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“The BDS movement is the single most destructive campaign of economic warfare against the Jewish state of Israel.”

By Andrew Bernard, Algemeiner

Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rick Scott (R-FL) on Thursday reintroduced legislation designed to combat the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

Titled the “Combating BDS Act of 2023,” the bill would give federal permission for states to enact laws to divest from or restrict contracting with entities or individuals that are engaged in a boycott of Israel. While many states already have such laws, they have faced legal challenges led by the ACLU and others. Several such cases are currently pending appeal in federal circuit court, though the Supreme Court in February declined to hear a case challenging Arkansas’ anti-BDS law in a move hailed as a major win for opponents of BDS.

In a statement Senator Rubio said the bill, a previous version of which passed the Senate 77 to 23 in 2020, would be a step toward ending the BDS movement.

“The BDS movement is the single most destructive campaign of economic warfare against the Jewish state of Israel,” Rubio said. “Amid a rising tide of anti-Semitism, we must stand in firm solidarity with our closest democratic ally in the Middle East.”

As then-Governor of Florida, Senator Scott in 2016 signed Florida’s anti-BDS legislation prohibiting the State Board of Administration from investing in companies boycotting Israel.

“I was proud to lead an effort as Governor to show the world that Florida will not do business with those that boycott Israel,” Scott said Thursday. “This good bill will continue that work by ensuring state and local governments have full authority to cancel or deny funding to organizations that support the BDS movement. I will always stand with our Jewish community and fight the BDS movement and anti-Semitism wherever it is found.”

The bill was further co-sponsored by Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Mike Braun (R-IN), Rick Scott (R-FL), Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Steve Daines (R-MT).

The post US senators reintroduce bill to combat BDS movement appeared first on World Israel News.

Nel tour europeo in Italia, Germania, Francia e Gran Bretagna,  Zelensky ha raccolto altri miliardi di euro e sterline in aiuti militari. Ciò però non basta.  Ora annuncia che presto una coalizione di paesi europei fornirà a Kiev cacciabombardieri da …

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As Canada’s conservative heartland goes to the polls, the incumbent United Conservative Party is planning to sell much of Alberta’s social housing to landlords. Under the plan, landlords will prosper, and tenants will suffer.

A view of a construction site of Telus Sky, a skyscraper in downtown Calgary, September 10, 2018, in Alberta, Canada. (Artur Widak / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The oil-producing, prairie province of Alberta, Canada’s conservative heartland, is going to the polls on May 29. If reelected, the United Conservative Party (UCP) plans to sell off most of the province’s remaining twenty-seven thousand social housing units to private landlords.

Alberta is not immune to the country’s housing crisis. The UCP plan comes amid skyrocketing rental costs in the province. It is difficult to see how the plan will not exacerbate the province’s rental crisis, but the UCP claims that the scheme is somehow part of its plan to “support affordable housing.”

This absurd proposal is a perfect example of supply-side “solutions” to the housing crisis — it is a “solution” that will actually make matters worse. It appears that the party believes that by privatizing social housing, thereby raising housing costs, it can . . . reduce housing costs. It is wishful thinking at best, mystical obfuscation at worst.

The UCP plan will not work as advertised. Similar programs, like Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy, which transferred 1.5 million publicly owned properties into private hands, did nothing to improve housing in the UK. In fact, for most people, it was a total disaster. For landlords, it was a godsend. The UCP seems eager to tread this Thatcherite path.

The plan may be a windfall for landlords, but it will have devastating consequences for people who need homes. The UN has declared adequate housing a human right. The UCP’s program seems tailor-made to hinder the pursuit of a society in which this right obtains.

Selling Off the Housing Stock

According to the province’s plan, the UCP aims to sell off “most” of the Alberta Social Housing Corporation’s three thousand properties — which accounts for about twenty-seven thousand units — to the private sector over the next ten years. As Alberta’s seniors and housing ministry announced late last year: “Alberta will shift away from being a significant owner of housing stock and focus on regulating and funding affordable housing.”

In addition to the aim of “genera[ting] revenue,” UCP leader Danielle Smith’s mandate letters simultaneously assigned the minister of communities and social services with the task of “address[ing] affordable housing across the province.” Unless one is operating with a slumlord ethos, these two aims seem irreconcilable. In what seems to be a naked instance of doublespeak, the UCP has set up a minister of affordability in place of its housing and labor ministers — even as it makes housing less affordable.

With over twenty-four thousand low-income Alberta families waiting for housing, the UCP has decided that the best course of action is to ensure the profitability of private landlords. To ensure consistent profitability, the conversion of public, nonprofit housing into for-profit housing will require the establishment of a reliable revenue stream. That will either mean increased rents or cuts to services and maintenance or some combination of the two. Neither will be good for tenants.

Based on the ministry’s data, as of last year, just 18 percent of the social housing stock was deemed to be in a “good” state of repair. With the majority of units constructed in the 1980s, the repair backlog continues to escalate, estimated at approximately $1 billion. Any reduction in the repair budget will make the situation worse.

The UCP’s Priorities

Maggy Wlodarczyk, a member of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told Global News: “Rent prices have been increasing for the past few years now. People are having a really hard time even staying in the apartments they’ve been living in for years, especially with the rise of other cost-of-living expenses.”

The privatization of social housing will impact the broader rental market and result in increased costs for all tenants. Privatizing nonmarket housing leaves low-income people more dependent on market housing — increasing competition for the already-scarce affordable rental stock.

While paying lip service to housing availability with the claim that “rent should be affordable,” UCP minister Jeremy Nixon told a press conference that “rent control is not on the government’s radar.” The UCP has also blocked inclusionary zoning motions by Edmonton and Calgary city councils.

Calgary Residential Rental Association executive director Gerry Baxter told Global News, “Landlords want to see people thrive, and if you’re looking to create affordable, strong and inclusive communities, we need to ensure that all Canadians have a broad range of housing options.” This prioritization of “choice” — the favorite canard of free marketeers everywhere — may be applauded by the province’s landlords, but it will further harm the province’s tenants.

According to Nixon and most of the landlord lobby, the government’s existing policies are the best way to make rent “affordable.” Rent control or investing in nonmarket housing apparently has no part to play in ensuring that the population is housed. 

While on the campaign trail, the UCP might claim to care about reducing housing costs, but no one can seriously believe that UCP leader Danielle Smith has any sympathy for tenants. Her curious suggestion that “the hungry” — people who can’t afford food — should be fed “tainted meat” is exhibit A in this regard. Her career has been marked by open malice toward workers and the poor.

In a 2022 interview, the UCP leader warned the province’s workers that they are in for austerity and “pain.” “We haven’t seen any austerity in the public sector,” Smith lamented. “It’s just continued to grow, more workers, higher wages.” Elsewhere, Smith has claimed that provincial income tax has created a “problem,” whereby “people think someone else should pay for the social services they need.”

The central claim underpinning UCP policy, however — the notion that increased profits will magically lead to affordable housing through increased supply — is a widely held position that extends far beyond Alberta. Among right-wing economists and policy wonks, it is a typical rebuke to calls for rent control and other supposedly “onerous” tenant protections.

What’s Good for Landlords Is Not Good for Tenants

The UCP is hardly alone in making supply-side housing arguments in Canada. When Ontario scrapped its rent control on most new buildings, a CBC opinion piece claimed that “low income earners” should “actually welcome” the decision — because it will “help make housing more affordable. “A partial reversal of rent control is one small step back to the right path,” the CBC piece claimed.

