Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 14

Working toward snatching humanist hope from the jaws of the unfolding genocide in Gaza. In conversation with Owen Jones

Owen Jones kindly invited me back to his show to discuss, what else, Gaza. We talk about the peculiarity of this genocide (i.e., that its perpetrators do not even care to hide their intent), the forgotten readiness of Western governments to brutalise not only foreign peoples (like the Palestinians) but also their own working classes, the hypocrisy of the West’s invocation of human rights and international law, Joe Biden’s motives and role, the history of settler imperialism (of which Palestine is a tragic repercussion), the brave resistance to Israel’s apartheid by humanist Israeli Jews, and, last but not least, the last source of hope there remains for the end of the slaughter and the granting of human rights to a people that have none – the Palestinians.

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Why Europe is not free to relate to China – China Daily op-ed

As the 24th EU-China Summit concluded on Thursday, it is natural to want to look behind the declarations and official speeches to identify the deeper forces shaping the European Union’s relationship with China and its policies toward China. But to understand the nature of these forces, it is crucial to go back to the very beginning, August 1971, when the United States ended the Bretton Woods international financial system designed by itself. The reason we need to go that far back in time is that the EU’s business model was shaped in response to that tumultuous transition from a fixed exchange rate system to the era of financialized capitalism. Similarly, China’s momentous rise, and its evolving links to Europe, need to be examined under the same light.Under the Bretton Woods system, fixed exchange rates between European currencies and the dollar (i.e., Europe’s dollarization) worked well as long as the US maintained a trade surplus with the European countries and Japan — in the sense that the dollars pumped into Europe would migrate back to US soil — courtesy of US net exports to Europe. However, once the US became a deficit country, sometime in the late 1960s, Bretton Woods was no longer sustainable and was speedily replaced by what I call a Dark Deal that Washington surreptitiously offered Europe and Japan.The Dark Deal was rather simple: “We shall keep demand for your products high, using our trade deficit. In return, you will voluntarily invest your profits in our FIRE — finance, insurance and real estate sectors.” Thus, the US dollar became a glorified IOU. The US could use it to buy more or less everything that Europe’s and Japan’s factories could produce, paying in dollars that European and Japanese capitalists had no alternative but to invest in the US’ FIRE.Why call this Dark Deal? Because, along with fabulous riches for US and European capitalists, it yielded permanent wage repression in net exporting countries, such as Germany, a slow burning recession in the rest of Europe, and a massive industrial decline in the heartlands of the US.China’s momentous rise in the 1990s found the US and the EU in this strange relationship. China’s economy benefited from Washington’s Dark Deal which was now extended to export entire factory lines from the US to China, whose output would then be exported to the US, with US citizens paying for it in dollars that their Chinese recipients would then invest in Wall Street, for example, in US treasury bills. And what would Wall Street do with these savings? They would invest much of European, Japanese and Chinese profits into new capital equipment around the world. In short, the US recycled other people’s moneys and kept a significant portion of the resulting profits and rents.This US-centered global recycling mechanism broke down in 2008 once and for all. What had happened was that, on the back of the billions of dollars of European and Asian profits rushing into Wall Street on a daily basis, the US and UK financiers built tsunamis of unsustainable bets (also called structured derivatives) which, inevitably, crashed and burned, first when Lehman Brothers collapsed and then in a vicious domino effect that brought down the entire North Atlantic and European banking system.At that point, the West practiced universal austerity for the majority and huge money printing on behalf of finance and its Big Business clients. The result was a superb recovery for financial markets, but a collapse of productive capital investments (as business could see that the majority could not afford pricey new goods), depression for the West’s working class, soulcrushing levels of inequality, and the rise of the racist ultraright both in Europe and the US.Two things saved Western capitalism: the Western central banks’ money printing already mentioned and … China. Immediately after Lehman’s collapse, the Chinese government wisely boosted investment to replace the anticipated loss of foreign demand with domestic investment. Thus, China was immunized from the Western financial crisis virus. In the process, China’s investment spree played a major role in stabilizing both the US and the problematic eurozone.This is the historical background against which to understand the current relationship between China and the EU: The EU needs China much more than China needs the EU, but it is restrained by the US in its relationship with China. To see this, note that before the 2008 crisis hit Europe, emanating from Wall Street, the very foundations of the EU were faulty, for unlike the US, which has a Federal Treasury, a fully unified banking system and a federal aggregate investment program (which, of course, includes the large budget of its mighty military-industrial complex), Europe has none of that. As a result, after 2008, with Greece being the canary in the coal mine, as European populations were being immersed in harsh austerity, most European governments were allowed to sink into unpayable debt, leading to investment levels lower than the already low levels of the US and far lower than those of China.Fifteen years later, we can see the results. In 2008, Europeans earned, in aggregate, 10 percent more than the US citizens. By 2022, the US citizens were earning 26 percent more than Europeans. Moreover, Europeans are becoming poorer not just collectively but also privately. What is worse is that for fifteen years, since 2009, Europe has failed to invest, unlike China or the US, into the technologies of the future: batteries, solar power, microchips and artificial intelligence. Most importantly, while the US and China have invested massively in the new cloud-based capital that grants its owners great power over the emerging nexus of Big Tech and digital financial transactions, Europe has not.The above explains why Europe, despite its wealth and riches, is a fading economic bloc caught up in the mounting new Cold War that Washington has unleashed against China in order to stem the growth of China’s agglomeration of Big Tech and digital payment systems which pose a danger to the global dollar-based payments system. By adding an East-West divide to Europe’s existing North-South divide, and by boosting inordinately its energy costs, the crisis in Ukraine has diminished even further Europe’s autonomy to choose its own policies vis-a-vis China independently of the will of the US.In conclusion, when the European and Chinese officials meet at the 24th EU-China Summit, Europe’s representatives will have far fewer degrees of freedom to choose their negotiating position than they once had. Europe is not what it used to be. And that is good for the peoples of neither Europe nor China.

The author is leader of MeRA25, former Greek finance minister and professor of economics at the University of Athens.  The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily. Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn 

For the China Daily site, where this article was originally published, please click here.

