 Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. 12th of November. Give the people what they want. Coming to you from people's dispatch. That's Prashant and Zoe. Zoe is in an airport. A fleeing from the COP26 in Glasgow. And I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. Very pleased to be with you. Today is the last day of the negotiations at COP. Not a police convention. It's the conference of parties, the 26th one. Regarding, well, climate change or the climate catastrophe. Zoe, bring us up to speed on the feeling at COP26. And where things stand, at least on the streets of the, of Glasgow. Thanks so much, Vijay. I mean, we spent a very productive, interesting week in Glasgow. Participating largely in the people's summit and other events related to that. The global day of action on, you know, last Saturday. I think by and large people are quite upset with the outcome of the COP26. Feeling like, you know, as the crisis continues to get worse, as we're seeing, you know, more intense impacts of climate devastation, islands disappearing, forest fires ravaging, you know, large parts of the globe, floods happening in places that were unseen before, that people still aren't taking this seriously. And in the sense that, you know, there's been a lot of discussion of, you know, very kind of small mechanisms. Okay, we're going to do X to limit, you know, the emissions. We're going to do Y to maintain the temperature gap. But really when it comes to rethinking how, you know, most of these countries approach production and consumption. We're talking specifically about global North countries. There hasn't been really any attention to this. And I think a large part of this element also of not rethinking has to do with militarism, the military industrial complex. Many activists that we spoke with, especially from Code Pink, from, you know, World Without War, other organizations that have been working tirelessly to bring up the very important issue of militarism in climate devastation. There's something that's completely not spoken about. The U.S. military is one of the largest contributors to climate devastation, not only, you know, in the actual, you know, destroying the environment with bombings with other sorts of military campaigns, but also to maintain the structure of 800-plus military bases across the world. This is one of the crucial measures that was raised and not a word. Not a word was mentioned except for a brave journalist, Abbey Martin, who did go into the sessions and ask Point Blank, U.S. legislators, about what they're going to do about militarism, and they really gave no answer. Other crucial issues, of course, the climate fund which we spoke about last week, you know, $100 billion a year promised by global North countries to support the most impacted nations by climate change, these islands that are disappearing, these small nations that are not able to do a green transition because, you know, they're former colonies. They have to pay massive debts to their former imperial masters, even amid a COVID crisis, even amid this environmental catastrophe. So all of these issues remain unaddressed, and so when we see leaders like Boris Johnson and Joe Biden getting up, even former President Barack Obama, you know, pleading on the world to take action, it just really feels like empty words when they are not able to really give any concessions when it comes to changing the mode, you know, of production of consumption that exists in their countries, which is the largest, again, contributing factor to climate change. So it's not going to matter how many bicycles people use, how many reusable water bottles they use when these countries continue to operate in the same way they always have been. And I think it was really inspiring, you know, despite all of that, kind of a grim outlook, it was still very exciting to be, you know, part of the People's Summit, seeing all these, you know, activists on the ground who are fighting to protect the climate, to protect the environment, you know, hearing their proposals for a, you know, a green future, what a just transition would look like. Vijay, you were on a panel two days back about, you know, what an actual just global green new deal would look like. What does that mean for the global south? What does the global north green new deal look like in terms of, you know, paying reparations, supporting technological transfers to the global south? I think these are the key issues that this space brought up and think that we need to take forward when really engaging in a true class-centered and imperialist, you know, having the analysis of imperialism when we're thinking about environment and climate change. And I know that in the coming weeks, People's Dispatch and Globetrotter will have a number of stories that Zoe and I will put together. The streets of Glasgow resounded with two slogans. One of them was blah, blah, blah, which was a comment made by the young Greta Thunberg in response to the kind of conversations taking place inside the green zone. You know, we now got used to calling places where these important people meet the green zone. I only think about Baghdad and Iraq, where it was the US occupations green zone felt a little bit like that, blah, blah, blah, said Greta. That was all across the cityscape. The second slogan was change the system, not the climate. I thought that was quite interesting. Not an attitude available inside the negotiating rooms. Nonetheless, nonetheless, this is very significant. The United States in China did sign the same piece of paper, a US-China memorandum of sorts on the issue of climate. There are three things important in my mind about this memorandum, one of them that they in fact signed it, that they sat down together and they produced a joint declaration. It's very significant in