Macro N Cheese

Listeners who came of age in the US since 2008 don’t remember a time when “class” was a term only used by politicians - and always with the modifier “middle.” Candidates of both parties assured us of their deep affection for and connection to the middle class. They left it up to us to define what exactly that meant. Unless you associated with leftists, you were more likely to hear “capitalism” spoken of by conservatives again with a modifier: “free market.” For many, the global financial crisis was an undeniable wakeup call and Occupy Wall Street drew attention away from Washington, DC, and pointed it toward the financial industry. At last.Steve’s guest, Joe Burns, is a union negotiator and labor lawyer. In the year and a half since he was last on this podcast, he completed and published his third book, Class Struggle Unionism. As we saw in his previous episode, Joe is a student of labor history, and he talks us through the historical division in the movement. Unsurprisingly, it coincides with the spread of neoliberalism.Joe contrasts class struggle unionism to business unionism – or pragmatic unionism - that developed after the relatively strong labor movement that lasted into the 1970s. Business unionism by its nature is extremely conservative. It is pragmatic and bureaucratic.But the problem is, as they say, capital is a relentless force, right? So society and the economy is constantly changing and employers, as I've noted, used their influence to change the rules of the game over the decades and the stable bargaining that might have existed 40, 50 years ago is gone now. Throughout the episode, Joe and Steve return to the question of power. Joe defines the real powers in society as the big institutional investors and multi-billionaires who have used their resources and influence for the past century to shape the laws and transform the entire economy.The US workplace is no longer one of industrial production. Gone are the days when half a million striking steel workers can shut down the economy. Today’s labor movement must face a different kind of employment, increasingly repressive labor laws, and a ruling class that is trying to drive us into a recession, which causes workers to lose their bargaining power.“That's a fundamental intervention to change the rules of the game. Workers finally have the ability to go on strike and the billionaire class and their representatives are changing monetary policy to try and drive us into a recession.” The rules of the game are rigged against working people, so class struggle unionism is acknowledging a reality that already exists.Joe Burns is a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer and the author of Strike Back and Reviving the Strike. His latest book recently published by Haymarket Books, is Class Struggle Unionism.

This week, Harvey J. Kaye and Alan Minsky stop by the Macro N Cheese clubhouse to talk to Steve about the 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights. Kaye, a historian, brings stories of FDR’s four freedoms and the impetus for what he called the 2nd Bill of Rights – an Economic Bill of Rights. Minsky brings his experience in progressive politics, both as a journalist and with Progressive Democrats of America. Of course, the Minsky name holds a special place in our MMT hearts – our own Randy Wray studied under Alan’s dad, Hyman. When listening to Alan, one might suspect he’s also related to friend-of-the-podcast Robert Hockett, who coined the term “metabolic optimism.”Whether or not we share Alan’s optimism, we agree with his insistence that “our winning political hand is our economic message.” The economy is central to everyone’s life and should be central to our agenda. He believes the 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights is the avenue to achieve that centrality in the left progressive program.As Harvey takes us through it, he adds historical details; many of these points can be traced back to FDR.1. The right to a useful job that pays a living wage.2. The right to a voice in the workplace through a union and collective bargaining.3. The right to comprehensive quality health care.4. The right to a complete, cost-free public education and access to broadband Internet.5. The right to decent, safe, affordable housing.6. The right to a clean environment and a healthy planet.7. The right to a meaningful endowment of resources at birth and a secure retirement.8. The right to sound banking and financial services.9. The right to an equitable and economically fair justice system.10. The right to recreation and participation in civic and democratic life.Roosevelt believed the American promise of “the pursuit of happiness” is not possible without economic security. FDR’s agenda lived on after his presidency – though without much success. Harvey names Jimmy Carter as the president who dealt the death blow to the New Deal:“Let me make it clear, ever since the 1970's the Democratic Party has not simply turned its back on the FDR legacy – the Jimmy Carter presidency was the launching pad of neoliberalism in the United States. People like to talk about Reagan. They like to talk about Clinton in the 1990s. Jimmy Carter was the first neoliberal president. The deregulation of finance, the deregulation of transportation, it all stems from Carter's determination ... It's Carter who first used the term austerity to promote the neoliberal agenda.”Alan adds: “the truth is, as every listener to Macro N Cheese certainly knows, that one party has been willing to run up deficits, the other party generally has not.” Democrats have wrapped themselves in a mantle of fiscal austerity and would sooner lose elections than change.This episode gives you history, it gives you economics, it gives you policy, and it engages in ever-popular political speculation. Did we mention Bernie? Yeah, his name comes up a few times.Harvey J. Kaye is Professor Emeritus of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of the newly published "The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great," "Take Hold of Our History: Make America Radical Again," and "FDR on Democracy."Alan Minsky is the Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America. Alan worked as a progressive journalist for the fifteen years before joining PDA. He was the Program Director at KPFK Radio in Los Angeles, and the coordinator of Pacifica Radio's national broadcasts. He was the creator and original producer for the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, as well as the political podcasts for The Nation and Jacobin Magazine. His many articles can be found at Common Dreams, The Nation, Truthdig and other platforms. Alan is the son of the late economist Hyman Minsky.@AlanMinsky & @harveyjkaye on Twitter

This episode of Macro N Cheese introduces us to Dr. Carey King of the University of Texas at Austin where he performs research and modeling of energy systems interaction with the economy past, present and future. He has published a book, The Economic Superorganism describing his research extrapolating the results into policy suggestions.Steve opens the episode describing the term “real resources” and asks Dr. King to explain the approach he took in his book. The explanation reaches back into history to the 14th century all the way to the present. Through that time span, he discovered that energy costs can reliably correlate to GDP (gross domestic product). This formed the basis for his research work and, subsequently, his book.Much of the discussion, then, centered around two significant points; the efficiency of energy consumption or output in terms of cost and an examination of the first point in terms of the book’s title that connects economics to an organism.The input or output of energy discussion details how a supply chain functions and how energy is consumed at every link in the chain. The result shows that actual efficiency of production has diminished since the onset of the 1970’s.Examining energy and the economy as an organism requires a view that details the multiple connections that any organism has to survive. Steve draws the parallel to a “system” of any sort, and current events. Dr. King builds on Steve’s points with further emphasis on the choices made and their impact on current economic issues.Other topics discussed were Dr. King’s next steps in adding environmental variables into his models that could possibly expose some options for coping with climate change. Also talked about was the post production variable of energy costs of handling production waste which builds further on the environmental variables.Lastly, both Dr. King and Steve exchanged views on the expansion of China’s economy, macroeconomic issues, and even how Dr. King’s work intersects with evolution itself.Dr. Carey W. King is Assistant Director of the Energy Institute at University of Texas at Austin, where he has been a Research Scientist since 2016. He is author of The Economic Superorganism: Beyond the Competing Narratives on Energy, Growth, and Policy (2021).Find his work at careyking.com@CoreyWKing on Twitter

Dr. Daniel Negreiros Conceição developed an interest in economics at a young age, having experienced the consequences of inflationary crises during his formative years. After being entranced by the writings of MMT economists as an undergrad studying economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, he came to the US to do his graduate studies at UMKC where he became a friend and colleague of so many of our favorite guests on this podcast. He left determined to use what he learned to help his own country achieve its potential.He spoke with us about the recent political and historical context for background into the broader political economic situation and the stances of the major political actors towards it. He pointed out the closely matching parallel track with our own political developments in the US and the economic underpinnings. He also discussed many similarities in the state of the discourse and misinformation in discussions of finance and government budgets.He then explained the mechanics of the Brazilian currency, the real, and discussed how the central bank manages it. He discussed balance of payment and foreign exchange situations, and explained why the issue of “monetary sovereignty” is part of the story, but not the end of it. He spoke of a country with monetary sovereignty and abundant natural resources. A country whose government accidentally proved with a massive pandemic economic bailout of the financial sector that the government can indeed do big things and better the lives of its people, if it really wants to.Daniel Negreiros Conceição is an associate professor at the Unicamp Institute of Economics. A professor at the Institute of Research and Urban and Regional Planning (IPPUR) at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He is one of the authors of the book “Modern Monetary Theory: The Key to an Economy at the Service of People”. He is president of the executive board of Institute of Functional Finance for Development Brasil.https://iffdbrasil.orgFollow Prof. Daniel Conceição on twitter @stopthelunacy

Our listeners know that Steve is a perpetual student -- his YouTube show is called The Rogue Scholar. He makes no apologies for past incomplete or erroneous thinking; he just soldiers on, deepening his understanding of the issues and course-correcting his analysis. He is a voracious reader and we can identify at least three books that led to this week’s episode: The Divide, by Jason Hickel, Blackshirts and Reds, by Michael Parenti, and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, by Vladimir Lenin.* They have all fed into his obsession with neocolonialism and the unholy trinity of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. The problem predates the modern neoliberal era:“Lenin talks extensively about taking out these loans. Now, mind you, the IMF wasn't around ... But this whole concept of global finance capital was already being talked about at the turn of the century. And what he showed was that these countries that took on these big loans, they would be fine for a year. And then by the next year, they were already losing money, deeply in debt, and by the third year, they had to take out another loan.”Steve summoned our old friend Fadhel Kaboub to take us through the history of the unholy trinity, connect it to monetary sovereignty, and untangle the cat’s cradle of international power and oppression. Who better than Fadhel, whose superpower is his ability to explain complicated systems in words anyone can understand?Fadhel begins with the currency wars in the period between the first and second World Wars. After WWII the allies gathered to establish a means of preventing currency wars in the future. You’ve heard of Bretton Woods? Well, did you know two competing plans were presented? Keynesian and... not Keynesian. Keynes’s plan was designed to promote full employment globally. The universe ended up with the non-Keynesian International Monetary Fund, or IMF, and the World Bank.“The World Bank was initially designed to be the bank for the reconstruction of Europe, essentially. And eventually after Europe was rebuilt, it was reinvented as an economic development bank for the global south, because in 1945, when the World Bank was designed, there were no developing countries, there were just colonies. So by the mid 1960s, all of those colonies are now developing countries, and the world needed a World Bank for economic development ... it's designed for long-term infrastructure, major projects, as opposed to the IMF, which was designed as the emergency room for financial crises.”The third leg of the unholy trinity is the World Trade Organization. Fadhel guides us through its origins and evolution. It turns out the entity committed to free trade limits itself to “free trade in everything but arms and farms.” Once the former colonies became independent, the former colonizers looked around and said, “Uh-oh, where are we getting our food?" With food now an issue of national security, powerful nations are subsidizing agricultural staples; farmers in the developing world cannot compete.Throughout the episode, Fadhel illustrates how these three institutions are able to ham-string the global south. He talks about the three main structural traps – food, energy, and low-tech manufacturing. The further the developing world is pushed into desperation, the greater the benefits to the global elite.Can the post-colonial nations cast off the chains of economic oppression and poverty? Fadhel provides answers, showing how the MMT analysis not only brings the problems into focus, but provides solutions. The final twenty minutes of this episode are perhaps the most important.*When you purchase these books through RP Bookshelf on our website, we make a small percentage on the sale. We are an affiliate of bookshop.org, not that online megamonster whose name shall not be spoken.Dr. Fadhel Kaboub is an Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.@FadhelKaboub on Twitter

** Be sure to check out the transcript for each episode of this podcast on our website, where you will also find an “Extras” page with links to related resources. realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast **Robert Hockett drops into the Macro N Cheese clubhouse to talk to Steve about the usual stuff: inflation, monopoly capitalism, the massive scale of global inequality, and the climate crisis barreling down on us at an ever-faster speed. It is our ninth episode with Bob, this one spurred by his recent article, the alliterative “Prices, Preclusive Purchases, and Production: Some Forgotten Solutions to Forgotten Inflation Problems” (Forbes, 13 May 2022), which diagnoses the current inflation as three supply side dysfunctions – short, medium, and long term.Folks like Larry Summers focus on labor costs, in hopes of encouraging a further clampdown on labor, while executives are boasting record profits and chortling about marking up prices under cover of inflation.Isn’t this just the reality of capitalism? Can it be tamed – and if so, what would that look like? If we can’t yet get rid of capitalism, are there workarounds? Bob suggests identifying those products and services that are essential to leading decent, peaceful lives and removing them from the profit-maximizing system altogether. He goes into the history of public involvement in healthcare and home finance. Another area is food:“Here's a case where we allow the private sector beneficiaries of that socialization, namely big agriculture, to profit enormously … The agricultural sector is subject, of course, to the vagaries of weather, meteorological conditions, and so forth. Furthermore, it's subject to the potential for overproduction of exactly the kind that Marx and some other political economists in the 19th century predicted. And the only way, it turned out, to keep them in business and keep them producing was for the federal government to promise to buy any of the surplus.”There has been a lot of talk about supply chains, which Bob welcomes, ironically, for including the word “supply,” because it has been missing from American economic discourse for quite some time.“But one problem with that phrase is, it lumps together two distinct things, right? On the one hand, you have to have the production of that which is to be supplied, and then on the other hand, you have to have the delivery of the supplies. And the phrase ‘supply chain’ seems to lump those two things together.”Steve brings up the fact that exporting production means exporting pollution. In addition to exploiting cheap labor abroad, outsourcing production has allowed companies to evade US environmental regulations. The discussion leads to the need for a Green New Deal and the possibilities therein. They also talk about the IMF and World Bank and ask if the US is held to different standards. (It is.)A Bob Hockett episode is as much a conversation as an interview. These two old friends don’t just look at problems, they peer down the path to solutions – some possible, some not. Whether you agree with either of them, it’s worth a listen. Tell us what you think.Robert Hockett is the Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Adjunct Professor of Finance at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and Senior Counsel at Westwood Capital, LLC.@rch371

