When We Fight For Public Schools, We Fight For Democracy

A “non-permission slip” is the first step in a new nationwide campaign training thousands of local organizers to defend public education.

By Kumar Rao

March 22, 2026

Source: Waging Nonviolence

A multifaith action in Washington, D.C. calls on U.S. senators to vote against school vouchers replacing public education. (Instagram/Reclaim Our Schools)

Every morning, across the nation, in red states and blue states, in urban and rural communities, we watch children walk through the doors of our neighborhood public schools, backpacks slung over one shoulder, lunch bags in hand. These are ordinary moments that contain an extraordinary promise: that education belongs to every child. But that promise — simple, powerful and profoundly democratic — is now under attack in ways we haven’t seen in generations. 

Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward,  Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice — now with Project 2025 architect, the Heritage Foundation — told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.” 

Public schools, like so many pieces of our social fabric, have emerged from the last year battered. The Trump administration, in close partnership with state and local allies, and billionaire co-conspirators, is enacting, play by play, Project 2025’s education provisions and broader authoritarian agenda under the three pillars: vouchers, patriotism and prayer. And schools across the country — in blue states and red states alike — are facing existential threats we have never seen before.

These attacks on public schools are attacks on democracy itself. The classroom is where kids learn to listen to different perspectives, to collaborate, to understand that rules apply to everyone. These aren’t abstract lessons — they’re the daily work of becoming people who can sustain a democratic society. 

Schools are also perhaps the strongest example of public policy and public dollars being deployed to build our shared commitment to one another, regardless of wealth or creed. They’re the core of a social compact in which we each have a stake in the success of families and communities everywhere.

That’s why education and democracy advocates like myself have launched a mass base-building campaign with the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools in order to unite people across political party and geographical lines in defense of public education. Called “Free the Future,” the campaign is organizing parents, educators and other community members to explicitly refuse consent to policies that undermine our children’s education and our democratic values. The key idea: Create channels for people to speak out, attend trainings and then flow into escalating resistance, starting with a simple statement of refusal and building toward coordinated public action.

Building the appetite for “no”

The entry point to the Free the Future campaign is simple but powerful: a non-permission slip.

We’re all familiar with permission slips — those forms schools send home asking us to consent to field trips or activities. This is the opposite. It’s a public declaration that we do NOT grant permission for our children to be educated in ways that betray the promise of public schools. 

The non-permission slip, an online fillable form, is a low-bar, low-risk first step — something any parent or community member can do: Read, click through, sign your name and hit submit. But it opens doors to deeper engagement. People who sign are invited to share the non-permission slip with their networks and to attend a leadership training. Over the last few months, thousands of participants — parents and grandparents, young people and educators — have joined our trainings. Some attended action calls to learn about the dangerous and chaotic maneuvering of the Trump administration and its congressional allies, and find out how to take steps to voice their opposition, both online and offline. Others joined workshops about the links between authoritarianism, billionaires and the current attacks on schools, or took a four-week module on understanding power and basic organizing skills. 

The leaders being recruited are everyday people: parents, educators, public school alumni and concerned community members. Participants can also receive one-on-one coaching from experienced organizers and support for escalating actions in their local communities — learning how to recruit other families, push elected officials to fight for public schools, and use fun and humor to resist attacks on schools and protect families from government repression.

Initial small refusals — signing a non-permission slip, meeting with your superintendent, posting dissent on social media and in online forums, organizing rallies with fellow parents or visiting a representative’s office — create the foundation for larger ones like participation in mass mobilizations, civil disobedience and even general strikes. When people see their neighbors taking action, it becomes easier to join. When isolated frustration transforms into organized resistance, it becomes harder for politicians to ignore us.

We are also pushing local officials — superintendents, school board members and other elected officials — to make public their nonpartisan opposition to the administration’s attacks on public schools and act on it. We’re asking them to adopt policies to keep students safe from ICE, share the impact of federal grant losses and budget cuts, and urge their states to reject federal vouchers. When courageous people in positions of power defect from the authoritarian agenda — and do so publicly, and make clear the source of the harm — it makes it easier for others to do the same and harder for the administration to carry out its policies. 

