Kees van der Pijl: The United States and Europe—Bolstering the Infrastructure of Atlantic Unity in a Time of Crisis, Overcoming Rivalry

In these notes[1] I will address the issue of how the United States and the European Union are responding to what is now increasingly recognised as an existential crisis of Western hegemony and liberal capitalism. As George Soros wrote on 23 October 2014 in The Guardian newspaper, the West must keep up its pressure in Ukraine, because if not, the system that has been built up over decades and which includes NATO and the EU, may begin to unravel and as it does, eastern Europe may again come under the influence of a resurgent Russia. More

 

Claude Serfati: 2014 – A Turning Point in the Economic and Geopolitical Situation

1) The hypothesis laid out in this paper is that a new turn in the international economic and geopolitical situation took place in the last months. On the economic side, not only it appears that the finance capital’s social and economic power has not been seriously dented by the new regulatory framework under way in different countries, but that it goes on thriving on the global bleak macroeconomic situation. Through the last years, mainstream economists’ main concern was EU deflation, a code name for depression. More

Joachim Becker: Enlarging the EU Sphere of Influence Eastwards – Or: The Dialectics of Integration and Disintegration

In the face of the austerity-induced depression of the domestic markets in the EU, the EU and its main powers bank on the expansion of economic relations beyond the EU and free trade agreements. The coalition agreement of social democrats and Christian democrats in Germany, the dominant EU power, is characteristic of this thinking. It is extremely brief and unimaginative in its paragraphs on the EU, but dedicates detailed and highlighted paragraphs on the Germany’s economic relationship with so-called emerging economies and on EU free trade agreements More

Judith Dellheim, Frieder Otto Wolf: On Industrial Policy

In addition to the posts from April 23th, April 30th, June 2nd, June 22th we publish two texts for the discussion on production and consumption structures and on conclusions for a socio-ecological transformation. Both texts were written for the EuroMemo Group meetings in 2013 and 2014.

Workshop Organizers: A Few More Remarks

We now propose the following workshop parts:

  • I. Global Context, Experience and Theoretical Basics
  • II. Financialisation and Transnationalisation; Social and Production Structures
  • III. Case Studies in Regard to Countries
  • IV. More specifically on Alternatives

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Kees van der Pijl: 1984 All Over Again. The Snowden NSA Revelations in Perspective

In the discussion concerning the Snowden NSA revelations many have referred to Orwell’s 1984. This paper highlights that Orwell identified two components–total surveillance and permanent war. The paper then looks at the actual year 1984 and argues that in that year was significant after all because both elements of today’s War on Terror (surveillance and war) were being prepared. One was the Washington conference on the War on Terror, the third in a series initiated from Israel; the other, the preparation of a Continuity of Government (COG) programme by the Reagan administration, more

Aris Chatzistenaou: How the IMF Destroyed Greece: The Reality of the Greek “Success story”: On Its Way to Become a Third World Country

In Greece we are living a financial and social genocide and it’s a huge lie from Greek Prime Minister to characterize people who are committing suicide because they don’t have enough for food and the don’t have enough to support their families to characterise this as a success story. We couldn’t imagine that something like that could happen. More

Peter Gowan: Crisis in the Heartland. Consequences of the New Wall Street System

The long credit crunch that began in the Atlantic world in August 2007 is strange in its extraordinary scope and intensity. Mainstream discourse, referring to a ‘sub-prime’ crisis, implies that the credit crunch has been caused, rather than triggered, by a bubble in the real economy. This is at best naïve: after all, the bursting of an equally large bubble in the Spanish housing market led to no such blow-out in the domestic banking system More