 So, we have three great speakers in today's second chapter of the webinar series that is hosted by RLS Brussels and RLS New York. And those two offices of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung have joined forces with Transform Europe as well as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute. So a lot of organizations are hosting this thanks to all the partners and organizers for making this talk today possible. And today in the second episode of the series, we will focus on state intervention and public services. We want to discuss what kind of state is needed in order to implement all the necessary social and ecological changes in the post-COVID area. As in the first chapter last week, we want to develop and discuss the proverbial big picture. We want to develop internationalist visions for green new deals that will work for the whole planet and that will also provide inspiration for the next chapters to come that will go more into details in the weeks and months to come. The neoliberal era has failed to prevent or solve the many crisis we have faced in the last 40 years. The latest of these examples is the current coronavirus crisis. In many countries, it is revealing the consequences of the dismantling of the healthcare systems and other crucial public services. As a result, economic actors across the political spectrum are demanding state intervention in the economy, often to save entire sectors from collapsing. Therefore, the current crisis emphasizes the need to rethink the commodification of money sectors but also the role and shape of public services and public utilities. The concept of a global green new deal in a similar way conveys new ideas regarding the place, role and form of public institutions and public services in the ambitious transformations ahead of us. So what kind of status needed to realize the social and ecological changes of a global red and green new deal? We have invited to talk about this with us Mike Davis, who is a writer, a political activist, an urban theorist and historian. He's the author of 15 books, including City of Quartz and Planet of Slumps. 15 years ago, Mike has also published The Monster at Our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu, in which he reconstructs the central roles of agribusiness and fast food industries, as well as governments in creating the ecological conditions for the emergence of the avian flu. Since this March, he has also published a number of analysis and interviews on the current COVID-19 pandemic, connecting this health crisis with austerity, inequality and demands for a post-corona period, for example, access to healthcare, a new deal and international solidarity. Maud Barlow is the co-founder and honorary chairperson of the Council of Canadians, the most important progressive think tank in Canada. She also chairs the board of Food and Water Watch and is a board member in the International Forum on Globalization and the Council of World Future Council. In 2008, 2009, she served as a senior advisor on water to the president of the United Nations General Assembly and was a leader in the campaign to have water recognized as a human right by the United Nations. Recently, she has published an article on the COVID-19 virus pandemic, arguing that COVID-19 puts the human right to water front and center. Welcome, Maud and Mike and our third panelist that we're still hoping we will try to get into our discussion is Martin Scherdermann. He is the co-chair of the left group in the European Parliament, the GUE-NGL faction. He is a former RLS colleague, actually, and has left us to be a member of the European Parliament since the end of 2017. Under his leadership and in anticipation of the European Commission's release of its European Green Deal, the left group in the Parliament has presented a detailed policy plan for a green and social new deal for Europe at the beginning of December in 2019. The document details 10 policy areas of radical action to tackle the climate emergency. In the last couple of weeks, however, Martin has been working a lot on the response of the EU to the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of health systems on the continent, economic and financial crisis response and other topics. We will discuss with the three of them in two or three, hopefully three quick rounds. We will start with a couple of personal statements from all of them and then two rounds of inputs on the key questions of today's webinar. We will also have time for questions from you from the audience. So use the Q&A function and finish with an outlook on the next webinar. So we will start now with the first round, the ice breaker round, with the same question to all three speakers, which is in what way does the current crisis, the coronavirus crisis impact or change your own political work and your own political thinking? What is maybe the one or two most important things that you felt was different or is different now than let's say two months ago? What? Why don't you start? Wait, you mute it. So keen to talk. I forgot. Yes. Now we have you, Maude. Go for it. All right. First of all, thank you, Wengie. Thank you, Mike. It's lovely to be here with you, and I sure hope Martin is able to join us. And thank you, everybody out there who's joined. These are very trying times, and it's really important that we find each other and we support each other in what we're learning, what we know we need to do. I would say that just as a kind of opening thought that the global water crisis has impacted the COVID crisis in a very profound and terrible way, people like to say COVID is an equal opportunity, virus, you know, we're all equal. That's not true. And I read a really good analysis that said, yes, it's true, we're all in the same choppy waters, but we have different boats. And for the 2 billion people who have to drink contaminated water every day because they don't have clean water or the 2.5 billion who don't have access to sanitation, the whole notion of having to wash your hands with hot soap and water and keep your, you know, body and your surroundings clean is impossible. And so the coronavirus has highlighted the water crisis, but I would say the water crisis has highlighted our lack of ability to deal with something that comes along like this COVID crisis that basically says we start off with inequality. You start off with extreme poverty, people living in circumstances where there's no way that they can distance themselves, people who don't have access to food from one day to the next. And then of course, in this case, water and of course, health care, and it is not an equal opportunity virus. It's going to come through the portals of poverty and injustice. So we're really looking at the issue of water and COVID in a way to say can COVID be the catalyst to make us understand that if governments can meet this crisis or at least begin to try to meet this crisis and it needs government and it needs public services and good public servants, can it help us? Can we bring the climate and the water and the food crises up on the same level? Thank you. So much. There was already so many important topics in this first statement. So let's go on with Mike. What is your impression? What did change for you and your political thinking in your political work in the recent weeks? Well, I'm speaking to you from San Diego, California. And if I go outside of my driveway, I can see our sister city of Tijuana, just 11 miles away. My wife is Mexican and the border is now closed to all but essential workers. So her family, which lives on both sides of the border, split in half, Tijuana has become the epicenter of COVID outbreak in Mexico. On this side of the border, the hospitals are gearing up as American citizens who live on the other side of the border come back to San Diego. And it's a kind of worst case scenario. But if there's a single political conclusion that we can already draw from this crisis, it's that COVID has awarded victory to borders and walls and wall builders everywhere. Consider first of all the World Health Organization. In 2005, the World Health Organization revised its international health