 The pandemic is still the headline, but the planet is also on fire. Tonight, we discuss the movement for a green new deal in Europe, in the United States, and around the world, and how that movement has changed, evolved, transformed, or not in a year of the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm joined this evening, or indeed this afternoon, for my guest by a friend, colleague, very inspiring economist and statesman, James K. Galbraith, my friend Jamie, who holds the Lloyd M. Benson, Jr. chair at the Lynn B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and a professorship in government at the University of Texas at Austin. Welcome, Jamie, to DMTV. It's a pleasure to see you all the way tuning in from Austin. Thanks very much, and it's very good to be with you as well. All right, so we'll jump right in. Jamie, everything has changed. Everything is moving incredibly fast. This is sort of the narrative that we're sold. Life has turned upside down. Our economy's plunged in crisis. Ideas are being ripped off the shelf. Paradigms are being thrown in the trash can. The geopolitical tectonic plates are shifting underneath our feet. How would you describe this present juncture one year after the declaration of the pandemic by the WHO? Well, I could only say I only wish. I mean, some things have changed. Anybody with eyes to see, ears to hear with can see that the ideas that we're driving global community are recently as 18 months or two years ago are defunct. That I think is obvious, but the hold of defunct ideas is does not disappear easily or immediately. So I mean, just to take the case of the United States already a year ago now in April of 2020, in a crash of the emergency, any notion that there were effective limits on what the federal government can do by way of sending out checks and stabilizing people's incomes were thrown away. It was thrown away for the business sector through both loans and loan guarantees and grants but made through the work of the federal reserve. But it was thrown away for the household sector through direct payments, extended unemployment insurance and other measures. And this was, we had the experience for a year and it was actually in many ways quite successful. The society did not melt down in a way that it might otherwise have done. In fact, would otherwise have done if people had been subject to income losses and then evictions and foreclosures and utility shutoffs and all of the horrors that were bad already but could have been much, much worse than they were. Has the country then moved to the point where it is effectively organized to take on the next phase of the challenges that in front of us? No, we haven't moved that point. There's discussion about it. There's even in today's paper, we know that the administration is preparing legislation. We don't know exactly what it will consist of but there's clearly a sense that a new direction is going to be needed. Does this country have the organizing capacity to implement that? That is a very open question at this point and we can go on to what's going on in other parts of the world momentarily. Yeah, I mean, I think you think a year ago lots of people were saying, citing the etymological origins of the word crisis that it actually comes. It's sort of an epidemiological phrase to refer to a change in the course of a disease where things are actually getting better. So it's both a kind of threat but it's an opportunity for learning and for bringing in those new ideas or healing a wound that's been gaping open in the global economy. I think now you mentioned, let's just stick with the case of the United States because I think it's illustrative and then I think we can go to other places in the world. So in thinking about how this crisis has maybe turned or what we've learned and how we've changed, there's a lot of talk now about these bills, first the ARP, the recovery plan and then now this potential infrastructure bill as marking some break with neoliberalism. Now, first of all, I wanna know from you, does it feel one year after the pandemic that we've broken with neoliberalism? And if we have or to the extent that we have, is this a simple case of when the facts change, minds change or are we being duped into thinking that there's some paradigm shift? Is there something more powerful underway? And I know I'm asking huge questions here but how should we make sense of this? What is actually changing under our feet before we talk about the details of it? How should we make sense of how exactly things have changed in the past year? Well, just to take up the American Rescue Plan, which is the one concrete thing that we have in front of us. I'd begin by, first of all, again, pointing to the experience of last year and secondly, to the political necessity that faced the incoming administration. It's very clear here we have a very narrow margin in the Congress. If you don't move quickly, effectively and massively, the chances are you're gonna lose that in two years. You have a president who has been around for a long time, has some experience of both Republican and Democratic administrations. The characteristic of Democratic administrations, Clinton, Obama, was that they were too timid and they got beaten, installed and in many cases, lambasted and ridiculed for not having done enough, aggressively enough in their first months in office. And you have the case of a Republican administration, well, actually several of them, Reagan and then George W. Bush and then Donald Trump, all of whom did very big things, things I may not have liked, but basically front-loaded their agendas, got them in place and then were in a position