Atossa Araxia Abrahamia — Yanis Varoufakis’s Internationalist Odyssey

Longish backgrounder on an emerging political force on the left. The Overton window had been shifting right for decades. Now it seems to be shifting left again.

The Nation
Yanis Varoufakis’s Internationalist Odyssey
Atossa Araxia Abrahamia

Yanis Varoufakis — The Progressive International has been launched. Read the Open Call. See the video. Join us!

Power to the People! ✊

In conjunction with the Sanders Institute.

Yanis Varoufakis
The Progressive International has been launched. Read the Open Call. See the video. Join us!

See also

Is trade a promoter of peace? Adam Smith, one of the earliest defenders of trade, worries that commerce may instigate some perverse incentives, encouraging wars. The wealth that commerce generates decreases the relative cost of wars, increases the ability to finance wars through debts, which decreases their perceived cost, and increases the willingness of commercial interests to use wars to extend their markets, increasing the number and prolonging the length of wars. Smith, therefore, cannot assume that trade would yield a peaceful world. While defending and promoting trade, Smith warns us not to take peace for granted. We unpack Smith’s ideas and their relevance for contemporary times in our recent article in the Cambridge Journal of Economics.

Imperial wars are about who controls commerce and resources.

Developing Economics
Do not take peace for granted: Adam Smith’s warning on the relation between commerce and war

Maria Pia Paganelli and Reinhard Schumacher

See also

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Book IV,  On Systems of Political Economy

Chapter III (part II):
On the extraordinary Restraints upon the Importation of Goods of almost all kinds from those Countries with which the Balance is supposed to be disadvantageous

Part II: On the Unreasonableness of those extraordinary Restraints upon other Principles

By such maxims as these, however, nations have been taught that their interest consisted in beggaring all their neighbours. Each nation has been made to look with an invidious eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it trades, and to consider their gain as its own loss. Commerce, which ought naturally to be, among nations, as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship, has become the most fertile source of discord and animosity. The capricious ambition of kings and ministers has not, during the present and the preceding century, been more fatal to the repose of Europe than the impertinent jealousy of merchants and manufacturers. The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy. But the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot perhaps be corrected may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquillity of anybody but themselves....

See also

Workers are not taking it lying down. Paris under siege.

Fort Russ News
VIDEO: MAYHEM IN PARIS, FRENCH POLICE USE TEAR-GAS AND WATER-CANNONS ON YELLOW VEST PROTESTERS

Joaquin Flores