regulations. This is a statute to which all the parties, all the states that belong to the WHO agreed with and in January and February, virtually every country in the world with very few exceptions simply ignored those regulations and basically ignored the World Health Organization, which has been much marginalized despite the fact that it theoretically is supposed to be the overall coordinator of international responses. The European Union in March, the Italy invoked the civil protection mechanism of the European Union and not a single one of its sister countries responded to it. They closed their borders. They prevented the transfer of vital medical materials to Italy. The only country that came almost immediately to Italy's aid was China, which within two weeks had a plane on the ground unloading pallets of medical supplies and medical experts. The United States, the United States has for 15 years had a pandemic response plan. This had innumerable studies, simulations, dozens and dozens of warnings, all pointing at exactly the things that have gone wrong. The lack of personal protection supplies, the lack of ventilators, test kits. All this has been gone over in great detail. The Trump administration has from the beginning of this abdicated the federal responsibility to aid states, supplying them with supplies from its national stockpile, coordinating response. It's practiced what you might call a Darwinian federalism. In other words, the response in Europe is fragmented and the United States is fragmented internally. So you have to ask, what does this mean for the future of the world economy? Because nationalism seems to triumph everywhere, not only over internationalism, but over the multinational organizations that were once considered to be the future of this brave new world of globalization. And it looks now like we might be headed towards something like the 1930s, when the world market fragmented a world of autarky countries turning inward to their own resources, to their own empires of exploitation. And of course, we know what happened in the 1930s as a result of this. Okay, thanks for this very, it looks, it sounds a bit bleak, but it is a crisis. And yeah, the closing of borders has been something very, very, something that we felt in Europe very much. And I hope that Martin can now join. I see him here at least in the list of panelists. Maybe you can switch on your, yes. Yes, it is already switched on. Hello, everybody. I hope that you can hear me. I'm glad that I finally made it. I had some problems with the connection, but obviously they are resolved now. So hello, everybody. And to answer your question, Venke, how does the crisis affect me personally in my day-to-day life and my political work? Well, I guess it affects me like many other people. I'm working since two months from home. I'm teleworking. And for me personally, this is less problematic for many others, I guess, because I'm a socialist and I earn my money in doing socialist politics. So I don't work alienated, but I imagine how it must be if you want to leave your work behind at your workplace and then you have to take it with you for weeks and for months and to work from home like we are doing it now, like teleworking. So the alienation of work is one topic that actually keeps me thinking. And let's say the boundaries becoming the workplace and the place where you should spend some leisure time, where you live, are becoming very fluid. This is just an observation. What I do politically, of course, is that my political group in the European Parliament and me, that we are working on the crisis or let's say on the answers that radical left should give to the crisis and all its economic and social consequences. And this is something that we'll discuss later tonight in more detail, but everything circles now in the European debate about the question, how can we answer the economic consequences, how can we answer the social consequences? How can the economic recovery happen? How can the social recovery happen? And what about the question of sovereign debt and the increase of sovereign debt? How about the role of the European Central Bank and its monetary policies? How about a huge social recovery plan and investments in public services in the health sector? So well, there are, of course, very differentiated opinions in the political spectrum in Europe and we are trying to put forward the answers from a radical left perspective. But let me get back to the alienation because there's also not only a day-to-day alienation to be observed, but also a very severe political alienation. We have to be very vigilant about this because everybody almost all over the world has left his so-called normal life or the life he or she has been used to live. So we left normality or the normality we knew behind it. We don't know if he will ever return to it and how that return might look like and some member states in the European Union have passed some legislation, some laws that resemble more of an authoritarian power grab than a political answer to the COVID-19 crisis, to the health crisis. And this is something we have to be very sensitive. We have to be very vigilant about. And this is, I'm completely in line with every measure taken in order to protect the health of the people here in the European Union, but I'm very critical about any political measure taken that restricts fundamental and democratic rights and does this in the long and mid-term perspective. And this is also something that we need to discuss, but from a, let's say, not from the perspective that the Trump administration does it or other authoritarian and right-wing administrations do it, but from the perspective of progressive Democrats. And this is something I just wanted to mention. Then there's something, as you and me, we are both living in Berlin, something that I will always remember about this time is, first of all, that there actually is a sense of solidarity and that solidarity became the defining topic of the political debate in Europe and in Germany. And on the other hand, that you and me, we are living in this wonderful city, Berlin, and it's, well, a huge city. And the emptiness of everything here, of the public places and spaces. This is a very strange observation, but this is something that I will remember, I guess, forever in my life. And what I'm doing politically, I already said, well, we are trying to give the answers a radical left has to give in these times. We want to strengthen social democratic rights and we want to re-boost the economy and using this re-boost also in order to overcome neoliberal and certain capitalist structures. Thank you. All right, thanks a lot. So we will dive right into the debate that you guys opened. There's a lot of thoughts already here in the room and we will also try to draw parallels between the current corona pandemic and the climate crisis in terms of the inequalities between people who are differently affected. That Maude also mentioned as well as the call for the broad restructuring of economies and societies in response to the corona crisis, but also the climate crisis. These questions can serve as a material for our discussion. And I want to give the word again to Mike and ask him, I'd like to go a bit on what you just started in this first quick round and talk as a historian, as a researcher, as an activist also about how you see the relationship between neoliberalism, globalization and the pandemic and therefore also the need for the structural changes of a Green New Deal. So maybe to make a short, how did we get into this mess? Like what are the structures that brought us to the point where we are now? I'm sorry, Mike, you were just muted. Do you mind restarting that? Sorry about that. Okay, let me turn your question around slightly. There are four fundamental ways in which global capitalism in all of its forms, not only neoliberalism, but imagined a de-globalized fragmentation of the world economy into individual capitalist blocks. In all of those cases, in all imaginable cases, global capitalism is a threat to human survival in four fundamental ways. First of all, it doesn't generate jobs or provide income and