 Hello, hello, hello, and welcome. I am Mehran Khalili. 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. You would have to have been living under a rock for the last couple of months if you hadn't noticed that everything is getting insanely expensive, whether it's food, fuel or housing, the cost of basic things we all need to live to survive is skyrocketing. Across the globe, inflation in the Eurozone just hit a record high of 8.6% in June. The increase in costs of basic goods in Belgium but also the UK are at a 40-year high in Germany. Energy products are 40% more expensive than at the same time last year and the Irish are paying 54% more for gas than a year ago and rents are increasing across the board. And of course, in the world's poorest countries, the cost of living is, well, the cost of living crisis is pushing an additional 71 million people in poverty and starvation according to the UNDP. And wages of course are not keeping up with the toll. There have been protests in several European capitals and some analysts are predicting a summer of unrest. So what's behind all of this? Are we to accept the narrative that the establishment are giving us that this is Putin's price hike coupled with disruptions to global supply chains because of the pandemic or should we perhaps also be wary of the fact that this crunch started before the Ukraine war and that corporations including in the energy sector are now reporting record profits. Of course, what can we do to fix all of this? Our panel today including our own Yanis Falafakis will be answering questions like these. Yanis of course knows a thing or two about economics and our panel of DM25's policy and campaigning experts will also be weighing in. You out there, if you have any thoughts, rents, questions, comments, concerns, anything you want to throw at us, this is live, this is YouTube, put them in the chat and we'll put them to our panel. Let's move now to Yanis. The floor is yours. Thanks madam. Hello everyone. Hello comrades from across DM25, across Europe and the world. Right. Look, remember 2008? Well, some of you don't because you're too young but those of you who are not too young to remember 2008. A raft of different theories were put forward as to why Wall Street and then the banks of Europe collapsed and financialized capitalism had a near-death experience. Some said that it had to do with the Anglo-Saxon model that broke down and many focused on the regulatory capture of the way in which the bankers had effectively taken over control of the asylum and they had captured governments and therefore escaped regulation and collapsed under the weight of their own hubris with all the derivatives that they had created. Others talked about the global imbalances, how the concentration of savings in places like Japan and China, whereas countries like the United States and Britain were leaving beyond their means, borrowing all this saved money from the East. There were some who blamed economists and toxic economics, liberalism. Something similar is happening today. Today, with the cost of living explosion, the inflationary bout that we're experiencing, well, again, there are many different explanations. Some blame, as Rensseld said, supply chains, others Putin, others, the laxity of central banks are printing too much money. Some blame the demographics that Europe and the West are getting older. And so on and so forth. Well, there are two things in common between 2008 and today. The first thing is that all these explanations are correct, all of them and none of them, in the sense that they're all touching on phenomena that contributed to the causes of the crisis, back in 2008 and today, but none of them explain what went on. So in that sense, it's a bit like a multiple choice question, I say, where imagine there was an answer, a potential answer and multiple choice question, all of the above and none of the above. It's not the one you find in a multiple choice test. And the second thing that they have in common is that the cost of living crisis we now have is essentially the evolution of the 2008 crisis. It's all the different crisis. It's the same crisis, which never went away after 2008. Crisis global capitalism, financialized capitalism, which has been taking different forms, morphing and evolving and hitting us in different ways, depending on which phase in its evolutionary path it is. So let me start at the beginning, 2008, and then reach today. In brief, what happened in 2008 was the second phase of post-war capitalism, crashed and burned. The first phase was present goods, the period between 1950 and 1971, during which we had a kind of centrally planned global capitalism with Washington DC doing the planning for the historians amongst us, because there are very few of us who remember that period. I do, I still have memories of that period, believe it or not, that proves my age. It was indeed a centrally planned phase of capitalism. Between 1950 and 1970, exchange rates were fixed. People never had to look at the newspaper or on some screen to find out what the exchange rate between the United States dollar and pound sterling or the Dutch mark of the yen was, because that exchange rate was the same for 30 years, more or less. Which today, just mind-boggling, just to imagine interest rates, plus or minus, but what you were saying. Finance was boring, nothing much was happening. Imagine if you have fixed exchange rates, interest rates that didn't change much. Inflation was really subdued, more or less, most of the time. Unemployment was very low. Growth that was quite high. Inequality that was falling. That was a very different beast, very different kind of capitalism. Now, that whole global design, globally planned economic system, was based on the capacity of the American economy to generate surpluses. And for the United States in one way or another, through political means primarily, to recycle its surpluses to Europe, Western Europe and Japan, which was the eastern pillar of the global capitalist system. Remember China, during that period, was under Mao Zedong, it was completely outside that system. The United States was the only creator nation in the beginning in 1950, and the only one that had net exports. At any serious level, Germany took some time before it started generating net exports, same with Japan. And it all happened because Germany and Japan were nursed back into economic health and allowed to become net exporters by the United States of America. It was a determined plan by Washington DC. At the end of the 1960s, the Americans had no surpluses, they had deficit. The whole thing was going to topple over, just fall over. And it did. And the Americans who always, the American ruling class, have absolutely no problem whatsoever, blowing up a system of their own design. When it's no longer fit for purpose, they blew it up. Richard Nixon on the 50th of August, 1971 blew up the system. And we had the second phase. The second phase begins in the 1970s, and it's exactly the opposite of the first phase. It is based not on American surpluses, but on American deficits. America goes deeply into the red, buying a lot more from Japan, from Germany, from Holland, from Italy, from France, from Saudi Arabia, that it was selling to those countries. And a revival, it's hegemonic power as