 If you're just tuning in now, we're in the second half of our DMTV doubleheader. I'm joined now by Astra Taylor. Thanks so much for joining us here for the hour, Astra. Hey, thanks for having me, David, and to DM25 for doing this. And you have a very dignified background for a webinar emergency live streamer. I'm impressed. I feel very lucky. No, I'm here, it's day 26 of the lockdown in Rome. And I feel like I'm adjusting to a new normal. We've moved through, I think, several different phases. You and I have spoken about this evolution of this lockdown. First, there was the kind of panic and adjustment. Then there was the honeymoon of thinking, oh, I can stay inside. I can read a bunch of books and do yoga and things like this. Then sort of boredom and restlessness. And now in a almost surreal and perhaps dangerous way, I feel like we're all kind of adjusting to the possibility that we might be inside for a long time. I might read all of these books at some point, but if I can get away from my Twitter feed. But I think that the general point there that keeps coming back in my mind is that this is not one thing. It's not one thing over time, even though we call it the COVID-19 crisis, the coronavirus crisis, it's not one thing over time. It's not one thing, it's not just a health crisis as Jeremy and Sresco were just talking about. It's layered through with an economic crisis and a social crisis and above all a political crisis. And of course, it's not one thing between different places in the world. So I thought we could start there. Jeremy spoke a bit about the situation in New York City, which seems extremely dire, approaching levels that previously we'd only seen here in Italy where I'm based. And I was hoping you could give us an update about where you are and what you're hearing in terms of how this is filtering into the American economic, political, social and healthcare systems. Sresco spoke about how this is not an equalizing thing. We talk about plagues as being the great equalizers, but we can clearly see the ways in which this is fragmenting a long, very familiar fault lines in terms of class and social position. I hope you could tell us just a bit about your experience of this and what you're seeing. Yeah, I was very happy to hear the previous conversation because I think we can just build on a lot that was said instead of kind of repeating it. I think you're exactly right that this is a multifaceted crisis. And this is something I've been saying in pieces, but the word crisis is a really interesting word because if you go back to the ancient Greek meaning of it actually is about, it's about illness. Crisis always means illness, the turning point in the illness where you either turn and recover or you perish. So this word that we've sort of been throwing around, right? I mean, it feels like we've been in this creative endless crisis and now it's even more resonant, but COVID-19 is a novel form of the coronavirus. Coronaviruses are things that we experience and it is a very deadly virus where we have no immunity to it. It's spreading very rapidly, but part of what we're seeing is that the problem is that we don't have the resources. Countries don't have the public health infrastructure, the resources to deal with it. So many people will perish not because solely of the virus, right? In other words, this isn't a natural disaster in that sense. What's gonna happen is that people will perish because of a social disaster. They won't have access to protective gear, to ventilators and then we forced to work in conditions and endangered them when they could have been protected. And so I think it's really important to lift that up, right? To just underscore that this is not a natural disaster. In fact, it's not a natural disaster on a deeper level. So I just finished co-writing an op-ed, I hope will be published with some friends about the fact that this is also a virus that emerged because the sort of what's often described is this human wildlife interface and increasing as human beings engage in environmentally destructive forms of agriculture and land use, we encroach upon wilderness and that increases the likelihood that these viruses will jump from animal species while the animal species to domestic livestock or to human beings. So almost every terrifying illness of the last few years, I mean, HIV, Ebola and now COVID-19 jumped species. So from bats we're hearing a lot about, right? Or from monkeys or ape species. And so this is, again, this is something that evolved in the natural world, but it's the reason that it jumped to human beings and it's now spreading so rapidly is very much a product of our political and social reality and our exploitation of nature. And the fact that we are leaving almost no space for non-human beings. And the fact that also biodiversity is diminishing which fuels these epidemics. So I think that that's really important to keep in mind that this is not something that's like just an act of God. Yeah, it's a political crisis. It really strikes me as a fascinating paradox because on the one hand, the pandemic is, as you say, not just mixing in with these crises, actually existing crises, but as many ways a product of them and products of crises that are fundamentally global. I mean, they're about our species, their planet, it's a pandemic. So on the one hand, we have this experience that, and many people, I think it's true to reflect on the novelty and the profundity of a moment when we're all consumed by the same anxiety. There's something truly, I won't say universalistic, but truly global about this way that feels novel. And we can talk a bit about the potential dangers as well as sort of emancipatory possibilities that come along with that. On the other hand, this pandemic feels incredibly personal. And I think most people who are watching this, most people that I speak to certainly, ask themselves some variation of why me and why now? Things we're looking up or things we're starting to look down and now they're looking worse. I mean, there's a way in which we're toggling between the global and the personal. Now, of course, when we talk about the way that the pandemic has been processed so far, it's still mostly in these national terms. I mean, we have these conversations that are mostly national, but it's a strange, we still haven't figured out how to make sense of the kind of scale of this thing. As we toggle between the personal experience of this, where no one can be blamed for experiencing as a personal crisis. It's all affecting our lives and our families in specific ways, a national crisis because it's interacting first and foremost with national institutions. And then, of course, this international crisis, which is only going to become more apparent, more urgent, and we'll discuss this more today, but how are you making sense? And especially from the American perspective, if you can speak from that, because I know that's where you are now, is