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A genocide of Palestinians is happening in Gaza now, in tandem with Israel’s methodically opportunistic ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. We are here because our humanity is being tested – because future generations will censure us for letting the death count exceed 10 thousand, mostly children and women. We are here […]

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

As harsh austerity and xenophobic nationalism fester in Europe, Yanis Varoufakis discusses his antidote with Tellus Senior Fellow Allen White.

What inspired your career trajectory from academic economist to prominent supranational activist?

This morning, in Greece’s Parliament, MeRA25’s parliamentarians are staging an all-out struggle against the ratification of disastrous contracts between the previous (SYRIZA) government and multinational oil companies.

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.

Amid the bad results for the Left in the European elections, the Greek outcome was particularly poignant. In the last such contest in 2014, Syriza rode the revolt against austerity to become the largest single party, in its final step toward national office. Five years later, in last month’s election, it finished ten points behind the right-wing New Democracy.

The memory of past greatness can be debilitating for a people who feel they have failed to rise to a historic occasion.  We Greeks have been burdened by this sensation at various moments in our postwar history: in 1967, when we failed to prevent a military coup; or more recently in 2015, when we allowed the troika of the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank to crush us. Brexit Britain is, today, wallowing in a similar sense of having betrayed both its past and its future. A “Speech of Hope” for Britain is now more necessary than ever as the country endures a humiliating impasse.

Britain is teetering on a knife’s edge: about to crash out of, or back into, the European Union. Either outcome would represent a defeat for democracy in the UK and in the EU. Crashing out would inflict substantial economic hardship on the weakest in Britain. It would boost jingoism and parochialism, drive England further apart from Scotland and Ireland, and expose the UK to the vagaries of a Trump administration eager to divide Europe and to liberate US corporations operating on British soil from all social and environmental constraints.

In 2018, the good people behind the Edinburgh Festival kindly invited me to host a series of discussions under the title KILLING DEMOCRACY? My remit was: Further to explore the question of whether the current form of financialised capitalism is devouring democracy, reflecting on my work with the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25). In a series of four events I tried to explore the ways in which the demos can be put back into our democracies.