 Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another live stream coordinating call of DM 25, the movement for Europe featuring progressive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. We're back after the summer with a new season of calls. I'm Meroen Kilele and today we're going to discuss, we'll have an initial discussion about privatisation and disaster capitalism, a slight change from the pan-topic that we had today. What kinds of issues are we grappling with here and what can we do about it? We've got some new people in our panel and they'll be introduced in the description of the YouTube video here. If you've got any questions, ideas, things you want to say, urgent things you want to put in our laps, then please write them in the chat and we'll be putting your comments to the panel as and when they come. Let me hand over now to Janice to kick us off. Janice. Thank you, Meroen. Folks, comrades, friends, I am in situ in a burnt out forest. Maybe you'll remember that in August we had a monumental inferno in Evia, northern Evia, in the Evias, that long island which is almost as big as Crete and which is on the side of the Greek-Greece mainland. Let me just show you a little bit. This is where I am. This is a beautiful pine forest. That has been burnt, smithereens. We're talking about something like 1.2 million square strema, as we say, something like 400,000 acres in British terms. There, you can see everything around this village. The whole forest has been burned down. Now, this is a natural disaster, not so natural. It's connected to climate change, of course. But what makes it particularly useful for today's discussion is the way in which, by the way, can you hear the insects? The only thing that has survived are some insects. What is particularly pertinent is the manner in which the right-wing government we have in Greece, which is the darling of Brussels, the darling of the central bank of Europe, the darling of financialized capitalism, they're weaponizing this fire, this disaster here in order to pursue the agenda of, as Meron said, disaster capitalism. And I'll give you a very specific example. The day after this fire ended, they immediately gave private contracts to their mates, large-scale companies. The people that I was just speaking to, you can see them there, they're volunteers who helped stem the fire and who are now trying to prevent the next disaster, which will come when the first rains hit with mudslides, they're working in the forest to try to create natural damming of the floods that are coming. They were contacted a couple of days after the fires by one of the large Greek firms that is very closely connected to this government. And that company offered them 100 euros a day to help work in the forest. Immediately they were very happy 100 euros a day until they read the very long contracts that the company offered. And that contract effectively meant that they were forfeiting all their rights as a community because this community has communal rights over the forest. So for 100 euros a day, they had to forfeit all their communal rights on the commons of this forest. They had to agree that they would be working at their own cost, which means that the 100 a day would be reduced effectively to something like 20 or 30 a day. Moreover, what this government and these companies are trying to do is to replace the natural pine forests that have burned down with quick growing genetically modified trees that grow very quickly, die very quickly, and then become biomass to be used by those large corporations. The forest will remain public in name, but the reality is that a disaster induced by climate change hit and within 48 hours at the most, large corporations, the government with the help and financing of the European Union, were immediately trying to turn this disaster into a fabulous opportunity for profit making, for rent seeking by the worst vultures you can imagine. Now, this is simply one example happened to be in a burned down forest. But as we speak, we all live in countries in continent where COVID-19 is wrecking our lives in many ways, as well as our health, not just our lives. And you can see that in exactly the same way that the pandemic has been used in order to privatize from within without making it formal, absolutely informally, to privatize the national health service in the United Kingdom, in Greece, in Germany, in France. The way they do it is through subcontracting most of the work that needs to be done in order to promote public health to their friends, maybe the same company that is doing what I just described here in this forest. That was my introduction to this discussion on how disaster, which happens for reasons that are not unrelated completely, especially in the context of climate change, and maybe the way we are abusing the animal republic, I refuse to say the animal kingdom, in capitalistic ways, the way that these disasters are being weaponized by the people who had something doing there happening, they're being weaponized so that they maximize their power over society and their power to extract rents and profit from society. The M25 must become a lot more radical than our manifesto in 2016 was, but that's another story. Thank you, Merlin. Thanks, Janis, and fortunately we'll be refreshing our manifesto over the next couple of weeks and months. Anyone, let's open the floor. Who would like to comment on what they've heard from Janis or bring anything else to the table on the subject of disaster capitalism and privatization? Yeah, Hannes, go for it. I can