 Good evening good evening, and I'm so sorry. We're late. No, I'm Chomsky's plane did make it from Boston, Hallelujah. I Really could not have stepped in to his shoes. I did have someone in the audience who would have But thankfully no, I'm Chomsky is here. Now. My name is Paul Holen Graeber And I'm the director of public programs here at the New York Public Library known as Live from the New York Public Library my goal as all of you know is to make the lion's roar to make a heavy institution dance and when successful to make it levitate as It may I hope Tonight I've always wondered how much this building weighs and Nobody in all these years a decade. I've been here has been able to tell me Now let me just quickly mention some of the upcoming events which include not on your program actor Matt Dylan who will be joining Magnum photographer extra extraordinary Bruce Davidson on May 4 Our next event will be with Chris Hedges and Seymour Hirsch on May 3 The week of June 12th. We will end the season with three punches this year's Nobel Prize winner Zvetlana Alexievich will be joined by Pulitzer Prize winner Catherine boo and journalist Masha Gasson That is on June 13th June 14th Walter Moseley will join Kareem Abdul Jabbar They will talk of course about basketball But also will discuss their passion for the tech detective fiction and much adults and to cap the season I will be holding a conversation with a very great musician and now also filmmaker Laurie Anderson That is on June 16th and in case you were wondering what might be happening between now and then Let me just mention that tomorrow. We will have the great honor to welcome on this very stage Dame Helen Mirren to talk about everything from Shakespeare as many of you probably know the man died 400 years ago yesterday, I'm told and we will talk about Shakespeare But we will also talk about her great passion for Peter Brook a passion I share who is still alive and 90 years old and very well now tonight you Probably know why you are here I'm hoping for a true exchange between two extraordinary people now Yanis Varoufakis after the event and After a Q&A now, I'd like to say a quick word about Q&A a Microphone will be put right in front of the stage I love the fact that some people are looking right there a microphone will be put right there You will queue up and you will ask intelligent questions and They will not last longer than 52 seconds I've actually determined that Questions can be asked in 52 seconds or less so you can't make a statement, but you can ask a question Keep it short keep it to the point Yanis Varoufakis at the end of that Q&A will sign his new book And the weak suffer what they must was a question mark So come up and have the book signed after purchasing it from our independent book store bookseller 192 books now I would like to say a big thank you to the Ford Foundation for their fantastic Support to live from the New York Public Library as well as their support to many other cultural institutions across New York City Thanks, also go to the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos and always to Manas and Adam Bartos now for the last seven or so years I've asked my guests to give me a biography of themselves in seven words a Haiku of sorts or if you're very modern a tweet Chomsky was recalcitrant Which in literally in Latin means kicking back He hesitated I really really really had to push him and His seven words reminded me of the seven words that Werner Herzog gave me Werner Herzog when I asked him for seven words He didn't quite know what the point was and he said filmmaker No, he wrote Werner Herzog colon filmmaker originated in Zachran Bavaria now Noam Chomsky in case you were wondering Linguistics and philosophy professor at MIT comma author That's a biography Yanis Varoufakis gave me a biography that doesn't resemble Werner Herzog's or Noam Chomsky's Yanis Varoufakis Dedicated to subverting dominant paradigms economic and Political please welcome them Good evening. We don't have anyone to introduce us. So I've been asked to kick off by saying firstly that Is this wonderful that we're all here? Just to subvert the notion that nothing good can come out of the public sector No Well, the fact that I'm here barely actually Has a relationship to that comment I came from Boston my wife and I came from Boston took seven hours in any society that hasn't been smashed by Leo neoliberal Policies of the kind you describe it would have taken Maybe an hour and a half two hours there is a train the pride of the public sector which I Took for the first time in 1950 and it's about 15 minutes faster now Then it was then when it makes the schedule, which is a chancee Situation so we decided to come by airplane and spent most of the afternoon on the runway Well, no, what shall we talk about? Well, we can talk about The neoliberal assault on the world's population in the last generation which you've written so brilliantly about What strikes me? Given the last quite Eventful year of my life. What really strikes me is the major disconnect between the philosophy and ideology of neoliberalism and that which I encountered when Negotiating in inverted commas negotiating when being dictated by dictated by The greater the good of the neoliberal international financial in style establishment Now think about it. If you if you take the great libertarians the great neoliberals who castigate all tax-funded Activities and You consider the reason why I'm here today, and I'm not still the Minister of Finance of Greece Why it's because I refuse another hundred billion smackers dollars of a tax-backed loan to my insolvent government Which the creditors insisted that I should take The three lines It's astonishing. So here it is Here you have the International Monetary Fund the European Central Bank and the European Commission insisting that our bankrupt state takes on another hundred billion Under conditions that guarantee that we will not be able to repay the taxpayers of Europe that would be granting us that money And that comes from neoliberals who supposedly are against all tax funded loans to government and who supposedly believe that An insolvent entity doesn't have the moral right to take on more and more loans But as you point out What is it 90% of those loans go to French and German bankers? That was the first loan this loan It would go from the one pocket of the creditors to another pocket of the creditors so that they would maintain the pretense that Greece was not bankrupt, but Effectively what I'm trying to say is the intense hypocrisy of the neoliberal establishment, which is not really even interested in Sticking to its own neoliberal ideology. This is just 19th century power politics of crashing anyone who dares Stand up to them and say a simple word. No But I think that's actually traditional one of the Paradoxes of neoliberalism is that it's not new and it's not liberal What you describe is a form of it hypocrisy, but the same is true of saying that We should not support tax-funded institutions the financial sector is basically tax-funded Of course, you recall the IMF study of the leading American banks which Determined that virtually all their profits come from their implicit government insurance policy cheap credit access to higher credit ratings Incentives to take risky transactions, which are profitable, but then if it's problematic you guys pay for it or just take the basis of the contemporary economy which actually I've been privileged to see developing in government subsidized laboratories for decades MIT where I've been since the 1950s is one of the institutions where the government the Funnel in the early days was the Pentagon was pouring in money to create the basis for the high-tech economy of the future and the profit-making of the Institutions that are regarded as private enterprises. It was decades of work under public funding with a very anti-capitalist ideology so according to capitalist principles if someone invests in a risky enterprise over a long period and 30 years later it makes some profit and they're supposed to get part of the profit But it doesn't work like that here. It was the taxpayer who invested for decades the profit goes to Apple and Microsoft Not not the taxpayer indeed if you take an iPhone apart Every single technology in it was developed by some government grant and for every single one and for long Some of them by government grants from other countries like Wi-Fi from the Australian You see an interesting Picture of it from a place like MIT or other major research institutions. So if you walked around the office the building where I work 50 years ago You would have seen electronic firms Raytheon itek others IBM I They are to essentially Rob the technology that's being developed at public expense and seeing if they can Turn it into something applicable for profits. You walk around the institution today You see different buildings. You see Novartis Pfizer pharmaceutical big pharmaceutical corporations why Because the cutting edge of the economy has shifted from electronics based to biology based so therefore the Predators in the so-called private sector are there to see what they can pick up from the taxpayer funded research in the in fundamental biological sciences and That's called free enterprise and a free market system. So speak of hypocrisy. It's pretty hard to go beyond that quite right this hypocrisy is fundamental to the whole enterprise culture of Capitalism from from the 250 years ago. I mean the whole notion that There can be a market system which is At an arms length separated from a state, which is the enemy is The sickest joke in the history of humankind if you think that I mean this this narrative of Private create wealth creation which is appropriated by the big big button Who will the state on behalf of trade unions and the working class that need this a social social welfare net? It's just a