Real Progressives and Macro N Cheese are committed to bringing MMT to activists and folks with no background in economics. Many of us were only interested in learning how MMT disrupts the concept of taxes funding federal programs, but the more we know, the more we want to understand. MMT is funny that way.If you’re new to MMT, this week’s interview with L. Randall Wray might appear to be wonky and intimidating. But we urge you to listen and promise it will be worth it. We’ve had a few episodes dealing with inflation in recent weeks because that’s where we are at this particular time in history. We believe it can’t be talked about often enough because we’re surrounded by misinformation in the mainstream media and lies from the mouths of so-called experts.Steve invited Randy to talk about the recent paper he co-authored with Yeva Nersisyan, another friend of this podcast. The title speaks volumes: Is It Time for Rate Hikes? The Fed Cannot Engineer a Soft Landing but Risks Stagflation by Trying. To put it bluntly, confronting inflation by raising interest rates is dangerous. Randy describes the catastrophic chain reaction – causing bankruptcies at home and tanking the economies of developing nations. He explains in detail how this happens, both to individuals and nations.The ‘experts’ love to blame government spending for today’s inflation – especially the paltry stimulus checks disbursed during the pandemic. Wages are another favorite culprit. Listeners to this podcast know these are not the causes. (How long ago were those damn checks?) However, both the pandemic and the current war have brought us supply chain disruptions. We can also look to corporate manipulation of prices and markups:“And they're very open about this. When they have their meetings with shareholders and others, they say, look, our customers are not going to blame us if we hike up the markups and take more profits, because they realize that inflation is creeping up. So, they're not going to blame us. So, let's do it. And they are.”Randy defines stagflation and its causes. He compares today’s inflation to that of the 1970s along with the actions of the infamous Paul Volcker. He explains why the Fed’s “tools” for fighting inflation are no tools at all. He suggests a legitimate role for a central bank includes protecting the public from banking fraud. He replies to Steve’s question about eliminating the interest rate altogether:“This was actually Keynes's proposal to have a zero overnight interest rate. His proposal was to euthanize the entire rentier class. You all know what euthanize means. Mercy killing of the rentier. That is the class of people that live off collective interest. He saw them as functionless in the economy. They don't serve any useful function. So, let's euthanize them now. Keynes didn't really mean kill.”Steve talks of people’s desperation as they look for solutions to the real-life problems that are not on the Fed’s radar. Inflation could be addressed with targeted spending on behalf of the public using the fiscal power of Congress. Expecting the Federal Reserve to fix it with interest rate adjustments is like giving a child a fake steering wheel in the back seat and expecting them to drive the car.L. Randall Wray is a Professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute.www.levyinstitute.org/scholars/l-randall-wray

A false dawn is a promising situation which comes to nothing. This is how Aqdas Afzal describes the situation in his native Pakistan and India at the end of the Raj.“The point to remember here, Steve, is that the British were in India not to govern. They were in India to extract surplus and to maintain what they called law and order. And so the British left without giving the local people any taste or mechanism for bringing about accountability or democracy. But they did leave behind these two very, almost draconian institutions for keeping law and order. And because of these two institutions - these two state institutions that the British left behind - in the case of Pakistan, the first 25 years of Pakistan's history was complete chaos.”Aqdas talks to Steve about the chaos of partition – a humanitarian crisis. Remember, Pakistan was not only separated from India, but it was also cleaved from its own Eastern wing, now known as Bangladesh. The generation that sacrificed and struggled to gain independence was hoping for a bright future. That was the false dawn.Pakistan fell into the lap of neoliberal thinking because of the Cold War, as Aqdas explains it. When the Soviets entered Afghanistan, the military government took over in Pakistan, cozying up with the US defense establishment. Pakistani policy makers began to sound like the godparents of the neoliberal project, Thatcher and Reagan.The interview covers the destructive role of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO – what Steve refers to as the evil trinity. No matter how many of our guests talk about them, there is always more outrage to be uncovered in their manipulation of the economies of the global South.Steve and Aqdas discuss Francis Fukuyama’s concept of “the end of history.” With the collapse of the USSR, liberal democracy and capitalism were expected to be the final stage of human evolution, leaving no other pathway for developing nations. Aqdas counters with the notion that history is not linear.“Russia is a country that went through shock therapy, that was undertaken by experts coming from the World Bank and the IMF. These experts are basically telling Russia how to open its economy, how to change over from socialism to a market-based economy. The same Russia today is challenging the might of capitalist countries like Britain, United States, Germany.”He calls this the beginning of history.Aqdas Afzal finished his undergraduate and first master's degree in Political Science from Ohio State University, then returned to his native Pakistan. After working there for five years he won the Fulbright scholarship for his second master’s and PhD in Economics from UMKC. He teaches at Habib University in Karachi and writes a monthly op-ed in Dawn, a leading English language newspaper there.@AqdasAfzal on Twitter

**Transcripts and extras for this episode can be found at realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast.** Iceland’s economy is an example of MMT working the way MMT economists say it works. It is the second smallest free-floating currency in the world. However, despite its size, conditions are dramatically different than in a country like Greece, shackled to a currency outside its control. For better or worse, Iceland has a bit of monetary sovereignty.“When you have your own currency, you can develop your economy by very smart economic decisions, domestic investments that build up the production capacity of the economy. Or you can use that currency to basically create a credit bubble, which then runs the economy to the ground.”Steve’s guest, Ólafur Margeirsson, has written more than 250 articles on the Icelandic economy over the past decade and, until recently, had a unique vantage point as an alternate member of the Central Bank of Iceland’s Supervisory Board. Despite Icelandic society’s Nordic influences, in this episode you’ll hear echoes of our past interviews with Fadhel Kaboub on the global South. With those countries it shares obstacles that arise from not producing all that they need. Its currency isn’t internationally accepted, so exports must generate income in foreign currencies to pay for imported goods.Iceland relies on three main exports - aluminum, fishing, and tourism – each about a third of the gross exports. These are vulnerable to all the problems of modern economies. The aluminum smelters are owned by foreign companies, so the profits do not benefit Iceland. Poorly managing their resources resulted in over-fishing, a blight on both the environment and the livelihoods of a sector of the population. Tourism, which helped Iceland recover from the 2008 global financial crisis, is dependent on the economic health of other countries.Like the US, shadow banking has been a huge problem, but unlike the US, it’s not a problem anymore. Not since 2008. There are other differences. Unlike the US, Iceland has a strong social welfare system. By saying no to austerity, it recovered from the GFC more rapidly. Instead of a standing military, Iceland has a SWAT team (of maybe 20 people?) which is the only weaponized force in Iceland. Imagine that.One more thing - shortly after the 2008 crisis they had a Debt Jubilee.“...proving the point that an economy that has its own currency can finance whatever it wants to. If it wants to finance a Debt Jubilee for the people, it can finance a Debt Jubilee for the people. Will it have economic consequences? Obviously.”…“So it goes back to the point that MMT always hammers on. If the problem is money, it's not a problem. If the problem is inflation, it is a problem. and that's something that actually I think Iceland has proven as well. Repeatedly.”Iceland is not a socialist paradise, but its story is instructive. With the clarity of his MMT perspective, Ólafur is an ideal tour guide.Ólafur Margeirsson writes about the Icelandic economy and specializes in financial instability, foreign direct investment, MMT, and real estate. Until recently he sat on the Supervisory Board of the Central Bank of Iceland as an alternate member. Currently, he is head of Global Real Estate Research at Credit Suisse.https://www.patreon.com/icelandicecon@icelandicecon on Twitter

Welcome to the third and final chapter in our series with Carl Zha on Mao and the Chinese Revolution. This one covers the sticky wicket of the Cultural Revolution, and the most controversial part of Mao’s legacy. It exposes the danger of a leader being out of touch with the base.The episode also looks at the complex political history of Tibet, an issue of concern to a few American celebrity Buddhists. (Spoiler alert: the story was rife with class conflict. Isn’t that always the case? What history books and media present as religious persecution turns out to be about money and power.) Tibetan monasteries wanted to maintain their serfs while the communists were into abolishing feudal relations of production. (Second spoiler alert: if you put your money on CIA involvement, you made a wise wager.)Carl brings the series to life with anecdotes from his own family. This episode is jam-packed with stories of his parents who grew up in the thick of these events. Some of their experiences were specific to their class and status, but they are a colorful illustration of this dramatic and significant period.Ultimately judgment of Mao’s legacy is mixed. It can be seen as both inspiring and concerning. According to Carl, the official assessment is that “he did 70% good, 30% bad.” He embodies the contradictions of China at the time. Mao should be given credit for massive improvements in the lives of the Chinese people - increasing life expectancy, abolishing illiteracy, raising the status of women, and lifting millions out of poverty.Carl Zha hosts Silk and Steel, a weekly podcast discussing history, culture, and current events of China and the Silk Road. Support him at patreon.com/silknsteel@CarlZha and @SteelSilkn on Twitter

**Every episode of Macro N Cheese has a full transcript at realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast. While you’re there, check out the extras page, with links to further information related to the week’s topic.The first part of this three-part series talked about China from Mao’s birth in 1893 through the Sino-Japanese war to the eve of the Chinese Civil War in 1945. This week, Carl discusses the civil war and the ultimate success of the Chinese Communist forces, despite being vastly outnumbered – 1.2 million against the KMT’s 4.5 million.The US looked to China to be its junior partner in East Asia, much like Japan is today. They backed Chiang Kai-shek with military training, weapons, and other resources. A government led by the KMT would preclude a strong China-Soviet alliance.Most leftists are familiar with the historic revolutionary form of warfare developed by Mao and the People’s Liberation Army. Lacking the numbers and equipment for a traditional, positional war, the Communists applied the tactics of what would come to be called guerrilla warfare, which has since been used successfully in wars of liberation around the world, including Vietnam, Angola, and Cuba.The episode takes a detour to look at the history of Chinese paper money. Carl also describes how Mao won the support of local populations through land redistribution, then looks at some of the mistakes in the Great Leap Forward. Carl brings history to life with anecdotes from his own family.Come back next week for the conclusion of this three-part series.Carl Zha hosts Silk and Steel, a weekly podcast discussing history, culture and current events of China and Silk Road. Support him at patreon.com/silknsteel@CarlZha and @SteelSilkn on Twitter

In the first of a three-part series about Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution, Carl Zha sets the stage with its pre-revolutionary history. Carl, host of the Silk and Steel podcast, was born in China in 1976, one month after the death of Mao, placing him squarely in the first post-cultural, post-Mao generation.The episode opens with Japan’s imperial expansion into China. After its defeat by Japan, there was a scramble to carve up China among the major world powers – France, Britain, Russia, Japan, and Germany. The US was a latecomer to the imperialist game. Fearing there would be nothing left...“The US actually proposed a so-called open-door policy, which means all the imperialist powers should enjoy equal access to the Chinese market. And in the US textbooks, that is presented as some kind of heroic effort on the US side to save China's territorial integrity.”This is the China Mao Zedong was born into, around 50 years after the first opium war, when Britain forced China to legalize opium in order to create a market for the product from British India.Carl tells the story of a nation teeming with predictable conflicts, odd alliances, and new conflicts. In the 1700s China had a quarter of the world’s GDP. By the time of the Chinese revolution, the country was desperately poor. From the Qing Dynasty to international imperialism, from the KMT/Guomindang to the Soviet Union and Chinese Communist Party, Carl paints a picture of China in conflict.Carl Zha hosts Silk and Steel, a weekly podcast discussing history, culture and current events of China and Silk Road. Support him at patreon.com/silknsteel@CarlZha and @SteelSilkn on Twitter

“In one sense, it's a state initiative, but in the other sense it's actually preserving rights of individuals against the state.”Rohan Grey is back with us for the seventh time. In this episode, he talks to Steve about the ECASH Act, which he helped craft as a step toward creating public digital dollars with the privacy and anonymity of physical cash.To explain the features this future currency requires, and the problems to be solved, Rohan takes us on a tour of the history of money, early record-keeping devices for the tax collector, and the development of banking. Tally sticks, which were broken in half (to be matched later) were primitive encryption keys. Further noteworthy events include the invention of the telegraph in the mid-1800s, the codebreaking and Navajo language speakers during World War II, and the cyberpunks of the 1980s.Rohan is an evocative storyteller, piquing our imagination with vivid references. By the end of the episode, he has mentioned five movies, plus Scrooge McDuck, Seinfeld, Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn. Oh, and Emma Goldman.Steve and Rohan sort through objections to the privacy we should demand of public digital currency. Arguments come from right, left, and libertarian factions, each believing their bogeymen will be free to do nefarious things under cover of anonymity. They put their faith in private entities.Digital public money would address the needs of populations who cannot or will not use banks. It can be accessed without an internet connection, and it is easy to see the benefits assured privacy provides to political dissidents, sex workers... and everyone else living under the gaze of surveillance capitalism. We have learned about the war on cash from our friend Bret Scott. It is time to fight back.Rohan Grey is an Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette Professor of Law at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, and the founder and president of the Modern Money Network.@rohangrey on Twitter

** If you haven’t checked out the transcripts and extra resources for all 166 episodes of Macro N Cheese, what are you waiting for? Go to realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast **Steve opens this episode with the MMT observation of the government’s ability to purchase anything for sale in US dollars if the real sources are available – and if we have the political will. When it comes to getting things done, this is of fundamental importance. Steve's guest, Paul Herman, agrees and looks beyond the government:“...because we have five crises of our time, and those crises are going to require a multi-sector approach. So, the five crises include a health crisis: COVID and its lingering effects ... and the impacts on our existing health care system and healthcare workers. We have a wealth crisis with inequality among many different geographies and income levels. We have an Earth crisis requiring climate action as fast as possible. That also requires equitable climate action because we have gaps in equality and inequality by race, by gender, by age. And then we have a trust crisis.”We met Paul Herman through the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, where he is a Research Fellow. He is also the founder and CEO of HIP Investors. In this episode you will hear areas of agreement between Steve, an unabashed anti-capitalist, and Paul, a portfolio manager and Chief Investment Officer: “Government's job is to ensure a better quality of life, a higher well-being, access to health, wealth, earth, equality, and trust.”As an activist and independent media content producer, Steve’s message sometimes leans toward the aspirational. Paul delves into complex problems in the here and now. Throughout the interview, he takes us through examples of consulting with private corporations or municipalities and using a multi-sector approach – primarily government, NGO, and private capital – to address complex issues of sustainability, environmental action, fair pay, or other social and governance factors.These are new waters for some of our listeners to navigate. There is always something to learn on Macro N Cheese, don’t you agree?R. Paul Herman is a Research Fellow at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and founder and CEO of HIP (Human Impact + Profit) Investor. He is a globally recognized leader and author in sustainable finance, impact, ESG, and SDG measurement — and investing to pursue positive impact and profit. HIP manages diversified, fossil-fuel-free portfolios for investors. Herman is the author of The HIP Investor book (Wiley, 2010) and co-editor and co-author of the Global Handbook of Impact Investing (Wiley, 2021).@HIPinvestor on Twitter

