 Hello, today is the 4th of June 2021, you are joining give the people what they want brought to you every Friday from People's Dispatch and we have here the editors Zoe and Prashant. Hi Zoe, hi Prashant. Morning Vijay. And I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. We come to you with the world news in half an hour. The first story I think that we'd like to get to on this 4th of June is that tomorrow the 5th of June is World Environment Day. Now in 1972 in Stockholm Sweden, the world gathered together for a meeting on the status of the environment by 1972 already clear great problems in the environment. They decided to have the 5th of June 1974 be the first World Environment Day. Subsequently every year, June 5th has been celebrated as World Environment Day. Now it's one of the limitations of our imagination that it's not become an important part of our calendar. I mean, for God's sake, when you read the reports coming out of the IPCC on climate change, when you read the reports coming out from the United Nations Environment Program, UNEP and a range of other international bodies including groups of scientists. You'd think that people would take World Environment Day more seriously than religious days or more seriously than, well, I'm sorry to say, but father's day, mother's day and so on. But of course there is no real World Environment Day popular understanding in our imagination. It's something that the United Nations holds small gatherings here and there. This year World Environment Day will be celebrated epicenter Pakistan. The issue is of course the redevelopment of ecological landscapes to reverse land degradation and so on deforestation and so on. I was struck in the last two weeks reading while I read a series of these reports from the United Nations from groups of scientists. I was struck by the statistic that showed a report from 2016. You should know a statistic that suggested that by 2050, by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean. By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Now, you must recall that off the coast of Sri Lanka, a tanker sits and leaks out plastic nodules that are gathering on the beaches of Sri Lanka being gathered, very hard work, 24 hour work by the Sri Lankan military putting these in plastic bags. These nodules are used in the molds to create all kinds of plastic goods. This was being transported by a large tanker. The tanker has run aground. Great threat of massive environmental destruction when the oil finally leaks which it's going to. They're having a hard time moving the tanker into deep sea. The tanker has run aground. It is leaking plastic nodules. By 2050, there will be more plastic in the world than fish. There is a place. There is actually a location in the planet Earth called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Friends, this is actually a technical word. I didn't realize this. This is actually a place. It's almost a country called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Its estimated mass is of 79,000 tons of ocean plastic. It's floating inside a territory whose area is 1.6 million square kilometers. For purposes of comparison, the Great Pacific plastic patch which is in the upper northern region of the Pacific Ocean. This Great Pacific plastic patch is the size of Iran. It's the size of Iran, 1.6 million square kilometers. We have new continents being shaped in the ocean made of plastic. Just to repeat this fact before we move on just so that there's some clarity about this. By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. There's a ship leaking plastic nodules off the coast of Sri Lanka. We are in a serious crisis, a serious crisis of the environment. June 5th every year celebrated as World Environment Day. It might be a good idea to go out there. Go to the website of dertricontinental.org, read the red alert which is on the problem of the environment. It's called Only One Earth. That phrase Only One Earth comes from the first World Environment Day in 1974. Please take a look at that. I think it's something that I'd really like you to have a look at. We're going to move on from plastic to teachers. Pedro Castillo in Peru has been walking around with his pencil, which is his main instrument of talking about how he's going to be the teacher of Peru, I suppose. What's going on in Peru's election, Zoe, with Pedro Castillo and so on? It's another historic day in Latin America this Sunday, June 6th. We're having another round of elections. This is, of course, the second round presidential elections in Peru and then local and subnational elections in Mexico. In Peru, we spoke after the first round of elections, which happened in April. For many, it was a big shock to see Pedro Castillo of the Free Peru Party kind of pulling first place in a very, very divided electoral scenario. For others, this is almost the natural outcome of a country that has been ravaged by pro-corporate anti-people policies for the past couple of decades, where the urban, rural divide grows stronger every day, where the central government puts an enormous amount of resources and effort towards maintaining this urban elite in Lima, but completely cast a blind eye to the majorities who are living, not the majorities, but the populations who are outside the city. In this context, we see the rise of Pedro Castillo. He's from the peasant patrol movement. He's a teacher. He's from Teachers Union. He is really this voice of the excluded in Peru, those who are forgotten