Ep 371 - You Can't Vote Away Colonialism with Fadhel Kaboub

Steve Grumbine: 00:00:43

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro and Cheese. It has been a year, folks, a year since I talked to my friend Faddle Kaboob. Faddle has been on this show many, many times.

And they are some of the best episodes that you will ever hear. Please go to our catalog and check them out. Do a search, go, expand it. Find all the episodes.

Because every one of them is just phenomenal and they build off each other. And there's a reason for that. We do try to keep threads between interviews going so that we're never losing information.

We're continually growing and building the information.

But fadl, just coming back into the States here, just coming back from doing some great work abroad, decided that he would grace us with a momentary presence. Just absolutely thrilled to have him. And for those of you who don't know who FADL Kaboob is, let me just read you his bio here.

Fadal Kaboob is a Tunisian American economist.

He is an Associate professor of Economics at Denison University, President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and author of Global South Perspectives on substack.

In: 2025

And Dr. Kaboob is also an expert on designing public policies to enhance monetary and economic sovereignty in the Global south, build resilience and promote equitable and sustainable prosperity. And with that, let me bring on my guest bottle. Welcome back, sir.

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:02:32

Thank you, Steve. It's a pleasure to be here.

Steve Grumbine: 00:02:35

Absolutely. I'm so excited. I'm getting all tongue tied. It's been a hot minute. Like I said, it's been a year since we talked last and you're really RP number one.

The intro song has your quote in it. You're a fan favorite. No question, man. I appreciate you coming back.

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:02:50

Thank you. My pleasure.

Steve Grumbine: 00:02:52

Yes, sir. All right. You have been doing an awful lot.

And before we get jumping into the subject matter today, why don't you let everybody know what's Been going on last year or so.

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:03:04

Last year, only good trouble. I've been back to teaching at Denison University in Ohio, my home institution.

And when I'm not teaching, I'm still involved in trying to kind of nudge the conversation and shape some of the thinking around climate, energy, and development policies in the Global south, especially on the African continent. The code word, I guess, for what we're trying to do is structural transformation, structural decolonization of the economies of the Global South.

So I try to do as much of that as I can from where I am with a little bit of traveling over the summer. And it takes a village.

And the good news is that there's a small army of us all over the global south who are trying to move the needle and really nudge policymakers to make the right decisions, especially in this current geopolitical moment where there is actually some opening, some cracks in the system, some possibilities.

And my concern is that if we miss these opportunities and maybe some several decades, if not centuries later, until similar opportunities present themselves, you know, it's powerful.

Steve Grumbine: 00:04:14

You say that. We've talked to a number of other thought leaders of late that have brought up the fact that there are these crises in the ruling class.

There's battles way above that open up opportunities. Some might call it a crisis of hegemony, others call it just ruling class bickering.

But one way or the other, there is shifts going on beyond the government level and in terms of opportunity for people to strike back.

Let me ask you, you know, you're doing this work and it's awesome, but you're not trying to get the global south and so forth just to randomly do things that they couldn't do.

You're dealing with the foot of empire on the necks of these different countries and the extraction process of these countries that render a lot of the opportunities for sovereignty, both currency sovereignty and productive sovereignty, to be a huge challenge.

Not because they can't do it, but because there's an active aggressor blocking them from doing it and making debt pile on top of it to make it so that they can't do this. Tell me a little bit about why not just do it. Why it's just not happening. Why is it just this little teeny crack in the window? What is it about that?

I mean, seriously, it doesn't make sense that if the people want to be liberated, why it's such a tiny crack to make change?

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:05:41

Yeah, if it was easy, it would have been done. And there was a time, actually in the early days after independence.

And most African countries where there was a number of clear headed economists and policymakers and leaders and presidents who knew exactly what needed to be done. They knew that political independence was just one component of what needed to be done.

And they knew that there was no complete sovereignty and independence without economic decolonization of the system. And some of them attempted to do that with the little resources and capabilities they had at the time.

And many of them paid the price with their own lives. Some were imprisoned, others were assassinated, others were forced into exile.

And it varies from country to country, but those efforts were systematically ended for a variety of reasons in different countries.

lking about the period of the: 1960

And with the debt crisis in the Global south comes the team of saviors, so to speak, the World bank and the IMF in particular, saying, basically, we're here to help, but you're going to have to do things on our terms.

You're going to have to introduce these structural adjustment programs to restructure and redesign your economies, presumably in order to avoid another debt crisis. But effectively with the structural adjustment program was to deepen the colonial structures and the dependency that we live with to this day.

So we can talk about what are those colonial structures that were put in place during colonial times, what happened in the aftermath of political independence, trying to escape those colonial traps, and how it led to the debt crisis.

Then we can talk about how we got to where we are today and what we're trying to struggle with, essentially to finish the unfinished business of structural economic decolonization.

Steve Grumbine: 00:07:59

You said a lot there. And it's really powerful and I can't wait to delve into each of those areas. But one of the things that I want to get out front and center.

A lot of folks that follow this podcast are MMT aligned, and that would make me too, because I'm MMT aligned, as are you. But one of the things we talked about offline was, okay, MMT is not the theory of everything.