meaningful social roles to half of the humanity. Secondly, it cannot guarantee food security to future generations on this planet. And food security is where climate change and disease very much intersect. Thirdly, it not only can't decarbonize our economies, but it can't carry out the adaptation to climate change. And of course, the extreme results of climate change will be felt most disastrously in the countries, which played the least role in generating greenhouse gases in the first place. So we're talking about the need to guarantee migration where that becomes necessary. But actually, we need for trillions of dollars to be spent adapting agricultural systems and cities to the world, places like the Indus River Valley, which is the largest irrigated system on the face of the earth, faces incalculable consequences from the new hydraulic regime that global warming's running about. And in the fourth place, of course, is the inability of the marketplace to translate revolutions in bioscience, biological design, biotechnology into public health for all of us. What's been missing, and I made this point again and again in addressing the role of the American life in the crisis, is any significant internationalism, at least in the case of this country. The United States is in a situation where more than likely the result of this crisis over the next year could be a significant strengthening of the love. A labor upsurge is already in progress. The opportunities here are very, very great. But the Sanders campaign, the new American love, focused almost entirely on domestic inequality and domestic conditions to a degree that I find very alarming. We have our own kind of version of America first. And there's an enormous need to reawaken the tradition of internationalism in this country. And this means things like the priority of medical aid and equal access to vaccines to the global south, in particular to Africa, but also to the world's slums population. The need for a left that makes universal health care not just domestic policy, but also foreign policy as well. Thank you. Thank you so much also for going already into all the things that we need to get out of this crisis, which will also be more or less the question that I want to ask too much. So how do you see us getting out of the current crisis? What comes after the current crisis? How do we rebuild societies and economy? And where do we need to go in terms of public services, the comments, and how could a global Green New Deal contribute to this? Well, clearly we are all looking at governments now, even the right. And we have, I live in Canada, we have a right wing government in Ontario, and suddenly this premier is acting like one of us, sounding like a person who cares and using the power of the tools of the state to address this. So I guess all of us are saying if we can use the tools of the state, strong public services, not just for the COVID crisis, but beyond real true and deep health care. I mean, in many of our countries, it's seniors in residences, long-term care residences who are dying because those residences were already privatized and the systems were not good for them. So we're reaping the inevitable outcome of what that would be with any kind of crisis like this. So it's understanding the commons, the need for us to take back the commons. I would argue that all of the tenets of globalization, privatization of social services, the deregulation of everything, free trade agreements, I mean our organization was founded way back to stop the Canada-US free trade agreement which morphed into NAFTA, which became the model for the World Trade Organization, the multilateral agreement on investment and so on and so forth. And we now have over 3,000 investment treaties between countries where corporations can bypass their own government and just sue governments of another country if they don't like their laws. I mean, we've tipped it so much over to the corporate side. The promise of globalization was give all of these decisions over to the market and leave the smallest space for what governments do. Crisis like this comes along and we realize that the bankruptcy of that and in a world in which there are the top 100 economies, 69 are corporations and only 31 are governments, this becomes so clear in a case like this. So the question becomes if we can have this kind of concerted effort and I know it's not everywhere, I understand that, but we are seeing governments addressing this. Can we not address this to the other issues, the food security that Mike talked about, the healthcare crisis that we all know is happening and in the case of the water issue, which I work on quite a bit, we know that half the population of the world doesn't have a place to wash their hands between, depending on what studies you look at, between a quarter and a half of all of the healthcare facilities in the global south don't have running water. So you start off with that and then you add the COVID crisis and you have a pandemic, a double pandemic for governments, for communities, for the people dying, for people trying to care for them. So in addressing the COVID crisis, we absolutely have to take it a step further and I'm hoping that what will come from this will be a total renewal of our foreign policy. I strongly agree with Mike and I think the whole notion of the third world, the debt of the global south is crucial, the conditions under which that money was granted to the global south all has to be strongly questioning. There's so much for us to do. I think there's an opportunity here for us to put that question forward. If governments can do it to prevent immediate deaths and they can feel maybe it could happen to somebody in my family so I guess we should move, we can use those same tools. What does it mean to truly care healthcare for people from birth to death? What does it mean in terms of true education so that we're not still having this elite system? What does it mean in the case of the the work that I do water for all and to do this we're going to have to on the waterfront we're going to have to insure water water but we're also going to have to stop the cutoffs and if you think that's just in the global south in one recent year alone in the U.S. 15 million people had their water cut off because they couldn't afford it couldn't afford to pay the bills in Europe there are 31 million people without basic sanitation that's not in the global south that's in Europe. This is a worldwide problem and as we we are destroying the world's water and I want to I won't get into it too much or you won't get me off but it's not just climate the water crisis has its own separate reality you could end every greenhouse gas emission in the world tomorrow and we would still have a water crisis we're a planet running out of clean fresh water we need to we need to care for this water we have to protect and and refresh and and renew watersheds and we have to share these water sources more justly if we don't there's going to be another pandemic and it will again hit the world's most vulnerable. Thank you very much Maud yeah I agree with a lot what you said that especially that the current crisis makes it very obvious that the human right to water is is very very urgent and very needed in all regions of the world so I'm very happy to go on in that discussion also to use the tools that we see that the crisis response can use and maybe this is also something that Martin can talk about and focusing on the European Union so we've talked about the global level at the at this moment with with Mike and Maud the global perspective so let's move to the European Union that is your field of work which is not only one of the corona hotspots globally but also a proponent of austerity politics in the last decades austerity is on Europe in terms of health care and we've seen we're seeing this crisis for example where the dismantling of public health care for example and so maybe you can explore this situation in what way did EU policies lay the ground for the crisis especially in the countries that were hit hardest in Europe and how did EU policies influence its handling in the last two