there a sense that this is something more than American? Of course, we see Trump talking about the Chinese virus, but how should we make sense of the toggling scale of this pandemic? Yeah, well, it did. Feminists have long said that the personal is political, and it's quite true, right? The political is very personal, as we're seeing. So these massive phenomenon like land management or industrial food supply chains are now coming home to roost. I mean, I want to also go back, I sort of skipped over your question about the issue of whether it's an equalizer, because I think that that is important if we're gonna think about this question of how to engage internationally or nationally. I mean, what's, there's sort of two things happening on that front on the equalizer question. I mean, the first is that, if you read the right wing media in the US, there are some frames and they're old frames, they're old and tired and somehow extremely resilient, but the idea is A, that disease is spread by the poor, and so you see a lot of comments about homeless camps being where the virus is spreading in cities, there's a kind of anti-city politics to the right, so this is a disease of liberal cities. And of course, there's this anti-immigrant motif. So when we see that, as you just said with Trump saying things like Wuhan virus, Chinese virus, et cetera. And that's also ancient, that's ancient news in the US where immigration policies were often very, very xenophobic, but then also explicitly named people with illness and then not just people from certain locales, but people who were contagious. So there's always been this kind of mix of racism and fear-mongering around disease and contagion and stuff like that. So we're seeing these tropes themselves and they're like, they're just these, there are viruses too, that are lingering on and now are picking up steam. So that's really troubling. I mean, on the equalizing side though, one thing, I've been trying to just put out there is that, you don't have a global pandemic spread at this rapid pace unless people are traveling by plane. And only 20% of human beings on this earth have ever flown in an airplane. I mean, the vast majority of people are not part of this sort of trans continental class. So this is very much a disease that actually, one of its vectors is wealth. And we're seeing that in the United States and we, I think we saw this quite a bit in Europe where spread via ski resorts and people who are lucky enough to have second homes are fleeing New York City because New York City is one of the hotspots and is under duress. And what we're seeing is people of means bring the disease to rural communities that don't have the infrastructure, the care infrastructure. So that's something, there's a class politics already to distribution. I think as things move forward though, what we'll see Keonga Yamada-Taylor have this phrase in a piece in the New Yorker about how reality has endorsed Bernie Sanders, where she said, you know, this is a virus that will thrive on the intimacy of poverty. And there's something to that as well. That's sort of the other line of the class narrative. And that's that, you know, yes, people are being told to shelter in place. Well, a lot of people have very, very new, if they even have a place, I mean, that assumes you have a home. A lot of people don't have a home or they're staying somewhere very small or they're forced into workplaces, again, that are crowded, unsanitary. We're seeing, for example, you know, factory workers and people in the food industry getting sick because, you know, these are the people who are having to go out and be in these close quarters. So the class politics pull in different dimensions that I think are important. I mean, you know, and then, and so that, those are the frames I think we have to have as we think about, well, what does this mean nationally and internationally? So I, you know, I think we absolutely as leftist need to push back on the idea that there's a national solution to this. I mean, as you said, it's a global problem. It's a pandemic. A pandemic by definition is international. That's what it means to be a pandemic and on epidemic. And borders don't make sense. I mean, so we're right now, we're in a place where there's no vaccine. There's no real treatment for COVID-19. I mean, there's a kind of hardware aspect that you can get access to a ventilator and help your body have time to heal. So we're using these like 13th, 14th century methods of quarantining and isolation. And those actually do make sense. It makes sense to shut things down to have people stay in place, to have people not travel. But that doesn't mean that the boundaries by which we shut things down at all like rationally correspond to national borders, right? So it is true that you need less movement to slow transmission, but that doesn't mean that you need less transmission along the arbitrary line that runs between the United States and Mexico or the United States and Canada. Like those aren't, and then what happens or what public health officials warn of and it's sort of played out is that when you start to shut borders, people panic and travel, right? I mean, and we saw that with these images from the American airports of just crowds and crowds of people. So, I mean, I think we just have to understand that yes, it's kind of like, trying to contain the illness, if you're looking at it scientifically, like borders are not the lines by which we necessarily do that. That is all about geopolitics and all about these human-made structures that really are relevant to a disease. Yeah, I wanna dwell a bit here on the global and really what exactly this means to take this seriously as a pandemic. I feel like we haven't spent enough time really thinking about what this has been so far and what it's going through. Yeah. The coronavirus crisis, again, it's not one thing, but the experience of the multiplied health, economic and political crises has by and large been an experience of middle and high-income countries. We're talking primarily about Europe, now increasing the United States and we're just seeing the beginnings of what this means for it to go south, to the global south, to countries with far less infrastructure and far less effective institutions, I'm not sure we can call the American institutions effective at this point, but far less effective institutions for helping to resolve this crisis and fewer resources at the household and individual level, like you said, in terms of quarantining. And I think certainly we should understand this pandemic as a test. It's a test of our institutions. It's a test of our ability to unify, transcend all divisions and make sure that everyone has the appropriate provisions because it is a pandemic that makes true the basic premise of solidarity, which is that we are only as healthy as our sickest. Now, here I am in Europe where we are failing that test in a way that is going to be remarkable