Balance sheet approach to economic analysis and its social political implications. How neoliberalism, controlled by finance capital, rules in the EZ owing to its self-imposed constraints and intransigence of finance capital to accommodate.People's DemocracyThe Yellow Vest MovementPrabhat Patnaik | Indian Marxist economist and political commentator, retired from the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi...
Read More »Mark Leonard — The Coming Franco-German Bust-Up
The partnership at the center of European integration is unraveling just when Euroskeptic forces are coming together. If French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel cannot start rebuilding the political center, next year's European Parliament election will produce the biggest victory yet for anti-EU populists.… Entering the endgame?Project SyndicateThe Coming Franco-German Bust-Up Mark Leonard | Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations
Read More »Luke Savage — Liberalism in Theory and Practice
Contemporary liberals are temperamentally conservative — and what they want to conserve is a morally bankrupt political order.,,, A characteristic of neoliberalism? Maybe I was predisposed to democratic socialism; I always considered myself to be “on the Left,” even as a teenager. In any case, it’s become clear in retrospect that watching the liberal class respond to events over the past decade has been a powerful stimulus in my politicization. Which is to say, I didn’t acquire radical...
Read More »Matias Vernengo — Middle Income Trap or the Return of US Hegemony
Short essay in Spanish for the special (40 year anniversary of the journal Coyuntura y Desarrollo, published by the Fundación de Investigaciones para el Desarrollo, FIDE). It is essentially a critique of the concept of middle-income trap and the idea of how the demographic transitions (discussed herebefore) affect the process of development. It suggests that the deindustrialization of the Latin American periphery results as much from the decisions in the hegemonic country to open up China,...
Read More »Anthony Coughlan — ‘Reclaiming the State – a Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World’
Review of Bill Mitchell and Thomas Fazi's Reclaiming the State.Village‘Reclaiming the State – a Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World’Anthony Coughlan | Associate Professor Emeritus in Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin
Read More »Bill Mitchell — EU Services Notification Directive will undermine democracy within cities
In a blog post last week – Financial services agreements – the EU as a neoliberal, corporatist project (November 13, 2018) – I wrote about the way the EU compromised the capacity of elected Member State governments to advance the well-being of their nations by the way they negotiate trade arrangements in services, particularly with respect to the financial services sector. For all those Europhiles that regularly deny the core agenda of the EU is to compromise democratic outcomes in favour...
Read More »Jonathan Cook — Long Read: The neoliberal order is dying. Time to wake up
Analysis from the left mostly about British politics but inclusive of all aspects of neoliberalism as the policy, strategy and tactics of elite power. Says "long read," but it is not that long. Worth a read even if you are not British since it is also an analysis of elite power as it relates to national politics and neoliberal globalization. Let's hope Cook is correct in seeing the wave cresting. The question then becomes will the breaking of the wave result in world war as the elite...
Read More »Bill Mitchell — Financial services agreements – the EU as a neoliberal, corporatist project
I have been reading the new book by Costas Lapavitsas – ‘The Left Case Against the EU’ – which has been recently published. It is solid and clearly explains why the EU is not an institution or structure than anyone on the progressive Left should support or think is capable of reform any time soon. It has become a neoliberal, corporatist state and hierarchical in operation, with Germany at the apex bullying the weaker states into submission. Divergence in outcomes across the geographic...
Read More »Tony Norfield — Finance, Imperialism and Profits
Last Friday I took part in a panel to launch a new book, World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx’s Law of Profitability, published by Haymarket Books, edited by Michael Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi. The presentation was at this year’s Historical Materialism conference in London. My presentation was on ‘Finance, Imperialism and Profits’, in which I stressed the need to develop Marx’s theory in order to explain the world today. I argued that an accurate measure of a rate of profit (in...
Read More »Zero Hedge — Maduro Scrambles To Repatriate Venezuela’s Gold After Trump Crackdown
Just four days after president Trump signed an executive order last Thursday enabling new sanctions on Venezuela’s gold sector, in a bid to disrupt trade with Turkey which U.S. officials believe is undermining efforts to cripple Venezuela's economy and force Maduro and members of his government out of office, Maduro is now seeking to repatriate about $550 million in gold bars from the Bank of England over fears it could be caught up in international sanctions on the country. US economic...
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