by the government, those who are not able to access basic services like healthcare, education, housing. I mean, even within the last year of the pandemic, we've seen how this crisis has impacted the Peruvian people. I mean, it has one of the highest mortality rates of COVID-19. You know, just in the past couple of months, there were 10,000 people who were forced to kind of camp in an abandoned lot outside the city of Lima. I mean, just thinking of that fact that families were forced to make shift houses, and then they were evicted by the police, you know, just kind of shows the precarity that people are suffering in this Peru for the elites, in this Peru for the people who can pay for a dignified life. So, you know, coming up to this second round elections, we've really seen, it's been an interesting scenario, because of course, while we're, you know, we've talked about Pedro Castillo, but who he's running off against is kind of the polar opposite, which is the daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori. Keiko Fujimori is the candidate from the popular force party. I mean, in addition to being the daughter of a dictator, she's also under investigation for corruption. Her party has been, you know, heavily scrutinized for taking place in corrupt acts for, you know, a slew of other crimes. And she's kind of this antithesis of the Peru for the majorities, Peru for the working class, and really what's happened is a campaign of polarization of saying that Peru, that Pedro Castillo represents a communist threat, and really just trying to drive this campaign of fear into the upper middle class, into the elites. And, you know, people are saying that they would prefer to have some people, of course, not all people are saying that they would prefer to have the daughter of a dictator, someone who caused, you know, you know, countless human rights violations who's currently in prison, who's, you know, charged with, you know, supporting massacres and forced sterilization of women. They would rather have this than a communist government, just so there's this constant fear mongering. But, you know, it's, and it's created polarization, but currently right now Pedro Castillo is polling ahead of Keiko Fujimori. It's honestly, it's going to be, it's really hard to tell what's going to happen on Sunday, but whatever is going to happen, I mean, the people have woken up and they've said that this is not a model they can tolerate. And, you know, we've seen in the past couple of weeks, massive marches in Lima, some of the biggest mobilizations against Fujimori saying, never again will we return to this model of dictatorship and demanding change. So it's a really interesting Sunday. Keep our eyes open for this. So there's the election in Peru, which is the second round presidential election. There's also the election in Mexico of governors of the whole parliament and so on. It's in some senses being seen as a referendum on the government of Almo and his Morena party. Let's see what happens with that. We'll come back next week on Mexico, I'm sure. I want to turn us to the Mediterranean Sea and Nigeria across the Atlantic Ocean. You know, we started our show with the Great Pacific Patch. Now we're back to traversing the Atlantic. At the People's Dispatch website, Pawan Kulkarni has a very detailed assessment of the Phoenix, you know, military exercises conducted by the US-Africa command. There's also, of course, you know, so-called humanitarian exercises, AFROCOM just did with Nigeria. Prashant, what's happening with Africa command? What's happening with these major exercises, this Phoenix Express exercise? Right, Vijay. So I mean, I think in this show, we've talked quite a bit about how in order to uncover imperialism, you often need to look at where the arms sales are and where the military exercises are. And I think the Phoenix Express 2021 exercise, which included on May 28th, it's a very good example of that as Pawan's story points out because it was held across the Mediterranean, 13 countries participated, including all those countries. In Northern Africa, again, the ones we talked about often, there's Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania and each of these countries, many of these countries having their own very complicated political dynamics, which you often looked into. A couple of things to flag in this, of course, the most important thing being that the stated reason for the exercise was to test the capability of participants to respond to irregular migration and illicit trafficking and trafficking in movement of goods, which is the argument always used by the ruling class across the world when they really want to do these military exercises. They're supposedly doing a humanitarian initiative here. And what goes without saying, of course, here is that, or what goes instead is basically the fact that the reason for this migration are the wars in Libya and Syria and especially in Libya. And who was responsible for the war in Libya? It was clearly the United States, its Western allies, the support they provided to Islamist groups on the ground, which led to the catastrophe in Libya, which is still continuing. Now there are small signs that there may be peace, but the toll over the past decade or so has been intense. It has been horrific. Hundreds and thousands of people displaced, so many killed, many forced into, forced to migrate, similar situations here as well. And yet these powers continue to look at migration as though it is