The neoliberal coup in Brazil

The slow motion neoliberal coup in Brazil, which masquerades as impeachment of the President for corruption, took another turn this week with the ousting of President Dilma Roussef and her replacement by Vice-President Michel Temer and the right -wing Brazilian Democratic Movement Party or PMDB (in Brazil impeachment results in the appointment of a person from a different party to that of the elected President).

Roussef was dismissed over allegations of accounting manipulation that supposedly misrepresented the fiscal position of the government. The allegations will be heard by the Brazilian Senate, which itself is awash with corruption.

In reality, her dismissal was a right-wing neoliberal coup by a right-wing party and their powerful corporate and business backers to wrench the country from the hands of a moderate left government and condemn Brazil to a path of unrepentant neoliberalism. This, despite the same right wing party losing 4 elections in the last 14 years.

In 2002, Brazil threw off the shackles of a 22 year long military dictatorship supported by the UK and US Governments, by electing the left wing Workers Party led by Lula Da Silva. 'Lula' was President until 2012 when he had to stand down because Brazilian Presidents cannot be in power for more than 3 terms. His replacement was Dilma Roussef who lead the Workers Party to a fourth election victory in 2014.

While the Workers Party implemented many important reforms- the minimum wage was doubled and public and social services expanded, poverty was reduced by 55 percent, extreme poverty by 65 percent and inequality reduced significantly- Brazil remains one of the most unequal countries in the world.

Although Roussef's party was mired in corruption scandals, she was not accused of impropriety. The collapse in the oil price hit Brazil's economy hard and forced Roussef to make severe cuts which demoralised her supporters. As her popularity plummeted Brazil's right wing corporate and political elite saw the opportunity to strike.

Political corruption is endemic in Brazil

Brazilian politicians are notoriously corrupt. Nearly 3/5 of the Brazil's congress (318 members) is under investigation or face charges, including many who backed her impeachment. The Speaker of the House who led the impeachment process is accused of squirreling away $5 million in Swiss bank accounts.

As Glenn Greenwald points out, Temer is a deeply corrupt and unpopular politician stained by his own corruption scandals. He is accused of involvement in an illegal ethanol purchasing scheme and was found guilty of, and fined for election spending violations for which he faces a 8 year ban on running for office.

Many members of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party have been involved in the most serious corruption scandal in Brazil’s history. Known as Operation Car Wash, the scandal involves hundreds of millions of dollars of money laundering and bribery surrounding the state-run Petrobras oil company.

A key agenda for impeaching Rousseff was to stop investigations of corruption against Congress members and media executives.

A neoliberal coup

The real purpose behind the coup was on display within days when Temer appointed a government made up of white male members of the BMDP, even though  they had lost 4 elections since 2002, including an election 18 months ago.

Seven of the ministers he appointed are under investigation for their alleged role in the Petrobras corruption scandal.

Temer showed his intention to serve the interests of his corporate and business backers. Without a mandate, Temer immediately announced a suite of neoliberal austerity measures, including sweeping cuts to government spending, reversing constitutional commitments to education and health spending, slashing pensions, cutting thousands of public sector jobs, freezing the minimum wage, gutting labour laws and weakening workers rights and privatisation of infrastructure, institutions and services.

Temer also announced his intention to appoint Goldman Sachs and IMF officials to run the economy.

Temer's appointments include  an agriculture minister who is an agribusiness billionaire known as the “soy king”, who is said to have destroyed more rain forest than any living person. The Minister of Justice is an open advocate of police repression.  In his previous role as Secretary of Public Security in São Paulo, he ordered the military police to invade a high school that had been occupied by students protesting against theft of funds allocated for school lunches. The Finance Minister is a former CEO of Bank of Boston and an advocate of extreme neoliberal economic policies.

US involvement in the coup

Once again, as in many other recent coups in Latin America, the hands of the US Government and US corporate and business interests are all over the Brazil coup.

The US President and Secretary of State were silent on the coup.

Wikileaks has recently exposed Temer's connections to the US Government. Wikileaks has  released declassified material showing that Temer was an embassy informant for US intelligence and military, raising serious questions about US Government and corporate involvement in the coup.

