Upstream - The Rise (and Fall) of the US Dollar w/ Fadhel Kaboub

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

In this episode we're joined by Fadhel Kaboub for a conversation about the US dollar, its hegemony over the globe, and the emerging challenges to this hegemony. Fadhel Kaboub is a Tunisian-American economist, professor of economics at Denison University, president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and author of Global South Perspectives on substack. The conversation opens with a historical overview of how the US dollar became the dominant global currency and the power that this brought with it—exploring the petrodollar, the use of sanctions, and other neocolonial mechanisms upheld by the dollar. We then introduce BRICS and exploring how BRICS challenges US dollar hegemony and the limitations to this challenge.  Fadhel then unpacks the ways that US dollar hegemony is and can continue to be challenges through focusing on food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, and industrial/technological sovereignty, which Fadhel unpacks in depth. We then explore some examples of attempts to achieve this kind of sovereignty, beginning with the Alliance of Sahel States and their successes and challenges in seeking sovereignty but looking also at Iran, Cuba, and China. We explore some concrete examples of how not just the dollar but other colonial currencies both past and present have been utilized to subjugate people and states in the Global South, focusing on the CFA Franc. Fadhel then gives us a sense of the better world that can exist outside of the neocolonial, imperialist structures that dominate today and how that world can be achieved in a concrete way. Further resources: Global South Perspectives (Fadhel Kaboub's Substack) Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity Related episodes: Our ongoing series on the Alliance of Sahel States Our ongoing series on Iran Our ongoing series on Cuba Our ongoing series on China Intermission music: "Capitalocene" by Wes Carroll Confabulation Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants—just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for Upstream stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going—socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. patreon.com/upstreampodcast For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

D-Dolarizing cannot happen by decree. You have to structurally decolonize your entire economy in the food sector, and the energy sector and the industrial sector. And as you do that, you liberate your economic structure from these colonial traps. You may not be able to do it by yourself as a small economy, but then you can do this as a regional economic block. And that's why a lot of my work is about South South Co-op. is about Pan-African regional economic cooperation,

because all countries in the global south, in Africa in particular, have exactly the same economic traps. And it's much easier to get out of these traps as a block of countries than as one country at a time. So that's why I say you can de-dollarize a system that hasn't been structurally and economically decolonized yet. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. We hear a lot about de-dollarization these days, and the fall of dollar hegemony seems almost inevitable. With the emergence of China as a competing superpower, with the BRICS nations and their efforts to reshape the dynamics of global trade, and with the obvious decay of the United States both domestically and as a global power.

But what does de-dollarization actually mean? What is dollar hegemony in the first place? And perhaps most importantly, how is the United States' stranglehold over the global economy being challenged, not just in the economic realm, but in the political realm as well? In this episode, we're joined by Faudal Kaboub for a conversation exploring the rise and fall of dollar dominance. Faddle Kabub is a Tunisian American economist, professor of economics at Denison University, president of the Global Institute for Sustainable

Prosperity, and author of Global South Perspectives on Substack. And before we get started, upstream is entirely listener-funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going. Post-capitalist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance. for the crucial support.

And now, here's Robert in conversation with Faddle Kibu. Fadl, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for the kind invitation. Looking forward to this conversation. Yeah, me as well. And I would love to start, as we always do, with our guest, you introducing yourself for our listeners, sort of in your own words, and just maybe tell us a little bit about the work that you do.

Well, my name is Fadl Kabou, but you teach economics at Denison, University in Ohio. I'm originally from Tunisia, and my work sits at the intersection of climate, energy, debt, and development, and it's focused primarily on the global south in general, Africa in particular. And because of the themes of the work that I tend to focus on, it's inevitable in a sense to do this work without a political economy, historical, structural perspective, which means, you know, at the end of the day, you dive into questions of power and geopolitics. That's essentially my approach to thinking about things. I write a blog on Substack. It's free and available to everybody. It's called Global South Perspectives. And I wear several

hats in my professional life, which people can read about when you follow my work. Beautiful. Yeah. Thank you so much. link to the substack and anything else that you share with us in the show notes so that people can access that right from the podcast app that they're using. All right. Well, so I asked you to join us today because we haven't really gotten too deeply into this topic on our show, which, you know, we've been doing this for almost 10 years now. So I think it's about time for us to talk a little bit more deeply about how the dollar works globally, especially in. in this world right now where things are kind of rapidly shifting.

So, yeah, focusing on this idea of dollar hegemony and what that really means. And then I also wanted to look at a little bit at how that hegemony is being challenged and what that might look like and what it's kind of looking like right now on the ground. So that's kind of the theme that I want to focus on. But just to start maybe, it might be helpful to bring back the lens. And if you could provide us with like an overview of how the dollar came to dominate the world and what that has looked like and currently looks like in the world that we're living in and also for the past several decades.

Very good question. Well, to start with the dollar, obviously history matters in the sense that the global economy was dominated by the British Empire, the British bound before the emergence of the United States economy. The United States is a dominant player and the global economy as a major superpower. And in that transition, and at the end of World War II, there was a major conference held at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944, in which the Allies met to discuss the transformation of the global financial system after World War II

and how they were going to avoid some of the major problems that they've created in between World War I and World War II. And that was the competitive devaluation or the currency wars that were sparked by the Europeans. So at the time, the world was under a gold standard, so all currencies were backed by gold. physical quantities of gold.

So countries accumulated wealth and power by accumulating more gold, which is why, by the way, a lot of the colonial extractivist policies were to go to Latin America, to Africa and other parts of the world, to mine gold because gold was money and power. But in terms of trade, in Europe, for example, when a country had a trade surplus with its neighbor, let's say France had a trade surplus with Germany and its trade relations with Germany,

then Germany would be losing gold and France would be accumulating more gold, which allows it to issue more of its currency, which allows us to spend more on armament, for example, and accumulate more economic and industrial power. So it became sort of in Germany's best interest, if that were the case, to our artificially devalue the Deutschemark and to make German exports artificially cheaper. And that would accelerate German exports to France. And Germany would create a trade surplus with France. And gold would flow in the opposite direction.

