 Hello, hello, and welcome. I'm Maren Kellele. We are DM25, a radical political movement for Europe and this is another live discussion with our coordinating team featuring subversive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. And today we are talking about what happened here in Greece. Last week, tragedy struck. Two trains collided late on Tuesday night in the north of the country, claiming at least 57 lives, mostly students traveling from the capital back to university. Greece is in mourning. This, the worst ever train accident in the country happened ostensibly because a single station master forgot to flip a switch. Indeed, the Greek prime minister's initial reaction was to blame the accident on human error, but that doesn't even scratch the surface. Greece has long had the most dangerous rail network in the EU. It operates a system that literally relies on manual controls, a system that's plagued by poor working conditions and chronic understaffing. And there have been many warnings that a tragedy was around the corner, from unions, from independent journalists in Greece, from the European rail authorities, and these warnings were met every time within difference. But the roots of the problem go even deeper, all the way to Brussels and beyond. At the height of Greece's debt crisis, the EU and the country's other creditors must have minded a sell-off of public assets. The state-owned train operator was sold for just 45 million euros to an Italian company. That company has since failed to invest in the network, providing trains that other countries use for scrap while taking 50 million a year in euros and subsidies from Greek taxpayers. So what's going on here? How can we unpeel the layers of this tragic story? How do the waves of privatisation of public services across Europe impact the state's ability to provide basic needs and keep citizens safe? And how can we prevent tragedies like the Greek rail disaster from happening again? Our panel, including the leader of Mera25 in Greece, Yanis Varoufakis and Eric Edmund, now the spokesperson for Mera25 in Greece, together with our crew of activists and policy experts will be weighing in on this question and you, you out there, if you've got thoughts, comments, concerns, rants, anything you want to say, throw it us. Please put them in the YouTube chat and we'll put them to our panel. Now let's hand it over to Yanis. The floor is yours. Thanks madam. There is going to be a series of investigations. We at DM and Mera, we don't need any investigation. We've already provided the report on the most authoritative investigation before the accident happened, not with a bit of hindsight. On 22nd of September, last September, Greta Narcenis, one of our members of parliament, stood up in the Greece Parliament and looked at the minister responsible for public transport and told him, in no uncertain terms, I'm quoting Verbatim, the Athens to the Saloniki railway is the unsafest railway in Europe. We are going to mourn victims if you continue doing nothing about upgrading it and upgrading its safety features. That was last September. On the previous July, July of 2022, again, Greta Narcenis had highlighted the unsafety, the lack of safety features of our, the whole gamut of our radar system, what is left of it, because most of it is derelict and simply doesn't function. A month before that or so, I think it was actually May 2022. Another of our members of parliament, Cleon Grigoriadis, had done something very similar. He had risen in parliament, addressing the government to relate to government ministers and experience that he and I had the previous night. We had paid a visit to a railway maintenance depot in the heart of Athens. The depot that houses about 30 maintainers, engineers of the railway and metro system of Greece, who had invited us to go and see with our own eyes the decrepitude of the equipment that they had to work with. In that particular depot we were told they used to be up until two years ago, 64 engineers and maintenance staff. Today there are 30. They have to work seven days a week, simply because if they don't, the trains won't operate. They showed us the tools of the trade that had to work with, from small pieces of equipment to large railway carriages that house maintenance equipment. The point they were making was that it was all breaking down and it was not being replaced. When the tools that they had to work with broke down, they were forced to improvise to create their own substitute tool that could build together. Of course you can imagine that these tools had no certification. They were actually breaking the law by using them, but management didn't leave them any alternative. In other words, merit 25 in parliament on four different occasions, I mentioned two or three, but there were four occasions. We want the government of what was coming. We do not need an inquiry to tell us what happened. Now of course, there is a larger story there. There is a story of Greece's bankruptcy 13 years ago, which plunged investment, especially public investment, into a black hole, a 13-year-long bankruptcy which was perpetuated massively and exemplified and reinforced by the policies of the lenders of the infamous Troika. But it's not just that. There is neoliberal ideology as well. In the year 2010, just as Greece fell into the bankruptcy hole, the European Union demanded of the Greek government as part of its statureite model of breaking up public utilities and then privatizing the fragments. That was the Margaret Thatcher model. This is how she broke down the electricity grid and power stations in the United Kingdom and then later on British Railways, a small aside just to confirm the pertinence of the link that I'm making. In the 1990s, the private was completed by the Tories and then the labor government of that poor representing himself as a laborite. You remember a fellow called Tommy Blair. It was completed in 1997. Two years later, in Paddington, close to the Paddington railway station, there was an almighty tragic accident claiming 31 lives. The Royal Commission that was convened after that clearly pointed the finger at this combination of the breakdown, the