Stern.de: You talk as if you were in the midst of warfare.
Varoufakis: It was a war. A financial war. Nowadays you don’t need tanks to defeat someone. You have your banks. It’s a bit like in Brecht’s ‘Threepenny Novel’ where it says: “The days of crude violence are over. You no longer have to send out murderers if you can simply send a bailiff.”
via Yanis Varoufakis: "They bury the values of democracy" – Ausland | STERN.de.
https://youtu.be/bl1HLS9DWXI?t=1h15m54s
In the 1950s, Europe was founded on the forgiveness of past debts, notably Germany’s, which generated a massive contribution to post-war economic growth and peace. Today we need to restructure and reduce Greek debt, give the economy breathing room to recover, and allow Greece to pay off a reduced burden of debt over a long period of time. Now is the time for a humane rethink of the punitive and failed program of austerity of recent years and to agree to a major reduction of Greece’s debts in conjunction with much needed reforms in Greece.
To Chancellor Merkel our message is clear; we urge you to take this vital action of leadership for Greece and Germany, and also for the world. History will remember you for your actions this week. We expect and count on you to provide the bold and generous steps towards Greece that will serve Europe for generations to come.
via Austerity Has Failed: An Open Letter From Thomas Piketty to Angela Merkel | The Nation.
Aditya Chakrabortty writes…
‘…The diplomatic beatings administered to Syriza since it came to power this year can only be seen as Europe trying to set an example to any Spanish voters who might be tempted to support its sister movement Podemos. Go too far left, runs the message, and you’ll get the same treatment.
Whatever the founding ideals of the eurozone, they don’t match up to the grim reality in 2015. This is Thatcher’s revolution, or Reagan’s – but now on a continental scale. And as then, it is accompanied by the idea that There Is No Alternative either to running an economy, or even to which kind of government voters get to choose.
The fact that this entire show is being brought in by agreeable-looking Wise Folk often claiming to be social democratic doesn’t render the project any nicer or gentler. It just lends the entire thing a nasty tang of hypocrisy.
via Greece is a sideshow. The eurozone has failed, and Germans are its victims too | Aditya Chakrabortty | Comment is free | The Guardian.
even the communists at the IMF agrees…
‘First, we show why policymakers need to focus on the poor and the middle class. Earlier IMF work has shown that income inequality matters for growth and its sustainability. Our analysis suggests that the income distribution itself matters for growth as well. Specifically, if the income share of the top 20 percent (the rich) increases, then GDP growth actually declines over the medium term, suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down. In contrast, an increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent (the poor) is associated with higher GDP growth. The poor and the middle class matter the most for growth via a number of interrelated economic, social, and political channels…’
— http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2015/sdn1513.pdf
‘…Walmart hid $76bn of assets in tax havens across the world, including $64.2bn managed by 22 different subsidiaries in Luxembourg, where Walmart has no stores, according to a study published on Wednesday.
The study, published by campaign group Americans for Tax Fairness and funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, alleged that Walmart has “kept its tax haven subsidiaries secretive by burying mention of their existence”. Walmart denied the claims.
[….] According to the report, since 2011 Walmart has transferred ownership of its stores in Brazil, Japan, Puerto Rico and South Africa to Luxembourg. It claims that Walmart’s Luxembourg operations paid less than 1% in tax on profits of more than $1.3bn between 2010 and 2013…‘
via Walmart hid $76bn of assets in foreign tax havens, new study claims | Business | The Guardian.
If it were not for Wikileaks would have anyone ever heard of TISA?? Short answer: No.
Thank you Julian Assange
WikiLeaks releases today 17 secret documents from the ongoing TISA (Trade In Services Agreement) negotiations which cover the United States, the European Union and 23 other countries including Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Taiwan & Israel — which together comprise two-thirds of global GDP. "Services" now account for nearly 80 per cent of the US and EU economies and even in developing countries like Pakistan account for 53 per cent of the economy. While the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has become well known in recent months in the United States, the TISA is the larger component of the strategic TPP-TISA-TTIP ‘T-treaty trinity’. All parts of the trinity notably exclude the ‘BRICS’ countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
via WikiLeaks – Trade in Services Agreement.
Today WikiLeaks has launched a campaign to crowd-source a $100,000 reward for America’s Most Wanted Secret: the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP).
more info: https://wikileaks.org/WikiLeaks-issues-call-for-100-000.html
‘…By no normal definition of the word popular were the Conservatives popular at the election. They received 36.9% of the vote. By no normal definition of the word mandate did they get the endorsement of the electorate to fully implement their manifesto. Nearly two-thirds of voters did not put their cross in the Tory box. Factor in the turn-out and the Conservatives secured the backing of less than a quarter of the registered electorate. It is first past the post that alchemises a minority vote share into more than half of the seats in the House of Commons, every seat in the cabinet and the power to pursue an entirely Tory agenda for the next five years.
