English

Should electricity markets be reformed or disbanded? My debate with Michael Liebreich on Cleaning Up

The other day, Michael Liebreich and I had a lively discussion on his CleaningUp podcast provoked by my call “to blow up the electricity markets”. It was fun but, of course, fell short of a comprehensive analysis of the complex issues pertaining to the political economy of electricity generation and distribution. Following our debate, Michael […]

Iran’s Revolutionary Moment as the Internationalist Left’s Great Challenge – by Shoja Azari

Shoja Azari, is an Iranian visual artist and filmmaker based in New York, working with Sherin Neshat, his life-long partner and comrade, on art projects of note and substance. Their last project is  Land of Dreams, a magnificent new film set in the United States but ever so redolent of meaning viz. the New Iranian […]

Our Task? To Inspire the Rebellion against the Legalised Robbery of People & Earth, even if it is too late – Reply to Chomsky, Fuentes & McPherson

Have we, humans, passed the point of no return down the path to ecological ruin? Does ruin-without-end loom black across the land, the air, the oceans? I hope not but, regardless, I don’t think it matters. What matters is what we do. And how we do it. From now on. Until our last breath. Sure […]

Comradely disagreements between progressives over Ukraine & the New Cold War – Reply to Anthony Barnett

Anthony Burnett, a friend, comrade and collaborator, just published an article in openDemocracy, a splendid and much loved source of progressive ideas and material, to which he alerted me in a mail reading: “Dear Yanis, we disagree but in solidarity!” Since Anthony’s article mentions me, along with Jeremy Corbyn, in its subtitle, here I am, […]

My take on Georgia Melloni and her incoming government – LTIO clip

Italy is about to have a new far-right government under the self-declared Mussolini groupie Ms Georgia Meloni. In this LTIO episode (entitled Fascism: The Radical Centre’s Last Resort), with comrades Roger Waters, Ece Temelcuran and Frank Barrat), I share my thoughts on Meloni and Co.
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How the West poisoned its money – Project Syndicate op-ed

ATHENS – Capitalism conquered the world by commodifying almost everything that had a value but not a price, thus driving a sharp wedge between values and prices. It did the same to money. The exchange value of money always reflected people’s readiness to hand over valuable things for given sums of cash. But, under capitalism, […]

Is This the End of ‘Socialism for the Rich’? – The Atlantic

Last Thursday, the International Monetary Fund spooked the markets and surprised the commentariat by chiding the U.K. Conservative government for fiscal irresponsibility. The shock was palpable. For the IMF to criticize the government of a major Western economy was a little like the janitor scolding the landlord for putting the building’s assessed value at risk. That sense […]

Trickle-down Truss is carrying on the dirty work of Thatcher, Blair and Osborne – THE GUARDIAN

If Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget survives the storm it triggered, a banker on a million-pound annual salary stands to receive £50,000 of income tax relief – on top of the extra bonuses the bank can throw in, now that the Liz Truss government has removed the cap on them. Meanwhile, a Deliveroo rider gets a pep […]

Zombie capitalism is unravelling – THE NEW STATESMAN

This is no sterling crisis. It is a crisis of British capitalism caused by 40 years of underinvestment and deindustrialisation, exacerbated by chronic reliance on speculative bubbles and triggered by Liz Truss’s extravagant kindness to Britain’s wealthy. While all eyes are on the fall of the pound, the real drama revolves around the Bank of England’s […]

The Greek Watergate – UNHERD

Nothing surprises me more than politicians professing to be surprised that their phones have been tapped. In the world revealed to us by Edward Snowden almost a decade ago, no phone is beyond the reach of motivated eavesdroppers. This is not to say, however, that phone-tapping political opponents has lost its capacity to poison democracy. […]
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