00:03:55.720countries and the goods are moved back and forth and then they're assembled in one place. What this
00:04:01.040did was it enabled the people who would have invested money in a factory in, say, Detroit,
00:04:08.400it enabled them to actually not invest much in the world. See, when you have a big factory,
00:04:13.940you have to invest a lot of money into that factory, you know, let's say millions of dollars.
00:04:18.480If you've broken it up into 20 different factories, the investment in each factory is lessened.
00:04:24.200Because these factories or these manufacturing plants are in Mexico or in, you know, Malaysia or in Indonesia, wherever they are, they're often subcontracted.
00:04:34.520So somebody in Malaysia has to raise the funds, much less than, you know, starting a big car factory.
00:04:53.360iPhones are made by Foxconn, you know, which is a Taiwanese company based in Shenzhen, China.
00:04:59.300Apple doesn't make anything. They just design brands, they develop some technology and so on, and they patent it.
00:05:06.280But they don't invest in China. That's a Taiwanese company that does that investment.
00:05:11.700So these firms were able to first not invest a lot of money around the world to do manufacturing.
00:05:17.860At the same time, they collected huge amounts of rent on the goods that they sold.
00:05:24.080This money wasn't going towards taxation because the big companies were basically buying out the political system and they bought out the media and they sold this story that low taxation is good for the whole country, for everybody.
00:05:42.860They corrupted the political system in general, also the media.
00:05:46.380I mean, look who owns the media now. Oh, well, Washington Post, who's the owner of the Washington Post, I wonder, you know, and so on. It's no longer a family that owns it, that's committed to the media. It's big business that owns these things. If you look at American broadcast networks, they're owned by arms dealers, you know, whether it's NBC or whoever, they're all owned by companies that manufacture weapons.
00:06:10.280So you have this situation where they stop paying taxes, essentially, what we at our institute called a long-term tax strike.
00:06:18.940They go on strike. They just don't pay taxes.
00:06:21.840They use the enormous wealth they have to go into tax havens, or they buy media outlets and so on and start to produce a version of reality.
00:06:34.160And at the same time, municipalities and so on are starved for funds, and they start privatizing and really eroding the basis of social life.
00:06:44.600I mean, it's a perfect storm of, to some extent, worsened job prospects for people because a lot of manufacturing goes global, precarious conditions in the service economy for a lot of people,
00:06:57.120A media that's basically pretending that it tells you a universal or truthful story, when in fact, it often just represents the viewpoints of the very rich. You have a government that basically succumbs to the very rich in the presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, $14 billion was spent on that election.
00:07:19.280It's an incredible amount of money, you know, in an election.
00:10:06.480There's so much to say here again, Ayana, and this is something I feel desperately moved
00:10:11.900by because, you know, as a consequence of the lockdown and this pandemic, we estimate
00:10:18.860that hunger rates have gone up dramatically.
00:10:21.780And I don't know, maybe half the world's population struggles with hunger.
