debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
Paul Krugman has a great post on how Mitt Romney proclaimed himself as the confidence fairy. But he’s not the first candidate to have done so. Last November we already witnessed Mariano Rajoy campaigning as the confidence fairy in Spain. What is confidence, according to Rajoy? “It is not a decree, not a law, not a [...]
“My heart aches for the people I’ve seen,” Mitt Romney said, on the second day of his Ohio bus tour. He’s now telling stories of economic hardship among the people he’s met. Up until now, Romney’s stories on the campaign trail have been about business successes – people who started businesses in garages and grew [...]
The first two components of the euro crisis – a banking crisis that resulted from excessive leverage in both the public and private sectors, followed by a sharp fall in confidence in eurozone governments – have been addressed successfully, or at least partly so. But that leaves the third, longest-term, and most dangerous factor underlying [...]
Many people know that it is electors in the electoral college that actually elect the president, not citizens voting on election day. They also may know that this system allows the candidate coming in second to win the election, as occurred in 2000, and thus violates the democratic norm of equality in voting. But more puzzling (and [...]
For the first time since the demise of the Eastern Bloc Cuba’s socialist rulers are undertaking serious reform. However, the leadership lacks courage and trust in the people. In Cuba, some things work differently. The visit to the island by Pope Benedict XVI at the end of March 2012 brought this home once again. The [...]
It looks like a coordinated offensive: on September 6, the European Central Bank outlined a new bond-buying program, letting markets know that there were no pre-set limits to its purchases. On September 13, the United States Federal Reserve announced that in the coming months it would purchase some $85 billion of long-term securities per month, [...]
In his last book Stiglitz (2012) remarks that the increase in income inequality is one of the most important reasons of the US economic and financial troubles in the last twenty years. In 2007, the top 0.1 percent of American income earners had an income that was 220 times larger than the average of the [...]
To protect and restore the hallmarks of a well-functioning market democracy, progressives in the United States and elsewhere must rebuild its institutional foundations and shift back the uneven organisational balance between concentrated economic interests and the broad public. The financial crisis of 2008 seemed almost tailor-made to discredit the governing economic philosophy of the prior [...]
Looking at Europe these days some people (at least of my generation) may remember the lyrics of a famous song of the rock band AC/DC from the late 1970s: “I’m on my way to the Promised Land — I’m on the highway to hell.” More and more countries of the Euro zone are drifting into [...]
I’ve spent the past few days debating right-wingers — among them, Grover Norquist and Ann Coulter. This isn’t my idea of fun. I do it because apparently many Americans find these people persuasive, and it seems important to try to show why they’re profoundly wrong. There are two major theories about why Romney is dropping [...]
Could you have imagined it? This is the kind of Europe we now have built for our children. We have seen the grotesquely overgrown financial sector destroy our economy, caused millions of Europeans to lose their jobs, handed our children billions of euro in bad debts, and yet its leaders evade sanction and even walk [...]
Listening to the European debate in Germany, the keywords have been the need for a Treaty change, political union, a European Convention and the lack of loopholes in the current democratic procedures … Now these keywords have been transposed to the European level by Barroso’s State of the Union Address: federation of Member States, treaty [...]
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