I’ve written a piece about the “enhanced cooperation treaty” — known as the Quirinale Treaty — that Macron and Draghi have signed in Rome today, its secretive nature and why it is likely to entrench Italy’s subsumption into France’s sphere of influence, and further erode what little sovereignty Italy has left.
[Update: the draft of the deal was published a few minutes ago]
Why did the left unquestioningly support all Covid measures, despite their disastrous psychological, social, economic and political effects (and dubious health outcomes)? This is the question Toby Green of King’s College London and I try to answer in this article.
Here’s my latest article, about the EU’s return to austerity, and how we are seeing a repeat of the post-2008 approach, with large debt burdens used as an excuse to punish – once again – the poorest and weakest members of society. I also explain how the EU’s pandemic recovery fund is not about welfare but about handing Brussels even more control.
Here’s an article of mine where I explain how Mario Draghi’s government in Italy is using the pandemic (and specifically Covid passports) to justify its technocratic rule and further entrench neoliberal policies.
A very long read of mine on Italy’s obsession for technocrats.
I’ve written an article about Matteo Salvini’s transition from die-hard eurosceptic to die-hard europhile. In it, I argue that the EU’s economic pensée unique, by ruling out all alternatives to managing the economy other than the neoliberal rulebook, is increasingly shifting challenges to the status quo, and to the EU itself, from the socioeconomic terrain to the cultural and identitarian terrain, thus fuelling the very culture wars that are tearing our societies apart. I hope you enjoy it.
The international mainstream media is fawning over Mario Draghi, hailed as the saviour not only of Italy but of Europe as whole. In this article I explain why the facts don’t warrant such eulogising. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Paschal Donohoe, the Irish finance minister and president of the Eurogroup, has written a preposterous article in the Financial Times claiming that the budgetary response of the EU and US to the pandemic has been more or less similar. In this article I debunk such claims, showing that the fiscal responses of the EU and US are not even remotely comparable. The truth is that throughout the pandemic the UE/euro area has proven once again to be utterly dysfunctional, in macroeconomic as well as in organisational terms (as testified by the vaccine mess).
In his recent budget speech, British finance minister Rishi Sunak continued to spread dangerous fiscal myths about the alleged ‘strains’ faced by the UK’s public finances and the government’s need to ‘balance its books’.
In this article I explain why such claims are completely unfounded. As a currency-issuing government, the UK government can, and indeed does, simply create the money it needs out of thin air (effectively self-financing itself). Hence, it can always make good on any promise to repay bondholders, without the need to raise taxes (or cut back spending, for that matter) to ‘pay back’ the public debt, as Sunak implies.
Don’t be fooled by the EU’s sham ‘recovery fund’. It offers a pittance to struggling member states, but will allow Brussels to assume yet more control over their economic policies. Europeans will still be made to endure austerity. Me for spiked.
Thomas Fazi 