 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Lebanon's economic crisis seems to be escalating by the month. According to media reports, the currency, the lira, has lost more than 15% of its value since the beginning of the year. Protests also took place in several parts of the country on Monday over the worsening economic situation. The crisis is not something new, but has been ongoing for years, especially in the period since 2019. And the people have taken to the streets multiple times against the political elite and the ruling class. How is the economy of Lebanon structured? And what lies at the heart of the crisis? How has it affected the people of the country? Dania Khalik of Breakthrough News explains. So Lebanon has been undergoing an economic collapse for the last two years now, a little over two years. It began in late 2019 when basically Lebanon had a Ponzi scheme economy that was set up after the Civil War in the 1990s. And that Ponzi scheme economy was set up by Lafayette Haridi, the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, in collaboration with a man named Riyadh Salame, who used to work for Merrill Lynch, but went from Merrill Lynch in France to come be the head of the Lebanese central bank. And together they created this Ponzi scheme economy where the central bank essentially borrowed money from commercial banks to fund Lebanese imports. And Lebanon never developed a productive sector. So the only real sector Lebanon that existed for people to have jobs and to bring in foreign currency was the banking sector. And the way it brought in foreign currency was by offering really high interests to people, particularly Lebanese expatriates, to put their money in Lebanese banks in dollars or in lira, the local currency, and they could make really high interest rates higher than they could make in, let's say, Goldman Sachs in New York. And so a lot of people put their money in Lebanese banks to make these high interest rates. And this worked for a number of years. And whenever this started to fail, the international community, and when I say the international community, I mean the Americans, the French and the Saudis, would get together and have a conference and basically bail the Lebanese out. And they would basically continue to fund this Ponzi scheme economy by doing so. They had a number of conferences. They called them the Cedar conferences throughout the 2000s and onwards. And the reason they continued to fund this Ponzi scheme economy and praise the central bank, Hajri al-Salamiyah, is because these officials who were incredibly corrupt, who were running this Ponzi scheme, were allies of the West. And they saw, the West saw this as an opportunity to basically invest in Lebanon to push back against Hezbollah. But after around 2016, they started to give up on this idea, particularly after Trump became president, because the Trump administration was very hawkish towards the Middle East. They had this maximum pressure campaign against the Iranians, which extended to any groups across the Middle East that they perceived as being an extension of the Iranians, meaning Hezbollah. And so this maximum pressure campaign extended against Hezbollah too. So the Saudis and the Americans basically decided just let Lebanon fall, stop propping up this Ponzi scheme economy. And that's when the foreign currency stopped coming into the country from the international community. And as we know with the Ponzi scheme economy, once you don't have a constant inflow of money coming in, it falls down like a house of cards. And that's what happened in Lebanon in 2019. The economy collapsed. The banks basically stopped letting people take their money out because it became clear that the money didn't exist. And since then, the economy has been in complete freefall with very little help to the average person, not only people who lost their money in Lebanese banks, which really has crushed the middle class in Lebanon, which doesn't really exist anymore, but even to poor people who didn't even have money in banks. People who are now being impacted in a really devastating way by the collapse of the local currency, because this has caused an inflation crisis. So the Lebanese lira to the dollar used to be 1,500 lira equals one dollar. And that was pegged at the dollar rate since the 90s. But now that currency exchange has changed to 30,000 lira equals a dollar. And the lira continues to devalue and devalue further. So people's incomes, if they still have jobs, 60% of Lebanese people are paid in lira. Their incomes are pretty much worthless now, because the salaries are not keeping up with the change in the dollars. Furthermore, the government is no longer able to subsidize things like fuel, which are bought in dollars, things like anything. Everything important to Lebanon is paid for in dollars. Medicine and fuel used to be subsidized at a very high rate by the Lebanese government. That's no longer the case. So now gasoline is really difficult to afford. And medicines are very difficult to afford. There's also a shortage. There's also hoarding. There's also many mafias in Lebanon that control these different sectors and monopolize them and are trying to make a profit off of the end of the subsidies. And this has also led to a bigger problem of, you've heard a lot of, there's electricity blackouts in Lebanon. The reason for that