The Fraser Institute, Canada’s preeminent conservative think tank, similarly claims:

The solution is to relax rent controls and provide tax incentives to developers to build new apartment units, to increase the supply of rental units and make renting more affordable. The sooner this is done, the sooner the benefits will come to renters, landlords and cities interested in mitigating economic inequality.

This view rests on the idea that increasing housing costs and bolstering landlord profits will somehow decrease housing costs in the long run. What is good for the landlord will, supposedly, be good for the tenant.

But, contrary to their own trumpeting, landlords do not create or “provide” housing. Successful landlords hoard it. They buy up existing units and existing land, often where housing is scarce, and use their power to gouge ordinary people for the privilege of shelter.

Housing does not follow the same supply-and-demand dynamics that other goods and services follow. Landlords and housing investors do not reap their returns from housing, maintenance, or any clear service as such — they’re reaping rent. They grow fat on monopoly profits where “land is scarce.” While most goods depreciate over time, land does the opposite, especially in major cities.

Indeed, in the early months of the pandemic, when housing prices dropped in Alberta, CBC News described a “surge” in Ontario investors scooping up housing units in Calgary. The acquisition was aided by a steady influx of potential tenants and Alberta’s decision not to enforce rent caps.

According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, despite plenty of “incentives” for landlords, Alberta’s rental housing has a vacancy rate of just 2.6 per cent, comparable to most other metropolitan areas. These investors and speculators are not lowering rent; they are acquiring existing properties due to inflated rents and subsequently driving rents even higher.

The Strategies of Real Estate Profiteers

Real estate agents with Royal Lepage made this explicit in their advice to prospective real estate investors:

Calgary is an excellent market to invest in real estate for the following reasons. 1) Calgary is the 4th largest city in Canada and as so has wide and broad rental population for attact [sic] for your investment property. 2) The number of rental properties in the city has remained stable for a number of years and as the rental market increases it puts preasure [sic] on rents. 3) Alberta has no rent controls and the rental market is a free market that allows rents to rise with a lack of supply. Rents can increase at higher percentages when market conditions are in a supply shortage.

In Edmonton, despite a much-reported decrease in home buying during the oil-price downturn and pandemic, at least one firm, Elevate Realty Group, says its investors can expect steady profits:

Generate instant cash flow by investing in western Canada’s most lucrative real estate market. Our fully finished, turn-key properties are guaranteed to deliver $500 –$800 in passive income each and every month – ZERO maintenance, ZERO rent restrictions and ZERO land transfer tax. Simply sit back, relax, and watch your investment grow.

Free-market incentives will do nothing to halt the overall trend of increasing land value and rents. Moreover, privatizing nonmarket housing will exacerbate the competition for market housing among tenants and empower landlords even more.

Whatever the UCP might claim, its measures will not make housing more “affordable.” Smith’s policies — enabling further rent increases and scrapping social housing — will make life worse for many Albertans. The UCP’s measures will only be of benefit to landlords.

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Over the past few decades, scientists have been making fewer and fewer innovative breakthroughs. The blame lies with academia’s increasingly competitive, metrics-driven model, which discourages creativity and risk-taking.

Disruptions in science have seen a steady and steep decline over the last decades. (Lea Suzuki / the San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

When I think of “disruptive” science, I remember the first pathbreaking scientist I saw: the late Nobel Laureate Oliver Smithies. In the presentation I heard him give, he reflected on his life and advised young scientists about their careers. “Very often ideas for research come from our experiences or memories,” he said. “It takes only one moment for the idea to occur, but it takes a lifetime sometimes to show that it works.”

Smithies thought it important to patiently pursue big ideas, even if that meant extended periods of low productivity. The advice was great — but following it today would likely be career suicide.

Smithies did his PhD research on a topic nobody cared about. He invented a machine, the osmometer, a device for measuring the concentration of particles in a solution, which no one ended up using. The publication from his dissertation was barely ever cited by other scientists. But for Smithies, this moment as a scientist in training was crucial: he acquired independence and learned how to do good research.

After his dissertation, he decided to totally switch gears and study insulin. His research largely failed to produce new insights, but in his side projects, he made his first “disruptive” breakthrough discovery. Based on observations he made watching his mom wash clothes as a child, Smithies developed starch gels for protein purification. These gels would be the basis of one of the most transformative methods in molecular biology: the Western blot. Western blots are now regularly performed in labs globally and often serve as the preliminary step for many forays into new scientific investigations.

Although it is hard to think of a more worthy contribution, Smithies never won the Nobel Prize for the Western blot. Instead, he received the prize for something else — after switching fields again. Smithies was awarded a Nobel Prize for the first successful approach to gene targeting in mice.

According to a recent study, disruptive findings like those made by Smithies have dramatically declined over the past several decades. Disruptive papers and patents are defined as publications that change the direction of a field, redefine already existing science, and have the potential to transform our understanding of the world, including what is being taught in introductory science courses around the world. The authors’ data is convincing: such disruptions in science have seen a steady and steep decline over the last decades.

When Science Was Still Disruptive

Why is science becoming less disruptive? Michael Park, Erin Leahey, and Russell J. Funk’s recent publication sparked a lively debate in the scientific community. Many believe it is an inherent feature of the field that more disruptive findings are made at the moment of conception of new areas of study: “low-hanging fruit” breakthroughs. But the study authors argue that such hypotheses do not adequately explain their observations. Instead, they suggest several systemic problems may explain the decline in disruptiveness, like a focus on publication quantity instead of quality.

The main problems leading to a decline in “disruptive science,” in my view, are structural. Chief among those is the increasingly competitive, metrics-driven nature of academia. Although this system purports to offer objective criteria of scientific merit, it actually takes away the freedom that is necessary for disruptive science and incentivizes researchers to boost their “success scores” instead of focusing on innovative science.

Nowadays, a career like the one Smithies describes is largely unthinkable. Scientists do not switch their research focus. Rather, they tend to become narrower and narrower in their research, something Park et al. quantify. It is also almost impossible to have a scientific career without publishing important papers every step of the way.

Publish or Perish

Why do scientists today shy away from taking the liberty Smithies found so crucial for his own career? The reason it is so rare for scientists to take a sabbatical or switch fields is simple: they are ensnared in a system of brutal competition. If you take a break or don’t publish for a while, you’re out.

In an elegant article, French sociologist Christine Musselin shows how competition came to structure academic science. Competition between universities for status spirals into a rivalry fueled by the state as “competition organizer.”

Initially, the National Institute of Health (NIH) awarded funding mostly to centers or common projects (“P01 grants”). In the 1970s, this funding scheme was rapidly replaced by grants for individual researchers handed out in ever more standardized competitions (“R01 grants”). Through the mechanism of an “indirect cost rate,” part of the money individual researchers receive from these grants flow into their universities. So federal funding for universities came to depend on how well their employed researchers perform in competitions for federal grants.

Scientists today are ensnared in a system of brutal competition. If you take a break or don’t publish for a while, you’re out.

In theory, contests between scientists don’t have to be a bad thing. As Musselin says, competition existed in science even when it was more disruptive. What changed was the nature of this competition between scientists. In the search for measurements universities and the state can use to rank competitors, these institutions look for objective metrics of researcher quality. It is this attempt to “objectify genius” that ultimately erodes disruptive science.

These metrics are based on researchers’ publications. Some measurements, like the “H-Index,” measure how often a scientist’s publications get cited by other scientists. Others, such as the “impact factor,” use the citation record of journals the scientist publishes in as a proxy. The “objectified” value of researchers has not only served for university rankings but has also come to determine the distribution of federal grants and faculty positions.

