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The Strike in Southern Europe
A storm is brewing in Southern Europe. In Greece on November 6 and 7 another general strike will take place. On November 14 Portuguese, Cypriot, Spanish, and Italian trade unions intend to go on strike in opposition to the austerity policies of the European Union. Belgian and British trade unions, as well as the European […]
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Regarding “Creative Time Summit”: No Time for Creativity With Apartheid Israel
It has recently come to our attention that the Creative Time Summit has listed the Israeli Center for Digital Art (ICDA) as a major partner for this year’s summit. After discovering this, we cannot in good faith participate in the 2012 Creative Time Summit in adherence to the call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) […]
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German Politics and Vitamin B
What has Vitamin B to do with politics? For the answer you must learn a little German, at least one key word. “Beziehungen” — with a capital “B” — means connections, especially good connections. It’s smart to have lots of “Vitamin B,” and not just the pharmacy kind! Now here’s a man whose pockets seem […]
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Some Memories of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy
In 1949, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman created Monthly Review. In the same year, Paul Baran and I began to teach in the San Francisco Bay Area: Baran at Stanford, myself at UC Berkeley. As the years unfolded, we worked together politically in the area with the same social aims and values. Meanwhile, the two […]
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No Deutschland Über Alles — and No Bris
Germany suffered two losses last week and underwent one very intimate decision. Whether the latter was a win or a loss depends on your (point of) view — about male circumcision. Most important to most Germans was probably their hope to win the European soccer championship, held this year in Poland and the Ukraine. Germany […]
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“SYRIZA Is Acting Responsibly”: Interview with Yanis Varoufakis
The German taxpayers should be happy to have SYRIZA in Greece, says economist Yanis Varoufakis in an interview. Greece is not unwilling to reform.
ZEIT ONLINE: Mr. Varoufakis, the Greeks say they want to keep the euro but vote for SYRIZA and its leader Alexis Tsipras, whose plan could lead to an exit from the monetary union. How does that work?
Yanis Varoufakis: SYRIZA also wants Greece to remain in the eurozone. But, at the same time, it wants to renegotiate the austerity program, because it doesn’t work. Just about everyone who knows anything about economics knows that by now.
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Greece at a Crossroads: Crisis and Radicalization in the Southern European Semi-periphery
Introduction The Greek crisis represents the deepening of a long systemic contradiction whose origins lie in the 1960s, in the stagnation of monopoly capitalism and the emergence of the South. The industrial centers of the world economy were struck by a crisis of profitability, which was displaced outward in space and forward in time by […]
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Can Germany’s Left Party Be Saved?
What is the matter with Germany’s Left Party? Or, more bluntly, can it be saved? What is the truth about the charismatic leader Oskar Lafontaine, from West German Saarland, who suddenly, surprisingly withdrew from the fight for party leadership? Is he really out of the running? And is that good or bad? What are the […]
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Impoverishing Europe
The crisis is not relinquishing its grip on Europe. From autumn 2008 to early 2009 the world market experienced the deepest slump in economic output since the Second World War. This is a global crisis. Even in emerging economies like China, Brazil, or India economic growth declined and could not compensate for the recession […]
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Argentina and the Magic Soybean: The Commodity Export Boom That Wasn’t
One of the great myths about the Argentine economy that is repeated nearly every day is that the rapid growth of the Argentine economy during the past decade has been a “commodity export boom.” For example, the New York Times reported last week: Riding an export boom for commodities like soybeans, Argentina’s economy grew at […]
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Social Democracy’s Great Error: Similarities Between the Schröder and Zapatero Administrations
In circles close to the former Zapatero administration, attempts have been made to represent former Prime Minister Zapatero as the politician who “sacrificed himself to save Spain,” comparing him to former German Chancellor Schröder who, though aware that he would antagonize his electoral base with his clearly neoliberal policies, went ahead with them, for he […]
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Tough on Euros, Weak on Nazis
Hurray! Merkel won the day! It took a long night of backroom bargaining, but except for that Tory, David Cameron, all European Union members agreed to save the euro, save the economy, save the world! It had been on the brink of disaster, Sarkozy warned on the eve of the meeting: unless we reach agreement […]
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The General Strike
General strikes were common in Europe and in the U.S. towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century. They provoked great debates within the labor movement and within the revolutionary parties and movements (anarchist, communist, socialist). Much discussed were the importance of the general strike in […]
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The Scream
Rajoy Won Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela. Cf. “Polls say that seven out of ten voters for the victorious People’s Party do not have much confidence in . . . PP” (Ancelmo Gois, “Direita, volver,” 21 November 2011); “Right away, the risk premium of the Spanish debt rises and the stock market tumbles, […]
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Debunking the Greek (and European) Crisis Narrative
In a recent debate the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination treated cutting the deficit as the panacea that would address the European crisis and prevent the United States from having a similar fate. This diagnosis is wrong but it is unfortunately not unique to the Republicans in this country. In fact, it is this […]
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Germany’s Euro Trilemma: Interview with Yanis Varoufakis
Yanis Varoufakis is a prestigious economist who heads the Department of Economic Policy at the University of Athens. From 2004 to 2007 Varoufakis served as economic adviser to George Papandreou. Author of several books on Game Theory, Varoufakis is also a recognized speaker and often appears as guest analyst for news media such as the […]
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Can BRICS Help Europe?
Last week Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega proposed that the BRICS countries offer help to Europe, either through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or by buying up European bonds. I can understand the sentiment: The European authorities have created a financial crisis that is already slowing the world economy and could potentially have even worse […]
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WFTU: ‘Support People, Oppose Imperialist Interference in Arab Countries’
The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) organised on September 13-14 a two-day international trade union meet in the European Parliament complex in Strasbourg, France, to express solidarity with the fighting people of Arab countries and voice strong protest against the hegemonic interference of US imperialism and its European allies in the internal affairs […]
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Austerity Politics Descends on US States
Last week, Democratic Governors in New York and Connecticut repeated the austerity politics of Greece’s Prime Minister Papandreou and Portugal’s Socrates. In doing so, they likewise imitated the austerity politics of their Republican and Democratic counterparts across virtually all 50 states. Austerity for labor and the public is everywhere capitalism’s Plan B. After all, even […]
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The “Debt Crisis” Myth
The prevailing understanding of economic troubles in the U.S. and Europe, the world’s two largest economies, is mistaken in a number of ways. First: Imagine that you are driving a car down a road packed with snow and ice and you are worried about an accident. At the same time you are ignoring the fact […]