Την περασμένη εβδομάδα οι τίτλοι και τα πρωτοσέλιδα των ΜΜΕ «γιόρτασαν το τέλος της οικονομικής διάσωσης της Ελλάδας, ακόμη και τη λήξη της λιτότητας, ενώ παρουσίασαν την οκταετή παρέμβαση της Ευρώπης στην Ελλάδα ως πρότυπο συνετής ευρωπαϊκής αλληλεγγύης στο “μαύρο πρόβατό” της, μια περίπτωση “αυστηρής αγάπης” που φέρεται να λειτούργησε. Όμως μία πιο προσεκτική ματιά αποκαλύπτει μία […]
Essays
Greece was never bailed out; it remains a debtor’s prison and the EU won’t let go of the keys – op-ed in The Observer
Over the past week, the world’s media have been proclaiming the successful completion of the Greek financial rescue programmemounted in 2010 by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Headlines celebrated the end of Greece’s bailout, even the termination of austerity. Buoyant reports from ground zero of the eurozone crisis portrayed Europe’s eight-year long Greek […]
Farewell Uri Avnery (1923-2018), Israeli humanist who demonstrated that there is no such thing as an Arab-Israeli conflict – just a constant struggle against racism, colonialism & misanthropy
Humanism is poorer this week. Uri Avnery has died. Soldier number 44410 of the Israel army, spent the following decades defending human decency in the land that he loved and struggled to make a welcoming home for Jews and Arabs alike. From his 1953 report of the raid on Qibya in Jordan, where an Israeli unit commanded by […]
Greece was never bailed out and remains in debtor’s prison – Bild Zeitung interview
BILD meets Yanis Varoufakis – the man who was THE symbol of the Greek left-wing government’s resistance against the targets set by the bailout troika for the broke state of Greece. We met the professor of economics – who co-founded left-wing movement DiEM25 – in his summer house in the mountains of the sunny island of Aegina. BILD: Mr. Varoufakis, […]
Der Spiegel – Verdammt zu 60 Jahren Entwürdingung
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/griechenland-krise-beteiligte-und-betroffene-ziehen-bilanz-a-1221081.html
On the Deep State – an audio essay in seven parts
Is there a Deep State in our western liberal democracies? If so, is it a conspiracy or something more ‘interesting’ than that? These are questions that the Left has been traditionally engaged with, especially when facing undercover campaigns to prevent progressives from winning power or, on occasion, to unseat or destabilise left-wing governments. However, more recently, the Alt-Right […]
CRASHED: Long version of my Observer review of Adam Tooze’s new book on the Crash of 2008
Every so often humanity manages genuinely to surprise itself. Events to which we had previously assigned zero probability push us into what the ancient Greeks referred to as aporia: a state of intense bafflement urgently demanding a new model of the world we live in. The Crash of 2008 was such a moment. Suddenly, the […]
Greed, ineptitude and austerity fanned the flames of the Greek wildfire – The Sunday Times
ATHENS: A biblical calamity befell the Attica region last Monday. I saw its first sign in the late morning at Athens airport, where I was seeing off my daughter to Australia. A strong whiff of burning wood caused me to look up to the sky, where a whitish-yellow sun beckoned, surrounded by the tell-tale eclipse-like […]
Behind Greece’s forest fires: a tragic reminder of our collective responsibility as Europeans
ATHENS – A biblical calamity befell Attica last Monday. I saw its first sign in the late morning at Athens airport, where I was seeing off my daughter to Australia. A strong whiff of burning wood caused me to look up to the sky, where a whitish-yellow sun beckoned, surrounded by the telltale eclipse-like daytime […]
On The Jolly Swagmen podcast, discussing economics, the economy, politics, Europe & Greece
Joe speaks with former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, the man who defied Europe to save Greece – and failed. Yanis, the suave economics professor turned unexpected politician, has recently announced he will run for Prime Minister of Greece at the next national elections. He is the author of multiple books including And The Weak Suffer […]
Ushering in a new school of principled politics: a discussion between Yanis Varoufakis (DiEM25) & Aldo Cazzullo (Corriere Della Sera) – openDemocracy
“The reason we formed DiEM25 was the diagnosis that old wine in new bottles will not help revive the spirits of progressives in Italy or in the rest of Europe.” Aldo Cazzullo, Corriere Della Sera (AC): Let us start from the beginning? Why did you decide to resign after OXI’s victory in the Greek referendum? Yanis […]
Reality & Nightmare: A brief assessment of the Eurozone’s ‘reforms’ – in Der Freitag, Issue 26, 2018
The official version reads as follows: Europe is on the road to recovery, the consequences of Brexit are under control, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Emmanuel Macron would now create the new foundations on which Europe will establish a stronger alliance. Even the Greek debt crisis, it is said, was over after the decision of the […]
If Trump wants to blow up the world order, who will stop him? op-ed in The Guardian
Even before Donald Trump drove to tears of dismay NATO’s leaders, Theresa May, the EU’s officialdom and Washington’s own ‘intelligence community’, the writing was on the wall: Trump is methodically dismantling a world order that he no longer believes to be in the interests of the United States’ ruling class. Mon 11 Jun 2018 16.23 BST Donald Trump’s early […]
A letter to my daughter about the black magic of banking…
As you grow up and experience more of the ups and downs of the economy, you will notice a piece of mindbending hypocrisy: during the good times, bankers, entrepreneurs—rich people in general—tend to be against government. They criticize it as a “brake on development,” a “parasite” feeding on the private sector through taxation, an “enemy […]