for historians in future generations. This is a European Union thoroughly integrated. I'm here in Italy, which is a part of the Eurozone. So we're talking about a currency union. They literally share money. And even within that framework, of well-to-do Europeans who know each other very well, who hang out in Brussels, even in this context of people who shake hands all the time, I guess not shaking hands anymore, but people who attend the same press conferences, who send their kids to the same colleges and the same Erasmus programs, we cannot get our share together to come up with a framework that is solid heuristic and that delivers on the promise of universal provision and create the fiscal resources that are necessary. Now, I want to turn back to you in the context of what we know is already happening in the Global South. In the past two and a half months, more money has flown out of the Global South than in history. More than three times the outflow of capital in the financial crisis, $90 billion have flown out of emerging markets. What this means is that just as the coronavirus arrives in the Global South, just as the health crisis begins to intertwine with political crisis and the economic crisis, they're likely to face a balance of payments crisis where they can no longer afford to import things like ventilators, where they can no longer afford to import basic goods like food. You're going to have this international crisis bearing down on domestic crises in a way that countries like the United States pretend that they can solve all these things by themselves. Of course, they have the benefit of this imperial currency called the dollar that other countries in the Global South don't have. Now, when we look at what's happening in terms of Trump literally behaving like a pirate, going in and thieving masks were destined for Berlin, that's warfare taking place between two high income countries. So I want to ask you, sitting in the seat of the empire, what exactly should we expect to see in terms of certainly America's role in the world, but how should we make sense of this thing going south as it were and taking seriously what Professor Taylor tells us about thriving on the intimacies of poverty? I mean, look, I think going south has a double meaning, because you meant it is like going towards the Global South and it also means going south is then getting worse. I don't, I mean, there's not a silver lining. I think you just laid things out brilliantly and the sort of, I mean, I think attention needs to be played paid to both the spread of the disease. But again, as you're saying, following the money, right? And following money as it flees certain areas, as it takes shelter in the dollar. And I think it's just really fucking bleak. I mean, in the United States, we're having a conversation about ventilators. We're having a conversation in Europe. Governor Cuomo of New York has requested an additional 30,000 ventilators. The country of Liberia has three ventilators and none of them are in the public healthcare system. This is a country of 5 million people. I think Molly, I just wrote down has 56 ventilators for 19 million people. So, I mean, to have a ventilator, as soon as you have an ICU, that you have a kind of emergency medical infrastructure with ample resources, you know, with electricity that runs 24 hours a day. So I think we're, you know, this is one of the problems we use that this experiences a very sort of personal tragedy, right, that to actually, you know, put your, like lift your head above the parapet and be like, wow, what is happening in a country that is, you know, not just less affluent, but actually that my country has been robbing for centuries. You know, like it's pretty fucking dire. I mean, and so I think those, you know, these things, we're also saying, yes, the U.S. has the imperial dollar, right? And so what we had is this unveiling of that fact with the economic stimulus program, right? So, you know, the Americans can do things with money that other countries cannot do. And what have we done with it? We have decided to give away $450 billion that can be leveraged into five, $6 trillion in just basically corporate handouts as a reward to countries that have spent the 12 years since the 2008 financial crisis, enriching themselves, not paying their taxes, banking offshore, laying off workers, attacking unions and pushing money out the doors to their shareholders. So, I mean, this is also part of the tragedy is, you know, it'd be one thing if the Americans were leveraging their incredible privilege in terms of what they can do with money by saying, let's use the $6 trillion to have a green new deal to address the public health crisis. And so they're not. So I mean, I do think, you know, this is, what we need to do as activists is one, you know, affect people's understanding and change their political understanding with the goal towards building power. And I think building power has gotten a lot harder under these circumstances. But I think, you know, you're exactly right to lay out this sort of economics. And I actually invite you to say more about it because, you know, one thing we're seeing also cover of the New York Times the last few days has had different articles about how great Germany is because they have so many ventilators. They have so many ventilators. They're inviting, you know, a couple of Italians to come and be in intensive care. But why is Germany so wealthy? What are the economic dynamics behind that public affluence? And, you know, so, I mean, what we want, I think, as the left is a world in which there's that public affluence but not based on exploitation, colonialism and disregard for human life. All these things seem too soft. It's not just disregard. Like it's like murder, murderous business models, right? Yeah. So I mean, I'm still optimistic. Yeah, I don't either. And I think that, you know, I think it brings us nicely back to some of the earlier things you said about, you know, where to for globalization in a way, you know? I think Europe has been an interesting, obviously you can tell from my accent, I'm originally from Los Angeles with, you know, I live here and I have bring it kind of outside as view to what's happening here, you know, in Europe and in the Eurozone and really understanding, you know, it's so wild to me when we have these glorious depictions of the great Germans who have managed this crisis without speaking about the invention of a new kind of international political economy that we can call sick and die neighbor. We're familiar with beggar-the-neighbor policies that effectively make one country rich at the expense of the other, which has been the core of the German economic model within the context of the Eurozone, massively inflating their surplus in order to manifest demand. We won't have to go all into it, but there's a reason why unemployment remains staggering here in Italy as well as in Greece and Spain. It's