The goal for our campaign is ambitious, but achievable: train thousands of leaders, draw out vocal support from officials and public figures who champion public education, and propel them to take public action in national mobilization events, including the upcoming No Kings Day marches on March 28, May Day Strong and Labor Day. We intend to cultivate what history shows is essential to resisting authoritarianism: the public’s appetite and courage for saying “NO.”

A movement building in classroom corners and sidewalks

Across the country, parents are already resisting — often in creative, unexpected ways that reveal how deeply people care about their schools, young people and the future of the nation.

In Idaho last year, in solidarity with a teacher who stood firm when administrators told her to take down an “Everyone is Welcome Here” sign, parents staged a “Chalk the Walk” event, painting the sidewalks outside schools with more welcoming words. 

In Long Island, New York, community members held a $1,000-a-cup lemonade stand to draw attention to the Trump regime’s proposed $12 billion budget cut to public schools. 

In Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Diego, Minneapolis and Chicago, parents and community members have organized “walking school buses” and neighborhood patrols to protect students and their families from ICE operations. 

In a school district in Minnesota, parents, students and educators banded together to fight a book ban policy organized by right wing extremist groups — and won. 

In Oldham County, Kentucky, the school board unanimously rejected efforts to create off-campus Bible classes during the school day for elementary school kids. 

And parents in Oklahoma re-purposed the law allowing parents to opt out of so-called “woke” curriculum to instead opt their children out of the new requirements for Bible lessons in social studies class.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re sparks of something larger and represent how parents and concerned communities are organically resisting in this political moment. 

That shared commitment creates potential to fracture the billionaire-fueled anti-democratic coalition currently threatening our institutions. When parents in conservative communities see their rural schools devastated by federal cuts, when they watch special education services disappear while the obscenely wealthy get tax credits for private schools, the contradictions become impossible to ignore.

Public education is one of the few issues that can unite people across the deep divisions of our current moment. Polling shows that parents across the political and geographic spectrum want their children to have well-resourced classrooms, trained teachers, safe buildings and real opportunities to learn and grow. That the $12 billion in proposed federal cuts to public education, initially passed in the House in 2025, was restored through a bicameral and bipartisan negotiation earlier this year, is proof that education transcends partisan fractures and that grassroots organizing can still have significant impact on federal policy.

Right now, wealthy interests and authoritarian politicians are hell bent on defunding, privatizing and ultimately destroying public schools. They’re betting that if they can divide parents over curriculum debates or convince us that “parental choice” means abandoning the public system, they can dismantle an institution that’s been central to American democracy for two centuries.

We can’t let that happen. And individual acts of resistance, as inspiring as they are, won’t be enough.

History teaches us that authoritarian movements succeed when people comply in isolation and fail when communities organize collective refusal. Education resistance has shown it can challenge authoritarianism and fascism. Norwegian teachers prevented Nazi curriculum takeovers in 1942, Argentine educators undermined and subverted mandatory lesson plans under Juan Domingo Perón, Chilean teachers mobilized against Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and most recently, Hungary’s Tanítanék movement has opposed Viktor Orbán’s attacks on schools.

The dismantling of democratic institutions requires public acquiescence — the quiet acceptance that “this is just how things are now.” Resistance requires the opposite: visible, coordinated action that says, “We do not consent.”

The truth is that the nature and scale of our current strategies aren’t sufficient to stop what’s coming. We need channels for public school parents and supporters to flow into sustained resistance. We need to move from individual frustration to organized collective action. We need to cultivate the courage for public refusal.

That’s what Free the Future is building: a movement that opens doors for every parent, educator, student and community member to take escalating action to refuse consent, join with others and defend an institution that, while imperfect, still holds democracy’s promise. Email

Kumar Rao

Kumar Rao is a social justice lawyer and democracy advocate, and an organizer with the Free the Future campaign.

The UK’s ‘Emergency Brake’ on Sudanese Students is a Cynical Act of Collective Punishment

By Husam Osman Mahjoub

March 21, 2026

Source: African Arguments

The Sudan University of Science and Technology. The current war in Sudan has destroyed educational institutions across the country.

The UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood recently announced an “emergency brake” on sponsored study visas for nationals from Sudan, Afghanistan, Cameroon and Myanmar. Presented as a crackdown on “visa abuse”, the policy is framed as a technical adjustment within a broader effort to tighten immigration controls. In reality, it reveals something far more troubling. Sudanese students have become convenient collateral in Britain’s domestic immigration politics.

The justification offered, a sharp rise in asylum claims following the completion of studies, rests on a presentation of data that is framed to mislead. When the actual numbers are scrutinized, it becomes clear that the vast majority of Sudanese students have remained fully compliant with immigration rules, yet they are now being subjected to a form of collective punishment that targets one of the most vulnerable and high achieving segments of the global student population. The Home Office cites a 470 percent increase in student asylum claims since 2021; however, this percentage masks a negligible absolute number during a period when Sudan itself has been plunged into war, meaning that an increase in asylum requests is to be expected.

In the year ending September 2025, only 120 Sudanese students applied for asylum, a tiny fraction of the 110,000 total asylum applications recorded in the UK. Furthermore, between 2021 and 2025, the UK issued a total of 1,480 study visas to Sudanese citizens, and during the same period, 380 Sudanese students claimed asylum, around 26 percent.

In addition, while the government targets these students for ‘visa abuse,’ it ignores its own data showing a 94% grant rate for Sudanese asylum seekers. This high approval rate proves that these claims are not abuses of the system but rather recognized cases of people fleeing one of the world’s most violent conflicts. By closing this route, the UK leaves thousands of Sudanese in need with more dangerous options, such as small boats. In 2025, a total of 5,896 Sudanese claimed asylum, of whom 596 held visas such as study visas, and 4,537 entered the UK on small boats.

What makes the policy particularly worrying is the context in which it arrives. Sudan is currently experiencing the largest displacement crisis in the world. Universities across the country have been destroyed and academic life paralysed by war. For thousands of Sudanese students, studying abroad is no longer simply an opportunity for advancement; it has become the only pathway through which a generation of doctors, engineers, researchers and public administrators can continue their education.

Cutting off access to international study does not merely regulate migration. It suppresses the intellectual capital that Sudan will desperately need when the war eventually ends.

Victims of domestic politics

There is also an unmistakable element of political opportunism in the measure. Immigration restrictions are rarely applied where they might trigger serious resistance from governments, universities or influential diaspora networks. Instead, they tend to fall on countries whose students lack the lobbying power or diplomatic leverage to challenge them. In this way, the policy allows the government to perform ‘toughness’ on immigration while avoiding confrontation with states and constituencies capable of pushing back.

The result is a selective application of strictness, producing a migration policy that falls hardest on those least able to influence political debate in London.

Blanket restrictions based on nationality mark a departure from the principle that immigration systems should assess individuals on their own merits. Portraying the act of seeking asylum from a war zone as evidence of “visa abuse” risks undermining the integrity of the international protection system itself. The right to request asylum exists precisely because people fleeing catastrophic violence may have no other viable path to safety.

Reframing that right as wrongdoing erodes the very legal frameworks designed to protect those escaping war.

Closing doors across the region

Britain is not the only place where Sudanese civilians are encountering closing doors. In Egypt, the neighbouring country that has long served as the primary refuge for Sudanese fleeing war and instability, the atmosphere has grown increasingly hostile. Security campaigns targeting migrants and refugees have intensified in recent months, with widespread arrests and deportations reported by human rights monitors.

In many cases, the distinction between those lacking documentation and those holding valid residency or refugee status appears to have collapsed, with both groups now facing detention and deportation.

Detentions, raids and administrative pressure have produced a climate of constant fear among families who believed they had found temporary refuge. Reports from detention centres describe harsh conditions and inadequate access to medical care, and several detainees have died in custody under circumstances that raise serious questions about the treatment of refugees and the responsibilities of host authorities.

