The New Cold War & What's After Capitalism | Yanis Varoufakis National Press Club Address

today at the

national

Press Club

yanis

yakis author, academic economist and former Minister of Finance of Greece, now leading the European royalist disobedience front jannis Yaris with today's

national

Press Club speech Hello and welcome to the national Westpack speech of the Today's Press Club, which comes to you from and from my country. My name is Anna Henderson. I'm the chief political correspondent for SBS World News and a director here at the

club

. Our guest today is Jannis Barakus, who has quite the extraordinary resume. He asked me to truncate it, but we have to make it a little academic.

Economist, best-selling author, parliamentary political leader, former Minister of Finance of Greece. He has spent time working as an academic in Australia and as Finance Minister he was credited as the Negotiator of the debt crisis with the European Union. His latest book is Techn Feudalism, in which he argues that

capitalism

is dead today we will hear more about his concerns about the future of Europe and Australia and fears of a fall into irrelevance due to ties to US politics. You can follow the conversation in Press Club OST or #NPC, please, welcome Yan Farus, thank you very much.

It is with a deep sense of obligation and duties to the custodians and owners of this land on which we meet with non-peoples that I pay my respects to the elders of the past, present and future and, in particular, and not only because They are past. week that we mark today's international women's day. I would like to mention the leading role of First Nations women as keepers of sophisticated and complex knowledge as community organizers and I think it is very important as beacons of wisdom, especially for those of us who suffer. From a masculine standpoint, ladies and gentlemen, today I am looking forward to discussing with you various reflections, ideas and concerns with a view to claiming, on behalf of Europe and Australia, a shared future in a world that is changing, a world in which Both you, Europe and Australia, are becoming increasingly irrelevant and to this I must add that not only as a European or Greek politician, but also as a proud citizen of Australia, Europe and Australia face a common situation: a threat existential, a progressive irrelevance that is due to two reasons: first, we have invested too little for too long and, second, we have allowed ourselves to slide recklessly from a strategic dependence on the United States to a non-strategic installation counterproductive to the agenda from Washington.

The current moment in Europe and Australia has been marked by three different important post-war phases: the first phase was the Breton timber system from 1944 to 1971. The United States emerged from the Second World War as the only creditor country. The only surplus country. The wood was a notable recycling. uh mechanism and, in effect, a dollar zone that was founded on fixed exchange rates supported by capital controls and run behind the gigantic US trade surplus at the time with free trade Quai being part of the agreement Washington dollarized Europe, Japan and Australia as part of an agreement whose purpose was to create aggregate demand for all those products coming from the production lines of the United States manufacturing sector that had become so remarkably productive and efficient during the war economy;

Subsequently, the US trade surplus operated like a vacuum cleaner floating out of our countries the dollars they had had sent us through their net exports the result was 20 years of high growth low unemployment low inflation wonderfully boring banking ever-decreasing inequality but, alas, that golden era of

capitalism

in which the Breenwood system was dead in water at the moment when the United States went from being a surplus country to a country with a very large trade deficit the second phase was marked by the violent reversal of this recycling mechanism, the United States became the first hegemon in the history of humanity that increased its hegemony by increasing its trade deficit, going further into the red, operating as another powerful vacuum cleaner, the growing US trade deficit raised the net exports of the world and how did the United States pay for these imports with dollars that were also floating above the rest of the world? world, as German, Japanese and later Chinese capitalists sent more than 70% of their profits to Wall Street to be recycled on Wall Street in the form of Treasury bonds, government debt, real estate stocks and, of course, later, the infamous derivatives, this bold reverse recycling system founded in the United States.

The deficits required ever-larger American deficits to remain stable in the process; They resulted in even faster growth rates than the Bretonwood system; However, they also gave rise to gigantic macroeconomic and financial imbalances, as well as mind-boggling levels of inequality. The new era was completed with an SDI ideology, remember neoliberalism with a policy of allowing finance to destroy financialization and a false sense of dynamic equilibrium, remember the great moderation that was built, of course, on enormously immoderate imbalances, almost inevitably in the wake of this perpetual tsunami. of capital rushing from the rest of the world to Wall Street, financiers created gigantic pyramids of complex derivatives,

what

Warren Buffett called weapons of mass financial destruction, exploded and we had the GFC, the global financial crisis, capitalism and Wall Street collapsed. saved thanks to the G7 central banks that printed between April 2009, April 2009 and last year they printed all the G7 central banks together around 35 trillion US dollars, that was one of the reasons why it was saved capitalism, the second was China, China directed half of its national link to say investment and in doing so, replaced much of the lost aggregate demand, not only domestically in China but also in the United States, in Germany, in Australia, the third period, the third phase is more recent.