going to soar, absolutely soar. Spain in particular will be devastated, these countries that depend heavily on tourism, whereas German production, the wheels keep turning and we can praise their reaction. Of course, that is a microcosm of this much larger problem that we're going to see escalating around the world. And I guess my question to you is, you know, in thinking about what globalization is and has been, you know, we can talk all day long about the perils of neoliberal globalization as it took shape in the 80s and 90s under the auspices of the World Bank and the IMF, as well as these kind of ridiculous proclamations of the inevitability of a certain kind of global integration. But at least those people spoke about a kind of mission to unify people, that there was something humanistic about the way that they spoke about globalization and network formation. And again, you know, what really concerns me is the idea that, you know, we like to pretend that globalization is this on-off switch, you know, that, okay, yes, Trump goes out there and says, we shouldn't be depending so much on some global supply chains we're gonna de-globalize, that may be true. But what we do know is that globalization involves the movement of not just humans, but also goods and also capital. And we also know that a crisis like this and the volatility entails is a tremendous opportunity for more deeper, more accelerated forms of financialization. Well, as you pointed out, could be a good excuse to kind of harden the borders. And, you know, we haven't gotten there in this crisis where we're really, really grappling with what borders are. And I think that on the left, probably speaking, we haven't come up with a kind of good understanding of how to make sense of that thing. Because I think we're all kind of grappling with a sense that, you know what, maybe there was too much movement, probably speaking. I'm hoping you could speak a little bit more about the border question. You know, for those of us who've been advocating open borders for a long time, you know, how do we stand on that platform again? Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, I'm, my feeling from what I've read is, you know, public health advocates are just like, there's no scientific rationale like what you're doing is disease management. There's no scientific rationale for closing the borders, right? I mean, this is, and it makes aid more difficult. I mean, if you're like shutting down airspace, it's harder to get aid into places that need it. So I think it's left us, we need to be very, very critical of this. I mean, it is the default because of centuries of ideology and the work anti-immigrant politics have always done, right? It's like, you know, it's a very cheap way of acting like you're doing something proactive, like, you know, this thing, oh, I'm protecting you by shutting out the others. But, you know, I mean, look, I mean, it's absurd. I mean, Donald Trump is, I mean, you're talking about solidarity across borders. I mean, this country doesn't even have solidarity across states, right? I mean, it's like the 50 states can't even work together. I mean, the federal government's at war with different governors based on whether they're, they are grateful enough to the president. And so, I mean, it's just, we're failing, whatever this test is you were talking about, we're, you know, I mean, a class of people is really failing. I think actually there's a case we made that many other human beings are really rising to the occasion. I think one thing this moment has driven home to me is how much altruism and solidarity is taking advantage of in our system. You know, I mean, people are going to work and risking their own lives because they care about fellow humans, not just because they need a paycheck. And that is part of what capitalism expertly exploits that altruism. So yeah, there's not solidarity between the states. And so on the border question, it's also just scientifically delusional, right? Like, you know, we can say we need to have international solidarity out of a kind of, you know, concern for the other or a selflessness. I mean, there's a self-interested argument to be made because, you know, it's not just that conceptually we're only as well off as the sickest or least off amongst us. But, you know, this, as long as this specific pathogen exists or the next one, which could very well be more virulent, we're all at risk, right? Like this is, it's just delusional. I mean, okay, maybe perhaps this virus could be contained by a border wall because let's say it's only transmitted human to human now that it's jumped species, right? But think about Zika, which is carried by mosquitoes, right? I mean, pathogens come in other forms like mosquitoes don't care about your border wall or your bio-surveillance, right? I mean, so it's just, there's a self-interest to it as well. It's like climate change. I mean, the left has been saying for so long, you know, we are global, we have to rise to these occasions. Climate change is like, well, yeah, this is here. This is proof that the nationalist approach is just, I mean, it's morally bankrupt, but it's just, it's scientifically bankrupt. And I don't think we should give any credence to it. Yeah, I think, you know, to me, it boils down to this fundamental conflict. I should say fundamental difference between these two basic ways of organizing at local, national and certainly international levels. One way is competitive and one way is cooperative. And we're seeing, you know, if this isn't market failure, if this isn't a failure of competition in the crudest, most Hobbesian form to deliver the necessary public goods, even within the same country, you know, the sort of competitive federalist model that we thought would work in our states where these states would be able to develop their own ways of doing this has failed disastrously and the need for stronger, more institutional forms of solidarity, as you said, that are driven not by altruism, but by a sense of shared mutual benefit, I think is really becoming clear. I mean, you know, I think that this is something that we were trying to make the case, because, okay, to give you some more background about the European situation, a group of nine countries in the Eurozone that included, okay, included Italy, France, was a big win for the South, Portugal and Spain came around together behind a proposal for a so-called Corona bond or a Euro bond that was going to create, you know, fiscal resources jointly issued by all the members of the currency union, all the countries that share a Euro to create resources for investing in public health and investing in economic recovery, right? With the idea that, guys, we share same currency, if one of us tanks were all fucked, which is so obvious, and the Dutch said, you know, you know, we bulk at this because we don't wanna be, you know, on the hook for these kinds of profligate, you know, spenders in the