Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 77

Άμεση απάντηση στον κ. Μητσοτάκη μέσα από την Αίθουσα της Βουλής για τα περί δίδυμου της καταστροφής- η ομορφιά του διαδικτύου

Καθώς ο Κανονισμός της Βουλής δεν μου επιτρέπει να σας απαντήσω κ. Μητσοτάκη, το κάνω – μέσα από την Αίθουσα του Κοινοβουλίου – εδώ! Είπατε πως η κυβέρνησή σας δεν έχετε ανάγκη συμβουλών για το πως θα διαπραγματευτείτε από το “δίδυμο της καταστροφής Βαρουφάκη-Τσίπρα”. Σας κατανοώ κ. Μητσοτάκη.
Από το 2012 έως και το Δεκέμβρη του 2014 η τρόικα σας εξευτέλιζε παρά το ΝΑΙ ΣΕ ΟΛΑ που τους λέγατε. Όταν, λοιπόν, τον Γενάρη του 2015 κάποιος μπήκε στο Eurogroup και τους είπε ΟΧΙ, κάνοντας ακόμα και νεοδημοκράτες να νιώσουν ανάταση, εσείς νιώσατε να χάνεται το έδαφος κάτω από τα πόδια σας.
Κι όταν ο λαός στήριξε το ΟΧΙ εκείνο με 62% βρεθήκατε στο καλάθι των αχρήστων. Αν και την επομένη ο κ. Τσίπρας σας ανέσυρε από εκείνο το καλάθι, και μαζί ανατρέψατε το ΟΧΙ (μπαίνοντας έτσι σε τροχιά επιστροφής στην εξουσία), την τρομάρα εκείνη που περάσατε, την ερήμην σας (και εις βάρος σας) ανάταση του ελληνικού λαού, δεν την συγχωρείτε.
Το να με χαρακτηρίζουν “καταστροφέα” εκείνοι που έλεγαν ΒΑΣΤΑ ΓΕΡΟΥΝ την ώρα που πάσχιζα για την αναδιάρθρωση χρέους που είναι απαραίτητη για την κατάργηση της Χρεοδουλοπαροικίας μας αποτελεί μεγάλη τιμή. Σας ευχαριστώ για αυτήν. Όπως είχα πει στην επιστολή παραίτησής μου, θα φέρω στο πέτο μου το μίσος της τρόικας εξωτερικού και εσωτερικού ως μετάλλειο τιμής.

 

What the Labour Party-DiEM25 collaboration is all about – speech by Yanis Varoufakis, now with video

On Sunday 14th July, the Labour Party and DiEM25 leadership teams agreed to embark upon a common agenda for Europe and beyond. Later that day, the collaboration was announced at the closing plenary of the International Social Forum convened by the Labour Party at SOAS, London and opened by Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party. Introduced by John McDonnell, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor of the Excequer, Yanis Varoufakis explained the task ahead.

 

(Photo taken after the event during a joint interview by Corbyn, McDonnell and Varoufakis)

Lagarde at the ECB – my take in The Guardian

Christine Lagarde was a key member of the infamous troika – Greece’s official creditors – who crushed our people’s resistance to perpetual debt bondage. The other key figure alongside the International Monetary Fund’s then managing director was Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, who played a central role in that drama by engineering the closure of Greece’s banks. Now, four years later, Lagarde has been anointed to succeed Draghi at the helm of the ECB.

Despite her role, and the dealings we had when I was Greece’s finance minister, not once did I feel animosity towards her. I found her intelligent, cordial, respectful. She even acknowledged, in private at least, that Greece had been given a raw deal and that my campaign to cut our public debt was right and proper. Lagarde’s priority was holding the troika’s line and minimising any challenge to its collective authority.

 The question now is whether Lagarde’s skills are in tune with the task of leading the ECB in the post-Draghi era. Much has been made, by supporters and detractors, of both her unquestionable talent for managing complex institutional tensions and her non-existent monetary policy background. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the two most influential central banks, the Federal Reserve and the ECB, are now to be led by lawyers with no academic monetary background. The shifting consensus on who is best placed to oversee monetary policy reflects a crisis of financialised capitalism that traditional central banking can no longer address.

Lagarde’s greatest challenge is that she is replacing a man credited with saving the eurozone by means of policies that are no longer fit for purpose. If she departs from Draghi’s script, she will face fierce criticism. And if she does not, the eurozone’s never-ending crisis will spin further out of the ECB’s control.

Draghi saved the eurozone by printing trillions of euros to fund the bankrupt banks and to allow Italy, Spain and other stressed states (though not Greece) to roll over their debts. To do this, he needed to skilfully subvert the eurozone’s rules which, in turn, required painstaking work to co-opt Germany’s Angela Merkel in his great clash with both the Bundesbank, Germany’s powerful central bank, and Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister.

While Draghi’s wall of money helped the eurozone perk up, it could not cure its underlying disease and had some pretty nasty side-effects. Stubborn negative interest rates continue to undermine pension funds and insurance companies in Germany and beyond. Rates remain negative because investment is woefully low due to investors’ self-fulfilling pessimism given the prospect of more austerity.

This creates deflationary pressures that eat into the savings of the middle class, replace quality jobs with precarious ones and, thus, beget political monsters across Europe.

Most commentators wonder whether Lagarde will be brave enough to continue with Draghi’s “unconventional” policies. This is the wrong question to ask since his trick for keeping key countries, such as Italy, in the eurozone has reached the end of the road both technically and politically.

Technically, because Draghi’s success in persuading Berlin to let him buy Italian public debt, and thus keep Italy in the eurozone, hinged on the promise to buy debt from each member state in proportion to the size of their economy – ie buying approximately €2 of German debt for every €1 of Italian debt. However, with Germany producing no new public debt, courtesy of running a budget surplus, Draghi’s strategy for buying Italian debt has fizzled out.