I call it the era of technological feudalism and that is the book that kindly As I mentioned, I think this third era took hold in the mid-2000s, but grew strongly after the GFC along with rapid technological change that caused Capital will mutate into a new form. I call it Cloud Capital, it's

what

lives inside your phone, inside your laptop. an automated means of behavior modification consider the six things Cloud Capital does where you find it when you go to amazon.com when you go to Uber the six things Cloud Capital does first get our attention, manufacture our desires, third sell directly to us things that will satisfy the desires you have made fourth drives and monitors workers in the workplace whether the workplace is a factory, an Amazon warehouse or the top of a track where a driver monitored by himself algorithm works fifth removes from all of us a huge amount of Free Work every time we click, like, publish everything we do on the Internet and, finally, offers the possibility of perfectly combining all that with digital payments.

Is it any wonder that the owners of this cloud capital that I call the Cloud lists, is it any wonder that these Cloud lists have hitherto unimaginable power? They are already a new ruling class. If we look at the capitalization of the seven companies on the Clouds lists in the United States, also known as The Magnificent Seven, we will find that the capitalization of those seven companies is greater than the maximum capitalization of all publicly traded companies in the following countries: United Kingdom, France, Japan, Canada and China together, where did the money come from to accumulate so much Cloud Capital?

Where did all this investment come from? they come from remembering the $35 trillion that the G7 central banks produced after the GFC that's where the money came from, an example N Of the $10 invested by Zuckerberg in Facebook came from central bank money, so the The problem, ladies and gentlemen, is not what AI will do to us. In the future, the question is what has already been done to us and now it is a question of immense importance for Europe and Australia in which countries the cloud is. Capital is concentrated in the United States and China. Nowhere else is that thought maintained.

I will return to First let's say a few words about Europe. Most of you will know me as the failed Finance Minister of Europe's most bankrupt state, although I take solace that some people here on Cyber, including one or two government ministers, remember me as their university economics student. lecturer in my defense and, without forgetting, the reason I was elected finance minister in 2015 was because we had a catastrophic, catastrophic collapse, not only of Greece but of the entire euro zone, of the entire banking sector of the European Union and then a domino ball. Indeed, with Greece being simply the canary in the mine, the reason Europe was so severely damaged by the gypsies was the ridiculous monetary architecture we had erected, we had a Monetary Union that had a central bank without a treasury to back it up. and we had 19 Treasuries with no central bank to back them while they tried to bail out 19 separate banking systems that were all bankrupt - in short, even if European governments wanted after 2008 to emulate the radical administration's sensible response to the GFC of the government r.

We simply lacked the institutions to do it in Europe and the result was the European vicious circle between bank losses, the stagnation of unpayable public and private debt and an investment strike that lasted a quarter of a century and whose result today is that of Europe and, in particular, that of Germany. deindustrialization a quarter of a century later, while 25 years ago we had a debilitating North-South divide in Europe, we now also have an East-West divide in addition to the North-South divide, while the essential fiscal and political Union that Europe needs is Further from the Horizon than ever, the so-called green deal of the European Union is honored in the bridge, not in the implementation.

European industries are falling behind their competitors in the United States and China in all the technology races that matter, particularly Green Technology and Energy, and our continent lacks Cloud Capital in the era of technological feudalism where power comes from own large amounts of cloud capital, the capital that only the United States and China possess in my introduction, I said controversially. I hope Europe and Australia confront irrelevance and marginalization. Two other reasons, one of the two. Neither Europe nor Australia have sufficient amounts of cloud capital. It's a bit like trying to make your way in the 19th century without steam engines or locomotives.

The second reason is the new Cold War that is disrupting the business model of Europe and Australia. Almost talking about the new Cold War. A year ago, at this prestigious institution, Paul Keing lashed out at the Albanian government for making its own call by allowing Australia to become complicit in Washington's pursuit of that new Cold War against Australian interests. The only question Paul Kitting didn't ask was why Washington is doing this. what's behind what's behind the new Cold War why did President Trump start this confrontation with the ban on Huawei and ZT and then the aluminum tariffs and please don't say that's what Trump does because Joe Biden, who was supposed to be the anti-Trump gets elected and what does he do?

Accelerate that

cold

war by declaring an economic war against Beijing because that's what you do when you say you won't be allowed to import advanced microchips when I asked this question in the United States among my friends there, I have two answers as to the logic behind the new Cold War: Taiwan, the growing military threat to international trade by the Chinese government, Taiwan and escalation. I'm afraid I remain de

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ingly unconvinced. I wish they had convinced me sometime. Since Nixon went to China and during the long period in which Washington was very strong in arming Australia and Europe to accept China in the World Trade Organization in the circuits of international capitalism, it was very clear that the policy of one China was a fact: Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan was a fact.

