Hello, and welcome to the session in which we would look at adjusting entries. Adjusting entries are the basic component of accrual accounting. Accrual accounting is the basic for accounting. When you learn accounting, gap, you have to know accrual. Adjusting entries, those are the oxygen of accrual. So if you don't understand and if you don't know how to apply adjusting entries, you will have problems as an accounting students and you will have major problem as a CPA candidate. So in this session, I will go over different type of adjusting entries, explaining those concepts briefly and working this example. Now, most likely, if you are watching this recording, you are either a student taken an accounting course or an accounting major or a CPA candidate. I cannot I cannot emphasize this enough. It's extremely important that you are comfortable with adjusting entries because once you know how to do adjusting entries, you understand the four types, how adjusting entries are affected, which accounts do they affect on the balance sheet, which account do they affect on the income statement, then you will have relatively easier time understanding more advanced topic. But if you don't understand adjusting entries, you're going to carry that weakness throughout your accounting career all the way to getting your CPA exam. Now, if you're a CPA candidate, I strongly suggest you check out my website forhatlectures.com. I can be a useful addition. I don't replace your CPA review course. What I teach you is the basics. What I teach you is something different than your CPA review course. So that's why I consider myself as a supplement because CPA review courses, they assume, you know, adjustments, you may or may not know adjustments. Or if you didn't know it in the past, you may forgot how to do adjustments. Therefore, by explaining the material better, I can add 10 to 15 points to your CPA review score. Your risk with me is one month of subscription. Your potential return is passing your exam. And if not for any, if not for anything, take a look at my website to find out how well your university is doing on the CPA exam. I do have financial accounting courses, material, intermediate accounting, as well as other courses. So in addition to the lecture, I have additional resources like practice exercises, multiple choice through false. I strongly suggest you take a look at my website. Also on LinkedIn, connect with me and take a look at the students that use my system to succeed on the CPA exam. Please like this recording on YouTube, share it, connect with me on Instagram and Facebook. So let's take a look at this exercise. Now, the first thing you want to know about adjusting entries, we have four types. Four types. I'm not sure if we're going to go over all four types in this example. But every time I go through a type, once you understand the type, it's easier to deal with the journal entry. So let's take a look at the first example and see what type is it. And we'll go over them. Now, on farhatlectures.com, I have a detailed explanation about adjusting entries. This is just an exercise, but I will try to explain the concepts as well. Briefly, though, a three year fire insurance policy was purchased on July 1st, 2021 for twelve thousand two hundred and forty. The company debited insurance expense for the entire amount. OK, first, let's journalize the entry, what's what's I call basic a basic journal entry when this event occur. So this event occur. And by the way, we're doing everything as of December 31st. So all the adjusting entries were assuming the year end is December 31st. So on July 1st, this is what happened on July 1st. We bought the policy and we debited insurance expense for the entire amount. And we credited cash for the entire amount, obviously. So this is a basic journal entry. You purchased an insurance policy and you debited for and you debited insurance expense. Now, this is when you when you bought this policy, the assumption here is you're going to consume this policy by the end of the year. Well, that's not really true. OK, so basically this you could consider this an error or you can consider it as a temporary journal entry until we make the adjustment. OK, but this is not the proper way to journalize what happened on July 1st. What happened on July 1st? We purchased a prepaid because the prepaid is for three years. Now, the insurance policy was for six months and our year end is July, August, September, October, November, December. Six months and our year end is December 31st. It would have been OK to debit the expense, but that's not the case. So now we have to fix this error. We have to fix this error or again, rather than an error, let's call it an adjustment. The first thing is you want to know what type of adjustments are you making here? This is called a prepaid prepaid adjustment. Prepaid you are adjusting prepaid. This is a prepaid adjustment. How do you how are we going to fix this adjustment? Well, let's think about it. So let's look from a T account perspective. We have insurance expense and we have in there 12,240. Now we have to find out how much the actual insurance expense should be. So simply put, we have to reduce our insurance expense. We did not use up all the policy. The policy is for three years. Well, let's do this if let's get our calculators ready. So here's our calculator and we purchased. We paid 12,240 and we're going to divide this policy by 36 months. Why? Because it's for three years. So our monthly insurance expense is three hundred and forty dollars. How did I know this? Again, it's three years and the cost. So let me do it again. Twelve thousand. So you know this. OK, divided by 36 months equal to three forty. Now, the only expense that should be here is for July, August, September, October, November and December. So therefore, we're going to take this amount multiplied by six multiplied by six. And that's going to give us two thousand and forty dollars. That's the amount that should be here in insurance expense two thousand and forty. What does that mean? It means we have to back out of expense. We have to credit expense. We have to back out of expense. The amount that's going to give us two thousand and forty. Well, how do we do this? Well, we have 12 we are recording right now. Twelve thousand two forty of expense, which is incorrect. We're going to deduct from it two thousand and forty. And we have to back out ten thousand two hundred. So this is part of the entry. This is the credit for every credit. We have to have a debit. We're going to take it out of insurance expense and we're going to put it into, you guessed it, prepaid insurance, which is an asset. Prepaid insurance, which is an asset. Therefore, I'm going to debit my prepaid insurance expense. Ten thousand two hundred. My prepaid insurance balance is ten thousand two hundred. Therefore, I debit prepaid insurance ten thousand two hundred. And I removed it out of insurance expense. Ten thousand two hundred because the only expense I need to record, I need to record is only two thousand and forty dollars for July for the year. Twenty twenty one from July 1st till December 31st. Now, the way they did this entry, it's a little bit kind of from the beginning. They shouldn't have debit insurance expense. The way they should have done this, let me show you how should they have done this, just this way, you know, you understand, because the information could be given to you in two different ways. OK, let's assume they did it properly. Let's assume they journalize the entry properly. If they did, if they did journalize the entry properly, they would have debited prepaid insurance, twelve thousand two hundred and forty, credited cash, twelve thousand two hundred and forty. So I'm just telling you, if they did it properly, it should have been something like this on July 1st. This should have been July 1st rather than this entry. OK, then by December 31st, what should have they done is credited insurance expense two thousand and forty and credited prepaid insurance. Two thousand and forty. This is this is if they did it right from the beginning, right from the beginning, they should have had a prepaid rather than insurance expense. But at the end of the day, the same thing happened. What do I mean by the same thing? Let me erase this to show you that from a T account perspective, the same thing happened. So from a T account, notice starting with insurance expense, we only have two thousand and forty, two thousand and forty, two thousand and forty, that's the balance. Notice two thousand and forty prepaid insurance, prepaid insurance. We started with twelve thousand two hundred and forty, reduced it by two thousand and forty. We end up with ten thousand two hundred. Same thing, ten thousand two hundred. But this is the proper way. This this is the proper way of recording the prepaid as a prepaid. OK, so this is a prepaid adjustment. Usually if it's recorded properly, we increase an expense and we reduce an asset if it's recorded properly from the beginning. So when you adjust the prepaid, you are bringing the prepaid down and you are increasing the related expense. Now, remember, every adjusting entry will affect a balance sheet account and an income statement account. So notice here, this is the adjusting entry right here. An income statement account went up, a balance sheet went down. An income statement and a balance sheet. OK, let's erase all of this and move on to the next, next adjustment, next adjustment. Depreciation on the equipment, total ten thousand twelve thousand two hundred and fifty, hopefully you should memorize this by heart when you book depreciation. It's depreciation expense, accumulated depreciation. Notice depreciation expense is an income statement. It went up, accumulated depreciation is a balance sheet. It also went up. They both went up. Remember, we affect the balance sheet account and an income statement account. Remember, accumulated depreciation is a contra asset account is a contra asset account that goes on the balance sheet. So make sure you know this by heart.  Depreciation expense is a debit. It's an expense on the income statement. Accumulated depreciation is a contra asset reduces the asset that is depreciating. Whatever that asset is, make sure you know that. And this is also a prepaid, a form of prepaid, OK, prepaid adjustment.  I'm sorry, this was not the proper way because it was not done the proper way. But that's what we did.  Let's take a look at number three employee salaries of 16,500 for the month of December will be paid in early January 2022. Translation, well, the employee earned the money. But we will not be paying them till January. What does that mean from an accounting perspective? It means we have an expense at that expense is called accrued expense. Accrued expense is another type of adjusting entries and other types. So this is the second type. We said prepaid is one type accrued expense in the other accrued expenses. We always debit an expense and credit the related liability related payable. Here what we're doing is we are accruing. We are we are recording accruing means recording expenses for salaries. So what do we do? We debit salaries expense and we credit salaries payable. Salaries liability. So this is a form of what did we say? This is called accrued expenses, always accrued expenses.  