Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis: On Global Trade and Tariffs, EU Arming of Israel, Israeli Destruction of Gaza, & More
Economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis discusses the merits and pitfalls of Trump's tariff plan, growing populist movements in Europe, the EU's "dangerous" and misguided push toward military Keynesianism, and Israel's destruction of Gaza. ----------------------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every single Monday through Friday, never an exception, at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Giannis Varoufakis is a prominent Greek-Australian economist, politician, and...
He led the charge against attempts by the neoliberal globalist institutions such as the IMF and the European Central Bank and the EU to force Greece to take out more high-interest loans to pretend to pay back its national debt.
And he most vociferously fought against attempts to impose massive suffering on the Greek people, the already quite beleaguered Greek people, through mandatory austerity measures which Brussels was attempting to impose on Greece.
As is true of most people who try to challenge or defy these sorts of neoliberal power centers, Varoufakis ultimately failed in the sense that he resigned from his government and his position when they began to make concessions that he regarded as, quote, surrender.
He did, however, succeed in convincing the Greek population to reject a referendum that would have ratified the EU's demands.
Of course, the government ended up ignoring the will of the people, as they often do.
And in the process, he also drew international attention to the way these financial institutions crush the lives of ordinary citizens, a dynamic that continues to drive right-wing populist movements in the EU and the US and all throughout the world.
And he ended up, whether he wanted to or not, With a massive platform, widely regarded as one of the most informed and most independent analysts of economic and geopolitical debates.
We certainly regard him as that, and thus are very glad that he has that platform and has agreed to come on our show tonight.
Varoufakis is currently a professor at the University of Athens, where his academic work centers on global economic systems, game theory, and critiques of neoliberalism.
He leads the Mara 25 Party, co-founded the Dean 25 Movement for Democratic Reform, and is a best-selling author.
His latest book is Techno-Feudalism, What Killed Capitalism, which examines how technology has transformed global economies.
We welcome him tonight to discuss a wide range of issues, including what lessons he took away from that bruising 2015 battle with the IMF and the EU.
His thoughts on Trump's current terrorist policy, which is a reaction that was far more nuanced than one might expect given his association in the public mind with the left.
We discussed trends in the EU regarding their claimed determination to want to massively increase military spending and turn themselves into an independent military power.
The Israeli destruction of Gaza and EU support for that destruction of Gaza and much more.
We taped this interview earlier today on Friday and are excited to show it to you.
Before we get to that, we have a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update after this very brief message from our sponsor.
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All right, we're about to show you our interview tonight.
And before we do that, I just wanted to talk a little bit, very briefly, about some breaking news in a story and in a broader story that we have been covering quite extensively.
This is the case of the Turkish-born PhD student at Tufts who was very close to finishing her PhD.
She was snatched off the street by plainclothes ICE agents and flew to Louisiana in order to...
Hope on the part of the government to get a better judge that would just rubber stamp her deportation.
Instead, the court ordered her back to Vermont, which is where she was taken from, and the court today issued a ruling ordering her immediately released from prison so that she can contest her deportation proceedings, but while totally free, he ruled that she was no threat to the community whatsoever, and in fact had done nothing at all that the government could point to.
Other than what we knew she did, which was co-author a very mild op-ed in the Tough Student newspaper a year ago that was about a resolution the Student Senate had passed calling for divestment from Israel.
It didn't praise Hamas.
It didn't talk about October 7th.
It didn't encourage terrorism or any of the things I've seen people doing.
And there's finally, the government was finally forced to come forward and show what they have against her.
Is it really anything?
Is it really just the op-ed or is it anything other than that?
And here's what Judge William Session of the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont had to say, quote, I mean, that literally is the case, he said.
Then he added, quote, So she's now out of prison.
This follows a similar order by a court in New York ordering a Palestinian prisoner,
Palestinian If a country is imprisoning people or punishing them or snatching them off the street...
For op-eds they've written in their student newspapers, something has gone very wrong in the United States.
So it is good to see judges pushing back.
I'm sure we'll report on this more extensively in just a little bit.
For now, here is the interview that we conduct tonight.
Giannis, it's great to see you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.
We're excited about it.
I have a lot of questions.
So why don't we dive in?
Things are going on today, and there are plenty of wars and conflicts and economic issues that merit a great deal of attention.
So I want to spend the bulk on that.
But before I get to that, I actually want to talk about, just briefly, the time in 2015 when you served as Greece's finance minister.
And I think that was when your work became known to huge audiences around the world.
I think that was when I first became aware of your work.
And it was just so interesting, for those who don't know, because Greece was facing this debt crisis.
The EU and the World Bank and the European Bank were squeezing Greece, trying to force you into these austerity measures that you had been elected to resist.
And it kind of went into this major conflict.
You won a referendum in your country where you convinced people to reject the EU deal, but the leadership of your party and of Greece ended up ultimately, as you called it, surrendering, and then you resigned.
And that's a very, you know, Well, a couple of...
Parts to this answer, I think, might help our audience.
The first one concerns the causes of the crisis that you described and to connect with a mainly United States-based audience.
It is important for you folks to realize that what happened here in Greece was the direct repercussion of the collapse of Wall Street in 2008.
Because the collapse of Wall Street precipitated, just like in 1929, the absolute deep bankruptcy.
Of every single bank in Germany and in France.
You only need to state this in order to realize the enormity of this.
And it was panic stations.
Governments didn't understand why they collapsed.
They had no idea where to find the money to save them, to bail them out.
Because unlike the United States, where you had the Federal Reserve that could...
Go in cahoots with the federal government and immediately print the money that was necessary through TAP, through various other means, quantitative easing.
The Europeans had this rule that we do not save either the banks of a nation state or the government of a nation state.
So they had to find ways of violating the rules while pretending that they are respecting them.