What a pleasure hearing Phil Armstrong tell us how MMT makes him feel supremely confident. He’s not afraid of going toe-to-toe with “experts” despite their credentials, because he has the right model. He has MMT.Phil was teaching high school economics in Iowa before going back to the UK to get his Masters and, much later, his PhD. An interest in post-Keynesianism eventually led him to Mosler and the world of MMT. He has recently published his first book, Can Heterodox Economics Make a Difference? Conversations with Key Thinkers. He tells Steve that when he started working on the interviews, in 2018, most of the mainstream hadn't heard of MMT. By 2020, when it was published, the profile of MMT had increased. Now everyone knows of it.The episode revisits the many criticisms of MMT – we've heard them all – and demolishes them. As for Weimar, Germany:“If you think about it, plausibly, if you imagine intelligent German bankers in the Weimar Republic -- and these are bankers, they don't like inflation. You tell me a banker who likes inflation. Never met one. So the idea that they came in one day into the Reichsbank when Havenstein gets the other guys, the chairman says, ‘Right, lads, crank up the presses. I just fancy causing a bit of hyperinflation.’ The idea is ludicrous.”Phil talks about the failings of mainstream economics. After the 2008 financial crisis, with all its models having failed, one might ask why those models are still around. Phil has some ideas about that. Mainstream economics consists of mathematical modeling which has almost no relevance in the real world. Phil compares it to being an expert on the unicorn. You understand its biology. “When its horns are the wrong color, you know what to do; when its hooves hurt, you know what to do. Fantastic. The only problem is the unicorn doesn't exist.”He and Steve talk about theory - The T in MMT (which is the subject of our very first episode). They talk about the traps built into neoliberalism, and philosophy. Phil calls himself a realist social ontologist, or a critical realist. If you want to know what that means, listen to the episode!From Phil Armstrong’s bio at Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies (GIMMS)As an Association for Heterodox Economics (AHE) member, Phil is a strong advocate of the need for pluralism in economics. He has spent the last 38 years teaching – in the main economics and business and lately, engineering. Phil is Post-Keynesian and a strong advocate of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and believes MMT provides both powerful insights into the way the economy works and how progressive economic policy can be put into practice.@PhilArmstrong58 on Twitter

It's hard to imagine ever having been unaware of the concept of bullshit jobs, but David Graeber made it official and helped us understand their role in our economy. Bullshit jobs are not necessarily shit jobs, nor are they low wage jobs, or dirty jobs. Bullshit jobs are those that are meaningless. The person doing the bullshit job doesn’t believe the work actually needs to get done.This week’s guest, Erik Dean, has studied the nature of modern jobs within money manager capitalism. He points out that bullshit jobs aren’t just a product of neoliberalism:“Speculative business and these labor hierarchies of the people with secure jobs versus the precariat … those things have been around. and it's not even necessarily part of capitalism. This is one reason it's good to read Thorstein Veblen, because in an anthropological sense, he takes it back to prior to capitalism. It's not like we didn't have hierarchies before capitalism. It's not like we didn't have power and it's not like we didn't have bullshit jobs. What the hell is a court jester? It's a bullshit job to entertain the king or whatever.”Dean talks with Steve about financialized capitalism – money market capitalism – and his disagreements with many on its basic characteristics. Just as bullshit jobs existed prior to our contemporary world, so did some of its other qualities, including its speculative nature and “short termism.”It was once thought that technology would relieve us of onerous jobs, allowing a shorter, lighter workweek, exchanging bullshit jobs for socially useful work. Steve confesses skepticism about the possibility of such a revolution. Dean responds:“If we were capable individually and collectively to reimagine what work is, what your time is best spent doing, and to break free of that encroaching neoliberal finance capitalist ideology that is, again, just gradually soaking into how we think about everything. To some extent, that is a revolution. If you can change the way you think and break free of the wider education of this neoliberalist ideology, that itself is a revolution.”**Don’t forget to check out the transcript for this and every episode of Macro N Cheese as well as the Extras page with additional resources. Find them at realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/Erik Dean is an Instructor of Economics at Portland Community College and researcher at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. His core expertise is in heterodox production theory, institutionalist methodology, and pedagogy in economics. His recent research covers a range of topics, including the nature of the modern occupational structure and the place of the corporation in money manager capitalism and the ramifications thereof.

Here’s an episode for those Marxists curious about MMT and MMTers curious about Marxism. Steve’s guest is comfortable identifying as both. Tony, better known as 1Dime on social media, believes MMT is not a threat to Marxism because it’s like comparing apples to oranges. They are designed to explain two different things. “Modern Monetary Theory is about understanding monetary operations in a fiat currency world – how things are financed. It's a narrow theory.”He’s careful about labeling himself, but in the marketplace of ideas, Tony says:“I find myself leaning the closest to Marxism in terms of its method because it sees things through the lens of class struggle and puts forth a first and foremost materialist view of history. I think that's very important because typically a lot of people will look at history as an evolution of ideas and will look at the individual as isolated from society. Marxism looks at things as an interconnected reality filled with contradictions.“The ontology of Marxism is only part of the picture.“I think the word dialectical is often thrown around by Marxists. A lot of people don't know what it means … put simply, dialectics is looking at contradictions between things. You can't explain the world through one dimensional narratives. There are contradictions. For example, people often talk about the elites versus the people. You hear that a lot with both right and left populist pundits. Marxists wouldn't see it as so simple.”Class struggle is not always vertical. Covid revealed the contradictions within the ruling elite: some capitalists benefited from the pandemic, while others were hurt by it.MMT’s explanation of the role of taxes gets pushback from some who call themselves socialists. If we don’t need their tax dollars to pay for federal programs, are we letting the rich off the hook? Tony says taxing the rich can be used to reduce inequality, but it doesn’t touch the root of the problem. We’re not going to solve capitalism through taxation.The interview covers a range of topics, from cryptocurrency to Chris Hedges – all through the double lens of Marxism and MMT.(If you liked this episode, check out Steve’s interview with Nathan Tankus. It’s from 2017 and still relevant.)Bio: Tony runs the YouTube channel 1Dime, where he makes leftist video essays and short documentaries that use ideas from Critical Theory, philosophy, and political economy to deconstruct hot socio-political topics. Notable 1Dime videos include "The Deficit Myth: The Biggest Lie in Politics", "The Burnout Society", "Planet of the Robots: Four Futures of Automation", and "The Socialism of Warren Buffett: How the Stock Market Works." He also runs a podcast called 1Dime Radio with similar content in audio form.@TheRapNerd7 on Twitter

**There’s a transcript accompanying every episode of Macro N Cheese. You'll also find links to other resources on the Extras page. Go to realprogressives.org.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/ **Alexander Valchyshen brings special knowledge of both economics and conditions in Ukraine. He’s a PhD student under Scott Fullwiler and has more than twenty years of experience in Ukraine’s banking and financial markets, so he has a point of view that the US public rarely hears. Given the current geopolitical conflict, Steve wanted to fill the gaps in his knowledge of Alexander’s homeland. It’s no surprise that social media and the major news organizations are unreliable.“As I said, it's a pretty difficult time. But at the same moment, this is a very crucial moment not only for Ukraine itself, for its existence, because we have to understand Ukraine as a sovereign country in every possible sense of that word, not only in the political terms, but also in the economic terms.”Some of what Alexander describes is very familiar, including the discrepancy between what Ukrainian policy makers understand and their public stance as fiscal conservatives. Alexander goes into some detail about the handling of budget deficits by turning to foreign markets.“I tend to differentiate between currency and money units of account ... What makes Ukraine vulnerable and weak is that historically, as many other countries, there has been instability, there has been a period of hyperinflation and people developed this habit to find a rescue in foreign money. And there is widespread usage of foreign money of account in this economy.”The episode looks at both the history and current conditions of Russia and Ukraine. At a time when most of the news from that part of the world is weighted with emotion and skewed by complex, often obscured interests, we're bringing you a perspective you may not be accustomed to.Alexander Valchyshen is a Research Fellow at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. student in the Economics department of UMKC, under the supervision of Dr. Scott Fullwiler. He holds an M.S. in Economic Theory and Policy (2019) from the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He completed his Master’s thesis under the supervision of Dr. L. Randall Wray and Dr. Jan Kregel. He has more than 20 years of experience in Ukraine’s banking and financial markets, including with some of Ukraine’s major banks and financial firms.During 2016-17, Alexander supervised a team of Ukrainian translators, who translated two books by Dr. Wray―Modern Money Theory and Why Minsky Matters―into Ukrainian. In the Fall of 2018, he held the position of visiting instructor of Finance at Bard College, and taught its Financial Management course to undergraduate students, supervised by Dr. Pavlina Tcherneva.@AlexValchyshen on Twitter

**Every episode of Macro N Cheese has a full transcript and an “extras” page with links to additional resources. Find them at realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/Fadhel Kaboub introduces us to the best people, including Yeva Nersisyan, a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity who joined Steve to talk about a paper she recently co-authored with Randall Wray, "Are We All MMTers Now? Not So Fast."The COVID pandemic has put MMT in the news, with plenty of critics mistaking stimulus spending with “MMT policy.” This absurdity creates a convenient narrative for detractors: MMT is a failure!Our argument was that MMT-inspired fiscal policy is targeted fiscal spending and in particular spending on jobs. Job creation, the job guarantee that Pavlina Tcherneva has been talking a lot about... a jobs policy rather than just indiscriminate stimulus kind of policy.MMT economists were not at the table when COVID stimulus policy was being decided, nor were they at the table when Larry Summers and Jason Furman were crafting the inadequate response to the global financial crisis – another missed opportunity for fiscal policy to serve the public good.Yeva describes the different government responses to World Wars One and Two, compares Keynesian and MMT-prescribed policies, and lays out the consequences to the states – AKA the race to the bottom – when the federal government shirks its responsibilities.In the second half of the episode Steve brings up the roles of the Fed, Treasury, and private banks and asks Yeva to take us through their processes and explain reserve accounting. If you’re at all confused about this, you’ll want to hear what she says.Yeva Nersisyan is a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and an Associate Professor of economics at Franklin and Marshall College. She received her B.A. in economics from Yerevan State University in Armenia, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in economics and mathematics from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her research interests include monetary theory, financial instability and regulation and macroeconomic policy. Yeva has published a number of papers on the topics of shadow banking, fiscal policy, government deficits and debt, financial fragility and instability, financial reform and retirement policy.

Steve’s guest is Dr. Ruchira Sen who got her PhD at UMKC where she studied with a number of friends of this podcast. Herresearch areas are in feminist economics, informed by institutional economics, MMT, and Marxian economics. She describes an economy built on the backs of women, that exists outside the normal parameters of capitalism while making it possible for capitalism to thrive.We've had neoliberal reforms since the 1990s, which has meant a gradual withdrawal of the state from almost everything. And that has specifically impacted the lives of women. Because when the state withdraws from providing you basic services like water, electricity, then it's usually the women who become additionally burdened...The participation of women in the (paid) labor force is declining, their contribution to unpaid work is phenomenal.In a country as massive as India, with a population of around a billion, any change in government policy can have far-reaching and unexpected consequences. Ruchira describes the effects of the 2016 demonetization action, in which two currency notes – of the most widely used denominations – were taken out of circulation. Among a population where the majority of individual financial transactions are conducted in cash and many don’t have bank accounts, this “decashification” caused widespread suffering for the poor and working class.Steve asks Ruchira what drives poverty in India and she talks about British colonial policy and the deindustrialization of the Ganges plain. Poverty is essentially a result of the pushing of capitalist relations onto our population. Not to say that there was no hunger before but the colonial power imposed selective tariff policies on Indian textiles...They pretty much decimated the artisan population in the Gangetic Plains and destroyed much of local industry. That resulted in large bodies of people who were dispossessed. They had nothing but their labor and they became the proletariat. I think it's pretty fundamental to how colonialism works because you need general labor-ready bodies to do the work, to produce the exports that your home country needs, to produce the wealth that your home country will drain away.Ruchira talks about the pervasive threat of violence against women in India, and what she calls a watershed moment – the Nirbhaya Incident and anti-rape agitation. She talks about the left, including some active communist parties that have had successes but have also made questionable choices on occasion. And she talks about India’s lack of energy and food independence.Dr. Ruchira Sen is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Jindal School of Journalism and Communication at O.P. Jindal Global University in India. She teaches macroeconomics, data analysis for storytelling, and data journalism. Her PhD in economics is from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Ruchira is primarily concerned with low paid and unpaid labor in various fields from housework and marriage to the media. She has written on dowry as a gift system in South Asia and how it relates to violence, and on international networks of care and how they impact the USA. Her recent research is on mediated activism in India. Ruchira is primarily informed by an international post-colonial feminist view of the world by MMT and Marxism.@RuchiraSen67 on Twitter