a result of becoming more and more deficit country, going more and more into the debt, into deficit and debt. Now, the German political elite, economic elite, really could not prop their mind around that. If when Germany goes into deficit, it's panic stations. Tightened belts, austerity, we have to get rid of, we have to go back to Schwarz-Nul, we have to end the deficit. No, I'm not the Americans. They saw their deficit balloon, and you know what they did? They said, more of it. We're going to go deeper into deficit. That deficit of the United States, trade deficit. Well, two things about it. First, it was the beginning, the fuel, the driving force of globalization. Because come to think of it, the United States of America, by being so much in deficit and in increasing trade deficit to Europe and to Japan on the one hand, and later on China, of course. These deficits translated into demand for the net exports of Germany, of Holland, of Italy, of Japan and later China. The American deficit was what propelled the export economies, primarily of Japan, China and German. The Americans were buying the factories in Japan, Germany and China could produce, plus lots of other things like French champagne, cheese, Italian design, stuff and so on. Now, the second thing I need to say about the American deficit, who on earth could sustain them? Because if you're producing gadgets and I go increasingly into deficit to buy them, you like this, but at some point I will go back that if I keep going into debt in order to buy your gadgets, right? So who was financing America's deficits? The answer is the rest of the world. The capitalist in Germany, the capitalist in Japan, the capitalist in China, the capitalist in China, they took 70% of the profits they made from selling to the United States primarily and they sent it to New York, to Wall Street to be invested in search of higher returns. This tsunami of capital, which was huge, 70% of world profits effectively were going back to the United States. That was financing the American deficits and at the same time it was the foundation upon which financialization took place because you give Wall Street bankers this tsunami of money every day, even for a few hours or minutes to hold and to find ways of financializing it, creating derivatives out of it and so on. This huge paper trail of, if you want, paper castles of private money minted by Wall Street journals, Wall Street banks, yes, sorry about it. Well, it's what crashed and burned 2008 and that was a moment of truth for financialized globalized capital. The whole system nearly collapsed. Central banks from the G7 and Treasuries got together and refloated finance. They printed 16 trillion American dollars and effectively made all the bankers of the world, Wall Street, City of London, Frankfurt, Paris primarily, they made them whole. While at the same time the governments were imposing massive austerity. So it's between 2008 and now, and let's say 2020, the beginning of the pandemic, you had financial markets that were salvaged, refloated, injected with huge quantities of money and this is why finances never had it so good as they had it after 2008. It's what I call, you've heard me say this before, socialism for the finances, socialism for the oligarchs, socialism because their riches, their wealth was predicated upon publicly produced, publicly minted central bank money while governments were imposing austerity upon everybody else. In the United States, in the United Kingdom, in the Eurozone of course, not just in Greece, in Germany as well. The result was the many didn't have enough money to spend. That brought down investment, business investment. So we had this combination, this huge imbalance in global capitalist economy. We had huge quantities of money in the financial circuits and very low levels of investment. Now that explains deflation. Why the problem of the world between 2009 and 2020, 2021 for that matter was deflation. It's hard for people now who read the newspapers that it's hard to imagine that the problem was not inflation, deflation. Central banks were struggling to push inflation up and they were failing. They were printing and printing and printing but prices were not rising. If anything, they were falling which is a huge problem for capitalism if all prices on average tend to fall because people, if they think that average prices are falling, why buy something today if you can buy cheap, more cheaply tomorrow? And then you don't buy and then you have a problem of demand and then people don't invest, capitalists don't invest. So it's a vicious circle. And that's the problem that we're facing between 2009 and 2020 because of socialism to the bank is in the steady for everybody else. So the remedy from the collapse of the second phase of the post-war era, the first one was Bretton Woods, the second one was the one predicated on deficit in the United States between 1971 and 2008. I call this the period of the global miniatur for reasons that I'm not going to explain comes out to the title of a book of mine. And then we have the third phase, the great recession that begins with the collapse of the pyramid of private money mostly 2008. Then we have the great deflation, I explained it and then we have the pandemic. Now what happens with the pandemic is twofold. The first thing that happens, of course, is the disruption of the supply chains. So while we're all locked down and locked in, the supply chains are out of kilter. We can't spend on going into the movies, I'm going to the theater, I'm going to the restaurant. So we buy more stuff from Amazon.com mostly. So there's an increase in demand for goodies produced all over the place in the globalized capitalist economy. When the supply chains are breaking down. So that starts during the pandemic, certain prices, transport prices and energy prices starts pushing those prices up. At the same time, what did the governments do to deal with the fact that half of the world economy disappeared because of the lockdown? Well, more of what they were doing since 2009 which is to print money and give to the private bankers. Some of that money for the first time after 2009, some of the printed money doesn't go just to the finances, it goes to the people in the form of furlough wages, in the form of benefits in order to keep people alive. So a little bit of money goes to the money. So think of the combination. Supply chains are being disrupted, demand for goods, physical goods goes up because we are locked in and we buy it from Amazon. We have a little bit more money as the mass of people because of furlough wages and so on. So we increase our demand for things whose supply is falling because of the interruption in supply chains. Some prices are beginning to increase. So what happens is the great deflation starts becoming a great inflation. And then the most powerful of the capitalists who had because of the crisis between 2008 to 2020 increased their own capacity or power, their power, their market power over us. Why did they increase their power? Because think about we had 13 years of very low investment. What does low investment mean? It means production capacity goes down. Supply goes down. But that's great for them because what monopolists love is a reduced output. Because when a monopolist produces less