 For more videos on People's Juggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. It's a great pleasure to speak today to the legendary musician, Roger Waters. Roger, welcome to People's Dispatch. Thank you. It's been a while. It has been a while. A few years ago, you took a break during your South America tour and went to Ecuador to lend your support to the campaign that people had been conducting against the oil company Chevron. Ecuador since then has, of course, slipped into cascading series of crises, terrible crises. There's an election on the 7th of February, there's an election where the lead candidate, Andres Arauz, a man of the left, is slated to win. Could you reflect a little bit, Roger, on the time you've spent with Ecuador, the campaign around Chevrons, oil spill and so on? What took you to Ecuador and what has Ecuador meant for you? Well, I did actually go to Ecuador when I was on tour. I was in Bogota and I suddenly realised how close Colombia is to Ecuador. And so I jumped on a plane to fly down there to see my friend Stephen Stonder, who was the attorney who represented the indigenous people up in the north of Ecuador, where they've been fighting Chevron in this long, drawn-out action, 21 years they've been at it now, desperately trying to get the $9.5 billion that Chevron owe those people, the plaintiffs in that action, 30,000 of them, out of Chevron who refused to pay. It's a long, long story anyway. And do you know what? They tried to stop me from going, interestingly enough. Now, who tried to stop me from going? I'll tell you who tried to stop me from going, Lenin Moreno, who hopefully, on February the 7th, will cease to be anything to do. Or maybe he's already resigned. Has he gone or is he still there? He is so unpopular, Roger, that he's not running for election, but his party is polling below 10%. So there is no hope that his successor will come in. Okay, here's my question, because this is what really interests me. I've, you know, since Correa had to leave and went to live in Belgium or wherever he leaves and whatever, and things have changed a bit. And we've seen the failed coup in Bolivia, and blah, and blah, and blah, and blah. And even my old friend enemy, Pignere in Chile, which we were speaking of earlier, but looks as if he's on his last legs and things seem to be swinging back towards the possibility that the people might hold some more sway than they have been doing in recent years. What I want to know is this, how on earth did a lousy cockroach, like Moreno, become the president of Ecuador when they had this perfectly good left wood leaning, humane, law-abiding, democratic president in Correa, in charge of the country. This is a man, this was the man who stood out from all the other leaders all over the world and gave political asylum in the embassy, but also citizenship to Julian Assange when he was being hounded. He still is being hounded. Let's steer away from that because the idea that they're going to go on hounding him to his death is all too present on our horizons. But Correa saw who he was. Correa is obviously man who believes in freedom of speech and the Fourth Estate and the press and the penism she had and the sword and all of those laudable things that we all believe in and was doing a good, how the hell did Moreno manage to oust that government and provide the people of Ecuador with this appalling band of fools and criminals who've been there for the last four years or however long it is. How did that happen, PJ? Do you have any idea? Well, some of it has to do with the collapsing oil prices which put pressure on the government, but really what it was was Lenin Moreno probably, and again I'm as perplexed as you are, but probably was a man who sympathized with the project of the United States government. When the US government came, the IMF came, they provided a certain set of options to him. He just went with the US. I mean he ejected Julian Assange from the embassy in order to get an IMF loan. I mean we've reached here, Roger. There's unprincipled behavior regarding Julian Assange, regarding Ola Bini who was arrested in Quito the day that Julian was thrown out of the embassy. All of this to get an IMF loan. Well, it just shows then how important your job is to continue to do the great journalism that you do and to inform what's it called globetrotter? What's your thing called globetrotter? How important a role globetrotter pays to have this network of reporters all over the world reporting on the reality of all of our lives if possible so that the Lenin Moreno's and the Modi's and the Bolsonaro's and so on are no longer able to pull the wall over the eyes of ordinary people to the extent that they can get them to vote against their own self-interest and against their capacity for love and comradeship and you know all of those things that you and I believe in so deeply and passionately because it is quite extraordinary the power of persuasion that exists is extraordinary and disgusting in equal measure. And yet it was Lenin Moreno who tried to stop you from going to the Amazon in Ecuador to see first hand what was happening with the people who had been impacted by Chevron. I mean what did he do to try and stop you? Well, I landed in Quito and I was and I picked up Stephen Donziger who was the lead human rights attorney representing the plaintiffs 30,000 