 Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. We are reporting from Caracas, where an international solidarity meeting with Venezuela is being held and delegates from 85 countries have arrived to express their solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution. Today we're joined by Jana, a Central Committee member of the Lebanese Communist Party, and she's here to talk about her organization as well as the current political situation in Lebanon. Thank you for joining us. Could you first talk about the current political situation and the policy framework of the new government that is taking power, especially in the context of the previous governments? There are new policies that are set to be agreed upon in the new government. These mean more cuts in the services that are already very, very limited and in a very bad quality. But the problem is that these policies are not coming on their own. These are the continuation of the same neoliberal policies which started in the early 1990s after the ending of the Civil War, when the new government actually applied the IMF projects that were enforced on most of the third world countries. Starting then, the complete disenfranchisement of the Lebanese people was very much witnessed. In addition to the huge debt that we're witnessing the results of today. So as we are today living under the results of these destructive neoliberal policies from the 1990s, the current government is willing and planning to decide upon new policies which are going to make the situation even worse to more than 95% of the Lebanese people. And could you talk a bit more about which are the sectors that are likely to be substantially hit because of these new policies? Healthcare, public education, both in schools and the public university. Infrastructure, this is very important because infrastructure since the end of the Civil War has been very, very weak, including specifically electricity. We're one of the very few countries in the world which still have incredible meaning four to three to six hours of electricity cuts per day. So we're going to have more electricity cuts, water sector privatization. In addition to several privatization projects in different and diverse sectors. Also at the level of the housing, the housing sector is now at the verge of destruction specifically because of the real estate. The state has decided after the end of the Civil War, the state had decided that only tourism is the sector that's going to be productive. Meaning the destruction of agriculture, industry, art production, art crafts, everything that is not included directly in tourism. So after destroying that since 2011, we have had the Syrian crisis which meant also the destruction of tourism. Since then, the Lebanese state has decided to concentrate only on banking. Meaning that now we are paying the banks for everything that we're living for. In addition to that, or link to the banking sector is internally connected the real estate sector. So the housing crisis is incredibly huge and we're expecting more and more cuts at these levels. And could you talk a bit about the Lebanese Communist Party and its current approach to this crisis and what are the movements and protests it's pure heading right? Definitely. What we're doing now is not starting from now. It has been an accumulation because we believe and we see that it is impossible to work on the spot immediately. It has been an accumulation since specifically 2011. A movement has started back then amongst several uprisings in the Arab world. And we had another wave happening in 2014 with the unions, an amazing union movement. Incredibly democratic and representative movement started in 2014. That was in 2013. And then 2015, the garbage crisis. And now in 2019, this is what we perceive as a result of all of these movements, which also means that it is an accumulation in awareness, not only in the political sense of the movement. So what we have been trying to do and we are still working on is, first of all, the formation of an opposition front. There are very few leftist, communist, Marxist parties in Lebanon. So we are opening this front to involve everyone who sees and perceives the current situation as destructive, including national anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist movements, in order for us to build not only an opposition but an alternative. We're saying that this is bad. We're saying we don't agree on what is being proposed. The government, like all capitalists in the world, are saying there's no other solution, which we're trying to build in an extremely democratic way with everybody who is interested to come and build this alternative. Could you talk a bit more about the trade union movements there also, which are the areas the trade unions are strong and the kind of mobilization they do? Of course, part of the new liberal policies in 1991, starting by the 1990s, was to destroy the union movement, which was very strong in the 60s and the 70s. Starting from then, we had a huge proliferation of creation of unions, which meant funded by the capitalists, which meant that not only the unions were destroyed, it meant also that ordinary people lost their trust with unionists and the union structure as a whole. So what we have been trying, I told you in 2013, we had a very strong union movement, which had set new tools and new rules for union working, specifically working all around the regions. Meaning that the decision of any union movement comes from the regions first to break, anyways, the centralization that exists specifically in Lebanon. It's meant also the participation of women in the higher positions. It also meant that there is a clear reading of the situation. We don't want compromises. We don't want one small piece of support from here and there. We want a very progressive and real change based on our demands. So what we are trying to do currently in many different sectors is, in a very complex situation, fueled by sectarianism, fueled by money, is to build the same kind of union, specifically at the level of teachers, at the level of agricultural workers. Thank you so much. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.