fragmentation of the railway system, dividing the railway tracks from the rolling stock to create supposedly some kind of pseudo quasi-market that's the neoliberal mantra and demonstrated that it was this privatization that initially the breakup and then the privatization of British Railways that led to 31 people dying and many scores of people injured. This is exactly what happened in Greece. Only it was worse. Let me share with our audience and you comments. My personal experience when I was Minister of Finance, when I moved into the Ministry of Finance on end of January 2015, I inherited a 1300 page list of commitments that the previous government had made to the Troika. It was essentially the longest death certificate of a nation. In it, we had the privatization of water, of electricity, of the railways, of our ports, of our airports, the takeover of all public assets by the lenders, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission on behalf of the world's oligarchy. It was an awful, awful document which of course I was never going to implement. That's why I was elected. That's why our government was elected, not to implement it. But the number one priority I had as a Minister of Finance of a bankrupt country was to haircut, to extinguish a significant part of our public debt to the international finances and to the Troika. Because when you owe money that can never been repaid, you're a slave. And if that entity is not a person, it's not a company, but it is a state, then that is a vassal state. It is a state that is essentially in a debtor's prism owned by the international financial, private and public community, oligarchs, crows, vultures, I should say. I should never call them a community. They don't deserve them. So my number one priority was to get rid of the debt in order to create the degrees of freedom that were necessary for the sovereign government, the democratically elected government, to do everything else that they needed to do in order to look after public goods, human beings, education, hospitals, the economy and so on. So my strategy was concentrate on the debt, on the debtor's structure, a deep debt cut. And when it came to all the other bits and pieces that were inside that litany of evil, that program of effectively destroying everything, to slow them down, to throw spanners in their works. So when they were coming to me they were saying, okay, here is a commitment your previous government has signed it, to give 14 of your most lucrative airports, including Mykonos, Hanyan, Santorini, you know, amazingly profitable airports, to give it to a German company called Frapport. I would say, hang on a second, give me a specification of how much money they would invest in it, where the money would come from, trying to slow them down. Same with the airports, same with the railways. When they said, oh, the previous government has committed, and we have a plan, that's a troika speaking as if they own the country, we have a plan to give them to an Italian company, FS, which is state railways. I would point out that FS is bankrupt. I said, look, we have a bankrupt railway system. Now, where is the logic in giving it to an Italian bankrupt company? Where is the money going to come from in order to invest in modernizing it, in making it safe? And essentially, I was playing one potential buyer against the other to gain time. But what was fantastically interesting was that these troika people were simply uninterested in any discussion that involved technical issues, safety, investment, speed, efficiency. And while I was talking about investment about modernization and so on, they looked, their face beamed boredom. They were just bored. They didn't want to talk about technical issues, safety issues, economic issues, let alone social issues. But they were supposed to be technocrats who didn't want to talk about technocratic stuff. And at some point they explained to me why they were bored. They said, Yanis, look, we've already agreed amongst ourselves. Your airports will go to Frapport. Your port of Piraeus will go to Costco. And your trains will go to the Italians. And then we've decided, why are you wasting our time? That was their attitude. And by the way, a little aside, have you noticed that all three companies are state owned? So Frapport, which took our airports in the end, is a nationalized German state owned company. Costco that took over the port of Piraeus is essentially, not essentially, even legally, a state owned Chinese company. And FS is a fully owned, 100% owned company by the Ministry of Finance of Italy, which of course doesn't have three pennies to wrap together in order to invest in, in Greece's railways, right? It's a joke that the Bank of the Italian state is investing in the Greek railways, right? So it was nationalization. It wasn't even privatization. It was nationalization by their own states. So the Chinese state took the port, the German state took the airports and the Italian state took our railways and put no money in it at all. Even in the airports, I mean, if you go now to Greek airports, if you fly into, you know, Santorini, Mykonos, Hania, Thessaloniki, you will see that the airports are very nicely refurbished. Don't get fooled. This is not money that the German company Frapport put into it. They didn't put in one euro. Do you know where the money came from? From Greece's structural funds, from the European Union. This is not just chronic capitalism. It's mafia capitalism. It's not even capitalism. It's just mafia feudalism, not even technical feudalism. Mafia feudalism. That's what it is. So the Italians got the trains. Now, of course, they didn't take the tracks. The tracks remained the property of the Greek state. This breakdown, this fragmentation, one broken down bankrupt company, state company maintains the tracks with half of the, half or actually 40% of the personnel they used to have. And the rolling stock is given to a bankrupt company, FS, from Italy. Now proof that they are bankrupt and that they have absolutely no sense of responsibility is that FS, after all, they've had the Greek railways now for seven years. They brought some new trains onto Greece, except they are