go. I wasn't planning to be second, but I take the chance. I'm speaking to you from Berlin. Hello, everyone. If you think about Germany, you might think that we have a quite decent healthcare system here, but which is also the case in many ways, but it also has been privatized partly, and it is quite unfair and quite unsocial. Let me give you some example, because often the profits and if something like healthcare, which is a public common good or should be a public common good, is privatized, then some few people profit from it, which shouldn't be the case, I think, from our perspective. There were the examples, for example, during the COVID crisis, some, as Janis just described, you know, some public hospitals in Germany, they are also private ones, but others are still public, but they outsource certain services like laboratories, which they desperately needed during the pandemic. And then suddenly these private institutions had too much of a risk to keep running during the pandemic, and they shut down and hospitals lost that service. So this has been a quite pertinent example of direct impact of something that is privatized and then not serving the public good anymore. Another example is the BioNTech Pfizer vaccine that you might all know, which has heavily been funded by the German state, which was good, because we needed this vaccine to be developed fast. And now there is a privatized vaccine, which is sold to countries all over the world. The waiver of the patent for it has been blocked by the German government. And there is a new top 10 rich profiteer from that in the top 10 of the richest people in Germany, which is exactly the personal, I think it's two brothers that own the BioNTech company. So they are heavily profiting from this, and many states around the world cannot even afford to buy this expensive vaccine. So this shouldn't be the case. Another example is that our double standard system that we have, we have a public insurance that you can be part of, that you have to be part of, but then very people that would have to pay a certain percentage of their wage can opt out and go into a private insurance in Germany so that the percentage of their wage will go down, that they pay for the public health care system or the health insurance. So these are all examples that show that this road down into privatization only leads to something that is not fiverizing or profiting for everyone as it should be for such a basic service as the public health care system. Thank you, Johannes. Who would like to go next? Maya. New speaker, Maya Pelovich, new member of our CC from Serbia. Go for it, Maya. Yeah, so I'm speaking from Belgrade, Serbia, but I also live in Montenegro during the winter so I can speak from both perspectives, but maybe Dushan can say a little bit after me about the Montenegro and perspective on the health care system as it is even, I think, a little bit worse than here. Well, the main problem, of course, with the privatization of the health care system is that we here in Serbia as the next Yugoslav country are used to having a public health care system. So it's not a thing that we have to talk about like an issue of having a public health care system. The main problem that we have here is that this public health care system is being completely ruined on purpose. It's similar as the forest thing Yanis was saying. And we can talk maybe also Dushan about the forests also as being a part of a privatization that's happening all the time. So you ruin the forest so that you can invest in it and make a private construction site on it. You can sell it for less money, of course, because it's not a forest and make it a private land. It's a similar thing that's happening with the health care system here. And that is that you completely ruin a normal health care system that was functioning completely normally by, of course, not doing anything with the hospitals, letting them go completely into complete devastation. Also not paying attention to the health care workers that work for really minimum wages for the things that they are doing. And then you have a lot of doctors that are just leaving the country and we're left with not so many good professional medical staff. And the ones that we have, of course, if they are invited by a private clinic to become a part of a private clinic, they will start working in both sectors. And then, of course, you have the private sector getting a little bit of the public health care system, but still not becoming good enough to be the main health care system. You still have the public one and the private ones are, of course, the ones that only the rich people can afford and also the public insurance. And then you have this situation where the government will say that they are doing everything for the public health care system. But during the COVID crisis, we can also see what is happening. And that is that we had a really, really huge rate of doctors that died because they didn't have like the basic masks and things that were supposed to protect them from COVID. So we had a lot of really young doctors dying in Serbia during the pandemic. And I think it's a big problem because at one point we are ruining something that already exists and the country is completely giving all the finances and, of course, all the liberty for the private clinics to become much more and more powerful. So now you have people just never going to the public hospitals because first they think that they will not get a good health care system there. And second, that we are not even using our public health