preposterous reversal of the truth That wealth is being created collectively and appropriated privately, but right from the beginning I mean the enclosures in Britain would never have happened without the king's army and without state brutality for pushing peasants off the Their ancestors land and for creating the Commodification of labor the commodification of land which then gave to the rise to capitalism just half an hour ago We were being shown some of us the magnificent collection of maps of the city of New York in this wonderful building and You could see in one of the maps of Alabama the precise depiction of the theft of land from Native Americans the way in which it was parceled up commodified now that would never have Happened without the brutal intervention of the state which created The the process of privatization of land and therefore of commodification actually one of my favorite passages from Adam Smith is Where he gives advice to the new colonies to newly liberated colonies as To how they should pursue sound economics Which is pretty much what the IMF tells the third world today? What he said is the advice was You should Concentrate on what was later called comparative advantage Produce agricultural products. You're good at that Export furs fish and so on but don't try to produce manufacturing goods because Britain England has Superior manufacturing goods so therefore you should import them from England. They're good at that you're good at Cotton and corn incidentally the cotton was hardly by free enterprise but and you should certainly not try to monopolize the resources that you have and if you pursue those Practices then everybody will be better off Economic theory proves that Well, the United States happened to be free of English control So therefore they were able to do the opposite Just as England had done high tariffs to block British goods Enable them to create a textile industry the beginning of the industrial revolution later in the century a steel industry blocking superior British steel and And right up to the present as I've mentioned with high tech as far as monopolization is concerned the US made a major effort to monopolize the Basic resource for the early industrial revolution namely cotton that's the oil of the 19th century and the US had most of it not all of it and the conquest of Mexico which was Not exactly by free enterprise was Largely undertaken to try to contain that to develop gain a monopoly of cotton Which would overcome the major enemy in those days, which was Britain Britain was the big force the enemy and the the The Jacksonian president styler purse 19th century Their position was that if we could monopolize cotton we could bring England to our feet That way we could really defeat them didn't quite make it that made a lot incidentally that effort was what Saddam Hussein was charged with in 1990 the charge was ludicrous But the charge was he was going to try to monopolize oil and bring us all to his feet Which was crazy, but the US did try to monopolize cotton and that's part of the way in which power shifted from England to the United States and that I think that's a pretty good record of the way sound economics has worked over the years there have been places where Sound economics was applied Liberal policies it's called the third world And there's no it's not an accident you take a look at the global south one country developed Japan the one country that was not colonized Take a look at East Asia the Tigers of East Asia one exception the one that was conquered by the United States 1898 with a couple hundred thousand people killed and stays semi colonized not part of the Asian Tiger Explosion of industrialization the pattern is just uniform But somehow has an entered economic theory wonder why you're an economist well There isn't why it never entered economic theory was because economics in universities Was began to evolve from the 1950s onwards as the queen of the social sciences and What gave discursive power and monopoly power within the academic Environment to economics was the claim that it was the only social theory Which was peddling Universal truths to be proven by mathematical means and and And it succeeded so when a sociologist and anthropologist an economist Applied for a ground it was always the economist who got it on the basis of this discursive monopoly and However, in order to close the model mathematically The only way to solve the equations is by making assumptions that distance The model from really existing capitalism. So for instance, you have to assume that there's no time There's no space because if you allow time to interfere with your model or space to enter You end up with indeterminacy in other words You end up with a system of equations that cannot be solved or that have an infinity of possible solutions and then You have no predictive power. You can't say well, this is what's going to happen. So You have a very interesting inverse Darwinian process the more successful Economists were at creating models that said precisely nothing about capitalism the greater their success in the academy So they became the opposite of the public intellectuals that you've been writing about They they create wonderful abstractions aesthetically pleasing models that I spent quite a few years studying in the same way that you go to a museum and you look at a Piece of abstract art, but you don't expect to find the truth of capitalism in its form So this is the the interesting sociology of knowledge within the economics Profession, but then there is a parallel shift the end of Bretton Woods Which unleashed banking remember? Roosevelt Made sure that in the Bretton Woods conference which designed the post-war war the first post-war phase between 1940s and 1971 1973 He had he had stipulated that one kind of person should not should not be allowed into the Bretton Woods conference You know who these people were bankers not one banker attended the Bretton Woods conference and that was at the explicit order of FDR And so you had boring banks Between 1944 and 1971, but after 1971 and we can discuss why that is suddenly banking was unleashed and Their capacity effectively to mint private money became unlimited and essential to the second post-war phase of global capitalism of American capitalism of American hegemony during this unleashing there was a need for a theoretical and ideological cover so I don't blame my fellow economists for pulling the trigger that Created so much devastation in 2008 and before that and after that But I blame them for providing the economic the mathematical models the sermons Which steadied the hand of the financiers and allowed them to believe that what they were doing was perfectly okay consistent with science Provable mathematically that it was riskless and therefore allowed them the mental and emotional Strengths to do a lot more of damage than they would have done otherwise one of the more interesting Moments in the history of Science and scholarship was actually in 2008 for as you know for decades economists had been claiming with extreme arrogance that the They completely understood how to control and manage an economy. There were fundamental principles like the efficient market hypothesis rational expectations and Anyone who didn't accept this was dismissed as a kind of a some strange kind of moron the whole system collapsed The whole intellectual edifice collapsed in a most amazing fashion and had no effect on the profession Not none at all. This is that well, it did have it had the effect that Sometimes, you know when when we're driving on a freeway, and I usually go well above the speed limit Condemn if you will and I get stopped by The police for the next 20 minutes a drive below the speed limit, but it doesn't last more than 20 minutes then I After a while, I just go back to where I was. This is exactly like the economics profession they had a brief moment of some did some some and at least of being a bit humble and Staying you know keeping the heads under the parapet for a bit But then within 20 minutes they forgot about it and they carried on teaching the same rubbish to the students But what is interesting? You know, I miss them to two small points. It's not that the economists Went headlong into this Mathematized Religion because that's what it is. It's a little religion with equations and with a bit of bad statistics What happened was two things firstly there was a kind of ethnic cleansing of anybody that had retained their wits about the economy So there were economists who challenged this view and who Were simply not reproduced by the system. They never got the grants. They never got the PhD students Their PhD students never got lectureships never got assistants assistant professorships So there was a purge of they stop the second which is and far more interesting phenomenon is that they wonderful minds that created the general equilibrium models The highest if the popes of the Catholic Church were not believers So take for instance can arrow Can arrow is you know and Gerard de Bray. They're the ones that a stop John Nash They established the mathematical theorems Upon which all this hypocrisy is based now these people can arrow. I remember in the early 1990s He was giving a talk at NYU and they were about 20 people. It was a highly Mathematized paper Okay, so he was enthusiastically going through the equations and one of the Professors there interrupted him at some point is that professor arrow equation 3.2 3 Reminds me of the argument in favor of this kind of tax as opposed to that kind of tax and can can stop him immediately and said My dear boy. He was a bit condescending. I think rightly so. He said you're confusing that which is interesting with that Which is useful. This is interesting If you try to apply to anything real, it's dangerous So the gurus the popes understood that this theory Was examining a post-capitalist