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Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’S Deep Establishment

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Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’S Deep Establishment Review: Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment Marnie Holborow ill with his uncompromising exposé of the Troika austerity terror regime. His overall political conclusions, likewise, fail to carry through the logic of his portrayal of the un- democratic nature of the EU. He certainly gives in raw detail what Greece has suffered. When he became Fi- nance Minister, it had lost 25% of its GDP, its minimum wage reduced by 40%, its pen- sioners had seen their living standards drop by 25%, one million Greeks could not pay their electricity bills, many did not have the money to put food on the table. The island of Crete, whose inhabitants are renowned for their pride, experienced the highest number of suicides. The story of Lambros, a trans- lator who lost his job, his job and his family, Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My battle with Eu- rope’s Deep Establishment, The Bodley Head, e18.99 stays with Varoufakis as Lambros implored him not to sell out like other governments did. The never-ending spiral of austerity policies, Varoufakis notes, has condemned The Dead-end of the EU and Greece to a social version of a Dickensian SYRIZA, as seen from the In- debtors’ prison and thrown away the key. side Varoufakis is new to establishment poli- tics and, with fresh eyes, he reveals the EU’s Yanis Varoufakis, in his new book, lays bare total distain for democracy. His account the rottenness of the EU for all to see. As the gives an inside story of the EU bureaucracy, new Greek Finance Minister, he landed right which has all the ghoulish goings-on of an into the bullying and fiscal waterboarding episode of Versailles. He is also able to make - his apt term - of the EU’s relentless aus- astute observations about the capitalist na- terity drive. He describes every step from ture of the EU. ‘I observed first hand’, he January to July in the fateful year of 2015, writes ‘what I can only describe as naked from the amazing defiance of the Greek peo- class war that targeted the weak and scan- ple to the further austerity blow of another, dalously favoured the ruling class’. worse Memorandum of Understanding, de- He shows how the January 2015 Greek livered this time by the Left-wing SYRIZA change of government, and the ‘no’ vote in government. July, simply never figured in the Troika’s Adults in the Room takes its title from calculations. German finance minister, a remark from IMF chief Christine Lagarde Wolfgang Schäuble, insisted that elections who claimed at one of the endless meetings could not be allowed to change economic that the crisis called for adults in the room. policy. His inside account provides a sober Varoufakis’s curious embrace of this term, as message for those who, post-Brexit, on this well as his obvious respect for Lagarde, sits island and in the UK, pin their hopes on a 76 supposedly liberal or democratic EU. reaucrats in forcing more austerity on the The blow by blow account, based on Greeks. Galway economist Declan Costello Varoufakis’s recorded conversations, of the headed up the European Commission’s mis- meetings of the Eurogroup read like show sion to Greece as part of its hated troika trials. The Eurogroup is an informal gather- of lenders. Varoufakis dubs Michael Noo- ing of the Eurozone’s Finance Ministers and nan ‘Schäuble’s model prisoner’ who takes has no legal status in EU law but this does a strong austerity line for fear ‘that upstart not stop it having crucial and extensive pow- Greece might escape having to do what they ers. The set ritual of these meetings, Varo- had been forced to do already in which case ufakis explains, was completely Schäuble- their own people might demand to know why dominated with everybody – Eastern Eu- they had not resisted austerity too’. ropean ministers, the bailed-out countries Michael Roberts, a Marxist who has including Ireland, and French and Italian written on the current Long Depression, says hangers on – parroting his and the ECB’s that for Greece there were three options tune, for fear of falling foul of Berlin. in 2015. The first was the neoliberal so- Varoufakis explodes other myths. Euro- lution demanded by the Troika. The sec- pean banks were much more reckless than ond was the Keynesian one advocated by Wall St. French, German, Dutch and British the left wing of SYRIZA which Varoufakis banks had exposure in excess of $30 trillion did not support, which theoretically would during the crisis, more than twice the US have meant boosting public spending to in- national income. As Varoufakis wryly ob- crease demand