 Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. Hello, today is the 22nd of July. And we are back with our favourite show. Give the people what they want. Brought to you by People's Syspats at Zoe and I. And Globe Trotter and Vijay from Globe Trotter is currently on a very interesting reporting mission. You'll see the article soon enough on all the usual places, including People's Dispatch. A lot of interesting aspects about trade, about resources in Latin America. So welcome back to the show everybody. And we always like to say on many of our shows, we often talk about the world burning in a more figurative sense. But this is actually one week or a couple of weeks actually where it's almost literal, forest fires, heat waves. Across the world really shows how badly global warming is affecting us. How badly climate change is affecting us. And the fact that we're not able to sort of do much about it. And one of the epicenters of this is of course been Europe. And where Europe of course as we have covered in the past few shows, also the centre of a lot of political crisis. It looks like as the war, as the Ukraine war progresses, government after government falling in Europe. We have Mario Draghi, the Italian prime minister who's finally quit. Now Draghi came to power in 2021 as part of a very, very strange arrangement where all these erstwhile political force, there was a five star movement, which is often called populist. There was a democratic party, which is kind of called centre left. It's actually more centrist. There were all these far right parties as well. All of them combining together under the leadership of a technocrat and Mario Draghi is as technocrat as you can get in associated with the highest levels of big finance with all the packing institutions. And all of them coming together to sort of govern Italy at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic really had really, really hit that country very badly. And that was to stabilize the country, continue on that path of austerity policies of reforms, which we have argued before the world should no longer be used in that context, but reforms and the agenda of big money, so to speak, big financial institutions. So keeping all this in mind, Draghi was kind of the consensus candidate of the establishment to enter to govern Italy at this point of time. And he led a difficult government for the past few, for past year and a half or so. And now it turns out that the internal contradictions within that government have kind of really sought and exploded. The five-star movement refusing to support a key policy prescription, which again was all about austerity policies. And now we're going to have fresh elections in September. This is really not a good time for Italy because the far right is expected to do quite well at the polls. The so-called centrist forces increasingly looking bankrupt before the people because what Italy has seen over the past few years is a horrible crisis in terms of livelihoods, in terms of salaries. We have seen young students dying in workplace accidents because there's a mandatory internship, which the government for some reason refused to change. There was the question of the fact that Italy was one of the few OECD countries which did not see a wage increase and multiple strikes by trade unions across sectors to sort of push the point forward that the people are really suffering. Instead what Italy went for was more austerity, more militarization, very enthusiastically joining the war in Ukraine. So all this is sort of come back to haunt the powers that be in Italy and the powers that be in Europe. And now what will we see in the coming months? It's a very big question. Will the far right, which is Eurosceptic in general, come back with a renewed mandate? What does it mean for the people? Very difficult questions, very important questions. We'll be tracking all these as well. And Italy has become once again one of those countries where all these conflicts are kind of have come to the fore. So that's where we are with Italy right now. Well, it's interesting to see the Europe, which is not used to these high temperatures, which is not used to this political instability, which seems to be something of the global south being taken over by these sort of southern problems. But in other side of the world, over to the Caribbean, similar energy crisis. We've talked a lot about the energy crisis in Europe. But Puerto Rico, one of the remaining colonies in the world is facing massive electricity outages, cuts, increased prices. The issue of energy in Puerto Rico has been a central theme in the country, in the nation. It has consistently brought people to the streets. There were last year huge protests. And once again, people are on the streets protesting these energy cuts and saying that the private company, which is based in Canada and the US, Luma, that the contract be canceled with this company. Oftentimes people love to say that the public sector is unable to administer public services, is unable to administer a good deliverance of these services. And that's why the contracts have to be handed over to the private sector. And the case of Puerto Rico is a clear cut example of why this is extremely not true. And that oftentimes these companies really just take advantage to increase their profits and decrease the service of this public service that people. For example, Luma in Puerto Rico has consistently been increasing the rates this on July 1. First, the rates of the price of electricity went up by 17%. So we're talking a lot about inflation on a global scale, basic importance having electricity. This price was increased by 17%. However, at the same time, constant cuts, constant