not new. They are 35-year-old trains that are banned in Central Europe as unsafe. So, you know, if this marriage of a bankrupt Greek state company owning the tracks and a bankrupt Italian company owning the ancient imported locomotives is going to lead to a bloody disaster. And it is a disaster which unfortunately has the imprint, the po-marks of all three major parties, New Democracy and Pasok, who started this ball rolling. And of course, Syriza, my former comrades, who after my departure, after my resignation said yes to everything that the Troika was telling them to do. And in 2017 it was they who privatized the Greek railways. So, this is a crime of omission and a crime of commission perpetuated by the political personnel here in Greece that said yes to the lenders, to the creditors, to the Troika, and of course by the Troika. You see, this is what happens when a country like Greece, Sri Lanka, Argentina, whoever goes bankrupt. The vultures fly over the land and pick the flesh from the rotting corpse of the country. They took the airports, they took this, they took that, they put nothing in. Right? And now we have the corpses of 57 of our own men and women, mostly young people, who are being buried as we speak, with a government that knows no compunction whatsoever. That's everything with impunity. Think about they, the Prime Minister, on the first day, went up to near the scene of the crash and said that he will leave no stone unturned until he finds, until a proper commission of inquiry finds out what happened. And in the same sentence, gives us his verdict. It was human error. I wanted to say to him, Mr. Mistakis, you are a human error, your parents and your social classes, and we have to suffer you. I didn't because politeness prevented me from doing that. I'm sharing this with you. And then, two days later, they decided to sideline any parliamentary committee whose job, according to the Constitution, should be to investigate the accident and to appoint a three-man, it's International Women's Day, let's make that panel point as well, three men were appointed, three experts. One of them was a gentleman whose previous job, if you look at his CV, includes seven years of overseeing the breakup of our railways and their privatization. So it's like asking a mafia boss to investigate a mafia crime. There's no other way of deciding it, of expressing it. And now for some good news, because we need to pierce this darkness with a few rays of hope. Young people out there have been energized by this. They are outraged. I have never seen, since 2015, such fervor, such rational and creative anger, such logical rage amongst the young. The police are attacking them. Eric has been attacked himself as part of our Mera Block, you've seen the photographs. This is going to escalate. And it's escalating at the time when we're moving towards elections. There were rumors that we would be having the elections next month. Now that election is going to be pushed into the summer. This is very bad for us because it means that the government has succeeded in disenfranchising the young, because when young people take jobs in the summer to work in the tourist industry, from Athens they go to Crete or from Thessaloniki they go to Rhodes to work in a God forsaken job. Seven days a week, no time off or the pittance of money. It's very hard for them to return to their place of residence in order to cast a vote. We don't have postal votes in Greece. So essentially we are going to lose some like 500 to 600,000 young people who will be disenfranchised by pushing the elections into the summer. This suits Mr. Takis and the regime down to the ground. They're very happy with that. I always suspected they would push the elections into May, June, July. Now they have an excuse for doing it. So I'm sorry for going on but I could be talking on screen imagine for five hours about this. Their death must not be invaded. We must never forget that there is a criminal here. It is the international oligarchy and their policy of fragmenting public networks and prioritizing them. Thank you. Thank you, Yanis. Eric, please give us your take and also your view from the streets where people are protesting. There's a general strike call for tomorrow. That's right. Yeah, and of course we'll be there just as we were in the last two demonstrations. Look, I'm a kid of the indignados movements. That's where I sort of cut my teeth politically and I agree with Yanis 100% in that I have the kind of people that I saw at Sintek Mount Sunday when we were there are people that have not seen on the streets of Greece for a good 10 years since 2013-2014. It's families, it's young people, it's people who are not politically organized around parties, around associations, around unions, it's citizens who have not been activated politically for a very long time. They've been going through this kind of political depression, if you like, since it is a betrayal back in 2015 and I saw them with us for the first time in a very long time and I think that's indicative of the fact that the political scene in Greece is shifting and people who have not been voting, who have not been engaged, are returning slowly. I don't want to be overly optimistic, but there's definitely a shift there that I think is important to note. Now, about the broader situation, Yanis has essentially said it all. Of course, the rail network in Greece was in no way a healthy infrastructural element of the country even before the economic crisis. It's been systemically undermined by certain political interests in the country, large-scale infrastructure, construction contractors who are responsible for building motorways or operating the tolls of those motorways, automotive lobbyists and the rest of it, big, big interests who are invested in ensuring that the railways in Greece remain in an appalling state so that people prefer to travel in other ways. That's one thing, and just as an aside, the minister of transport and infrastructure in Greece, Mr. Karavan Leafs, resigned the previous minister, the one who was in the ministry at the time of the accident, and the person who replaced him, Mr. Jera Petritis, is, I kid you not, the