It’s school break and my ten-year-old godson is enrolled in soccer camp for a week. We get up early in the morning and drive him to the indoor stadium where he does soccer stuff from 9 am to 4:30 pm.

All French boys dream of being a future Kylian Mbappé, the 24 year old professional footballer who plays for the French national team and the Paris Saint-Germain Club.

“Who’s your favorite football player?” I asked my godson. To my surprise, he said “Robert Lewandowski” who plays for “Barça” (FC Barcelona).

A cold Saturday night and I’m watching a Bob Dylan and Joan Baez documentary on YouTube. Tomorrow I take the train up to Lille for a week’s vacation. It’s “les vacances scolaires” (school break) up north and I’ll be spending time with my favorite ten-year-old.

Joan was hopelessly in love with Bob. They were a couple in the early days, but it didn’t last. He moved on, but they did remain friends and in later years continued to sing together.

The song. Written in 1974, Joan Baez is singing to her former lover Bob Dylan, fondly reminiscing about their 1960s affair. Lyrics below. It’s a truly beautiful song, tinged with melancholy. 

The man who had the audacity to slap President Macron in 2021 was given a four-month prison sentence. Not enough, most people say. The prosecutors had asked for eighteen months. 28 years old and unemployed, he was said to harbor ultra-right political convictions.

There’s an old tradition in France to “flour” politicians. What does this mean? The act of covering someone with white flour sends the message “se faire rouler dans la farine” (to get rolled in flour). That’s the literal translation, but the real meaning is to dupe or lie to people. This is what many French citizens believe their politicians do to them. The expression comes from the 19th century when actors used flour as makeup and would dupe people with their identities.

Oddly enough, no one seems to protest this strange French practice, including the target himself. We watch it on TV and everyone chuckles (myself included). Even the perpetrator below (wearing sunglasses) had his moment in the sun when reporters gathered round with microphones to ask what compelled him to buy a bag of white flour and throw it onto Jean-Luc Mélenchon (leader of a left-wing populist political party called La France Insoumise). Video below. Mélenchon’s reaction is calm as he brushes the flour off his suit and hair. He himself was probably a flour-thrower when he was a young rebel.

Further below is another video showing other politicians getting floured and worse – receiving cream pies in their face. Look at President Hollande standing calmly before a lectern on stage while brushing the flour of his papers.

Nicolas Sarkozy gets a pie in the face, as do others.

In today’s JDD (Journal du Dimanche), a French weekly newspaper published on Sundays, the Prime Minister announced that those who started working between the ages of 20 and 21 will be able to retire at age 63. “It’s a measure that will cost between 600 million and one billion euros per year and will affect up to 30,000 people per year,” she said. “We hear the demand of right-wing elected officials on long careers.” Debates on the bill begin Monday in the National Assembly.

Continuing from my post of the other day, here’s another reason why 70 percent of the French population opposes the reforms: Women are the big losers. The salary and career inequalities experienced by women throughout their working life have repercussions on the amount of pensions they receive and their retirement age.

The amount of pensions paid to women is 40% lower than that paid to men, a problem which the current reform ignores. There exists a flagrant inequality between men and women: the average male retiree receives €1,924 per month, while the average female retiree receives €1,145.

While women’s salaries are on average 22% lower than those of men (INSEE 2022), their direct pensions are 40% lower than those of men. Retirement therefore further amplifies wage inequality. 20% of working women must wait until age 67 to retire, compared to 10% for men. When our leaders are questioned about these pension inequalities, the classic answer is that they are reduced over time. In reality, they are stagnating, just as wage inequalities are stagnating. (source: Le Monde)

Who doesn’t fear poverty? I know I do. I must work until I am 67 before I qualify for full pension. Why? Because I came to France late and didn’t start working (and contributing to the obligatory pension fund through my paychecks) until I was in my thirties. Thank goodness I have a job I love. Believe me, I am grateful. BUT, I have never received a high salary and during the early years I had gaps of unemployment, so my monthly pension won’t be high.

The poverty rate of retired women is significantly higher than that of men (10.4% against 8.5%), and this gap has tended to widen since 2012, as noted in the 2022 report of the Pensions Orientation Council.

In the beginning, I raised my eyebrows then pooh-poohed the idea of my fellow citizens protesting against President Macron and Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne’s planned reform. But the more I listened (to the protesters, not to Macron and Borne), the more I agree with them. Now I too will be joining the next protest march on Saturday February 11.

WHERE? Place de la République at thirteen hundred hours (1 p.m.) BE THERE!

It’s so much more than raising the legal retirement age from 62 to 64. Here’s one reason out of many why the French are protesting:

Amidst rising energy prices for consumers –

French energy giant TotalEnergies posts a whopping €14 billion profit thanks to soaring oil and gas prices

Calls for bigger windfall tax after Shell makes ‘obscene’ $40bn profit

Oil giants post eye-popping $237 billion record profits

“The pension financing system needs to be rectified because it is in deficit”, the government tells us. The labor unions exhort the government to apply windfall taxes to France’s gas and oil behemoth, TOTAL, which, up until now, pays zero tax.

Those tax payments could help contribute to the pension finance system and spare the workers, many who are underpaid and have physically demanding jobs, from working longer.

Michael Zemmour (no relation to the far-right failed presidential candidate, Eric Zemmour), an economist at Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University, believes the government has ulterior motives. “Our pension system is healthy,” he says. “The government only wants to balance its budget and offset the impact of tax rebates for companies.” He thinks it’s worth putting public money into a system that reduces inequalities. “If there is a deficit, now or in the future, we could finance that by increasing employers’ contributions, which many people would prefer to the reform.”

And it’s not just TOTAL. The top forty companies quoted on the Paris stock exchange earned collectively 174 billion euros in profits in 2021. But did they all pay reasonable taxes in France on those record earnings?

Vivendi, the French media and communications group, made 24,692 billion euros in 2021, on which the company paid 929 million euros in French tax. Very roughly, one third of one tenth of one percent.

Here’s how much ordinary salaried workers pay in income tax in France; I’m in the third revenue band –

https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1419?lang=en

“It really comes down to the question of what kind of society we want to live in — one ruled through market-orientated rationality or one which is focused on reducing inequalities,” says Daniele Linhart, a sociologist specializing in work relations at the public research institution, CNRS.

Those protesting the reforms (the majority of the population) believe that, little by little, Macron’s government is dismantling France’s (cherished) social model.

Next up: retirement inequality: Women’s pensions are much smaller than men’s

The inequality stems from career breaks, wage gaps and the choice of lower-paying professions.