Best of the Web

• 97% Owned | Documentary on Money

  This looks good…

  When money drives almost all activity on the planet, it’s essential that we understand it. Yet simple questions often get overlooked - questions like:

  • where does money come from?
  • Who creates it?
  • Who decides how it gets used?
  • And what does that mean for the millions of ordinary people who suffer when money and finance breaks down?

  97% Owned is a new documentary that reveals how money is at the root of our current social and economic crisis. Featuring frank interviews and commentary from economists, campaigners and former bankers, it exposes the privatised, debt-based monetary system that gives banks the power to create money, shape the economy, cause crises and push house prices out of reach.

  Fact-based and clearly explained, in just 60 minutes it shows how the power to create money is the piece of the puzzle that economists were missing when they failed to predict the crisis.

  Produced by Queuepolitely and featuring Ben Dyson of Positive Money, Josh Ryan-Collins of The New Economics Foundation, Ann Pettifor, the “HBOS Whistleblower” Paul Moore, Simon Dixon of Bank to the Future and Sargon Nissan and Nick Dearden from the Jubliee Debt Campaign, this is the first documentary to tackle this issue from a UK-perspective, and can be watched online now.

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• Greek leftist brings message to Europe - “Let’s talk”

  “The first reason we are taking this trip is because we want the governments of these important European Union countries, France and Germany, to see what we stand for: what is being transmitted in Europe about us is not what we represent and want,” Tsipras told Reuters at the office of his SYRIZA party.

  He will not be meeting government officials, but will see fellow leftists in France and Germany, including former French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon and Klaus Ernst and Gregor Gysi of Germany’s The Left. He will hold news conferences in both capitals to get his message to a wider audience.

  “We are not at all an anti-European force. We are fighting to save social cohesion in Europe. We are maybe the most pro-European force in Europe, because its dominant powers will lead the union into instability and the euro zone to collapse if they insist on austerity,” he said.

  While he repeated his assertion that the terms of a 130 billion bailout agreement Greece signed with international lenders in March are now a “dead letter”, he said that if he comes to power he will seek a new policy mix to keep Greece in the euro.

  “Yes, we do want Europe’s support and funding, but we don’t want the money of European taxpayers to be wasted. Two bailouts in a row went into the dustbin, into a bottomless barrel. If this continues we would need a third package in six months. Europeans and their leaders must realise this,” he said.

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• Damien Dempsey calls for a No vote in the 31st of May Fiscal Compact Treaty Referendum

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• Mandate: Vote No to the Austerity Treaty

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• Étienne Balibar: ‘Ejecting Greece from the eurozone would be a moral failure for Europe’ - video

  French Marxist philosopher Étienne Balibar discusses European identity amid the financial crisis. Using ideas explored in his 2002 book Politics and the Other Scene, he argues that the continent still has some way to go to rid itself of xenophobia.

  Guardian Comment is Free Video Interview

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• Greece: when the lights go out

  Ireland is not Greece, Michael Noonan has said. The two countries are so far apart that the only thing that reaches us is feta for our fancy salads. Yet, Phil Hogan is planning to use details from electricity bills to go after those who haven’t paid their household charge, just like they tried in Greece. Let’s see how that goes…

  The desperate cunning scheme to get Greeks to pay property taxes by bundling them with electricity bills didn’t last long. You guessed it, people stopped paying their electricity bills and now it looks like the power company - which had to be bailed out last month - has stopped even trying to collect the levy.

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• Greece: heading for the exit? | Michael Roberts

  There is a way out of this. But it’s not on the basis of the pro-banking, pro-capitalist policies of the Euro leaders. Greek state finances would be fine if the richest Greeks paid taxes and did not spirit their money offshore to buy property in Kensington, London or Monaco, with the connivance of Greek banks and politicians granting their wealthy friends and multinationals all kinds of tax advantages and favours that have diluted tax revenues to the point where there is not enough in the kitty to maintain public services.  According to the Tax Justice Network, over a trillion dollars lie in offshore banks and companies in tax havens (not all Greek money of course).  Recover this money and governments could not only reduce their debts but pave the way for a lowering of taxes across the board to encourage investment and growth and increase spending power for the majority.

  Capital controls, public ownership of the banks and major corporate sectors to organise a plan for investment and growth: this is not just an alternative programme for Greece but for all of Europe.

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• On ABC Radio National, PM program: ‘Stupendously idiotic’ policies for Greece can’t work.

  Good answers….

  MARK COLVIN: Well it’s being imposed effectively from Germany, isn’t it? What are the chances that Germany is going to have any patience with a Greece which has failed to form a coalition, which is going into uncharted territories, as you say, with a new election?

  YANIS VAROUFAKIS: It’s like asking the question, what kind of patience am I going to have with gravity? It doesn’t matter.

  (sound of Mark Colvin laughing)

  Gravity is a law of nature and I cannot do anything about it. Similarly, Germany at some point, and I think that that point has already come, Germany will realise that it is absolutely impossible to, for a country like Greece, or for Spain for the matter, to exit this debt deflationary spiral, through cutting. This cannot be done even if every single Greek and Spaniard and Italian wants to do it.

  Even if God, his angels and, you know, every good man and woman on this planet wanted to implement this German prescription on the European periphery, it cannot be done for the same reasons why I can’t fly without an aeroplane.

  MARK COLVIN: So what’s the alternative? Where’s the money going to come from for pump priming?

  YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, I don’t think we should have pump priming. What I think we should have in Europe is a little modicum, tiny whiff of rationality.

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• Video: David Graeber and David Harvey in Conversation

  David Graeber and David Harvey discuss their new books, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and Rebel Cities, respectively.

  25 April 2012 at The CUNY Graduate Center

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• Choonara, McNally and the US rate of profit | Michael Roberts

  As readers of my blog will know, ad nauseum…

  Oh go on then, say it again, once more with feeling….

  I think there has been a secular downtrend visible in the US rate of profit, but there is also a profit cycle in the US capitalist economy that lasts from trough to trough about 32-36 years.  I reckon that the last peak year of 1997 set the marker for the end of the ‘neoliberal’ up phase from 1982.  The down phase then began to exert pressure on the US capitalist economy.  It forced an even bigger switch from productive investment in manufacturing, transport and communications into financial and property sectors to maintain profits through the expansion of what Marx called fictitious capital, or credit.  That laid the basis for the crisis in 2007 and the ensuing major slump.  In that sense, Marx’s law of profitability did operate to cause the crisis.  The great up phase in profitability after 1982 had finished in 1997, some ten years before the Great Recession.  We are still in the down phase, which will last for at least another three to seven years, on my reckoning, in what is really a long depression like the 1880-90s in the US and the UK.

  But remember the data for these arguments are for the US only.

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