For MMT to really matter, you gotta have a different entry point, right?

There's a whole bunch of different things that allow us to bring MMT insights in without actually saying mmt, MMT and the idea of making this matter to people outside of the narrow corridors of friends that study ledgers and study balance sheets and so forth, it's great talk just to Talk about mmt. But MMT in the real world has a whole bunch of things that, as Bill Mitchell says, don't fall within mmt. MMT is not the theory of everything.

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:09:00

And right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:09:01

This podcast has endeavored to bring those things together, not just to talk about the ledgers and the tracing, the reserve accounting and the. Well, all that stuff is really good. We've covered it here many times with Eric Tamoine and others, so I'm not here to denigrate that.

But I am here to say it's inadequate. It's absolutely inadequate. And you have brought this to the fore as well.

Can you explain how MMT informs the work you do and what other lenses you bring to the table as you think through these structural issues and the actual role of empire and colonialism and the impacts that this has had on the work you're doing?

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:09:43

Absolutely.

So I think if you ask any of the MMT scholars about this, there's a clear understanding and agreement that nobody claims that it's a theory of everything. When your issue is race or class or gender, MMT is not the entry point.

But at some point, MMT becomes relevant and important and inevitable as a framework. For example, if you're going to talk about reparations, right, how do you pay for it?

Then you can go into the sound finance approach and say, oh, we're going to have to tax this to pay for that and generate tax revenues to pay for reparations and all of that. And then you have the usual reactions, oh, it's going to destroy the economy, it's going to cause inflation or hyperinflation.

MMT has answers to those.

So you can't really get to how do you pay for climate, reparations for reparations for slavery, reparations for colonialism, unless you have an MMT framing. But MMT is not the entry point to talk about slavery or to talk about climate reparations or climate change, for example, and things like that.

So in my work in the policy space, MMT is often not the entry point.

The entry point is the issue that's on people's minds, which is access to energy, dealing with climate change, dealing with the fact that the economic structure is deficient when it comes to self sufficiency and food production and energy production and producing, the basic pillars of development and prosperity, health and public transportation and things like that. So those are the entry points when you talk about how do you mobilize the physical productive capacity.

And that's where you start dragging people slowly into the MMT framework. And then you talk about, how do we pay for this? How do we avoid a debt trap? How do you avoid inflationary risks? Then you get into the MMT framing.

And most of the time, I don't even have to call it mmt, because as you walk people through the logic step by step, you don't have to call it the theory of anything, right? Or MMT this or MMT that. People get it because it's very logical, very intuitive.

And occasionally, if there are economists involved in these discussions, they'll say, well, this is very insightful. What do you call this? Right? You're an economist, and say, oh, I'm glad you asked. This is mmt.

And frequently the economist will react, will say, well, I heard about mmt, but I didn't think it was this insightful. I thought it was a thing about printing money and not worrying about inflation. I was like, what? You thought wrong.

Now you know that it's a useful framework. So that's the way I engage in these questions.

I think we, in the narrow space of the MMT discussions, especially within the economics profession, we tend to neglect how important all of those aspects that are outside of our narrow space, how important those aspects are to people, to governments, to policymakers who are not interested in a theoretical debate.

They're interested in practical, pragmatic solutions that deliver results without bankrupting a country, without getting you into a debt trap, without causing inflation. That's what they want.

And they don't really care which theory delivers that and which lens delivers that as long as you present them with the logical, practical framework. And I think that's the strength of the MMT framework.

And I think it's a message here to all of us in this space to take it a little bit easier on ourselves and really engage in the transformative work without neglecting the technical aspect of mmt, but without necessarily always putting it as the entry point and the main hook for every single discussion, because most policymakers are actually not interested in that discussion.

Steve Grumbine: 00:13:47

It's funny, because I was talking on Twitter, which I no longer. I have an account there, but I'm no longer active on there. I got locked out and I can't get back in. And I'm not sure I ever want to get back in.

But, you know, I was having a discussion with somebody, and they're a longtime MMT person, and they said, no. MMT really does center class in its analysis. And I said, no, it doesn't.

I've talked to a lot of people that share a class based understanding of the world that are mmt'.

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:14:16

Ers.

Steve Grumbine: 00:14:16

But MMT doesn't do that. And this is why that secondary lens, whether it be race or class or really if you do the studying on the.

And I'm talking to a professor, so it's, I'm not talking to you obviously, but when you digest theory, when you read history and you read history not from the CIA, but like the people's history and you really understand these things, you understand how prevalent class domination and power and empire really are. So it's not just like, well of course they could just go ahead and do Medicare for all.

Because for example, in this country, the U.S. that is, I think the vast majority of people would like those kinds of policies. And yet for some bizarre reason, unbeknownst to anyone, oh my goodness, it never happens.

And it's like, but, but, but we gotta fight and save our democracy. We've gotta do all these things. And it's like there's a secondary thing there that's happening. There's something else going on.

There's geopolitical dynamics, there's internal oligarchy. And we say we have an oligarchy and then we simultaneously act like we can vote oligarchy away.