particularly in Reagan's case to be more flexible in the remaining years of the term. So the political lessons are there and then you also have the fact that the president is, well, I mean, he's not exactly in the first flush of youth and I think it's reasonable to say that old men in a hurry are not a bad thing. They recognize that they've got to get things done because they recognize that their time horizons are not unlimited. So all of that's come together in a kind of practical way to put the U.S. in the forefront of at least a change in attitudes toward the macro level fiscal policy, the attitudes toward public finance. It's also, I think, practically recognized that the U.S. is, if not uniquely positioned in the world to make that change, it's got the strongest position amongst the Western countries to make that change because it is the country that supplies the settlement currency to the rest of the world, at least for the time being. And so this is something which is open to the U.S. which would be a harder sell in a lot of other places. So does this represent a real acceptance of an alternative theoretical framework for thinking about economic problems? I only wish. I know my friends, our friends who have been advocating for such a change of perspective are, I think many of us are quite happy with the immediate turn of politics, but has the correctness of that perspective been recognized, acknowledged, has it been taken up? Have people been, have the doors of the academic power structure been opened to the partisans of monetary theory? No, they have not. And so I think that any real and deeper gains are very much provisional at this point. And that is before you get to the structural questions which I want to take up as well. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a very, it's a very interesting theory of political transformation that you're articulating, one that really is about necessity or dragging these forces along by the kind of sort of structural conditions that demand it. It feels like a very sort of Angelus Novus theory that we're sort of being dragged towards these fiscal stimuli as we watch the destruction pile up behind us, that there's not actually, we're not, what we're seeing in the case of the United States and perhaps you can make the same argument about the kind of painful process of arriving at what's now known as this recovery plan or EU next generation here in Europe, that this was after years of dragging their feed, net public investment falling to zero in Eurozone, obviously people ailing in child poverty levels rising the United States at these kind of structural conditions sort of demanded. And I think to me looking, we're obviously convened here to talk about the Green New Deal and I think understanding what's changing now is not, we can't just look to the past year, we also have to look to the past decade and to lessons that perhaps were not learned in 2008 or in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. Now, the Green New Deal as a policy paradigm gained some kind of popular traction, some popularity in the wake of the great financial crisis of 2008 in part because of a parallel that people were able to draw with 1929 with the fact that we were in a period of tremendous financial speculation followed by a depression that required the kinds of relief recovery reform that Roosevelt had put on the table a century before. But then it felt like, okay, we didn't really learn the lessons there. We didn't really get as far as putting a new deal on the table and then the COVID crisis kind of fell into our lap. Not exactly as an exogenous shock but something like an exogenous force. So my question to you is thinking now not just one year but 10 years, how does this present crisis change the kind of desirability or feasibility of something like a Green New Deal? Should we understand this crisis in that medium term process of, okay, finally, are European leaders in particular coming around to thinking, well, austerities may be not the most responsible way of handling this question of providing for citizens. And maybe the US is thinking, well, we need bigger stimuli to take care of people and think about things like child poverty or is that, are we not even there yet? Well, okay, let me back up a little bit and just talk about what I think is going on. You use the term stimulus, that's the description of the program. And I don't think that demand was ever actually the problem and I don't think what is going on is appropriately described in those terms. Those were terms that were suitable if you like the post-war Keynesian era when you went into a recession as a result of an over buildup of inventories and laying off of workers and so forth and then you gave the economy a boost to come out of it. What the pandemic actually did was to expose the extreme fragility of the entire structure that had been built up over 13 years since the great crisis in really over 30 years, which was heavily dependent on a very bimodal economy, a small group of extremely high income people who were in the business of producing advanced technologies for world markets and a vast number of people who were in the business of producing services for each other and both pieces of this got hammered in the pandemic, the technology sector because there's basically no demand for airplanes, for example, a world in which the vast number of them are sitting on the ground and no demand for office construction in a world in which offices are empty, no demand for retail malls in a world which is being taken over by Amazon, so on and so forth. And the services side, people can't be in direct contact with each