At first glance, the system seems like an elegant way to address a problem that was likely even worse in the past: if we attribute objective quality scores to scientists and use these, for example, to distribute faculty positions, we are less reliant on subjective decisions, which can allow for nepotism and individual prejudice to determine who advances. But the measured decline in disruptive science suggests that the system does not really work as intended. Instead, it creates incentives that are poison for innovative research.

Incentives for Senior Researchers: the “Productive Lab”

Once a career depends on a score system, researchers will seek to optimize their scores. Instead of a competition to do the best science, scientists hunt for “impact points.”

How does one become the highest scorer? First, you get a better score when you increase your output of papers. The easiest way to increase that output is to hire people whose work and brainpower allow you to produce more papers that you will get credit for.

The incentive for professors is clear: get as many subordinate workers as possible, and you will have more publications. A certain feature in the publication system ensures hiring more trainees is never detrimental: the splitting of “first” and “last” author. Professors get their currency by being last authors (the last name in the list of people publishing the paper), while the workers receive first-author credits. For researchers, “last author” means “this person is the brain of the study,” and “first author” means “this person did the hands-on work.”

The incentive for professors is clear: get as many subordinate workers as possible, and you will have more publications.

The example of Smithies shows that disruptive scientists need freedom to pursue questions out of curiosity. Smithies had this freedom because his professors, at all career stages, saw him as a peer and not as an employee. In modern laboratories with professors who fully embrace the competition model in academia, young researchers are hands for hire, not peers.

Like a recent commentary in the debate around disruptive science suggests, young scientists these days focus on an “executive and results-based approach” rather than engaging in creative curiosity-driven research. In my opinion, this change in training for young researchers is not due to flawed teaching styles. Instead, it is the logical consequence of the transformation of the professor-trainee relationship, fueled by the current scheme of competition in science.

Incentives for Junior Researchers: Productivity and Specialization

The focus on “research productivity” not only shapes how senior scientists operate, but also fundamentally restricts junior scientists. These restrictions are most obvious at the transition point between trainee and professor.

To become a professor, you need to acquire “starting grants.” In life sciences in the United States, the main starting grant is the K99 from the NIH. To receive a K99 grant, you have to demonstrate your productivity. And your productivity is demonstrated by publications over time.

To measure this productivity, you need a set time frame. Junior scientists can only apply for a K99 grant during the first three and a half years of their postdoc. During this time, scientists have to demonstrate their productivity with first-author papers.

But different kinds of research are not rationally comparable in this way. Let’s say there are two researchers: one is a computational biologist who uses preexisting data for their research and the other researcher studies the effect of an aging immune system and must perform their own experiments. The computational biologist has no problem publishing in three and a half years. But for the researcher focusing on aging, each experiment takes a year. Unless they are extremely lucky, there is no way they can publish in time.

It should be obvious that time restraints like those imposed by the need to win starting grants select for a certain type of research. The researcher interested in aging will likely have to choose between pursuing their curiosity-driven research and risking their career, or pursuing a project that is “feasible” for publishing more papers quickly. Unfortunately, the most easily publishable science is likely the least disruptive. The chance of publication is best if you follow the research of your supervisor and study questions that yield predictable results.

The restrictions imposed on researchers by “feasibility” and “productivity” are not limited to starting grants: the NIH explicitly lists “feasibility” as one of the key criteria in the evaluation of all grants. Behind this decision lies a valuing of “productivity” over “creativity” in the competitive structure of academia.

The Corset of Neoliberalism Does Not Fit Academia

The incentives that come from the competition model of modern academia limit the freedom of researchers in a way that suppresses disruptive science. But how can we undo it?

A first step is to understand why academia was transformed like this in the first place. And at the core of this transformation is the neoliberalization of science. The reigning viewpoint of neoliberal capitalism says that a (supposedly) meritocratic competition is the best way to structure society and maximize economic growth. The objectification of research value is a form of the broader phenomenon of ever-expanding commodification under capitalism; the transformation of trainees into hands for hire is an instance of the alienation described by Karl Marx, in which workers are separated from the fruits of their own labor and their control over the productive process. And behind the current methods of assessing the “feasibility” of scientific research, we can find the same practices financial institutions deploy for “risk analysis” of investments.

The structure of a competitive marketplace is not conducive to good research in the first place.

Facing climate catastrophe and a crisis in wealth distribution should make us rethink this approach to organizing social life. But for science, the problem is obvious: the structure of a competitive marketplace is not conducive to good research in the first place.

First, objectification of scientific exploration and innovation in the way that capitalism demands is not conducive to scientific breakthroughs, because most breakthrough discoveries, by their nature, are unpredictable. For instance, when Francis Mojica began studying repetitive patterns in the DNA of bacteria, no one cared. Big journals refused to publish his findings. Today we know that this work was in fact the basis for maybe the biggest discovery in modern biology: the gene scissors CRISPR/Cas9, which is revolutionizing molecular biology and life science.

Second, the transformation of the mentor-trainee relationship from peer-to-peer to boss-and-wage-laborer also makes little sense for academia at a large scale: today’s trainees are tomorrow’s professors. Suppressing the autonomy and creativity of the trainees by turning them into wage laborers is detrimental for the future generation of professors, who then have lost their ability to think creatively and have been trained to take less risky options.

Last, if we accept that breakthroughs are unpredictable, we should understand that good science can never be “quantified” like a product. The most disruptive science likely requires much more time than other research. It also requires taking great risks — for example, scientists choosing to switch fields or study something entirely new. If we continue to measure the quality of research as “predictable productivity” and distribute resources and positions accordingly, we will miss out on much disruptive science.

Bring Back Disruption by Limiting Competition

To bring back disruptive science, we need to limit the competition scheme that has ultimately impaired our ability to conduct curiosity-driven research. A first step could be to strengthen guaranteed funding from institutions and reduce the resources that have to be acquired in grant competitions, especially for young researchers.

Moreover, attempts to “score” the value of researchers via their publication record should be dramatically scaled back. Instead, we need to embrace the fact that scientific value cannot be quantified. Decisions about faculty positions therefore must be based largely on qualitative judgments. To make sure this does not lead to nepotism or unfair discrimination, we should radically increase democratic input into institutional decision-making. Faculty hires, for instance, could be voted on by the whole faculty, and even postdocs.

Last, we need to reverse the recent transformation of the mentor-trainee relationship. Limits on the composition of research groups could help here, since most “exploitative” structures are characterized by a large number of highly qualified postdocs that stay for an extended time under the control of a single professor. And graduate student and postdoc unions are essential to empower trainees and make their concerns heard in a way the current system does not allow.

Kati Kariko’s work on mRNA vaccines was not predicted to be of any value. As a result, she was almost forced to leave academia because she couldn’t get funding or a senior faculty position. Kariko, a New York Times profile said, “needed grants to pursue ideas that seemed wild and fanciful. She did not get them, even as more mundane research was rewarded.”

Her work, of course, would turn out to be the basis for lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines. By reforming science to put curiosity-driven research back at the center, we can make sure we don’t miss out on more important discoveries like hers.

Amid the debt ceiling debate, House Republicans are pushing for cuts to the Veterans Administration, and corporate Democrats are continuing to support privatizing the agency’s socialized medicine. Both are an attack on working-class veterans.

