We’ve had several episodes on Brexit, but this is the first time we’re talking about it with a Scottish nationalist. Kairin Van Sweeden is the executive director of Modern Money Scotland and works with the SNP, the Scottish National Party.Joining the union was forced upon the Scottish people in 1707 against the wishes of the majority. With the seat of government and economic power concentrated in London, the needs of Scotland are not a priority in the UK. Despite the continual growth of the independence movement, they couldn’t get it passed in the 2014 referendum. By the time of the Brexit vote in 2016, many realized their mistake as the majority in Scotland voted to stay in the European Union.Scotland has an abundance of resources, with a huge farming sector and an excess of renewable energy potential in the form of tidal and wind energy. They have 60% of the UK’s ocean water but only 8% of the population. Enter a problem. Scotland has an aging (shrinking) population and needs to attract young people. The result of the Brexit vote led to an immigrant exodus.Kairin’s anti-Brexit sentiment isn’t a signal of approval of the European Union. As an MMTer she understands the powerlessness coming from the lack of monetary sovereignty. Scotland is at the mercy of the Bank of London in a situation not so different from the EU nations’ impotence at the hands of the troika.We can see that neoliberalism is built into the EU. You cannot have more than a three percent deficit just across the board for all countries, you know, and that's complete nonsense. Of course, that can't possibly apply to all different countries. And different countries have different requirements as well. Greece is never going to be anything like Germany, so you can't expect it to be an industrial powerhouse in the way that Germany is.Kairin and Steve talk about the neoliberal mindset which is recognizable regardless of nationality. We’ve all heard of the Northern Europeans who blame Greece for its economic problems, but Kairin tells us of a former editor of The Sun newspaper who was recently online saying, "Yeah, that would be good if Scotland got their independence because I'm sick of paying for them out of my taxes."The COVID pandemic is opening many eyes. In recent years the UK’s national health care system has been eroded by privatization. Consumer choice is portrayed as a human right. But the public health crisis demonstrated that money can be created when politicians choose to do so. People must now ask why we’ve had decades of austerity.Kairin Van Sweeden is Executive Director of Modern Money Scotland, Convener @Yes Edinburgh North and Leith, and North East Coordinator of Scottish National Party Common Weal Group.@[email protected]

Recently our friend Bill Black introduced us to June Carbone. He suggested she could tell us how the job guarantee fits into cutting edge research on the family. June holds the Robina Chair in Law, Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota Law School and writes about the intersection of family, the economy, and politics. In this episode, June takes Steve through the evolution of the American family as it transitioned to meet the economic needs of modern society. She says what excites her is not so much what things are, but why they change. When the US was founded, it was an agricultural society. The foundation of the colonial era family was the farm, owned and controlled by men and primarily a self-contained unit. Industrialization and urbanization disrupted the system. The entire economy became dramatically more insecure, with boom-bust economic cycles. Women are no longer helping in the fields.They are the moral centers of the family. What's their job? Well, we think of it as sparkling kitchen floors from the 50s. But the real job of the women in the separate spheres is the creation of a new upper-middle class. It is to have the girls prevent the boys from getting them pregnant. Why? Because if the girls get pregnant too early, the boys have to marry them and that derails the whole enterprise. You’ve got to keep the boys in school. They've got to get the job. They've got to get through the first couple of years when they're working their way up, and then they can afford a wife.June talks to Steve about the changing economic conditions through the 19th and 20th centuries, and their effect on demographics and family behavioral trends. Race and class distinctions were sharp. Patterns of migration during WW II and the postwar period have had long-term effects, especially on African Americans. She explains how trends like divorce rates and single parenting reflect economic precarity. The Reagan years saw massive increases in both instability and inequality.By today’s unrealistic model of the urban middle class family, young people have cycled through the first three or four jobs, and have settled on a career. They’re able to marry and have children with the financial security to weather a downturn or allow the spouse to go back to school. As June points out, the majority of the population cannot get there. Well, start thinking of what it would mean to empower workers the way we empower employers. The corporate world wants flexibility, the ability to move plants abroad, to a different state, to automate, to sell one unit and buy another unit, to reinvent the iPhone. They have the iPhone replace the PC. We build in disruption in the corporate model. What would it mean to provide stability and security for people?Steve and June go through much of the interview without mentioning the job guarantee, yet there’s no doubt June is constructing the case for it. Our listeners may never have heard it approached from these angles. It will give you a whole new perspective.June Carbone holds the Robina Chair of Law, Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota School of Law. She is coauthor of RED FAMILIES V. BLUE FAMILIES: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (Oxford, 2010) and MARRIAGE MARKETS: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family (Oxford 2014)http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=165168@carbonej on Twitter

What can we say about the job guarantee that hasn’t already been said?  Quite a bit, actually, as you’ll see in this and upcoming episodes.This week Fadhel Kaboub is talking to a mellower Steve, fresh from the hospital and still on the mend from Covid19. Fadhel begins with the reality that capitalism is a brutal system that constantly leaves people behind. It’s driven by technological change, and as this develops, we require some workers with new skill sets, while others are rendered virtually obsolete. We don’t have an existing system bringing them into the new technology.We count on individual workers to do this on their own, to somehow anticipate technological change, take time and money from their own budget, so to speak, to invest in learning new skills that will be useful for this new industry that doesn't exist yet and somehow be ready to go to transition to those new jobs. And those jobs sometimes are in a different location. Sometimes they're completely in a different country, a different part of the world. So that is the absurdity of the system that we leave this up to individuals to struggle.A job guarantee will treat training and education as part of the job. Advancing technology tends to be more capital intensive, requiring a smaller workforce. What do we do with all the surplus labor? Fadhel explains why it’s not enough to provide a basic safety net, such as healthcare and social services, though they are desperately required as well. Work is more than an income, with well-proven benefits to individuals and families beyond the paycheck. JG advocates like Pavlina Tcherneva and Fadhel speak of a “care economy” of the most valuable work from a broader human and social perspective. Fadhel says it’s “a social, economic and political consensus, a social contract that doesn't throw people under the bus as the economy changes over time.”Steve asks Fadhel about the job guarantee in a mixed economy and command economy. They discuss workers’ co-ops and the aversion, from some on the left, to state control. Fadhel reminds us the JG talks about federal funding. Everything else, from job creation to implementation and management, is done at the local level through a participatory democracy model.Some tricky questions arise. Who defines local?  Is it state, municipal, county?How many grassroots voices do we have in the decision-making process? Is all the money going to go to the same city council officials who will hand out these contracts to the same developers who exclude minority groups from access to jobs, who always invest in the wealthier part of town? So those are important details so that we don't end up feeding the system and recreating the same problem. So grassroots participation, community participation is important. It can't be just symbolic.Fadhel talks about the role of nonprofit organizations, which are important not only because they are existing organizations we don’t need to invent or create from scratch. They’re also in touch with the people who need the most services, so are in the best position to speak to what will benefit them.The interview covers the UBI, with enough information to handle any debate. Fadhel explains the meaning of “buffer stock,” with examples of how economists normally use the term. He reveals the real reason UBI is being heavily promoted by Silicon Valley.Steve and Fadhel look at the need for independent media like Real Progressives. Democracy without a fourth estate is not a democracy. The privatization and monopolization of the media over the past 40 years has served to destroy local journalism, meaning we don’t have full-time reporters covering local news, city councils, how the money is spent.This episode covers much more than can be...