months yeah thank you first of all Mike and Maud for these very useful contributions and thank you for this follow-up question maybe I can just compliment a bit on what Maud just said referring to poverty in the European Union because this is let's say the mirror of the results of the policies of austerity implemented in the European Union in Europe on the European Union better to say the fifth of the population lives in poverty or is at risk of living in poverty this is an unbelievable number I mean we are talking about one of the richest regions in the world the European Union but a fifth of the population lives in poverty or at risk of living in poverty and let me have a closer look at the crisis and at the health crisis now here in Europe we see that this crisis clearly proves that when we talk about let's say public services and frontline workers and the health and care sector or those who keep the public transport running or those who go on a day-to-day basis to the shops and sell the things everybody needs like food and water etc or those who provide us with heating and water and energy these are actually people working in the public services that keep the society running and what we have to keep in mind if we talk about public services in the European Union there might be a difference between the English meaning and let's say the at least German meaning if we talk about public services in Europe or in the German speaking regions this always implies the social commitment as well in the social dimensions so if i'm talking about public services i'm also talking about society not only about a service comparable to any service that is provided by someone who's self-employed or whatever but i'm talking about a service that actually takes care of the needs of the society and what we could see in the European Union in the last three decades in fact is that the so-called financial market driven economy or the neoliberal model and Maud put it like this that we we tipped it over to the corporations i think now it's time to somehow take society and economy back and maybe the crisis provides us also with an occasion to take at least some parts of society and economy and also democracy back under public control but if we are talking about the impact of the financial market driven economy and neoliberal politics and politics of austerity in the European Union we have to say that public service and also social security systems and that's that explains the high number of people living in poverty in the European Union also social security systems were put under an enormous under an enormous political pressure and what we also saw at the same time as a result of neoliberal policies is a redistribution of wealth within the society from one class to the other to keep it very simple the poorer getting even poorer and the rich getting even super richer and there has also been a distribution of public wealth from let's say public ownership to private capital and at the same time the sources of public or state revenue were under constant political pressure by neoliberal interest groups and there is for instance no proper taxation for the digitalized economy neither in europe nor in the united states or in canada there is let's say in very long-lasting history of decreasing corporate taxation or corporate taxes there is a long-lasting history of tax avoidance schemes using tax savings all over the world in order to not pay your fair share and to not contribute your fair share to the society etc and that led to that led to two tendencies and again to keep it very simple you can call the one cut and the other one privatization and these principles or tendencies of cuts in the public services and social security systems and the privatizations of public wealth public property and public services have been reinforced by the macroeconomic framework of the european union and just to give you an example many let's say critics of the neoliberal macroeconomic framework call it the european macroeconomic framework call it neoliberal such or per se i wouldn't i wouldn't go that far but clearly neoliberalism is enshrined in some parts of the european treaties and that actually is a problem to give you an example the stability and growth pact i don't know if you have heard of it on the other side of the atlantic ocean but the so-called stability and growth pact defines criteria that the public debt does or should not exceed 60 percent of the GDP of the gross domestic product and it also defines that the annual deficit should not exceed three percent of the GDP and this means i don't want to go into the details here but this means that the commission the european commission interferes with the budgetary planning of the member states and it means that the european commission can interfere with the national budgetary autonomy which leads to a very strange situation a member state cannot address let's say it's it's originally needs properly the commission can say well you have to cut here and you have to privatize there because your public debt exceeds the 60 percent or your deficit exceeds the three percent and instead that a member state can boost its economy through public investments or can invest in public services in order to reorganize them to improve them to buy some equipment for the health and care sector for instance or instead of investing in social security systems in order to fight poverty this led to the very strange situation that between 2011 and 2018 the commission recommended or send recommendations to member states requesting more than 300 times that the member states should cut or privatize cut public expenses and privatize parts of their public services meaning the commission actually demanded that the member states should change their well system of pensions their social security systems the the amount of wages etc but always meant to decrease social security systems or weaken social security security system and decrease pensions and wages and 63 times and this is what i want you to bear in mind 63 times the commission has requested member states to cut in the health sector or cut public spending and for the health sector and privatize parts of it and what we can see now is a well a very very severe and deadly actually health crisis in several member states especially in in the south in Spain and Italy foremost and those were countries that have already been affected by the consequences of the financial crisis and those were the countries that had to cut in their public spending especially for public services due to the stability and growth pact which did not allow them to exceed 60 percent of the sovereign debt of the GDP yeah you understand what i mean but the thing is here that those countries were forced or those member states were forced actually to decrease the level of public services and to decrease the level of public security of social security and this is unbelievable and we can see the results actually today every day in the hospitals in the south of Europe especially in the south of Europe but actually all over Europe and what we need now is of course a complete change of this political cause we need to overcome austerity that's that's clear we need to abandon the stability and growth pact and these nonsense criteria of 60 percent public debt and three percent deficit where this is this actually makes even from a macroeconomic perspective no sense at all this is clearly just neoliberal ideology and we need to overcome this but what we need now and this is what the crisis provides us with but it depends on our political strength as a left in Europe is that we need a recovery program for public services this is urgently needed that we need to improve of course the working and living conditions of the frontline workers of the employees of the public services that we need to invest in public infrastructure like for instance public transport which brings the people to their workplaces etc we need from my perspective or from the perspective of my political group we need to exclude public services from the state aid from the european state aid rules which actually often those regulations hinder the