So that is considered cheating, right? Because you're artificially devaluing your currency. But there is no stopping it because then France will do the same. And the Italians will retaliate. and the British will retaliate, and that started a vicious cycle of currency wars and so much uncertainty, so much instability that translated into, in part, to the conflicts between the countries. So at the end of World War II, the question was, how do we move to a stable international financial system in which trade deficit countries don't have to resort to these tactics

in a vicious cycle of mutual self-destruction cycles? So the idea was the British Empire is gone and the American Empire is emerging. So the idea was to create new international financial institutions that would stabilize the global economy. And there were two competing proposals, one from the UK, the Keynes Plan named after John Maynard Keynes, who was the famous British economist, after whom Keynesian economics was named. and Keynes proposed the creation of the World Bank, the creation of the IMF, which is what we ended up with, plus the creation of a third international institution, sort of an international central bank that will be the stabilizing feature of the system. That proposal was rejected by the American side, and we ended up with the White Plan, named after Harry Dexter White, and the white plan was to create the World Bank and the IMF

and to have all the major countries fix the value of their currency to the dollar rather than fixing it to gold. And then the United States committed itself to fixing the value of the U.S. dollar to gold. So everything is anchored to the U.S. dollar, and then the U.S. dollar is anchored to gold. And that meant instead of countries, having to accumulate gold reserves, they now have to accumulate U.S. dollar reserves.

And the U.S. committed itself via the creation of the World Bank and the IMF and also the role of the U.S. Treasury to supplying countries with the dollars they would need to muddle through a crisis when needed instead of having to engage in these very destructive currency devaluations. So that's the early phase of anchoring the global economy around the dollar. And then by the time we get to the 1970s, the world economy is changing because 1945, Europe is destroyed, Japan is destroyed. The only major producer in the world is the United States. So the United States was a major exporter, and that meant the United States accumulated large trade. trade surpluses during that period. But by the time we get to the late 60s, early 70s,

most of Europe is being rebuilt and back to being industrial powerhouses that are competitive. Japan is rebuilt. So there's a lot more competition now. And the U.S. gradually turns into a trade deficit country. And the United States remains a trade deficit country, essentially since. then. Now, the U.S., as you know, during that time period, there was also the Vietnam War, which was not going very well for the United States and didn't end well for the United States. So the U.S. found itself in a situation where there is lots of dollars out there in the global economy that would be redeemable for gold, because that was the promise of the gold dollar standard. But the United States didn't have sufficient reserves of gold that would actually

allow it to honor that commitment. And that led to the United States in 1970, blanking on the year now, is it 71 or 72, essentially ending the gold standard, ending the gold dollar standards. And that meant that the dollar became a fiat currency, not pegged to gold. So there's no fixed exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and gold and the U.S. Treasury is no longer going to convert U.S. dollars into gold on demand. And that meant that the entire world is now using dollars as their reserves. All international trade, is denominated in dollars, especially the major commodity that is oil, is denominated in dollars. And that remains the system that we have to this day. So a lot of people make this

reference to the so-called petro dollar, which is sort of a geopolitical economic security agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia, made in 1974 after the oil crisis of the 70s, that essentially says that Saudi Arabia and OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, would commit to only accepting U.S. dollars in payment for oil. When they export oil, they only accept dollars, not any other currency.

And in return, the United States will commit to a security umbrella, military cooperation, security cooperation, to protect countries that join that agreement, primarily Saudi Arabia and its neighbors in the Gulf. And now you have Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries accumulating massive amounts of surplus in U.S. dollars because they're exporters of oil. What do they do with those dollars? They have to park them somewhere safe

and earn some basic, you know, decent amount of interest at no risk. And the agreement was to park those dollars in the U.S. Treasury, meaning to buy U.S. treasury bonds. And that was the stabilizing factor for the dollar. So now any country that needed to import oil from anywhere in the world, oil is priced in dollars. So they had to accumulate dollar reserves. They had to use dollar for trade. And anybody exporting anything, they would want to export it and earn dollars in order to use those dollars to import oil or to import anything else. So everybody was locked into

the US dollar system. This is what we call the US dollar hegemony. All of that is essentially still the same to this day, except there is a few things that started to happen in the last decade and started to accelerate in the last few years that are beginning to nudge some key players, some countries into thinking about alternative international payment systems away from the dollar-denominated system, the dollar-denominated payment system that is for, actual transactions, for example, the SWIFT payment system, even though SWIFT is not an American company, but it's an American controlled company, essentially. It started with China and Russia recognizing that their assets can be sanctioned, that they can be cut off from the international

payment system. So they both started to develop an alternative payment system. It was made even more prominent with Saudi Arabia itself, not renewing the petrodollary agreement and starting to trade some of its oil in non-US dollars, meaning in Chinese yuan, for example. And that led other countries, not just Saudi Arabia, but the UAE and others, to start trading directly with China and Chinese yuan

instead of US dollars. Now, the volume of all of those transactions is still very small. The dollar dominance is still alive and well. But all of these things, plus the Iran war and the sanctions that we've seen on Iran, on Russia, on any country that challenges the pressure also on countries that challenge the dollar hegemony is alerting more and more countries that your dollar-denominated assets and reserves are not really safe because now the U.S. is weaponizing the dollar hegemony against some countries,

which means you can be cut off financially, economically at any moment. So there's more interest in diversifying and regionalizing economic transactions, financial transactions, away from the U.S. dollar system. So again, there's a pathway to that, but we're nowhere near eliminating the dollar hedger. of money anytime soon. But things could change and could accelerate quickly in the next few years. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you. That was so, so helpful. I really appreciate that. And I'm going to ask you a little bit more, I think, about what you ended on with the alternatives and especially getting a little bit more into the petro dollar in light of the war on Iran and this crisis around

the Strait of Hormuz and some of the questions that that's brought up. But first, I would love to focus a little bit more on some of the alternatives that you brought up the alternatives and challenges to the US dollar. So let's talk a little bit about bricks or bricks plus. I would love it if you could situate bricks into this context of dollar hegemony and sort of how that relationship and interplay works. But first, for somebody who may not really have any conception of it, can you give us a basic overview of what Bricks or Bricks Plus is. So Bricks is a group of five countries. The acronym Bricks spells Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

Those are the five core countries that started the organization. Initially, it was actually four. It was only brick, and then South Africa was added. Bricks as the initial block, and this is my opinion, analysis, my interpretation. Bricks was never designed or envisioned to be a decolonial, structural transformation block of countries, despite what many people think about a coalition between Russia, China, India, and so on. Bricks itself is a, this is Bricks not Bricks Plus. Bricks Plus is the second wave of countries that were invited to join Bricks. That includes

the UAE, that includes Ethiopia, that includes a number of other global South countries that were invited last year to join the initial five into a larger block now, with some privileges. But Bricks, to me, is still a mercantilist block of global South countries who are trying to beat the global North in its own game on its own terms. that is export-oriented mercantilist type of competition. So in that sense, it presents sort of a gentle rivalry to the dominance of the United States and Western Europe when it comes to economic dominance, international trade.