Ecuadorians and I said right my friend Stephen Donziger and I are now going to take off that no your plane is grounded. What do you mean my plane is grounded? We will not give you permission to fly to where you want to go. What's it called lago agrio or something like that? I'm sorry to have forgotten the name of the term but so I went well that's ridiculous and blah and I started making gentle kind of noise but I said I want to speak to the head of the of the federal aviation. Do you have such a thing in the back? And they went and they all started to arm an arm and eventually they got me some politician on the phone and I explained to him that I was going to make the loudest fuss that anybody had ever heard and and within about and they said well you can go but Donziger can't go and I went not good enough. Okay right who do I call next? I want to speak to Moreno and it went on like this for about 10 minutes and they suddenly said okay you can go. Anyway so that's what happened and we went and we spent the whole day there you know and it rained and rained and rained and we went on ferry crossings and met lots of the local people and they gave me feathers and beads and it was so moving and I'm still fighting. I was in New York last week standing outside Donziger's apartment because he has now been under house arrest in New York for 500 days disgustingly enough put there by this crooked federal judge in the South Circuit of New York called Louis A. Kaplan and he has another federal judge called Prescott Loretta Prescott is her name and they're in Cahoots and they are owned owned by the Chevron Corporation and it's the most and yet it's impenetrable it's that weird wall of bureaucracy and power that exists in the United States of America beyond which it is very difficult to reach but we're not going away and we now have a huge number of people many of whom are eminent presences in the United States judicial process standing and beginning to slowly stand shoulder to shoulder with Stephen Donziger and go this is crazy and all just so that Chevron can steal more and more money from people because it's not Chevron obviously the reason they won't pay up the 10 12 it's probably 12 million dollars now with interest and whatever billion dollars why they won't pay up is because they understand that this could be opening the floodgate imagine how many billions in reparations Chevron Corporation must owe to people in countries all over the world you know it won't just be Ecuador it will be all over South America it will be all over West Africa it's all over Australia and and once one case goes against them and they pay do you know BP because it was in Louisiana okay where where the where the Gulf spill was which they took the blame for even though it was that company that was owned by Bloody Cheney Halibut and owned the drill drilling rig that exploded and had that oil spill it was a relatively minor oil spill and it was accidental they paid up BP paid up without being asked I think it was 158 billion dollars to clean up the coast 158 Chevron are only being asked to pay up 10 and it wasn't accidental they did it criminally and on purpose so imagine how much they would have to pay if the same kind of rules that were applied to BP in the Gulf were applied to Chevron all over the world because they've been doing this routinely to indigenous people all over the globe but how far does this extrapolate imagine how much the British and the Belgians and the Germans and the Dutch and all the other colonial settler nations from Europe would have to start paying out to the indigenous people in all the billions and millions and millions of acres and countries all over the world that we settled and and attempted to clean clean clean out so I don't know this this is a long unfolding story I just hope it gets a chance to unfold I wrote something yesterday this is what I'm going to come to this now because I think it's really important and it is this hang on I parked it here so that I could tell you because I started writing this morning and I wrote about the dog and getting into the bed and coffee and then I cut to a Twitter feed from yesterday and it's like I'm just going to read you a little bit because last night I watched the 2013 Danish documentary film The Man Who Saved the World the man's name is Stanislav Petrov the year before Stanislav saved the world in the year 1982 I wrote a song The Gunner's Dream it is weird to think that had Stanislav not been in the right place at the right time none of us would be alive no one under the age of 37 would have been born at all ever it is acknowledged by all but the cretins amongst us that nuclear arms have no value it is also acknowledged that they are a ticking bomb and we ignore them at our peril accidents happen the Stanislavs of this world are a rare breed we've been extraordinarily lucky if I ruled the world I would heed the words of the wise and I would get rid of nuclear weapons first thing tomorrow morning on Dr King's name day of course no one can rule the world the world cannot be ruled it can only be loved and respected and shared if we're still here in the morning I shall post a new recording and video of The Gunner's Dream and blah blah blah and all of that so the point of reading that to you is that some people may not have watched that documentary about Stanislav Petrov and it's about