And politically, Draghi’s trick has also expired because the deflationary dynamic of the last decade has given birth to a Eurosceptic rightwing Italian government unfazed by the prospect of Italy dropping out of the eurozone.

The pertinent question to ask about Lagarde’s ECB tenure is: can she push Berlin to ditch the eurozone’s suicidal fiscal rules (which reinforce Europe’s deflationary dynamic) and to accept the idea of a common, safe debt? If she does not do so, no matter how energetically she continues to impose Draghi’s policies, she will fail the test of history. To succeed she needs to be subtle, creative and confrontational.

Subtlety requires that she does not ask Berlin explicitly to denounce dogmas that have, over the years, acquired quasi-religious status.

Creativity will help her sell the abandonment of fiscal rules as their reinforcement, via the interest rate mechanism. For example, Lagarde could propose that the ECB help member states refinance their debt, but only the part they were allowed to have according to the eurozone’s own rules – thus, giving Rome a market-based disincentive to borrow excessively. Similarly, there are imaginative ways to create the common debt that Berlin detests but which is essential to the smooth operation of any monetary union – for example, by insisting that the ECB borrows on its own account to roll over Italian, Spanish, German, etc, debt already purchased under Draghi.

Lagarde is certainly smart enough to grasp the necessity of such a feat – and to pull it off if she puts her mind to it. The real question is whether she has the inclination to confront Berlin head-on, to the point of telling the German government that it is her way or, ultimately, the end of the euro and a chaotic return to the deutschmark. The omens, I am afraid, are not good.

During her IMF days in Washington, Lagarde often had to choose between policies that were to Berlin’s liking or in the fund’s interests. The clearest example was over the extending of Greece’s insolvency by a lethal combination of more loans and more income-sapping austerity. While the IMF’s staff were adamant that Greece needed an outright debt reduction, Lagarde repeatedly sided with Berlin. Forced to choose between Berlin’s favouritism and the interests of the institution she led, she unfailingly opted for the former. If she continues this behaviour after her Frankfurt move, her ECB career will prove inauspicious.

For the Guardian site click here

Against extractive practices (social & environmental). Interviewed by Kate Aronoff for DISSENT

“We have to talk to people in a way that combines addressing these [economic] anxieties with the issues of the environment. Unless we manage to do that, we will fail.”

Kate Aronoff [image error] Summer 2019
Yanis Varoufakis celebrating the anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 2018 (Pedro Ribeiro Simões/Flickr)

The last few years have been a bit of a rollercoaster for the European left. Riding up front has been Yanis Varoufakis, the charismatic economist and former Greek finance minister who went to war with the troika—the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—in 2015 as it sought to inflict brutal austerity as a penalty for his country’s debts and its decision to elect an openly left-wing government headed by Syriza. They lost that fight, but Varoufakis escaped mostly unscathed. Amid Brexit and a wave of Euroskepticism, he went on to found the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), pushing for a more democratic and inclusive continent, free of austerity. The group mounted several candidates under the mantle of a European Spring this May, including Varoufakis himself. They failed to gain a single seat, though his vote total came in a hundredth of a percentage point below the 3 percent threshold needed to gain representation. While the center-right faltered in May, so, too, did the left.

Particularly among young voters, progressive and social democratic parties—including those in the DiEM25 orbit—seem to have lost many of their votes to the European Greens, which successfully tapped into the momentum of the youth-led Fridays for Future protests around Europe and Extinction Rebellion in the UK. Voters across the continent now rank the climate crisis among their top concerns. The great irony in left parties’ generally meager showing is that, from La France Insoumise to Labour in the UK, they are greener than they’ve ever been, in many places rejecting the old-school productivism that fueled them through the postwar era.

In Europe, all politics is now climate politics. The question is whether the left can ground the conversation about rising temperatures in a broader egalitarian vision that can counter tepid centrist technocracy and far-right xenophobia alike, and the response of each to the existential threat hurdling toward us. In its push for a Green New Deal, DiEM25 wagers that it can, but it has hit no shortage of road bumps along the way. Engaging in the largely symbolic European Parliament elections was one piece of an effort they’ll continue as the left attempts to craft the kind of systemic and internationalist climate response that science is demanding.

The interview below was recorded a few days before voting began.

Kate Aronoff: DiEM25 and many others are advocating a Green New Deal, something you’ve worked on for several years. What do you think it is about that framing that is grabbing people’s attention, despite it being seemingly so American?

Yanis Varoufakis: What is important about a Green New Deal is that it concentrates the mind on the main task, which is to swiftly and efficiently find massive funding for a cause that is in the public interest. The New Deal began with Roosevelt in the 1930s in the midst of a Great Depression. The innovation of this thinking by Roosevelt, who wasn’t exactly a radical, was to concentrate on the fact that even during the Great Depression—when everybody was short of money—there was a mountain of idle cash, which could be converted into investment. So instead of thinking of a different social system, like changing property rights, he used the toolkit of the federal government, and in particular U.S. Treasury bills, to put billions of dollars into the service of investments in jobs, in building roads and hospitals, even art projects and so on.

Our version of the Green New Deal [in Europe] combines the original aims and inspiration of Franklin Roosevelt. We want governments to use public financial instruments to massively increase investment in good quality jobs, and technologies and facilities that are necessary for green transition in the fields of energy, transport, manufacturing, and agriculture. That is absolutely essential, and this is what we’ve been working on for years now.