outages. Puerto Rico, I said that energy is extremely important issue. It has suffered horrible natural disasters in the past couple of years. Hurricane Maria, which happened in 2017, essentially decimated the power grid. People were left without electricity for months. And so this was an extremely important issue for the people. And instead of trying to rebuild the public sector, trying to strengthen Puerto Rico's electric power authority, the Junta, which is essentially a non-elected board of corporate advisors who are administering Puerto Rico's debt, which has essentially complete control over all of the economic systems. Decisions that happened on the island decided to hand the contract over to this private company. And so this ending the company with this ending the contract with Luma has become a central demand. People are on the streets in the thousands. And this demand of canceling the contract with this company is really related to this overarching demand of the demand of true independence and national independence movement, which has been so vibrant in Puerto Rico. And we've seen a number of moments where it has really come to the fore because of different political and economic developments on the island. So the scandal that broke out a couple of years back with the governor who had sent horrific text messages was in a telegram group chat and had been messaging other advisors, other politicians, making fun of the victims of Hurricane Maria. When this scandal broke, unprecedented protests happened across the island. And of course, these were in response to this specific scandal, but really related to the overall colonial nature of the relationship that Puerto Rico has the United States and that the fact that it cannot, the people of Puerto Rico are not able to make decisions about their economic futures, about their political futures, and instead they're ruled by this junta, which was installed by the promesa law under Barack Obama under his presidency means that, you know, this colonial nature is even further entrenched. And when these natural disasters happened like Hurricane Maria, which led to so many deaths, so many people without power, so the consequently, you know, ripple effect that that had on the people's access to medicine, people's access to food and so many other essential items was deeply affected. The administering of the pandemic in Puerto Rico was also, you know, mediated by this colonial relationship. And so it's back on the table that the issue of independence, the issue of sovereignty, it's so important to remember that, you know, the U.S. in addition to having imperialist efforts across the globe still has a formal economy. So we talked a lot about neocolonialism, but the United States still has formal colonies. And so in this struggle against, you know, a very corrupt electricity company which has just been, you know, digging out the pockets of the Puerto Rican people, stealing their money essentially for a service that they're unable to deliver. The central, this really roots back to sovereignty, to independence and this the struggle for national liberation. Right, Zoe, you mentioned very important words, sovereignty, independence and the struggle for national liberation. And you also mentioned the kind of dual private companies are taking. It's important this context to talk about Ghana, Ghana's struggle for liberation. Dr. Karmila Krum, of course, inspiration to people across the world. But let's take a look at what's happening now. For instance, in Ghana, the numbers say that between 1990 and 2002, I believe, only about 1.3% or 1.7% of the revenue from gold made its way back to the Ghanaian government. Ghana is a major exporter of gold, but just imagine that. 1.7% of the total revenue from gold makes its way back to the government which means 98.3% is in the hands of private entities, often multinationals. And that, you know, just this number alone should kind of tell you what many countries in the global south today face in terms of how the economies are structured. And of course, just as these kind of multinationals and private corporations play a huge role in this extraction of wealth, so does the International Monetary Fund, which is always there to provide assistance. So they claim, but which basically provides a kind of, the kind of aid that keeps you chained forever. And this is, for instance, very important when you're talking about Ghana because Ghana is now in talks to probably have its 17th agreement with the International Monetary Fund. And we have a long story by a colleague Tarapriya Singh on people's dispatch on this story. And it talks about why the socialist movement of Ghana, the trade unions in the country are very, very fiercely opposed to the steel. Now, a couple of things we need to remember. First of all, the fact that Ghana is going through an extremely difficult economic situation right now. Inflation, I think, is at its highest since 2004, if I'm not mistaken. I think it's 29.8% in June. The price of food is up by around nearly 31%. For many other essentials like vegetable oil, wheat flour, it's much, much higher. The country currency has lost a lot of its value, which basically also means that due to all these reasons, the salaries that workers are getting is completely inadequate. And whatever increases the government has really promised them also don't really make sense because the government promises workers increases. In this case, it was promised on the basis that inflation would be much lesser. And now that inflation is so many times more, the increase that the government has promised workers does not really mean any improvement in the quality of living. So basically, workers in principle, in paper, they