Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 65

The 9th April Eurogroup ended the prospect of saving the EU & heralded more fiscal waterboarding for our countries – Speech in Greece’s Parliament (subtitled)

 

Με λάσπη δεν καμουφλάρεται το 5ο Μνημόνιο που δρομολογήσατε την 9η Απριλίου κ. Μητσοτάκη

Την περασμένη Πέμπτη 9η Απριλίου η κυβέρνηση έδεσε τη χώρα με το 5ο Μνημόνιο. Το έκανε μέσω του Υπουργού Οικονομικών ο οποίος στο Eurogroup της 9ης Απριλίου συναίνεσε σε νέο δάνειο από το ταμείο της τρόικας (τον Eυρωπαϊκό Μηχανισμό Σταθερότητας – ΕΜΣ), «πουλώντας» έτσι το θεραπευτικό για την Ελλάδα και την Ευρώπη ευρωομόλογο – το οποίο και ο ίδιος ο κ. Μητσοτάκης είχε ζητήσει μαζί με άλλους 8 Πρωθυπουργούς και Προέδρους συναισθανόμενος την καταστροφή που έρχεται.
Την περασμένη Πέμπτη 9η Απριλίου, λίγες ώρες πριν το μοιραίο Eurogroup, ζητώντας από τον ΥπΟικ να ασκήσει βέτο στο νέο δάνειο από τον ΕΜΣ, ανάγκασα τον ΥπΟικ σε μέγα ολίσθημα ενώπιον της Ολομέλειας της Βουλής: Ομολόγησε ότι, λίγες ώρες μετά, δεν θα γινόταν «Βαρουφάκης», δηλαδή δήλωσε ότι στο Eurogroup δεν θα ασκούσε βέτο. Με απλά λόγια, ο ΥπΟικ σηματοδότησε στη Γερμανία και στην Ολλανδία την συνθηκολόγηση της ελληνικής κυβέρνησης με το 5ο Μνημόνιο πριν ακόμα ξεκινήσει το Eurogroup – στο οποίο, έτσι, προσήλθε ως θλιβερός παρατηρητής.

Την περασμένη Πέμπτη 9η Απριλίου, στην Ολομέλεια της Βουλής, οι κυβερνητικοί υπουργοί και βουλευτές, συμπεριλαμβανομένου του Υπουργού Οικονομικών, έμειναν αμήχανοι και άφωνοι μπροστά στην πραγματικότητα που τους παρουσίασα:


Πτώση του ΑΕΠ τουλάχιστον -10%, μάλλον πιο κοντά στο -18%


Πρωτογενές έλλειμμα του κρατικού προϋπολογισμού στο -15%


Ποσοστό χρέους, ως προς το ΑΕΠ, μεταξύ 210% και 220%.


Την περασμένη Πέμπτη 9η Απριλίου, στην Ολομέλεια της Βουλής, εξήγησα πως, οι αριθμοί αυτοί που γεννά η συνθηκολόγηση στο Eurogroup, θα οδηγήσουν με μαθηματική ακρίβεια στην επιβολή από την τρόικα νέων μέτρων λιτότητας ύψους 10% του ΑΕΠ. Λιτότητα που θα ολοκληρώσει την ερημοποίηση της χώρας.
Την περασμένη Πέμπτη 9η Απριλίου κατέρρευσε πλήρως το αφήγημα της κυβέρνησης Μητσοτάκη, και εν γένει του Μνημονιακού Τόξου, ότι πηγαίνοντας συναινετικά με το Eurogroup η Ελλάδα θα ορθοποδήσει. Ακόμα και φιλοκυβερνητικοί σχολιαστές εκείνη τη μέρα έλεγαν ότι «ίσως χρειαζόταν ένας Βαρουφάκης στο Eurogroup».
Ήταν μια δύσκολη στιγμή για την κυβέρνηση και την τρόικα εσωτερικού που τόσα πολλά επένδυσαν, από το 2015, στην δαιμονοποίηση του ΟΧΙ και εμού προσωπικά. Για αυτό και έκαναν αυτό που ξέρουν: Αντιπερισπασμό μέσω λάσπης.
Στόχος τους; Αντί να συζητείται η συνθηκολόγηση στο Eurogroup και το στυγνό 5ο Μνημόνιο που αποκάλυψα την Πέμπτη 9η Απριλίου στην Ολομέλεια της Βουλής, να λοιδορηθώ επειδή… τόλμησα να πάω στη Βουλή, παρουσιαζόμενος ως «παράνομα» μετακινούμενος. Κι όταν συνειδητοποίησαν ότι η δική τους Πράξη Νομοθετικού Περιεχομένου εξαιρεί (ως οφείλει η μη κατάλυση του Κοινοβουλευτισμού) τους βουλευτές από την απαγόρευση μετακίνησης, πέρασαν σε νέα μορφή λάσπης επιστρατεύοντας ψεύδη περί μη συμμόρφωσης μου με ελέγχους λιμενικών κλπ.
Ο Πρωθυπουργός κ. Μητσοτάκης πρέπει να αποφασίσει αν, στην προσπάθεια τους να συγκαλυφθεί το 5ο Μνημόνιο στο οποίο ενέδωσαν την περασμένη Πέμπτη 9η Απριλίου, θα συρθεί στην υπονόμευση του Κοινοβουλευτισμού από υπουργούς του όπως ο κ. Πέτσας (ο οποίος είχε το θράσος να μου ζητήσει να ζητήσω συγγνώμη που έπραξα το κοινοβουλευτικό του καθήκον) και ο κ. Πλακιωτάκης (ο οποίος συμπράττει στην λάσπη καλύπτοντας υπέρβαση καθήκοντος αξιωματικού του Λιμενικού). Η επιλογή δική του.
Το ΜέΡΑ25 σημειώνει την Πέμπτη 9η Απριλίου ως αποφράδα μέρα για τον ελληνικό λαό, σταθμό στην ιστορία της δεκάχρονης Χρεοδουλοπαροικίας μας και, ταυτόχρονα, την ημέρα που μία πανικόβλητη κυβέρνηση μετέτρεψε τη λάσπη από όπλο αποπροσανατολισμού της κοινής γνώμης σε όπλο κατά του ίδιου του Κοινοβουλευτισμού.
Οι βουλευτές, τα στελέχη, τα μέλη και οι φίλοι του ΜέΡΑ25 καλούμε σε δημοκρατική εγρήγορση όλους τους δημοκράτες που βλέπουν το τσουνάμι του 5ου Μνημονίου να έρχεται.
Έρχονται μέρες χαλεπές για τον Λαό, για την Δημοκρατία, για την Ευρώπη ολόκληρη.
Η απάντηση πρέπει να είναι Ενότητα και Αγώνας.
ΟΛΟΚΛΗΡΗ Η ΟΜΙΛΙΑ ΣΤΗ ΒΟΥΛΗ – 9η Απριλίου 2020

 

 

 

The Brown University Journal of PPE interviews Krugman, Pinker & Varoufakis on Inequality, Financialisation, and Populism

JPPE: Many economists have their explanations about where inequality comes from, such as financialization, credit, globalization, technology, and bad policy. When thinking about the causes of inequality in the last thirty years, are there specific areas you think we ought to devote our attention to? 