Steve Grumbine has been in the hospital with Covid-19 complicated by pneumonia. We’re encouraged by his progress and expect to have him back in the saddle soon. Since he was unable to record a new interview this week, we’re reviving a 2017 conversation he had with Patricia Pino from the UK. Our listeners know her as co-host of the MMT Podcast, but this was recorded several months before that project was launched.  It’s amusing to revisit the past, comparing ourselves then and now. In 2017 Steve was still very much into a heavy metal, confrontational style. He was constantly being challenged by folks obsessed with the “Illuminati.” They were more willing to believe in Rothschild conspiracies than in the reality of sovereign fiat currency. In contrast, Patricia was remarkably optimistic, assuring us that we’re “almost there”... MMT is catching on.  American progressives had been frustrated by the results of the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and identified with the disappointment in the Labour Party’s defeat in the UK. Many of us saw similarities between Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie, though the electoral systems, political parties, and governing structures are quite different. Patricia enlightens us on both.  A large part of the discussion is about Brexit, which British liberals associate with racism and xenophobia. Patricia talks about the history of the European Union, a project that was sold to the public as a means of keeping the European countries united after WW2. Eventually, the neoliberal agenda slipped in by way of government spending treaties and single market agreements. Many still see in the EU the ideal of a united Europe and international cooperation. The extreme suffering of the Greeks is blamed on their own mismanagement. According to Steve, we can’t understand the Greek crisis without considering sectoral balances. Greece is a net importer.   They have no ability to really produce any kind of export activity, not at least at the level required to sustain their existence. And when they gave up their monetary sovereignty by joining the EU, they, in essence, gave up the ability to offset the fact that they're a net importer. And so now they're basically a debtor nation enslaved to the troika.   Eurozone countries that are net exporters, like Germany, are doing fine while non-sovereign countries that are net importers are struggling. This is as true of Greece as of Puerto Rico.  Patricia and Steve look at the concept of government debt in both the US and UK and agree that when the public understands how things actually work there will be millions of angry people ready to make demands and accept no compromise. Folks won’t need to understand economics to see the truth.  Patricia Pino is a London-based engineer, artist, and activist. She is co-host of The MMT Podcast and a research fellow at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.  @PatriciaNPino on Twitter  https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/  http://www.global-isp.org/patricia-pino/

Happy New Year!  Welcome to our first episode of 2021.  Among ourselves, we on the Macro N Cheese team often debate (argue) whether it’s possible to achieve our economic and political goals under the present system. We’re as susceptible to discouragement and despair as anyone else. This is why we love a guest like Emma Caterine whose optimism is rooted in experience and realism.  Emma’s message for 2021 is “organize!” To begin with, we must address the isolation that people are feeling while in the midst of the most heightened state of class war since the Great Depression. Everyone has lost a source of income - or they know somebody who has. Debt continues to accrue with no end in sight, and while people understand that this is widespread, they all experience it on a visceral, personal level. It’s our job to communicate with them. It’s our job to educate.  It’s clear we can’t expect much in the way of solutions or relief from the Biden administration. The president-elect has had a lifelong political commitment to the finance industry. He's a true believer in financial capital. When the government denies relief, that industry does very well; we have nowhere else to turn. Emma describes the provisions in the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which Biden co-authored. Class warfare is virtually written into the law.   The whole point of going over this is to say that the Biden administration is not only ideologically committed to the finance industry, but Biden is so committed to the finance industry that he will actually do things that hurt the economy overall, not just working people, but the economy overall, just to make short term profits for his friends in the industry.   On a positive note, there are groups doing great work. The Debt Collective initiated student loan strikes, which are a historic, successful attempt to inject class politics into the world of finance and debt. Make the Road NJ and NY, are mobilizing around workers and immigrant rights. During the pandemic, there have been many efforts to cancel rent, without much success. It comes down to the usual suspects: budgetary restrictions and means-testing for what little relief is available. The states are proclaiming their helplessness, but Emma pierces that veil.  Steve brings up the “moral hazard” argument, which is an all-purpose excuse for federal lawmakers to clutch their pearls and tighten the purse strings. Emma says it’s a term that neoclassical economists love to use.   The model is all nice and beautiful in its abstract vacuum world that is nothing like the real world that we actually live in. And that's a really important point, because these austerity politics, they're not pragmatic. They're not some kind of cost-cutting realism. It's an ideological belief that when times get tough, the worst off people should be the ones to shoulder the burden. It's not a mistake. It's not a hard reality. It is class warfare. It's an element of class war.   As is appropriate for the first episode of 2021, the final part of the interview looks at our goals for the coming year. We need to build on the enthusiasm for the Sanders campaign and the awareness and participation in Black Lives Matter. Emma urges us to focus on recruitment. Let’s not just rely on reaction to events, whether positive (AOC’s election) or negative (police shootings). She shares her experiences as an organizer in the labor movement and Democratic Socialists of America. We have a long way to go, but maybe it’s not impossible.  Emma Caterine is a lawyer and writer with more than a decade of experience working within economic justice, feminist, LGBTQ, and racial justice movements. Her legal practice...

Happy 100th!To our supporters, both old and new,Thank you for making this podcast a success exceeding our expectations.  For the story of Macro N Cheese and our 100th episode, please check out the “Extras” section on the episode web page.  realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-100-flying-with-sara-nelson  *   *   *   *   *  Sara Nelson is a labor leader with MMT bullets in her bandolier. She’s practical, wise, and filled with compassion for the workers she represents and those she doesn’t. She joins us fresh on the heels of another victory, celebrating the passage of the latest Covid-19 relief bill while admitting it’s not perfect.  She explains that her union’s strategy requires a multi-pronged attack and its success manifests on multiple fronts. They could only prevail because they are organized. Their battle began long before they arrived at the legislative process. They had already fought through the early rounds.  We brought capital to the demands. OK? … This is organizing in the workplace and saying capital is going to be disrupted if you don't work with us. So bringing our airlines to this political process was what made all the difference. And that's only possible if we organize in mass numbers and build that kind of power in the workplace because the only thing that is going to move people is if you actually move capital.  Sara shares astute observations of neoliberal maneuvers from Wall Street to Washington. She warns against those who ask “is it politically possible?” If you’re starting with that question, you’ve already lost. It’s up to us to make it politically possible.  Steve and Sara discuss the power derived from penetrating the deficit myth, pulling back the curtain, and laying bare the lie of austerity. They talk about the 1912 textile workers’ demand for “bread and roses” and how it’s as vital now as it was then. The recent rebirth of the strike in this country is resulting in unexpected and transformative outcomes.  Look at the Chicago teachers who lifted tens of thousands of people out of poverty with that strike. Life-changing. Right? Got nurses in the schools so that parents who are working two and three jobs to survive and don't understand why their child is having such a hard time at school. And now there's a nurse to say, you know, your child's having a hard time hearing and we just need to get them a hearing aid and all of a sudden that child can participate. And the parents, you know, I mean, can you imagine that? Can you imagine the difference this makes in people's lives? But those are the results that we can get by organizing.  Sara Nelson is the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO. She worked to secure federal payroll grants to keep aviation workers employed and connected to healthcare during the coronavirus pandemic while banning stock buybacks and capping executive compensation. The program was extended in the emergency relief bill on December 21st.  afacwa.org  @FlyingWithSara on Twitter

Are you listening to Macro N Cheese on our website? If not, you’re missing the transcript and extra content that accompany each episode.  This week we welcome Professor Steve Keen for his third visit to the podcast. He talks to us about the need for a debt jubilee, rising from the insanity of orthodox economics and the very real consequences attached to that paradigm.  There's this belief which is promulgated by mainstream economics. If you read a text like Mankiw, for example, you'll find a statement saying that when the government runs a deficit, it has to borrow money from the private sector. And when it borrows that money, it puts an unreasonable burden on future generations. And that belief, I think, is the core of why we don't use the power the government has to create the money when it's necessary, as it is right now. And that belief is fallacious. The government creates money by running a deficit, it doesn't need to borrow in the first place to raise the money. It creates it by the deficit.  Keen and Grumbine focus most of their discussion on the US, since its behavior is the most egregious, both in how it cares for its citizens and its export of neoliberal capitalism around the world. Keen compares the government’s response to the 2nd World War to its response to the COVID crisis. He also talks about the significance of the relatively low level of private debt after the 2008 recession and what that could have meant about the near future. Of course, with the pandemic, all bets are off. People will come out of this period buried under piles of personal debt, with no way of paying it off. He thinks we could be facing our very first slump not preceded by a boom.  There’s a humorous (sort of) segment on why economists are unable to accept MMT. Having spent 50 years in the field, Keen notes that a few are simply malicious...  ...but the vast majority of them believe they're making the world a better place by explaining economic theory to us and getting us to redesign the economy so it matches a first year economic textbook. And it is simply a mindset, and it's the same thing as a religious mindset. They have a paradigm. The paradigm makes perfect sense to them.  He compares economics to science. Ptolemy’s model of the universe simply couldn’t explain the actual behavior of the planets, but even so, Copernicus wasn’t able to convince Ptolemaic astronomers they were wrong. Thus we have the trope that science advances one funeral at a time. So why is it that when the old generation of economists dies, a new generation replaces them believing the same thing? Keen provides a cogent explanation.  Professor Keen is a Distinguished Research Fellow at UCL and the author of “Debunking Economics” and “Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis?” 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.  @ProfSteveKeen on Twitter  Most of his content on Patreon is free. Subscribe: www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen

