More than 500 people have been evicted from a former university residence in the suburbs of Paris, believed to have become France's largest squat.

Coincidence ? I think not.

Total sees 2020 oil output peak, urges less demand

- France's Total estimates global oil production will peak around 2020 if output growth continues at current levels and has advised governments to cool demand to avoid a supply crunch, its chief executive said. "The capacity of raising (oil) production is a real challenge ... if we stay with this type of production growth our impression is that peak production could be reached around 2020," Thierry Desmarest told the World Gas Conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday.

What corporations call “flexibility”—the right to dispose of workers at will—is what workers experience as disposability, not to mention insecurity and poverty. The French students who were tossing Molotov cocktails didn’t want to become what they call “a Kleenex generation”—used and tossed away when the employer decides he needs a fresh one.

Almost uniquely in Europe, the majority of French wage-earners fiercely oppose the government’s attempt to wash its hands of them and let unrestrained globalisation serve them up to business. This shift in the relationship between political power and society could mean the end of the welfare state. The (First Employment Contract) is part of a campaign to destroy the sense of social solidarity central to French identity. That is why there is so much opposition. And why France is in revolt.

By Jerome Pugmire

Paris -- Warming up on the sideline, a black player jogs toward fans at the Parc des Princes soccer stadium. As he gets closer, a barrage of monkey chants explodes -- "OOOH! OOOH! OOOH!"-- and racist insults fill the air.

The French government today bowed to weeks of protests and announced it was scrapping a controversial employment law that made it easier for employers to fire workers under the age of 26...In the wake of the biggest street demonstrations for almost 40 years, the office of the president, Jacques Chirac, said a new plan focusing on youths from troubled backgrounds would replace the "first job contract"...The secretary-general of the UNSA union, Alain Olive, said the 12 syndicated groups of workers, university and high school students had "won a great victory".

We Americans like to think we're tough. And lately, following the lead of our bold president and secretary of defense, we've taken to characterizing the French as sissies. But when it comes to gumption, young French people have shown us up. They're not taking this abuse. They may not drive around, gangsta rap blaring, with "Fear This" stickers on their SUV windows, but they're bringing the French economy to a halt by sitting on rail lines, blocking trains, by blocking major traffic arteries, by closing down the centers of major cities.

The protests against the job law, the WTO and IMF, and totalitarian immigration laws are the results of conscious choices made by a relatively small number of the earth's inhabitants. The protests in France are a wake up call to all of us. It's time we started making our own choices. Because they are bound by their need for profit, the masters of capital have proven that they are incapable of doing so.

These protests against the CPE are just part of a broader movement against the US/UK-style liberalisation of the French economy, and follow other public rejections of these policies, including the referendum which gave a firm ‘non’ to the proposed European constitution and its raft of neo-liberalisations. Despite the mainstream media claiming that the French are being anything from anti-free enterprise to downright racist, a look at the real causes behind the revolt reveals the usual plan: corporate bosses are lining politicians’ pockets for a mutually beneficial carve up of the economy, and the dumping of any regulations – such as workers’ rights - which stand in the way of the fat-cat feeding frenzy.

French Protesters Set Strike Date
By CRAIG R. SMITH
Published: March 20, 2006

PARIS, March 20 - French students and unions stepped up pressure on the government today, calling for more demonstrations culminating in strikes next week to fight a hotly contested new labor law that makes it easier for companies to fire young employees.

A powerful union leader in France has raised a new threat of a general strike to press the government to withdraw a jobs plan that sent at least a half-million people into the streets in weekend protests...Student and employee unions have given Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister, until Monday night to withdraw the measure, which is designed to increase hiring among the youth but seen by critics as an erosion of workers' rights that will not produce solid jobs.

Since Monday morning, February 20th 2006, a few dozen people occupy the building site for a youth prison (called EPM in french, standing for Établissement Pénitentiaire pour Mineurs) in Orvault, in the suburbs of Nantes, France.

Part of the activists are occupying trees, in which they have set up four tree-houses. Meanwhile, others gather on the ground in solidarity. By this action, activists intend to prevent the construction of this new prison, since occupied trees are to be cut for the building work to start.

[img_assist|fid=166|thumb=1|alt=Toxic Ship Clemenceau|caption=French plans to dump Clemenceau scrapped.]
French President Chirac has announced a dramatic recall of the asbestos-laden warship Clemenceau -- it will be turning around and going back to France. Our actions, emails to Chirac and an embarrassing international scandal left France with little choice but to abandon the misguided attempt to dump its own toxic mess on India.

La Vía Campesina | February 9, 2006

(New Yort/Jakarta – 9 February 2006) José Bové, the French farmer who became a leading figure of the worldwide anti-globalisation movement was deported from New York's airport Wednesday night. He was to attend a conference on Global Companies organised by the Cornell University Labor Center. José Bové is one of the leaders of the Confédération Paysanne in France and of the international farmer’s movement La Via Campesina.

Police in Strasbourg have used tear gas and water cannon to disperse dock workers who marched to the European Parliament in a mass protest...Protesters threw firecrackers, stones and metal missiles, smashing windows and causing "considerable damage"...The dockers, from across the EU, had converged on Strasbourg to protest at controversial proposals to open up port services to greater competition.