But it's playing by the same rules of the system. In more recent years, as I said earlier, with the sanctions on Russia in particular, and the weaponization of the dollar hegemony, that triggered more countries, especially within bricks, to think about how their entire economic edifice and all the gains that they've accumulated with the rise of these global south economies, all of it can be gone in a minute if they get sanctioned or isolated from the international payment system, the dollar system. So that's what triggered Russia first, of course, because they were under sanctions to develop an alternative payment system away from the dollar.

But that triggered China in particular to preemptively build a much more sophisticated, actually, alternative to SWIFT and started to diversify its international trade away from the U.S. market, actually. to the point that even when the Trump tariffs were imposed on China this year, China's exports to the U.S. dropped from about 20 percent a decade ago to less than 12 percent, I think, or 11 percent right now. So China is diversifying away from the U.S. economy and is trying to build an alternative payment system and signing these alternative agreements with oil-producing countries in the Middle East to trade a new one as opposed to trading in dollars.

So the recent developments are kind of nudging bricks to become much more aggressive and careful about accelerating the alternative payment architecture, the alternative financial architecture. So we may see more and more of these developments soon. And that's what triggered also the Trump administration this year. We heard Marco Rubio explicitly making statements about Brazil, for example, trading with some of its neighbors in regional currencies and national currencies as opposed to dollars. And he made it very clear that this is unacceptable. They need to go back to trading with dollars.

Otherwise, how are we going to be able to sanction them? How are we going to be able to discipline countries if they trade in other currencies? and if they trade outside the dollar system, right? So it's clearly from a U.S. administration perspective, at least the current administration, that one of the tools of U.S. foreign policy that can be weaponized to discipline countries into obedience is the U.S. dollar system.

Yeah, absolutely. Discipline them into obedience or for the countries which are intransigent and will not bend to the knee of the United States, like Venezuela was or Cuba as we're seeing other countries which are then just punished. And the goal of this, of course, is to create unrest and an internal revolution of some kind, which hasn't really been very successful, but they're continuing to work on this every day. We're seeing it play out in real time with Cuba right now.

And this is not conspiracy theories or theories proper that I or others are making up. This is direct official public statements from the Secretary of State of the United States saying exactly these words, that how are we going to sanction or discipline countries if they're trading outside the dollar system? They need to go back to trading in dollars. This is unacceptable and so on. So this is official declarations of the United States government, not an imagined story about what. may be happening behind the scenes. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I want to read a quote of yours, which was written in one of the pieces that you sent me

when I was asking you a little bit about, you know, your work on bricks and the dollar and all of that. So I'll read the passage and then I'm going to ask you if you could maybe expand on it a little bit. So you wrote that quote, de-dollarization cannot be declared into existence by a present. Dissential decree or via a BRICS declaration. D-dollarization doesn't require the creation of a new currency, certainly not a currency backed by gold or oil. D-dollarization is achieved via strategic investments aimed at enhancing economic and monetary sovereignty at the national level or at the

regional level, a block of countries investing in collective self-reliance. D-dollarization is built on a three-legged stool of food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, and industrial slash technological sovereignty. So if you could first start maybe by expanding on this and unpack these three neocolonial structures, which are standing in the way of de-dollarization, and maybe expand on this idea that bricks, although it presents an alternative, which you said, you know, they're working even more aggressively right now to come up with ways of sort of bypassing U.S. dollar hegemony and the U.S. control of the global economy, that it's not enough. Like that it's from the sense that I got from from reading your pieces and listening to some of your conversations in the past, like it seems

like the dollar needs to be fought on a much more structural level. But yeah, I'm sure you could put it in much better terms. So maybe I'll just talk about it. toss the mic over to you and ask you to expand on that quote and talk a little bit about those three areas of intervention. So I usually summarize that quote that you just read from my blog, I think, by saying that we can't de-dollarize a system that hasn't been structurally and economically decolonized yet. So what we're talking about here is not just, you know, a president declaring a de-dollarization or announcing a new currency backed by gold or oil or anything else,

those declarations automatically fail if you don't transform the structure of your economy. And that's why earlier I said Bricks is still a mercantilist block. It's not a decolonial block yet. But it does have the potential to do exactly that. So here's what I mean by decolonizing, structurally decolonizing the economy. When you look at the majority of the global south today, especially the African continent, you find that there are some colonial economic functions that persist to this day. And I'll describe very briefly what those three economic functions are. And we'll see why most of the global south is still technically economically colonized.

And then we'll realize that the core of the decolonization has to happen in three key sectors. One is food, the other one is energy, the third one is industry. And then when we successfully decolonize those three segments, then that process in and of itself will be a process of de-dollarization. So you can't just de-dollarize by decree. you have to do the heavy lifting, right, of these strategic investments to transform these areas. So let me start by describing what colonialism did economically on the African continent in particular. Colonialism imposed three basic functions, economic functions.

Number one, the colonies were supposed to be the providers of cheap raw materials for the industrialized world. We still play that role to this day. That has to change. Number two, colonialism imposed on Africa the role of being the consumer, not the producer, the consumer of industrial output and technologies from the industrialized world. We still play that function to the stay. That has to change, of course. And number three, and most importantly, Africa and the colonies 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 under the guise of development and cooperation and job creation and partnership.

And what it does effectively is that it locks you permanently at the bottom of the hierarchy, at the bottom of the global value chain. And we still play that role to this day. And that has to change. So these are the three economic functions. The translation of this economic role that persists to this day, the visible part of it, is the external debt, the massive external debt, the developing countries have accumulated over the years.

And this external debt is denominated in U.S. dollars. So what are the sources of external debt? and we'll see here the sectors that need to be transformed to kill the source of external debt. External debt, of course, just to give you one number according to UNCTAD, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the recent numbers on Africa, the African continent as a whole spends more money on debt service than on health and education combined. That statistic is just outrageous in and of itself. but that debt service and debt as a stock itself is a symptom of these deeper neocolonial structures.