Yanis Varoufakis: Well, there’s one word that answers your question: financialization. Financialization came on the back of the post-Bretton-Woods drive for completing a surplus society loop, where the United States operated like the world vacuum cleaner, sucking into its territory the net exports of the world on the basis of pushing down wages, lowering inflation, and, of course, Wall Street and the exorbitant power of the dollar. But the tsunami of capital that was going into Wall Street every day to close this loop and to pay for the increasing trade of the US was what shifted the center of gravity of power from industry to finance.
JPPE: Private credit played a big role in that?
Varoufakis: Of course. It’s all private credit. You know, financialization is 99.9 percent private money lending. Consider the financialization of blue-collar workers, in which their homes became the only way of catching up and competing with the Jones’, and since their average earnings were stuck at 1973 levels in real terms, it was only the appreciation of house prices that allowed them to continue the American Dream of rising standards and consumption. And in 2008 that came crashing down, and ever since then, you have a process leading to Trump.
So today’s extreme inequality is due to a very significant class war against the American working class that started at the end of Bretton Woods. And Paul Volker, who recently passed, was central to this. All of this created a new phase in global history: financialized globalization. It pushed inequality back to 1920s levels, financialization collapsed, and then central banks and governments like that of President Obama’s refloated finance, creating socialism for the very few and permanent austerity for everybody else. That’s the answer in a nutshell. That’s my narrative. But, I have to tell you, since your focus is on inequality, I’m one of the very few left-wingers that doesn’t much care about inequality or so much about equality. I don’t consider equality to be such a well-defined term. Equality of what? How do you define it?
JPPE: What about income inequality?
Varoufakis: Inequality is a terrible thing, but it’s a symptom. For me, it’s not the issue. The issue is exploitation. If we have huge levels of exploitation it is because we live in an extractionary economy in which the very few extract value from humans and from nature. Deep down, I’m a liberal, who thinks that liberalism has not served the cause of liberty.
JPPE: You’re a liberal who thinks that liberalism has not fulfilled its promises.
Varoufakis: No, it’s gone completely against its mission, like the Marxism of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union led to a regime that violated every principle of Karl Marx. Similarly, what passes as liberalism has created remarkable illiberties and spread them globally. So what matters to me is freedom from the extractive power of others over you and over nature. Capitalism, through its ever-expanding power, destroys the planet and the air that we need to breathe.
JPPE: People like Harry Frankfurt argue that what we should care about is not the gap between the rich and the poor, but rather how well off the worst off are doing.
Varoufakis: That’s rubbish. This willfully and purposefully neglects the source of the riches of the rich. It is as if it’s a random distribution based on DNA, on ability, and on god-given talents. In the standard debate between John Rawls and Robert Nozick, I was always far more impressed by Nozick than by Rawls because the Rawlsian veil of ignorance is lovely, but the critique of it by Nozick is devastating. He says ‘ok, let’s say we agree with Rawls and we work out what the uniquely just and therefore rational income distribution is. Let’s say we agree, so everybody gets slotted into the income distribution we agreed is uniquely just.’ And then suddenly he’s got this example from basketball, in which one of us becomes very famous for a particular kind of basketballing technique, and people are prepared to pay a lot of money to watch us. Do we ban ourselves from doing this and receiving the money that people are willing to give? Illiberal. Or do we allow ourselves to receive that higher income, in which case we have just proven that the income distribution we decided is uniquely just is not uniquely just?
So in the end, what really matters is not what you have, it’s what you do in order to have it. That is perfectly Marxist to me. And, as a leftist Marxist, the point where I disagree entirely with Nozick is on his definition of entitlement. In his entitlement theory of justice, he says anything people agree to give you under any circumstances means you have it justly and that you are entitled to it. I say this is nonsense. So if you’re starving and I have some food to give you and your kids, and then I make you become my slave voluntarily, that is as coercive as it would be to point a gun at you. So, the distribution of basic goods according to Rawls is important because, without the minimum basic goods, you volunteer to give me things that I’m extracting from you coercively. That’s the Marxist critique. I’m neither Rawlsian or Nozickian, but the process that Nozick brings into the conversation, as well as Hayek, is crucial. But where we disagree with the right-wing is on what qualifies as, firstly, sustainable process and, secondly, just process.
JPPE: Would it be fair to say the distinction also comes down to the difference between positive liberty—the capacity to act—and negative liberty— the right to act? 
Varoufakis: Here I think the theories of the Canadian philosopher CB Macpherson are helpful. He criticized the Isaiah Berlin distinction between positive and negative liberty by asking, very correctly, that if negative liberty is freedom from interference, how do you define interference? If you and I meet in the desert and you are dying of thirst and I have a glass of water and say ‘if you want this, you have to sign a contract saying you pass along all your belongs—your house, your car, and everything’. If you say yes because you are dying of thirst, is this interference? Is this a voluntary transaction? Am I impeding your negative liberty? According to Berlin, I’m not because I’m not forcing you to do anything. You are choosing to give me things for a thing.
In my view, the inequality of access to basic goods like water allows me to exercise extractive exploitation over you and therefore to impede your basic freedom. If you accept the distinction between positive liberty and negative liberty, you end up saying, in the end, ‘we’re only going to accept negative liberty because who gives a damn about positive liberty—it’s too dangerous because it legitimizes all sorts of violations of negative liberty. My model is the following: if instead of negative liberty, you have freedom from extractive power, and instead of positive liberty, you replace it with the notion of developmental freedom—the freedom to develop as a character.
JPPE: Would you say part of the reason it’s so important to object to high levels of inequality comes down to the fact that, in highly unequal societies, you have very different abilities to participate (e.g. unequal baskets of basic goods)? 
Varoufakis: When so much of one side doesn’t have enough to live on, then you have exploitative power and extractive power that functions to deny every liberty to the party that doesn’t have access to that basket of basic goods. This is, of course, the original argument by Karl Marx.
JPPE: Do you think a big component of that comes down to education and access to education?
Varoufakis: No, it comes to ownership. As long as we have shareholders, we’re going to live in an illiberal society. What do I mean by shareholders? As long as you have tradable shares and anyone can buy a share in a company in which they don’t work, then you create this situation where the majority of the shares of any company are going to be owned by people who have nothing to do with the company. And once you enter that process, you create an alliance with finance because finance creates the capacity to buy shares and fictitious capital minted out of thin air that allows the oligarchy the right to extract the value of others.
Yet imagine a situation in which we have shares, but it’s one share and one vote for one person. So anybody working in our business has one vote. I think of it as similar to a library card. When you’re enrolled in a university you get a library. Everyone gets one. You can’t trade it. It would be similar, in this model I am proposing. As long as you work, you have your share. And then you have one vote. Imagine if corporations operated along those lines. There would be inequality because we would all vote on bonuses, and not everybody would get the same bonuses because we would collectively decide that a certain person is of high value to us and so this person deserves more of a bonus. But the differences would be much smaller. And that has to do with the way in which property rights are distributed.
JPPE: Doesn’t this create an incentive for companies to hire fewer people because it would require cutting the company up into thinner slices? 
Varoufakis: I don’t think that holds water because if you and I create a startup and we add a third person to expand, and the growth rate is higher than the basic wage in our company, then we would do it because it’s in our interests to do it. And the fact that companies would be small and not have more than 300 or 400 people —because you can’t scale this up—is a fantastic thing. We need small companies. The whole point about competition is that you have many small companies competing. Now, we have no competitive markets. So one of my criticisms of capitalism is that it is completely anti-competitive. It’s monopolistic.
JPPE: So on some level, it’s almost this Polanyi Esque argument about liberalism undermining itself and actually requiring government state intervention in order for it to even continue as liberalism. 
Varoufakis: Yeah, the Polanyi argument and also the Marx argument. Any attempt to set the state against the market or the market against the state is historically pathetic because the market was created by states. Even the enclosures in Britain that created the circumstances for capital to emerge in Britain would not have happened without the king’s army. To pit the state against the market is historical nonsense.
The only reason capitalism happened in Britain and not in France is that there was a powerful central government in the former but not the latter. And the central government dispatched the army in support of the lords that pushed the peasants off the land and replaced them with sheep. The sheep had the capacity to produce wool which was internationally traded, and suddenly the land had value. Without the king’s army, it wouldn’t have happened.
JPPE: Your focus is on financialization when explaining inequality since the 1970s, but do you think that technological innovations played a role in that as well? In the Industrial Revolution, you saw rising inequality because of increased productivity but stagnant wages. Today, researchers talk about how modern inequality seems at least partially a consequence of the hollowing out of middle-skill/middle-wage work because innovations automated work in that middle sector. 
Varoufakis: I don’t think we have seen this yet. I think we probably will see it. The hollowing out of the middle class is evident, but I don’t think it’s because of automation. I think it’s simply a situation whereby two things coalesced. On the one hand, it was the introduction of two billion workers in capitalistic markets after 1991 through the Soviet Union satellite states and the rise of China. Two billion workers came from those countries. There were huge shifts of factories to those countries, whether it was Poland or China. But the proletarianization of former peasants is a standard process that has nothing to do with technology per se. That’s the first dimension. The second dimension is the increasing role and capacity of the financial sector in turbocharging private money minting. Through all the financial derivatives and fast trading, without having to press a button, I can transfer billions at lightning speeds. That technological innovation made a huge difference in shifting and increasing power from the industrial scene into the sphere of finance.
JPPE: How did that work? I would imagine a lot of the competition would be between investing firms and companies with better algorithms and better technology.
Varoufakis: Yes, but between 1980 and 2008, in 1980 dollars there was an average inflow of money into Wall Street every day of between five and six billion, on average. Now, if you give a banker five billion every day, even for ten minutes, they will find ways of multiplying it. It’s called derivatives, options, financialization. Computers helped them create really complicated instruments that totally blew up the multiplier. So from that five billion, they could create a hundred or two hundred trillion in securities, which very soon started to operate like money to the extent that they were mediums of exchange and a source of value. So effectively they created as much value as they wanted. And immediately, political power shifts to Goldman Sachs, and General Motors becomes a hedge fund that produces a few cars that nobody cares about. So that’s what I mean by financialization. And that creates huge inequality because just think of all the bonuses.
JPPE: And very few people have a stake in the stock market.
Varoufakis: Most of this was not in the stock market. The derivatives were traded under the table. And so you have a huge new body of the proletariat coming, factories shifting to china. The Chinese people were coming up very slowly in terms of per capita income, but of course, they lose a lot of the old values—community values, environmental values, cultural identity. And fifteen boys living in one room today might make 15 dollars a day, which in the world bank statistics is a fantastic improvement for them. But maybe their life is far worse than it was when they were in their village milking a cow.
JPPE: Yuval Noah Harari makes the point that, for many people, even the shift to agriculture from hunter-gatherers resulted in a dramatic decline in standards of living. And the same was certainly true of people in the Industrial Revolution. So how do you reconcile that argument with the notion that all of those innovations resulted in improvements in the standard of living that were eventually felt by everyone?
Varoufakis: I simply reject it as uninteresting nonsense. When people say to me, ‘look at the last 200 hundred years and the massive decrease in poverty’, I ask ‘how do you measure poverty?’ Take the Australian Aborigines. When Captain Cook arrived in what is now New South Wales. These people had zero income, but they lived very full and fulfilling lives. Today, an Aborigines person gets a hundred Australian dollars a week from some kind of social security fund, and they are obese, they have diabetes, and they are dying from a number of diseases, if not from police brutality. So you consider that to be an improvement because they went from zero to a hundred dollars?
But going back to what you were saying—the hollowing out of the middle class—we should come to that. Given that financialization was based on this exponential growth in fictitious capital that made the very rich exceptionally rich, and at the same time, to have this money coming into Wall Street, you had to have American wages kept very low and below American standards. And this means prices must rise against the home so that people can afford to buy stuff and fill up their garage with rubbish. And then, of course, in 2008 this house of cards comes crashing down. With jobs moving to China and, at the same time, financialization collapsing under the weight of its own hubris, that’s what explains the hollowing out of the middle class. These people initially turned to Barack Obama. He betrayed them. And now they turn to Donald Trump. But AI and automation are going to hit us when we’re down already. I don’t think the hollowing out has to do with automation, but now that the hollowing out has taken place for reasons that don’t have to do with automation, automation will be the second part of the double whammy.
JPPE: A lot of people are very happy about automation because they believe in its potential to improve productivity. However, if you believe technological change results in significant short-run damages to certain people’s livelihoods, is it worth trying to stop automation? 
Varoufakis: Automation would be catastrophic. But why would it be catastrophic? It’s a question of nationalizing it and of socializing it. It’s a question of who owns it. Because if the machines are owned by the very few like they are, then those who own them will look at them as a source of personal enrichment, which means there will be a serious crisis by which those machines will be replacing workers who have no access to the returns of that capital. And so they will not be able to buy stuff. So we’re going to have a collapse. But if we all benefit and we all own the robots collectively, we would not have that problem. This is why I keep coming back to questions of ownership. And this is where I find some commonality with the extreme libertarians, because they also put a great deal of emphasis, not so much on income distributions, but on property rights, and I do too. They want to defend the property rights of oligarchy. I want to socialize property so that everybody has equal access to it.
JPPE: When you think about the recent UK elections and the failure of Jeremy Corbyn and the British left to challenge more traditional and conservative leadership, what do you think about the prospects for a US presidential candidate like Bernie Sanders?
Varoufakis: Privilege has a remarkable capacity to reproduce itself and kill any challenge to its reproduction. If the challenger is Bernie, Jeremy, you or me, they will crush us. There’s no doubt about that. When I was elected, I never expected for a moment that I would not be vilified. If I wasn’t, then I would be worried, ‘why are they not vilifying me? Am I doing something wrong? Have I sold out already?’ What I find astonishing is that, in 2016, Bernie Sanders came so close. And he would have won it had he not been robbed by Hilary Clinton. This is what happened yesterday with the Labour Party, which was effectively defeated from within by the extreme center—the Blairites and the hard “remainers” that did everything they could for two years to undermine their own party and to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. Why? Because they were in concert with the privileged classes.
JPPE: Tactically, what do you make of the primacy of emphasizing cultural issues over economic ones? Do you think the left makes a mistake when it focuses on the culture wars instead of socio-economic challenges? 
Varoufakis: Yes, the left has been catastrophic. Look, I’m an old Marxist. The economics is always at the base of it. It’s at the base of Brexit. Why did Brexit happen? Because you had a financial sector collapse and you had the rubbish assets of the banks put on the shoulders of taxpayers. But at the same time, the European Central Bank was contracting the money supply and the Bank of England was expanding. And that meant three million continental Europeans went to Britain. And for the country, this was substantial and some people felt they were being pushed out of their own country. So their grievances are economic, even if they don’t consider it clearly as an issue of economics. Whenever we have this kind of economic recession, it’s easy for a fascist to jump on the soapbox and say, ‘I’ll make you proud again by getting rid of foreigners.’ You see this with Salvini or Farage. Why did Trump get elected? He didn’t get elected because of the culture wars. He got elected because half of Americans, for the first time since 1923, could not afford the cheapest car on the market. These people felt betrayed, and here comes a guy who says ‘I’m not the worst person on earth, but there’s a good reason to vote for me: it will annoy the shit out of everybody you hate.’ Of course, the fascists take advantage of these economic grievances and build a narrative by saying that they will make you proud and look after you.