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By continuing the persecution of Julian Assange, Biden jetissons the 1st Amendment – The Nation

In early 2024, a new, grim chapter may be written in the annals of journalistic history. Julian Assange, the publisher of Wikileaks, could board a plane for extradition to the United States, where he faces up to 175 years in prison on espionage charges for the crime of publishing newsworthy information.The persecution of Assange is clear evidence that the Biden administration is overseeing the silent death of the First Amendment—with global consequences.Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s exposé during the Watergate scandal is seen as a triumph of truth over power. Their investigative reporting led to the downfall of President Nixon, cementing their status as champions of press freedom. However, what if this tale had taken a dark turn, with the journalists prosecuted for espionage and silenced under the guise of national security? While this is mere fiction, Assange’s plight is all too real.Assange, the standard-bearer of our era’s investigative journalism, awaits extradition in a British cell in Belmarsh Prison, a fate that could stifle the beacon of transparency he represents. At a time when the world grapples with the erosion of press freedom, with journalists imprisoned and killed, Assange’s case raises profound questions about the consequences of challenging power and unveiling uncomfortable realities.The legacy of WikiLeaks goes beyond exposing government misconduct; it pierces the veil of secrecy shrouding global affairs. The release of  Collateral Murder , the haunting camera footage from a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad showing the murder of several civilians, including two Reuters journalists, shocked the world. As we’ve seen in the past two months, the killing of civilians and journalists in war continues. In the last two months, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed dozens of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. On Thursday, human rights groups determined that Israel had deliberately fired on a Reuters journalist in southern Lebanon—a blatant war crime.The aim of targeting journalists is to keep information where governments want it—under lock and key. That is why Wikileaks is such a threat—because, since its founding, it has fearlessly worked to wrest that information out of the hands of the powerful and put it in the hands of the people.Wikileaks exposed not only civilian casualties, torture, and other human rights abuses through projects such as the Iraq War Logs, but also published documents that offer invaluable insight into conflicts still raging today. For example, cables released by Wikileaks in the 2010 Cablegate leaks show Israel’s policy towards Gaza in the years following Hamas’s election victory in 2006 and the group’s 2007 takeover of the strip. According to the cable, Israel determined that Hamas’s rise in Gaza would benefit them as it would allow the Israeli military to “deal with Gaza as a hostile state” and so turned down a Palestinian Authority request for assistance in defeating Hamas. Israeli policy to blockaded Gaza was to “keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest possible level consistent with avoiding humanitarian crisis.”This information is essential, and we need more of it. That’s why the three of us, as members of the Belmarsh Tribunal—a group of experts that gathers together at regular intervals to present evidence about Assange’s persecution—are raising our voices together to free the truth and free Assange.The extradition case against Assange is now entering its final phase, with his final UK court hearing expected in early 2024. He could then be brought to the US to face charges under the Espionage Act. The potential ramifications for power-challenging, truth-seeking journalism cannot be overstated.The application of the Espionage Act in the US sets a chilling precedent that reverberates far beyond Assange’s individual fate. The silencing of a truth-seeker sends a dangerous message, signaling a decline in the resilience of a free press against the forces of authoritarianism.The latest meeting of the tribunal is taking place in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. (The Nation is a cosponsor of the event.) One of us, Lina Attalah, the chief editor of the Egyptian publication Mada Masr, is unable to attend in person. Her publication’s reporting of the ongoing assault on Gaza has raised the ire of the US-allied Egyptian state. If the US can imprison those who reveal torture and persecute journalists who reveal truths, what’s to stop the US government’s authoritarian allies?In defending Assange, we defend the right to know, to question, and to challenge power. The echoes of history remind us that the struggle for press freedom is ongoing, and the fate of Julian Assange is a litmus test for the resilience of truth in the face of oppression. The world needs more journalism that fearlessly confronts power, not less.The pressure is mounting on the Biden administration to free Julian Assange. It’s not only one man’s life that is at stake, but the First Amendment and freedom of the press itself. As long as the Espionage Act is deployed to imprison those who exposed war crimes, no publisher and no journalist will be safe. Yanis Varoufakis

Yanis Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece and a cofounder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025.

Lina Attalah

Lina Attalah is a cofounder and the chief editor of Mada Masr, an independent online Egyptian newspaper.

John Kiriakou John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer who blew the whistle on the agency’s use of torture.

For The Nation site, where this article was originally printed, please click here.

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On the causes and nature of Populism’s Surge – interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend

Discussing the surge of ultra-rightist populism, where I argued it all started with the West’s response to the 2008 crash – just like after 1929. When $35 trillion was printed on behalf of financiers (between 2009 and 2022), while most people were subjected to some variant of austerity, and given the Left’s failure to defend the majority, the rise of new forms of fascism was inevitable.

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As bombs are raining down on Gaza again, it is no longer about Hamas or Netanyahu. It is about OUR humanity being tested – video message

