there’s this joke, going around Puerto Rico, that the U.S. would trade with the European Union—would sell off Puerto Rico to the European Union; the European Union would give Greece to the United States.
According to Schäuble—Bloomberg, Schäuble said, “I offered my friend [U.S. Treasury Secretary] Jack Lew these days that we could take Puerto Rico into the euro zone if the U.S. were willing to take Greece into the dollar [union]. He thought that was a joke.”
Yanis Varoufakis talking:
Like with all excellent jokes, they are far too close to reality for comfort. It was actually a statement that was said half-jokingly by Wolfgang Schäuble, the German federal finance minister, the finance minister of the most powerful country in Europe, that was responsible, personally, for the process—and it was a process, not just a policy—of austerity and bank bailouts, which effectively put the European periphery, with Greece the most obvious case, into, if you want, the dustbin of modern capitalist history, and created circumstances that are not as extreme as those in Puerto Rico, but himself—it was quite interesting—isn’t it?—that he’s making this comparison between Puerto Rico and Greece, which is an apt comparison, because, you know, they have a fiscal board effectively banning democracy and creating a government of bailiffs, which is precisely what Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble did in my country. And the reason why I was elected was to end that.
The Grapes of Wrath tells the story. You only need to read Steinbeck and apply to the case of Puerto Rico. The whole point of the New Deal, of FDR’s New Deal, was to stop this process of, after a binge of the financial sector that goes wrong, and you have the collapsing pyramids of debt that it creates, to shift, cynically— The 1929 Depression —to shift cynically the burden and to liquidate the little people, to shift the burden of the financiers onto the weakest of shoulders. That was the whole point of the New Deal and all the institutions that the New Deal created, like the FDIC, like Social Security and so on. Puerto Rico is part of the same monetary union. Its people are supposed to be U.S. citizens. And yet they are not—they were never part of this New Deal.
The whole force of evil that was imposed upon the little people in 1929, 1930, under the Hoover administration, being imposed upon a small island nation, that has also been devastated by this terrible hurricane, which is not completely unconnected to the policies on the environment that Mr. Trump is so keen to keep promoting.
climate change. I mean, we—there is absolutely no doubt anymore that the degree of devastation wreaked by hurricanes in this part of the world is intensifying as a result of severe climate change. And it is remarkable that we have in the White House a climate change denier, who, while removing all the benefits of the New Deal from the people of Puerto Rico, at the same time exposes them to the great vagaries of climate change, the very phenomenon that he denies its existence.
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Yanis Varoufakis
former Greek finance minister and author of Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment.
— source https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/3/economist_yanis_varoufakis_puerto_ricans_deserve 2017-11-03