time they did because I think frankly right now today it is still and every single morning when we wake up nuclear disarmament is the most pressing item on the agenda for every human being and very few of us have a platform where we get the chance to mention that salient fact he this guy you know the Russian computers in 1983 this is just after the downing of the Korean airliner where things were very very brittle Reagan yeah during the Reagan presidency they're all sitting there and their computers is telling them that the Americans have launched a missile attack and there are one then two then three then four then five missiles on the computers are telling them that they're being attacked and this guy who was in charge of that particular outpost refused to call his superior officer in fact he did call his superior officer and said I'm a hundred percent sure that this is not a real attack all of his subordinates were going you're insane you're crazy we're all gonna die so they waited until they had until the radar kicked in they knew that within three minutes they would see physical evidence on the radar of these missiles and when and when the radar kicked in there was nothing there it was a glitch nobody knows what it was to this day they have no idea but he refused to launch the counter attack he Stanislaw Petrov I'm getting quite emotional now literally this guy provided life to everyone 37 years old or younger alive on the planet today every single one of them not to mention us but you're you're raising Stanislaw Petrov is very meaningful because Donziger is another Stanislaw Petrov Julian Assange is another Stanislaw Petrov I would say that the incoming president of Ecuador Andres Arauz could be another Stanislaw Petrov it takes courageous brave people to do the courageous brave thing that not only saves humanity but drives the agenda forward don't you think there's so many people like that yeah you're absolutely right yeah you're completely right and as I say in that little piece they are a rare breed they are so precious to us they are so precious men who have the courage and the spirit to do the right thing and to be right having done it but isn't it weird BJ that on the 14th of February or the 15th or whenever it was in 2003 there were 20 25 million Stanislaw Petrovs on the streets of every capital city in the world telling George W. Bush and Tony fucking Blair not to invade Iraq because the consequences of that illegal act would be unimaginably destructive not just to Iraq but to all of us and yet they went ahead and did it because they are cretins cretinous they're cretinous they cannot see that the entire construct upon which they behave they base their belief in money and power is ultimately going to mean the end of life on this planet and so yeah yeah I mean frankly you know when you said Chevron should pay up the nine to ten billion dollars to Ecuador we did a calculation and showed that the current external debt total external debt is about 11 trillion dollars you know when we talk about settler colonialism and reparations and so on there's 37 trillion dollars sitting in illicit tax havens if we just moved one third of that illicit money we could clear the entirety of the external debt of poor countries you know and let them in the pandemic start from scratch Ecuador recently had the US government come in and buy off the China debt that Ecuador has and told Ecuador you cannot use Chinese telecommunications as a consequence I mean this is using debt essentially as a weapon when we should just wipe out debt not forgive there's nothing to forgive just wipe it out but they won't do that you know of course they won't because that that's not what they're in business for you know nobody can ever remember the names of the actors in it's a wonderful life Clarence is the only name anybody can remember who was the angel in it's a wonderful life and but the bad banker is is the perfect model for all of them and he of course in the movies he is the villain and he's accepted as the villain and he is the villain and he's whatever but what people don't see is that Jimmy Stewart you know who's and and bell rings when Clarence gets his wing you know and all of that nonsense is sort of is sort of irrelevant to what's happened since they made it it's a wonderful and they show it every Christmas day all over the western world you know it's the evil guy is the one who won everything and they they go on foreclosing on all those poor people who Jimmy Stewart's trying to help because you know when the bank fails and blah blah blah blah but people don't get it they refuse to get it they so desperately want to believe in the Rockefellers or whoever it might be you know or the Carnegie's or the or the JP Morgan's or the these are the people that we build statues to but thieves they're thieves and gangsters they're crooks they're evil nasty nasty men all of them you know and they make a lot of money and occasionally some of it escapes you know like I'm sure the Rockefeller Foundation tries to do good I know in fact I'm not sure I know it does I know it tries to some but the Rockefellers are all you know the people who started it all have all long gone and they only put the money there because they didn't want to give any of it away to the people you know that's a way to protect your money from tax which is a perfectly