A genocide of Palestinians is happening in Gaza now, in tandem with Israel’s methodically opportunistic ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. We are here because our humanity is being tested – because future generations will censure us for letting the death count exceed 10 thousand, mostly children and women. We are here because, when our grandchildren ask us “Where were you during the mass murder of Palestinians in 2023?” there will be no hiding behind excuses such as “we did not know”.We do know! Our governments know. Everyone knows because the official representatives of the State of Israel proclaim proudly and openly their genocidal intent. Was it not Israel’s Prime Minister who quoted biblical scripture to justify the wiping out of Gazan Palestinians? Are key ministries of the state of Israel not being run by fundamentalist extremists peddling what can only be described as Messianic visions of a land from the river to the sea delivered fully into the hands of settlers, emptied of Palestinians? No. No one can feign ignorance anymore.This is why we are here. To tell our rulers:Enough! Put an end to the slaughter or the slaughtered will haunt you in your sleep till the end of your days.Enough! We shall never let you forget that you are aiding and abetting Crimes-Against-Humanity, even if the International Criminal Court disgraces itself by staying quiet.But, friends, to be on the right side of humanism, we need to be clear on who humanity’s enemy here is: It is not the people of Israel, for they suffer too. It is not the Jews outside of Israel – in the same way that the British Empire’s atrocities in Kenya and in India were not the doing of the majority of Britons who also suffered violence and expropriation under the same British authorities – and in the same way that our Israeli friends and comrades are suffocating today under Israel’s apartheid apparatus.To drive this point home, allow me a personal note. Back in 2015, while fighting the financial oligarchy during my brief tenure as my Greece’s finance minister, an oligarchic newspaper thought they diminished me with a cartoon that depicted me as a Shylock-like figure. What these idiots did not realise was that trying to tarnish my image by likening me to a Jew was, and remains, a badge of honour.Whenever an antisemite bundles me together with a people who have suffered racism for so long so very bravely, I feel deeply flattered. As long as a single Jew feels threatened by antisemitism, I shall carry the Star of David, eager and ready to be counted as a Jew.At the same time, as long as a single Palestinian is terrorised, deprived of water, bombed, maimed or killed, I shall wear the Palestinian flag as a symbol of solidarity with a people living in an Apartheid state built by reactionary Israelis damaging my Jewish and Arab brothers and sisters, and stoking the fires of racism – which, ironically, always forge a steelier variety of antisemitism.Here is a question for well-meaning people who think that centuries of pogroms against Jews, culminating into the uniquely evil Holocaust, make it incumbent upon us to defend Israel come what may:How far must Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians proceed before our utterly justified collective guilt over the Holocaust no longer prevents us from confronting Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?Until the last Palestinian is killed or exiled?Is this the legacy we want to leave behind those of us genuinely opposing antisemitism in all its forms?Does ANYONE think that our guilt over the Holocaust can be washed clean with Palestinian blood? I don’t believe so.And now a message to those for whom Hamas’ atrocities justify all atrocities Israel, supported by the West, inflict on the Palestinian people.Have we not learned the lessons of recent history? The undisputed fact that Saddam, Qaddafi and the Taliban were bloodthirsty tyrants was a terrible reason to invade, and to bomb to smithereens, the people of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan.Consider also this: What if Hamas had never existed? What is the Palestinians’ representatives recognised Israel and laid down their arms? What would be happening now? No need to speculate. Just look at the West Bank where there is no Hamas and where the Palestinian Authority cooperates with Israel: Mass murders, evictions, collective humiliation, Apartheid methods, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank. Clearly, focusing on Hamas’ atrocities is a cheap trick for ignoring the true cause of this endless, one-sided crime against the Palestinian people.Meanwhile our established parties of government, if pressed, will tell you that their idea of a peaceful future is the Two State Solution. They are lying! They know that Netanyahu’s life aim was always to make the Two State Solution impossible & ethnic cleansing permanent – an aim that Europe, Britain and the United States allowed him to fulfil – a great gift to Hamas who use the Palestinians’ ongoing suffering as an excuse for their inexcusable atrocities. At that point our Western rulers condemn Hamas and back Netanyahu to kill off the leftovers of the Two State Solution with far worse atrocities whose ultimate victim is the West’s Two State Solution. And that’s how Netanyahu’s and the Israeli racist fundamentalists’ plan to destroy the Two State Solution is implemented. With our Western leaders’ consent!That’s why we are here. Because our Western rulers are a clear and present danger for World Peace. What should be done now? Four things to begin with.An immediate ceasefire.The release of all hostages, Hamas’ and the thousands held by Israel.An arms embargo and commercial sanctions on Israel.The immediate recognition, symbolic but crucial, of a Palestinian State across all the lands Israel occupies since 1967.And, of course, a Peace Process, under the United Nations, supported by a commitment by the International Community to end Apartheid and to safeguard Equal Civil Liberties for All – whether as part of two multi-ethnic states or one common secular one.Our rulers will not push for any of this. This is why we are here. This is why you are here.When the rulers fail History, it is the People who must make History.I salute you all. Carpe DiEM!

 

 

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Europe’s 15-Year Slump – Project Syndicate op-ed