00:10:26.500and there's something just obscene that about our world that we can do so many incredible things
00:10:32.780you and I are talking to each other through a computer it's incredible Ayanna you are you're
00:10:37.880in Portland Oregon we're just chatting as if you're sitting in the same room as me your voice
00:10:42.180is very clear we can do all these amazing things you know we could put our cameras on if we'd like
00:10:47.820and see each other it's incredible and yet just five minutes from where I am somebody will be
00:10:53.640hungry. A young person can't study properly. Their brains are not developing because their0.99
00:10:59.000nutritional rates are down. Stay with the United States. Roughly 567,000 people struggle with0.98
00:11:06.100homelessness. You know, half a million people struggle with homelessness in this extraordinarily
00:11:11.040rich country. This is a canary in the coal mine, not of social systems that are not working and so
00:11:19.000on. It's a canary in the coal mine about feeling, about the compassion, sense of compassion in a
00:11:25.140country. I mean, how does it, how does a country claim to be a civilization? You know, if you just
00:11:32.560have no way, no project to address the fact that half a million people struggle with homelessness
00:11:40.360and that increasing numbers of people struggle with hunger. I mean, how do you go on with your
00:11:46.620own life. You know, there's something wrong with that when a country doesn't have that as its first
00:11:52.560priority. You know, the principal priority in an election campaign should be we're going to just
00:11:58.400not have people be homeless. It should be we're just not going to have people be hungry. We need
00:12:04.540nutritious food for people. And it's not a question of creating giant, ugly, you know,
00:12:11.000nature-destroying factory farms. Let's be creative in thinking of ways to, you know, grow nutritious
00:12:17.880food near where people live, decentralize, you know, food regimes and so on. Let's have that
00:12:24.860conversation and let's be serious about it. Let's not say this is some marginal thing for hippies
00:12:30.080and, you know, people on the side. It's a ridiculous attitude. This should be at the center.0.99
00:12:35.080Why isn't a mainstream political party putting at its heart the question of homelessness and hunger and so on?
00:12:43.140And they don't. And for me, what that says is that's the canary.
00:12:47.900That's an indictment of a culture. It's nothing to do with this party or that party.
00:12:52.820You know, the squad, you know, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have put together these seven bills and others with them.
00:13:05.080have put together seven bills to directly address the question of, you know, homelessness or
00:13:10.400houselessness, as you see fit to say. They're very pragmatic and good steps that they're asking for.
00:13:17.100There's nothing utopian about it, you know, but it's a direct challenge to the banks, to people
00:13:21.760with money, to property owners and so on. And it's the same with hunger. I mean, we know that there's
00:13:27.660enough food produced in the world. And, you know, I have my critiques of how food is produced, but
00:13:32.340let's leave that for a moment. There's enough food produced in the world. And I often, you know,
00:13:37.260think, I often think about this, that, you know, there's a place, there's a warehouse of food,
00:13:42.600and then there's hungry people. What prevents the hungry people from getting the food from
00:13:47.900the warehouse? Well, what prevents the hungry people from eating that food is they don't have
00:13:52.260money. And if you don't have money, then you are condemned to starvation. There's something just
00:13:57.800vulgar about the fact that we have people without homes, people without food, people without health,
00:14:03.880people without access to education, and what prevents them from getting these things which we
00:14:08.640have is the lack of money. This is what the capitalist system has done. It has eroded
00:14:14.840the sense of morality in a culture where people in a society just get inured. They come to terms
00:14:23.300with this they see homeless people on the street they just turn their face and walk by they see
00:14:28.520hungry people they just don't know what to do they feel they feel assaulted by the presence of the
00:14:33.540hungry person there on the street it's as if the hungry person is hurting them by just being there
00:14:39.500you know instead of taking that hurt that you feel when you see somebody hungry and saying i need to
00:14:45.120construct a political project i need to be involved in something to just end this you know to not
00:14:51.320allow this. And again, this inured sense of break, where people just don't feel like the hungry,
00:14:59.900the homeless, the people without medical care, the sense that they are not part of me,
00:15:05.140they are alien to me, you know, we are alienated from them. That predates the pandemic. I mean,
00:15:11.560that's been a long time in motion. And, you know, I think that there is really something
00:15:16.820quite significant about trying to create a political project that, in a way, breaks the
00:15:24.100alienation of human beings from each other and breaks the alienation of human beings from nature.
00:15:30.740It's the same sort of detachment. I am detached from other people, especially those who are1.00
00:15:37.860struggling. I don't want to deal with them. I don't want to see them. We'll move them away.
00:15:42.500We'll evict them and remove them. And I'm also detached from nature. I don't want to deal with
00:15:48.180the vagaries of nature, the sense of nature. I just want to give you an example. In Cuba,
00:15:54.320every year, as you know, there are hurricanes and the hurricane tears through the island as it tears
00:15:59.400through other islands. It's a decentralized society. So in every village or town, there is
00:16:06.200a committee to defend the revolution. And in their committee, there's often electricians.