So you can imagine the shit show that that was, excuse my not particularly scientific term.
And then they started, you know, they were just like Silly cats chasing their own tail.
And they were borrowing from the weakest of the citizenry around Europe in order effectively to bail out the banks.
They couldn't even print money at the beginning.
So Greece being the most fragile and economically challenged.
Part of this block called the Eurozone, we collapsed first.
But it was the first domino of a domino effect.
By the time I got into government, five years later, in 2015, I only had one task, one objective.
That was the mandate that I had received from the Greek people.
To resist being forced to take yet another credit card.
From the powers that be, from international financiers, from the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the European Commission and so on, from which to draw money at high interest rates in order to pretend to be repaying the German and the French banks.
Because not only were they insisting that I should take a credit card on behalf of our suffering people, but that the conditions for giving me these credit cards was...
Even harsher austerity that would crush whatever incomes there were left.
So, anyway, this is history, but it's not just history.
Because, Glenn, allow me to say something that I think will connect with our audience today.
Directly connect.
I remember one of my debates, deliberations, clashes with the German finance minister, a certain gentleman going by the name of Wolfgang Schäuble.
He has passed on now.
Very important and smart and powerful man in the European Union at the time.
He was pushing the line that only through belt tightening, austerity, can we essentially become self-sufficient again, we Greeks.
And what he had in mind about self-sufficiency was that we would become net exporters.
And through the net exports, be able to pay back our debts.
And, you know, this is a German model.
And when I said to him, Volkan, you realize that if we all do that, if we all become net exporters, like Germany's, if we all become Germany's, then it is the United States that will have to take on all the net exports that we are exporting, because the Chinese are net exporters.
The Japanese are net exporters.
If we all become, in Europe, net exporters, who on earth is going to be a net importer?
The United States, which, of course, was a net importer.
But effectively, what Europe did between the great financial collapse of 2008 and today is they created, to some extent, with the help of Obama, I have to say, Donald Trump.
Because when Donald Trump says that, you know, folks, you Europeans, you have 240 billion Dollars of a trade surplus with the United States.
That can't continue.
Well, you know, he's a madman.
He's a very poor excuse for human nature.
I consider him to be a proto-fascist, a quasi-fascist.
But on this he's right.
And this is exactly what Europe did in order to overcome the bankruptcy of its banks after Wall Street collapsed in 2008.
Essentially pushed all our countries.
Through austerity, harsh austerity, through mind-numbing levels of poverty, to tighten our belt so much, to stop consuming locally, so that we all become net exporters.
And you see the chickens are coming home to roost now because you have that madman in the White House who correctly points out that Europe has been a freeloader on this.
Now, of course, what he is proposing instead is utterly mad.
And bad.
But this is the problem that Europe has.
Europe is not this democratic, civilized, rational place that has just been assaulted by the madmen with the orange hair.
Europe is at fault.
We have treated our own peoples abysmally through this combination of harsh austerity for the many across Europe, not just in Greece, in Germany as well.
Low levels of investment.
And net exports to the rest of the world.
So there you are.
I want to get to the Trump tariff plan in a minute, in the whole scheme that he's trying to implement, what those goals are.
But just staying on Europe for a second, I do think, certainly rhetorically, and maybe in an enduring and sustained way, European leaders are thinking about the world differently, in part because of Trump's obvious desire to...
Abandon Ukraine, kind of force a peace deal on them and leaving Europe to think, oh, wow, we can't rely on the U.S. anymore.
We better go do that.
Even talks about forcing the Europeans to take on more of their own defense responsibility and these huge budgets that are now coming for vastly increased spending on the military in the name of, I don't know, saving Ukraine or making the EU into some sort of independent military power, no longer needing to rely on the U.S. If that were to take place, if this defense spending increases, these significant defense spending increases that we're being told to expect or that are even coming, actually has started to happen.
And the EU really starts rearming and building its military in a very meaningful way as it says it believes it has to do.
What effect would that have on this kind of already tattered social fabric in the EU where people feel besieged?
Very similar sentiments to what's taking place throughout the democratic world.
They feel like these distant establishment institutions don't care about them at all.
Will that exacerbate it or what will be the implications of all that?
Glenn, the dominant paradigm, the dominant narrative in Europe is that, well, you know, we can't...
Any longer sell our cars because they're not competitive in relation to BYD, the Chinese ones, or Tesla.
So we might as well convert Volkswagen's production lines into production lines producing cars for Rheinmetall.
And we will grow through this kind of rearmament project, or allow me to put it a bit slightly more pseudoscientifically, military Keynesianism.
That's a dominant paradigm.
It is dangerously erroneous.
It is such a myth.
It is such a toxic lie that is being sold to Europeans.
And allow me to say this.
Military Keynesianism does work.
It can work.
It worked under Hitler.
Within two years, Hitler eliminated unemployment.
Germany grew.
But of course, the result was the Second World War.
Because ammunition.
Once you start basing your whole growth strategy on...
You know, producing more ammunition, at some point your warehouses will be full.
So you will need to restock.
You will need to get rid of it in order to restock.
So you need a war.
In the United States, military Keynesianism has worked since the late 1930s.
It's the reason.
On the one hand, yes, of course, there was FDR's New Deal, but...
If it wasn't for the Second World War, the German, the American economy, would not have recovered to the extent that it did, and it would not have become so dominant during the Bretton Woods era.
So military kensians work, but this is why the United States needs to conduct a war every one, two, three years, and sometimes every year.
And that's why we had Korea, that's why we had Vietnam, that's why we had Iraq, that's why we had Afghanistan, because the stock needs to be replenished for military kensians to work.
Is Europe proposing to start its own sequence of wars in order to keep the military Keynesian multiplier accelerator growth model going?
Firstly, it will be catastrophic ethically and from the perspective of the human species to do this.