world a world without labor markets without the You know labor exploitation without monopolies without even the slightest of capacities to alter prices on the behalf of employers of entrepreneurs of Conglomerates a world without firms because what are what is a company a company is a market-free zone? It's a hierarchy. It's a light a little small Soviet Union with Gosplan and central planning if you look at Google If you look at Microsoft then you have Kosas theorem. That's a big help. Yes Yes, but the Cosas theorem is taught for five seconds and then forgotten Yeah In order to to make them feel that they've said something about the reason why firms exist But then in those models that produce the macroeconomic policies that were applied even under Clinton especially under Clinton There are no firms. There's no time no firms no space Everybody resides on the same point in space so that there are no costs of transport or anything like that so imagine a world in which economic policy is Predicated upon models that assume there is no time space firms profit or Economic rent or monopolies. Hi. It's time to get really scared You know, there's a question that I'm sure you know the Answer to from your own experience, which has kind of puzzled me about Contemporary economists tested with the IMF and in your experience as Greek finance minister From what I can see from the outside It looked as if the IMF economists were pretty harshly criticizing the Austerity policies of the Troika, but the IMF itself was strongly supporting them What was going on in there? Well, this is exactly what was what was happening and it's happening to this very moment wiki leaks leaked a wonderful conversation between my old friend Paul Thompson who made his name by crashing the Greek economy and then as a result being promoted to IMF chief in Europe And his success success or a Romanian lady going by the name of Delia Velkulesko Just a read this exchange. Just read it. It came out a few weeks ago wiki leaks Go and look at it. It's fantastic because they're telling the truth and they're telling exactly you're saying they are admitting That which they you know, Paul Thompson and I had had this conversation first time I met the IMF chief in Europe was in a hotel in Paris and I was elected with a mandate to Negotiate a debt write-down for the Greek debt Against the Troika of lenders against the wishes of the creditors But at the same time because I had a mandate to negotiate not to clash with the creditors I would I was prepared to clash if I had to but my intention was not to clash My intention was to come to an honorable agreement between us So because I knew that the German government had a very serious political problem going to the federal Parliament in Berlin to the Buddha stag and admitting that the money they had given to the Greeks was not money to the Greeks for the Greeks but money for Deutsche Bank and therefore they were never really expected to get it back So this is why we're going to give the Greeks a debt restructure. That's what Mrs. Merkel should have said to the Buddha Stag but of course, this is not something she could have said and remain the chancellor of Germany So I knew that the Germans had a political problem admitting to what they had done in the in the sense of having given money to the Greeks so that Effectively the German taxpayer and the Slovak taxpayer because they spread the risk like good financers do to the other Europeans effectively they were bailing bailing out their banks a second time in 12 months So I so of course I knew that and I was trying to find a formula that would allow our debt To become more manageable and less toxic for the Greek people while at the same time achieving a kind of Political arrangement with Berlin that would make it palatable for them to say yes to it So first meeting with Paul Thompson. I Come to him with a proposal for the kind of debt swaps financial engineering that Wall Street is very good Not the kind of thing that one expects from a left-wing minister of finance But yeah, I wanted to make things work at that point not so much to go and clash with them And you know what he said? Oh, this is this is this is too mild We need to take a large chunk of your debt and write it off immediately. I said well, that's music to my ear, Paul How are you going to convince all constable to do this? I said well, that's a problem, you know, but we'll find a way so at this level of bilateral discussions even with the leadership of the IMF you got the idea that they understood what they had done they knew that they had done a Nasty deed they they were subterfuting what I had done. There was a bailout for banks presented as solidarity to a suffering nation And they were trying to do something about it, but then when it came to the final settlement As creditors they stuck to one another they remained loyal to one another They spread the rumor that our government was putting forward Impossible demands that we didn't want to reform that we had no proposals We we came to them with financial engineering proposals from Wall Street They had nothing to suggest except for these signals that they were emitting, but I think the most important Discussion I had was was was with somebody really high up in there in the IMF The name will not be mentioned higher up than Paul Thompson. You can imagine After 10 hours of negotiations when we got into the nitty gritty these extremely boring meetings with aids with advisors with experts with Committee on pensions and another committee on VAT and other in the end we ended up together and we had a discussion Confidential discussion that attack and I heard the following words Yanis you of course you're right these policies were trying to impose upon you can't work. I thought oh, no You know deep down. I don't know whether you have this. You probably don't you're no I'm Tromsky you wouldn't but I'm I'm less experienced in in this game of clashing with powers that be at that level and Deep down. I think if I'm I psychoanalyze myself I really wanted to think that the adults know what they're doing And that I'm the child that is recalcitrant kicking and screaming, but deep down the adults You know the people will be in power at the top of the IMF know that what they're doing and my complaints and protestations Maybe they're not not completely. I maybe they they know more than I think they do But when these people turn around to me and say you're right It can't work what we are trying to impose upon your nation can't work but Yanis You must understand We have Invested so much political capital in this program. We can't go back and your credibility my credibility depends on accepting it I Think that answers your question. Well, how do they? How do the participants in the Troika? deliberations react to the Technical papers that are coming out from the IMF economists Saying their own Economists that blanchard others saying these policies of austerity under recession are just destructive. It's very simple They ignore what what are they in the euro group in the euro group? These were never mentioned. I mentioned them Quoted chapter and verse from their own Statisticians and economists like Olivier Blanchard and those people I quote there was also a remarkable study from the IMF Showing that the liberalization of labor markets the removal of protection of labor of trade union protection or trade union rights Protection from unfair dismissal and all that that in the end is counterproductive When it comes to competitiveness and productivity the IMF came out with this in the spring of 2014 a Beautiful report. It could have been written by a progressive economist from Right, it's where exactly did it's include but what did it conclude? It concluded that these labor market reforms that the IMF had been pushing down the throat of Countries from Africa to Asia to Europe. They don't work They do not enhance competitiveness, especially when investment is subdued which was always my argument So I quoted that as well in the Europe. I might have been singing the national anthem of Sweden It was exactly the same thing because you've got to understand that these meetings are quite brutal They have already decided what they're going to do The ministers are treated like vermin By their own mind there is and by their representatives the Troika Something that very few people people know is that the Eurogroup Is actually led by the Troika not by the finance ministers the elected representatives of the nations So you've got the head of the Eurogroup who is usually Let's face it appointed by Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble Then next to him there is the real ruler of the European Union a gentleman called Thomas Wieser Nobody's heard of him. He's a he wields the real power. He tells what is his position? He's the head of the Euro working group, which is the cabinet under them. What do you do? The non-existent group. Yes, they are the shadow cabinet of the non-existent Europe. Yeah And this gentleman has been around now. How does the Eurogroup get established? You don't discuss this in your book. You just say it's there I think it just sprung out Yeah, you know out of the shell like you know for a day in Cyprus Look when when when when we created in our infinite wisdom a common currency and we had a common Central Bank, but without a state To correspond to the central bank and went up with states that didn't have a central bank because that common central bank was created on The provisor that it would not come to the assistance ever of any of the states of which it would be the central bank They decided that well every now and then the finance ministers of these nations that now don't have a central bank But they have created a common central bank should get together and discuss economic policy to coordinate So this is how it emerged. It's not in any treaty and do you know how I found that