some problem that sprung out of the desert, so to speak, random people just wanting to leave their country for no reason without this. So that issue completely going ignored in these exercises, no discussion about that. But what has really happened is that this is just a very clear attempt to combat what, again, once again, the kind of a specter of Russian and Chinese influence that has been consistently raised by the Western powers and their allies. And of course, we know how this works. There are all these claims about the most significant claim being, of course, that China is supposedly involved in some mass conspiracy in Africa to build innumerable bases. Whereas, I think I believe there's maybe one, there are of course rumors floating all around social media, which experts have pointed out too, that where are these so called bases coming up? There's no information about that. Whereas Africa has 29 bases already. And the number of participants, the number of, I think around 6000 personnel, including Pentagon personnel deployed in Africa. And that's the United States, the United States and where is Africa. So under the pretext of combating these influences, similarly the other pretext is combating Islamist groups. And we, again, as the report points out, there's actually been an increase in these kind of attacks attributed to Islamist terrorist organizations. A 500% spike almost. So especially over the past decade when Africa has established itself. So I think it's a real important question that we keep asking that what exactly is Africa, what exactly is the US policy in this region. And I think it all boils down to a very simple answer, which is the hunt for resources. Of course, the hunt to the attempt to establish, you know, a kind of complete geopolitical influence over these countries. And in people's dispatch, I only covered how, for instance, the Democratic Republic of Congo, US influence has played a huge part in not only propping up Joseph Kabila and his murderous regime, but also his successors. In so many other states, we've seen the United States influence playing an important role and this having a direct bearing on the resources that are at the hub, at the heart of today's technology that are the heart of the profits that US corporates and US invested industries making and capitalism is making. So I think it's a, you know, it boils down to a very simple answer, but there are like layers and layers of sophistication built around these military exercises, which we need to consistently keep challenging and pointing out. Well, you see, this is a reason to go to people's dispatch, you'd be able to read that today Pawan Kulkarni's piece. It's a very thorough piece about military exercises conducted by the US Africa command that's peoplesdispatch.org. You're listening to give the people what they want coming to you every Friday, half an hour whirlwind tour we start with the great Pacific plastic patch we go to the Mediterranean Sea. Now we're going to cross the Atlantic again. We're going to Columbia where military is back on the table. We have the military being sent out onto the streets. Ivan Duque, unwilling to listen to the protests on the streets, Kali Columbia epicenter of the uprising. Zoe, what's going on in Columbia? We need a regular Columbia update. Yes, well, now it is a feature of give the people what they want. So we have to, you know, keep giving the people what they want. And it is so important that we not turn away from Columbia. You know, protests are continuing negotiations between social movements and the government are continuing, but the government kind of refuses to see it on the key demand, which is the demilitarization of the cities and end of repression. The latest human rights report on police repression says that at least 76 people have been assassinated during this past month of the national strike. And, you know, again, we go into a lot of these stories every week. But, you know, in the past week and two days ago, a journalist was stabbed by the police and then was unable to be picked up by the ambulance because police wouldn't allow them to pass. Another journalist was beat up and arrested. And then something I wanted to kind of point out today is that yesterday the International Mission of Solidarity, which was a mission that was made up of a lot of different human rights and social movements from Argentina, members of these movements traveled to Columbia to kind of fill the gap that the Colombian state has, you know, made, which is that they haven't investigated the rampant human rights violations against the people. So this really brave delegation of people from Argentina, also people from the United States came to Columbia to go to the different regions, investigate what's been happening and try to shine a light on what the state is responsible for and what has really been happening on the ground. Because, you know, as we've mentioned several times, it's really hard to get this information because the government is trying to cover it up, is trying to censor people who are doing this work. And, of course, from day one, you know, we saw that Juan Graboa, who was part of this delegation was deported, wasn't even allowed into the country. And the delegation, you know, suffered constant attacks from Colombian politicians and most, you know, yesterday they concluded their visit. They presented a really, really harrowing report shining light on the role of the Colombian government in carrying out these human