Yanis Varoufakis: Thoughts for the Post-2008 World

Backstage Yanis Varoufakis, DiEM25 à Nuit Debout, 16 avril 2016, Paris

Yanis Varoufakis responds to Alexis Cukier and Patrick Surain, who challenged him on his time as Greek finance minister, the feasibility of reforming existing EU structures, and a left-wing exit from the EU. Read ‘the challenge’ here. Friends, Thank you for your article in reply to my op-ed ‘The Left After Brexit’. Here is my response to your important questions and retorts, which I take the liberty to summarise in the following headings: 1. Why did I sign the 20 February 2015 agreement...

Leading activists, artists, scholars and political figures take central role in DiEM25 Linguist Noam Chomsky, novelist Elif Shafak, artist/musician Brian Eno, activist Zoe Gardner and fashion designer/environmental activist Vivienne Westwood are amongst those elected by DiEM25’s members to coordinate the movement’s activities. (See full announcement at DiEM25.org).The teams that will coordinate and guide our movement to democratise the EU – our Coordinating Collective and Advisory Panel –...

[Click here or the image above] Europe doesn’t always like to admit this but it needs the US. The US economy has an outsized effect on Europe’s, while Europe often needs the diplomatic and (sometimes) military heft of the US. All of which means that those of us in Europe are keenly watching what happens in the US this November. Trump’s few foreign-policy pronouncements have filled many Europeans with fear. Are they right to be afraid? Monocle’s Steve Bloomfield is joined by Greece’s...

Imagine a city or state budget where citizens could see at a glance where every euro, pound or dollar went or came from, which services were paid for by their taxes or rates, the distribution of the tax burden across different regions etc. You don’t need to imagine it. The City of Barcelona has delivered it. Click here for the OPEN BUDGET and here for STRATEGY & FINANCE. Europe’s rebel cities, adopting DiEM25’s transparency campaign, are leading the way!

When humour becomes essential in understanding the farcical reality we live in, pieces like this are priceless. CERN Discovers New Particle Called The FERIR CERN has just announced the discovery of a new particle, called the “FERIR”. This is not a fundamental particle of matter like the Higgs Boson, but an invention of economists. CERN in this instance stands not for the famous particle accelerator straddling the French and Swiss borders, but for an economic research lab at MIT—whose...

Yanis Varoufakis: The left never recovered from the fall of the Soviet Union — yet there is hope The left has been in disarray since 1991 – it never fully recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite widespread opposition to Stalinism and ­authoritarianism. In the past two decades, we have witnessed a major spasm of global capitalism that has triggered a long deflationary period across the United States and Europe. Just as the Great Depression did in the 1930s, this has...