 Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. Well, it's the 97th episode of Give the People What They Want. You're with Prashant and Zoe from People's Dispatch. That's peoplesdispatch.org. I hope you go there every few minutes, hours. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. We're coming to you with a range of interesting and important stories. I want to start, however, with a story that I'm going to say a thing about Britain and then go to the Gulf and then Prashant is going to come back with more on the situation currently in Europe over the cost of living crisis. Well, look, in Britain, the national company just released a report saying that they might have blackouts in the winter. 50% of Britain's energy comes from the North Sea fields. And that might be so, but the fact is that we have an issue here with the question of where Europe is going to get its energy. Well, interestingly, Olaf Schulz went on a tour of the Gulf. And that's interesting to me because here is Mr. Schulz and other European leaders talking a lot about human rights and so on. And he arrives in Saudi Arabia, meets the high officials of the Saudi government. I know that we're going to come back in this show to talk about Yemen where Saudi Arabia is prosecuting a ghastly war. But Mr. Schulz, during his visit to Saudi Arabia, essentially made it very clear that everything is basically normal with Saudi Arabia. He said we have longstanding economic and political relations with Saudi Arabia. Therefore, it's right and important that we continue to talk here and at the other stops on my trip about the development of the region, about the possibilities of economic relationship. The possibilities of economic relationships. A centerpiece of Mr. Schulz's visit to the Gulf was about energy. In fact, energy is defining a large part of Europe's foreign relations now with places like the Gulf, like the United States, countries which increasingly will get dependent as a consequence of the cut with Russia will be dependent on the Gulf. Well, there's another country, a major country that's a provider of energy for the world and strikingly, this country has only recently entered into global discussions and that's Norway. Norway is one of the world's largest producers of energy, a major producer of natural gas. In fact, a lot of conversations have been taken place about Nord Stream 2 and the sabotage of Nord Stream 2. I'm going to say a word about that in a minute, but much less is said about the pipelines coming from Norway down into Europe and Germany. It's interesting that the Europeans were not relying on Norway rather than Russia for power it has to do with prices. Norwegian gas was more expensive, they preferred Russian gas. Now, of course, there's a turn back to Norway to get gas and it seems that perhaps the Saudi, you know, liquefied natural gas is going to be preferable. This means an enormous investment in Europe in building liquefied natural gas terminals. Not sure if all that is going to happen. In the Gulf, of course, in Saudi Arabia, there's a kind of jubilation because it seems that everything is forgotten. All is okay now. As a consequence of the war in Ukraine, Saudi Arabia's various problems are off the table and Saudi Arabia is back in business now as a major player in world affairs. The United States government, as you saw earlier, Joe Biden visits with the Saudis, talks to the king and so on. All is forgiven with Saudi Arabia. An interesting position to be in for the world now. The cost of living crisis, energy crisis in Europe on the one side and a rapprochement with the Saudi regime on the other. But Prashant, much more important is if these rapprochements don't take place with the Saudis or they don't take place, the ability to buy from Norway, what's the situation inside Europe going to look like? Right, Vijay, before going to Europe, of course, another important thing to note that despite all this rapprochement, the OPEC+, in which Saudi Arabia plays an important role, decided to cut production from November onwards, which means that the crisis is definitely nowhere close to ending for the European Union at least. The United States, of course, has much more. It has reserves, which are also depleting, but at least they have reserves. Europe, on the other hand, going possibly going to enter a very difficult point of time. One of the interesting things that we see in Europe is the fact that in various countries, there have been mass protests over the past one week. We saw one of the earliest manifestations in Germany a couple of weeks ago when people actually came on the streets and said, we want Nord Stream back. And somehow, some days later, Nord Stream was sabotaged and apparently nobody knows why it happened. So that's a big question as to who actually benefited from the sabotaging of Nord Stream because Nord Stream was one of those pipelines that bound Europe and Russia together and not only Germany, but the whole of Europe and Russia together in various ways. But now with Nord Stream more or less off the table, it's a very difficult challenge as far as Europe is concerned. So over the past week, between September 29th and October 1st, we had protests in France, tens of thousands of people taking place. We had huge protests in the United Kingdom. Again, tens of thousands protests in Belgium in the previous week. We had similar actions taking place in Holland, taking place in smaller countries like Serbia. The interesting thing in all of these