Macro N Cheese

The Covid19 pandemic is much more than a public health catastrophe; it has highlighted and exacerbated economic, social, and environmental crises on an unprecedented scale. While Congress sits on their hands, a learning-by-doing experiment is already underway at the Federal Reserve. With more than 40 million Americans out of work, the Fed appears ready to fulfill its congressional mandate to both maximize employment and promote stable prices. Indeed, the strongest signal that this time things can be different is the opening of the Fed’s new Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF), which promises to buy both existing and future state and municipal debt. -- from “Overcoming Covid19 Requires Rethinking University Finance” (see article link below) Our guests, Ben Wilson and Scott Ferguson, are working with others in the MMT community to develop the plan for a new university-issued currency, the Uni, with backing by the Federal Reserve. Universities are not unlike small states or municipalities. They provide jobs and living quarters, engage in commerce both on- and off-campus. They collect rent on their vast real estate holdings. They also behave like banks, providing students with accounts for purchasing books and supplies. The university’s stated mission is to contribute to the greater good, produce educated citizens, and be cooperative partners with the surrounding communities. According to our guests, the Uni’s value extends beyond immediate financial practicalities. The project can use the university as a proxy for reformulating the macro economy on a micro-scale, creating real-world experience pushing the modern money agenda forward. We can ask ourselves what we want money to do for us and how it can meet the needs of our communities. Rather than wait for the federal government to act, we can structure it on our own terms. Benjamin C. Wilson is an Associate Professor of Economics at the State University of New York at Cortland and a research scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. @autogestion77 on Twitter Scott Ferguson is an Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies in the Department of Humanities & Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida and a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He is co-host of Money on the Left podcast featured by Monthly Review Online. @videotroph on Twitter https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/scott-ferguson-benjamin-wilson-william-saas-maxximilian-seijo-overcoming-covid-19-requires-rethinking-university-finance/ Read about the Uni in the demands issued by the Resident Assistant/Peer Mentor union at UMass Amherst. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1psWUI4PGVVYOJ9flQiwsWKWHK9qhdLPFjonToNo4R7M/mobilebasic?fbclid=IwAR2pKwOHzggugNSJsrrQGFtm1Bl7D-1eYJDfQNgzD4s5yIfnu2VgmkJCTkc The Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity http://www.global-isp.org/

This week we welcome Richard Dien Winfield, a rare candidate for national office who is running on the Federal Job Guarantee and Medicare for All. It’s no surprise, then, that Richard is fully onboard with Modern Monetary Theory and spoke at the MMT Conference in Stonybrook last September. Steve talks with him about his new book, Democracy Unchained: How We Should Fulfill Our Social Rights and Save Self-Government, and the platform for his current campaign. Richard is running in Georgia’s special election for the US Senate. His campaign is founded on correcting the failure to recognize and enforce our social rights, which he sees as the key to remedy blockages of opportunity that hobble our democracy. Throughout this interview, he frequently returns to the concept of social rights as the rights that are not in our constitution but should be. These include the right to a decent livelihood, healthcare, education at all levels, the right to balance work and family, and to level the playing field between employer and employee. Martin Luther King said that without a job and income, one can have neither life, liberty, nor the opportunity to pursue happiness. Richard eloquently connects the dots between our social rights, demonstrating their interdependence. How can you solve homelessness without a job guarantee, which will require a higher minimum wage than the $15-an-hour we normally hear about. The job guarantee would, of course, include full benefits of pension and healthcare -- though we wouldn’t need the latter if we had Medicare for All, which is another necessary social right: without health, we can’t exercise our freedoms. There are two exacerbating factors disempowering employees. The first is globalization and free trade, due to the ease with which companies can find the lowest wages and relocate. The second factor is the rise of the gig economy. Employers can use technological advancements so that workers are on their own and scattered around the globe; the employer doesn’t have to provide overhead or face worker solidarity. Richard describes the UBI as setting up a 2-tiered society: those condemned to the poverty income of the UBI alone, and those who receive the UBI plus wages from their jobs. Instead of eliminating economic disadvantage, it sanctions it. Considering the threat of fascism, we look again to an FJG. For all the praise given to the social democracies of northern Europe, the fact that they don't have a job guarantee has left them vulnerable to the kind of xenophobia and bigotry that has caused workers in other countries to vote for extreme right-wingers. When there aren't enough jobs, a wave of immigrants is seen as a threat. Universal healthcare and generous unemployment insurance do not replace the need for jobs. Richard and Steve go through all the social rights in depth and, sometimes, from a new angle. Listeners will hear something they might not have considered about racism, sexual harassment, unionization, corporate compensation, reparations, the needs of families, and much more. Have you ever heard a candidate demanding legal care for all? Listen to the episode! Richard Dien Winfield is an American philosopher and Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Georgia. He has supported striking workers, organized sugarcane laborers, and joined unionizing efforts at UGA. Winfield was a candidate for U.S. Representative from Georgia's 10th Congressional District in 2018 and has declared his candidacy for the 2020 United States Senate special election in Georgia. WinfieldforSenate.com @WinfieldForUS on Twitter https://bookshop.org/books/democracy-unchained-how-we-should-fulfill-our-social-rights-and-save-self-government/9781950794133 Find his books on Amazonhttps://www.amazon.com/Richard-Dien-Winfield/e/B001HP3FH2?ref_=dbs_p_pbk_r00_abau_000000

