Italy should be doing well. Unlike Britain, it exports considerably more to the rest of the world than it imports, while its government spends less(excluding interest payments) than the taxes it receives. And yet Italy is stagnating, its population in a state of revolt following two lost decades. While it is true that Italy is in serious need of reforms, those who blame the stagnation on domestic inefficiencies...
Read More »New York Magazine – Interviewed by Felipe Ossa: “Yanis Varoufakis Has Some Ideas About How to Save the Future”
Much of the world was introduced to Yanis Varoufakis in early 2015, when, as Greece’s bold new finance minister (he rode a Yamaha to work and tabloids touted his sex appeal), he led negotiations with the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund to restructure the country’s crushing load of government debt. To many, he was a leftist hero standing up to the heartless eurocrats...
Read More »President Mattarella of Italy: From moral drift to tactical blunder
I concede that there are issues over which I would welcome the Italian President’s use of constitutional powers that (in my humble opinion) he should not have.(*) One such issue is the outrageous policy of the Lega and the promise of its leader, Mr Salvini, to expel five hundred thousand migrants from Italy. Had President Mattarella refused Mr Salvini the post of Interior Minister, on the basis that he rejects...
Read More »Does capitalism make us happy? On THINK AGAIN: A Big Think podcast – 26 MAY 2018
[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...
Read More »On YouTube’s ‘The Young Turks’ (TYT), interviewed by Nomi Konst on Capitalism, Democracy and Crisis – 21 MAY 2018
[embedded content] Nomiki Konst (TYT Politics) interviews former Greek Finance Minister and Greek Member of Parliament Yanis Varoufakis. Get ‘Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism’ here: http://a.co/eXqqRNt
Read More »Is capitalism devouring democracy? At the Cambridge Forum, Massachusetts, 17th May 2018 – video
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Read More »At the New School, discussing ‘Capitalism and the Present Moment in History’ with Will Milberg – 7 MAY 2018
[embedded content] On the day of this discussion/presentation, students and staff were occupying part of the New School as part of a twin labour dispute: one regarding the cafeteria staff facing dismissal and partial re-employment under worse terns and a second dispute concerning low pay and lack of rights for student workers-TAs. It is in this context that I asked the New School’s...
Read More »Trump vs. Europe – Interview for The Nation podcast
[embedded content] Trump vs Europe: He’s threatening European banks and industries with sanctions. If they don’t cut off trade with Iran, they would be barred from American markets and transactions with American banks. We asked Yanis Varoufakis for his analysis—he’s the former finance minister of Greece who led the resistance to European Bankers demanding austerity—now he has co-founded...
Read More »On Hard Talk, BBC, summing up what our 2015 struggle against the EU-IMF troika was about, and how it was undermined
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Read More »THE NATION: Yanis Varoufakis’s vision for a more democratic Europe – a review of ‘Adults in the Room’, ‘Talking to My Daughter About The Economy’ & ‘And the Weak Suffer What They Must?’ by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
The idea of a unified Europe didn’t always elicit the current mixture of exasperation, boredom, and rage, in politicians and ordinary people alike. In fact, there was a time when the European Union seemed like a great initiative, especially on a continent ravaged first by two hot wars, then broken in half by a cold one. A permanent peace between neighboring nations founded on a common market and sealed with...
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