care system even though we have it. So this is a way to privatize the health care system, not saying it, just doing it on purpose by destroying it. And that's the way I think that is happening on the territory of the ex-Yugoslav countries that had a really good public health care system. Thank you, Maya. Now, Rosemary, Rosemary Beckler, based in the UK. An awful lot of people in Britain would be surprised to be told that much the same thing as Maya describes is going on in the UK. In the UK, we've had 40 years of privatization of the health service that was one of the major things that came out of this terrible World War II. It was meant to make a land fit for heroes, rewards for all the lives lost in that terrible war. And for a long time, it was the pride of Britain to have a welfare state with the NHS at its center. But we're now in the very last stages of that privatization, a privatization by stealth. And so for me, the key question is, how do we build campaigns when there has been absolutely purposeful fake news and misleading news surrounding health in all our countries, particularly during this COVID crisis? It's very, very clear indeed that what is needed in a pandemic like ours is a wonderful public health system, particularly with local doctors, with databases, with people who know who other people are, so that they know how to support them if they need to isolate and if they need to leave their homes because they're overcrowded to go to special places where they can actually keep their infection separate from those who are not infected. All these things disappear with local public health. And yet local public health is what has been slowly crushed out of existence in the UK. The GPs, our general practitioner doctors, are now under attack in a completely new way that they shouldn't be having face-to-face meetings with patients. These should be relationships online. And then the most important thing I think about the whole thing is now the battle for who has the data. The National Health Service data impression is a particularly precious resource because it's been there for such a long time. There's so much data, it is, it extends throughout the UK and the government is trying to sell it off and trying to sell it off secretly for quite a long time and even managed to get Peter Thiel's company, Palantir, the CIA sort of funded company that deals with military where etc. Very, very interested indeed in Britain's National Health Service data. That deal was stopped at the very last minute when questions were asked by campaigners and some legal companies that have begun to take cases on this about whether really the British people, if consulted, would want their data to go to such companies and be used by who knows whom for what purpose commercially and slowly but surely we have stepped back a couple of inches from the yawning chasm which is about to see our largest and biggest asset chucked into the whole privatisation pot. Of course we have many many campaigns against privatisation of the health service but not a single one of them has managed to unite all the disparate constituencies and parts of the UK that really need to be mobilised in order to defend the NHS and so a lot of us are wondering how we can fight back. It takes so much better information, so much better organisation, so much better organisation across constituencies across interest groups. One of the biggest divides in the UK is between the health service and social care generally and it's a desperate divide because only when you put those two things together can you begin to really address anything like a pandemic indeed normal normal health service activity. So I don't really have the breath to go into all the aspects of privatisation of the health service in the UK and that's a good thing because we have to make a beginning now to tell people about it and I hope that we will in DM25 search about this task. Thank you very much Rosemary, a little comment from the chat here on YouTube. Firstly, underfund it and ruin it, we're talking about healthcare here. Then they say doctors and nurses are incompetent and spoiled and then that the answer is a quote strategic private public partnership or some such phrase. Well put. Over to Amir, Amir Kiyei from The Hague, a new member who is DM25's new policy coordinator. Welcome Amir, floor is yours. Thank you so much Mehran and the situation in the Netherlands also quite echoes precisely what the commenter on YouTube just mentioned in the chat. In the Netherlands the healthcare was privatised around in 2006 and since then the costs have risen, the service has decreased. General GP consultation with doctors on average around eight minutes which is far less than around the average of 14 minutes if you go to a doctor in Bangladesh for example and so it's a similar situation that's been described by all of our fellow CC members and of course people on the chat and what is being done though however and what can be done about it and Rosemary briefly touched on possible campaign ideas and so forth and we also saw this in the Netherlands as well. One of the first times and this happened just before the pandemic where 100,000 hospital workers went on strike to demand a better working situation and better working conditions because they are being squeezed, their wages have been cut down as opposed to the big insurance oligopoly companies who have doubled their cash balances and control the market. So in a sense that it is comes down again to what campaigns can be done can be launched and which direction we can