protests is that the demands are very, very similar. And this stems from the fact that across the board, workers are finding that their wages are no longer enough to meet the rising cost of price. Inflation, of course, is a very common issue in all these places and a lot of it is also due to rising energy prices as well. Private companies, of course, using this opportunity to sort of raise, make a huge amount of profit. In fact, that is one of the factors that many of these protests, the organizations which have been holding these protests have been highlighting that you need to take action to regulate the prices. Governments need to take action to regulate the prices by power companies. So the Netherlands coming up with a proposal, we know that France is also spending money in terms of trying to sort of create a buffer for its consumers. But that alone is not going to be enough because we are going through a time period where governments which have so far failed to act are now being called into question because decades of neoliberal policies where governments refuse to intervene, what they have led to is a situation where over the question of minimum wages, over the question of better working conditions, fewer working hours, some of the core demands that trade unions and workers organizations have been raising. These have been coming to the forefront even more now because of what is being called the cost of living crisis, which I think deserves a completely different relook so to speak. But what all of this brings to the fore is how are governments and people for that matter going to face this situation. So on the one hand, we do know that the governments have taken a particular path. They have completely aligned with the United States. The governments of Europe have more or less abandoned their foreign policy, their financial policies, their future for that matter on the US bandwagon so to speak with reference to the Ukraine war with reference ties of Russia. And this leaves them with a huge credibility crisis as far as addressing the needs of their own people are concerned. So what we are probably going to see in the coming weeks and months, undoubtedly, as Europe is set to move into a recession, a lot of economists saying that now is the fact that we are going to see more and more people on the streets. We are going to see massive protests. This throws a challenge before the organized left the trade unions. Will they be able to mobilize these people? Will they be able to capitalize on these protests, present progressive demands to their governments? Or will this opportunity be used by the far right as it often happens? And we've seen main instances of that already happening. Far right countries, which you know, far right parties, which for instance offer convenient villains for the people in terms of immigrants, in terms of so-called culture wars, come to the minorities and then say that these are the cause of your problems. If you somehow sidelined them, you're going to be okay, you're going to be better off. And this is really, I think, a key question right now in Europe, an important part of the world, surely because of its GDP numbers, it contributes a lot. And it's very clear that the governments and the mainstream political elite is completely fearing to address this question. So Europe pretty much right now in the balance as we speak, I think the next few months are going to be very crucial. Well, you said the next few months are going to be crucial Prashant. In Brazil, they're talking about the next few weeks being crucial. It's today, the 7th of October. Just about five days ago, Brazil had a presidential election and now a second round on the 30th of October. Bring us up to speed, Zoe. That's exactly right. And I think it's so important to go over the different aspects of this election. The first round that happened on October 2nd, past Sunday. Now there's going to be a second round on October 30th. So essentially on October 2nd, there were many things that people were voting for. One is who's going to be president. Two is the composition of the Senate. Three, the different federal deputies. Then there's the local legislatures as well. And so there was a lot up at stake in, you know, the importance of the next couple of weeks, but really the composition of these different bodies is what's going to determine what happens in Brazil for the next couple of years and the years to come. So a lot of people, and we're really hoping for first round victory of Lula da Silva, the Workers' Party, he was favored in all the major polls and all done by all the major pollsters here in Brazil, given about 47 to 48% of the voter intention. Meanwhile, Jair Bolsonaro was the incumbent president, far-right president and candidate of the Liberal Party, not to be confused with the actual Liberal Ideology, but just the Liberal Party. He was given somewhere around 33 to 35%. I think maybe the most optimistic poll gave him around 38%. But he was never really given more than 40% of the voter intention in these polls. Come Sunday, October 2nd, and he ends up with 43% of the votes. So one big question out of many people's minds is how did he get so many votes? Not only because of what he's done while president and the horrific situation the country is in right now, but also none of the pollsters really predicted this. One of the explanations for this is that he constantly in his speeches, he talked about the inefficiency of these pollsters, he undermined the