J.D. ALT is an architect who has spent much of his career researching, inventing, and visualizing things that he hoped might improve the quality-of-life and prosperity of collective society. Gradually, he came to two realizations: first, the kinds of things he was envisioning (free-to-ride downtown people-movers and affordable housing strategies) would never be undertaken by a profit-oriented corporate business model and, second, the only other possible financier--the federal government--was "broke" and hopelessly in debt. Alarmed and discouraged by these realizations, he stopped thinking about new things to build and started investigating how--and why--it could possibly be true that collective society was, "for lack of money," so helplessly unable to build things it both needed and could dramatically benefit from. So begins J.D. Alt’s biography on Amazon. This week he joins Steve to talk about his new book, Paying Ourselves to Save the Planet: A Layman's Explanation of Modern Monetary Theory. The interview begins with J.D. describing the insights he gained once he understood that fiat money actually refers to reserves and the other money we use, bank-created money and cash money, are claims on those reserves which are held in the reserve banking system and never leave. They are digital entries on a score sheet. One method for creating reserves is when banks make loans (creating bank-money). This is a claim on that bank’s reserves at the central bank and is how money for private enterprise is created. Since private corporations only engage in producing goods and services generating profits, it’s safe to say that bank-money is only created for profitable endeavors. Therefore, the myriad of things we need as a society that don't bring in a profit must be created by public enterprise. Where does the money for public enterprise come from? This leads to the heart of MMT, and J.D. breaks down the distinction between it and the standard theory of money. In his book, J.D. tallies up the public enterprise goods and services we require and puts together a projection of what they’ll cost. When compared to how much the standard money theory believes the government can either collect in taxes or borrow, it becomes clear that we must look at a different way to finance the public needs. Steve and J.D. discuss just a few examples of the cost of the climate crisis. Much of it involves paying people to mitigate and adapt to climate change, which includes the expense for farmers to sequester carbon in their soil and workers to build machines that scrub carbon out of the atmosphere. Ironically, the bottom line is instead of costing the people a lot of money, a lot of people will be getting paid. J.D. Alt is an architect who writes about the economy, the climate crisis, housing, and the needs of humanity. His books include Paying Ourselves to Save the Planet, The Millennials’ Money, The Architect Who Couldn’t Sing, Low Earth Orbit, and Housing for the Masses, Dwellings for the Soul. Find him and his books at JDAlt.com @JD_ALT on Twitter

