debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
What to do when pyromaniacs are extinguishing a house on fire? A house that has been set on fire by themselves. Do you leave them in peace or do you call them to order? That is one of the painful dilemmas of the contemporary eurocrisis. The metaphor of the EU as a burning house derives [...]
After a recent trip to the United States (New York and Texas) we are reminded of the comment by the US journalist Lincoln Steffens after a trip to the Soviet Union in the 1920s, “I have been over to the future and it works”. In the case of what most people call “America” (there is [...]
To paraphrase Denmark’s Prince Hamlet, ‘To enact austerity or not to enact austerity, that is the question.’ Unfortunately, dear Hamlet, that is a question without a sure answer. The truth is, none of the experts know what is the correct thing to do. Trichet, Bernanke, Geithner, Schäuble, Krugman, Stiglitz, Wolf, Münchau, Soros, all of them [...]
I noted last week that I would post an article on healtcare and the US election. One of the data that struck me most in last week’s CNN election reporting was how massively the elderly turned against Democrats. What was striking was not only that this was the age group in which Democrats lost by [...]
If you want to be cynical, then the US Congressional election has made Congressional Democrats considerably more left-wing. The vast majority of House Democrats who were defeated were from the party’s moderate wing, so on average the surviving Democratic caucus is much more likely to be amenable to progressive policy proposals than their outgoing peers. [...]
Allowing a massive housing bubble to inflate without counteraction was a massive policy error. The regulatory authority and capability of central banks to prevent asset bubbles before they distort fundamentals of economic growth should be reestablished, while financial transaction taxes would limit the size of primarily speculative transactions. Most of the debate over reforming the [...]
Ten areas of financial reform are regarded as being essential to re-establish the two basic functions of the banking sector, namely, extending credit to households and the business sector, and connecting investors to entrepreneurs. Pure trading and speculating should, meanwhile, be discouraged to the maximum degree possible. The project of seriously re-regulating the financial sector [...]
On the weekend of May 7-9, the European Union gazed into the abyss of historical failure. The fate of the euro was at stake and with it European unification as a whole. Not since before the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 had Europe been in such grave political danger. On the surface, [...]
Given that empire remains a wide-ranging and hugely influential phenomenon it is surprising how little academic attention has been directed towards it. Those few texts that do examine the processes by which empires gain power tend to focus upon the most obvious method, conquest. Yet there remain a surprising number of alternative strategies for expanding, [...]
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