then because he's a monopolist and it's a he, right? Mostly let's not be gender neutral here. They can gouge the consumer. They can charge more of it. Think of why Putin now is making more money even though he's selling less oil because we are a monopolist or an oligopolist. A reduction in output is a godsend because you increase your profit, your monopoly profits. So the people who control the conglomerates love the fall in the capacity to produce because of low investment because of supply change, interruption. At the time when prices beginning to bite because they can increase retail prices far more quickly and faster than the increase in wholesale prices. So today, why is it that Meron mentioned that? Why is it that let's say electricity producers making a mint? Because yes, natural gas is going up. Everybody suffers, the many suffer because of increased electricity prices. But producers, and I'm not talking about distributors I'm talking about producers can increase the price of electricity they sell to retail distributors faster than the increase in the cost of production. So this is how we went from the great recession to the great deflation now to the great inflation with stagnation and a new form of the austerity for the many that takes the form of the increased cost of living crisis. Right, what does this mean for us here in Europe and for DM-25? It means comrades that we need to rethink everything. Everything. We had a movement that began in 2015, 2016 as a result of the euro crisis of the snapping out of the Greek spring in 2015 with the referendum, that great grounds well of opposition to austerity, the hope of democratizing the European Union. That's what brought DM-25 into being. Well, folks, the crisis is getting worse. The reasons for having DM and the task of democratizing Europe is getting more pertinent, more topical, more relevant every day. But the beast that we're facing, these oligopolistic, oligarchic, authoritarian European Union is fragmented. The business model of the German Federal Republic, which was the foundation of the European Union is kaput. It's dead in the water. It's finished. There will be no salvation. I know this is a very big statement, but that's why DM exists to make big statements that are backed by facts. The German economic model begins in the early 1950s in the Bretton Woods period that I mentioned. It is predicated upon two things. Cheap labor relative to the labor of France and so on, the labor of France and so on, low labor costs in Germany. In other words, restricted wages. A social market model so workers are looked after, but they are not paid much. Very cheap energy. Germany always enjoyed very low energy costs relative to those of France, Italy and so on, that gave a competitive advantage to the German industrial machine. And global markets that were secured for German business by the United States of America in the 1950s, 60s and so on during Bretton Woods. And then with globalization again secured by the United States of America in the global minotaur era. So German business was guaranteed markets in the periphery of Europe and then later in places like China. So the macroeconomic environment was looked after by the United States up until 2008. Then the whole thing collapses, but it was a time when China was responding to the global crisis of 2008 by cranking up its own investment machine, which created more demand for German goods. What the war in Ukraine and the collapse of this third phase, if you want, remember that we had Bretton Woods and we had a global minotaur period. Then we had a period of the great reflation, the great money printing exercise by central banks that was creating socialism for the bankers and the oligarchs and austerity for everybody else. That period for the German economic model was ideal because countries like Greece and Italy were keeping the exchange rate of the German industry low. So German experts were cheap outside of Germany. Putin was keeping energy costs extremely low. Schroeder's hard sphere reforms were pushing wages low. And that was the foundation for the deep macroeconomic imbalances within the European Union, where Germany, the German economy was running ahead, becoming more and more competitive and pushing countries like France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and so on, deeper and deeper into the red. That broke in 2010, beginning with Greece. This was the Euro crisis. And then what happened was austerity was doubled down upon, right? Low energy cost became even lower for the German industry. China provided the substitute market. So Volkswagen was no longer selling to the Greeks and the Portuguese, they were bankrupt, but they were selling to the Chinese. With the current twist, the era of low energy cost for the German industry is gone, which means, okay, that's one thing, the era of low energy cost is gone. Secondly, what is gone is this globalization system, whereby the United States absorbs the capital of China, right, in order to create the deficits that give rise to demand for German goods. Because from now on, especially with the war in Ukraine, the Chinese are no longer trusting the United States with their savings. The moment the Federal Reserve was given the order by the White House to confiscate $800 billion of the Central Bank of Russia. Let's understand it so that I'm not passing judgment, I'm simply describing it. Chinese capitalists and the Chinese Central Bank suddenly feel that they are dollar assets, they are dollar savings are no longer safe. So China is going to be divesting from the American economy. The savings of the Chinese will no longer be directed to America. That means that the American deficits will no longer be funded by China, not even South Korea, for that matter, which means that America will not be able to keep the German factories going, which in any case will no longer be competitive because energy prices in Germany are going to be increasing. The capacity of the federal government in Germany to run surplus is gone, couple to finish forever. Lidner, the finance minister plans to bring the budget back to balance. He's going to fail. He will declare victory by Greek statistics means. So the German government is going to adopt the methods of Greek governments of yesteryear to fudge the statistics, the macroeconomic statistics. In other words, the German government is going to lie to the German people. It will claim that the budget will be balanced. It will not be balanced. There will be off-budget accounts here and off-budget accounts there. You can see already there are electricity providers who are falling like Uniper. The government will have to bail them out. So that will all happen with borrowed money. So the model of low energy surplus, the trade surplus for the first time now, this semester, for the first time since 2000, Germany is in the red. Germany has a trade deficit for the first time. That will recover. There will be a trade surplus again, but it will be nothing like it used to be. So meanwhile, France and Italy are being torn apart from Germany more and more every day. If you look at the path trajectory of French debt, it's going through the roof. The German debt is going to also rise or stabilize as a proportion of GDP. It will not be falling the way it used to during the euro