Yanis Varoufakis: Crisis, Recession, the Left & the state of the world economy

"Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, professor and left-wing Greek politician. Yanis has taught at several universities in Britain, Australia, Greece, and the United States.

He became the finance minister of Greece in 2015, when the coalition of Radical left- Progressive alliance came to power. In March 2018, he founded MeRA25, the "electoral wing" of DiEM25 in Greece.

In the 2019 legislative election, MeRA25 was the sixth most voted-for party, amassing nine parliamentary seats, with Yanis himself returning to the Hellenic Parliament. He is currently serving as a Member of Parliament in Greece.

Brazil resistance documentary launch by Helios Molina in Barcelona

 

Filmaker Helios Molina says, "I'm presenting/launching a documentary along with a debate at the Athenaeum Enciclopedic at C/- Reina Amalia 38 (Raval) Barcelona on 30 Sept at 18.30. It is about how the extreme right entered Brazil and will be with various artists from Rio de Janeiro and the resistance. The doc is 1h08 + debate following on how to cope."

"Spain’s New Left[-ish] Government"

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A 19 year-old friend of my son's was crying with relief and happiness when he found out about the new government plans for welfare the other day. 

It's difficult to know how progressive the new left coalition will be, given the Socialist party's previous move to the right but there are some encouraging signs already...

"Today Spain elected its first left-wing coalition since the civil war in the 1930s. Already, it is under siege from the country's elite - but if it succeeds, it can improve the lives of millions...

Before last weekend, it had been decades since the Spanish parliament had seen such a powerful challenge to the rhetoric of “defending the homeland.” Countering the rising politics of nationalism, Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias told a heated Congress that the real “betrayal” of Spain was “attacking workers’ rights, selling off public housing to vulture funds, and privatising the welfare state and public services.”

For the far-right forces whom Iglesias was addressing, he and his allies were simply a band of “communists, populists” and regional nationalists run amok. In the view of Spanish-nationalist parties like Vox, the Podemos leader is figurehead of an “anti-Spanish” rabble, entertained by a power-hungry “sociopath” in the form of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

At the heart of this debate was the prospect of a historic coalition agreement between Sánchez’s centre-left Socialist Party (PSOE) and Iglesias’s Unidas Podemos — on January 7 sworn in as Spain’s new government. Supported by Catalan and Basque regionalists, along with a mishmash of independents, after years of false starts the two parties are finally forming what they call a “progressive coalition” — for its critics, a “Frankenstein’s government.”

Such an arrangement is long overdue, after a decade of post-crash austerity and Spain’s most serious constitutional crisis since the 1970s transition to democracy. Since Podemos smashed open the two-party system almost five years ago, no such coalition with the PSOE has proven possible, even when the parliamentary arithmetic allowed it.

Yet all this changed with the November 2019 general election. As the left-wing parties dropped some 1.5 million votes (with the PSOE itself losing 800,000) Sánchez found himself unable to make a deal to his right, and was finally forced to commit to the “progressive” agenda he had hitherto only gestured toward.

After the previous general election in April 2019, the long summer of coalition talks between the PSOE and Podemos were polarised and often conducted in bad faith by Sánchez’s party. Yet November’s electoral setbacks for both the PSOE and Podemos — in a climate of rising nationalist tensions, fed by the Catalan issue — instead rapidly drew them into a coalition.

In a period of retreat for the European left, this government will arguably constitute the most left-wing administration across the entire continent. Yet, beyond its lack of international allies, this administration will also be forced to work within the challenging confines imposed by Spain’s constitutional crisis, EU budget rules, and the virulent opposition not only of the Right but also Spain’s major economic and media powers.

For years, these same forces have succeeded in blocking a PSOE-Podemos coalition. Today, we can be sure they will waste little time in looking to neutralise — if not do away entirely — with this government and its paper-thin majority.

Yet despite the clear challenges that lie ahead, there are also positive signs. This administration will also see Pablo Iglesias’s formation assume cabinet positions — the government posts it has long believed necessary if it is to hold the flip-flopping PSOE to its promises of social reform and democratic renewal.