The damning evidence was provided in a series of tweets by the WikiLeaks Twitter account that linked Temer to diplomatic cables highlighting the information he provided to the U.S. military and National Security Council.

The USA has long opposed Roussef's independent-mindedness and participation in the BRICS trade grouping seeing it as a threat to US influence in the region. Edward Snowden's revelation that the NSA had been tapping her phone, led Roussef to deliver a blistering speech at the United Nations accusing the US of violating international law and violating “the principles that must guide the relations among…friendly nations".

Leftist governments in Brazil and Venezuela have long been targets of US destabilization efforts. Mark Weisbrot writes that the US has always supported coups against left wing governments in Latin America:

"...including — in just the 21st century — Paraguay in 2012, Haiti in 2011 and 2004, Honduras in 2009, and Venezuela in 2002. President Obama went to Argentina to lavish praise on the new right-wing, pro-U.S. government there, and the administration reversed its prior policy of blocking multilateral loans to Argentina. It could be a coincidence that the scandal at Petrobras followed a major NSA spying operation that targeted the company — or not. And within Brazil today, the opposition is dominated by politicians who favor Washington."

Democracy Now reported that in the lead up to the coup key Opposition leaders from the PMDP right wing party traveled to Washington to meet with and brief senior US officials.

There is also evidence that some of those involved in the coup have links to the US billionaires and influential political funders, the Koch Bros. The Free Brazil Movement, a far right group committed to neoliberal market solutions, is linked to groups financed by the Koch Bros.

Some groups actively involved in the coup also have direct links to corporations, big business and corporate elite in Brazil. The Chair of the group Students for Liberty has business interests connected to companies previous involved in the 1964 military coup and the organisation VemPra Rua (Come to the Streets) is funded by a foundation owned by Brazil's richest businessman.

As Glenn Greenwald writes, the Brazilian corporate media is a key player in what he calls a 'neoliberal coup', by drumming up and legitimizing corruption allegations and supporting impeachment, supposedly in the name of democracy and freedom and to protect against corruption. This is despite the new right-wing government being more corrupt that the one it replaced.

Reporters Without Borders wrote:

"In a barely veiled manner, the leading national media have urged the public to help bring down President Dilma Rousseff. The journalists working for these media groups are clearly subject to the influence of private and partisan interests, and these permanent conflicts of interests are clearly very detrimental to the quality of their reporting.”

Maria Luisa Mendonca, Director of Brazil Network for Social Justice and Human Rights noted the role of media outlets in calling for demonstrations against the Rousseff government and ignoring large demonstrations against the impeachment:

"A key player is Globo TV, which is known for supporting the military dictatorship that lasted more than 20 years in Brazil. Globo executives were recently mentioned in connection with the Panama Papers, and in the investigations against FIFA for illegal procedures in negotiating broadcast rights of soccer games. At the same time, large demonstrations against the impeachment and in defense of the democratic process that elected president Rousseff have been ignored by mainstream media."

Response to the coup
Street protests against the coup erupted across Brazil immediately and a group of over 800 international academics and intellectuals calling itself “Humanity Against the Coup in Brazil” released a statement  condemning the coup.

The new  government threatened  to criminalise and arrest protesters and demonstrators.

Leaders of other Latin America countries condemned the coup.

In this piece Lawrence Reichard writes on the response of some everyday Brazilians in the neighborhood where he lives in Rio.

Here in Australia there has been virtually no serious reporting of the Brazil, coup. The only reporting Australians get about Brazil focuses on Australia's preparation for the Rio Olympics.

In The Nation, Dave Zirin writes that the Brazil coup is yet another reason to protest the Rio Olympic Games. Zirin has written previously about the ways that the Brazilian corporate and political elite are exploiting the Rio Olympic Games for private economic gain and political power. Zirin has argued that the Rio Olympics cemented the coup.

There are growing calls for a boycott of the Rio Olympic Games in protest against the coup.