This week, Randy Wray joins us for his fifth Macro N Cheese episode. As always, he brings loads of useful insights and factual information, both historical and of the moment.  While cable news and Democratic social media are jubilant with the ouster of Donald Trump, we know it’s a hollow victory. There’s nothing to celebrate. Randy and Steve look at the sobering facts. We stand on the precipice of country-wide evictions and mortgage foreclosures. Many jobs and businesses are lost forever. The optimists among us keep looking for signs, but at every turn, we’re confronted with evidence that the incoming administration has no intention of meeting the challenges.  In normal times (pre-pandemic), our paychecks are gobbled up by rent, health care, utility bills, and debt, debt, debt - leaving very little, if any, discretionary income. Now we’re faced with overdue rents and mortgages, overdue electrical, gas, and water bills. Student loans, car loans, and credit card debt haven’t gone away, and there’s no help in sight. Whatever relief numbers have been floated in Washington are woefully inadequate. Just like the Obama stimulus, our lawmakers are too timid to extend relief past the trillion-dollar line. Big numbers are so frightening!  When the global financial crisis hit, instead of punishing the financial institutions, the Obama administration ramped up the moral hazard by rewarding bad behavior, thereby guaranteeing it would continue unabated. So financial institutions went back to doing what they had been doing in the run-up to 2007. Since then, their behavior has gotten worse and financial fragility has grown. Randy refers to the theory of his professor, Hyman Minsky, to explain the trend.  When we look at government response to the pandemic, most of the focus goes to the individual relief checks. What tends to be ignored are the preemptive bailouts of financial institutions. Before they actually experienced a crisis, we began funneling funds to them, leading the mainstream press to marvel that despite record unemployment and a disastrous economy, the stock market keeps going up. It’s a miracle!  Randy says it’s hard to make forecasts about the real depths of the economic crisis because of the uncertainty of the pandemic.  The last one began as a financial crisis that then begot an economic crisis and high unemployment. This one is completely turned all the other way around where first it's a health crisis, then it's an economic crisis, and then eventually it's going to be a financial crisis. So there's lots of uncertainty about this, but I will be very surprised if we get through this without a major financial crisis.  This episode covers a lot of ground, like PAYGO and healthcare. Steve and Randy discuss the double disadvantage American workers face -- the low rate of unionization leaves them without representation on the job, and the lack of a US Labor Party means no representation in Washington. They talk about the Panama Papers and make an interesting case about inefficiency created through legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion. They look at the way the pandemic has exposed weaknesses in global supply chains and whether this might lead to changes in the way production is organized.  As liberals celebrate the Biden administration bringing us back into the international community’s efforts to address climate change, Randy offers a unique caution,  Remember the Democratic convention last time around? ...I was surprised to find out that Russia and China were enemies of the United States, according to the Democratic Party.  Building up to another Cold War contributes to the climate catastrophe, even if we don’t use the weapons and it is, of course, the...

You don’t have to be a Marxist to know the vital importance of labor. Workers hold the key to social change. They keep us fed, clothed, and provided for; they’re the only force with actual leverage over the ruling class. No wonder unions are such a threat.  Joe Burns isn’t just a labor lawyer and negotiator, he’s a student of labor history. He joins us to talk about the past, present, and future of the movement. For the challenges faced today, it is instructional to look back. For example, the gig economy is not so different from the early days of the auto industry, when employment was often temporary. The sprawling nature of trucking was used by employers as a barrier to organizing. When unions saw past those conditions, they were able to grow and achieve results.  Joe talks about the historical significance of national unions as we look at today’s international economy. Early unions were local or regional, but as transportation and trade developed, so did national manufacturing and product markets, so labor had to be organized on a national scale.   And I think if we fast forward to today, we're really in a similar situation where labor and product markets are global in nature. So it doesn't match the employers' structure and scale if we're still organized only on a national basis. Right? So we need a global labor movement that's able to confront global capital. Now, that's not an easy task. And frankly, the labor movement over the years has done a horrible job at it. For decades, the labor movement basically operated as an arm of the United States State Department.   When talking about solidarity, we don’t have to look into the distant past to see examples of it.  While working-class solidarity may or may not exist naturally, it can build rapidly through struggle. Joe brings up the “red state teachers’ strikes” of 2018, which sprang from discussions by a handful of teachers on Facebook. After sharing their grievances (as one tends to do on social media) someone suggested a strike, and it spread like wildfire. West Virginia teachers went out and, despite its illegality, they were granted concessions. Teachers in Arizona and Oklahoma followed suit; and then it spread to blue cities and states.  You can’t talk about labor without discussing class, and Joe briefs us on the two basic trends in the early years of organizing. There was class struggle unionism, represented by the IWW, International Workers of the World, and the business unions, typified by the AFL, American Federation of Labor. From the 1930s through the ‘60s, they achieved a grand bargain, gaining a little bit for a lot of workers.   But at the same time, we didn't really contest this control over the workplace and society, and employers got more and more powerful because they accumulated more and more profits. And then eventually they turn it against the workers. Right? And against our movement. So if we're going to revive the labor movement, we really have to look to socialist union theory. It's hard to envision a labor movement that doesn't actively contest the power of capital in the workplace and society succeeding.   Unsurprisingly there has also been a long debate about race among union organizers, with many believing they could talk about workers’ unity without involving race in the discussion, especially in the South. The leftist unions of the ‘30s and ‘40s confronted the special oppression of black workers head-on.  Throughout the episode, Joe continues to look to the past for understanding of the present and lessons for the future.  Joe Burns is a labor lawyer and negotiator. He is the author of “Reviving the Strike” and “Strike Back.” Look

When Steve Mnuchin announced a clawback of the CARES Act, the liberal media wasted no time before launching condemnations. Among our friends in the MMT community, wiser heads prevailed. Make no mistake, nobody denies Mnuchin is the Grinch who stole Christmas. But like a magic eye picture, if you change your focus slightly, a different image will form. This week, our friend, Robert Hockett, joins us to tell us why Mnuchin’s announcement can be seen as a gift in our stocking, not a lump of coal.  On the surface, the CARES Act appeared to be an acknowledgment that the Federal Reserve and Treasury had gotten it wrong in 2008-09. They had bailed out the banks, while ignoring the victims of those very same institutions whose obscene dealings had plunged the planet into crisis in the first place. This time they were extending a lifeline to Main Street, and to the states, regions, and cities bearing the brunt of the current crisis -- who are, in fact, first responders on the front lines of both the pandemic and economic devastation it has wrought.  The CARES Act was ultimately a smokescreen, making it appear as if Congress and the White House wanted to take serious action, while its performance was same old, same old. Mnuchin said the facilities established under CARES Act “achieved their objectives,” which apparently meant propping up Wall Street and enriching the elite.  As Bob wrote in his recent Forbes column, the Fed never needed the CARES Act in the first place. It can provide funds to strapped entities under provisions that already exist under the Federal Reserve Act. Meanwhile, he sees the creation of the Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF) and Main Street Lending Program (MSLP) as net positives  because they call attention to the possibilities for “spreading the Fed.”   This episode is packed with information on the workings of the regional Federal Reserve banks and their underutilized potential for meaningful aid to cities, states and territories (like Puerto Rico) and life-saving loans to small businesses. Whether the Fed will accept this role is a whole ‘nother question. It may never depart from its ostensible mission of shoring up the financial industry. Much may depend on the incoming administration. Which brings us to…  The final part of the interview is Bob’s assessment of Janet Yellen, Biden’s pick for Treasury, as well as speculation on the rest of the team of economic advisors, including potential roles for Stephanie Kelton, a long-time favorite of this podcast. He ends on a note of his irrepressible optimism. We wish we could agree. We hope he’s right. But we doubt it.  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. @rch371 on Twitter Check out Bob’s TWO new books!Financing the Green New Deal: A Plan of Action and Renewal https://bookshop.org/books/financing-the-green-new-deal-a-plan-of-action-and-renewal/9783030484491 Money From Nothing: Or, Why We Should Stop Worrying About Debt and Learn to Love the Federal Reservehttps://bookshop.org/books/money-from-nothing-or-why-we-should-stop-worrying-about-debt-and-learn-to-love-the-federal-reserve/9781612198569  His latest column from Forbes:https://www.forbes.com/sites/rhockett/2020/11/20/treasurys-gift-to-the-fed--and-to-our-states-cities-and-small-businesses/?sh=571e252564c8