The European Union’s supporters celebrate the survival of the euro, the fact that public debt is no longer the threat it was, and, crucially, that their mercantilist business model remains intact. But it has come at a steep price: Europe’s permanent stagnation and continuing fragmentation.ATHENS – Europe is languishing in a long-term economic slump whose origins lay in Wall Street’s near-death experience in 2008. There have, of course, been subsequent spurts of growth (and hope), but these tend to fizzle out soon after they appear.Given the European Union’s policy choices, it could not have been otherwise. These policies reflected the eurozone’s faulty design and guaranteed chronically low investment at precisely the time massive investments were necessary to shift Europe’s aging industrial base from dirty energy, chemicals, and the internal combustion engine to cloud capital and green technologies.On both sides of the Atlantic, the policy response to the chain reaction triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was similar. The United States and the EU carried out history’s grandest and most cynical transfer of private losses from the books of quasi-criminal financiers onto public debt ledgers, combined with fiscal austerity to rein in burgeoning public debt. The result? A massive liquidity trap that increased public debt and led to the greatest disconnect ever between available liquidity and real capital investment.The predictable long-term outcome was economic stagnation. In the event, the malaise was so deep and lasted so long that it poisoned politics in Europe and the US. But that’s where the similarities end and Europe’s growing disadvantage relative to the US begins, because, unlike the US, the eurozone lacked the federal institutions which, in times of crisis (like that of 1929 or 2008), can stabilize a monetary union and prevent it from falling into a lasting slump.After 2008, the EU had two options for keeping its monetary union intact, only the first of which could avert the permanent slump. The first option was to federate de facto, even if not de jure, a strategy that would entail common debt, substantial federal-like taxes, and a five-year aggregate pan-European green investment plan.To choose this option, however, Europe would have to ditch the neo-mercantilism central to the German and Dutch business models, which lay at the heart of the eurozone. One might have thought (as, admittedly, I did) that Europe’s elites would have considered the abandonment of neo-mercantilism a relatively small price to pay for avoiding a perma-slump.But one would have been wrong. Europe’s most successful net exporters and their political agents cared far less for Europe’s dynamism than for maintaining their reliance on net exports sustained by the US trade deficit (a constant source of aggregate demand for their wares). They also ranked the importance of their net exports to China and the suppression of German wages well above the importance of giving Europe a chance to recover its elan.The second option was to avoid the quasi-federal option by relying on massive austerity for the eurozone’s most depressed member states, accompanied by equally massive quantitative easing favoring the least depressed parts of the monetary union. This was the option that was adopted, with the cruel treatment of the eurozone’s most bankrupt member, Greece, intended to signal this choice to the other member states.The result was that the euro was saved at the expense of a permanent stagnation in aggregate investment across Europe, along with deepening rifts between the EU’s north and south (with new east and west rifts developing, too). Meanwhile, the US is on a public investment spree that lures Europe’s industrial conglomerates stateside, thus deepening the EU’s investment gap. Unsurprisingly, the EU, despite its Green Deal pronouncements, cannot fund its own green transition, let alone Ukraine’s post-war recovery.Today, the danger is not that Europe’s policymakers will double down with more fiscal austerity. Their preferred weapon of contraction nowadays is monetary policy. Having erred once in shunning a bold progressive monetary policy that would have averted the recent bout of inflation, they are now tightening too much and for too long. The result is that an already disjointed monetary union, on the verge of recession in the midst of stubborn inflation (despite the rapidly shrinking money supply), is falling behind China and the US.The cause of all this is structural. Contractionary, and thus debilitating, austerity remains hard-wired into Europe’s current institutional framework – a fact that stops governments of all political shades from trying out different policy agendas. Europe’s unfinished architecture of integration prohibits experimentation with the kind of industrial policy the US is now pursuing (under the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act) or with other agendas.Sure enough, the German government is departing from EU orthodoxy, by channeling vast public funds into aiding its floundering industrial model. But it does so at the cost of wrecking the single market and the commitment (more theoretical than actual) to a pan-European level playing field. Expect a backlash soon from EU member states that cannot match German subsidies, especially those that cannot protect their industries by devaluation.EU cheerleaders celebrate the survival of the euro, the fact that public debt is no longer the threat it was, and, crucially, that their mercantilist business model remains intact. Deep down, they understand that they owe this small miracle to those who worked hard at the European Central Bank (despite the Bundesbank’s fierce opposition) to crank up the ECB’s printing presses and unleash torrents of euros to prevent a Greece-style outcome in Italy.But it has come at a steep price: Europe’s permanent stagnation and continuing fragmentation. Europe’s monetary union remains disastrously incomplete, lacking the political and fiscal union necessary to make it work; worse, 15 years of malaise have deepened the impasse. We Europeans must either brace ourselves for secular decline, forced upon us by our problematic currency, or do something about it. A structural problem demands a political solution.

For the Project Syndicate site, please click here.

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Questions I am frequently asked on Israel-Palestine