the midst of the war on words particularly imposed by Washington DC on the Chinese government, on the Chinese people. It's significant that the Biden administration, the Xi administration put down a declaration together. I think we should take some relief from that. The second important thing is that the declaration said that the two countries would work together and work in the multilateral system to reduce carbon emissions. I think this is significant. It puts a lot of pressure on the United States now to meet some of the targets. China has already pledged to go to net neutrality, net zero. We know that the term net zero is actually not a credible term. It doesn't mean zero carbon emissions, friends. Don't get misled by this. It's a kind of branding exercise. It means lowered carbon emissions, but still the countries, particularly the United States, pledged to advance the decline of carbon emissions. That's important. But the third very significant thing is that the declaration talked about methane. Now, methane is the second most prevalent greenhouse gas. And here we have an open door. Methane or conversations about methane lead us to discuss the farming crisis in the world. The farming crisis. Look at what the farmers in India have been doing now. A year of protest around Delhi and in other places in Haryana and Punjab, Western Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and so on. Really well developed farmers protest. They are protesting. We've talked about Iraq where this year farmers have reported to the Ministry of Agriculture. Only one third of the land is being farmed. These are significant issues. The issue of drought of agriculture, of corporate farming and so on. And the methane explosion takes place principally also because of increased consumption of meat products and so on. All of this is on the table now, given that the United States and China signed a paper saying, let's discuss methane. It was not much discussed at COP26. Even the day when agriculture was to be on the table. They discussed things like supply chain problems, liberalization of trade and so on. This is not the way to talk about how we're going to reduce methane. What one should do about creating nutritional food, the question of corporate capture on food and so on. Not on the table, but raised as a consequence of it being noted down in the declaration by China and the United States. Now we should not exaggerate this declaration right after that. Jake Sullivan made a throwaway remark saying the United States is going to work with Pacific Rim countries, East Asian countries to build an economic alignment that essentially the way his language sounded without China. Xi Jinping responded at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit saying, look, we don't want to return to the world of the Cold War. We don't want to have these trade blocks that restrict access from one country or the other. The problem faced by the United States is it's all very well to create these alignments. But for most of the countries in East Asia, in fact, for many parts of the world, China is the principal trading partner. So they cannot afford to join these packs. It's a move that I think to some extent is a little bit politically aggressive. It's not really economically sensible. And I think this is clear. And I think this has been made clear by trade negotiators who don't want to enter into a kind of exclusionary pact with the United States against China. But this is where we are still. I think we should pause and say the declaration between China and the United States of some significance. It's not just the waste of paper that we often assume these things are now waste of paper. I wish someday we could have a paper that talked about the rights of the people of Western Sahara where that piece of paper is taken seriously. Prashant, what is happening in Morocco and in Western Sahara? This is a very important month because this actually marks about just about a year since the Moroccan forces launched a major escalation in terms of the situation in Western Sahara. They attacked the buffer zone, peaceful protesters. They attacked peaceful protesters and forced the Western Sahara, the Polisario front of Western Sahara to also respond by saying that they could not stick to the ceasefire anymore. But over the past one year, of course, there have been a lot of incidents. Morocco is continuing human rights violations in the region. So recently Qadessa, which is one of the most important organizations that talks about the issue to the Sahara people, has released a report where it has indicted both the Red Cross and the international UN framework which deals with this issue for not really doing enough on the issue of Western Sahara on the issue of those who are suffering under Moroccan occupation. So that's one side. On the other side, it's important to note that just a few days ago, the king of Morocco has said that Western Sahara is a non-negotiable issue. And again, recently, a couple of days later, Morocco's foreign minister said that they wanted to change, turn the page definitively as far as Western Sahara is concerned. Now they, of course, they have foreign ministers talking about this issue in the context of tensions with Algeria, which has been supportive of the Sahara people. But it's important to note, of course, that over the past one year has been a very important year in the country as far as issues concerned, also because we saw the Abraham Accords. Morocco joined the Abraham Accords. Donald Trump giving legitimacy to Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara in return for Morocco, recognizing Israel, one of the most cynical deals that we have seen in recent times. Recognize one occupation in return for another. So that was a huge game changer as far as the situation on the ground