son-in-law of the CEO of one of the biggest construction contractors of the country, Jekterna. Now, in most, if not all other countries, that would have been considered an impossibility. You cannot maintain a person like that at this political position, and yet in Greece, it's just another Tuesday. We also have our own internal issues that the state of politics in the country is really appalling, and the kind of things that people take for granted, and this is very much the result of this political depression that we're going through. Everybody's the same, and you don't know where to look first. It's a kind of Trumpian political approach where you're just bombarded with scandals, and by the time you've assimilated one, this moved on to scandal number 38. So it's impossible to keep up with these sorts of things, and yet we are trying to bring these things to the surface. Something that is not very easily done when the vast majority of the media in the country are invested in making sure that these kinds of scandals don't see the light of day. So it's very much losing and fighting an uphill battle, but fight it, we must. And one more thing about the role of the European Union and the European Commission. Jani said what really means to be said, but our current government has an incredibly bipolar relationship with the European Union. On the one hand, they pretend to be their most loyal subjects and bend the knee to the vast majority of EU instructions, whether they are the results of bailout agreements, the kind of austerity measures that are being imposed on Greece and the rest of it, or whether it's using the country as essentially a shield towards the waves of refugees and migrants who were trying to make their way to Europe. All of that is fine and dandy. It's also fine to accept the austerity that Jani said is destroying the infrastructure of the country or selling off people's houses so that funds from the United States and elsewhere can buy up people's homes and leaving them essentially home, not essentially leaving them homeless. Another instruction of Europe, but when the interests of Greece's oligarchy is threatened, for example, the ship owners that we have here, their ability to transport Russian oil, that was the first time this means the Texas government detailed a decision of the European Council. Or indeed, now, not to the other day, literally yesterday, we had a subcommittee of Liber, that Liber is the committee of the European Parliament responsible for human rights and liberties in the European Union. They had created back in May of 2022 a committee to investigate the state of the rule of law in Greece when the scandal came out first for the, what's it called, the spy scandal, the spyware scandal in the country. And since then, a bunch of other scandals have come to be added to the story, whether it's the rule of law, more broadly, or the freedom of speech and the freedom of press. These have all been added to the agenda of this subcommittee and they made their way to Athens yesterday, even though the government of Greece has systemically been trying to undermine their work in Brussels, while they were still in Brussels, and they tried to stop them from coming to Athens, saying that firstly, we're in public mourning, and it wouldn't be seemly for the committee to join us at this time. And then, yet Mr. Jera Petritis, the minister I mentioned earlier for transport and infrastructure, went as far as to say that the visit of the committee in Greece would essentially be undermining the election results of the elections that we have this year. It would essentially be the European Union trying to influence the electoral results of a member state. Now, these are the kind of statements that were used to coming from, you know, Mr. Orbán in Hungary, and we've been screaming our lungs out that the urbanization of Greece has been happening for the past few years, and we're seeing it now in practice. So it's an incredibly bipolar relationship. And then on top of it all, the European Commission, which had sent Greece to the European court because of the state of the infrastructure of our railways three weeks ago, they sent us to court to answer for the kind of disastrous state our railways are in. Apparently, they don't think that the kind of policies that they were pushing for have anything to do with that is something for the Greek state to answer to. So this European Commission now is suggesting through Ursula von der Leyen, that the president of the Commission, to send over a team of experts to help us upgrade the infrastructure of our railways with ideas. Now, we're not missing ideas. We're missing the resources to implement those ideas, that the real resources have been taken away from the Greek state systemically through these kinds of policies of austerity, which have taken the elements of the Greek railways that are the most profitable, namely the transportation of passengers, given that to private capital and then leaving the Greek state with a bill. It's the Greek state that has to pay for the infrastructure maintenance. So these private companies can continue making money on Greek railways. So it's at the perfect picture of hypocrisy on all sides, on the side of the state of the government, on the side of the Commission. And we're trying to really delineate and to separate these things and try and present people with the reality, which is the fact that what New Democracy has been doing for the past four years is not running the country. They've been slowly building a network of corruption, connecting judges, connecting the media, connecting oligarchs into one network of corruption, which they are now engaging in order to hide the fact that they have not been acting as a government for the past four years, but as a plunderer of the country and not even for themselves, a plunderer for these oligarchs. And that is the only thing that they've been doing since this crisis began, since this tragedy happened last week. They've just engaged this network in order to hide the truth. Thank you, Eric. And that transport minister that you just referenced there who resigned as a result of this tragedy, I should add that he's the nephew