Young students and elderly refugees alike have been caught in these enforcement campaigns. Families describe being pressured into paying fees in order to facilitate deportations back to a country still engulfed in war. In some cases, even Sudan’s embassy has been drawn into the process, with reports that officials have requested payments from families to process or expedite deportations.

For Sudanese civilians trapped between a devastating conflict at home and tightening restrictions abroad, the corridor of survival is rapidly narrowing.

The humanitarian contradiction

Seen together, these developments expose a profound contradiction in the international response to Sudan’s catastrophe. Western governments regularly position themselves as leaders of the humanitarian response, convening aid conferences and issuing statements of concern. Regional actors speak of solidarity and shared history, yet the policies shaping the everyday realities of Sudanese refugees and students tell a different story.

Legal pathways are shrinking. Safe havens are becoming uncertain. And those who have already lost homes, universities and livelihoods are increasingly treated not as partners in reconstruction but as risks to be managed.

For a country that once prided itself on being a global hub for higher education and a defender of human rights, Britain’s visa “emergency brake” represents more than a narrow administrative adjustment. It signals a retreat from the very principles that once made its universities magnets for talent from across the world.

Sudan’s war will eventually end. When it does, the country will depend heavily on the skills, knowledge and networks of those who managed to continue their education during the conflict. The question then will not only be how Sudan rebuilds its institutions, but also which countries chose to nurture its future leaders, and which chose instead to close the door.

Real leadership requires more than humanitarian rhetoric. It requires the political courage to keep legal pathways open for young people fleeing devastation, ensuring that when the guns finally fall silent, there remains a generation prepared to return home and rebuild what war has destroyed.

How Global Finance Drove Deindustrialization

Economist Ann Pettifor explains how America’s industrial decline has its roots in the dismantling of the international monetary system established at Bretton Woods and in the rise of a global financial system that prioritizes capital mobility over production.

By Ann Pettifor, Bartolomeo Sala 

March 23, 2026

Source: Jacobin

Activists from various climate groups in solidarity with the uprising of Letzten Generation (Last Generation) block the road to the Ministry of Transport. Invalidenpark, Berlin, November 18th, 2022 | Image by Stefan Müller via wikimediacommons

Economist Ann Pettifor is one of the world’s most authoritative and consequential voices on the themes of global finance, debt sovereignty, and sustainable economics. She is widely credited for having predicted the 2008 financial crisis in her book The Coming First World Debt Crisis (2006) as well as providing the main inspiration behind the Green New Deal. In 2000, she led the campaign Jubilee 2000, which resulted in the cancellation of $100 billion of debt for more than thirty of the world’s poorest countries.

In her latest book, The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet, she takes on the global financial system, showing us how its currently deregulated, de-territorialized iteration is at the root of so many of our current crises — from the erosion of democracy and the appeal to strongmen to the cost of living essentials all the way to climate change. In an interview for Jacobin, Bartolomeo Sala asked her how this system originally came into being, how it currently works in practice, and, more importantly, what an alternative system which works for both people and the planet would look like.

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Bartolomeo Sala

In your latest book, The Global Casino, you build a powerful case for the dismantling of the global financial system as it currently exists.

You show how unregulated capital flows and murky financial speculation happening in the “stratosphere” of the shadow banking system not only cause ever-frequent financial crises but are also at the root of the extractivist, export-led, imperialist orientation of most economies and the appeal of strongmen, whose ultimate promise is shelter from its volatility.

Could you tell us briefly what the bare bones of this system are? What is shadow banking? And why can it be so dangerous if left unchecked?

Ann Pettifor

Shadow banking is the manifestation of [Friedrich] Hayek’s utopian ideal of denationalizing money, the idea that money can and should be detached from regulatory democracy. As I argue in the book, it is a system that began in Chile with the privatization of pensions. What happened was that the combination of the privatization of pensions and the deregulation of capital flows — those two changes in policy that happened in the 1970s and 1980s — led to the funneling of the world’s pension savings into institutions, first pension funds and then asset management funds like BlackRock, which, with time, soaked up more and more of the world’s savings.

