Russell Brand and Yanis Vaynerchuk discuss the latest in the cost of living crisis, Julian Assange's acquittal and the deep state ploy to get Donald Trump to pardon Julian Assange. Plus, a new episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand. Stay Free is a podcast that aims to help people around the world get a good night s rest and get some rest so they can be their best, most restful day of the week. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/StayFree and use the promo code STAYFREE at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase when you enter the code StayFree at checkout. To support StayFree, visit stayfree.org/donations and make sure to leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, too! StayFree is a non-profit organisation that helps people everywhere get a decent night's rest, a good nights rest, and a good start in their day to day life. Don t forget to give us a small donation to StayFree.org.uk and help us keep us out of your local shops! Stay Free. Thank you so much for all your support, stay free, stay safe, stay woke, stay happy, and stay free! xoxo, Caitie Caitie & Jodie xx - The Duke of Cambridge, PhD - The Daily Mail - The Thick & The Dark Lord - The Vagrant, The Good Lady - The Good Wife, The Badot, The New York Times Magazine - The Fucking Truth, The Fcking News, and The Good Fight, The Thickness, The Vagabond, The Ugly, The News, The Pizzazz, The Irishman, The Oldest, The Greatest, & The Good Morning, The Most Beautiful, The Cute, The Nonsense, The People s Guide to the Good Life, and So Much More! - And so much more! - Stay Free, Stay Awake. - This episode is sponsored by Stay Free! . . . and Stay Awakened. . , The Good Thing, Stay awake. , Stay awake, Stay free, Stay Woke, Stay woke, and Stay awake! , And so on and so on. (Thank you, Thank you, Stay w/ love you, Cheers, - Carolyn Joy
00:06:01.000Is it Putin's price hikes, or is it energy conglomerates and powerful globalist interests that prevent us from being able to have access to the most simple resources, let alone the deep power within us all?
00:06:16.000It's always worth remembering, isn't it, that reality passes through human psyche.
00:06:22.000Every single social system ever designed at some point has to pass through human consciousness.
00:06:57.000The money that you donate, you know, you can do those little donations, we give that money to the Stay Free Foundation.
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00:07:09.000I'm not that... I'm saying that that's what...
00:07:13.000I'm sure it goes to all sorts of good places.
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00:08:13.000If you don't meditate yet, you've got to learn to meditate.
00:08:16.000You are simply not accessing a power deep within you that will bring you much serenity and peace, that will help you to get a different perspective on your life, that will help to free you from the constant intransigent nagging in your belly.
00:08:58.000Carolyn Joy, you got in touch saying, thanks for all you bring to us, it's very much appreciated.
00:09:02.000Here's some pictures of Ivy and Ruby, who prove canines and felines can be besties.
00:09:08.000How can we not achieve peace between Ukraine and Russia when that dog and cat...
00:09:13.000Against all odds, they're getting on so well.
00:09:16.000Mazza1, I used to listen to Above the Noise, so pleased you're still guiding us.
00:09:19.000My beautiful chocolate Burmese, Coco, often joins me for meditation.
00:09:24.000When I heard beautiful chocolate Burmese, all sorts of images went through my mind, but that's the one that I want you to focus on, that one, of a sort of Siamese-looking cat, but it's actual Burmese.
00:09:33.000AmandaGrace777, you don't know how much I needed this today, speaking about my meditation.
00:09:37.000Here's a picture of Carl, my foster dog, who I'm adopting tomorrow.
00:09:40.000I didn't know that, that there's a sort of a process where you sort of foster a dog, and then ultimately it becomes your dog, as long as you get on with it, I suppose.
00:10:51.000One of the great guests we've had live on Rumble has been Stella Assange, wife of Julian Assange, currently in Belmarsh Prison, put there because of his revelations that damaged US reputation.
00:11:04.000He told the truth about US foreign policies and some of the unnecessary deaths that were caused.
00:11:10.000The CIA threatened to have him killed.
00:11:15.000I asked Stella, did you ever think that Trump would pardon Assange?
00:11:19.000The reason I asked it is because I know a lot of you like Donald Trump and think that Donald Trump was a genuine maverick and a genuine opponent of the establishment and, you know, they want you but they need to get me to get to you.