out The Eurogroup consists of the finance ministers. Yes. Well, that was the initial idea the finance ministers and one of them chairs it before a diesel bloom who is now the president it was The head of the largest tax haven in the world Luxembourg certain John Claude United States is getting close Not as badly as Not as badly as a couple of states. Yes But not not not at that level and but ever since This eurozone which by the way the euro is a carbon copy of the gold standard of the 1920s It was created in the image of the gold standard of the 1920 See, you know what happened to the gold standard of the 1920s. It gave rise to the roaring 20s to immense financialization immense concentration of industrial power Funded by the consolidation of the financial sector and then Wall Street enormous inequality, of course, enormous equality, which is the result of this easy Private money minting by the financial sector and when the chickens came home to roost in 1929 the common currency of that era the gold exchange started collapse started fragmenting very soon the Germans hated the French the French had it the Germans everybody hated the Greeks and We descended into the abyss of the 1930s and 1940s after our generations 1929 which took place in 2008 guess what happened the gold standard started fragmenting It was called the euro in Europe and very soon after that the Germans started pointing moralizing things at the Greeks the Greeks remembered the Nazi occupation everybody hated the French and We are now in a state of disintegration where the refugees are the problem actually you should bring up 1953 the London Agreement, which most people don't know about that's rather critical Of course, maybe you want to Complete the story about the you know, I'll just tell you the story of how I found out that your group doesn't exist in law By the way one more point after our country started to go failing inconsistent with European law or just no It's kind of orthogonal no connection It's it's it's it's outside the framework of the of European law now does it do its decisions? Impact how do its decisions? Impact it makes all the important decisions that determine the future of Europe and every single one how are those decisions? Transmitted to the official decision-making bodies to the Brussels bureaucracy. Oh, yes What happens is there is the euro group meeting and then afterwards there is an ecofin meeting the ecofin meeting The ecofin does exist. It's the meeting of all the European Union Finance ministers including the ones that are not using the euro So George Osmond from Britain as they are the Danish finance ministers and what happens? It's a rubber stamping process. So whatever the Europe has decided ecofin says, okay, we agree And there's never any debate. No, no debate. Yeah, but let me tell you this is quite interesting How I came to understand that this is a paralegal group at some point The Troika inside the euro group because now it's not just the finance ministers the IMF lagarta sitting there Thompson is sitting there the European Central Bank is sitting there the Commission is sitting there They set the scene and then the vermin us the finance ministers simply not And the I am the IMF has no reaction to the euro group decisions Well, it's in the euro group. The IMF is part of the year there. So they're so there. Yeah So they're represented in the euro. Well, let me give you an example when when the ultimatum was presented to me on the 25th of June On a take it or leave it basis and what that meant was that if I said no, I'm leaving it Our banks would have been closed as they were five days later. Yeah, so that's a pretty powerful ultimatum It's like making me an offer that I can't refuse even though we refused it For a while for Until we caved in and then I designed but this is interesting. I was presented with this Ultimatum it comprised three chapters one was the fiscal policy that we would have to follow for the next 20 years interesting It's interesting given the taraman date from the Greek people was only for four years. This is Spelled out and spelled out in black and white. Yeah, what the primary surplus could be what the tax take should be what? What what measures would we should use what the VAT rate should be in order to get that primary surplus? Chapter one to two. This is specifically for Greece only for Greece. Yeah, has there been something similar for Spain? Yes, Lee. Yeah, Portugal. Yeah, this colonization is At full blast not just it started with Greece all bad things start Yeah, and and then they spread out Greece is the laboratory of misanthropy. How do they deal with France? But France of course is a final destination Yeah, and but is that beginning to give orders to France? Of course that is of course from the euro group No, I'm the beauty of those five six months in power power not what power Watching watching power in office The Beauty of it was you know we academics all our lives we theorize about things Okay, we try to get evidence, but we theorize During those five months. I didn't have to theorize and to answer your question about France at some point I was having a very interesting of it. I had many interesting conversations with the Finance Minister of Germany dr. Wolfgang Schoibler at some point when I showed him this this Ultimatum and I said to him It's a it's a long story, but I'll cut it short. I said him would you sign this just let's take off our hats as finance Ministers for a moment. I've been in in politics for five months. You've been in politics for 40 years You keep barking in my ear that I should sign it stop telling me what to do as human beings You know that my people now are suffering a great depression. We have children at school That faint as a result of malnutrition Can you just do me the favor and advise me on what to do? Don't tell me what to do as somebody with 40 years a Europeanist somebody who comes from a democratic country just Wolfgang to Yanis not finance minister to finance and it means that and to his credit He looked out of the window for a while and he turned to me and he said well the question that I'd actually asked He was would you sign this? And he turned around and he said as a patriot I wouldn't Of course the next question was so why are you forcing me to do it? He said don't you understand I? Did this in the Baltics in Portugal in Ireland, you know, we have discipline To look after and I want to take the Troika to Paris He said yes, so I Don't need to theorize This it starts with grace graces and peeps quick country. It's not that important, but you start with that small problem you impose these Unsustainable loans which give creditors huge power and then you start cutting cutting cutting because the final intention and I try to explain this in this book is to cartel the Parisian elites Long-standing ambition to usurp the power of the Deutsch mark for the purposes of expanding the French nation states and reach and control of Europe also I presume for the Bundesbank to be able to control the French budget Absolutely, not so much not so much a Buddha Buddhist bank, but the federal finance me And and I don't blame the Germans for that if you if you go back to 1992 When this euro was first created Maastricht treaty To convince the French to vote for it the French conservative newspaper Le Figaro Had a headline that was offensive to human beings It read as an encouragement to the French to love the Maastricht treaty Maastricht and underneath a new Versailles treaty without a shot being fired Now that is offensive to the German people it is offensive to anyone who understands the pain of the Second World War It is offensive to all well Intention and you think French elites actually believe that yes, Maastricht absolutely this and this was the intention look the goal the goal in 1965 in response to a journalist Who asked him don't you worry that with this European Economic Union Germany is going to become the powerful country here and his response was They are going to be the horse and we are going to be the carriage driver It's clear the Brussels bureaucrat well the French graduates of the great Yeah, who would be populating the Brussels bureaucracy, so We should not be anti-German anti-French or in we just must understand that the elites of Europe have made a complete and utter mess of The project of European Union. Yeah, but when you get to Maastricht the French elites still believe that they were Controlling German power in the Maastricht treaty. Yes. That's pretty It is it is an astonishing error on their part, but so was the German elites Estimation that Helmut Kohl for instance who was a Europeanist who was a federalist tip down that you create a currency union first and Then when it gets in trouble the political union will fall what an error when you create a gold standard it starts fragmenting you're not going to end up with a political union you're going to end up with a Abyss you're going to end up with Le Pen in government in France golden dawn in Greece the eye of danger money So he on the fragmentation you think he understood say Nicholas Caldor's Prediction he never did never no none of it and not including all including all he didn't understand it and he didn't believe it. He really genuinely thought in a rather simple-minded manner that We are creating this monetary union. It's fragmentation is going to bring about humongous costs for Europeans. So our successors When this fragmentation begins must fix it by creating a political union. Well, yes, they must but they're not doing it and they're not doing it because they are falling prey to this Self-reinforcing negative feedback mechanism between authoritarianism and bad austerity policies How did the Fed respond to Maastricht the Fed? Yeah It is interesting Remember Alan Greenspan was not the most astute of central bankers And he was in some ways. He understood why the economy was working