So three sources of external borrowing, and these are the sources that need to be tackled. Number one, food imports. Number two, energy imports. And number three, imports of high value-added manufactured products of technological products. So when we say food imports, for example, this is the most absurd thing you would discover when you look at the African continent. Again, according to UNCTAD, Africa today imports 85% of its food from outside the continent, when less than 100 years ago during colonial times, the African continent was the breadbasket for colonial powers. So food deficits is a major source of external debt.

And that didn't happen by accident. That was by design, colonial and post-colonial design, because of the heavy agricultural subsidies in the global north and so on. Number two, energy deficits. When I say energy deficits, I'm including here the biggest oil producers in Africa. The biggest oil export is in Africa, that is Nigeria, Angola. These are countries, Nigeria up until last year, before they built the mega refinery, the Dengote, refinery. Nigeria up to that point imported 100% of its fuel from international markets. Angola, to this day, imports 85% of its fuel from international markets.

Not by accident. Again, by design. So you export the crude oil, the cheaper version, and then you import the more expensive gasoline and kerosene and petrochemicals and so on. So that's the second source of external debt. And again, debt denominated in dollars. And number three, and most importantly, the kind of industrial base that the African continent was allowed to have, and I use my words very carefully, allowed to have, is the kind where you have to import the machines, you have to import the fuel to power the factories, you have to import the intermediate components to be assembled with low-cost labor, and we even import the packaging in many cases. So you end up with a manufacturing base that exports low value-added content, and what it imports is high-value-added content. So then you can double-triple, quadruple your exports even with free trade agreements and partnerships and access to markets and whatever, but you're still locked at the bottom of the value chain because you're still deficient in terms of value-added content. So then if you take food deficits, energy deficits, manufacturing value-added deficits, you have a structural trade deficit on an annual basis year after year, decade after decade.

And of course, everybody knows when a country has a trade deficit, the value of its currency will decline relative to the dollar, which means they have a weak exchange rate. And that means when I have a cheap currency, relative to the dollar, anything I need to import the next morning, whether it's food or fuel or medicine for my people, I have to import it at a higher price, which means I literally import inflation in the most sensitive areas of the economy, food, fuel, medical supplies, which means I have a revolution waiting to happen the next day. And that means governments have

to intervene immediately with the Band-Aid solution. So what do they do? They subsidize food. They subsidize fuel to protect the most vulnerable people. They subsidize health services as much as possible, but it's unsustainable to do this. And then they ask their central bankers to stabilize the exchange rate, to strengthen the exchange rate artificially, at least. And the way they do it is by borrowing more dollars. And now you accumulate external debt. The lenders then get to dictate what you do with those dollars you just borrow because they want you to pay them back. So they force you to prioritize economic activity that will generate dollars as quickly as possible so you can pay them back, which means they want you to dig the mines as quickly as possible.

Export raw materials to pay them back. So you're back into the colonial trap. They want you to divest from producing wheat and rice in corn to feed your people, and they want you to prioritize producing bananas, coffee, tea, and tobacco and the colonial crops to export to global markets to get those dollars to pay them back. So all of this feeds back into the vicious cycle of colonial and neocolonial intentional economic entrapment. So de-dollarizing cannot happen by decree. You have to structurally decolonize your entire economy in the food sector and the energy sector and the industrial sector.

And as you do that, you liberate. your economic structure from these colonial traps. And when you do that, you reduce the debt, debt denominated in dollars, and you structurally de-dolarize your economy. And you become much more self-sufficient, self-reliant. You may not be able to do it by yourself as a small economy, but then you can do this as a regional economic block. And that's why a lot of my work is about South-South cooperation, is about Pan-African regional

economic cooperation because all countries in the global south, in Africa in particular, have exactly the same economic traps. And it's much easier to get out of these traps as a block of countries than as one country at a time. So that's why I say you can't de-dollarize a system that hasn't been structurally and economically decolonized yet. That makes a lot of sense. And I really appreciated that about your analysis.

I think sometimes we can get stuck in thinking. about things in the realm of economicistic and less focusing on the actual structures of power that are needed to be intervened in in order to actually create real structural change. You mentioned

Pan-African regional cooperation as being part of the focus on your work. And so I want to spend a little bit of time looking at actual on-the-ground examples of states and regions that are working towards.

decolonizing in this way. I want to start specifically, and this is just because we do have an ongoing series that we've been doing on the Alliance of Sahel States, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. So this question really brings this up for me in terms of the Sahel region. So this is an example of a block that is decolonizing. This is more of a military alliance, but they are also decolonizing and working together in these ways where they're trying to build sovereignty specifically, you know, from the French and the other neo-colonial, European neo-colonial actors that have spent most of their time in those regions. So I don't know. Is there anything that you would want to talk about with the Alliance of Sahel states and how they are going about doing this and how you view it? Do you see it as

being on the path of something similar to what you're talking about or not? Or, yeah, maybe if you could just give us your analysis on the Sahel states. I think the political motivation, the intuition of the alliance of the Sahel states is definitely the correct intuition. The reality of their economic and geopolitical capabilities is unfortunately very difficult. partly because they're landlocked countries, partly because economically they're deeply entrapped still in the French colonial CFA Frank zone,

partly because of the immediate sanctioning and isolation that France and Europe in particular have immediately inflicted in those three countries and weaponized the African Union, weaponized their own neighbors to turn against, them, partly because we're talking about countries that have been, if you follow the news and watch the reporting, have been under threat, security threat, in terms of assassination attempts and attempts to destabilize national security, overthrow these governments.

So you have not only the challenges of economic development proper that you have to deal with, but you have to deal with being constantly under threat of being eliminated, physically eliminated, and the country being destabilized from a national security perspective. So not the most ideal environment to implement an economic development strategy. With no access to external partnership for transfer of technology, for unleashing your full potential, no access to markets outside. your small internal economies, all of these make it very difficult to move forward with real structural transformation. And that means, in reality, your people, the popular support that these

governments had from the beginning is still there. But history tells us that that political capital that leaders typically have in the beginning of a transition like this, whether it's military transition or any kind of transition, that political capital needs to deliver real results, tangible results as quickly as possible to renew that political capital or increase that political capital. Otherwise, popular support starts to diminish and sometimes turn against governments. My assessment is that those three governments have managed so far to stay resilient in terms of national security. They've managed to deliver some tangible results that their popular base is happy with. But in terms of massive structural transformation of the energy

system, of the industrial system, I think those are going to be the most. challenging areas. In terms of the agricultural system, I think there's been some significant progress. That's the nice thing about agriculture. You can have an impact in 12 months. You can really build your agricultural self-reliance and food sovereignty, rebuild it very quickly, despite climate change and other challenges. It is technically possible. My assessment on the energy front is that for a number of reasons, The Sahel countries have opted for nuclear technology, apparently, and that is a strategic mistake, I think. Not just for environmental or climate reasons, just because it's a very expensive, very slow technology to deploy.

