 Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. Give the people what they want. Coming to you every week from People's Dispatch. That's Zoe and Prashant. Zoe and I are both in undisclosed locations in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Prashant is in Delhi. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. Glad to be with you. I'm really happy to be with you. We're on the cusp of May Day. Of course, May Day is a big day in the calendar of the international left. And I think about a hundred young people from the United States have decided to mark off in what they call a brigade to Havana, Cuba to join the Cuban people in their great May Day celebration used to be of course May Day was a big day in these socialist countries in the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc and so on. It was a big parade. Well, they have one in Cuba. Give the people what they want is the name of your show. Not sure that people want the continuation of this war in Ukraine. The United States government has now announced that they will increase their weapons delivery to the Ukrainian from about roughly three billion. Hard to tell what the initial number was to 33 billion dollars. That's a lot of money, my friends. 33 billion dollars. That's about just 10 billion less than the US government is planning on the so-called green transition. Just about 10 billion less than that. 33 billion dollars. Not likely that this 33 billion dollar amount is going to be spent merely on defensive material. You see, one of the issues in the war between Russia and Ukraine is that the United States is not a party to that war. NATO is not a party to the war. None of the neighboring countries of Ukraine are saying they are party to the war. This is really important because if a NATO country gets involved in the war, then NATO countries by their charter are compelled in a way to enter that war. Then it becomes a European war. This is Europe's third world war and so on. The fact that the United States selling weapons which I don't think are entirely going to be defensive weapons. Many of them are going to be offensive weapons. At what point does Russia say, well, look, this is no longer funding for weapons systems to Ukraine for defensive purposes but offensive purposes and therefore the United States has entered the war. At what point does Russia say that and then what happens next? Well, look, a very scary thing happened this week. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. This is the US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. He described when the US officials went to meet Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelinsky. He said something and I wanted to read out two sentences from US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's own remarks about that meeting. He said, our focus in the meeting was to talk about those things that would enable us to win the current fight. Please pay attention to his language. Our focus in the meeting that would enable us to win the current fight. That means the US Defense Secretary is saying quite clearly that us, the United States is part of the us with Ukraine and others in this fight and then Lloyd Austin said something interesting. You see, what is the United States providing $33 billion for? Is it to remove Russian troops from Ukrainian soil? That's one objective of a war. Is that the war objective? No, this is the second sentence from Lloyd Austin, US Defense Secretary, former senior general in the US Armed Forces. Lloyd Austin said, we want to see Russia weakened. We want to see Russia weakened. This is on the table now. $33 billion going into Ukraine and towards other special forces and so on. We want to see Russia weakened. Two CBS, former US Army Europe Commander, Ben Hodges said, we're not just observers cheering for Ukraine here. We want to win. We want to win. Striking language coming from the United States. That's $33 billion going into this conflict. No small amount. You know that this isn't a first tranche. The United States government not able to pass infrastructure funding within the country willing to spend $33 billion as a first tranche into a war that the United States says is to weaken Russia not to remove Russian troops from Ukraine and where former US officials say we want to win. Pretty chilling stuff. Lots of weapons flowing around. Arms dealers quite pleased. Arms companies seeing their profits rise in the middle of all this in Sweden of all places, I must say Sweden of all places gives out the Nobel Peace Prize also provides weapons systems all across the world. Prashant, they also are the home to Sipri and Sipri has a new report out. Right Vijay, you mentioned Sweden. Of course Sweden also considering joining NATO in what is probably going to be yet another unfortunate escalation but today we're talking about the Sipri report and as usual as we expected the Sipri report this time which talks about military expenditure across the world, paints a very dismal picture of what is happening. This is about the year 2021 the pandemic was still in full flow. We saw many countries where the pandemic actually was worse than in the first wave into 2020 but if you look at military spending it's like the pandemic never existed because the overall amount of money that is being spent is spent for military global expenditures again increased for the 7th straight year in a row it's 2.11 trillion US dollars now. And this is a remarkable, this is an unbelievable amount of money. You talked earlier about the amount of money the US was spending on military supply as opposed to the climate change purposes but if you look at these numbers they're like staggering because I think they have reports which talk about how much this US military spending is when compared to the amount of money it has spent on the pandemic I think it's about 7.5 times or whatever has been spent more on military spending than on the pandemic but if you look at the breakdown of the numbers that itself is quite interesting because we see that the United States has spent close to 801 billion of that 2.11 trillion that we talk about just one country just one country spending 800 billion of this amount alone and we know how in the last year we saw when Joe Biden asked for a particular amount of budget Congress actually voted to give him more which means this is like a bipartisan understanding you can't blame certain parties or certain people this is the understanding of the US establishment that they need to spend more on military purposes that they need to keep close to 1000 bases across the world because you know irrespective of how far it is from the mainland of the United States just because they need to achieve that sort of supremacy that preponderant power as they used to talk about earlier and we actually see