Heterodox
It is Wednesday so only a couple of snippets today. I was going to write about the BBC’s ridiculous attempt to portray Jeremy Corbyn as a sort of Russian-spy-type-dude in its Newsnight segment last Thursday (March 15, 2018). They manipulated his peaked hat (via Photoshop or through lighting) to make it look like a typical Lenin-type “Soviet stooge” hat and presented him against a red Kremlin skyline of Red Square...
Read More »Bill Mitchell — Europhile reform dreamers wake up – there will be no ‘far-reaching’ reforms
I have now escaped the near-Arctic chill and back to warmer climes for a little while. While I was in Finland though, the Finnish news media was agape over the – Joint Statement – released by 8 Finance Ministers from the smaller Northern EU Member States (March 6, 2018). The statement released by the finance ministers of Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Sweden aired their views on how the Eurozone (EMU) might develop. Nobody should be under any...
Read More »Bill Mitchell — Poverty among the unemployment now close to 50 per cent in the EU
Last week, Eurostat released it updated data covering people who are at risk of monetary poverty. In the press release/news page (February 26, 2018) – Almost half the unemployed at risk of monetary poverty in the EU – we learn that 48.7 per cent of unemployed persons in the EU “were at risk of poverty” in 2016, even “after social transfers” were taken into account. The situation has deteriorated significantly since 2005 as a result of the impacts of the GFC and the policy response taken by...
Read More »Thomas Fazi and William Mitchell — The EU cannot be democratised – here’s why
As the EU’s internal crisis increases with many citizens rebelling against what has become a neo-liberal project, European politicians are racing to strip national governments of all power to prevent any further democratic interventions. The centre-left still believes the EU is an institution for the good of Europe. They fail to ask the most important question: Whose Europe are we talking about?... BRAVE NEW EUROPE Thomas Fazi and William Mitchell – The EU cannot be democratised – here’s...
Read More »Will Podmore — EU Imposes Anti-Union Law on Greece
Neoliberal union-busting in full swing.CounterpunchEU Imposes Anti-Union Law on GreeceWill Podmore
Read More »Bill Mitchell — IMF finds the Eurozone has failed at the most elemental level
The IMF put out a new working Paper last week (January 23, 2018)) – Economic Convergence in the Euro Area: Coming Together or Drifting Apart? – which while they don’t admit it demonstrates that the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has failed to achieve its most basic aims – economic convergence. The stated aim of European integration has always been to achieve a convergence in the living standards of those within the European Union. That goes back to the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which...
Read More »Thomas Piketty’s — 2018, the year of Europe
Piketty's view on what the EU needs to do in order to seize the opportunity that is presented by the withdrawal of US leadership under the Trump administration that is creating a vacuum. Thomas Piketty's Blog at Le Monde 2018, the year of Europe Thomas Piketty | Professor at EHESS and at the Paris School of Economics
Read More »Warsaw to Kiev — ‘You Won’t Get Into Europe Glorifying War Criminal Bandera’
Former Polish President Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the influential leader of the country’s ruling Law and Justice Party, has some frank advice for Kiev, telling Ukrainian officials that the country would never join Europe if it continued to try to build its national identity on the glorification of notorious Nazi-allied war criminals like Stepan Bandera. In an interview for the news weekly magazine Do Rzeczy, excerpts from which were published by other Polish outlets on Monday, Kaczynski...
Read More »Bill Mitchell — Massive Eurozone infrastructure deficit requires urgent redress
The latest – EIB Investment Report 2017/2018 – published last week by the European Investment Bank tells anyone who cares to take those Europhile Rose Coloured Glasses off for just a second how deep the failure of the European policy making structures are and how long the negative impacts of those failures will resonate. This is the true ‘burden for our (their) grand kids’ sort of stuff. In claiming they had to run tight fiscal policy biased towards surpluses to avoid forcing the future...
Read More »Erik Reinert — Towards a better understanding of convergence and divergence: or, how the present EU strategy – at the expense of the economic periphery – neglects the theories that once made Europe successful
This new working paper attempts to address some of the main problems of the European Union today. The main thesis is that the Weltanschauung and the economic narrative on which the European project has been based have changed radically since the inception of the European Project, from one conducive to convergence and cohesion to another which is conducive to divergence and, in the last instance – I shall argue – to a form of internal colonialism towards the economic periphery. The field of...
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