 Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news round up. Well, you are with give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news round up. Today is the second of September. Very important day. It's the day when the Vietnamese declared their independence in 1945. And then, well, on that very same day Ho Chi Minh dies in 1969. Important day, I think, to commemorate the valiant struggle of the Vietnamese people. Give the people what they want. Ninety-second episode brought to you from People's Dispatch, your favorite website to get movement-driven news. You got Zoe right there. Prashant is on the road. Can't join us. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. Zoe, terrible, terrible incident yesterday. I mean, appalling what happened in Argentina. Really appalling. Quite stunning. I think also something that perhaps is not unexpected. What happened in Argentina yesterday? Yesterday, when Christina Fernandez-Kirchner was coming back from the Senate, she was surrounded by supporters by fans. They've been mobilizing outside her residence for the past week, following as what we covered last week, both the sentence and the increased legal persecution against her. And in the moment that she was being received by supporters, a man approached her and attempted to fire a gun at her face, attempted to assassinate her. For some reason, the gun which was loaded with five bullets did not fire. And the man was apprehended immediately. She was taken to safety. Since then, messages of solidarity have been pouring in, messages of condemnation, repudiation of this horrific act, which was nearly took her life. And it's extremely worrying. The man that was apprehended is 35 years old. He has a neo-Nazi tattoo on his arm, which many media outlets have shown. Just an hour back, there were declarations from one of his close friends and said, oh, well, I guess he wasn't successful because he didn't practice. So it's a very, very tense climate. Right now, movements in Argentina are rallying at Vasemayo, at the Ovalisco, in the center of Buenos Aires, to reject this horrific attack on democracy, attack on Cristina, to stand in solidarity with Cristina, but really to defend their democracy at such a very crucial time. As we spoke about last week, Cristina has increasingly come under attack from the right wing in the country. She has been the victim of an insane lawfare campaign. There's over 100 processes against her for a variety of things. And recently, as we're getting closer to the upcoming elections, as new developments are happening, for example, in the investigation of fraud against Maurizio Macri because of the IMF loan, as there's increasing pressure on the right wing as they see their own power decreasing, they're ramping up this persecution using the media, using media outlets like Clarín, a historic right wing media outlet that has always put forth the vision and the ideology of the ruling class, and using the legal institutions which they successfully captured during their time in office. And so Cristina had been, she's demanded not a, she doesn't want to pardon, she doesn't want amnesty. She wants the justice system to realize that all of these charges are fabricated. She herself revealed that a lot of the evidence was planted that the people who are organizing this attack against her all have connections or all friends linked to Maurizio Macri, for example. And so this assassination attempt really comes in the midst of this escalation of violence, of persecution against her, and where the media and the right wing is every day feeding into this discourse of hatred, this discourse of violence. And so, you know, they come on to, they make their statements, rejecting the assassination attempt, but really it should come as no surprise that you keep saying hateful things, you keep saying horrible things. We're in a moment in society and across the world that violence is increasing, that polarization is increasing, that people are more and more taking to desperate measures and they feel at a loss. So really this assassination attempt is a horrific result of this discourse from the right wing, and it must be condemned. The mobilization today is going to be massive. I'm sure we're going to be able to share videos and photos from it. And it's impressive to see all of the leaders across Latin America have also rallied in solidarity with Christina. And it's a really important moment to not stay silent about this. It's quite an amazing thing to have watched that video real time, the gun jams, the man stands right next to her. We live in extraordinary times, unpleasant times as well, around the same time as this attempted assassination against Christina Kirschner, who has of course faced this campaign of vilification in Argentina. We got news from Russia that Mikhail Gorbachev had died. The last leader of the USSR mixed sort of appreciation of Gorbachev in the West. He's celebrated as the best Soviet leader. But of course in Russia, he's condemned as somebody who dismantled the Soviet Union excess deaths as a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union, perhaps as high as 3 million people. You know, entire social indicators collapsed after that. No doubt