take it. Thank you. Thank you Amir. Dushan. Thanks. Sorry, thanks Mahna. Yeah, I'm completely in line with what Maya said. Let me just start that it's not only about is it private or is it public. It's definitely a matter of is it underfunded or not and is it short-stopped or not. Basically what is happening in Montenegro that we is the thing that we are heavily understaffed. The stuff is not so well educated. They are in burnouts. Also the hospitals are not getting money and what I want to especially stress because as you know I'm a psychologist. Basically the thing about Montenegro is that mental health institutions are disaster and you need to wait for appointment for like six months or something if you decide to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist. So in the end of the day people are getting checked by stuff who's overworked, who's in burnout, who's not well educated and all of that is happening for the purpose that the government may present privately owned businesses and present it as a final solution to the crisis which is all in according to plans as in ex-Yugoslavia was happening to all the companies. So now is the time that the health sector came in queue. The thing is that still our government doesn't even care about this. We have 750 COVID cases today which is a lot for a country with 600 000 people and our government is only talking about the Serbian Orthodox Church which is their affiliated institution because we now have extreme right-wing Serbian government and all they're talking about is religion and strictly populistic concerns like church and corruption, battling corruption which is not ever happening. So we need someone to blame and if we really want to point fingers that's the government as always as it seems. Thank you Tushan, Ivana. Yes, thank you. I'm also speaking from Belgrade, Serbia and as Maya and Tushan already presented very well I think that ex-Yugoslavian model of health care, public health care is a good one to have as an ideal model maybe not everything was ideal in Yugoslavia I'm not saying that at all but a health system and something to point out which was not free because this is the misconception about socialists wanting the free lunch. It was paid by the taxes that everybody was paying from their salaries. So from your gross salary amount a portion would be taken for the social and health care. So this is how it was funded and each citizen had this fund basically to go to see the doctor regularly or if you need the hospital. What we are not talking about enough I think and what we should maybe think about as DM is the prevention of course the authority measures which are leading to this failing of the not just the health system the firefighters as well because the fires in Greece were devastating this summer they happened in Croatia and Montenegro in Turkey as well and fires will naturally happen during the summer and so on and they will happen even more due to climate change. So we need to be prepared and to do more to prevent the fires and to prevent people from going into the hospital bed that is like what our funds should be for when we need it but hopefully we wouldn't. So mental health as Lucien said is also part of the health system and we are quite often not thinking about that part. So I think that we should think also as the autumn comes floods will come and also in Serbia we had huge floods in 2014 since that year until today nothing was invested in preventing the floods it was just being ruined further and further so the coast can be privatized so Belgrade waterfront can grow and so on and so on. So this is the model that we can apply almost everywhere it's just I think very extreme in the Balkans but it goes for basically every country in Europe. Thank you. Thanks Ivana, Juliana from Germany. Thanks. I just want to add one thought which is what I see here in Germany for example in the society there is this I think there is a thinking that when you look at science and technology that eventually all these things will even out at some point you know like people think medicine there will be much more technology you will need less people to work in medicine computers can take over surgeries and so on and I fear sometimes that people lean too much onto you know inventions that might save us in the future and you know it's really a scary thought to see how things develop with privatization it's a experiment we're doing now for decades it's not new so everything we see now it's just like a further developing catastrophe due to privatization in every area of our lives so essentially if our governments don't have anything to govern anymore at some point like we will elect them but if everything is privatized at some point or as much more as privatized we don't have any influence anymore on what's happening around us which is bad but I don't see people panicking as much as they should I think I mean I think we should be really concerned about the next 20 years and I feel that we will lose many many many peoples and animals life until we come to that point where we realize that a profit oriented society is just not working out if you want to live on this planet basically it's just simple as that so I think when it comes to campaigning we have a lot of demons to find like misinformation is one demon but the other is also to be all like well humanity will develop further and inventions will come and we will save ourselves this idea of someone will save the world and this belief and I don't think that it will happen like this I think that at some point