Wounded soldiers who have recently returned from Iraq receiving treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC on January 7, 2005. (David S. Holloway / Getty Images)

When the new House Republican majority passed its grab bag of government spending cuts last month, setting up an ongoing game of chicken with the White House over any federal debt limit increase, they also targeted essential services for military veterans, a constituency long courted by their own party. Included in the “Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023” was a proposed 22 percent reduction in funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Right-wing Republicans scrambled to provide political cover for themselves by insisting that “our budget-cutting plan doesn’t harm veterans.” Instead, claimed Mike Bost, a former Marine from Illinois who now chairs the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, his conservative colleagues were just trying to force a long-overdue discussion of whether VA funding is “actually helping veterans.”

Fortunately, a VA patient, elected to Congress last year, took the House floor to accuse the Republican majority of passing a “B.S. plan” that’s “an absolute betrayal and a disgrace.” As former Navy officer Chris Deluzio (D-PA) noted, House Republicans are “threatening to blow up our economy and to push us into default unless we agree to cuts to the VA and veterans, and to so much else. There is not a single protection, not a single one for veterans in their bill. [. . .] Millions of veterans are going to be screwed by this plan. They won’t get the care they’ve earned, and they will have to wait longer for benefits.”

Deluzio’s fiery speech generated much media attention and set the tone for other Democrats, like Joe Biden and California congressman Mark Takano, who have weighed in with similar criticisms of GOP hypocrisy. Democratic Party consultants and strategists are undoubtedly already sketching out the kind of attack ads — focusing on Republican support for VA benefit cuts — that will be aired to help the White House woo the “vet vote” away from right-wing candidates next year.

A Timely Smoke Screen

That forthcoming paid media blitz will have one downside. It will further obscure the fact that current threats to veterans’ programs are not just coming from the House majority or conservative Republicans in the Senate like Jerry Moran (R-KS). Biden and pro-business lawmakers are harming veterans by undermining the public provision of their care. Moran, along with former Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, has just introduced the Veterans Health Empowerment, Access, Leadership, and Transparency for our Heroes (HEALTH) Act of 2023, which would force the administration to double down on VA privatization.

As this political collaboration illustrates, the incremental defunding of direct care for nine million veterans has long been a bipartisan project. From Barack Obama to Donald Trump to Biden, three successive presidential administrations have embraced the idea that turning VA patients into customers of the private health care industry is better policy than strengthening the nation’s largest public health care system and best-working model of socialized medicine.

VA outsourcing has greatly accelerated since a coalition of conservative Republicans and corporate Democrats passed the VA MISSION Act of 2018.

VA outsourcing has greatly accelerated since a coalition of conservative Republicans and corporate Democrats passed the VA MISSION Act of 2018. Implemented by Trump — and, now, Biden himself — this legislation diverts more than $30 billion a year from the agency’s direct care budget and showers that money on private medical practices and for-profit hospitals often less well prepared to treat veterans. This amount roughly equals the VA funding shortfall that would result from House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s biggest legislative achievement so far — the above-mentioned “Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023.”

Thanks to the MISSION Act, the VA has been partially converted into a Medicare-style payer of bills submitted by outside vendors, with many of the same paperwork hassles, lax quality controls, and opportunities for fraud and abuse. The powerful private interests that gained this lucrative new federal revenue stream are fighting to preserve and expand it. They include some of the same companies who are undermining traditional Medicare coverage by enlisting more than half of all seniors in Medicare Advantage plans, with active assistance from the Trump and Biden administrations.

“Healthy Competition” or Disadvantaging the VA?

As a House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing revealed in 2022, VA spending on private sector care soared by 116 percent in the years after the passage of the MISSION Act, while funding for VA medical center staff grew by only 32 percent. Since Deluzio joined the committee this January, he has been the rare House Democrat willing to question this disastrous trend. At a recent hearing, attended by VA secretary Denis McDonough, Deluzio said he was “proud to receive my health care at the VA,” noting that many research studies have confirmed its higher quality and cost-effectiveness relative to the private sector.

In an exchange with McDonough, Deluzio pointed out the continuing disparity between Biden administration budget allocations for in-house vs. outsourced care for his fellow veterans. He then invited McDonough to “walk me through why we are seeing that growth on the one side and what is constraining the VA’s ability to do more within VA facilities?” McDonough hid behind the disingenuous claim that his hands are tied by Congress.

In reality, since January 2021, the VA secretary has failed to replace administrative rules for the MISSION Act, promulgated under Trump, that require the VA to refer patients to millions of appointments outside its own system, where wait times have often been longer. In a report to Congress last September, McDonough made the alarming, but accurate, prediction that the “VA is rapidly approaching a point where one-half of all care” will be outsourced. In the same document, he acknowledged that in-house care is cheaper, faster, higher quality, and preferred by veterans themselves. But McDonough insists that his agency and its 1.2 million private contractors are nevertheless engaged in a form of “healthy competition” that benefits patients, providers, and the public.

A March 2023 report warned that frontline caregivers’ ability to care for veterans has been seriously compromised by Biden’s continuation of Trump administration policies.

Frontline caregivers strongly disagree with this assessment. Several thousand responded to a survey conducted last year by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest VA union. In a March 2023 report called Disadvantaging the VA, they warned that their ability to care for veterans has been seriously compromised by Biden’s continuation of Trump administration policies and personnel practices. Survey respondents reported service cutbacks, facility closing threats, lack of new hiring, and resulting staffing shortages, exacerbated by a disruptive shift of thousands of health care professionals from providing direct care to monitoring the performance of private sector providers.

As the AFGE-backed report argues, “Even within the statutory constraints of the MISSION Act, Secretary McDonough can promulgate new regulations that would prioritize medical necessity, quality, and timeliness of care, above all else,” as the basis for patient referrals outside the VA. As in the past (ie., before Obama, Trump, and Biden), individual veterans could still be “sent outside the system if appropriate care was unavailable inside it.”

The Sinema-Moran Bomb

That course correction will never occur if Senator Sinema, a Veterans Affairs’ Committee member with five hundred thousand veterans among her constituents in Arizona, builds momentum for further privatization. Under the guise of expanding “veteran choice,” her Veterans HEALTH Act would open the floodgates for outsourcing in new and more destructive ways because it “would codify and expand the existing criteria for determining when a veteran is eligible for [non-VA] care.” Among the endorsers of this legislation are longtime proponents of VA privatization like the Koch Brothers–funded Concerned Veterans for America and the Trump-connected Independence Fund, plus the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).

Under the guise of expanding ‘veteran choice,’ Sinema’s Veterans HEALTH Act would open the floodgates for outsourcing in new and more destructive ways.

The conservative Legion and VFW both let their own members down five years ago when they pressured Congress to pass the MISSION Act, a surrender to corporate health care interests. Unlike these old-line organizations, smaller progressive groups like Common Defense and Veterans for Peace have challenged VA privatization and related bipartisan assaults on social programs for all poor and working-class Americans.

Two years ago, for example, Common Defense spotlighted Sinema’s ties to the health care and pharmaceutical industries, two major beneficiaries of VA outsourcing. Five former members of the military serving on her veterans’ advisory council resigned in protest, and their action was amplified in a seven-figure ad buy. Air Force veteran Sylvia González Andersh was among those blasting the senator for “answering to big donors rather than your own people.”

Common Defense members and other Arizona voters betrayed by Sinema are now rallying behind Congressman Ruben Gallego, a forty-three-year-old Marine combat veteran, who is her likely Democratic opponent next year. The son of immigrants from Colombia and Mexico and a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Gallego launched his campaign in January at an event with fellow veterans at a Legion post in Guadalupe, Arizona.