pollsters, talked about how they were useless, and so a lot of people suspect that many of his voters wouldn't have participated in these polls. Another hypothesis is that because it's an embarrassed vote, people are embarrassed to tell them, they're embarrassed to express that this is going to be their vote. So these are some of the factors maybe at play that can explain for how he was able to get such a high number of votes in this first round. Either way, the Lula victory in the first round wasn't necessarily predicted by all the pollsters. I think people are most surprised at how many of those Bolsonaro was able to get. Nevertheless, there's going to be a second round in this presidential race, and already it's really, really heating up. I mean, we thought that September was intense, but it's already been only been four days and already the fake news campaigns are wild. Every single hour that you enter into Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, there's some new conspiracy that's being launched by Bolsonaro supporters about the Workers' Party, about Lula. Right now the hot topic is talking about abortion. Who supports it? Who doesn't? It's very, very fierce. Meanwhile, Simón Tevez, which was one of the candidates, she expressed her support for Lula, Ciro Gomez, who is this hanger on. He didn't exactly say I support Lula, but his party said that they supported Lula and he agreed with the position of his party. He actually never says the name Lula out loud, but it's still a vote of confidence for the Lula ticket. In other terms, there's also a governor's race in Sao Paulo that's going to be really important in the second round. Fernando Haddad, who contested the presidency in 2018, is going up against a big time Bolsonaro supporter, Garciso, who's from the Republicans' Party. This is going to be a very important race as well. Sao Paulo is the biggest state in Brazil. It has the biggest population and really what happens here does impact the entire country. Also, another decisive vote will be this governor's race of Sao Paulo. The state of Sao Paulo was actually one of the swing states in terms of Bolsonaro getting a lot more votes than people had initially predicted. A lot on the table, people are out on the streets once again, rallying, trying to turn the vote. They call it the Viravoto, which is getting more votes in favor of their candidate. It's going to be a very intense month here. An intense month, and I will of course be following it. Zoe is in Sao Paulo in Brazil. If you go to People's Dispatch, she has an interview with Gilmar Mauro, who's one of the leaders of the Landless Workers' Movement. Well worth watching. You're with Give the People What They Want. It comes to you every week from People's Dispatch and Globetrotter. This is our 97th show. That's a lot of shows, Prashant. I'm not sure that we can keep going at this rate of exhaustion. Look at us. There's Zoe in the middle of a campaign, still at it, still there. We've reported to you from bus stations, from basements in strange, damp rooms in Glasgow. We keep coming to you with our stories. Initially, I began by talking about the visit of Olaf Schulz to the Gulf. Well, you know, there's Saudi Arabia, and it's prosecuting its war in Yemen. Yemen, a country that's fallen off the table of the world press. But Prashant, you continue to follow what's happening in Yemen. What's going on? Right, Vijay. I mean, the latest development, of course, a very unfortunate development in some senses is that the ceasefire, which held for six months, starting from April, finally expired in the beginning of October. That's on the 2nd of October. We really don't know what will happen, of course. This comes after nearly seven years of war. The war began in 2014, 2015, and went on almost relentlessly until 2022 in April. When the time of Ramadan, there was some amount of negotiations that set a series of agreements and conditions that were reached, and a ceasefire came into effect. Now, the ceasefire was far from perfect. There were incidents of violence, obviously. But there has been a definite chronicling of the fact that it has had an impact. For instance, I believe civilian deaths have declined by at least 60%, and displacement is at least half by according to UN figures. So just in these six months, we saw that kind of an impact due to the lack of fighting. And this itself is a key indicator of how much, you know, what kind of an intense conflict was taking place in Yemen. And, you know, we've talked about these numbers innumerable times. I think the 73% of the population is dependent on humanitarian aid now, which has actually increased from last year. And I believe that's like what they've been, the number of deaths, again, lots of numbers that have, you know, placed some numbers even say they're close to over 350,000 people have been killed in all these seven years of war. And that's an immense astonishing number. And the fact is, like you said, despite all this, that this war has never really sort of found, you know, really come into people's notice or become an international cause, so to speak. And the reason I say it's not become an international cause is because of the fact that this is not a war within Yemen per se. This is not a war between two Yemeni factions. Although on the face of it, that's what it, you know, is often termed as the Houthis. And they're supposedly the internationally recognized government, which is what it's called. But what the internationally recognized government