Not all of our listeners are anti-capitalist but it’s safe to say that most of us object to the accumulation of massive wealth solely by virtue of inactive, unproductive ownership. Sitting on idle property is a particularly egregious way of accruing riches, often to the detriment of surrounding communities that are forced to tolerate eyesores in their midst for decades on end. Depreciation has been a windfall for the ruling elite.  Our guests, Joshua Vincent and Rich Nymoen, are proponents of the land value tax, or LVT, associated with 19th-century political economist and journalist Henry George. The term "Georgist philosophy" refers to the economic analysis and social philosophy he advanced.  Neither Josh nor Rich promote the confiscation of property. Value is derived by different means:  ...it's the rental value, not the actual land itself that belongs to the community. And most of that wealth is publicly created, is community-created. If you look at a city, almost all of its value - some comes through the location - but most of the value comes from the investments that have been made into that city: infrastructure, sewers, schools, fire protection, that kind of thing. And so I think it's our view that none of that wealth should be short-stopped by private operators, private players, rent-seekers.  In this country, property taxes fall equally on land and buildings. When landowners improve or develop their holdings, their taxes go up, serving as a disincentive to improvement. Josh and Rich explain how communities can use the land value tax to encourage productive use of property and collect revenue benefitting the locality. The LVT applies pressure to develop vacant or unused sites by dramatically increasing the taxes on these properties, while improved lots will see significant reductions.  Josh and Rich describe some remarkable successes, particularly in Pennsylvania, as well as the challenges they face when first attempting to introduce these concepts to recalcitrant officials. They find that they need to use both the carrot and the stick.  The LVT has supporters as diverse as Joseph Stiglitz, Milton Friedman, and our recent guest, Michael Hudson. The financial industry’s connection to land is of critical importance. Most bank lending is tied to real estate. Since people borrow from a bank in order to purchase land, they’re essentially paying the land rent to the bank.  So that's really how the 1% is being created: by all these land rentals and natural resource rentals being paid to the finance industry. Whereas if you were paying it to the community, it would be shared more equally than being funneled to the top. You may be aware that the board game, Monopoly was originally intended to teach these principles?  This interview contains a good balance of the micro- and macroeconomics of Georgism, some strategies for applying them, and the community benefits that ensue.  Josh Vincent is Executive Director of the Center for the Studies of Economics, a 501(c)3 organization dating back to 1926.  One of the group’s endeavors is the Center for Property Tax Reforms. urbantoolsconsult.org centerforpropertytaxreform.org @JoshuaRVincent @urbantools Rich Nymoen is the President of Common Ground USA, a 501(c)4 affirming that “all persons have equal and common rights in the earth and its resources.” He is on the board of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.  commonground-usa.net  schalkenbach.org  @rnymoen2  @Schalkenbach

At Real Progressives, we get daily messages from people who are still recovering from Bernie’s trouncing in the primaries. They remain distraught, disillusioned, and discouraged - convinced that he was robbed.  Last week Rohan Grey explained Rashida Tlaib and AOC’s Public Banking Act. This week we asked him to take off his MMT hat and talk to our wounded volunteers. To help them put the recent political past in perspective and move forward, they first must accept a sobering dose of reality. Rohan wasn’t surprised by Sanders’ loss.   ...I think at least for me, as someone who tries to be a committed leftist revolutionary, whatever, the odds are always extremely small. The odds are extremely small right up until the point that you win. And they continue to be very small the next day for the next thing you try to win. And I don't think that the history of progress is the history of always inevitably having a good shot. It's the history of very, very difficult things, somehow managing to eke through as much as it is.   The idea of continuity expressed above is repeated throughout the episode. He constantly suggests we ask ourselves what we’re going to do next. The social media battles for and against voting for Biden didn’t alter the need to fight for a Green New Deal and a job guarantee.  For those who may still be reeling, Rohan reminds us: political action neither begins nor ends at the ballot box. Electoral politics can play a role in a left agenda, but the size and scope of its importance will vary, and shouldn’t be exaggerated. We could use a more nuanced appreciation of it as a cultural and political institution among many, just as there are many legitimate roles and actions for any of us to undertake.   And most importantly, hopefully, you can develop a nose where you can say, OK, this opportunity is coming down the line, and it's one that has the potential to do something. Today we're out in the streets, tomorrow we're talking about a political candidate, the next day we're in the labor unions, the next day we're on social media, the next day we're writing a fiction novel that's going to spark a new social imagination. All of those are legitimate and valid. The only question is in what context and to what extent?   To be effective, we need to be informed. Ideas don’t arise in a vacuum; they’re shaped by material conditions, but they also have an impact on those material forces. Rohan’s advice echoes that of some other podcast guests, like Esha Krishnaswamy, who suggested we read theory, especially Lenin. Rohan, unsurprisingly, thinks those who care about economic issues should understand the history of political economy, how it’s handled in academia, and how those ideas get refracted back through popular culture and media. We should work towards understanding human and social psychology. Armed with these tools we’re more adept at assessing the value of political resources and the usefulness of various strategies and tactics.  The interview isn’t all advice and therapy, and it isn’t all Bernie. Steve asks about presidential politics because, well, we can’t help but be interested. Rohan calls it parlor gossip. After all, these are the celebrities of our time. He has an interesting take on the outcome of the election and suggests that a Biden presidency might be better for the left than the Obama years were or a Hillary Clinton victory would have been in 2016. His explanation might surprise you.  Rohan Grey is an Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University, the president of the Modern Money Network, and a director of the National Jobs for All Network, whose research focuses on the law of money in the internet...

On October 31st, Rohan Grey posted a 31-part Twitter thread about Rashida Tlaib’s and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s new Public Banking Act, which he helped craft. We immediately reached out and arranged for Steve to interview him, ending up with not one, but two episodes of Macro N Cheese. This week he answers our questions about the Public Banking Act. Next week he and Steve will venture into the swampland of politics. By the time the episode airs the election will truly - finally - be over. So, has anything changed? How does Rohan see the road going forward? But back to the Public Banking Act…   "It's long past time to open doors for people who have been systematically shut out and provide a better option for those grappling with the costs of simply trying to participate in an economy they have every right to—but has been rigged against them," Tlaib said in a statement. "The COVID-19 pandemic has also plunged city and state governments into a financial crisis unlike any other they've ever experienced—and public banks could offer a much more tenable option for dealing with their debts at a time when they need it most.” -- Newsweek   Instead of attempting to describe this interview, we’re going to let Rohan’s Twitter thread speak for itself:   First, some big picture comments about the bill  a) It does *not* create any new public banks. Rather, it *enables & encourages* the creation of public banks by establishing a comprehensive federal regulatory framework, grant programs, & supporting financial infrastructure.  b) It is designed to foster *state & local public banks*, not establish a federal public bank. In contrast to the federal govt, which issues the $US dollar, state & local govts face unique financial & monetary constraints that public banks can help alleviate.  c) It *complements, rather than competes with,* other progressive financial reforms, such as postal banking, FedAccounts, & eCash (on latter, see @RashidaTlaib’s #ABCAct). Together, they envision a new financial system that serves the people & promotes public purpose.  d) It does not make the mistake of treating public banks as an alternative to/substitute for federal spending & investment. Rather, it provides “top-down” support for “bottom-up” local initiatives, even while recognizing the critical need for more direct federal action.  e) Finally, it does not take a one-size-fits-all approach to the kinds of public banks eligible for federal support. Rather, it accommodates a wide variety of institutional structures and activities, from basic payments to consumer lending to public investment.  Okay, now let’s look at what the bill says...   The rest of the thread is published as an article on Real Progressives website. If you listen to Macro N Cheese on the website, don’t miss the EXTRAS section for each episode. This week it’s full of links leading to the complete text of the Public Banking Act, press releases, and articles. Rohan Grey is an Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University, the president of the Modern Money Network, and a director of the National Jobs for All Network. His research focuses on the law of money in the internet society.  modernmoneynetwork.org/  @rohangrey on Twitter