had they opted for solar or wind or renewables, the impact would be within weeks. You deliver clean electricity to the most remote areas of the country. And for every green kilowatt hour you produce locally, you are sparing yourself from having to borrow dollars or euros to import fuel and the interest you have to pay on that debt. That may have been a choice. made under the duress of the current siege that they're facing and the fact that they had to rely on Russian support and Russian technology. So I'm not very optimistic on the energy front

that the development is going to be transformative in that case. On the manufacturing front, there's some minor progress, but again, without energy sovereignty, you can't really industrialize. And industrialization requires economies of scale. And those three countries combined, it's just not enough economies of scale to industrialize internally. You really need your neighbors to be part of your strategy. You need access to larger markets to industrialize. You want the complementarity of resources and capabilities for joint industrial policies. Otherwise, you end up manufacturing a small component and somebody else's industrial policy.

Or you end up basically doing assembly line manufacturing. It gives the appearance that you're producing a finished product, but you're really importing all the high value added content and your contribution is just the low-cost labor assembly line manufacturing.

So that's my quick assessment. I wish I had better assessment to report, but this is really not necessarily a critique of the leadership of the Sahel countries, it's more a call to action for other African nations, especially their neighbors, to join in structural transformation that will help them decolonize their own economies. And I think without Pan-Africanism on a large scale, that's why I always

say Pan-Africanism is the economics of industrialization, because without it, without economies of scale, no African country can industrialize. In three African countries is not enough. Pan-Africanism is the economics of prosperity because without it, Africa cannot become the economic powerhouse that it deserves to be in the global food, energy, transportation, logistics, finance, insurance, real estate, and manufacturing systems. And I always say it's pan-Africanism or death because the breakdown of all the life-sustaining systems, the food system, the water system, biodiversity, energy, health, all of these systems.

The breakdown is exacerbated by the climate crisis, by dangerous distractions, by neocolonial greenwashing forms of extractivism and economic entrapment. So we either industrialize and radically transform the continent to unleash that potential, or we do nothing and face the breakdown of all the life-sustaining systems. That's what I call death. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Foddle Kaboob. We'll be right back. So get the capitalism.

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Working weekends, Freakam while the early of the week begins And there's some stuff out there that just might blow your mind Like a lazy boy jacuzzi that automatically reclines Or if you just somehow knows just how to pour you a beard It can absorb all your fears And that drive to hold it dear So keep that foot on the ghetto

And blast on and if it's smoke, put a mask on till you pass on and get ready for the capital scene it keeps going ever quizzes supplies with dreams it's got a new phone a new home provides you with stuff and a line of credit when you're just not making enough so get the capital see it trudges on through the dawn and the rise inside screams it's got a billion bombs kills a million moms and stands with Israel for shipping on Amazon come give them a tch it's got a kissy henry kissing you're alive in your dreams and it's got YouTube and a new coup and a stockpocket

and that drive to keep on going even when you wanted to stop. So let's turn up the heat at this party. This one's sponsored by a Zanix and Ferrari. And that one's sponsored by Toyota and Bacardi. And this one's sponsored by the van on the moon. I soon for a new plush, I just must have a new crush. A new thrusts get off the rust that our minds can escape us. It's time to grind all the way up right to the top.

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enough. So get the capital of C. One percent who killed. And it's on for 49. So head right. That was Capitalocene by West Carroll Confabulation. Now back to our conversation with Faudal Kaboob. I want to ask you about some other examples that you could bring into the conversation that might give us a sense of maybe some potential regions or states that are at least attempting to decolonize their economies. But first, I don't mean to jump around too much, but you did mention the CFA Frank and it made me think that maybe it would be interesting and important to take a little bit of time to talk about, and you already have in a more broad sense, but talk about some of the concrete ways of, you know, not just the dollar and other currencies in the present, but also

in the past, which have been utilized to subjugate people in states in the global south. And the CFA Frank was something that when you mentioned, I thought that could be an interesting example. Yeah, most people don't really know much about the CFA Frank. And when you say it's a colonial currency, people think, what do you mean? Like today, are you describing it as colonial? Is it actually from colonial times? And it is literally from colonial times, never went away. So you have essentially 14 former French colonies that to this day use the CFA Frank, which is literally a colonial currency. That's what it used to be called during colonial times, CFA.

The C during colonial times used to refer to Colony, Colonnais-Dafrique, that's the CFA, meaning French colonies, the African French colonies. And then after independence, when technically France left Africa alone, quote-unquote, you couldn't call the same. currency, CFA with the same CRE referring to colonies because they are no longer colonies. So they change the C to community.

So it's communities now, francophone communities of Africa. But the function of the currency is exactly the same. The structure of the monetary system is exactly the same. So there is one of the basic rules of this system, the CFA Frank system, is that all export revenues from the 14 African countries that use the CFA, 50% of those revenues are deposited in the French treasury in Paris as reserves. So essentially, if you're talking about a country's monetary sovereignty, if you're Senegal, for example, one of the CFA countries,

50% of your export revenues are deposited in Paris. and when you want to use them, you essentially have to apply and get approval from the French government to use your own revenues from your own sovereign resources. So if that's not colonial relationship, I don't know what is. The other thing that is important to recognize here is that the CFA Frank used to be tied or fixed in terms of exchange rate. its value is directly fixed to the French francs until the creation of the euro. So now the CFA franc is pegged to the euro. So now it's denominated essentially into euros, not French francs, but it's still deposited

at the French treasury in terms of deposits, reserves. So what this does is that you have sovereign, independent countries, like Senegal, for example, or Cote d'Ivoire, who have their own governments, parliament, presidential elections, parliamentary elections. Their people vote in elections and elect a president, a prime minister, and cabinets are appointed and so on. And now there's a popular mandate, let's say, by the youth who elected a particular president to create jobs, to deliver infrastructure, education.

health, and so on. But now the budget that should be dedicated to invest in health and education and infrastructure is not something that the Senegalese government can decide on its own, because Senegal cannot issue the French franc into existence. Senegal is a user of a foreign currency. It's not the issuer of a national currency, a user of a foreign currency that is controlled by, the rules established during colonial times for colonial purposes. Remember, the CFA Frank was not designed to develop the African colonies. It was designed for extractive purposes, to extractive cheap raw materials and so on. So we're still operating in a colonial extractive system.