It has never been questioned by the West, so what has changed in terms of China's military threat? I am afraid that in this conversation with Malcolm Fraser when he once opined that we will only be able to talk about a provocation by the Chinese army when the Chinese Navy ships anchored. right outside the US Navy San Diego base in the United States or outside Northern Virginia and can someone please explain to me the reason behind the accusation that China is threatening the sea lanes international when China is a country that completely depends on a current account?

Surpluses and imports of energy, why would they want to endanger the routesinternational maritime? No, ladies and gentlemen, the new

cold

war is not due to Taiwan or China, the answer is there and this is my hypothesis at Cloud Capital. The hegemony of the United States since 1971 is based on its trade. deficit that is a paradox and that however depends entirely on its ability to maintain its Monopoly on international payments denominated in dollars, which is what allows the United States to make the rest of the world pay for its deficits but the Chinese Cloud Capital has already managed something that the dollar system has not and cannot achieve, it has simply integrated Cloud Capital with financial services, for example, take WeChat, an app provided by the Chinese conglomerate tensent, which allows anyone with an account make free payments anywhere, free payments regardless of where you bank that is not available in Australia, in Europe, in the United States, similarly, the digital currency of the Central Bank of China, why is there no equivalent American to this?

It's actually very simple because Wall Street won't allow it. Wall Street refuses to share finances. lend either with Silicon Valley's West Coast cloud list or with a federal reserve and there is the r The United States still maintains its stranglehold on international payments traveling along a potholed, technologically backward dollar highway that , however, remains the highway of choice for global money, meanwhile Chinese cloud capital has built an all-singing, all-dancing payments superhighway, dubbed one that very few use, but the very existence of this superhighway It is a clear and present danger to the American monopoly. of the dollar payment system on which the United States relies, especially after the war in Ukraine, created nervousness among the oligarchs of Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, the Philippines and some in Europe as well, who began to use that superhighway for fear of that your money could be confiscated at some point.

In short, the new Gold War has nothing to do with Taiwan's trade routes or Chinese escalation; It is rather the manifestation of a dangerous clash between two technological systems, one denominated in dollars and the other in Chinese, so, if I am right, the question is: What should Australia do in this upside-down world that is increasingly technological on the home front? First we and I say we because I am the proud bearer of an Australian passport, as I said, the first thing we need to do is we need to get rid of the old model. banking business model in holes and houses because this old Australian model is Now a Ponzi scheme, a Ponzi scheme whose maintenance will result in a country marred by minimal investment in the things that matter, low productivity, debilitating inequality, high inflation and low salaries that push out the talented.

The people of this country, especially the young, in a low innovation system. Instead, we should embrace a Green U deal for Australia in this country as a necessity, not a luxury. Let me give you an example. Europe is about to introduce a border adjustment carbon tax. USA. Others will surely follow, so Australia must end its dependence on dirty fossil fuels and unrefined minerals and stop attacking solar energy, solar and wind energy, but mainly solar, to do what with it , to produce green hydrogen, to do what with it, not to export it, but to use it nationally in a new manufacturing sector, intermediate manufacturing sector that refines copper, cobalt, nickel into green copper, copper, green, cobalt, green steel and then transport it and export it to Asia, where the batteries that will be used in electric vehicles will be manufactured to be sold to Europe and the rest of the world as green technology, which I believe is the future for an Australia that participates in the international division of labor green, but for that to happen, this country needs a massive injection of public investment, the private sector Do not do it, nothing less than a snowy plan from the last days of the 1950s is necessary here.

Secondly, recognize that never It has been more de

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ing to be young in this country. Reverse the absurdity of the Australian government collecting more money from hex than from oil resource revenue. tax income appropriately to make higher education free again and negative gearing and, in particular, the egregious real estate capital gains exemption. Investments tax those with concentrated power to set prices and tax them through the nose and move away from the mentality of tax cuts as something that is smart and good is neither smart nor good you care about young people build social housing because the Social housing has a double effect: firstly, it benefits those who take it, secondly, by increasing the supply, it reduces or limits inflation in the prices of private homes so that everyone benefits, that is the second thing I would do and the third thing, since That Australian capitalists can't compete with big tech, the cloud theist of the US west coast or China, is a role for the Australian government in the same way it once was. created the ABC or CSO, it is the role of the Australian government to make important new technologies available to Australians to build public capital in the cloud, starting with a digital Australian dollar that the Reserve Bank of Australia can provide tomorrow essentially a free current account for each resident of this country, according to their taxi number with a PIN number, receives on their deposits there the interest rate provided by the Reserve Bank of Australia to those who already have accounts with them, the bankers at the rate at one day, what happens internationally first?