Aronoff: As part of that, you’ve also called for refashioning the Bretton Woods institutions and referenced the Marshall Plan, which, as you’ve written, was arrived at for a mixed bag of reasons, a big part of which was U.S. policymakers’ self-interest in having allies around the world in the context of the Cold War. What does refashioning the Bretton Woods institutions look like today? Is there a similar appeal to be made for the sort of self-interest that propelled the Marshall Plan?

Varoufakis: The Bretton Woods system was originally conceived by the New Dealers as the global framework within which Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States could prevail.

Today, if we want a European Green New Deal, or an American Green New Deal, we will have to look beyond the confines of the borders of our countries to build the circumstances in which the New Deal can go global. It requires something like a new Bretton Woods. If you look at the old Bretton Woods institutions that are still with us, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in the era of financialization, they have become toxic. They have become detrimental to the interests of the multitudes around the world. In DiEM25, but also as part of a progressive international that we are slowly building with our friends and colleagues in the United States, in Japan, in Iceland, in Africa, and so on, we are envisioning a new Bretton Woods that will have a very little to do with the old Bretton Woods, except in the original idea of creating the international framework and the international institutions that are absolutely necessary to maintain an international Green New Deal.

Aronoff: How does that get around some of the problems that have been faced by bodies like the United Nations Framework Conventions on Climate Change in trying to arrive at a global solution to this problem?

Varoufakis: The approaches that you mentioned have so far been approaches focusing on constraints. Now, this is very important, of course: physical limits to growth and setting ceilings for CO2 or methane gases is essential. But the problem with these international agreements is that while all countries around the world would benefit if everybody stood by those constraints, each one of them individually has an incentive to find some pretext, either covertly or directly, to break those commitments. However, if the international agreements on climate change move into creating public financial tools that allow banks to collaborate to issue bonds that soak up the excess liquidity, then suddenly the incentive would be there for countries to opt in. This would be a very large-scale international investment fund from which to create jobs and from which to do good things regarding technologies for renewables and so on. A large-scale, international green investment plan would offer not just sticks, but also carrots for countries to participate in these international agreements—something that has never been attempted before.

Aronoff: Adam Tooze responded to some of your writing on this point by arguing that power isn’t really held in nations as it was toward the end of the Second World War when those institutions were created, and is now concentrated among central bankers, lawyers, and financial economists. How do you respond to that critique in terms of where power is held today?

Varoufakis: I agree with that. We should never underestimate the importance of functionaries, both functionaries who work for the states and functionaries who work for large corporations. But to say that because they are vested with inordinate power, the rest of us should simply throw up our hands in the air and surrender to climate change or to underinvestment or to what Larry Summers refers to as secular stagnation, that is a non sequitur for me. My assessment of Bretton Woods in 1944 is that it was driven by a combination of a very powerful moral commitment by people in the New Dealers’ administration who felt in their bones the inequities and the wretchedness of the Great Depression, and they didn’t want to live to see it again. That moral political force, ideology if you want, was a necessary condition, even though it was not sufficient. As Adam Tooze points out, it took many lawyers and functionaries, who recognized the self-interest in participating in this majestic new internationalist project, to then bring it about. I don’t see why we should not aim to do the same thing at this juncture. The year 2008 was spectacularly similar to 1929.

Aronoff: There’s this tendency to treat climate as something that can be walled off from the financial sector or from issues of immigration. Could you say more specifically about why massive reforms to the financial system are so important to dealing with the climate problem?

Varoufakis: If you look at what’s going on in Wall Street today, it’s as if 2008 never happened. The financial sector is like a driver who was caught doing 130 miles an hour, gets a huge fine, and after half an hour forgets all about the fine and starts speeding again.

As for climate change, in my own country, we have a feast that is being prepared by the oligarchs of the eastern Mediterranean, including the Greek ones, and the American multinational companies that will soon be extracting oil and natural gas from deep sea wells. All that’s being financed by a financial sector that is going haywire yet again as if 2008 never happened.

Aronoff: In the 1930s and ’40s there was this real change in how people were thinking about the role of the state in the economy and what it is governments should be doing and providing. There was a similar paradigm shift in the 1970s that created an opening for neoliberals. Does the climate crisis offer that kind of opportunity today to folks looking to put a new paradigm into place that can actually deal with it?

Varoufakis: I think that this shift has already happened. A majority of people in every country realize that Alan Greenspan’s touching faith in the capacity of markets to self-regulate was nothing but a particularly toxic form of idiocy. The question now, however, is this: how do we go from the serious weakening of the libertarian paradigm to creating a political consensus toward a Green New Deal? This is the task ahead for all of us.

At the moment, instead of progressives getting together and planning a new Bretton Woods, what we have is a neo-fascist international led by people like Matteo Salvini in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Orban in Hungary, Steve Bannon—who is traversing the continent spreading his poison—Donald Trump in the White House, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India.

We are trying to create a progressive international but we are just at the very, very beginning. And the rallying call of the neo-fascist nationalist international is: Make America Great Again, Make Greece Great Again, Make Italy Great Again. On the one hand they’re saying they are nationalist, but on the other hand, they’re combining forces very efficiently across the world. What we need to do is effectively emulate their success but not by emulating their tactics. They are using xenophobia: they’re blaming Muslims, Jews, Greeks, and all sorts of categories and sets of people and nationalities and religions. They claim to be doing it on behalf of the people, but once in power they employ the worst offenders from Wall Street. Donald Trump took Goldman Sachs personnel and implanted them in the Fed and in the Treasury.

We need to use the Green New Deal as a rallying call across the world. The Green New Deal is a positive message of realism. We have excess liquidity. The world has never had savings as high as we have today. So all we need to do is find ways to turn those savings into good quality green jobs.