Secondly, they can't do it.
They really can't do it.
Because in order to start a war, you need to have somebody who can make the decision to start the war.
Now, in the United States, you have the American president.
You have Congress.
Who in Europe can decide, even if we created, let's say we created a massive European army, who's going to decide whether they should go to war or not tomorrow?
Who will send these men and women to the battlefield?
I hope that never happens, but if it happens, who is going to decide that?
The European Commission...
President, Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen, doesn't even have a democratic mandate in her own neighborhood.
Thank God.
She would like to do it.
She would like to do it, but...
Zero democratic legitimacy.
It's not even in her job description.
Once upon a time with Angela Merkel, who was the de facto leader of Europe, because...
Germany still had a massive surplus that was sustainable to the extent that everybody else was practicing.
Now they can't even elect, you know, the Pope was elected more speedily than the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.
France has a lame duck president.
France is a deficit country anyway.
When I was in government, there was a north-south divide in Europe.
Now there is also an east-west divide.
So what I'm saying, briefly, it can't work.
It won't work.
Europe will stagnate faster because they are borrowing as we speak.
You know, there is a directive that is coming to our capitals from Brussels saying shift resources, funding from social programs to military spending.
Now, this is in a Europe where the majority have been treated like cattle that lost their market value long ago.
And this is why they are turning towards the ultra-right, just like in the mid-war period.
To reduce social spending in order to buy tanks that we neither need nor want.
While increasing the indebtedness of our already fiscally stressed countries to do so without any multiplier, accelerator, developmental growth machine happening in the medium term.
This is simply digging the hole in which we find ourselves deeper instead of stopping digging.
But I'm really interested in that question because what you described happening in Europe is, in my view, what already just happened in the United States.
It's happened in many parts in the democratic world.
It was what led to, in my view, Brazil's election of Jair Bolsonaro after, you know, basically 16 years of rule by the Labour Party under Lula.
You have, obviously, places in Europe where it's not just sort of in the future these populist right-wing parties.
Are going to grow, but they're clearly growing very massively and showing their strength in elections.
And the thing that amazed me is that even after 2016, when Donald Trump defied all expectations and won, broke every political rule, there was almost no interest in interrogating, why is it that somebody like Donald Trump, know, so out of the category of what we expect just in terms of comportment, ended up being elected president despite all these institutions aligned against him.
And they kind of blamed the voter.
They said the voters are racist.
They're susceptible to whatever.
But there was no sense I still don't think.
There's any kind of self-reflection or interrogation about why these right-wing populist movements are growing.
It's an anti-establishment fervor fueling them.
And to me, I don't see any of that self-reflection in Europe as well.
And until that happens, those parties are going to grow no matter what.
And I think you're suggesting, and I can see that as well, that if anything what they're doing, hey, let's shift tons of money from social programs for people who we've already beaten into the ground in order to build our military and enrich military contracts will just fuel that even more.
Why do you think there's such a reluctance on the part of these establishment institutions to look in the mirror and say, "What have we been doing that has been causing people to hate us?"
Because the status quo, the way in which our political economies have been working, both in the United States and in Europe, The liberal establishment,
who are very, very close to Wall Street, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, were much, much closer to Wall Street than the Republicans were, or at least as close.
Why is Wall Street such a wealth-generating engine?
Well, it is because of the United States' trade deficit.
After 1971, when the Bretton Woods system was blown up, the post-war model was effectively turned on its head.
Between 1950 and 1971, the United States had a trade surplus.
It was a surplus country.
Very smartly, I would say, successive American governments from Eisenhower all the way to LBJ were taking a part of the American surpluses and they were recycling them.
They were dollarizing Europe and Japan so that the Europeans and the Japanese could have enough dollars to keep purchasing the American net exports in order to keep America in surplus.
Now, that model died.
For a number of reasons.
The Vietnam War, the fact that the American industry was becoming less competitive vis-a-vis Japan and Germany, the Greater Society Program by RBJ, which cost a ton of money and increased imports.
America became a deficit country.
And then what did the Nixon administration do?
After 1971, and then this was followed by the Carter administration, by the Reagan administration, what they did was they intentionally expanded the American trade deficit.
And this is the beauty and the horror of it.
The American trade deficit became the engine of growth in Germany, in Japan, and later in China.
It was like a huge vacuum cleaner sacking into the United States, the net exports of Germany, Japan, and China, and of course everybody else as well.
But these are the main power blocks.
And how were these deficits being paid for?
with IOUs that we call greenbacks or dollars, right?
Printed dollars that went to the German, to the Japanese and to the Chinese countries.
And what did they do with the dollars?
They couldn't spend them in their own homes.
So they sent them back to Wall Street.
And Wall Street demanded and succeeded in getting it to be utterly deregulated if it was going to play the role of recycling other people's profits.
And what did they do with this money?
They plugged the hole in the federal government's budget.
U.S. Treasuries.
They bought some shares.
And primarily, they bought real estate.
So you have a rentier ruling class in the United States, which is getting much exponentially wealthier the more the United States goes into the red.
Remember?
Can you get this?
The more the United States as a country goes into the red in terms of its trade balance, The richer, the rentier class of the United States.
Now, at some point, they start believing their own propaganda.
The propaganda is all about, remember, riskless risk?
This was the nuts theory about the efficient market hypothesis that was doing the rounds in American universities, Ivy League universities, which was the ideological...
under which Wall Street was producing its weapons of mass financial destruction, the CDOs, the CDSs, the CDO squares and so on.
They believed the myth that we had a globalized village where free markets were ruling supreme.
They believed the idea that it was a period of stability when that model was based on the imbalances of the Trade deficit of the United States getting larger and the capital surplus getting also larger as other people's money was sliding into the United States.