other or those jobs just evaporate like so much mist in front of the morning sun. So they're gone. And some of them will come back but many millions of them will not. What the programs did was to basically hold everybody in place financially through this. It was more of a balance sheet thing. People have rent, they have mortgages, they have utility bills, they have grocery bills, they have student debts to pay, they have all kinds of things and handing them out a check meant that they could continue to make those payments by large. I mean, not everybody. And I was not going to minimize the suffering except to say that without that assistance it would have been much worse. And in fact, they discovered you could actually give a lot of people more money than they were making in their jobs. And this also kept the social situation stable. Economic stimulus, it is not. What's going on with a rescue plan is exactly, I think as described, a rescue plan. It enables people to get through another six months or a year as maybe the pieces start to get put back together in some way. But they can't go back the way they were. Things have changed. We are not going to return to the kind of economy in which basic people's jobs were providing leisure time goods to each other. And we're not going to return to an economy in which the advanced sectors are supplying a particular kind of advanced good to the world economy. That's got all changed. So what we have to recognize is that we have to use the resources that we have in a way that's directed toward the problems that we actually are going to face. So now you say, well, 10 years ahead. 10 years ahead, obviously the major issue if you want to put one on top of all the others is the climate crisis. It is the necessity of a green new deal and a green new deal is two pieces. One of it is energy transformation, resource transformation so that we begin to stabilize the ecosystem of the whole planet. And the other piece of it is the new deal piece which is to say something which is truly post-capitalist, something which is truly democratic, something which creates in a pragmatic way, institutions that we can continue to live with through at least a number of decades into the future as we continually adjust to circumstances. That's what we need to be thinking about. It is not just a device for existing political leadership to make themselves more palatable. And that's very much the sense one gets about Europe. And we'll see what happens. I don't want to hold out the U.S. as a uniquely advanced case here, but we'll see what this administration is plotting. I do want to come to the question of what's impelling and I think it's impelling us toward making some progress. And that is the experience of what's happening on the other side of the world, right? This is something very important that we need to bear in mind, which it starts with, I mean, it can start with, but it certainly is expressed in a way which cannot be mistaken by anybody, by the pandemic. There were countries that dealt with it. There were countries that moved on the first day to place controls on their borders and to get testing and contact tracing regimes in place and to isolate and protect themselves from contagion. Many of them were small countries, places like Korea and Singapore and Hong Kong and Taiwan did well and Cuba did well and New Zealand did well. But then there was also China. China's not a small place. China's 1.4 billion people which managed to suppress the pandemic over the course of maybe six weeks or two months and get themselves back to a normal condition of life in a country which has also succeeded in transforming itself technically over the last 30 or 40 years into one of the most advanced and carefully or fully engineered places on the planet. So when we're looking at what's out there for the global population, those of us who are not China have to recognize that demonization isn't gonna work because a lot of people can see very clearly that there is a level of competence which used to be characteristic of the West and which the West has lost. And that's what the greener deal needs to recapture is a capacity to do these things in a way which is in consonance with democratic values and consonance with a popular will but that is actually also effective and not just cosmetic or as sustaining of an underlying power structure that isn't really serious about these things. Yeah, so let's bring it to here in Europe. During my time as the policy director of 4DN25 for this Democracy in Europe movement in collaboration with you and DM'ers across the continent of this vision of a green new deal for Europe, something that would have both of those components you outline, take seriously the urgency and demand for a rapid decarbonization and green transformation and also live out that sort of Rooseveltian tradition gained the envision of rebuilding a new economy and mobilizing the wealth that we have towards good decent jobs and transformation of our infrastructure. And what's happened in the wake of this green new deal movement very much in the kind of pathetic and mimetic sense is that the European Union has adopted this name of a green deal, essentially greenwashing what is otherwise quite austere agenda and obsessing over how they're going to in various terms unlock, unleash or nudge private capital towards green investment, essentially pulling the classic European Union move of socializing risks while privatizing gains in green transition. And it's interesting, you put it in this way of, are we going to be building a more cooperative perhaps post-capitalist economy in the course of this green new deal or are we