English

No policy is as self-defeating during recessionary times as the pursuit of a budget surplus for the purpose of containing public debt – austerity, for short. So, as the world approaches the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it is appropriate to ask why austerity proved so popular with Western political elites following the financial sector’s implosion in 2008. The economic case against austerity is cut and dried: An economic downturn, by definition, implies shrinking private-sector expenditure.

Over the past week, the world’s media have been proclaiming the successful completion of the Greek financial rescue programmemounted in 2010 by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Headlines celebrated the end of Greece’s bailout, even the termination of austerity.

Humanism is poorer this week. Uri Avnery has died. Soldier number 44410 of the Israel army, spent the following decades defending human decency in the land that he loved and struggled to make a welcoming home for Jews and Arabs alike.

BILD meets Yanis Varoufakis – the man who was THE symbol of the Greek left-wing government’s resistance against the targets set by the bailout troika for the broke state of Greece. We met the professor of economics – who co-founded left-wing movement DiEM25 – in his summer house in the mountains of the sunny island of Aegina.

BILD: Mr. Varoufakis, Greece went broke ten years ago. Where does Greece stand now, after three rescue programmes, 270 billion euros in loans and two debt cuts?

http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/griechenland-krise-beteiligte…

Is there a Deep State in our western liberal democracies? If so, is it a conspiracy or something more ‘interesting’ than that? These are questions that the Left has been traditionally engaged with, especially when facing undercover campaigns to prevent progressives from winning power or, on occasion, to unseat or destabilise left-wing governments. However, more recently, the Alt-Right has begun waging a war of words against the Deep State, with Donald Trump and his supporters doing so most boisterously.

Every so often humanity manages genuinely to surprise itself. Events to which we had previously assigned zero probability push us into what the ancient Greeks referred to as aporia: a state of intense bafflement urgently demanding a new model of the world we live in. The Crash of 2008 was such a moment. Suddenly, the world ceased to make sense in terms of what, a few weeks before, passed as conventional wisdom – even McDonald’s, for goodness’ sake, could not secure an overdraft from Bank of America!