So, you know, if for 30, 40 years you have a ruling class, it doesn't matter where in which country, that is getting exponentially richer from a particular economic arrangement, then it is really very hard for them to turn around, you know, and through some introspection and rational analysis say, you know what?
This is no longer working for us or for the country.
Maybe it's working for us, but it's not working for the country.
And this is why they, you know, that's why in 2016, they did not question whether Trump's victory was, as I believe it was, the result of Barack Obama's treachery towards the American people.
They blamed it on Putin.
They blamed it on Facebook.
I have no doubt that Putin and Facebook are abysmal entities who try to influence the American vote.
But that's not why Trump won.
So when the Democrats convinced themselves that Qataris paribus, other things being equal, they would have won.
And it's only a matter of time before the democratic shifts within the United States, more Latinos and so on, are going to make this a permanently democratic regime.
So, you know, they bought their own bullshit.
Sorry for the expression.
Yeah, I mean, I understand why the Democrats were willing to write off 2016 as some great aberration and just say, oh, it's because they cheated with Russia, etc.
But these trends have continued to intensify.
And, you know, it's three elections now where Trump has demonstrated remarkable strength, far beyond what people could detect or understand.
And I don't think there's still any more introspection.
I understand your point that a lot of people have an interest in its continuity.
So I don't mean why aren't they morally willing to sacrifice their own interests for the greater good.
I mean, just as a matter of strategy, historically...
If you don't pretend at least to care about the majority of people who are suffering economically, you're going to get a huge backlash, either electorally, as we're seeing, or, you know, in terms of, like, violence and revolution.
That's why the richest people, you know, like the Henry Fords and the J.P. Morgans used to drive through the streets all the time and hand out money to the people to say, oh, look, we're good people, we're charitable, we're benevolent, our wealth helps you as well.
And there seems to, you know, the alternative is just to build the wall higher.
You know, like, put a surveillance system in place, militarize the police force, all of which is being done.
Just say, ah, screw them.
We don't have to placate them.
If they really get uppity, we can just crush them with power.
And I think that's what a lot of the West has decided is the best route.
But there's still elections, and that can be a vessel for it as well.
Let me move to tariffs, because I really want to understand.
We would have to spend the whole show on tariffs to really understand your views.
It's a complicated topic.
But I just want to ask you this.
As long as I can remember, as long as I've been paying attention to politics, Free trade has been like the bugaboo of the left in the United States and in Europe.
I mean, the 1999 protest with the World Trade Organization in Seattle was a major moment where people understood they were being victimized by things like NAFTA and World Trade.
It's the reason the left hates the Clintons because they've been pushing free trade policies and blamed NAFTA and blamed the Clintons for deindustrialization of the United States, which a lot of people warned about, including on the populist right, but mostly this has been a view on the left.
And as a result, tariffs have been a way to kind of push back against this, the tyranny of free trade, the destruction of free trade.
And now here you have Donald Trump coming and making that case.
He's the one who's saying free trade screws over the United States in the way that you described, but also, you know, these countries that drown our country in cheap products is what is eliminating these jobs.
And so we want to reinstitute nationalist economics that will serve our people and not to be dependent on these cheap supply chains that destroy our country.
I understand why people like you find horrific, this, like, arbitrary chart that gets created or treating, like, trade deficits as a tariff or proof that there's some injustice going on.
So, and even the danger that...
He's only doing this so that he can then have companies come to him and beg for exemptions in exchange for some favors that he gets or people around him get.
I understand all that.
But just directionally, like in terms of saying free trade doesn't work, the system of free trade only benefits the elites and not the American worker, and we need to get away from that because it's the only way we can recover the working class.
Is there any positives that you see in that?
Yes, there is.
Have I surprised you?
Yes, there is.
Trump or his team more like it.
You know, people like Scott Besson and Stephen Miran, who are smart and they understand economics and finance.
They put their finger on the pulse of the problem.
Or one of the main problems.
The fact that the American rentier class, essentially financiers and realtors.
Of whom, of course, the Donald is one.
They have been enriching themselves because, not in spite of, because of the burgeoning trade deficit of the United States, which is the other side, the flip side of the same coin as that of American manufacturing decline and deindustrialization.
On this, they're right.
It's been my analysis now for 40 years.
I've written books about that well before I knew who Donald Trump was.
The tragedy is that the remedy that they're offering through bilateral, mafia-like negotiations, first with Britain, then with India, then with Germany, and so on and so forth, that is not going to work out well in the end for the people that are voting them in, only because for once they heard something that...
It's remotely connected to the reality.
And of course, the people who voted them in are the blue-collar workers, the MAGA crowd between the two coasts, the east and the west coast of the United States.
That's the first point.
The second point, let me speak to what you said about the opposition of the left to free trade.
Well, to begin with, there was never free trade.
We never had free trade.
It was predatory trade.
And let me remind you, Glenn, you don't need to be reminded, but just in case somebody from our audience needs to be reminded or has forgotten, what were these multilateral trade agreements?
TTP, TTIP, and all that, if you remember, CETA, these huge trade liberalization negotiation rounds, which some of them led to agreements, some of them failed.
This was not about freeing trade.
It was about establishing the ultimate authority and power of multinational corporations to come to my country, to come to your country, and to say you cannot have a public health system.
You cannot sell pharmaceuticals below a certain price.
You cannot protect your environment because this will be considered, according to the free trade agreement, some kind of...
Unequal, uneven playing field.
So it was never about free trade.
Now, tariffs.
If you look very carefully at, not at what Donald says, but what his men say, Besant, Miran, and the rest, cats, what they are saying is that, and I think that they believe it, I think they're being honest on this, that tariffs are not an end in themselves.
Tariffs are a means for rebalancing the world economy.
Now, if they succeeded in rebalancing the world economy, I would be all for them.
I don't think they will.
But the idea that they are putting forward is this.