South, you know, we in DM 25 put out our own three-point plan about how to kind of bring these Eurozone countries together and use the institutions we already have to make sure that we're in China kind of solidarity, but the proposal was not, do this because it'll make you feel good at night, do this because you're a good Christian. The proposal was either we unify it or we literally will die, you know, this Eurozone will sink and fall apart. That's the case that we've been making, but I think there's a tendency, and this is what I worry about, the new kind of strain of globalization we might see coming out of this, that we'll double down on a kind of notion of aid, of kind of, oh, especially if the US, let's say if the high-income world can bounce back, more quickly than the global South can bounce back. The temptation will be to, you know, harden the framework of charity, basically, of redistributing, you know, some goods and some wealth from the North to the South, but not actually building any institutional framework, saying, ooh, those guys are in deep shit. Why would we want to sort of bind our countries together into a more soliduristic institutional framework? You know, so what I would love to see is for us to recognize that this moment is very, you know, everyone's saying it, everyone's saying it's just like World War II. And we all know that after World War II, you know, all the countries around the world came together to design these so-called Bretton Woods institutions, which were going to help coordinate cooperation among these countries, both North and South, not to just be like, you know, every year the US will sign a check that goes down to Latin America, quite the opposite. It was a way of regulating international economy that could be in mutual interest. So, yeah, I don't know, again, I'm not hopeful about this, but I want to, insofar as a job of us sitting here to try to ignite the imagination of certain activists and political people who will be interested, we should be thinking on that level of ambition. Well, and I think this is, you know, because something you said earlier sort of made me think about the, you know, now it seems like another world, but the sort of neoliberal claims, like the world is flat, right? There was a pretense, it's kind of the trickle down economic pretense, like this globalization will lift all boats. And now I think that that seems to be gone, which is what you're identifying, where it's a sort of, no, every country for themselves approach. So a sort of meaner version of that economic approach. But the things we have to remember, like that was just rhetoric because they set the stage for these kinds of mercenary economic policies, right? I mean, and what we're seeing with the, the Corona Braun thing you laid out is like, you know, a variation on what we saw happen to Greece and, you know, in the economic crisis there, like a kind of, you know, fiscal cruelty, right? Yeah, I don't say this very often, but you know, it doesn't, you know, Marx liked to say that first as tragedy than as farce, but it does strike me now as first as tragedy and now as fucking giant tragedy. I mean, I don't think there's anything farce. I wish we were moving in the farce direction. I need humor. Yeah. I mean, you know, we keep talking about the word solidarity. And I love to sort of like, where do these words come from? And solidarity I think is, you know, the thing about solidarity is it's not charity. That was another word you used, right? It's not, it's not charity. And it's not being an ally. Solidarity going back, you know, had its first appearance in ancient Roman law and solidarity comes from the phrase insolidum. So it was when debtors held a debt in common. And so very much was this idea that if one person failed to pay, then everyone had to come in and bail them out. And so solidarity always has an economic component. It's not a sentiment. You know, it's not just an ethos. It's actually like we're in this together. Yeah, exactly. It's not a tweet. I mean, it is economic bonds. And it's, you know, it's imagining a world where all of these words that we associate with banking, bonds, mutual funds, you know, would actually be things that tie us together in a positive way that creates commonly shared prosperity, you know? And the word solidarity was revived in the 1700s and became sort of a key part of thinking about socialism and the law for states. I mean, and so that is what we need, a kind of awareness that, you know, we need to create institutions of economic cooperation. I mean, right now I think what's globalization is real. Globalization is also, it's not just about our political structures. We were talking about the transmission of disease and greenhouse gases, all these things. But it seems like we just have every bad international structure and like none of the good things, you know? Like we need an international EPA, Environmental Protection Agency that actually maybe has some sort of like police force. We need, you know, something that can enforce labor standards. We need international taxation. We need this, but that's not, those aren't the institutions we have. And there is, again, there's a huge power problem. Like by what block of power does the left, which is so beleaguered right now, you know, fight for these things, but we do need a kind of conceptual map or, you know, political imagination for this. And like what would good globalization look like? Because we are defaulting to something that's very cruel about that. You know, just to plug, you know, as you know, over the past however many months we've been working, trying to bring together a group of people, a group of institutions and parties who can be part of a new kind of progressive international. And the good news there is that that is launching next month. So we'll try to be building that platform, but the challenge you set out is huge, which is to reimagine these institutions, that will be a fundamental piece of this progressive international. And to think about how we can make movements that have been built at the national level, maybe winking towards international solidarity, people wringing their hands quite a lot about how to connect domestic struggles to international ones without actually developing concrete actions. You know, Jeremy and Sresko spoke about a potential, you know, Amazon strike that would be global in scale. And it seems to me, we're at that point, I could only cross my fingers, we're at that point, where we realize that, you know, we have to match the scale of the corporation, in that case, with a scale of the challenge, be it this health crisis, but I would like to talk a bit more about the environmental crisis with the scale of the activism itself. Yeah, I mean, I think it's for me on a strategic level to that point, you know, I think some of these people take what you're saying a bit literally, like, okay, if we're facing a global threat or even a global company, then