so well remember his testimony to Congress where he explained How magnificent the economy was that he was administering he said it's based on growing worker insecurity True that that was a good remark. Yes. Yes. So he was a real class warrior. Yeah, but he did not understand finance Yeah, yeah, unlike Paul Walker, but he understood power. Yes. He understood power But Paul Walker, yeah, his predecessor understood both power and the pitfalls of over reliance on markets Okay, so what was the reaction to Maastricht by the Fed? None none none it was they didn't pay attention there was well I do not know of any Substantial reaction. I haven't seen any I've done some research. They were just going along They would be making comments about the specifics technicalities, but not any Paul Walker did make some very Critical he was very critical of the lack of checks and balances and short absorbing mechanisms But Alan Greenspan and the Fed under Alan Greenspan Indulged in auto lobotomy regarding these Structural aspects of global capitalism Actually what a bring up what the 1953 story that's quite critical Well, it's part of a broader story of American hegemony after the Second World War. Yeah, which has two dimensions that are of course Interwoven one is the Cold War story, which is a very important story and the Increasing authoritarianism of the United States after after Truman. Yeah Beginning with it the Truman doctrine again Greece remember everything bad starts in this Like the Cold War which began in the streets of Athens in December 1944 not in Berlin then spread Berlin I With the with the first attempts by the CIA successful attempts to overthrow Governments that they considered inimical to the interests of the global Empire Like the Mossadec government then later our government I grew up in the dictatorship that the CIA Managed to create just before the Pentagon had its own coup with the generals they felt you know, there was a wonderful race between the Pentagon on the one hand and The CIA asked who was going to stage the Greek who in 1967 first and they were working quite separately from one another The Pentagon with generals and the king and the CIA with the colonels and the colonels got in first They were more agile, so they moved in first and so then you had a pin of shed. You have the Latin American Brutality and so on so that's one story. We all know about American imperialism post-1944 but the the second dimension which is much more interesting and much more benign Because if you look at it starts with Bretton Woods an attempt to prevent by the new dealers in power and by some very good people To prevent another great depression in the States The great fear of course was in 1944 they could see that the war would end They could see that the wonderful factories that were churning out the aircraft carriers the tanks the bullets the jeeps and so on Even if they were reconfigured to produce white goods and cars and consumer durables There would not be sufficient demand within America for all those products that these factories could potentially make so that Eventually they would scale down investment at a time when the American GIs American soldiers will be coming back from the front And that would spear and they fear that they called it the night the 1949 moment They fear that the 1949 20 years after 1929 there would be another crash famous tower gap Exactly, yeah, so they sat down and design the magnificent global plan to prevent this from happening. They also knew there was a Cold War of course there was the the Pressing agenda of making sure that Europe doesn't fall to the communists and Asia doesn't fall to the communists So the two dimensions were combined and the global plan of which the Bretton Woods System was just one part and they just to put it as succinctly as I can the following characteristics dimensions Europe would be dollarized So that our Europeans could buy the gleaming cars and the gleaming Gleaming aircraft and washing machines from Westinghouse and so on and so forth that America would not be able to absorb on American soil Europeans were in ashes after the war so they needed to be dollarized So they would be allowed to recreate on their own currencies But that currency would be pegged to the dollar effectively They would have the dollar in different form and that was a fixed exchange rate regime It's very similar to the gold exchange standard, but with a very big difference The new dealers who had felt the great depression in their bones Most of them if you look at their biography had actually suffered during the great depression And they were very keen to avoid it again Understood that what was missing in the gold exchange standard was a system of surplus of cycling Of taking surpluses surpluses from jurisdictions where they were being created Through a political mechanism and siphoning them in the form of productive investments or some kind of investment into the Deficit areas in order to be able to generate the incomes in the deficit areas that were necessary to keep purchasing stuff From the surplus countries so the surplus countries could remain surplus countries like America for instance to keep Recycling surpluses and deficits to maintain This global plan if you think about the new an extension. This was an extension of the new deal. It's worth Bringing out the role of Reconstructing Germany in this system, which was quite critical. I have looked at Senate papers from 1946 talking exactly about that because this global global plan Had to rely on a European pillar and on an Asian pillar and they had to have a Strong European currency and a strong Asian currency to act as shock absorbers. I there are these amazing documents where they say, okay American capitalism is going to go through a spasm like capitalism always does that shows a kind of understanding that today or the last 20 years is absent from policy makers So they could see that there will be a recession and the question they were asking if we only have one currency after the war because Europe was destroyed and We would be dollarizing them if we only had the dollar any crisis in the dollar zone in America would be Be transmitted very quickly both to Asia and Europe and maybe those shocks would be Magnified instead of being dumped. So we need shock absorbers. We need the European currency and the and the Asian currency That would do the shock absorbing so but in order for those currencies to be sufficiently strong They would have to have that have to be this way and they don't say and Cursely supporting it to the dollar supporting it not Kansas exactly exactly But they would have so they would have to be net exporters in their vicinity Yeah, but Germany in the rest of you know, but within China Yeah within the global system managed in Washington in the global system under the tutel That's the Cain's white dispute exactly the battle of Bretton Woods, which is an amazing episode in intellectual and financial history Now at that point the problem they had when they were thinking about this 1946 late 45 early 46 was that they already had agreed with the French to turn Germany into a pastoral land to deindustrialize Germany So they had to go back to the French and say we changed our minds and they did and they offered them a bargain You will agree to the reindustrialization of Germany You will agree to a write-down of German debt Otherwise The German economy will never be able to recover if it is in the dark cloud of unsustainable debt and instead and in Return what we're going to give you is the leadership of Europe This is the the goal idea that they are the drivers of the carriage and Germany is the horse that powers it And he did this is what happened if you think of the where is the OECD? It's in Paris. What is the OECD? The OECD is a relic of the Marshall plan So the French were distributing martial aid in Europe Think about Brussels Brussels was completely another designed by the French elites. Yeah, think about the IMF. Why is Christine Lagarde the managing director of the IMF. Why was Troscan the man? This is still the relic If you want the the the leftover of this deal with the French and the Germans Interestingly, so going to 53-53 is where the Americans grabbed the heads of the British of the French of the Italians and of the Greeks Incidentally and that's and banged them together and said you are going to Write down German debt. So Greece was owed money by Germany that it rolled off so that Germany could Reindustrialize in the 1950s and that Illustrates the title of your book the French got something in return The Greeks didn't the weak sufferers they must Yes indeed, but of course I always like to leave a degree of optimism hanging in me there So you may have noticed that my book ends with the title ends with a question mark and the emphasis is on the question mark and the dedication is to my mother and It says that my mother would have slaughtered with immense kindness anyone who dared say that the weak suffer what they must and even the original Expression comes from facilities in the history of the Peloponnesian war when he recounts as an Athenian Remember facilities is an Athenian historian and soldier and general who is recounting the story of when Athens Sent a fleet with troops The marines the Athenian marines to the island of millers to crush the local society the local city-state Why because millers refused to take sides in the Cold War or actually the hot war of the time between Athens and Sparta and Athens had its own NATO in the archipelago of the region and It was very worried that if the millions are allowed to be independent then the rest might get ideas that they want to exit NATO the NATO of the time so they sent the troops to crush them and there is this interesting meeting when the Athenian generals meet the The million representatives delegates to announce to them that you know your life is over