You impose sky-high tariffs upon everyone.
Not because you want to keep them there, but because you want to scare the living daylights out of them.
And then they come to you.
And then the world resembles a bicycle wheel, with the hub being the United States, or Trump and his team.
And every other country or economic bloc being a spoke on that bicycle wheel.
So even if two or three of those spokes are broken, that is, there is no deal with them, it doesn't matter, the wheel still turns and works.
But they don't talk to one another.
So no multilateral negotiations and so on and so forth in case they bind together against the hub, against the United States.
So we will slap these immense tariffs upon them.
Then they will come, each one, At the time to us, and we will demand from them very specific things.
So, for instance, when the Japanese come, and they have come, from what I hear, we will point out that they have $1.2 trillion in savings, and we want them to sell half of that, because we want to divide the dollar.
But we don't want them to buy Chinese one or European euros or any other currency, for that matter, because we don't want any other currency to compete with the US dollar.
So we are going to ask them to buy things we will point at or to, like, for instance, stablecoins like Tether or 30-year long-dated U.S. Treasuries, because that way we reduce the long-term interest rates of the United States while dividing the dollar and increasing the competitiveness.
So this is the kind of thinking that goes on in there.
And they also...
Bank on, and not irrationally, they are banking on the fact that from some countries, like Germany, this has already happened, already, German car manufacturers and chemical industries like BASF, They are shifting their capital investments from Germany to Texas, to New Mexico, to Arizona, to various places in the United States.
So that's the plan that they have.
But that's a legitimate goal, right?
That would be, I mean, leaving aside the other problems, I mean, from the perspective of an American president prompting to bring back jobs and companies and industry to the United States, It's a legitimate objective.
I don't think they will succeed in making it a reality.
And let me tell you, I could spend hours talking about this.
I won't, though.
Don't worry.
I knew.
That's what I said.
I knew.
I know.
You're an economist and you have a lot to say on tarot.
But go ahead.
Yeah, I want to hear it.
There are two points that I think are useful and quite succinct.
The first is this.
When Apple shifted some of its production lines from China to Austin, Texas to produce the MacBook Pro.
The Apple MacBook Pro.
They did bring manufacturing back to the United States, but very few jobs followed simply because of automation.
So even when Mercedes-Benz or BASP or Alstom, a major manufacturer from Europe, shifts to the United States, automation is going to ensure that the number of jobs that come to the United States is going to be much higher.
Smaller, proportionally speaking, to the amount of capital that shifts the United States.
That's one reason.
The second reason, Glenn, is this.
Suppose it works.
It begins to work.
If it works, it will work gradually.
And as it works, in the hypothetical scenario that it works, the trade deficit of the United States shrinks, which is the objective.
What happens then?
Well, as the Trade deficit of the United States shrinks.
The Germans, the Japanese and the Chinese and the Saudi Arabians and so on are going to have fewer dollars because their dollars come from the trade deficit of the United States.
Okay, so they will be sending fewer dollars to Wall Street to bolster share prices, to bolster bond prices, and to bolster asset prices in Miami, in California, in Manhattan, in real estate.
That's my point, and this is how I conclude.
I don't think that his types will work in the sense of shrinking substantially the American trade deficit, but even if it does, then Donald Trump is going to have some very irate, very angry financial friends and realtor firm.
Which he does already, but isn't that in some way a commendation of the plan?
In other words, the people who have been sucking the lifeblood out of the vibrancy of economic life in the West, in the United States, these are the people most alarmed by and objecting to his plan, and you saw that in the reaction to the stock market, but many other ways, precisely because it endangers that system that has been fattening them at the expense of everybody else.
Not exactly.
I wish it were.
But what I think is this.
Look, we must differentiate between the very short-term and the long-term.
What happened recently was this spasm in the New York Stock Exchange.
It's gone.
It's already gone.
You can see that the financial markets have recovered.
What Trump is telling them is, look, this is a very short-term pain for long-term gain.
This is what he's telling them.
Soon I'm going to fire my second weapon.
The first one was the tariffs.
The second one will be massive tax cuts for the fat cats.
And you will benefit enormously.
You'll see, you know, the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ is going to shoot through the roof.
Okay?
That's what he's telling them.
So he's presenting the pain that they suffered in the last few weeks as a form of investment into even more wealth for them in the next 2, 3, 5, 10, 20 years.
What I am saying is that if his strategy works, very soon after it starts working, then the rent extraction capacity of his mates is going to be damaged permanently.
And that will put him in a political bind.
He will have to choose between going back, just peddling back and reversing course.
Because he cannot stand, I do not believe that he can politically or even psychologically stand the long-term wrath of the bankers and of the realtors.
He's not FDR.
FDR stood in 1936 in Madison Square Garden and said that I treasure the hatred of the bankers to my person or some words to that effect.
Trump is not going to be that kind of president.
I hope he would be, but I think that there is a zero probability of actually being that.
So I don't think that...
But anyway, look, I don't think it's going to work anyway.
Because in the end, China is not going to succumb to his bullying.
China is going to expand its realm within the BRICS-plus countries.
There's going to be a new payment system that will increasingly be anchored on the Chinese one.
Trump may have quite a bit of success in the next two or three years in extracting concessions.
You saw this yesterday when Keir Starmer ridiculed himself by celebrating a so-called comprehensive US-UK trade deal, which is nothing.
There's nothing comprehensive about it.
And it is a great success for Donald, but not a great success for Keir Starmer.
Trump can score quite enough victories in the next two or three years.
But I don't think it's going to go down in history to be remembered by historians in the future in the same way that Nixon was.
Because Nixon's shock in 1971, which was very similar to the Trump shock, had continued after him.
It was continued by Carter.
It was continued by Reagan.
This policy of shrinking the rent extraction powers of the powers that be, of their interior class in the United States, have any follow-up?