Aronoff: There’s this argument that welfare states were contingent on cheap oil. If we need to actually keep fossil fuels in the ground what does it look like to build a low-carbon welfare state?

Varoufakis: I’m not convinced at all that the welfare state was built on cheap energy. The welfare state was simply built as a result of the political pressures upon capital to yield some of its profits in order to stabilize its rule over labor. It was a result of class conflict. Already we see that renewable energy is cheaper than oil. So what seems to me a question that would have been very pertinent in the 1970s—because back then renewables were either not available or very, very expensive—is no longer pertinent. Today all we’re missing is a massive investment in turning existing renewable technologies and technologies that come into existence in the next five years into the mainstay of energy generation.

I reject the argument that we need to go back to a bucolic existence to save the planet. When we talk to people who are struggling to make it until the end of the month, telling them that over the next fifty years we’re going to lose species, they say “I don’t give a damn! I can’t make ends meet today.” We have to talk to people in a way that combines addressing these anxieties with the issues of the environment. Unless we manage to do that, we will fail. But I think we can.

Aronoff: For the last several decades, GDP growth, has been the main metric by which an economy’s health is judged. There is a stubborn relationship between GDP growth and emissions, but it’s also true that GDP growth is not necessarily a great indicator of human well-being, or of many other things we might think are important in an economy. Is growth a useful metric? Should there be others?

Varoufakis: GDP is an awful metric. There’s no doubt that GDP growth is meaningless in terms of human achievements and happiness and success. You burn down a forest, GDP goes up. But we don’t just need a new metric, we need a different system of organizing economic life. We need to transcend capitalism. But as long as we are with capitalism, what is the point? Let’s say I were to design a fantastic new metric that puts a great deal of value in trees and poetry and all the other things that should be valued. If we live in capitalism, it’s irrelevant.

Aronoff: Among economists, the go-to answer for how to deal with climate change for years has been to correct the market failure by making the price of carbon dioxide reflect it’s true value: the social cost of carbon. Do you see that consensus slipping at all?

Varoufakis: Economists are very funny creatures. When economists look at market value, the complete disaster in the environment, or for that matter in the financial markets, isn’t recognized as a market failure. So what are they proposing more of? More markets. They’re hoping that the market will perform its miracle and an emissions trading scheme will create a shadow price for carbon that will make it more likely that humanity will reduce its use of carbon. Now if you are interested in saving free-market ideology from failure and from becoming humiliated by the facts, then of course this is what you do. But if you’re interested in saving humanity, you just remind yourself that you started from the wrong axiom, and the wrong axiom is that the market knows best. The market doesn’t know best.

Aronoff: Now we’re talking a couple of days out from the European elections. However things turn out, what are the next steps?

Varoufakis: When we announced a year ago that we’re going to run in the European elections, we were really clear in saying we don’t consider the European Parliament to be that significant. What we always savored was the process of elections in the same week across Europe that allowed us to put the Green New Deal on the agenda in Poland, Denmark, Portugal, Greece, France, Germany, and Italy. This has been remarkable. So after the election we will take stock of what happened, how successful we were in putting it on the agenda and getting some people elected. We will see what new tools we have, whether we have some new resources as a result of the election or some of us in the European Parliament, how many of those resources there are. The next stage will be national elections in Germany, in Greece, maybe in Italy. This is not going to be an easy struggle, and it’s not going to end anytime soon, and it’s not a discrete event. It’s a continuous campaign.

Kate Aronoff is a fellow at the Type Media Center and a member of Dissent’s editorial board.

Yanis Varoufakis is the cofounder of DiEM25 and the former minister of finance of Greece. He is the author of Adults in the Room and The Global Minotaur, among other books.

An Interview with Yanis Varoufakis

What the Labour Party-DiEM25 collaboration is all about – speech (audio) by Yanis Varoufakis

On Sunday 14th July, the Labour Party and DiEM25 leadership teams agreed to embark upon a common agenda for Europe and beyond. Later that day, the collaboration was announced at the closing plenary of the International Social Forum convened by the Labour Party at SOAS, London and opened by Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party. Introduced by John McDonnell, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor of the Excequer, Yanis Varoufakis explained the task ahead.

(Photo taken after the event during a joint interview by Corbyn, McDonnell and Varoufakis)

Ένα μικρό δράμα στο αεροδρόμιο του Παρισιού που πολλά λέει για την κατάσταση της Ευρώπης μας

Μικρά δράματα συχνά αντανακλούν μεγάλα προβλήματα. Χτες το απόγευμα, ένα τέτοιο μικρό δράμα διαδραματίστηκε στο αεροδρόμιο του Παρισιού καθώς έβγαινα από το αεροπλάνο της Aegean. Το μικρό αυτό δράμα από μόνο του ήταν άνευ σημασίας. Δυστυχώς όμως λέει πολλά για το μέγα δράμα μιας Ευρώπης που αποδομείται και, έτσι, αφήνεται όλο και περισσότερο σ’ έναν αυταρχισμό χωρίς ειρμό, χωρίς λογική.

Γάλλος αστυνομικός, αφού έλεγξε και επέστρεψε το διαβατήριο μου, για ακατανόητο λόγο, με έσπρωξε. Όταν διαμαρτυρήθηκα πέρασε στην κατάχρηση εξουσίας: μου απέσπασε το διαβατήριο και αρνήθηκε να μου το επιστρέψει. Έπρεπε να απαιτήσω την παρουσία ανωτέρου του ώστε να τερματιστεί το μικρό αυτό δράμα.

