Tag Archives: Politics and Economics

Donald Trump’s victory marks the end of an era when a self-confident Establishment preached the end of history, the end of passion and the supremacy of a technocracy working on behalf of the 1%. But the era it ushers in is not new. It is a new variant of the 1930s, featuring deflationary economics, xenophobia and divide-and-rule politics. Passion has returned to politics but not in a way that will help the 80% left behind since the 1970s. Passion is now fuelling misanthropy. Passion is...

By Thomas Seibert and Yanis Varoufakis, members of DiEM25’s Coordinating Collective As in the case of Brexit, we refuse to respond in a binary manner (remain or leave, Clinton or Trump) to the question facing voters.For us, Clinton and Trump are the two sides of the same effaced coin, redolent of the fading illusions of global capitalism’s neoliberal turn. The virulent clash between them, just like the clash between David Cameron and Boris Johnson in the Brexit campaign, is masking the...

History may repeat itself but never as quickly or as mindlessly as it does within Europe’s social democratic family. Spain’s socialists jettisoned Pedro Sánchez to allow Mariano Rajoy to form government as if in a bid to replicate the disappearing act of their Greek counterparts, the once formidable PASOK. In 2011, after having backed the calamitous troika Greek ‘program’, PASOK’s socialists jettisoned George Papandreou, their leader, to facilitate the formation of an essentially...

ATHENS – The right to laziness has traditionally been only for the propertied rich, whereas the poor have had to struggle for decent wages and working conditions, unemployment and disability insurance, universal health care, and other accoutrements of a dignified life. The idea that the poor should be granted an unconditional income sufficient to live on has been anathema not only to the high and mighty, but also to the labor movement, which embraced an ethic revolving around reciprocity,...

[embedded content] On the panel are Conservative former chancellor Ken Clarke MP, Labour’s shadow education secretary Angela Rayner MP, runner up in the UKIP leadership election Lisa Duffy, DiEM25 initiator and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and the previous owner of the Daily Telegraph Conrad Black.

Click here for the CNN site. (Note that the title was chosen by CNN’s editor.) Arthur Miller once said that “an era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.” The faith in trickle-down economics, in the wisdom of unfunded tax cuts, in the capacity of Wall Street to regulate itself, and in Silicon Valley to look after America’s innovations — all of these illusions now look completely exhausted. Americans have good cause to be disillusioned. Median incomes have...

Addressing a DiEM25-Another Europe event held at the LSE on Saturday 8th October 2016 Before the referendum DiEM25, our Democracy in Europe Movement, and Another Europe Is Possible, joined forces to argue the ‘IN the EU and AGAINST this EU’ line. In town hall meetings, on the streets, on radio & television, in newspaper interviews & articles, we traversed the country to convince the people of Britain that another Europe is possible. We failed! On 23rd June, the people of Britain...

[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...

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...