Australia must restore a tarnished reputation for blindly following the United States in lethal adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and today for its active and crucial complicity in Israel's deliberate war crimes in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, ladies and gentlemen, children do not They are starving today in Gaza, no, they are being deliberately killed. deliberately, without hesitation and without remorse, the famine in Gaza is not collateral damage, it is an intentional policy whose purpose is to defeat a population and ultimately drive it from that Land, leading Credence to the notion that Israel is exercising the right to In self-defense and by withdrawing funds based on baseless accusations, the only agency that can combat hunger in Gaza.

Australia damaged its already wounded reputation. Reversing this decision is too late now, just as there was a partisan campaign led by Malcolm Fraser. and Bob Hawk to end partial settlement in South Africa against the wishes of Washington who supported white supremacists in Petoria, the Australian political class needs to lead a campaign to end partial settlement in Israel Palestine and restore equality of civil liberties for Israelis and Palestinians this is the duty of every nation, but it is especially the duty of this one, why because of the Tanus story, the white settlers ideologically covered up the genocide of the native populations that was transported from British outposts like Australia to the land of Palestine and Israel. with the banner a land without a people for a people without a land that is Stan Ulus second Australia has the duty to reduce the escalation of the new Cold War.

I have already made this point, but I need to do it again to understand that this can only be If Australia ends its relationship with the United States, the United States is actively creating threats that then make us pay through the nose to be protected. Let's imagine an Australia that helps bring about a just peace in Ukraine instead of a pointless, eternal war being fought. nowhere does a non-aligned Australia that is never neutral in the face of injustice but also does not automatically align itself with every warmongering adventure decided by its allies imagine an Australia that has reestablished its credibility credentials as a country that thinks and acts on its own behalf . engages with China in a spirit of peaceful cooperation, a much better way to

address

Beijing's growing authoritarianism toward its own people than buying useless and very expensive submarines that only succeed in forcing the Chinese political class to close ranks around a core authoritarian.

Imagine a truly patriotic Australian Prime Minister. who tells the American president to see SE and desist from the slow murder of my friend Julian Assange why for the crime of Journalism for exposing to American citizens the crimes that his government and our governments have perpetrated behind our backs in our name in the ending that will contribute to a better friendship with the United States because, believe me, one of the few things I learned while in office in that short period of time. American power brokers appreciate you more if you can tell them no, they appreciate you.

They would appreciate an independent-minded Australia more than they appreciate Australia today in the same way you appreciate a friend who tells you you're wrong when you're wrong instead of saying yes to everything you do and then flying behind your back. to conclude yes For Europe and Australia to escape blatant irrelevance, we need separate but well-coordinated Green New Deals, one for Europe and one for Australia, but none of that is going to work in a world shaken by an uncontrollable new cold war that threatens the green transition that is necessary to preserve the viability of our species to have a future Europe and Australia must end our senseless slide from strategic dependence on the United States to a makeshift, impulsive and ill-timed installation for the United States dm25 our pan-European movement is working towards this goal, especially now that we have in view the elections to the European Parliament next June in the last fortnight while I was here in Australia.

During this visit, I was excited to discover many talented Australians full of wonderful ideas about how to do this in this country, as well as dedicated effective organisations. By the same token, the optimism may not yet be empirically founded, but I hope that Burns, thank you very much, thank you, thank you for the direction from him. I think one of the main themes he's touched on in his conversation here is about how Australia is aligning. with the United States on a military level just last week our Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, again warned about China's destabilizing, provocative and coercive actions.

Is there a risk that we don't actually see the reality of defense in the region in terms of how you are framing this debate and what do you say to those who see your position as quite naive on this because of the realities of the different defense superpowers and their military development and the economy behind there was a Chinese ship entering territorial waters in Australia? in Japan, in the United States, none of that, so the only risk here is that we allow someone like the Foreign Minister to get away with subterfuge and creating a false perspective about a threat that does not exist, the Chinese people He has every reason to fear. your government, if you are a student at the Technic po in Hong Kong, you are terrified by a very authoritarian regime, if you are Muslim, you have difficulties in certain provinces, as we well know in China, my friends and comrades in China feel that there is an authoritarian noose around their necks that is a threat and we need to help the Chinese democrats, the Chinese progressives and the Chinese socialists, we need to help them free themselves from that news, but we are not going to do it by allowing Penny Wong and other warmongers to create a false sense that China is threatening southern Australia when that is not the case, in order to weaponize a particular defensive policy motivated by a military industrial complex that in the end is the best gift that can be given to the elements of the Chinese Communist Party to use this clear misrepresentation of the situation in the Pacific to take drastic measures against their own people.