00:11:34.000So I asked Stella, how come if Trump was a genuine outsider and a genuine maverick, how come he didn't pardon Assange and Snowden as part of his presidential pardoning campaign?
00:12:08.000So that's an opportunity which I thought, you know, it could work for Julian and, you know, he's my husband, he's the person I love the most, so I will try anything I can to get him free.
00:12:20.000Did you think that Trump might pardon Snowden and Assange, genuine enemies of the establishment, patriots in their way?
00:12:28.000I would say righteous people in their way.
00:12:30.000Edward Snowden, I think, was motivated purely by a love of America and American values.
00:12:35.000Julian Assange, I think, is a person that believes In telling the truth.
00:12:39.000These people are human beings, I'm not suggesting they're anything other than flawed human beings, but why are they in the position that they're currently in?
00:12:45.000Why is Snowden exiled in Russia, having sought solace in other nations first?
00:12:50.000Why is Assange currently in a British prison?
00:12:54.000Now I know there's a counter-argument that usually predicates on putting the lives of military personnel in danger and I think that would be unforgivable.
00:13:01.000I'm very supportive of the military and I think the people that have the biggest obligation to look after American military personnel are the Pentagon or the British military.
00:13:09.000Those are the people that should be looking after them by paying them properly, taking care of them when they're in service and certainly taking care of veterans and I think there's a lot of questions to be asked there.
00:13:18.000Have a look at Glenn Greenwald on Breaking Points when asked about the same story.
00:13:21.000He suggests that Trump was on the precipice of pardoning both Snowden and Assange, but was persuaded to do otherwise.
00:13:29.000Who has the power to persuade Trump to do other things?
00:13:31.000What does that suggest about democratic power?
00:13:33.000If people are more powerful than the president, particularly if that president's like a crazy, ego-led person like Trump, rather than a sort of near-cadaver like the current White House occupant, who has sufficient power to manipulate these apparently potent marionettes?
00:13:48.000There was real movement inside the Trump administration to give particularly Snowden a pardon.
00:13:53.000It came much closer to Snowden than they did to Assange.
00:13:56.000And if you think about it, why would they have initiated an impeachment proceeding against a president who within a couple of weeks was on his way out?
00:14:04.000And the reason, Crystal, was that they were very afraid that on his way out, Trump was going to do a bunch of stuff Including not just giving pardons to Snowden and Assange, but also declassify all kinds of documents he had been threatening to declassify about the CIA, about the Kennedy assassination.
00:14:22.000And the only leverage they had against Trump doing what they considered crazy stuff on his way out was the second impeachment trial.
00:14:30.000And they explicitly communicated to Trump, multiple Republican kind of hawkish senators did,
00:14:35.000that if you do what we know you're thinking about doing, what Rand Paul and Matt Gaetz and others were encouraging
00:15:41.000Does that not feel like an impingement not only on your free speech, but your free thought?
00:15:46.000Whilst I'm not an advocate of Donald Trump, I can see that Trump was a figure That was a berserker, a disruptor.
00:15:52.000Even though Trump gave tax breaks to the rich and did things that I recognize are not going to help ordinary Americans and therefore don't address the fundamental issues that democracy must address, I can see that he agitated establishment figures like the Clintons and evidently he had an impact on the figures that are more deeply buried whose names we don't even know.
00:16:12.000Does that relate to the documents that he then takes to Mar-a-Lago?
00:16:16.000Because there's some reporting that the documents that he took there were, you know, related to Russiagate.
00:16:22.000What I know for sure is that Trump was threatening to declassify all of those documents relating to Russiagate because Trump believes, I think, with a lot of validity, That there were crimes committed or at least ethical transgressions committed during the 2016 election to create and manufacture Russiagate.
00:16:42.000And I don't know exactly which documents he took.
00:16:44.000Nobody really knows exactly which documents he took.
00:16:47.000But it certainly seems to align with everything I knew at the time, which was that Trump wanted those documents public.
00:16:54.000Had the power to declassify them and now his defense is that he did.
00:16:58.000It's amazing to consider that a figure like Donald Trump rose to power.
00:17:02.000Perhaps it's even more amazing to consider a figure like Joe Biden could occupy office.