The other party greatly favoured by winner takes all were the Scottish Nationalists. Their hugely swollen contingent of MPs have announced their arrival at Westminster in noisy fashion. When not winding up Tory traditionalists by clapping in the chamber, they are battling with Labour for buttock space on the opposition benches….’
via The real reason David Cameron is sitting on a Commons majority | Andrew Rawnsley | Comment is free | The Guardian.
‘… Yanis Varoufakis traces his political consciousness to his childhood in “the junta era” — the years when Greece was ruled by dictatorship. “It was very hard to avoid being political,” he said. “It was all around you.” His father, he said, was raised as “a liberal enlightenment person, not a left winger,” but when he immigrated to Greece from Cairo in the late 1940s, the royalist-communist civil war was underway. One day, the police roughed him up but said they would release him if he signed a denunciation of communism. “He said, ‘Look I am not a Buddhist, but I would never sign a denunciation of Buddhism,’ ” Varoufakis said. “He read Rousseau at 13 years old, and he knew about civil liberties.” He ended up in a concentration camp with communists — and joined the Communist Party, which made finding work nearly impossible. Eventually, he got a low-paying job as a personal assistant to the owner of a steel company, and today, at age 90, he is its chairman. Varoufakis’s mother, a biochemist, made “a pittance,” he said, because she was a woman. She became involved in the feminist movement in the 1970s. Varoufakis was also a political activist from a young age. When he began his career as an academic at the University of Essex, he said, his slogan became “subvert the dominant paradigm,” which some of his students later put on a T-shirt.
Varoufakis left England in 1988 to teach at the University of Sydney, where he began a series of conversations about the global economy with the economist Joseph Halevi, the two of them among academics in their field who contested the notion then popular that the world had entered a new phase of “perpetual growth,” what the former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke called the “great moderation.” After the crash, Varoufakis decided to put those ideas into a book for a popular audience titled, “The Global Minotaur,” which presented the world, and Europe, as perilously yoked to the fluctuations of the American economy. When the crisis finally reached Greece, Varoufakis began working with the British economist Stuart Holland and, later, the American economist James Galbraith, on a pamphlet titled, “A Modest Proposal,” which identified four major crises in Europe — in banking, public debt, underinvestment and social welfare — and proposed solutions to each. “Europe is fragmenting,” they wrote. “As this happens, human costs mount, and disintegration becomes an increasing threat. . . . The fallout from a eurozone breakup would destroy the European Union, except perhaps in name. And Europe’s fragmentation poses a global danger.”
via A Finance Minister Fit for a Greek Tragedy? – NYTimes.com.
read ‘A Modest Proposal’ @ http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/euro-crisis/modest-proposal/
The European Court of Human Rights urged the US not to execute the suspects???! Is this a serious worry, or just something the ECHR feels it has to say when handling with legal cases dealing with the USA??
‘…The European Court of Human Rights had imposed a Saturday deadline on Poland to make the reparations. Last July Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were awarded USD $147,000 and $113,000, respectively, in a lawsuit against Poland for allowing the CIA to detain them and for not preventing torture and inhumane treatment. The court also ordered Poland to urge the US not to execute the suspects.
via JURIST – Poland to make payments to alleged CIA rendition victims.
Reuters 2015.05.14:
‘Setting aside for a moment all the world’s major problems,
NATO foreign ministers let their hair down at the end of a meeting in Antalya, Turkey.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_wfMrz9_mY
‘…The swing to the SNP is political pragmatism at its best – the Scots electorate – a politically savvy bunch at the best of times – are simply ensuring they have the best representation at Westminster you can possibly have; a bloc that will fight to get what they were promised [by the Conservatives, Labour and LibDems] at the referendum…’
via The UK is now a failed state – Al Jazeera English.
Giles Fraser writes about this week’s UK election:
‘…What difference did my vote make? Why indeed do people vote, and care so passionately about voting, particularly in constituencies in which voting one way or the other won’t make a blind bit of difference? And why do the poor vote when, by voting, they merely give legitimacy to a system that connives with their oppression and alienation? The anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee suggests a fascinating answer: elections are like religious rituals, often devoid of rational purpose or efficacy for the individual participant, but full of symbolic meaning. They are the nearest thing the secular has to the sacred, presenting a moment of empowerment.But is this empowerment illusory? Is, as Banerjee asks, “the ability to vote … a necessary safety valve which allows for the airing of popular disaffection, but which nevertheless ultimately restores the status quo. In such a reading, elections require the complicity of all participants in a deliberate mis-recognition of the emptiness of its procedures and the lack of any significant changes which this ritual brings about, but are a necessary charade to mollify a restless electorate.”…’
via Democracy is a religion that has failed the poor | Giles Fraser | Comment is free | The Guardian.
So it seems that the confetti terrorist that attacked the European Central Bank (ECB) chief Mario Draghi is a one-woman splinter group of Femen.
At last!, Femen does something worthwhile!