Notice an income statement account is the expense. A liability is a balance sheet. Notice when we do adjusting entries, we don't touch the cash unless we are adjusting, we are doing adjusting entries for the bank for the bank reconciliation. Then we will involve cash. Otherwise, generally speaking, adjusting entries will not involve cash, will not involve cash. This is another type. This is an accrued expense. Let's take a look at the fourth entry on November 1st. The company borrowed 190,000 from a bank. The note requires principal and interest at 12% to be paid April 30th, 2022. All right. Good. So let's first prepare the journal entry when the transaction took place. The transaction took place November 1st. Therefore, on November 1st, we are going to debit. Let's do this from the beginning. We are going to debit cash 190,000. I'm going to credit notes payable 190,000. Didn't you say we don't involve cash? Yes, this is not the adjusting entry. This is November 1st. The adjusting entry happened on December 31st. Now here's what happened on a timeline. Let me show you on a timeline what's going on here. Let me make this in red. On a timeline, we have the following are the following took place. We borrowed the money. November 1st, which is this is the journal entry for it. Then we're going to have to make an adjusting entry December 31st. Then we are going to pay off the loan. April 30th. OK, so this is what happened first. We did this entry now from November 1st till December 31st. We have all of November and all of December, the loan accrued interest for two months. Well, what we have to do is we have to compute the interest, which is 190,000 times 2 divided by 12 times 12 percent. Let's do this on a calculator here, 2 divided by 12. Let's get the fraction first, times 190,000 times point one, two, 12 percent, and that's 3,800, 3,800. So this is the interest expense that we have to accrue again. What type of adjusting entry accrued expense? What do we do under accrued expense? We are going to debit an expense and credit the related liability. Therefore, we are going to debit interest expense, 3,800 credit accrued credit, the liability, 3,800. So this is the adjusting entry. So this is on December 31st. Now, on April 30th, when we make the payment on April 30th, when we make the payment, let's do the payment anyhow, although it's not it's not required in this exercise, but let's do the payment. So we did November 1st. We took out the loan. We make the adjusting entry. Now we're going to make the payment April 30th on April 30th. Here's what we have to do on April 30th. We are going to so we have six months. So we're going to be six months. It's so first we have to compute how much interest we are going to pay 190,000 times 612 times 12%. It's going to give us the total interest. So 0.5 is 612. Oops, clear this 0.5 times 190,000 for the loan. 190,000 times 0.12. So the total interest we have to pay is 11,400. Let's generalize the entry. So now on April 30th, April 30th, we have to pay cash in total. We have to pay cash in total 190,000 plus 11,400 plus 100 and 90,000. We have to pay in cash 201,400. Well, part of it, it's going to be for the note. We're going to have to debit the note 190,000. Then remember, we have to remove the interest payable. Notice here, we have an interest payable. We said we owe the bank 3,800. Now we pay it. We have to debit interest payable 3,800. Now we still have a dozen balance. Now we have to record the expense that took place from this from January 1st till till April 30th. Well, the difference is 11,400 minus 3,800, because the total interest was 11,400. So let's do it that way. 11,400 minus 3,800. And that's the amount of interest expense. Interest expense, and that's going to be 7,600. OK, now also, if you want to do this, you can take 190,000 times 4 divided by 12 times 12 percent. It should give you 7,600, the amount of interest for this period. But I just took the total interest and back out the interest that we already recorded for this period, which is November and December. Right, so this is again in a crude interest journal entry, that I went further and I paid off the loan. This way I showed you how it all works. OK, let's work another adjusting entry. Five, on December 1st, the company received $6,000 in cash from another company that's renting office and Adams building, the payment representing rent for December, January, February. It was credited to the third rent revenue, at least they did it right. OK, so on December 1st, 12, 1, we received $6,000 in cash. Good, we debit cash, 6,000, and we credit. They said here they credited the third revenue. And this is what they should have done, the third rent revenue. And in your textbook, it might be called unearned revenue. That's fine, 6,000. This is the third type of adjusting entries unearned revenue. OK, this is unearned revenue. It means you received the money, but you haven't earned it yet. And they did it properly as of December 1st. The debited cash credited the third rent revenue. Now, December 31st, 12, 31. From December 1st to December 31st, I earned one month of revenue. Well, they gave me 6,000 for three months. Therefore, I earned 2,000. What I do on December 31st, I debit this account. I start to reduce this account. The third rent revenue, 2,000. And I will credit rent. I'd start to to to count the revenue, 2,000. Therefore, this is the adjusting entry right here. Now, from a T account perspective, my deferred rent revenue, I had 6,000 initially. I reduced it by two. I still have 4,000, and this is for the month of January and February, which I'm going to have to earn later on. When I earn, I do the same journal entry. This is a unearned revenue and unearned revenue. If it's booked properly, debiting cash credited rent revenue, you will reduce the liability and you will increase revenue. OK, this is unearned revenue. And the reason I said if it's booked properly, because what could have done is this, they could have debited cash and credited rent revenue, which would not be correct. And then the adjusting entry will be different. OK, but they did it properly. Let's look at transaction six. On December 1st, the company received $6,000 in cash from another company that's renting office space in Adams building. The payment was credited to rent revenue. Oh, OK, good. So now, we did not book the transaction properly. So here's what happened now. We debited cash 6,000 on December 1st, and we credited rent revenue. Now, you should know what we need to do. We need to take out 4,000 out of rent revenue, make it. So simply put, this happened on December 1st. They did it incorrectly. OK, so what do we have to do now on December 31st? We have to take out of rent revenue 4,000 because we haven't earned it yet. We only earned 2,000 and put it into unearned revenue. Therefore, I'm going to debit rent revenue for 4,000 and I'm going to credit the third rent revenue for another 4,000. Simply put, here's what happened. This is rent revenue. So initially, I had 6,000 in rent revenue. I'm going to debit it for in my rent revenue is only 2,000 for the month of December for rent revenue for the third rent revenue for the third rent revenue. I did not have anything that I need to put in 4,000. And I should have a balance. Just move it up a little bit further. OK, so for the third rent revenue and this is a liability, I had nothing. Then I booked 4,000. Therefore, I still have 4,000 for January and February. Back to what I'm supposed to have 2,000 only of revenue for 2021 and 4,000 of unearned revenue for January and February of 2022. So notice I'm back to exactly what I want to be. So notice number five is the correct proper proper way to do it. OK, now the only the only adjustment we did not work is an adjustment called accrued revenue and accrued revenue. You debit receivable and your credit revenue. This is the adjustment. Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, you can go to my website to to to to to look at more adjusting entries and explain and learn how to do adjusting entries. It's critical. It's extremely important that you understand this topic inside out, whether you are an accounting student or most importantly, a CPA candidate. All what I'm asking you is give me a chance for a month to help you. I can help you understand accounting, be successful. It's a long term investment. Invest in yourself. Stay safe until we get those vaccines. Good luck.


I think we're gonna start now. Welcome everyone to the premiere of Let's Talk It Over, a monthly show that I've got the privilege to co-host tonight with Yanis Varoufakis and Roger Waters. The show is live streamed on YouTube and Facebook, so please do subscribe to our pages and like our pages. That'll be wonderful. I also wanted to quickly thank our partners that are also streaming the show tonight. So DM25, Deverelle Morgan, Jadalia, Films for Action, The Canary, and We Tell Stories. We're very pleased tonight to welcome two fantastic guests and comrades, Noura Erekat, a legal scholar and author of Justice for Some, Law as Politics in the Questions of Palestine, and Kiyanga Yamata Taylor, author of From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation, Race for Profit, and How We Get Free. I want you to start with Yanis. You were the one that picked the title of this show, Trumpism After Trump. What was it important for you to start with this topic? Somebody tell him. You just did, Roger. Thank you.  It's even grip over tens of millions of people in the United States and beyond, because let's face it, there is a neo-fascist international at work from India with Modi to Bolsonaro, here in Europe, it's ultra-right wing galore. Look, for a while now I've been worried, for a very long while, because if you think about it, after 1929, the Weimar Republic, in the name of democracy, subjected to the humiliated German people to harsh austerity for the many, while the oligarchy was being salvaged. And Hitler promised to make them great again, in exchange for their soul and the complete subjugation of the people. And after our generations, 1929, which as we all know happened in 2008, again in Wall Street, in the name of the dispossessed, the radical center of Obama, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, you know who I'm talking about, they practiced a very interesting regime, I call it socialism for the bankers and harsh austerity for everybody else. Coupled with workplace exploitation, the Amazons, the techno feudalism that we're seeing, that created a new fascist movement. First it was the headless Tea Party, then they found the head in the figure of the Mussolini like Donald Trump. Who promised, what did he promise? Just exactly like Hitler and Mussolini to make people great again, humiliated people, great again, in exchange of, again, their soul and their complete subjugation. Now, another similarity between the fascism of the 19, of the mid-war period and what we're experiencing with Trump, but also with others, is that, you know what? The center called them liars. They're worse than liars. They are liars, they have no problem distorting the truth, but at the same time, they have a capacity to reveal unique truths that the radical center would never reveal. Like for instance, you know, when Donald Trump was asked, why are you defunding the post office? Are you doing it in order to gain political points? And he said, yeah, because I don't want the Democrats to vote. What as president would ever say that? But also, you know, the whole anatomy of the disaster that is the middle class, just like Gebelz in the 1920s, his analysis of the demise of the middle class in Germany was spot on. To a very large extent, what Trump was saying about the Midwestern zone was also spot on. But there are two differences with the fascists of the 1920s and 30s. And it's the reason why Trump is not still in power, why his coup d'etat has not succeeded. The first one is that central