going to be inflaming a kind of xenophobic and imperial way of organizing the economy but it's, you don't have to read too deeply into these intentions when you hear speeches from people like Guy Verhofstadt who stand on their soapbox and say things like, we live in a world of empires the United States, an empire, China, an empire we Europe must be an empire and this green deal is our strategy for remaining competitive in that world of empire and externalizing our carbon costs. Yes, we're going to be the first decarbonized continent but only by basically sending our emissions south. So what does it mean to take seriously this idea of a green new deal as a vehicle of cooperation as supposed to a vehicle for geopolitical competition which really only promises to put us set us back half a century at a time when that type of international coordination towards protecting the human species is so essential. Well, I would generally speaking recommend against getting into a competitive struggle that one is going to lose. This is not a sensible countries and sensible leaders steer clear of that kind of problem. This is, I don't know one doesn't want to be remembered like Napoleon III, for example. It's just, it's a bad look historically to do this. So what's required is something that is much more oriented toward an actual practical plan of construction and development, redevelopment. That's why again, why this word new sits in between green and deal. Not because we're looking for novelty but because the new deal was a historical phenomenon that had that characteristic. Let me just talk a little bit about that because I think particularly for European audiences a lot of this may not really be familiar. There's a tendency to regard the 1930s as the era of John Maynard Keynes. Governments came in and started spending and running budget deficits. But the new deal, while Keynes was a factor in his thinking and it was known in the United States it was far broader than the Keynesian element. It consisted of every conceivable political movement from the late 19th century forward in the United States the populist, the progressives, the social democrats from the upper Midwest and all kinds of other people, a social credit movement. And it built up, it came in at a time when we were 70 years after the end of the American Civil War and the South of the United States was a exceedingly impoverished and backward region. And the new deal basically built it up and created the conditions for its emergence as a middle class society and ultimately for the emergence of the civil rights movement, but which was not a feature of the new deal in the first place but electrification of the entire American South and Southwest or it was an essential piece of this and there was industrial development that goes along with that. The construction of a public infrastructure of governments, schools and courthouses of transportation, roads and airfields. Much of this was made easy by the fact this was the high era of the rise of fossil fuels and particularly of oil. Now we have a different challenge now which is moving away from that but the underlying conception has to be similar. We have to decide what kind of society we want and how do we build toward it? And there I think actually the pandemic has given us in some sense some very useful guidance. We know here we are you and I talking in a way that a year and a half ago we probably wouldn't have done technically as possible, it's certainly much easier now that we're much more habituated to it of that involves no carbon emissions, no jet aircraft rides, no jet lag, no hangovers. It makes a great many things are now possible and easy that were not done before. People are working from home which means much less commuting is necessary which means many fewer automobile miles, many fewer carbon emissions. The office buildings that were maintained which are extremely expensive energy using glass and steel structures not necessarily may not be necessary to maintain as many of them into the future. One can go down the list of ways in which one can make the whole energy picture better without sacrifice of the quality of life and in fact to some degree with improvement of it and as the pandemic itself recedes the last thing we wanna do is to say, oh gee we're just going to greenwash the previous economy because we just add a lot of green energy sources to what you've had before you're not dealing with a climate problem. You're simply increasing the CO2 load keeps going up and that's the issue. You've got to have to figure out how to live well while actually emitting less of that stuff into the atmosphere. Yeah, I think for all, for myself even you know just hearing how breathtakingly ambitious the new deal vision was not just the vision the implementation was is deeply inspiring. I think it's also jarring to contrast that the dimensions of the original deal new deal with what is on the table in the form of this so-called green deal which of course steals so much legitimacy from that concept and from the green new deal movement more broadly as it's taken root in places like the United States but has so little of the content and it's not just the vision it's also the politics that undergird that vision it's the coalition for whom that new deal speaks. I think in Europe one of the challenges that we face as DM and in trying to build a green new deal for Europe movement that is across the continent is that for so long workers in Europe have been portrayed for cynical reasons as well as substantive ones as fundamental barriers to the green transition as fundamentally the antagonists of the efforts to decarbonize. So we have