 Hello and welcome to another weekly coordinating call of the M25 the movement for Europe, featuring progressive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. As usual we'll be talking about our burning issues, which is our take on what's happening in the world this week and what can be done about it. And we'll have a discussion on the EU recovery fund you out there if you've got any comments, questions, rants, concerns anything you want to throw at us. Let's do it in the chat. This is live on YouTube so put them in the chat and we may be reading out some of these questions to the people here with us between the interventions so let's kick it off. Yes, thank you, Magran. Well, let me say that what we have read in the last hours is that Putin is a killer according to our president Biden, the president of the United States. So, in the middle of a pandemic crisis, the last thing we need is a new Cold War. And this kind of definition doesn't help us. For sure. Now, in Europe, we have really a good art, a good memory, and we perfectly remember that in 2003 it was the men together with others, of course, who supported the Saddam attack in Iraq. Why I'm saying that because according to the last news went out in the last two hours, it was saying that if Europe is going to buy vaccine or gas from Europe, we will have a sort of some kind of stuff. What does it mean? I was wondering if it would bomb us like it has done in the past in Iraq. I was also wondering, politics or senile incontinence, I could say. Now, what we should really need in Europe from president of United States in this moment, I do believe, is hopes, first of all, and help in our vaccine campaigns. As everybody knows, for example, in the last three days, in seven of the European countries, AstraZeneca vaccine has stopped and we are really in big troubles with our vaccine campaign. So we do need really have to focus to concentrate our attention. The last thing we need is this kind of declaration. I really think so. Thank you, Patricia. Yanis. I take Patricia's point about the other hypocrisy of president Biden. He's the president of a country that has killed most people since the Second World War, who is forgetting Vietnam, sponsored fascist regimes around the world. That doesn't mean that Putin is not a murderer, in my view he is. And the most murders he committed, he committed at the time when the United States was supporting him. Do you remember Chechnya? Does anyone remember Chechnya? When he flattened Grozny, he killed 200,000 people in Grozny, in Chechnya, with the enthusiastic support of the United States of America and surely Joe Biden as well. So it's this sheer hypocrisy that is covering up for geopolitical games. Now, let's go to Europe to where our heart beats and our mind concentrates. Today I issued a tweet with which more or less spontaneously I called for the immediate sacking or resignation, whichever comes first. Of Ursula von der Blagen, the president of the European Commission. She must go. She's an embarrassment for Europe. She is a failed defense minister of Germany who had no prospects, political prospects in Germany. And you know what happens when a politician doesn't have any prospects in their own country anymore. They're being promoted to senior positions in Brussels. So Macron and Merkel did a back room deal between two. The two of them decided that Ursula von der Blagen, the failed defense minister of Germany, is going to become the president of the European Commission. This is the state of democracy in Europe. And then they pushed this through the European Parliament and she would not have become president of the European Commission if it wasn't for the votes of the ultra-rightist Mr. Orban. It was with his votes in the European Parliament that Ursula von der Blagen became the president of the Commission. Okay, that's how she became president of the Commission. You know, we are good people in the DM. We'd like to hope that even failed people who are promoted through corrupt processes can do some good, but she hasn't. She's been an unmitigated, bloody catastrophe. This vaccination fiasco has been done is due to her personally. She failed to procure the right vaccines. She failed to sign proper contracts with, you know, BioNTech, Pfizer, with AstraZeneca, Oxford, with Moderna. She failed. If you read those contracts, they are an example of the contract that you never sign if you really want to buy something. And then when her failures were revealed, you know, she played the blame game. She started blaming, undermining the efficacy and safety of vaccines of AstraZeneca, for instance. Then you have Merkel and Macron who supported her also doing the same thing, playing the same blame game. So we have lots of people who will die in Europe today because they will not be vaccinated with AstraZeneca because they heard that it is unsafe. And this is a false claim by failed corrupt politicians, you know, Merkel, Macron and von der Leyen. This is the state of nature today in the United, in the European Union. We are the sick, stupid continent. The same failures, you know, motivated, corrupt decisions that we had in 2010, condemned the whole of Europe to stagnation and the south of Europe to a humanitarian crisis in place like Spain and Italy and Greece and so on. The same failed processes of lack of democracy leading to stupidity, to orchestrated, organized, turbocharged, nuclear powered stupidity. We've had it now with COVID-19. Comrades, today I looked at some numbers that have not been circulating. I'm going to write an article about this. I haven't had the time to write it yet. Let me give you a number. Half a trillion euros. 