Esha Krishnaswamy, host of the historic.ly podcast, joins Steve to talk about the frustrating political miasma of centrism. Centrism. So vapid and insubstantial, how does one grab ahold? It’s a wispy dandelion head (aptly named the capitulum) - one slight *poof* and it’s gone. But we’re not fooled. As soon as the left gets behind a popular policy or candidate, the center reveals itself to be a mighty, unstoppable force in the service of the ruling class. In today’s world, the US centrist home turf is the Democratic Party.  Esha’s jam is history and throughout the episode she calls on instances from the past, from John Locke’s justification of inherited land wealth to E. Belfort Bax on liberalism and socialism in 1890. Through the lens of historical materialism, events can be progressive or reactionary, depending on the conditions of their time. She likes reading Lenin because “he’s hilarious and insults everyone.” If he were around now he would be “the worst Twitter troll ever.”  She compares the DNC to Russia’s Constitutional Democrats and reads Lenin’s 1906 description, summed up nicely with:  They want to ransom themselves from the revolution. They long for a deal with the old authorities. They are afraid of independent revolutionary activity by the people. The more this party develops its public political activities, the more marked it becomes in its inconsistency and instability.  Steve and Esha talk about the failure of electoral politics. In the US we’ve seen Bernie-like suppression of progressive candidates like Eugene V Debs, Henry Wallace, and Jesse Jackson. Whatever our democratic achievements, they were not won at the ballot box, but through political organizing and strikes. Esha points out that class awareness existed in the US up until the 1970s or 80s, when somehow it vanished. In Venezuela and Bolivia, radical change occurred through elections, but only with the groundswell of massive popular movements.  Esha sums up her indictment of centrists: “Their entire grift is to convince you that if they had the power, they'd totally do it,” but their hands are tied because they have no power - “which is always a lie.”  Esha Krishnaswamy is the host of the historic.ly  podcast. She is a lawyer, writer, and media critic, whose focus is on history, foreign policy, and Modern Monetary Theory.  @eshaLegal and @historic_ly on Twitter  historicly.substack.com

This second part of Steve’s conversation with Warren Mosler was to be about the government response to the pandemic, but first Warren talks about disagreements with some in the MMT community. We here at Macro N Cheese believe in healthy debate and want to bring a range of viewpoints to our listeners.  The federal job guarantee is one area in which Warren disagrees with certain prominent MMTers. He sees the JG as a transitional program to be used during downturns in the business cycle with the goal of getting people hired by the private sector when the economy rebounds. A number of advocates see the job guarantee as a door to more spending on the public purpose. Warren’s position on public purpose jobs is simple: “if you need them, hire them.” We’re all in agreement that skilled workers shouldn’t be working minimum wage jobs, even at the more reasonable rate of a job guarantee minimum, but there’s a vast need for public services that won’t be met by private firms. Mosler says that some MMT proponents feel his position is politically naive; he goes so far as to suggest there’s an ideological war going on. We agree. Real Progressives is fiercely committed to radical systemic change extending beyond the seeming neutrality of MMT.  Whether it’s naive or not, Warren wants to rely on the democratic process and an informed electorate. Steve brings up the reality of fraud within the system and the overwhelming imbalance of power, to which Warren expresses optimism about electing better candidates and brings up his “60-40 plan” to take the money out of politics. This would dilute the power of the 1% but, of course, it would have to be passed into law… by those in power.  Warren is consistent in taking a straightforward approach to federal spending, and expresses skepticism about proposals to “mint the coin” or take advantage of swap lines through the Fed.  ...well yeah, that's fiscal spending and that's the realm of Congress. You know, if Congress wants to support full employment in Mexico or Bangladesh or Canada or New York, you know, they can do it. They don't need the Fed to come up with subterfuge of using swap lines for financial assets to get redirected into goods or services.  When the interview gets to COVID, Warren talks about the uniqueness of both the supply shock and demand shock we’re experiencing. They primarily involve non-essentials. Combine this understanding with the fact that the pandemic has resulted in a massive cut in our energy consumption, and there are lessons to be learned that should lead to significant changes in the way we live and do business.  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/  @wbmosler on Twitter

Talking to Warren Mosler reminds us just how far MMT has come since the days he traveled from conference to conference, peddling his intellectual wares. Well, they no longer laugh at Mosler Economics, AKA Modern Monetary Theory. It’s a well-known part of MMT history that Stephanie Kelton, fresh out of grad school, set out to disprove his assertions, point by point, and ended up making MMT her life’s work. Today, in Warren’s view, she’s arguably the most influential economist in the world, because all of the powerful economic advisors have read The Deficit Myth. Of course, he gives credit to Randy Wray, Bill Mitchell, Mat Forstater, and those who came after, but, he says, her book saved the world.  That we get this deficit spending is just great, you know, that we've had recently. You could say MMT has saved the world. Whether it knows it or not. There's no way they would have done three trillion and now talking another two trillion. And there hasn't been a single mention of a tax.  In this first episode of a two-part interview, Steve decided it’s a good time to revisit the money story. This podcast always has new listeners and, for those also new to MMT, who better to go to than Warren Mosler for the money story? If you haven’t heard how he flummoxed a tour guide in Pompeii, you’re in for a treat. To further illustrate the order of operations, he includes the tale of British colonists in Africa, imposing a hut tax in order to create - or coerce - a labor force for their coffee plantations.  Talking to Warren brings to light some of the differences among MMT proponents. They seem to be pretty much in agreement on the facts or core principles, although you might say proposals for the federal job guarantee are a significant departure from his “employer of last resort”. For the most part, however, Warren only expresses frustration with choices of emphasis, especially when it comes to the Fed’s inadequate analysis of some basics, like the rate of inflation.  What is the rate of inflation? Well, how is it defined academically? Academically, inflation is the continuous change in the price level that's happening right now. It's faced by people in the real economy. What's the continuous change in the price level they're facing right now? That they're dealing with? That's affecting their business, their purchases, their sales.  What the Fed doesn’t grasp is when they set interest rates, they are setting the inflation rate for the economy.  Throughout the interview, Warren details some of the most significant contributions of MMT, including a tax liability’s function, the national debt, and the cause of unemployment. He explains that the Fed’s use of “easing” (lowering rates) and “tightening” (raising rates) are exactly backwards. Even those who don’t understand the Federal Reserve’s operations should be able to see that when they raise interest rates, it’s mainly a boost of interest to the wealthy. Warren calls it a “basic income” for people who already have money.  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/  @wbmosler on Twitter

Bill Mitchell joins us this week to discuss a plethora of American misconceptions… perceived exceptionalism, obvious neoliberalism, and a dysfunctional electoral system, as we approach the culmination of perhaps the most absurd and disheartening presidential election in history. The interview covers the consequences of neoliberalism in Europe, the UK, Australia, and the US, both in the rightward march of political parties and the ticking clock of catastrophic climate change. They discuss the attraction to the Universal Basic Income by some on the left who can’t see its underlying agenda and the perils of turning us all into consumption units. Bill Mitchell is the guest we need to hear from as the ugly campaign season winds down. Our Australian friend’s vantage point, as well as his astute grasp of political economy, combine with his level-headedness to bring a message of understated optimism. When Steve gives in to a rare bout of despair about the future, Bill talks about the early days of the MMT movement, when Warren Mosler and the others would count the number of MMTers on their fingers. MMT is becoming mainstream. Everybody's hearing about it in the Australian press as regular articles now. I write op-eds in the Murdoch press about MMT. Critics or supporters are getting articles published regularly. Central bankers are talking about it. They're giving evidence before government committees about it. The financial markets are increasingly getting me to run workshops to teach them MMT - all around the world, not just in Australia - because they want to know about it, and they also now have finally worked out that an adherence to mainstream economics has cost them money. So I wouldn't be as despairing about the spread of the ideas just yet. Bill sees a cautionary tale in the subversion of Keynes’s ideas during the Great Depression. The mainstream economists hijacked his substantial insights into what’s called the neoclassical synthesis, which essentially watered his ideas down to only be applied in a special case. He sees today’s orthodoxy normalizing MMT within their own skillset when, in fact, the work of MMT economists has demonstrated the catastrophic failure of mainstream macroeconomics. He refers to the German physicist Max Planck, who said “Science advances one funeral at a time.” Bill adds that paradigms shift the same way. As for navigating through these final weeks of the US presidential election, Bill suggests we focus on and accelerate the education process and the organization of grassroots resistance. He says our challenge is to start rebuilding the sense of collective responsibility to society. ...And hope to hell that we've got some climate space that we can do that education, and that organization, and we can save the planet. But I'd focus on the positive and wouldn't get tied up too much in the dilemma you're facing with Biden and Trump. I mean, it's a no-win, isn't it? So try to move beyond that sort of angst, not tear yourselves apart about that, but move beyond it. And basically, I'm an optimist. I just, every day, get up and pursue the education agenda in hopes that little bit each day moves us in a positive way. It’s clear that with either electoral outcome we're not going to get a fantastic response to the climate emergency, new public infrastructure investments, and we’re certainly not going to fix our dysfunctional healthcare system, so if we're not going to get anything we want from either of these two, it’s time to move on. 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 also is a Visiting Professor at Maastricht University, The Netherlands, and is on the management board...

