Tag Archives: English

A few days ago, I received a letter from Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi that works like a punch-in-the-stomach type of wake up call addressed to all Europeans. To crown its tough message, Bifo concludes that his conscience cannot fathom being a European any longer, given Europe’s daily crimes against logic and humanity. Thus, Bifo concludes, he is compelled also to resign from DiEM25’s Advisory Panel. You can read his...

ATHENS — The recent elections in France and Britain have confirmed the political establishment’s simultaneous vulnerability and vigor in the face of a nationalist insurgency. This contradiction is the motif of the moment — personified by the new French president, Emmanuel Macron, whose résumé made him a darling of the elites but who rode a wave of anti-establishment enthusiasm to power. A similar paradox is...

Today, on the anniversary of the stupendous NO with which 62% of Greek voters responded to a third predatory loan ultimatum from Greece’s ‘official’ lenders (the troika: IMF, ECB, EU), Greece’s oligarchic press – in cahoots with the troika itself – is hard at work in its attempt to demonise the people of Greece for having dared to say NO to yet another lost generation. The memory of our collective defiance still...

Reading Varoufakis: Frustrated Strategist of Greek Financial Deterrence (click here for the original site) by Adam Tooze  Adam Tooze holds the Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute. He is currently at work on a history of the global financial crisis 2008-2018, which will appear in time for the anniversary in September 2018. Adults in the...

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ATHENS – Europe is at the mercy of a common currency that not only was unnecessary for European integration, but that is actually undermining the European Union itself. So what should be done about a currency without a state to back it – or about the 19 European states without a currency that they control? The logical answer is either to dismantle the euro or to provide it with the federal state it needs. The...

[embedded content] Extracts from an event that took place on 3rd December 2016 in Zagreb’s National Theatre.

This is a superbly written account of the struggle to alleviate the austerity imposed upon the Greek people by the eurozone. Greece, argues Varoufakis, has been put in a debtors’ prison and robbed of autonomy and dignity for the indefinite future. Critics would argue that he failed as finance minister in 2015 because he was insufficiently politic. More plausibly, he could never have succeeded, such were the...

It is no surprise that Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, turns up to our interview without a tie. The 56-year-old famously arrived at Downing Street in 2015 for a meeting with the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, with his shirt untucked. More surprising is that the left-wing economist, who led negotiations with creditors during the 2015 Greek government-debt crisis, is...

[embedded content] “We have a major imbalance between savings and investment. We have the highest savings rates in the history of capitalism and lowest level of investment. You only have to state that to realise what the source of our troubles are.” Speaking at FundForum International 2017, Former Greek Finance Minister and DiEM25 Co-Founder Yanis Varoufakis sat down with FundForum...