Beyond Iglesias’s own appointment as Deputy Prime Minister, there will also be substantial portfolios for Podemos’s Yolanda Díaz as Labor Minister and Irene Montero as Minister for Equality. Izquierda Unida (United Left) leader Alberto Garzón will be its Consumer Minister — the country’s first Communist minister in over eighty years. This weekend it was also announced that renowned sociologist and social-movement theorist Manuel Castells will become the fledgling government’s Universities Minister, after being put forward for the role by Podemos’s Catalan affiliate, En Comú Podem.

Read more from source here

What's needed to combat ring-wing lies in the media? Paul Mason tells us...

ALSO HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1jOqbQ5iEg

I generally don't listen to podcasts but I did with this one because it is compelling. 

Broadcaster and journalist Paul Mason, talking to Joana Ramiro tells us exactly (at 35.00) what's needed for the Left to have a fighting chance against bullshit news.

From source at  Politics Theory Other

“The EU declared war and Theresa May played along” -- Yanis Varoufakis

[Photo: Barcelona, 9 Nov. 2017, ALBERT GARCIA]

 "In 2016, shortly before the EU referendum, Yanis Varoufakis warned that the UK was destined for a “Hotel California Brexit”: it could check out but it could never leave. 

The former Greek finance minister spoke from experience. In 2015, his efforts to end austerity – “fiscal waterboarding” – were thwarted by the EU (a struggle recorded in his memoir Adults in the Room: My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment).

Theresa May’s draft Brexit deal confirmed Varoufakis’s prophecy: the UK would be condemned to purgatory. 

With fortuitous timing, on the evening that May’s agreement was published, Varoufakis delivered an Oxford Union lecture on Europe’s future. [He] wryly remarked that Conservative cabinet ministers praised his analysis in private.

“The UK should never have entered the negotiations,” he told me when we met afterwards. “You do not negotiate with the EU because the EU does not negotiate with you. It sends a bureaucrat, in this case it was Mr Barnier…they could have sent an android, or an algorithm.”

May’s fatal error, Varoufakis said, was to accept a two-phase negotiation: a divorce agreement followed by a new trade deal. “This was a declaration of war because Barnier said: ‘You will give us everything we want: money, people, Ireland. And only then will we discuss what you want.’ Well, that isn’t a negotiation, that’s a travesty. And Theresa May agreed to play along.”

Read more from article in The New Statesman here.

Video: "The politically abandoned"

 

As well as the above short film (with English subtitles) there is this fascinating and insightful study on right-wing strongholds in deprived populations across France and Germany that recently found...

"There is a considerable discrepancy between the issues that people view as the ‘biggest problems’ facing their country (which are immigration and the economy) and the challenges that they face in their everyday lives (precarious working conditions, worries about money and declining social infrastructure). 

Media and politics at the national level are criticised for not having properly adopted this ‘citizens’ agenda’. This problem also results in a sense of unfairness and disadvantage.

As such, when people in these regions devalue others, especially migrants, they do so as a reaction to their own experiences of devaluation (this follows the ‘logic of comparative devaluation’). Importantly, the interviews demonstrated no intrinsic patterns of xenophobia.

The central narratives employed by the populists are far less prevalent in their strongholds than is generally assumed. 

When people are asked to describe political contexts in their own words, issues such as Islamisation, Euroscepticism, sweeping criticism of the media and the emphasis on national identity hardly ever crop up. Instead, more often than not the European Union, for example, tends to be viewed as part of the solution, not the problem.

Nationalist clamouring or demands that include a ‘Germany first!’ approach, are ultimately based on the view that politics sets the wrong priorities and focuses on issues that do not reflect the realities of people’s everyday lives. 

However, the interviewees did not necessarily view measures aimed at tackling the refugee crisis, or foreign policy commitments, as fundamentally wrong. 

Nevertheless, the interviewees often believed that a focus on immigration and foreign policy tended to result in less investment and fewer policy measures at the local level that would help tackle the tangible challenges that these people face in their everyday lives. 

This includes increased economic pressure faced by people on low incomes and the gaps in public services. Finally, many interviewees believe that politics has withdrawn from certain social and geographical areas. Importantly, this feeling has led to a strong sense of abandonment.

Conclusions...

Areas now exist which are marked by ‘political abandonment’. 

To regain the trust of the people who live in these areas, it will be necessary to establish a local presence, provide recognition and resolve the problems that they face. 