is basically a proxy for Saudi Arabia, its allies, the UAE and this coalition of countries, it has formed. And equally importantly, it is a coalition whose members are supported strongly by the U.S. and the United Kingdom among other countries. So Saudi Arabia, for instance, since the war began, there was a huge boom in its weapons exports, I believe, from 2015 to 2019. Its weapon imports increased by around 130%. And this was the single biggest conflict it was invested in. Saudi air raids, for instance, I believe to have caused thousands of deaths in Yemen, including as recently as a few months ago. And so this is, in some senses, an international war. This is not, you know, this is not the war in Yemen. It's a war in Yemen, but it's not just a war among Yemenis because there are, this part of the Saudi-led coalition includes mercenaries who are brought from other countries with money paid by the Saudis. For instance, there's been infighting between the Saudi coalition itself as the Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates have often divergent interests. And amid all these people, we have, amid all this fighting, we have tens of thousands of people who are suffering in a variety of ways. We are whites, but hunger, we had a cholera epidemic some years ago. And even now, if we look, for instance, at the fact that even people who are returning after the conflict during peace, their houses are completely destroyed. Drinking water is not available. I believe one recent study has said that only 25% of households have a water source available within the house. A large number of students, children, I believe, 40 to 50% not going to school. So these are all numbers. These are all, these are all crises which require years to resolve. I mean, there's no easy solution to that. And the fact that, you know, of ceasefire, which is any way of fledgling has once again collapsed is a very unfortunate occurrence right now. So I believe mediation efforts are going on. But for people across the world, I think the important thing to note is that this is a global war, so to speak. There's been a lot of pressure in the US and UK about weapons supplies to Saudi Arabia. After Joe Biden came to power, he immediately initially made some noises, but then said that he would be selling weapons for defensive purposes. And like you pointed out at the beginning of the show, now that Saudi Arabia has become a country, everyone wants to sort of, you know, bring on their side the possibility of even more weapons sales is very much on the cards. So that's because that's the way the US diplomacy so to speak by supplying weapons. So all this together make the situation in Yemen far more volatile. So I think people across the world definitely wishing that the ceasefire continue, that there be greater discussions for peace. But right now it's very weight in watch. Well, you know, Prashant, that phrase you said about diplomacy and the military, the UK's Department of Defense released a report in 1998 that had a phrase called military diplomacy, which is precisely what the United States had been doing in Yemen when Ali Abdullah Saleh was the president, military diplomacy using US warplanes to bomb Yemen and then letting the Yemenis say they were doing it. We only found that out because WikiLeaks released an enormous tranche of cables. Well, the head of WikiLeaks continues to sit in Belmarsh prison in the UK, Zoe. I gather there's an international move to get Julian Assange released what's going on with this campaign. That's exactly right. Tomorrow there's going to be a human chain formed around the parliament in the UK and this is just one action, part of an entire wave of actions demanding that the United Kingdom really respect their commitments to international law, to human rights. There's so many other things that they claim to uphold globally, but turn a blind eye or willingly go against with the case of Julian Assange who has been in Belmarsh prison for the past several years who has been subject to torture who is facing what could be a lifetime in high-max security prison in the United States just for telling the truth allowing journalists like us to be able to access information about things that the powers that be would rather be a secret. There's many different actions organized. I know that today several organizations with the International People's Assembly have been turning in letters to their local UK embassies calling on Julian Assange to be released expressing their solidarity with this case telling them to take action. This is extremely important and I think it's telling this week there was a very interesting interview that happened on Piers Morgan's show. It featured John Bolton who is our favorite guy for so many reasons John Bolton speaking to Stella Morris about the case of Julian Assange and I quote John Bolton said I hope he gets at least 176 years in jail for what he did. So I think this really speaks to the fact that the US establishment that the people who are in power in the United States were so offended by the fact that all of their crimes in Yemen their crimes upholding the crimes of Saudi Arabia upholding the crimes of Israel the crimes that they committed in Afghanistan and they committed in Iraq during those horrific wars and they continued to devastate the lives of millions of people all of these crimes became exposed the people of the world have acted to this information and they no longer had an excuse or justification and so this really