crisis, but the increase in the debt of France and Italy will be such that the European Union is going to be torn apart. There is no doubt about that. A new debt crisis in the offering, they may not allow it to appear because they will have the ECB buying it and so on, but they're underlying macroeconomic value. So look, I'll cut a long story short. Every assumption we've made about the architecture and the structure of the European Union is gone. I remember, maybe some of you will remember me saying that the result of Berlin crashing countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland and so on was that investment in Germany was very, very low. And I was giving examples such as what's happening in the car industry, that the car industry is failing to catch up with electric car production. Now Volkswagen to give you an example and BMW and others are going to increase to produce a lot of electric cars too late because the value added of these cars, the batteries that official intelligence systems will all be developed and produced in China or elsewhere. So the German model is gone. There are pockets of it still available, like good things that are happening in Europe, but primarily in Germany like biotech when it comes to vaccines and so on, okay? And there will be some investment in sustainable energy in green energy. However, the capacity of Germany and of central Europe, northern Europe to innovate and to compete in the areas where value added is created is gone. We have a very top-down model in the United States and China, you've got research and innovation and development that takes place organically, bottom up in Germany. If it doesn't happen by Volkswagen or bus, it simply doesn't happen. So the growth model of the European Union is coupled, no longer works. There isn't another one to replace it. There isn't even a discussion about it. You can see that the euro is sliding as a result. This is not bad for countries like Greece, for Italy, even for some German exporters, but it signals a structural defeat which is going to get worse in the next winter. In this environment, the great question for us, D25, this is how I end, sorry, this was very long, but look, this is, you asked me a question but I cannot answer in less than half an hour. The question is what do we do? Because the fragmentation of the European Union is going to get worse. All the developments that I described will be a boon for the xenophobic extreme right. The radical center is in Tatters. You can see that everywhere. The social democrats in Germany, gone. Macron, finito. Draghi, on the left, is committed to it because the left never accepted D25's proposal that we create upon your repeat. Not on the European Union deal. Call it what you might. Common progressive program. Each one of them wanted to run with their habits on their own in different directions. So the left has become irrelevant. It actually has died. It doesn't exist anymore. The Greens are presiding over the introduction of new Lignite powered power stations in Germany. It's only the fascists and the very cynical rent seekers in Europe who are running the show. D25, as I keep saying, and this is what really worries me, we are becoming more relevant and more pertinent and more necessary now at the time when democratic politics is becoming less and less possible on a daily basis. Oh, by the way, Boris Johnson bid us very well today, more or less, not on Tendoning Street, but at least, you know, he has fallen on his sword and he's dying slowly as a result of the pressure the sword is putting in his abdomen, which is great news for those of us who abhor his recklessness and his amoral approach to politics, a man who doesn't give a damn about anything except him being in power. But having said that comments, whoever takes our Tendoning stage, the United Kingdom is going to face a far worse result of Johnson's passing. Johnson understood, like good old populists of the past, that austerity doesn't work. The reason Johnson is not has nothing to do with models, it's got nothing to do with parties during COVID. It's got to do with the fact that he's refused to introduce austerity. It is due to the fact that he's given huge quantities of money more than any social democrat has ever given in the last 40 years to the working class. That is a sobering thought for progressives. Thank you, Marilyn. Thank you, Yanis, for putting us in the picture and giving us the macro view. Your internet connection was kind of hanging by a thread, but we got most of it. Half of the comments are, oh, are you doing a podcast now? Because you were frozen a bit. But actually, we do have a podcast as well, guys, you out there. It's dm25.org slash podcast. So if you would like that version and listen to these talks just with audio so you don't have to look at our ugly mugs and have to deal with internet issues, then please do subscribe there. Let's move to Juliana Zeta in Germany for your take. Juliana. Yes, thank you, Marilyn. Hi, everyone. Yeah, I think that when it comes to the current crisis, I want to talk about the perspective of the people of the suffering and so to say. I believe that 10 years ago, I would say the wages were too low as they are today, but now for essential workers, for example, and my family is we're like two essential workers with three children and we have already moved out of the city to lower the costs. Now it does make no difference. It's just like now it's like living in the city without having the benefits of the city because the prices are ridiculously high. So and I believe that in past years, there were crisis and some people felt it a bit more, some people felt it a bit less. Now I believe that it's evident that, for example, the essential workers in general, they're out of air. So it's not just about being able to save a bit money. It's about really not being able to pay the bills, for example, or the upcoming bills, the upcoming gas prices, gas bills that we will all receive for next January and so on. I think this would be like a crossroads moment for many, many essential workers and that, yeah, in my feeling, to be honest, I am expecting a further uprising of these people and we can see it globally all over the world that people are quitting their jobs. They don't want to be servants for society anymore because all they get for it is a shoulder tap and some broken promises and poverty. So this is a bad deal to become a nurse. This is a bad deal to become a teacher and to become anything that society needs. If you see the classical class pyramids, these are the people who are under the pyramid holding it up, holding everything up. With that being said, it's also completely in their power to put an end to the system because they just have to stop doing what they do. It's not hard for them. If all designers in the world would quit their job tomorrow, no problem. If all nurses quit their job tomorrow, big problem. They will be dead people. It will be interesting to see how far, for example, if you look at Germany, the government is the worst government for social week people ever. The ideas to have relief for these people are like, we can't give them 300 Euro one time. It doesn't help. It doesn't help at all. What shall people do with 300 Euros one time if you're having minus 1000 every month? Without