I find this very hard to believe, independently of whether we have a Republican or a Democratic White House.
I mean, what I've thought for a long time is that no matter how powerful a president is, no matter how much of a popular mandate they have or whatever, how much they have a party control of both congresses, the only things they can't really withstand are serious upset and anger by the banking class, by Wall Street, by the financiers.
There's, I think, a president, no matter how popular, would be destroyed, trying to destroy the power of...
Except for it, you know, it's...
Yeah, no, I'm talking about the modern presidency in terms of how it's constructed.
And maybe you can imagine like a very passionate, devoted, charismatic, shrewd leader like FDR reappearing who could.
But the way American power functions, I think it would be very, very difficult to impossible.
And then the other way would be, you know, trying to destroy the intelligence community or the military industrial class.
And then finally, I think the last way, maybe the hardest thing to do, would be to separate the United States from Israel and sort of put an end to the largesse.
And that's a good segue into what I want to just shift to in our time that we have left, which is exactly that question of the U.S. relationship with Israel and Europe's relationship with Israel.
And before we get to the kind of meat of the matter, which is the Israeli destruction of Gaza, increasingly the Israeli destruction of the West Bank, their stealing of land from other countries including Syria and Lebanon, their attempt to bomb the Houthis, et cetera.
I want to ask you about the kind of free speech aspect of this because there's a lot of, I think, growing awareness in the United States and a lot of resentment toward Israel as a result that constantly now the censorship that is being imposed through, you know, sort of informal cultural means, which was called cancel culture, but also through policy and explicit rules and hate speech codes and campuses and other places is designed to silence people or punish people from questioning Israel.
I think there's a growing awareness to that.
You were...
I think notoriously banned from Germany as a result of an organizing event you were doing for a week or four days or something.
What is going on in Europe in terms of the crackdown on speech in favor of the Palestinian cause or in opposition to Israel and its wars?
A triumphant march of totalitarianism.
That is what we're observing in Europe at the moment.
Because on the one hand, you have the revived neo-fascists who are presenting themselves as victims of authoritarianism.
And therefore, they are being strengthened by this authoritarianism.
And this authoritarianism is real.
When you've got, for whatever reasons, let's not get into the nitty-gritty, the leading politician in France being banned from participating in elections for something that I can assure you all politicians do.
In terms of the shenanigans with European funds that they use for their own political campaigns at home, it's irrelevant.
When you've got that Romanian...
If I could just interject there for a second, John, as you and I actually talked in depth about exactly this issue, this use of lawfare, the attempt to ban from the ballot or even imprison leading right-wing populists throughout the democratic world, including Marine Le Pen in France, the Romanian example you're about to use.
So I encourage anyone to go watch that.
It was just about a month ago on a channel with which Giannis is associated.
But go ahead.
I think that you're you know, usually when people on the left say they have a perception that they're being victimized by authoritarianism and their posturing is being it, immediately they say, of course, it's not true.
But you're essentially saying, yeah, there is actually a real element of that.
Of course there is.
When you ban candidates, now they're thinking of banning the EIFD.
I want to crush the EIFD, the Alternative for Deutschland, this neo-fascist party in Germany.
But I want to crush them at the polling stations.
I do not want them to be banned, because not only is it wrong to ban anyone, because you don't agree with them, even if you loathe them, even if you think of them as dangerous for human society.
I don't believe that I have the right to withdraw anyone's political rights.
But that's not just that.
It's also enlightened selfishness.
Because the moment you ban them, they grow stronger.
They become far more legitimized in the eyes of the majority.
And you cannot defend democracy by destroying the concept of majoritarianism.
So that's one point.
But then at the same time...
Let's not forget, because we need to connect it with Palestine, that these neo-fascists are totally on the side of Netanyahu.
They are out-and-out supporters of the genocide, of the apartheid state's genocide in Palestine.
But so is the liberal establishment.
The liberal establishment is actually sending armaments to Netanyahu.
Boatloads of bombs and missiles and so on, of the kind that are...
Killing, as we speak, it's a meat machine that is grinding the flesh, blood, soul and dreams of the Palestinian people.
So both sides, the authoritarians in government, the liberal authoritarians, or totalitarians as I call them, and the neo-fascists.
So this is the point of agreement between them.
And at the same time...
It's worthwhile, just for one second, to say, why was I banned going to Berlin?
It's nothing to do with me.
It's because the German authorities couldn't stand the fact that that Congress that we had organized on a just peace in the Middle East was co-organized with Jews.
So you have the whole panoply of the German state, of the French state, of the Dutch state, being unleashed against Jews.
Who have rendered themselves the target of liberal authoritarianism by not accepting the right of the Israeli state to commit genocide.
So it is a kind of assault on Jews who are questioning the legitimacy of the Jewish state perpetrating genocide.
On behalf of the German liberal establishment, for instance, which seem to believe that if there are enough rivers of Palestinian blood, they will be washed clean of their guilt over the Holocaust.
And the Jews who are saying no to that are the worst victims of liberal totalitarianism and, of course, the worst victims of European neo-fascism.
It is.
I mean, I never thought I would see the day where German tanks would again be rolling eastward to Russia or being sent toward Russia and the Russian border to fight.
But the one thing I really never thought I would see was German police arresting German Jews and other activists who are Jewish for the mere crime of expressing Well, being a genocide then.
You know, Jews are not allowed to be against genocide in Germany.
Yeah, they get arrested by the German police.
I know, it's been going on for so long, and I think Americans sometimes, because of the growing censorship in the United States over this issue, don't realize how much further down the road, even though J.D. Vance loves to lecture Europe about their addiction to censorship, and I don't actually object to that, but this issue, probably the primary...
Censorship target is never something that he includes.
Let me ask you about Gaza itself.
There's been atrocities and massacres and ethnic cleansing and genocide for thousands of years.