Our next question is from Tom Connell. Tom Connell, uh, on the board here and also from Sky News, thanks for the speech from him. I want to come back. until 2015, when President Xi Jinping was in the White House with Obama and he pledged not to militarize the South China Sea, the islands there, then he went and did it, wasn't it that a threat emanating from the Chinese side had changed What they said? China has made no secret that zone B, which is close to Australia and the Pacific, are not real risks and threats that need to be responded to in order to discuss how to do it, but it is necessary to respond to that? respond to whenever in the diplomatic sphere there is a setback, there has to be diplomatic language to respond and sometimes some action in terms of, um, some military maneuvers that are proportional to the threat, but let me raise the question of slightly differently: What happened to Europe and NATO expansion after all the successive promises that there would be no expansion of NATO commitments with Yelin toPutin, which were completely and absolutely violated by the West, that justifies Putin's use of weapons of this particular violation of order, in the end even invading Ukraine I don't think so, so proportional answers yes, I have a problem with militarization.

Yes, I believe that the response to the militarization of certain islands in the South China Seas is to essentially fuel a new cold war that destroys our business model and that essentially all it does is solidify the power base of the particular segment of the Party Communist in beIN that you consider to be the source of the violation of that trust. I don't think so, in other words, let's keep our Chiefs, let's maintain diplomatic proportionality and certainly not spend $368 billion on submarines, things that are completely useless to Australia and that will do nothing to sour those threats that they are talking about and that the seller to Australia has a button.

That can push and suddenly, as Elon Musk can shut down a Tesla car at will, he won't be able to use his submarines for the purposes of Australia's defensive moves. Our next question comes from Julie Hair. Julie Hair of Australian Financial. review thank you very much for your speech um you talk about the new Cloud Capital um cloud capitalism um I don't know um and the new ruling class um you talk about the GFC being a fundamental point in the development of that, could you please explain to me? He tells us how the GFC played a role in this, in developing this new capital, paid him.

The GFC caused our great and good leaders to flock to London in April 2009 in a state of panic, naturally because the whole system was going bad. and they decided to revive the finances between that April of 2009 under the presidency of Gordon Bryan, if you remember who was the prime minister of Great Britain at that time, until last year they printed 35 trillion dollars now at the same time that they practiced austerity in Europe in Great Britain. even in the United States, despite Obama's so-called stimulus program, what happens when huge amounts of newly minted money are injected into the financial system, it is full of liquidity, it is drowning in liquidity and there is austerity in the real economy, What happens is Bank of America or Deutsche Bank or City Group pick up the phone and call an industrialist British Aerospace or, you know, General Electric and say: I have 500 million.

I'll give them to you for free at zero interest rate. Will you accept them now if you want? G well, you look around and you don't see demand for your products you already have cash that you are too afraid to invest but you still get it from zero at zero interest rate you say yes, give it to me but you don't invest it what you do is go to the stock market of securities and you buy back your own shares the price of the share goes up your bond goes up no investment the only companies that really invested in capital were the cloud Elis the zukerberg eh and the Googles and so on, that's why I'm saying that this is my hypothesis or thesis, if you want our central banks paid for the explosion in quantity and therefore quality, in the final analysis of cloud capital, what would have happened if austerity if they, you know, had gone towards austerity instead of austerity?

To what you're describing here, well, let's say that instead of giving it to bankers, central banks had to partner with a public investment bank to invest money in green technology. Well, in Europe we would not depend on Putin. gaspro just like we were once he invaded Ukraine we would have had good quality jobs just the same in the United States we wouldn't have had Trump we wouldn't have had the alternative for Germany because all these neo-fascists this is what I call them well because I'm too old and tired to try to find polite terms. All of these neo-fascists grew because they surfed the wave of discontent caused by the combination of socialism for the bankers and austerity for everyone else.

Thanks Paul CP. Paul KP, from The Guardian, thank you very much for his speech. Many of his internal policies. Solutions like a Green New Deal or cutting housing tax concessions would be good for the environment and for inequality, but I don't see how they would do it. Anything to prevent this technological feudalism, that's the problem you described in your speech, could I ask you first what you think of more extreme policy solutions, like the United States breaking up big tech companies or Australia banning tech companies? collect users? data uh and secondly, do you think consumers would be interested in signing up for a government bank account, a government Uber, and a government Amazon as a publicly owned alternative?