500 million, right? Sorry. See, I got mixed up. 500 billion, right? 500 billion euros is the money that left Europe over the last six months. For the first time, we had such a huge outflow of capital. Money left the Eurozone, not the European Union, the Eurozone. Simultaneously, throughout 2020, we had a drop in investment by 50%. The largest drop in investment in the history of humanity, not just of capitalism. That has never happened before. Stagnation is coming. It's deepening. The economic crisis, which is being maximized by the pandemic, is already eating into the heart and soul of the European Union. Not just the South, the whole lot. You can see Merkel, Macron, for the lion are panicking. The vaccination fiasco coupled with the flight of investment, with the fact that they've done nothing to inflate the economy. Nothing like the United States is doing, Biden is doing. The recovery fund that we will discuss further afterwards has not kicked off yet. The Americans are injecting trillions into their economy. They are already doing it. People today are getting $1,400 American dollars. Every citizen in the United States is getting a check. We proposed that last March for the European Union. It has not happened. The recovery fund is going to disperse nothing this year. Trivial sums. The European Union is really going down the drain. This is going to poison politics. You're going to have dragies everywhere. Toxic, right-wing, former Goldman Sachs or my kingsy types, running the democracies that have failed. This is where we are. Unfortunately, as DM25, even though we were the ones that brought it up first and created the first pan-European movement, with very clear policies of how to reverse this decline, the decline of our whole continent, we have failed to make a serious impact in terms of electoral politics, but also in terms of the movement. It is a remarkable success that we exist as DM25, but let's not mean words. We should be getting elected now. The fact that Volt, the revolting, my kingsy-inspired pan-European establishment movement, they got into the Dutch parliament. What is their agenda? No agenda. The only agenda they have is to simply aid and abet the corrupt EU deep state. And we are not in there. We did get into the Greek parliament with DM25, but we have to lift our games. And I say games in the plural because we have many games happening. The European Green New Deal is one game. We are the only ones who are really pursuing it at the pan-European level. And I'm very pleased. We have do something here. We are relaunching it and we need to fight for it. We need to do the same thing regarding vaccination. Our policy for vaccination I'm going to propose should go to an AMV. It should become to an old member vote. It should become much more substantial. It should be connected to the European Green New Deal. And we should campaign for it. Our vaccination and public health policy. We should really lift our game because this is the time for action. Europe is becoming stupider, more toxic and more corrupt every day. Thank you, Janis. And Dushan, our Green New Deal for Europe campaign coordinator is here with us. So if you have any questions about that specific campaign, please put them in the chat. Fotini. Thanks, Mehan. A few thoughts after what Janis said. We all see that the European Union failed first in regards to the Eurobond. And now we are going through an immense pandemic, the COVID-19, in the one hand. And on the other hand, we have a tremendous economic crisis, a crisis that will become even worse after the pandemic is behind us. The recovery fund that we discussed in a bit really will not be sufficient. The crisis will be so extreme that no recovery funds, especially not this one, will be able to ameliorate. This is the time to act. We should act and act fast because we will see small drags everywhere. It might be Sturnares in Greece or anyone else. But we should now is the time to act. It's not the time to think only, but it is a time to act because Europe disintegrates even faster than we discussed on. And thought back in 2016 when we started working and creating Europe. And now we should really strengthen our fight, both in the ground and also in the heart of the battle of the beast. Thank you. Thanks Fotini. David. Thanks Mehran. Since we've started this discussion now on the recovery fund, let me just continue with it. The first point I wanted to make is recovery fund. It sounds good, doesn't it? But is it really or are we all being taken for a ride? It's time to start calling it what it really is, which is the EU decomposition fund. Let me explain why. First of all, we cannot seriously talk about a EU recovery fund when only a meager 380 billion euros will come in