00:16:11.180when the storm is coming they leave their homes they go and they take down the power lines they
00:16:16.620just dismantle it they remove it because they know that the lines will otherwise snap so they
00:16:21.400preemptively put people without power then the storm blows right through then they go and put
00:16:26.660the power line back up in other words they're planning for a certain eventuality and then they
00:16:32.180remedy it in these countries like let's say the united states example puerto rico nothing is done
00:16:39.140And then the storm comes in, knocks down the power line, and a population is completely disorganized.
00:16:50.300So now you have to wait for the electricians to come from the mainland or somewhere else to put up the power again.
00:16:56.880And then you go weeks and weeks without power.
00:16:59.220I mean, it's an example of two different models.
00:17:02.060You've got the Cuban model where they put people before profits, you know, where people are organized, they're trained, they work in community to deal with adversity, to deal with challenges.
00:17:13.360You have the other side where people basically are alienated from each other.0.85
00:17:23.480And really, COVID has shown us that, you know, 29,000 Cuban medical students went door to door and tested all 11 million Cubans to see if they had COVID-19.
00:17:34.360In the United States, most people, and I would hazard almost like to say everybody, nobody has seen anybody from the government come to their door, knock on the door and say, can I test you?
00:17:46.840And yet it happened in a poor country like Cuba.0.68
00:17:49.500It's a different attitude to human beings.
00:17:52.160That model says people come before profit. In this very rich society of the United States, there's no doubt that profit always comes before people and profit always comes before nature.
00:23:08.920So what's happened because of this lack
00:23:11.680of an understanding of class in the United States
00:23:14.240is the punishment is what is seen there.0.60
00:23:17.340In other words, when we say Black Lives Matter,
00:23:20.220we say Black Lives Matter, meaning Black Lives Matter.
00:23:23.840That means that police killing must stop.0.87
00:23:26.700that police killing must stop in other words the punishment must stop but what about the so-called
00:23:33.040crime what when you say black lives matter you you surely don't just mean that the killing must
00:23:40.600stop surely you mean that the precious lives of human beings must have access to food must have
00:23:47.540access to housing must have access to education health care broad range of services and so on
00:23:54.440Surely it means that whole preciousness of life, not just that, oh, you should be allowed to live. What's the point of living if I can't live with dignity, you know, is the issue. So in that sense, you know, there is no project that's articulated, particularly in the Democratic Party, which addresses the broader question of life.
00:24:19.640You know, again, it's not enough to say we have to go and check the police and so on,
00:24:24.100because it's not just about the police.
00:24:25.860It's about the whole system is wretched.
00:24:28.420People don't have the ability to feed themselves.
00:24:31.180They don't have the ability to take care of their children.
00:24:34.080They don't have the ability, you know, to have their health monitored on a regular basis.
00:24:38.920Public services have faced total attrition.
00:24:41.680That kind of broad, bold project needs to be articulated.
00:24:46.000You know, you need something like that.
00:24:47.600And it's out of a bold project like that, that you have to risk creating a majority, you know, a majority, as we say, is not found, it has to be made, you can't find a majority of people to back you, you have to make a majority, you have to make a majority around the program that unifies people and people will be unified by programs such as everybody agrees that feeding people is paramount.
00:25:15.020People must have a full dignity of their precious lives.
00:30:15.540I mean, what's happened in a way is you've commodified public action in the West, in the capitalist countries.
00:30:23.200But public action has become the province of non-governmental organizations that get grants and they have professionals running them and so on.
00:30:31.160You don't have masses of people organized into neighborhood committees and so on.
00:30:36.380You just don't have that kind of broad public action.
00:31:50.180So student organizations from colleges said, we volunteer to pick up the food from the school and deliver it to people's homes. I mean, this is public action. You know, Ayana, this is a habit that develops in these societies.
