Greece will say it as it is: five years on, the medicine prescribed by Germany, Europe’s paymaster, to mend the ills of run-away profligacy hasn’t worked. Instead, the nation has become an echo of its former self; its economy slashed by almost a third, one in four out of work, one in three facing the prospect of living in abject poverty.
“We’ve lost everything,” he says. “So we can speak truth to power, and it’s about time we do.”
Damned book readers.
I wonder if he knows Papa John personally?
Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis: ‘If I weren’t scared, I’d be awfully dangerous’, by Helena Smith (Guardian)
... At 53, Varoufakis is still clear that he “understands the world better” as a result of having read Marx. But he no longer considers himself a diehard leftie, whatever others may think. Rather, he says, he is a libertarian or erratic Marxist, who can marvel at the wondrousness of capitalism but is also painfully aware of its inherent contradictions, just as he is “the awful legacy” of the left. “It is a system that produces massive wealth and massive poverty,” proclaims the economist who taught at the universities of East Anglia, Cambridge, Glasgow and Sydney after gaining his doctoral degree at the University of Essex. “I don’t think you can understand capitalism until and unless you understand those contradictions and ask yourself if capitalism is the natural state. I don’t think it is. That’s why I am a leftwinger.”
More than that, Varoufakis is an iconoclast, a self-styled “contrarian” who is also an idealist, “because if you are not an idealist, you are a cynic”. And he has, he laments, lost a lot of friends on the left who believe that Grexit, Greece’s exit from the currency bloc, would be the country’s best course.
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