This week’s episode is another chapter in our mission to educate ourselves about modern China. Yan Liang specializes in Modern Money Theory, international trade and finance, and economic development, with a special regional focus on China. She is also the wife of friend-of-the-podcast Eric Tymoigne.Steve and Yan discuss the truth and misconceptions about the ongoing competition between the US and China. It has created winners and losers, with the working class in both countries affected by globalization. Trade war is class war.The explanation for China’s growth is sometimes attributed to market reform and opening itself to trade, but Yan points to the role of the state in financing development, formulating industrial policies, and building infrastructure, both hard and soft. Policymakers are beginning to tighten the grip on private enterprise as they plan to grow China in a more sustainable way, unlike in the past, where extensive growth was a major driving force.US officials pay lip service to job creation while ceding power to private corporations. Steve compares the role of government:It seems like in China it's a little bit more egalitarian. The wealth gap is not as severe, and there is more universal opportunity at some level for leading a life without the precarity. Everything seems to be taken care of with a mindset of empowering and improving the lives of Chinese citizens.Market reform brought about widening inequality in China, between urban and rural, and between east and west. But public healthcare and pensions guarantee certain protections and the Ji Xinping administration’s “common prosperity” policies are further addressing inequality.There is a crackdown in the tech sector; they are trying to solve the so called three mountains on people's back: education, housing, and healthcare. So, this idea of common prosperity is really trying to elevate even more that egalitarianism that I think gradually eroded in China because of market reform and opening up.This interview looks at China’s use of capital controls, its shift to sustainability, and the role of Taiwan as a focal point for US economic interests and propaganda (and its strategic position in the semiconductor industry.) They talk about the meaning of human rights, which is seen by the Chinese as the right to a livelihood and freedom from poverty.Finally, Yan talks about the possibility of the Chinese accepting MMT and how it would affect the respective roles of central and regional governments.Yan Liang is Peter C. and Bonnie S. Kremer Chair, Professor of Economics and Chair of International Studies at Willamette University. She is also a Research Scholar at the Global Institute of Sustainable Prosperity. Yan specializes in Modern Money Theory, International Trade and Finance, Economic Development, with a special regional focus on China.@YanLian31677392 on Twitter

What do you know about modern China? Is it capitalist? Socialist? What do those terms mean in today’s global economies? According to Steve’s guest Vincent Huang, China considers itself “a socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics.” In this episode, Vincent tells Steve how this socialist market economy plays out in Chinese society, and how it compares to the world we know in the US – and just about everywhere else. There’s a stark difference in the power wielded by corporations, for example. In China...The state is the representative, it's the agent that mediates the conflicts between the corporations and the working class. So that actually is quite important because for China's socialist market economy, the goal is to elevate the well-being of people. And the means could be marketization, could be liberalization, could be market-oriented reforms, but it doesn't have to be.American listeners may be surprised by the people’s faith in government. When comparing public versus private, whether in schools or housing construction, Chinese citizens tend to trust the public, because there’s no profit motive involved.Vincent, who got his PhD at University of Missouri - Kansas City, is an MMTer. He and Steve discuss the attitude towards deficits, the role of endogenous money, and China’s infrastructure policies. They talk about what it means for China to be the world’s manufacturer. Steve asks about the possibility of a job guarantee.In a sense, the obstacle for China to implement a job guarantee also depends on how successful its already established projects are in absorbing excess labor ... And frankly, if they do a good job already and there is no need for a job guarantee anymore, then that's perfectly fine.This episode looks at China’s treatment of ethnic minorities, its commitment to transitioning to green energy, and the agility with which the government shifts between regulation and leniency with private corporations. The latter appears to be based on social and economic outcomes. Vincent explains that the attitude toward the public good is tied to the relationship between individual rights and collective order.“In fact, your individual freedom can only be viable and real when a collective order is in place.”Vincent (Yijiang) Huang is a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and a Teaching Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Denver. He received his Ph.D. in Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. His research and teaching interests include Money & Banking, Green Job Guarantee, Political Economy of China, Comparative Economic Systems, and Trade Wars & Agreements.

**Have you seen the Rogue Scholar, Steve Grumbine’s new brown bag lunch show on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at noon EST? For interviews, commentary, and, of course, MMT, go to Real Progress in Action on YouTube.Newcomers to MMT tend to draw a blank when they are told that taxes drive the currency or taxes created the first unemployed person. After all, none of that seems to track with the way they personally experience taxes. Warren Mosler makes sense of it by starting with the money story, using the example of colonial currency. The British wanted workers on African coffee plantations, but people were not clamoring to be hired. So, they created a coin or scrip and levied a hut tax payable in the new currency.The public purpose behind what the British were doing was to grow coffee. They levied a tax. They put a tax liability on everyone's house. That caused lots of people to be looking for work or look for some way to earn scrip so they could pay the tax so their house wouldn't be burned down ... It's just a tax liability. Nobody has any yet. Those are called unemployed. And so, the hut tax created unemployment.Some of the scrip was used to pay taxes and the rest became the money supply in the local economy. The British did not collect taxes to accrue currency for payroll, just as the US did not need to collect taxes (or borrow dollars from China) in order to distribute COVID stimulus checks.By getting the sequence all wrong, mainstream economic models cannot arrive at correct solutions. It leads to hyperbolic predictions of the US becoming like Greece (Venezuela? Zimbabwe? The Weimar Republic?), appealing to the IMF on bended knee.This week’s Macro N Cheese is the recording of Warren Mosler’s January 5th presentation to members of the US Green Party, hosted by Real Progressives. The episode includes excerpts from the Q&A following his talk. He explains why a sovereign currency is a public monopoly, discusses the policy implications of the money sequence, debunks misconceptions about the Federal Reserve, and defines the “national debt.”The full two-hour session is available at Real Progress in Action on YouTube.Warren Mosler is an American economist and theorist, and one of the leading voices in the field of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Presently, Warren resides on St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, where he owns and operates Valance Co., Inc. He is the author of “The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy” and “Soft Currency Economics,” which are available on his website.moslereconomics.com@wbmosleron Twitter# MMT #inflation #Fed #debt #deficit #Treasury #China #trade #currency #money

Macro N Cheese devotes considerable attention to ecological economics and environmental justice. We’re always working to expand our understanding of both. Dr. Hail connects the dots between environmental sustainability and the broader public purpose. It’s a focus of his new podcast, “Modern Money Doughnut”.But that's done best of all in Kate's book, when she talks about the doughnut, when she talks about moving away from growthism, from pursuing the growth of GDP as though that is an end in itself, and towards identifying those things which ought to be true of a successful society that provides everybody with the best possible chance of living a secure and safe and rewarding, engaged, empowered life while living within those planetary boundaries.By expanding our scope, the problems appear more complex and vast but, paradoxically, everything starts to make more sense. The goal cannot be just to clean up the planet. If we want to sustain and prolong life on this planet, shouldn’t it be a life worth living, free of exploitation and inequality? Isn’t it kind of like trying to solve healthcare without addressing health?Steven Hail, along with others such as our recent guest Phil Lawn, has been working to bring MMT to ecological economists. At one point there was a danger of people seeing MMT as just a more efficient way of growing the economy faster.Steve Grumbine first heard the term “degrowth” from Steven Hail at the 2018 MMT conference in New York City. Hail says at the time he wasn’t necessarily talking about decreasing the GDP, but about living within our planetary boundaries.Or to put it another way, to a situation in the future where we are obeying Herman Daly's three principles of sustainability, not emitting waste like carbon dioxide more rapidly than the environment can safely absorb it, not using up renewables like fish in the sea faster than our environment can renew those resources. And not using non renewables like lithium that you're digging out from under the ground at a rate which is faster than you can develop renewable alternatives for them.When it comes to the need to reduce the GDP, Hail says he’s agnostic. Clearly, only a tiny minority benefit from its growth. Grumbine brings up the inadequacies of the GDP as a measure of those things or activities we value. Cleaning up an oil spill increases the GDP. Hail says “We don’t value a forest in GDP until we cut it down” and goes on to talk about the history of the GDP and our worship of it. They also discuss alternative measures like the Genuine Progress Indicator and the dashboard approach Jason Hickel spoke of in a recent Macro N Cheese episode.We saw a decrease in carbon emissions in 2020 (thanks, COVID!) but now we’re approaching the global peak again – about seven times as high as in 1950. Hail says we’ve been talking about carbon emissions for 30 years and at this point it’s not enough to get them to fall, we need to get them down to zero.We're not cutting them at all at the moment. And the message of lots of people, the Mark Diesendorfs of this world, even the Kate Raworths of this world, is that we have the technology so that we could do this. Can we do it within capitalism? Jason Hickel would say no. I think probably Bill Mitchell would say no.Hail is known to be optimistic. His message of hope is that we have the science and resources to live within biophysical boundaries while meeting the needs of the people. How will we make that happen? He admits he may soon find himself in the streets with Extinction Rebellion.Steven Hail is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Torrens University, having previously been a Lecturer in the School of Economics at the University of Adelaide. He is the author of Economics for Sustainable Prosperity. Find the Modern Money Doughnut podcast and Dr. Hail’s other work at Modern Money Lab.@StevenHailAus on Twitter#biophysical #ecological #MMT #Kelton #Raworth #Mazzacuto #Hickel #environment #IPCC

We call this episode “Duality” because it covers what Bill Mitchell describes as separate realities experienced by the elites and the masses. We do not occupy the same universe. The results of this duality are reflected in the manufactured divisions within the working class itself and in the unequal economic power relations between countries. There is a conflict between the public’s need for services and capital’s need for profit and privatization.The point is, we live in 2 worlds – and the disparities are extreme.Bill lays out some of the ways our lives are organized around serving capital. Most of us understand how the education system serves to condition us to passively obey authority, but even our leisure time has been transformed. Bill refers to the book, Labor and Monopoly Capital, by Harry Braverman:What Braverman spoke about was more than a spatial spread of capital and capitalism of the type you’ve just been talking about, but also more and more activities that we typically never thought were part of our working lives, our productive lives. In the past, we would go to work for 8 hours a day ... and then we'd come home and have leisure. We would have non-work time. We'd go and play sports or we'd go dancing or whatever. But increasingly, those non-work activities have become surplus producing profit-making activities. So, you can't go to the football match in Australia now without being completely confronted with surplus creating processes, sport has become a corporate machine. Music has become a corporate machine. And so, more and more of our lives become subsumed within this process of surplus production and profit realization.The pressure of mass solidarity and citizens’ uprisings – from events like the Paris Commune of 1871 and the labor movement of the first half of the 20thcentury – forced certain concessions by the ruling class. The neoliberal era brought a retrenchment, a rollback of many of those gains. Now, instead of paying a living wage...The financial engineers could trap us in increasing debt, which allowed us to maintain our consumption, which allowed the participants in this other reality to realize profits through surplus value creation. And that's my worldview. And that's how I see the struggle of MMT. It's a transverse between the first reality and the elite reality, and it threatens the propositions because the elite reality reinforces itself and secures itself by miseducation. And it controls media. It pumps out lies … and it keeps us under control in a state of ignorance.Bill’s commitment to teaching Modern Monetary Theory stems from his belief that, for the first time in economic history, MMT directly challenges the miseducation program used by the elites to suppress us. His free course, MMT Ed (URL below), is available to all. We urge you to register.Professor Bill Mitchell holds the Chair in Economics and is the Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), an official research centre at the University of Newcastle. He is also a Visiting Professor at Maastricht University, The Netherlands, and is on the management board of CofFEE-Europe, a sister centre located at that university. He is co-author of the MMT textbook, Macroeconomics.Enroll, support and donate to MMTed at mmted.org@billy_blog on Twitterhttp://www.billmitchell.org/“Macroeconomics” ordering information on bilbo.economicoutlook.net/#MMT #capital #capitalism #scarcity #austerity #labor #neoliberalism #taxpayer #Australia

Stephen Williams and Philip Lawn join Steve to discuss the forthcoming book, Sustainability and the New Economics: Synthesising Ecological Economics and Modern Monetary Theory, which Williams co-edited. The book brings together sustainability, ecological economics, and MMT.As you learn more and more about this thing called sustainability, you realize that it's really the economic system that is at the heart of the problem. It's the economic system you have to change. So when you start studying what we usually call heterodox economics, you soon start to learn about something called ecological economics, which Phil is an expert in. And then you start to hear about this other thing called Modern Monetary Theory. And it turns out these two things are completely complementary, and you need both of them.The volume is a collection of work by 15 authors or so, all with expertise in different areas, including the relationship between climate change and health impacts, planetary boundaries, sustainable development goals, and law. The book contains chapters by friends of this podcast -- Professor Steve Keen, who looks at the way mainstream economics has perverted the IPCC process, Steven Hail who wrote the chapter on MMT, and Phil Lawn, whose work ties the whole thing together by connecting ecological economics and MMT. In fact, according to Williams, he was the inspiration for the entire project. There is no other book with a focus on this connection.They explain the extent of the current mess, the post WWII Anthropocene, and examine how we got here, including the birth of neoliberalism, the fossil fuel industry, the publication of the “Limits to Growth” report, (which Steve Keen has talked about in a previous episode of this podcast), and more. Once they’ve laid out the past and the present, they look to the future: where do we go from here?How do we design a safe and prosperous future? That essentially means what new economic system could we bring in to replace the current failed economic system? Hey, there's nothing more dangerous than a bad idea. And mainstream economics is a terrible idea.**For a full transcript and “extras” page of this and every episode, go to realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/**Stephen Williams, from Australia, has a long background in newspaper journalism and a short background in law. His lifelong obsession is the issue of designing societies for maximum well-being and sustainability. This has led him to the study of heterodox economics as an essential suite of tools. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming collected volume, Sustainability and the New Economics: Synthesising Ecological Economics and Modern Monetary Theory(Springer International, 2022).Based in Adelaide, Philip Lawn is an evidence-based economist and Adjunct Professor at Torrens University, Philip is also research fellow with the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and a member of the Wakefield Futures Group (South Australia). He is the author and editor of eight books on sustainable development, climate change, and the steady-state economy, and has 55 journal articles and more than 40 book chapters to his name. Philip makes speaking appearances at public events/debates and is regularly invited to deliver keynote and plenary presentations at academic conferences. #IPCC #MMT #ecological #climate #economics #sustainability #Anthropocene #GISP #Kelton #StevenHail #SteveKeen