00:17:06.000Yet more significant to note the amount of censorship that took place on social media platforms to enable Biden's unimpeded ascendancy.
00:17:15.000We are living at a time when we need to question power.
00:17:18.000The invisible power that's evidently present While the artifice of power in the form of the Republican Party and the Democrat Party shift and interchange without, I would say, ever making a real impact on issues that are symbolically significant and meaningful also, like the imprisonment of Assange and the exiling of Edward Snowden.
00:17:36.000This is an opportunity for us to observe how entrenched these power systems really are.
00:17:41.000When you see the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street, when you see the significant comparisons that can be made between the policies of both parties, When you can see successive administrations entering and leaving office without real change for American people on the issues that matter, you have to bring this question to the forefront of your mind.
00:18:25.000But I would think there's certainly a relationship between his belief that documents were being hidden that should be seen and his decision to remove a lot of documents out of the White House tomorrow.
00:18:34.000Can you imagine how you would have felt if Trump on leaving office had pardoned Julian Assange, pardoned Edward Snowden?
00:18:41.000How that would change the political landscape.
00:18:43.000Imagine if he had released files pertaining to the assassination of JFK and other issues that are the center of conspiracy.
00:18:51.000Is it possible that Donald Trump was a genuine outsider?
00:18:55.000that genuinely wanted to make revelations about the machinations of American power, but was stopped by a deep state system?
00:19:03.000Let me know what you think about that.
00:19:06.000Let me know in the chat if you think that Trump was on the brink of revealing things that would shake the state and the state system to their very foundations.
00:19:15.000This is a further confirmation that there is classified information that exists, that if you knew about it, if I knew about it, if we knew about it, we would no longer be able to give our trust over to the state.
00:19:27.000We would realise that there are levels of corruption, hypocrisy, assassinations, murders, Plots and lies that would mean, well how can we trust these people?
00:19:36.000How can we trust them to run schools, hospitals, build roads, conduct international diplomacy, when evidently on the basis of this secrecy alone, we can see that ultimately they are self-interested politicians.
00:20:07.000Maybe the argument that I'd much rather live within American hegemony than Chinese hegemony or Russian hegemony holds true.
00:20:15.000And I should thank my lucky stars for those lucky stars and stripes.
00:20:19.000For me, if we're told that we live in a transparent democracy, if we're told it's us that elect our leaders, if we're told that America is the greatest and freest country in the world, why didn't Trump pardon Snowden?
00:21:06.000Go on, rumble like you mean it, for God's sake.
00:21:08.000And go over and watch that Stella Assange interview in full.
00:21:12.000To give yourself a little more insight on that peculiar case.
00:21:15.000Remember, any donations you give to us go to treatment centres where drug addicts and people with mental health issues are regularly helped.
00:21:22.000I want to welcome our new Stay Free AF members, Liberty Veritas and Amanda Grace.
00:21:28.000Now, there's a cost of living crisis devouring our planet.
00:21:33.000Wherever you are in the world, it's likely that you are being impeded, that you're experiencing an energy crisis.
00:21:40.000In our country, the UK, our energy bills are doubling in size.
00:21:44.000Perhaps this is because we are seeing the neoliberal experiment Reaching its crescendo.
00:21:51.000Julian 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.
00:21:59.000Think simply of the example of the funding for the recent vaccines.
00:22:02.000Do you know how those vaccines were funded in the experimental phase?
00:22:13.000It was your tax money that paid for them.
00:22:15.000Today, in our conversation with Yanis Varoufakis, we talk about how a financial elite has reached a state of total domination around the world.
00:22:23.000How there isn't just one planet, there are several.
00:22:26.000There are invisible barriers that prevent you accessing power and prevent these elites ever being made accountable.
00:22:33.000We'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.
00:22:40.000This is going to make you a lot smarter.
00:22:43.000Please now enjoy this 30-minute extract from Subcutaneous.
00:23:12.000Because some people are watching us live and then later people will be listening to this as a podcast, Yanis, and watching it on a variety of platforms.
00:23:19.000We will be disseminating this message in as many places as we possibly can.