00:32:05.400They haven't attacked trade unions. They haven't attacked the organization of students and so on. You just don't see this in the West where people live much more atomized lives. You know, there is a greater sense that the culture promotes individualism. You need to get by. Don't work collaboratively or cooperatively.
00:32:25.400cooperatively, and the cooperative spirit has eroded deeply in these societies. It's not like
00:32:31.700the United States didn't have this at one time. Let's go back to the readings of 19th century
00:32:38.100fiction, where you see, or I guess even the history books, where a community would come
00:32:43.120together to raise somebody's barn. Their barn needed to be raised. The whole community would
00:32:48.060provide their labor. Nobody asked to be paid. They just did it together as a community,
00:32:52.680because they knew they relied on each other.
00:33:18.480And that culture of commodifying all social relations
00:33:22.360it doesn't prepare you for a pandemic and how to respond to the pandemic in the end
00:33:27.760in the places like the united states you wait for the state to act and otherwise you're paralyzed
00:33:32.800in your home in in these kind of countries in country where you've essentially commodified
00:33:39.760so many social relations you know where when you need help from for something you try to either
00:33:45.820hire somebody to do it for you by paying them directly or you use your credit card or whatever
00:33:53.040it is. But this idea of mutual community support is deeply eroded in the system and it has its
00:34:01.180impact at the time of a pandemic. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you just brought up so many
00:34:08.040important points about our mutual aid being eroded. And I feel that. And you've been working
00:34:17.360to outline what a post-COVID-19 agenda needs to look like for parts of the world who have been
00:34:23.180long held captive by global austerity measures. And I'd like to explore how the pandemic is
00:34:30.040projected to affect the world in the long term and what strategies and policies need to be centered.
00:34:36.260But before I ask about the 16-point agenda, I wonder if you can remind listeners about the extent of global debt servitude and just the amount of external debt countries have been forced to bear while trillions of dollars sit in tax havens and billionaires offer, you know, paltry philanthropic donations.
00:34:57.140i mean this is extraordinary like you know it should be a slogan i mean i would like to make
00:35:04.040a t-shirt ayana which says no philanthropy only taxation look the problem with philanthropy is
00:35:11.300they give money and then they expect you to genuflect in front of them name buildings after
00:35:16.180them praise them to the skies i mean this is medieval you know this is how kings and noble
00:35:22.520people said look i am giving you something and then you had to make you know to fall on the
00:35:28.280ground before them what's the difference you know the donor comes oh my god the donor is coming
00:35:33.400tomorrow everybody's smart enough and you know you're like hello no you know i mean what this
00:35:38.020is medieval the attitude towards philanthropy is positively medieval i don't want philanthropy
00:35:43.940pay your taxes fair and square and then let's have a democratic you know discussion of how to
00:35:51.880utilize that money not allow one rich person to define the agenda you know with society when you
00:35:58.160have somebody like bezos you know 700 billion dollars plus you know that they're sitting on
00:36:05.140um you know they have more money than the the wealth of countries you know they can move
00:36:12.020enormous agendas by their whim that's what i mean by it being medieval i mean what gives one person
00:36:18.120the right to move a major social agenda, you know, whether good or bad, you know, I'm not
00:36:23.060judging it. It's just the structure is wrong. You know, we should have democratic control over our
00:36:28.820social wealth, not allow WIM to define it. Well, you know, we know that right now the situation
00:36:37.280with debt is just obscene. You know, it's literally obscene. You know, the best estimates show us
00:36:44.620that there is about $11 trillion in external debt in the developing world. And the wealthy
00:36:52.060bondholders, they just don't want to give these countries a break. I mean, right now,
00:36:57.220if you're smart, and we live in a smart world, we'd say, oh, wait a minute, let's just forgive
00:37:02.740all the debt, you know, this $11 trillion. I mean, after all, after all, there's $32 trillion
00:37:08.340sitting in tax havens. And that's, that's just the number that we were able to find, you know,
00:37:13.660$32 trillion, and we went and looked at this, $32 trillion is more than the total value of gold
00:37:23.380that has ever been brought up from under the earth. All the known gold reserves are less than
00:37:31.600$32 trillion. So we've got $32 trillion sitting in tax havens. Let's use some of that money,
00:37:39.500which is sitting idle, to essentially forgive the debt.