of the four-time Greek Prime Minister, ex-Prime Minister and cousin of one more recent Prime Minister. And he's also announced that he's going to be running in the next time. And let me add, one of the people working for him was the son of one of the highest ranking judges in the Supreme Court of Greece, who is now being asked to investigate this tragedy. So it's all connected. As much as I hate to echo Trump, it might be time to drain the swamp. Two comments from the chat. One from George Iliopoulos. He proposes that we should fund independent research groups and communities in contrast to legislative and politically corrupt forensic researchers. And Daniel Atchison says it's ridiculous how the airports and other infrastructure have been sold off. It's the same in the UK. UK train companies, sorry, UK train costs provide profits and subsidize French railways. They are gangsters in all but name. Juliana, Juliana Zeta from Germany. What's your take? Thank you, Michael. Well, first of all, I really hope that people understand that these politicians are not just incompetent. It's not just a matter of making a wrong decision, but they are actually working against the people in their interest, in their oligarch's interest, but in the same breath against the people. And I don't think they care about the consequences. I don't think they care about the dead people and my condolences to the families, of course. But I think it's really fundamental. It's an ideological, it's a philosophical question that we have to ask ourselves as a society or European wide here because with the title of this live stream, it's fitting, you know, privatization kills, but it doesn't only kill people's lives, but it kills like the way the society runs, like nothing functions properly anymore. Also, all these strikes all around Europe are not just coming from, from somewhere, you know, it's, it's the same, it's the same topic. And sadly, even if companies are not privatized, they are run by the government, especially neoliberal government, social democratic governments, you know, conservative governments, they run the infrastructure by the same business model as a private company would, you know, they cut wages, they don't invest, they don't maintain what they should maintain. I mean, if you see like the Deutsche Bahn here in Germany, it's a joke, you know, it's for the last 25 years, they have not built new railroads, the trains are getting worse, the materials of the trains getting worse. They, they fired a lot of people in the past years, now they lack personnel, but nobody wants to work, you know, now with inflation, the wages are way too low. It's just, it's just, the question is about the way of living that we want to have. And I think it's really time for the public to realize that we need a new model for infrastructure in general, you know, we need to be, we need to have some sort of democratic say in what's happening to public goods, and we have to take back certain assets of the infrastructure and run them in different ways. I think there is a good example in Germany, I think hopefully Johannes von Neugender later, of new ways to think about how public goods can be, yeah, can be run together with the public in their hands. And I think with Greece, it's so unfortunate that, you know, there was a democratic decision against this whole wave of privatization. And it didn't matter at all. Like it was, you know, last year in Berlin, they had, they had this election about expropriating, you know, the housing company and the government, you know, the last thing they wanted to do was that. So they had like, I think, 57% of people in Berlin saying we should do that because we lack housing, we don't have, you know, space to live anymore. And, you know, we had this social democratic green government, and they said no, no way we're going to do that. And this, this shows like, it's not just that these assets are gone from public space, but it's really difficult to get them back if the politics are working against you as the people. So I really hope, you know, like Eric said, he witnesses in Greece, that there is a kind of change of mood with the people that, you know, this happens also in the rest of Europe, because we will have suffer consequences in the future and other countries as well. It will be, it's a slow process, but there will be harsh consequences in the end. The more this privatization gets further, and the more we let those politicians play with, with all these things that are crucial for our lives, you know, I'm not in the game. Yeah. Thank you, Juliana. Amir, Amir Kiayi, our policy coordinator. Thanks, Mehran. And of course, our hearts go out to the families and loved ones of the victims in this tragedy. Do you want to make some good, good points early on? And in our Green Needle for Europe program, we've envisioned really a way for public ownership and democratic say in not just transport, but also energy and housing and other aspects of importance to life, if you like, and those are all laid out. And even to some extent of making public transport free to some extent, even if it's possible, estimations for the Netherlands are around 4 billion euros a year to make public transport completely free in the whole country. So the sums are not that much. And it's never really issue of money, as we all know funds are available depending on political will. But let's just quickly backtrack to what was being said earlier on. And we continue to see that the politics of the day is seeking to maximize profits. And we saw that, as well before this tragedy in Greece, in East Palestine, Ohio, that development, which everybody has, of course, seen the massive, looked almost like an atomic bomb had gone off, and the toxic spill and so on. According to leaks in the media, employees that were on that line were pressured to disregard repairs. Since repairs take time and trains on the repair don't generate profit. And so, and it's not just the public transport infrastructure that is under pressure. We see this in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, where it continues on the investment and the investment is costing a lot of lives each week. And this