00:23:34.000It's interesting that you open with that phrase, because a lot of people that consume our content are American, and they, I think, have a completely different perception of the left, and I imagine they envisage, based on my sort of casual observations and research, that the left is defined by identity politics, which, you know, any regular viewers of this channel will know I'm supportive of, but that I think a component of a political ideology that is about the empowerment of all people.
00:24:06.000And I feel, Yanis, that there's a lot that you can teach us.
00:24:09.000And I want to start, first of all, by talking about political and financial corruption in the United States of America.
00:24:18.000For example, the New Stock Act has been introduced that has a loophole in it that means that one way or another, People in Congress in the United States will continue to be able to trade in stocks and shares that they regulate.
00:24:31.000It's been recently revealed that 20% of American Congress people own stocks and shares in companies that they literally sit on boards to regulate.
00:24:41.000We know that Barack Obama, who was the great hope of the center-left ...introduced a stock act and then nullified it and neutered it sort of a year after it had been much trumpeted.
00:24:53.000So, in a sense, I would, first of all, I guess, could we talk a little about the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street and how it seems like that, for example, Trump's rhetoric around the swamp and draining the swamp was to a degree legitimate, although neither you or I would imagine that Donald Trump would be, or his sort of ideas would be the
00:25:35.000Insiders are the people who, the way that it was described to me once by Larry Summers, the great of the greatest insiders in the United States, academic, political, financial, Establishment.
00:25:52.000He said to me once, when we had just met, I was finance minister of Greece at the time, and he was actually helping me, because he was quite peeved with the way that the German government was throttling the people of Greece.
00:26:08.000Not because he was a philanthropist and a humanitarian, and he gave a damn about the people of Greece, but because he thought that what Germany was doing to Greece was creating repercussions that were negative for American financial capital.
00:26:20.000So it was a kind of wolves friendship for a very short period of time, during which we met in a Washington DC hotel.
00:26:30.000And after a long discussion, when we agreed on a couple of things that we had in common regarding our common objectives, he turned around and said to me, Yanis, let me ask you, what kind of politician are you?
00:26:45.000I looked at him and said, define your terms.
00:26:48.000He said, listen, inside this are people who enter the system and they accept the rules of the system in return they get information which is vital crucial information that the system shares with them and they can make minor marginal changes to the system and then there are outsiders people who prefer to speak their minds and
00:27:18.000You know, who will be jettisoned by the system very, very, very soon.
00:27:21.000And the key difference is that the insider never turns on other insiders.
00:27:52.000The only difference between Trump and the rest was that Trump was a better liar than the others.
00:27:56.000When he was saying, I'm going to drain the swamp.
00:27:59.000And I'm going to stop the revolving doors.
00:28:02.000And I'm going to stop the revolving doors.
00:28:04.000What revolving doors was he referring to?
00:28:07.000He was referring to situations where, I remember, during 2008, the great financial collapse, you had Hunt Paulson, who was the Minister of Finance of the United States, the US Treasury Secretary, What was his job for decades before he was the CEO of Goldman Sachs, the vilest and most apoplectically disgusting financial firm on Wall Street.
00:28:39.000So he was He was there as Goldman Sachs' representative in the US government.
00:28:47.000And when Lehman Brothers went under, the only reason why he let Lehman Brothers go under, with all the repercussions that you know, is because he didn't actually like the head of Lehman Brothers, because they used to be competing CEOs.
00:29:00.000You know, you are the CEO of Goldman Sachs, then you become the finance minister, and then after you become the finance minister, you return to JP Morgan.
00:29:17.000He took the next CEO of Goldman Sachs and made him finance minister in the United States.
00:29:22.000So, you know, this is insider trading.
00:29:25.000The government has been absolutely utterly co-opted by the nexus of the military industrial
00:29:32.000complex, the Wall Street financial sector and big tech.
00:29:47.000The consequences of that crash are perhaps being felt still, exacerbated by the pandemic.
00:29:54.000Now, 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.
00:30:08.000But it seems to me, with energy companies continuing to profit in the way that they are, that this cannot be the only factor.
00:30:19.000One 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.
00:30:41.000Two, 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.
00:30:56.000And 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?
00:31:07.000What do you have to say on this, dear Yanis?