was concerned. And at this point of time, I think it's very important to go back to, when we talked about COP26, we talked about some of the commitments that are made, some of the agreements that are made of international nature which are binding. And the fact is that there is supposed to be a referendum that the UN has to conduct, which is not being conducted because of Morocco's, you know, Morocco's intransigence for lack of better word. So in this context, I think very important to keep returning to this issue again and again, there have been multiple human rights violations for it. I believe on November 5th, there was an airstrike in which at least two civilians accrued a number of, you know, there were instances of say civilians being targeted with missiles by the Moroccan forces as well. And a lot of these incidents often sort of, you know, go under the radar because then maybe the number of casualties is not say that high for the media to take notice. It's not one of those issues. And the media has also gotten used to a situation where it takes many of these issues of occupation as, you know, granted. We see the same with Israel and Palestine as well, except when there's a major escalation. Otherwise, it's just something that happens regularly. So I believe that, you know, the fact that this is the anniversary of that very, you know, that very unfortunate attack by Morocco and the fact that there was no international condemnation. In fact, Morocco was actually rewarded by the United States and the fact remains that the Joe Biden administration has not substantially reversed any of its positions either, especially on the Abraham Accords. So as far as the people of Western Sahara are concerned, it's continuing. And we spoke recently to one of the representatives of Kodesa who pointed out that the Saharavi people have been patient for decades now. I mean, they were promised a referendum. They were promised an internationally agreed diplomatic solution to be decades since that promise was made. And that was 1990, four or three decades. And the fact remains that nothing has changed on the ground. The situation has in fact gone worse. So how long do we expect the people of Western Sahara to be patient? How long do we expect the people of Palestine to be patient with all these international commitments that are made? I just, you know, thrown to the winds by the United States, its allies and, you know, the situation, the ground is allowed to change to the extent where these powers can finally say, okay, we agreed to this 30 years ago, but now unfortunately everything is different. So we need to have a new reality, which is really the idea that Morocco is also pushing for. So an important anniversary to Mark. A new reality. You know, it's interesting how reality that word gets used facts on the ground, new realities. This that and the other thing on the backs of ordinary people new reality in Afghanistan, not so very new for many people Prashant. You know, when the winter starts to set in in places like Afghanistan, it is a moment of great peril. People are now I think realize that before the Taliban took over in earlier this year. Half of Afghanistan's gross domestic product came from foreign aid, which has been largely suspended. There have been some pledges and so on but not enough has come in. This includes food aid, very significant. The food and agriculture organization just released a statement recently saying two thirds of Afghans are going to struggle with food from now till the end of winter. That's about 25, 26 million people are going to struggle with for food from now till the end of winter. That's several months. The two provinces of Badakhshan and Nuristan are going to freeze in. And you know, recently I was in touch with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies and you know been communicating with them about what's going to happen in Badakhshan. I had written a series of stories for Globetrotter and people's dispatch from the Wakhan corridor, which is in Badakhshan up there in the north. You know, Fezabad, the main city, there's a great concern that as the winter closes in, as the roads close, there's simply not enough capacity for food. In Wakhan, for instance, there has been endemic poverty for a long time. I fear that the starvation is going to get a lot of people and there's very little commentary happening about the possibility of rushing food aid and so on into Afghanistan. The European Union has pledged a billion euros of aid to Afghanistan. That's a good thing. The US said it would provide 144 million in aid, but you know, even 1 billion euros, 144 million dollars insignificant compared to the needs if half of the gross domestic product was made up by foreign aid. This is simply not enough and I mean there's a way in which there's a need to come to maybe three, four times that amount of money, but it's not just the money, it's the food aid. That means food has to be air shipped in and so on. Not sure that there's any interest. Meanwhile, on Friday, there was again another attack in Spenghar district. This is in Nangarhar, which is in the southeastern part of Afghanistan. You might remember this as the area where Donald Trump launched the mother of all bombs. There was another attack in a mosque. People killed, you know, injured and so on. Don't really exactly know what's going on. Looks like this is another one of those, you know, Islamic State attacks, perhaps the Mulalim mosque was struck. You know, it's not clear what's going on, but we know that the violence is still continuing. We know that the violence one way or the other is not being brought down at all. So there is a great deal of concern in Afghanistan still and I'm afraid most of the press has just put their boots on and walked away from the story. Part of the story, as