surrender quietly and we will sell your slaves if you resist we are going to crush you and The millions gave them a Kantian argument that you should never treat human beings as And then a means to an end you should treat them as the ends in themselves. Not exactly They hadn't read Those in a position of weakness in the same way you would want to be treated in a position of weakness Because one day you will be in a position of weakness as at the Athenians Of course did become Afterwards when they lost the world is part of and the Athenian general responded. No, you've got it this wrong The strong do what they can and they weak suffer what they must but Fucidity is telling us this story in order to allow us to criticize it. That's the question Well, I think the the real optimistic element in the book is the Condorcet quote about power really being in the hands of the masses if they take it in the mind Of the mass in the mind and in fact that goes back to and he was probably quoting David Hume who in the First principles of government Makes that point very clearly. He says He says it's surprising to see the easiness with which the Great mass of the population is Subordinate to their governors because power is in the hands of the governed and If we inquire into the means by which this wonder is achieved We see that it is by consent alone that the powerful are able to govern meaning if the governed refused to consent To use your words the game is over. That's exactly right and I and Then I my wife we felt that on the 3rd of July last year There was a magnificent moment Because you've got to remember we our government Won the election in January 2015 with a mandate to speak truth to the powerful to say no to them and do your worst We're not accepting any more of your toxic loans Under conditions that will shrink our economy and our people further and we won this election, but because of the system of Disproportional representation we won't govern with 36% of the vote the next day The previous governing party received some like 25% so we were we had enough seats in parliament to Form a government, but that's 36% of the vote and we had the whole media of Greece and the world completely and utterly Militantly against us we had the central bank third day I was in the in my office the president of the Eurogroup visited me to say either you accept the existing policies the ones we were challenge We were elected to challenge or your banks will be closed within a month So we this this is the you can't be weaker than that. We did have a strategy We did have a secret weapon. We can talk about this later when we open this up But when they closed our banks down I believed That it was just a matter of days Before our support would wane and we had called for a referendum to support us to carry on fighting So remember we had only 136 percent the banks were closed people didn't have access to their money Pensioners were fainting in line in front of closed banks to get some money out in order to feed themselves that the press is Bombarding terrorizing people in their living rooms on the television set saying to them that if they vote with us against the Troika Armageddon is going to come and will be expelled from the universe not just Europe And those crazy magnificent Greeks gave us 62 percent Why because they won deficit That they could not bear was a deficit of dignity and they had a condos a moment So What happens to Greece now? Well, unfortunately that very night of the referendum. Yeah, our government my prime minister And that well to answer your question that surrendered meant that we have the worst of Possible combination. We have a neoliberal ideology with completely anti neoliberal policies They increase the copper heart rate harsher Increased the VAT rate they increase the income tax rate They reduce pensions they reduce wages. So they did even harsher conditions Yeah, the Greek economy is fading all business plans are going haywire in a sense remember liquidate liquidate liquidate under President Hoover melon. I think it was the name of the US Treasury Secretary that said that this is what's happening complete liquidation of Greek business the Greek state and the Greek people and all That is happening in the context of a 19th century gunboat Diplomacy the purpose of which it's not so much Greece. It is how to keep France Spain Portugal after my prime minister's Surrender on the 13th of July He signed the document of surrender and you know what happened the Spanish right-wing prime minister came out of the room Building this document like this in front of the cameras and speaking in Spanish to the Spanish media He said this is what you get if you vote for the Syriza of Spain, but then what they must Yeah, well, thankfully the Spanish people put it him out But didn't vote for them was in so now have a hung parliament in Spain. No government. No government Well, actually that's much better than having that gap So what do you think the future is for the peripheral conch when you say liquidate Does that mean liquidate into German hands primarily? No, what I'm meaning is they have What's going to happen is we're gonna have hundreds of thousands of small business who's very much are people who will lose their shops Who will lose their pharmacists? They will be a lost generation. They'll become homeless. They will leave the country their kids who are well educated We'll go to Germany that will go to Spain. No because the Spain's are leaving They'll come here that will go to Canada will go to Australia that will go to South America somewhere to find a way of making ends meet You're going to have the liquidation of households with foreclosures and And foreclosures in Greece are worse than here because here you can take the keys to your house and go to the bank and say take it By in case you can't do that. Even if you lose your house, you still have the debt You carry it with you like Mephistopheles walking around with hell around him. You're walking around the world with that same debt You have no house. It's kind of like student debt So in answer to your question What is now the prospect of progressive politics and of hope in Greece? I think that now we had a window of opportunity in Greece to reboot this loan agreement and to reboot Europe because had we succeeded there Then it was it would have really spread to Spain and to Italy and to the rest of Europe. We missed that This is why I and some other Utopians and the recalcitrant's throughout Europe. We have we've created what we call DM the democracy in Europe movement With our money surface so that no I'm Chomsky signed making the happiest person in Europe For the very simple reason I think we are in a 1930 moment Shortly after the collapse of world state of the great financial crisis and just before the slides into a postmodern abyss of Xenophobia misanthropy failed economic policies austerity debt deflation that will Become a major source of uncertainty of Misanthropy of pain and unnecessary pain not just for Europe, but for the rest of the world and Allow me at this point I have a pin that I've brought with me for them to give you which I'm wearing and this is a bit of Propaganda for our democracy in Europe movement. I Can't not give this to no I'm Chomsky since he signed our manifesto Thank you very much And I'm being signaled to that we have to open this up to good point you a day. It's good point We mr. Chomsky mr. Chomsky mr. Grafakis My question is about European integration policy the then and now We know that 1992 the leaders of the day signed the master treaty which stipulated those convergence criteria to measure Well, I guess similarity between economies such that if they were able to fulfill those criteria They qualified for the initial round of your membership our EU policymakers only looking at those Criteria now those debt deficit criteria, or they're looking at other measures of integration given what we know about what? Are looking at are they is that their only policy focus? Well, let me say that they never looked at those criteria Those were bogus kind criteria Greece didn't meet those criteria Italy didn't meet those criteria Far from it the criterion was 60% of debt over GDP as a maximum Italy had a hundred percent But of course the whole point of creating the Eurozone was in order to stop Fiat producing cars that would be remain competitive vis-a-vis Volkswagen's through devaluation of the leader So they needed Italy so they They violated their own criteria They just ignored them and they brought Italy Greece and you know how Greece got in We had some smart people in the finance ministry in the bank in the central bank of Greece And they copied exactly the same tricks that they used in it to let Italy in and they said well We know what you've been up to so if you've let Italy in we were doing the same tricks We will present the same data so either you have to keep the Italians out or allow us in as well So this is how we got caught up you've got to understand that It's a very hypocritical concept the whole thing the whole process so there was never a question of integration really there was a question of expanding the limits of Predatory financialization Frank what did Greece have to offer the Eurozone can I tell you what we had we had no oil we had really I mean we were not a traditional colony that had natural resources to be what we brought to the Eurozone was a Population with minimal debt and a lot of equity Because Greeks love that my parents generation didn't have credit cards personal loans mortgages They worked for 30 years put some money aside borrowed some money from an aunt or an uncle and bought a house okay, so We were a dream come true for German and French bankers We had a protestant almost ethic in terms of in that is very low debt and a capacity once Extended once the Deutsch mark was extended to Greece Okay, we had a capacity to borrow and