debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
The biggest economic debate is between Keynesians (who want more government spending and lower interest rates in order to fuel demand) and supply-side “austerics” (who want lower taxes on the wealthy and on corporations to boost incentives to hire and invest, and who see government deficits crowding out private investment). But both approaches have problems. [...]
One of the major intellectual stumbling blocks in having a clear and honest debate about the Greek situation and by extension the situation throughout the entire European Union is an unrelenting and pure naïveté, if not stupidity, in the way that the situation is discussed: wide swathes of the European media talk about Greeks and [...]
During my lifetime two class wars have been fought to resolution across Europe: one economic the other cultural. The outcomes of the economic class wars are uncontroversial. In Britain the middle class won the economic war: social protection is relatively poor (most notably for pre-school and the elderly), labour markets are only lightly regulated, and [...]
This is the lull before the storm, the final moments within which to settle the character of the presidential campaign of 2012. Even in the lull, however, the likely lines-of-march are already clear – lines that, if unaltered, should give far more comfort to conservatives than they do right now to progressives. The Romney camp [...]
A Swedish medical study presented in the European Journal of Cancer (abstract), shows that working class men that suffered from prostate cancer get significantly worse treatment than men in the upper middle class. The researchers have followed up 17,522 cases of prostate cancer in Sweden between 1997-2006 that had particularly aggressive or rapidly growing tumours. [...]
The Danish middle class is shrinking. That can be read in a new report from The Economic Council of the Labour Movement (Arbejderbevægelsens Erhvervsråd), the Danish labour movement think-tank. The report shows that 31.5 percent of the Danish population belonged to the middle class in 2002. Seven years later that share had drop to 28.6 [...]
The battle has resumed in Wisconsin. The state supreme court has allowed Governor Scott Walker to strip bargaining rights from state workers. Meanwhile, governors and legislators in New Hampshire and Missouri are attacking private unions, seeking to make the states so-called “open shop” where workers can get all the benefits of being union members without [...]
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