Tag Archives: English

Brexit rode to victory on the coat-tails of a type of discontent whose power sprang from its insuperable reluctance to specify its nature. Seemingly focused on a foreign power centre that British voters saw (with some justification) as the usurper of their democratic rights, its real focal point was nebulous and imprecise enough to encompass a potent mix of grievances. The unifying force behind the variety of...

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...

Corriere Della Sera, the Italian daily, published today an interview that I gave to Aldo Cazzullo. For the published version (in Italian of course), you can visit the paper’s site here. However, the published text is a heavily reduced version of the exchange between Mr Cazzullo and myself. For those interested in the full exchange, see below. (Nb. the exchange took place in English) Dear Professor let us start...

JOHANNESBURG – One of the most common mistakes European leaders make in interpreting US President Donald Trump’s hostility toward America’s traditional allies, or the alacrity of his administration’s efforts to blow up the international order, is to assume that all of this is unprecedented. Nothing could be further from the truth. To continue reading for free click here...

Rome, July 24, 2015To Yanis Varoufakis and Dominique Strauss-Khan Dear Yanis, dear Dominique, There is a place on earth that represents Europe’s very roots: Greece. Let us begin there. Athens, April 28, 1955. Albert Camus’ conference on “The future of Europe”.[1] On this occasion, participants agreed that the structural characteristics of European civilization are essentially two: the dignity of the individual; a...

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...

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...

[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...

[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

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