banks in after 1929 didn't do much to help the bankers, whereas now they have been pumping out mountain ranges of money to support them. And the second reason is that the industrialists, big tech now, for instance, in the United States, have not backed the fascists in the way that they did in the mid-war period. But while that has ensured that Trump has not stayed in power, because a large segment of the establishment did not support him, they supported Biden, that's no reason to think that Trumpism is out. Because the causes of Trumpism are still with us. And I very much fear that with Biden, they are going to get even reinforced, even harsher. So just to conclude, Frank, look, people like Biden and the centrists in Europe and so on, they're romanticized working class values. They're romanticized Black Lives Matter and so on. While the fascists either oppose Black Lives Matter in a natural kind of way, or refer to the working class as their own troops. What we must understand is that Trump's followers have already, to a very large extent, as a result of deep despair over what has been happening, the stagnation, the deep stagnation of the working class, the blue-collar workers, and the proletariat in the United States and elsewhere, they have sold their tragic-like, ghetto-like figures that have sold their soul to this devil. And for them, evil destruction, even what we saw in Washington, serves the purpose of somehow establishing an identity that helps them forget their despair. This is the way I see it. The damned cannot escape violence and punishment because, as Getter said, punishment is what they seek in a tragic kind of way. So what do we do to end Trumpism? Not just Trump, two things. We need a serious agenda of radical change by which to challenge not only the Republicans but also Biden. And we need a humanist embracing of the Trumpists, of the supporters of Trump, not to vilify them, not to treat them like vermin in a zoo, but to treat them like human beings who have surrendered to despair in the same way that many supporters of strongmen have done in the 1920s and 1930s. Thanks, Yanis. Roger, while we were preparing the show, you said you never wanted to hear the word Trump again. And Yanis, as mentioned this word about 15 times in five minutes. So why did you say that, Roger? Why don't you wanna hear this word again? 28, 28, I was counting. No, I wasn't. Obviously, I wouldn't do such a thing to a colleague's friend. Well, because it's a waste of effing time, and that's why, because we're not, like we've just spent 10 minutes. Well, Yanis has been kind of just talking to us for 10 minutes, but I didn't gain a lot from that. It may be because I'm a base player among academics, the rest of you are all academics, okay? And so it's difficult. No, it's not difficult for me. It's easy for me to go, why are we talking about this? Yeah, we know who that person was whose name I'm not gonna mention.  But why bring him into the conversation? I think he should be set to one side. However, you do bring up some very interesting things. But one of them is the nature of American politics and whether or not it is bipartisan. My view is that it's not bipartisan. Nothing really has changed with the last election. Certainly in terms of foreign policy. You know, certainly in terms of Norah's here, hi Norah, I didn't say hello to you. So nice to see you. The policy vis-a-vis Israel, for instance, will not change at all, not in one iota. And he will not be called to account for it and neither will the American people. We'll drift past that. I'm talking about the person whose name I won't mention and his attachment to 1929 or by my Germany or Mussolini or blah, blah, blah. Or I did do some research this morning and saw that the lady in Italy, who is the dream ticket for what is called melons, which I thought was interesting. And also I have to see what this woman looks like at the risk of being sexist. So I did and I went to the, she looks just like the awful woman from Peru. No, sorry, from Bolivia, who presumably is now in prison. If she isn't, she soon will be, I hope. But it's very weird, you know, that the whole thing is very weird, but we shouldn't focus on it. We should focus on what are we gonna do? Are we gonna try and get David North and Joe Couchor to look like human beings and for the fourth international to take over more of our airwaves and to actually get through to the people by selling socialism in a more definite and more acceptable and more palatable way or what? Or I'll stop, because, you know, I'll finish. Thanks, thanks, thanks, Roger. I wanted actually to talk to you, Nuda, while I invited you to the show, I mentioned a tweet that you sent on January 20th when there was the inauguration of Biden. I'm going to read the tweet. So you said, I missed the inauguration to teach the first class of the semester, just as well to be cultivating critical thinking about race, empire and law in the classroom because Trump's departure is not the end and Biden never represented our salvation. Sige la lucha, let's go. So do you mean Biden is as bad as Trump? Hi, everyone, and thank you for having me. I remember when Frank, you know, then hit me up and said, I want you on the show to tell me why they're the same. And I said, that's not what I meant. I didn't mean to say that Biden is as bad as Trump. There's no, I wasn't suggesting a comparison in order to make a point because the lesson that we are learning here is not one about Trump versus Biden, but frankly about US empire. US empire which begins within its borders, right? Because of the colonization of indigenous peoples on these lands, as well as the enslavement of Africans and the continuous racial domination of them which is colonial in nature, even examining that part of it shatters for us an idea that America is exceptional and that all that it needs to do is fulfill its dream of becoming a more perfect democracy and now it's dealing with its imperfections, right? But going from there, understanding America as empire helps us understand that it also continues to function as such across the globe through its occupation of Hawaii where it maintains its largest military base in Honolulu that oversees some 30% of the world's population from the Pacific Rim, from thinking of its military bases across the Middle East and of course its relationship to Israel which then we can refract and think about, well, how does that relate to the war on Yemen and how does that relate to intervention in Syria and so on and so forth? But my point was to say, not to fetishize Trump because what ends up happening is that we miss the bigger picture which is what you're discussing here. You've called it Trumpism but I think Roger was right to call it fascism in which we can continue to call forms of colonial and racial domination. And the other point that I wanna make here is that with specific regard to Palestine, right? That even though, and not just Palestine but if we think of Palestine, Iran, right? If you think of Yemen right now what's happening in Haiti, these other, these things that I can rattle off US, what we regard as US foreign policy, what my historian friend asked me one time, he says to me, he says, what's the difference between US foreign policy and imperialism, right? And I'm still trying to answer that question but the point is is that US foreign policy as such has received very little scrutiny in discussing this administration transition and so little that it received less than an hour in the presidential debates and in fact had, if you focus on it, illuminates for us so many of the policies that we're reeling from today that Trump has taken to another level, many of them, the contemporary ones were inaugurated by President Barack Obama which also shatters for us and complicates for us how we think through an anti-racist program and what happens, sorry to be academic here, Roger but what happens, the risks and the pitfalls of what happens when we decouple racism from capitalism, right? Because then we fetishize, sorry, because then we fetishize race as if it's separate from capitalist development and what we better understand is racial capitalism. So I'll stop there and leave a lot more for the discussion. Thanks, thanks Nura. Kianga, Nura, I mean Roger Yanis, I've all mentioned Trumpism, fascism but a lot of the talk since Biden has been elected has been about healing America's society. What's your opinion on this? Can you actually heal and which means actually talk to fascists to build a new America? Well, I think, and also thanks for having me on. I think that that's sort of intended for two audiences. I think some of it is projected towards Trump's periphery, his supporters. I think it's also an internal message for the Democratic Party, which right up into the cusp of the election was certainly riven by a sharp, caustic debates over the direction of the party over and not just for this election but in a much more general sense. But I think in terms of its appeal to Trump supporters and really trying to respond to the enormous divisions in this country, I think pious political statements are not really what is important right here. If Biden is able to actually deliver his $1.9 trillion stimulus and demonstrate government as something that is not present just to make your life bad and take things from you, whether it's in taxes or arrests or the many different dysfunctional ways the American government has been performing but that the state can actually provide, then that will go a long way towards peeling support away from Trump and redirecting it towards the Democratic Party. The problem, of course, is that this brings up existential questions for the Democrats as well as the Republicans and this entire American approach to governance which has been to kind of turn away from taxing those corporations, the rich, from creating the funds that are necessary to pay for social provision. This has been, I mean, this is neoliberalism. This has been a foundation, a bedrock of American governance for the better part of 50 years which has really corroded public institutions, has corroded the public sector. This is a reason there can't be coherent, sensible vaccine distribution in the US. It's a private sector free for all. And so all of this has left the US government ill-equipped to deal with the most dire crisis in modern American history, the twin crises of the pandemic. 40,000 people have died in this country in the last two weeks, right? So the crisis of the pandemic, the economic crisis, the US's public sector has been gutted. It barely functions.  And if the Democrats want to pose a serious challenge to the underlying features of Trumpism, then they're going to have to respond to that and they're going to have to demonstrate government as functional, competent and capable of delivering the goods. And that creates a political dilemma because that means challenging the Washington consensus as it has been for the last 40 years. Thanks, Kiyanga. I want to go back to you, Nura. What do you do with the 74 million people that voted for Trump in 2020?  