Corporate crime wave: Australia's epidemic of corporate criminality

“As crimes pile up they become invisible”

Bertolt Brecht

“Corporate crime poses a significant threat to the welfare of the community. Given the pervasive presence of corporations in a wide range of activities in our society, and the impact of their actions on a much wider group of people than are affected by individual action, the potential for both economic and physical harm caused by a corporation is great.”

Law Reform Commission of New South Wales

In two recent submissions, I argue that Australia is in the wake of a global and national epidemic of corporate and business malfeasance, lawlessness and criminality, and has become a haven for corporate and white collar crime.

Crimes committed by those at the top of the corporate (and political) hierarchy are routinely ignored or brushed under the carpet and Australia governments and the various regulatory authorities have failed to take action against increasingly egregious and escalating levels of unlawful and criminal conduct by corporations and business.

One submission was to an Australian Senate Inquiry into Penalties for White Collar Crime (which has since lapsed because of the government's dissolution of both houses.) My submission is available here as Submission No 18 under the banner of the Nemesis Project which I coordinate.

The second submission was to the Federal Attorney's General's public consultation on Deferred Prosecution Agreements for corporate and business crime (submission is not yet publicly available but will be here).

In the submission to the Senate Inquiry into Penalties for White Collar Crime, I argue that:

• Over recent decades legal and regulatory systems have been dismantled or loosened to remove constraints against corporate and investor profit-making and profit-taking.
• Corporate and white-collar crime is traceable to a gross failure of the law. Legal constraints have been cast aside or not applied to their fullest. Corporations and business groups have worked to limit the effectiveness of efforts to stamp out corporate crime. They make it more difficult to prosecute crimes.
• Corporations and business have actively subverted the law, as well as government regulation and ethical standards, in order to maximize their profits and ensure that resources flow to them. There has been a pervasive legal and political failure to control unlawful conduct by corporations and business.
• For decades, the regulatory authorities have failed to investigate and take action against corporate and white collar crimes.  Governments, corporate regulators and law enforcement authorities and politicians have been unwilling to take serious action against corporate criminals who knowingly swindle and harm ordinary Australians.
• The dominant response to corporate and business offending has been regulation rooted in co-operation. These strategies work predominantly to the advantage of powerful corporate and business interests.

These views were supported by numerous other submissions to the Senate Inquiry, as well as a recent report by the Australia Institute.

A submission to the Senate Inquiry by the the Economic Consultancy LF Economics provides a damming indictment of corporate criminality and control fraud within the FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate).

They contend that systemic criminal activity exists in the FIRE sector, with the full knowledge of all the regulatory authorities and State and Federal governments, and  places consumers at grave risk of having their finances and livelihoods destroyed.

LF Economics calls for much greater enforcement and prosecution of corporate and financial criminality:

Australians have been betrayed by the regulatory agencies’ neglect and continual siding with lenders and corporate management, despite their full knowledge of the catastrophic pain endured by many who have lost their homes, assets and life savings. ….. A strict focus on rules, regulations, standards, codes and penalties will have a negligible effect on control frauds because these crimes are simply ignored in reality. Two decades of fruitless inquiries and tweaking of innumerable rules and regulations has merely contributed to the losses endured by typical ‘mum and dad’ investors, now into many tens (perhaps hundreds) of billions of dollars. The nation already has an abundance of appropriate laws and regulations to contain and dismantle these control frauds, yet regulators are averse to enforcement, rendering these powers null and void.

The Australia Institute report Corporate Malfeasance in Australia shows that corporate malfeasance is endemic and widespread in Australia. Its findings include:

• Budget cuts enacted by the current government have compromised the ability to investigate corporate wrongdoing.
• There are hundreds of cases against corporations and business being pursued by Australian regulators each year, however progress is seriously impaired by the lack of staffing and resources.
•  There are fewer regulators ‘patrolling the corporate beat’ in Australia with government agencies responsible for monitoring corporate wrongdoing and malfeasance having their staffing cut between 14-16% since the 2013-14 Budget.

Despite this corporate crime wave, the Abbott/Turnbull Government is considering introducing a Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPA) Scheme to give corporations accused of wrongdoing and criminality the opportunity to defer prosecution in exchange for a monetary payment and compliance with a range of conditions. DPAs involve a shift from prosecution to compliance.