hit at their heart and that's why they're so committed to prosecuting Julian Assange I think it's beautiful to see that people from across the world understand the importance of Julian Assange and not only what he represents as a publisher for going after those documents and doing the work that he did but really beyond that in terms of someone who stood up to the empire and sought to expose the crimes and give the people of the world this information so that they no longer in the dark that they're able to carry forward their struggle for justice at People's Dispatch we've been covering the case, the extradition hearing to the United States of a case quite closely and I know we wrote about one of the testimonies that took place during this hearing and it was of someone who had been imprisoned in different clandestine torture facilities across Eastern Europe and he spoke about the importance of the WikiLeaks files of the Gitmo files which discussed all of the black sites that exist across the world of the United States where people have been held where people were tortured where they were not told about their charges and this information is crucial without this information he would have had no recourse he would have maybe still been in prison there's so many other people whose lives have been fundamentally changed and that's why we see the response that we see today people in Brazil people in Morocco, people in Tunisia standing up and saying Fridjuli Nassange because the truth about the crimes of the empire is our right, we have a right to know the crimes that they are committing and meanwhile I wish that I could see the State Department cables around what happened in Burkina Faso on the 30th of September on Friday early in the morning gunfire was heard in the capital by just after midday it became clear that Captain Trariore 34 years old had taken over from Colonel Damiba but in fact Captain Trariore made it very clear to the French broadcaster this was not in fact a second coup but merely a change of leadership inside the coup administration that had been there since January what he also reinforced when Mamadou Isofou who was the former president of Niger came to Vagadougou the capital of Burkina Faso on Tuesday Captain Trariore told him that look the coup administration is still committed to handing over power to civilians by July 2024 so the economic commission of West African states economic community of West African states can calm down a little bit that's what he said well why was there this so called second coup which they say is not a coup merely a change of administration inside the coup regime why did this happen fascinatingly if we go back look at the statements made by Colonel Damiba in the lead up to the coup we learn a lot well what was the claim made by Colonel Damiba he essentially said that the coup took place overthrowing a government that had been in power since 2015 seven years the coup took place because they wanted the military wanted a much sterner response to the Islamist jihad that had been taking place in northern Burkina Faso now it should be said that Ouagadougou that is to say the government of Burkina Faso only controls about 60% of the country's territory very large portion has been seized by these sections that essentially were emboldened and armed by the collapse of Libya in 2011 in the northern part of Burkina Faso well the first was that he said we're going to go and turn this around we're going to actually defeat the Islamic jihadists with the full might of the military that was the claim made by by Mr. or Colonel Damiba but in fact the armed conflict location and event data project shows that armed group violence particularly in the north of Burkina Faso increased by 23% in the five months after Colonel Damiba took power in other words he was not able to control the insurgency the second thing he said was they were going to sort of come in and take care of the economy well Burkina Faso which is the fourth largest producer of gold on the African continent is also one of the poorest countries because that gold is siphoned off in a kind of international corruption that brings almost nothing to the people of Burkina Faso so on these two planks there was really no relief he was not able to deliver well what Colonel what Captain Tarore said when he took power was that Colonel Damiba the previous head of the coup government had not been able to deliver on these things because he was too close to the French now this is interesting we have been here before there have been several coups in the Sahel region in Africa in Chad, in Guinea, in Mali and in Burkina Faso each one of these must be understood as an anti-French coup these are coups asking based on popular opinion asking for the French to get out of the Sahel region very interesting developments including when Emmanuel Macron went to Algeria he was booed in Oran he was heckled in Algiers and so on the increasing anti-French sentiment is considerable shouldn't be underestimated that people like Captain Tarore 34 years old came to consciousness after the death of Thomas Sankara and yet the Sankara movement based on the regime of Thomas Sankara from 1983 to 1987 continues to play a role we are going to keep following what's happening in Burkina Faso and in Mali very interesting developments we will come back to you next week perhaps a little more on that you are with give the people what they want brought to you from People's Dispatch and from Globetrotter see you next week