*Feature*

JPPE INTERVIEWS, YANIS VAROUFAKIS:

Inequality, Financialization, and Populism

Yanis Varoufakis is the co-founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement) as well as the former Minister of Finance for the Greek government. Additionally, Varoufakis has written several books including his most recent work Adults in The Room: My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment, which is a first-hand account of Europe’s hidden agenda and a call to arms to renew European democracy. As a self identified “libertarian Marxist,” Varoufakis calls for a radical new way of thinking about concepts like the economy, finance and capitalism.

“It is either political unification or disintegration of the EU” – a chat with Frank Barat (VIDEO)

 

For a global movement with a radical agenda – long interview in THE HINDU (its FRONTLINE magazine)

In this interview, the first to Indian media, Yanis speaks elaborately on the 2019 British election, Brexit, the E.U. crisis, the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the global financial crisis, rising ultra-national forces, the need for a progressive international movement, the DiEM25, rising inequality and the Greek crisis.
How important is this year’s U.S. presidential election for the world? What were the challenges Bernie Sanders faced in electoral politics? What did you look for in Sanders’ candidature? How do you view President Donald Trump’s years in the White House?
Every American election is significant given that its purpose is to elect the most powerful political operative in the world. However, none will be as crucial as the one that took place in 2016. Donald Trump’s election [that year] was transformational. Even if the liberal establishment returns to the White House, for instance a Joe Biden presidency, there will be no going back to the earlier model of U.S. hegemony. What died in 2016 was the post-War pattern of U.S. domination of a coordinated alliance of Western powers, with the U.S. determining the common line, and Europe, on the one hand and Japan-Australia-New Zealand on the other toeing that line. The new, Trumpian model of U.S. hegemony is based on what I call the bicycle wheel principle: The U.S being the hub and all other powers the spokes of the wheel that is global political economy.
Trump correctly discerned that the multilateral NATO-G20-ANZUS-TTIP-TPP [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation-Group of 20-Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty-Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership-Trans-Pacific Partnership] model was incapable of reproducing the U.S. hegemony as the size of the U.S. economy shrank proportionately. But, the bicycle wheel principle is different in the sense that the hub will always be stronger than any individual spoke.
In practical terms, this means that the U.S. downsizes or even blows up the institutions it helped create, NATO-G20-ANZUS-TTIP-TPP, and replaces them with bilateral agreements and relations. Trump’s loathing of the E.U. and his determination to fragment it [his support for Brexit, Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French presidential election, Matteo Salvini in Italy] must be seen in this context. What will change if someone like Biden is elected? Very little, I fear. Any member of the liberal establishment, Democrat or Republican, that manages to reclaim the White House will give some nice speeches, alluding to the importance of multilateralism, but, in practice, will neither manage nor want to shift away from Trump’s bicycle wheel model. And, thus, the world will continue to move in the direction of global feudalism under the military and monetary hegemony of a U.S. decoupling increasingly from both the supply lines of countries such as China and global capitalist institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
In this context, only Sanders could make a real difference. He is the only potential U.S. President who could do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did to Herbert Hoover-like policies that every other President would continue. This is precisely why he was targeted the same way that [Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn was in the United Kingdom.
You ask me about the challenges Sanders faced in this electoral year. His greatest foe is the Democratic Party’s bureaucracy and power brokers. As in 2016, they would much rather see Trump re-elected than Sanders win. If Sanders wins the primaries, the Democratic Party apparatchiks will do their damnedest to re-elect Trump, exactly as the so-called radical centre of the Labour Party was so relieved that Boris Johnson beat Corbyn.
I suppose that the lesson that progressives all over the world must draw from the United Kingdom and the U.S., from the Corbyn and Sanders experiences is this: centrist parties that used to be in the business of civilising capitalism, of restoring some balance between capital and labour, have become the greatest brake on progressive politics. Why? Because they were central in, first, unleashing the financial genie that caused 2008 [recall that it was Democrat and Labour administrations that deregulated fully Wall Street and the City of London in the 1990s] and, then, were central during 2009 in re-floating the bankers after their paper pyramids collapsed. In short, since the 2008 crash of Western financialised capitalism, centrists have been responsible for implementing socialism for the financiers and harsh capitalism for the many. The resulting discontent led to two intertwined phenomena: the nationalist international led by Donald Trump, on the one hand, and centrist parties, on the other hand, whose top priority is to prevent progressives like Sanders and Corbyn from challenging the nationalist international.
The 2020 U.S. presidential election must be seen through this prism. It is why the Progressive International is such an important project.
In the December 2019 British election, the Conservative Party under Boris Johnson won a historic mandate. How does it reflect on Britain’s domestic politics, the E.U. and the world? What went against Corbyn although the Labour had a promising manifesto?
There is a tendency to over-think this result. The situation is clear: Johnson took advantage of the voters’ collective fatigue with a never-ending Brexit process and of a Parliament incapable of making up its mind, to unite the Leave vote under a single ticket and with a simple slogan [Get Brexit Done!]. On the opposite side, the Remain vote was split between Labour, LibDems, the SNP [Scottish National Party] and Plaid Cymru [Party of Wales]. The final result was the culmination of the worst own goal in British politics scored by the hard Remainers who, on the one hand treated Leavers like vermin and on the other they attacked Corbyn, the only leader who could deliver them the second referendum they craved for.
Corbyn’s assessment, which has been ridiculed ad nauseam since it was delivered, was right: Labour won the argument but lost the election. What he meant, and where he was right, was that the Labour manifesto resonated with the views of a large majority: On the need for a massive investment in a green industrial revolution; for a National Investment Bank to work in conjunction with the Bank of England; for the extension of the National Health Service to a National Care Service; for transfer of shares from capital to labour; for an end to the U.K.’s carte blanche support of foreign wars. Alas, none of that mattered in the end. Why?
Brexit eclipsed the popularity of the Labour manifesto because of the coup in the Labour party and, in particular, by The Guardian and the BBC. Ever since Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour party, the centre-left’s establishment made it its top priority to overthrow him. A series of coups took place within the party, but they failed because hundreds of thousands of new members kept supporting Corbyn. The plotters were banking on the 2017 general election, hoping that a terrible result would help them oust a party leadership that challenged the privileged classes’ capacity to reproduce their privileges by co-opting the young and the working class. Alas, in 2017 the then Prime Minister, Theresa May, made the error of going to the polls before she had an over-ready Brexit deal. That gave Corbyn the opportunity to campaign on the basis of an anti-austerity, progressive Labour manifesto. The result was a remarkable 40 per cent of the vote and denying the Tories an overall majority.
From the next day, the internal campaign to unseat Corbyn took a nastier turn: they attacked his character, with anti-Semitism as the tip of their spear. And they ridiculed, as indecisiveness, his worthy attempt to behave like an honest broker of unity between working-class Leavers and Remainers.
For two years The Guardian and the BBC adopted twin tactics. First, they chose a turn of phrase whenever they referred to Corbyn that indirectly, but surely, insinuated that he was of suspect character and, most certainly, an enabler of anti-Semitism. Secondly, and more poignantly, they pushed hard the view that “they are all the same”, successfully building on the majority’s dislike of politicians by portraying everyone, from Johnson and Nigel Farage to Corbyn and John McDonnell, as different sides of the same coin. Moreover, their incessant campaign to cancel Brexit by any means helped turn progressive Leavers away from a Labour party in which Corbyn struggled to keep Leavers and Remainers united by keeping alive the prospect of resorting to…democracy—to a second referendum.
Given that most of the media were always in the pocket of the Tory party, ready and willing to promote Johnson when it mattered, having the only outlets of anti-Brexit, non-Tory, opinion (The Guardian and the BBC in particular) taking a neutral stance on the basis of “they are all the same” proved a decisive advantage for the incumbent Tories. If “they are all the same”, why not vote for Johnson, who will at least end once and for all the Brexit saga? Thus, Brexit trumped the popularity of Labour’s manifesto, giving a magnificent opportunity to Corbyn’s opponents within Labour to take back the leadership of the working class’ party and, once more, turn it against the working class, against the precariously employed, against the young (who voted overwhelmingly for Corbyn), against those on the fringes of a failing British capitalism.
The lesson from the 2019 U.K. general election is the same as the lesson from Greece’s 2015 referendum: At crucial moments when people get a chance to win power, their worst enemy emerges not within the ranks of the establishment’s servants but within their own progressive block’s, or party’s, nomenklatura.
Britain is no longer a member of the E.U. What would be its political and economic implications in the international system and Europe, in particular? Would other E.U. member-countries choose the path of Britain in the future?
The main impact will be on the E.U. itself. Already, the funding gap that the U.K.’s departure caused has made it necessary for Brussels to distribute cuts among the remaining member-states. The E.U., like all cartels, is quite good at distributing gains but awful at distributing losses. It is not so much the missing money. What matters is the manner in which the need to distribute losses is exposing existing rifts within the E.U.. While I do not envisage other ‘exits’, Brexit is already causing the existing bonds within the E.U. to weaken. The E.U.’s greatest danger, therefore, is that policy agendas on migration, banking, debt, etc., are re-nationalising. In the limit, the E.U. runs the serious danger of ending up formally intact but, in reality, an empty shirt. And would that not be music in Trump’s ears?
Because of the memories of the World Wars and the traumatic past experiences, most of the European Left is more in favour of an integrated Europe and also sceptical about the demands for exit or separation. You were personally against Brexit. Why so? Don’t you smell a ‘revolt against Capital’ in Brexit? You advocated ‘Greece exit’ earlier when Greece was in the crisis. Why two different positions?
Brexit and Grexit are like chalk and cheese: very, very different propositions. Brexit was a home-made campaign and aspiration. It reflects an essential incongruity between British and Continental capitalism and, importantly, a commitment of the British [bourgeoisie and working class] to parliamentarianism that is absent on the continent. In contrast, Grexit was never a home-grown campaign in Greece. In fact, Grexit was a threat invoked by the European establishment to make Greece accept new loans to pass on to the French and German banks: “Take these loans on condition of stringent austerity or we throw you out of the eurozone.” Also, whereas Brexit was about exiting the E.U. by a member-state that never adopted the euro, Grexit was about Greece returning to its national currency [exiting the eurozone] but not the E.U. itself. You are correct to say that I campaigned against Brexit. Why? Because it was always going to reinforce the British ruling class, divide progressives and magnify xenophobia. The events of the last year or so confirmed this prediction. As for Grexit, while I never advocated it, my reply to the European establishment was clear: If you are forcing us to choose between permanent debtor’s prison and Grexit, we shall take Grexit, thank you very much.
How would you trace the economic and political interest behind the establishment of the E.U.? You had earlier said that “Europe is disintegrating”. Whether Brexit and similar demands point to a fundamental discontent against the E.U. set-up other than just reading these developments as demands of right-wing populism? Also, Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) campaigned for “Germany exit” from E.U. ahead of the European election last year.
The E.U. was set up as a big business cartel, inimical even to bourgeois democracy. Following the 2008 global financial crisis, the E.U. began to disintegrate. To keep it together, its establishment imposed a class war against the weak across Europe [from Greece to Germany and from Latvia to Portugal] while printing mountains of money to re-float the failed banks. Is it any wonder that good, progressive people began to question the desirability of this E.U.? However, it is one thing to come up with the above diagnosis and it is quite another to advocate the disintegration of the E.U. The latter will only blow fresh wind into the sails of deflation and the ultra-Right. As for the fact that the ultra-right has advocated exiting/disintegrating the E.U., it reinforces my point and reminds us of how in the 1920s and the 1930s, the Fascists followed the strategy of adopting elements of the Left’s critique of existing institutions before taking them over and weaponising them against the people.
As a Finance Minister of Greece in 2015, you presented the Greece Debt Restructuring plan before the establishment of Brussels. What were your key suggestions in the “debt restructuring plan” then to address the crisis?
I knew that the German government could not “sell” an outright haircut to the German Parliament. So, to make it more palatable for them, I proposed a series of debt swaps. For instance, swapping existing debt obligations that specified fixed interest rates and repayments with new bonds specifying repayments and interest rates that were analogous to Greek gross domestic product [GDP] size and growth rate. More precisely, I was proposing to link the total amount to be repaid by, say 2040, to Greece’s total GDP between 2015 and 2040 and the rate of repayment to the rate of Greece’s GDP growth.
What was the reason put forward by the establishment in Brussels for not accepting your plan of restructuring Greece’s debt?
No economic reason whatsoever. In fact, behind closed doors they agreed that it was the obvious thing to do. Alas, they rejected it because the German leaders had lied to Germany’s Parliament in two ways. First, they had told their members of parliament that the loans were for the Greek people, covering up the fact that they were a bailout of French and German bankers. Secondly, that they would get every penny back from the Greek state, even though they knew perfectly well that it was impossible to retrieve monies lent to an insolvent entity, especially if you forwarded the loans on conditions of stringent austerity that would shrink the already low incomes of the insolvent. Tragically, having issued these lies in Germany’s federal parliament, the German Chancellor did not want to return with a debt restructuring proposal that, in effect, was tantamount to an admission that she had lied to them. In short, they rejected my proposals in order to avoid admitting to having lied to their own people—a rejection that, interestingly, cost their taxpayers serious money (in the sense that my proposals would have allowed the Greek state to repay more of its loans in the long run).