And let's be very clear about colonialism, in case your audience, for some reason, didn't know what colonialism was supposed to do. Colonialism was never designed to deliver justice or development or human rights or democracy to the colonies. Colonialism was violent, hierarchical, non-democratic, extractive, abusive, you know the rest of the adjectives. So the question for us today is, why do we expect the same economic design of colonialism,

somehow to deliver democracy or justice or development or industrialization or to protect human rights in the CFA Frank zone or in any other country in the global south that still operates under the colonial economic architecture. By design, it's impossible. That's why I always say the sustainable development goals developed by the United Nations are not achievable under the current global economic architecture because the global economic architecture is colonial by design. So it cannot deliver the results that the SDGs are designed to deliver. It cannot eliminate poverty. It cannot protect human rights. It cannot deliver a just transition. By design, it's impossible. And that's why we need this structural decolonization of the economy if we're serious about achieving all of these noble goals.

Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that completely. And I, I would would say the biggest barrier to that, of course, is the United States, right, and the imperialist structures that have been placed all across the globe. And none of these things like you mentioned, like any kind of sovereignty or just transition or any kind of real facing of climate change can be done until those structures are torn apart. I would love it if you could now give us a little bit more of a sense of any other promising examples, both historically or present, that you can point to, that you believe are presenting a viable path out from under the thumb of Western domination, anything that you can point to, and then we can kind of move on.

I'm going to ask you a little bit about China as well, but before we get there, yeah, any other examples that you want to point us to? Yeah, I mean, in recent months, when most people turned their attention to the U.S. Israeli war on Iran, a lot of people started realizing that, oh, there is this country that has been under U.S. sanctions basically for five decades, and that not only managed to survive with all the challenges of surviving sanctions and isolation, but in some areas managed to excel and to thrive, look at the educational achievements of Iranian society. It's beyond impressive what the country was able to achieve. And then look at the strategic military capabilities without outspending the U.S. in terms of

dollars and without matching the U.S. missile for missile, they managed to develop a national defense industry that is much smarter in terms of how to use the resources, but extremely effective in defending itself from the most vicious military attack by the United States and Israel combined. That is impressive. I mean, this is not a political statement about the conflict itself. This is just on technical grounds. This is really impressive.

And probably what we're seeing now in terms of the ceasefire, I'm not a military expert, but I don't think the ceasefire was the result of the U.S. wanting to negotiate a peaceful settlement to this because of the global oil crisis. I think it has to do with recognition that the military capabilities are actually not sufficient to do what the United States and Israel thought that they'd be able to do within a few days or within a couple of weeks. Plus the impact on the global economy, the pain

inflicted on the global economy is still being felt as we speak, because the conflict is technically not over yet, despite the ceasefire. So to go back to your question, yeah, there are countries, apparently that are able to withstand the most aggressive sanctions and violent confrontation. Look at Cuba. We're not talking about military confrontation here because Cuba doesn't have any capacity to face off with the United States or with any other nation, so to speak. But in terms of being able to survive and to thrive in some areas, in terms of quality of life, in terms of health achievements, scientific development, especially in the biomedical industry,

and to be a country that is a source of solidarity with so many other countries around the world. The country with the smallest amount of financial resources is a country that is able to intervene during COVID and send Cuban doctors to Italy on day one of the outbreak of the pandemic to back up the Italian healthcare system, to offer Cuban medical services to many neighbors in Latin America. There is a tremendous achievement, despite all the constraints.

And that's inspiring to so many other countries to say that there is a world in which we can actually thrive without being superpowers, without being empires, right, that we can excel in areas of human development with very limited resources and that areas of South-South cooperation in terms of health, education, scientific innovation for peaceful purposes, right, can be a win-win for everybody. And as we see the global climate crisis unfold, the bruceful. breakdown of the international trade system with the Trump tariff wars and currency wars and all of that, there is the emergence of an old discourse from the 1970s that was silenced, intentionally silenced,

by the end of the 70s, early 80s, which is a discussion about a new international economic order. And this was not an intellectual debate for academics. This was the lived experience of most of the global south, especially in Africa and the rest of the former colonies, where the world was essentially saying, we're finally emerged out of colonialism. And that generation that liberated the land from colonial presence did their part, but they left us with the unfinished business.

of decolonizing the economic structures. So the discussion was, how do we create a truly decolonial, new international economic order? And these were vibrant debates in the United Nations, across the Global South and academia, and everywhere. And those debates were silenced by the end of 1970s and the beginning of the 80s and the rise of the neoliberal dominant paradigm, and all of that has reemerged in the last few years, 50 years later. So today we have major international convenings, governments, civil society groups, think tanks, reviving that intellectual discourse about a new international economic order and trying to co-create a truly multipolar world, non-hiercical world in which

countries retain their sovereignty in which no country can say, this is my backyard and this is your backyard, and nobody has the right to claim any other country as their backyard. All countries are equally sovereign and independent, but especially economically sovereign and independent. And I think that's going to be the challenge for our generation. We either get this right now in the next few years, or we devolve into another cycle of colonial and neocolonial hierarchies of unipolarity or bipolarity that are never designed to produce peace, justice, or sustainable prosperity. So that's really the space within which we operate today.

And there's increasingly more countries in Latin America and Africa and the rest of the global south who are saying, can we co-create? and co-design a system in which the global majority, that is the global south, can actually rewrite the rules of international trade, international investment, international taxation, international finance that are actually fair and equitable for the global majority. And can we do this without inflicting pain or revenge on any of the countries that cause the damage, whether it's climate damage or colonial damage? Can we do this without invading, colonizing, or enslaving any other people?

And can we do this without throwing our own people under the bus? And the answer to this is, I think we can. There is a way to create a truly multipolar world and create a scenario of win-win possibilities in which we can all thrive in a world of peace, justice, and sustainable prosperity. Yeah, that vision, it seems so sensible, right? I really appreciate you providing that sort of alternative of a better world because I think sometimes we get stuck in thinking that, you know, this isn't the best system, but it's the best we can do. We hear that a lot. And this brings in Cuba, actually, because what's so impressive about Cuba is that even despite the fact that it has been just hummeled by the illegal blockade and sanctions imposed by the U.S., it has shown glimpses of that world, right? Like, even in those dire circumstances, it was not only able to reverse some of the

horrific conditions that existed in pre-revolutionary Cuba, but, you know, we've been learning, I've been learning in our series on Cuba that we've been doing. Our most recent episode at the time of this recording was with Helen Yaffi, who actually, talked about how in Cuba, 96% of people own the home that they live in, or at least this was the case before the worst conditions more recently. And 4% is the max cap. The most that you were supposed to pay on rent for the 4% of people who were paying rent was 4% or maybe it was 6%, I forget, some very low percent of your income, which is, someone who's paying like, I don't know, almost half of my income on rent right now.

