Yanis Varoufakis (Understanding the cost of living catastrophe)
Russell chats to philosopher, politician and economist Yanis Varoufakis about the global cost of living crisis. Yanis helps to explain the economic journey of how the US controlled the market with a surplus of dollars through the 50s & 60s thanks to a healthy export industry, how that changed during the Vietnam war and tumbled during the 2008 financial crash. Yanis also explains how the insider trading works with the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street. This is an extract from Subcutaneous. To watch and listen to the full interview, go to https://russellbrand.locals.com/ FOLLOW and WATCH 'Stay Free with Russell Brand' LIVE weekdays on Rumble https://rumble.com/russellbrandCome to COMMUNITY 2023 (3 day festival) - https://www.russellbrand.com/communit...NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Hello and welcome to my new podcast, Subcutaneous.
If you enjoyed Under the Skin, you'll love this, because subcutaneous means under the skin, but it's probably a slightly fancier word.
We're going to dive deeply into the minds of people like Elon Musk, Vandana Shiva and Eckhart Tolle.
Now, there's a cost-of-living crisis devouring our planet.
Wherever you are in the world, it's likely that you are being impeded, that you're experiencing an energy crisis.
In our country, the UK, our energy bills are doubling in size.
Perhaps this is because we are seeing the neoliberal experiment reaching its crescendo.
Julian Assange was of course famous for saying that the function of modern government was to extract public money and to place it in private hands.
Think simply of the example of the funding for the recent vaccines.
Do you know how those vaccines were funded in the experimental phase?
You funded them.
Taxpayer money funded that experimentation.
Do you know what happened when it came to paying for them?
You paid for them!
It was your tax money that paid for them.
Today, in our conversation with Yanis Varoufakis, we talk about how a financial elite has reached a state of total domination around the world.
How there isn't just one planet, there are several.
There are invisible barriers that prevent you accessing power and prevent these elites ever being made accountable.
We're going to talk about how the financial system has been managed by the US from a surplus of dollars in high exports to the financial crash of 2008.
This is going to make you a lot smarter.
Please now enjoy this extract from Subcutaneous.
That's our deep conversation.
So deep it gets under the skin.
I wanted to call it something like cut to the bone, but people said that sounds disgusting.
After the 2008 crash, whether you were living in a European nation or the United States of America, ordinary people generally suffered.
The consequences of that crash are perhaps being felt still, exacerbated by the pandemic.
Now, with this war in Ukraine, there is a genuine cost of living crisis, much of which is being blamed on the war between Russia and Ukraine.
But it seems to me, with energy companies continuing to profit in the way that they are, that this cannot be the only factor.
There are a few questions in this.
One is, what do you see as being the solidarity between all people of the world?
Not that I'm suggesting any kind of centralised government at any point.
I believe in autonomy, I believe in localised authority, I believe in true democracy.
That's one area of it, but a degree of global solidarity of ordinary working people, of all descriptions, persuasions and views.
Two, This exacerbating cost-of-living crisis that's been continuing, lurching from catastrophe to catastrophe in the last, you know, sort of 12, 13 years.
What can we do to arrest it?
And three, what about the role of the media in the way that these stories are presented, in ways that keep people fractured, separate, disparate and unable to unify?
What do you have to say on this, dear Yanis?
I'll give you an example from little pipsqueak Greece here.
Because it's actually, it tells a story which is much broader in terms of its application.
Here in Greece we have six oligarchs and one hedge fund stationed in London called CBC.
They own the electricity producers and the electricity providers.
They also own the media.
Every single television channel and newspaper is owned by the same people.
During this tremendous cost of living and energy catastrophe, their profit rates have skyrocketed because they have managed to amplify their price-cost differentials during the electricity disaster and the oil crisis.
And they're using these funds in order to ensure that they are buying out every journalist that appears on their channels.
Channels that they own.
I'm a parliamentary leader in Greece now for three years.
My party is in Parliament.