our movement has to be massive and global. But, you know, often, I think as organizers, you do have to always tie your actions to where you are. That doesn't mean like, you know, just, you know, very intimate and, you know, in your own backyard. But to like, ultimately, we aren't able to operate at this macro international scale. Like we actually do need to organize our municipalities, our states, and I'm thinking here of, you know, the state level in the United States, the federal government, like to affect these global things, we actually do have to build power where we are. And so this is why, you know, how did the right wing get so powerful in the United States? Decades of the most kind of, but now sort of organizing and taking over school boards and writing legislation at the local level. I mean, you know, yes, their campaigns were funded by billionaires and the left has to, you know, come up with a different more democratic radical model of sustaining itself and its organization. But, you know, they aren't just operating up here. They operate down here too. And I think that's, again, I'm always into the paradoxes of democracy, the paradoxes of organizing. And what is it if we want to change things at the global scale that actually involves being very strategic in the communities we inhabit? So let's go to one of the more urgent pieces of that, where we again, are toggling back between the person on the local as well as the global. This are questions that are coming from viewers who are tuning in to watch the conversation that we're having. You know, you mentioned an international EPA, some kind of institution that could effectively bind internationally beyond the kind of ridiculous theatrics of the COP negotiations, which are likely to happen this year. So the question is, you know, how is the ecological crisis tied into the COVID-19 crisis? And I'm sure that applies both as a sort of a vector, as you put it, you know, as well as how should we make sense of the consequences? I think there's been a lot of perhaps premature excitement about rewilding and, you know, we are the virus, whatever that may be, but how do we make sense of this kind of very, very complicated interwoven relationship between ecology and the coronavirus? Yeah, I mean, I think again, you know, the science is pretty freaking clear on this, right? I mean, this is something that emerged because of human beings encroaching on wildlife and it looks, you know, again, we're still sorting out the specific disease, but what seems to be the case is, you know, what drives a lot of farmers in China, you know, people like, you know, pundits like to blame the wet markets and sort of do this very racist thing of, you know, exotifying the animals being sold like, oh, well, you know, bats and snakes as though eating pigs and cows is any more natural than that. But, you know, part of what drives people into these other markets is industrial agriculture and sort of the inability to compete with the scale of big ag, right? And so that's happening globally. I mean, so the ecological crisis, again, like you can't separate the ecological crisis in climate change from agriculture. I mean, agriculture is a very substantial part of the emissions. I think we're also seeing interconnections. Naomi Klein has written about this, you know, between the fact that, you know, this is a respiratory illness, COVID-19, and people are more vulnerable to it if they have things like asthma, if they live in communities that suffer from air pollution, right? So there's also these ways ecological, environmental determinants shape people's ability to survive through these crises. So I think that's important to keep in mind. I mean, there's also the fact that the Trump administration has responded to this moment by speaking of the EPA, by basically saying, okay, well, you know what? We're in a crisis now. So none of those old pesky environmental regulations need apply. So just go ahead and pollute the air some more. That will be a very rational response. So, I mean, we're also seeing, I think, a kind of one thing that's sad, like speaking of old bad ideas that are in circulation and then just get brought to bear on us. I mean, the right wing has been mastering the art and it is an art of science denial, right? This is an art they have cultivated. They have spent hundreds and millions of dollars denying climate change and sowing down confusion. And so we're seeing that that's all of those, all of those tropes again are in play dealing with this, right? We're not having a kind of scientific or rational conversation about the origins of this pandemic. So I mean, I think there's lots of ways that these things are connected and the solution. I mean, if you talk to people who are experts and who study this, many of the solutions, I mean, I've already said this a few times, to solve the climate crisis, you know, overlap with the kind of things we would have to take to prevent more of these outbreaks and other really dangerous ones like, you know, antibiotic resistant bacteria that are also people have been warning about for, which is like rewilding. That would be a great, you know, that would be a great jobs creation program if we're gonna enter another great depression, right? Just, you know, pay people to plant some trees and restore some natural habitat. But those, you know, these solutions overlap, you know, and we can kind of tease out the different threads, but the thing is we are, as you said at the beginning in these interlocking crises. So, you know, I wanna go to another case of a crisis that, you know, you've worked a lot on the issue and we talked a bit about its fascinating relationship over time with the question of solidarity and that's the question of debt. I spoke a bit about the evacuation of capital from emerging markets back into this with a dollar, this imperial currency, giving tremendous power to the fed, basically decide who lives and who dies in the course of this coronavirus crisis. This is a huge principal agents crisis of historical proportions for sure. We're also likely to end up, you know, in very familiar territory with these countries in the global south stacked with unsustainable debts and once again reaching back out to international institutions that we might call unreliable managers historically of this challenge. Now you've done a lot of work around organizing, around the question of debt and in the United States, well I should say in North America and Europe and around the world, my question to you is, this is a perfect issue that links these toggled levels, right? This is a crisis of debt at the individual level. We are, we had, we had the last 15, 20 years, we saw an explosion of credit card debt as well as household and general law varieties. So that's gonna hit hard in places like the United States where that has been led to run free. You're also gonna see a lot of sovereign debt and a huge sovereign debt crisis. Now, how