Economics and politics are so intertwined and interlinked that politics now, mainstream politics, extreme center politics, are little else but a version of concentrated economics. And this means that any alternative - alternative capitalism, left Keynesianism, intervention by the state to help the poor, rolling back the privatizations - becomes a huge issue. The entire weight of the extreme center and its media is turned against it, which in reality now is beginning to harm democracy.

I think Syriza and Podemos are very, very different from Sinn Féin in many ways, and so I wouldn't put all three together. I would say that Syriza and Podemos are movements which have come out of mass struggles. In the case of Podemos, directly out of tariqaliextremehuge mass movements in Spain, which started with the occupation of the square. In Greece, as a response to what the EU was doing there, punishing it endlessly, for the sins of its ruling elite.

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.

Economics and politics are so intertwined and interlinked that politics now, mainstream politics, extreme center politics, are little else but a version of concentrated economics. And this means that any alternative - alternative capitalism, left Keynesianism, intervention by the state to help the poor, rolling back the privatizations - becomes a huge issue. The entire weight of the extreme center and its media is turned against it, which in reality now is beginning to harm democracy.

I think another crisis, which is being predicted now and which will be worse than what we saw in 2008, could bring the European Union down unless there are huge reforms from within to democratize, to give more power to the regions, etc. If this doesn't happen, the European Union will fall.

The situation in Turkey is extremely troubling. A panic-stricken regime, desperate to divide the Kurdish population from non-Kurds because it feared the rise of the HDP, has helped to create a huge crisis in the country. Can it be ended while Tayyip Erdogan remains in power? I don't think so. Erdogan may not be a "joker," but he is definitely a political plagiarist.

If there is a Greek exit from the Eurozone, I think the German elite will be quite pleased that they can then use that to restructure the Eurozone and make it a zone where only strong countries are allowed in. There would then be two tiers within the European Union, which is in fact already happening. But you cannot simply get rid of German control by raising the specter of the Third Reich. That's ahistorical.