The Israeli-Palestinian Question could not be more complex, urgent and emotionally charged. Those of us who take a position on it have a duty to a full disclosure of the thoughts, assumptions and beliefs that motivate our commentary. To this effect, I collected a number of questions I am frequently asked by friends and critics which I answer below. They may not be a comprehensive, all-encompassing, set but it will inform you sufficiently on where I stand on the crucial issues involved.ON ISRAELIS’ EXISTENTIAL FEARSIs Israel not engaged in a war for its very existence? No, it is not. Israel is a nuclear-armed state with perhaps the most technologically advanced army in the world and the panoply of the US military machine (including aircraft carriers at the ready) having its back. There is no symmetry with Hamas or Islamic Jihad, groups which can cause serious damage to Israelis but which have no capacity whatsoever to defeat Israel’s military, or even to prevent Israel from continuing ethnically to cleanse Palestinians under the system of Apartheid that has been erected with long-standing US and EU support.Are Israelis not justified to fear that many Palestinians would love to throw them into the sea (if not exterminate them in some gigantic pogrom)?Of course they are! Many Palestinians, sadly, dream of a Palestine either free of Jews or with the Jews fully subjugated – exactly like many Israelis, sadly, share the ultra-Zionist dream of a Greater Israel either free of Palestinians or with the Palestinians fully subjugated. This is the tragic reality of the Land of Palestine today. And, yes, given that Jews have suffered a Holocaust that was preceded with pogroms and a deep-seated antisemitism permeating Europe and the Americas for centuries, it is only natural that Israelis live in fear of a new pogrom if the Israeli army folds. However, by imposing Apartheid on Palestinians, Bedouins etc., by treating them like sub-humans (or human animals), the Israeli state is stoking the fires of antisemitism, is strengthening the Palestinians who dream of pushing Jews into the sea (against those who dream of peaceful co-existence with the Jews), and, in the end, contributes to the awful insecurity consuming Jews in Israel and the Diaspora. Apartheid against the Palestinians is not the Israelis’ best defence – to put it mildly. Ergo, Europeans and Americans do the Jewish people an incredible disservice when supporting, or turning a blind eye to, Israel’s Apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.But, surely, Israel is at war with GazaIsrael is not, and cannot be, at war with Gaza. Gaza is not a country. It is a Palestinian territory illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. The fact that Ariel Sharon, Israel’s then PM, decided to withdraw Israel’s army (and a few settlers) from Gaza in order to turn it into an Israeli open prison for millions of Palestinians (totally blockaded, ceremonially bombed, and absolutely dependent on Israel for water, food, fuel, everything), does not make Gaza a country. Nor does the fact that Hamas took over Gaza after the Israeli army’s withdrawal. [For cinema buffs, who remember John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, it is like saying that, in that movie, Manhattan was a country with which the USA was at war.]Did you expect Israel to supply an enemy population with water, food and medicine?It does not matter what you or I expect in this regard. International Law, including the Geneva Convention, demands it! Indeed, withholding water, food, medicine, fuel etc. from an occupied population that Israel keeps imprisoned in Gaza constitutes a war crime. It is equally a crime to withhold the basics of life from a population in order to force it to accept its transfer to another land.Even if its existence is not threatened, for now, does Israel not have the right to defend itself?Of course it does. We all have a natural right to defend ourselves. However, just as my right to defend myself when an intruder breaks into my home is limited by law (e.g., I have no right to kill him after I have disarmed him, and certainly not to kill his family while pursuing him), so is a state’s right to self-defence against a state or an armed resistance group in an occupied territory. This is why we have the Geneva Convention and the International Criminal Court whose statutes make it abundantly clear that Israel’s military assault on Gaza after the 7th October Hamas assault constitutes a series of war crimes. (See Appendix 1)ON HAMASDo I condemn Hamas’ atrocities?I condemn every single atrocity, every war crime (as defined in International Law, see Appendix 1) whomever is the perpetrator or the victim: Hamas, Israeli settlers or the Israeli armed forces. The Geneva Convention holds for everyone or it holds for no one. What I do not condemn is armed resistance to an occupier, to an Apartheid system designed as part of a slow-burning, but inexorable, ethnic cleansing program. [In the same way I do not condemn legitimate IDF military action in defence of its soldiers or Israeli citizens within Israel-proper.] Indeed, Palestinians (PLO, Hamas or any group or individual) have a DUTY to demolish the Fence in Gaza and Sharon’s Wall in the West Bank – as well as to attack the IDF. What they do not have is the right to attack civilians.”But is Hamas not a terrorist organisation?As we know well, one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. Were Yitzak Shamir (Israel’s PM between 1986 and 1992) and his Stern Gang terrorists? The British government, and most European ones, thought so but many Jews did not. Was the IRA a terrorist organisation? Perhaps, except that without the IRA (and its political wing, Sinn Fein, which today is the largest Irish party both North and South of the border) there would be no Good Friday agreement and no end to The Troubles. Was Nelson Mandela a terrorist? Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan certainly thought and said so – and, as a result, the ANC and its cadres were on the US and UK terrorist list.Returning to Hamas, there is no doubt that Hamas uses terror tactics and/or commits war crimes. But, then again, so does the State of Israel for (more than) seven decades (illegal evictions, illegal settlements, illegal imprisonment of civilians and civil society representatives in occupied territories, murders and the ritual humiliation, white phosphorous bombs, wholesale destruction of hospitals, whole neighbourhoods etc.).Hamas is no different to ISIS or Al Qaida. Surely, Israel has a right to take Hamas out like the US, Iran, the Kurds and others eradicated ISISFalse analogy. Al Qaida had no roots in the local population, anywhere. They were not a homegrown, roots up movement – unlike the ANC, the IRA, the PKK in Turkey, the Tigers in Sri Lanka. Al Qaida were a bunch of imported gunmen with no organic connection to the Sudanese or the Afghans. As was ISIS. Hamas, on the other hand, in one way or another (with massive intertemporal help from Israel, who were keen to see Hamas rise up as an internal foe to PLO), ended up growing deep roots in Palestinian society (especially in Gaza) – providing services to a desperate population that no one else provided. So, even if you choose to call Hamas a terrorist organisation, it is simply factually wrong to say that Hamas is no different to Al Qaida or ISIS. And this is doubly important because any Peace Process must involve Hamas (like that in Northern Ireland had to involve the IRA).But