Thanks for the easy question, Frank. Just 74 million, not 75? So I was actually honest when he was saying that we shouldn't vilify the Trump base because their turn to Trump represents a despair amongst them and something that they want to recreate. And so I'm sympathetic in that we don't want to vilify the individual in thinking about this, but I want to take issue with what despair? Despair over what, right? Because when Trump was elected, there was so much that was said in the post-election kind of shock that these people aren't racist. They voted for Trump because there's been an economic crisis and there's a failure of government, the failures that Keyanga so eloquently attended to, that this was a referendum against that. But in fact, what has been shown over and over again in the foreign intervening years is that no, there was a racial element to this, that the anger and the final straw was the ascendance of a black president. However much we can debate the question of whether or not he was the first black president, so to speak, you know, academically, but the idea that that was the final straw and that there is an anxiety, an anxiety that the United States will no longer be a majority white country where white supremacy is an organizing principle of government and instead in order to insist upon it as an organizing principle of government, it has to be a coercive force rather than a hegemonic one that we just agree to. I mean, all of that is to say that there is white anxiety about whether or not we should just accept white superiority, right? So, and then, so just to go back about, well, what does that mean about the base? I was listening to Mahmood Mamdani who recently released a book who said that the difference between the Nuremberg Trials and South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is that in the Nuremberg Trials, the international community decided to prosecute individual Germans, individual Nazis, but never condemned Nazism. Whereas in South Africa, the condemnation was the condemnation of apartheid as a system and never the condemnation of the base itself of the individuals who furthered that harm. And so bringing that back, what do those models tell us about, you know, how do we address 74 million people in the United States? I think we need to reckon with white supremacy as an organizing principle. I think we need to not focus on the individual. I think we need to actually, there never has been a conversation in the United States about racism, right? We never really condemned it. Instead, it was, you know, federal end of the jury segregation and racism, which then becomes de facto. And there's never been a spiritual, you know, embrace of what that means had there been, we would have seen reparations in the U.S., right? There's so much work to be done here that, and I'm a teacher, and when I get into the classroom, I recognize that if I even start to talk and name racism and point it out and talk about it, rather than being this abstract thing, but something that we all participate in, right? I tell them, you don't need to be a capitalist to participate in capitalist society. You don't need to be a racist to participate in a racist one, right? And then the moment that I mentioned that there is so much discomfort in the classroom that I'm worried whether or not they're going to go report me to the administration. That's how far gone we are from the conversation that we need to be happening. So that's what I think we need to start, Frank. I think that there needs to be a reckoning with white supremacy, putting it on trial, right? Similar to the way that apartheid was, dissimilar to the way that Nazism wasn't, and similar to the way that we are contending in the debate, in the very contentious debate around Zionism. I wanted to go to you, Yanis, but I wanna ask quickly, Keonga, to answer this. How would you put white supremacy on trial? What's the process? I think that we have to talk about both. I think that we have to talk about the failures of American capitalism to actually be able to respond to the crises in people's lives and that, in fact, make up a great part of the foundation for the crises in people's lives, that the concentrations of the spoils of American capitalism have become increasingly, increasingly concentrated at the top and has created a range of insecurity and misery at the bottom. And so I think that, no, if we look at the reasons why Trump was elected and who constitute the core of his base, that it is impossible to discuss that without talking about racism in the United States.  And yet, I think it is also coupled and intensified by the complete collapse of our social welfare state. I think the complete collapse of our public sector and the triumphant, the triumph of capital over every aspect of our lives in this country. And so I find it difficult to disentangle the two because when I talk about despair, I mean, the two things that I point to, one is the reversal of life expectancy. Can anybody hear anyone else? Yes, I can hear you. I can hear you, but not Keunga. Keunga, maybe your microphone has been taken off the hook. Can you, yeah, because we can hear everyone but you. We heard you until the last 20 seconds.  In your recent piece, Truth After Trump, and I want to ask you about this because we've seen the rise of all these conspiracy theories in the last four years and you wrote something, you wrote, we need to recall how our societies discern truth in the first place. What do you mean by that? Well, the notion that there is a marketplace out there where ideas compete on the basis of their merit and in the end, the better ones through their winning process prevail is of course all rubbish. There is a pattern of power which serves the interests of those controlling financial capital, increasingly financial capital, not just capital, and their propaganda becomes the truth. And science is weaponized by them as well. And scorned by the Trumpists when it doesn't suit them but also weaponized by the Trumpists. But allow me to go back to the original, well, to the main discussion. Look, now there is no doubt that Trump used race, weaponized racism. And after all this time, there is no doubt that 75 million that voted for him are either tolerant of racism or actively racist. But people are not born racists. They are made racists and they are made racists by circumstances not of their choosing. In the same way that the good people of New Hampshire and even Nevada who voted for Bernie, my friend Bernie Sanders, they didn't become socialists overnight. Circumstances led them. So it is perfectly possible to do what you say, which is put racism and white supremacy on trial, while treating the people who have become victims of it and who have espoused not the values but the identity in order to forget what is really happening in their lives. And to extend a brotherly and sisterly hand to them and say, you know, talk to me, why are you against? I mean, I remember I was in Idaho once.   And he was destroyed and he was 65 and driving all hours a truck. And his wife left him and so on. You know, I fell for him. And then he told me how he hated Obama because of Obama care. What right does he have to treat me like somebody who needs the kindness of the state? And I thought, oh my God, this country is seriously buggered. This is the capacity of the insurance companies of the toxic oligarchy to cop people who are suffering. Now, we do not vilify those people. We have to talk, we're not going to talk to them about socialism, Roger, because the word is tainted. But we're going to spread socialism by talking to them sense and creating an alliance because let's face it, the only time when we defeated fascism and racism was when working class people from different communities, white, black, brown, yellow, red, whatever, got together behind a progressive, effectively socialist agenda. This is the only time when we defeated the fascism. This is what we need to do them now. And my great fear, I'm afraid younger, is that Biden's 1.9 trillion stimulus program is going to bugger off for this movement. And the reason is the vast majority of that money is going to go to the large corporations. It is not going to go to the little people. Very little of that is going to go to the little people. The combination of the mountain ranges of money printed by the Fed going to Wall Street. From Wall Street, they go to Apple. Apple takes the money, goes back to the New York Stock Exchange, buys back Apple shares. You know, Apple shares go through the roof. The directors get their bonuses, right? And the combination of that with Biden's, by the way, the Green New Deal is finished, right? All these great plans for the green transition are dead in the water because of the balance in the Senate. So to cut a long story short, Biden may be a very nice guy. I don't know, I don't care. Obama was a very, I've met Obama personally. He's extremely charming. So what? His policies were toxic. They were racist. They were imperialist. You know, he was killing people every day using joystick. Yeah, I don't think anybody here cares whether Biden is nice or not nice. Exactly, that's the point. That's not what the debate is. Here, it's coming from a situation where the federal government was actually completely hostile to any intervention around a vaccine towards, the Trump plan was to essentially starve people out of the recommendations from the Center for Disease Control to shelter in place, to isolate. And so he cut off money from cities and states from last April really until very recently. And so I think that coming from absolutely nothing to something gives the Democratic Party a leg up in comparison to what the Republicans have on offer. Is that enough? No, it's not even the beginning. It's not even the beginning of enough. But if we're talking about what is the kind of immediate response to Trumpism, that's one of them. There's a whole other conversation to have about how one does the things that you're describing, Yanis, in terms of how do you make appeals to people who I think have all sorts of ideas, who have racist ideas, xenophobic ideas, also a desire to have a better life. I mean, there's all sorts of consciousness that exists. And in this country, in the United States, we are imperiled by the lack of a coherent left that is able to offer a worldview, to offer an understanding of what is happening. To shape- Well, that's exactly the point. I'm sorry about that. That's exactly the point. Because you see, if we now say Biden is better than Trump and hope that Trumpism will go away, effectively, the only radicals that will be left will be the Trumpists, whereas we will be copied by Biden and Janet Yellen. We have to organize the left resistance, resistance to the Biden administration. If we do not radicalize ourselves within the Democratic Party and within the center left and the left to clash against those who are using the Biden administration to further the interests of capital accumulation, financial capital accumulation, if we are not the radicals that rise up against Biden, then Trumpism is going to get another go. Comrades, it's an amazing conversation. I want to go to Roger and then to Nura, because Nura is going to have to go in about 10 minutes. Roger, Yanis mentioned that we need to talk to people and I guess that's what life is about. You don't only talk to your friends. I remember coming, being at one of your concerts in Paris, I can't remember like maybe two, three years ago, and when you started talking about Palestine towards the end of the concert, there was a lot of clapping, but I also heard a lot of people throwing insults at you, even if obviously you couldn't hear them. So as an artist in a way, what would be your idea about reaching people that might not be on our side yet or socialists yet? I don't think being an artist has got anything to do with it. I meant to be having the platform, you know. Frank, sitting here, listening to this blah, blah, blah, blah, backwards and forwards, and this talk about the Democrats and that there is an elephant in the room. I did an interview with Rolling Stone about a year ago when I pointed this out and I thought, they're never gonna put this on American television. The American in the room is American exceptionalism, an American racism, an American white imperialism. That is the elephant, that is the elephant that is destroying the whole of the world. And the Democrats are destroying the world just as fast as the Republicans are, whoever they may be. The Democrats pay lip service, the Republicans don't even pay lip service. Democrats pay lip service to some of the ideas that are written and espoused in your Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They claim to believe in human rights and all men are created in them and liberty and blah, blah, blah and democracy, but they don't.  