The Greek debt crisis and the ultimatum given by the troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the IMF) in 2015 was a classic case exposing the face of institutions such as the IMF and the ECB. As the Finance Minister of Greece at that time, could you speak about the unfolding of the crisis?
My precise expression was that it was as if the eurozone crisis, which erupted in Greece before spreading like a bushfire across Europe, was designed. No one intended it, of course. But, the crisis was inevitable given the design of the euro, Europe’s common currency. Think about it: They created a central bank, the ECB, without a state to have its back during a crisis while, at the same time, 19 states shared did not have a central bank to have their back [since the ECB was banned from monetising the states on whose behalf it issued the euro].
To boot, they preserved separate banking systems [a German, an Italian, a Greek, and so on] that had to be bailed out, without any help from the ECB, by the national governments, which could not rely on the ECB either. The sequential bankruptcy of states and banks was, therefore, a designer feature of the eurozone. The fact that it was not the intention of the euro’s designers does not make it less of a designer feature of the common currency they produced.
Even a leftist government that came into office with the promise of a restructuring plan different from that of the troika, surrendered before the troika. It led to your resignation from the Cabinet.
You have to ask them. The moment my comrades, the Prime Minister in particular, surrendered, I resigned, joined many progressives around Europe to form the Democracy in Europe Movement and, eventually, to return to Greece’s Parliament to carry on the fight that must be fought against the orchestrated misanthropy that passes for economic policy.
What are the lessons nations, especially countries of the tricontinental, should learn when dealing with international agencies. What does the case of Greece tell the world?
It is a lesson that has been learnt a long time ago, during the developing world’s debt crisis in the 1970s and the 1980s, in the case of South East Asia in the late 1990s, and today in Ecuador and Argentina. And it is this. The IMF operates as a bailiff on behalf of international creditors. Their job is to come in after a government fails to meet its debt repayments and impose, in exchange of stabilising the currency, cruel conditions that amount to the expropriation of the majority’s assets and public services. The trick is to, in the first place, avoid a build-up of debts to foreign financiers in a currency that your state does not control and, if this has failed, to be ready to shun the IMF even if the price is a default and a sharp devaluation of one’s currency. Accepting IMF loans on conditions that turn your country into a debtors’ prison is never a good idea, whatever the local oligarchy [who always benefit from IMF programmes] say.
In this context, it is worth quoting the idea of delinking championed by Marxists such as the late Samir Amin and Prabhat Patnaik. They talk about the delinking of Third World countries from the vortex of globalisation. As an economist and a politician, what is your take on this idea? What are its practical implications? How could a country not willing to bow down before the neoliberal financial capital meet the transitional economic difficulties when it dares to delink and also maintain an alternative path of economic development? Bolivia declared total independence from the World Bank and the IMF. Yet, its economic indicators show improvement.
As I already said, it is crucial to delink from private loans that are denominated in a foreign currency or a currency that your government does not control. This is what is crucial, since it immunises you to IMF interventions. This does not mean, of course, turning to autarky. Joint ventures, collaborating with foreign companies on the basis of mutual advantage, technology transfers, etc., cannot and should not be avoided.
Along with democrats from various political traditions—green, radical Left and liberal—you founded DiEM25 to repair the E.U. What are you looking forward to “repair” through such a movement? How do you propose to “mobilise, organise and hold” the movement? What are the alternatives you are looking at to see this movement through?
Our objective is not to repair the E.U. but to transform it. You repair something that used to work well but is not broken. The E.U. was always a big business, anti-democratic cartel which could not handle the 2008 crisis and its aftermath without massive doses of misanthropy. This is why DiEM25 is not about its repair but its transformation. The main idea is twofold. First, since our main crises (private and public debt, banking, poverty, xenophobia, climate) are transnational, we need a transnational movement, with a single, coherent agenda. Secondly, political parties that confine themselves to the nation-state are no longer relevant to the struggle against globalised banking and authoritarianism. On this basis, of a new transnational politics, and with our Green New Deal as the unifying agenda, we seek to unite workers, the precariously employed, intellectuals, and others.
On the issue of inequality, Thomas Piketty’s research and proposal for a global wealth tax has received much appreciation in many progressive and liberal circles. How could it be implemented in a world context where big capitalists control every organ of states in most parts of the globe? You proposed universal wealth dividend. Could you elaborate?
I have no quarrel with a wealth tax, except that it won’t do much either to restore justice or to stabilise capitalism. Take for instance Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax, the most radical variant of Piketty’s idea. If implemented, it will not raise more than 1 per cent of the national income.
In my view, nothing will do short of redistributing property rights over capital. A first step is DiEM25’s universal basic dividend. It would work very simply by making it a legal obligation of all large companies to pass, say, 10 per cent of their shares to an international wealth fund, with the accumulating dividends divided amongst the population. A second step would be to increase that percentage in proportion to automation. A third step would be to re-write corporate law. My dream would be to live in a world where shares are non-tradable and where each member of staff has a single share granting her or him a single vote on all matters pertaining to management and to the distribution of a firm’s net revenues. That would end the wage-profit divide, indeed it would end… capitalism!
You say that “social democratic new deal paradigm is finished and it cannot be revived”. Could you explain?
Social democracy lost its soul when social democrats [from the SPD in Germany, Tony Blair’s Labour, Bill Clinton’s Democrats, and so on] got into bed with the bankers, cutting a deal according to which social democrats would let the bankers run riot and the bankers, in return, would give them a cut to finance their campaigns and, partly, the welfare state. So, when in 2008 bankers went bust social democrats lacked both the analytical power and the moral strength to expropriate the bankers while saving the banks. Instead, it acted as social democrats that imposed austerity on the many and socialism for the bankers. That’s when the social democratic project died.
Can it be revived? No, it can’t be. Global capitalism can no longer be restrained by national governments seeking some historic compromise between national industrial capital and the nation’s trade unions. We now need a transnational movement which targets both financiers and multinationals. Social democrats are neither interested in nor capable of being part of such a movement. This is why we created DiEM25. This is why we are working hard to put together a Progressive International, to which we invite our friends and comrades from India to be part of.
How do you analyse the present state of capitalism?
Capitalism suffered a large blow in 2008, inaugurating a third post-Second World War phase that poses a lethal threat both to capitalism and to humanity.
The first phase [Bretton Woods, 1944-1971] was based on a highly regulated global system with fixed exchange rates, capital controls and a U.S. which provided the global currency but which also recycled its surpluses to Europe and Asia, thus stabilising capitalism. That phase ended when the U.S. turned from a surplus to a deficit economy and could no longer stabilise global capitalism without becoming insolvent.
The second phase began with the end of the fixed exchange rate regime [of Bretton Woods] and was typified by the important role of the U.S. current account deficit which provided huge demand to net exporters in Europe and in Asia, in exchange for 70 per cent of Asian and European profits that flowed back into Wall Street, thus closing the loop and funding the U.S. [current account and government budget] deficits. On the back of these capital flows, Wall Street built up financialisation, which in 2008 imploded.
The third phase began with that 2008 implosion. Even though the policy of bailouts for the bankers and austerity for the people re-floated banking and returned the U.S. current account deficit to its original levels, Wall Street and the rest of global finance could not recover their capacity to fund investment in real capital. Thus, since 2008 capitalism suffers a massive imbalance between savings and investment, leading to low-quality jobs and negative interest rates. The remarkable technological innovations [the rise of machine learning, 3D printers, etc.] that come on top of this failure to balance savings and investment are now magnifying the political and economic pressures upon globalised capitalism. Barbarism, xenophobia and Donald Trump are mere symptoms of this congruence.
“The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Antonio Gramsci explained the inter-War period thus. Would you draw a similar conclusion about the present world situation?
Absolutely. This is why it is crucial that we speed up the evolutionary process, by means of a radical, transnational movement with a radical, transnational agenda that can inspire peoples from across the world: to help the new be born and end the interregnum that only benefits the varieties of authoritarianism damaging humans and the planet.
There is an upsurge of right-wing nationalist/fascist movements across the spectrum of the globe in different forms. This phenomenon can’t be analysed in isolation from the trajectory of neoliberal capitalism and its predatory nature. Samir Amin called it “the return of fascism in the contemporary capitalism”. And you said that the 2008 financial crisis also is one of the reasons for such an uprising. How dangerous is the threat? Is there enough “political infrastructure” to counter it?
2008 was not one of the reasons: it was the reason, in precisely the same way that the crash of 1929 was the reason that the dark side of humanity took over, leading to tens of millions of deaths.
On November 30, 2018, you formed Progressive International. Is it a political counter to right-wing upsurge?
Yes, I believe Progressive International is the only weapon we have against, on the one hand, global finance and, on the other, the nationalist international that the crash of 2008 has given rise to. This is why, together with Sanders; Katrin Jakobsdottir, the Prime Minister of Iceland; Fernando Haddad, Lula’s stand-in candidate in Brazil; and many others we inaugurated Progressive International in Vermont [U.S.] in November 2018.
Developments in 2019 proved beyond doubt the Progressive International’s importance. To put it bluntly, the progressives’ lack of coordination, of a common programme, of common institutions, led to 2019 being our collective annus horribilis all over the globe: From the E.U, where in May 2019 European Parliament election, regressives and authoritarians triumphed, to the unchallenged dominance of Narendra Modi, Boris Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, Jair Bolsonaro, and the new conservative Greek government. Everywhere we turned in 2019 we saw progressives lost, defeated or, at the very least, on the back foot.
This is why in 2020 we shall do our utmost to give Progressive International a boost. We begin in February with the launch of a board comprising progressive leaders from around the world, each of whom will join not just symbolically but in order to pursue a particular project on behalf of Progressive International; e.g., to organise a global trade union recruitment and coordination exercise or a consumer boycott of multinationals pushing workers into precariousness and small business into bankruptcy. Then, in the Fall of 2020, we plan our first large-scale event where a common programme and a manifesto will be hammered out.
You opinioned that Chinese economic management is the most adorable in the world. And, China helped a lot in managing the 2008 financial crisis. Still, you have differences with the Chinese mode of governance. How do you see their economic growth and poverty alleviation in the last decades? Do you think China is still on the socialistic track? If not, where do you place China?
I opined that the Chinese government proved to be an adept macroeconomic manager and, also, that without China’s massive investment drive after 2008, global capitalism would have been in a far, far worse state.
What is my problem with China? The abject authoritarianism, the manner in which workers have been denied a voice, the environmental damage wilfully inflicted… How do I place China? Certainly not a socialist country, it is nevertheless a fascinating experiment in combining markets, planning, common purpose, individuality, high technology and a refreshing scepticism over globalised finance. Future socialist experiments have a lot to learn from contemporary China.
In Europe, the refugee influx has been used by right-wing political movements to increase their appeal. It seems that not only the right but even liberal politicians hold anti-immigrant views. “Europe must curb immigration to stop right-wing populists,” said the former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. You criticised her for this comment. Could you talk about the so-called “European refugee crisis”? How does the Left politically engage with this?
There is no such thing as a European refugee or immigration crisis. Europe is large, rich and comprising half a billion people. One or two million wretched souls arriving on our coasts and crossing our borders would not have been an issue if it were not for the deep crisis of European capitalism which, as always, gives a splendid opportunity to xenophobes to jump on a soap-box and point the finger at the “brown people” as the reason for the crisis.
How should the Left engage with this phenomenon? By denouncing politicians of the Hillary Clinton variety who advocate “racism lite” as an antidote to the Right’s full-blown racism. No version of racism can counter its true-blue variety. Only radical humanism can do it. It takes courage but it is our only option. This is why DiEM25 states clearly: Let them in! Europe has been colonising the world for 1,000 years. Now that we are getting older, as a continent, the migration flows have reversed. No walls can change this. Let’s embrace the immigrants. Let’s see them as a gift. Let’s fight fascism with the only worthy weapon we have: radical humanism.
The world has changed in many ways from the time of Karl Marx. How relevant is the analytical framework and revolutionary theory of Marxism in understanding our times and for changing the world?
More than ever. If anything, the first few pages of the Communist Manifesto describe today’s globalisation far more pertinently than it described 19th or 20th century capitalism. As if to disgrace social democratic notions of a mixed economy and a middle-class liberal democracy, capitalism has recently destroyed both the mixed economy and the middle class; as if to confirm Marx’s prognostication that capital accumulation, once globalised, creates a dynamic that polarises humanity between a tiny ruling class and a massive precarious proletariat.
You taught economics across the world before assuming the post of Finance Minister in Athens in 2015. While in office, you saw “how power and its establishments work”. As a Marxist, what did you learn about the opportunities and limitations when working within the state?
That it is utterly possible to disrupt the establishment by means that even authentic liberals would approve (e.g. denying bailout funding from the IMF). And that the worst enemy is not the ruling class but, alas, our own comrades who can ever so easily be lured by the establishment in surrendering—and, at once, turning against the common cause.
Jipson John and Jitheesh P.M. are fellows at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and contribute to various national and international publications, including The Hindu, The Caravan, The Indian Express, The Wire, Frontline and Monthly Review. The writers can be reached at jipsonjohn10@gmail.com and jitheeshpm91@gmail.com.

