CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—All of our world’s worst problems are created by the powerful. The powerful will keep creating those problems until ordinary people use their superior numbers to make them stop. Ordinary people don’t use their superior numbers to stop the powerful because the powerful are continuously manipulating people’s understanding of what’s going on.

Humans are storytelling creatures. If you can control the stories humans are telling themselves about the world, you control the humans, and you control the world.

PEPE ESCOBAR—Now the EU is promoting its new “infrastructure” project for the Global South, branded as Global Gateway, officially presented by European Commission (EC) Fuhrer Ursula von der Leyen and – surprise! – coordinated with the floundering B3W. That’s the Western “response” to BRI, demonized as – what else – “a debt trap”.

Global Gateway in theory should be spending 300 billion euros in 5 years; the EC will come up with only 18 billion from the EU budget (that is, financed by EU taxpayers), with the intention of amassing 135 billion euros in private investment. No Eurocrat has been able to explain the gap between the announced 300 billion and the wishful thinking 135 billion.

A wide-ranging discussion by four iconoclastic thinkers on the state of the world and humanity’s likely direction in the coming years. The encounter is centered on Regis Tremblay analyses of Russia, the Ukraine War, the state of US armed forces, and related topics.

MICHAEL HUDSON—Raising interest rates will cure inflation by deterring borrowing to spend on the basic needs that make up the Consumer Price Index and its related GDP deflator. But banks do not finance much consumption, except for credit card debt, which is now less than student loans and automobile loans. Banks lend almost entirely to buy real estate, stocks and bonds, not goods and services. So you argue that one of the effects of this is that it’s actually going to roll back homeownership in the United States. You note that the rate of homeownership has been falling since 2008.

The panel discusses the many complex issues defining this election and the nature of the forces contesting power.

Chances are extremely slim that the new leader of Colombia may achieve anything of consequence during his tenure, as the nation is an imperialist fortress in South America, and even a member of NATO, all of which facilitates US meddling of all types, from economic to political and military. There’s also the problem that the reformist incrementalist model sailed a long time ago, and will accomplish little or nothing in Colombia and other nations following the same approach (i.e., Chile, Argentina, Peru and possibly Brazil in the near future).