having a prospect of getting more money, because for example, if you work in a kindergarten, you will earn what you will earn. You cannot go to your boss and say, I want more money because I cannot pay my bills. It's what you get. It's like, I don't know, it's called tariff in English. Maybe Judith has worked for it. I think that people are on their knees. It's not a question of well, maybe we elect somebody else next time. I think it will reach a tipping point. And I believe that those who are kind of still middle class will not see it coming because for them, it probably feels more like a usual crisis. And the system will somehow manage to get everything again on track. And I do not believe that this will happen this time because many people will not have the option to wait for the system to get better. I think it will crush and I think it will crush because so many people will stop playing this game and because they will have no option. Thank you, Yudhiana. And now let's move to Judith Meyer also in Germany. And if we can also talk about a little the solution here because the M25 is also a political movement with several political parties, including one in Germany. And let's identify what are these sort of short-term steps to easing some of this pain rather than aiming for a system-wide change which is not going to happen overnight. Judith, what do you think? Well, I would like to go back to the basics for a moment here. As Yannis laid out, some corporations are exploiting their ability to make a profit right now. Anyone who can exploit it is exploiting it. And why is this happening? I mean, if we go back to Adam Smith, the butcher, the brewer, the baker, this kind of market economy, if we imagine, let's say the brewer decided it's a public holiday, everyone wants to drink beer. So today it shall cost three times the usual price. What happens in this kind of situation? I think that the brewer would find himself shunned, might be finding it more difficult to survive if people would sell him food at three times the cost. Maybe if there's a shortage of coal in the winter, it would just not be sold to him. It would be priorities to other people. The kids might be shunned at school, the neighbors might not help if there's a fire. This kind of social control is lacking today, mainly because the companies have gotten just too big. They don't have to care about whether they're getting along with people, whether they're being moral, whether they're exploiting, or whether they're contributing to the social fabric. So today, even if 100,000 people suddenly decide to shun Amazon, it doesn't really hurt them. It gets their attention, but it's not enough to even hurt them. These are not local businesses. They don't have the ties to their customers. And traditionally, when businesses got too big to be affected by the environment that they live in, they have been controlled through government regulation. For example, setting a maximum profit margin. I think this is an excellent tool that some governments are also now adopting in some countries or thinking about adopting to set a maximum profit that for example, gas companies can only charge at most 10% more than they buy the stuff for, or also regulations on pollution and so obviously. But today, the problem is that there are some companies that are so big that they're even beyond that level of democratic control. They incorporate in laxed countries, and if it's really necessary, they just buy entire parties, along with the media if necessary. So we're living in oligarchies, and that is the real problem. Nothing and nobody can control these behemoths anymore. And these huge superstructures, these huge corporations, the super rich, they're insatiable, and they don't think anything about destroying our livelihoods, about making, let's say, heating too expensive for the average family. They don't think anything about that. So we have to go back to the basics. And by basics, I mean we are many, they are few, and we're educated. Unlike in the feudal age, we know that the current situation has nothing to do with God's will. We can organize against it. We can shun and arrest any oligarch who thinks that he can buy political decisions. We can break up corporations. Okay, that's going into the long term, but I would definitely break up any corporation that is too big to be influenced by the local people. We can abolish the entire system of tradeable shares and ensure that only the employees decide what the company shall do. This is an idea of Janus, by the way, from the book Another Now. So I think that there are definitely options, but I don't think we'll make much progress at all while we have these huge companies that are not in a social setting, that don't have to care about their reputation, that don't have to care about being shunned. Judith, can I ask you something? I mean, what is the missing link here? If people know, for example, there was an article in the UK, I don't know if this is the same in every country, but from June 14th, how the wholesale prices of petrol have decreased and the retail prices are hitting new records. Why doesn't an article like that get people so insanely angry that they protest outside the fuel stations, that they mob the CEO of those energy companies or the distributors or whatever? Like what is the missing link between that news being out there and people becoming mobilized? Is it just a question of organization? Is it a question of people just being, frankly, tired after the pandemic? What do you think is missing there in that mix? I think that it may be the media capture and the political capture because it's quite hard to get to this information. Most people have a kind of intuitive understanding of the economics, as in, of course, there's a war in Ukraine, we're trying to divest from Putin's gas, so of course these things should be more expensive, so they're more accepting of these prices. And there's nobody really telling them that no, actually 50% of the increase, or of course it depends on the country and the cost, but most of this increase is actually just profiteering. If we could have major news organizations trace these profits to a particular company or a particular person, I think that there would be violence. Thank you, Judith. On that note of people-powered protest, Dushan, our campaign coordinator, what's your take? Dushan Payovitch from Montenegro, go for it. Thanks, my friend. So as I usually go, I will take it from an international perspective and then lower it down towards the national one. So the thing is just to take off the sounds. The thing is that if you're wondering why your electricity bills are so high, you should definitely know that 834 billions of pure profits, it's what fossil fuel industry got. So it's not inflation, if you ask me, or at least not just inflation, it's price gouging. It's something that benefits only the oligarchs and not the people in the world, in Europe. So what is also happening and what is really, really connected to this topic is that Ursula von der Leyen is actually arranging so-called green transition with organizations, companies like Shell and EON. They also pronounced gas and nuclear as green and labeled it as such, which we are opposing with our Don Peyton Green campaign. That happened yesterday and we won't stop