if you look at for instance the fact that so much of the money there's been a considerable increase of money in terms of research that is being spent and okay let's go beyond the United States and of the 10 top spending countries there are I think 4 of the top 10 NATO members that's US, UK, France Germany and 7 of the top 10 are basically US allies because they include South Arabia, South Korea, Japan etc so if you have a world where today 7 of these top 10 countries are say together they account for about 1.14 trillion of total spending that we talked about of the 2.11 trillion so this itself I think shows is a very clear sign of the kind of spending you know of the kind of world we're building where at the height of the pandemic this was how countries still chose to spend money there was no concerted attempt to you know there was no attempt at universally reaching some kind of understanding on reducing military spending no global effort on that no global effort on disarmament of any sort the peace movement is a lot of challenges that way and in some senses this also reflects in the spending of other countries as well because countries like Russia, China or India for that matter have also tended to increases time passes because we're moving into this world where everyone has decided that increasing spending is the only way to sort of maintain some kind of parity and this is a very dangerous tendency when you look at especially when you look considering the fact that you know towards the 80s and 90s there was in fact so much progress towards the idea of disarmament itself not only the nuclear field but across the world there was a notion that we should sort of try and reduce the amount of say the amount of money the amount of energy the amount of human resources being spent in the military so all this together very depressing picture one stand out example is Nigeria whose expenditures increased by 56% that is an incredible increase considering the public health challenges that Nigeria and many other countries in Africa face so all around quite an unfortunate and depressing picture like you said the only people who are happy are the arms manufacturers the big companies you mentioned I think it is Blinken and one of them did meet with top weapons manufacturers recently who said they were facing supply side challenges and you know supply line challenges and the government was all for supporting them as much as possible so this has sort of become a kind of a vicious circle where the military establishment and these top companies are working together in such close collusion that getting out of this cycle seems very difficult and that's the top diplomat that's the top US diplomat who's there discussing with arms manufacturers how to ease their pain the top US diplomat gun to the head of countries gun to the head of countries gun to the head of a tiny little country many times invaded by the United States in fact if I if I'm right Zoe the little country of Nicaragua and I don't mean little in a diminished sense just in terms of the size of the population the country of Nicaragua once had a US national as its head of government in the 1920s I mean for God's sake this country is never allowed by Washington to exercise its sovereignty seems like it's having some problems with well with Washington isn't it well yes on Wednesday State Secretary a member of the State Department of the US actually announced that Nicaragua along with Cuba and Venezuela would not be allowed to attend the upcoming summit one of the Americas organized by United States alongside the Organization of American States this was not surprising as a development this has really been building in the last several years Nicaragua just last week actually announced that it was going to leave the Organization of American States this is a move that was taken by Venezuela several years ago but really their exclusion from this summit goes beyond you know their membership to the Organization of American States it's a flat out exclusion from the United States which not only implicates that this summit is not really about cooperation it's not really about building together or as it says on its website looking for addressing hemispheric challenges looking for social inclusion economic recovery it's not really about these broad ideas that it claims to be about but it's a political agenda and it's a political agenda because they're excluding Cuba they're excluding Venezuela they're excluding Nicaragua countries that have a different political orientation that have taken a stand against U.S. orientations in the region that have attempted to forge different forums of regional integration which actually seek to address these questions of economic recovery of recovery after the pandemic attempting to address climate change and so this announcement by the it wasn't an official announcement from this authority of the U.S. government but it does indicate that this will probably be formalized in the coming weeks this forum is going to take place the first week of June in Los Angeles this is the first time that the summit of the Americas will return to the United States in over two decades it's going to be a quite important forum with a crucial moment in the Americas where you know one year into one and a half years into Biden's presidency someone who said that he would be drastically different than Donald Trump on issues of foreign policy and on domestic policy and I think as both of you have just outlined in this first two segments this is clearly not true not only has the U.S. increased military spending at home and in that you know disregarding very key infrastructure bills cutting social spending cutting even benefits that were existing under Donald Trump to low income families to single mothers very very crucial social programs but also it has continued to pressure other countries under its influence to increase military spending we know that members of NATO alliance for example have to spend a certain amount of their GDP on weapons and I mean again I think we can look at Cipri we can look at other reports to see exactly where this money goes to but oftentimes it goes right into these U.S. weapons companies so when the U.S. is talking about democracy when it's talking about these forums for regional integration and it's excluding countries that are seeking to build outside of this it's important to question it and to really look at what's going to happen there one of the key topics for the summit of the Americas is immigration and this of course has become a very crucial topic over the past two decades of course in North America in the Americas across the world as well but it is at a moment where there was some expectations that with the Biden administration there would be laxer policies on immigration that the Trump era