In that announcement and other interviews, he linked his own struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder to his decision to enter politics and fight for public programs like Medicare and the VA. “The rich and the powerful — they don’t need more advocates,” Gallego says. “It’s the people who are trying to decide between groceries and utilities who need a fighter for them.”

Soviet Russia’s food shortages were frequently held up as proof of the Communist system’s failure to provide for its citizens. But here in hyper-capitalist America, tens of millions of people are going hungry.

Food bank clients line up outside the American Red Cross Food Pantry in Boston, Massachusetts, on April 26, 2023. (Kayana Szymczak / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On January 22, 1992, America’s newspaper of record published a front-page report detailing the long lines still appearing in Moscow and other Russian cities as hungry citizens sought out bread. Several weeks earlier, the USSR had finally collapsed and breadlines — much as they had during the Cold War — persisted as the de facto symbol of the country’s dysfunction and crippling economic inefficiency.

“In Russia, Long Lines for Plentiful Bread” blared the Times’ headline, accompanied by a report from journalist Louis Uchitelle that detailed lengthy waits despite the country’s ample supplies of grain and flour. “The bottlenecks that make Muscovites and the residents of other major cities anxious about bread shortages,” wrote Uchitelle, “are not, so far, in the supplies of grain and flour. The problem instead lies in the methods used by the state-owned industry to make and distribute bread.”

Various inefficiencies were documented, among them an incentive structure that perplexingly encouraged retailers to throw out day-old stock and order less bread than they might have been able to sell. Distribution was reportedly poor because there weren’t enough trucks to move goods and single-cashier service at the point of sale created massive bottlenecks. Thanks to the recent relaxation of price controls, the cost of bread was also soaring.

Only privatization and the introduction of market efficiency, the piece suggested, could possibly ameliorate the situation. What Uchitelle’s report described was a pointless cycle of waste and human indignity, underwritten by a system that remained so inflexible it was squandering surpluses and allowing citizens to go hungry.

The breadline has long been a potent symbol, but it’s also one that, for mainstream media and political institutions, can only manifest beyond America’s borders. When they happen in other countries, food shortages are framed as evidence of precapitalist backwardness. The American system, by contrast, is one of such relentless dynamism and efficiency that, while individual people might experience problems or hardships — hunger, poverty, unemployment — they are precluded from being an indictment of the model itself.

In light of this, it’s worth considering a recent Bloomberg report on the growing queues outside the nation’s food banks that begins by describing a lineup outside one Boston Red Cross facility that stretched the length of two football fields. It includes quotes like this one, from a forty-year-old disabled woman who is a mother forced to ration food for her two adolescent children. “They’re like ‘Mama, I want two pieces, I want three,’” Lopes said. “They’re boys. They’re big. They want more.”

Scenes like this are all too common across America today, as food banks report record demand amid skyrocketing grocery prices. The US Census Bureau estimates that nearly twenty-five million people went hungry in April alone, thanks in part to the slashing of pandemic era food stamp benefits.

Such queues are breadlines in all but name. Tens of millions presently do not have enough to eat in a country with a $25 trillion GDP, all while Congress debates the possibility of attaching new work requirements to an already inadequate and paternalistic food assistance program. Effectively, ordinary Americans are being hit with a three-punch combo of soaring food prices, benefit cuts, and fiscal policies explicitly designed to drive up unemployment.

As one commentator succinctly put it: “1) Too many people have jobs so the [Federal Reserve] raises rates to boost unemployment in the name of taming inflation. 2) People lose their jobs, making them need food stamps. 3) Politicians demand those same people get jobs to be eligible for food stamps, but the jobs are now harder to get.”

Want, cruelty, waste, it’s all here — the whole needless cycle symbolized by long lines outside of food banks in urban areas where there is more than enough to eat. God bless the free market.

Born on this day in 1743, Toussaint Louverture led the black uprising that resulted in the Haitian Revolution. He was born a slave, and he died in captivity, having dealt a decisive first blow to colonialism and slavery.

Close-up of a drawing of Toussaint Louverture on horseback, 1802. (Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons)

In the great book of history, as well as in the 1960 study that Aimé Césaire dedicated to him, Toussaint Louverture makes his first appearance two years after the storming of the Bastille, at the beginning of the French Revolution. He arrives on the stage of history in August 1791, aged almost fifty, as a leader of the slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue.

Himself born a slave on May 20, 1743, the anti-colonial leader was at first known as Toussaint Bréda, after the plantation near Haut de Cap where he was based. There, he became a detonator for the revolutionary ideas from Paris, which, making their way across the Atlantic, led to one of the most important political upheavals of recent centuries.

This Caribbean territory had been a linchpin of the eighteenth-century imperial order; it was also one of the richest colonies in the world at the time. But in a land where slaves constituted nearly 90 percent of the population, the oppressed revolted against the colonial monster — and defeated it.

In Césaire’s words, the rebels not only showed how “the rights of man [had] often been reduced to the rights of European man alone,” but prompted the beginning of the “abolition of the colonial era in the American hemisphere.” Imperialist and colonialist Europe had brought the whole world to its knees; now, its invincibility was finally cracked.

The Slave Revolution

A widely debated, somewhat elusive, and indeed controversial figure, Toussaint Louverture became renowned worldwide even at the time of the events. In recent decades, he has regained notoriety mainly thanks to C. L. R. James’s 1938 classic The Black Jacobins, one of the most influential historical works of the twentieth century. There has been no shortage, even in recent times, of studies that capture the complexity of the Saint-Domingue revolution and the special role of Louverture’s leadership, his pragmatism, his military skill, and his Machiavellian diplomacy. But Césaire’s book remains a milestone for its insightful reading of the “three moments” needed for the revolutionary process to mature.

Césaire, as a longtime politician — and poet, storyteller, and essayist — dug deep into the contradictions of the gradual overthrow of “white” power in the Caribbean. The events there marked the first real step forward in a long decolonization process that culminated, not coincidentally, in 1960: the same year that the first edition of his book Toussaint Louverture was published.

As James had already pointed out, the Haitian slave revolution exploded a striking contradiction between principles and material interests. If, as James tells us, “the slave-trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution,” and “a great empire and honest minds go ill together,” in the development of privileges built around color “it was the quarrel between whites and Mulattoes that woke the sleeping slaves.”

The events in Saint-Domingue marked the first real step forward in a long decolonization process that culminated in 1960: the same year that the first edition of Aime Césaire’s book Toussaint Louverture was published.

In France, the curtain was raised on this dispute on March 2, 1790, with the “first great colonial debate in French parliamentary history.” As Césaire explains, this took place in the face of pressure from mulattos who, following in the wake of the colonists’ demands, claimed equal rights for themselves, too. When they were ignored, they were driven to rebel.

The subsequent “Negro revolution” (Césaire himself alternates between the terms noir and nègre) was in fact made possible by the two previously unsuccessful attempts. First was that of the “white” settlers who sought access to the rights that the Assemblée Nationale in theory proclaimed for “all men,” while hesitating for those born outside mainland France, and excluding anyone with skin darker than their own: the “men of color,” usually mulattos who were the children of relations between settlers and slaves or ex-slaves.