00:37:42.540These countries, for instance, if you take an example, Ethiopia,
00:39:28.240you've long called for the need to push the debate about the environmental crisis to not
00:39:49.800only include more nuance and complexity but to also acknowledge labor and land struggles
00:39:55.760And to address the question of deprivation, and I've heard you share sentiments that point out what is the point of a climate strike that speaks of an uninhabitable earth when people on this earth presently cannot eat, which is something you were just referring to.
00:40:10.800And so this question is open-ended, but I wonder if you could speak to what agricultural workers could teach us about reorganizing the system and how does an extended movement actually translate into a stronger movement?
00:40:25.760You see, right now, we have, in a place like India, we have increasing and long-term and what looks to be permanent agrarian distress.
00:40:37.400You know, agriculture has been commercialized.
00:40:41.140You know, big firms dominate the landscape, determine the outcome.
00:40:46.960They are growing things essentially for markets all over the world.
00:42:40.140because you have to build mass support for some of these ideas.
00:42:42.880And this is a long-term rebuilding project because around the world, farm worker organizing, farm worker strength has been greatly depleted in the face of giant corporations coming in with the full support of governments and basically eroding the capacity of agricultural workers and small farm owners to live with dignity.
00:43:08.320I mean, that's what they were eroded. So, you know, we can talk as much as we want about agroecology, organic farming, good stewardship of the land and all that.
00:43:17.500All of that stuff is abstractions, Ayanna. All of it is abstractions, because it's not a question of having the right ideas.
00:43:24.640You know, you can have the right ideas. You can say, oh, look, you know, you shouldn't use so much fertilizer.
00:43:53.060by building a small organic experimental farm somewhere
00:43:55.760that proves that small experimental farms are correct.
00:43:59.120You need hundreds of millions of people who work the land to be gripped by the idea that we need to have a different way of doing agriculture.
00:44:07.940And that's why I want to emphasize the importance of these agricultural workers' movements, farm workers' movements, these big marches being held in India.
00:44:17.660Because in the marches, they are also articulating and debating their agenda.
00:44:21.720And in that is certainly an agenda about letting the cultivator set the course for what agriculture should look like, listen to the cultivators and so on.
00:44:32.640And I think this is not just happening in India.
00:44:35.620In Brazil, for instance, the landless workers movement, they have experimented, built cooperatives, worked on the construction of what they call agroecological production and so on.
00:44:48.480And that's entirely driven by formerly landless farmers and workers who now live in these collective settlements where they are experimenting with new forms of not agriculture for boutique consumption, you know, rich for the rich and so on, but agroecological food for themselves, for the communities around them and so on.
00:45:10.040So I say that the beginning of the transformation doesn't come from, you know, a book somebody has written somewhere about, you know, let's do agriculture like this. It comes from these experiments and struggles of peasants, farm workers, who are literally, literally with their fingers in the dirt, trying to understand how to draw food from the earth without destroying it.
00:45:38.300And I think we need to actually take the lead from them.
00:45:52.260And I've been so disenchanted with just the folks who have the mic and have the power and how they try to, yeah, push their armchair philosophical ideas onto those who are actually the ones working with the land.
00:46:12.560And I think that's just such a powerful point.
00:46:17.160And Navija, you've been very vocal about the recent coup in Bolivia and its relationship to lithium mining, as over 50% of the world's lithium resides amidst Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile.
00:46:30.360So can you talk a bit about the United States' role in interfering with this election in order to gain fuller access to lithium?