cancelling part of the govern- serves, ‘If Wall St deserved the wrath of the ment debt, and introducing a new currency American public, Europe’s banks deserved to make Greek industry more competitive 38.8 times that wrath’. Washington was in a in new markets. In practice, as Varoufakis position to use the Federal Reserve to hold shows, the SYRIZA option became no op- its bad assets. But Brussels and the ECB tion at all and morphed into worse austerity. were not. That made the EU rigidly tied The third was a socialist solution whose first to austerity and taking the cash to bail out step would be to replace Greek capitalism the banks from the people, as we in Ireland with a planned economy, with Greek banks know only too well. and major companies publicly owned, and On his recent visit to Dublin, in a panel the drive for profit replaced by investment, interview on RTE, Varoufakis reminded us growth and meeting the urgent needs of the again of the crimes the EU inflicted on Ire- people. Crucial to this being implemented land. Unlike Greece, Ireland was forced to was mobilization and creating people-led, bail out private not public debt, leaving us bottom up European-wide movements that today and forever with a burden of e200bn’s operated outside the asphyxiating structures worth of debt. He castigated the Irish gov- of the EU. ernment as pathetically weak for giving in Unfortunately Varoufakis’s proposed so- without a whimper. He dismissed any sug- lutions fall within the ambit of the first op- gestion of an Irish recovery by describing Ire- tion.. It is true that his guiding light was to land post-crash as ‘a dual economy, with a get debt restructuring and, to his credit, un- German part and a Greek part’ - one for the like others, he stuck to this principle to the wealthy, doing boisterously well, and one for end. But in other respects, his proposals as the poor, doing very badly with lack of hous- outlined in the book, were in sync with, not ing, poor services and many still forced to against, neoliberal Europe. A striking ex- become emigrants. ample was his plan to off-set the impending In the book, Varoufakis highlights for us Greek default through more privatization. the complicity of Irish politicians and bu- He recounts how he attempted to get the 77 Chinese conglomerate Cosco to extend their quoting George Orwell, says that parties al- ownership of the Athens Port of Piraeus, to ways end up making their members blindly get companies like Foxconn, with offers of follow Big Brother. Events showed other- special business tax rates, to build produc- wise as after SYRIZA capitulated, a sec- tion and assembly facilities nearby and to tion of their MPs and many hundred on the persuade the Chinese government to buy up ground left them in disgust. some of the Greek debt to boot. The plan It was a specific politics that was to fell through. Ironically, Berlin contacted blame, as the examples Varoufakis gives Beijing to tell them to withdraw from any show. Tsipras cynically used the anti - deals with the Greeks until the Troika deal austerity Thessaloniki programme to gain was done. support but never intended it to be imple- Varoufakis is scathing of the role of mented. This is condemned by Varoufakis French and Italian social democrats, of not as parliamentary opportunism but as an the French Finance Minister, Sapin, who inexplicable manipulation. ducked, deferred and simulated. But he has Most shocking to us in Ireland, since we no problem heaping praise on Emmanuel demonstrated in our thousands in solidarity Macron. He criticises the Italian finance with the ‘Oxi’ vote in July 2015, are Varo- minister Pier Carlo Padoan, formerly the ufakis revelations about SYRIZA’s cynical OECD’s chief economist for his attacks on political calculations about the referendum. workers’ rights. Yet Varoufakis’s Cosco pro- Tsipras called it, according to Varoufakis, posal took no account of what the dockers with the conviction that it would result in wanted. He refers to his affinity which he has a yes vote. This would let them off the hook with the mobilizations on Syntagma Square and allow another memorandum to pass. On and his first action as Minister was to rein- the night of the result, Varoufakis was with state over three hundred cleaners who had the other SYRIZA Ministers, and when the been sacked from their jobs at the Finance NO vote came in at an amazing 62.5%, he Ministry who had been sacked by the previ- was the only one in the room celebrating. ous government. But workers’ struggles as a Varoufakis had already sensed the trans- key tool against the Troika, supplementing formation of SYRIZA into another auster- the popular mandate of the new government, ity party but he is shocked at the speed get little mention.
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