But there's a difference with modern technology and the extent of what that can entail.
But we also now...
Have the ability to watch it in real time, no matter where you are in the world.
You see every day what's being done to Palestinian life.
I mean, it's basically being eradicated.
No schools, no hospitals, no food.
The deliberate destruction of an entire society of two million people with the intent to drive them out or just eliminate them altogether.
In your lifetime, and I know there have been a lot of kind of massacres and horrible things, where do you kind of rate this in terms of magnitude and criminality as compared to other types of, I don't want to call it a war, it's not really a war on a helpless, armless population, but I think it is time to call it a genocide.
I thought that for a long time.
I don't like to bicker over that word, but where do you place it?
Well, there is war.
Which in itself is a crime.
Then there are war crimes, which we, as a species, got around various roundtables after 1945 to agree that we should ban, even when, sadly, we fight wars against one another.
So there is a very clear definition of what constitutes a war crime.
So, forcefully removal of populations, intentional starvation.
Using populations in any particular way and targeting populations in order to kill combatants that may be hiding within the populations, the human shield story, these are all outlawed by international law.
The greatest achievement of the Second World War, the other day we had the 80th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis, if we got something out of that, was this Basic fundamental agreement of what constitutes a war crime.
Now, above a war crime is a genocide, which is an attempt to eradicate in whole or in part a population, an ethnicity, a religious group.
Now, there is no doubt that if Srebrenica and Rwanda fell under the heading of genocide, most certainly Gaza.
It falls and becomes the textbook case.
I mean, in the next 100, 200, 500 years, it will be taught, if we still have universities teaching international law, it will be taught as a prime example of a genocide.
Now, I have this view that the Holocaust was another kettle of fish.
It was quite separate.
Because the mind-boggling...
The necessity that the Nazis, the top Nazis felt to eradicate every Jew around the world just because they were Jews.
I think that remains unique in my heart as a crime.
I have no doubt, for instance, that if, let's say, the Palestinians decided all to drop their connection to their land and leave Palestine.
Then I don't think that Mossad will be chasing them in South Africa to kill them just because they were Palestinians.
But that is a completely theoretical and worthless point to make at this point.
Because at this point, Glenn, I seriously feel in my bones, morally, ethically, politically, philosophically, that this is our generation's Kristallnacht.
If you and I were to...
You know, be in a time machine and go to Berlin in 1938 and wake up on the morning after Kristallnacht.
We would have only one duty, and that would be to defend the Jews from the Nazis.
Today, you, me, our audience, everyone, we have only one duty, to stop the genocide of the Palestinians.
And that, I think, is essential.
It's a unique moral clarifier.
A unique moral...
Today it distinguishes in the same way that people's behavior after Kristallnacht distinguished or separated those who had an ethical leg to stand on and those who didn't.
Similarly, I believe that opposition to Palestinian deaths, to Palestinian massacres, to putting a whole population on death row and starving them at the same time.
This opposition is a constituent part of being a human being today.
And the tragedy is that Europe is silent, except for some of us demonstrating, some impressive demonstrations, which come and go, we will be stigmatized by this.
And so will you, on the other side of the pond, in the United States, in Canada, in Australia, for that matter.
Where is the global solidarity of nations coming together?
Where is the coalition of the willing to stop our generation's genocide from proceeding?
You know, I try very hard never to believe that my way of seeing the world is the only way to see the world.
I think it's important to keep that humility, though in this case, I don't feel any hesitation at all in I mean, it's just as you say, you feel it in your bones.
It's visceral.
It's not even intellectual.
The magnitude of this crime, of this cruelty, of this atrocity is so enormous that I don't even regard it as meaningfully debatable.
I'm not interested in even debating it all that much.
But it is very frustrating.
And sometimes I feel like we talk about it too much on this show.
But honestly, I feel like I'm abdicating my responsibility morally if I even go a day or two without talking about it.
The scale of it and our responsibility for it, since our governments are the ones that are financing and arming it, are so great.
And yet, the reality is, as you say, that most countries who are supporting it aren't really reacting in that way.
And in fact, in Europe...
You know, it's always kind of amazed me because as much as the United States pays lip service to international law and international conventions and the like, it doesn't, really never pretends to believe in it.
It didn't even join the International Criminal Court.
It's not a signatory to most of these.
But Europe, I mean, the identity of Europe in a lot of ways is constructed around these conventions.
And yet you have an ICC indictment of Putin.
And I remember very well, you know, South Africa was hosting a BRICS conference and they said...
We, of course, think it's wrong that Putin has been indicted.
We want Putin to be here on our soil, but we're a country that signed the ICC, and therefore we're duty-bound to arrest him if he comes.
And, you know, we're not a country that gets to ignore conventions.
And the Europeans were applauding that.
You know, obviously Putin couldn't travel to Europe without being arrested as well.
And yet you have the European governments, at least some of them, exempting Netanyahu, exempting Yovkan, exempting other Israeli officials who have been charged with war crimes.
Even from the basic requirements of the ICC.
And is there any kind of, I of course understand the unique history to Jewish questions in Israel because of, in Europe, because of what would happen in World War II, especially Germany, but is there any sense at any point, like growing at all, like how is it that we can continue to turn our backs on this, or worse, even continue to actively enable and support it?
Well, I couldn't put it better than you just did.
But you see, the point I'm trying to drive home when I speak to an audience which is not particularly concerned about Palestine, what I say to them is, OK, forget the Palestinians.
When you're walking down the street, whether it is in New York or in L.A. or in Paris, and suddenly hooded men wearing black abduct A student from the street because she or he has been in some Palestinian protest or has written an article which is critical of the apartheid state of Israel, of genocide.
And you see these men effectively using the tactics, the methods of the brown shirts in 1938.