Yeah, we're just going to vote away the oligarchy, baby, don't worry. I'm going to put this I voted sticker on my forehead and it's going to make the oligarchs go away.

It's going to make the power of capital just vanish. It's gone. No problem.

In reality, what I'm seeing, and I think that your work shows as well, is there are very, very intentional dynamics at play that subjugate the global South. And it's not some benign thing. There's intent here.

There is an entire system that extracts and subjugates and basically neocolonialism, dollar based hegemony, colonialism, where we create debt traps for folks, that's not a democratic thing. People aren't self determining anything.

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:16:14

Right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:16:14

Help me understand that relationship. Because you have to focus on that because you're trying to liberate the global south from these chains.

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:16:22

Yeah. And you're not going to vote away colonial structures in election cycles.

So, and you've probably heard me say this, you can't really democratize a system that hasn't been structurally and economically decolonized yet. And I can explain what I mean by that.

So first it's very important to identify what the colonial economic structures are, why they were introduced and to show that they actually Persist to this day that they, if anything, they've been reinforced rather than removed. So colonialism imposed on Africa in particular, three basic economic functions that persist to this day.

The first one is that the colonies in Africa were supposed to be the place where you get cheap raw materials for the empire, for the colonizing empires, and, you know, cheap raw materials. This is where we are today. Extractivism. We still play that role to this day.

Number two, the colonies were supposed to be the consumers, not the producers, the consumers of technologies and industrial output from the industrialized world, from the global North. We still play that role to this day.

And number three, and most importantly, the colonies in Africa were supposed to be the place where obsolete technologies, assembly line manufacturing that is no longer needed in the industrialized world is outsourced to the colonies, especially after independence, under the name of development, job creation, partnerships, and all of that. But effectively, what it does is that it locks you at the bottom of the global value chain, at the bottom of the hierarchy.

And that is precisely the case for most developing countries today, With a few exceptions, few countries that managed to escape the bottom of the hierarchy. We can talk about how those exceptions manage to do that.

So if we don't recognize that those colonial structures persist to this day, and if we don't remember, especially people in the global north, allies and advocates and people who are engaged in these conversations, if they don't remember that colonialism and its economic structures were not designed for development, they were not designed for democracy, they were not designed for justice, they were not designed to produce a just transition or human rights or any of this thing. If anything, colonialism and its economic structures were hierarchical, abusive, violent, extractive.

You can complete the long list of really ugly adjectives that go with colonialism.

So why do we today live in a world where these economic functions and these colonial structures persist, but somehow we expect democracy to thrive in the global south? Somehow we expect human rights to be protected. Somehow we expect development and industrialization to take place. They cannot by design.

It's impossible. That's why I say you can't democratize a system that was not designed for democracy. It was designed as a colonial system.

So that doesn't mean we don't like democracy and we don't like transparency and accountability in elections and all that. Of course we do. But there are structural conditions that make it nearly impossible for democracy to take hold and to thrive under those conditions.

And I'll give you an example.

nisia, after the uprisings of: 2010

And now we transition in: 2011

But fundamentally, the economic structure of the Tunisian economy remained the same, right?

Because all major political parties that were involved in that transition to democracy, they didn't have a vision of structural transformation, structural decolonization.

So the economic structures remained, and as a result, they continued to produce exactly the same results, which is unemployment, inequality, socioeconomic exclusion, a debt trap, the same things that were happening under the dictatorship.

But the illusion that the public had at the time was that those bad results were because of dictatorship and they were not because of colonial structures. But that's okay.

But then what happens is that you elect a president and a prime minister and members of parliament and cabinet, and you can debate about how qualified and how skilled these individuals were, but at the end of the day, they were voted by the people in transparent elections. And the vast majority of them were really hardworking, genuine people who loved the country and wanted to do what's right.

But they are governing now an economy that is steered from abroad, an economy that they can't really control because it's not a sovereign economy. So they're facing a situation where they have to extract so much of their own economy to pay external debt as a priority. Right?

Because you can't default on external debt. Right?

And when they're faced with this scenario where they have to make a choice, do they deliver to the democratic aspirations of their people and the mandate that they gave them during the election, or do they throw democracy under the bus and prioritize paying the debt and neglecting, delivering better quality of life to the people who voted for them and one government after the other.

We had Several, more than 10 since then, who systematically were cornered in a situation where they had to throw democracy under the bus and neglect the economic needs of their people, which is development, right.

In order to continue to service the debt, which is part of the colonial extraction and economic entrapment that was designed for the Tunisian economy. And Tunisia is not unique. Every single country in the global south, with a few exceptions, is trapped in that situation.

So now, when you have perfectly well designed political system with transparency in elections and participation and all kinds of rights that are being given to the people, people to the press and so on, and the freedom of participating and engaging and criticizing your own government and so on, all of that is great checks and balances and accountability. But then the system compels your democratically elected government to throw democracy under the bus and to continue with the same economic system.

And that's why I say you can't democratize a system unless you structurally decolonize it.

And that's the part that not a single government since that transition to democracy was able to address, the unfinished business of structural decolonization that is so powerful.