everyone needs to voice their perspective you know everyone needs to show their flag whether we want to we want to change the system of profit oriented economy or whether we go ahead with it but then we must live with the consequences which will be disastrous thank you Juliana and yes you touched on something very important there campaigning I would like I mean Johannes is next to speak but I would like all of you guys to perhaps also think about what is it that we can do against this problem are there examples of messages that resonate particularly right now in 2021 campaigns that have made headway against privatization of health care I mean rosemary referenced the the the legal win that open democracy had against the the spy technology firm Palantir anything like that that could inspire potential approaches for DM beyond just the idea of competing in elections and and trying to change policy that way so if there are examples of things that have worked let's let's hear them and put them on the table we're interested in your experiences Johannes very shortly I wanted to add one example which I had actually this morning because I was at the dentist and I got a little filling and I had to pay 70 euros so this filling would be the best quality ceramic filling and not the standard one that this dentist wasn't even offering anymore because no one wants to have it and this is something that you know shows you again and again that we need to do something so Madan's question is of course very important and I wanted to say that this was a another point of me to also go back as you might know we are writing our policy program for DM 25 in Germany at the moment to go back there look into and say like hey what are the things that we have in there already what needs to be added and what can we then also campaign on so if you out there and that's why I raised my hand if you have any ideas and you want to contribute by discussing this topic developing ideas and policy ideas together with us and then also developing campaign ideas together with us then I would call you to write an email to volunteer at DM 25.org or any other address you find on our website and get in touch with us thank you Johannes Rosemary yes when I was speaking about the importance of information before it wasn't just information for information sake I was thinking about a recent campaign which was quite successful in that the government had plastered somewhere on its website the information that if you want to do withdraw from commercializing your data in the NHS you could say this by filling in a form a certain date which was about three weeks off when people first noticed it and the campaign got going and millions of people withdrew their right to have their data shared but with these commercial companies they wanted to know more much more before they would have their data shared and the government that actually had to extend that deadline by three months make it much more public and is now talking about how it too doesn't want to see mucking around with the commercial companies so Johnson is trying to argue that he also doesn't want to see any more privatization this of course is where they get you the other way that is through fake news so there's an awful lot to be said about what kind of information we need who needs to get it and how to turn that into a campaign but I think we can think about a lot of this together across countries because it's when you go to cross countries that you realize what the absolute basics of this scrabble are all about thanks thank you Rosemary I'm talking about there the important intersection between this issue and technological sovereignty big tech and privacy there's definitely lots of inroads that can be made in terms of campaigns there anybody else have any thoughts Maya go for it well my view is a little pessimistic as that I am not completely sure how we can as citizens influence the government not to do the things the way that the government is doing and of course capitalist neoliberal government will only think about profit and care about the ruining of the public systems not just the healthcare system but I think maybe a good perspective would be the perspective of the healthcare workers and in a way communicating to them and seeing if there is a chance of course I'm talking it has to happen in every country independently probably to talk to because we still in Serbia have some really good doctors and experts and specialists that don't want to work in the private sector because they want to devote themselves completely to the public good in a way there is not many of them but most of them are the best doctors that we have in some sectors and I think reaching out to them and having them publicly speak about the healthcare system would be really influential to people that don't even think about it in this kind of a way because I think that most of the people just hate going to the doctors and they don't have money to go to the private doctors and if they had they would go to the private doctors at the end so I think that this way of having these really influential doctors and now after the Covid crisis I think that the doctors really are becoming like some kind of gods that they will have in a way influence to the public society and of course going on some kind of strike is always good but I think that having also people that will speak publicly about this problem in a way that everybody can understand is very important. Thank you Maya and a very good point talking to the people on the front lines there to get their