A discussion of racial taxation and private digital currency may seem like two disparate subjects. Raúl Carrillo’s genius is his ability to explain these things in such a way that their intrinsic connections are unmistakable. Just as there is racialized taxation, we also have racialized surveillance, and private digital currency is definitely in the surveillance business. Previous episodes have spoken of the effects of racial taxation, creating a disparity in public schools due to the inequities in local property tax funding schemes that pay for education. The same kind of taxpayer pressures that have defunded the schools have combined with the starving of federal support for the states, making it hard for local governments to provision themselves. States and municipalities resort to collecting fines and fees through petty crime designation, using the courts and incarceration as a funding source. The burden falls heavily on poor and oppressed minorities. These problems come from neoliberalism’s core embrace of austerity. Mass unemployment results in near-mass incarceration. A theme running through Raúl’s scholarship and our collective activism is that if something is a right, or is integral to due process and constitutional safeguards, then it should be funded by the federal government. Otherwise, what does it mean to have fundamental rights in this country? The government is willing to spend unquantifiable sums defending the rights of property while insisting it’s too expensive to provide jobs, healthcare, and housing. When the government doesn’t meet the people’s needs, it creates a vacuum that forces them into debt, turning to the predatory lenders who have built an industry on the backs of the needy. And now Wall Street is increasingly serving fewer kinds of investors. When Wall Street decides it’s no longer profitable to prey on the poor, Silicon Valley is offering an alternative that is predatory in its own way. Raúl recently produced a Black Paper on Libra, Facebook’s foray into the digital currency market. Most cryptocurrency doesn’t have retail value, so much of the activity is through speculation. Libra is an attempt to create a stabilized private money, which introduces a new set of dangers. Steve and Raúl devote a good portion of the interview looking at the different levels of threats that are posed by turning over the reins of currency creation to tech corporations. Libra is connected to Facebook and Uber, but Google and Amazon can’t be far behind with their own projects. Silicon Valley is now in the debt game. With public money, we can still demand some degree of protection for our privacy rights. Facebook’s entire business model is based on surveillance; it knows what you’ve bought, where you’ve been, what you like, and who you hang out with. Police have been using Facebook’s facial recognition to identify Black Lives Matter protesters. It’s hard to imagine enforcing legal protections when Facebook has been breaking promises to (defanged) regulators for years. For the US, public-private partnerships have crowded out government spending on social needs. For us MMTers, using the public purse for the public purpose is of seminal importance. A private currency, spying on us all, cannot be tolerated. We need to multi-task - wed the anti-racist, decarceration, and abolitionist fights with a vision of public money spent in a way that allows people to flourish. Raúl Carrillo is the Board Chair of the Modern Money Network and a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He sits on the boards of the National Jobs for all Network and the Our Money campaign. @RaulACarrillo on Twitter Reflections: Challenging Monetary Sanctions in the Era of Racial Taxation https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7rp8g89c Banking on Surveillance: The Libra Black Paper: https://ourfinancialsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Libra-Black-Paper-FINAL-2.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1qqjecm45wHuNUljezfm19qCLg034VqgL2rQAwjqsr__B_Zfulzt0OKLs

Our guest is Jengis Osman, an activist and labor organizer who was led to Modern Monetary Theory through his life experiences and those of his family and the people he works with. After graduating from university, he struggled to find work and questioned why it had been easier for his grandparents who had immigrated to Australia from wartorn Cyprus in the 1970s. When he taught English to new immigrants, they asked the same question: why aren’t there enough jobs? Jengis now lives in the Northern Territory, a remote section of Australia. The effects of austerity are always harshest on the most vulnerable groups, but the living conditions of Australia’s indigenous population also reflect that country’s unique history of brutal colonial oppression. Before colonization the people had an abundance of food and water; their kinship systems worked for them. The colonizers tore communities apart with forced relocation to different regions with different customs and a foreign language. Children were uprooted and sent to mission schools far from their families. Colonialism effectively made slaves of the indigenous people and austerity assured their continued suffering. When Jengis discovered Bill Mitchell’s blog (http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/), the pieces began falling into place. Much of this interview takes us through the MMT fundamentals that brought reality into focus for so many of us, starting with the difference between a currency creator and a currency user. Jengis talks about Pavlina Tcherneva’s example of the “hut tax” imposed by the British in Malawi as a coercive measure that provided the colonists with a labor force by creating a need for the pound sterling. Understanding that taxes don’t fund government expenditures at the national level leads to awareness of the vast array of unnecessary political choices that cause pain at every level, including unemployment and homelessness. Fracking in the Northern Territory will damage the water supply and prolongs the negative impact of fossil fuels. Yet when the central government doesn’t spend enough in the territories and states, regional governments are forced to find private investors whose interests don’t align with that of the community. This brings us back to the difference between a currency creator and a currency user. Steve often asks our podcast guests how they introduce MMT to the uninitiated. Jengis talks about money as akin to points on a scoreboard -- the referee cannot run out of them. Money is a measure, like an inch or a mile. Those numbers are a statistical artifact and without a context, they make no sense. The economy isn't an abstraction that sits above us and is not a “thing” we should be working to serve. The economy is us. We want to focus on achieving real outcomes, like employment opportunities, tackling climate change, and creating the kind of world we want to live in. Jengis Osman currently works as a union organizer. He has had many occupations over the years including a substantial time unemployed as neoliberalism has decimated the idea of secure employment, providing sufficient work for all and forced education and training onto the individual rather than a collective responsibility. These jobs include a terrible stint in the retail sector, a call center as a researcher, a garbage man, and an ELICOS teacher. Check out his blog: https://jengis.org/ @JengisO on Twitter