about it that in his memoir in 1996, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was a communist from his youth in the 1940s during World War II, Mikhail Gorbachev in his memoir, 1996, tried to say, look, I didn't do anything wrong. The person who did everything wrong was Boris Yeltsin. No doubt that Boris Yeltsin carried a lot of the burden, carries a lot of the burden for the destruction of the USSR. After all, Yeltsin, who was the Moscow party chair in the period leading up to the dissolution of the USSR, led the fight to eventually dismantle it. But Gorbachev himself opening the doors with Perestroika, which means reconstruction and Glasnost, which means openness, essentially took the Communist Party and dismantled it long before Yeltsin and the so-called White House coup that brought down the Soviet Union eventually. People may not know this, but the USSR actually was taken down by an armed coup led by Boris Yeltsin. Well, Gorbachev is gone. He tried for the rest of his years to rehabilitate his reputation, both in his own memoir, 1996, in Taubman's biography, 2017, and as has been widely circulated on social media, the Pizza Hut ad. Unfortunately for Mr. Gorbachev, he will be remembered by many Russians as the person who destroyed Russia and created a, along with Boris Yeltsin, a kind of crony system, what even liberal scholars called the pirateization of Russia, where pirates essentially pillaged the great social assets in the Soviet Union. Pillaging of great social assets, Zoe, think about what's happening in Pakistan. Three years running La Nina, which is when the surface waters of the ocean cool down and so on. Three years running La Nina, catastrophic weather patterns and so on. We saw heavy rainfall. Pakistan is still in the monsoon season. It ends in September, but heavy rainfall, even in by August, 190% of normal rainfall from previous years was registered in Pakistan. Torrential rains, the Indus River just went over the banks, Sindh and Baluchistan, two major provinces in Pakistan, overrun by the waters. Current numbers and I'm looking at the most recent numbers. Extraordinary, over a thousand people dead, 99,000 plus houses destroyed, 3,500 kilometers of roads destroyed. And very sadly, 727,000 livestock killed. Very sad. You know, this is not only sad for the livestock cows, the goats and so on killed by this floods. But also this is the wealth of a lot of very poor people. That's just been wiped out. Estimates suggest that the floods are going to cost Pakistan around $11 billion. Now mark this coming in using this as an opportunity in a sense to drive the International Monetary Fund agenda. Estimated cost of this flood, $11 billion US dollars. IMF comes in and says, well, we'll provide $1 billion in loans. This is the level of so-called Western generosity. The financial markets are going to punish Pakistan for this. No sign of any recovery. Weekly inflation rate about 40% very high for the people. People are very angry with what's been happening in this great country of Pakistan. You know, you've got to see that there's a kind of misery inflicted on the population and they have gone up to it's very interesting. People have rushed up to the highways and built towns essentially on the highways tells you a lot about, you know, the way the world works richer parts of the country on higher planes have been less effective. I know that there have been lots of messages of solidarity to the Pakistani people and we certainly on behalf of give the people what they want. People's dispatch globetrotter want to say that we're really concerned about not only those who have been killed and so on, but how the Pakistani people come out of this. Not going to be easy for them at all. Not going to be easy for them at all. Well, we've said that about the Horn of Africa many years past maybe 50 years of various forms of economic and military conflict. The war in Ethiopia as we give us an update. Well, there had been a ceasefire in Ethiopia after the TPLF instigated a war with the Ethiopian government. It was a brutal war. We've covered it pretty extensively in people's dispatch and in the past week this war has resumed. The TPLF has begun carrying out attacks once again on Ethiopian villages, on Ethiopian troops. It's horrific because this war that already went on for over a year and caused mass casualties, mass infrastructural damage in places that the TPLF had taken over, which is the they had destroyed medical facilities, destroyed schools and just to give people a bit of an explanation, the TPLF is the Tigray People's Liberation Front. It was in power in Ethiopia for a long time and under their rule it was a rule of division. It was a rule of fermenting differences between ethnic groups in the country. A lot of devastation of different ethnic groups and the current President Avi Ahmed came to power in 2018 after the TPLF were defeated with a promise and with a vision to overcome these divisions, overcome this politics of division of hatred. The first thing he did was make a peace deal with Eritrea, which had been at war also with Ethiopia, with many different conflicts for decades. They made a peace agreement and he really worked to create this consensus of national