Firstly, I mentioned the importance of, for example, the government in the same way that csro and ABC created to create a public Cloud Capital infrastructure that can be used at the state level, for example, the Reserve Bank. Why don't you answer your own question if the Reserve Bank of Australia gave you? a digital wallet with a PIN number, uh, and you could put your salary in there and make free payments to anyone, free payments, no fees, no questions asked, and you would receive the Bank of America overnight interest rate on your deposits. Reserve Australia, would you say no to that?

I can see how the public option you would say, wouldn't you say, wouldn't the cloudless still be hoovering up all my all of this is public, this is the Public Public Ledger and you can have your Australian Parliament Safeguard the anonymity of your payments and protect your privacy much better than the common World Bank B in Australia. The naab, of course, West B is excluded today. As for an Uber government, I wouldn't want an Uber government, that would be ridiculous. have a government Uber, but it would be great if we had a driver cooperative with its own cloud.

They will capitalize on their own algorithm so that they retain rents and profits from their clients instead of having them taken away through Luxembourg. that's how Uber works from Ireland to the Cayman Islands so I'm talking about a cooperative company here that is assisted by legislation from the Australian Parliament and finally I totally agree with you that we need a digital Bill of Rights Because we own our data and more than our data, it's about time we own our digital identity because you and I have no way of proving who we are on the Internet unless we beg some conglomerate or bank to answer for us. who we are because unlike the analog world where you know our states provide us with a driver's license or a passport that proves who we are and the Internet doesn't, you have to beg Google to attest to who you are so these small changes can make a big difference.

Our next question is from Belad Al Kaki, so here for the Australian Associated Press he has included some suggestions on possible business models or technologies that may be useful, including a public cloud capital to counter the concentration of power among the tech giants. What hope can this have? give for small business owners and a cost of living crisis well, to start with the cost of living crisis, here is a double edged s because companies like Amazon or Walmart in the United States have an ideology of cheap, but that cheapness in the end bites us in the ass because that cheapness means that all the value created by the companies that produce the things that are sold on their platforms is taken from the producers and diverted to Jeff Bezus's account and from there it does not comes out.

Not going anywhere because if you have $300 billion, I mean, if I give you another dollar, why how can you spend it? You can't spend it even if you want to do it right. So ending what Amazon can do is in the interest of the entire economy, including small businesses, to end through secondary and tertiary effects, but as a first step I would recommend, for example, the Australian government to do what the Indonesian government does, other governments in Turkey impose a 5% cloud tax. Digital purchases are actually very simple: you tax the purchase, which is detrimental to the ability of a small shop to trade without effectively trading through a platform that will plan whatever value it produces and, if you want to take this further, If you're feeling radical enough, uh, I can tell these platforms that if they want to operate in this country they will have to deposit 10% of their shares in our sovereign wealth fund where the dividends are accumulated and distributed to the people of Australia as an income essential. or basic dividend to be more precise, thank you our next question comes from Simon gross uh Simon gross c brq um Cloud capitalism um you're basically talking about the digitalization of much of what we do um in commerce and in dealing with the government um and you're looking at average citizens as victims.

I just want to relate this to Greece, when you had the big financial problem, one of the things we learned was the high level of tax evasion and avoidance which I mean, it's like a national sport in fat um and uh last month the IMF published this uh this report on recent informality trends in gree that's the term they use for tax evasion and um uh they say "Digitalization is an important factor that helped reduce informality in Greece. So can you improvise a little bit on the goods and evils of this? The digitalization of our lives.

I am totally in favor of digitalization. I am not a ladita nor a neolite. I don't want to destroy the machines and return to a bucolic lifestyle. As Finance Minister, my intention was to effectively ban cash for all digital transactions in order to end the problem of tax evasion. uh, that was not very appreciated by the vast majority of tax evaders, but what I want to point out, if I may, is that my concept of cloud capital is not a criticism of digitalization, it is a criticism of the fact that we have companies that own so much Cloud Capital that they can modify our behavior in such a way that they allow the owners of that digital capital or Cloud Capital to obtain massive rents, which is another form of hypersonic tax evasion or evasion of everything because they think that Amazon does not pay taxes. you realize that zero, yeah, it's zero, very dodgy stuff, yeah, zero, okay, zero, it's all legal, zero, I'd probably say something different, but they'd probably say something different, of course I'd say something different, no it would be as much as they should, I just need to say that they pay zero taxes, last year I looked at the figures: they had 46 billion euros, 46 billion euros of income in Europe and they paid nothing, okay, whatever they tell me, no I am convinced that they had no profits and paid. zero, okay, so digitization is not a solution to tax evasion when the entire value chain is being taken to the Cayman Islands by Jeff Basos, so yes to digitization, but at the same time we must take ownership of these chunks of capital in the cloud that allows them to create a number of different problems, not just the EV tax, let's say, take over, what do you mean?