spreading the news. You can expect some of the new information in that next newsletter. What is also happening in this matter is that EU is opposing to ban diesel and petrol cars now. So there are a lot of news that are heavily intervened with ecology and with economy or price gouging, as I said. Why is that? Well, because it's not just the system. Yeah, the system is completely rigged. Capitalism or techno feudalism is crazy. It's bad, but also it's these people that according to psychology, according to science, are sociopaths because companies actually want CEOs to have narcissistic and sociopathic traits. We need to overthrow these people. We need to limit these people and we need to have the laws against all of this. Now regarding Montenegro, what happened here is that in search for higher wages, our previous government abolished health insurance fee from gross salary to get higher minimum wage and minimum wage and average wage. Of course, that led to price gouging because they didn't have any amendment in the annex of the law to stop it or anything like that, basically. And it also led to the total collapse of public health, which is the plan all along. As you know, in these countries that we call countries that are in transition, which Montenegro, according to you, is still are, is still. So this government is not doing anything to stop this. All they are doing is solving church issues instead of focusing on EU integration, on our justice system, on corruption, oncologies and everyday lives of citizens. That's why in a bit more than an hour, I will be on streets of Podgorica with other comrades where we are organizing all night protests. So if you are watching this from Montenegro, make sure to join us. And I hopefully see you in the streets. Make sure to say hello. Thank you. Thank you. Dushan, Johannes, Johannes Fair in Germany. For yours. Thanks. I have to say that I want to start by saying that I just met yesterday evening going to a bar here in Berlin. I met a person after talking a little bit that told me with tears in his eyes that he went to a soup kitchen just last week for the first time in his life because he just wasn't able to pay food anymore. And the other week, I met someone at the train station that was asking me for money, an old lady pensioner, as she told me, that is just not having to do this, having to stand at the train station asking people for money because there's just nothing left. So I think this is the reality for many people in a rich country like Germany. And the first thing I wanted to say and the other point I want to make about the current situation is another event that happened a couple of days ago is that the last production plan for rotor blades for wind turbines closed here in Germany. So something that we really should be doing and should be doing more is actually getting shut down. And the same happened to the solar panel production that we had here some years ago. Of course, many reasons for that are the free trade agreements and all this stuff that we, yeah, the policy that was put into place years ago. And at the same time, now there's new infrastructures for fossil fuels being built and they have long lasting contracts for gas, for lignified gas from the US, from Qatar. So it's really like, for me, it feels like we're digging our own grave. The government is really going into the wrong direction. So what are we working on here in Germany, for example, with Meta 25, for example, of course they have the Green New Deal, massive investment into renewable energies, green social mobility, sustainable heating, energy savings, all these are all the things that we actually would have to invest in. And at the same time, and I think that is going to be very important towards the autumn, that we should cap the prices for energy so that just people don't really fall into the abyss that they are already on the edge. But unfortunately, of course, the current government, yeah, I just heard, I saw a video of the speaker for energy of the German Greens saying that, yeah, that they just cannot cap the price for energy for very long, because that's too expensive. And that's coming from the same people who just invested 100 billion euros into the German army. So there, there was money available, of course, for everyday people, there's nothing. It's really, yeah, applauding, and every time I'm getting very angry when I hear this. And we are getting into dangerous waters, because as Juliana also said before, people will just not keep up with this. So I think what we should all do is organize. It's also something that Judith mentioned. No matter if you join a movement like the M25 or a party like META 25 here in Germany, I think it's also important for us to get organized in all kinds of ways. For example, at the union in your workplace, at the citizen initiative around your corner. So because I think that's going to be the most important thing for us collectively being able to put pressure on the establishment to actually do something against the inflation and against the cost of living crisis. Thank you, Johannes. And in terms of potential solutions, I'm looking at an article in The Guardian from a couple of weeks ago. And it talks about Unite, the union in the UK. And they're a very dynamic new leader. And one of the things they do, which I mean, I can't understand why more people don't do this to you. They've hired a forensic accountant. And they go through the accounts of some of these profiteering corporations to identify all the dirty and dodgy ways that they make their money. And they prepare what they call a dirt dossier. And then they contact their contractors, their clients, their suppliers. They contact these people who are working with these companies and they convince them using the dirty dossier not to work with them. And they've won plenty of battles like this. And I think this is one thing which could be done, it could scale up. Anyone with any kind of forensic accounting experience that's mad about this kind of thing could be getting in on this and following the lead from what these people in Unite are doing. And there are plenty of other potential solutions too that are short-term solutions but might make a difference in terms of changing the image of some of these corporations which of course will affect their bottom line. Eric Edmund, the floor is yours, based in Brussels. Thank you, Mehran. Hi, everybody. Look, unpopular opinion based on what you just said. I think we need to be very careful between because we have finite time, we're all finite beings, we're here today, gone tomorrow. And we have only so much time to dedicate to political activity, political engagement, especially those of us who are not lucky enough to do it professionally, which is our lives. There's only so much time that you can spend getting educated, figuring out who is on which camp and the rest of it, and then also dedicating some of your own time in order to create change. I think the biggest thing that we can do is to at least build on solid foundations, work towards things that actually work on the long term. And there are some political actions that feel a little bit, and I'm sorry to say this, I've been involved in many of them myself, right, like I'm not pointing any fingers here, but it's often a little bit like