As the White House finally agrees to release FEMAdisaster aid with more flexibility to try to help rebuild Puerto Rico’s devastated power grid and other infrastructure, we speak with economist Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister, about the history of the island’s debt crisis and what to do as it recovers from Hurricane Maria.
Oct 31, 2017 YANIS VAROUFAKIS , GEORGE TYRIKOS-ERGAS
In September alone, another 2,238 refugees arrived in Lesbos, despite Turkey’s attempts to cut the flow. A camp designed for 2,000 people now “houses” three times that number, behind rows of barbed wire, in a magma of mud, refuse, and human excrement.
Those aren’t the words of Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. They’re from someone who watched his nation get hammered first by a financial crisis not solely of its own making and then by a heavy-handed international push to bully his government into accepting draconian spending cuts that ravaged the lives of millions of his fellow citizens.
Last week, DiEM25’s Yanis Varoufakis and Lorenzo Marsili toured Italy, meeting activists, movements, municipal coalitions and political figures across the Eurozone’s third largest economy to put forward our proposals for tackling Europe’s common problems, and to introduce our ongoing debate on DiEM25’s role in the 2019 European elections.
The American New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt’s first two terms combined the goals of financial stabilization, reconstruction, conservation, and employment—jobs for the jobless; public works; power systems and new industries, especially in the South; soil conservation and reforestation to battle the Dust Bowl; and a potent mix of regulations and insurance to assert public power over high finance.