Yanis Varoufakis is an internationally known Marxist economist and a Greek politician who served as Minister of Finance in Greece from January 2015 to July 2015. At present, he is engaged in mobilising people for a better and inclusive world with a progressive economic and political vision. Before entering active politics, he taught economics at various universities across the world, including the University of Cambridge, the University of Sydney and the University of Athens. As Finance Minister, he led negotiations with Greece’s creditors during the government debt crisis. After Greece surrendered to the austerity demands of the European Commission and accepted another loan without debt restructuring, Yanis resigned from Alexis Tsipras’ Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) government on July 6, 2015. Since then, he has been actively involved in politics in Europe, and Greece in particular. In February 2016, he launched the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) with the aim of transforming the European Union (E.U.). It is an alliance of “people of the Left and liberalism, greens and feminists”.
On the formation of DiEM25, he says: “The main idea is twofold. First, since our main crises [private and public debt, banking, poverty, xenophobia, and climate] are transnational, we need a transnational movement, with a single, coherent agenda. Secondly, political parties that confine themselves to the nation-state are no longer relevant to the struggle against globalised banking and authoritarianism. On the basis of a new transnational politics, and with our Green New Deal as a unifying agenda, we are seeking to unite workers, the precariously employed, intellectuals, etc.”
In March 2018, he founded the European Realistic Disobedience Front (MeRA25), the “electoral wing” of DiEM25 in Greece with the stated aim of freeing Greece from “debt bondage”. MeRA25 secured nine seats in the Hellenic Parliament. Yanis returned to Parliament in 2019. In December 2018, he launched Progressive International, a grass-roots movement for global justice with the United States Senator and Democratic Party leader, Bernie Sanders. He supports and advocates the idea of basic income.
Yanis has authored several bestselling books addressing issues such as the European debt crisis, the financial imbalance in the world and game theory. They include Adults in the Room, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?, The Global Minotaur, Foundations of Economics: A Beginner’s Companion, Economic Indeterminacy, and A Game Theory: A Critical Text.
Yanis contributes articles to Project Syndicate, The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN, The Economist, The New Statesman, Financial Times and other international publications.

https://frontline.thehindu.com/world-...