a classic sort of proletarian and young precarious split. You've got the student strikers in the streets who are fundamentally opposed to the miners in the countryside and that there's no way to bridge those two constituencies and catering to the former will any of the latter and catering to the latter will of course inflame tensions in the liberal parties that aim to represent the former. And so what we've ended up is this what I've with my colleague, Pavel Varga previously calls it decarbonization without democracy. It's this way of doing decarbonization. We've talked about the reliance on the private sector and nudging it with green taxonomies that are deeply flawed. We don't have to get into the details of that. But essentially it's not about driving a democratic transformation in the process of stripping carbon from the economy. It's about kind of preserving technocratic power and making as few as most sort of a very defensive position. These light touch interventions which claim not to be threatening the social order and the underlying fabric of these communities but in the process provide really paltry sums is seven billion euros over seven years for a just transition fund, right? To say, okay, we know there's gonna be some social dislocation in the process of the green transition. We'll just throw some pennies to the Hungarians or the Poles, right? Which of course is gonna line the pockets of the capitalists whose coal mines and factories are sort of put out of business in the course of the screen transition. But this is not a worker empowerment. This is not even a jobs program. I spoke a bit before about the dominance. Are you serious, seven billion over seven years? Yeah. I mean, the Navy couldn't build an aircraft carrier for that in the United States. But it's being sold, you know, the language they've underlined use is we leave no one behind. This is the European way. I mean, the most kind of pompous rhetoric around what the just transition means. And so- I trust not many people are fooled. Well, you'd be surprised by the quality of journalism in the Brussels bubble, but, you know, without trying to slander my colleagues too much just across the pond, I think, you know, there's a question about- There's a question about what- I've long taken the view that Western consumers of journalism are at least as clever as the old Soviet readers of Pravda and Izvestia and that one should not overwrite the power of journalism to fool people to believe things that they can clearly see are not true. I think we know. Let me come to this question of the coalition because this, of course, this division, it has its parallels in every democratic society. One can say that the loss of the working class, particularly the white working class of the United States was the phenomenon that delivered the country to Donald Trump in 2016. And that loss goes back to a split that goes back 30 or 40 years really beginning with the Vietnam War. So these are issues that have to be dealt with, but the way to deal with them is to present a program that meets the social and economic requirements of all significant factions in the all significant groups. And again, I want to come back to the model of the New Deal in that respect. The New Deal was not perfect. It did not meet the social requirements for progress for African Americans in the United States and that came later in the 1960s. But amongst the political constituencies that it pulled together, it was very significant and wide ranging. And it did not just focus on building dams and new industries and so forth. It was a project that built up communities. Viewers in Europe may want to check out the website of a group called the Living New Deal which maps out just exactly how many things happened in the United States. We're built in the United States that are still with us that were products of the New Deal. I mean, there are many, many thousands of them all over the country. It was a very, very big, many big things, many, many much smaller things. But in addition to that, the New Deal was also a cultural and artistic phenomenon. It also supported communities that bring us together as a population that define our, if you like, our cultural and our national identity and in a way at the time, that strongly emphasized the rights and the power of the common person. This was the era of the common man. And you can see this in murals. You can see this in sculptures. You can see this in photography. You can see this in painting. You can see this in every dimension of cultural life that was backed by the New Deal. As we come out of the pandemic, we need to think about these things. We need to think about what it will take to bring meaningful employment to, back to the whole population. This has been the scourge of Europe for decades since the 1970s. For the francophones, I'll mention the magnificent bande dessinée, le choix du chômage by my friend Benoît Colombe, and a colleague of his, Duvidier, which has just been published, that illustrates this history for France. The story here is that I don't think that the network, if you like, of profit-seeking services businesses, ordinary businesses, is going to return in the scale that is required to provide people with meaningful employment. So we're going to have to, as a democratic movement, think about how to structure cooperatives, how to structure other kinds of entities that can make that sort of work available and sustainable. Another economist, my friend, Pévelina Chirneva, has put a proposal together, which is articulated in a number of national contexts, the US and Europe, for a job guarantee for using, basically for using the public