Steve Grumbine: 00:24:27

And I want to bring a quote up because your guy, our guy Ndango Samba Sila, worked at the Rosa Luxembourg foundation. And I believe it was a foundation. Regardless, he worked at the Rosa Luxembourg, Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung.

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:24:41

It's a German foundation. You can say, yeah, all right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:24:45

So there's a quote from that person, Rosa Luxembourg, who I think we all should keep in mind because it speaks to what you just said.

It says the character of a bourgeois government isn't determined by the personal character of its members, but by its organic function in bourgeois society. With the entry of a socialist. This is her quote. So whether you're a socialist or not, this is coming from her.

With the entry of a socialist into the government and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn't transform itself into a socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister. And I think that's kind of the systemic issue there. Right.

It's not a matter of whether these people are good or bad, whether they love their country, whether they really, really mean well. It's a matter of the economic system itself is set up to create these outcomes.

And until we can get rid of that, it's going to be really, really hard for your favorite elected official to do. Jack diddly. Do you agree with the Rosa Luxemburg quote? I guess. First off. And second off, what are your thoughts?

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:26:00

Absolutely. And the example that I mentioned, Tunisia, it wasn't just one minister or one mp. It was an entire political class of well meaning people, right?

For the most part.

But they were plugged into a structure that they couldn't transform and they didn't recognize that the structure, the economic structure needed to be transformed. They lacked the vision.

And every time somebody talked about, oh, the colonial legacy of French colonialism, and you hear people, very intelligent, highly educated people in Tunisia, but also in other parts of the African continent, they will say, oh, come on, Guys, colonialism is over a long time ago. Stop blaming everything on colonialism. Let's roll up our sleeves and work hard and get things done. And that's so unfortunate.

That speaks actually to the effect of how powerful the neocolonial legacy is. And that's really about decolonizing the mind, not just decolonizing economic structures.

When you live in a colonial system, but you just can't see it. Right?

When your entire vision of economic development and prosperity is fully informed by a colonial model of economic extraction that actually serves not your country and not your people, but serves the interest of the former colonial interest, that's when you realize that you're in deep trouble. That is often the case, unfortunately.

Steve Grumbine: 00:27:31

We just had a gentleman on from Venezuela analysis, Ricardo Vaz, and he talked about the unfinished Bolivarian Revolution and talked about the learnings and the ebbs and flows of that. And it wasn't Venezuelan society that tried to tear itself apart. It was the CIA and it was the US interests coming in there.

So whether it's Chavez or whether it's Maduro, whether it's someone else, at the end of the day, they're contending, as always, with a counter revolutionary force, a force that is intent on destabilizing and wrecking any kind of advancements that preclude the accumulation of real wealth and real resources and minerals and all the other aspects that are being farmed out and mined out of and extracted from society there. And it's not Venezuela, it's the us it's other global powers. These power dynamics are very real and there's no way to just vote that away.

It's going to require people to really, really fundamentally, not just the people that are oppressed, but in particular those who weirdly don't believe they're oppressed. They don't realize, they don't see their own chains. Yeah, because if I try to make change, I'm just one person.

Obviously there's no great man theory going on here, but if you looked at millions of us, under what official channel could we vote away snatching up an elected official from Venezuela? Or at what point could we vote away the extractive policies of empire?

We can't even get a straight answer on thuggery from ICE within the United States. And as bad as it looks right now in the us, Obama.

I mean, I was around for the Dakota Access pipeline and the militarization of the attacks on those indigenous people, blocking the pipeline on their land, protected land and their water. How exactly?

I'm really getting at a point here where it's like you could give the best democratic institutions ever in Africa, but as long as empire is willing to disrupt what the CIA is willing to do, I mean, these are things that are like literally freedom of information act away from you knowing these things. I mean, these are not neutral actors.

There is a counter revolutionary force every single time a nation attempts to decouple itself from the tentacles of this vast economic machine, the swift system, all the different tools of empire. Help me understand, I mean, because you've been very clear in the past about the Global south cannot just do it one country at a time.

I, Ron Gray, once said, we used to be a fist, now we're a bunch of pinkies. And I have held onto that for dear life because pinkies break when they try and punch a wall.

But as a block, as a group, as a mass, the possibility to make change, building those relationships is very real. But there is going to be blowback. Help me understand that.

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:30:48

Yeah, actually when you think about these things, especially in the present moment, you don't actually have to wait 50 years for documents to be released to find out these interventions or threats of interventions to stop and prevent countries from actually delivering to their own people, to structurally decolonize their own economy and reclaim their actual sovereignty.

The reaction to that, especially in Europe, when it comes to France, for example, and its interest in its former colonies, they're not hiding very well what they're trying to do and what they're trying to stop. Because when you think about it today, when people think about the empire, they think about the US but there are other empires still.

As far as the African continent is concerned, the Monroe Doctrine, the so called Monroe Doctrine. When you think about it, the US has control over its backyard in Latin America, supposedly.

And the agreement was that the Europeans will take care of their backyard, which is Africa, and feel free to do whatever they want in their former colonies.

And today we're still living by that reality, except we're living in a moment where there is very intense geopolitical and economic and international trade competition, primarily between the US and China and to a lesser extent Europe. So I'll comment on Europe in particular, and I think this will help us understand a little bit how these things work.