00:46:37.880And if you think more and more coups will ensue in the coming decades as corporate miners seek to propel, quote, clean energy forward?
00:46:47.160Yeah, so, you know, I mean, I think the idea of the Green New Deal sounds great. And who's going to disagree with that? You know, we do want to transition away from fossil fuel energy. Of course, we want to transition from fossil fuel energy. But what are we transitioning to?
00:47:03.280We're transitioning to energy that is derived from the sun, solar, we're looking to wind, we're looking to maybe tidal energy, different forms of energy from the earth, from the sun, as I said.
00:47:20.840But of course, these forms of energy are erratic.
00:47:23.900Solar energy is not available at night, you need energy at night, therefore you need to somehow capture the energy.
00:47:30.000In order to capture energy, whether it's any of these non-fossil or what we call renewable energy, to capture these, you need batteries.
00:47:39.940And thus far, the most efficient batteries we have use cobalt, use lithium and other such minerals and so on.
00:47:49.520But cobalt and lithium are two important ones.
00:47:54.320Cobalt comes from the tailing mines of copper.
00:47:57.180And the largest amount of cobalt comes out of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where some companies with hideous records like Glencore, domiciled in Switzerland, these companies are the ones that essentially, by outsourcing the gathering of cobalt from the tailing mines, make a ton of money, you know, ton of money.
00:48:22.800So the people who are mining this, you know, families, including children, are paid almost nothing, and these companies make a ton of money.
00:48:31.000So in Congo, you don't need to do a coup because basically these corporations have enormous control of parts of the country already.
00:48:38.820Then with lithium, there's big lithium production in Australia, but it's not enough.
00:48:44.340The real scaled-up green transition takes place.
00:48:48.140you're going to need a lot more lithium than is currently being mined out of Australia.
00:48:54.160You know, there's lithium available in Cornwall in England.
00:48:57.080But let me tell you, I don't think they're going to be mining in Cornwall.
00:49:00.720This kind of dirty mining, it's always in somebody else's backyard.
00:49:04.580So the big, big dump of lithium is in that ABC triangle, Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile.
00:49:12.260You know, and in these countries, there is considerable lithium.
00:49:16.920uh evo moralee's government when he was in power 14 years improved the conditions of his people
00:49:23.660immensely he insisted that the government mining company would be in charge of the sale of the
00:49:31.240lithium or going into joint ventures that you cannot privatize the mines um you know and they
00:49:36.940also started making a deal which would allow them to process the lithium and make batteries in
00:49:43.840Bolivia government run factory. In fact, they also mass produced a small car, which Evo Morales
00:49:51.460was the first to drive off the lot in Bolivia. They were interested not just in selling raw
00:49:56.180materials, but in going from lithium all the way out to electric cars with their own lithium
00:50:02.240batteries in it and so on. And then the coup happens because this is unacceptable. Because
00:50:07.140who actually should control the lithium? Not the Bolivian people and their government. No,0.99
00:50:12.040Certainly not. It has to be controlled by big multinational corporations. And that's the scandal. You're asking, will there be more coups in the future? Well, of course there will be, because this seems not to end. And these coups are getting more and more sophisticated as time goes by, because the apparatus to make you believe it's not a coup is quite sophisticated.
00:50:31.960I mean, even people, sensitive people, people who lean toward the left after this coup in Bolivia, they spent weeks saying it's not a coup. Morales should not have run again. I mean, who are you to say who should or who shouldn't run again?
00:50:48.920You know, I mean, this is something that can be settled in the ballot box in Bolivia. You know, somebody sitting in Vermont shouldn't have the license to dictate to other parts of the world what should or shouldn't happen.
00:51:01.940You're entitled to your opinion. But in this case, your opinion is not merely an opinion. You're being weaponized by the CIA, by the U.S. State Department. If you come out there and join the chatter saying, well, you know, he's been there too long, you're just legitimizing what they are doing by force on the ground.