The problem with that is that eventually they accumulated funds at a scale that cannot be deposited in a high street bank or in a main street bank. If you’re managing a billion dollars, you cannot put it into a normal bank. Out of the creation of such institutional funds, you then get the creation of a market called the shadow banking system — a market in money that operates beyond regulation. Asset management funds, hedge funds, and other kinds of institutional funds still have to maintain the value of their assets.

They can’t hold it as cash because cash doesn’t earn interest. You are holding Mrs Jones’s savings, and you need to invest these money into something that will generate returns and that will enable you to pay her pension in thirty years’ time. In other words, you need to invest your cash into an asset that is interest-bearing.

Now, the best way to do that is to lend money to someone else who needs cash. A hedge fund thinks — or rather, a guy owning a hedge fund might think he wants to buy a new AI company that’s been set up in California somewhere. He needs billions, you know, at least $100 billion. That’s “big potatoes,” as Damon Runyon would have had it, are you familiar with his writing?

Bartolomeo Sala

No, I am not actually.

Ann Pettifor

I suggest you look him up; he writes stories about New York gangsters. Anyway, the point is, they need $100 billion. They go to the asset management, and the asset management says, “Yes, we will lend you $100 billion, but you are going to have to pay a rate of interest on that.” In other words, we will lend you $100 billion, but you’ve got to pay us back, I don’t know, $110, $120 billion. That’s how they create new money for themselves, essentially. The hedge fund promises to pay, and the asset management fund uses this promise to pay to leverage additional finance. It is a system based on very big-scale money and great risks, especially for individual pensioners.

What really bugs me, though, is that while this is the culmination of the Hayekian fantasy of a deregulated economy, it is at the same time tethered to the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of Japan. So in the event of a crisis — as we saw back in 2007, but again in 2020 and again in the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and the failure of Credit Suisse — when the shadow banking system is in trouble, the Federal Reserve bails them out effectively. These guys are trying to have it both ways: they want to be beyond the reach of public authority but nevertheless be sycophantic in the case of losses.

It’s that injustice for me that is crucial, and it seems to me outrageous that the public doesn’t understand this. Now, having said that, I am also clear that the public do understand. They do know that the 1 percent get bailed out periodically and do very, very well, and that they, the 99 percent, have been doing very badly. The reason I wrote this book is I would like them to understand the mechanics a little better.

Bartolomeo Sala

In the second chapter of your book, you identify President [Richard] Nixon’s decision to break away from the financial architecture of the postwar years, Bretton Woods, as the ground zero of the current deregulated global financial system you just described.

This history is very striking, first because it shows how the financial system in its current form is not “natural” but that it is a relatively recent invention; and second, because it draws a direct line between Nixon’s decision and the election of Donald Trump fifty or so years later. It feels almost like a foregone conclusion.

Can you tell us why Nixon’s decision was so momentous? And how it did in effect give us Trump fifty-odd years later?

Ann Pettifor

You need to know that I am very influenced by Karl Polanyi and his book The Great Transformation, which explains that what happened in the 1920s and 1930s was effectively a response to government by markets.

When I first began understanding and talking about the Nixon shock in the 1980s and 1990s, economists tended to speak about it as a minor affair. They still do. They thought it had some impact on the American economy, but they didn’t regard it as a breakdown of the architecture of Bretton Woods as such. I am convinced that’s how we should understand it, because Nixon was incredibly reckless. But to understand why he was reckless, we have to go back to 1945.Rather than being governed by politicians, you are being governed by markets.

The year 1945 is when they built a managed, regulated financial architecture — I like to use the term “architecture” because it is something that was built — and they did so in reaction to what happened in the 1920s and the 1930s. The men and women at Bretton Woods sat down and said we must never ever allow that to happen again, to have financial imbalances and trade imbalances explode in the way that they did in the 1930s. To do that, we have to manage exchange rates and trade balances, and so they began building this architecture. [John Maynard] Keynes, in particular, was very clear about this because he understood what J. A. Hobson, the famous economist and author of Imperialism, had explained in the early 1900s.