For example, I gave the example above of how an alternative Uber could operate a cooperative that It belongs to the workers to the drivers and then having the algorithm is part of the capital of the cooperative and then there is the digitalization of the taxi service but it does not go to the Cayman Islands it does not create circumstances of psychological desperation among the drivers and it does not exploit their data the way Uber does it, that's an example of socialization of the algorithm, not nationalization, okay, Tony Melville, Tony Melville, director of the national Press Club.

I wasn't going to talk about EV taxes, but one of my favorites, maybe low-calorie in pools, there was a big sale on The Tools and people covering their backyards might be apocal, but my question goes back to your comment about me being the uh and I quote, the failed Finance Minister, former Finance Minister of the most bankrupt state in Europe, yes, there is a great Great community here today and how about something positive about Greece in terms of How is the economy going there? I'm not going to indulge in fantasies, okay, you want something positive. Yes, I will say it in Greek and then I will translate it.

I will translate that you can't kill Greece, it's very hard to kill, right, Nick Stuart, most people here today have paid for their lunches with credit cards, everyone uses credit cards all the time, as you pointed out, the Bank Australia's Reserve actually has. examined and investigated, although we have not seen any results of their investigation, they have analyzed the possibility of introducing some alternative form of transaction. Right now, between 1 and 3% of all of Australia's GDP is effectively going overseas. to a series of multinationals, what can we do now? Why vote for politicians who have what it takes to introduce it?

What if you can't find any? Well, then you run and create them. Today, whatever you think about China and the United States and all that, as we speak, there are 180 million digital wallets that are already up and running and they're not just used by the Chinese. KnowGerman businessmen who use them because they buy aluminum in Shenzhen. Bring it to Germany, they make propellers for the Shanghai shipyards and then send the propellers to Shanghai, yes, instead of going to their bank managers at Deutsche Bank to send money to the Buddhist bank that goes to the European Central Bank, which goes to the European Central Bank.

Central Bank of China then goes to your private account and makes a payment to get the aluminum and then the whole process is reversed. They have a digital wallet provided by the Central Bank of China. They make payment with the push of a button, no. fees no questions asked money comes and goes why the chinese can do this and we count it's not that the Reserve Bank of Australia can't do it or they have to investigate it over and over again they can do it yesterday the banks won You don't let them because they demand the Monopoly of the payment system and that is a scandal that they have it because you know if you ask an economics student what the role of a bank is they tell you oh they are intermediaries from whom they take deposits Jill and lend them to Jack that is not what What they do is a fiction, what they do is because to make a payment for lunch or a coffee in a cafe you need to have a private account, otherwise there is no card there, well, if the Reserve Bank gave them that card , suddenly banks would have to provide genuine services to their customers, something they don't want to do, except West Par of course, do you think Australian consumers would prefer to have that? actually reduce their rates rather than quantitative points or other things like that, as long as Australian consumers aren't total idiots.

Yes, we have a few more questions. I just wanted to take you to a part of your

address

where In your opinion, you talked about Australia blindly following the US and in my opinion that's fine, and in terms of the way you raised that concern about the pause of funding in Gaza, we see a variety of perspectives here at the Press Club. Of course, hearing different sides of you know the views on these issues, isn't it important that countries like Australia and many other countries that have also paused that funding to investigate when those types of issues are raised, of course , investigate to your heart's content? but don't stop feeding the hungry while you investigate, you would never have done it anywhere else in the world, of course everything must be investigated, but you know what we are missing.

The point is that as we speak. there are people being bombed and people going hungry and Australia is whistling in the wind and that is not good for Australia's image around the world, in the global South, but also in the global North, among the young people within 10 years be the decision-makers and even the United States is dismayed by this complicity in so much suffering again. I thank you again for your speech. Maybe I'll just thank you for inspiring the great lamb lunch, uh, which was really good. You've talked about the power of Big Tech. Once upon a time Roosevelt broke up Big Oil and Big Railroads because they were bad for the country, maybe Big Tech is still bad for America, but they bring in so much money that it's such a big part of the stock market probably isn't the from China, something similar, so if they don't want it to happen, how would that play out if the rest of the world and countries combined to try to bring in or not hinder big tech, while the US and China want to? those companies being as big as they are is a problem, of course, it will be a problem whenever you are faced with exorbitant power, you have an exorbitant problem, there is no doubt about that, what I am saying is that we need to try, but it is a It is a mistake to think about the task at hand the same way we thought in the 1910s about the destruction of trust.