rights violations. And, you know, what have they been met with a campaign from the far right in Colombia to save their link to illegal organizations to say that they're implanting a plan of destabilization. And so all every single narrative that the government and far right politicians can use to really undermine, you know, the efforts of people who out of humanity out of their empathy and compassion have just been trying to raise light to this. I mean, it's really horrifying. And meanwhile, a armed civilian last Friday was, you know, documented open, you know, shooting at protesters. He later did an Instagram live video saying that, you know, he felt that he had to protect his community, which is, of course, an elite community in the northern part of the city from the vandals from the criminals who are participating in the protests. Just to highlight this night, 14 people were killed by the police and armed individuals, and this individual is walking free. Yet members of this delegation are receiving threats. Members of Congress of Colombian Congress who have been accompanying youth on the street to make sure they don't get arrested and disappeared. They now have investigations opened up against them. So Maria Jose Pizarro, India Spria, several other members of Congress are now being investigated by the Colombian government for obstructing justice. So just to really throw in some of these elements about the complete breakdown of, you know, what is right, what is human rights and what the state and government has the responsibility to do and is not doing. Well, we know that the government is not being spied upon by the United States. We know that the government most likely is spying upon the opposition in Colombia. This whole business of spying upon is back in the news, crossing the Atlantic again about, what was it now, eight years ago when Edward Snowden, a contractor with the National Security Agency in the United States, revealed that the US government had been spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone. This is 2013. Nothing happened when this was revealed. By the way, there was some, you know, guffying on the corner, but nothing really happened. Now in a Danish publication has said that Denmark facilitated regular spying by the United States of European leaders. The story is broken. It's a very important story. Prashant, give us the update. Right, it's an interesting, absurd. There are so many words to describe it. I mean, the craziest thing, of course, is that Snowden had told us about all of this in 2013. The Danish government knew about this. They set up an inquiry in 2014. The report, the inquiry report came in 2015 and was nothing really happened after that. So in 2020, of course, apparently some intelligence officers were suspended. Now, we'd like to sort of bring a different perspective to this because what is being talked about is the fact that all the United States spied on the leaders of Germany and France and the Netherlands, maybe. But I think the question is much more larger than that, which is what is going to come out in an interview that we're publishing soon as well. It reveals the extent of mass surveillance and how easy it is for the United States and its allies to target anybody. Because the surveillance happened through a targeted application of these, of technology on cables, on internet cables, which enter Denmark. So you have a situation where everything, your leaders, supposedly your most secure people in the country were involved in the searches, the telephone conversations and messages were being tapped. And I think that this is an issue which suppose your leaders can be tapped, what really remains of the privacy of common citizens. And of course, common citizens is important, but also of activists, also of people who would like to express dissent. You see a similar situation in India right now where there's a controversy going on with the social media rules, where restrictions are being placed, which when you feel is an overreach on the part of the state. And I think that this is a conversation that we cannot stop having because what Snowden did, what Julian Assange did for his instance, the work that many of them did. Brought a huge amount of spotlight on how normalized this kind of surveillance is in the world. And I suspect some of that has fallen off the radar over the past few years because we had some levels almost so used to it. And of course, you're not only talking about the state, but also an entire ecosystem involving the big corporate giants, which has normalized this amount of data collection, this amount of data processing and surveillance that comes with it. These are two inseparable issues altogether. So I think that when we're looking at this issue of spying, of course, one thing is about the strategic implications, what happens with the US spies on its allies? Are there any other similar programs still continuing, which we don't know about? This issue happened, of course, between 2012 and 2014, but are there similar programs which are being run against leaders in other parts of the world, activists in other parts of the world? Of course, no information we'll never probably get to know. So that's one part of it. But I think also the infrastructure of mass surveillance is, I think, what we really need to sort of remember both at national level, at an international level, and keep flagging and highlighting movements across the world have been putting that forward. And that remains one