unity and end to the war and end to kind of these intergroup conflicts which had been happening across the country. And Avi Ahmed really threatened this control that the TPLF had in the country. Of course they were sort of relegated to their province at that point, Integre. And basically in November 2020, the TPLF attacked one of the army garrisons of the Ethiopian army and from there started this long protracted bloody war which saw human rights violations, there were incidents of mass rapes, conscription of children, you name it, really awful things. And this is people within one country. So this is happening within Ethiopia but also the TPLF was launching attacks into Eritrea which at that point was on good terms with Ethiopia. And so really just creating violence, creating chaos, creating bloodshed. And what's interesting and what a lot of the analysts, which we've spoken to with Kavankal Kharkni is the journalists have been covering this mostly and he's been talking to people within Eritrea, within Ethiopia. And a lot of these analysts say that a lot of the activity of TPLF has been instigated following meetings with the U.S. government. And so Joe Biden has been continually accused of having fanned the flames of this conflict. The U.S. has taken a very, very hard line against Ethiopia in this conflict. They've said that Ethiopia is the one that's carrying out all of these human rights violations. TPLF, for example, was documented to have taken trucks of the World Food Program and stolen humanitarian aid destines for the population. They stole this aid. This was documented by international organizations. Yet the United States has continually supported the TPLF. It's been a very polarizing conflict that a lot of the discourse and the debate has been taking place on social media, a lot of different versions being contested there. But what is true and what cannot be denied is that every single time that there's been an instigation of war, the U.S. has somehow been involved. And so, for example, with this latest breaking of what was a six-month ceasefire, a very, very important ceasefire that finally brought some stability to the people of Ethiopia, of Tigray who have been ravaged really through this conflict. This latest attack happened right after a special visit of the U.S. envoy and a delegate from the European Union had a meeting with TPLF leaders specifically, which was condemned by the Ethiopian government. Weeks later, the conflict resumes. Obviously, we're not going to say this is directly related, but we have to say that the EU and the U.S. clearly aren't invested in peace because they're going to an antagonistic force that is fighting the government, fighting a government which is trying to make life better for all of its people. And this is the result. So it's a really worrying development. Last time when the war started, it lasted for over a year. And so we really hope that this time it won't last that long, that the attacks will not continue, but last time it did. So, you know, following this development, hoping that this does not escalate into a full-scale war, hoping that thousands of people don't get displaced by this conflict, aren't affected by the ravages of war once again. I've got to say, friends, that people's dispatch has been keeping its eye on the Horn of Africa as it does on other struggles, but specifically here. Go and read the story on the U.S.-backed TPLF resumed war in northern Ethiopia. Highly recommended. Must be read. You're listening to give the people what they want brought to you every single week. This is the 90-second show. So, okay, the world didn't start 92 weeks ago, Zoe, but we did. And we're coming up to those 100 weeks of give the people what they want. Bring us your selfies. We want to watch you. We want to see pictures of you watching our show. It's the only thing that we really care about why we do this show. We're coming to you from people's dispatch and globetrotters. I'm going to take us on a little journey to Iraq where there's been very little coverage of what's happening there. There's entirely a political, you know, it's a political catastrophe. What one has seen was that ever since the 2019 elections, it's been virtually impossible for the country to have a government, the 2019 parliamentary elections, then the 2021 parliamentary elections. There's just been no government. What you've had is a so-called caretaker, prime minister, former intelligence official, Mustafa Al Khadimi, Mr. Al Khadimi is not with a political party. He is an independent. He's basically imposed on the country by the United States government and perhaps to some extent by Tehran. There is no base that he has. Again, he was the head of intelligence. He's really not... If you go and try to talk to Mr. Al Khadimi, it's very clear that he's not with any political party. You wonder in such a fractious parliament, how is it possible for him to have been the prime minister before the 2021 elections and then subsequent to the 2021 elections? Well, what's the crisis? The crisis is that in recent years, the largest political bloc in Iraq has been comprised of a variety of forces. It's called the Sairun movement or the Alliance of Reform. This includes