You know, Theodore Ruselt famously and very bravely broke the Standard Oil Rockefeller monopoly, which was very difficult politically but technically. Very easy because there was an oil company that had all these gas stations in the United States. One thing was a monolithic company and what the government did was say, okay, we divided it into 50 companies, one per state, it's pretty clear. Wanting to do it, you can't do this with Google. The point about Google is that it's universal, what do you look for, yeah, how do you separate it? You remove YouTube from U from Google's search engine, everything collapses, so I.

I don't think the solution comes by emulating what happened in the 1910s. We need a completely different approach. I think there are three steps that I would recommend or four steps, or several. There are many things you can do. but it is not the old-fashioned regulation, the first thing you have to do is impose the interoperability that exists at the moment if you want to get out of Elon Musk's X or Twitter as we mainly know it, you can't, you can't, there's Blue. Sky there are many alternatives and technically technologically they are just as good or better but I have a million followers on Twitter if I go out and go to Blue Sky I won't even have myself as my follower it's a good problem to have H it's a it's a good problem to have it it's a good problem to have maybe not if you want you know how to say what you mean seriously not now, but imagine if you could really take your followers with you, which is what phone companies have long remembered. too young to remember a long time ago you couldn't take your phone number, your mobile number from T to Optus until the government said no you can't now that's technically very easy to allow the transfer of a phone number to allow all your data that you have on Facebook to go somewhere else is another matter, so you can do that, you can have a digital Bill of Rights, so if they use your data, they will have to pay you pennies, but pay you third, which What I said about the sovereign fund deposits shares there and therefore gives the people of Australia, the Australian Parliament, a say in shareholder meetings.

These are more radical, but I think the approaches are smarter when it comes to the algorithms you can have and need to have. In the same way that you know the federal police, you can create a federal unit whose purpose is to solve the subfuture and illegality that has been implanted in the algorithms, for example, let me give you an example when you are an editor of a newspaper. or any supplier on amazon.com at first they pull you in by going up quite a bit and then you see a lot of trade they bring you, you do a lot and more and more and more trade on Amazon because you are making money by the time they catch you, they push you down and then they blackmail you and tell you that you have to pay this amount of your income if they are going to raise you again that should be illegal and there should be a way to just take these people to the cleaners, thanks.

I understand that technological feudalism is a global phenomenon, but I wonder if there is a natural political system that could all governments become ACC company technological feudalism and secondly, do you believe? Social democracy can survive the challenge of the rise of far-right parties, particularly in Europe, well, it is a global phenomenon, just as capitalism was a global phenomenon, but that does not mean that it is the same everywhere, as if the capitalism was not the same. Everywhere, you know, Chile, Sweden, Australia, Poland, they are all capitalist countries, but very different within capitalism. Similarly, technological feudalism in China is different than technological feudalism in the United States and one difference is the fact that um, I mentioned payment systems which in China are far away. more efficient because finance doesn't control what big tech does in China.

The second point was, the second question was actually about social social democracy and the rise of the right. I have a very, very sad opinion about this very depressing vision. I think social democracy died a long time ago and we didn't realize it. What do I mean by that social? What was social democracy? It was the political project of the governments that brought together the representatives of the industrial capital of the factories and the unions and cut a deal between them saying to the factory owners, okay, you will have an industrial piece, we will get out of your case, but a Part of your profits from your capital gains will go to the state to fund Medicare, another part will go to workers to have it. a decent life is fine, but after the end of Breton Woods we had a situation where the economic sphere was divided and multiplied between the industrial sphere and the financial sphere, so finance effectively separated, created its own kingdom and power moved from the industrial manufacturing sector to the banking sector once that happened and especially with deindustrialization everywhere from the United States in Britain here H all the factories disappeared even if you are the Australian Prime Minister or the British Prime Minister or the American president who you bring to the table the head of Goldman Sachs and the trades, what about the nurses, what conversation can you have at that moment, that's why I say that you and the reason you see the decline of social democracy , you know that the DI diminishes the ambition of the ALB, uh, where it was effective, they said: "Okay, let's get out of this, there will be no awards, there will be no collective agreements, we will just introduce the minimum wage and we will take care of the workers through the pension system or the one-upmanship, that's the end of social democracy, this is this idea of ​​a kind of uh Big deal, a big contract between capital and labor disappeared a long time ago and the GFC completely killed it and now the techn- Feudalism has made it a figment of our imagination.

I don't know whether to thank you for that or not, but then Look, we'd just like to thank you very much for your time today, far away, and give you a warm thank you from the group. Well, thank you very much, thank you for watching. If you enjoy our videos, be sure to subscribe and hit the button. Bell button to receive notifications when we publish a new one, until next time.