English

Le leader de DiEM 25, Yanis Varoufakis, ancien ministre grec des finances qui a rompu avec le parti d’Alexis Tsipras, est l’invité de La Midinale. L’occasion de parler de la situation de la Grèce, de ses relations avec la gauche française et des élections européennes de l’année prochaine.

Yanis Varoufakis is full of teasing paradoxes. As a radical economics guru, he expounds on the state of the world with a mixture of burning grievance and brimming, almost imperious, self-confidence. Aged 57, his personal baggage includes a keen sense of the wrongs of recent Greek history, which overshadowed his parents’ lives, and the glories of the ancient Greek heritage. But his real obsession is with the future.

You can disagree with him, mock him, despise him. But you cannot ignore what he contributed to your understanding of crimes committed in your name against humanity. Or that he is persecuted for this and nothing else.

End Assange’s isolation now. Sign the petition!

Ladies and Gentlemen, my heartfelt thanks for your presence here tonight. Thanks also to the good people at South Bank who honoured me with the humbling idea and invitation to combine my own musings on globalisation with the remarkable images of Andreas Gursky – images which have, over the years, done so much to enlighten us regarding the topsy-turvy world that we have been helping bring about. Yes, a picture is a thousand words but, at the same time, words liberate  our mind’s eye so that it can make sense of otherwise incomprehensible images.

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.

Join economist and Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) co-founder Yanis Varoufakis for a keynote talk on the economic force that has shaped our world: globalisation.

As British Prime Minister Theresa May is finding out, disentangling a member state from the EU is an arduous and complex undertaking. But how much harder would Brexit have been had the United Kingdom adopted the euro back in 2000?

The state of permanent debt bondage, which threatens Greece with desertification, is in the mind of every Greek. Imposing emigration on our young, and indignity to those who stay behind, it hangs over the country like a thick, dark cloud. Unable to discern any light in the long night of our Great Depression, the Greeks’ humiliation is reinforced every time they hear the powers-that-be tell them, gleefully, that the crisis will come to an end as a result of the enthusiastic implementation of the policies that caused it.

It is with great concern that we heard that Julian Assange has lost access to the internet and the right to receive visitors at the Ecuadorian London Embassy. Only extraordinary pressure from the US and the Spanish governments can explain why Ecuador’s authorities should have taken such appalling steps in isolating Julian.