00:31:10.000I'll give you an example from little pipsqueak Greece here.
00:31:14.000Because it's actually, it tells a story which is much broader in terms of its application.
00:31:20.000Here in Greece we have six oligarchs and one hedge fund stationed in London called CVC.
00:31:28.000They own the electricity producers and the electricity providers.
00:31:37.000Every single television channel and newspaper is owned by the same people.
00:31:42.000During 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.
00:32:03.000And they're using these funds in order to ensure that they are buying out every journalist that appears on their channels.
00:32:33.000So, you know, this is a very small example of what's going on worldwide.
00:32:40.000But Russell, allow me, because, you know, your question is so... I mean, it contains almost everything that happened after the Second World War.
00:32:50.000So, 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.
00:33:03.000After 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.
00:33:23.000So for 20 years, The West had the common currency, the dollar.
00:33:39.000And it was actually the only time when capitalism seemed to be working.
00:33:45.000It was a time, you remember, between the 50s and 60s of the baby boomers, a period of high growth, very low inflation, Very low unemployment and shrinking inequality in the 50s and the 60s.
00:34:06.000Rich people could not take billions from one country and speculate in another.
00:34:11.000There were restrictions in the movement of money.
00:34:15.000No restrictions in the movement of trade, which is not a bad thing.
00:34:20.000And the most important thing was that the whole thing was predicated on America having surpluses.
00:34:25.000America 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?
00:34:32.000So we were buying American cars, American washing machines, and so on and so forth.
00:34:36.000And 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.
00:34:53.000It was very, it was always rational, the system.
00:34:57.000But that system blew up in the late 60s for a very simple reason.
00:34:59.000America stopped to be a surplus country.
00:35:02.000It 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.
00:35:28.000The United States goes deeply into the red.
00:35:31.000It starts importing from the rest of the world almost everything.
00:35:35.000From Germany, from Italy, from Japan, and of course later from China.
00:35:40.000It was operating like a huge vacuum cleaner that was sucking into American territory the goods produced by these exporting countries.
00:35:48.000Now the question is, who was paying for that?
00:35:51.000Any other country doing that would have gone bust.
00:35:55.000But 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.
00:38:16.000When you have austerity for the many, and you print money and you give it to the rich, to the financiers, the financiers then lend it to big business, big business gets all these trillions from the central banks.
00:38:31.000They look out there, out of the window, and what they see is that multitudes, the masses, were impecunious because of austerity.
00:38:41.000I'm not going to create, you know, a Tesla competitor if you're in Germany.
00:38:46.000I'm not going to create new, fancy, high-value products because, you know, the hoi polloi out there cannot afford it.
00:38:53.000So what do you do with the dough that comes your way if you're a big business person and money that has been freshly minted by the Fed comes your way?
00:39:02.000You go to the stock exchange and you buy back your own shares.
00:39:05.000Because that pushes your share price up.
00:39:07.000Your bonuses are connected and your dividends are connected to your share price.
00:39:19.000There is no investment, not even in capital goods, in manufacturing, in green technologies, in energy.
00:39:27.000That explains why Germany has been sitting on surpluses now for 20 years and they're still struggling to produce electricity after all those years.
00:39:53.000During the lockdown, however, they had to do also something else.
00:39:56.000They had to give some of the money, some of the money they were making, for the first time since 2008, give it to the poor people.
00:40:02.000Because otherwise it would be a revolution.
00:40:05.000You lock down people, you give them some fairly low wages in order to keep them fed and quiet.
00:40:12.000So at the time when the lockdown was crushing supply, supply chains, the availability of goods was gone because of lockdowns, and 13 years of underinvestment.
00:40:25.000At that time, the hoi polloi get a little bit of money printed by the central bank.
00:40:30.000So you have an increase in demand because the many now have a little bit more money.
00:40:53.000Because they're damned if they do, they're damned if they don't.
00:40:57.000If they increase interest rates, then all the zombie corporations, financiers, banks, states that have been addicted to the free money over the last 13 years will go bust.
00:41:10.000If they don't increase interest rates, inflation will go back to 1970s standards.
00:41:18.000The media, in the meantime, I gave the little Greek example, is owned by the same people who've been practicing socialism for the very few, for the bankers and the big finance, and austerity for everybody else.