policies of for example separating children from their families and other very horrific and inhumane practices that were happening at the border were going to end and Kamala Harris famously went to Guatemala and told people do not come to the border and we have seen that the border practices have not really become that much more humane there are images of border patrol officials whipping Haitian migrants who are attempting to cross the border so it's important to pay attention to the summit of the Americas equally and not if more important important to pay attention to the People's Summit that was going to be happening at the same time as the summit of the Americas in Los Angeles organized by people's movements organized by trade unions immigrant rights groups which seek to call attention to his hypocrisy that I just mentioned well I am very interested in this because as you know the OAS takes all kinds of statements about various issues happening around the world they've been putting a lot of pressure on Nicaragua recently they had as you said on Cuba and Venezuela now the OAS putting pressure on these countries there's another platform in the world that puts a lot of pressure on countries during the Russian invasion of Ukraine you saw various social media accounts on Twitter that were sometimes loosely associated with the Russian Government thrown off Twitter as they were thrown off other sites before the Russian sites some of them as I said loosely connected to the state we saw the same thing happen to Chinese social media accounts and so on well long comes the white night fresh off his moon agenda decides to spend all his money not on alleviating poverty which he talked about but buying Twitter who is that Prashant who has just bought Twitter well the discussion around this has been one of the you know more interesting and slightly frustrating discussions in recent times because we've had this talk about free speech and democracy and being thrown about people critical of the decision people critical of around Moscow very good reasons of course being very skeptical but I think the simplest way to understand this is that this has just largely been two sets of oligarchs basically fighting each other for a platform which is basically built on capitalizing on our social networks and I think that's probably the better way to see it as opposed to this Elon Musk ride or Ice Twitter ride or Jack Ross ride which is a completely pointless debate because like you pointed out what we're seeing is two sides of sorry two sides of a political establishment two sides of an imperialist establishment which in many ways have pretty much exactly the same goals we're seeing this time and again we're seeing this when it came to Bolivia where Elon Musk tweeted about we will cool whoever we want we're seeing this when it comes to Ukraine just as just as Twitter cracked out very heavily on so many voices which did not to the US establishment line we had Elon Musk offering Starlink terminals to Ukraine as well so keeping all this in mind lets be very clear of the fact that there is in some ways very little it separates the two of them as two sets of people as far as we're concerned but nonetheless also throwing this nonetheless throws larger questions into the fray because like I said Twitter has become you know it's not just a plaything of rich people which you know it's not just some kind of tech entrepreneur or tech billionaires little project which you know they're doing it for fun it has become vital for many people across the world as a way of communication as a way of putting out their issues as a way of organizing even and this is something that is goes way beyond the whims and fancies of a particular set of people and this is something that has never adequately been taken into consideration because the fact that it is somehow understood or somehow accepted that billionaires have this kind of divine right so to speak to do whatever they choose with our data with our networks and that has been the understanding which has you know been at the bottom of this phase of capitalism to speak so to speak so I think you know these kind of questions are not really going to be addressed Elon Musk might bring in a new set of policies some of his policies seem quite dangerous because he seems to believe in a notion of free speech which in effect will actually embolden majoritarianism I mean we talk about rather than I think talking about whether he's far right wing or less right wing the key point is that they're going to you know embolden majoritarianism he's obviously also been very cynical and skeptical about the left and his whole statement that you know he wants to keep the far right and the far left out does not really work in practice that way because ultimately what this is going to do is embolden you know majoritarian and right wing sentiments across the world so we are Twitter is probably going to become a much more painful platform for lack of better words going to be more difficult unfortunately for activists people who are fighting to build a better world but you know what do we say except that is what capitalism does I mean again we've seen that happening in every phase of life every phase of life so Twitter is going to probably be no different as well well Elon Musk as you said the great exchange around Bolivia we're going to call you that's an epic statement coming from an important guy apparently and this might be fake news but apparently there was a tweet about cocaine and coca-cola most likely fake news all surrounding Bolivia not fake news I checked it today okay not fake news all around Bolivia in a way where of course coca leaf is part of the culture and life so speaking of Bolivia Zoe the Alba movements holding their third continental assembly give us some sense of what this Alba is and what are people discussing well I think it's directly related to the OAS in some senses because Alba is a platform Alba TCP is a platform that emerges in the 2000s under the leadership of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro it emerges as a platform for states for progressive states to come together to make economic cooperation agreements to have a political forum for discussion on different issues of cooperation not only in the economic realm but in other senses it's the space where Venezuela launches Pedro Caribe and it was largely a space for where states could come together and in this process and in a moment where a lot of different forums were opening up across the region and across the world really there was a need for movements to come together and have this space of dialogue space of debate there were many instances and many attempts to do this for example the World Social Forum which was a global platform but really there was the movements of Latin America