Basil Oberholzer

Economist PhD: macroeconomics, development, environment; lost in too many other interests; former member of parliament St.Gallen (CH)

[Basil Oberholzer @basiloberholzer]

NEW PAPER OUT: limiting economic #growth & reducing working time help protect natural resources. But how is this possible in capitalism? The paper explores what a stable pattern to a post-growth economy may look like.
https://t.co/ZUwRCoq1X0

@heterodoxnews @EcologicalEcon

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

Perhaps that AI will bring us back to the medieval conception of production & dissemination of knowledge: monks who copied what was already written & known. Those with the best calligraphy were held in highest esteem. New researchers will have AI write their papers & the best researcher will be the one who selected the coolest AI stuff.
A topic for Borges. Knowledge will be a fixed sum of things and the best bricolage of what is known (by all) would be called science.

[Louis-Philippe Rochon @Lprochon]

"Reclaiming the Narrative: The Revival of Challenge"

Here is my editorial about relaunching Challenge.

It is Open Access. Please share widely.

https://t.co/2wNH7Ep2AG

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE

There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"

Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?

Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!

And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.

Francesca Albanese is that someone.

She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."

Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.

And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.

Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.

There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.

There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."

There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”

Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.

She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".

Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.

What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.

These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.

Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.

We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."

Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.

So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.

A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.

Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.

Let us stand with her.

Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.

[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]

[Pedro Sánchez @sanchezcastejon]

La responsabilidad pública también implica la obligación moral de no mirar hacia otro lado.

Es un honor otorgar la Orden del Mérito Civil a una voz que sostiene la conciencia del mundo: @FranceskAlbs, Relatora Especial de la ONU en el territorio palestino ocupado.

[The Daily Britain @dailybritainonx]

Quote of the day 👇

[Matías Vernengo @NakedKeynes]

There is no Milei miracle. It’s exchange rate stabilization based on unsustainable external financing paired with painful domestic austerity. Argentina isn’t fixed and the crisis is just deferred
https://t.co/wnLVYHmbme

[Bruce Arthur @bruce_arthur]

JD Vance is lecturing the Pope on Catholicism and Pierre Poilievre is lecturing Mark Carney on economics and RFK Jr is lecturing scientists about vaccines and Donald Trump is lecturing the world on tariffs and Pete Hegseth is quoting Pulp Fiction and thinking it’s the Bible

[COMBATE |🇵🇷 @upholdreality]

Cuban President Diaz-Canel to NBC: if Cuba is so incapable, so closed-off, so uninnovative -- why has the US spent 60+ years and millions of taxpayer dollars trying to crush it?

"Why don't they let us fall on our own, if that's what they believe?"

[Kerem Schamberger @KeremSchamberg]

"Wenn man jemandem Carte blanche gibt, alles zu tun, was er will, dann endet das mit Bergen palästinensischer Leichen und Leichen im Iran, im Libanon. Es wird nicht aufhören, solange Länder wie Deutschland nicht Stopp sagen. Es braucht Druck von außen."

https://t.co/tLrYlSI1Dz

[Jörg Dürr-Pucher @J_DuerrPucher]

Fast alle Länder weltweit setzen auf günstigen und klimaschonenden Solarstrom. Das Gerede vom deutschen Sonderweg der Energiewende ist falsch, ebenso die herbei fantasierte Renaissance der Atomkraft.

Solarboom weltweit: Photovoltaik-Ausbau bricht Rekorde https://t.co/7t88WUHEOI

[Basil Oberholzer @basiloberholzer]

@fuecks Aus Afghanistan, Irak und Libyen nichts gelernt.

[Basil Oberholzer @basiloberholzer]

@Airtel_Ug Hi @Airtel_Ug I am looking for support to set up a business account but have not gotten any response so far. Please reach out. Thank you.

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Iran:

Today more than ever, it is essential to remember that one can be against a hateful regime, as is the case with the Iranian regime, as is the whole of Spanish society, and at the same time be against an unjustified, dangerous military intervention outside of international law.

That one must be against a war initiated without the authorization of the United States Congress or the United Nations Security Council and, as I have said before, one that violates international law.

And that there is always room for a negotiated solution, instead of being dragged along by the devastation of arms as the only possible way out.

Therefore, I would like once again, as we have done since the beginning, to appeal for immediate de-escalation, for full respect for international law in all the conflicts we are unfortunately suffering, and for the urgency of resuming dialogue as soon as possible.

That is where Spain will be, and that is where I believe the whole of the European Union should be.

[Basil Oberholzer @basiloberholzer]

@RKiesewetter Das Atomabkommen, welches die USA aufgekündigt haben?

[Basil Oberholzer @basiloberholzer]

@Airtel_Zambia @Airtel_Zambia I have a question on opening a business account but have not gotten a response for a week. Can you please advise?

[Kenneth Roth @KenRoth]

The usually reticent International Committee of the Red Cross president warns that Israel's destruction in Gaza represents a collapse of all international standards. “What we have seen in Gaza exceeds all legal, ethical, moral and humanitarian norms.”
https://t.co/fBQ5kxdraF

[Elgar Economics @Elgar_Economics]

🚨Out Now: Elgar Encyclopedia of Central Banking, Second Edition

Edited by Louis-Philippe Rochon and Sergio Rossi

🔵 Learn more: https://t.co/94DUZAyZMp

🔴 Free chapter: https://t.co/OvQhk6cOuB

350 entries from specially commissioned experts in their fields.

[Basil Oberholzer @basiloberholzer]

@curtdoolittle @Pater_Nosterdam @Daractenus You have guns in every corner and more inequality, which breeds violence.

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Six reasons why Trump’s attack on Venezuela was very wrong:

[Basil Oberholzer @basiloberholzer]

@DavidNdii Please summarize your ideas in three bullets. Keen to learn.