Joe Biden doesn't. If he did, why is he not moving the American embassy back to Tel Aviv where it belongs? Why does he not come out and stand up like a man and say, Israel is a racist apartheid state and I disapprove of it and we're not giving them any more aid to buy weapons to subjugate the people? No, I could shout that until the cows come home and be like, oh, let's not listen to him. He's obviously a bit loopy. No, I'm not loopy. That is what's going on. That is on the face of it.  I completely understand that $1.9 trillion is a lot of money and it might help a few, but let's not forget that Biden promised to grant to everybody when he was in a presidential race. Didn't happen, did it? But you see, I'm getting dragged back into the Overton window of American politics. It's not the important thing. What do you do with the 72 million or 3 million or however many it was, people who voted for that asshole, educate them. But if you educate them, you're gonna have to educate the whole country and it's part of the policy of the oligarchy not to educate people.   Most of you don't even know where Iran is. Literally, if you give you a globe and say, where's Iran? You know, I don't know. I'm from Iowa, you know. Well, it's not good enough. But that's the way it's done.  America is not great. It's a terrible, terrible malign influence on the rest of the world. Almost single-handedly, you, the people of America, are destroying the world. And you certainly have shown us no lead. You are not a shining city.  So let's call a spade a spade. You know, first things first, let's start with human rights, all right? Please, if you try and develop even a political party in the United States of America, whose platform is human rights rather than profit or the oligarchy or Wall Street or pleasing our masters, because that's where it is. And I'll stop again, but I'm deeply frustrated. Thanks, Roger. I guess we all are. I want to go to, you've mentioned education. I want to go to Noura. She's an educator, a teacher, and she's going to have to go teach in about four or five minutes. So Noura, two questions. Roger mentioned Palestine. You also mentioned at the start, Biden foreign policy. Can you tell us in your opinion what's going to happen in terms of Biden foreign policy? And then, because this is also the idea of this show, it's not about analysis, but it's about how to move forward. How can we, I mean, we've addressed this a little bit, but how can we change things on the ground from the grassroots up? So again, you've got the floor for as long as you need before you need to go. I'm actually going to try to stay out and push it. So just so you, I don't, I can't get rid of my chat and all of the chat is demanding Roger. So I can see why. Roger, you... I moved my screen over to try to like get it out of view. The chat, yeah, I forgot to mention people, like there's a lot of people asking questions stuff in the chat. We're not going to obviously take questions, not tonight. It's great. I see that you love Roger. Roger, I don't know if you can see the chat, but a lot of people like love you. Well, no, what I was saying is that I can see why now the demand because Roger is bringing through a cathartic experience for everyone, which is the basic level. And not just an analysis. And I get that and I appreciate it. I want to build on, I think I just want to lift up something that, you know... Someone wants Nuda. Keonga and Yanis, we're talking about. And lift up, yes, Keonga, we cannot decouple this idea of white supremacy and capitalism and the gutting of the state and despair, right? And so much in the United States has been about the role of the state. Does state intervention in our lives, in the provision of medical care, in the provision, right, through health insurance, in the provision of a basic universal income, in the provision of basic housing, all those things that constitute human rights, as you say, Roger, right? There is a debate, a split within the US between those who believe that the US can and should deliver them as a state, which can be trusted and a provider versus those who see the state as a threat. And that bifurcation and that construction of seeing the state as a threat is not by accident. It has been constructed by those who will benefit from it, right? There was David Harvey talks about how the Koch brothers developed an antagonism through socialism, using racism as the Trojan horse. So that people in articulating their aversion to a socialist state as a provider learned to refract that language through the aversion of racism as anything more than basically what the people demanded through the free market. So yes, I do believe that those things go hand in hand and that their entwinements are not accidental. When it comes to human rights, so I just wanna build on this idea of human rights and what we can do. Roger, the class I'm leaving to teach after this is actually one where we use the International Human Rights Law to think about how we can hold the US criminal justice system to account. Because at the depth of it, the criminal justice system is basically a site of racial oppression and a tool that maintains the racial supremacy that we were talking about earlier. So I do think human rights is a useful framework, although that too is manipulated very much so and we shouldn't take it for granted. But what happens when we discuss the United States within a framework of human rights is again, we shatter the idea that the US is somehow exceptional, right? In the words of Justice Scalia, international law is foreign law. It applies to everybody else, but not to us. And so that we see come to understand civil rights in the United States also as human rights and what that means. As it come, finally then, what about Palestine? This has been said, it's been made clear. Biden has basically kept intact some of the worst foreign policy shifts that we saw under the Trump administration, including all the things on Palestine from moving the embassy to Jerusalem from then basically calling out BDS as a form of anti-Semitism. We see that through this appointment of the UN ambassador. The maintenance of the Abraham Accords and the normalization agreements that basically offered Israel normalization without extending a single enduring concession for Palestinian rights, not even easing the deadly blockade on Gaza. And worst of all, as far as I'm concerned, was recently the State Department has said that it will maintain the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism of including criticism of Israel. And that's just on Palestine. If you move to Iran, Biden has said that he wants to renegotiate the nuclear agreement, but without lifting sanctions. Even though the US was the one that violated the agreement, Iran is being punished for it and forced to come back to negotiate without the lifting of sanctions. If we move to, if we think about the Caribbean and Haiti, we see a similar policy of maintaining now what Haitians are referring to as their dictator and Haiti at the same time that ISIS deporting Haitians in mass, some 600 Haitians have been deported since the beginning of February. The one distinction that I'll say is quite different has been what we've seen in Yemen and the fact that the US is going to end a military aid to Saudi Arabia. And here I wanna just point out a few things. Number one, the US has made clear that it's only ending the offensive, the military aid that goes through offensive operations, which means that Saudi Arabia could define something else as defensive in order to maintain that support, not aid, excuse me. And the other thing to keep in mind is that from the beginning, the US didn't know what it was getting into, why was it entering into Yemen, which wasn't a sectarian conflict at all. The Houthis in the course of the war on Yemen have developed a relationship with Iran and so we constructed that relationship. It didn't precede the war on Yemen, it was produced by the war on Yemen and we're still not really evaluating that, but instead have been mobilized by the gruesome murder of the Mahal Khushoggi. So what does that mean? Where does that put us in terms of where we go? I look to the anti-imperialists who are continuing to protest US militarism as part of a foreign and domestic policy. I think one of the, you know, my anti-imperialist struggle is local. My participation, for example, in boycott, divestment, and sanctions is a local. My, you know, ending of US police training by Israeli forces is a local effort, but challenges these imperialist dimensions. And so I think that whatever we do is very local and we have agency to change that. This is not just something that happens from the top down. We have the agency to change that at the local level. So are you saying you're gonna stay with us till the end? There's about 10 minutes to go? Yes, I apologize to my students. Yes, I wanna listen, yes. Okay, amazing. So we've got about 10 minutes to go and as I mentioned, you know, trying to imagine new possibilities and new horizons is something that I'll be very interested in. But before we go to that in a way, isn't the question about democracy and what democracy means for our societies right now, because we're talking about Trump, we're talking about Biden, but I mean, eight years of Obama created Trump. Isn't it? I don't know who wants to answer that, maybe Keonga or, and Obama was ailed as the first black president, a progressive president, but after eight years of Obama, you get Trump. So something is rotten much higher than this, than just the guy who's in power or the woman who's in power. Well, I think, yeah. I mean, I think that the seeds of Trumpism were of course planted in the failures of the Obama administration to really deliver in substantive and meaningful ways after the disaster of George W. Bush. I mean, George W. Bush in this country is treated like the kind of cute fool or buffoon, but people forget, perhaps young people in particular, that George W. Bush was the architect of the disastrous Iraq war, the occupation of Afghanistan, the architect of Guantanamo, the one who sat by passively as New Orleans, a black city drowned and called black residents of that city refugees as they dispatched them across the country. And then of course was at the heart of the completely anemic, pathetic response to global economic crisis in 2008. And so those were the issues that Barack Obama had to attend to as president, and those were the things that motivated particularly African-Americans to vote for him in ways that were wholly unprecedented. And the failure to deliver meaningful change is what really underlie the emergence of Black Lives Matter in the twilight of his presidency. And I think again, we see Black Lives Matter revive again in the twilight of Trump's presidency. And so the failure of the American state to really grapple with the impacts of racism, both in their social, political, and economic repercussions has