00:41:33.000And, meanwhile, you've got working classes that have been completely divided.
00:41:40.000Completely divided between people who still have a decent job, the precariat, who don't give a damn about the rest of the working class because they think the rest of the working class does not have their interests in mind at all if you are peddling around London for Deliveroo.
00:42:02.000You don't feel that the trade union movement is on your side.
00:42:06.000You don't feel that the rest of the working class gives a damn about you.
00:42:10.000So, what Thatcher began in the 1970s and 80s, which is to divide and rule over the working class in Britain, has now become a worldwide phenomenon.
00:42:22.000Working classes are being turned against working classes.
00:42:25.000This is what the fascists, neo-fascists like Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Meloni in Italy, Orban, this is what they do.
00:42:33.000They invest in, you know, my country is greater than your country.
00:42:37.000My working class, I'm going to look after my working class against your working class with tariffs and all that.
00:42:44.000So you've got effectively a postmodern version of the 1920s and 30s of the mid-war period during which the only serious Resistance against the liberal, so-called liberal, illiberal establishment comes from neo-fascists, who are stoking up the fires of nationalism, of racism, of dividing one working class from another working class.
00:43:13.000Sorry, that was too long an answer, but your question was very packed, mate.
00:43:17.000I liked that answer, and we will release that answer in its complete form to as many people as possible.
00:43:24.000The only points that I would like to pick up on is to the final flourish, almost the denouement of your 20-minute beautiful response.
00:43:34.000Was that it's the ethno-nationalism and retro-fascism and this sort of post-modern nationalism that you cited is enhancing and increasing social tensions through their policies, their ideals and their rhetoric.
00:43:51.000I also feel that the centre-left, which I regard now as a subset of neoliberalism, distinct in ways that are only A superficial, an artificial, they do their part too in stoking those divisions.
00:44:05.000For example, in Clinton's, Hillary Clinton's, condemnation of Trump supporters as, you know, invert commas, Nazis, because of like they did that America first, one finger salute, while simultaneously praising Georgia Maloney for being, you know, like a woman, glass ceiling, but also maybe a fascist as well, you know.
00:44:29.000Also, because when someone like Maloney is able to say, I will stand as a woman, as a Catholic, as a supporter of families, those ideas taken at face value, I believe are valuable ideas and ideas that have been neglected.
00:44:47.000Whether or not I'm setting you up for long, long answers here.
00:44:52.000you're not a part of this group then fuck you. You know that's like yeah that's a longer conversation
00:44:57.000and a relevant conversation but a conversation that wouldn't be necessary if there was a
00:45:01.000meaningful party representing ordinary working people at the national and international level.
00:45:08.000A few other things I just want to pick up on is like I'm setting you up for long long answers
00:45:13.000here I recognize this Yanis and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to listen. In this country of
00:45:18.000course like Liz Truss has just sort of exploded it seems like a not even an economic time bomb
00:45:25.000an economic bomb because it sort of went off immediately.
00:45:28.000I'd love you to explain that for me and our audience, like in sort of simple terms, what she did and why it's been so negative so immediately.
00:45:36.000I'm curious as to why banker bonuses caps were simultaneously removed as part of this package.
00:45:42.000And I wonder if you would like to comment too on the broad but helpful proposition from Julian Assange
00:45:51.000that the function of modern government, I think he's talking in particular about America but I feel like it
00:45:56.000applies elsewhere, is to extract, and it sort of seems like a post-Thatcherite
00:46:00.000notion, extract public money and place it into private hands.
00:46:04.000So I wonder if you could elaborate on that Assange maxim a little more.
00:46:09.000But start with, if you don't mind sir, a little breakdown of trusts' budget.
00:46:15.000I hope I'll be more succinct than that.
00:46:17.000the role of neoliberalism from the left and their culpability in creating the conditions
00:46:22.000that you just described and sort of attributed more it seemed to me to be a problem of the
00:46:27.000right rather than the left and I just want to present the alternative view as well and
00:46:32.000that's my question. See you in 20 minutes.
00:46:35.000I hope I'll be more succinct than that. Rasta let me begin with Trash, with Lizzie.