It just feels so remarkable. And again, you know, this threat of that example is exactly why the United States, one of many reasons why the United States is currently going after Cuba. In terms of Iran, I would love it if you could maybe just talk a little bit about how Iran, you brought up how they have been sort of, you know, going toe to toe with the United States in a sense in terms of holding their own militarily, how has Iran been challenging the petro dollar? And I thought maybe this was an opportunity to bring in China into the conversation. In terms of, you know, we were hearing a little bit about this idea of the petro yuan when Iran was first sort of negotiating the rules around potential rules, the future rules of the Strait of Hormuz.

But I'd also love it if you could contrast China's project of global South development and how it fundamentally differs from the West's form of development, because we hear a lot these days about how China is imperialist and often how, for example, to bring the alliance of Sahel states back into the conversation, how they're, quote, just replacing one imperialist power with another imperialist power in terms of, well, mostly in that case it would be Russia. But I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about the differences between China's project of Global South development, and how it differs from the West's and also maybe this idea of the challenge to the Petro dollar.

And I know that's a lot in one question. So, yeah. No, but it's a very good question. I'll start by positioning myself in this in my work because my work is not about this China's model of development for the Global South better than the Western model of development for the Global South. That's not the question for me. I think every major economic block, whether it's China, the U.S. or Europe, has every right to have a vision, a strategic, long-term vision for itself.

Every major economic block has every right to use its economic diplomacy and incentives to nudge everybody else to where they want to see them within their vision. But so do we, the Global South. We have a right to have our own strategic vision for ourselves. and we have the right to use our own collective economic and geopolitical weight and whatever weight we have diplomatically and economic incentives we have to also nudge everybody else where we want to see them and to wiggle ourselves out of the bottom of the hierarchy and position ourselves where we belong,

which is, I think, the global majority belongs at the center, not at the bottom, the center of a multi-eastern. polar system. So that's to frame the conversation. So my work is not how does China see the global south and is it better to be dominated by China or by the US or by Europe. My work is how do we as the global majority position ourselves collectively at the center of a multipolar world on equal footing with equal relationships with China, Europe, the U.S., Russia, and everybody else. And this is the old slogan of the early independence leaders of the African continent and the rest of the Global South.

If you remember the phrase, friends of all satellites of none, or friends of all enemies of none. This is really the vision of multipolarity that the Global South had from the beginning. and that's the vision that had to be silenced during the Cold War and sort of made to disappear. That's the vision that we're bringing back here. So that being said, is it true that China's engagement with Africa in particular in the global south is less extractive, abusive, let's say, neo-colonial than the relationship that the West in general, Europe in particular had with Africa.

Absolutely, yes. I mean, I get this question all the time from European officials who are looking at the African continent and engagement with China and say, aren't you afraid of the Chinese? They're coming

with this neocolonial vision. They're trying to colonize the African continent. And I almost have to kind of hold myself and not laugh at these statements because my immediate reaction is to say, actually, you know what, I'm actually afraid of you, not of China, because you look back at the track record at the history, how many African governments

have been overthrown by the Chinese? None. How many African countries have been colonized by the Chinese? None, right? How many African countries have been the subjects of military coups or anything supported by the Chinese, none, versus how many governments have been overthrown or assassinated by the French alone, right? Not just by the rest. Of course, there's a long list of countries we can list. So this is point number one. That doesn't mean that we should have an open door policy for anything China wants China gets in Africa. But just as a point of comparison, we're talking day and night in terms of political and geopolitical economic engagement. Also, countries in Africa remember China when China was a poor country because China is not new on the African continent. This is something a lot of

people in the West don't recognize that when China was poor, when China had millions of people who were living below the poverty line, when China had no technology, no financial resources, very little to offer. When China offered solidarity with some African countries, and African countries asked for help to build a railroad, China managed to squeeze some resources here and there, and they didn't do it because they wanted critical minerals from Africa or because they wanted to dig for gold.

They did it at the time because they believed in solidarity. So those are things that the people of the continent and their leaders don't forget. get. So that's point number one. China, of course, today is a superpower economically, technologically, and is a willing partner on the African continent. Here, this means that we, the people and the leaders of the African continent in particular have to be very strategic and careful in terms of how we engage with our partners. Do we want to go to China and say, would like to have a whole bunch of electric buses imported from China or electric motorbikes or whatever Chinese products gifted to us by China so we can use them. Well, of course, China

will be more than happy to send you electric buses and all of that. It doesn't cost them anything, but is that the kind of transformation we want? Do we want to ask for a railroad that will upgrade the old colonial railroads from the mines to the port so we can continue to extract cheap raw materials. That would be a strategic mistake. Of course, China will be more than happy. If you ask for a loan or an infrastructure to be built, they'll say, if that's what you want, we'll be happy to give it to you. But if we organize ourselves, again, as I said early, as a pan-African block, not as one country at a time. This is a mistake. No country in Africa can truly industrialize alone. If we co-organize ourselves at home, before we go to China,

as a block of countries, let's say 15, 20 countries, doesn't have to be the whole continent at first. And we co-design a joint industrial policy in which we have the economies of scale as a block of countries. We have the complementarity of resources and capabilities. Remember, we have the youngest labor force on the planet. We pre-negotiate the distribution. of the value chain within our block. We pre-negotiate the ownership structure. We pre-negotiate the protection of labor rights, human rights, biodiversity rights on our own terms. And we do all of this and then we say, okay, we have all the components of a real transformative joint industrial policy that will not reproduce the injustice of the old system. And what is missing now is access to the manufacturing

technology. The manufacturing technology to manufacturing deploy, solar panels, wind turbine, geothermal infrastructure, high-speed rail infrastructure, medical infrastructure, the building blocks of development and prosperity. If we go as a block, this is what I call the geopolitical bargain of the century. We go to China and say, look, we give you the bargain of the century. If you agree to share your manufacturing technology in kind as a joint venture of, contribution, not as a loan, not as a debt trap. Here's what we give you in return. If you agree to our terms to unleash this potential, in 10 to 15 years, you double your industrial footprint, your geopolitical weight globally. You also have privileged access to these precious minerals that

everybody's panicking about. In addition to that, once we trigger this process of real development, every other country on the African continent, for that matter, in the Global South will want to join in this joint industrial policy, which means we as the African continent, we give you access to the largest market on the planet. Africa will be a market of four billion consumers by the end of the century. I guarantee you China will agree to this transfer of technology, to this joint venture partnership, in-kind contribution to unleash this potential. Now, the purpose of this bargain of the century is not to position China at the top of the global hierarchy, but rather to trigger a process that will then compel all other major economic blocks to align in a multipolar system.

