not going to happen this time - with Rumsfeld´s/Wolfowitz´s vastly improved "shock and awe" toys being dropped right in the kindergarten´s sandbox
There is little or NO doubt that a boycott will harm Germany and France enormously. A smaller turnover may be the difference between making a profit or making a loss. freealways
Does this answer your question? France is in the midst of a gradual transition, from a well-to-do modern economy that has featured extensive government ownership and intervention to one that relies more on market mechanisms. The government has partially or fully privatized many large companies, banks, and insurers, but still retains large stakes in several leading firms, including Air France, France Telecom, and Renault, and remains dominant in some sectors, particularly the power, public transport, and defense industries. The telecommunications sector is gradually being opened to competition. France's leaders remain committed to a capitalism in which they maintain social equity by means of laws, tax policies, and social spending that reduce income disparity and the impact of free markets on public health and welfare. The government has lowered income taxes and introduced measures to boost employment but has done little to reform an overly expensive pension system, rigid labor market, and restrictive bureaucracy which discourage hiring and make the tax burden one of the highest in Europe. In addition to the tax burden, the reduction of the workweek to 35 hours has drawn criticism for lowering the competitiveness of French businesses. The current economic slowdown has thrown the government's goal of balancing the budget by 2004 off track. More here: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/fr.html#Econ And here is some website that I came across which clearly shows how the US ticks. Have a look for yourselves: http://www.stopesso.com/funstuff/nose.html Absolutely hysterical!
Good Lord! A huge cut and paste and you don't get to the question posed, so NO, it doesn't answer the question. BTW, the answer is in the source you cited... Sheesh!
Well, I must confess, I was off on this one. Ranked in order of annual output: machinery chemicals automobiles metallurgy aircraft electronics textiles food processing tourism. I thought the main industry was tourism, but that's the main industry of Monaco; must have had the world exploits of RS7 on my mind. In any event, I think French tourism will be off substantially this year, IF France keeps flapping its jaws. If it keeps its mouth shut, I think it will fare much better. So far, it doesn't seem to have hurt this years big wine taste and the Bordeaux Vinexpo bookings are up, maybe because of the astounding 2002 vintage. I did read though that Robert Parker opted not to show.
Emperor George What has become of American values and idealism? All swept away in this thoroughly un-American war Jonathan Freedland Wednesday April 2, 2003 This war is un-American. That's an unlikely word to use, I know: it has an unhappy provenance, associated forever with the McCarthyite hunt for reds under the beds, purging anyone suspected of "un-American activities". Besides, for many outside the US, the problem with this war is not that it's un-American - but all too American. But that does an injustice to the US and its history. It assumes that the Bush administration represents all America, at all times, when in fact the opposite is true. For this administration, and this war, are not typical of the US. On the contrary, on almost every measure, they are exceptions to the American rule. The US was, after all, a country founded in a rebellion against imperialism. Born in a war against a hated colonial oppressor, in the form of George III, it still sees itself as the instinctive friend of all who struggle to kick out a foreign occupier - and the last nation on earth to play the role of outside ruler. Not for it the Greek, Roman or British path. For most of the last century, the US steered well clear of the institutions of formal empire (the Philipines was a lamentable exception). Responsibility was thrust upon it after 1945 in Germany and Japan. But as a matter of deliberate intent, America sought neither viceroys ruling over faraway lands nor a world map coloured with the stars and stripes. Influence, yes; puppets and proxies, yes. But formal imperial rule, never. Until now. George Bush has cast off the restraint which held back America's 42 previous presidents - including his father. Now he is seeking, as an unashamed objective, to get into the empire business, aiming to rule a post-Saddam Iraq directly through an American governor-general, the retired soldier Jay Garner. As the Guardian reported yesterday, Washington's plan for Baghdad consists of 23 ministries - each one to be headed by an American. This is a form of foreign rule so direct we have not seen its like since the last days of the British empire. It represents a break with everything America has long believed in. This is not to pretend that there is a single American ideal, still less a single US foreign policy, maintained unbroken since 1776. There are, instead, competing traditions, each able to trace its lineage to the founding of the republic. But what's striking is that George Bush's war on Iraq is at odds with every single one of them. Perhaps best known is Thomas Jefferson's call for an America which would not only refuse to rule over other nations, it would avoid meddling in their affairs altogether. He wanted no "entangling alliances". If America wished to export its brand of liberty, it should do it not through force but by the simple power of its own example. John Quincy Adams (before Bush, the only son of a president to become president), put it best when he declared that America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy". Could