Hamas uses Palestinians as human shieldsIsrael and Palestine, taken together, is a tiny land with two (main) populations at war with one another for eighty years. In such a confined area, it is impossible to conduct war without ‘human shields’. Put differently, the idea of a war in that neck of the woods where the combatants are neatly separated from the civilians is ridiculous. Case in point: Where are the Headquarters of the Israeli army, which has a lot more room for manoeuvre than any Palestinian armed resistance group? In downtown, densely populated Tel Aviv! Does this mean that the Israeli army is using the nearby population as human shields? Would Palestinian fighters (Hamas or anyone else) be justified to flatten the whole neighbourhood, including the nearby hospitals, on the strength of the argument that “the Israeli army is hiding behind human shields”? That would be a ludicrous argument. Exactly as ludicrous as the Israeli statements justifying mass civilian deaths on the basis of the ‘human shields’ argument.Hamas do not care for their own people whom they know will be bombed when Hamas unleashes attacks from within Gaza on Israeli targetsThis is an argument used by every occupying force to shift the blame for civilian deaths to the armed resistance against their occupation. Indeed, every resistance movement in History faces the accusation that, in raising arms against an occupying force with overwhelming firepower, it is risking its own population. Here in Greece, that was the argument of Nazi collaborators against the Greek Resistance: Greek partisans knew that, when they shot at a Nazi patrol, the Nazis would kill at least 10 Greek men for every one of their soldiers that the partisans killed. Therefore, the Nazis’ and their collaborators’ argument was, the partisans were responsible for the Nazi’s criminal reprisals. Ergo, acquiescence to the occupation was the only ‘humane’ choice. Do Israeli officials think it is a good idea for them to employ such an argument? I don’t think so.The Palestinians voted for Hamas in Gaza – they are not innocentIsraelis must beware this argument – for it is ever so easily reversible: Netanyahu and other genocidal Israeli government ministers (e.g., Bezalel Smotrich, Ben-Gvir) were elected with a clear agenda of war crimes; of ethnically cleansing Palestinians. This does not, and should never, legitimise any Palestinian armed group killing Israelis on the grounds that they are collectively responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The very notion of collective guilt is not only racist but also a war crime in itself.If they Palestinians are innocent, why are they not turning the Hamas men over to Israel?First, because the Hamas fighters have guns and, thus, the weak and the infirm that Israel is bombing to oblivion cannot hand them over to Israel even if they wanted to. Secondly, consider what you are telling the people of Gaza. You are telling them this:Israeli troops killed your grandfather in 1948, took your olive grove and your home and chased your family into Gaza. Since then, their bombs murdered your brother, cousins, mother and friends while confining you to an open-air prison where your children grow up malnourished, with no prospect of a decent education, no chance of a dignified job, no capacity to travel, zero hope. Every few months, bombs rain down from the sky and, periodically, Israeli troops enter your village shooting at you and your neighbours indiscriminately. The neighbourhood’s kids, having no other outlet for their frustration or dignity, join Hamas as nurses, teachers or, yes, gunmen eager to shoot back at the Israelis. And, now, the ‘civilised’ West – who have not lifted a finger on your behalf all these decades -point the finger at you for not handing over these young gunmen to the army that has destroyed your nation and whose commanders answer to a government that proudly pronounces the end of any chance of you becoming an equal citizen of any state. And all this while the West knows what will happen in Gaza if Hamas surrenders: the kind of ethnic cleansing that proceeds apace in the West Bank, where there is no Hamas.I submit to you dear reader that we, Europeans and Americans, should hang our heads in shame for even thinking of telling the people of Gaza anything like the above.Why don’t you agree that Hamas, a fundamentalist Islamist group intolerant not only of Israel but also of secular people like yourself Yanis, must be eradicated so that Gazans can return to a normal life?What does it mean to eradicate Hamas today? Who counts as Hamas? Do you ‘eradicate’ the nurses employed by the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza? The teachers employed by the Hamas-run Education Ministry in Gaza? Are you forgetting that, unlike Al Qaida which was never integrated with the Afghan communities, Hamas is utterly interwoven with Gazan society? In this sense, Netanyahu and his fellow genocidal Israeli politicians are more logically consistent than those (possible well-meaning people) arguing for an eradication of Hamas in Gaza so that the Gazan Palestinians can live happily ever after. For Netanyahu and his fellow supporters of genocide aim at the murder of as many Gazans as it takes to persuade the rest to move from Gaza to some arid desert in the Sinai or to any country that will have them. In short, anyone who believes in the physical elimination of anyone connected with Hamas is supporting genocide in Gaza (as a first step to genocide across the West Bank).How should Israel have responded after the 7th October Hamas attack?The first duty of the Israeli army was, of course, to neutralise the attackers. The second duty fell to the Israeli government to free the Israeli hostages that Hamas had dragged into Gaza – which would mean negotiations involving the international community. The government’s third duty to Israeli society, one that every Israeli government has had for decades but eschewed, is to announce the end of Apartheid and the admission that, as long as Israel enforces a State of Apartheid on the Palestinians, violence will beget violence with the result that Israelis will never be able to live in Peace.ISRAEL IS AN APARTHEID STATE THAT MUST BE RESISTED – WITH ARMED STRUGGLE IF NEEDS BEAre you seriously saying that Israel is enforcing a State of Apartheid on the Palestinians? Don’t take my word for it that Israel is imposing Apartheid on the Palestinians. Tamir Pardo, a former Director of Mossad said it: “…Israel’s mechanisms for controlling the Palestinians, from restrictions on movement to placing them under military law while Jewish settlers in the occupied territories are governed by civilian courts, matched the old South Africa… There is an apartheid state here,” he said. “In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.” And it is not just him. The former speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, Avraham Burg, and the renowned Israeli historian, Benny Morris, are among more than 2,000 Israeli and American public figures who have signed a recent public statement declaring that “Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid”.Are you drawing a parallel between Mandela’s ANC and the thugs of Hamas?Those who scream blue murder when any comparison is made between South African Apartheid with Israel’s must be reminded that Nelson Mandela was never in doubt that Palestinians lived under Apartheid. [Or that Israel was openly the best ally of the White Supremacists in Pretoria].