employment program, public and non-profit employment, as a way for people to always have a job available, doing something useful. And so nobody has to be obliged to be unemployed, to sit around filing applications and waiting for someone to come calling. That is a device which causes people to waste years of their lives, to lose their morale, their skills, their meaning, really, of making a contribution. We can do something about that. A job guarantee program is a very effective, I think, way to approach the problem. And of course, as people are required by private sector employers, they'll hire people who are already employed. They'll hire people out of, away from the job guarantee, which is a good thing too. So there are ways to reconstruct our society. And that's what a green, new deal needs to think about doing in a very wide-ranging and comprehensive manner. For the final section of the conversation, I think it would be helpful to shift from looking at these cases. We've spent a lot of time talking about the case of the United States, for very good reasons, because of its hegemonic position and its particular leadership and the privilege that it has. Take only hegemonic position. Shake only hegemonic position, temporarily hegemonic position, and talking about Europe naturally, because this is the democracy in Europe movement. But of course, when it comes to climate change, it's going to be global, or it's going to be nothing at all. And so in the case of Europe, if you look at how I mentioned this in my previous rant before you spoke last about the ways in which there's a real risk of decarbonization on the inside of the continents, simply exporting those carbon emissions to the outside and then kind of holding up this A plus report card to the world and marching through the halls of COP26 in Glasgow and saying, you know, aren't I great? Pat me on the back kind of thing, which Europe is very inclined to do in this new strain of exceptionalism. So, you know. I'm glad to say, David, that you and I are not citizens of a country that has any tendency to pat itself on the back. It's the epitome of modesty and self-effacement. You know, Jamie, as a young cosmopolitan, and a ruthless Jew, I feel I belong to a no-patia. But I do, I wonder, you know, I think I've been disappointed, I'll be honest with you. I've been disappointed in proposals that I've seen tabled in the United States, certainly in Europe, for how we might internationalize the Green New Deal. What do we mean to go global? This is something that, you know, my colleague, Janis Varoufakis, in Meta 25, has, we've written about how we might put together something like an organization for emergency, OEC for the 21st century, something that could really take on this scale. You know, what do you, how do you feel about thinking through where the Green New Deal is at? What are the barriers to thinking through this question of how we can deliver a global Green New Deal, a global green and just transition? How we can have the conversation you were just suggesting that we have about what kind of society we want to live in, about what kind of jobs we want to provide, about what kind of lives we want to live. How do we begin to have that on the scale that it requires, given that no country's green transition happens in isolation? Okay, so let's begin, take this up in two pieces. The first piece is that for dealing specifically with the problem of climate change in the planet, one has to deal with the largest economic entities and they are North America, Europe and China essentially, China, Japan. And those are, that's a manageable coalition if you put it together and do it in a serious way, you can make a very serious effect. Now, obviously you've got other parts of the world, you've got, you've got, deforestation is an issue and you've got a whole host of other things. But putting first things first, one has to go for the big prizes and get them under control and then proceed. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, oh, and I should mention India is also a very big case. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, then my mind, the first thing that one has to do is to put the financial relationships between the wealthy and the less wealthy countries on a, on a just and sustainable basis. Debt's that will not be, that cannot be paid will not be paid. Debt's that are burdensome and oppressive need to be written down or written off. And we need to have a structure for preventing, from getting away from this idea that the development is a function of, of foreign investment and the accumulation of new debts. My friend, Luis Carlos, Professor Pereira in Brazil is very good argument that while we can have a good benefits out of trade and particularly learning and transfer technology, the country should maintain control over their own financial environments and that it should be facilitated by international organizations. If we can make that change, it's actually within the ambit of the charter of the IMF, the IMF has lost sight of it. If we can make that change and then we would have to restructure and really change the power position of the financial sector in the rich countries, because you're going to restructure credit or debtor relationships, you're going to basically be reducing the financial claims and therefore the wealth of the oligarchs of the West. And that's a big challenge for an democratic movement. I mean, this goes back to, let's mention our friend Yanis Verifakis to be the first to remind us that you can have oligarchy or democracy but you cannot have both together. They are not compatible. That is something that the Athenians knew very