therapy, things that we do sort of like self-care in order to feel like in this awful, awful world that we really don't like and we really don't feel represented by, we're doing a little bit of good. But at the end of the day, you know, whether or not I get involved in my local community garden and grow biological vegetables, it doesn't stop the fact that, you know, supermarkets in Belgium create about a billion ton of food waste every year. What am I trying to say? It sounds a bit bleak, but I feel like the crisis that we're facing right now, excuse me, a bit under the word, the crisis that we're facing right now is extrapolated and really made ten times worse by the fact that there isn't political will to work on top level solutions. There's no political leadership in our countries, no political leadership in the European Union. There's no Willy Brandt and Olof Palme and Mitterrand, you know, take him or leave him politically, but at least there were people with ambition, there were people, you know, with a plan. And that doesn't exist in Europe right now, what we have instead, it's a political sort of elite that has fed off the status quo for decades and is where it is today because of that status quo and will do everything in its power to maintain it, even when faced with what to the rest of us seems like an obvious total collapse of that status quo and a need to adapt. They won't see that until it's too late. So our biggest problem here, I feel, is that we have a crisis of self-confidence. We're not really taking that fight where it needs to be. We're keeping to smaller individual fights organized by individual organizations rather than uniting and bringing that fight at the level where solutions could be created that would have a much bigger impact. So what I'm saying basically, and this comes also from the experience that David and I had together with other DMs in Strasbourg this week when we were there to oppose the taxonomy which paints gas and nuclear energy as green. That was co-led by a number of young political organizations such as Fridays for Future and the rest of it. And there was a very interesting clash in that narrative. The people would take the floor to speak of that demonstration and they would start with this very polemical message of we don't believe your lies. We don't believe you anymore. We know you're not going to do it. And then at the end, they would say, so vote against the taxonomy. So at the same time, you're identifying that the people that you're speaking to really are not planning on doing any of the things that you want to do. And that is proven by the fact that that taxonomy did go through, as we saw the day before yesterday. And at the same time, you continue to separate your own political activity from theirs. It's them and us, the people on the street and the people in power. That's not democracy. That doesn't make any sense. If we're serious about this, about any of this, then what we really need to be talking about is how do we get those people out and us in? How do we get those kids from the street to be the ones taking political decisions? Why have we separated those two spheres? That is not a democracy. And that starts in our own heads, trying to find these smaller solutions, smaller actions that don't really go all the way. So basically what I'm trying to say is that that is really what we need to be talking about. That is really what makes the current crisis that we're facing truly existential, the fact that the solution will not come from the people in power. So our task is even bigger than it seems. It's not the radical change of the system. It's the radical change of the people who run the system so that the system can be radically changed. That is the whole package of what we're facing. And unless we really start tackling that problem, everything that we're doing is essentially damage control and the maintenance, the humanization, if you like, of this miserable world that is being built by the people in power. Eric, just so that I understand your point exactly, are you saying that for something this big, the only answer is sort of a top-down institutional change, I mean, running in elections? Because I think that the answer, I think, lies on both ends here, the top and the bottom. I think people like us definitely should be, and we will, run in elections, create political parties that can manage this whole thing differently and hopefully better. But I think at the same time, between elections, it's the responsibility of everybody across society and the responsibility of organizers like us to try and make this easier to confront power in between elections and do these kinds of grassroots activities that can change the narrative and pave the way for larger change? Well, what would you say to that? Well, really, that is not something that can be answered in under 20 minutes. Essentially, what I would tell you is that our representative political system is broken and that having elections and engaging as a democratic citizen once every four years is nonsense. It makes no sense. It's built around a system where our primary role is to be consumers and workers. And the whole democracy thing is a sideshow, but you can't really run a democracy. Like that, you need people to have the time to engage with these things and not just on their off time off work. It needs to become part of what it is to be part of society. It needs to be our job, really. If you're going to be part of a community, it's a job and it needs to be treated as such. So it's a much bigger issue that we could be debating for ages. But what I'm really saying is I'm the first one to really support all of these initiatives, but at the same time, we also need to be honest with ourselves that those initiatives on their own will not save the world. And if that is our main focus or even the majority of our focus goes towards those initiatives, then we are basically abandoning the world to doom. And that is not good enough. We cannot afford to leave high level politics to the people who want to do that stuff because those are the kind of people that are constantly undermining whatever other initiative we do. We give off all of that power to them and we limit ourselves to the political periphery, if you like. And there's no time for that. We need to have much braver, ambitious action. Thanks, Eric. And I mean, I'd agree with you, the power to vote versus the power of the people to vote and then the power of the corporations to lobby governments. There's a massive mismatch there. A great mismatch. And I should note that Eric was a couple of days ago, as he mentioned, walking around in Strasbourg in 40 degrees in a hazmat suit. So he's no alien to grassroots action. Okay, Amir. Amir Kiayi, our policy coordinator. For us yours. Thank you, Mehran. Just sort of trading off a little bit from what you said right to the end is that the corporations are not only lobbying here, but in fact, they're actually owning the politicians. I mean, in a classic sense in the Netherlands recently, the prime minister's cell phone rings, and this is on the news, rings at 6 a.m. in the morning from a phone call from the CEO of Unilever being demanded that the dividend tax be abolished, otherwise the corporation will move to the UK. And that's how policy decisions have been