Πιο λαβωμένη Ελλάδα & Ευρώπη από τη νέα έκφανση της ίδιας κρίσης – συνέντευξη στη REAL NEWS

“…Με την αδυσώπητη νέα τροπή, λόγω πανδημίας, της ύφεσης αυτής μιλάμε για μια κατάσταση που δεν θα είναι διαχειρίσιμη όσο το πολιτικό καθεστώς συνεχίζει να πηγαίνει συναινετικά με ένα Βερολίνο και μια τρόικα που δεν ξέχασε τίποτα αλλά δεν έμαθε και τίποτα από την Κρίση του Ευρώ.”

Πώς κρίνετε την μέχρι τώρα εγχώρια αντιμετώπιση της πανδημίας όσον αφορά το υγειονομικό κομμάτι ;
Το ΜέΡΑ25 στήριξε, και στηρίζει, τα μέτρα «συμπίεσης» της μεταδοτικότητας του ιού, μέσα από την κοινωνική απόσταση και την απαγόρευση κυκλοφορίας, που εξήγγειλε η κυβέρνηση. Ήταν σημαντικό να επιβραδυνθεί η αύξηση των περιστατικών που απαιτούσαν μία από τις ελάχιστες, για μια χώρα σαν την δική μας, κλίνες στις Μονάδες Εντατικής Θεραπείας. Όμως, η κυβέρνηση είχε ιερή υποχρέωση να σχεδιάσει την μετάβαση από αυτή τη φάση της γενικής καραντίνας στη δεύτερη φάση των μαζικών εξετάσεων με στόχο τον διαχωρισμό των πολιτών σε εκείνους που είναι εν δυνάμει μεταδοτικοί φορείς και στους υπόλοιπους. Μόνο έτσι μπορεί να διατηρηθεί η αξιοπιστία της κυβέρνησης, κάτι για το οποίο η κυβέρνηση δεν έχει μεριμνήσει.
Σε αυτό το σημείο πρέπει να σας πω ότι εμείς, το ΜέΡΑ25, έχουμε αρχίσει να χάνουμε την υπομονή μας με την κυβέρνηση. Δεν είναι δυνατόν να μην έχουν παρουσιάσει Εθνικό Στρατηγικό Σχέδιο για τους επόμενους μήνες που, μεταξύ άλλων, να απαντά στο ερώτημα:


Έχει η κυβέρνηση μεριμνήσει για τις μαζικές που θα απαιτηθούν στη δεύτερη φάση;


Που θα εξετάζονται οι πολίτες;


Σε ποια χρονική στιγμή, ή υπό ποιες ακριβώς συνθήκες θα ανακοινώσουν ότι η ελληνική κοινωνία περνά στην δεύτερη αυτή φάση;


Αν δεν το κάνουν απλά θα χάσουν την αξιοπιστία τους και, συνεπώς, τον έλεγχο του πληθυσμού
Μέχρι πότε θεωρείτε ότι θα πρέπει να βρίσκονται οι πολίτες σε καραντίνα; Σε άλλες χώρες έχουν αρχίσει συζητήσεις για εκτεταμένα διαστήματα που φτάνουν ή και ξεπερνούν το καλοκαίρι. Σας βρίσκει σύμφωνο; Ποιες είναι οι επιπτώσεις;
Αν απλά ζητούν από όλους να μείνουν για καιρό εντός των τειχών, απλά θα χάσουν τον έλεγχο καθώς οι πολίτες θα πάψουν να τους ακούν. Αν, από την άλλη, πουν «βγείτε» και μετά από λίγο αρχίσουν να αυξάνονται τα κρούσματα, θα αρχίσουμε την διαδικασία της καραντίνας από την αρχή. Για αυτό, το ΜέΡΑ25 επισημαίνει ότι όλες οι σοβαρές χώρες σχεδιάζουν την μετάβαση από την φάση της γενικής καραντίνας στην δεύτερη φάση των μαζικών εξετάσεων ώστε να μπαίνουν σε πραγματική καραντίνα οι φορείς και να αποδεσμεύονται οι μη φορείς.
Είστε ευχαριστημένος από τα πρόσωπα που έχουν αναλάβει την μάχη κατά του θανατηφόρου ιού;
Δεν είμαι ικανός να κρίνω πρόσωπα. Κρίνω πολιτικές. Κρίνω την έλλειψη σχεδιασμού. Κρίνω ότι δεν προβαίνουν στην πρόληψη των 7 χιλιάδων γιατρών που είναι απολύτως απαραίτητοι μετά από δέκα χρόνια τροϊκανής βαρβαρότητας εναντίον του ΕΣΥ. Κρίνω το ότι οι γιατροί κι οι νοσηλευτές μας ρίχνονται απροστάτευτοι στη μάχη μέσα στα νοσοκομεία. Κρίνω ότι, αντί να επιταχθούν οι μονάδες εντατικής θεραπείας του παντελώς απόντα ιδιωτικού τομέα, διοχετεύονται σε αυτόν σπάνιοι πόροι που μόνο διαπλεκόμενοι μπορούν να χαρακτηριστούν.
Την μέχρι τώρα στάση του Πρωθυπουργού πως την κρίνετε; Ως αντιπολίτευση, έχετε την ενημέρωση που χρειάζεστε;
Αρνούμαι να χρησιμοποιήσω την κρίση για να κερδίσουμε ως κόμμα μερικούς φτηνούς πόντους. Αυτό που ζητώ από τον Πρωθυπουργό είναι ένα Εθνικό Στρατηγικό Σχέδιο για την μετάβαση στη φάση των μαζικών εξετάσεων, για το μεγάλο θετικό δημοσιονομικό σοκ που αρνείτει η κυβέρνηση να κάνει, για την στρατηγική του Πρωθυπουργού στις Συνόδους Κορυφής ώστε να τεθεί η κα Μέρκελ προ του διλήμματος «δέχεσαι ένα πραγματικό ευρωομόλογο ή εμείς θα θέσουμε βέτο στα πάντα δια παντός»…
Ο Κυριάκος Μητσοτάκης ανήκει στην ομάδα των 9 Πρωθυπουργών που ζήτησαν ευρωομόλογο στην τελευταία σύνοδο Κορυφής. Εσείς συμφωνείτε με αυτήν την πρωτοβουλία;
Το πρώτο μου άρθρο υπέρ του ευρωομόλογου το δημοσίευσα το… 1999. Το 2003 το πρότεινα στην ευρωβουλή. Το 2011 και 2013, με τον James Galbraith και τον Stuart Holland, καταθέσαμε ολοκληρωμένη πρόταση για το πως μπορεί να εκδοθεί. Προφανώς, λοιπόν, και συμφωνώ. Δυστυχώς, η ομάδα των «9» έκανε μεγάλο λάθος όταν, απλά, ζήτησε την έκδοση ευρωομόλογου χωρίς να πουν ποιος θα πρέπει να το εκδώσει, ποιος θα το εγγυηθεί, τί ποσό θα δανειστεί η ευρωζώνη με αυτό το εργαλείο και, τέλος, τί διάρκεια θα έχει αυτό το ευρωομόλογο. Αντίθετα, την περασμένη βδομάδα το ΜέΡΑ25 απάντησε όλα αυτά τα ερωτήματα καταθέτοντας Πρόγραμμα 3-Σημείων με τίτλο «Τι πρέπει να κάνει η ΕΕ τώρα». Χωρίς μια τέτοια συγκεκριμένη πρόταση ήταν πολύ εύκολο για τους «αρνητές» του ευρωομόλογου, κυριώς την κ. Μέρκελ και τον Ολλανδό πρωθυπουργό, να πουν άλλο ένα nein.
Θεωρείτε ότι υπάρχει περίπτωση οι χώρες του Βορρά και ειδικά η Γερμανία να συναινέσουν σε ένα κοινό ευρωπαϊκό ομόλογο; Προς το παρόν το αρνούνται…
Ναι, υπό έναν όρο: Οι κκ Μακρόν, Κόντε, Σάντεζ, Μητσοτάκης κλπ, που ορθώς προωθούν το ευρωομόλογο, να κατανοήσουν ότι τα ωραία λόγια υπέρ της ευρωπαϊκής αλληλεγγύης και του ορθολογισμού δεν θα πετύχουν τίποτα, πέραν κάποιων άλλων δανείων από τον ESM που είναι το ακριβώς αντίθετο από το ευρωομόλογο. Το μόνο που θα κάνει τη διαφορά είναι ένα βροντερό ΟΧΙ και των «9». Να πουν, δηλαδή, εν χορώ στην κα Μέρκελ πως, αν δεν συναινέσει στην έκδοση ευρωομόλογου από την ΕΚΤ, τον μόνο θεσμό που μπορεί να το κάνει θεραπευτικά, θα ακολουθήσουν όλοι μαζί στην τακτική της «κενής καρέκλας» του Ντε Γκολ. Αν δεν είναι διατεθειμένοι να απόσχουν από κάθε Σύνοδο Κορυφής, από κάθε Eurogroup, το Βερολίνο, η Χάγη και η Βιέννη θα καταδικάσουν την ΕΕ σε αργό, βασανιστικό θάνατο. Για να σώσουν λοιπόν την ΕΕ, ανακουφίζοντας τους λαούς μας, πρέπει να είναι έτοιμοι να το πάνε μέχρι το τέλος. Αλλιώς, άλλη μια φορα η κα Μέρκελ θα επικρατήσει επιβάλλοντας πολιτικές κάκιστες για την Ελλάδα, τον υπόλοιπο Νότο, την ΕΕ αλλά και, εν τέλει, για τον ίδιο το γερμανικό λαό.
Οι ευρωπαϊκοί θεσμοί πως έχουν ανταποκριθεί στην κρίση κατά τη γνώμη σας;
Η αντίδραση των ευρωπαϊκών θεσμών θα μείνει στην ιστορία ως άλλη μια ιστορική ήττα της Ευρώπης.
Η κυβέρνηση έχει ανακοινώσει ως τώρα δύο πακέτα μέτρων για την οικονομία. Τα θεωρείτε επαρκή; Και αν όχι που πάσχουν κατά τη γνώμη σας;
Πρόκειται για τον ορισμό της ανεπάρκειας. Ας το δούμε ψύχραιμα και υπερκομματικά το ζήτημα. Η νέα ύφεση θα μειώσει το εθνικό εισόδημα κατά περίπου 20 δις λόγω ακόμα μεγαλύτερης κατάρρευσης του ιδιωτικού τομέα ο οποίος σήμερα, λόγω καραντίνας, είναι στο ψυγείο. Για να αντικατασταθούν αυτά τα 20 δις απαιτούνταν τουλάχιστον μια Δημοσιονομική Τονωτική Ένεση 12 δις – τα οποία με τον δημοσιονομικό πολλαπλασιαστή θα έφταναν στα 18 δις, αφήνοντας «μόνο» μια ύφεση της τάξης των 2 δις. Αντ’ αυτής της Δημοσιονομικής Τονωτικής Ένεσης των 12 δις η κυβέρνηση έχει ανακοινώσει 6,8 δις μέτρων στήριξης εκ των μόνο τα 2,6 δις είναι Δημοσιονομική Τονωτική Ένεση (με τα υπόλοιπα να είναι αναβολές πληρωμών σε εφορίες, ταμεία κλπ).
Πρόσφατα προβλέψατε πως η ύφεση φέτος θα φτάσει σε διψήφιο νούμερο. Πως μπορεί να αντιστραφεί αυτό;
Όχι με αναβολές πληρωμών ή δάνεια. Όταν μια επιχείρηση έχει πρόβλημα ρευστότητας, ναι, τότε πράγματι, οι αναβολές πληρωμών και τα δάνεια βοηθούν. Όταν όμως δεν έχουν, ούτε θα έχουν για καιρό, καθόλου έσοδα, τότε αντιμετωπίζουν πρόβλημα πτώχευσης, όχι ρευστότητας. Σε αυτή την περίπτωση τα δάνεια και οι αναβολές είναι «δώρον άδωρον». Πως βοηθάς έναν επιχειρηματία που δεν έχει έσοδα όταν του λες «καλά μη μου δώσεις τώρα αυτά που μου χρωστάς, μου τα δίνεις μαζεμένα σε 5 μήνες;» Απελπισία του δημιουργείς δεδομένου ότι δεν θα έχει να στα επιστρέψει σε 5 μήνες – με αποτέλεσμα να τον ωθείς στο λουκέτο. Με άλλα λόγια, όπως το ΜέΡΑ25 λέει ξανά και ξανά, εντός και εκτός Βουλής: Οι επιχειρήσεις και οι πολίτες χρειάζονται «κουρέματα» οφειλών και μη επιστρεπτέες ενισχύσεις, όχι δάνεια και αναβολές.
Πόσο μεγάλη διάρκεια θα έχει η κρίση; Πότε βλέπετε επανεκκίνηση της οικονομίας; Θεωρείτε πως ο τουρισμός είναι δυνατόν να σταθεί ξανά στα πόδια του φέτος;
Κάποια στιγμή η πανδημία θα μπει σε ύφεση. Αλλά, δυστυχώς, όχι μόνο η ύφεση της οικονομίας δεν θα εξαφανιστεί ως δια μαγείας αλλά, και αυτό είναι το χειρότερο, όταν ο ιός θα υποχωρεί η παραγωγική βάση θα έχει συρρικνωθεί με μερίδιο των απωλειών της να μην είναι αναστρέψιμο. Οπότε η Ελλάδα θα βγει ακόμα πιο λαβωμένη, υπερχρεωμένη, με χαμηλότερη δυναμική και από αυτή την κρίση.
Τι σημαίνει αυτή η κρίση για την Ελλάδα; Τι επιφυλάσσει η επόμενη ημέρα;
Πριν απαντήσω, να σας πω ότι το ΜέΡΑ25 ιδρύθηκε πριν δυο χρόνια επειδή, εμείς που το ιδρύσαμε, κρίναμε ότι η κοινωνία μας αντιμετώπιζε δεκαετίες Χρεοδουλοπαροικίας (μόνιμου μη βιώσιμου χρέους ιδιωτικού και δημόσιου τομέα) και Ερημοποίησης (φευγιού, δηλαδή, των παιδιών μας). Από τη στιγμή που εισήλθαμε στη Βουλή προειδοποιούσαμε, κόντρα στις υπερφίαλες δηλώσεις ΝΔ και ΣΥΡΙΖΑ περί εξόδου από την Κρίση, ότι το 2020 θα ήταν υφεσιακή χρονιά. Τα οικονομικά στοιχεία του τελευταίου τριμήνου του 2019 μας επιβεβαίωσαν: Είχαμε νέα ύφεση! Κι αυτό προ κορωνοϊού. Όπως, λοιπόν, λέει ο λαός μας «ήταν στραβό το κλίμα…». Με την αδυσώπητη νέα τροπή, λόγω πανδημίας, της ύφεσης αυτής μιλάμε για μια κατάσταση που δεν θα είναι διαχειρίσιμη όσο το πολιτικό καθεστώς συνεχίζει να πηγαίνει συναινετικά με ένα Βερολίνο και μια τρόικα που δεν ξέχασε τίποτα αλλά δεν έμαθε και τίποτα από την Κρίση του Ευρώ. Αν ο κ. Μητσοτάκης δεν πει ένα μεγάλο ΟΧΙ στην απανταχού παρούσα τρόικα, σαν εκείνο που ο ίδιος με την βοήθεια του κ. Τσίπρα δαιμονοποίησαν το 2015 και μετά, η κοινωνία μας θα γονατίσει και η Ευρώπη θα διαλυθεί.
Παράλληλα, η χώρα μας αντιμετωπίζει την κρίση του προσφυγικού ζητήματος. Ποια πρέπει να είναι τα βήματα αντιμετώπισης από εδώ και μπρος, δεδομένης και της υγειονομικής κρίσης;
Άμεση μεταφορά όλων των ανθρώπων που σήμερα ζουν σε συνθήκες απάνθρωπες σε ξενοδοχεία που, έτσι κι αλλιώς, είναι κλειστά. Έτσι, και οι ξενοδόχοι θα έχουν ένα εισόδημα σε περίοδο νεκρή και η χώρα μας δεν θα διασύρεται παγκοσμίως.