It was precisely the attempted rebellion of the “mulattos,” the free “men of color” — though generally not at all caring about the rights denied to the great mass of slaves — that provided these latter with their great opportunity. In a nutshell, these three phases make up the three books of Césaire’s vast study focused on the period from 1789 to 1804, on both sides of the Atlantic: namely, “The Dissent Among the Rich Whites”; “The Mulatto Revolt”; and “The Negro Revolution.”

‘When Toussaint Louverture arrived’ — writes Césaire in conclusion — ‘it was to take the Declaration of the Rights of Man literally.’

Key to this latter revolution were the days in late August 1791, when the mulattoes tried in vain to seize the opportunity of a “Negro revolt,” as “countless hordes, with rage in their hearts and knives in their hands, flooded the northern plains” of Saint-Domingue. They sought to exploit the revolt — and also to stop it in good time. It was they, in March and April 1793, who stormed the places of white power and temporarily overwhelmed it. Notes Césaire: “It is a fact that black men had succeeded in a short time in transforming a small, despised caste, a social group kept on a leash — and the Revolution is the locomotive of history — into a class that had prevailed against the others and without which it was impossible to rule.”

But apart from a few isolated voices, both mulatto leaders and the revolutionaries in France had not understood the issue sufficiently clearly, even in brutally quantitative terms: the “terrible Negro problem.” There was nothing to expect from Paris, Césaire again summarizes: “the French assemblies chatted a lot about the Negroes but did very little for them.” Indeed, in those same days in late August 1791, while two hundred sugar mills and six hundred coffee plantations were being destroyed and hundreds of whites being killed, a leader emerged for the revolt “when it, through its constancy, had reached the moment when it could turn into insurrection.”

A Man, a Legend

In August 1791 Toussaint Bréda — who, three years later, decided to take the name “Toussaint Louverture” — entered the stage of history — a stage where he would remain. In Césaire’s work he is introduced in epic tones, with a zeal that runs throughout the work of the poet of négritude:

He was the coachman of a cultivator, Bayon de Libertas, legal agent of the Bréda habitation belonging to Count Noé — hence the name which Toussaint was given for a time: Toussaint Bréda, known as Louverture.

A man of forty-eight, he could read and write and enjoyed a certain prestige among his peers, owing both to his decisiveness and intellectual superiority.

He was a valuable recruit for the rebellion. So valuable that it was impossible to estimate his importance.

By welcoming “old Toussaint” into its ranks, the rebellion believed it was welcoming a kind of Nestor. He was in fact a leader, that is, a leader the rebellion was giving itself….

Toussaint was a man of tact. He knew how to make his way into the scene, to take possession of it without alarming anyone.

“When Toussaint Louverture arrived” — writes Césaire in conclusion — “it was to take the Declaration of the Rights of Man literally.” Mapping out the “immoral color prejudice” that the French Revolution set before itself — indeed, debate after debate over 1790–91 had only confirmed the institutionalization of slavery — the Martinican poet observes that neither “whites” nor complicit mulattoes could have sparked the revolution. It took a “political mind” convinced that the conquest of “general freedom” would be “a long-term task,” and moreover the work “of the black people, who had to mature this idea in their own heads, and not in the heads of the colonists.” And so it was.

Toussaint Louverture was able to lead his people militarily and, at the same time, “to forge a nation in the midst of struggle.” In the heart of the 1790s, in the Caribbean, “a leader for the black people of Saint-Domingue” was born:

a revolutionary leader, a man connected with the masses, who revealed new capabilities as events invested him with new responsibilities. A man of thought, a man of action, a diplomat, an administrator, all qualities that came to the fore as the need arose. Toussaint Louverture was all this; and we can only shudder at the thought that his genius, if overlooked by men and unused, could have been all spent in slavery.

The period that followed was tremendously complex. The years between 1794 and 1801 saw the troops of Saint-Domingue rebels captained by Louverture put themselves at the service of the French Republic. On February 4, 1794, after nearly four years of dilemmas and vacillations, this Republic finally brought the French Revolution to the abolition of slavery.

Louverture was an ambitious man (what leader isn’t?) with ambivalent and even contradictory attitudes. He repeatedly fought under different banners, indeed quite literally: at first a monarchist, he then found himself collaborating with two other empires, the British and Spanish, finally with the French tricolor, only to be betrayed by France itself. Yet he developed firm, unbreakable, radical principles, well summarized by a letter he sent to the Directory in June 1798, in which he bitterly commented on the plots he saw mounting Saint-Domingue. He here renewed his oath, both for himself and the men and women who had freed themselves from their chains, namely “to prefer to be buried under the ruins of a country resurrected by freedom rather than suffer the return to slavery.” He declared that if slavery were to be reestablished, “it would be like attempting the impossible; we knew how to face all dangers to obtain our freedom, we will know how to face death to guard it.”

Louverture repeatedly fought under different banners: at first a monarchist, he then found himself collaborating with two other empires, the British and Spanish, finally with the French tricolor, only to be betrayed by France itself.

Toussaint Louverture was surely reluctant to give up the power he had won, as shown by the debate among historians, taken up by Charles Forsdick. He was also a man — this is one of Césaire’s arguments — who was unable to transform the economy of Saint-Domingue quickly enough, even if he had wanted to. It remained stranded in the difficult and dramatic phase of transition between a system structured on slave or quasi-slave exploitation — a system that would long endure, as the coffee empire still demonstrates today — and a new order that remained to be invented. He understood, however, that the situation called for his sacrifice: that “his person, mixed up as he was in all events,” had become an obstacle to the unity of the people of Saint-Domingue, whose territory had come back under the control of the France of “consul” Bonaparte. And so, Louverture effectively surrendered himself to the French, and stepped aside.

The revolution remained stranded in the difficult and dramatic phase of transition between a system structured on slave or quasi-slave exploitation and a new order that remained to be invented.

Climbing aboard off Cap-Français, he told the commander of Le Héros, “By overthrowing me you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of black freedom; but it will grow back from its roots, for they are many and deep.”

Bitter Ending, Open Future

The struggle that the people of African descent in Saint-Domingue led for some twelve years — defeating white settlers and French soldiers, repelling a Spanish invasion, a British expedition, and a final French attack — ultimately led to a momentous victory that the “Black Spartacus,” the first “black superhero” (as defined by Sudhir Hazareesingh), would not see.

Even with all its contradictions, Saint-Domingue’s was the first and only slave revolt to become a revolution and lead — as Marco Bascetta points out — “to the founding of an independent state, albeit one destined for a decidedly unhappy existence.”

Toussaint Louverture is still today “the center of Haitian history, probably the center of Caribbean history,” as Césaire writes, with a deliberately hagiographic tone and rhythm: “They gave him bands, he made of them an army. They gave him a jacquerie, he made of it a Revolution. Of a population he made a people. Of a colony he made a state, or rather a nation.”

Toussaint Louverture died a prisoner of the French, at Fort de Joux, on April 7, 1803. He passed away a few months before the independence of the first “black republic” in human history, Haiti, was proclaimed “in the name of blacks and men of color,” at a moment when slavery had just been reintroduced in France. Slavery would remain in force for another four decades, despite the 1794 decree.

As Jacques-René Hébert, murdered a few days later during the Terror, said at the time,

A day will come, I hope, when all the peoples of the earth, having exterminated their tyrants, will form one family of brothers. Perhaps one day Turks, Russians, French, English and Germans, united in the same Senate, will compose a great Convention with all the nations of Europe. That would be a beautiful dream that, however, could come true. I do not believe, however, that, as Anacharsis prophesies, we should make Don Quixotes and undertake a universal crusade to convert to freedom those who are not yet worthy of knowing it. It is up to time and reason for such a miracle. Let us begin ourselves to establish freedom!