get a slightly higher salary maybe, but it does not really improve their standard of living in any sense. And this is really infuriated left and trade unions across Ghana who have been saying that you cannot, this is not really how you can negotiate and what treat the people who basically run your economy. Now it's in the context of all this that Ghana is also negotiating with the IMF. It has a lot of structural issues with its economy, including a balance of payment crisis, huge amounts of debt. But again, the question people are asking right now is that all these previous agreements with the IMF have brought to Ghana his further austerity policies. For instance, the general secretary of the Socialist Movement of Ghana has pointed out that during common agronomist time of the 400 factories that were built, I believe about 300 were privatized because of most of these agreements. We have agreements which led to caps in increasing salaries, which have agreements which led to reduction in public spending. So due to all these reasons, the real question before the people of Ghana, before the government of Ghana, is your 17th agreement really going to make a difference? And the trade unions have made it very clear. They say that alright, you're going to sign your 17th agreement, but be prepared because there's going to be an 18th and a 19th and a 20th agreement because all the IMF brings is an unending chain of debt, is an unending cycle of being in debt and because of that being forced to implement more policies which affect the people in really, really bad ways. And of course, the solution to this is sort of restructure the country's economy. We've talked about this in the context of Sri Lanka, another country which is facing a very similar crisis where the left says that you need to completely rework your economy if you actually want a solution to this crisis. But as we know, the ruling elites, the ruling establishment in many of these countries which is convinced or firmly believe have been convinced that the IMF is the only real way to sort of solve the crisis. And it's quite unfortunate because country after country keeps doing this and we keep going into the cycle of misery caused by these kind of policies because these IMF policies are not implemented by, the IMF policies are not designed by political leaders per se because by the anonymous bureaucrats, people often don't realize what kind of an impact the IMF has on their day to day lives. So very important story to keep track of justice in Sri Lanka, justice in Argentina, justice in Pakistan, justice in Tunisia, we'll come to that later. What the IMF does, what the IMF is doing to all of us, very important to remember. Well, from economic crisis to economic crisis, it seems that's really the talk of the times. Going back to the Caribbean, over to Panama, we've been following this story for a couple of weeks. It's an incredibly important story. And yes, Panama is a small country in Central America, formerly part of Colombia, but was broken off as part of imperialist efforts to kind of isolate and break the unity of Colombia. And people have been on the streets now for three weeks in Panama, demanding, as in many other countries, as in Ghana, as in Puerto Rico, that the government makes structural changes to address this cost of living crisis, which, as you mentioned, is not only because of the COVID-19 pandemic, is not only because of the war in Ukraine, but really is linked to the structure of the economy. Panama is another economy where huge amounts of capital circulates, especially because of it being considered a tax haven, huge, huge amounts of capital circulating their massive construction projects. Many companies have their headquarters there, yet so little of this money goes to the people. As we've said, they've been on the streets the past three weeks demanding price-freezing, reduction of prices specifically in goods that affect everyday life. So this is fuel, this is food, this is medicine, all of the products of, as they say in Spanish, the basic basket of daily consumption goods. And after three weeks of road blockades, of militant protests, of militant mobilizations, yesterday, finally in the evening, the government agreed to sit down with all of the forces that have been on the streets, that have been organizing, that have been mobilizing, and it's so interesting and it's so important to raise awareness to this because in May, when this list of demands was created, I was speaking to a trade unionist from the National Front for the Defense of Economic, Social and Political Rights, Ronaldo Ortiz, and he told me in June, we presented these demands the government and the government laughed in our faces. They said, we're not going to compromise on any single one of these demands. And these are basic demands about having access to medicine, having access to food, making sure that these prices don't go even further through the roof. And the government said, no, we will not contemplate making any concessions. And yesterday, the government was forced to sit down with all of these different organizations that have been on the streets, that have been making these demands, that have been telling them, you have to address this. And the government is starting to make some considerations. Of course, this is going to be a long process of negotiation. These organizations have said, we're not going to leave the streets just because we're in the negotiation. We're going to continue mobilizing, continue putting on pressure because they know this is where their power is. They have been able to effectively paralyze the construction work sector. One of the largest unions is the National Construction Workers Union. They