debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
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 [...]
Paul Krugman posted this interesting video explaining what Occupy Wall Street is all about on his New York Times blog. It also features several authors, including Krugman and Robert Reich, who contributed to the Occupy Handbook. Have a look, it is worthwhile watching.
Sanford Weill, the former Chairman and CEO of Citigroup, suggested on CNBC that banks should be broken up to separate retail from investment banking – a reform also widely proposed in Europe. This is a very significant move, as Robert Reich argued, given that Weill is widely credited as having developed the current Wall Street [...]
I’m in Alaska, amid moose and bear, trying to steal some time away from the absurdities of American politics and economics. But even at this remote distance I caught wind of Sanford Weill’s proposal this morning on CNBC that big banks be broken up in order to shield taxpayers from the consequences of their losses. [...]
As the Supreme Court shows every sign of throwing out “Obamacare” and leaving 30 million Americans without health insurance, another drama is being played out in the quiet corridors of the Federal Reserve system that may affect even more of us. Taxpayers will be on the hook for another giant Wall Street bailout, and the [...]
Greg Smith, a Goldman Sachs vice president, resigned his post Wednesday with a stinging public rebuke of the firm on the oped page of the New York Times — accusing it of no longer putting its clients before its own pecuniary goals. But if Mr. Smith believes his experience at Goldman is something new, he doesn’t know history. In [...]
Mitt Romney is casting the 2012 campaign as “free enterprise on trial” – defining free enterprise as achieving success through “hard work and risking-taking.” Tea-Party favorite Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina says he’s supporting Romney because “we really need someone who understands how risk, taking risk … is the way we create jobs, create [...]
It’s one thing to criticize Mitt Romney for being a businessman with the wrong values. It’s quite another to accuse him and his former company, Bain Capital, of doing bad things. If what Bain Capital did under Romney was bad for society, the burden shifts to Romney’s critics to propose laws that would prevent Bain [...]
In a year of revolution, causes have been easier to identify than consequences. In 1989, following the end of the Cold War, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote in The End of History? of the “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism”, marking “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of [...]
The defining political issue of 2012 won’t be the government’s size. It will be who government is for. Americans have never much liked government. After all, the nation was conceived in a revolution against government. But the surge of cynicism now engulfing America isn’t about government’s size. The cynicism comes from a growing perception that [...]
You’ve been seeing this across the country … Americans assaulted, clubbed, dragged, pepper-sprayed … Why? For exercising their right to free speech and assembly — protesting the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the top. And what’s Washington’s response? Nothing. In fact, Congress’s so-called “supercommittee” just disbanded because Republicans refuse to raise [...]
The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt, and then to Spain, has now become global, with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalization and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can. And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: [...]
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