Stuart Medina is a founder and current president of Red MMT Spain. He joins Steve this week to talk about conditions in Spain after two years of the pandemic, more than two decades as a member of the eurozone, and nearly half a century since the death of General Franco, dictator from 1939 to 1975, when Spain became a parliamentary monarchy.In the 1960s and 70s Spain had a fairly successful state-led industrialization policy. Franco’s death coincides with the ideological victory of neoliberalism. The elites turned to deregulation (“let the market decide”) and shut down all the public banks.When asked to summarize the situation in Spain today, Medina brings up the astounding unemployment figure of 15%, which doesn’t begin to reflect the reality. In 2011 it was as high as 27%, a rate which the US hasn’t seen since the Great Depression.But we are suffering those unemployment rates currently, as we speak. And when you look at the details, when you look at the youth unemployment rate there, we're talking of close to 40% unemployment. It's a tragedy because it's just such a waste of potential, of human dignity, I think, is the right word. It's just lives that are cut short. In some cases, people not being able to develop a career, a project, a life, getting married, having children, buying homes. It's a tragedy that is basically what is going on.Greece’s treatment at the hands of the notorious “Troika” is well known, as are the results of the harmful fiscal choices they were forced to make. Stuart tells us how Spain, too, was virtually blackmailed in 2011, pressured by the European Central Bank, Germany, and the Obama administration to amend the Spanish constitution and adopt impossible austerity measures.Stuart provides a thoughtful critique of the EU and discusses the kind of flexibility required to put a population back to work. He and Steve talk about Mosler’s assertion that imports are a net benefit and exports are a net loss, and how an export-led growth model has affected other economies.It can be difficult for a foreign audience to understand why countries like Spain and Italy joined the EU. Stuart suggests the European Union can be considered a surrogate imperial project to replace the old one.There's also the fact that the elites of Italy and Spain somehow needed or wanted some tool to control the restless trade unions, the industrial unrest of the 1970s and early 1980s. And let's face it, these elites are not doing badly.Those in the section of the ruling class with an export-led growth model are doing extremely well. They are, of course, interested in keeping their access to the European markets, among other benefits.They're interested in repressing wage growth. They're interested in fiscal rectitude because it helps to discipline the workforce and either consciously or unconsciously, they know it's in their best interest to enter into the arrangements of the European Union. The European Union is a neoliberal project. It is the project of the European elites, and they control the media. And they have convinced most of the population, I would say, (to be) in agreement that the European Union has been good for Spain.**Don’t forget to check out the transcript and “extras” page accompanying every episode of Macro N Cheese. Find them at realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast**Stuart Medina is an economist and a founding member of Red MMT Spain, of which he is currently the president. He is an advisor to Parliamentarians of the Progressive political movement Elkarrekin Podemos in the Basque Country. He has developed his professional career in the biotechnology sector where he has held management positions such as controller and director of business development. He also founded the consulting firm Metas Biotech and the biopharmaceutical company ProRetina Therapeutics. He is the author of two books on modern currency theory: El Leviatán Desencadenado and La Moneda del Pueblo.@SMiltim on Twitter@RedMMT

This week’s episode is the audio portion of a presentation by our friend Professor Fadhel Kaboub when he spoke with the Hanon Project's Yousra Magouri in September about the causes and effects of inflation during the pandemic. It’s a beautiful illustration that you don’t need an education in MMT to make sense of the economy. With Fadhel’s characteristic cogency, complex subjects are made accessible without sacrificing depth.He opens with basic definitions of inflation and how it is measured. He describes the two main types – demand pull and supply push -- then contrasts the mainstream and MMT explanations of inflation and the connection of our current circumstances to the pandemic.For the last several decades since the 70s, the mainstream economist will tell you too much government spending will cause inflation, right? Whether it's government subsidies or government contracts, you're just flooding the system with cash, giving people dollars to go out and shop and increase demand way beyond the capacity of the economy to keep up with it.Needless to say, different explanations of the causes lead to very different prescriptions for the solutions, as evidenced by political opposition to further pandemic relief measures and spending on social programs and infrastructure.Fadhel maintains the risk of inflation is triggered by the lack of productive capacity, including the supply chain disruptions during the pandemic. These problems exist on a global scale.The second source of inflation, which is the most important, I think, and most neglected by the economics profession is what I call the abusive market power and price setting behavior of key players in the economy. Think of big pharma, think of the energy companies, think of companies that have high degrees of market concentration that allows them actually to set prices simply because they can, because there isn't enough competition, because consumers don't have a choice...…Now, that type of inflation is not going to go away by spending less on the unemployed, on the pandemic, on education or infrastructure. It's got nothing to do with it.The episode goes into creative solutions for the global South, the danger of deflation, the limits of quantitative easing, the effect of climate change on the economy, and much more.Full transcripts of this and every episode of Macro N Cheese can be found at realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcastDr. Fadhel Kaboub is an Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics & Social Science Consortium, 2006, University of Missouri - Kansas City; M.A. in Economics, May 2001, University of Missouri - Kansas City; B.S. in Economics, June 1999, with Distinction. Emphasis: Money & Banking.@FadhelKaboub on Twitter

The Blockchain Socialist wants to dispel the notion that blockchain technology can only serve a right-wing libertarian agenda. In this week’s episode, he tells Steve the left loses out when new trends or innovations are introduced into the economy. Blockchain is a neutral tool on which we can build different types of organizations and institutions. He speaks of the risks taken when groups use Google Docs for organizing their information. Google’s removal of access to Palestinian activists should be seen as a threat to the left.The Blockchain Socialist – let's call him TBS – created his blog and podcast to provide a space for learning about blockchain and digital currency free of right=wing propaganda. He talks with Steve about a wide range of uses in both the near and distant future. For countries under economic sanctions, cryptocurrency can make it possible to engage in international financial activity. For the myriad groups on the left who seem unable to unite because of, often, some pretty obscure differences, TBS sees other benefits......using this shared economic platform to do that -- to keep track of political goals and to move forward on them. Then in some utopian socialist future in which the workers finally own the means of production, we can collectively decide to or decide not to use blockchain as an important decentralized institution for keeping track of other things that we may want to do.TBS lays out the difference between smart contracts and legal contracts and goes over their potential uses. He also explains the concept of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and how it could change the banking system, for better or worse. He and Steve discuss imposing expiration dates on cryptocurrency to encourage spending and disallow hoarding.It is hard for MMTers to understand why libertarians would want to impose artificial scarcity on cryptocurrency, as if Bitcoin were digital gold.It's really heavily based on this commodity theory of money, and especially the libertarian view that the best type of money can be abstracted away because it's backed by a commodity which has objective value -- as if gold is really objectively valuable. So I think part of the issue is that a lot of these first cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin, were designed intentionally with this hard money view in mind. They encoded hard money into Bitcoin. It does not have to be hard money.Ultimately both the right and left have objections to the way the government handles money. Whether you think it is spending too much or too little, the whole process is undemocratic. Bitcoin is not the solution, but there is a lot more to digital currency than Bitcoin, not all of it a rightwing tool. This episode provides just a taste – we recommend following the Blockchain Socialist for a real education.The Blockchain Socialist is a blogger and podcaster whose work can be found on his website, theblockchainsocialist.com.Support his work at patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist.@TBSocialist on Twitter

It's one thing to understand the US government will not protect us from certain types of abuse by corporations. We see it in the weakness of labor laws as well as environmental and consumer protection regulations. We know the government has no problem sending poor and working-class men and women into harm's way to protect corporate interests overseas. But how much farther will the state go to protect the interests of global capitalism?Ray McGinnis doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but he’s here to remind us of the questions that need to be asked. The title of his book says it all: Unanswered Questions: What the September Eleventh Families Asked and the 9/11 Commission Ignored.It took a year for George Bush to decide on forming a commission to investigate 9/11. He appointed Henry Kissinger as chair. This was ironic (and outrageous), given Kissinger’s connection to that other 9/11 -- the September 11, 1973, coup in Chile to overthrow the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. Henry Kissinger was responsible for atrocities as far back as the carpet-bombing of Cambodia and was known for keeping secrets from Congress and the people.A group of women from the 9/11 Family Steering Committee visited Kissinger to voice their concerns. As Kissinger served them coffee, one woman got straight to the point:“Dr. Kissinger, we just want to make sure you don't have any conflicts of interest. You don't have any business clients by the name of Bin Laden.” At that point, Doctor Kissinger pours the coffee all over the table, partway falls off the couch, blames it on a fake eye, and resigns the next day.It was clear from the start that Congress had no will for this investigation. McGinnis reminds us that up to $80 million was spent investigating the Clintons in the ‘90s; the 9/11 Commission was given $3 million. Chairman Thomas Kean was on the board of a corporation with interests in building a pipeline across Afghanistan. George W. Bush had begun his presidency with plans for regime change in Iraq. The outline of the eventual Commission report was written before any evidence was examined.For 20 years, thousands of the 9/11 families have been pressing for an investigation into Saudi complicity in the attacks but have been stonewalled by the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. In April of 2020, Attorney General Barr and a representative of the NSA appeared before a judge to argue against releasing documents regarding a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia, claiming it would harm American state secrets and national security.The families are scratching their heads: how is our lawsuit to find out if there was Saudi Arabian complicity in the attacks on September 11th possibly going to harm American national security and state secrets? What state secrets would those be?What secrets indeed? It’s been 20 years since the events of 9/11. For those of us fortunate enough not to have lost a friend or family member, some of our questions may have faded. Ray McGinnis brings the inconsistencies back into focus and adds some new ones.Ray McGinnis was educated in political science, religious studies, and history, and graduated with a B.A. from the University of Toronto. He also earned a Diploma in Christian Education from the Centre for Christian Studies. He was an educator with the United Church of Canada, working at their national office for 9 years. He subsequently worked at the Naramata Centre in rural British Columbia. From 1999 to 2020 he taught writing workshops. He is the author of Writing the Sacred: A Psalm-inspired Path to Appreciating and Writing Sacred Poetry. McGinnis is interested in the stories we tell, the ones we ignore, and how this shapes our worldview.https://unansweredquestions.ca/@RayMcGinnis7 on Twitter

Do you think of colleges and universities as protected islands of intellectual activity, ivory towers where the world’s problems are contemplated and debated? Steve Grumbine’s guest is here to tell us otherwise. Davarian Baldwin, of Trinity College, is an urban historian and social theorist, whose work examines the landscape of global cities through the lens of the African Diasporic experience. His most recent book is In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities.Baldwin describes how institutions of higher education are the largest employers, healthcare providers, and landlords in cities and towns across the US. They leverage their massive financial and real estate holdings to displace the most vulnerable communities across the US. Their tax-exempt status does not result in savings for the local citizens, but puts a greater burden on everyone else’s property taxes.The conservative and mainstream media still maintain the pretense that campuses are a hotbed of radicalism, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Corporate partners sit on universities’ boards of trustees and shape the curriculum to reflect the interests of capital. The Koch brothers and other corporate entities are funding “innovation centers” and entrepreneurial institutes to fit their own needs.The powerful thing about higher education is the myth of the schoolhouse -- that it's just a place where we conduct classes and conduct pure research. Teaching classes has become a side business in higher education. There's so much more here that goes on in ways that either generate or manage capital that have nothing to do with teaching classes.Most colleges and universities maintain a substantial policing apparatus. According to Baldwin, “75% of public and private schools have police departments. Not public safety units -- police departments. Nine of ten are armed, and about 85% of these police departments have jurisdiction beyond the main campus. They police regular residents.”And so the irony of this phenomenon is that the biggest crimes on campus, sexual violence and substance abuse, are not policed. They do a horrible job. While some people might say capacity. I say intent, because schools -- predominantly white schools, I'm going to be clear -- are not going to want to say that they have a campus full of white criminals. This undermines their brand. So the policing is all outward facing into the poor, black and brown neighborhoods around the campuses, to say to investors, to say to students, to say to families, and to say to everyone else that we are open for business and we are safe. These police units, their job is to protect the brand.Baldwin gives numerous examples of different schools around the country and their outsized effect on the communities they reside in, their poorly paid employees, and, of course, students. He suggests specific reforms and asks that our listeners follow New Deal for Higher Education, Scholars for Social Justice, Cops Off Campus, and other organizations that are working toward change.Davarian L. Baldwin is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Trinity College, and is a historian, cultural critic, and social theorist of urban America. His work largely examines the landscape of global cities through the lens of the African Diasporic experience.Author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities Co-editor with Minkah Makalani, Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem Author of Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life Series Co-Editor, Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy @DavarianBaldwin on Twitter

Michael Albert is one of the creators of participatory economics (parecon) and has developed a vision for a post-capitalist world that includes participatory governance. His new book, No Bosses, A New Economy for a Better World, goes into detail. From Noam Chomsky’s endorsement:*No Bosses* describes and advocates a natural and built Commons, workers’ and consumers’ self-managing councils, a division of labor that balances empowering tasks among all workers, a norm that apportions income for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor, and finally not markets or central planning, but instead participatory planning by workers and consumers of what is produced, by what means, to what ends. It makes a compelling case that these features can be brought together in a spirit of solidarity to establish a self-managing, equitable, sustainable, participatory, new economy, with a rich artistic and intellectual culture as well.Albert recently spoke with Steve Grumbine about these concepts. His critique of what he calls “20th century socialism” is a rejection of centralized management. He and Grumbine discuss the MMT proposal of a Federal Job Guarantee which, though centrally funded, is locally managed, allowing communities to determine their specific needs and values. While Albert might be opposed to central funding (and all currency?), local management is consistent with his beliefs. He is concerned, however, with replacing the 1% with the 20% - the “coordinator class.”He also differentiates between reform and non-reformist reform, a concept we value at Macro N Cheese. Albert says, “What makes something more than just a desirable reform is partly how we would fight for it, and to an extent, what it is proposing.” He uses several examples, like the fight for a livable minimum wage and for replacing the use of fossil fuels with clean, green energy. Winning any of these things would be great, but then what? We're back to the system that we have. Or you can do it in a way which is constantly raising the need for innovation, the need for new social relations, the need for a new system, but recognizes the need to get these things done now. So one approach is reformist, the other approach is, I think, revolutionary.Albert’s post-capitalist vision includes self-management, diversity, equity, solidarity, and sustainability. Whether or not you agree with him on all fronts, you’ll find plenty to think about in this episode.** Each episode of Macro N Cheese has transcripts and an Extras page with links to additional information and resources. Go to realprogressives.com/macro-n-cheese-podcastMichael Albert is a veteran writer and activist of the left. He co-founded South End Press, Z Magazine, ZNet, and the Z Media Institute. He has written over 20 books and hundreds of articles. Along with Robin Hahnel, Michael is the co-developer of the post-capitalist economic vision called participatory economics (parecon). Michael runs a popular podcast called RevolutionZ and founded the School for Social and Cultural Change.@michaelalbertz on Twitternobossesbook.com