the form of grants. Half of the total amount of the entire fund, by the way, to put it into perspective, 380 billion euros is around the same amount as the total gross domestic product of Norway. It sounds like a lot, but it really isn't when you consider that we're talking about the whole of the EU. The other half will come in the form of new loans, loans which will put increasing pressure on the weakest of member states. It's the equivalent of giving money to the poor on conditions that make it rather impossible for them to pay it back. In other words, it is a form of blackmail and economic and financial imprisonment, not to mention political subjugation. This 19 pandemic hit exactly one year ago, as you all know, fast forward a year and as Janice said, no EU country has seen any money whatsoever, and it's very unlikely that they will see it this year. And according to the European Commission itself, EU countries have until April 30th of this year to submit, and I quote, their national recovery and resilience plans, setting out their reform and investment agendas until 2026. This means that the money will only be disbursed once the plans have been reviewed and approved. So in the end, the question is recovery for whom? Is it going to go to small businesses and medium-sized businesses as well and the people who actually need it? I very much doubt it. A EU Council press release that I read just today, dated from February 11th of this year, states, and I quote again, support will be linked to country-specific recommendations under the European semester, which identify central challenges for each member state to address to strengthen competitiveness. Now, to the majority of people out there, this means absolutely nothing. And there's a good reason for it, because it is meant to be difficult to understand. To break down the jargon, what it means is that money lent to EU countries will depend on whether they implement the recommendations said by the EU. Now, don't get me wrong, if the grant money was contingent upon being spent on things like public education, health care and so on, things that people actually need, fine. But that's just not the case. The press release goes on to state that the money will only be disbursed upon, quote, achievement of the agreed milestones and targets. And the same press release states that only 13% of the money will be pre-financed. The rest, the other 87% will arrive way too late and pending an assessment of whether the plans follow those EU recommendations. Now, if you look closely, the EU is essentially weaponizing the pandemic in order to push through a reform agenda that ultimately aims to benefit the rich and the powerful, all the while selling it as a recovery plan. It's really quite unbelievable. In other words, money is being used as a tool, just like it was in 2008, to shape society in the interests of the ruling establishment, an establishment which does not have the interests of people and the planet at heart. In other words, socialism for the rich and austerity for the rest, as we've been saying for a while. While people in the EU bubble in Brussels are tapping each other on the back for what they claim to be the most wonderful achievement, the reality could not be further from the truth. The truth is that the so-called EU recovery fund, or what the EU bubble as rebranded as next generation EU, will do absolutely nothing to prevent the suffering that people are going through right now across Europe. So it's not that the EU is going slowly in the right direction as some claim, but that it's going fast in the wrong direction. There are people out there who cannot afford to put food on the table, comrades. People who can't afford medicine and hospital treatment. People who are totally isolated and alone, people who can't find good quality jobs, people who are being evicted as we speak because their salaries are not enough to cover their essential expenses like their rent. And just yesterday, a new report in Brussels in the Brussels Times referencing data from the November 2020 census showed that the homeless population in Brussels has increased by 50% over the last five years. The same applies everywhere across Europe, not to mention those living under the poverty line and so on. So when EU leaders talk about recovery, I'm sorry to say, but it's literally slapping the face to all those whose lives depend on the proper functioning of the EU and its member states and so on. And that is just not happening. That is why DM25 exists, because we need to turn this European Union into a project that actually works for the benefit of the whole population and solves these problems, does not exacerbate them. In summary, what this shows once again is that the EU that we have today is simply not fit for purpose, something that we've been saying all along, which to leave no room for doubt does not mean that we should abandon the project, as several left parties in Europe have been advocating. On the contrary, it means that we need to radically transform it, to democratize it in a way that it puts people first and not those private interests. So what does Europe and its people need instead? We need to implement a real Green New