Living in the COVID World... and Beyond #71: Exploitation and Debt Webinar - Part II

On September 28, 2025, I co-led a webinar Entitled: Exploitation and Debt -- Implications for Climate and Human Services in Africa.    My previous blog, #70, contains my opening talk.  Then my co-leader talked about the impact of colonization, imperialism and racism in Ghana and the implications for climate and human services.   Below are my final comments at the webinar about what we, in the Global North, can do to address the historical injustices done to Africa.

How can we correct the history of injustices done to Africa?

There are policies that we can educate people about, advocate and campaign for, and protest about until they actually happen.   And we also need to look at the personal work that we can each do to clear up our confusions so that we think more intelligently about the policies needed.

The Global North holds 70% of the world’s wealth due to colonialism and imperialism.  

There is more than enough money to fully address the climate crisis and meet human needs.   

The richest 1% of the world’s population (about 51 million people) has 38% of world’s wealth.   We can tax their wealth, we can tax financial transactions, and we can increase income taxes for high earners.

We can tax fossil fuel companies.  

The Secretary-General of the UN called “on all developed economies to tax the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies….”   

All subsidies to fossil fuel companies need to end.

We have described the dynamics that has caused the Global South to be in debt to institutions of the Global North, and this history is ongoing.

Debt should be cancelled while outright grants from public-controlled funds to countries in the Global South should be increased.   

Pope Francis called for debt cancellation and a new international financial system to help low-income countries during the Year of Jubilee in 2025.

‘Turning Debt into Hope’ is the Jubilee 2025 theme for Catholic and other faith and justice organizations around the world.

Instead of instituting these commonsense policies, numerous false solutions for climate financing have been proposed like providing more loans to Global South countries, debt swaps, and temporary moratoria on debt payments when there is a catastrophe.  

These false solutions provide some temporary relief for developing countries, but they do not address the underlying issue of the huge debt burden that Global South countries are carrying.   

There are major inadequacies in international structures like the International Monetary Fund (IMF).   Each country, based on its ‘relative economic position’ is given voting rights to elect delegates to the IMF’s executive board, which makes all the organization’s important decisions.  The Global North is vastly overrepresented.  The United States, for instance, has over 16% of the votes on the IMF’s board despite representing only 4% of the world population. Since the IMF’s Articles of Agreement require 85% of the votes to make any changes, the US has veto power over the decisions of the IMF. 

Given this situation, what is the personal work that we, people of the Global North, need to do to act boldly and equitably to solve the climate emergency?

We must accept responsibility for the role that our nations of the Global North have played in creating both global wealth inequality and the climate crisis.

We must better understand the history of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and racism as we have begun to describe today. 

And we must look at how we have been conditioned to want more than we need (for ourselves, our people, and our nation), to seek comfort, and to be indifferent to the needs of others. 

We have been taught to believe that the Earth is ours to do with as we please, to celebrate the accumulation of wealth, that having more is better, that what’s mine is mine -- valuing personal ownership, and that growth is good.   As a white US upper middle-class man, I have internalized these beliefs, as have many of you, through no fault of our own.   And to move forward we need to rid ourselves of these confusions.

What are our thoughts and feelings about the Global North’s appropriation of the world’s resources and controlling of so much of the world’s wealth?   We think it's unjust, unfair, and wrong.   And we feel furious about it along with sadness.   It is important that we access these feelings.   If we don’t, we could become bitter or depressed.

This is the work we need to do as citizens of the Global North.

We can work through these confusions that were installed in our minds, we can listen to each other about where we first heard these messages, we can express our upset (both from our early lives and in the present), and support and back each other to powerfully speak truth to power.

We then asked people to do listening exchanges in triads with the prompts:

•            When did you first see or understand that there were differences in people’s wealth?   How did we feel about some people having more and others having less?


•            Do you have more than we need?  Have you ever bought something and brought it home only to wonder why you had bought it and recognize that you do not need it.    Indigenous leaders have challenged us to reduce our consumption to support a sustainable world