adjustment of public services according to the needs of society i mean in a progressive way not in the meaning of decreasing it further and further and further no and in actually actually adjusting it to the real need of society meaning if there is a need for more intense unit cares care units intense care units then please provide the money for that can this shouldn't be a problem at all i mean this should be self understood for a society to spend enough money for health and care for the health and care so what we need the purpose the purpose of public service is not not to be is not to be profitable this has to be a general understanding the purpose of public service is not to be profitable but to serve the people and to serve the needs of the society their profit purpose isn't to provide the society with the necessary when it comes to mobility to participation to health and energy to water supply to heating etc and therefore actually to achieve this political objective we have to be very radical and questioning and fundamental and questioning the principle of the market driven economy when it comes to public services and we have to actually raise the question of the renationalization of public services and we have to actually push towards a change of the european treaties and abandoning stability and growth pact and that's it from my side i hope it didn't take too long thank you it is like the the more or less the i would say the biggest reform agenda in terms of reform of the european institutions summarized in like 10 minutes wow but yeah it was good that you made this really really big line up to like from where are we now and what what needs to be reformed about and in the european institutions and because this is going to be the starting point for us in our second round and we are also still collecting um your questions in the question box that you can find for the for the question q and a round so the second round before we go into the q and a will focus specifically on the state and and as we have seen with what mitin said but also with with what mod and mike already talked about we need radical changes in policies in um in state institutions to get to a green new deal and to get into the radical transformations that are necessary to overturn this overload of the of the private sector of neoliberalism and so on and um one of the most important factors in that um in thinking about these transformations is indeed the state and the question of providing of public services in terms of how do we rebuild the economy and so on and um also how do we build infrastructure services mobility and so on like martin also mentioned in in his previous talk so let's therefore go into detail here a bit more and discuss the role of state of the state in crisis and transformation and um maybe um mike you can start uh this round again and commenting on states worldwide what can we learn from the failure of the neoliberal state that we are seeing and um what is the role of states in the current crisis and um would it what would need to be transformed um and changed in terms of the state especially also um having in mind that you um that you mentioned internationalism or getting over the nationalisms that we see in the current crisis well when we say the current crisis i think what we're really talking about is we're saying there's a new epic of history that's opened up and uh we all foresaw this in some way maybe not consciously and it's totality but for instance for the last two years all the business press for that matter the academic economic journals we've been talking about is recession and not if recession is coming but when it's coming i think we all realize the debt is a global problem that we never really structurally emerged from the 2008 crisis um we put band-aids on it and what the coronavirus pandemic has done is simply to accelerate all of these trends it's detonated the recession and made it incomparably uh more global and more uh destructive uh than we imagine but i don't really believe there's a way out of this crisis uh i think this new era presents us with the same kinds of uh challenges of that existed in the late uh 1930s with the u.s unable to pull itself out of depression with the viral spread of fascism uh across the world with new threats of war now we get up in meetings and sometimes in the end of meetings we sing this old song uh say the lute finale well people haven't really believed or at least most people who sing this song in the lute finale for a very uh long time but i think we have to recognize that there is no realistic way at least that we can envision now that we will leave this crisis or prevent it from deepening and unleashing violence globally on a scale we haven't seen since the middle of the 20th century it's not just a matter of deglobalization if you forgive such a ponderous term it's also a matter of the hegemonization i can't even pronounce it uh in 2008 recovery was led by the huge stimulus package adopted in china but china can't do that again uh china spent hundreds of billions on infrastructural investments uh that allowed it and the company the countries that supply it in room itself to find their way out of the uh crisis this is not going to happen again the instability in china the structural instability is huge and the chinese leadership is recognizes for ten years perhaps a reason the g uh resorts to extreme nationalism uh because realizing uh how precarious china's situation the eu is not going to lead the world economy uh out of the uh a crisis particularly as long as it remains basically a club of bankers northern european central european bankers and the united states of course uh it's totally abdicated an international role and even if biden were elected is he well maybe in november we shouldn't pretend that this is going to restore the world uh to what it was before uh this january he's already signed aboard the anti-china uh club let me be clear i mean as a revolutionary socialist opposed to the chinese state and the dictatorship of uh uh the poland bureau but what's happening in the united states is frightening and it's not just campaign strategy because it's become bipartisan which is really sawing the seeds of endless conflict of a new cold war uh with china large part of it is based on lies uh about chinese science and chinese uh medicine supposedly uh concealing the outbreak which isn't true at all in other words from the standpoint at least of of americans went to sleep one night we woke up in the morning opened the doors and it was 1933 over again and there's no simple or clear exit uh for that and we the final point is you know from an american perspective the most astonishing thing in recent years hasn't been trump and the trump coalition it's been the unexpected rise of a broad new left in america uh which is represented in in to large extent by this andrew's campaign but whose roots are in an upsurge of social struggle in unionism and this struggle is now taken on a broader in some ways uh more radical death so on one side we're fighting for what uh traditionally social democratic or progressive demands like national health care but on the other hand it's now possible and indeed it's absolutely necessary to talk about socialist solutions like for instance the privatization the the the public production of uh of lifeline drugs and medicine something elizabeth warren's actually written uh a bill about it so we're faced with you know on a task that are unparalleled uh really since the 1930s and and the struggle against fascism and political terrains will change everywhere because the surveillance state and the rise of social forces willing to adopt what can only be described is is neo neo fascist political solutions and uh you know modes of struggle put us in an entirely different historical epic before and the prime character of it i believe is the acceleration of the convergence of all the crisis we're talking about they're all in our length and i would say to mod that i agree with mod entirely because the problem with water and particularly with fecal contaminated water it is one of the most dangerous disease conditions on earth and we