borrow and borrow on the basis of very sound collateral So this Edifice was never designed to sustain an economic rise Do you know which are where the two countries that violate the master's criteria first before anybody else? Germany in France So these rules were written not to be respected But were written to be used as a club by which to beat the week and the ones who dare speak out against the irrationality of the system Thank you. Thank you My question is for mr. Chomsky in the past You've been very critical of the way in which the West has engaged in political and economic imperialism around the world behind closed doors Kind of smoke and mirrors How do you believe that transparency and democratizing the eurozone will affect or deter this behavior with the transparency in and democratizing the eurozone and democratizing the eurozone how will it kind of affect or Possibly deter this actually one of the things that the honest discusses in his book is that the eurozone in the eurozone democracy has declined Arguably even faster than it has in the United States During this past generation of neoliberal policies there has been a global assault on democracy That's kind of inherent in the principles and in the eurozone. It's reached a Remarkable level. I mean even the Wall Street Journal, you know hardly a critical rag pointed out that No matter who gets elected in the European country whether it's communists fascists anybody else the policies remain the same and the reason is they're all set in Brussels by the bureaucracy and the Citizens of the national states have no role in this and when they try to have a role as in the Greek referendum They get smashed down That's a rare step. Mostly. They are sitting by passively as Victims of policies over which they have nothing to say and what Yana said about the euro group is quite striking This is a completely unelected Work group not in any remote way Related to citizens decisions, but it's basically making the decision the choices and decisions That's even beyond what happens here that here. It's bad enough, but that's more extreme Well, let me add to this and just to clarify something actually I will go further and on about Europe Europe is the European Union doesn't suffer or the euro group from a democratic deficit It's like saying that we are on the moon and there is an oxygen deficit. There's no oxygen deficit on the moon There is no oxygen full stop and this is official in Europe in my first euro group as the rookie Around I was given the floor to set out our policies and to introduce myself Which is nice and I gave the most moderate speech that I thought it was humanly possible to make I said I know that you are annoyed. I'm here Your favorite guy didn't get elected. I've got elected. I'm here But I'm here in order to work with you to find common ground There is a failed program that you want you that you want to keep insisting on Implementing in Greece. We have our mandate. Let's sit down and find common ground I thought that that was a pretty moderate thing to say they didn't And then after me After I had expounded the principle of continuity and the principle of democracy and the idea of having some compromise between the two Dr. Volkan Shaibley What's his name tag forward and demands the floor and he comes up with a magnificent statement? verbatim I'm going to give you what he said Elections cannot be allowed to change the economic policies of any country At which point I intervened and I said this is the greatest gift to the Communist Party of China because they believe that too Okay Now while I was in there in the 12 euro group meetings that I attended Before I resigned I noticed in those very lengthy Incredibly intense and depressing Sequences of discussions some of them lasted more than 12 hours The room was full of cameras Microphones, you know these screens we had 30 of them I could say whoever I know we were in the same room with people and I was watching them on television because you know This is the power of the screen. You don't watch the person speaking you watch him on the screen or her yeah And at some point he hit me We don't need a revolution here Somebody in the control booth just press a button and connect all these cameras to the internet Just imagine if that were to happen You don't need a treaty change a new constitution evolution nothing Somebody just press a button like in a science fiction movie you press a button and suddenly you have a new universe What will happen would show you please say this I Don't know maybe he would but you know what he would make a difference for the Germans The French the Portuguese the Greeks to hear him say those words Instead of reading the financial time where people like Peter Spiegel was simply saying that Young's world like is was resisting reform in his country And he demanded more money for it. All right, so transparency is everything we need. This is a first step. It's a huge Revolutionary step that takes nothing more than the press of a button So this is why on our side again. I'm a salesperson here tonight in dim 25 org There's a transparency in Europe now campaign. We're demanding the live-streaming all of all these Meetings we're demanding that the ECB publishes in minutes. We are demanding That all the TTIP negotiating Do you know that as the Minister of State for finance in Greece in order to look at the TTIP? documents of the negotiations between the European Union to which I was a Finance minister and the United States. I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement I had in other words the price of looking at those documents was that I promised not to tell my electorate So if you can get into our site and sign the petition for transparency It's a small step just to make it difficult for even if they have to answer the question Why are they not live streaming the meetings? That's a small step because you're putting them in a difficult position I just want to say that we are also live-streaming That I'm not going to tell you how many questions we're going to take but we're going to end at 8 59 it's a good next question I know what It's a little bit follow-up question to the previous one To Varoufakis, I'm wondering you wrote that Wolfgang Schäuble wants to kind of have a super minister of all of the eurozone Non-elected one who would just kind of decide on national budget sets his plan But I'm just wondering what is would you propose instead because sometimes it's a bit unclear to me If you also want kind of a super minister just elected one or if you want more A power of the budget put taken back to the national countries and also What is second question? No, but also just the eurozone If you if you want to keep the euro in the long term or if it should be maybe slowly Okay, let me be brief what Schäuble wants and I know that because he's written about it. We've discussed it is Assemblance of federation where the euro group becomes he doesn't feel good that it's not legal He wants to legalize it and he wants to turn the president of the euro group into the fiscal Leviathan of the eurozone He doesn't call him that he wants him to be if you want the the fiscal representative of Treasure the treasurer of the eurozone, but he wants to give this person a Tiny little budget tiny federal budget 1% of GDP nothing in other words and The main function for this person will be to have a veto power over national budgets now this is a Monstrous notion Let me give you an example On the one hand you have a parliament the French National Assembly voting in a budget Okay, the budget of Of the French government is 50% of GDP half of the economy of France is controlled by the state Okay, and now you're going to have a fiscal overlord in Europe that has a 1% budget In other words have absolutely no capacity to affect surplus recycling within Europe and stabilize European capitalism, but he is going to have I Was going to say he or she but we know it's going to be a he He's going to have the right to veto The budget that National Assembly of France vote and why in order to keep Countries within the fiscal constraints of the master's treaty with us, which has so abundantly spectacularly failed and let me give you an example why this is just mad and it makes absolutely no sense even from a neoliberal perspective take Ireland Ireland before 2008 was the blue-eyed boy or girl of the International neoliberal Washington Consensus They had turned their markets so elastic that they you know, they resembled a circus They had a debt to GDP ratio of 25 percent half that of Germany They were never about budget They had a surplus that actually had a surplus in their The equivalent of their federal budget right or their state budget So they were the model country the model citizen of the neoliberal mantra Okay. Now, of course if you look at what was happening in the private sector They had gone crazy with you know, there was a frenzy of indebtedness like here in Wall Street and so on and so forth The moment the credit crunch begun after Lehman brothers The developers went bust the developers loans to the Anglo-Irish Bank and the various other Shady banks in Ireland went bad They became non-performing those banks immediately became insolvent and then the president of the central bank Mr. Jean-Claude Richer called the Irish Prime Minister and said accept transfer all the losses of the private sector on to the public books on to the taxpayers Or else or I will close down your banks. Remember what that happened to me a few years later, too and at that point suddenly Irish public debt went from 25 percent to 120 percent. Now, what would the fiscal overload do then? nothing Would you veto this? No, because it was the central banks Direct directive that pushed all the losses of the private sector onto the taxpayers so this system That dr. Shoaib is proposing is just an attempt to legitimize the illegitimate current informal