**Reminder** Each episode of Macro N Cheese is accompanied by a transcript and an “Extras” page with links to related material and resources. To access, go to realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast.In one sentence: the winners and losers of the 21st century are the countries that attract young people.Parag Khanna is a leading global strategy advisor and best-selling author of numerous books on globalization, migration, the info-state, and the future of the world order. In this episode, he speaks with Steve about his newest book, Move: The Forces Uprooting Us.Most people who pretend to understand globalization reduce it to the rate of world trade growth. Khanna says we need a broader and more nuanced view, even though there are aspects that cannot be quantified. In his work he takes a multi-dimensional and systemic approach.An earlier book, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, was about the functional geography of infrastructure and supply chains. Its “punchline” is that connectivity is destiny. The recent book, Move, looks at how these ever-greater volumes of infrastructure affect the evolving distribution of population across the world.Human geography, Khanna explains, answers the questions: Who are we? Where are we? What are we? It is not simply a matter of the number of people inhabiting the planet, but what is our demographic composition - the distribution of age and race?Most people agree both climate change and economics are global in nature. They know the price of goods in one country can be affected by various phenomena in other parts of the world. Likewise, the impact of climate change is dramatically different from region to region.Because climate change is so much more extreme and occurring at a much faster pace than we previously acknowledged, it means that adaptation is as important as mitigation. This is a huge theme in the book and, quite frankly, an open door, a big hole that I'm trying to drive a truck through because I'm beside myself with rage.For all our concern about climate change, the focus is skewed. According to Khanna, only 6% of climate-related funding goes to adaptation.Meanwhile, people are dying every single day. You got your rising sea levels in Bangladesh and people dying in floods and heat waves, droughts and cyclones -- all these climate related phenomena. Every single day hundreds, if not thousands, of people are dying. The number of climate refugees in the world is greater than any other category of refugees. Climate migration will soon exceed all other drivers of migration, and yet we don't have a collective discourse on adaptation.Khanna describes the US as “second world,” by which he means it is both first and third world at the same time. He finds lessons in the history of the rise and fall of past civilizations. Societies collapse when their brittleness is exposed by their vulnerability to complex supply chains and structures they haven't fully grasped or untangled.Parag Khanna is a leading global strategy advisor, world traveler, and best-selling author. He is Founder & Managing Partner of FutureMap, a data and scenario based strategic advisory firm. Parag's newest book is MOVE: The Forces Uprooting Us (2021), which was preceded by The Future is Asian: Commerce, Conflict & Culture in the 21st Century (2019). He is author of a trilogy of books on the future of world order beginning with The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (2008), followed by How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (2011), and concluding with Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (2016). He is also the author of Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State (2017) and co-author of Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (2012).Paragkhanna.com@paragkhanna on Twitter@drparagkhanna on Instagram

Dirk Ehnts, an economist from Berlin, joins us to talk about his book, Modern Monetary Theory and European Macroeconomics. In addition to discussing the current situation in the Eurozone, he helps us understand the similarities and differences between the Eurozone and the US, especially regarding the relationship between the individual states and the central bank.So in the US, whatever happens in your state ... you always have government spending coming from the federal level. So that's going to pay for the military installation, that's going to pay for the pensions. It's going to pay for some of the public federal infrastructure. And that means that whatever happens in your state, the federal government is always there. And you also have these institutional mechanisms to ensure that states which do not have a lot of employment can somehow make bargains in the political process and basically trade votes for jobs. And that's the main difference.The Eurozone has both the European Central Bank (ECB) and national central banks for each EU nation.We have this problem, that there's going to be a lack of government spending when it really matters. And there's no institution to address this kind of shortcoming. So the Euro was always incomplete, and it was kind of the idea that once it is in place, it can be completed by having a Euro Treasury. But we've been in this kind of mess now since the global financial crisis, and it's not clear where we are going.Ehnts also addresses the question of how countries within the EU make fiscal policy and get programs funded. He talks about causes of the disparity between northern and southern European nations and Steve brings up the race to the bottom we see among US states. Not only are there differences in the political economic strengths of individual EU countries, but within each there are states or provinces with their own strengths and weaknesses.The episode covers austerity policies, the changes from pre- to post-GFC eras, and economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s enough about money creation, interest rates, and bond sales to satisfy the wonkiest among us.Don’t forget to check out the episode transcript and Extras pages! If you’re listening on a podcast platform, you’ll have to head over to realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast to find them.Dirk Ehnts is an Adjunct Lecturer at Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences, the Speaker of the Board of the Pufendorf Society for Political Economy and author of Modern Monetary Theory and European Macroeconomics.@DEhnts on TwitterWebsite (in German or English): dirk-ehnts.de

Somber headlines recall the 2008 financial crisis: “Global financial markets have been on high alert,” warns the BBC. “Chinese property giant Evergrande is on the brink of collapse, and analysts warn the potential fallout could have far-reaching implications that spill outside China’s borders,” says CNBC. From the New York Times: “Every once in a while a company grows so big and messy that governments fear what would happen to the broader economy if it were to fail.”To navigate this story, we needed someone immune to hysteria, so Steve invited the infinitely sensible Robert Hockett to guide us through the Evergrande saga.Hockett begins the episode with a brief history of China’s strategy for economic development. Unsurprisingly, it looks a lot like that of the US, Germany, and Japan, in different eras. The so-called export-led growth strategy involves developing industries that can achieve a sizable share of the global market for manufactured goods, starting at the low end and proceeding up the ladder to higher end products. Current account surpluses are plowed back into domestic investment, creating a virtuous circle and growing productive capacity.Throughout the history of capitalism, developed nations have been willing to tolerate current account deficits of developing economies for a number of reasons. During the post-WWII cold war years, the US was in competition with the Soviet Union for influence with Germany and Japan, for example. Sometimes, it’s simply to help create good trading partners. The US was pleased to see China join the WTO in 2000.And even before that, the US was willing to endure or experience sustained current account deficits vis a vis China on the theory that China developing more rapidly in consequence of that strategy would ultimately give it a stake in the global neoliberal order that it would become a team player…But as tends to happen over time, after a while, the countries that are footing the bill as it were, or in this case, the US, which was footing the bill in the form of rapidly hollowing out industrial base and even more rapidly eroding labor standards and workplace standards all in the name of global competition or competitiveness. Eventually the US began to object.When the pressure mounted, the Chinese government turned toward investment in domestically generated demand. They looked at the commercial and residential real estate bonanzas that drove American growth during the Reagan and Clinton years, respectively. These investments are substantially debt fueled. Ergo, Evergrande.As for predictions of imminent financial meltdown, Hockett remains sanguine. If a bailout is required, the Chinese government has the capacity to do so without the kind of constraints, real or fictional, that prevent the US government from acting in the interests of the majority. China is not afraid to attach strings to bailouts, including, if necessary, seizing control of a private company.Grumbine takes a detour to ask about infrastructure. Given the deteriorating state of infrastructure in the US, it’s remarkable to see the massive amount of government spending in China, some of which may appear baffling to people in the West. They have literally built bridges to nowhere and uninhabited ghost cities, but there is logic behind it. It is a way to both spend money into the economy as well as prepare for the eventual migration of people from the countryside. Rather than tent cities and Hoovervilles, they will have housing, roads and utilities.One conclusion we might draw from this episode is that sovereign states’ differing approaches to spending their fiat currency can have vastly different outcomes.Robert Hockett is the Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Adjunct Professor of Finance at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and Senior Counsel at Westwood Capital, LLC.@rch371 on Twitter

This week Steve investigates the cutthroat world of local school board elections. So, get ready to get down and dirty... Just kidding! His guest, Rana Odeh, is the genuine article: thoughtful, straight forward, and unafraid to bring up uncomfortable topics. At a time when the country’s political polarization seeps into every crevice of civic and social life, our school boards have become battlegrounds. Rana is willing to armor up and fight for our youth and their education.  Rana is running for a seat on the school board in Granville, OH, where she lives with her three kids and her husband, Fadhel Kaboub – a dear friend of this podcast. Anyone who follows Fadhel on Facebook has seen their beautiful family of fledgling artists, musicians, and young campaigners. Steve and Rana talk about the lack of a federal right to education in the US and the need for proper (federal) funding, decoupled from the local tax base. They talk about the mask mandate wars now being waged in schools across the country, serving as proxy for the deeper political divide. They talk about Islamophobia. The recent hysteria over Critical Race Theory is absurd because, as Rana points out, CRT isn’t even taught in K through 12.  It’s a law school term. Racism itself, however, is alive and well in every part of our society. Instead of helping students understand the history of racism in this country, the focus is on No Child Left Behind with its emphasis on testing and memorization. Students are memorizing things, but not learning how to write very well. And other life skills. I'm thinking about how to get along in society, and the discussion on racism is a big part of that. How can you go out into the workforce in 2021 or later and not have a basic understanding of racism and current affairs... Rana’s emphasis is on the whole child, preparing them for problem solving in the real world. In a recent candidate forum, she said: It's about learning for life and equipping students with the skills they need to be collaborative, critical thinkers - empathetic, adaptable, responsible, and resilient. If any of our listeners are in Rana’s district, we urge you to support her campaign and vote.  For everyone else, perhaps listening to her will spark your imagination for ways to engage in your own community. Rana Odeh is a mother of three boys, a potter, and a public speaker. She and her husband Fadhel have enjoyed being active members of the Granville community for the past 12 years. Rana currently serves on the Granville Township Land Management Committee and has served on the board of the Granville Parent Cooperative Preschool. She has previously worked as a freelance writer and editor, and was a debate forum columnist for the Dayton City Paper. Rana has a Bachelor's degree in English, and a Master's degree in International and Comparative Politics. ranaforgranvilleschools.com Follow her on Facebook: Rana Odeh for Granville School Board

In 2014, Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters engaged in armed confrontation with law enforcement. Bundy had been embroiled in a 21-year legal dispute with the US Bureau of Land Management. The “Bundy Standoff” was splashed across the news, allowing the public to watch as Cliven Bundy became a hero – a symbol of conservative America under attack by the federal government.This week, Jamie Skillen talks with Steve Grumbine about the history and politics of federal lands. Skillen’s book, This Land is My Land, traces three periods of rebellion against federal land authority over the past forty years. The issue wasn’t originally defined by the so-called left/right divide. Prior to the Sagebrush Rebellion (1979-1982) these were regional actions waged by people who shared a common material interest in federal lands, regardless of political identification. Since 1979, however, federal land issues have become flashpoints in conservative politics.In a nation that prizes private ownership and individualism, isn’t it ironic that the federal government owns 28% of the surface land? Conservatives demand these lands be ceded to the states, but were that to happen, the states would have to bear the cost of maintaining them. Politicians rail against public lands, pledging to eliminate them, while fully aware of their constituents’ love of national forests and parks.When the federal government encouraged expansion beyond the original thirteen colonies, European Americans settled wherever there was arable land, across the Midwest and Great Plains and, eventually, on the West coast. The topography of the intermountain region was less hospitable to agriculture. When, in the late 19th century, the US government began creating national forests and parks, the lands available to it were largely those that nobody wanted at the time.Historically, the federal government manages the development of oil, gas, coal, and timber, as well as ranges for livestock grazing. Generally, about half of the revenues from these ventures are given to the counties where they’re located. Any new federal regulations, restricting timber harvesting, for example, directly affect jobs and slice into funding mechanisms for those counties. (As MMTers, we know that states and counties are currency users, not currency issuers.)Skillen sees the public lands issue as a microcosm of our national politics, replete with all the contradictions and hypocrisy therein. While Western states and conservative political leaders have become increasingly radical and vitriolic about federal ownership …... I never hear a parallel complaint against the market economy, against corporations. There is built into our culture this idea that what government does is a choice, and we can question those choices. We can make different choices. Whereas what the markets do is like nature; it’s like evolution.Note to the Macro N Cheese audience: on our website, realprogressives.org, you’ll find past podcast episodes with transcripts and extras. Please consider supporting Real Progressives by becoming a monthly donor at patreon.com/realprogressives.James R Skillen is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Calvin University and director of the Calvin University Ecosystem Preserve and Native Gardens. He is an expert on public land management and politics, including the impacts of anti-government extremism in public land politics and author of This Land is My Land: Rebellion in the West.https://www.jamesrskillen.com/@JamesskillenR on Twitter

This week Steve welcomes Scott Fullwiler for the first time in two years. Scott is a research scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and associate professor of economics at UMKC, where he teaches the macroeconomics PhD program. As listeners of this podcast know, UMKC is one of the two academic birthplaces of MMT.The episode begins with a look at social security and FICA taxes. Originally, the idea behind FICA was for people to feel like they’re paying into their own retirement. The expectation is that SS will be politically protected as a result. Scott points out that this is an unnecessary narrative and compares it to national defense. “It's not as if the reason why we continue to get national defense spending is because somebody feels like they've paid into it and they’re owed it.”There are three different separate things we need to remember when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, and unfortunately, all three of them get blended together in our public discourse … And those three narratives are the financial ability to pay for Social Security, the legal authority to pay for Social Security, and the productive capacity to have a future in which both retirees and workers can sustain the standard of living that's improving.Scott says FICA reduces production capacity. Not only does it pull money out of the economy, it’s a regressive tax, with a vast amount not coming from the “one percent” but from the majority of workers between 16 to 67, who are far from wealthy.The episode covers the debt ceiling in terms of both political and operational realities. Scott calls it “one of those tragically hilarious things that we do,” enabling a “savvy minority party to take a pound of flesh out of the majority party.”He also describes the workings of both the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department as well as the possibility of minting trillion dollar coins.Scott Fullwiler is a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and Associate Professor of economics at the University of Missouri – Kansas City.www.global-isp.org/scott-fullwiler/