Deal for Europe that Yanis mentioned, that will transform our continent for good. And not that aberration that the European Commission calls Green Deal, which as I said some weeks ago is Green only in name. Our landmark report, which you can find over at gnd4europe.com, is the most comprehensive plan ever published to pull Europe out of the twin crisis of austerity and climate and environmental breakdown. So, you know, if you're watching, do go and check it out. And after that, join us at dm25.org slash join and let's just make it happen. Thank you, David. Yuliana. Thank you. I guess there's not much to add, because David said, I think everything that's very important. The only thing that I might add is that during this pandemic, what I realized, and I think many, many more people realize that too, is that we say that they failed. But I'm asking myself if they ever had the goal to have a pandemic crisis management, you know, because like it looks from me. It was it was never the goal to help people or to to help the citizens of Europe through this crisis, not on a European level, but also not here in Germany. I mean, if I think that German politicians put money in their pocket, made dubious mask deals, what is there to expect on the European level. So, so I think that that the time is over where you can, you can say, we have to put pressure on politicians and to change things. I think we now it's the time to think more about what we can do and also for for every every citizen in in the EU to or in Europe, not just the EU to to really believe much more in what they can do and where they can participate in. And I think it was also already mentioned from David and before that now it's not only the time because because European Union lacks this kind of of politics, the Green New Deal. But I think that it's very obvious that they never they will never change their ways, they will never implement better policies, they will never reform the EU in a way that we as the people wanted. This is crystal clear. So we have to draw a line and think about starting over and to an advertise for the Green New Deal but also be pretty clear about the missing options. It's not about going to the link and persuading them to adopt the Green New Deal. I think at some point we have to take it in our own own hands, much more than I would have said a year ago. Dushan. I agree more with you, David and Juliana. You, as you all know, we have been hearing a lot about so called Green Deals or even Green New Deals that are nowhere near enough. Anyway, majority of them or almost all of them besides ours have two big faults in them. Either they are austerity for the common people and fall on the backs of the working class, or they only have demands without any structure. The thing with our Green New Deal is that we have both the numbers and the structure and we are fighting for it to be implemented in a thorough way that is workers friendly and green, really green like we noted so many times ago. And the beauty is in the fact that our vision is both revolutionary and realistic. We promised to establish fairness, economic justice and sustainability to both our continent and the world itself. And we cannot wait, we cannot afford to wait around. We can begin to build the transition today. And this campaign that we are just leading aims to show how basically for the last 10 days we've been posting on our social networks, the content that explains to the to the people and to the European what the Green New Deal should actually look like and what needs to be implemented. Some of the content has been shared a lot, and we got a really wide audience. Now it's time to spread the word to the European Parliament itself. Tomorrow we are doing a tweet storm towards the European Parliament and we will show them what the real Green New Deal really should look like. So join us comrades from the 9am you will have the post on Twitter of GND for Europe, where you can just copy paste the tweets and direct them towards the EU Parliament, as I've noted. And I call for all of you to storm the parliament with us. Thank you. Thank you Dushan. 9am tomorrow CET GND for Europe.com a tweet storm from us and from Dushan. Thank you for that. David, an update on our sister organization Progressive International. Hello everyone. Pleasure to be here with you all on this live stream. Three points, three exciting points I hope, one an update and two looking more prospectively to the future. The first is an update about what's what's happening in Ecuador. The last time I think we spoke we talked about the stakes of this election and the severity of the attacks that we've seen on institutions of democracy in Ecuador. The National with the help of DM and the council members represented here namely we're not stretch go Yanis have been really at the forefront of the fight for international solidarity and defense of those democratic institutions. And from all the conversations we've had, it has played a major role in staving off some of the most vicious forms of legal warfare and blatant attempts to override and undermine the constitutional right to popular sovereignty in Ecuador. Now we're preparing a mission to return to Ecuador