Όπως γράφω στην μηνυτήρια δήλωσή μου (βλ. πιο κάτω την αγγλική της μορφή) που ήδη κατέθεσε στις γαλλικές αρχές ο δικηγόρος μου,

Ως έλληνας πολίτης, κι εκλεγμένος μέλος της Βουλής των Ελλήνων, έχω υποχρέωση να διαμαρτύρομαι απέναντι σε τέτοιες συμπεριφορές που στοχοποιούν τον οποιονδήποτε πολίτη της Ελληνικής Δημοκρατίας.
Ως ευρωπαίος πολίτης, αρνούμαι να αποδεχθώ την κανονικοποίηση τέτοιων συμπεριφορών στα ευρωπαϊκά σύνορα, ιδίως σε σύνορα εντός της Σένγκεν τα οποία, υποτίθεται, έχουν καταργηθεί.

ΥΓ1. Ευτυχώς, βίντεο που καταγράφηκαν από συνταξιδιώτες (βλ. εδώ και εδώ) δεν αφήνουν περιθώριο αμφισβήτησης του γεγονότος.

ΥΓ2. Αφού δήλωσα την πρόθεσή μου να προβώ σε μήνυση, με διασκέδασε η είδηση ότι ο αστυνομικός-δράστης προτίθεται να με μηνύσει με την σειρά του. Οι αστυνομικοί έχουν υποχρέωση να συλλαμβάνουν πολίτες που παρανομούν. (Αν παρανόμησα, γιατί δεν με συνέλαβε;) Μόνο οι πολίτες μηνύουν αστυνομικούς που κάνουν κατάχρηση αρχής.

OFFICIAL COMPLAINT ON INCIDENT AT CHD AIRPORT
Time: 17.23
Day: Saturday 13th July 2019
Upon arrival at CHD airport, and as I was exiting the airplane (Aegean Airways, A3 612), police officer No. 1059129, standing within the ramp two meters from the airplane door, asked to see my passport.
I presented my passport to him, as instructed. Even though he seemed satisfied that the passport was in good order, he seemed reluctant to return it and had a hostile expression. A few moments later he returned the passport to me but, as I was about to leave, he positioned himself in the middle of the corridor, with his elbows extended rather aggressively, leaving little room to pass him by without touching him.
With my passport in hand, I walked past him on his right, my right elbow touching his right elbow. The moment our elbows touched (an inevitability, given his posture), he reacted violently. I looked at him and said that it was unbecoming of an officer to behave that way to a visitor. In response, he grabbed my passport and asked me to stand against the wall.
I refused and immediately demanded to speak to his superior officer. He reacted even more aggressively, refusing to call upon anyone. At that point I told him that, though his behaviour was unacceptable towards any visitor, regardless of status, I refused to tolerate such behaviour towards all Greek citizens also as a freshly re-elected member of Greek Parliament.
It took more than half an hour for his superior officer to arrive. During that time, the whole airplane walked by me and officer 1059129 maintained his aggression. On a couple of occasions he asked me to follow him. I refused loudly on the grounds that his aggressive behaviour made him a clear and present danger to me and, also, on the strength of my request to speak to his superiors – a request that was being denied on the pretext that there was no superior officer nearby. Surely, I said, in a sensitive facility like an airport it would not be that hard for a more senior officer to be in hand.
In the end, a superior officer (No. 1222366) arrived. Though (unlike officer 1059129), he was not aggressive, he failed to resolve the issue quickly and maintained a rudeness at odds with what one would expect of a senior officer of the French police serving at the nations’ welcoming hub.
After explaining to superior officer No. 1222366 what had happened, I asked for my passport and for an apology. He said he had to talk to his officer first. After speaking with him, he said that his officer wants to lodge a complaint against… me! Meanwhile, officer 1059129 was holding on to my passport. I, thus, demanded of superior officer No. 1222366 that either my passport be returned or I should be arrested. At that point, he seemed to worry sufficiently to return my passport.
In conclusion, with the present letter, I am formally requesting a formal apology from the French police and a reprimand for the officers involved.
As an elected member of Greece’s Parliament, it is incumbent upon me to demonstrate against such behaviour aimed at any citizen of the Republic of Greece.
As a European citizen, I refuse to accept the normalization of such behaviour at any border crossing of the European Union, especially Schengen Treaty borders that the European Union was meant to have done away with.
Yanis Varoufakis

 

A tiny incident at Paris airport that speaks volumes about our Europe – the whole story

Small incidents can pack hefty messages. Yesterday afternoon, a tiny drama unfolded at Paris airport, as I was disembarking the airplane that had brought me over from Athens. It speaks volumes about the state of our European Union and the drift toward inane authoritarianism.

A French policeman, for no obvious reason, took it to himself to be hostile and to manhandle me after having checked and returned my passport. As I conclude in my official complaint (lodged by my lawyers) with the French Police,

As a European citizen, I refuse to accept the normalization of such behaviour at any border crossing of the European Union, especially Schengen Treaty borders that the European Union was meant to have done away with.
As a Greek citizen, and also as an elected member of Greece’s Parliament, it is incumbent upon me to demonstrate against such behaviour aimed at any citizen of the Republic of Greece.

PS1. Thankfully, videos recorded by fellow passengers (see here and here) leave no room for doubt regarding the incident

PS. I was amused to hear that the perpetrator-policeman is planning to… sue me. This is, of course, absurd. For if I had violated the law in any way, he should arrest me. Policemen arrest citizens for legal transgressions and only citizens sue police for abuse of power.