I have no doubt that at that moment you feel very uncomfortable.
And what you do is you turn a blind eye.
You pretend you haven't seen that scene, the abduction of this person right in front of you, being bundled into a van and sent to Louisiana.
You know what I'm referring to.
Well, the moment you turn a blind eye to that, you have lost part of your own capacity to defend American democracy or European democracy.
Or the rule of law in your country.
The moment you turn a blind eye to international law, you turn a blind eye to your own law.
So I will never forget something a Palestinian said to me once, many, many years ago.
I'm talking about 30 years ago.
He said to me, do you realize that unless we have rights, your own rights are jeopardized.
And I think that that is the message that we need to push through.
We need to make people understand that this is not simply...
Benevolence towards the Palestinians or caring about any genocide that happens anywhere in the world.
Yes, it is that.
But even if you don't have that kind of sensitivity and sensibility, if you care about your own rights, you see, don't tomorrow return against you.
First, they came for the Palestinians and you turn the blind eye.
Second, they came for the, I don't know what, the Latinos or the Catholics or the Protestants.
You turn the blind eye.
Who is going to stand up when you are being bundled into that van?
Let me ask you the last question.
We're almost out of time, so let me just ask you this as the last question.
I've lived through enough wars to understand well how they work.
I mean, if you're an American citizen, it means you're living through constant wars and therefore attempts to sell the war, to justify the war.
And it's always amazing to me there's this trend that's so clear in data that once you unveil the war and you give the excuses for the war and the pretext for the war, people get very nationalistic.
We're tribal beings.
You can easily get 60-70% of the people to support the war.
Then very shortly after, they start asking themselves, wait a minute, why are we in this war?
Like, it doesn't seem to have any effect on my life and we're killing huge numbers of people.
We're having earned citizens killed.
We're spending lots of money.
And then also it turns out that every time we're sold this case, like in Vietnam, this Gulf of Tonkin lie, and obviously in Iraq with weapons of mass destruction, and we were told in Libya it was just to protect Benghazi and not a regime change war, over and over and over, we realize, oh, we've actually been lied to, and yet every time this new war, a new war is presented with these new pretexts, people are, you know, it's very effective propaganda.
They play on people's primal motions and the like, and that's why it works.
It's a science.
And so, of course, anyone who listens to our conversation and hears what we're saying about the destruction of Gaza will say, yeah, but, you know, it's only because of October 7th.
Like this attack on October 7th was so savage and brutal that whatever the Israelis do, even if they wipe out all two million Palestinians, it will have been justified because of this attack.
Now, there's a lot of arguments, just like where people wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11 and then got to use the excuse of 9/11 to go do what they always wanted to do anyway.
That this is something Israelis have been wanting to do and planning to do for a long time.
And that October 7th sort of became the pretext.
What is your view on sort of what the real Israeli intention here is and the evidence for the fact that it certainly doesn't have anything to do with the hostages, as their families have been saying for a long time in Israel, but really October 7th is more the pretext than the cause.
Truncating history is a very well-tried technique for justifying massacres and genocide.
If you look at every colonial ruler, whether there was a British in Australia with the frontier wars, how did they justify the fact that they killed half of the Aborigines during the frontier wars when they essentially took the whole of the Australian land and declared the terra nullius and made it their own?
Well, they identified one moment in time when some Aborigines resisted and killed a white European.
And that becomes, this is how truncation works, that becomes the original sin, which then explains the annihilation, the annihilation of the Aborigines.
This is how they always do it.
This is how they did it in South Africa, the Boers.
This is how they did it in every massacre there ever was.
The whole point is to cover up the underlying chain of cause and effect.
To cover up the fact that Moshe Dayan, the Israeli general and then defense minister and very significant person in Israeli history, once gave a speech right at the border, border, the fence, separating Israel proper from Gaza.
What had happened was, you probably know the story, there was an incursion by a Ghazan who was trying to go back to his village from where he was expelled.
That's why he was on the other side of the barbed wire.
And he killed an Israeli soldier.
And Moshe Dayan goes to the funeral and he gives a eulogy, he gives a speech, which is very poignant and, you know, we should never forget what he said.
He said, don't blame him.
He did what you would have done.
Let's not blame the Arabs, the Palestinians, because we took their homes.
We took their land.
We are squeezing vegetables and olive oil from their patch.
This is what they do, what we must do.
We must make sure that they never grow roots in Gaza and that we, we...
Eradicate them before they eradicate us.
I'm not quoting verbatim, of course, but this is what he actually said.
So, you know, our job is to take the veil off, to end the truncated history, which always begins with an original sin of the oppressed, of the eradicated, of those who have been thrown out of their homes.
In order to justify, they are being thrown off not only their homes, but also the tents in which they moved after they were thrown out of it.
Yeah, you know, it's amazing.
Every time people mention October 7th, and I point out that the Israelis were bombing Gaza and the West Bank all throughout 2023, before October 7th, killing babies, killing children, killing civilians.
There's a lot of people who don't know that that was happening, let alone the prior 20 years of the blockade and before that, the occupation.
Going back even further, but even just in 2023, before October 7th, the Israelis were bombing relentlessly multiple times as they had done many, many years before, going back to 2014 being the worst one.
But it's so true that you just convince people that, no, everything was so peaceful and perfect, and then suddenly Israel minding its own business, not hurting anybody, doing nothing wrong, suddenly got attacked out of nowhere by these homicidal maniacs, and so now you have to just let the Israelis go do whatever they want.
It's incredibly effective propaganda to the point where, I don't know, sometimes I get very alarmed by how well-developed propaganda has become over time, and I think the tactic that you just identified of truncating history is one of the crucial.
Features of it.
All right, Giannis, it's always great to talk to you.
Always great to have you on.
It's great that we've been able to talk directly.
We'll do everything we can to make it in person the next time.