When you think about Europe today, Western Europe, that is the EU in particular Europe is a very poor continent actually in terms of natural resources, has very limited energy resources, natural resources, especially the resources that really matter for the next century, like critical minerals, for example, or strategic minerals. It's very poor also in terms of its demographic potential.

It's actually the all the demographic trends are working against Western Europe, against it in two ways.

One is you don't actually have young population to give you the industrial power that Europe used to have at some point, which you can fill in with immigration by the way. And two, you don't have the market size in the next hundred years to absorb industrial production. So you need to be export oriented. Right?

Intermission: 00:33:13

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Fadhel Kaboub: 00:33:36

and unfortunately, the highest level of political leadership. The political elites of Western Europe has decided on a particular survival strategy because they know all of this.

And their survival strategy is to double down on their colonial extraction from the African continent.

Because without access to Africa's resources, without access to the large African market, which will be growing substantially in the next 75 years, Europe can't survive economically. The problem is that African continent is no longer theirs alone, so to speak.

From their perspective, they see the threat of China becoming more present economically on much, much better terms with Africans than what the Europeans have ever offered to African countries.

But not only that, now the US is actually very much interested in African resources way more than in the past, violating the old gentleman's agreement that Africa is for Europeans and Latin America is for the Americans.

Because now the US sees that, you know, if China is going to be the one having the biggest impact and access to African economies, then that's a threat to the U.S. so there's strategic interest. So now for Europe, if China and the US are going to compete for African resources and market access, than what's left for Europe, right? Nothing.

Right. That's the sad story about how European political leadership think about their survival strategy.

Because their survival strategy is a colonial survival strategy. They can't think of real partnership with their closest neighbors on non colonial terms to create win win scenarios.

And here it's important to highlight a few things about the African continent in terms of its potential.

t continent on the planet. By: 2050

The Youngest on the planet. And by the end of the century, Africa will be one of the largest markets on the planet. Four billion consumers now.

Four billion consumers with a rising purchasing power. If we get this right and actually do development and industrialization, that's the biggest consumer market on the planet.

Now that doesn't mean we want to encourage consumerism and drive extractivism and all of that. But I'm saying this from the outside world.

Looking into the African continent, All the other major economic blocks are declining in terms of demographic trends. This is going to be the market, right? So there is interest in the consumer market to have privileged access to it early on.

There's interest obviously in all the strategic minerals that are available on the African continent.

There is also interest in the brain drain from the African continent to accelerate because you have young people that will supply the youngest and brightest engineers and doctors and innovators for the next 75 years. All of that is part of the drive for having access to the African continent.

The main problem is that African political leadership is not thinking strategically as a collective unit with a single vision, coherent vision, to create this bargaining chip that says we have all of this to offer, but we're not going to offer it unless it's on our own terms, unless it's a win win scenario.

And really go back to the early days of after independence when many of the African political leaders, their main message to the outside world, especially during the Cold War, was friends of all, satellites of none, friends of all, enemies of none. This was not just Africans, but across the global South.

But you hear Mia Motley today, the prime Minister of Barbados, repeating the same phrase, friends of all, enemies of none, friends of all, satellites of none.

So giving a new life to that vision of friends of all, satellites of none means that we can strike bargains with the major economic blocks that have the life saving technologies that are needed for real development and prosperity on the African continent.

Real structural transformation, structural decolonization, giving the African continent also the bargaining position to say we're going to transform this continent into a prosperous, sustainable, open and livable continent on terms that have not been done anywhere else in the world.

Because when you think about what this vision is about is to give better quality of life for everyone, transform, decolonize and do all of this without enslaving any other nation, without colonizing any other nation, without throwing our people under the bus. Nobody has done this before.

So we're inviting the rest of the world to be a true partner in creating a new and better sustainable international economic Order of peace, justice and sustainable prosperity. A truly multipolar world on terms that are set by the global majority. And the global majority is the Global South.

So my work is basically to collaborate with all of my peers and like minded colleagues across the Global south who are doing similar work. Pushing for the same tipping points is to convince political leaders in the Global south to coordinate at the highest level this kind of unity.

And that's why I always say Pan Africanism is not the nice fluffy word that we say to each other when you take pictures on the red carpet. And Pan Africanism is a survival strategy. Pan Africanism is the only development strategy. And it's not just a nice thing to say.

It's the only way to transform and reposition the Global south away from the bottom of the hierarchy and at the center of a new system. And today we do have that opportunity because of this intense competition.

But the lack of that leadership on the African continent, in particular in the Global south, means that you leave the main scene to the existing major economic blocs to compete. And you can't blame any major economic bloc for having a vision for itself, a long term vision for itself.

And every major economic bloc has every right to do what's right for themselves. And they will use their economic diplomacy, they'll use pressure points, they'll use leverage to achieve whatever is best for them.

And you can't blame Europe or China or the US for doing what's best for them, to keep them at the top of the hierarchy, so to speak. So the responsibility is on the Global south, the global majority, to have a vision for itself.

Because if you don't have a vision for yourself, you're already part of somebody else's vision. And that's really, in a nutshell, what we're dealing with today. And this window of opportunity is here.