meant that has revealed the destabilizing nature of the Black social movement. And I think this is ultimately why the development of a coherent left and not just a collection of small marginalized groups that are very effective at debating each other but are absolutely inconsequential in the world of politics has to develop in this country because neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have any meaningful response to the issues that continue to radicalize young Black people at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement. And we can see that the politics in this movement are developing, it is a cumulative process from body cameras and police commissions in its first iteration with Obama to the demands to defund the police in its second iteration and a much more robust worldview about the intrinsic structural institutional nature of racism to American society. These are issues that require substantive systemic change, not superficial pious statements about unity, the soul of the country coming together and all of that which don't actually attend to the reasons why people erupt in rebellion in the first place. And as has historically been the case, the Black movement is so completely destabilizing is because it reveals all of the inherent inequities of U.S. society. It unmasks the myths, the central core mythologies of American society as unique, as exceptional, all of that gets exposed by looking, having any engagement with the history of Black people in the United States, having any understanding of the issues that Black people struggle over. And none, neither party have been able, obviously with the Republicans, but the Democrats as well have not been able to respond to the issues that compelled people to rebel in the first place. And so there's no reason to expect much to be different as we head towards the spring and the summer with the greatest impact of this pandemic being on Black communities with police being revealed as what Black people have always known as having a core of white supremacist logic and practices. None of that has been dealt with. And so until it is, I think the volatility and instability in the U.S., in the United States is here to stay. Thanks, Yunga. We've got about five minutes.  So I'm gonna give the floor to each of you for maybe like one, two minutes. Roger, do you wanna start these final words? I know that I'm gonna go on for more than a minute, but I'll try.  It's no good fiddling around with the frosting like, I don't know, legislation that touches upon the freely periphery of the police and how they behave in my view. You know, you have to accept that the whole 250 years ago in Paris in 1789, they had their declaration, I see, on Dédouard de l'Aub in America a couple of years earlier. No, about almost exactly the same time. They all got together and said, look, this is the society that we want to create. They were lying. They had no intention of creating an equal, free society where all men were equal. They were capitalist white supremacist landowners and they wrote the constitution to make absolutely certain that they never lost grip of their hold on power and that they were never gonna make a free country where people were free. And people may be possibly just beginning to realize that now. I read about it from time to time in lots of these things I read and the people who write about it obviously are entirely correct. How to throw that cake off the table and say, we gotta start cooking again from the beginning.  We cannot fiddle with the frosting on the outside and think that that is gonna have any effect in the short term or the long term.  It has nothing to do with my life or any of your lives or anything else. It's a complete red herring. It is the emperor's new clothes. Though this two-party system held up and supported by Citizens United, which has to go before any democracy can ever appear in this country. And it should go because wouldn't democracy be a great thing just to start with?  We have a democracy. No, you don't. No, no, no. This is not a democracy. All right, I've finished. That was more than a minute. Apologize. To be in the room with everybody. Yanis, I'll go to you, except if, Nura, you've got to go. You've got to be honest if you've got to go. Okay, so Yanis, I'll go to you and then... I don't want to speak, thank you. You don't want to speak? Before you go, I have to say that you and Roger reminded me of that remarkable and prescient expression by the great Edward Said, who said that the Americans will never liberate themselves until Palestine is free. And he was so accurate, so spot on about that. So I don't need to say anything more on Palestine, you know where I'm standing on that. But let me remind everyone I have a duty to bring another person into the conversation regarding Biden as proof of what Roger said that I really see absolutely no hope coming from a White House occupied by Mr. Biden. Even though, you know, as a person, he may be better than Trump. And the person I'm going to bring into the conversation, just to mention him, is Julian Assange. Julian Assange is rotting in the Guantanamo of Britain in Belmarsh, and the Biden administration only two days ago came out with a statement that they will continue to pursue his extradition, effectively his murder in some supermax prison. Okay, so we don't forget. Finally, message to Roger. Well, the reason why we're having this conversation, talking it over, is because it's wonderful to have this occasion just to throw things at each other, even though we agree on everything more or less. But Roger, look, you know what? Five years ago, I made the mistake of throwing my hat in the political drain. And since then I've become more radical, but at the same time more worried, because you and I can take all our feelings and wear them on our sleeves and just vent the way you did, and the way I do too. You should hear me vent when I go off. But nothing is going to change until and unless we can talk to people who have been deluded, who have been oppressed, who've been suppressed, who've been exploited, who they're treated with, what you used to call it, 29 channels of shit on the television to choose from, and who become effectively enslaved in a machine that uses them as fodder to produce value for the very, very few. You need to talk to them, and you cannot say to them, here in Greece, I mean, this state of ours is a failed state, even more failed. I mean, the only reason why we're not more brutal than the United States, because we are more bankrupt and weaker, not because this state is not brutal. All states are brutal, capital states. But if I go out there and say to the people out there, I'm leading a political party, if I were to say to them, this place sucks, and we're all guilty, and Greece is an awful place. They will give me a brush you off, and we'll simply not respond. You have to speak to their concerns and you have to bring out in a dialectical way the truth, because it's somewhere inside them. They can see it.  That my great friend Bernie Sanders in 2016 stayed in the Democratic Party.  Now he's stuck in the Senate trying to push the Biden agenda. I think that Trumpism is going to be strengthened by this. I hope I'm wrong. Thanks, Yanis. I just got a message from Ken Loach, who thought he was on tonight. So we'll have to explain to him next time that he's on next month. So, Nura, you've got 30 seconds. Oh, sorry. Actually, I want to end with you. So I'll give 30 seconds to Nura. That's what she sent me via WhatsApp. I'll talk to you for 30 seconds. I don't need to talk. So then he gave me 30 seconds. So this is what I'll just say in my 30 seconds is to say, you know, I hear from Yanis and from Kianga, as well as from Roger, this idea of developing the left out beyond the realm of ideas and a space where we're battling one another to think of how we translate that into political power, right? Whether that was in Bernie's hands to do or remains in art and it's now our own regardless of what we think about it. And in the meantime, as we're doing that, I just want to tell folks who are listening that really this work of changing, right? Of destroying the cake is rooted in local action and things that you can do in achieving, you know, changing your municipal funds of deep funding local, right police departments and ending police trainings in Israel and participating in boycott, divestment and sanctions, you don't need a savior. You can do it yourself. Thanks, Nura. Kianga, you've got the floor. So I would say about that, I think that's a really important point, which is that we need to talk about the development of big left parties or coalitions is important. But it in whatever form that it will assume will be the constitutive elements of it exists now and we see it everywhere with the proliferation of Black Lives Matter, organizing, mutual aid, all sorts of organizing and activism on the ground right now. The problem as I see it is that it's very disparate in some ways, people are cut off from each other. There's not enough generalization of what people in one area or one section are doing with other people. And so for me, the key is how do we wed that together? How do we pull that together? Not into one big thing that is only one thing, but that is effective as a bigger force in politics. And I think that for me, this is the big question that confronts our ability to go from where we are today to being able to actually influence in a substantive way the direction of things in this country. And I think that the need for that has never been clearer because of the depth of crisis in this country right now. And what I was saying before, before I lost sound and fell off, was the issue of the Trump supporters, this issue of political despair. It has been tagged death, death by despair, how we understand the reverse in life expectancy among ordinary white people driven by drug addiction, opioid addiction, alcoholism and suicide, all of which are evidence of a completely broken society. And yet our side has very little reach and ability to offer a different set of explanations for why that is. That is what the right has been so effective at in this country where they are able to use the Republican party as a mouthpiece to shape public opinion, to intervene on these questions, to provide a different kind of worldview where the Democratic party is this big baggy mess where the leadership is trying to contain these different constituencies which result in a very muddled political message around unity, searching for the soul of the country, that sort of thing. And so the challenge is, how do we as a left break out of either isolation or parochialism into a larger, coherent, powerful force that can also intervene on these big questions and shape the political questions themselves, the political debate. That's the challenge that we face, that we have to take up. Thanks, Kiunga. Comrades, we're gonna have to end it here. We could have actually chatted for many more hours. Noura's students would have been sad about that, I guess. But so thanks again, a million to Kiunga Yamata Taylor. She's the author of three amazing books. The links will be in the description of the video. Thanks to Noura Erekat. You've gotta get her book, Justice for Some. It's amazing. And again, the links will be posted below. Thanks to Yanis Varoufakis and Roger Waters for being my amazing co-host. So this is Let's Talk It Over. This was the premiere. It went pretty well. And next show will be in a month. So March 15th, Ken Loach, who actually didn't think he was on the show, but wanted to watch the show and couldn't find the link. Ken will watch the video in the next few days. He'll be on next month with Brian Eno. We'll have other guests very much looking forward to this as well. If you liked the chat, share it, like it, subscribe, do whatever you want with it. Love to everyone. Thank you, bye-bye. See you, comrades.