A DPA is a contractual agreement between government and a corporate entity that allows government to impose sanctions and set up and monitor institutional changes, in exchange for an agreement that government forego further investigation and corporate criminal indictment.

Governments and regulatory authorities (particularly in the USA and UK) have relied primarily on deferred prosecution agreements, however corporations and business continue to engage in unlawful and criminal conduct. Indeed, the criminality has intensified and become more brazen.

In the US, despite an epidemic of criminality, the authorities have been unwilling to charge and prosecute corporate criminals and one consequence of the adoption of DPA’s, is that Federal prosecutions of corporate and white collar crime is at a 20 year low.

In my submission, I argue that Deferred Prosecution Agreements are no solution to the epidemic of serious corporate malfeasance and criminality that has made Australia a haven for corporate crime.

There is no evidence that DPAs deter corporate and white collar crime and they may, in fact, encourage crime by reducing the threats of prosecution and incarceration. As the number of DPAs rise, the number of prosecutions decline.

My submission opposed the adoption of a DPA scheme in Australia.

How I miss Tony Judt

"Tony Judt was an inspiration: an intellectual Titan, a fierce warrior, a brilliant orator, a charismatic public intellectual. To be sure, he was all of the above. But he never set out to attain any of those accolades. He just wanted to say what he thought had to be said and say it until people noticed"
The Observor newspaper 

Six years have passed since the death of Tony Judt, the distinguished historian, public intellectual, political commentator, essayist and author.  His words, ideas and invigorating presence are missed in these troubled and dystopian times.

Judt was a speaker of unfashionable truths about history and the contemporary politics of Europe, America, and Israel. He was an outspoken critic of conventional wisdom and intellectual and academic dogma on many issues, including political and economic issues, social policy, American foreign policy, the war on terror, global politics, the future of Europe and the state of Israel. For his staunch criticism of Israel he was vilified and attacked.

Tony Judt died, aged 62, on 6th August 2010, just 2 years after he was diagnosed with  amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. ALS is a progressive motor-neuron disease that causes the central nervous system to degenerate. Over time, patients lose the ability to move their bodies, but retain full control over their minds.

Judt once described the effects of the disease as "progressive imprisonment without parole."

Within months of the symptoms appearing in 2008 he was paralyzed and unable to breathe without mechanical assistance.

Despite his illness, he produced some of his finest work during that time. 

He wrote the book Ill Fares the Land, a searing critique of market fundamentalism and the way we live today and an argument for a politics and economics shaped by ideas of progressive social democracy.

Judt argued that we face the terrifying prospect of perpetual insecurity and growing inequality as a result of the triumph of corporate power and market capitalism.

How prescient he was. Judt wrote:

"For 30 years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest. ... The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth-creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities [between] rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth."

Judt warned of a “new age of insecurity”- which has come to fruition. If social democracy had any future he argued, it had to be reformed, not as a set of idealist and utopian promises, but as a bulwark against all that had gone wrong during the 20th century.

Although he was critical of parts of the European left and key leftist figures, such as Eric Hobsbawn for their attachment to Soviet Communism, Judt presented the seemingly contradictory notion that a key task for the Left was to conserve its past achievements, as well as renew their moral appeal, whilst being able to change policies and develop new agendas where necessary.

Judt was prolific in the last years of his life and numerous collections of his essays, interviews and writings have appeared since his death, including, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010 (published in 2015), Thinking the Twentieth Century: Interviews between Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder (published in 2012) and The Memory Chalet (published in 2012).

Many of his essays can be found here at the New York Review of Books. 

Words were important to Tony Judt.

He believed that words lose their integrity when they privilege personal expression and rely on rhetorical flourishes. When this happens, Judt believes, public ideas that can be expressed and discussed through language fall into disrepair and eventually are lost.

Judt argues that the professionalization of writing, be it by academics, journalist, writers or politicians, favors obscurantism and has:

"encouraged the rise of a counterfeit currency of glib popular articulacy.. It is the performer rather than the subject, to whom the audience's attention is drawn".

His conclusion is a timely warning to us all:

"If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have".