have been paralyzing this entire industry, which as I mentioned is a huge part of the economy in Panama. And so it's such a great example of workers' power, of the unity of the working class in making the government take these demands seriously. This is a conservative government, a right-wing government that has always favored neoliberal policies, always favored transnational corporations, transnational capital over the people and over their well-being. But this government is going to have to make concessions. It already made a concession on reducing the price of fuel. The movement said this wasn't enough, there was a mandate more. And so this is going to continue. They're going to continually be engaged in these negotiations. And it's such an important lesson for movements and people across the world of how this has to happen. There has to be pressure on the streets. There's been unity amongst the construction workers with indigenous communities, with peasant communities. There was a very important agreement achieved between the peasant agricultural producers and the unions to create humanitarian corridors so they could both sell their goods and the people could have access to the food that they need so that this dialogue can continue. They can continue putting pressure on the government. And there's this mutual kind of support between these sectors. So such an important story. That's why we've been continuing to cover it at People's Dispatch in dialogue with people who are at the negotiation table on the streets mobilizing. And there we have it. Right, like you said Panama is a very small country of course, but the kind of sentiments, the kind of power that animates the people, the drives the people who are on the streets is something that's common across the world. And I think it's just why it's very important to keep talking about it, because these are the kind of protests that are necessary to sort of push back against what we, the other kind of stories we talk about, which are the cruelties and the tragedies and the horrors of capitalism and those who rule us. And that's really what we try to do it, give the people what they want, bring you both these aspects, both these sides of the coin, so to speak, because they're inseparable. And of course, going from Panama to another country, which is in the midst of a lot of social chaos, social crisis, and that's Tunisia, where what we saw was, what we have been seeing over the past year is a very curious move by the president, Kaisai, who pretty much decided for a variety of reasons that he would be, that he was some kind of historic figure maybe who would reverse all that was put in place after the Arab Spring protests of 2011. So he dismissed the government, he basically suspended parliament. He took more powers to himself over the months. And then he declared that he's going to frame a new constitution. And then people are going to vote on it in a referendum and so on and so forth. And he's going to inaugurate a new era for Tunisia. Now, this has been a very unique constitution drafting process. There's actually been very little consultation. The process has been completely, very little transparency. We've got a great interview with Father Lalireza, the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Meshkaal, the media platform, who talks about many of these issues. And curiously, the head of the drafting committee for the constitution itself came out against the draft saying that this was not the draft given that we gave to the president because the new final draft which is being submitted for referendum seems to really concentrate a lot of power in the hands of the president. So that's a surprise. We are proposing a constitution where the power of parliament has been diluted considerably. There are going to be two houses which itself is a sign of that. Some of the fundamental rights are kept, of course. All those are technically still protected. But what happens is that many of the key institutions which are supposed to enforce these rights, in whose absence these rights won't really mean much. They have been weakened. For instance, you have the fact that the judiciary, it set their restrictions on members of the judiciary protesting or members of the government protesting. So KSI has basically come out with a constitution which in some senses is the antithesis of what happened after the Arab Spring. And now let's be very clear about it. The post Arab Spring situation in Tunisia was not ideal. There was a lot of political chaos. They were in a government. It was very difficult to form governments. There was an insane amount of corruption. All that is very much true. There's no doubt about it. And a lot of people are genuinely unhappy with that. But even these people are really asking the question that is the answer to all this centralizing power in the hands of just one person. Is the answer to all this dismantling to a large extent all those institutions and checks and balances which were introduced after 2011 because we do know that Tunisia was under the dictatorial rule of Zain al-Abdil bin Ali for the longest time and what the Arab Spring achieved was actually overthrowing him. So now the question is before the people of Tunisia on the 25th of July. That's just about three days from now and it's going to be very important. Interestingly, even how significant the referendum is going to be itself is a question because there are clauses which indicate that the constitution will be adopted nonetheless. So this is an extremely curious process of constitution building where the president has pretty much been the judge, jury and executioner all in one. So remains to be seen what happens. Interesting thing of course