perspective there's a comment here from the chat from Sean Singh one potential way of moving forward part of the the issue is lack of nurses and doctors and chronic political apathy and disengagement so what he would propose is to start a community of healthcare workers starting with telehealth and a donation based fund to support that group and build a smaller political movement based on patient communities to try and reverse privatization trends so a more kind of grassroots doing approach there quite interesting. Anyone else are there any other examples names of campaigns or people that are working on this issue that have made some progress whether or not DM agrees with them politically they may still have have good approaches Juliana. I want to just mention something else which I thought of while Maya was speaking when I was in the hospital after giving birth to my twins on the station there was one nurse from Serbia she she lived there she she lived in Traplaclark for a few months and she worked in in the hospital and she was alone on that station so the woman ran in between I don't know how many rooms and I talked to her and and you know there's this trap I think with with migrant workers they are so overexcited about having a job and getting the opportunity that you know there's there's not much room to reflect whether it's appropriate in the way they work you know I would say like how are you doing this alone I mean are you not complaining you cannot do like all the rooms alone and she's like oh no that's fine that's fine it's really it's really cool for me and you can see like there's this over excitement of getting a job and having an apartment in Germany and coming here and then you know one year passes and I know people who are living here for years come from from the Balkans and you know they they miss one year two years then suddenly they they work 10 years in a company for minimum wage not noticing that they got basically you know it's not humane you know to to be to be underpaid in a job with so much responsibility but this is like what Germany found out that you just need to to bring those thankful people from other countries because no one from your country wants to work for that condition so um I really I'm always thinking like how can we possibly empower those people because I get the psychological trap that they're in because they want to build a life and yes so this is just what I came to want. Thanks Juliana. Rose-Marie then Ivana. Yes I think one way that might be successful Juliana is what the Tory government tried in the UK because they got us all standing on our doorsteps clapping the nurses and the doctors during the COVID and then they only offered them 3% pay rise which when properly worked through actually represented a decline in their pay packets after inflation was taken into account. So this was such a slap in the face that even in the UK where we tend to think we must be doing okay all right um people have begun to wonder and there are numerous campaigns now including a marvellous trade union campaign calling for 15% rise in the wages of of of of these poor health workers who are practically on their knees it has to be said they are so overworked and they were just given this slap in the face no incentive they actually want nurses and doctors to leave in droves because they are ruining the system in order to be able to extract the remaining wealth. Thanks Rose-Marie Ivana. To answer Juliana's question or to give my opinion about it is that that's how the European Union works and regardless of the Balkans not being in the EU it's one of the resources right and even better because it's in this black hole so what Diem I think should be thinking about is providing the conditions for the nurses and doctors in Serbia in Bosnia and even Croatia although it's in the EU not to have to leave Serbia because they would be able to have a really decent life out of their salaries which are even worse in Serbia than underpaid job that they will be doing in Germany so this is the level of of the trouble we are in and also something that we should keep in mind when we are thinking about labor redistribution is that a lot of labor is coming from the Eastern Europe on the black market and that this is a grey economy something that we don't see and that again works for the European Union because in case of Greece and fires they're not investing enough in firefighters but then the EU will wave a flag of solidarity by sending German planes to fight a Greek fires right so we should have this European vision but provide the conditions in each country so we leave our countries only if we like the weather in another country. Thank you Ivana comment from the chat here from Caroline Duvier she suggests looking at worker cooperatives campaigning for those she references Mondragon in Spain and democracy at work in the US to give employees back power another interesting potential angle any other thoughts this is all very interesting and we're collecting it all and and you out there if you've got any other comments or thoughts please put them in the chat but also as Johannes said if you would like to be part of the solution to some of these problems then please join DM at dm25.org slash join and you can get involved in crafting those solutions and campaigning for them because this is just an initial discussion no more thoughts everybody's saturated okay fair enough well we're at 10 to the top of the hour thank you very much for joining us you out there and see you at the same time same place two weeks from now