00:46:46.000Okay, apart from the fact that she's clearly incompetent, because she made such a spectacular mess of it within seconds of getting her hands on the steering wheel.
00:46:58.000What we have here is a clear case of what Marx once said, that when history repeats itself, it is as farce.
00:47:06.000And the history I'm referring here to is her attempt to distance herself from Rishi Sunak.
00:47:13.000Her great opponent within the Tory party, whom she defeated in order to become Prime Minister, and Boris Johnson, whom she replaced.
00:47:23.000She decided that she's going to, I don't know whether she believes in it or not, but at least this is the strategy, it's a clear strategy, to present herself as a revivalist Thatcherite.
00:48:02.000Now, Thatcher, I lived through this, I remember, I was in England during every one of Thatcher's years, unfortunately.
00:48:14.000absolutely a master strategist when it came to combining an intensified class war against the working class with brilliant communication.
00:48:26.000So her line was, for instance, on the one hand, that the state has to wither, which by the way is an expression first used by Karl Marx, the state has to wither to make space for people to actually be creative and do stuff.
00:48:47.000And by that she meant reduce tax rates, reduce regulation, get the state out of people's way.
00:48:58.000But secondly, the tax cuts that she introduced were always the kind of tax cuts which simultaneously keep the lid on The government budget deficit.
00:50:31.000She understood that in order to create the appearance of growth, short-term growth that she capitalized on politically, electorally.
00:50:41.000She won every election, you know, I mean to the extent I had to leave Britain at some point and migrate to Australia because she was winning everything.
00:50:49.000The way to do it was by Just as Julian Assange said.
00:50:53.000I wrote an article in the Guardian a few days ago saying the same thing.
00:50:57.000What she did was to liquidate public property and throw it into the cauldron of financial capital in the city.
00:52:22.000People actually went and borrowed money to buy their council homes.
00:52:26.000And she did the same thing with council homes.
00:52:28.000She threw the value that decades of working class effort had Put into council houses, took this value and threw it into the City of London.
00:52:38.000Because this is what happens when you go to the Barclays Bank or Royals Bank to borrow, you know, get a mortgage in order to buy a council house, you are financialising the house.
00:52:48.000This house that the working class built over years for itself.
00:52:52.000Now it's become part of the City of London.
00:53:05.000She thought she could, you know, play the role of the new Thatcher simply by announcing tax cuts here and more expenditure there and, you know, adopting the language of Thatcher.
00:53:53.000I like the fact, for instance, that you are adopting the mantra of liberty, that you're saying, you know, stay free, that you're talking about freedom.
00:54:00.000Because, Russell, you and I have talked about this before, the left, you know, when the left began in the 19th century, you know, trade unions, the Communist Manifesto, the whole paraphernalia of the left ideology, It was not about justice.
00:54:47.000And I'm mentioning this because we, the left, during the 20th century, all sorts of left, the communists, the socialists, the social democrats, the labour rights, we ended up Presenting ourselves as lovers of a state that will come from, you know, a cradle to our coffin to look after us once we give up some of our liberties.
00:55:28.000The reason why Trump succeeded was one word, Obama.
00:55:36.000It was Obama's failure, not failure, design to use a left-wing language in order to reinstate Larry Summers, the gentleman I mentioned at the beginning of our program, to the Treasury Minister.
00:55:55.000To take Tim Geithner, all those people who had unshackled Wall Street in the 1990s under Clinton, and who had caused the massive pain of blue-collar workers in the United States.
00:56:08.000Obama, who was voted by those blue-collar workers to give them a chance at having life prospects again.
00:56:18.000took the architects of Wall Street's emancipation, put them back through the revolving doors that you mentioned, in power, to bail out the bankers and create socialism for the very, very few.
00:56:35.000Well, Yanis Varoufakis, remember, that dude was running Greece during the time of the 2008 crash.
00:56:41.000So he's got real experience of the EU, real experience of government.
00:56:45.000If you want to listen to the rest of that conversation, it's available to our Stay Free AF members.
00:56:50.000At the moment we're doing an offer of $33 for a year of membership.
00:56:53.000Later in the year, my stand-up special, $33, will be dropping and you'll get that additionally.