If we miss it, it's going to be a long time until another opportunity presents itself. And you don't have to take my words for it.

All you have to do is listen to one of the participants of the top of the global hierarchy who decided to expose, so to speak, the dirty laundry of the global powers at Davos.

That's the Canadian Prime Minister a couple of weeks ago when he basically described how the system has been working, right, and we've known this, of course, but he explained it very eloquently without apologizing for Canada's role and the abuse of the Global south, without promising that there will be any transformation, for example, on the way that Canada will engage with the rest of the global majority, but recognizing that the top of the hierarchy, the US is mistreating the middle powers, right, Europe and Canada, and that is not fair for Canada.

So as a result of that, Canada needs to fend for itself and reposition itself by building better relationships with China and as he said, with other like minded countries, by which he meant probably Europe, to protect the middle powers from the rage of the US leadership at this point.

But there is no indication that this will involve actually delivering justice to the countries that have been on the receiving end of that violent, abusive extractive system that Europe, Canada, the US and others have benefited from. He said it very clear.

We benefited from policing the rest of them and for creating international law that only applies to those smaller countries, not to us, of course, but now when these rules are weaponized against us, we can no longer remain silent. So that's my little commentary on Davos and on Canada.

So I think what the Canadian Prime Minister has said should be a clear message to leaders in the global south that you should not expect Canada to come save you either. Right? This is on you. Canada has told you, this is what we've been doing to you. Right.

And now it's your responsibility to organize yourself and use your collective economic and geopolitical weight to reposition yourself in this new international economic order. And it has to be done not on Canadian terms, but on the global majority terms.

Steve Grumbine: 00:44:22

Well said. I want to bring up something.

We started the call off talking about that initial episode about xenophobia and climate migrants and the pitfalls of watching, say, the Pakistan, India kind of migrations and wars that could come from that, and how we had even talked about the job guarantee being a real meaningful way of addressing immigrants and migrations and stuff like that, and how it could eliminate some of the xenophobia.

But as you see what the US is doing, what these various global powers are doing, and these middle managers, if you will, these middlings of the Canadians and the European folks, they're doing it as well. But they create situations where they've destabilized the homeland of people. And those people want to survive. And so what do they do?

They leave their countries. Not because they are unpatriotic in their own country, not because they don't love their own country.

They just have some great desire to go somewhere else.

They leave because the conditions imposed upon them by these kinds of powers create conditions that are unfit, that are impossible to survive or very difficult to survive. Can you talk a little bit about immigration in this kind of framework? And what you're seeing, yeah.

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:45:47

As I said earlier, when you have a political system in the Global south that can't deliver the quality of life for its own people because it's in a debt trap and it's forced to prioritize extractivism and neglect the needs of its own people, then people are left to fend for themselves.

And then part of it was trying to move somewhere else where people can find jobs and better quality of life and livelihood and opportunities for their families. And that's where migration has always been kind of the relief valve for the system.

Except now in the Global north, the doors are increasingly closed in the face of people moving from the Global south for those opportunities.

So the only people who have access to the legal pathway to migrate to the Global north are the highly educated, in general workers who are the people you need the most for development.

The doctors and the engineers and the nurses and the teachers and the tech workers or the other workers that are sort of allowed to move in, are allowed to move into most precarious occupations, often undocumented, without labor protections or labor rights. And that's just not right. And I'll mention here just the impact of climate change. And you don't have to take this from me.

ion. Right. The World bank in: 2021

It's called Groundswell, in which they try to estimate for the entire world the impact of climate change on mass movement of people who will be displaced because of climate change.

And most of my colleagues who are experts on this, they say the real numbers are probably three times what the World bank is estimating, at least three times. But let me give you just the World bank numbers.

They're saying by: 2050

And we know every time there's internal displacement, there's additional pressure on housing, on access to food, on jobs, on schools, which exacerbate conflicts and exacerbate social unrest. And very often that mass movement of people spills over borders. And the pathway for relief is usually by moving all the way to the Global North.

And in this case it will be Europe in particular will be flooded by millions of people. And we're Talking about the next 25 years, right? And some of this is already happening.

World bank has estimates for: 2030

So no country, no region, take Europe for example, is prepared logistically, fiscally to welcome millions of people and treat them with dignity, right? If we just take the very conservative numbers that the World bank is putting on the table, which means we're moving towards a disaster, right?

Globally. And the longer we wait to recognize this, the worse the problem is going to be. So this is where again, the entry point is not the mmt.

The entry point is migration and all of that. But then why are the gates closed on the other side?

And you hear this, if you watch and listen carefully to the rhetoric about immigration in Europe, the right wing neo fascist rhetoric is alive and well and thriving everywhere, right? Blaming all kinds of things on immigrants, whether it's documented or undocumented. And it's not unique to Europe, of course.

It's the same in different parts of the industrialized rich world, including the United States and other parts of the Global North. So this is the reality we're dealing with.

And if we don't have an answer, a technical answer, that says the millions of migrants who are moving to Europe, for example, will bring massive economic benefits to Europe.