the Sada rights led by Muktadal al-Sadr. It includes the Communist Party. It includes various groups apart from that. They have the largest bloc in parliament, but they're unable to produce a parliamentary majority and that's important. Mr. Muktadal al-Sadr himself, the scion of the Sadaist movement, the son of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, Mr. Muktadal al-Sadr is an extraordinary erratic politician. In the past eight years, he has four times announced his retirement from politics, creating complete furore amongst his followers. This time again as a consequence of not being able to assemble a parliamentary majority, Mr. Muktadal al-Sadr decided, well, I'm going to retire. When he made that announcement, his followers rushed in Baghdad into the green zone. They set up a camp underneath the government's own nose in other cities, particularly in the southern part of Iraq. They went and gathered all over the place. This created a serious political crisis, particularly after the Sada rights began to smash up buildings. Well, then on Monday, Mr. Muktadal al-Sadr said, I'm going on a hunger strike to get my followers to withdraw from the green zone to stop smashing things up. This deepened the crisis. Meanwhile, the main spiritual leader in Iraq, the principal spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Khadim al-Hariri, who was 83 years old, decided to retire. He retired in a very consequential way. He made a statement saying, Muktadal al-Sadr is not the heir of his father, Muktadal al-Sadr. Instead, he said, all my followers, and that's basically the Shia community of Iraq, all my followers should give their allegiance to Ayatollah Ali Khomeini of Iran. They must obey Ayatollah Ali Khomeini. This, of course, has created even more problems in the Sada right movement. In a sense, Mr. Al-Hariri has challenged the authority of Muktadal al-Sadr. Iraq is in great turmoil. The climate catastrophe has made drought a permanent feature of Iraqi society. Agriculture has been hit very hard. Prices have been hit very with inflation up and so on. A cycle of protests, Zoe, began in October 2019. In fact, if you map out Iraq's protest calendar, it actually resembles that of Colombia. Around the same protest cycles you saw in Iraq as in Colombia, there was a fruition of that protest cycle into the election campaign where Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez were able to win an election and bring a coalition into office. Let's see what agenda they'll be able to push forward in a sense to address the question of the protesters. In Iraq, Mr. Al-Sadr simply with his inexperience, I would say, and this kind of erratic form of politics, not able to generate a sufficient coalition to lead the cycle of protests into office and to try to address the demands of the protesters. Nobody is addressing their demands. Iraq is in a great, what I feel is a kind of a cycle which the people in Iraq, the Iraqi people just seem to not be able to break. Well, talked about elections. In Iraq, there have been several, but there's no real government. They're still in the hands of a US-backed official, former intelligence agent. Brazil is having an election. You're going to be covering it. Form the ground, Zoe. What's happening on the ground? Well, Vijay, you just released a terrific piece speaking to different leaders. Dilma Rousseff, Fernando Hadaad, Joe Paulo Rodriguez of the Landless World Workers Movement. And being in Brazil over the past, specifically in Sao Paulo over the past week, it's quite interesting. You really feel the election spirit in the air, whether it's seeing stickers everywhere, people with the car, signs, voting for their candidate. It's really, it's really vibrant. And as you wrote in the article, it is a decisive election, not only for Brazil, but for the region and for the world. And it will have global consequences, really what happens in these elections. And what happens in these elections, not only who's elected, but what happens around the elections. What is the reaction of the institutions in Brazil? How do they respond if there are threats made to democracy? We've highlighted on the show before that Jared Bolsonaro, the sitting president in Brazil, has made several threats to the electoral process, both undermining the electronic system that is world recognized for being an extremely trustworthy system. He's attempted to create a discourse undermining the validity of the system. He's also continued to fan the flames of hatred. It's quite interesting that following the assassination attempt on Cristina Fernández Kichner, he is one of the only heads of state within Latin America, but even globally, who hasn't expressed his solidarity, who hasn't condemned this horrific attack. That is telling, that is telling that he's not willing to extend his hand across the island as they say in the United States and really stand with the life of someone whose life was just threatened. You were speaking to a lot of these leaders, and there's a lot at stake in these elections, as we've mentioned. And the model of democracy in Brazil is really on the line. One thing that's also crucial to keep in mind is not only the contest between Luisa Nacional