is according to the British Medical Association that has estimated approximately 500 people die every week due to delays in emergency care in the United Kingdom. So these numbers are, you know, we're not talking a few, we're talking about hundreds and thousands of lives. And this is not just unless quickly moved to the Netherlands, again, Schellen ExxonMobil, which are involved in gas extraction in the Honinger fields, have been extracting way too much gas, you know, from the ground, and that the authorities have been aware since 1993 that there's a link between gas extraction and earthquakes. And we're not talking about one or two earthquakes. This is almost 1,600 earthquakes have been recorded in Honinger. And so the government has been complicit in silence because, again, this is, as we keep mentioning, we know where the interests of our governments are. And just coming back to the money issue early on, that's, you know, when the political world of the oligarchy is aligned with the politics money becomes available, even in Greece, the government military spending has increased by 60% over 2019 to 2022, which is it's not almost 4% of GDP spending more than the United States when measured in that way. But it doesn't actually have to be that way, though. And the logical rage that's spreading throughout Europe, the protests, the strikes, the people coming out can be organized and must be organized so that we can avoid unnecessary deaths to our friends and families, loved ones and colleagues. And look, it took maybe centuries and not yet in all countries, of course, but it took centuries to separate the church and states and we really need separation of business and the state to happen a lot sooner if our species is to see the 22nd century. Thank you, Amir. And thank you for mentioning the East Palestine. I think it's pronounced tragedy in the US. Our opposition to privatization, I mean, it's not an ideological opposition. Am I right just to play the devil's advocate here? What does a healthy model of privatization look like for you? I don't know if you want to take that, Amir, or maybe it's something for the rest of you also to think about. Yannis has got his hand up. Maybe I can squeeze you in before Yannis. When it comes to public goods and networks, our position to privatization is analytical, ethical, political and ideological. There can be no such thing. I've already made this point in one of our live streams from this channel. There can be no such thing as a market for electricity. Remember my seemingly very simple argument is one wire coming out of the wall. So it's going to be a monopoly one way or the other. Governments try to simulate markets, but in the end, all they create is an oligarchy cabal, which sucks energy from society, energy in metaphorical terms. Similarly with railways. A railway cannot be privately run and safe and efficient and a source of good. The idea that you will have one company running the tracks and then the operators of different rail companies are going to compete on the same track. Who gets the one o'clock in the afternoon or eight o'clock in the morning? Right. Who gets that? Because this is when people actually want to use the train to go to work or to go shopping. There's going to be one train. You're not going to have 20 parallel tracks with passengers choosing which train, which eight o'clock in the morning train to take. So by definition, the eight o'clock train is going to be a monopoly. And if you have privatization, it's going to be a private monopoly. And who gets that? Well, the oligarch with a cloud. That's who gets it. And they will cut corners. They don't care about the rest of the system. It is impossible to have a proper timetable. Remember those of you who know the United Kingdom at the time of the transition from the publicly owned and run uniform British railways to that disaster of a hodgepodge of a system that came out of privatization. It was impossible to plan your trip from, let's say, London to Stoke. Because, you know, if you had to make a change, the two companies running the different trains could not coordinate or they would change. The second train would never wait for you if the first train was late. So our position to public goods and networks being privatized is non-negotiable. Now, I'm not against the idea of a company which is not producing a public good. And it is not networked, not being publicly run. But speaking for myself, as an anti-capitalist, I would like it to operate on the basis of one one employee, one share, one vote. Because the alternative, capitalist ownership of the means of production generates a host of crisis and inefficiencies. We haven't made that system of effective, modern, cooperative work yet. The US Library was a good example with very interesting experiments, multiple experiments, some of which worked very well. But that self-management, cooperative-based economy was snuffed out, both by the Soviet Union on the one hand and the West on the other hand, especially Western bankers, that lent them a lot of money. And then once interstates grew up to 20%, all these Yugoslavian companies died with the results being the war in Yugoslavia. Anyway, I think I've answered the question. Thank you, Jan. His two related comments from the chat from Mohammed competition is not the same as efficient. And Carl, large corporations are inefficient by definition. Ivana, Ivana Nenarevic, Serbia, for yours. Thanks. And it's a perfect timing because Janis gave me this cue to connect with Yugoslavia or your previous question, Mehran, is there a successful privatization? I haven't seen it because Serbia, as the last country affects Yugoslav Republics, entered this transition, which was supposed to transform our system from ancient, old and non-functional and non-profitable, quote, unquote, to a more profitable private, as it should be, as it's in the West. That's what we were promised. We are still not out of this transition 23 years later. And the transition meant that all of the public goods will be privatized. And literally from A to Z, everything Janis Nenarevic said that was happening in Greece was happening in Serbia as well. These companies that