Some of us Macro N Cheesers first heard the term “rentier class” from Michael Hudson’s interviews and YouTube talks. In today’s episode, he and Steve discuss the idea of economic rent as a remnant of feudalism. Bankers have replaced the feudal lords as the parasites who extract most of the wealth from the economy. The financial, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector comprise the contemporary kleptocracy. They have manipulated the system to such an extent, it is impossible to get an accurate measure of our society’s economic health or pain.  Michael delves into the history of debt and its role in our ever-changing economic structure. He references classical economists like Smith, Mills, Ricardo, and Marx, with their concept of economic rent as unearned income. They believed that industrial capitalism would eliminate the entire legacy of feudalism and dissolve the landlord class by taxing away rent or nationalizing the land. Since most governments were subsidizing education and health care, it seemed counterproductive to allow privatization of health, education, or land rent monopolies. They also saw ‘credit’ as a public utility, expecting banks to lend for socially worthwhile and productive purposes. Ultimately, instead of banking being industrialized, industry was financialized.  Debt deflation is the idea that the more people pay in debt service — i.e. mortgages, credit card interest, fines, and fees — the less they can spend on goods and services; so money is sucked out of the production/consumption economy, and siphoned off into the wealth economy. This demand for debt service pillages the domestic market, destroys employment, and drives the population to emigrate, suffer, or die.  Since we’re still mired in the “silly season” of US elections, Steve asks Michael whether he holds out any hope for finding solutions through electoral politics. Michael says it’s not possible to vote ourselves out of the mess we’re in due to the nature of the two-party system in the US.  It's basically the same party with a little ethnic difference between them, but economically it's the same party, and there cannot be any alternative to this monolithic - we'll call it the Republican Party with Democratic cheerleaders - there cannot be any progress made until you break up the Democratic Party.  Looking at their success in keeping the Green Party off the ballot in most states, the Democrats and Republicans have sent the message of virtual impossibility for third party wins. They’ve gimmicked the system, leaving Wall Street in charge of the economy and our lives. The elected officials haven’t been captured by the kleptocracy; they are its front men. They’ve been nurtured and groomed for that role.  I think most people who have to work for a paycheck realize that they're being squeezed, but that's not what the politicians say. You know, "hope and change"... and, of course, their real job is to prevent change and to smash hope.  Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of J is for Junk Economics (2017), Killing the Host (2015), The Bubble and Beyond (2012), Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971), amongst many others.  For access to his books, articles, and interviews:michael-hudson.com

Our guest, Cindy Banyai, is exactly the kind of person we want representing us wherever policy is made. She has the life experience of a working woman raising three kids, runs her own consulting business, and has lived and traveled all over the world. Did we forget to mention she knows MMT and supports the Green New Deal, universal health care, and a federal jobs program to ensure a basic minimum wage, worker protections, and benefits? When Cindy happened upon Modern Monetary Theory, it made sense of much of what she already believed. She had been a longtime proponent of participatory budgeting and says that being freed from economic shackles in policy-making is revolutionary. When people in her district come with complaints, she can truthfully say she knows what to do. She talks with Steve about the conservatives from both parties who place roadblocks in programs like Social Security and then criticize them for having those very complications. They use terms like “accountability,” “efficiency,” and “effectiveness.” Cindy tells us that her consulting firm is all about evaluation: I eat, sleep, breathe, effectiveness, and efficiency. There is not a single one of these hucksters that's going to be able to put a program in front of me, put a policy in front of me, and say, "We're working on efficiency." If that doesn't have the metrics in it and that doesn't have the right kind of measures to actually get these things accomplished and not just be these stupid barriers for access, then I'm going to call him out on it. And I will probably be the only one doing it. Because I'm going to be the first evaluator elected to Congress. As parents, Steve and Cindy have a shared, gut-level understanding of the need to fix a broken healthcare system. Cindy’s three-year-old daughter spent her first two years fighting a rare blood disease; while she was in the hospital fighting for her life, Cindy was fighting the insurance companies. She knows that there’s an alternative to medical bankruptcies and treatments determined by somebody else’s bottom line. She has done research and comparative analysis between the Japanese national health care model and the US model. As we move to universal healthcare she wants us to consider adapting features of the Japanese model, including cost-setting by the central government and decentralized implementation at the state level. One of Steve’s favorite components of the job guarantee is the way in which it is a democracy enhancer. It will revitalize local democracy by having it funded by the currency-issuing federal government but locally administered. Communities will determine which jobs to create based on which services are needed. This is an invitation for citizens to become involved in designing their very own local program. The discussion ignites Cindy’s enthusiasm for rethinking the way that we do governance. She talks about participatory governance - and the participatory budgeting component of it - having been a major component of her life’s work and research around the world. She describes the amplifying effects of civic engagement: people are more invested in their community, they meet their neighbors, some develop joint projects or business ventures together. We here at Macro N Cheese cannot endorse a specific candidate, but we can urge our listeners to pay attention and ask questions of your future representatives. We hope everyone finds candidates as well-informed and passionate as this one. Dr. Cindy Banyai is a Democrat running for Florida Congressional District 19, spanning coastal Southwest Florida from Boca Grande to Marco Island. She is a mom of 3 native Floridians, a small business owner, and part of the faculty of Political Science and Public Administration at Florida Gulf Coast University....

We here at Macro N Cheese are immersed in the world of MMT, but that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate people who aren’t yet on board. As long as they’re not pushing an austerity agenda, we welcome them. Today’s guest, Margaret Kimberley, of Black Agenda Report, is just such an ally. Her book, Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents, was published earlier this year.  This interview takes place as one region of the US is ablaze in wildfires and the pandemic is no closer to being resolved. Margaret sees the inadequate handling of COVID19 as confirmation that we live in a failed state. Countries that have responded best to the virus are either fully socialist or have robust public funding of their healthcare system. The climate crisis is further proof that capitalism is in crisis and neither of our two major political parties has plans to protect us from the fallout. Barack Obama illustrates the hypocrisy as he tweets dramatic images of the orange fire-lit skies and urges people to “vote like your life depends on it.” During his term as president, he bragged about increasing oil production and fracking. The Governor of California, another Democrat, has given more fracking permits this year than he did in 2019.  The point is, we have these two parties who come together more often than not. Margaret reminds us that Democrats used to go through the motions of being the working people's party, and have been living off this reputation for decades. Yet when Kamala Harris was announced as Biden’s running mate, the headlines announced: "Wall Street Breathes a Sigh of Relief." "Silicon Valley is Happy."  It’s impossible to have a conversation nowadays without debating the current presidential elections. Steve brings up his fear that a Biden win will cause Democrats to relax and go to brunch. Any energy built up in the resistance to Trump will die out. He asks whether she sees more possibilities for revolutionary change arising from a Biden or Trump victory. Margaret, who votes Green, believes they’re about equal, but doesn’t want to focus on electoral politics. Our job is to build the movement, taking a lesson from the civil rights era:  During those years, people made concrete demands and they stuck with them. And they knew that they had an adversarial relationship with politicians and they didn't care. They knew that when they demanded the right to vote, or an end to segregation, or an end to housing discrimination, they knew that politicians didn't want to do what they were demanding. But they demanded it anyway. They worked cohesively en masse for years. And that is how those changes came about. I think the problem with electoral politics is that it should be what comes last. It's the movement that has to come first to create the political crisis, to move politicians, because that is the only way they move.  That's true not only of civil rights legislation, it's true of the environment. Nixon gave us the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Why he gave it is because people were in the streets, there were millions of people.  Steve and Margaret talk about the differences and similarities between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. By the end of King’s life he had broken with Lyndon Johnson, who was seen as an ally of the civil rights movement. This could be a model for working with elected officials; you don’t have to sell out your principles.  The interview goes over many of the crucial issues affecting our lives in 2020, from Bernie Sanders to the actions of the Democratic Party elite; from Black Lives Matter to Antifa; from the Green Party to the need to end the duopoly.  Margaret Kimberley is a co-founder and Editor and...