made and are being made in this country. And this is not the only country in the world where phone calls, unmonitored, unrecorded, unknown, are impacting people's lives on a day-to-day basis. So in preparation for tonight, and I'll try to be short and I'll be going a bit over the time, yesterday the United Nations World Food Program, UNICEF, and WFP, et cetera came up with the annual report on hunger. And the numbers are out of this world. We're looking at about almost 900 million people affected by hunger. Adding to this is not a 2.3 billion people who are moderately or severely food insecure. Add to this another 100 million people who are now classified as internally displaced to refugees and we can add to this thing. And on a planet of about 8.5 billion people, that's a lot of people who are being affected by hunger, by energy crisis and so on and so forth. We can see Sri Lanka is the latest case where there's no more few to go from A to B or anything to that effect. That people are going, grandparents are going on a boat across India to try to escape from Sri Lanka. That's a situation in that part of the world. So we are in living in this world. We're on the other hand, just recently, the Chief Financial Officer of BP, Marie Ashikloss. I hope I'm pronouncing it wrongly, actually, said in February that after they've made 100 billion euros collectively as a fossil fuel company as the first quarter, certainly, and I'm quoting, certainly it's possible that we're getting more cash than we know what to do with. Add to this the almost $6 trillion every year that fossil fuel companies are getting in subsidies. And you can see, you can begin to imagine the significance and balance that we have in what our priorities need to be and ending global hunger. It only needs about $300 billion a year. So we're not even talking about, we can reduce fossil fuel subsidies by 10% and end global hunger. So it's not an issue of money. It comes down to the issue of political will and political representation, meaning that the people, what's important for the public, we're talking about the whole night here. And those in power are just not carrying our interests through and this and hence therefore, and Eric touched on it brilliantly earlier, where our model and why we see the way the change needs to happen. So please, the audience needs to take this into consideration because we're also seeing that with the deterioration of the latest German Bundesbach data shows that if the gas shortage hits Germany severely, the GDP will drop by 10% in 2023 in Q1. And so we're going to see possibly rapid securitization of state response, allow what we saw tragically, what happened to Jayland Walker, who was shot with 60 bullets a few nights ago. And just bear in mind that that's the American way of dealing with security issues. And so I hope the good people of Finland and Sweden are taking whatever chances that have left to not join NATO because they're going to be on the front lines and they're going to be fighting against, for the benefit of America down to the last Sweden, Finland and the rest of humanity as we see it. A lot to pack in there, but thanks very much. Thank you for that, Amir. Very important points. A couple of comments from our friends who are watching us live now on the YouTube chat. Lisa says in the US, lobbyists write policy and hand it to their puppets. Christian says, I don't think the system of represented democracy is broken. I think education, vision and focus is lacking among people who are willing to run for political office. Anton says, the first task is to legitimize radical with a goal to press ahead with radical ideas and change. And DV says, people from the system do not change the system. Change needs to come from the outside. I think we've gone over by 15 minutes. It's a really interesting chat and these kinds of chats always end up kind of going into different directions and I could do this for a couple of hours, but I don't know if all of you can. I think we should probably wrap up. So Janis, perhaps I could bring you back in just to make a quick summary or a quick conclusion. No, I don't think there is any need for a summary, but conclusion can always come up with one and it has to be the same one. Again and again and again. As you and Eric and others have indicated, indicated, intimated, we have to fight at all fronts. There's no question. I don't think that it's a legitimate question to say, do we need to fight this at the top? Do we need to fight it at the bottom? Do we need to fight this in Northern Europe, in Southern Europe, in Eastern Europe, in Western Europe? We need to fight everywhere at once. We need to work with movements here in Greece with Mera25, our electoral wing here in Greece. We and the various name supporting movements, we are not trying to absorb them, we're not trying to exploit them, we're going to take them over. We're there to help them. We're there to work side by side with them, learn from them. At the same time, we're running elections, so we fight in parliament. That's what it was too. At every level, folks look, no movement like ours can create the momentum for revolutionary radical change. This is a historical process, which is too large for a movement like ours, or any movement for that matter, to generate. What our movement must do, we must work at every level, waiting for the moment in history when the wave comes, because we had a wave that came in the last 20 years, so in 2008, it was a fantastic opportunity for a world rebellion against the forces of capital. We were like stupid surfers not prepared for the wave. We were looking the other way when the wave came. Then there was another wave in 2010 here in Europe. We missed it. There was a wave that we nearly called in 2015 here in Greece with the referendum. We just had the seventh anniversary from it. We missed it. We must not miss the next one, so we need to organize at every level to prepare for the next wave that history will churn out to rise it and to be on top of it, and to use its energy for progressive purposes. Thank you for that, Yanis. And you out there, if you would like to be part of what Yanis is just describing, all you have to do is go to dm25.org slash join to sign up and join us. Basically, we've got Zoom calls every month. Well, I think even more frequently than that, but at least every month that are open to everybody that you can come through your questions at us and be onboarded and get assigned roles and tasks and everything. It would be really wonderful to have you there. And if you would like to run for the CC, in other words, the Coordinating Collective, sorry, I'm slipping into actor and in-mode there, those are the people who coordinate the movement. Then please do the elections. I'm just looking at the timeline here. You've got until the 24th of July. We started accepting candidacies on 1st of July. And until the 24th, you can send in your candidacy. And if you get voted in, you'll be joining us here in this chat room and in these weekly, fortnightly calls. And Dushan is just reminding me that it's every week the open Zoom call. Thank you for correcting me on that, Dushan. Thank you again to my panel. Thank you, you out there for listening and see you again at the same time. Same place, two weeks from now. Take care and stay.