Just to remind people that what you read in papers about foreign countries is not always correct

[Mass]

(or even concerning events that happened in this country).

Yesterday, I saw this Newsweek article about France and how bad it is and I thought I was in the Twilight Zone. Sure, French bashing is something the media and American people love (just as French people and the French media love to bash the USA), but here, while the argument (the legitimacy of which is supposedly based on the fact that the person lives in France -- in a very ritzy part of Paris) is common to most Republican writers, reporters and politicians (as seen by the number of pols saying that Europe has unlimited unemployment insuracne??? Seriously? Not true, but who cares) this was just so full misstatements that it was unclear where the arguments came from.

Here is the article, for amusement purposes only.

http://www.newsweek.com/fall-france-225368

t’s a stretch, but what is happening today in France is being compared to the revocation of 1685. In that year, Louis XIV, the Sun King who built the Palace of Versailles, revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had protected French Protestants – the Huguenots. Trying to unite his kingdom by a common religion, the king closed churches and persecuted the Huguenots. As a result, nearly 700,000 of them fled France, seeking asylum in England, Sweden, Switzerland, South Africa and other countries.

The Huguenots, nearly a million strong before 1685, were thought of as the worker bees of France. They left without money, but took with them their many and various skills. They left France with a noticeable brain drain.

Since the arrival of Socialist President François Hollande in 2012, income tax and social security contributions in France have skyrocketed. The top tax rate is 75 percent, and a great many pay in excess of 70 percent.

What is more surprising is that Le Monde, arguably the equivalent of the New York Times in France, found necessary to answer, in an article called The Fall of Newsweek

Here is the link to the English translation - atrocious, but this will give you an idea

In contrast, M me di Giovanni - which bases its legitimacy on the fact of living in Paris - commits an incredible number of factual errors which remove much of the credibility of this indictment.

1 / "Since the election of François Hollande, in 2012, the income tax and social contributions peaked. The higher rate reached 75%, and a large number of people pay 70%."

[

It is not known if the article here talking about income tax or social security contributions, obviously, it mixes the two. But to say that the "top tax rate" , the maximum tax threshold is 75% is wrong.

Beyond 500,000 annual, the marginal rate of income tax is 49%. As for the tax to 75%, it was censored by the Constitutional Council as supplementary tax bracket, and is now paid by companies.

Just remember that when you read papers on countries that are much more culturally different than France. What you read is not necessarily true.

[Laelth]

1. k&r for the truth. n/t

-Laelth

[blm]

2. US corpmedia will say whatever supports the furthering of their owners' fascist agenda.

.

[LeftishBrit]

3. The American RW view of France sometimes amazes me

Not that the British and French typically love each other; there are all the suspicions, rivalries and traditional enmities that you expect of two closely neighbouring countries. But the American RW paranoia about the country sometimes makes me utterly gobsmacked.

Merde alors!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. I find all sorts of inaccurate "information" about Japan in the U.S. press

even--or especially--in the New York Times. I know that they keep sending reporters who do not speak Japanese, so they make statements like, "No one in Japan knows about the Nanjing Massacre," when if they could have read the titles on the magazines on the newsstands at the time, they would have seen that there were featured articles in political magazines of all stripes debating whether the Massacre had happened or how bad it had been. (Predictably, the right-wingers were claiming either that the Massacre was Communist propaganda or that "only" 10,000 people had been killed.)

Another report was that Japanese women were taking up smoking. No, they were just violating the former taboo against women smoking in public.

[1StrongBlackMan]

7. I find all sorts of inaccurate "information" ...

about the U.S. in the U.S. press, as well.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. That too, that too

I find a lot of inaccurate information about everything in the U.S. press

[geardaddy]

5. Great post.

The misinformation on China and Taiwan in the U.S. media makes me cringe. On the other side, the misinformation in the Chinese (PRC and ROC) media on America made me cringe, as well.

[tclambert]

6. How have we forgotten Lafayette? Without France's help, we would have lost the American Rebellion.

(You call it rebellion rather than revolution when the rebels lose.) Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and some number of Adamses would have been hanged.

But they didn't support our righteous war with Iraq and thought George W. Bush was un imbécile, therefore we must call pommes frites freedom fries! That'll teach those "cheese eating surrender monkeys."

[Egalitarian Thug]

9. I don't ever believe anything I see in the American corporate press until enough time

has passed for the story to be checked and verified by someone with no dog in the fight. Of course this practice has exposed that 90% of the tiny percent of stories that are actual news, is corporate spin and Soma.

American Journalism died two generations ago.