This study outlines five relevant fields of action as a means of contributing towards this aim:

• solidarity with the resident population is essential if solidarity is to be expressed with newcomers;
• infrastructure as a means of promoting equal opportunities;
• strengthening structures through the presence of political parties at the local level;
• make structural change compatible with society;
• and confidence and assertiveness in the face of right-wing populist narratives."

To download the full study from Zentrum click here.

"Why the left is failing in Europe (but not in the UK) and the need for a New Deal through DiEM2"

"On BBC HARDtalk Stephen Sackur speaks to Yanis Varoufakis, Greece's radical leftist finance minister at the height of the economic crisis, and an advocate of a new global progressive politics. The old certainties in European politics are crumbling. Voters seem fed up with the long established supremacy of the parties of centre right and centre left. The politics of identity and raw emotion have fuelled populist insurgencies from Italy to Sweden to eastern Europe. Mostly it's the right, not the left in the ascendant..."

"Can Yanis Varoufakis Save Europe?"

[Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.]

'...he was one of those left-wing politicians critical of Europe’s economic institutions, though not necessarily of the idea of Europe itself. 

Even as a young man, Yanis Varoufakis had always been struck by the idea of a united Europe as a way to “forge bonds relying not on kin, language, ethnicity, [or] a common enemy, but on common values and humanist principles.” ' 

A well-written article on the leader of Europe's most exciting new political movement, DiEM25 here.

"Macron’s Gift to the Rich"

"Surprise, surprise: Emmanuel Macron's first budget slashes taxes on wealth and guts social spending...

Anyone with lingering doubts about whether the moniker “President of the Rich” fits France’s Emmanuel Macron could safely put them to rest this month, upon publication of his first budget since taking office.

Last week the National Assembly, dominated by Macron’s En Marche party, approved a reform package overwhelmingly weighted toward elite interests. Its €7 billion of tax cuts included reducing France’s wealth tax, long a bête noire for the country’s right wing, by 70 percent and subjecting capital gains tax to a new flat rate of 30 percent.

Tellingly, the Ministry for the Economy and Finance withheld its own research on the impact of the reforms before the vote in the Assembly. But, by Thursday, they had fallen into the possession of the Socialist chair of the Senate Finance Commission and were released. Under the capital gains reforms, France’s wealthiest 100 taxpayers will earn an additional €582,380 per year on average. The top 1,000 will each get a modest €172,220. The rest of the country, on the other hand, can expect little to nothing. Forty-four percent of the total benefits will flow to the top 1 percent.

While the ministry said it could not precisely calculate the financial effects of slashing the wealth tax, Senate Finance Commission estimates placed the gains for the country’s top 100 taxpayers at an average of €1 million. These are people with last names like Peugeot and Rothschild; heads of telecom giants, weapons manufacturers, and luxury brands.

But the tax cuts were only the opening salvo of a budget that forms part of Macron’s sweeping plans to liberalize the French economy and in his own words, “celebrate those who succeed.” After the passage of business-friendly labor reforms and the introduction of plans to rein in unemployment benefits this fall, next up for debate this week are roughly €11.6 billion worth of spending cuts aimed at trimming the country’s social safety net.

The double standard is glaring. Just as the government prepares to fork over millions from state coffers to the ultra-rich, it tells the general population it must tighten the strings on public spending. Its budget will include measures such as a €1.7 billion cut in housing aid as well as the elimination of 120,000 state-funded short-term job contracts. Votes on these measures are slated for the coming weeks, with the Assembly wrapping up its work in late November.

Parliamentarians will begin by tackling the Social Security budget. Here, too, the wealthiest will stand to gain. En Marche deputies have proposed lowering employers’ Social Security taxes from 30 percent to 20 percent on bonus shares offered to employees. That might seem like an arcane measure, but it has symbolic value. The reform previously passed in 2015, championed by then-minister Macron. Legislators repealed it the following year following a public outcry over booming CEO compensation tied to stock options. For Macron’s commanding parliamentary majority, concerns like these appear to be old news.

Opinion polls suggest otherwise. Macron’s popularity has already fallen below that of historically unpopular predecessor François Hollande during the same period of his presidency. An Odoxa poll released after the budget measures found that 88 percent of French people thought they would benefit the richest. Meanwhile, Macron’s approval rating with pollster Ifop continued to drop in October, sliding a further three points to 42 percent.