Bartolomeo Sala

Oh yes, this is the argument that export-led economies have a tendency to get into trade wars, which often turn into actual wars. . .

Ann Pettifor

Hobson had explained that Britain had industrialized and built up financial surplus in the City of London. However, when that surplus had grown to a certain amount, rather than investing it back into Britain, the City of London chose people like Cecil John Rhodes to invest it in a country like South Africa, where I was born, because there the capital gains you could make were simply much higher than what you could make at home by investing in Manchester.

Meanwhile, in Manchester, people’s wages were low, falling in real terms, or are stagnant, so they’re not able to consume all that is produced by the export sector. Because they don’t have enough income to do that, then that’s partly why Britain moves from exploiting South Africa to exploiting India and other markets. The consequence is that you get both overproduction and underconsumption at home. But above all you get imbalances, you get countries in surplus and countries in deficit.

That leads to the sort of tensions that Keynes and his colleagues were opposed to in 1945. Your standard economics, your traditional neoliberal economics, teaches that really all economies should be export-oriented, and should be earning hard currency. Now the problem with all of that is you also get inequality at home, which breeds political tensions and hatred. As Polanyi explained so clearly, the public realizes that the market is saying to ordinary people, “Sorry, but we can’t supply you with life’s essentials. We cannot afford a roof over your head. We cannot afford decent health care. We cannot afford for you to go to university,” and so on. Rather than being governed by politicians, you are being governed by markets.

I mean, we see this very clearly in Britain. When I was young, to be a politician was to exercise political power, because in those days the British government owned the water companies, the electricity energy companies, the broadcasting services. The politicians decided on the allocation of resources into those sectors. Today they don’t do any of that. That is all being done by markets, private markets. We’ve hollowed out our political institutions; they are powerless and we can see how weak and powerless they are.

All the public is doing is saying, “Give me a strongman to protect me from markets that strip me of the right to a decent roof over my head, food, education, health,” etc. This is a very natural response. However, as Polanyi also explains, by looking for a strongman, what the public does is make things worse. Meanwhile, centrist politicians don’t have an answer to what to do about the government by markets. They say, well, we’ve just got to put up with them. And that impotence of our political class is what makes us turn to strongmen, even if they ultimately make things much worse.

Bartolomeo Sala

In the book, you explain how Nixon’s decision of decoupling the dollar from gold initially caused a devaluation of the currency. With time, though, the dollar turned into a global reserve currency that directly impacted the US’s manufacturing and export capabilities. How does a strong dollar concretely lead to the destruction of the US’s industrial base? And how does this lead to Donald Trump?

Ann Pettifor

What Nixon does is to remove global regulation. Soon after the shock, they decided to lift exchange controls as well as controls over the cross-border mobility of capital, and that made it much easier for capitalists to move their money across the world effortlessly.

However, the key point about it is that for many years gold wasn’t used in the same way as it had been used under the gold standard. It was simply used as a kind of comparator for your currency. Your currency had to have a basic relationship to the price of gold, and you had to keep it within bands relative to the value of an ounce of gold. And that was simply a way of saying, you have to manage your economy so that your currency does not rise too high or too low. And that means you’ve got to be exporting, but you’ve also got to be importing. And you can’t overdo one and not the other.

One of the things that happened after Nixon is economists said, “No, no, we don’t have to manage trade, the market can manage the trade. Global markets, they will be able to sort out the trading system. We can trust the market, right?” And so now the situation is: China becomes an expert at building iPhones. It sells iPhones to the US economy and makes huge capital gains from that. Rather than taking that money and investing it in China and raising incomes in China, he invests it in US Treasury bills. Now, Treasury bills have become effectively the world’s gold standard.

And that led to, as I say, these massive imbalances. The United States becomes the world’s consumer of last resort and China becomes the world’s producer of last resort.

Bartolomeo Sala

And how does this concretely lead to the election of Trump?

Ann Pettifor

Trump’s advisor Stephen Moran — who’s on the board of the Federal Reserve now — has written a paper saying they want to limit the flow of capital into the United States. And there’s a think tank, American Compass, led by Oren Cass, which also argues for capital controls, inward controls effectively.Americans are right to want to demand protection from global markets — but that would require that we restructure the international financial and trading systems.

