Stay Free - Russel Brand - Yanis Varoufakis (Understanding the cost of living catastrophe)

Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek politician, economist and political philosopher who has been a member of the European Parliament for the past three years. In this episode, we talk about how a financial elite has reached a state of total domination around the world, and how there are invisible barriers that prevent you accessing power and prevent you from ever being made accountable for the decisions and actions you take. We also talk about the role of the media, and the role that it plays in keeping people fractured, separate, disparate and unable to unify. This is a deep conversation, so deep it gets under the skin, that I wanted to call it something like cut to the bone, but people said that sounds disgusting. But it s actually, it tells a story which is much broader in terms of its application, because it s 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. And what can we do to arrest it? And how can we stop it from happening in the first place? This podcast is going to make you a lot smarter. Subscribe to Subcutaneous to get access to more episodes like this, and to learn more about what s going on in the world and what's going on around the globe. You ll get a better idea of what s really going on and why it s so important to be a smart human being, not just smart, not smart, but smart, smart, and smart, intelligent, not dumb, not stupid, smart. Subcut to the core. If you enjoyed this podcast, you ll, then you ll love this one! Subscribe and tweet me to let me know what you think about it! Timestamps: 0:00:00 - What do you thought of this podcast? 3:30 - What does it mean to be smart? 5:00 | What are you looking for? 6:40 - How do you think it s getting deep? 7:15 - What s going to help you feel smarter? 8:00 9: What s your favourite part of the story? 10:30 | What s a good day? 11:30 12: How do I feel about the world? 13: Is it possible to be smarter than you feel like it s better than the rest? 15:15 16:20 - Why is it better than that?

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to my new podcast, Subcutaneous.

00:00:02.000 If you enjoyed Under the Skin, you'll love this, because subcutaneous means under the skin, but it's probably a slightly fancier word.

00:00:09.000 We're going to dive deeply into the minds of people like Elon Musk, Vandana Shiva and Eckhart Tolle.

00:00:16.000 Now, there's a cost-of-living crisis devouring our planet.

00:00:21.000 Wherever you are in the world, it's likely that you are being impeded, that you're experiencing an energy crisis.

00:00:27.000 In our country, the UK, our energy bills are doubling in size.

00:00:32.000 Perhaps this is because we are seeing the neoliberal experiment reaching its crescendo.

00:00:39.000 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.

00:00:47.000 Think simply of the example of the funding for the recent vaccines.

00:00:50.000 Do you know how those vaccines were funded in the experimental phase?

00:00:53.000 You funded them.

00:00:54.000 Taxpayer money funded that experimentation.

00:00:57.000 Do you know what happened when it came to paying for them?

00:00:59.000 You paid for them!

00:01:01.000 It was your tax money that paid for them.

00:01:03.000 Today, in our conversation with Yanis Varoufakis, we talk about how a financial elite has reached a state of total domination around the world.

00:01:11.000 How there isn't just one planet, there are several.

00:01:14.000 There are invisible barriers that prevent you accessing power and prevent these elites ever being made accountable.

00:01:21.000 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.

00:01:27.000 This is going to make you a lot smarter.

00:01:31.000 Please now enjoy this extract from Subcutaneous.

00:01:34.000 That's our deep conversation.

00:01:36.000 So deep it gets under the skin.

00:01:37.000 I wanted to call it something like cut to the bone, but people said that sounds disgusting.

00:01:42.000 After the 2008 crash, whether you were living in a European nation or the United States of America, ordinary people generally suffered.

00:01:52.000 The consequences of that crash are perhaps being felt still, exacerbated by the pandemic.

00:01:59.000 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.

00:02:13.000 But it seems to me, with energy companies continuing to profit in the way that they are, that this cannot be the only factor.

00:02:22.000 There are a few questions in this.

00:02:24.000 One is, what do you see as being the solidarity between all people of the world?

00:02:31.000 Not that I'm suggesting any kind of centralised government at any point.

00:02:34.000 I believe in autonomy, I believe in localised authority, I believe in true democracy.

00:02:38.000 That's one area of it, but a degree of global solidarity of ordinary working people, of all descriptions, persuasions and views.

00:02:47.000 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.

00:02:59.000 What can we do to arrest it?

00:03:02.000 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?

00:03:12.000 What do you have to say on this, dear Yanis?

00:03:15.000 I'll give you an example from little pipsqueak Greece here. 0.99

00:03:20.000 Because it's actually, it tells a story which is much broader in terms of its application.

00:03:26.000 Here in Greece we have six oligarchs and one hedge fund stationed in London called CBC.

00:03:34.000 They own the electricity producers and the electricity providers.

00:03:40.000 They also own the media.

00:03:42.000 Every single television channel and newspaper is owned by the same people.

00:03:47.000 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.