Do you know how many times I've appeared on standard television channels like the equivalent of the BBC and ITV and Channel 4?
It's a rhetorical question.
Every day?
Every day.
So, you know, this is a very small example of what's going on worldwide.
But Russell, allow me, because, you know, your question is so... I mean, it contains almost everything that happened after the Second World War.
So if you allow me, I'll try in very broad, in the broadest brushstrokes, to tell a story that Follows through your line of thinking and questioning.
After the Second World War, we had two decades, the so-called Bretton Woods system, if you remember, or if you ever read about it, I'm talking to our viewers now.
It was a remarkable system because it was designed by the Americans, the American New Dealers, by the FDR administration, to reflect the American New Deal.
So for 20 years, The West had the common currency, the dollar.
We had fixed exchange rates.
The exchange rate between the pound and the dollar and the yen and so on didn't shift for 20 years, right?
It was a managed system.
And it was actually the only time when capitalism seemed to be working, seemed to be working.
It was a time, you remember, between the 50s and 60s of the baby boomers, the period of high growth, high growth, very low inflation, Very low unemployment and shrinking inequality in the 50s and the 60s.
Now, why did that happen?
Because you had boring finance.
There were capital controls.
Rich people could not take billions from one country and speculate in another.
There were restrictions in the movement of money.
No restrictions in the movement of trade, which is not a bad thing.
And the most important thing was that the whole thing was predicated on America having surpluses.
America was selling more to the world than it was buying from the world.
Because after the Second World War, the rest of the world was in smithereens, right?
So we were buying American cars, American washing machines, and so on and so forth.
And so America had a dollar surplus as a result of the net exports to Europe and Japan.
And that net surplus was being recycled to Europe and to Japan in the form of investment Public and private, the Marshall 8 plan and so on.
It was very, it was always rational, the system.
But that system blew up in the late 60s for a very simple reason.
America stopped to be a surplus country.
It went into a deep deficit because of the Vietnam War, because of the Civil Liberties Rebellion, which caused the LBJ, while at the same time sending young men to be killed in Vietnam, to increase social security payments and so on.
And so that was the first period.
That collapses in 1971 under Richard Nixon.
And then we have the reversal of this.
What happens is this.
The United States goes deeply into the red.
It starts importing from the rest of the world almost everything.
From Germany, from Italy, from Japan, and of course later from China.
It was operating like a huge vacuum cleaner that was sucking into American territory the goods produced by these exporting countries.
Now the question is, who was paying for that?
Any other country doing that would have gone bust.
But because of the exorbitant value of the dollar, and the American military and all that, and Wall Street, 70% of the profits of non-American capitalists, German capitalists, Italian capitalists, Japanese capitalists, and then later in the 1990s and 2000s, Chinese capitalists, 70% of the profits they made, they sent back to the United States to be invested in Wall Street.
So that was a recycling.
It was not ecological recycling, but it was financial capitalist recycling.
And that was a period during which we had financialisation, you had Thatcher, you had Reagan.
To do this they had to unshackle finance, to let the City of London, Wall Street, go haywire, do anything they wanted.
And that came to a crushing end in 2008, when this tsunami of financial capital, under the weight of its own hubris, collapsed.
And then we have the period between 2008 and the pandemic.
Which was, briefly put, socialism for the bankers and austerity for everybody else.
By that what I mean is this.
All the banks, every single bank in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union went bust.
Every single bank.
It was a gigantic implosion of financialized capitalism.
And the states, central banks primarily, but also governments, saved them.
They bailed them out.
Something that never happened in 1929, which was the other equivalent financial crash.
That's socialism for the bankers.
You have the state, Providing the dough that keeps the bankers alive.
Constant socialism, right?
Lavish socialism for the bankers.
And austerity for everybody else.
Remember George Osborne in your country, the Troika in my country.
Even Obama, who did a supposed stimulus in the United States, if you look at the overall fiscal situation in the United States, it was austerity.
Because the states were retrenching.
Much, much faster than the federal government was stimulating.
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