will now see in Africa and in global slums how contaminated water becomes a co-morbidity with corona virus and ensures uh uh basically that there are two pandemics going on one we've seen in the wealthy countries but the one in poor countries may follow different pathways and sanitation is one of the absolutely key cofactors and what could be basically a massacre of people and in in in conditions of poor sanitation poor at home thank you very much um for um like outlining um also that this is not only um a corona crisis we're facing but um like multi-layered much bigger one that we have to deal with when we are talking about uh socio-ecological transformation all the green new deal or um all the work that we all need to do and um maybe uh mod you can follow up on this one um and comment from your experience also as uh from your experience in the bureaucracy as an activist working also in the un and so for you how does the idea of a green new deal connect um with um with the notion of the state and with the question of how do we get out of this crisis so um how do also social movements and political actors that um that mike was mentioning maybe get into this so who are the political actors that are driving this change and how can they influence the state and change it well i want to pick up on something kind of take it a step from what mike was talking about around globalization is a de-globalization what does that look like is i think that as we see the supply chains breaking around the world those of us who warned about this notion of you know if country a makes all the widgets the best then they'll make all those widgets and country b makes this widget best so we all argued first of all it's going to be all the it's where the the labor is cheapest and they maybe the environmental rules are the weakest and so on it's not you know so how did that how did country a get to get to that status but that whole notion that neoliberal notion of production has failed and it's very clear it's failed and so you're getting governments now saying we're going to take some of that back and i could certainly look at our own government in canada we have a a so-called progressive but very neoliberal think tony blair um government uh in canada um they've come out swinging with um social programs and money for students for people laid off of work i mean there really has been an outpouring of of incredible support i mean even our left parties are saying okay you might tweak this a little bit but nobody's arguing and and our government this uh just and true don't never saw a trade agreement he didn't like suddenly he's talking about bringing in new legislation to stop foreign investors coming in and taking over failing canadian uh companies because they're failing because you know we're the economy is failing and that this is new talk we're getting governments even sort of right wing provincial government saying uh we we have to be able to have to make our own at least our own medical supplies at least our own food production so that we're not dependent on on this global chain this just global supply chain so i think what we're going to come out of this and globalization as we have known it is gone what will it look like were we going to move back to a narrow nationalism i mean we in canada fought that first free trade agreement because ronald reagan was in power and we didn't want ronald reagan's you know margaret thatcher ronald reagan in canada we got it anyway but um we really fought it in terms of having the right to have our own foreign policy our own cultural policy and so on and so i think you there's sort of a progressive protectionism and then there's a narrow nationalist protections and then we really need to think about what that's going to be like how we maintain our international connections how we how we how we continue to be to care about the world the good parts of globalization but take but take back the the modes of production that that we need more locally and a lot of us are talking about local production on local food production and we've been talking about that for 35 years so this is an opportunity again i would raise another concern and that is that there's going to be a lot of talk of austerity martin spoke about this from the european point of view but there's going to be you know after all the spending governments are going to say we have no more money and we're going to come up against public private partnerships particularly again in the water sector but in healthcare and so on so what what we need to say is just like the second world war this you know my dad fought in it the same government that didn't have money to feed clothes house or employ people suddenly had all the money it needed for that and more and those those people came back and said we're not going back into the bread lines this group we demand a social nation state and i think that can happen again i don't want to be the hopeful one on on here like that but i do think hope is a moral imperative and i do think there's an opportunity here and just the last thing that i want to say around this on on water is that thank you mike for recognizing that the sanitation piece of this is just absolutely urgent i mean more children die of waterborne disease than all forms of violence put together including war i mean it is it is the killer and it's getting worse as the water supply the supply of clean accessible water is in decline for reasons that we're polluting and diverting water and damning our rivers to death and over extracting groundwater and taking water from where nature put it and where we should be damn well leaving it and taking it to do whatever we want with it because it's our for our profit and and pleasure and so on we need a new relationship with nature we need a new relationship with water and one of the hopeful signs here is that we are seeing governments come in and age eight agencies and wealthy governments directing eight agencies to really addressing this crisis i just wrote down some countries here argentina spain zambia many cities in the u.s. something like 90 some cities in the u.s. maybe more have have stopped all water cutoffs for lack of people being able to pay for the covid crisis that has to go beyond i mean what we have to say is the water crisis doesn't stop when the covid crisis comes on others have have put serious money into paying you know absorbing the debt when people can't pay their water electricity bills and so on and i really do think that this is a moment when we can say if we collectively as a human family can can meet badly as it's done in many places we can meet this covid crisis we can meet the environment it's environmental twin and none of that can be answered if we don't deal with the deep inequality between nations and within nations within all of our countries all right thank you very much um we're going straight into um picking up some of the questions you all brought into the q and a and the first one goes to martin because he's actually like he would be in line but uh i'm switching from my question to your question so that um i'm not the only one here i think so practically um uh we wanted to talk a bit about the green new deal um uh proposal that also the um the left faction in the european part of your faction proposed in december already um as a as an alternative to the to the green deal by the commission and there's actually a question that relates to that to the green new deal for europe um so the question is do you support the call for a care income for people now doing care work unpaid in our families and communities as proposed in the green new deal for europe i suggest i suppose it's um the question means the green deal by the commission um but maybe you can use that to um also explain to us the position of the gua and of the green green and left faction and um and answer the question yes thank you my mic is already and muted i hope yeah all right so thank you very much for this question maybe i can answer it by first of all pointing out a problem of semantics that exists between um anglophone countries and let's say the european notion of a green new deal and as