Back in 2018, Steve invited Robert Hockett to come on to talk about shadow banking and explain its role in the 2008 financial crisis. We’re bringing back this interview because shadow banks are still around and people still have a hard time grasping exactly what they do. This is partly because many don’t understand what banks themselves actually do. The popular vision is that banks borrow and lend and that they make loans based on what they have in the vault; we MMTers know that they make loans based on profitability.  Banks are policed with a view to their liquidity risk, while shadow banks are behaving the same way, without the policing.  In order for us to unpack this issue, we need to know the meaning of “endogenous” and “exogenous” money. Bob defines endogenous as the credit-money generated by private banks and lending institutions, while exogenous is the sovereign element, created by the Fed or central bank. As in most cases, there’s always an element of public involvement in the private. This is usually overlooked. To better illustrate this, Bob uses the metaphor of franchising, where the Fed is the franchisor and the private financial institutions are the franchisees, charged with distributing a public resource which Bob defines as “the sovereign’s monetized full faith and credit.”   When the Fed recognizes a bank loan or loan extended by a financial institution, it is effectively turning a private liability into a public liability. But if it's not fully cognizant that it's meant to be exercising quality control, you can get a defective product. That certainly happened in the lead up to 2008.  In this interview, Bob points out that everyone operates under the false premise that there’s a shortage of capital. He also distinguishes between capital meant for productive use and that meant for speculation and gambling. The market for speculation - ie, the neverending quest for new ways to generate profit - leads to the creation of new and twisted kinds of financial instruments, such as the disastrous subprime mortgage packaging that led up the financial crisis.  Bob’s proposal to insulate us, the public, from the kind of harm that arises from speculative mania is to separate the two kinds of financial institutions. Those that actually extend primary credit to homebuyers, small businesses, producers of goods and services should be separated from those that create credit for speculation. In other words, one institution would not be able to perform both functions.  For a true solution, he suggests we look to the past, to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 1930s and ‘40s:  The RFC in its day was by far the largest financial institution in the entire world. Its balance sheet dwarfed all of the combined balance sheets of the Wall Street institutions. It was by far the largest credit-generating institution, credit-extending institution in the world, and it extended loans as small as $20 or $30 to African American barbershops in certain Los Angeles neighborhoods to giant mega-million or even billion-dollar loans for large public infrastructure projects like the Hoover dam or what have you. And this institution was a public institution. It was a government institution.  After all, it’s our credit anyway, isn’t it?   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...

Our guest this week is long-time friend of the podcast, Fadhel Kaboub. The Macro N Cheese audience will remember when Fadhel and Ndongo Samba Sylla visited with us last October on their way to the conference on African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty in Tunis, Tunisia. In that episode, we learned about the CFA franc, a vestige of colonialism, a symbol of the lack of true sovereignty in the post-colonial world, and a tool of economic oppression by international financial powers.  The conference in Tunis was an unqualified success and plans for a second one were underway until COVID19 interfered. To keep the conversation alive, Fadhel and his colleagues from Senegal, Tunisia, and Germany wrote An Open Letter on African Economic and Monetary Sovereignty. Having it translated into 50 languages and creating audio recordings in each, makes it accessible at the grassroots level. There are more than 500 signatures of scholars, economists, activists, and political figures from developing and former colonial nations. (See link below) Ironically the pandemic turned a spotlight on the systemic problems of most countries, including those of the developed world. Hardest hit are the former colonies, especially those on the African continent, who are adversely affected by the extractive nature of the global supply chain. Fadhel uses the MMT lens to explain the interconnectedness of the lack of monetary sovereignty, lack of food and energy independence, and lack of political power. In building a coherent economic development alternative for the developing world, we need to understand how the interests of the IMF and World Bank, in conjunction with those of private importers, trap poorer nations in external debt and prevent the development of a strong national economy. There’s an illusion that richer countries send money to poorer countries when in actuality the US (and others) extract more wealth than they inject; it’s a recurring global pyramid scheme.  Fadhel lays out the myriad ways this is accomplished and looks at the kind of investments, both financial and resource-based, required for achieving sovereignty and reliable growth. In the second part of the interview, Steve and Fadhel talk about the Green New Deal. Too often the discussion of combating climate change focuses on plans and obligations of the developed world. When we ask what it would mean to look at it from the point of view of the poorer nations, it’s clear that we need to consider a global reparations agenda. Fadhel says: I use reparations in the broadest sense of the term. That includes reparations for slavery, reparations for colonialism, reparations for post-colonial abuse, reparations for climate debt. And reparations are not one country to another alone; it's also within countries because countries have abused their own native people and have abused their own environment... So we're talking about a global reparations model that goes beyond the United States. To read the Open Letter on African Economic and Monetary Sovereignty, visit the website: mes-africa.org/ @Mon_Sovereignty on Twitter If you’d like to hear more from Fadhel, with Q&A, you’re invited to attend the Real Progressives National Outreach Call. September 16, 2020, at 9pm EDT/6pm PDT.Register here: https://www.bigmarker.com/real-progressives2/September-National-Outreach-Call-w-Dr-Fadhel-Kaboub Dr. Fadhel Kaboub is an Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.  global-isp.org  @FadhelKaboub and @GISP_Tweets on Twitter

This week Brett Scott brings us a report from the war zone. He’s based in the UK but the war on cash serves the same global interests and employs the same sort of weapons in the US. The interview begins with Steve asking about the role of COVID19. Brett tells of the huge British supermarkets, at the start of the pandemic, blasting the message that cash is dangerous; warning that passing cash from hand to hand is likely to carry the virus along with it. The CDC as well as major financial institutions have published that there is evidence to the contrary. They say, in fact, that credit cards and pin pads are far more likely to transmit the coronavirus. But the message persists: cash is dirty. The mainstream narrative has it that the move to a digital economy is happening organically, from the bottom up. As if people are simply drifting away from cash and migrating towards digital payment systems. In reality the opposite is true. You could say the war on cash is a war on class, from the top down. Working-class and poor communities are highly suspicious of banks and digital finance. Once you have your dollars in your pocket, nobody has to know what you do with it, where you go, how you spend it… which is why the banks hate cash. Clearly then, the extension of that mainstream bottom-up narrative is also untrue. This is the part bemoaning the fact that certain marginalized communities have been left behind. (“If only we could plug them into digital payment systems, everyone would be on the same level.”) Cash is a public utility. Brett calls it a nonjudgmental form of money in this potentially dystopian brave new world. Without physical forms of money, you’re absorbed into a panopticon banking system which we have reason to mistrust. It’s not just the finance sector that’s waging war against cash. Huge companies like Facebook need to sell ads. How can they prove to advertisers that the ads are effective if they don’t know what you’re buying? How do they know when they can stop flooding your pages with ads for certain products? Behemoths like Amazon and Uber profit from being automated and efficient. When big tech marries big finance, they seamlessly integrate on a huge scale. This is why they are able to annihilate small businesses and independent operators. The international aid community has usually handed out cash in disaster areas. It not only helps the refugee or survivor, it typically gets spent in the local community, serving as a boost to the economy. Now they’re moving to digital transfers of funds via prepaid cards. Digital payments are designed for web commerce, not local development. Brett has spent the past 18 months working on a book that will be published late next year. We expect it to be full of the kind of insights about cash and class he has shared with us today. The book will also look at cryptocurrency (if you’re still unsure about bitcoin, you won’t be after this episode) and another area of Brett’s expertise: alternative monetary systems. In the rest of the interview, Brett teaches Steve, and the rest of us by extension, about mutual credit systems and ripple credit systems. It’s rare that a guest talks about something that’s completely new to us. We found it exciting and we know our listeners will too. Brett Scott is a journalist, campaigner, former derivatives broker, and author of The Heretics Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money. @suitpossom on Twitter Subscribe to his new newsletter: BrettScott.substack.com