Similarly, Desmond Tutu, another hero of the Anti-Apartheid Resistance in South Africa was under no illusion: Palestinians suffer under Israel’s Apartheid.Why don’t Palestinians pursue their objectives by peaceful means?They did. The PLO recognised Israel and renounced armed struggle. And what did they get for it? Absolute humiliation and systematic ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. That is what nurtured Hamas and elevated it the eyes of many Palestinians as the only alternative to a slow genocide under Israel’s Apartheid – leading to Hamas’ takeover of the government of Gaza.THE WAY FORWARDWhat about antisemitism? Is it not a scourge?Of course it is. Antisemitism is deeply ingrained in the West, and worldwide, and needs to be fought against constantly. The question is: Does the genocide of Palestinians serve, or does it hinder, the purpose of defeating antisemitism? My specific question to Europeans who feel the need to support Israel come what may, due to our collective guilt over the Holocaust, is this: How far will you allow Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to proceed before our fully justified guilt over European antisemitism and over the Holocaust no longer permits us to tolerate Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians? Put in more emotive terms: How much more Palestinian blood is necessary to cleanse our guilt over the Holocaust? Surely, NEVER AGAIN means NEVER AGAIN FOR EVERYONE & ANYONE – Jews, Palestinians, everyone.For my take on Antisemitism, as penned long before the 7th October Hamas assault, please see this long article.The West must recognise that the current Israeli game plan is Palestinian genocideThis is what the Israeli government and main opposition are telling us. They reject both a Palestinian State and the idea of a single state in which Palestinians enjoy the same civil and political rights and liberties as the Jews. What option does this leave? Ethnic cleansing, Apartheid, genocide. Indeed, Israel’s authorities do not hide the ambition for an Israel that has annexed all the occupied territories and has ethnically cleansed all Palestinians (except perhaps for a small number who accept second-rate status and who provide menial labour to their Israeli masters). In addition, for decades (and even more so after the 7th of October), the Israeli authorities are telling the world something incredibly chilling:Israel’s army has the right to KILL ANY AND EVERY PALESTINIAN in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Armed men, unarmed men, journalists, women, older people, doctors, nurses and farmers – whoever is killed by Israel is officially declared a legitimate murder target as either directly culpable or as human shields (for whom blame is shifted to the Palestinians hiding behind them) or as a complicit population (due to their sympathy for the armed resistance). Even days-old babies are declared deservedly dead because, had they lived, they would grow up to be terrorists.What should be done now? What might bring Peace to Israel-Palestine?A global campaign of boycotting, divestment and sanctioning of Israel and of Hamas until there is an immediate ceasefire, all hostages are released (Hamas’ and the thousands held by Israel), Israel recognises the State of Palestine and a Peace Process begins under the United Nations supported by a commitment by the International Community to end Apartheid and to safeguard Equal Civil Rights & Political Liberties for All. Whether this will end in a single federal state or two side-by-side multi-ethnic states sharing the Ancient Land of Palestine, this is up to Israelis and Palestinians to decide.Yes, but you (and DiEM25, the movement to which you belong) have already come out in favour of a Single Secular State solutionYes, we have. But that is only our opinion. As internationalists, we have a duty to have an opinion about the substantial political conflicts and issues all over the world – but that, of course, does not mean that we shall tell the people directly involved what to do. Speaking personally, I was persuaded by the great, late, Ed Said that the Two-State Solution is untenable (at least for progressive internationalists) and that the only humanist outcome would be something along the lines of a One State Solution. As for DiEM25, two years ago we had a long, vigorous and hotly contested debate amongst ourselves which resulted in this joint position. But, lest I am misunderstood, this is a matter for Palestinians and Israelis, Israelis and Palestinians, to decide.We, the international community, have a duty to help our Israeli and Palestinian friends and comrades to smash Apartheid, to eradicate antisemitism and to edge bigotry out so that, whatever the specific solution the peoples directly involved come up with, everyone living, labouring and dreaming on the Land of Ancient Palestine is vested with the same civil rights and political freedoms.Appendix 1 – What International Law SaysRome Statute of the International Criminal Court – Genocide Article 6(c): Deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.Article 25(3)(c): For the purpose of facilitating the commission of such a crime, aids, abets or otherwise assists in its commission or its attempted commission, including providing the means for its commission.Article 25(3)(e): Directly and publicly incites others to commit genocide. War crimes –Grave breaches of the 1949Geneva Conventions Article 8(2)(a)(i): Willful killing. Article 8(2)(a)(ii); Torture and inhuman treatment.Article 8(2)(a)(iii): Willfully causing great suffering and serious injury to body and health. Article 8(2)(a)(iv): Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.Article 8(2)(a)(vii): Unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement. Other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict, within the established framework of international lawArticle 8(2)(b)(i)): Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities.Article 8(2)(b)(ii): Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives.Article 8(2)(b)(iii): Intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, as long as they are entitled to the protection given to civilians or civilian objects under the international law of armed conflict. Article 8(2)(b)(iv): Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated.Article 8(2)(b)(ix): Intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not military objectives. Article 8(2)(b)(xii): Declaring that no quarter will be given.Article 8(2)(b)(xiv): Intentionally directing attacks against buildings, material, medical units and transport, and personnel using the distinctive emblems of the Geneva Conventions in conformity with international law.Article 8(2)(b)(xx): Employing weapons, projectiles and material and methods of warfare which are of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering or which are inherently indiscriminate in violation of the international law of armed conflict, provided that such weapons, projectiles and material and methods of warfare are the subject of a comprehensive prohibition and are included in an annex to this Statute, by an amendment in accordance with the relevant provisions set forth in articles 121 and 123. Article 8(2)(b)(xxv): Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival.