Discussing SOCIETY AFTER COVID-19 with Brian Eno on DiEM-TV – VIDEO

DiEM TV honoured me yesterday night by asking me to host a discussion on SOCIETY AFTER COVID-19 with Brian Eno – an idol of mine that I am privileged now, in my old age, to count amongst my friends, not to mention a co-founder of DiEM25. Enjoy his take on our current predicament as well as our duty to fight not for a return to ‘normality’ but for something much, much better than what was ‘normal’ until a few weeks ago.
Donate

Tonight, with Brian Eno on DiEM-TV, to discuss SOCIETY AFTER COVID-19

DiEM TV welcomes you tonight  to the latest instalment intended to offer escape and hope in this time of confinement and frustration. Our pandemic had three effects on our political reality: It has magnified the never-ending crisis that began in 2008. It has proved that the government must and can act massively in the common interest. And tt has temporarily revealed the true nature of politics – which is the question of WHO has the POWER to DO WHAT TO WHOM. So, the question for this evening is: How will this change society? And, is there a realistic utopian vision of society after the virus that can help avert the nastier of scenaria? In grappling with this question there can be no better DiEM-TV guest than Brian Eno – remarkable artist & co-founder of DiEM.
This discussion will be live-streamed on the DiEM25 Youtube channel. Please ask your questions ahead of the event via the registration form .
WHEN: 03/04/2020 @ 20:00 – 21:00
WHERE: Online
ORGANIZER: DiEM25
AUDIENCE: Anyone can join; you don’t have to be a DiEM25 member. Please register for the event in order to get a link sent to your email. The registration form also allows you to ask a question to the panelists, suggest next topics and next guests.
Register here

Δεν μπαίνει θέμα νέου Μνημονίου κ. Μητσοτάκη. Είστε σε Μνημόνιο! Το ερώτημα είναι πως θα βγείτε – βγάζοντας παράλληλα το λαό από την μαζική καραντίνα μέσω μαζικών εξετάσεων

Δεν μπαίνει θέμα νέου Μνημονίου κ. Μητσοτάκη. Είστε σε Μνημόνιο! Αρνούμενος να κάνετε τα ελάχιστα που απαιτούνται για να χρεοκοπήσουν λιγότεροι, απλά θα σφίγγει περισσότερο η μέγγενη του 4ου Μνημονίου καθιστώντας τη δική σας κυβέρνηση πιο δέσμια στην τρόικα που σας κρατά έτσι κι αλλιώς δέσμιους. Έχετε υποχρέωση άμεσα να προβείτε: Σε κουρέματα (όχι αναστολές) οφειλών. Σε άμεσες προσλήψεις 7000 γιατρών στο ΕΣΥ. Σε εγγύηση στους αγρότες ότι το κράτος θα αγοράσει τα αδιάθετα προϊόντα τους. Σε ΠΝΠ που θα παγώσει τον “Ηρακλή” και θα αποτρέψει νέο δανεισμό 12 δις υπέρ των αρπακτικών. Τέλος, όλες οι σοβαρές κυβερνήσεις σχεδιάζουν τη μετάβαση από την φάση της γενικής καραντίνας στην φάση των μαζικών εξετάσεων ώστε να μπαίνουν σε πραγματική καραντίνα οι φορείς και να αποδεσμεύονται οι μη φορείς. Εσείς;

 