I say, is the ongoing war or ongoing hostilities and the attack in Spenghar is a sign of that. But the other part of the story for me that I think the most powerful and urgent part of the story is the question of hunger and the question of how hunger is going to impact areas which will be snowbound. By the way, I want to just put a plug in for the seven media houses that produce this very important text on hunger. You can see it at the People's Dispatch website, peoplesdispatch.org. Very important text on hunger. It takes a global panoramic look. I feel now Prashant, the desire to slip in a story about Afghanistan and the great hunger, the international red crescent and red cross societies say it is the worst humanitarian disaster in the world today. And by the way, that is after Yemen or Yemen coming second. It's Yemen and Afghanistan in the lead to be the worst humanitarian disaster of our time. Catastrophic. Catastrophic. Both disasters made by war. Both disasters made by war. One of the great pollutants, not only of the planet but of the human spirit. Very, very sad story. We'll come back. We're going to be covering this. We're not going to drop the Afghan story. It's very important for us to keep on the Afghanistan story, keep on the Yemen story. Meanwhile, I gather there's a big strike wave taking place in the United States. We saw Amazon workers earlier. We saw workers at supply chains and so on. And now Columbia University. Columbia University, one of the major universities is seeing a strike. Prashant, what's happening at Columbia? Right, Vijay. It's interesting you mentioned Yemen and Afghanistan because what's common to that, of course, is the fact that the United States and its allies are involved in weapons and selling munitions, providing information, all kinds of assistance to these conflicts which have caused these disasters. Whereas at home, what we see is that there is no money, apparently, to pay for the discussions we've seen in Congress over infrastructure, the kind of haggling that has been happening. Apparently, there's no money to pay for, say, infrastructure as kind for social security of any kind, for spectacles for old people, for dental aid. Interestingly, so like you said, Columbia University, one of the biggest, you know, one of the biggest and most famous in the world, across the global south, in countries like India, of course, people always talk about this big university, Harvard, Columbia, etc. There's this idea, you know, this notion of them being very elite. But what we've seen in recent times is that in many of these universities, student graduate workers are going on strike demanding that they be treated as workers, not at all a counterintuitive thing, if you think about it, but which for these universities seems to be very counterintuitive because for long these universities have functioned as though they're doing the students a favor by allowing them to work in the university. It's like working in a university campus, you know, builds your character, builds your career, gives you more experience, and so for that matter, it doesn't really, and so because that doesn't really matter if you're not really treated as a worker. So it's interesting to note that across some of these major universities, strikes are going on, protests are going on. So the most recent one, like you said, the strike has entered its second week. Thousands of graduate student workers have gone on strike with a very basic set of demands, demands like dental care, demands like wage, you know, wage hike. So I think the numbers basically are that if you look at the cost of living in New York, Columbia actually pays much, much lesser than what a person can survive by. Meanwhile, it's actually got a very, very huge endowment. So pandemic doesn't really seem to have affected that. So the numbers basically say that I think $6,000 to $19,000 below a living wage is what some of these graduate workers are paid. And meanwhile, I think 2020 ended with a $42 billion endowment that the university received. So really the question is that, why is, why can't these worker, why can't these student graduate workers be paid? And like I said, Howard, again, seeing a protest, MIT, another protest on the major university, which, you know, another major institute where again, student workers have been mobilizing. It's interesting to note that these are not just students who are coming together just for a cause but that this is unionizing per se. So it's very, you know, it's not, it's not just a gathering or anything but students properly unionizing in the format that we recognize around the world. There's been a lot of solidarity from other sectors in all these universities where, you know, employees for instance have extended help have tried to, you know, provide support to the pickets. The universities, of course, responding despite their claim of academic freedom, responding by very crude methods including cutting, cutting down some of the stipends. We're trying to divide the union for that matter. But nonetheless, the fact remains that these protests we talked about in the previous episode, we talked about how the United States was going through, going through what was called striketober, where there was this mass number of strikes across various sectors. So after, you know, after the 80s and the 90s, when we were all told that mobilizing for your rights has sort of become, is no longer, it's part of the end of history. It's part of the past. But nonetheless, what we see is that across sectors, we saw teachers protesting a couple of years ago across the country as well. So I think all these waves indicate the fact that increasingly there is a huge amount of disenchantment with the system, with, you know, with how things are organized and when it even escalates or percolates upwards