This week we’re checking in with a couple of candidates from The New Liberals (TNL) of Australia. We’ll be learning about the traditional Australian political parties and getting an overview of how their electoral system works.Steve Keen is an old friend of this podcast. In the past he’s joined us to talk about everything from climate change to Marx to the breakdown of supply chains during the COVID pandemic. Now we’re meeting him as a political candidate; soon Professor Keen will be Senator Keen. Victor Kline, the leader and one of the founders of TNL, is running for a seat in the House of Representatives.TNL is only two years old but has already gained wide support. Unlike the US, where third parties have been almost entirely shut out of national elections, Australia’s preferential voting system and parliamentary style of government have made it possible for TNL to gain traction.Voting is mandatory in Australia, which Keen explains is far superior to the farce called democracy in the US:I see it as a way of making sure the politicians can't ignore you because they can't just hope to suppress different groups and stop them registering because it's against the law not to register and not to vote. So therefore the politicians can't ignore you. And I say this is a law controlling the politicians rather than the voters.With an existential climate crisis bearing down on us and Australia just as eager to adopt the neoliberal agenda as western Europe and the US, Steve Grumbine asks how they’re breaking through the narrative of false scarcity. It’s not so difficult, says Kline:Well, funny thing is that most people intuitively understand MMT or Keynesianism. If you say to them, look, we've got 3 million people below the poverty line in Australia. We want to put them back to work, and every dollar we spend putting somebody back to work gets spent and re-spent across the economy and stimulates small and large business alike … Now, most people get that, they don't see that as strange. You tell them that a sovereign government can invest in what it wants to invest in. They get that. Like the US, Australian politics are presided over by a duopoly of neoclassical parties - an “alternative autocracy.” The Liberal Party of Australia and the Australian Labor Party are almost indistinguishable in their fealty to the neoliberal agenda, both “reporting to Rupert Murdoch and the fossil fuel industry.” However, unlike the performative opposition of American Democrats and Republicans, the two Australian parties tend to vote the same way. Imagine what kind of policy gets 100% “yes” votes.Whether or not it’s possible to fix the mess we’re in through electoral politics, political campaigns allow for a dialog with the public, as Bernie Sanders demonstrated in the US. We’ll be watching and cheering on our friends down under.Victor Kline is a Sydney barrister specializing in refugee law. He is the Founder and Director of the Refugee Law Project which offers pro bono legal advice and representation to asylum seekers and refugees. He is the Leader of TNL (The New Liberals) and one of its founders. TNL will be contesting the next Australian federal elections running candidates in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Victor will be contesting the House of Representatives seat of North Sydney in New South Wales.Steve Keen is a Distinguished Research Fellow at UCL and the author of “Debunking Economics,” “Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis?” and his latest “The New Economics: A Manifesto.” He is one of the few economists to anticipate the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, for which he received a Revere Award from the Real World Economics Review. His main research interests are developing the complex systems approach to macroeconomics, and the economics of climate change. Professor Keen is the lead Senate candidate under The New Liberals.On Twitter:@victorklineTNL@ProfSteveKeen

Our friend John Harvey is back to answer a question that’s usually accompanied by much wailing and gnashing of teeth: “what happens if people lose faith in the dollar?” The question contains all sorts of assumptions and intentions, which the Cowboy Economist proceeds to dismember, dispelling all sorts of myths – from inflation to the Fed. (He even tells us why China will continue holding US dollars, in case you’re worried.)One approach taken by the “faith in the dollar” Cassandras is that government is bad, therefore non-governmental currency (Bitcoin!) is better... because the free market is more efficient. However, to say efficiency is good means accepting all sorts of negative social conditions and behaviors, including racism.John talks about economic models and their need to mirror real world behavior....you go back to Milton Friedman's philosophy of positivism. And this is how you do economic research. The idea was that it doesn't matter how unrealistic the assumptions of a model are, as long as they predict well. "Indeed," Friedman goes on to say, "often the most significant models are those with the most unrealistic assumptions."Try telling a physicist that the most significant theories we put forward in physics have the most unrealistic assumptions.If it's no longer necessary for me to justify my model assumptions based on real world phenomena, then what is this really allowing me to do? Well, it's allowing me to preconceive my conclusion. I hate the government. So I've got my conclusion already and now I make up premises that will allow me to get there.John not only dispels the notion that creating currency causes inflation, he also maintains that all inflation is not created equal. Are rising prices a bad thing if wages are increasing even more? If more people are employed?Steve and John discuss the difference between the financial markets gambling on currencies and the real economy, where people buy and sell and pay taxes.It all boils down to there not being a clear understanding. Okay, what creates the ultimate value for the dollar? The fact that on April 15, that's the only thing the US government accepts. And faith is irrelevant in that case.The episode revisits some of the basic insights of MMT. Around here, we can never get too much of that. Money isn’t just dropped into the economy; it’s created when the government spends it into existence. It’s spent on labor, production, real resources, commodities, war... it isn’t dropped from helicopters.John Harvey speaks in a language anyone can understand, which makes this interview so valuable to us non-economists. It’s packed with answers to the questions and arguments we constantly encounter. Be sure to bookmark it, because you’ll want to refer to it again. And don’t forget – each episode of Macro N Cheese is accompanied by a transcript, making it easily accessible.John T. Harvey is a Professor of Economics at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, where he has been on the faculty for over thirty years. His main areas of research interest are exchange rates and business cycles and his teaching responsibilities include Intermediate Macroeconomics, International Monetary Economics, and Contending Perspectives in Economics. He has published over forty refereed articles, two edited volumes, and two books. John has a YouTube series called The Cowboy Economist and a blog at Forbes.com.@John_T_Harvey on Twittercowboyeconomist.com

Modern Monetary Theory Has a New Friend in Congress said the headline of a New York Times op-ed earlier this month. That friend is House Budget Committee chair John Yarmuth, the 8th term congressman from KY.Isn’t it ironic that it’s newsworthy when the chair of the House Budget Committee understands the basic truth about the workings of the US dollar? That it was a bold move for Yarmuth to appear on C-Span and explain how federal financing differs from our household budgets? This is the world we live in, so we take our MMT victories where we can get them.This week, John and his journalist son, Aaron, talk with Steve about Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth and how it opened their eyes to the contradictions and absurdities of conventional thinking about our government’s economic policies and the national debt. Instead of asking themselves what the US can afford to do, Congress can now ask what the American people need them to do.John describes his second term on the budget committee, when the chairman, Paul Ryan, warned of financial Armageddon if they didn’t rein in the growing national debt. As we know, the debt kept increasing and Ryan’s dire predictions weren’t borne out. That’s when John figured we should start thinking about it differently. Thanks to Aaron, he heard about MMT and began learning about it.Abraham Lincoln said the legitimate role of government is to do for the people what they need but cannot do so well for themselves.And that certainly relates to spending probably more directly than anything else we do because we are the ultimate banker. We are the ultimate provider and creator of resources. And anybody who's looked at state and local government knows they're not in that same position. And certainly households and businesses aren't.As grandpa and dad to 2-year old JD, both John and Aaron recognize the true responsibility we all carry. In budget committee hearings, John listens to politicians wail about the burden we’re placing on future generations. He does not fall for it:Wait a minute. We've been accumulating debt in this country for 230 years. Has anybody ever been asked to pay it back? Of course not ... I'm sure when the national debt reached a billion dollars under Abraham Lincoln, people were saying the same thing: that all future generations are going to have this burden.Right now, future generations are going to have a burden of an uninhabitable world because of climate change. Our students are going to be studying in 100 year old schools, and we'll have a workforce to be inadequately educated and trained for the jobs of the future. That's the big burden we're putting potentially on future generations if we don't act now and do what we need to do and can do.Steve talks with the Yarmuths about the MMT “layer cake” concept, which ties the Green New Deal to a federal job guarantee and Medicare for all. While the logic is irrefutable, political reality can get in the way. In John’s experience, the Green New Deal is a lot for the American public to grasp. “If you have to explain everything the way you just did, you've already kind of lost…” This just tells us at Macro N Cheese that we have to keep spreading the word. Knowing that there are people at the highest level of government who have caught on to - and are enthusiastic about - MMT, might give us cause for optimism.Congressman John Yarmuth represents Kentucky's Third Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Now in his eighth term, he has served as Chairman of the House Budget Committee since 2019, and also serves on the Committee on Education and Labor.Aaron Yarmuth is a journalist. Until recently he was the executive editor of LEO Weekly in Louisville. He is currently serving on the board of directors of the Snowy Owl Foundation and the Kentucky Golf Association.Follow John @RepJohnYarmuthFollow Aaron @yarmuthnytimes.com/2021/09/01/opinion/mmt-john-yarmuth.html

MMT, at its most fundamental, shows us the difference between a currency user and the currency issuer. This reality affects policy decisions in ways it would be foolish to ignore. As Fadhel Kaboub and Bill Black explained here recently, even if it were possible to create some inadequate public programs at the state level, they will stall the progressive agenda.Malcolm Reavell of Modern Money Scotland talks to Steve about the parallel situation he and his compatriots are facing. Scotland’s annual budget is determined and controlled by Westminster, the Parliament of the UK.Every year they get a block grant from Westminster according to certain calculations, and that block grant is supposed to provide enough money for the Scottish government to do whatever it has to do. It's a totally artificial constraint, and it is used to prove that Scotland can't manage its own finances and it's too poor.The Scottish government is criticized for not taking sufficient action to combat climate change, for not properly supporting the health service, and for the schools being underfunded. Of course, just like in the states, any money spent on one of these programs reduces the available funds for the others.Malcolm and Steve share their histories as MMT activists trying to contribute to a new movement. They both relied heavily on familiar experts like Mitchell, Mosler, Hail, and many, many others. Some, like Steve Keen and Mark Blyth, they see as adjacent or “broad MMT.”Modern Money Scotland and Real Progressives have a common origin story as Facebook groups. We often hear the charge that MMT is US-centric, so it’s a pleasure to have guests from other parts of the world to compare and contrast our mutual journeys as well as differing political and social conditions. For example, Brexit disrupted the trucking industry in Scotland well before COVID disrupted supply chains for the rest of us.Whether you call it football or soccer, our listeners will recognize Malcolm’s approach to talking MMT to the uninitiated.Well, just imagine this. If all the goals ever scored had to be paid back, who would you pay them back to? ... Supposing they had a ledger. Every time a football team had a goal scored against them, there was a debit marked against them.Then if you ended up with a net balance, you had more goals scored against you than you've scored, how would you settle that account?For more information about Modern Money Scotland and the Scottish National Party, listen to our episode 105, The Case for Scottish Independence with Karin Van Sweeden.Malcolm Reavell is a co-founder of Modern Money Scotland. According to his Twitter bio, he is an “Ex-Aircraft engineer, retired IT guy, internationally renowned composer, now decomposing, still #MMT though.”modernmoney.scot@malcolm_reavell@ModernMoneyScot

Steve’s guest, Dr. Jason Hickel, is an economic anthropologist whose research focuses on global inequality, political economy, post-development and ecological economics. After listening to this episode, “degrowth” will become part of your vocabulary. For MMTers, it is a natural fit.Before unpacking the implications of degrowth, we need to understand how the language of growth has served to justify the exploitative ravages of capitalism and, to paraphrase Lenin, its highest stage – imperialism.Jason tracks inequality between the global South and North from the industrial revolution and the colonial era to the present day. You don’t need to be an economic historian to see that growth in the north relied on forms of appropriation from the south. As Marx pointed out in the 19th century, price inequalities are not natural; they are induced through geopolitical and commercial power.So in the colonial era, of course, you drove down wages by enclosing Commons and dispossessing people and destroying subsistence economies to create massive unemployed people. Today it is through a variety of different mechanisms, the structural adjustment programs that were imposed across the global south by the World Bank and the IMF, which are controlled by the US government primarily.G-7 countries made massive cuts in public sector employment as well as labor and environmental standards. Neoliberal structural adjustment programs of the 1970s and 80s further induced price inequalities. Today countries of the global South are heavily dependent on foreign currency and are forced to compete to attract foreign investment. They are in a global race to the bottom to deliver cheap labor and resources to multinational companies effectively as tribute.This is why I come to degrowth from the perspective of anti-imperialism, recognizing that we live in an imperialist world economy. Degrowth is a demand for ending those patterns of net appropriation that sustains such high levels of access consumption in rich nations ... Rich countries should reduce the resources to get back within sustainable levels, while poor countries should reclaim their resources, mobilizing them around meeting human needs with throughput converging globally at a level that's consistent with universal welfare and ecological stability. That is the world we should be imagining and calling for.Jason and Steve discuss the gross inadequacies of the GDP as an indicator of growth and the need to break from the ideology that defines growth as a positive, desirable goal or outcome. GDP only counts commodities regardless of their social value or harm. It doesn’t distinguish between $100 of books or bullets. It says nothing about whether people’s needs are met. As an alternative to GDP, Jason leans toward a dashboard approach instead of the Genuine Prosperity Index.Understanding MMT shows the way to meet the main objectives of degrowth. Jason adds that the MMT proposal for thinking about taxation - i.e., not as a way of funding public activity but as a way of pulling demand out of the economy - can be applied to ecological economics as a tool for reducing excess resource and energy use. Dr. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is Associate Editor of the journal World Development and serves on the Statistical Advisory Panel for the UN Human Development Report and the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe.Jason's research focuses on global inequality, political economy, post-development and ecological economics, which are the subjects of his two most recent books: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.@jasonhickel on TwitterJasonhickel.org

Scott Ferguson serves as editor of the Money on the Left (MotL) Editorial Collective and co-host of the Money on the Left podcast. In July, he was guest speaker at Real Progressives’ event, RP Live. This week, Macro N Cheese is presenting his talk, Money and the Limits of Sovereignty, in its entirety, along with most of the Q&A discussion.Trying to summarize the presentation would be doing it a disservice. The idea of sovereignty is one that has been a point of discussion – and a certain amount of controversy – among the MMT community for some time. The work of MotL has contributed enormously to expanding our understanding and considering it in a new, multi-faceted light.Scott begins with the semantic history of the term “sovereignty” and its use in 14th or 15th century Europe to introduce a new conception of political rule, though not always with consistency. It has been used to justify political philosophy on both the left and right.Yet fundamentally, for us, the logic of sovereignty is violent because it denies that everything in this world is interdependent—which is to say, meaningfully and necessarily intertwined--in both social and ecological senses.Meanwhile, we contend that sovereignty as a concept is false because everything, in our interpretation actually is interdependent, no matter how much the logics or institutions of sovereignty pretend they are not.Interdependence opens opportunities for participation and cooperation as well as competition. We could replace “sovereignty” with the language of monetary “capacity,” “power,” and “agency” as well as “sustainability” and “resilience.”We tend to equate money with private exchange, revenue-driven relations, and the profit motive. We operate under the specter of privation. MMT teaches us money is not a zero-sum game; scarcity is a social construct. Scott suggests we extend the vision to political and social relations more generally.The second half of the episode contains Q&A discussion that followed Scott’s presentation. After listening to the episode, we suggest you read the transcript. The complete text of Scott’s presentation is available on our transcript page and elsewhere on RealProgressives.org.Scott Ferguson serves as editor for The Money on the Left Editorial Collective. He is a research scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainability Prosperity and co-host of Money on the Left podcast. Scott holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Film Studies.moneyontheleft.org@videotroph