Κύριε Πρωθυπουργέ,
«Μένουμε σπίτι» σας άκουσα να λέτε κλείνοντας τη σημερινή σας ομιλία από το… βήμα της Βουλής. Δεν θελήσατε να στηρίξετε τις προτροπές της δικής σας κυβέρνησης προς τους πολίτες να μην μετακινούνται όταν υπάρχει εναλλακτική – η εναλλακτική, εν προκειμένω, των συνεδριάσεων της Βουλής μέσω τηλεδιάσκεψης.
Χαίρομαι που, αντίθετα με το αδελφό κόμμα της Νέας Δημοκρατίας στην Ουγγαρία, το οποίο κατέλυσε τον Κοινοβουλευτισμό, δηλώνετε ότι η Βουλή παραμένει ανοικτή. Κι εμείς ανοικτή την θέλουμε. Όχι με μια χούφτα βουλευτές και υπουργούς αλλά και με τους 300! Αλλά σε τηλεδιάσκεψη. Με ζωντανή αναμετάδοσή της βέβαια από το Κανάλι της Βουλής.
Κύριε Πρωθυπουργέ,
Σας άκουσα να λέτε, ασκώντας κριτική σε όσους από εμάς καλούμε την κυβέρνηση να προβεί στο Μεγάλο Θετικό Δημοσιονομικό Σοκ που αρνείται, ότι «όσοι σπεύδουν να ζητούν ατελείωτες παροχές είναι σαν να στέλνουν από τώρα την Ελλάδα σε ένα νέο μνημόνιο»
Κρίνοντας από την φράση σας είναι πλέον ξεκάθαρο ότι δεν έχετε κατανοήσει ούτε το είδος ούτε το μέγεθος της Κρίσης που αντιμετωπίζετε.
Πρώτον, δεν μπαίνει θέμα νέου Μνημονίου κ. Μητσοτάκη.  Είστε  σε Μνημόνιο! Στο 4ο και πιο τοξικό που ετέθη σε ισχύ το καλοκαίρι του 2018. Πραγματικά δεν καταλαβαίνω γιατί θεωρείτε ότι σας συμφέρει αυτό που μόνο τους προκατόχους σας συμφέρει: Το αναμάσημα του παραμυθιού για έξοδο από το Μνημόνιο, όταν είμαστε σε πολύ συγκεκριμένο Μνημόνιο έως το 2060.
Δεν καταλαβαίνετε ότι αυτό που συμβαίνει με την δημοσιονομική σας ολιγωρία, με το ότι αρνείστε να κάνετε εκείνα τα ελάχιστα που απαιτούνται για να χρεοκοπήσουν λιγότεροι, απλά θα σφίγγει περισσότερο η μέγγενη του 4ου Μνημονίου καθιστώντας τη δική σας κυβέρνηση πιο δέσμια, ακόμα πιο ευάλωτη, στην τρόικα που σας κρατά έτσι κι αλλιώς δέσμιους;
Τί είναι τα ελάχιστα που απαιτούνται και που δεν κάνετε; Σας τα έχουμε πει επανειλημμένως αλλά ας τα ξαναπώ εν τάχει:


Κουρέματα χρεών. Όχι αναβολές πληρωμών φόρων, εισφορών, δόσεων. Δεν βοηθά τον εργαζόμενο, τον μικρομεσαίο τον αγρότη που δεν έχει και δεν θα έχει εισοδήματα να του πεις «μου τα δίνεις όλα αργότερα, και μάλιστα με τόκο». Μόνο το κούρεμα βοηθά.


Άμεσες προσλήψεις 7000 γιατρών στο ΕΣΥ. Τώρα. Σήμερα. Αν όχι τώρα, πότε;


Το κράτος να εγγυηθεί στους αγρότες ότι θα αγοράσει τα αδιάθετα προϊόντα τους τα οποία θα διοχετευτούν στις αγορές των πόλεων όπου οι εγκλωβισμένοι πολίτες ήδη βλέπουν τεράστιες ανατιμήσεις από τα ολιγοπωλιακά σουπερμάρκετ.


Κόκκινα δάνεια: Πράξη Νομοθετικού Περιεχομένου (ΠΝΠ) σήμερα, άμεσα, με την οποία να παγώνετε όχι μόνο κάθε πλειστηριασμό αλλά τον Νόμο «Ηρακλή». Όπως σας έχω θυμίσει κ. Πρωθυπουργέ, αν δεν παγώσετε τον «Ηρακλή» θα ενεργοποιηθεί η δημόσια εγγύηση από τα αρπακτικά ταμεία και τότε η κυβέρνησή σας θα αναγκαστεί να δανειστεί από την τρόικα άλλα 12 δις ευρώ υπέρ των ταμείων. Σας προειδοποιώ κ. Πρωθυπουργέ: Αν δεν κάνετε το αυτονόητο, να παγώσετε με ΠΝΠ τον «Ηρακλή», με αποτέλεσμα να αυξήσετε το δημόσιο χρέος κατά 12 δις αυτήν ιδίως την εποχή θα δώσετε το δικαίωμα να τεθεί το ερώτημα: Ποια συμφέροντα δεν επιτρέπουν στον πρωθυπουργό να παγώσει την αύξηση του δημόσιου χρέους υπέρ των ταμείων κατά 12 δις; Ποιοι κύκλοι της κυβέρνησης έχουν σχέσεις εξάρτησης από τα ταμεία αυτά;


Κύριε Πρωθυπουργέ,
Καταλάβετέ το: Χωρίς τη Μεγάλη Δημοσιονομική Τονωτική Ένεση που σας προτείνουμε, το χρέος θα αυξηθεί ακόμα πιο πολύ. Η δημοσιονομική τονωτική ένεση δεν είναι «παροχές που θα φέρουν Μνημόνιο». Είναι επένδυση στην μείωση της σκληρότητας του υπάρχοντος ασφυκτικού Μνημονίου.
Το Μνημόνιο είναι, σας θυμίζω, δεδομένο καθώς, επί της ουσίας, δεν βγήκαμε ποτέ από αυτό. Με τη πολιτική που ακολουθείτε, με την άρνησή σας να μας ακούσετε, το δημόσιο χρέος θα ανέβει τουλάχιστον στο 220% του εθνικού εισοδήματος εντός του 2021. Στο πλαίσιο του 4ου Μνημονίου που λειτουργείτε, τί νομίζετε ότι θα αντιμετωπίσετε του χρόνου; Αγάπες και αγκαλιές από την τρόικα; Ή σφίξιμο της μέγγενης της λιτότητας;
Κύριε Πρωθυπουργέ,
Αυτοί είναι οι λόγοι που το ευρωομόλογο δεν είναι πολυτέλεια. Δεν είναι κάτι που καλό θα ήταν υπήρχε αλλά, ε, και να μην το δεχθούν εμείς θα προχωρήσουμε. Είναι θέμα επιβίωσης της χώρας, είναι θέμα επιβίωσης της ΕΕ. Κατανοείστε αυτό: Δεν θα το πετύχετε αν δεν δηλώσετε, μαζί με τους άλλους οκτώ εκ των «9» που μαζί το ζητήσατε στη Σύνοδο Κορυφής, ότι θα ασκήσετε βέτο και θα αποχωρήσετε από κάθε Σύνοδο αν δεν εγκριθεί ευρωομόλογο 1 τρις ευρώ έκδοσης της ΕΚΤ.
Παρεμπιπτόντως, άκουσα τον Αρχηγό της Αξιωματικής Αντιπολίτευσης να μιλά για έκδοση μεγάλου ευρωομόλογου από τον Ευρωπαϊκό Μηχανισμό Στήριξης, τον ΕΜΣ. Αναρωτιέμαι αν πρόκειται απλά για ανεπάρκεια του κ. Τσίπρα ή του οικονομικού του επιτελείου. Ή αν πρόκειται για εσκεμμένη υποστήριξη της σκληρής γραμμής του Βερολίνου που δείχνει το δρόμο στα μνημονιακά δάνεια του ΕΜΣ. Δεν καταλαβαίνει ο κ. Τσίπρας ότι δάνειο του ΕΜΣ, ακόμα και χωρίς προαπαιτούμενα, είναι ακριβώς το αντίθετο του ευρωομόλογου, δηλαδή της αναδιάρθρωσης χρέους που μειώνει το εθνικό χρέος επιμερίζοντας το σε όλη την Ευρώπη;
Κύριε Πρωθυπουργέ,
Θα κλείσω με το πιο άμεσο ζήτημα όσον αφορά την καθημερινότητα και την υγεία των πολιτών.
Το ΜέΡΑ25 στήριξε, και στηρίζει, τα μέτρα «συμπίεσης» της μεταδοτικότητας του ιού. Όμως, η κυβέρνηση είχε ιερή υποχρέωση να σχεδιάσει την μετάβαση από αυτή τη φάση της γενικής καραντίνας στη δεύτερη φάση των μαζικών εξετάσεων με στόχο τον διαχωρισμό των πολιτών σε εκείνους που είναι εν δυνάμει μεταδοτικοί φορείς και στους υπόλοιπους. Μόνο έτσι θα μπορέσει η κυβέρνηση να διατηρήσει τον έλεγχο της κατάστασης.
Δεν είναι δυνατόν να μην έχετε παρουσιάσει Εθνικό Στρατηγικό Σχέδιο για τους επόμενους μήνες που, μεταξύ άλλων, να απαντά στα ερωτήματα:


Έχει η κυβέρνηση μεριμνήσει για τις μαζικές εξετάσεις που θα απαιτηθούν στη δεύτερη φάση;


Πού θα εξετάζονται οι πολίτες;


Σε ποια χρονική στιγμή, ή υπό ποιες ακριβώς συνθήκες θα ανακοινώσετε ότι η ελληνική κοινωνία περνά στην δεύτερη αυτή φάση;


Κύριε Πρωθυπουργέ,
Όλες οι σοβαρές χώρες, αφ’ ενός, προβαίνουν σε Μεγάλη Δημοσιονομική Τονωτική Ένεση και, αφ’ ετέρου, σχεδιάζουν τη μετάβαση από την φάση της γενικής καραντίνας στην δεύτερη φάση των μαζικών εξετάσεων ώστε να μπαίνουν σε πραγματική καραντίνα οι φορείς και να αποδεσμεύονται οι μη φορείς.
Η δική σας κυβέρνηση δεν κάνει ούτε το ένα ούτε το άλλο. Μήπως ήρθε η ώρα η σοβαρότητα να αντικαταστήσει την σοβαροφάνειά σας;

Why are they saying no to the eurobond? The case for constructive disobedience in the EU Council