for the second round, which will be on the 11th of April, a very important day for the trajectory of Latin America of democracy across the region of Latin America with elections for the constitutional assembly in Chile to rewrite the Constitution after throwing away that of Pinochet, as well as presidential elections in Peru and this second round, runoff election in Ecuador. So we plan to be there to wage this what we hope is a final push in defense of transparency and integrity and free and fair elections in Ecuador, and we'll rely as as always on the solidarity of our friends and comrades in across the continent and inside the movement to power that delegation because only by linking the delegation that's on the ground and a few people we actually managed to send and be present there and keto and across the country with solidarity and the scrutiny of our friends abroad that we're going to be able to apply that pressure and play the role we need to play as an alternative infrastructure to the organization of American states the oas in whom we have no confidence. So that's our update of Ecuador as we continue to build out this electoral observatory and continue to hone this model of a kind of internationalist brigade that is able to bring delegations of data scientists parliamentarians technical experts, friends and allies from around the world to these front lines of fascist violence of environmental breakdown and try to bring greater forms of solidarity in this in in action as opposed to just inward. The second is an update on our campaign to make Amazon pay. We finished last year with a call to all our supporters to help us fund a people powered campaign that is to move from a coalition based model of make Amazon pay to one in which we are building volunteer teams all across the world. One of the conversations that I had with Johannes I remember ahead of the make Amazon pay campaign back in back in October was you know what can people do how can people get involved and the truth was that back then we didn't have a very robust strategy with a few resources we had and the and the partners in the coalition we were building to actually put people on the streets to build the ties we need to build between the workers who are being exploited by Amazon and the consumers who, you know, who obviously rely on this infrastructure, whether it's Amazon or another corporation, but to build that that that tie and whether it's bringing people to the Amazon warehouses, or bringing workers out into the streets and town squares from Centagma to, you know, the town squares in the center of well, to fall over square right so we that's that's the task of this in this next phase of the campaign, which can be rolling out next month is really building out teams of volunteers. You know, relying on learning a lot from the experience, various experiences that DMS had and how to do this effectively, so that we can have a much more decentralized model of how this campaign can work, which is just going to be a lot more creative in terms of, you know, disrupting life and making this message heard more loudly, in addition to planning these larger global days of action, about which you will know and toward which I think we can look forward in the spring. So that's the brief update on make Amazon pay. It's not the most exciting updates it involves a lot of just wait and see but we hope to be rolling that out in terms of volunteer program very soon. Finally, there are preparations for the anniversary of the launch. So you know the progressive international is technically only about 10 months old, our anniversary is coming up in May on May the 11th, and we're going to mark the occasion of the anniversary with an injection of new council members to make the council more representative and more powerful to bring in new organizational members many of whom we've worked with already. Others of which are kind of outside the orbit but are really important for filling out these these representational representational gaps, whether that's in East Asia or that's in Southern Africa, you know, trying to live up to this grand ambition of being more international. So, as always trying to make this international richer, more representative more inclusive more diverse, but above all more powerful, as we propel ourselves into the new year. So that's my updates, and I'll see you in in two weeks time now that we've set up a more regular update system from the side of the progressive international so we can kind of stay more closely aligned and so there's more opportunities for members to plug into this work. But hopefully, as I said, moving into a space of big organizing with these kinds of volunteer groups plugging in in different places. There's going to be a lot more activity for the PIDM connection to solidify. Janis. I'll conclude with a comment on the campaign against Amazon. Amazon, make Amazon pay. Most of you know my fixation with a project I have in mind, a campaigning project that reverses the costs and benefits of strike action of campaigns compared to the to what we had since the 19th century. What do I mean by that? Trade unions began campaigning and existing and doing things and changing