far as i understand in english-speaking countries the green new deal is a very has a very progressive ring to it is has been put forward by progressives as an alternative to existing awesome neoliberal now capitalist authoritarian systems as a part of a transition of society and economy and in europe it is a bit different because the european commission for instance has been putting forward their proposals and their idea for a green new deal meaning first of all the greening of the economy but also many green parties have been working on the topic for quite some time and the ambition let's say the objective of all these political proposals mainly has been to reconcile economy and environment and climate issues and this is something that we as left a radical left in europe have to pick up on but we also have to let's say redefine the meaning of a green new deal that's why we tend to call it a social and green deal or social and green new deal or however but we want to add the social dimension to that then leads me of course to the concrete answer of that question but what we did in the european parliament after the commission presented its proposal for a green new deal as the left group we presented our ideas which are of course more ambitious and far far reaching than the ideas presented by the commission and we were criticizing the shortcomings of the european debate about a green deal first of all everything that passes european legislation should be a paris compliant meaning compliant with the objectives laid out in the paris climate agreement and this is not the case so for instance the commission aims at reducing carbon emissions until the end of 2030 about 55 percent which is clearly not sufficient the paris agreement speaks of at least 65 percent of reduction of carbon emissions until 2030 one member state in the european union namely danmark has already passed the legislation aiming at 70 percent of carbon emission reduction until the end of 2030 this of course aims at the 1.5 percent laid out in the paris climate agreement this is something that we are far more ambitious because we put first here let's say climate protection and environmental protection not the interest of the corporations and economy and the attempt to reconcile economy and climate protection is something of course we have to elaborate on we have to think about but what is clear what has become clear and thinking about climate protection is that we need a profound and thoroughly transition also of the way we produce things we consume things the way of living so everybody more or less knows that but that also means that the concept of reconciliation of economy and greening the economy reconciliation of economy and climate protection is doomed to fail if you are not ambitious enough of course that means putting into question also let's say the the private private property and making use of yeah the means of production in a more let's say public way the second thing we were addressing is that there is no fossil fuel phase out strategy presented by the commission and also by some of the green parties this is a crucial thing because if it is missing the member states can still use let's say carbon and gas and to be honest some of the economies some of the european economies depend on carbon and depend in their production on gas etc but still you need a fossil fuel phase out strategy in order to reach 100 percent renewables in due time let's say in 2040 we should produce everything with 100 percent renewables and this is of course a huge effort to be made and it also is linked with huge efforts in public spending in order to change the mode how we produce energy first of all this means that we come to the next question of just transition just transition means that there are defined by the european commission all over europe or all over the european union at least 108 coal mining areas and in those mining areas work at least 240 miners plus their families plus small-scale business depending on the income of the miners plus suppliers of the mines etc etc so this is a huge business factor of course and therefore in order to transform those jobs located in the carbon industry we need to spend money and also transform their workplaces to make them let's say to make them able to work in jobs that are secure also in the future now they are working in carbon and they know that in one or two decades they will lose their jobs anyways but this is something that the society has to answer if we want to get out of carbon and we have to provide them with some future secure job models meaning we are also addressing the question of digitalization of automation of course automation digitalization change of production or does not only refer to renewable energy but also to the question of digitalization and then all this thoughts together you have to sum up Martin yes i'm doing that i'm doing that i'm not no problem thank you thank you for giving me that hint thought all of this together this leads us to let's say this results in a profound and a socialist and in the ecological transition of the economy and the society because this is actually what we are talking about if we are talking about a social and green new deal this is our progressive alternative and of course then we are also discussing the role of public services in that new society again and then we are also discussing let's say minimum income or basic income or proper wages for people working in the health and care sector but also for those who take care privately of their beloved ones at home yeah thank you all right thanks a lot and thanks a lot i just have to look at the the time and i wanted to give also one or two more questions to the other panelists to mike and mott and correct one of my mistakes that i made that i mixed up the green deal by the commission and the one the proposer of coup n gl with the green new deal for europe which is an initiative also brought into the debate by dm25 and other actors and here in the chats people have been discussing that a lot of what you said martin is actually something that is also taken up and discussed in that proposal just to add to that and there were a lot of questions and also this one i am seeing in the chat here pointing towards the international dimension like to go like going beyond europe again and this like maybe also a bit limited perspective and so one of the questions is that possibly or very clearly we will have to have reductions of consumption and production in the global north like in the u.s and in europe and otherwise the green new deal will accelerate extractivism and exploitation in the global south so that is one of the one of the might be dilemmas and i wanted to give this question to mike and ask them how how you think about this do we need to accelerate reductions in terms of production consumption in the global north otherwise as part of a green new deal well the conservative forces in the united states have always been pretty successful in attacking the idea of environmental policies and reduction of greenhouse gases on the question of jobs that all this seems they argue to reduce jobs and standard living of working people and the environmental movement and the green movement to some extent has indeed been guilty of not linking environmental protection mitigation to greenhouse gases to increasing employment okay so this is a very very old debate and the green new deal does that whether it's conceived in the terms of it of a national public works project as it is in the united states or a global platform for progressives and socialists around around the world but right now the um i'm sorry remind me of your initial question the question was whether we need to radically reduce consumption okay now we shouldn't think of it in in in a quantitative sense yes we over consume but at the same time even in the so-called rich north uh somewhere between one third and 60 percent of our populations uh have very poor qualities of life uh immense unmet family and and social needs and i think we have to look at it in a different way that there isn't this contradiction between uh reducing the human footprint in terms of