system It has absolutely no capacity to stabilize European capitalism The only thing it will do it will formalize the current impasse You ask me what I want. I would like a federal democracy. I would like a European Parliament I would like a federal government with a substantial budget with problems proper circles Recycling and I would like to have a European Union Constitution that is 1520 pages and not written by a failed former president of France That that that scripts the preface that happened in 2005 beginning with the rights of capital You knew that don't you? That the there was an attempt to write the European Union Constitution which began the preface the bill of rights It was all about the rights of capital This isn't this is good. You can't make it up. Can you show a bull's comment about elections? Hi First of all, I'm very honored to be here in front of both of you I wanted to ask a quick a quick question of for Yanis to our extent do you agree with the notion that the Greek government was caught in a tragic circumstance and they did what Their options allow them to do at the time given that the other option might have been an exit From the euro combined with the refugee crisis that they have now and for mr. Chomsky I wanted to ask a little bit your evaluation on the Bernie Sanders Phenomenon in American politics and how do you evaluate that for the future of American politics? Sorry Bernie Well Bernie Sanders is Extremely interesting phenomenon. He's decent honest person. That's pretty unusual in the political system Maybe there are two of them in the world He's considered Radical and extremist which is a pretty interesting Characterization because he's basically a mainstream New Deal Democrat His positions Would not have surprised president Eisenhower Who said in fact that? Anyone who does not accept New Deal programs doesn't belong in the American political system That's now considered very radical The other interesting aspect of Sanders's positions is that they're quite strongly Supported by the general public and have been for a long time That's true on taxes. It's true on health care so takes a health care his his proposal for a National health care system Meaning the kind of system that just about every other developed country has at half the per capita cost of the United States and Comparable or better outcomes That's considered very radical, but it's been the position of the majority of the American population for a long time So if you go back say to the Reagan right now, for example latest polls about 60% of the population favor it When Obama put through the Affordable Care Act there was you recall a public option But that was dropped it was dropped even though was supported by about almost two-thirds of the population They go back earlier say to the Reagan years About 70% of the population Thought that national health care should be in the Constitution because it's such an obvious right and in fact About 40% of the population thought it was in the Constitution Again because it's such an obvious right and the same is true on tax policy and others So we have this phenomenon where someone is taking positions that would have been considered pretty mainstream during the Eisenhower years that are supported by a Large part often a considerable majority of the population But he's dismissed as radical and extremist That's an indication of how the spectrum has shifted to the right during the neoliberal period so far to the right that the Contemporary Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans and the Republicans are just off the spectrum They're not a legitimate parliamentary party anymore and Sanders has The the significant part of he has pressed The mainstream Democrats a little bit towards the progressive side. You see that in Clinton's statements But he has mobilized a large number of young people these young people who are saying look We're not going to consent anymore and if that turns into a A continuing Organized mobilized mobilized force that could change the country. Maybe not for this election, but at the longer term I'm going to answer your question by saying And I hope you don't Consider this to be too harsh a judgment of your question. I will say that embedded in your question is the most toxic form of Tina of That of the proposition that there is no alternative the idea that In the end we had to surrender because the alternative would be worse or worse Effectively denigrates the 62% of Greeks who ordered us Not to surrender and it denigrates those of us who actually won't government because if what you're saying is right We were naive we walked in there and we thought that with a power of rationality and the Force of our personality we would convince the Troika of lenders to be kind to us That we would relying on the kind and kindness of creditors. No, we were not naive from 2012 2013 I had long conversations with our team the government the team that in eventually became the Negotiating team the government the inner cabinet the war cabinet as we called it and we were talking about How are we going to respond to the threat of bank closures that would happen on the first day of our government? and we had worked out a plan of What our retaliation would be I won't bore you now. We don't have the time I've spoken about this extensively We would have to haircut the bonds that the ECB held that were in Greek law It was perfectly simple to do it We would not end up as Argentina because it was Greek law the ECB would have to come to a Greek court to contest it They would not be dragging us to Luxembourg to London or to New York and that would have crippled QE It would have brought down with a very high probability the euro So if they closed down our banks, we had a weapon by which to react entirely aid We were planning a parallel payment system in case the banking system was in this repair It could not be used for transaction. We had that agreement It's the only reason why I stood in front of the Greek people and I asked them to vote me in There I didn't ask them to do this in order for me to go in there I'm going to the Eurogroup and and give nice speeches and hope for the best and we did not see this through To say that it was inevitable that we would surrender and that the alternative would be Worse is effectively to confirm that there is no alternative to barbarism and I just have not confirmed this May I if if this would be okay for you, may I suggest that we take we bundle three questions together and So you ask three brief questions, maybe one of you you ask one you ask one question You ask one question and the gentleman there asks one question and the others who are there I applaud you for being so hopeful Thank you very much for this conversation and I would like to ask my question to both of you You have discussed the situation in Spain and we have just found today that after four months without being able to form a government There will be new general elections on the 26th of June So my question will be which will be your message in this critical juncture in the battle of ideas in Europe For the Spanish people and also for Podemos. Thank you Question number one question number two Yes, thank you for a fascinating evening austerity is bankrupt. It's bankrupt empirically. It's bankrupt intellectually It continues to be imposed on the people of Europe. You have framed this tonight as primarily a political conflict Primarily between Germany and France can't we interpret this as an agenda by people who have no particular political or national allegiances to impose Reagan and Thatcher style Capitalism on the core of Europe including Germany. What happens to German pensions at the end of this game? And the last question my question was concerning some of the other peripheral countries in Europe Ireland Spain and Italy and their national governments did not support you last year during the crisis Now would you comment on that and also what do you think the prospects for those countries are now? economically well the Message for the people of Spain. I think should be this That's what they should be voting for Go back to David Hume a power is in the hands of the people if they don't consent And that's critical. I have nothing to add to this I'll try to combine with the last question Because what applies to the people of Spain applies to people of Italy to the people of France But indeed also to the people of Germany and that brings us to the other question as well We're in it in it together The notion that Europe is split between north and south and the north is populated by all the ants Whereas the grasshoppers have congregated to the south and to Ireland It's a very strange and all the idea there are ants and there are gross grasshoppers everywhere What happened before 2008 was the grasshoppers of the south and the grasshoppers of the north go together into a splendid alliance of Dead driven frenzy they were the bankers they were the spives they were those who predicated their growth on Transfers from the European Union budget to create Motorways that went to nowhere or Olympic game sites in Greece and so on and so forth and they became fabulously rich There is with this this was the alliance of the grasshoppers The ants were working very hard and we're finding it very hard to make ends meet during the good times And then when the grasshoppers empire collapsed It was the ants of the north and the answer the south that had to bail them out And it's time for the answer the north and the answer the south to unite in Europe to change that crazy regime final words I think I want to pay my respects to this institution And I want to thank you and your staff. I met some of them before for the diligence and the dedication and the enthusiasm If only our rulers Had a modicum a modicum a percent a small percentage of this dedication to public service Continue a little more. Thank you very much