Tag Archives: The Guardian

An angry Attorney General Garland yesterday called former commander-in-chief trump’s bluff. In an unusual move, Garland asked the court to unseal the search warrant and the nature of the inventory of property(?) taken from Trump’s home. This came after heavy criticism by trump, Republicans, and also an attack on the Cincinatti FBI office. “trump himself broke news of the search, thereby shattering his own expectations of privacy, in order to...

David McWilliams and I have had many conversations, often in front of large audiences in Ireland, on the economics and politics of Europe, Brexit, Ireland, Greece, the world. In this latest conversation we are discussing the impact of Covid-19 on capitalism. The extract below, published by The Guardian, comes from the last chapter of an edited volume entitled A Vision for Europe 2020: Nothing But an Alternative...

Europe suffered a historic defeat on Thursday night. After weeks of impasse, the Eurogroup gathering of finance ministers, whose countries share the euro, reached a decision on their collective response to the coronavirus pandemic’s economic impact. Besides constituting an epic dereliction of duty, the Eurogroup’s decision dealt a decisive blow to the foundations of the European Union – much to the delight of...

Nationalism and speculation have seldom had a better opportunity to combine forces as the one riding today on the coattails of Covid-19, known as the coronavirus. When Covid-19 leapfrogged from China to Italy, even ardent Europeanists normally appreciative of open borders joined the deafening calls to end freedom of movement across Europe’s national borders – a longstanding demand of nationalists. Meanwhile, the...

Spring is already in the air across Greece. Even in the bleakest of times, nature’s renaissance renders hope irrepressible. But this one is proving a cruel spring for a people caught up in a decade-old crisis yielding one ritual humiliation after another. Costas runs a small bookshop in my central Athens neighbourhood. Although jovial by constitution, he finds it difficult to hide the worry lines multiplying on...

Ursula von der Leyen’s signature proposal co-opts the slogans of climate activism, but has none of the substance Emergencies tend to reveal our true priorities. When our house is burning down or the storm waters are flooding in, we hold on to what we value most, and leave the rest behind. A decade ago, the leaders of the European Union found themselves facing such a moment. With the French and German banks...

Every year for nearly 70 years, the Guardian has collected the best of its journalism into a book – the BEDSIDE GUARDIAN. This year,  Bedside Guardian 2019 is edited by Aditya Chakrabortty with Paul Johnson, deputy editor, alongside  Jonathan Freedland, Zoe Williams Emma Graham-Harrison. The editors were kind enough to ask me to write the Foreword. As it reflects my take on 2019, I thought posting it here might...

Last April, again in The Guardian, David Adler and I called for a particular Green New Deal to be implemented internationally. Now that a new recession is ante portas, we are renewing this call, suggesting that we cannot afford yet another ‘good’ economic crisis to go to waste. Our latest piece in The Guardian follows: Brexit, Trump’s trade wars, the crisis of our democracies, the failure to address climate...

Christine Lagarde was a key member of the infamous troika – Greece’s official creditors – who crushed our people’s resistance to perpetual debt bondage. The other key figure alongside the International Monetary Fund’s then managing director was Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, who played a central role in that drama by engineering the closure of Greece’s banks. Now, four years later, Lagarde...

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