reasonable you know to suggest that part of your income should go to funding society in general as a whole I can't fuck that and we'll put it in a trust so the people can't get at it all those scum you know anyway Roger when the when the pandemic ends you and I will fly back to Ecuador when Andres Arauz will be the next president yes and we will then go back to the Amazon area and by then hopefully the new government would have reversed the deal that they made with Chevron and we'll see some of that money come in and perhaps they will create a little school for children in the Amazon to learn music and just as you did when you were in Argentina you can visit the school and lead the kids in singing a song well why not teach them how to play the song you played for the children of the slums of Buenos Aires you know a child will fly yeah all right that's that's a lovely idea and and and and a possibility except that I've got one bone to pick with you and hold to pick in your narrative you talk about a small school we need a big school the choir has to grow the choir has to be some so big all over the world that it makes a beautiful harmonious noise that is so loud not that the arseholes will hear it because Tony Blair and George Bush and Bolsonaro and Modi and blur and blur and blur and Moreno and all those they could never hear anything they are emotionally deaf they have no hearing no we want other people who may hear the choir to join it and then there will finally be so many of us all singing the same song and the song is just love love sharing cooperation doing all the things that we have to do human beings have to do to protect ourselves and to protect the other inhabitants of the planet we need we need an ecosystem as well we can't just go oh I can buy you know I can buy a global express yeah but you'll kill hundreds millions of people in in your pursuit of the money to own a global express and I'm yeah well I don't care I want that plane I need it I thought Noam Chomsky made a very good point in one of the speeches I heard him make about what does the CEO of Exxon or Chevron or any of them feel like when you say he said probably they feel differently when they're being the chief executive of an oil company than when they're being Mr Smith who has a wife and children and who have cousins and lives in a community and whatever because the chairman of Exxon is bound by the fact that he has a private jet and a huge income and this is that but also he wants to be he gets accolades for being that person so he's prepared to sacrifice everything that's over here i.e his family his children his grandchildren every generation to come the whole idea of being able to live at peace with himself in in his relationship to his brothers and sisters all over the world every other human being on the planet he can forget about that because he's given this completely artificial misery misery of being very rich and powerful and the head of a great big corporation even though intellectually he must know that he is one of the very important cogs in the machine that is destroying life on this planet faster than his grandchildren or great grandchildren will ever be able to catch up with he's just going fuck out i don't care welcome well if you take him out of that position and put him over here and give him you know a cow and a and a saw and say and there you've got three sheep as well get on with it he's gonna go shit i really have to look after these kids and this is my family i really need to look after them and and and so and so he behaves differently but when he's and the two things are completely incompatible and odds with one another but when he's sitting on the board of Exxon or chevron or what he can't he can't he cannot remove himself it's chomsky said all that and i thought well he's not he's a pretty wise bloke chomsky he's been being wise since 1940 or something he was probably wise before then he was already like 10 or something he just turned 92 years old and he is not slowing down at all not one bit it's pretty incredible you know this this guy i know has made this lovely movie and it's called noman pepe i think and it's about chomsky and uh mujica you know the ex-president of ecuador who did would have a yes uh or a guy yeah of or a guy yeah of or a guy who did go on living in his little house even when he was the head of Exxon he wasn't the head of a corporation but he was the president of or a guy and he went no i don't want any of that shit i am going to go on i'm going to go on driving my Volkswagen and live in this house because i'm essentially the same guy that i've always been and he used to take the bus from his house to work that was if he didn't drive his bw bug he used to take the bus yeah you know if i had any shame he would shame me well i mean look Boris Johnson used to make a big thing about biking to work you remember putting his clips on and so on so there's a way in which they manufacture humility but mojica was actually humble is actually humble and that is shaming i've seen this movie in rough cut and i've listened so i listened to them both both having these conversations and it is a beautiful film anyone said more about it roger waters thank you so much for being with us at people's dispatch please have me back again soon i thought anytime anytime in batch it's really important part of my life trust me