towards institutions like Columbia and Howard, we do know that the United States and its managers clearly have a problem. Well, you know, of course, this is an extraordinary, you know, set of events that at these prestigious institutions were seeing strikes and perhaps this will become a strike wave. Meanwhile, of course, going south from the United States and election in Nicaragua. You know, the result seems to be that the government of Mr. Daniel Ortega will continue. There will be a range of other elections taking place this month in South America, in Latin America and so on. You know, that is of importance. Before we get to them, I just want to say that in Chile, the president, the sitting president Sebastian Pinera was impeached by the lower house for the revelations in the Pandora papers. It's unlikely that the upper house will follow suit, but the right has been dented by these revelations that were, you know, created a political crisis in a sense. Chile meanwhile is facing another problem. The French have refused to ratify a trade deal through the European Commission. In the European Commission, they worried about the import of Chilean poultry, but this is going to have also knock on effects on the election there later this year when Gabriel Boric will stand from the left against the right wing candidates. And then there'll be a second round in December, but that's Chile. Meanwhile, Zoe attempts at coups and so on in South America while these democratic processes are happening. Tell us about it. Yeah, so we've discussed, you know, some of these processes before attacks on both the government of Pedro Libre, Pedro Castillo, who, you know, had a very hard spot, won victory back in June in the Peruvian presidential elections, a second round runoff against Keiko Fujimori. And we followed the step by step how the right wing, you know, first of all, didn't allow him, basically didn't want to concede their defeat. They're very, very clear defeat in these elections. They didn't want to concede. They put up every legal obstacle possible to delay the electoral council from really declaring him victor. And since then they've been putting pressure on in, you know, all sorts of ways. So, you know, creating defamation campaigns online against members of his cabinet, saying that they won't approve his cabinet. Several ministers have been forced to resign. Then a new cabinet was sworn in. And since then they've continued and continued to put pressure against them. And it's unfortunate in the sense that, you know, in the leading up to these recent presidential elections, there was this crisis, this institutional crisis in Peru, which saw several starting with the impeachment of Pedro Pablo Kosinski, and then seeing the successive kind of right wing being able to wield this pressure on this, you know, in parliament to force the presidential vacancy, which is when they force out who's in office. And there have been rumors that they're trying to create a situation of in governability to kind of give the justification for creating the forcing basically Pedro Kosinski out of office. They have made it impossible for him to really take forward any of the, you know, programs and proposals that he, you know, proposed as part of his campaign. They're trying to, you know, rid all left elements from his government. So this is something, you know, we've been watching, we're going to continue to watch. And then just over the border over in Bolivia, you know, a parallel case in some senses, but I think the force of the social movements is really, and, you know, their ability to mobilize and defend the government is sort of what differentiates the two cases, because since the return of democracy in Bolivia just a year ago with the landslide victory of the mass ticket of Luis Arsene, David Chokwanka, the right wing has, of course, not remained quiet. They have been, you know, trying, similarly trying all avenues possible, trying their old strategies of civic strikes, resisting the process of justice. Many of these people were involved in severe crimes against humanity during the coup itself. Some of them are in jail. Some of them have fled the country. But the most kind of hard headed far right leader of them all, Luis Fernando Camacho, he has been engaged in a campaign of creating civil strikes. And so back in October, he had called for a, you know, national strike to try to destabilize the government. And this really did not have much of impact. Social movements took the streets immediately, rejected the strike, called on people to continue about their work as normal. He has once again called another civic, civic strike, the start of the beginning of this week on the one year anniversary of the return of democracy. And then, and similarly, the strike has not been successful in disrupting commerce and business, but they have returned to this strategy of violent road blockades and attacking indigenous working class people. Already one person has been killed in these clashes between, you know, people calling for an end to these disruptions, trying to against the destabilization of their democracy and defending the government. So, you know, when the left wins power, it is not just about winning in the elections, but it is about defending that process of change, defending that revolutionary process because the right wing never sits idly. Well, it's important story. We'll keep following it. Zoe right now is in the airport. If you look behind her, you'll see a sign that says Kazakhstan, not sure where she's going to, but she may be going somewhere interesting. You've been listening to give the people what they want coming to you from People's Dispatch. That's Zoe and Prashant, the co-editors of the finest movement driven news site, peoplesdispatch.org. And I'm Vijay from Globe Trotter. See you next week.