When Do We Strike?

One of the truisms about France is that government services work fairly well when government employees aren’t on strike. The French love to strike. In a nation that shuts down for a couple hours every afternoon just because, it only makes sense that they would also set down their pencils for any perceived injustice. They strike so often, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether the nation is experiencing a labor action or merely having lunch.

Do the strikes work? I don’t know enough to say. What I do know is that the French work fewer hours and have greater social service protections than we do in the United States. On the other hand, their unemployment rate is higher and their economic growth is slower. When President Macron came into office in 2017, he overhauled the nation’s labor laws, making it easier for companies to hire and fire people. There were strikes, of course. In the end, it seems unclear whether the reforms achieved their desired effects, although unemployment has fallen since the measures passed.

Sometimes reform is needed. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes, what is being advertised as reform is something else entirely.

Such as a coup.

Why is Elon Musk ransacking the Office of Personnel Management? Elon Musk does not work for the government. He has no title, no official agency, nobody voted for him. So how is it that his staff has set up shop in the OPM? How is it that they are, allegedly, sleeping on sofa beds there and locking employees out of their computer systems? This is a private citizen, acting as a private citizen, installing himself as the head of a government agency he does not lead. I will ask this in the politest way I know how: what the fuck is going on?

This is what a general strike looks like. Paris, 2023

There are also now reports of Musk demanding access to the Treasury Department payment system used to distribute trillions of dollars each year. The Treasury Department’s acting head, David A. Lebryk, a 30-year nonpolitical public servant, resigned as a result.

At the same time, Burger King fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on the last coup instigated in his name. As the New York Times wrote, “Emil Bove, the acting No. 2 official at the department, offered no evidence those targeted had done anything improper, illegal or unethical. Instead, he cited a legal technicality.”

At the same time, transportation officials are investigating the cause of the nation’s worst domestic aviation accident in 16 years, despite being hobbled by the fact that Trump and Musk gutted the agency charged with investigating such accidents. Musk forced out the last head of the FAA, and an acting head was only named after the crash over the Potomac. Trump’s new Transportation Secretary and Defense Secretary spend their first few days on the job decrying DEI instead of, you know, doing their jobs.

While this is happening, foreign aid groups are having to decide whether to follow the administration’s order to shut off life-saving help to, for example, undernourished children in Sudan, or to continue their work as long as possible before the supplies they currently possess run out, knowing that they will then return home to jobs they will have lost because they disobeyed the edict to, essentially, let the children starve.

In California, the US Army Corps of Engineers opened the gates to two dams in the central part of the state on orders from the President. Why? To make good on his lie that California had “turned off” water to help combat the recent fires. The water released will do nothing to help firefighters but will impact the farmers who grow there, particularly if drought conditions worsen later in the year.

Meanwhile, Burger King ordered Guantanamo Bay to be retrofitted into a concentration camp. Oh yeah, and a bunch of tariffs are about to go into effect on our biggest trading partners for no reason.

Again, I ask in the politest possible terms: what the fuck is going on here?

Many, many people warned that a second Trump administration would unleash exponentially worse chaos than his first term for two simple reasons: he has a better understanding of the mechanisms of government under his control and because NOBODY IS TELLING HIM NO.

Where the fuck are the Democrats? I understand that they’re not in power, but why aren’t they in the streets? Why aren’t they holding press conferences at the dams in California? Why aren’t they visiting the USAID sites where children are being given life-saving care? Why aren’t they holding press conference after press conference after press conference? Why aren’t they suing Musk? Why aren’t they suing Trump? What the fuck are we even doing?

Maybe they think they’re giving him enough rope to hang himself. Bullshit. They’re giving him enough rope to tie the nation to train tracks so he can run us right the fuck over. Where is the press? Where are the people in the streets? Why are we letting this lecherous chode abuse our country with all the subtlety and finesse he demonstrated on E. Jean Carroll? Because that’s what’s happening.

We’re witnessing the dismantling of America, by Americans. It’s being done in the name of reform. It’s being administered by people who hold no position in the American government with the goal of turning the nation into… what, exactly? Nobody knows. Those committed to the project envision, perhaps, a streamlined America reliant on an elite cadre of technoligarchs managing the server plantations to which the rest of us will eventually be assigned to labor. The rest of us watch with dread as minions of the regime storm into every federal agency to tear out its workings with no idea how to reassemble the thing. What will be the consequences? What the fuck are we doing?

When I was walking through Lyon last night, I saw a sign for a shop that seemed to sell keys and boots. Yes. Keys and boots. The sign was, of course, in French, which I do not speak. But I did recognize one word: “réparations.” In America, it has come to mean payment for wrongs committed. But in French, it simply means “repairs.” We need both, but it might already be too late.

General strike. Now.