‘…She had no need for violence at Wednesday’s ECB protest.“I got in like anybody else – there’s this airport control thing, but I didn’t carry any weapons except for confetti in my bag” [….] “The confetti attack was not a Femen protest – I’m sorry ladies. I consider myself a freelance-activist”, she wrote, accompanied by the hashtag #exfemen, indicating she’s no longer part of the group….’
via Who is the woman that threw confetti on Draghi?.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS_ROi0iiZw
‘April 15 — European Central Bank President Mario Draghi was attacked by a protester yelling “end the ECB dictatorship” during a press conference today. The event resumed a few minutes later.’
UPDATE: Who was the woman that threw confetti at Mario Draghi?
http://redjade.noblogs.org/20150416/990
‘…[Birgitta Jónsdóttir, MP for the Pirate Party] says that she does not want to become Prime Minister and if the Pirates were to receive this number of votes in the next general elections the party would not be likely to form a coalition government with the ruling parties, the Independence Party and the Progressive Party…’
via Pirate captain as Prime Minister? – mbl.is.
‘Declan Costello, director at the EC’s directorate for economic and financial affairs, has ordered the radical left-led coalition governemnt in Greece to stop. A planned law to allow tax arrears to be paid in instalments, set before the Greek parliament on Thursday, has also been vetoed [….] Mr Costello’s letter effectively says that if the Greek parliament votes on the new law tomorrow, it is a violation of the compromise deal signed by finance minister Yanis Varoufakis on 20 February in Brussels…
via Don’t pass new anti-poverty law, commission tells Greece | Paul Mason | Paul Mason.
‘…Condemns in the strongest possible terms the vast, systemic, blanket collection of the personal data of innocent people, often comprising intimate personal information; emphasises that the systems of mass, indiscriminate surveillance by intelligence services constitute a serious interference with the fundamental rights of citizens; stresses that privacy is not a luxury right, but that it is the foundation stone of a free and democratic society; points out, furthermore, that mass surveillance has potentially severe effects on the freedom of the press, thought and speech, as well as a significant potential for abuse of the information gathered against political adversaries; emphasises that these mass surveillance activities appear also to entail illegal actions by intelligence services and raise questions regarding the extra-territoriality of national laws;…’
via European Parliament: Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs .
Strange Arithmetic (lyrics) by The Coup
History has taught me some strange arithmetic
Using swords, prison bars, and pistol grips
English is the art of bombing towns
While assuring that you really only blessed the ground
Science is that honorable, useful study
Where you contort the molecules and then you make that money
In mathematics, dead children don’t get added
But they count the cost of bullets comin out the automatic
Teacher
My hands up
Please, don’t make me a victim
Teachers
Stand up
You need to tell us how to flip this system
Economics is the symphony of hunger and theft
Mortar shells often echo out the cashing of checks
In Geography class, it’s borders, mountains and rivers
But they will never show the line between the takers and givers
Algebra is that unique occasion
In which a school can say that there should be a balanced equation
And then Statistics is the tool of the complicit
To say everybody’s with it and that you’re the only critic
Social Studies, the goliath to tackle
Which turns into a sermon on simplicity of shackles
Physics is to school you on the science of force
‘Cept for how to break the hell out the ghetto, of course
Home Ec can teach you how to make a few sauces
And accept low pay from your Walmart bosses
If your school won’t show you how to fight for what’s needed
Then they’re training you to go through life and get cheated
https://vimeo.com/103299654
Who could have predicted that price of ‘Western Democracy’ was anti-democratic neo-liberalism?
/snark
‘In other Ukraine news, the International Monetary Fund has agreed to extend a $17.5 billion loan package to Kiev in a bid to help prevent economic collapse. The credit will be provided in return for deep structural reforms and cuts to government spending.’
via Ukraine Accepts Deep Cuts, Reforms in $17.5 Billion IMF Loan Deal | Democracy Now!.
And notice also that this is being implemented during an economic crises and Capitalism is under no threat of collapse because of this new policy.
Just saying.
‘…Germany on Friday became the latest and perhaps most significant country so far to commit itself to improving the representation of women on corporate boards, passing a law that requires some of Europe’s biggest companies to give 30 percent of supervisory seats to women beginning next year.
[….] In passing the measure, Germany joined a trend in Europe to legislate a much greater role for women in boardrooms. Norway, Spain and France have set their boardroom quotas for women at 40 percent. Belgium, Iceland, Italy and the Netherlands have also set quotas.
[….] Under the new measure, some 100 of Germany’s best-known companies must give 30 percent of their supervisory board seats to women starting next year. A further 3,500 companies have a deadline of Sept. 30 to submit plans to increase the share of women in top positions…’
via German Law Requires More Women on Corporate Boards – NYTimes.com.
Maybe if the US, France,and other EU powers didn’t arm and fuel the Libyan civil war (and continue still today), this ‘problem’ of migrants would only be half of its current size? Just a thought.
“Around 280,000 migrants entered the EU in 2014 compared to just over 100,000 in the previous year. It’s a huge increase,” Frontex spokeswoman Ewa Moncure [….] “Libya has become the main departure point for migrants,” she added, noting that around 170,000 arrived in the central Mediterranean from the North African state that was engulfed in chaos after its 2011 revolution.
via Huge surge in migrants entered EU in 2014: Frontex – Yahoo News.
