Tag Archives: Op-ed

 So, here is an idea: Let us join forces to block Assange’s extradition from any European country to the US, so that he can travel to Stockholm and give his accusers an opportunity to be heard. Let us work together to empower women, while protecting whistle-blowers who reveal nefarious behavior that governments, armies, and corporations would prefer to keep hidden. To read the article, please click here...

Brexit is, undeniably, important. The Prime Minister’s faulty negotiations have now turned what the majority of the British people considered an opportunity into a national crisis. However, now is perhaps the moment to reflect that, in an era of trade wars, geopolitical realignment and existential threats to our nations’ democracies, Brexit is not as important as we have allowed ourselves to imagine....

The official story is one of creating a national champion, a German bank large enough to compete with American investment banks. The truth is far less heroic and a lot more sordid than that. Here is why Demokratie in Europa is campaigning against this merger. Both banks are zombies. Commerzbank has gone through eight years of constant cost-cutting but still delivers profits of less than $1 per share at a time...

The memory of past greatness can be debilitating for a people who feel they have failed to rise to a historic occasion.  We Greeks have been burdened by this sensation at various moments in our postwar history: in 1967, when we failed to prevent a military coup; or more recently in 2015, when we allowed the troika of the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank to crush us. Brexit Britain is, today, wallowing...

When the Great Depression followed the 1929 stock-market crash, almost everyone acknowledged that capitalism was unstable, unreliable, and prone to stagnation. In the decades that followed, however, that perception changed. Capitalism’s post-war revival, and especially the post-Cold War rush to financialised globalisation, resurrected faith in markets’ self-regulating abilities. Today, a long decade after the...

A l’approche des élections européennes, le Printemps européen, coalition transnationale de partis de gauche, présente un programme social et écologique pour dépasser le clivage entre populistes et libéraux. Avec des propositions concrètes : plan de transition écologique de 500 milliards d’euros annuels, Assemblée constituante, fonds citoyen financé par les Gafa…  Yánis Varoufákis pour un New Deal européen...

The European Union is fragmenting at a time when Europeans need it the most. Emmanuel Macron is right to point this out. But he is wrong to push another top-down agenda that lacks credibility, fails to speak to European’s concerns, and entrenches the democratic deficit at the heart of the EU. By entrusting Europe’s renewal to its unaccountable bureaucrats, Macron’s programme will only deepen the discontent that...

The fact that Italy’s public debt has a lower credit rating than private debt is a reflection not of public debt’s intrinsic inferiority but of a political choice made by European leaders. And, by bolstering an authoritarian politician, that choice is now blowing back on them. ATHENS – Italy is now the frontline in the battle of the euro. Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini is being propelled by a political...

Imagine that we knew the day of our death. Our lives would change drastically. Though we know we shall surely die, not knowing precisely when the mortal coil will be shuffled off makes all the difference, allowing us to live life productively on a day-by-day basis. For exactly the same reason, the fixed deadline embedded in Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty guaranteed that nothing good would come out of the...

The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, will step down on 1 February – three and a half years before the end of his term – in search of greener pastures. His readiness to resign from the leadership of one the two most powerful international institutions is a worrying omen. But it is also an important wake-up call. The World Bank and the IMF are the last remaining columns of the Bretton Woods edifice under...