The president’s approval among investment bankers appears much higher and steadier. The evening after the National Assembly passed his tax cuts, Macron dined with executives from twenty-one of the world’s leading funds in the Elysée Palace’s winter garden. They came away pleased. “Yesterday’s session was beneficial to the investors present,” said a spokesperson for Blackrock, which manages around €5.5 trillion, “and reinforced the view that the opportunities in France are the strongest they’ve been in two decades.”

Meanwhile, meaningful political opposition remains alarmingly limited. En Marche is in firm control of the National Assembly. The right-wing Republican opposition may crib about minor details, but it largely supports the budgetary reforms. The far-right National Front and center-left Socialist Party, both reeling from internal turmoil, formally opposed the tax cuts — but made little impact. As is the case for most parliamentary issues, the most vocal and sustained criticism of the budget came from the left-wing France Insoumise grouping headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

But the Left has not managed to raise mass popular opposition to Macron’s measures and the street remains quiet. Union-backed demonstrations against labor-law reform have drawn hundreds of thousands of protesters but failed to make much impact. And in spite of a one-day, public-sector strike and a well-attended France Insoumise march in Paris in late September, a more unified social movement has yet to emerge.

Still, left-wing opponents of the government may have reason for optimism. On November 16, unions are calling for another round of nationwide protests. Unlike the three previous days of demonstrations against labor-law reform, the upcoming protest counts the support of Force Ouvrière, France’s third-largest labor confederation, and aims to oppose Macron’s economic policy at large."

Read more from source (Jacobin) here.

"Real red: Corbyn, Goytisolo and the rallying of the left" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

Elections can be strange events. The British one last month produced a mixture of results but one thing it showed was that a genuinely democratic socialist government there is a distinct possibility after the next time the nation goes to vote again.

For the first time since the mid-1940s, the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, led by underdog Jeremy Corbyn is offering a collection of policies that are not a softer, pale imitation of the Conservatives and roughly supporting the economic and social status quo.

This Labour party with its election programme (or ‘manifesto’) was full of plans to tax the richest in society and increase company tax to pay for better public funding of schools, hospitals and social care, all of which have been cut away horrifically by the Cameron and May governments since 2010. In truth, many of these severe austerity policies had actually begun under previous Labour leaders in power.

Corbyn however has moved his party clearly to the left and many of his ideas proved to be popular during the last few weeks of the election campaign. Theresa May lost her majority in parliament but we simply cannot know for sure how much this was due to her bumbling campaign and how much credit Corbyn can rightly claim.

What we do know is that over 70 per cent of young voters in the 18 to 24 age bracket voted for Labour candidates. Partly, this must have been due to Corbyn’s policy of guaranteeing free university places for all, instead of the current system which demands exorbitant annual fees but it seems that his appeal was wider than just this one promise.

His more concrete and costed commitments to put the rail network back in public control and reverse the creeping sell off of the NHS public health system also appear to have found support from the young to the old. Labour’s pledge to raise the minimum wage to 10 pounds an hour was another vote winner. It showed that they have once again gone back to their red roots and are not afraid of being labelled radical by the establishment-controlled media.

Another progressive iconoclast who has lived by his left-wing beliefs and regularly paid a price for doing so is Barcelona-born writer Juan Goytisolo [pictured above], who sadly died at the age of 86 at his adopted Moroccan home in June of this year. As a critic of General Franco and conservatism in general, he was known across Europe for his books such as “Campos de Níjar,” a travelogue that detailed the harsh social and economic conditions in 1950s Andalucia (translated into English by Peter Bush.)

As a writer, I was also inspired by Goytisolo’s autobiography, “Forbidden Territory”. It is rare to read such brutal honesty about his own evolving sexuality and highly-personal inner landscape. Through creamy prose, he makes a sharp dissection of the “ill-formed universe” of his bourgeois upbringing. We can only hope to see others follow in his wake.

[This article was first published under the title "The rallying of the left" in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2017.]

Video: 'Capitalism will always create bullshit jobs' | Owen Jones meets Rutger Bregman

"Rutger Bregman is the author of Utopia for Realists and he advocates for more radical solutions to address inequality in society. His ideas include the introduction of a universal basic income, a 15 hour working week and...open borders.

When I went to meet him, he told me politicians have failed to come up with new, radical ideas, instead sticking to an outdated, technocratic form of politics. He argues this has allowed politicians like Geert Wilders and Donald Trump to slowly shift extreme ideas into the mainstream."