And that Europe actually does have the fiscal capacity with an MMT lens here to leverage this inflow of people to boost its own economic development and treat people with dignity in a win win scenario. And not only that, but Europe and the rest of the Global north does actually have the fiscal capacity to repair the damage, right?

The colonial damage, the climate damage at the source in the global South. So people don't have to leave their own communities.

Nobody wants to leave their hometown, their country, their culture, their food, their music, their parents to move to a place where they know they're going to be mistreated and disrespected and undervalued, right?

So if you can treat this at the source, with strategic transformative investments in win win scenarios that structurally decolonize African economies, in particular with partnerships with African governments, then you can really address the problems at their roots. Then you can really allow democracy to thrive in the African continent. Then you can have a transformation that is sustainable.

But the problem, the way I see it, is two things. One is the majority of political leadership doesn't know how to pay for it.

They think they need to tax their economy into destructions or they need to borrow their way into paying for reparations. And the second thing is they fear, they truly fear the structural transformation of the Global south.

Because they see the world in permanent hierarchies where if they're at the top of the hierarchy and Africa escapes the bottom of the hierarchy, then they will drop at the bottom of the hierarchy and Africa will rise.

And what we're proposing here is not a hierarchy replacing the old hierarchy, but a flat surface, kind of circular platform in which the Global south is at the center of a new multipolar international economic order of peace and justice and sovereignty for all major economic blocks. Because today the colonial mentality doesn't really believe in sovereignty for the Global South.

They don't want that sovereignty because it's a threat to their position on the hierarchy. They can't envision a world in which other sovereign nations and the Global south are actually partners in equal rather than competitors and threats.

And that's really where we are today.

If we can crack that nut, right, and decolonize the mind of our leaders in the Global south, but also decolonize the thinking of the top level political leadership in the Global north because we do have allies in Europe think tanks and academics and intellectuals and civil society. People who understand this, who want to transform the system, but they too are facing political elites that ignore them, right?

On domestic issues, on international issues, and so on.

Steve Grumbine: 00:54:00

I want to throw one more thing into this mix before we close out. And I appreciate your time, fadl, but this to me is super important.

So many people derive their view of Africa, of South America through the lens of the mainstream media. They hear that they're nothing but drug cartels and that they're slavers and they're out there hacking people up.

And don't get me wrong, I believe there are atrocities all around the world. I don't think it's even debatable.

But that said, we are talking about counter revolutionary forces from the imperial core that destabilize these regions and create these situations.

When they see them coming up for air, when they see them spreading their wings, people do not take into account what it takes to maintain the gains of a people led transition. They don't understand. So they see these historical things like oh, a million people were killed and blah blah blah and famine and blah blah blah.

Think about the level of disinformation that went into some, like Zimbabwe, the colonial powers and things like that. People just see the end result and then they blame Africa or they blame South American and Central American countries for violence and whatnot.

I want people to understand that these things are not just natural occurrences. There is an incredible amount of effort to make sure that they never leave that place.

To piggyback on all the points you made through this conversation.

It really, I think it, it maybe makes me angriest when people can't see that moment because they blame socialists, they blame the socialist nation, they blame the.

This that they don't ever blame the fact that the imperial core, the capital, the powers of capital are weighing down on them in a way that is in some ways invisible in other ways.

Just like they can pretend that ice didn't kill these people in cold blood, they can pretend that they were being run over by a car, were just protecting themselves and the people believe it, for crying out loud. Bottle. So help people understand how hard it is to protect the gains when you don't have the number one military in the world.

Fadhel Kaboub: 00:56:15

Yeah. It's actually interesting that you mention this rhetoric about the drug gangs and all of that. And this is where.

I'm not a historian, but this is where knowledge of history really matters.

And if people are interested, it's a fascinating history to go back and learn the history of how Hong Kong was colonized by the British and why Hong Kong now went back to mainland China after more than a century.

Look up the Opium War, where the British Empire basically was the drug dealer that flooded Hong Kong at the time and other parts of China with opium to start an opium epidemic in the country, which the Chinese authorities at the time thought was really bad and needed to be fought. And they attempted to fight it like you would fight any epidemic. And that started a war with the British.

I will not spoil the story for you, but there was quite a bit of American participation and the spreading of the opium, including some very well known family names that became presidential family names in U.S. history. So I'll let your listeners find out.

But it's a fascinating history about how you use drugs as an entry point for destroying an economy because the British did this because they were losing on trade with China when it came to the trade of tea. At the time they were running a trade deficit. They wanted to offset their trade deficit in tea with a trade surplus in opium.

So fascinating history, but we can learn so much from that history because as the saying goes, history doesn't completely repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

So we live in an era now where we talk about losing an international trade and we're using the rhetoric of the drug cartels that need to be fought to stop the invasion of country X or country Y or country Z. But it's the same old colonial trick using these scenarios to justify military intervention, colonial grabbing and control.

So the media narrative, to go back to your point about this, is so important because you have to justify what you're doing to some extent. And when we lose the Fourth Estate, right, in a democracy, which we've lost in this country, in the US Then you don't really have a democracy. Right.

You don't have checks and balances on the political system.