once hired thousands of workers and took care of their part of the job in the name of the state. So somebody was accountable and responsible for the infrastructure of the country and the safety and so on. Now it's divided to private company, which is just a cover for some mafia brother or godfather or some member of the mafia cartel that is running the country. And there are small sub companies that are then running separate parts of the business. And you have this effect on a society that Juliana was talking about because once hired workers with workers' rights, union rights and benefits became zero-hour contract hired workers that are at the end of the chain blamed for the human error, which is a consequence and unfortunately not the cause. What I wanted to mention here and it's a lucky coincidence, I guess, that we were talking about Janis mentioned these negotiations in Brussels, which were never negotiations because they didn't want to listen. And also when we think that our governments or representatives are going to negotiate, they're not. And on this day, three years ago, we released EuroLeaks, which is the proof of everything Janis is saying and none of our politicians will tell you. Thank you. Thank you, Ivana. And yes, that privatization model of breaking up public companies into many different, in the case of the train operator, one company has the tracks and another carriages, another the ticketing. Whenever tragedy strikes, that system also makes it very easy for people to pass the buck and say, well, no, it was their fault. It was their fault, it was their fault, which is kind of what happened here in Greece with the lack of train safety over over recent years. Okay, Johannes, Johannes Fair from Germany, Flora Jules. Thank you. First of all, solidarity to all the victims of this strategy and the comrades and people in Greece who are fighting now back and trying to change something, we are with them. And I think there is this privatization, neoliberalism politics have been going on in many states and many different ways over the last years. Also in Germany, as Juliana has been mentioning, for example, in Berlin, and I want to come back to something that she has been mentioning in Berlin in the early 2000s, mainly a lot of state owned housing was sold off by a center left government to private business that now runs this a lot of the housing in Berlin as profit with profit making. And I think also there in the end the saying that privatization kills in this case is kind of true because every winter in on Berlin streets, there's homeless people freezing freezing to death. And the state and the society is not run in a way that we kind of provide something that is also limited here and should be in public run in a in a way that is, you know, that's distributing the space, the space of living in a city like Berlin, evenly and fairly among people and run it effectively not in terms of making money but providing what's important warm house for everyone. And I want to shortly present something that the expropriating campaign here in Berlin that was successfully run and supported by almost 60% of the people and is not implemented by the government, of course, and to expropriate a lot of these companies that once were public, then were sold off. And now, all these companies that have more than 3000 flats should be brought back into public ownership. And the campaign that we also supported with Manor 25, of course, because it's very much in line with our policy as well. They developed a model for Berlin and how to manage this public housing. And it is not just giving it back to the state because also in Berlin, there's existing state owned housing companies that are run with, you know, this kind of way of trying to make a profit and try to run them like a private company, which is also something that lets the tenants and the people suffer. So their model is to actually bring together as the people managing and overseeing the running of these, of the housing, the management by, first of all, of course, the tenants in system of local councils, regional councils, sending off five people into an overall council that is also, besides these five people brought in by the tenants run by four people brought in by the workers that work for the housing companies to have their interests reflected in the management of the whole association, and as well by society in large. So society in large also elects four people and only two people are, you know, brought in by the government. So you have in the end a council of 13 people that is run by the tenants, the workers and the wider society and a little bit also by the government. And with this, I think this is a model, one example. Of course, you can imagine different examples for railway companies who can be have kind of different interests that you need to reflect when you put them into in a kind of ownership that is made sure that it's run by the people for the people. Thanks. Thank you, Johannes, for sketching out that solution to comments from the chat from Yabitz systems that deprive a worker of their sense of ownership and pride in their workmanship must be phased out and phosphorescence on the oligarchy. So the oligarchy is no longer invested in the democratic model. It's no longer aligned with their current or future interests. Therefore, they're becoming increasingly authoritarian. Who do we have up next? Dushan. Dushan Poyevich of Campaign Coordinates of Montenegro. Basically, I don't have much to say. I have rather a question to ask. It's about the economy. So probably best suited for Yanis, but anyone else is also more than welcome to answer. Listen, I'm not an economist. So if I say something logical, don't shoot me. But my question basically is should national strategic key points and by definition monopolies such as railway be managed as one person, one share or just nationalized in so-called ordinary way? If the first one is the case, as I would prefer it as well, but then I have a lot of doubts such as what percentage of dividends in such a monopoly should be allocated back to the society? In that case, should the transportation be free on the other side? Where does the money