OFFICIAL COMPLAINT ON INCIDENT AT CHD AIRPORT
Time: 17.23
Day: Saturday 13th July 2019
Upon arrival at CHD airport, and as I was exiting the airplane (Aegean Airways, A3 612), police officer No. 1059129, standing within the ramp two meters from the airplane door, asked to see my passport.
I presented my passport to him, as instructed. Even though he seemed satisfied that the passport was in good order, he seemed reluctant to return it and had a hostile expression. A few moments later he returned the passport to me but, as I was about to leave, he positioned himself in the middle of the corridor, with his elbows extended rather aggressively, leaving little room to pass him by without touching him.
With my passport in hand, I walked past him on his right, my right elbow touching his right elbow. The moment our elbows touched (an inevitability, given his posture), he reacted violently. I looked at him and said that it was unbecoming of an officer to behave that way to a visitor. In response, he grabbed my passport and asked me to stand against the wall.
I refused and immediately demanded to speak to his superior officer. He reacted even more aggressively, refusing to call upon anyone. At that point I told him that, though his behaviour was unacceptable towards any visitor, regardless of status, I refused to tolerate such behaviour towards all Greek citizens also as a freshly re-elected member of Greek Parliament.
It took more than half an hour for his superior officer to arrive. During that time, the whole airplane walked by me and officer 1059129 maintained his aggression. On a couple of occasions he asked me to follow him. I refused loudly on the grounds that his aggressive behaviour made him a clear and present danger to me and, also, on the strength of my request to speak to his superiors – a request that was being denied on the pretext that there was no superior officer nearby. Surely, I said, in a sensitive facility like an airport it would not be that hard for a more senior officer to be in hand.
In the end, a superior officer (No. 1222366) arrived. Though (unlike officer 1059129), he was not aggressive, he failed to resolve the issue quickly and maintained a rudeness at odds with what one would expect of a senior officer of the French police serving at the nations’ welcoming hub.
After explaining to superior officer No. 1222366 what had happened, I asked for my passport and for an apology. He said he had to talk to his officer first. After speaking with him, he said that his officer wants to lodge a complaint against… me! Meanwhile, officer 1059129 was holding on to my passport. I, thus, demanded of superior officer No. 1222366 that either my passport be returned or I should be arrested. At that point, he seemed to worry sufficiently to return my passport.
In conclusion, with the present letter, I am formally requesting a formal apology from the French police.
As an elected member of Greece’s Parliament, it is incumbent upon me to demonstrate against such behaviour aimed at any citizen of the Republic of Greece.
As a European citizen, I refuse to accept the normalization of such behaviour at any border crossing of the European Union, especially Schengen Treaty borders that the European Union was meant to have done away with.
Yanis Varoufakis

 

 

 

How Syriza’s capitulations allowed the Greek right to escape the dustbin of history – The New Statesman

The left-wing party’s embrace of austerity created the conditions for a parasitic and cruel oligarchy to return

The Greek right is back: greedier, uglier and more focused than ever. The incoming New Democracy government is determined to reclaim full control of the state on behalf of the most parasitic segment of Greece’s oligarchy and, of course, of our country’s ruthless creditors.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the new prime minister, is a scion of one of the dynasties responsible for Greece’s perpetual bankruptcy, corruption and subservience to the Atlanticist oligarchy-without-borders. Tellingly, he has surrounded himself with, on one side, apparatchiks connected to vulture funds and failed banks and, on the other, ultra-nationalist former fascists.

Together, Mr Mitsotakis’ motley reactionaries plan to unleash a fresh class war against a people who have already lost almost everything, against minorities, against our environment, against common decency.

How did this happen? Four short years ago, Greek voters gave Syriza, the party of the radical left, a mandate to unseat the oligarchs and confine New Democracy to its rightful place — the dustbin of history. On 25 January 2015, caught up in the moment’s excitement, I quoted from Dylan Thomas to convey a message of hope to progressives across the globe: “Greek democracy,” I wrote, “today chose to stop going gently into the night. Greek democracy resolved to rage against the dying of the light.”

So, what went wrong? What was it that allowed the restoration of an authoritarian, incompetent regime that wrecked Greece before turning it into a harsh debtor’s prison from which emigration was, and remains, the only escape? When did my fellow Greeks stop raging against the long night of our debt bondage? The answer is: the night of Sunday 5 July 2015.

The night had begun brilliantly. The Greek people had flocked to polling stations to deliver a resounding “No” in a referendum called by our government at short notice. That brave No was addressed to Greece’s troika of creditors (the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund) who, on 25 June 2015, had delivered a callous ultimatum to the nation: succumb to new, inhuman austerity measures in exchange for another huge credit card from which to draw funds, or risk being thrown out of the euro and forced to transition to a new national currency.

The vast majority of the 62 per cent who said No to the troika’s ultimatum knew exactly what they were saying and the risks involved in saying it. Disingenuous commentators try to portray our people as delusional, citing what they regard as a “contradiction”: most of those who voted No did not want Greece to leave the euro. While this is true, preferring to stay in the euro and voting No to those threatening us with Grexit is as much of a contradiction as saying that, in 1939, the people of Britain craved peace but at the same time backed Winston Churchill’s determination to defend the nation against the Axis’ aggression.

What the people of Greece had said to us, their government, in that 2015 referendum, made perfect sense: “We don’t want to leave the euro or to clash with the European Union. But, if the European Union is demanding of you, of our government, the intensification of the austerity-insolvency doom loop that forces our youngsters to emigrate and the expropriation of what is left of our public assets, don’t you dare surrender — even if Grexit is the price we must pay.”

That night, while our people were out on the streets celebrating their remarkable victory, the political representatives of Greece’s oligarchy were in tatters. The leader of New Democracy resigned, the party’s cadres wallowed in deep despair, the oligarchy they represented was in a state of panic. Alas, they worried unnecessarily. For at the same time, a coup against the people was being hatched in the office of my colleague, the prime minister.