00:04:08.000 And they're using these funds in order to ensure that they are buying out every journalist that appears on their channels.

00:04:17.000 Channels that they own.

00:04:18.000 I'm a parliamentary leader in Greece now for three years.

00:04:21.000 My party is in Parliament.

00:04:23.000 Do you know how many times I've appeared on standard television channels like the equivalent of the BBC and ITV and Channel 4?

00:04:32.000 It's a rhetorical question.

00:04:33.000 Every day?

00:04:34.000 Every day.

00:04:38.000 So, you know, this is a very small example of what's going on worldwide.

00:04:45.000 But Russell, allow me, because, you know, your question is so... I mean, it contains almost everything that happened after the Second World War.

00:04:55.000 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.

00:05:08.000 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.

00:05:18.000 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.

00:05:28.000 So for 20 years, The West had the common currency, the dollar.

00:05:33.000 We had fixed exchange rates.

00:05:34.000 The exchange rate between the pound and the dollar and the yen and so on didn't shift for 20 years, right?

00:05:42.000 It was a managed system.

00:05:44.000 And it was actually the only time when capitalism seemed to be working, seemed to be working.

00:05:50.000 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.

00:06:05.000 Now, why did that happen?

00:06:06.000 Because you had boring finance.

00:06:09.000 There were capital controls.

00:06:11.000 Rich people could not take billions from one country and speculate in another.

00:06:17.000 There were restrictions in the movement of money.

00:06:20.000 No restrictions in the movement of trade, which is not a bad thing.

00:06:25.000 And the most important thing was that the whole thing was predicated on America having surpluses.

00:06:31.000 America was selling more to the world than it was buying from the world.

00:06:34.000 Because after the Second World War, the rest of the world was in smithereens, right? 0.67

00:06:37.000 So we were buying American cars, American washing machines, and so on and so forth.

00:06:41.000 And so America had a dollar surplus as a result of the net exports to Europe and Japan.

00:06:48.000 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.

00:06:58.000 It was very, it was always rational, the system.

00:07:02.000 But that system blew up in the late 60s for a very simple reason.

00:07:05.000 America stopped to be a surplus country.

00:07:07.000 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.

00:07:24.000 And so that was the first period.

00:07:27.000 That collapses in 1971 under Richard Nixon.

00:07:30.000 And then we have the reversal of this.

00:07:32.000 What happens is this.

00:07:34.000 The United States goes deeply into the red.

00:07:37.000 It starts importing from the rest of the world almost everything. 0.62

00:07:40.000 From Germany, from Italy, from Japan, and of course later from China.

00:07:45.000 It was operating like a huge vacuum cleaner that was sucking into American territory the goods produced by these exporting countries.

00:07:53.000 Now the question is, who was paying for that?

00:07:57.000 Any other country doing that would have gone bust. 0.91

00:08:00.000 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.

00:08:22.000 So that was a recycling.

00:08:25.000 It was not ecological recycling, but it was financial capitalist recycling.

00:08:29.000 And that was a period during which we had financialisation, you had Thatcher, you had Reagan.

00:08:34.000 To do this they had to unshackle finance, to let the City of London, Wall Street, go haywire, do anything they wanted.

00:08:41.000 And that came to a crushing end in 2008, when this tsunami of financial capital, under the weight of its own hubris, collapsed.

00:08:52.000 And then we have the period between 2008 and the pandemic.

00:08:56.000 Which was, briefly put, socialism for the bankers and austerity for everybody else.

00:09:04.000 By that what I mean is this.

00:09:06.000 All the banks, every single bank in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union went bust.

00:09:16.000 Every single bank.

00:09:18.000 It was a gigantic implosion of financialized capitalism.

00:09:23.000 And the states, central banks primarily, but also governments, saved them.

00:09:27.000 They bailed them out.

00:09:30.000 Something that never happened in 1929, which was the other equivalent financial crash.

00:09:36.000 That's socialism for the bankers.

00:09:37.000 You have the state, Providing the dough that keeps the bankers alive.

00:09:43.000 Constant socialism, right?

00:09:46.000 Lavish socialism for the bankers.

00:09:50.000 And austerity for everybody else.

00:09:51.000 Remember George Osborne in your country, the Troika in my country.

00:09:55.000 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.

00:10:04.000 Because the states were retrenching.

00:10:08.000 Much, much faster than the federal government was stimulating.

00:10:11.000 Listen and watch the full conversation by joining Stay Free AF.

00:10:15.000 To get the rest of it go and join Stay Free AF for the rest of this conversation and conversations with Vandana Shiva, Eckhart Tolle.

00:10:21.000 Join us for special Q&As weekdays after our daily show Stay Free with Russell Brand on Rumble.

00:10:26.000 There's a link in the description to that as well.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - October 11, 2022

Yanis Varoufakis (Understanding the cost of living catastrophe)

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