing with all their rights in the USA.