do we link these together? I mean, do you have a sense of where organizing around this question of debt goes from here as we move from bad to worse? I mean, the thing is, they are linked. They are linked. We just have to recognize the linkages and then figure out strategically how to respond. So it's, so yeah, I mean, when we think about the personal is political, you know, this is very much true for our personal financial realities. So, you know, right now we're facing mass unemployment in the United States and around the world and people are being laid off and it's not their fault, right? It's because we, and it's not the virus's fault actually, it's because of the political, economic, social circumstances they're in and the fact that we have an economy that refuses to prioritize saving lives over, not even sort of, you know, saving the financial sector but just like further enriching it and granting it even more power than it had before. So, I mean, the debt thing is, that thing is one of these interesting things about like how movements learn from each other and how they grow. So actually, so I'm part of the debt collective. I'm one of the people who founded the debt collective as a union for debtors. And the idea is essentially to sort of pick up on what you said that easy access to credit especially in the United States sort of masked the fact that wages have stagnated over the last four or five decades. That's part of, you know, how is financial, use this word, financialization. We say neoliberalism. How is that experienced? Well, for most people's experience is the age of debt. So Americans owe on average, you know, 36 or $37,000 just for going to college if you've had to borrow to go to college. The majority of people owe debt for medical bills because they don't have health insurance and every person who has lost their job in the United States will pretty much lose their health insurance now. So people are in debt, you know, for their housing because there's no social housing. People go into debt on credit cards and pay the loans because they're not paid enough. Most people put necessities on their credit cards not, you know, fancy cars or fancy televisions despite the myths of the profligate debtor. So the idea has been that, you know, our debts are asset. So what if we in sort of as a complimentary move to traditional labor unions, what if we organized people into debtor's unions and now give regular people another form of economic leverage? And the argument would be you are indebted because you're being denied social services, right? So you don't have, you don't, you have medical debt because you're being denied universal healthcare. You have student loans because you're being denied public education. And so in a sense, we're an anti-austerity movement even though Americans don't use the word austerity because we just live it. So, but, you know, I was very inspired by the Jubilee South campaigns. In other words, movements that I encountered as a young person around, you know, in the early 2000s that were campaigning for the elimination of sovereign debt for developing countries, right? And there's the concept of odious debt that some debts governments incurred, you know, and where basically there's sort of a corrupt cash grab, right? Those debts were odious, they were actually illegal. So, you know, our argument is, well, individuals' debts are odious too. They're odious if you've gone into debt for essential necessity of life. And so kind of already we were almost saying, well, let's scale down the sovereign debt work and think about it. And also let's try to fight the right wing because the right wing in the US is always saying, oh, there's deficits, the national debt, therefore we have to cut your social security, cut your public funding. And the argument is, well, a deficit spending is good for a country like the United States because again, as you said, the US dollar is in this privileged position and we're actually indebted because of the austerity you're imposing, right? So we're trying to flip that right wing narrative on its head. And so I think right now, we have to figure out how to talk about personal debt and the question of public financing and international financial flows in a really concise way that drives home the fact that the enrichment of a few via these financial mechanisms is the reason that so many of us are broke but also desperate when a crisis like this hits because most people don't have savings, they have debt. And so these connections, they absolutely exist. And I think in a way, the simplistic demand on both fronts, whether we're individuals or countries, is can't pay, shouldn't pay, won't pay. These debts are illegitimate. And they're not about, they're always about control. They're always about domination, extraction and power for some, right? I mean, look at this, look at Jared Kushner, look at Donald Trump, these guys have gone, they bankrupted so many companies and walked away from their debt so many times. It's always just the little people who have to pay up and who have to be subjected to the discipline of debt. Other people are enriched by it. I mean, right now this bailout in the US bailout is partly because all of this corporate debt for the last 12 years, all these companies have just had all of this zero interest credit basically. I mean, low interest loans, they over borrowed and now they're going crap, the economy's in meltdown. We'd like more money and they're gonna get it whereas little people are going to go into debt for their COVID treatment and lose their homes over it. So there's a double standard to it. And I think debtors around the world must unite and say, no. Yeah, well, you know, you've got a choir here in Southern Europe. David agrees with me, there's two of us now. I think it's a great point because it really is the essence of internationalism. I mean, we're here, I guess, in the auspices of trying to speak about what internationalism means in the context of this pandemic. And I think this is exactly what we talk about. When we talk about internationalism, okay, we've talked about how it's not charity. We've talked about how it's not symbolic forms of solidarity either. We've talked about how it's fundamentally about the link between these different types of crisis that bind us all together and arriving at mutual benefit. And I think that that's a perfect case because I mean, I hope to see to it that these cases for debt jubilee for the Global South are revived, perhaps the basis of this progressive international world building because it's going to be the central demand. And I speak now as an American to say, we are very bad at, even on the left, at framing the urgency of those crises at speaking out about this stuff. And it raises a question. I think that we might want to explore this a bit before we end, which is about these unreliable institutional managers. You know, we are kind of saddled with the IMF. And I've written even in the context of this crisis that I believe the IMF is a more trustee manager of this than the Federal Reserve. I don't think it's a multilateral institution is going to be better than the unilateral decision-making of an administration, especially one like Trump's, of any imperial administration for that matter, but certainly these bunch of idiots. Now we have a question here also from our viewers, which is to say, you know, UN has been missing from this thing. I mean, it doesn't exist. For all intents and purposes, our most important treasure multilateral institution has been MIA in the context of the most severe global crisis we've seen. So, you know, where do we turn? And you know, how do we build the energy behind a vision that can seem so utopian to say we need better international institutions, which of course is, you know, something I feel deeply in my heart. