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Yanis Varoufakis – Happiness, Inc. – Think Again – a Big Think Podcast #149

Jason GOTS: As the Wu-Tang Clan once put it: “Cash moves everything around me… Get the money. Dollar dollar bill, y’all.” I grew up not wanting to believe this. All the stuff that seemed worth having was hard to put a price tag on. But under global capitalism, there’s a lot of hard, sad truth to it. As an American child of the 1980s, I absorbed the message “find yourself!” “Follow your passions!” But there are powerful economic forces at work, shaping our lives and opportunities.

After successfully quashing Greece’s 2015 debtor’s prison break, Europe’s deep establishment has embarked on a mission to declare the country’s economic and social crisis over. To recall Tacitus, “they make a desert and they call it peace”. Since 2015, the Greek state has paid its creditors a sum equal to the aggregate pre-tax revenues of all Greek businesses over an 18-month period. And as if these pounds of flesh were insufficient, between now and 2030, the state must pay the creditors almost twice that sum, and more than three times the same amount between 2030 and 2060.

 
Dear Wolfgang,
I read carefully and listened your recent statements in response to journalistic questions emanating from my recent book “Adults in the Room” relating to our conversations during the first half of 2015.

This Saturday (28/1, 10am), Conway Hall, London, Brian Eno, myself and others will launch DiEM25 UK.

Join us in a three hour event to discuss taking our countries back on the basis of a progressive agenda. Here is a teaser of what Brian wants to talk about.

2016-2017

For der Freitag’s site click here. To read my original English answers…

A few years ago, in a televised chat with other French progressives, Benoît Hamon succinctly exposed the essence of our troubles in Europe: “[EU] governments may change,” he said, “but not the policies”.
Since then, the Socialist former Education minister has been developing policy proposals to help steer both the EU’s second-largest economy and the European project away from its current destructive socioeconomic spiral.

 
 
Brian Eno’s talk
https://varoufakis.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/eno-speech-value.mp3
Yanis Varoufakis talk
https://varoufakis.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/varoufakis-speech-value.mp3
Discussion
https://varoufakis.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/discussion.mp3