of the key agenda points for a progressive organization or a movement anywhere in the world. This show is called Give the People What They Want comes to you every Friday brings you the whole world's stories. Give the people what they want. In order for that, we, Zoe, Prashant and I, people's dispatch globetrotter, we go out there, try to assemble as many stories as possible. That also means that we have to read reports that we don't expect you to read. I spent a lot of time this last week reading some reports I want to talk about in these few minutes. Firstly, a stunning report, the Food and Agriculture Organization, their food inflation report is out. It's incredible. It shows you, for instance, that food prices just in May went up by 40%. Food prices now are the highest in 15 years. Lebanon last year, Lebanon saw food price rise by 400%. Friends, this is catastrophic for poor countries that have to import food. If you're relatively food sufficient, if you're able to produce enough food, you can manage pricing. But if you have to import food, it's catastrophic. Poor countries around the world are net importers of food, most of them. This is going to increase hunger rates as prices of food go up. There's a global conversation that's begun around inflation. And I'm going to come back to that, not just food inflation. This is a conversation being held by central bankers, largely European central bank, Japanese central bank, the Federal Reserve in the United States and so on. Banks who when they raise or lower interest rates has an impact on the economies of people all around the world. It's that old story of the butterfly. Butterfly flaps its wings over here. It creates a storm over there. Somebody sitting in a relatively unventilated room in St. Louis, Missouri at the Federal Reserve decides to shift interest rates. It has a catastrophic impact on a farmer sitting somewhere in southern Zambia. Their lives are linked because of the central bank operations, mainly of countries, as I said, in Europe, Japan, the United States and so on. A big debate now on inflation because there's a fear as a consequence of pent up demand. This long period of lockdown in the North, people not spending so much. They have some savings even though there's an unemployment problem and I'll come back to that in a minute. There's pent up demand. There was supply chain bottlenecks. We have a ship stuck presently off the coast of Sri Lanka. There's supply chain bottlenecks. An enormous number of shipping is waiting because Indian workers on ships are the majority of workers on ships. And when this wave of COVID struck India, shipping lines not willing to pick up Indian sailors for fear they would bring COVID on. All of this has had an upward pressure in prices around the world. What do central banks do? Central banks have in most capitalist countries have a dual agenda to manage price inflation in order to keep inflation steady, keep it as low as possible. But they also have in most countries a fundamental responsibility to increase to full employment. They have a responsibility for that. It's not just in a socialist country. Even in the United States, the Federal Reserve has a dual agenda on the one side to stabilize prices and that is to say to stabilize the price of money. The other side to promote full employment. Well, so far the central banks have done almost nothing to create full employment. The International Labour Organization report is really chilling reading. It's chilling reading. It shows South Africa, for instance, struggling with 42% overall unemployment, 42%. That's twice the rate it was in Nazi, in Weimar Germany, which led to the rise of Hitler. 42%, but that's not the real issue, friends. The real issue is in that International Labour Organization report, it shows that youth unemployment was almost 75%, 3 out of 4 young people without a job. If you go to New Frame, I recommend you go there right now and read the editorial. The editorial at New Frame is called A Place Weeping. It is a beautifully written discussion of what it means to live in a country whose society is collapsing, whose state is non-existent when it comes to people's needs. Please go and have a look at that. We are at a perilous point forward, friends. We are at a perilous point. On the one side, the Food and Agriculture Organization says food prices highest in 15 years. The International Labour Organization says unemployment in many countries is at unimaginable levels. People are without an income and food is more expensive. This, friends, is a recipe for global famine. This is a recipe for global famine. Coming at the same time as by 2050, there might be more plastic in the ocean than fish. What kind of world are we living in? Give the people what they want. The people want the truth. That's what Zoe and Prashant from People's Dispatch give you every week and every day at the People's Dispatch website. That's what I try to do my best to do when I join you here on Give the People What They Want. Don't forget to tell us what you think of the show. Don't forget to tell your friends and family. Bring a crowd. Prashant, Zoe, you're having a good week. You're looking forward to next week. There's a lot happening over the weekend, sir. Well, there's no weekend for people like us. Friends, see you next week. Give the people what they want. We'll come back to you next Friday looking forward to talking about Mexico and other things that will surely be at the front of our agenda. Have a good weekend.