 

 

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How should we tax wealth & multinationals globally? Speech at UNDP, New York 14th NOV 2023

Ms Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, Esteemed colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen, before I address the question of taxing serious wealth seriously, I you forgive my inability to proceed without an acknowledgement of the human tragedy in the Middle East.As Secretary General Goutières correctly put it, nothing happens in a vacuum, nothing is sustainable in the face of industrial scale cruelty. So, for the record, I declare that, as long as a single Jewish person is targeted by antisemites, I shall wear the star of David in solidarity AND, at the same time, as long as a single Palestinian is bombed and leaves under Apartheid conditions, I shall wrap myself in the Palestinian flag. Moving on to our session’s topic:Lessons from the EurozoneSince 2008, our central banks, fiscal levers and tax systems have been servicing a tiny oligarchy whose riches are surpassing the limits of human imagination while the majority of our peoples have become poorer, disenchanted and cynical – paving the ground to populist zealots eager to poison our politics. Meanwhile, our climate crisis is ever so close to the point of no return but the poor, who will suffer the most, can’t pay for its reversal while the rich whistle down the wind.This is not a technical problem is search of a technical fix. It is a political problem that guarantees to undermine any macroeconomic policy concocted as if society is a competitive marketplace populated by clones of some representative agent.At the beginning there was the financial sector’s collapse in 2008. Hot on its heels came the so-called dogma of expansionary contraction – which amounted to (A) history’s grandest and most cynical transfer of private losses from the books of the quasi-criminal financiers onto our public debt ledgers, combined with (B) universal fiscal austerity – supposedly to arrest the burgeoning public debt burden. The result was a massive liquidity trap that increased public debt and led Europe and the US to the greatest disconnect ever between available liquidity and real capital investment.This was no mistake. At best it was an example of motivated irrationality – of the sort I witnessed back in 2015 while negotiating with the troika regarding two related, red-hot, issues: Debt & VAT. My proposals got off to a flying start when I discussed them first with the IMF leadership. To restructure Greece’s public debt to the official sector I had proposed swaps using GDP-indexed bonds and perpetuals with no further haircuts for privateers. Regarding VAT reform, I proposed the simplification of rates (that the IMF demanded) and the reduction in rates (that I wanted to reduce VAT evasion and stimulate the small business sector). To my surprise, the IMF leadership endorsed both proposals in private. A few days later, at the following Eurogroup, the deal was off – without warning or explanation.Why? Did they change their minds about the logic of the policies we had agreed? No, it was a political decision to fall into line with Berlin’s policies. Which begs the question: Why did German officials claiming to want to increase our tax base, so as to rein in our public debt, undermine an agreement that would do exactly that? The answer lies in the political economy of the eurozone. Put simply, there were always only two ways the eurozone could be held together.Option 1 was to federate de facto, even if not de jure – a process whose first step would be the sort of Debt & Tax Restructuring I advocated for Greece before proceeding to the second step: the issuing of eurobonds (in the interests of surplus recycling) in tandem with a 5-year aggregate paneuropean green investment plan. But that would kill off the neomercantilism at the heart of the German business model. European net exporters would no longer be able to reply on the US trade deficit as a source of aggregate demand for their exports. And it would also mean higher German wages.Option 2 relied on massive austerity accompanied by massive quantitative easing – which, at the expense of crushing investment and causing deepening rifts between North and South (now East & West too!), it turned the eurozone into a permanently stagnating (yet still rich), politically impotent, monetary union – one that is incapable of investing properly in its own Green Transition.In summary, the eurozone crisis reveals how macroeconomic policy is always and everywhere subjugated to the authority of concentrated rentier power which will sacrifice the common good at the drop of a hat to reproduce itself. I submit to you that this is an insight our discussions on taxation and sustainable development cannot afford to neglect.Taxation Reform: State of PlayRecently, many hopes have been vested in windfall taxes, wealth taxes and a universal minimum corporate tax rate in the context of the OECD’s Base Erosion & Profit Shifting (BEPS) framework.We all know this framework’s severe limitations: 15% is too low and too flat a rate and it comes with more exemptions than Swiss cheese comes with holes. Moreover, the multinationals can conjure up as many IP-based deductibles as they please to pay as little tax as they want to pay.Multinational rentiers, in short, do not fear the new OECD framework. And this at a time when a new, menacing form of macroeconomically significant rent is coming into play: Cloud Rent. In a recent book I argue that a new form of capital, cloud capital, has emerged as a produced means of behavioural modification. Amazon’s or Alibaba’s capital, for example, does two things: It trains us to train it to train us to train it to manufacture our demand for wares that Amazon sells to us directly bypassing all markets – wares Amazon does not produce but over which it ‘taxes’ their producers a huge cloud rent (between 15% and 40%). There is, ladies and gentlemen, no way our national tax offices can quantify, let alone tax, these cloud rents through conventional means. To tax them, we must tax revenues at the point of sale – a cloud tax on revenues, not on reported profits. And to do so with a progressive rate that is small for cloud-based start-ups but rises with the size of the firm’s revenues.At the national level I believe we need a combination of:The Progressive Cloud Tax on Digital Platform Revenues; including the millions spent by corporations and political parties on social media.Local Progressive Corporate Tax Rates – with punitive rates for windfall monopoly profitsZero VAT rating for basic goodsWhat about the international level? Professor Stiglitz has advocated the issuing of new SDRs to fund the Global Green New Deal in the Global South. That would be splendid. But, I fear, it will not happen. While Joe is right that the new SDRs will not cost Northern governments money, it will cost them power – coveted power over the Global South.So, what should happen? Ideally, we would need to introduce a modern variant of John Maynard Keynes’ International Clearing Union (ICU) featuring a common accounting unit in which all trade and capital flows are denominated (like Keynes’ bancor or the IMF’s SDRs) plus two levies: A trade-imbalance levy that taxes trade deficits and surpluses symmetrically. And a capital-surge levy in proportion to any surge of cross-border capital flows. These levies can then flow into a Global Green Fund for investing in green energy in the Global South.The beauty of the two levies, the trade-imbalance and the capital-surge levies, is that, unlike the minting of new SDRs which involves exogenous political decisions, here the new funds are produced endogenously by the trade and capital flow imbalances that the same two levies help keep in check. This is a little like the brakes of an electric car which, as they slow it down, help generate the electricity that helps propel the car forward.Naturally, just as the powers-that-be will not flood the Global South with SDRs, they will not go for this revival of Keynes’ ICU either. But the Global South can create this system as a coalition-of-the-willing, perhaps in conjunction with BRICS Pay or the New Development Bank, and then exert moral and political pressure on Northern countries (like Norway and Finland) to join in.EPILOGUE: The need to blend high-end policy with grassroots organisingTo conclude, whenever power is concentrated, socially suboptimal policies follow.Ergo, no policy proposal, however smart or common-prosperity-enhancing it might be, stands a chance unless supported by a transnational, progressive, grassroots movement ‘out there’.Here is an example of what I mean: In ten days, on Black Friday, just like on previous Black Fridays, the Progressive International is organising an international rolling strike against Amazon. It begins, with the first light in Vietnam before it proceeds to Bangladesh, then to Germany, to New Jersey and finally to Amazon’s HQ in Seattle. We call it #MakeAmazonPay.Why? Because rational discourse is never enough. No global corporate tax, no cloud tax, no windfall or wealth tax will be enacted without such a movement pushing for it globally.Thank you.

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On Europe’s historic responsibility for the never-ending conflict and war crimes in the ancient land of Palestine – Al Jazeera long interview with Marc Lamont Hill

On UpFront, interviewed by Marc Lamont Hill on Europe’s historic responsibility and current role in the Israel-Gaza war.

 

 

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Discussing Israel’s War Crimes with Katie Halper on USEFUL IDIOTS

In this week’s live chat Yanis Varoufakis joins Katie and Aaron [Jump to 19:25 for the Yanis Varoufakis interview]:  “The United States fully endorses Israel’s war crimes,” says Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. “Because that’s what it is. When you switch off the water to two and a half million people, by the Geneva Convention that’s a war crime.” [Click here for the original site]The economist, who shares a European perspective on the war, says that “the West has conspired to ensure a generalized massacre.” And the real question is “how much Palestinian blood is required to cleanse the hands of Europe?” As a European, Varoufakis tells us how his continent’s mix of guilt and cowardice are keeping the war fueled. “You have a situation where the European Union simply doesn’t exist anymore as a geopolitical entity, and therefore it simply mimics whatever is coming from Washington DC.” This wasn’t the case even twenty years ago, but today governments are too afraid to have their own positions. “Even if they secretly oppose what the United States is doing, European presidents and prime ministers are too scared to actually express these disagreements. And that is a major defeat of European democracy.” So for now, without faith in any government to do what’s right, Yanis Varoufakis encourages the people to take the streets. “I try to make the point that the protests in favor of Palestinians are also protests of solidarity with our Israeli and Jewish comrades who are suffering immensely under the apartheid regime of Netanyahu.” Subscribe for the full interview where Varoufakis shares his deep disappointment in Bernie Sanders, the nefarious reasons for NATO’s existence, the disaster that is the war in Ukraine, and a look at his new book Technofeudalism, which posits that capitalism actually ended over a decade ago.

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