00:51:19.740And I find that to be quite shameful. I mean, people need to really introspect. Next time there's a coup, and as I said, there will be a coup somewhere, hopefully not in Bolivia, but somewhere, people need to really think about what they are saying and in whose interest they are saying what.
00:51:37.340Look, you may not like the way somebody is governing. That doesn't give you the right to allow your government to overthrow them.
00:51:43.840I want to go back to Tri-Continental, and in The Ruins of the Present, it's written, quote,
00:51:51.460The culture of commodities and the idea of people as consumers has desecrated the idea of the human.
00:51:58.220Bolivian socialists have looked deeply into their own traditions and elaborated a vocabulary to talk about human character,
00:52:05.180of a human society that is not subsumed by capitalist social norms.
00:52:09.260David Choke Iwanka, the executive secretary of the Bolivian Alliance of the Peoples of
00:52:14.860Our Americas, speaks of kapaknian, the path of the good life, with the need to create
00:52:21.760not consumers and owners, but iamba, a person without an owner.
00:52:27.520Being a person without an owner is, as Choke Iwanka says, the future, the path of people
00:52:35.560And as we come to a close, I wonder if I can ask you to speak about the world, the mass movements, and lives being lived outside of the West, remind you about the authentic agency that still exists and a sense of satisfaction that isn't sought through consumerism.
00:53:06.320Well, before I answer that, I would just like to say that you quoted from our first document
00:53:12.720and you quoted within that from David Chokyuanca.
00:53:17.120David has just been elected the vice president of Bolivia.
00:53:20.940He was the vice presidential candidate with Luis Arce.
00:53:25.060And I'm very pleased that he is the vice president because what the sentiment that you read out
00:53:32.300from our first document, it's something that I deeply believe in. You know, when he articulates
00:53:39.340the view that a person without an owner, you know, that's the future. You know, that's what
00:53:45.960a good life will be. We want everybody to feel like they don't have an owner. And whether it's
00:53:51.700a tangible, real owner, another person, or it's us being owned by money, by, you know, by mortgages,
00:53:59.680by these sorts of attachments to things rather than other people.
00:54:04.440I mean, that's a beautiful way to try to construct a world.
00:54:08.960And I'm very, very pleased that David is the vice president of Bolivia.
00:54:13.360And I know that he will be alongside Luis Arce and all the people there,
00:54:19.160including Patricia Arce, who was such a brave person,
00:54:22.620was beaten during the coup and looked directly in the camera
00:54:26.520as they cut her hair, put red paint on her face, threw gasoline over her.
00:54:31.040She looked directly at a camera and said, we are not afraid.
00:54:34.380And she has just been sworn in as a senator in the Senate in Bolivia.
00:54:41.520So these are the people, in a sense, Ayana, who are going to construct with us the future.
00:54:47.740These are the kinds of people, this is the caliber of person in the movements around the world.
00:54:53.280You know, these are sensitive people. These are people who believe we have great faith in the capacity of other people. They're not afraid of people. You know, you've got to listen more. You've got to build projects in unity with other people, whether it be in Bolivia, as we see here, or it's in, you know, places where, like in South Africa and Durban, where Abba Khali-based Majondolo, the shack dwellers movement, you know, has incredible resilience.
00:55:22.640You know, mostly these women who built networks, political networks of Abaklali inside the neighborhoods of the poor in Durban, but other parts of South Africa as well, which stood attacks and murder by, you know, property developers and so on to give themselves dignity.
00:55:41.000You know, if you go to Colombia in the northern part of South America, where social movement leaders are being killed almost one a day, you know, at that rate. Nonetheless, people still stand up, unafraid, stand up to the kind of mafia state that's led by Ivan Duque. These are brave people. I mean, you know, it breaks my heart every time I hear the name of somebody who's been killed because they are trying to create a sensitive world.