And yes, the Fourth Estate was always under threat because it does create problems for governments that want to achieve certain things by bending the rules and crossing the red lines of human rights and international law and all of that.

But there was always some fearless members of the Fourth estate of the media that did their job and exposed them, and there were whistleblowers that put their lives on the line and exposed injustice. But we live in an era now where there is very little of that happening. And you can say at the moment where we need it the most, right?

There's very little of that happening in the Fourth Estate and the media.

And it's a sad story because the media has been destroyed by the plutocrats, by the billionaires who systematically bought and destroyed and controlled whatever media we had, and now it's just a mouthpiece for the interest of the elite.

Steve Grumbine: 01:00:02

Unbelievable. Actually, very believable. Father, I want to thank you.

I also want to tell you had the opportunity to finally sit down with Ali Kadri and discuss the unmaking of Arab socialism, among a number of things. And I'm not sure where that will come out. That podcast will probably come out before this podcast.

So, folks, if you're listening, just know the order of operations. But it was so good. I love the fact that I am able to reach and access such brilliant minds and appreciate your facility in that as well.

Jason Hickle had told please talk to Ali Kadri. And you're like, hey, I'm good friends with Ali Kadri.

Fadhel Kaboub: 01:00:41

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I can't wait.

Steve Grumbine: 01:00:43

He was so good. It really is.

Fadhel Kaboub: 01:00:46

I mean, Ali Kadri is by far one of the best Arab political economists alive today.

Very much underrated because, you know, when you are of his caliber intellectually, you don't get invited to speak at the big podiums where people will actually hear your transformative, radical thinking. Because it makes people uncomfortable, right?

Steve Grumbine: 01:01:12

Yep.

Fadhel Kaboub: 01:01:12

Telling the truth with deep historical and with a clear understanding of the political economy of development and colonial and imperial entrapment, you make a lot of people uncomfortable. So I'm glad you managed to speak to him, and I can't wait to Listen to the podcast. He's fantastic.

Steve Grumbine: 01:01:33

You know, I gotta say this, this is kind of my parting shot here. Between him, Vijay Prashad and Gabriel Rockhill, they took aim at academia for being silent on a lot of the travesties that we're witnessing today.

And I want to tell you, I appreciate so much my relationship with you, fadl, because obviously there's a lot of people that we love in the MMT space, but you have given me access and helped me cross beyond just ledgers. And I never want to look back. I'm so grateful that there are people like you that make me feel sane.

And these folks said, basically, look, there's all these supposed left wing thought leaders in academia and they've stayed silent for access, politics for whatever, and people are dying.

And I really appreciate the fact that you say things plainly and for my friends that follow us, that are MMT and they're MMT only and do not let the paths cross kind of thing. You're really missing out.

You're really missing out because MMT is a powerful tool when married with these other lenses, when married with these other entry points, as FADL pointed out. And that's what this podcast is all about.

I don't want to be a sanitary guy with a glass case that has white papers in it that no one reads that don't really pertain to working class struggle. If that's you, hey, more power to you. There's room in the world for all.

But I'm telling you right now, the transformation comes from understanding what's happening outside, what's happening within these struggles for liberation, and understanding how the MMT lens can help facilitate that struggle and help them get out of it. And it also helps you find out where the breakpoints are. It helps you find out where the barriers to getting out are.

And then you've got to deal with those too. So, Fado, you've been instrumental in helping me get there.

I'm not an academic, but daggone, and I try to pretend like I'm one sometimes on these podcasts and I appreciate you letting me have a moment with you. It's been really great. Tell everybody where we can find more of your work.

Fadhel Kaboub: 01:03:45

Well, thank you, Steve. This is always a pleasure.

So you can find me, I guess, these days mostly on LinkedIn, the only platform that's still sort of useful and functional these days. But occasionally I post on my substack Global south perspectives, and I'm happy to engage.

And it takes a village, as I said earlier, to move the needle.

So I really appreciate all the work that you and the rest of the team at Macro and Cheese and Real Progressives are doing to inform and educate and empower and mobilize people. So thank you.

Steve Grumbine: 01:04:21

Thank you so much for that. All right, I'm going to take this out. First of all, I want to thank my guest, FADL Kaboob for joining me. We have.

I don't even know the number, but I think it's somewhere in the vicinity of 13 episodes with bottle. So go check them out. Every last one of them is Evergreen. You don't want to miss them. They're really good.

Have a cold weekend with snow, sit down and binge listen to some macaron cheese. We call it comfort food for the mind. And with that in mind, Real Progressives is a nonprofit. We survive by your contributions.

We're a five zero one c three. That means your contributions are also tax deductible. So consider becoming a monthly donor. You can go to patreon.com forward/real progressives.

You can also go to our substack which is Real Progressives. Unfortunately not Mac Wrenchies, but Real Progressives. And you can go ahead and become a donor there.

Or you can go to our website which is realprogressives.org and go to the dropdown for donate and make a one time or a monthly donation as well. All are welcome. So on behalf of my guest FADL Kaboob, myself Steve Grumbine, for the podcast Macro and Cheese, we are outta here.

End Credits: 01:05:43

with the working class since: 2015