Tag Archives: Box2_ENG

As harsh austerity and xenophobic nationalism fester in Europe, Yanis Varoufakis discusses his antidote with Tellus Senior Fellow Allen White. What inspired your career trajectory from academic economist to prominent supranational activist? I went into politics because of the financial crisis of 2008. Had financial capitalism not imploded, I would have happily continued my quite obscure academic work at some...

This morning, in Greece’s Parliament, MeRA25’s parliamentarians are staging an all-out struggle against the ratification of disastrous contracts between the previous (SYRIZA) government and multinational oil companies. The contracts to be ratified give the companies (including Exxon-Mobil and Total) full licence to drill, extract and exploit gas & oil reserves across Greece’s beautiful seas (Ionian, Aegean,...

The left-wing party’s embrace of austerity created the conditions for a parasitic and cruel oligarchy to return The Greek right is back: greedier, uglier and more focused than ever. The incoming New Democracy government is determined to reclaim full control of the state on behalf of the most parasitic segment of Greece’s oligarchy and, of course, of our country’s ruthless creditors. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the new...

Amid the bad results for the Left in the European elections, the Greek outcome was particularly poignant. In the last such contest in 2014, Syriza rode the revolt against austerity to become the largest single party, in its final step toward national office. Five years later, in last month’s election, it finished ten points behind the right-wing New Democracy. And where once Syriza promised to spark change...

The memory of past greatness can be debilitating for a people who feel they have failed to rise to a historic occasion.  We Greeks have been burdened by this sensation at various moments in our postwar history: in 1967, when we failed to prevent a military coup; or more recently in 2015, when we allowed the troika of the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank to crush us. Brexit Britain is, today, wallowing...

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Britain is teetering on a knife’s edge: about to crash out of, or back into, the European Union. Either outcome would represent a defeat for democracy in the UK and in the EU. Crashing out would inflict substantial economic hardship on the weakest in Britain. It would boost jingoism and parochialism, drive England further apart from Scotland and Ireland, and expose the UK to the vagaries of a Trump administration...

In 2018, the good people behind the Edinburgh Festival kindly invited me to host a series of discussions under the title KILLING DEMOCRACY? My remit was: Further to explore the question of whether the current form of financialised capitalism is devouring democracy, reflecting on my work with the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25). In a series of four events I tried to explore the ways in which the demos can be...

This year, the good people behind the Edinburgh Festival have kindly invited me to host a series of discussions under the title KILLING DEMOCRACY? My remit was: Further to explore the question of whether the current form of financialised capitalism is devouring democracy, reflecting on my work with the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25). In a series of four events my purpose will be to explore the ways in...

[embedded content] Yanis Varoufakis – Happiness, Inc. – Think Again – a Big Think Podcast #149 Jason GOTS: As the Wu-Tang Clan once put it: “Cash moves everything around me… Get the money. Dollar dollar bill, y’all.” I grew up not wanting to believe this. All the stuff that seemed worth having was hard to put a price tag on. But under global capitalism, there’s a lot of hard, sad truth to...