The French Revolution, “confronted with the colonial question,” had to “confront itself,” and “the principles from which it had sprung,” Césaire writes. It hesitated, wavered, and ended up engulfing itself. But it also learned, thanks to the determination of Toussaint Louverture and his slave army, that freedom is not a force you can stop at will. That the oppressed do not need tyrants’ permission to break their chains: dissent can become revolt, and revolt can become revolution.

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Ahead of Greece’s general election on Sunday, the business press claims that the country is bouncing back from its years of austerity. Yanis Varoufakis tells Jacobin why, for ordinary Greeks, the situation is only getting worse.

Yanis Varoufakis, Greek economist and general secretary of the MeRA25 political party, center, participates at a protest during a strike in Athens, Greece, on March 16, 2023. (Nick Paleologos / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Over a decade since the start of Greece’s sovereign debt crisis, claims that the country has got “back on its feet” seem rather out of step with reality. The February 28 rail disaster in Tempi, which killed fifty-seven people, provided a tragic reminder of how national infrastructure has been devastated by years of austerity and shock privatizations.

Seeking a fresh mandate in Sunday’s general election, the right-wing New Democracy faces criticism not just for Greeks’ economic woes, but also its record of authoritarianism and spying on opponents. Yet its main competitor, Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza, is struggling to mobilize popular discontent. After he spent his spell in office from 2015 to 2019 imposing the austerity he had promised to resist, the Greek left remains greatly weakened.

Yanis Varoufakis was finance minister in the first Syriza-led government, resigning this role in July 2015 rather than capitulate to austerian dogmas. A staunch critic of Syriza’s record, Varoufakis is today a leading member of the left-wing party MeRA25, for which he has also been an MP since 2019. Jacobin’s David Broder spoke to him about the ongoing effects of austerity on Greece, the bases of its claimed economic “recovery,” and his party’s alternative.

David Broder

On Sunday, the Financial Times published an article that told us that, after a decade of bailouts and austerity, Greece had rebounded. GDP is still only 80 percent of 2008 levels, and wages under 75 percent, but growth is now rapid and the country is on the cusp of regaining its investment-grade rating. The headline cited the Eurobank chief executive’s claim that this was the “greatest turnaround in the European financial system.” How realistic a picture is this?

Yanis Varoufakis

It depends on whose perspective you take. If you care about the people of Greece, then all this is an Orwellian lie. If you are looking at Greece as a foreign investor, it is true.

Greece is deeper in the hole of insolvency today than it was in 2010, when the whole world of finance — the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission — said we were bankrupt. Back then, our debt was something like €295 billion and our income €220 billion, whereas today the debt is €400 billion and our national income, in real terms, €192 billion. Most of our debt is owed to the troika and to foreign investors. So, our dependence on the kindness of strangers is greater than ever.

Greece’s population today has, on average, 20 percent lower living standards than in 2010; if you look at the working class, the reduction of GDP per capita is 45 percent. As for private sector debt, around two million out of ten million Greeks have negative equity and nonperforming loans. It’s a world record: it didn’t even happen in the US in 2008–09, during the subprime mortgages crisis.

But how come I acknowledge that from the perspective of foreign investors, Greece is doing better than any other country? Well, government bonds are trading at 3.6 to 3.7 percent yields — a very nice spread over German ones at 2.2 to 2.3 percent. Everyone knows that the Greek state is bankrupt and the bonds are junk. So, why do they buy them? The European Central Bank (ECB) has announced that it will back Greek bonds. It’s a political decision to declare Greece solvent, just as it was a political decision to declare it insolvent in 2010. Christine Lagarde and her minions are making a nod and a wink to investors.

Greece’s population today has, on average, 20 percent lower living standards than in 2010; if you look at the working class, the reduction of GDP per capita is 45 percent.

Why is the ECB standing behind bonds, when it didn’t in 2012 or 2015? Recent years saw a world first, a mechanism for extracting wealth from the bankrupt. The powers that be have instituted the so-called Hercules plan, taking bonds off the books of banks and selling them to vulture funds based in the Cayman Islands. They belong partly to foreign investors, partly to people who run the Greek banks, partly to the extended families of the political class. They can, for instance, buy a nonperforming loan of €100,000 but for just €3,000. They don’t expect to get the money back; but if they can sell the collateral for €50,000 they have extracted €47,000 in rent to the Caymans without paying a cent in tax. This can extract around €70 billion from a sub-€200-billion-a-year economy.

So, it may sound like a paradox that the financial press is hailing an economy whose public and private sectors are more bankrupt than ever. But seeing the gains foreign investors can draw from this situation, it is no paradox. Greece is a goose laying golden eggs: such profit rates don’t exist anywhere else. To boot, this Hercules scheme, passed by the Greek parliament, guarantees a minimum of €23 billion. The Greek state — and thus the ECB itself — stands behind the vultures’ interests, if they don’t manage to extract enough in dispossessions.

David Broder

In January, you called Syriza, New Democracy, and Pasok the parties of the “Memorandum Arc” — saying that they were ignoring the reality that whoever is in power at the end of the decade will be forced to borrow ever more. But in what ways has Greece sunk further into dependence on European loans since 2015? Are there not some elements of renewed growth, for instance in construction or tourism?

Yanis Varoufakis

What we are seeing is disinvestment — money is being spent in ways and in sectors that decrease this country’s productive capacity.

The government and the foreign press are celebrating an increase in foreign direct investment (FDI), and it is indeed increasing. But what’s the effect on prices? A vulture fund that brings €3,000 to buy a €100,000 loan counts as FDI. But it’s just bringing a small amount of money to extract a much larger amount through dispossession. It doesn’t leave a single thread of productive capital.

The Frontex border forces are pushing people back at the Greek coastline, with the result of many deaths at sea. Yet through the Golden Visa system, we are offering Schengen visas [allowing free circulation across most of Europe] to anyone who brings €250,000. Again, this is not productive investment. In my downtown neighborhood they are buying apartments to turn them into Airbnbs. This doesn’t build the capital stock, but takes properties from the housing market, as they are no longer available for rent, and pushes locals out. People from Ukraine or Russia or China or Nigeria use their Schengen visas not to stay in Greece but to move to France or Germany. The US tourists’ money goes from an American bank account to a German one; so, the money bypasses Greece entirely while also increasing rents for locals. So, the investment is for the purpose of profiting from real estate, nonperforming loans, and privatizations detrimental to the productive economy.

We can also take the example of the rail crash in which fifty-seven people died. MeRA25 members of parliament had predicted the dangerous effects of privatization. The Greek rail company was sold off to the Italian state rail firm Ferrovie dello Stato for €45 million in 2017, but there was no investment, and instead the Greek state committed to pay €15 million in annual subsidies for the Athens-Thessaloniki line. It was a complete scam.

It’s a political decision to declare Greece solvent, just as it was a political decision to declare it insolvent in 2010. Christine Lagarde and her minions are making a nod and a wink to investors.

For all the talk about the EU Next Generation funds, the distribution of the money is completely and utterly corrupt. It either goes to oligarchs, who are not adding investment, or to the banking system. What we have seen, since Tsipras surrendered in 2015, is a continual plunder, a large-scale experiment in various forms of rent extraction. Immediately after the pandemic I said that the recovery fund was macroeconomically insignificant; if some spoke of a Hamiltonian moment, really it was the death knell of any project for fiscal union.