What they don’t say is that they have come up against Wall Street. Because while Trump might want to have to weaken the US dollar and increase and manage inward capital flows, Wall Street isn’t going to have it because Wall Street makes its money from the capital inflows that Trump and co. claim they want to restrict. Wall Street will not tolerate limits on capital inflows unless it has a government like that of President Roosevelt. And I don’t think Trump has the strength or the power or the intelligence that Roosevelt’s administration had.

Americans are right to want to demand protection from global markets — but that would require that we restructure the international financial and trading systems. However, in the world of free markets, the ideology of free trading markets is even more powerful than the ideology of free capital mobility. If you read the Financial Times, people who talk about managing trade are treated as mad Trotskyists. I dare not say it because I don’t want to be branded as a mad Trotskyist, I’m just a very moderate Keynesian, for God’s sake. But even my moderate views are considered extreme in the world of free markets. And how we overcome that ideology is the issue that we face.

Bartolomeo Sala

Far from a rarefied activity happening in some distant realm, global finance is ultimately tethered to the real economy.

Indeed, as you discuss very well in the body of the book, it has a parasitic tendency to find ways to commodify everything into assets on which it can bet and charge rents. I have in mind prediction markets apps such as Kalshi and Polymarket, whose unique selling proposition is that they can turn everything, even opinions, into tradable assets.

Can you tell us more about this relationship? Is this situation sustainable long term?

Ann Pettifor

The problem they face is there’s a finite amount of real assets. I have a chapter in which I talk about the importance of assets and, above all, the valuation of assets. The issue we face now is there’s so much debt leveraged against them. I never quite remember the numbers on this, but it’s $300 or $400 trillion out there in financial assets, while there’s $100 or $110 trillion real income from the real economy. Those financial assets have to find somewhere where they are being used to leverage additional debt, because quite a lot of those assets are also liabilities. They’re also debts, really.

Here is this finite economy called the world economy. It can shrink. It can get blown up by war. It can be wiped out by climate change. What then happens to this enormous amount of debt that’s out there? That’s the kind of cancer at the heart of today’s global financial system.

If you think about Elon Musk, he does not live on income. Musk simply takes out a loan against the value of Tesla. He says, “Look, I’ve got shares in Tesla and they’re worth, say, $30 billion. Give me $1 billion to spend on going on holiday or whatever.” He uses an existing asset to obtain income and then of course he doesn’t pay tax on it because it’s all debt. This is what’s so evil about the rich, it’s this debt-based economy that is unstable relative to the world’s income, but it’s also unstable relative to the real finance, the real assets of the real economy.

We have a very moving story in Suffolk at the moment where people who live near the sea are literally having their houses demolished because they’re being rushed away by the sea. These people are finding that the value of their homes is collapsing. They have borrowed huge sums of money to buy that house, they’ve got the debt, and now they’re losing the value of the asset. And that’s been eroded by climate breakdown, essentially. In a microform, this is what’s happening to the global economy as well.

Bartolomeo Sala

A central preoccupation of the book is how global finance acts as a powerful fetter to any chance of tackling climate change. You end the introduction, I think very provocatively, by saying that the idea of cutting greenhouse gas emissions and restoring climate stability is simply futile and delusional until we, the people, take back control, taming and subordinating the financial system to serve the interests of both the biosphere and humanity, not just, as at present, the interests of wealth.

This will sound heretical, not only to many economists but also to many well-meaning environmentalists who have bought into the neoliberal playbook and think that effective markets could act as a panacea for every crisis, including the climate. How does financial gambling exacerbate the climate crisis?

Ann Pettifor

I wanted to provoke the environmentalists and to challenge them on the fact that they live in a silo, which is called the ecosystem, the biosphere. I am perhaps being unfair because they do care about what’s happening in the economy. But this failure to see the financial system means that we can never really get around to doing what we need to do to curtail fossil emissions.