is the country can no longer afford to purchase fuel to run the power stations in Lebanon. So the state is right now providing about two hours to four hours of electricity a day to people. That means the rest of the day, people who can afford it are dependent on private generators to have electricity. And there's also a mafia that controls the private generator industry. So Lebanon is a complete disaster right now. It's in free fall. And the people are suffering dramatically while those who are in power who actually caused this crisis continue to be protected by the international community. And when I say that I mean the West, because they are the allies of the West against Hezbollah. The past few years have also seen a major political crisis in the country with multiple governments coming to power but failing to gain much legitimacy in the eyes of the people. How has the political elite and the ruling class sought to respond to this crisis other than talking about assistance from the IMF? How do sections of the political spectrum not aligned to the West propose to deal with this crisis? There have been certain measures put forward, certain proposals by those in Lebanon in the ruling class who made their money outside of the country. Therefore, they're not so invested in maintaining the current economic situation in the country. But the other portion of the ruling class in Lebanon that is invested in the current economy of the country that owns the various monopoly entities that control the fuel mafias that make money off of the medicine mafias. These ruling elites, the ones that actually profited from the economic crisis are the biggest obstacle to actually fixing anything or mitigating the worst impacts of this collapse. And these are the closest allies to the Americans. They one of the biggest issues right now is trying to release IMF funds to help keep Lebanon afloat as it tries to figure out what to do. And the only way to access those IMF funds is to have a central bank audit. But a central bank audit would implicate those responsible for the collapse as well as those who profited off of these insanely high interest rates and moved their money out of the country before the collapse because they knew the collapse was coming. And so these people are very close allies of the West. The West has been very hesitant to go after them. The Yatzelemi, the central bank head, there's a few investigations into him in France and Switzerland, but these are unlikely to go anywhere. They're really just symbolic and for show. So because these particular corrupt officials who were America's allies, who were France's allies, who were Saudi Arabia's allies would be the most implicated. There's a level of protection and immunity being provided to them that's making it impossible to really move forward to get over, to move past this crisis and to fix anything in the economy. And as long as those obstacles to dealing with the central bank, to auditing the central bank, as long as those obstacles to forcing people to give money that they stole from the country back, as long as those obstacles exist, as long as Lebanon continues to have an economy that depends so much on Gulf states, which are now blockading Lebanon to punish it for being a host to Hezbollah, as long as Lebanon continues to have the system, it's going to continue to suffer from this economic collapse that, by the way, Western countries continue to blame on local corruption. And it's true, Lebanon has a terrible amount of local corruption that contributed to this crisis. However, that's not the entire story. The international community is absolutely complicit in this crisis and is playing a role in choking Lebanon to try to use this economic crisis to collapse and kind of crush Hezbollah. So as far as the parties that have power in Lebanon go, there are no real parties that are offering radical solutions because none of them are really economically radical. Like we don't have a strong leftist movement in Lebanon that could offer the kind of solutions that Lebanon needs. However, I think the closest party, the closest that comes, that anybody comes to that is Hezbollah. You know, Hezbollah gives speeches and talks about the need for Lebanon to become self-sufficient in food production, for Lebanon to stop depending on foreign interests, for Lebanon to turn to the East, to turn to China, to turn to Iran, because the West is not going to save Lebanon. For Lebanon to have more economic integration and cooperation with its neighbors like Syria and Iraq, in spite of the U.S. sanctions that block Lebanon from having an economic relationship with its neighbors, Syria. So these are important and good solutions. The problem is that there is such a polarization inside the Lebanese government. There are so many ruling elites that prefer to stick by the Americans, that prefer to suck up to the Saudis and try to stay friends with the Gulf states and be anti-Iran and anti-China. And as long as the West has these kinds of clients in Lebanon, you're going to constantly have obstacles to pushing these more radical solutions because Hezbollah is a powerful group. It's a powerful political party, but it does not control the government. And it can't control the government. And if it attempted to control the government, you would probably see some sort of military intervention in Lebanon against them.