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, you know, I think, again, the, you know, it's also interesting to have this conversation as the Sanders campaign in the US, you know, comes to terms with the fact that Biden is the Democratic front-runner and you know, I don't know what kind of miracle it would have to happen for Bernie to take his place. But, you know, the left in the US and in the UK and you know, in other countries before us, Greece, you know, have banked a lot on electoral strategies because, and I think the thinking was, wow, if you can take power at the federal level, at the national level, well, that is also a way to, you know, that's obviously a huge stepping stone to have a conversation about what kind of internationalism you want, right? I mean, if you had a Sanders administration throwing its weight around, it'd be very different than a Biden administration, very different from a Trump administration. And so there's a reckoning that's happening. And I think this is the thing we're all learning in real time, we're all thinking in real time, but a reckoning with, you know, not just the fact that that strategy didn't work, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't keep engaging in electoral politics, but that alongside the coronavirus reality that we're not, that we're now entering. So, I mean, I think the strategy, you know, again, it's this question of power, like, you know, I can give the analysis of debt politics all day long, you know, like there are, I think we should reduce the bad debts and then there are good debts that we need to pay, you know, we should pay reparations, we should actually pay, we should not just erase the sovereign debts for the global south, but pay them back for all of the damage that's been done. I mean, climate debt is a real kind of debt that I think we need to pay. You know, we in the United States are exceeding our carbon allotment, we are carbon debtors who should honor the debts by giving aid, aid by a form of reparations that are investment in a sustainable economy. That's all great, analysis is great. I love philosophy, that's what I would like to do with my life, but we need power and you don't have power magically. You have power by building associations, by human beings organizing themselves, organizing themselves into parties and unions. Now, I'm of the opinion that those unions should be very, very diverse, that we should have labor unions first and foremost as a leftist, as someone who loves their Karl Marx, you know, labor production is it, but we live in this financialized reality. So let's also have debtors unions, let's also try to democratize the parties, right? I mean, I think we're seeing right now that the Democrats are not a democratic party. So thinking about party structures is really important. Right now, I think we're gonna see a wave of, people organizing in their communities as tenants. Tenants should have unions, students should have unions. So there's no way to just suddenly go up to that international level. We have to organize ourselves. As Jane McAleavy says, there's no shortcuts when you want to build power for working people. And that's, I think that's where, on the one hand, we're in a situation we couldn't have imagined a month ago, but we actually always knew what we needed to do, which is get organized. And it's just that it's harder now. But that's still the answer, is that we don't have power as individuals. We only have power collectively and we need to figure out how to build associations that are also willing to take bold actions, willing to try to shed things down, willing to go on strike, whether it's a labor strike or a debt strike, willing to challenge centrists in the political parties and take risks. So that's it, we have to think internationally, but we have to organize ourselves where we can. Yeah, I think on that very hopeful message of moving out from social isolation to an explosion of associational activity and an organization, we need to think about how we can prepare ourselves to slingshot from this moment of isolation and anxiety and fear. Well, I think on the slingshot front, it's like this is a moment to say, well, let's start thinking through this question of what good democratic international institutions would be and to figure out also how to articulate that in a way that's exciting to people, right? I mean, okay, how would our lives be different right now under this, if a pandemic, if a, would this not be a pandemic? Would it be an epidemic locally situated if we had a global public health framework that was truly universal? I mean, I've been thinking about this phrase, universal healthcare and be like, what if that was really made real? It was not just global, but it actually also acknowledged that it's not just the human body, it's the environment that we inhabit and contained a kind of ecological consciousness too in terms of its sense of health. I mean, what, I don't know, we need to also imagine how this could have played out and been much less disastrous if different institutions and different realities had been in place. Yeah, well, just to bring in full circle, obviously we spoke about the etymology of crisis as this turning point. And I do take a lot of hope from the idea that lots of masks are slipping off. We're seeing a lot of things that previous kind of euphemisms and outright lies have been made abundantly clear to no longer hold and I'm hoping that that can be a source of inspiration, emancipation. And on this note, I want to thank you for coming tonight or I should say in the United States for this afternoon. And I hope to continue this conversation soon for all of you tuning in. Thanks so much for watching to consider donating to DMTV to keep the wheels moving on this incredible series. But for now I want to just thank you, Astra and I hope that we can continue this conversation here and elsewhere and at a bar wouldn't that be amazing to meet up at a bar again sometime soon. We will one day, but thank you, friend solidarity. Take care until soon. Bye everyone.