da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro for the presidency, but the fact that the Congress, right now, a lot of seats are up for dispute. And so the composition of the Congress in Brazil is going to be an extremely decisive factor. The Congress is the Congress that is able to, for example, vote impeachments. It is the Congress that was able to vote Dilma out of office and to carry out this parliamentary coup. And it is the Congress that was able to protect Jair Bolsonaro from over 80 impeachment requests that were lodged from different civil society groups, from different trade unions, who consistently attempted to ask the Congress, you need to hold an impeachment vote against him. And this was never taken forward precisely because Bolsonaro had control over the large majority of Congress. He was able to make deals. He was able to make agreements with them to make sure that all of his initiatives were protected. So we're going to be giving reports weekly on what's happening in Brazil, not only with the presidential race, but also with the Congress. What are the candidates? For example, the Landless World Workers Movement is launching several candidates in different states. All who are committed to carrying forward agrarian reform and other imperative social measures will be giving you all of that and more. So keep tuned to this coverage. Keep tuned to this coverage. Bookmark people's dispatch on your computer. Go to it every few hours. You'll get everything you need. Listen friends, stunning, stunning story was published in Foreign Affairs, which is an establishment journal in the United States reported by Fiona Hill, Angela Stent. The stunning part of this isn't the story, which is a basic rundown of how Vladimir Putin has done this or bad thing. But the stunning revelation was that in April 2022, the Russians and the Ukrainians had agreed to a peace deal. They had come to an interim deal where the Russians said that they would withdraw to the February 24th line if Ukraine made a direct pledge not to join NATO. Fascinating that there was this deal. Essentially, seemed to me a lot like Minx too. The agreement that had been negotiated almost a decade ago. Well, a deal was in the offer. People agreed to the deal. And then Boris Johnson travels to Kiev and informs Vladimir Zelensky not to take the deal that the Ukraine's western backers would not ratify this deal. It's a fascinating revelation. Earlier it had been reported that Mr. Johnson told Emmanuel Macron in May of 2022 that when he was in Kiev in April, he told Zelensky not to make a deal with the Russians. That was already reported, that Johnson had said this. What had not been previously reported is that there was a deal in April and that both sides had agreed. That is a stunning revelation. What it suggests and quite against the reporting in most western media outlet, what it suggests is that the war could have been ended by the end of April. Now we are in September. Over six months of this conflict has been going on. The Russians and the Ukrainians quite prepared to have ended this conflict in April. That means the Russian entry was on 24th of February. Let's say basically almost March. March and April, two months and a week perhaps of conflict and it would have perhaps come to a close instead of having a deal with the Russians. That is the consequence of Boris Johnson who no longer will be the Prime Minister of Britain in a matter of a couple of weeks and I will get to that in my last comment. It is quite clear now that Boris Johnson perhaps carrying a message from the United States Government perhaps not. We are not clear on that. That is not actually information that one has. But a deal apparently an interim deal that had been agreed upon by the Russians and the Ukrainians that itself is a matter of great concern I think for the world and it's again striking that this revelation in the article by Fiona Hill and Angela Stent has not made the front pages of newspapers perhaps people are reporting it in more depth and so on I'm not sure but it came in foreign affairs highly credible journalists highly credible journal and they're not carrying water for the Russians certainly because the article in which that revelation appears is utterly against Mr. Putin. Boris Johnson will be off he'll be free to do the things that Boris Johnson does most likely the British people will have a new Prime Minister Liz Truss who is going to thatcherize the country. Rishi Sunak her competitor most likely is not going to win well that's what Britain always does and here having scuttled the peace agreement in Ukraine and Russia they will have Liz Truss the former foreign minister will be most likely the next Prime Minister of Britain you've been listening to give the people what they want brought to you from people's dispatch that's peoplesdispatch.org Zoe is the editor I'm Vijay from Globetrotter the chief correspondent at Globetrotter super title I really like it hope you like our show tell your friends about it this is episode 92 got 8 more to go before 100 and when we have our 100th show please please bring your entire community we'd like to have thousands of people celebrate with us at our 100th show see you next week.