The limits of western power?

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Tuesday July 25, 2006 · 3:57 AM PDT

2006/07/25 · 03:57

Recent events in Iraq and Lebanon lead me to wonder if the necessity to maintain at least minimal support for wars by avoiding large spikes in our casualty rates makes it impossible for modern, high-tech, highly connected democracies to successfully prosecute aggressive wars.

Colman

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Monday June 19, 2006 · 10:43 AM PDT

2006/06/19 · 10:43

The Financial Times asked Europeans what they thought of US foreign policy:

In a Harris opinion poll, published on the eve of Mr Bush's latest visit to Europe this week, 36 per cent of respondents identify the US as the greatest threat to global stability.

Colman

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Thursday June 15, 2006 · 5:20 AM PDT

2006/06/15 · 05:20

This (European) morning, Jerome a Paris did a story on Eurotrib about a report from the McKinsey Global Institute think-tank that the FT had covered with the headline 'Real Swedish jobless rate 15%'. So much for the vaunted Scandinavian model, eh?

The report contains this lovely graphic, displaying the breakdown of what they call the Swedish de-facto unemployment.

I think this is a great graphic, and not one I've seen before: they break down the factors of unemployment and underemployment and display them.

In fact, I like it so much I made a similar one for the US which I'm not sure that the McKinsey Global Institute or the FT would be quite so happy to see - graph and explanation after the fold...

Colman

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Tuesday October 11, 2005 · 5:02 AM PDT

2005/10/11 · 05:02

Crossposted from European Tribune : One of our aims is to stand against the cascade of corporate capitalist propaganda that constantly floods over Europe. This article is part of that effort, and might be useful to American progressives when this nonsense comes up.

One of the key complaints levelled against the European social and economic model by corporate capitalists is that it causes high unemployment. The examples chosen are generally France and Germany who are compared against the US.

Before we concede that EU unemployment is substantially higher than in the US we need to examine the numbers cited. Often the official national numbers are used despite the fact that they differ fundamentally on what they measure and how they measure it. Reporting the German rate as 12% and the US rate as 5.1% is either lazy, clueless or dishonest. The official German rate includes people working less than 15 hours a week but who want a full-time job as unemployed while the headline US figures count anyone who works for even one hour a week as employed.

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The limits of western power?

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The US has a "real" unemployment rate of 13.3%

How the Right lies about unemployment.