Austerity kills

“If austerity were tested like a medication in a clinical trial, it would have been stopped long ago, given its deadly side effects…. One need not be an economic ideologue – we certainly aren’t – to recognize that the price of austerity can be calculated in human lives.”
David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu,“The body economic: Why austerity kills."

There is a chilling study in the latest edition of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine that shows that austerity measures, including reductions in income and welfare support imposed by the UK Government, are killing vulnerable elderly people in England.

The study shows a clear link between rising mortality rates among older people in England and the austerity measures imposed by the UK Government.

The authors conclude that:

" Rising mortality rates among pensioners aged 85 and over were linked to reductions in spending on income support for poor pensioners and social care"

One of the study authors is David Stuckler, whose 2013 book The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills (co-authored with Sanjay Basu) documents and describes the profoundly harmful effect of austerity policies on the health and wellbeing of vulnerable people and those who live precarious lives.

Stuckler argues that austerity policies imposed by national governments in response to economic crises bring about increases in disturbing public health and housing outcomes, particularly among the most vulnerable people.

He documents the unnecessary suffering and rising mortality rates associated with austerity policies.

Stuckler's book reveals that austerity polices in Europe and North America contributed to 10,000 additional suicides and a million extra case of depression.

Stuckler describes austerity as 'a public health disease". His conclusion is:

'Recessions harm but austerity kills'

Thomas Frank on why many Americans support Donald Trump

Thomas Frank has written some smart books on the links between the American political and corporate elite and the concerns and aspirations of everyday Americans, the rise of the political right, the failure of the Democratic liberal elite and why ordinary Americans often support politicians and policies that are counter to their own interests.

In a recent article in the Guardian [1] Frank drills down beneath all the rhetoric and outrage about Donald Trump to explore why large numbers of ordinary Americans support him.

Frank dismisses the simplistic moralizing and manufactured outrage of the media and political commentators who dismiss Trump’s working class supporters as ignorant and ill-informed bigots and racists.

As Frank notes, while Trump appears to be a racist himself, racism is not necessarily what motivates many of his followers. Instead Frank writes:

“A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America… ……when people talk to white, working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their place in it”

 

Franks suggests that part of Trump's appeal is that he is telling a tale as much about economic outrage, as it is about racism:

 

"Many of Trump’s followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama  and Hillary Clinton".

In a similar vein, Jeff Gupo [2] of the Washington Post argues that it is economic distress among older white people in many parts of the country that is driving many voters toward Donald Trump.

Gupo, who has delved into the connection between white mortality, economic anxiety and support for Trump writes:

"[I]t is nonetheless striking that Trump’s promise to "Make America Great Again" has been most enthusiastically embraced by those who have seen their own life's prospects diminish the most — not [only] in terms of material wealth, but in terms of literal chances of survival."

In his Guardian article, Thomas Frank refers to the findings of a recent study by Working America, an organization associated with US Unions, which interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January. 

The group found that support for Trump is strong, even among self-identified Democrats and not because people are racist or want a racist in the White House, but because Trump speaks about their number one concern- “good jobs and the economy”.

Of that study Frank writes:

“People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,” is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey “confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don’t have a future” and that “there still hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another.”
 

Frank cites Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council:

“These people aren’t racist, not any more than anybody else is,” he says of Trump supporters he knows. “When Trump talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs.”

“They look at that, and here’s Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way, but at least he’s representing emotionally. We’ve had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we’ve had to fight them to get them to represent us.”

Frank concludes:

"Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people’s concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a “creative class” that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn’t need to listen to them any longer.

Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed."[1] Thomas Frank 2016) Millions of ordinary Americans support Trump: here’s, the Guardian, March 7 2016

 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support

 [2] Jeff Gupo https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/death-predicts-whether-people-vote-for-donald-trump/

 

The connection between corporate money and climate change denial and skepticism

A study by Justin Farrell titled Corporate Funding and Ideological Polarization about climate change confirms what many have argued- that behind climate change scepticism and denial is corporate money. 

These findings are not surprising to many people. 

Advocacy and environmental groups have exposed this connection before (here, here and here). 

