debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
The blame game in Europe has not yet begun. An agreement between Greece and its private creditors and public lenders will enable it to meet its next debt repayment deadline of March 20. The Europeans should be commended for a significant step in the direction of realism. Private creditors have accepted a haircut of more [...]
I think there are some good reasons to believe that something has got to give very soon. It looks like the wheels are coming off the Eurocrisis strategy of kicking the can down the road and throwing crisis countries into a recession/depression. I won’t repeat the reasons for why austerity is wrong – numerous authors have done this on SEJ [...]
The Financial Times reports about an interesting new FBI initiative designed to tackle insider trading. The Bureau got “Gordon Gekko” Michael Douglas, who won an Oscar for his role as the rogue Wall Street trader, to explain the difference between fiction and reality to traders who might have difficulty with the distinction: The FBI’s New York [...]
My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he’s been a Democrat (he just celebrated his 98th.) What happened? “They lost me,” he says. They’re losing even more Americans now, as the four remaining GOP candidates seek to out-do one another in their race for the [...]
The world is at a crossroads. Either the global community will join together to fight poverty, resource depletion, and climate change, or it will face a generation of resource wars, political instability, and environmental ruin. The World Bank, if properly led, can play a key role in averting these threats and the risks that they [...]
Last week I blogged about how the euro-crisis poisoned the way we talk about each other in Europe and I argued that this starts getting dangerous. I am happy to see that this observation has found its way into the FAZ Feuilleton and that even the FAZ starts to get concerned about this, although the paper’s take on the [...]
In return for getting access to additional financial resources from Europe and the IMF, Greece has now been forced to swallow yet another round of brutal fiscal tightening and social deregulation. One can already predict what its effects will be. The ‘spiral of death’ in which Greece is already trapped will intensify: Wage and expenditure [...]
For years the left in Poland was represented primarily by the SLD, whose left-wing credentials began and ended in its name. A kind of virtual political reality ruled, whereby a person’s connection to the left was more due to their own personal history than any real political conviction. The SLD had become complacent in its [...]
Have you heard of William Dore, Foster Friess, Sheldon Adelson, Harold Simmons, Peter Thiel, or Bruce Kovner? If not, let me introduce them to you. They’re running for the Republican nomination for president. I know, I know. You think Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney are running. They are – but only [...]
Greece in all probability will host national elections sometime this April. The elections are necessary because unlike in Italy, in Greece there is no popular support for a technocratic government. The two big parties PASOK and Nea Dimokratia, who currently control two thirds of the seats in the Greek Parliament, are profoundly destabilized. According to [...]
The unanimous political response to the crisis across Europe today is that of austerity and budgetary discipline. Cutting pay and social welfare, attacking bargaining mechanisms and making employment contracts ultra-flexible: that is the current paradigm, the Berlin/Brussels consensus, offered as the only way forward. This solution is not working and will not work. It stifles [...]
A showdown over the ALP leadership, and therefore the Prime Ministership, has been inevitable for some time, and Kevin Rudd has finally brought it on, resigning as Foreign Minister in the face of direct personal attacks from Simon Crean (himself, apparently, a covert contender for the top job) and others. Readers won’t be surprised to [...]
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