Headlines the world over ‘agonise’, on behalf of Greece and Europe, on whether the PSI+ negotiations will come to a conclusion. The presumption is that, if they succeed, Greece will be reprieved and Europe (with France and the EFSF having recently been downgraded) will buy some much needed extra time to put, at long last, its house in order. Nonsense, I say! This PSI+ is yet another assault on Reason. It co ...

On the last day of 2011, a headline in The Wall Street Journal read: “Spain Misses Deficit Target, Sets Cuts.” The cruel forces of poor economic logic were at work to welcome in the new year. The European Union has become a vicious circle of burgeoning debt leading to radical austerity measures, which in turn further weaken economic conditions and result in calls for still more damaging cuts in government s ...

January 11, 2012 is a profoundly depressing anniversary — marking ten years since the Bush administration established its “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and decided that those who ended up in US custody would not be screened to ascertain whether or not they were combatants, and would be sent to Guantánamo to be held without rights. To mark this bleak occasion, Andy Worthington, investigativ ...

Georges Prévélakis Historically positioning themselves between an unruly, oriental population and the western powers, since 1981 Greek elites have siphoned off EU funds into a bloated public sector favouring corruption, patronage and social climbing. The threat posed to Europe by the breakdown is less contagion to the centre than a wave of anti-western feeling that could exacerbate geopolitical instabilitie ...

It's clear that punishing the poor will only deepen the recession – so why are the IMF technocrats intent on further austerity? During an official visit to the LSE in November 2008, the Queen asked a professor why economists had failed to predict the financial crash, the most dramatic event in recent economic history. The professor's answer is not known. A year later, after a British Academy seminar, eminen ...

Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history. Debt has b ...

Three South European Economists living in The Netherlands write about the consequences of austerity and debt speculation in their countries. João Romão (Portugal), Sol Trumbo (Spain), Dimitris Pavlopoulos (Greece) We are witnessing an apparently endless crisis. What started three years ago in the subprime mortgage market in the US has now spread to such an extent that the unity of Europe as a political and ...

Tax havens help rich people hide money that should be spent on schools, hospitals, roads and other public services For example … Switzerland, not only one of the world’s biggest financial centres but also one of the world’s largest tax havens,[1] Switzerland takes first place on the 2011 Financial Secrecy Index.[2]     The dirty details Switzerland is home to about a third of the world’s offshore ...

Living in the new dispensation By Harvey Cox A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised t ...

From the massive student strike at OccupyCal in Berkeley to the police crackdown of the OccupyWallStreet movement’s birthplace in New York City and dozens of actions and headlines in between — from coast to coast, last week was an important, up-and-down week for the growing Occupy movement. Where the movement heads in the weeks and months to come, however, will be even more critical to the fate of this peop ...