However, Farrell’s study is one of the few that directly demonstrates the connection between corporate money and the content and specific language used in public messages to encourage public scepticism and question or cast doubt on the science of climate change.

Farrell's study demonstrates, in stark terms, how corporate power and corporate money make it appear that there is more of a debate around climate change than actually exists, with the goal of creating public uncertainty and policy stalemate.

In an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Farrell analyses 20 years of data to show that corporations use their money and wealth to promote and amplify contrarian views about climate change and to create an impression of greater scientific uncertainly than actually exists.

 

Farrell used computer analytics to systematically examine printed matter published by 164 groups, including think-tanks and lobbying firms, and more than 4,500 individuals who have been skeptical of mainstream scientific views on climate change. Farrell analysed documents, statements, articles, policy papers and transcripts produced by these groups over 20-years.

In comparing the groups that received corporate funding with those that did not, Farrell found an an “ecosystem of influence” within corporate funded and supported groups.

 

Farrell found that groups that received corporate funding consistently promoted the same contrarian themes such as - climate change is cyclical in nature and that there are positive benefits to carbon dioxide. 

Over time, the effect of all these separate groups giving the same message is create an increased sense of cohesion. There was no evidence of such coordination among the non-funded groups.

Farrell concludes that corporate money “created a united network within which the contrarian messages could be strategically created and spread.”

He writes

“This counter-movement produced messages aimed, at the very least, at creating ideological polarization through politicized tactics, and at the very most, at overtly refuting current scientific consensus with scientific findings of their own.”

DiEM 25: A movement to take Europe back from authoritarianism, corporate rule and austerity

2015 saw a surge of  leftist and radical movements and the rise of anti-austerity forces across Europe.

So it is interesting to see this week's launch of DiEM 25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), a new left-wing cross-European progressive movement to democratise Europe and present alternatives to austerity and authoritarianism.

The purpose of DiEM is to act as a bridge to bring together the movements that flourished before 2015, together with Europeans awakened in 2015 (e.g. by the Athens Spring) who now see that the EU will either be democratised or it will disintegrate (with frightful repercussions for Europeans and for the world at large).

DiEM aims to provide existing movements and the new forces of progressive change with the ‘infrastructure’ necessary to build up the cross-European response.

The Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis launched DiEM 25  at the Volksbuehne theatre in Berlin, which is known as a landmark in German leftist activism.

Varoufakis left his position within the Greek leftist Syriza government in July 2015 after he refused to accept a third financial aid package from European Union creditors that imposed more rigid austerity terms on the Greek people.

Varoufakis claims that Europe is controlled by authoritarian technocrats and the leftist movement is necessary  to take back power from what he described as a shadowy world of bureaucrats, bankers, and unelected officialdom.

In speaking at the launch Varoufakis describing the EU’s current state as “a post-modern version of the 1930s,” and warned against a return to individual nation states and “building walls again.” He also warned against turning Greece and Italy into “concentration camps” for refugees.

Footage of the launch is here.

An outline of the launch and those involved is here.

In launching DiEM 25 Varoufakis said:

“To counter this de-politicisation of political decision making, which reinforces the economic crisis and the crisis of legitimacy facing Europe, we need a movement that rises up throughout in Europe, at once, with the same agenda everywhere to re-politicize political decisions and to democratize the decision making process,”

“There is no other means by which to arrest the awful feedback between authoritarianism and failed economic policies—a feedback that, left unchecked, will wreck Europe and help ultra-nationalism triumph.”  

DiEM's online manifesto is  here. One aim is  to prevent the disintegration of the European Union.

The Manifesto states:

Our goal to democratize Europe is terribly urgent, for without a swift start it may be impossible to chisel away at the institutionalized resistance in good time, before Europe goes past the point of no return. We give it a decade, by 2025.

If we fail to democratize Europe within, at most, a decade; if Europe’s autocratic powers succeed in stifling democratization, then the EU will crumble under its hubris, it will splinter, and its fall will cause untold hardship everywhere – not just in Europe.

In this long article Thomas Fazi supports the broad thrust of DiEM's manifesto but questions some of its strategy and general goals.