"Land of Hope & Fury"

In honour of the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of Britain's Labour party (and in answer to my own rhetorical question in this previous blog... where I asked "Where have all the sad and angry songs gone?)

"a collection of 16 contemporary protest songs, including 10 BRAND NEW RECORDINGS, available from http://bit.ly/lohaf_sampler (with proceeds to 38 Degrees:" a progressive, people-power organisation for social change.)

"Left-wing intellectuals of Europe: take on the challenge" says José "Pepe" Mujica

The most recent former President of Uruguay has published an article arguing that "European intellectuals must take the responsibility to change their social model before it turns into a catastrophe.

The trade union movement, the ideas of socialism, anarchism and communism, and all of the ideas of progress: all have their roots in Europe. It is in your continent that the first great popular movements – the main drivers of social change – emerged."

Read more here.

"Anti-Semitism and the Catalan left"

The entrance to the Auschwitz Birkenau death camp

Matthew Tree (author of the remarkable novel SNUG) writing in Catalan for nuvol.com with his usual clear sight and bravery...

"Before World War II , anti-Semitism - a toxic hybrid

of anti-Judaism and Christian European pseudo-

scientific racism - was fashionable throughout

Europe, especially among young people. From 1945,

when everyone realized that some 5.8 million people

had been executed, starved, beaten, gassed or - in

the case of many babies- impaled on bayonets or

smashed against walls, simply for having non-Gentile

surnames, anti-Semitism began to lose popularity.

According to Labour MP Denis MacShane ('The New

Anti-Semitism', 2008) during the 60s and 70s certain

European intellectuals helped to make anti-Semitism

a socially acceptable prejudice once again thanks to

the concept (also a hybrid) of “anti-Zionism”, which

denies the right of Israel to exist as a state (on the

grounds that it is fascist and colonialist) while hinting

that all Israelis (or all Jews, even) manipulate

international opinion (especially U.S. opinion) in favor

of the said state of Israel by means of powerful

lobbies. 

In other words, rather than make specific

criticisms of certain undeniable crimes committed by

the Israeli state, anti-Zionists treat this country as if it

were the only beneficiary of a powerful and diabolical

conspiracy, against which everything from boycotts

to physical elimination is therefore justifiable.

In Catalonia this discourse has enjoyed huge success,

partly because it is often accompanied by an equally

huge ignorance of history: just look at the

incredulous face of almost any Catalan 'anti-Zionist' if

you tell him, for example, that in 1947, the

Palestinian Arabs were offered their own state, twice

as large as the current Occupied Territories; or that

the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were occupied

from 1948 up to Six Day War [in 1967] by Egypt and

Jordan respectively (though these states did not treat

the Palestinians any better than the Israelis have

done). 

And perhaps our anti-Zionist may not know –

accustomed as he is to qualifying the Israelis as Nazis

–that an important part of the Palestinian national

movement had genuinely Hitlerian roots, having been

founded by Yasser Arafat 's mentor, Haj Amin el-

Husseini, a personal friend of Himmler and the

architect of a plan to exterminate all the Jews of

North Africa and the Middle East with an

einsatzkommando led by Walter Rauff, the inventor

of the gas trucks used in Chelmno.

What is more, after centuries of relative tolerance

by Muslims towards Jews, European anti-Semitism,

imported directly from the Third Reich by el-Husseini,

has thoroughly infected the doctrines of radical

Islamist organizations such as Hezbollah or Allah

Hamas, both funded by Iran, a country that denies

the Holocaust, and has repeated again and again

hat Israel should be wiped off the face of the planet.

Yet when these same countries and organizations do

things that are somewhat worse than anything Israel

has done (such as now sending military support to

the current Syrian regime, which is responsible for

more deaths of Arab civilians in the last three years

than in Israel in it's entire history) the Catalan anti-

Zionists don't mutter so much as a word of protest.

In a nutshell, anti-Semitism has taken on many

different guises over the years, and the Catalan

variety - a generic anti-Zionism, often poorly informed

and pseudo-progressive (because it implicitly supports

regimes that are homophobic, sexist and, of course,

anti-Semitic) - is yet another variation on an old

European theme. Having said which, that does

not deny anybody the right to crticise a cruel and

unjustifiable occupation on the part of the state of

Israel. But of course, that's so obvious it doesn't need

to be stressed. Or maybe it does."