well. And some things are reproduced throughout history. Yeah, just to stay there for one minute, just because, well, Perks are interested in your thoughts about this. You know, we certainly share this vision of this broad restructuring of the global economy as the kind of precondition to any serious conversation about what a global Green New Deal might look like, certainly about what the claims of justice or democracy might look like in those countries which are stuck in these relations of dependence along the periphery of the global economy. You know, the IMF may have its headquarters in Washington DC but let's not forget a gentleman's agreement that ensures European leadership at its helm. So I wonder, you know, if you're speaking, of course, to a broadly North Atlantic audience but lots of Europeans who are there and who care about this issue. And I wonder, you know, what are the chief barriers to delivering this kind of transformation? You know, Jamie, you've had great experiences not only working domestically in US government but traveling the world and working with different governments and seeing that multilateral system and the promises and its perils and its falsehoods and its opportunities for transformation. And I wonder, you know, looking at this crisis, many have described what we're up against as the greatest debt crisis in history in the heels of this pandemic which could become even worse as we end up in a world where the global North is broadly post-pandemic and the global South is certainly not, is certainly mid-pandemic for a couple of years to come. You know, how do we make sense of the opportunities that from the global North or indeed from the global South we might have to transform that system especially given what we're being told is a historic political opportunity structure with a sort of alignment of non-national populist forces in those two great blocks of Europe, the United States. Well, let me speak to the situation, first of all, internally in the United States because there's a consciousness here that is going to be raised if it hasn't been raised already as time goes on. American households remain deeply in debt. It's obvious that giving them funds enables them to get by but an increasing percentage of people are behind on their rent and are unforeseen on their mortgages. And at some point, those bills are going to come due and the question is what happens then? Do you say it's too bad? You have to basically head out on the street so your places can be repossessed or do you say, look, no, we understand. What you had to do losing your job losing your income, staying home for a year, year and a half was necessary for the larger society, for public health. And therefore these debts are gone. Well, if you make that case internally you can make it also externally. You can make it with respect to the whole world. And so I think there's a kind of a kind of sympathy or at least a common interest here which is going to be hard or to conceal from people as time goes on. In terms of the wider world, I mean, these are issues that I've dealt with all my life going back to the New York city financial crisis in 1975 when I was 23 and on the staff of the house banking committee and I was called upon to draft the first plan and put in it with my 23 year old enthusiasm that the bondholders should take a hit. They should be haircut as part of any resolution. And this provoked a telephone call and probably a good way to wrap up the show to tell the story. Telephone call from a senior figure former governor of New York resident of Georgetown by the name of Averill Herrmann who wanted a briefing on this subject. And my boss, the congressman, very good guy social democratic congressman from Milwaukee, Henry Royce sent me over to brief governor Herrmann who greeted me in his drawing room. He was in his pajamas. He'd broken his hip. He had, there was a Van Gogh on the wall and a Degas ballerina under glass and between the two of them I delivered my little explanation of why I thought the bondholders had to pay. Had to take a hit and he leaned forward on his cane and he said, I understand completely capital must pay as well as labor. And I think it's a pretty good story. In this situation, we all understand that frankly, we're all in the same boat. Labor has already paid, capital has not. And fixing things at the national level the international level is going to require a big adjustment for capital. It is one which gets us back to situations we have lived with, at least I have because capital played a much smaller role and bank finance played a much smaller role in the years before the 1970s than it did afterwards. And those years were more stable, more prosperous more democratic in some respects. And then the one sense and we simply as I say we cannot be ruled democratically and financially at the same time. And for me, this is an easy choice. Well, on that call to solidarity on that call indeed to courage for whatever 23 year old is watching now who happens to hold the same set back to sort of hold their pen hanging over the policy to drive us towards a more just and democratic world. I wanna thank my esteemed colleague and guest this evening, Jamie Galbraith. It's a pleasure to see you and have you on DMTV this evening. As always a pleasure, David and keep up all the good work and good luck as you're heading off. I know to Ecuador for a very good cause in a few days. Indiza, stay tuned. Thank you all for watching. Please make sure to subscribe to DMTV, to donate to DM25 to join the movement if you have not already. It's been a pleasure to have you here this evening and I hope to see you soon. Take care.