the world in the 19th century through industrial strikes. Industrial strikes were exceptionally costly for individual workers. And the benefits were spread throughout society, but did not accrue to the individual workers. What do I mean by that? Come to think of it, you know, especially in countries where where there's violence against workers where they disappear in the middle of the night where they are thrown in prison or beaten up. There are lots of countries like that, especially the United States. Think of the history of the workers movement in the United States, but not anywhere in the United States, almost everywhere. When a worker organizes a strike and goes out on strike, firstly, she or he loses pay. That's a huge cost to the family. You know, the hardship is immense. They cannot put food on the table. They can be dismissed and face unemployment, especially during periods of recession. They can be beaten up. They can be, you know, victimized. They may find it very difficult to get even a passport or an ID card in certain countries. So the cost of striking for an individual worker, a trade union member is gigantic. And the benefits are usually very small for the strikers relative to the costs. So it's a massive act of sacrifice. Workers who break strikes and get the pay rises, not the strikers, secure for them. So it's their definition of a free rider problem. Because there are few. Those who go on strike and get beaten up and they're jailed and they're tortured and they die and they lose their jobs. Those are a small proportion of the workforce. Yet the whole of the workforce gets the benefits. So what we have been asking as the left, trade unions, lefts and so on, of people, of workers over the last 200 years has been mass sacrifice at the personal level, very little benefit at the personal level, even though they've been driving history and changing the world. My dream is for us to devise a campaigning system which reverses the cost benefit analysis where those who participate in the campaign do very little. You know, their sacrifice is tiny, but there are so many that these sacrifices add up and inflict maximum cost to Jeff Bezos, for example. Now our campaign began with a trade union strike, a traditional trade union strike. It was a good thing because the Progressive International needed to align itself with trade unions and so on. And we did that. It was a very good thing. But we're not going to succeed against Amazon by organizing workers. We have to organize workers. It's a necessary condition. It is not a sufficient condition. What does Jeff Bezos worry about? He's not worried about a strike in some warehouse that disrupts his supply chains for a few days. He's worried about losing customers. This is why I recommended to the PI and I'm recommending to DM25 and to all of you today that our next make Amazon campaign must be a consumer boycott that is well organized six months in advance. For six months we organize people to say, on those three days, let's just choose three days. Just three days. No more. Don't buy from Amazon. Don't visit amazon.com for three days. I call it days of inaction. Don't do anything for three days. It doesn't cost anything anyway. Even if you're buying stuff from Amazon and you rely on Amazon, a lot of people do rely on Amazon. It doesn't cost that much to you not to buy stuff for three days. I tell you comrades, if Jeff Bezos, during those three days, especially if we publicize that, sees that the dial on the visitations in Amazon goes down by 5%. Not much more. By 5% he will take notice. He will take notice a lot more than trade unions. That way, if trade unionists want to strike on the same day, that's fine. We are there supporting them because our demand is not that Amazon reduces prices for us. No. Our demand is to allow workers to unionize and to pay. To pay taxes and to pay wages. So we consumers are not buying for a few days so that workers can be empowered. Whether workers feel strong enough to participate in that is another matter. I'm talking about exactly the opposite kind of campaign to the one we had on Black Friday. One that concentrates on an international global consumer strike against Amazon. On behalf of workers and on behalf of the environment and society, because we are going to be pushing for them to pay taxes. I think that that can become very trendy. People can actually feel fantastic to wear a badge and for three weeks from now, I'm not going to buy anything from Amazon. I'll just shut up by repeating the main concept. Minimum sacrifice for campaigners, maximum cost inflicted upon Amazon. Reversing what has been happening for 200 years. Thank you, Yanis. And if you like what you've heard today, specifically perhaps on what Yanis was just talking about, particularly if you've got campaigning expertise, organizing expertise, if you're the sort of person that likes to confront power and make change happen, then join us, help us. The email address, well the web address is dm25.org slash join, and it just takes a couple of seconds to sign up. I think that concludes this week's meeting of our coordinating collective. Thank you out there for listening and watching and see you next week.