David Broder

What could a Greek government do differently?

Yanis Varoufakis

MeRA25 is the only party with a fully-fledged, modular, multidimensional program for government, an economic, social, and environmental manifesto that offers an alternative to the so-called Memoranda of Understanding which are ruling the roost here in Greece.

One major element is a publicly owned bank to replace Hercules and stop the buying and selling of nonperforming loans on secondary markets. Rather, this bank — called Odysseus — would register these loans and allow those whose home or small shop or farm is at risk to avoid the foreclosure, dispossession, and auctioning of their property, for a small fee not exceeding one-sixth of their disposable income.

Banks would pass bad loans to Odysseus, which would then freeze them through bond issuance. The idea is that once the prices of the properties exceed the face values of the frozen loans, then there can be negotiations between the borrowers and Odysseus. They would not lose the share they have already paid. This would stop the transfer of wealth to the Cayman Islands and the social disaster resulting from dispossessions.

Another key element concerns energy. The electricity grid has been privatized and is in the hands of the oligarchs who purchased the remnants of the public electricity board. Our program sets out the gradual nationalization of energy producers and distributors, ensuring that the price of energy does not exceed the average cost of production.

Prime Minister Mitsotakis is also a mini-Trump, taking the border wall in northern Greece as a symbol of national prowess and pride. What is the difference? That he actually built it.

After my departure from the finance ministry, a “superfund” was imposed to manage public assets. This is a unique case in world history: since it is directly troika-controlled, Greece’s assets are formally, legally controlled by foreign powers, the worst kind of neo-neocolonialism. We are proposing its disbandment and the passing of all public assets to a new public developmental bank. Its capital stock would create a stream of investment, including for the green transition and organic farming.

Another institution we propose is a free, digital payments system, based on the software of the Greek tax office. People could receive and make payments based on their tax-filing number, effectively a transaction system outside of the ECB, private bankers, Mastercard, or Visa. While it would save €2 billion every year, this is a controversial proposal because it is independent of the ECB, which would thus be unable to blackmail the Greek banking system as it did in 2015.

Moreover, we propose the disbandment of companies that trade in human labor, the rampant system of hiring via middlemen. We would reduce VAT from 24 to 15 percent and cut small businesses’s tax rate from 22 to 10 percent, while increasing the corporate tax rate from 22 to 30 percent. Funding for health and education is today abysmally low, and needs to be doubled. In all of this, we are not promising something that cannot be paid for, but an anti-austerity program.

David Broder

Your list for Sunday’s election, known as MeRA25-Alliance for Rupture, includes Popular Unity, and thus currents who favor a break from the eurozone or even the EU itself. What common ground do you have on this question, and what does it mean for implementing your program?

Yanis Varoufakis

With Popular Unity, we have had a difference of tactics and to some extent of strategy. It had as a goal exit from the eurozone. We thought that wasn’t a good idea, economically or politically. Yes, the euro is a terrible currency, is not viable, and has asphyxiated Greece and Italy. But we thought putting the aim of eurozone exit up front did not make sense politically. Exiting will come at a hefty cost.

What has happened in the last year is that our comrades in Popular Unity have come around to our position, coalescing around the original position of MeRA25. What is also true, however, is that since 2015–16, the eurozone has never failed to miss an opportunity to make the euro economies viable. For it to be viable, a political and fiscal union would be necessary.

The problem, today, is that the eurozone is both invincible and unsustainable. So, we need to have plans in place for what to do if the euro dissolves on its own. It would be tremendously stupid to imagine that the German Bundesbank does not have a plan for printing Deutschmarks, if it had to. It’s a bit like foreign policy: it would be remiss of us not to have a plan in case Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan invaded Rhodes tomorrow, even though we do not expect it to happen.

The problem, today, is that the eurozone is both invincible and unsustainable. So, we need to have plans in place for what to do if the euro dissolves on its own.

We are steadfast in insisting that euro-exit is not a policy aim. But at a time when the euro is unsustainable, our Demeter — our digital, publicly owned payments system — has two distinct merits. It allows us to breathe better and more freely within the eurozone. And, if the need were imposed upon us, it can be used as a conduit toward something else.

David Broder

Though it is somewhat behind New Democracy in the polls, Syriza is clearly hoping to form a government. In a recent interview for Star TV, Tsipras said that Pasok and MeRA25 would have little option but to support his party in office, rather than let Greece head for repeat elections. Are there any circumstances in which you would support such a government?

Yanis Varoufakis

For two years, as a result of the MeRA25 congress, our party has had a policy calling on the leadership of Syriza to sit around the table, without any preconditions. That is, to put aside all the bitterness and our past differences, to honor our proportional-representation electoral system and explore the prospect of a convergence that can make this society viable again and end the radical exploitation of the many.

In this call we also mentioned the — indisputable — fact that the Greek constitution doesn’t allow us to do what happens in Germany or Italy, where the parties sit around a table for three months after election day until they come up with what they consider a viable government plan. This coming Monday morning, someone is going to get the opportunity to try to form a government by Wednesday night at the latest. During these couple of days, it would be impossible to have any real conversation that could lead to a decent progressive government plan. So, for the last two years we called upon Syriza to have discussions with us.

We aren’t going to go to people and say, ‘vote for us to end the nonperforming loans scam, to end the electricity marketplace, to renationalize and reconstitute our railways that took fifty-seven lives,’ just so that on Monday morning we can accept a handful of ministries.

Tsipras said no — that we would have talks after the Sunday when the election was held. We say: no, if you wait till the Sunday of the election, we won’t talk after that, because all you will do is give us two or three ministries in exchange for us becoming complicit in the rule of the oligarchs. And the oligarchs surely don’t need a manifesto: they have the Memoranda, they have their own law firms, they rule by stealth.

We aren’t going to go to people and say, “vote for us to end the nonperforming loans scam, to end the electricity marketplace, to renationalize and reconstitute our railways that took fifty-seven lives,” just so that on Monday morning we can accept a handful of ministries.

David Broder

On Monday, I attended a conference in London, where UK home secretary Suella Braverman cited Greece alongside Britain, Poland, Italy, and Denmark as countries taking a tougher line on migration. In an interview with Bild, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called for EU funding for the border fence along the whole Turkish border. If his New Democracy is sometimes compared, more negatively, to Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, in what sense is it an outlier, or part of a wider reshaping of the Right?

Yanis Varoufakis

Mitsotakis has based his power on a combination of radical centrism, troika-speak, and ultranationalism. It is a government of neoliberals adopting troika policies, and of neofascists who depict foreigners and Muslims as “Satan.” That is how they portray desperate people avoiding war and hunger, who try to cross into Greece.

I’ve had the misfortune of living in Australia in the 1990s, Britain and Texas in the early 2010s. Mitsotakis has something of the Australian premier John Howard, the first leader to imagine and implement the inhuman policy of taking refugees arriving at the country’s shores and bribing some foreign poor country to take them into its own concentration camps. He has something of Braverman; indeed, the EU has for years been funding monsters in Libya to keep refugees in concentration camps in the middle of the Sahara.

He is also a mini-Trump, taking the border wall in northern Greece as a symbol of national prowess and pride. What is the difference? That he actually built it, and takes photos of himself in front of the wall. The former comrades in Syriza accuse him of being a Greek version of Viktor Orbán (but not Trump — indeed, Tsipras had a very good working relationship with him as president). Shamefully, Tsipras, too, has explicitly stated that he’s in favor of the border fence — the only difference is over whether the funding should come from the EU.