natural resources and consumption it's really debate about the nature of the quality of life and i think part of the solution lies in the nature of the city itself now that we're a majority urban world and that cities are the largest generators of greenhouse gases and uh other problems we have to go back to the tradition that existed say roughly from William Morris in the 1880s to red vienna uh in the 1920s of an alternative way of life an alternative urbanism based on public affluence in other words you can see behind me i have a lot of books but i'll never own enough books to replace my university library i might have a swimming pool in back no actually i don't but even if everybody in southern gala morning has has a swimming pool it's nothing equal to the magnificent uh swimming pools i saw the last time i was uh in in germany in other words there are a lot of unmet fundamental human needs they can't be met simply through the consumption of manufactured products or consumerized leisure in cities and themselves in the most classical sense by putting private af public affluence ahead of private wealth are capable realizing extraordinary economies in terms of of consumption of unnecessary consumption so as mod said earlier and putting the commons first it's not only placing public resources and public ownership first it's also transforming the nature of our needs and what we mean by quality of life and i think only a socialist society can offer the quality of life that people demand but i don't think this should be a matter of whether or not you leave litter on the side of the street obviously that's you know a bad idea but we have to attack it on you know of course the institutional and and structural level but a final point here okay let's say say one more thing it's simply this that right now the question in front of us is not so much parliamentary agendas and the platforms of parties this remains important as of course due to the political struggles in parliaments and congresses but the immediate thing before us is what kind of tactics and strategies address the needs of people right now as they've lost their jobs they see their savings their homes at risk everything you know they've built up over their lives they stand you know to lose so i think the major focus of course has to be on struggles and workplaces within communities out on the streets and in the united states this particularly i think will be a labor struggle mayday here was celebrated in an extraordinary way by hundreds of instances of demonstrations by warehouse workers food workers nurses public health employees rejecting the idea that uh it's okay to give billions of dollars in relief to big banks but to expect that low paid workers should go to work without any kind of personal protection i mean there's a stirring stirring here is something uh immense and we need to look very directly at the emergent class struggles that are occurring across the world all right thank you very much and sorry for cutting your shorts and i want to give more also the opportunity to come up with some final thoughts maybe on the question of of these international relations of the green new deal and also there was one very interesting question in the in the q and a box that i was thinking you could maybe um also um talk about it was about governments that uh at the current situation seem to focus on aid and handouts rather than moving the imf the international monetary fund to forgive you serious foreign debt um why you think that is that is and how can we get them to wake up well i'd like to address first of all the question that we were just talking about the issue around consumption in the north versus consumption in the south i get nervous when we talk about individuals being responsible you know you hear this all the time with water well just turn the tap off when you're brushing your teeth or get you know do whatever get low flush toilets or whatever and that really leaves the system a lot to allow it itself to continue um yes our individual behavior matters and but martin luther king said many wonderful things and one of them is um legislation may not change the heart but it will restrain the heartless we need good law we need tax reform if we want to change people's consumption behavior we need good universal social programs public services and tax reform including um dealing with the tax havens where people make money corporations make money and don't pay any taxation in in their in their country of origin this would go a long way to changing things if we equalized out where are where the who has the money and as mike says if we if you know put hands money in the hands of workers you're going to see a very different situation and of course there's consumption in the global south too we have poverty in the global north so it's it becomes a it becomes something that i think is an easy statement but um needs realistic legislation behind it um and i i terms of aid i just i'm that's a very big question or around of course we need to look at the iam f and and the world bank and and that's been a big part of the work that we've done certainly in the in the water field but i just want to say i want to end because i know our time is up now with um with a positive statement and that is that the coven crisis coven 19 crisis has revealed other crises in my opinion none quite as stark as the nexus between poverty and water or poverty food and water which are all very related and if governments can act to deal with coven they can act to deal act to deal with the rest of it which means the rest of the world is not just for the people within your own country we are now clearly um one people around the world for one percent of the global gvp we could we could provide sanitation and water for every human being in the on the planet we need to change our priorities we need a new relationship with one another and with nature and i i'm a hopeful that this crisis is going to humble us it's going to make people to back to the consumer question and what do you need do you need all that stuff do you need all those clothes do you need all that stuff to deliver to you i think there's going to be some change that just happens within our societies and i i'm in the dark and the depths of all of this i have i think there are rays of hope and this is wonderful thank you so thank you so much um also for ending at at a positive note and i will maybe pick that up and for me the interesting one of the most interesting things of this crisis is that it's very visible what politics what politics can do um and what we can also demand in our struggles in terms of public interventions and so on so i'm going to um i'm going to say thank you to everyone to um the wonderful speakers um i'm going home or i'm home but i'm leaving my laptop now with a lot of new ideas and thoughts and thank you for that thanks to the interpreters um for your great work to making everyone understand and be part of our talk thanks to all the participants who um the attendees who shared their thoughts in the chat and supplied great questions thanks to the organizers and i'm also going to hand over now to my colleague erin who's going to tell you how you're going to go on with this colonization and what's the next topics and the next dates for continuing our talk on the global green new deal and i'm going already going to say bye um to all of you especially to all the new themes here thank you so much um thank you all for joining this was really wonderful as for next steps i have put on the screen um our next webinar hosted by our friends at the tni um it'll be continuing this conversation in a um internationalist framing for global green new deal next wednesday may 13th following that there will be another conversation on may 20th on public goods and public services and a public goods approach and then on may 21st we will have a continuation of the series with um green new deal and trade policy and in overview how those two are interlinked a very broad spanning one we will follow up with all of you and thank you all so much for joining us it was very much appreciated and thank you all for joining us today