DiEM25

The Left must adopt a new, credible EU policy agenda: It’s time to explain how the bloc, and the euro, could be run differently, democratically and sustainably

Italy’s recent political crisis has at once confirmed the European Union’s unsustainability and the left’s impotence.

Italy should be doing well. Unlike Britain, it exports considerably more to the rest of the world than it imports, while its government spends less(excluding interest payments) than the taxes it receives. And yet Italy is stagnating, its population in a state of revolt following two lost decades.

Much of the world was introduced to Yanis Varoufakis in early 2015, when, as Greece’s bold new finance minister (he rode a Yamaha to work and tabloids touted his sex appeal), he led negotiations with the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund to restructure the country’s crushing load of government debt. To many, he was a leftist hero standing up to the heartless eurocrats in Brussels. But then the eurocrats won.

I concede that there are issues over which I would welcome the Italian President’s use of constitutional powers that (in my humble opinion) he should not have.(*)  One such issue is the outrageous policy of the Lega and the promise of its leader, Mr Salvini, to expel five hundred thousand migrants from Italy. Had President Mattarella refused Mr Salvini the post of Interior Minister, on the basis that he rejects such a monstrous project, I would be compelled to support him. But, no, Mr Mattarella had no such qualms.

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.

Nomiki Konst (TYT Politics) interviews former Greek Finance Minister and Greek Member of Parliament Yanis Varoufakis. Get ‘Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism’ here: http://a.co/eXqqRNt

On the day of this discussion/presentation, students and staff were occupying part of the New School as part  of a twin labour dispute: one regarding the cafeteria staff facing dismissal and partial re-employment under worse terns and a second dispute concerning low pay and lack of rights for student workers-TAs. It is in this context that I asked the New School’s authorities to begin the evening by giving the floor to two student representatives who would present their case.

Trump vs Europe: He’s threatening European banks and industries with sanctions. If they don’t cut off trade with Iran, they would be barred from American markets and transactions with American banks. We asked Yanis Varoufakis for his analysis—he’s the former finance minister of Greece who led the resistance to European Bankers demanding austerity—now he has co-founded DiEM25 an international grassroots movement that is campaign for the revival of democracy in Europe.