Status Coup Media's co-founder and CEO Jordan Chariton joins Real Progressives’ founder and CEO Steve Grumbine for a discussion of our crumbling infrastructure, our inept and complicit corporate media monolith, and they share some ideas about our options going forward.This conversation seems like a perfectly segued culmination of Jordan’s recent RP Live presentation on the corporate media cover-up of issues like Flint’s notorious water crisis and climate change related issues as well as last week’s Macro N Cheese episode on infrastructure with Bob Hockett. As Jordan has repeatedly asserted, the infrastructure issues plaguing Flint, MI are prevalent in hundreds of other cities across the US right now. Flint is the story of America: deindustrialization, the offshoring of jobs, privatization, and the controlled demolition of the working class. In this case, it was the water supply.The financial constraints of a state budget, the corruption of politicians, and an inept media apparatus came together to poison an entire city through apathy and greed.And again, seven and a half years later, the pipes have still not been replaced. So, from a federal perspective, as we always talk about, of course, they had the money to do all of this. They could have sent the Army Corps of Engineers in the next day. Each Flint resident could be getting a monthly stipend or Medicare for All.Steve calls it a textbook case of environmental racism as well as a model for neglect of the public good while extracting profit from the very things people cannot live without. While the situation in Flint is extreme, it’s not entirely unique. There are contaminated water supplies across the US. The hashtag “water is life” was born at the time of struggle over the Dakota Access Pipeline. Nestlé is trying to take California’s water while the state is literally on fire.Status Coup has uncovered the many levels of corruption that led to the poisoning of the citizens of Flint as well as the careful cover-up of these crimes. Meanwhile, local and mainstream media have willfully ignored the evidence.Steve and Jordan talk about the state of electoral politics and the need for divergent groups of activists and workers to unite and assert the kind of power that will be felt at the top.Jordan Chariton, Status Coup CEO, is an independent progressive journalist who’s worked inside and outside the belly of the corporate media beast for over a decade. He has worked at Fox, MSNBC, and The Young Turks, before starting Status Coup. His team’s investigative work is attracting attention and expanding their reach.@JordanChariton@StatusCoup

This week Steve brings back Robert Hockett to help us understand the big “I” word - infrastructure.Our focus on particular infrastructure depends on the social or public goals we have in mind. If we are a society that values mobility, we will concern ourselves with transportation infrastructure. If this were the 19th or early 20th centuries, we would be prioritizing infrastructure that facilitates industrial productivity. There’s also such a thing as “soft infrastructure.”It's probably worth noting that a lot of public policy discussion these days seems to be about social productivity. Right? To what extent are we adding to the material wealth of our society? To what extent are we improving our material well-being, society-wise, and we can think of productivity along those lines, right? To what extent are we producing better material lives for ourselves?Robert and Steve dive into global supply chains, discussing how the Biden regime may be realizing the old methods of outsourcing our domestic supply of critical inputs to producers abroad isn’t working anymore. The pandemic’s disruption of the supply of semi-conductors, which predominantly come from China, caused a US shortage. On the one hand there’s some awareness of the value of nationalizing production, but the Biden administration seems unwilling to spend the money required to invest in the necessary infrastructure.Bringing production back to the US would create jobs and reduce our reliance on imports, but the question remains: what about the inevitable environmental impact of increased domestic manufacturing? The need to radically evolve our energy production and resource extraction methods is more detrimental than ever as we face economic, and more importantly, ecological, catastrophe. Robert and Steve discuss the need for a more egalitarian distribution of technology to maximize our ability to be more productive while becoming more efficient and reducing our collective footprint. It’s important to be reminded that any given policy has social implications, productive economic implications, environmental implications, and even mental health implications.This episode is dense with useful information including, but not limited to, Senate procedures, political posturing, and America’s role in the world for better or worse.Robert Hockett is the Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Visiting Professor of Finance at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and Senior Counsel at Westwood Capital, LLC. He specializes in the law, economics, and philosophy of money, finance, and enterprise organization in their theoretical and practical, their positive and normative, and their local, national, and transnational dimensions.Follow Robert on Twitter @rch371

Marianne Garneau is a labor educator and organizer with the historic IWW, Industrial Workers of the World. She’s the publisher of the website Organizing.Work.According to Marianne, real-life examples of workers taking successful action anywhere, inspires, empowers and emboldens workers everywhere. The crucial tactic our labor movement currently lacks is the ability to exercise the muscle of collective action, acting in an organized, harmonious fashion, building coordinated disruption that defies authority, while spreading trust, preparedness and the very habit of defiance.Labor has undergone enormous changes from the days of worker-powered assembly lines and shop floors, when workers could engage in day-to-day refusals. One tactic was “whistle bargaining.” The shop steward would blow a whistle, bringing production to a halt. The workers formed a circle around the foreman and voiced their grievances. Another blow of the whistle could send everyone back to work.Steve recounts the “work to rule” he engaged in as a member of CWA. By fastidiously following every regulation, every safety procedure, the workforce was able to slow things down to a crawl.Today labor has been reorganized and decentralized, so strategy must adapt to modern conditions. It all comes down to workers understanding the workflow and the ways the employer depends on them.The need for workers to communicate is as essential as ever. The means of communication are corporate-owned and can be heavily monitored and censored, again requiring creative adaptation. Marianne describes a tactic used by workers for a food delivery service in Canada. They couldn’t contact each other through the app, so they organized the old-fashioned way, person-to-person, identifying each other by company logo and approaching the vehicles.Marianne and Steve talk about the history of organized labor and the significance of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935....a lot of people in the left and in the labor movement still look back on that as a triumph for labor, which in some ways it was. But it was also meant to really regulate and tame the labor movement.For a movement to build capacity, it must come from the bottom up. To survive, it needs to grow roots, so it is never dependent on individual leaders. Real power comes from mass collective action. Marianne Garneau is an organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World, a labor educator, and the publisher of Organizing Work (organizing.work) @OrganizingWork on Twitter 

When Bill Black introduced us to Patrick Lovell and Eric Vaughan, they were just wrapping up production of their documentary series, The Con, about the 2008 great financial crisis. More than a year has passed and we’ve become partners on a podcast and video series, The New Untouchables: The Pecora Files. Both series have a second season; TNU’s is five episodes in, and season 2 of The Con is not yet scheduled for release. Stay tuned.The episode opens with Steve telling Patrick and Eric about the responses to both series. Everyone was affected by the GFC, but many are still struggling to understand it. Eric jumps in to warn we must stop thinking of it as a past event. Just look out your window. We can expect an epidemic of homelessness with the coming spate of evictions and foreclosures.Patrick and Eric originally came at The Con from opposite directions as each sought to unravel the process. Patrick had been looking for the culprits at the top of the food chain – the CEOs and their ilk. Eric was interested in the victims, who, as we have learned, meet very specific criteria and are just as necessary to the process as the corrupt executives and absentee regulators.Recent news reports are full of stories about upcoming evictions as the COVID-era moratoriums are coming to an end. Congress has provided $47 billion in rental relief assistance, of which only about $3 billion has reached the people who need it. Patrick compares this to the ‘08 mortgage crisis when, after the trillions spent to prop up the banks, $50 billion was provided by the federal government to prevent foreclosures, to allow homeowners to modify their loans, to prevent foreclosures. Similar to rental relief, most of the money never reached those who needed it, due to a tricky process involving insurance and middlemen. The end result is the same, a corporate entity comes in and vacuums up all the foreclosed properties on the cheap.Regulators are cops. Fraud and predation are crimes -- some on the books, some not. When it’s legal, it’s a result of the revolving door between the financial industry and politics. Changing the laws to ease up on corruption is itself corruption.This episode lays out the fraud recipe step by step, from the top of the chain to the bottom, as fees generate fees. It’s not a narrow path. To make it work, they need assessors and underwriters who are willing to sell their souls. Patrick and Eric explain the whys and hows of liars’ loans and documentation fraud, among other practices.When you see how strategic and cunning the predators had to be to entrap entire poor and minority communities, you must question why anyone would call the victims irresponsible. Yet we continue to hear it. Eric talks about our culture of victim-blaming, which allows us to point the finger at Addie Polk instead of Angelo Mozilo. What regulation we have is aimed in the wrong direction.And so, we have regulators whose only criminal referrals are coming from the banks against private citizens. And we're not getting criminal referrals from those same regulators because they're looking at the banks, I would term that systemic victim-blaming.As cynical as many of us have become, whenever we hear stories about the extent of the elite control fraud and predation it still makes the blood boil. THE CON will be available September 21st on Amazon, Apple TV, and XBoxPatrick S. Lovell is a 30-year veteran of media production. He is co-creator of Real Progressives’ series, “The New Untouchables: The Pecora Files.” Patrick is producer and protagonist of the documentary limited series: THE CON.Eric S. Vaughan is an award-winning commercial director/producer with extensive experience in leading-edge media production from narrative films to VR/immersive experiences. THE CON is his long-form documentary series directorial debut. Eric is co-creator of Real Progressives’ series, “The New Untouchables: The Pecora Files.”@PatrickLovell1@TheConSeries@UntouchablesNew

Esha’s last visit to Macro N Cheese inspired Steve to read Lenin’s What Is to Be Done and John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, igniting a new interest in political theory and revolutions. This, in turn, lit a fire under others on the Real Progressives’ team. In the past half year, we’ve been learning about the Russian, French and Haitian Revolutions. (If you haven’t yet heard last week’s episode on Haiti with Pascal Robert, what are you waiting for?)Esha’s Historic.ly podcast aims to decolonize history and debunk myths and misinformation taught in school and on corporate media. She has now added “Late Nights with Lenin” and “Soviet Summers” to her programming line-up.This week Esha is back to lead us through 1917. The Russian Revolution often focuses on individual players: Tsar Nicholai, Kerensky, Lenin. In fact, Russia’s fate was inextricably entwined with and affected by massive geopolitical shifts as the 19th century division of the world amongst the imperial powers of France and Britain was threatened by a late-bloomer, Germany, and unrest in Russia.In reality, the object of the struggle of the British and French bourgeoisie is to seize the German colonies and to ruin a competing nation which has displayed a more rapid rate of economic development. And, in pursuit of this noble aim, the “advanced” democratic nations are helping the savage tsarist regime to strangle Poland, Ukraine, and so on, and to throttle revolution in Russia more thoroughly. - Lenin, “War and Russian Social Democracy”Esha compares the players to those on the global stage today and constantly reminds us to question the old narratives. After World War I ended, 14 nations conspired to attack Russia, yet it’s called a “civil war.” Why? American and British newspapers published puff pieces about the Tsar Nicholas, while portraying the Bolsheviks as brutes and tyrants. Why? Whose interests were served by perpetuating such myths?Esha’s enthusiasm and delight are infectious. She describes events as if she had been there and people as if she knew them. It is hard to avoid finding heroes and villains in history. We learn to discern propaganda so we can study history and theory and consider how to shape the world we want to build.Esha Krishnaswamy is a writer and media critic whose focus is on history, foreign policy, and Modern Monetary Theory. She is host of Late Nights with Lenin and Soviet Summers. Find her work at historicly.substack.com@eshaLegal@historic_ly

In the US we are taught history from the point of view of the colonizers. The heroes are the victors, and the victors are the ruling class - the oppressors and exploiters - reconfigured to appear dashing and noble. When truth falls outside of this heroic narrative, it’s distorted or buried.Our guest this week, Pascal Robert, pulls back the curtain to reveal the story behind the myths of the Haitian Revolution. His work appears in Black Agenda Report and many other publications, and he’s co-host of the “This is Revolution” podcast.The Haitian Revolution was an earth-shaking event that changed the course of history. It was the first successful slave revolt, resulting in the first Black republic. The stakes were enormous: the 13 colonies of the British empire combined brought less value than Haiti brought to France. Because of its sugar, rum, coffee and tobacco, pre-revolutionary Haiti, called Saint Domingue, was possibly the most valuable colony in the western hemisphere, giving a clue as to why the plantation system was so brutal.American exceptionalism extends to believing slavery in the US was the most brutal and vast in the world, but Robert’s evocative descriptions of the brutality of the plantation system are beyond imagination. When the revolution arrived, the liberation fighters were well-prepared and motivated.Robert is a riveting storyteller with a potent message. His take on “white supremacy,” provides a taste:A large part of how I view the history of slavery, race, and racism comes from the fact that I am Haitian … I come from a country where slaves destroyed the three greatest European empires at the peak of their power. I don’t see white people as supreme at all. I'm not mystified by white power in any way.The history of Saint Domingue is riddled with class and racial strife that carries forward to modern day Haiti. Robert explains the roots of those divisions, the material conditions that created them. He tells us why he considers Mackandal’s Rebellion - three decades earlier - the opening salvo in the revolution. He debunks the glory of Toussaint L’Ouverture and shows Jean-Jacques Dessalines to be the true hero. Robert brings us vivid tales of military strategy, geopolitical missteps, and voodoo.However much you think you know about the Haitian Revolution, this episode will excite and enlighten you.Pascal Robert is an essayist and political commentator whose work covers Black politics, global affairs, and Haitian politics. His work has appeared in the Washington Spectator, Black Commentator, Alternet, AllHipHop.com, and The Huffington Post. He is a regular contributor to the online publication Black Agenda Report and is the current co-host of the THIS IS REVOLUTION PODCAST, which is live streamed via YouTube and relevant social media on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9 pm eastern standard time and Saturdays at Noon. Pascal Robert is a graduate of Hofstra University and Boston University School of Law.@[email protected]/c/thisisrevolutionpodcast