needed a forum to come together and in this sense in 2013 Alba Muy Mientos was founded it is the social movement platform of Latin American the Caribbean I think there were over 300 hundreds of organizations really if you think of all the local chapters and this platform involves peasant organizations women's movements student movements trade unions left political formations really across the specter across sectors you have people coming together and they come together around six main principles the defense of the mother earth the internationalism the construction of our America the economy for good living and many other such principles that really outline their anti-capitalist anti neoliberal stance and all of these organizations involved in struggle across their territories across their regions come together in this forum to be able to channelize their power and to build a project that can challenge this exact project that has for the region and so they in many different countries they have been resisting government policies in others they have been working with progressive governments which is such the case with Venezuela now in Argentina is part of front de todos and so there's really a diversity of groupings of experiences and in these last couple of days in Buenos Aires they have been coming together to discuss precisely the international context since the last assembly in 2016 the world has changed a lot there's been a pandemic there's been now we are in the midst of this increasingly hot war in Europe which has global consequences which has global impacts which we have talked about on this show the rising price of fuel the rising price of food and so in these days they have been discussing this context how it impacts movements what are the new strategies they need to respond in this context what are the new banners of struggle that people are mobilizing behind in their regions what are the new challenges there's upcoming elections in Colombia upcoming elections in Brazil what is the new political scenario and so that's really what people have been doing in the past couple of days evaluating the work of the platform the conference will close and on May 1st along with the Argentinian workers they will be mobilizing on the streets of Buenos Aires in this great communist holiday that we love to celebrate which is International Workers Day a few years ago I was in a cafe or restaurant in Buenos Aires and during lunch the Argentinian peso fell by 40% currency markets around the world in great turmoil in almost turmoil the United States dollar is strengthening which means that it's actually getting stronger against other currencies around the world US Federal Reserve is decided in a sense to come in and act and basically the point of it is they don't want inflation which is now running at 8% they're going to expect it to raise the base interest rate to stem the tide of inflation down in some countries over 10% down by over 10% this is actually quite catastrophic in Europe the European Central Bank indicating it's not going to raise interest rates at the same pace as the US Federal Reserve this is actually going to be very interesting to watch and I don't mean interesting in a kind of observer way because it's going to impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people you know European capacity for consumers basically basic goods as not only as prices go up but as energy costs go up alongside that it's going to be the wide inflation across the board I wanted to actually point fingers at one other area which hasn't received much attention and that is the question of the Japanese yen now the Japanese yen has fallen to a 20 year low against the dollar it's very interesting the Bank of Japan doesn't have many tools left and it's struggled with the kind of stagnation inside the country for decades generally because Japan you know most of its debt is internally held and this is important Japan doesn't export its debt because its debt is internally held the yen is considered a pretty safe investment you know and the fact that it's fallen 12% this year is quite surprising it's doing worse than the ruble the Russian ruble that's remarkable the Wall Street Journal said if the yen were a smaller currency its slide might have less importance to financial markets that's interesting what are they talking about here's what they're talking about and this is why people need to pay attention to what's happening in the Bank of Japan there are there is a basically a US Treasury market the Treasury bond the bond market is worth around 22 trillion dollars it's really important to know that Japanese banks and financial institutions are some of the biggest purchasers of US Treasuries that means Japan is one of the biggest purchasers of US debt if Japanese capital is going to get skittish on buying US debt United States is going to have a really hard time transferring its debt obligations to other countries you can't go on and on pressuring China and expect it to continue to buy US debt you can't prosecute a war against Russia where you say we want to weaken Russia and expect the Russian billionaires who are being sanctioned to buy US debt the customers for US debt are getting fewer and fewer I almost said lesser and lesser then I remembered my old English teacher I think it's fewer and fewer the customers for US debt get fewer and fewer Japan is going to be key here what will Japan do to essentially protect the yen will it slow down on purchases of of US debt will it put whatever excess surplus capital it has in other areas where will it invest its money that's a possibility lots of potential for infrastructure development inside Japan will they continue to invest in China and Russia big locations for Japanese surplus capital particularly in energy markets in Russia production lines in China and so on gotta watch this carefully the Chinese meanwhile have been trying to protect the renmenbi renmenbi is not somehow protected from these ups and downs renmenbi also facing some serious challenges as the US dollar will strengthen when the US government when the Federal Reserve puts up the interest rates in the United States dollars come right back into the US because you'll get a higher rate of return there that is going to be catastrophic for the debt crisis in the third world we're going to keep a close eye on this I know that most of the people that watch give the people what they want from People's Dispatch and Globe Trotter their eyes glaze over when we talk about financial markets and currency markets and things like that but my friends the gap between what I'm telling you and the price of a tomato is very slim thanks for watching give the people what they want brought to you as I said from People's Dispatch that Zoe and Prashant I'm Vijay from Globe Trotter see you next week