Yanis Varoufakis talking:
it used to be, in the United States—remember President Eisenhower—it used to be the military-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex. In Europe, it was the cartel of big business, heavy industry. Recall the first name of the European Union. It was called the European Community for Coal and Steel. So it was like OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. It was a cartel for big business.
But then, with the collapse of the Bretton Woods period, after the Nixon shock in 1971, you have the rise of the financial sector. Banks start becoming absolutely significant, far more significant than industries like carmaking, like steelmaking, like coal. So, financialization created a new deep establishment that included the revolving doors. Remember in the 1990s when people from Goldman Sachs—well, what, the 1990s, it’s happening today as we speak. People from Goldman Sachs took over the Treasury, and then the people who were in the Treasury retired and went to Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.
So, now we—the deep establishment comprises primarily the banking community, their connections through the revolving doors with the administration in Washington, D.C., in this country, in Brussels and various centers of government, particularly Germany and Paris, in Europe—and the way that they have coopted the systemic media and journalists, who acquire inside information only to the extent that they become functional to the interests of this deep establishment.
this is not a book about villains and heroes. This is—the way I conceptualized it, especially after I was out of those corridors, once I had resigned, I conceptualized it as a genuine tragedy, a Shakespearean tragedy, because, you know, when you watch King Lear or Macbeth, you realize that these extremely, supremely powerful people, characters that you encounter on stage, are exceptionally powerless at the same time. So, I remember my conversation—one conversation I had with Barack Obama, he was extremely supportive of what I was trying to do, and yet completely powerless to do anything about that. Jack Lew, the U.S. treasury secretary, was absolutely straightforward on this. Yes, I was right, but, no, America did not have what it took anymore, or the interest, to intervene.
I was simply trying to get our people out of debtors’ prison, which is what the Puerto Ricans now deserve, an escape from a permanent debt prison.
To put it very briefly, Amy, in 2010, the Greek state went bankrupt. Let’s not get into the reasons as to why it happened. It’s a fact, just like Puerto Rico. And the great and the good decided to conceal, fraudulently, that bankruptcy. And the only reason—the only way you can conceal a bankruptcy is by giving a very large loan. So we got the largest loan in human history—not for the Greek people, of course. All of that money was given to us so that we can bail out, we can give it back to the German and the French banks. And this was done fraudulently, because the German and the French leadership, and the Greek leadership, went to the Parliament and effectively said that this was an act of solidarity with the people of Greece, when it was an act of solidarity with the bankers. But, of course, they never told the parliamentarians that this was an act of solidarity with the bankers. And they promised the people—in the German parliament, for instance, Angela Merkel promised the German parliament that this was a loan that was given to Greece for solidaristic purposes, and the Germans would get all their money back, with interest. That was never going to be the case, because when you give a huge amount of money to a bankrupt entity, on conditions of austerity that shrink that entity’s income, there’s no way you’re going to get your money back, not because the debtor doesn’t want to give it, but it is absolutely impossible to pay it back, like Puerto Rico today.
And then, of course, once you commit that crime against logic and you lie to your parliament, like Angela Merkel did in the Bundestag, the federal parliament in Berlin, then you’re like Macbeth: You commit one crime, you have to commit a second crime to cover up the first crime, and then a third crime. Or, to put it in financial terms, if you try to repay a mortgage by means of a credit card, then you need a second credit card to repay the first credit card, then a third to the second. And I was just trying to get Greece out of that spiral to desertification.
I quit. Because my prime minister surrendered to the creditors, and I was not prepared to do the same.
Greece was the beginning of Brexit. I have no doubt it was. I campaigned in Britain against Brexit. I gave speeches in 13 towns and cities, before Brexit, against Brexit. And the good people, mostly left-wingers, who came—and progressives—to listen to me would come to me afterwards and say, “Look, we really like you. We really agree with you, with your analysis. But we cannot vote to stay in the European Union after the way you were treated.” So, you know, this was a very paradoxical situation to find myself in. And look, remember, Brexit won with 1.8 percent of the vote. If only 3 or 4 or 5 percent of those who voted in favor of Brexit were motivated by the crushing of our government and of our democracy—you know, we are in Democracy Now!, Amy. Our democracy was crushed, like Puerto Rico’s democracy was eliminated. Our democracy has been eliminated. My friend, former comrade, Alexis Tsipras, is the prime minister of Greece. He has less power than the mayor of a small town in the United States, because, you know, sovereignty has completely shifted to a group of bailiffs called the troika of lenders.
By the way, to go back to the White House, the sight of my former comrade bowing his head to Donald Trump, after everything he and I used to say about Donald Trump and about the “alt-right” and about the rise of xenophobic populism, was an extremely sad moment for me. And it was also against the national interest of Greece, because hobnobbing with the Donald is not going to help Greece in any way. The Donald is not going to do anything to—Obama did not do anything to intervene to get our people out of debtors’ prison. And, you know, the only thing that they actually did was to sign a two-and-a-half billion dollar or euro deal to refurbish the Greek Air Force’s American-sourced planes, which, of course, Donald Trump really liked. In a country where people are finding it difficult to put food on the table, where we have refugees that are living in conditions that are despicable and a scourge and a blight on the integrity and soul of Europe, to spend money now refurbishing airplanes, in order to satisfy, to some extent, fleetingly, Donald Trump, is an abomination.
This is one of the worst aspects of it, to see these Nazis. They’re not neo-Nazis. There’s nothing new about them. They’re fully fledged, old-fashioned Nazis. But, Amy, you know what is the worst aspect of it all? The only good thing about them is that they are thugs, so their proportion of the vote is not rising very fast. But their policies have infiltrated the mainstream, not just in Greece. Think of the new Austrian government. Their number one priority is to erect taller borders, to fence the refugees out. Think of the AfD, the Alternative für Deutschland. It’s spreading throughout Europe. The worst aspect of the rise of Nazism today is that their policies are winning independently of whether they are winning government.
ISIS loves Donald Trump. He’s the best recruitment officer for ISIS, because what ISIS wants is they want us, our societies, to turn against migrants, to become xenophobic, to assault them on the streets of our cities, to fence them out of our countries, because that is the way that they will breed hatred within their own communities, of Muslims, for instance, and recruit them to ISIS.
I think that, being here in New York, I have to say that I’m very pleased—because there is good news always, and we should focus on the good news—by the way that the people of New York are responding calmly, democratically, to the tragedy that befell them, without grudges and without Donald Trump’s reaction.
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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 democracynow.org 2017-11-03