is that they've been protests all these months by the left by trade unions against many of these centralizations of power. It is expected that much of this will continue as well regardless of what happens on the 25th. And of course we know that Tunisia going through an economic crisis also engaging with the IMF which has kind of become the theme of this show. But yeah, so remains to be seen what will happen on the 25th but definitely a very important country and a very important moment for that country in its history. Well, this last story is sort of a mix of some of the stories that we've seen before and it's an interesting one. There seems to be a lot of revelations coming out of Spain that directly impact and directly affect kind of the Latin American progressive politics. So just yesterday, El País, the Spanish newspaper came out with an investigation that box the far right political party in Spain. It had released, it's through its foundation, the Samuel. It had released a scathing 30 minute documentary. One of those that creates the web and connects all the things and says that the communists here related to the communists there and everyone's plotting and everyone's doing this to overthrow everyone else. But this was specifically talking about the Forte de Sao Paulo which is a group of, from social democratic to communist parties across Latin America. It has very wide ideological leanings, as I said, it includes communist parties but also includes a lot of social democratic or liberal parties. And essentially this box documentary is unmasking the Forte de Sao Paulo and it essentially again tries to create all of these links which they are a group of parties so they do have relationships but essentially it focuses on the character of Lula da Silva who is the pre-candidate for the Workers' Party and many leftist alliances in Brazil for these upcoming elections and it says that he has all these questionable links and that he is, while he's heralded as this great leader he's really the architect of the worst corruption in history. Interestingly enough the leaders of Vox have had very close relationships with Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, many members of this political faction in Brazil. The Santiago Avascal who's from Vox Party he went to a big foundation meeting held by the Bolsonaro's. Those are very clear links and they have very clear political motivations. However, what El País revealed is that Vox used public money to create this documentary. It used money from the Spanish government to create this documentary which is essentially an extremely wild... we talk a lot about conspiracies theories but it's one of these movies that really it pulls together all these narratives, you know, cut speeches from different leaders and says these are the real demons, these are the real devils and they say that one of the intentions behind this documentary was to make the Spanish people vote against socialist government it was also against the government of Pedro Sánchez, of the Socialist Party and of Podemos and so it's a very big effort using state money to say that all of these leftists, all of these progressives are horrible, they're corrupt, they're terrible and it's just interesting because these are the same people who call for the dismantling of the state saying the communists, the socialists, they're just stealing money from the state and doing what they will with it, they're corrupt. However, this documentary receiving direct money from the state is doing exactly that, so it's an interesting development it's interesting to see how the right wing is so coordinated, is so linked, has these direct relationships, is trying to subvert the will of the people trying to instill fear by creating these great conspiracies saying that all of these people are corrupt, that they're working together and look what they're doing to our people and it's, well, unfortunate is a light word for this but I think it's so interesting and it's so necessary for us to pay attention to these things because as we saw with the story of Pablo Iglesias that this whole lie was invented in order to say that he had received 200,000 euros from Nicolás Maduro, which was spread by the media, confirmed by the courts, was essentially made up. You know, a lot of times we take this without a grain of salt, we take it for what it is and we say, okay, yeah, these people are horrible, what are they doing? And so it's so important that when these things come out to follow them, to investigate, to look deeper, to see the links that are there, it's also interesting to see that one of the first news agencies that published an article about this documentary is the same news agency that was publishing the lies about Pablo Iglesias. So who knows if there's coordination there? Who's to say? Right, Zoe. So it does look like as when people do achieve awareness, when people do struggle towards awareness and change those trying to hold society back, definitely seeing a conspiracy, no surprise about that. And that's pretty much been the trajectory of all of human history. So in some senses, not a surprise at all, although always important to mark each of these instances very closely in record, very closely in our histories so that we and everyone around us are more aware of it. And like I said, this is what we try to do on this show, this is what we try to do with people's dispatch and globetrotter and we hope to see you all next week. For more such stories, more such stories of both, of stories unfortunately of repression and cruelty, we can't avoid them, but also stories of hope and resistance which basically are what drive all of us. So thank you so much from Zoe and myself and see you next week.