Hello everybody, and welcome to this special edition of the Agenda Dialogues. I'm Amanda Russo. I'm going to be your moderator for the next 30 minutes. We have a lot to cover and a lot of very important topics, so we're going to jump right in. Today, we're speaking about how businesses and governments can deliver on the promise of climate action. COP26 was just five months ago, and we saw a slew of climate commitments and millions funneled into important financing. But then, just one month ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. The war is already a humanitarian disaster, and in addition to the human cost, leaders around the world are warning that the stakes are high when it comes to the next stages of the energy transition. We're midway to COP27 in Egypt, and there's a lot of questions on what to do next and where to go. The two people I have joining me today are going to help us answer some of these questions. We have Alec Sharma joining us from London, the COP26 president, thank you for joining us, and we have our managing director, Kim Hoi Nio, from the Center of Climate and Nature here at the World Economic Forum. Alec, I'm going to come to you first for the first question. Will the crisis and its impact on energy flows speed up or slow down the energy transition? Amanda, first to say thank you to WEF for having me on. Look, I mean, you're absolutely right. The world has changed for the worse since the illegal and frankly brutal invasion of Ukraine by Putin's regime, and I don't think anyone can be failed to be moved by the terrible images that we're seeing coming out of that war every day. And of course, the international community stands shoulder to shoulder with the courageous people of Ukraine, and you talked about humanitarian crisis, absolutely, and we have to address that and provide support. But of course, there is also an issue in terms of global energy markets, and that is again something that every country is having to grapple with right now. I've just come this afternoon from Paris. I was at the International Energy Agency, I mean, it's a real meeting, and of course, this was sort of front and central of that discussion. And what I did say at the meeting to colleagues is that clearly every country is going to have to look to see how they meet that acute need now. Clearly, governments are going to have to make sure that lights stay on, that people's homes are heated, that businesses are able to operate. But I also made the point that ahead of COP26, we managed to get 90% of the global economy committed to net zero. And in fact, some of those commitments came at COP as well. So as countries make those decisions in terms of energy going forward, they also need to keep the medium and long term view in sight and make sure that they are staying committed to the net zero commitments that they have made. And clearly, we are seeing the benefits of having homegrown renewables, homegrown clean energy right now. So in the UK, for instance, we've built a big offshore wind sector. We've gone from 40% of the coal in the UK coming from, sorry, of electricity coming from coal back in 2012 to a few percentage points now. And certainly, I can see that we will see an acceleration in renewables. We will see an acceleration in clean energy as well. And I think it's worth pointing out that when this takes place, it is, of course, good for the environment. It also has a big economic benefit in terms of creating jobs as well. So yes, we will see, I'm quite sure, a accelerated push on renewables. And at the end of the day, we will end up, I hope, with not just an environmental but an economic dividend as well. Thank you, Alec. And so, Gimhue, over to you. Alec talked about an acceleration. What are your thoughts or some of the next steps of the energy transition? So first, my heart goes out to all those who have been impacted by the situation, the current crisis that we are confronted with. I think we need to, it's a humanitarian crisis. And we have to support all multilateral efforts to help the people on the ground. At the same time, we also want to reduce collateral damage from the crisis. On energy, agree with Alok, we need to see how we can step up on the transition towards renewable sources of energy and continue to push on to address climate challenge. And stepping up was a big part of what we saw back in November at COP26. Alec, obviously, is a big part of your existence for the past many years. And I'm sure with the conclusion of the Glasgow Climate Pack being signed on and the 1.5C warming target within reach, we know there was a lot of involvement from the public and private sector. But what I'd like to ask you is, for you, what was the role of businesses? And how did businesses contribute to that Glasgow Climate Pack? Yes, Samantha, I mean, the Glasgow Climate Pack, I mean, I do think it was a historic achievement. I mean, even in a pretty fractured world last year, it's obviously got worse this year. But even in a pretty fractured world last year, we managed to get consensus with almost 200 countries signing up to a really strong set of commitments. The issue now, of course, is to push forward and make sure those commitments turn into delivery and action. But I do think COP26 in Glasgow was one of the first cops where there was a big focus on business. We had lots of the business community coming together. And I think the reason for this is because we have got to that inflection point where governments, businesses, society effectively are singing from the same hymn sheet. They understand why it's important that you need to take care of the climate and the environment at the same time as your championing growth. And that's why green growth is a big, big trend. Net Zero is a big, big trend right now. And if you look at some of the commitments that the business has made, we were running campaigns on clean energy. We were running campaigns on stopping deforestation. We were running campaigns on zero emission vehicles. And in all of those areas, we had some significant signups from business. So we had 54 businesses and investors, big businesses and investors, car manufacturers signing up to the Glasgow Declaration on Zero Emission Cars and Vans. And basically what they were signing up to was ending the sale of ICE vehicles in 2035 in the big leading markets and 2040 in other markets. We had commitments made by companies in terms of addressing the issue of deforestation. And we also had a significant number of big financial institutions signing up to the Powering Pass Coal Alliance. But I think one of the biggest announcements from business was the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. So $130 trillion of assets signing up to go to Net Zero by 2050. I mean, that is absolutely huge. I think that will grow. And I think that is the kind of the direction of travel. And so I do think business played a big, big role in terms of the momentum at COP. And last year, I visited almost 40 countries. I spent a lot of time talking to governments, but also to businesses. And I can tell you that there are countries across the world where business is leading government on this clean growth agenda. And that's something that we need to see happening more and more. Because ultimately it is going to require the real economy to help deliver on the commitments that were made in Glasgow. And I think delivering on these commitments and making them is obviously something that continues to make headline news. And it's very encouraging to see this happening. But I think when we talk to friends and family who may not be in this, who may not be in these industries, may not be in government, they think, wow, 2050. That's really far. Like that seems like a long time in the future.  Because you have to lay the foundation now for 2050. And I think there's a lot of activities that maybe people just don't know is currently happening. And I would agree that the first steps have been made. It's an important one, the long-term commitment. And really now it's translating ambition to action. But before I get into the detail, I do want to congratulate Alok and his team. Because I think Glasgow did very successful mobilized. The corporate and business finance industries to engage governments, to push for bolder commitments, they themselves are also organizing efforts bottom up to drive towards net zero. From an optimist point of view, I would say that right now the glass is 20% full. Lots more to do. And really is to map out action plans. Reduce, how do we continue to cut emissions? Replace, how do we continue to invest into new sources of energy, new technologies, innovations to support energy transition, but also to restore, conserve, and carbon sinks in nature, both on land and in water. Every company, every industry group, governments will need to map out their own action and deliverables. And the more clarity they can have on the immediate actions to be taken, I think the faster they can get to where they need to be 10, 15, 30 years from now. And I know one of the things that the forum did was the first Movers Coalition. And that was all about creating the market demand now to create the investment now so that the technologies can be developed so that way you can then test them and then use them. It's not an overnight thing. So it's definitely a very impressive thing that was mobilized for COP26.  So staying with you, tell us what do you think are some of the key actions within the finance world that need to happen this year? How do we protect the climate and the communities that are most vulnerable to some of the changes that are happening because of climate change? Yeah. So ESG is quite well understood among financial players. And ESG stands for Environment, Social, Governance Issue. It's quite well integrated into operations of financial players. But it's still more regarded as a compliance area. The question is whether or not we can get the financial industry to also start looking at investing into ESG opportunities. So they need to find that sweet spot and ideally grow it where people, planet, and profit can jointly prosper. These opportunities exist, but we need to put some spotlight on it and continue to push for growth in this area. The second thing that I want to highlight is really the notion of a green premium. So CEOs have told us that today, you don't really command a significant price premium for green goods and services. And the analogy that I would draw is for tech companies, they do command a premium when they are tech enabled. Can we actually do the same for companies that are actually going green or contributing significantly to the climate transition? If you think about carbon pricing, the World Bank, IPCC have spoken about how you need at least carbon price to be $80 and above for us to get to a 2 degree, 1.5 degree pathway. So to a large extent, we are still not fully pricing in the cost of carbon emissions. And I think one of the things we need to do collectively is think about how we can price in and provide a premium for green. The forum is quite well known for its global risk report. Every year we publish a report, and every year the same three risks are flagged out, climate change, biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and extreme weather events. And these have been flagged out as the top risks among business government