The moment I walked into the office of Alexis Tsipras, he told me he had decided to fold, to ignore the people’s No, and to side with New Democracy in order to pass through parliament the bills by which Greece would, again, surrender to the troika. After I failed to dissuade him, I resigned as minister of finance. A few hours later, Mr Tsipras convened a meeting with the acting leader of New Democracy, and the leaders of the other pro-troika parties, whose votes he needed in parliament to pass the third bailout. It was at that moment that New Democracy was retrieved from history’s dustbin and placed on a track leading, with mathematical precision, to election victory.

Since that night, Greece’s parliament has been the stage for a four-year long tragicomedy: Syriza MPs passed austerity and fire-sale bills with which they disagreed, while, on the other side, New Democracy MPs voted them down — in spite of agreeing with them. How my former colleagues convinced themselves that this would end in anything other than a devastating defeat for Syriza is beyond my comprehension.

Syriza unconditional surrender to the troika would have sufficed to revive New Democracy. Alas, Mr Tsipras’ government went to further lengths to alienate the progressives that elected him by surrendering on every imaginable front. His unforced submission to the status quo demonstrated a facility for casually betraying every one of the left’s most cherished principles.

By endorsing Angela Merkel’s inexcusable refugee deal with Turkey’s increasingly dictatorial president (effectively bribing Recep Erdoğan to allow Europe to violate its legal obligations to refugees), Mr Tsipras destroyed the soul of Syriza followers for whom the defence of the wretched of the earth was essential.

By divvying up lucrative television licences between traditional oligarchs and shady upstarts close to Mr Tsipras’ circle, another leftist principle was traduced. The final ignominy came when Mr Tsipras appeared on television with Binyamin Netanyahu, hailing a new alliance between Greece, Israel, Cyprus and oil multinationals, with President Trump’s active support, jointly to exploit the Eastern Mediterranean — while introducing fracking in Epirus and surrendering Thrace and Eastern Macedonia to multiple gas and oil pipelines. For a party that had co-opted the Greek Greens, on the promise of promoting an environmentalist agenda, it was a capitulation more momentous than even that of 5 July 2015.

***

One of the insights on evil I owe to my father was his chilling account of how, while in a concentration camp for leftists in the late 1940s, their fascist torturers actively sought to break them and have them torture their comrades in return for perks. In 2015, Mr Tsipras was subjected to a similar tactic.

Prior to 2015, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, and the troika leadership more generally, were keen to enlist a left-wing party for at least three important reasons.

The first was that they needed a pretext for burdening the Greek state with another vast loan. Given its permanent insolvency, and the expiration of the 2012 loan, the government needed either a new loan or debt relief. However, Schäuble and the troika had pledged to give Greece neither. Our government’s stated determination to fight for debt relief, instead of a third loan, would have forced Schäuble to claim that, while a third loan had been unnecessary, it became necessary due to Syriza’s economic mismanagement. Tsipras’ surrender thus liberated Schäuble from a conundrum of his own making.

The second reason was that Schäuble wanted to use a third loan to expropriate, on behalf of the creditors, all lucrative assets still in the possession of the Greek state. Having a left-wing, formerly anti-troika, government implement this stunning raid was the perfect legitimation.

Spain was the third motivation for the troika bending Mr Tsipras to their will. On the day the Greek government signed its surrender document in Brussels, Spain’s conservative prime minister Mariano Rajoy waved a piece of paper with Tsipras’ signature and, addressing his domestic audience, said: “This is what you get if you vote for Spain’s Syriza.” From that moment, Podemos’ steady decline to the point of political irrelevance began.

***

Mr Mitsotakis is the most fortunate incoming Greek prime minister of recent times, and he has the outgoing Syriza government to thank for it.

Last August, Mr Tsipras’ administration concluded the third bailout loan and, under the guise of an end to the bailout programme, entered into the fourth and longest agreement with the troika. The only real difference with previous loan agreements was that the fourth loan involved relatively little money upfront. The bulk of the financial assistance came in the form of deferrals as more than €100bn of repayments that the Greek state had to make between 2021 and 2030 were pushed beyond 2032 (with interest included, of course). In exchange, Mr Tsipras agreed to permanent austerity until 2060.

And there lies the paradox: while the state’s insolvency has deepened, the Mitsotakis government will be the first since the crisis that does not need to worry about meeting large repayments to creditors. Thus, Greece’s Tories are now, courtesy of Syriza, at liberty to build their regime as they please.

An inspection of the new government’s cast and programme shows that they are aiming for a Latvian solution to our permanent Great Depression: dealing with under-employment via the emigration of even more young people; subjecting the remaining workers to medieval terms and conditions; devastating small businesses whose market share will be taken over by troika-supported multinational oligopolies; using the banking system to launder dark money; surrendering public assets and the property of indebted households to assorted vultures; and leaving the state too impoverished to look after the weak but ever so generous to the strong.

As this naked class war will provoke considerable resistance, I expect the new government to turn viciously authoritarian. Already, New Democracy cadres warn of new draconian laws against dissent. The alliance of neoliberals and post-fascists entering Greek ministries will work together to violate basic civil liberties in the name of … economic liberalism.

The only ray of hope in this bleak landscape is the entry of MeRA25, DiEM25’s electoral wing in Greece, to parliament. Nine of us were elected, despite zero funding and a sustained campaign of character assassination against us by New Democracy and Mr Tsipras’ government.

Unlike Syriza’s MPs, who will lack all credibility in opposition, our MPs and activists will lead the resistance, inside and outside parliament, against the parasitic, cruel oligarchy that New Democracy will strive to erect upon the foundation of Mr Tsipras’ fourth bailout agreement. Together with our comrades across Europe, the UK and the world, we shall work for a Green New Deal to prevent apocalyptic climate change.