What I’m trying to argue in the book is that the financial system provides rocket fuel to the fossil fuel sector. They do so because fossil extraction is much more profitable than clean energy, but also for another reason, which is rate of interest. Now, the rate of interest, people think of it as something obscure, a percentage, which indeed it is. But the rate of interest is effectively the rate of return on an investment. Rather than simply a profit, it’s a capital gain, and it is something that rises mathematically. If you apply interest to a loan, that interest can rise exponentially over time.The financial system provides rocket fuel to the fossil fuel sector — they do so because fossil extraction is much more profitable than clean energy and the rate of interest.

What the rate of interest then requires is an exponential rate of extraction of the Earth’s finite assets to satisfy the interests of creditors. As I always explain, Brazil has to strip its forests, has to fish its seas, and has to degrade its land in order to raise the money it needs to repay its foreign debts. The same applies to ordinary people. In America, many of them are heavily indebted. They have to work very long hours and take up more than one job in order to repay mortgages or health bills or whatever. That rate of extraction concerns not just human labor but also green resources of the Earth.

What you have to do to stop the rate of extraction is to switch off the spigot. You have to turn off the tap and lower the rate of interest at which money is lent. If you’re going to invest in a green economy, you’ve got to transform your economy. You’ve got to retrofit housing. You’ve got to build flood defenses. That’s an awful lot of money and you shouldn’t expect to make massive capital gains from that. But you need to be able to do it all the same, and therefore you need to have low rates of interest. So, for me, there’s a line that goes between the economy, the financial system, and the ecosystem, which is called the rate of interest.

Bartolomeo Sala

In the last chapter of the book, you set out to provide a series of recipes for a world in which finance is not allowed to run wild on the biosphere and society. Some of these recipes, such as capital controls and a Tobin tax, are straightforward enough, if easier said than done.

What caught my attention, though, is the overall framework you are proposing. Basically, you are calling for a rolling back of globalization and a reshoring of economic activity within national boundaries as well as a general call to “living within your means,” which I take to mean a balance between imports and exports and a focus on domestic demand, as well as on ecology and climate.

Can you tell us why this is not some sort of nostalgic return to an era before globalization? And why do you see this return to sovereignty as the only guarantee for lasting democracy and peace?

Ann Pettifor

I think for me it’s mainly environmental. I begin with the view that, and I put it very crudely, in Britain we have to learn to grow our own green beans. In Britain, we expect to have fresh green beans on our tables every day of the year, and we expect to draw down Kenya’s water table and exploit its cheap labor so that we can have green beans every day of the year. That has to end. We’ve got to learn to grow our own green beans. We can’t prey upon the assets of others for our own economic well-being.We want to cooperate with our friends and partners across the world; we don’t want to exploit and extract assets from them — it’s as simple as that.

At the same time, I want to be very clear, I am not a nationalist. I believe it must be possible for a government to respond to its electorate and act in their interests. For me, that’s democracy. At the same time, I don’t believe we can achieve that degree of autonomy without internationalism. We can only do it by actually cooperating. I’m arguing that there must be a much greater emphasis on environmental self-sufficiency. However, that is not nationalism, that is internationalism in my view. That is saying that we want to cooperate with our friends and partners across the world. We don’t want to exploit and extract assets from them. It’s as simple as that.

What always strikes me about the great financial crisis of 2007–9 was that the Left didn’t know it was coming. I am very proud of having written The Coming First World Debt Crisis (2006), but the rest of the Left didn’t see it coming. People talked about globalization as if it was a given. And then when it blew up, there was no plan B. We didn’t even know it could happen. We were as stupid as the chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. The Left was as stupid as Greenspan, who said he didn’t believe it could happen.

Meanwhile, Wall Street couldn’t believe its luck because it then consolidated itself and became stronger than it had ever been. Before the financial crisis, it could go bust. Since the financial crisis, no Wall Street bank can go bust anymore. They are now guaranteed; they’re too big to fail. I think it was the failure of the Left not to have a plan B. So I’m offering a plan B. It might sound utopian to some, but let’s debate and let’s discuss. And has anybody else got any better ideas? If they do, I’d be really pleased to hear them.