Here's what happens. As soon as you trigger this process, we can then go to, let's say, a country like Germany or France, and say, look, we offer the same bargain we just offer to China. if you agree to share your high-speed rail technology with us to manufacture and deploy the building blocks of logistics and transportation on the African continent. At that point, France cannot say no, because if they say no, we go to Spain. If Spain says no, we go to Japan. If they all say no, we go to China because they have the same, if not better high-speed rail technology. And then we allow China to triple, quadruple their economic and geopolitical weight in countries that refuse to participate.

on these non-colonial terms, they become part of the isolated global minority. So that means every country now, major country will make the calculations and realize that they cannot afford to be left behind. So the idea here is not to position any country at the top of the hierarchy, but to rather position Africa and the rest of the global south, the global majority, at the center of a new international economic order, a truly multipolar system of peace, justice, and sustainable prosperity. And this is, as I said earlier, this is a process by which we are truly doing something that's never been done in the history of the world before, because we're uplifting billions of

people from the bottom of the hierarchy, from poverty and socioeconomic exclusion. and we're doing this without invading, colonizing, or enslaving any other nation, without inflicting pain or punishment or revenge on any nation that caused this pain, whether it's ecological or neocolonial pain, and we're doing this without throwing our own people under the bus. So we're really inviting the rest of the world to co-create this truly multipolar system, this truly new international economic order of peace, justice, and sustainable prosperity. I really appreciate your vision of a better world.

And I think that so many of us share that vision with you, you know, if perhaps we're not as experienced in understanding the mechanisms and the concrete actions required to achieve that vision, I want to see that world. And I think it is a possibility. And also at the same time, the reality of that possibility seems to be slipping through our fingers more and more every day, you know, as we see the way that the U.S. is approaching its decline. We have such a short time frame that we're working under, too, because of climate change. And, you know, even though climate change has not been as front and center recently, I think, just because of so many acute crises that pop up. every day. Climate change is really putting a strict time limit on, you know, how quickly we need to

move to achieve these things. And, you know, I personally vacillate. It depends on the day. Sometimes it depends on the hour of the day of how hopeful I feel versus how much doom I feel about the future of society and the planet. And I'm wondering how you contend with these, you know, these real limits and the fact that barbarism is bubbling up everywhere and that this better vision of the world is up against so, so much, you know. Yeah, I just don't know if I have a totally concrete question there to end on, but I just want to throw that at you and just get some of your thoughts and how you would respond to these very real challenges that seem to be getting worse and worse every day. Yeah, I mean,

I like your realism. And it's actually important here. And it's important also to acknowledge that the vision that I described is not a vision of confrontation. As I said, it's not designed to inflict revenge or pain on any nation. It's an invitation to create a better system in which everybody benefits from a win-win scenario. there's a small, tiny minority of people, and they're really a small minority who despise this idea. And we can fit them sometimes in small buildings.

They often fit themselves in small buildings together. That is the global political elites who live in a delusional headspace. is deeply colonial and by design. They're joined by a very powerful class of techno-fascists, some from Silicon Valley, others from other places, who just despise the idea of democracy and justice and people's freedom. And these are not my words. All you have to do is just listen to their statements.

And they say, well, democracy doesn't really, give us the world that we want. It gives these people the world that they want. And I don't use the terms techno-fascism lightly because they do have so much power because of how plugged we are into the technology that they control. But again, the good news is that they're small in numbers, but they're powerful, mighty and powerful when it comes to surveillance and technological and political influence. But when I think of the United States, there's two ways to think of the United States,

to think of the United States elite and power at the top of the hierarchy, and there's the United States, which is the people of the United States, the vast majority of the United States. The good news is that the vast majority of the people of the United States, they want a world of peace and justice and prosperity and all of that. And I think the same is true of people in Europe and people around the world.

But there's this small political elite in Europe and the United States and in Japan and Russia and also parts of the global south who just despise this idea of a new international economic order. So I think that's why these conversations are important, conversations like this and the public discourse about the world of possibilities that we have. And I don't think we can get there unless we have these honest open conversations about what's possible. If we just talk about what is not possible and why it's impossible and talk about the obstacles without designing strategies to all. overcome those obstacles, then we're not really doing justice to the process that we believe in. And that's why I believe in this work, including this podcast, including this popular engagement,

because it's all about informing, educating, empowering people with knowledge, mobilizing, organizing, and building a critical mass that is, informed across the system because this is a systematic issue. This is not just about food. This is not just about money. This is not about power. This is not about just energy. This is not just about technology and silicon.

This is about all the above, all interconnected, all combined. It's one interconnected big beast, right, that we're trying to overcome. And we're not, no single silo of our movement is going to be able to do it alone. So it has to be the mass movements or a movement of movements across south and north of this globe in order for us to overwhelm this system in a good way to be able to give this new world order the right to exist. And I think if we focus on the fact that it's really difficult to do it, then we might as well just give up. And then that's really the last thing I want to do is when I'm retired and old and the next generation

asked me about what I've done in my own way to contribute in my career. I say, well, there was this system and we sort of knew it was so overwhelming. And we decided not to bother because it was too much. What kind of inspiring message would that be? It will be shameful. So I'd rather be in a position where I will say, well, there was this very powerful system. We worked really hard.

We co-designed the best strategies we can come up with, and we fought and we tried and we lost. And here's why we lost. Here's what we learned. And now here's what you and your generation can do. I'd rather face that scenario than say we decided not to do anything. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Podhill Kaboop, a Tunisian American economist, professor of economics at Denison University,

president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and author of Global South Perspectives on Substack. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to West Carroll Confabulation for the Intermission Music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support.

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