there be a better description of Washington's pre-emptive pursuit of Saddam Hussein? The Jeffersonian tradition is not the only one to be broken by Operation Iraqi Freedom. Last year the historian Walter Russell Mead identified three other schools of US foreign policy. Looking at them now, it's clear that all are equally incompatible with this war. Those Mead calls Hamiltonians are keen on maintaining an international system and preserving a balance of power - that means acknowledging equals in the world, rather than seeking solo, hegemonic domination. So Bush, whose national security strategy last year explicitly forbade the emergence of an equal to the US, is no follower of Alexander Hamilton. Jacksonians, meanwhile, have always defined America's interests narrowly: they would see no logic in travelling halfway across the world to invade a country that poses no immediate, direct threat to the US. So Bush has defied Andrew Jackson. Woodrow Wilson liked the idea of the US spreading democracy and rights across the globe; banishing Saddam and freeing the people of Iraq might have appealed to him. But he was the father of the League of Nations and would have been distressed by Washington's disregard for the UN and its lack of international backing for this war. Which brings us to a key un-American activity by this Bush administration. Today's Washington has not only broken from the different strands of wisdom which guided the US since its birth, but also from the model that shaped American foreign policy since 1945. It's easy to forget this now, as US politicians and commentators queue up to denounce international institutions as French-dominated, limp-wristed, euro-faggot bodies barely worth the candle, but those bodies were almost all American inventions. Whether it was Nato, the global financial architecture designed at Bretton Woods or the UN itself, multilateralism was, at least in part, America's gift to the world. Every president from Roosevelt to Bush Senior honoured those creations. Seeking to change them in order to adapt to the 21st century is wholly legitimate; but drowning them in derision is to trash an American idea. The very notion of unprovoked, uninvited, long-term and country-wide invasion is pretty un-American, too. When it thinks of itself, the US is a firm believer in state sovereignty, refusing any innovation which might curb its jurisdiction over its own affairs. Hence its opposition to the new international criminal court or indeed any international treaties which might clip its wings. Yet the sovereignty of the state of Iraq has been cheerfully violated by the US invasion. That can be defended - the scholar and former Clinton official Philip Bobbitt says sovereignty is "forfeited" by regimes which choke their own peoples - but it is, at the very least, a contradiction. The US, which holds sovereignty sacred for itself, is engaged in a war which ignores it for others. The result is a sight which can look bizarre for those who have spent much time in the US. Americans who, back home, resent even the most trivial state meddling in their own affairs are determined to run the lives of a people on the other side of the planet. In New Hampshire car number plates bear the legend, Live Free or Die; a state motto is Don't Tread on Me. If a "government bureaucrat" comes near, even to perform what would be considered a routine task in Britain, they are liable to get an earful about the tyranny of Washington, DC. Yet Americans - whose passion for liberty is so great they talk seriously about keeping guns in case they ever need to fight their own government - assume Iraqis will welcome military rule by a foreign power. Talk like this is not that comfortable in America just now; you'd be denounced fairly swiftly as a Saddam apologist or a traitor. The limits of acceptable discussion have narrowed sharply, just as civil liberties have taken a hammering as part of the post-9/11 war on terror. You might fall foul of the Patriot Act, or be denounced for insufficient love of country. There is something McCarthyite about the atmosphere which has spawned this war, making Democrats too fearful to be an opposition worthy of the name and closing down national debate. And things don't get much more un-American than that.
Good on ya, MSFE. Just a couple of weeks ago I read somewhere that in the States more people are killed with their own weapons which they keep in their homes to defend themselves against intruders. There is some kind of a pattern: 1. Robber gets into someone's home 2. Home owner gets his gun, but unfortunately does not know how to use it effectively (only lessons he ever got was watching NYPD on TV) 3. Robber takes gun from home owner 4. Robber shoots him If it was not so sad, it could even be considered funny. The sad story is: most Americans know they are deserting the principles that their forefathers have died for, and even the most hardened war mongerers know that, but because of that silly attitude "my country: right or wrong" they think they have to stand up for, of all people, George W.! The other day I met a dim wit from the other side of the Atlantic, a German who was so proud of his government's anti-war stance. I asked him if he would, like several thousands in Russia, volunteer to fight for the Iraqi government. "Of course not!" was his reply. Sure, that fellow's principles were put in some measure to the test and quickly dismissed. He is doing exactly the same as the "patriots": "my country: right or wrong". Coz Joschka Fischer (don't get me wrong, I am a great admirer of that man) says so, and Schroeder and all those government bureaucrats say so, he just follows. He's just the other side of the same coin: once you start scratching on the surface of those people's "opinions", there is very little substance to support them.