MeRA25’s share of the vote was a small number (3.4 per cent). But, along with the fabulous news that the Nazis of Golden Dawn have been evicted from parliament, that small number is large enough to make a crucial difference — just like a small candle whose light is capable of penetrating the darkness.

FOR THE NEWSTATESMAN SITE, CLICK HERE

MeRA25 as the only ray of hope on the day the recalcitrant Greek Right returned to office – Election Night message

Greece’s Tories, the New Democracy party and its leader, Mr Kyriakos Mitsotakis, today are the victors in our general election. However, their victory that was set in motion on the night of the referendum (5th July 2015) by Mr Tsipras, the outgoing Prime Minister.
Lest we forget, it was immediately after the Greek people’s magnificent NO vote that Mr Tsipras invited the leaders of New Democracy and pro-austerity forces to help him convert the NO vote into a YES. Thus, a referendum that had the capacity to confine New Democracy to the dustbin of history was annulled and the people overthrown by an alliance of Mr Tsipras and New Democracy. Is it any wonder, once Mr Tripras passed every austerity measure and privatisation bill demanded of him by the troika with the implicit and explicit support of New Democracy, that New Democracy is back?

Today, on 7th July, the Greek people did what they have always done since their incarceration in our vast debtor’s prison: they overthrew a government that imposed a new troika bailout along with its poisonous preconditions. And so it is that another chapter of our debt bondage ends while another, darker one, is about to begin.
The only ray of hope in this bleak setting is the entry of MeRA25 into Parliament. DiEM25’s electoral wing in Greece was the pleasant surprise, entering Parliament with 9 MPs despite a total lack of funds and a sustained campaign of demonisation by the establishment and Mr Tsipras’ government.
Our commitment to the people of Greece, to the people of Europe is unwavering. We shall continue with a combination of constructive policy proposals and total disobedience to all those policies that hurt the many.
As of today, we embark upon a steadfast campaign against the most parasitic and cruel form of oligarchy that New Democracy will strive to erect upon the foundation of Mr Tsipras bailout agreement with the troika of Greece’s lenders.
Together with our comrades across Europe, and also as part of the Progressive International that DiEM25 co-founded, we shall fight both types of rising authoritarianism (that of the establishment and that of the racist ultra-Right), while connecting our resistance to the crucial campaign for a European and, indeed, an International Green New Deal.
Today, MeRA25’s share of the vote was a small number. But it was large enough to make a crucial difference – just like a small candle whose light is capable of penetrating the darkness.

Το μήνυμα ελπίδας του ΜέΡΑ25 το βράδυ των εκλογών του 2019

Όπως επιβάλει ο πολιτικός πολιτισμός την ημέρα των εκλογών, συγχαίρουμε τον κ. Μητσοτάκη και την ΝΔ για την νίκη τους. Μια νίκη που δρομολογήθηκε το βράδυ του Δημοψηφίσματος όταν, μετά το μεγαλειώδες ΟΧΙ του ελληνικού λαού, το οποίο έστελνε Νέα Δημοκρατία και λοιπές Μνημονιακές δυνάμεις στο χρονοντούλαπο της Ιστορίας, ο κ. Τσίπρας τους ανέσυρε συγκαλώντας Συμβούλιο Πολιτικών Αρχηγών όπου τους ζήτησε να τον βοηθήσουν στην ανατροπή του ΟΧΙ και την μετατροπή του σε ΝΑΙ.
Θυμίζουμε στην ηγεσία της Νέας Δημοκρατίας ότι η νίκη τους οφείλεται αποκλειστικά σε ψήφο αρνητική καθώς ο λαός μας, άλλη μια φορά, ανέτρεψε κυβέρνηση που του επέβαλε Μνημόνια – κλείνοντας ένα κεφάλαιο της Μνημονιακής Ελλάδας και ανοίγοντας ένα άλλο, πιο σκοτεινό.
Μοναδική αχτίδα φωτός σε αυτή την νύχτα που κράτησε τόσο πολύ η είσοδος του ΜέΡΑ25 στο Κοινοβούλιο και η έξοδος της Χρυσής Αυγής.
Δεσμευόμαστε ότι, τόσο εντός όσο και εκτός της Βουλής, θα αρθρώνουμε τον εποικοδομητικό, προγραμματικό λόγο που οι πολίτες εκτίμησαν στην προεκλογική περίοδο.
Από την Δευτέρα το πρωί, το ΜέΡΑ25 ξεκινά μονομέτωπο, ανένδοτο αγώνα εναντίον της παρασιτικής ολιγαρχίας που σχεδιάζει να χτίσει η ηγεσία της ΝΔ πάνω στο 4ο Μνημόνιο του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ. Παράλληλα, ως μέρος του πρώτου ενιαίου πανευρωπαϊκού κινήματος, του DiEM25, το ΜέΡΑ25 θα εργαστεί μαζί με τους συνοδοιπόρους μας σε όλη την Ευρώπη για να ανατρέψουμε τον διττό αυταρχισμό που πλήττει τους πολίτες: τον αυταρχισμό της τρόικας και του ολιγαρχικού κατεστημένου και τον αυταρχισμό της ρατσιστικής Ακροδεξιάς που τρέφεται από τις πολιτικές του εν λόγω κατεστημένου.
Το ποσοστό που λάβαμε είναι ένας μικρός αριθμός. Όμως, είναι ταυτόχρονα αρκετά μεγάλος για να αλλάξουμε το πολιτικό σκηνικό – όπως ένα μικρό κεράκι του οποίου το ισχνό φως μπορεί και διαπερνάει το σκοτάδι.