leaders. The question is, are we actually pricing in well the risks in each of these areas? Because if we are, then really companies who are best able to mitigate the risk should become the winners of tomorrow, business winners of tomorrow. And Alec, over to you next within the finance questioning we have here, you greatly increased the amount of climate finance going to developed countries. However, there's still been reports that there is this gap in the financing required for developing in low income countries that they need to be able to balance economic growth with the transition to net zero. So what's the role of the private sector in helping to close this gap? Yeah, Amanda, if I may just go back very briefly to an earlier really important point you made, which is that we talk about net zero by the middle of the century, by 2050, that is some way off. But of course, what we have also got is commitments from countries in terms of how they will cut their emissions by 2030. And in the UK, we have a very ambitious plan to cut emissions by 68% by 2030 our nationally determined contribution. And one of the things that all countries agreed to do was to look again at their 2030 emission reduction targets and come back by the end of this year if necessary to see that those are then aligned with the Paris temperature goals. And so, I mean, the reason I say that is that this issue of, you're talking about 2050 but actually what matters is what you do by 2030 and 2035 and moving forward. So that is something that we, of course, this year are pushing forward countries to come forward with more ambition. On the point about finance, you are absolutely right. I mean, there are lots of commitments that are made by governments, but I think we have to understand that ultimately, a lot of that is going to require finance to deliver it. And yes, we got commitments in Glasgow. So, ahead of Glasgow, we set out a climate finance delivery plan which is basically showing how developed countries collectively will get to that $100 billion year goal that was set a long time ago was due to be delivered by 2020. I think we accept that it's unlikely to be delivered in 2020. I mean, that report will be produced by the OECD so we will see where we come out. But what we did manage to do was to get commitments which show that, and I think with some credibility actually that over the years 2021 to 2025 around half a trillion will be mobilized from developed countries to support developing nations. And the other thing that we agreed at COP is that developed countries will double the amount of money they put into adaptation by 2025. And that is a particularly acute issue for many countries which are on the front line of climate change but actually are not responsible for creating any meaningful emissions at all. But this is where the private sector is going to be so important. So, one of the things that we also announced at COP26 was a just energy transition partnership for South Africa, $8.5 billion initially to support South Africa to support SCOM with the move away from coal towards clean energy. And last week I co-chaired a meeting with our German minister of colleague on bringing together the G7, bringing together the multilateral development banks, bringing together the private sector to see how we might be able to support, collectively, other countries as well, developing nations to make a clean energy transition. So, the reality is that none of this is going to be possible until and unless we're able to deploy private money and that's what we are looking to do. And actually the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero has a strand of work where they're doing precisely that, looking to see how all these trillions that have been committed to Net Zero by 2050, how do you mobilize that money into developing countries? And I do think actually the MDBs, the multilateral development banks, have a key role to play here as well, looking for instance to establish first loss capabilities behind which the private sector can then come in and invest as well. So, yeah, there's a lot of work going on. I hope by the time we get to Sharnel shake, we can show some more country deals in the same way that we had for South Africa, but there's a lot of hard work ahead and ultimately to deliver on all of this, it does require finance. And let's turn to some of that hard work ahead. COP 27, we're about halfway there. I think a lot of questions that have come up have been around leadership, the bold leadership that's needed from public and private sector to really move things forward and we're seeing a lot of this, people are calling and urging their leaders to say, hey, we're behind you, like we're ready to go, tell us what to do. So, Alec, kind of turning to you, you're the president of the COP, what's your advice to CEOs, to heads of states, to heads of NGOs, are there specific qualities for climate leaders that we need in today's world? Yes, I think first you mentioned Egypt and of course they have the presidency for COP 27, Sharm el-Shague is, as you said, a number of months away now. We're working closely with our Egyptian partners on this agenda because obviously a lot of what we've got of the line in Glasgow then has to be delivered at COP 27, but then also beyond that, there's a whole range of work programs that are taking place. And that work is vital. Clearly every COP then is a stepping stone for the next COP. So we very much hope that we will see more progress in Sharm el-Shague. Look, I mean, I always hesitate from telling people how they ought to lead. I mean, let me give you my own experience from COP 26, which is that this was the first COP that I had ever been to. I'm not at least historically a sort of climate warrior. My own background is banking. I was our business and energy minister when I took on this role full-time. The one thing that I felt was incredibly important as part of this process was to build consensus. And that's why my team engaged with countries all around the world. It's why, for me, it was so important to visit as many countries as possible last year. As I said, I visited almost 40 countries over the eight, nine month period. And it was about listening, because I think there are countries which are in different positions here. There are those developed nations. There are those sort of developing nations which want to grow. And one of the recognitions, I think, that we have to have is that you cannot say to a developing country that, I'm sorry, you must curb your growth because that is somehow going to keep emissions down. I think the answer is to support countries with green growth.  And yet we've also cut emissions by 40%. So I think supporting countries is going to be really vitally important. And as I said, from a leadership point of view, it is about listening and building consensus as a co-presidency. That's something that we sought to do. And I think those who watched COP26 will have seen that the final few hours were actually pretty tense. And the reason that we were able to get this historic deal over the line is because we had collectively with other countries built the trust over the last two years. And just in terms of businesses, what I would say is that, please walk the walk, right? You're making commitments. Make sure you deliver on them, work with your suppliers, and actually give the message to governments around the world that business is willing to lead. And frankly, if business is saying that to governments, you're gonna get much more progress with governments also then deciding that the business is behind them in this green growth agenda.  I think people are actually gonna start saying, okay, well, let's go. We know you do, you know, going green is good for business. And we know that, you know, Zebras can change their spots. People who said one thing one day have decided, you know, we're all in. We realize this is good for business. We can move forward and it's good for our partners and members and everything. So, Gimwe, I know you've addressed climate and sustainability in a number of angles throughout your career. You know, what's your advice to some leaders out there? Maybe there are people, you know, in the tech sphere or in crypto or in, you know, traditional business or in NGOs. What would be some of your advice to them for the next stages? I think first we have to be optimistic. We have to dare to dream of a better future for ourselves. You know, I was speaking to some scientists from the polls. Working in the North and South Pole is difficult for them and they speak about the eco-entuousness, right? And I think this is also quite pervasive among corporate executives, public sector leaders, right? Especially those dealing with climate sustainability issues. The challenge is immense, it's highly complex. But I think in situations such as this, we also need to maintain a very healthy state of mind, right, dare to dream and to, so that we are in a good position to deal with the issues, right? And to take it a step at a time in a good direction, right? We want to take care of the environment but this transition path is a journey, right? We also need to take care of our lives, livelihoods, jobs at the same time, right? So there are many things that we're trying to solve but we just need to be directionally moving and ideally accelerating as we move. The second thing that I would highlight is that I think this is also a moment to harness innovation. I mean, the human being has a huge capacity to innovate, especially in times of critical challenges. Within the forum, we've actually launched an open-source platform called Uplink that actually allows innovators to, we crowd-source ideas from innovators from solving problems of plastic waste to reforestation efforts. In fact, just yesterday, we announced the winners in India where we had launched a trillion tree challenge. And the innovations came in all form, right? From simple ideas to recycling agricultural waste to into packaging material to scientific ones where you can actually use fungi to bind the roots of plants, to enhance a plant-neutron intake, which is also a good form of carbon storage. So what we really want to do is to launch a bit of an eco-pruner revolution, right? Use that energy to want to make things happen into something very positive for ourselves, right? The last thing is that I think at moments like this, we also need to continue to build partnerships. It is a global challenge. None of us can do it alone, and we are much stronger together, right? We have convened various communities, highly committed to climate action, the youth global leaders, CEO, climate leader, champions, friends of nature, friends of ocean, so and so forth, right? And right now, we are also starting to look at how we can engage the regions, right? Regional stakeholders and partners who would actually be closer to the ground and they can help drive execution and success stories. And the other area is also how we can actually continue to convene closed-door conversations where we can talk about difficult issues, and address them on a sectoral basis. One of the most recent dialogues we've launched is around the oceans, ocean 100 dialogues, right? To create spaces for companies engaged in the maritime, shipping industries to discuss, and work together to build a future together. Well, I'd like to thank both of my guests, Alex Sharma. Thank you for joining us from London. Kim Hoi Nio, thank you for joining us here in the studio in Geneva. And thank you to our audience. It's been a pleasure and we hope that you've enjoyed this special edition of our Agenda Dialogue series.