come from if it's free? And if it's from the other sources, how to set up a voting system on salaries in that company? If it's free but dependent on other sources, at the same time, if it's standalone, then it's a lot of money and a lot of salary and so on. I don't know if you get me on that. Of course, of course. Can I answer that, Meren? Yeah, please go. Look, the brief answer is that if it is a natural monopoly and it is an essential, it's a public good. It should not be down to one member, one vote. It should be a nationally run network which, however, I don't want to see being governed, managed by government. We do not want to replace the oligarch with a bureaucrat. That's the last thing we want to do. So the idea of supervision of a board of governors to which management is answerable and which selects management. That is, however, selected on the basis of sortition, random draws from a pool of experts, representatives of local communities, of society, so that you have neither capital nor the state running the system. That's what I think we should be aiming at. This is the view of Mera25 in Greece. This is part of our policy. And you see, it's not just natural monopoly because you may have a natural monopoly in pink pencils. Who cares? Let there be a natural monopoly in pink pencils. And if you feel exploited, if you really want a pink pencil, I really don't give a damn. But when it comes to what we call in economics, public goods. A public good is not something that is provided by a public utility. When you privatize railways, railway transport is still a public good, even if it's privatized. The definition of a public good is a good whose consumption does not only affect the person who consumes it, but it then affects through externalities the rest of society. So a bus service, a railway service, is a public good because when all of us take it, then this is good for the environment. This is good for congestion. It means we need to build fewer roads, destroy fewer lithium mines or the vicinity around the lithium mine in case of electric cars. So when it comes to public goods, this is not just a matter of the employees, one person, one vote, one share. That's when society needs to have a say in how it's run, because there's a very good, for instance, case for saying that it is in the interest of society, the economic interest of society that this service is subsidized. So I believe, for instance, that in a good society, railways must be subsidized if they do not make ends meet or at least some of the railway. I mean, if you go to Switzerland, a very rich country, they're very capitalistic in their thinking, there are trains going everywhere all the time. And most of those routes are not economical in the sense of private profit making. They don't cover enough from ticket sales. But it is a Swiss society that has decided that it wants to have a railway system that functions all day and all night, because otherwise they will have to buy a lot of cars and build lots of railways and destroy the Alps. Thank you for that, Janis. Let's close with Juliana, Juliana Zeta, because we're at the top of the app, for yours. Thank you. Yes, what I wanted to add actually, Janis, close on that point, that what I really miss and when it comes to infrastructure also European-wide is exactly that, that it doesn't have to follow the logic of profit. I mean, I looked at the map of Europe and I'm like, why can I not take a train from Frankfurt to Athens? Exactly. Because of a lot of things that we discussed today and also because of what Ivana explained once to me what happened to the main station in Belgrade and that the train cannot pass there anymore, that there is no infrastructure which people can really enjoy and which makes sense for people's lives rather than having an infrastructure that is for profit for this company and this company or this state. But also in the face of climate change, we need to do these things. So why not do them with joy and ambition as a human society to say we want to have trains everywhere in Europe, we want to have clean energy, we want to demand things rather than just to accept or to minimize the damage or to make the best out of what it is, but to have really ambition projects in Europe and to have a little bit of vision and fantasy when it comes to how this continent can look like. And I think that would be really great if we can come to a point as a society where we think about these things and about all these structures like that and not just to minimize collateral damage. And I think that can only happen if people have a say, if people get asked what they need and what they want in their lives and to extract more ideas also from everywhere, not just concentrate on having some experts in governments, maybe they do a good job, maybe they don't do a good job. But I think that the model also that Johannes talked about to have like mixtures of people from society, from governments, from scientists to work on projects. I mean, this is really like science fiction at this point where we stand. But yeah, I think it's good to have a dream and I would like Europe to be a continent that has projects which are really good for everyone in the society and with high quality. Thank you, Juliana. And we've gone past the top of the hour, but if you would like to join us in bringing about the kind of world that Juliana is describing and addressing some of the problems that we've seen here today. There's a simple address, it's dm25.org slash join. I should note also that on Thursday, because the cause of exposing power, we've talked about EuroLeaks, something, a project that we did a couple of years ago, Exposing Power, but Julian Assange is the definitive exposer of power and he, well, not him unfortunately, but his wife and all of us here will be at the Trianon Cinema in Athens on Thursday for the premiere of the documentary about his case. So if you're in Athens, then please do join us there. It's free to join. And again, thank you very much for your questions and comments, all you out there. And once again, our hearts go out to the victims of this terrible tragedy in Greece. And in the meantime, good luck and stay safe.