Whenever Steve's guest is a lawyer, we know we're going to learn something new. Rohan Grey told us it's like the saying: “when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” When you're a lawyer, you look at any issue and see a network of laws. This is why we're so grateful for the lawyers on Macro & Cheese - they teach us about that underlying legal framework. Camille Walsh isn't just a lawyer, she's a historian. We've been hearing about her book, Racial Taxation: Schools, Segregation, and Taxpayer Citizenship, 1869-1973, for a long time. Interestingly, she never intended to write about taxation, but her research led her there, and decided it for her. The notion of identifying as “taxpayer” is entwined with presumptions of entitlement which, in the US, date back to the founding principles, determining who has the right to be a citizen, who's qualified to vote, claim property, or own other human beings. The bottom line: it was a privileged group of white males back then and little has changed. Ultimately a group’s identity as taxpayers decides whether they’ll get some tiny amount of financial support, be it by federal, state, or local governments. After the Civil War, the taxpayers’ status was firmly established. All power was concentrated in their hands; they wrote all the laws and accrued all the benefits. It was during this period -- Reconstruction -- that there was a boom in the founding of schools. The fact that they were funded by local property taxes determined something as basic as whether a school was a one-room shack or a schoolhouse supplied with books. To this day, we have a stark disparity in resource distribution between schools in white and minority districts, with white men predominantly staffing the school boards and unevenly allocating funding based on this false sense of entitlement. The burden of educational funding remains squarely on the shoulders of revenue-constrained states and communities, creating a sense of scarcity and subsequent resentment toward nonwhites as “others,” allowing racist and classist biases to guide the outcome. Underfunded schools lead to under-educated citizens -- poor whites as well as minorities -- relegating them to low-income employment in a vicious cycle that traces back to the rigged educational system. Camille talks to Steve about the shocking number of rights that are assumed to be in the Constitution but aren’t actually spelled out until there’s a legal challenge, in which case the court’s ruling sets them in stone -- for better or worse. For example, the right to interstate travel didn’t exist until California attempted to limit settlers from other states. People assumed that Brown v Board of Education settled the issue of an equal right to education. In the 1954 ruling, Earl Warren said “education is possibly the most important function of state and local governments." What many of us weren’t aware of, though, was the 1973 decision in San Antonio v Rodriguez. It’s a little known case -- one out of many that dealt with education and segregation. In a 5-4 decision, it shot down the right to equal funding of schools. Unequal funding means unequal education. The argument leaned heavily on anti-communism, warning that once we start funding schools equally, we’ll be on the slippery slope to becoming Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China. Justice Powell, that great hero of neoliberals everywhere, wrote the majority decision. In this particular moment in time, as extraordinary and unprecedented things are intersecting and coalescing, we need to understand the consequences of our history. This episode gives us much to consider. Camille Walsh is an Associate Professor of Law, Economics, and Public Policy at the University of Washington Bothell. She doesn’t spend much time on social media. Racial Taxation: Schools, Segregation, and Taxpayer Citizenship,...

World-renowned economics professor and accomplished author/podcaster/speaker Mark Blyth joins us this week to discuss MMT, the variants of capitalism, and the current culmination of the populist anger outlined in his new book Angrynomics, co-authored by Eric Lonergan. The book, in brief, is a revolutionary, yet practical solution for an economically unjust world brought into clear focus by the Covid19 pandemic. Mark has been a consistent ally to the progressive movement over the years, using his broad reach to advocate for economic literacy and justice. Although he hasn't fully embraced MMT as his lord and savior, he calls himself a fellow traveler with no doubt that when they round up the MMTers, he'll be thrown in the back of the van with them all. His sharp wit and finely honed sense of the absurd make his social and political observations as interesting as his economic ones. An underlying theme the authors encountered consistently throughout the research for Angrynomics was - you guessed it - anger. It arises from the disconnect between our experience of the world and how it's explained to us. About anger, Mark says, “you assume you know what it is, but don’t necessarily think about it.” He talks about public and private anger, distinguishing righteous anger from tribal anger which is, inevitably, weaponized. The economic portion of the discussion touches on the variants of capitalism throughout our history, and the benefits or drawbacks of each. He also focuses on how, when the government spends at the bottom through wages and public purpose spending, the wealth trickles up, but when spent at the top, it most certainly does NOT trickle down. There’s no lack of good ideas and policy prescriptions; there’s a lack of political courage to implement them. Mark and Steve look at the social and political differences between “boomers” and the generations that came after. Mark attributes it to their incomes. The boomers’ income is asset-based, making it stable and secure, while the others rely on income drawn from wages, uncertain and insecure. These younger and poorer Americans are expected to be the shock absorbers of a volatile and unpredictable economy. The current pandemic is revealing the gaping flaws in our economy and waking up many normally comfortable and apathetic folks to the reality millions of Americans have been living every day -- being left behind by an economy built by, for, and of the oligarchs. It’s capitalism… and the people are angry. We cannot nudge the system back to stability. We need radical economic reform to create a bottom-up economy now. Mark Blyth is Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Political Science at Brown University and a Faculty Fellow at Brown's Watson Institute for International Studies. He is co-author, with Eric Lonergan, of Angrynomics, and author of Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Check out his podcast https://watson.brown.edu/rhodes/podcasts, including a recent interview with Stephanie Kelton http://markblyth.com/ @MkBlyth on Twitter https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48908670-angrynomics

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 Amazon...

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:<br...

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

This week we welcome back our favorite Cowboy Economist, who immediately tells us what a great job Real Progressives and Macro & Cheese are doing. Smart guy! John Harvey and Steve have much to discuss. The coronavirus pandemic is showing no signs of abating. It underscores or exacerbates all the other monumental problems we’re facing. There’s the high stakes presidential election asking us to choose between a deficit hawk neoliberal and a lunatic, while a large portion of the public have no faith that the electoral process is anything but rigged, especially after the primaries. Police brutality and injustice have reached critical mass, sending people into the streets in numbers we haven’t seen in our lifetimes. The climate crisis is being ignored, but the IPCC predictions hang over us like a doomsday clock, ticking away. Steve and John share the frustration of everyone who understands MMT: we know things don’t have to be this way. John holds the current economics discipline in particular disdain. Politicians turn to mainstream economists for advice, but the leading lights in the field believe that the market fixes itself. Paul Krugman might concede that we can “help it along,” but there are few other fundamental differences between the liberals and conservatives in the profession. Given that we’re staring down the barrel of a worldwide depression, Steve asks what we can learn from the Wall Street crash of 1929. John gives a concise history lesson, beginning with the enormous economic expansion that took place in the 1920s when, for the first time, there were as many people living in cities as on the farms. It was a time of huge investments on the part of government, businesses, and individuals. The federal response is where we see the difference between the depression of then and now. Today both parties confuse the economy with the market system. The economy is the means by which we meet our needs for food, shelter, and clothes, among other things. We don’t need the free market system to do that. During the New Deal, they applied extra-market solutions. There wasn’t a food scarcity, nor is there in 2020. What people need is an income so they can purchase those necessities, pay the rent and bills. John says that policies of the New Deal addressed social problems, not market problems. There were urban and rural projects, like building city parks or the Tennessee Valley Authority, creating jobs while improving the quality of life for residents of the area. Compare the government’s solutions today. The COVID-19 crisis has created massive unemployment and business closures, The response by every state governor is to increase commerce - get the market running again. The federal government could have generated income for everyone. Instead, we’re going to emerge from this pandemic under a mountain of debt. This interview isn’t entirely limited to the discussion of economics -- it would be hard for John and Steve to stay away from politics for a full hour. Their exchange of ideas is interesting because neither of them insists that he has all the answers. (We need a strong third party in order to exact some leverage. Or should we expend energy on parties at all right now?) They appear to be considering and reconsidering their positions just as we all are. In our whiplash world, how could we trust anyone who claims otherwise? John T. Harvey has been a Professor of Economics at Texas Christian University. since 1987. He specializes in exchange rates, macroeconomics, business cycles, and contemporary economic schools of thought. Check out the Cowboy Economist on YouTube.. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL9PHjlPQ5wq0CD6vAibxYg/featured @John_T_Harvey on Twitter

An alternate title for this episode could be “Back to Basics.” It reminds us why Randall Wray’s MMT Primer continues to be a definitive resource for the Macro & Cheese community. This 2017 interview came about when the American Monetary Institute (AMI) published an article critiquing MMT. Randy Wray was mentioned and quoted throughout, so Steve invited him on to set the record straight — and maybe shed some light on AMI and its theory of “positive money.” If you don’t come away with a clear understanding of it, it’s because Randy himself can’t always get to the bottom of AMIs logic. It turns out they have some less than pristine methodology. It’s hard to assess the strength of their theory when you can’t pin down the theory. They don’t even produce balance sheets. AMI wants the Treasury to print greenbacks because they posit that the Federal Reserve is private and independent, with full control over the US dollar. Randy explains that we do, indeed, have a sovereign currency, and suggests that we read the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The Fed is a creature of government, under the control of the Congress. Its very limited independence consists of the freedom to set overnight interest rate targets. It’s easier for Randy to debunk AMI’s critique of Modern Monetary Theory, and a large part of the interview takes us through the fundamentals of MMT — how money is created, the differing roles of the Treasury and the Fed, the causes of hyperinflation, sectoral balances, and why the US will always have a trade deficit. In our lifetimes, at least. We end with a long discussion of solutions to inequality. Since taxing the rich is politically unfeasible, Randy says a better way to reduce their wealth is to attack it at its source, where vast wealth is amassed. He wants to forbid corporations from buying back their stocks. Corporate CEOs and upper management receive outsized compensation in the form of stock options. Corporations spend more on stock buybacks than on investment in plants and equipment, which would create jobs. The buybacks raise the value of the shares, then the CEOs exercise their stock options for huge amounts of money. There’s no reason to allow it. This is an episode you’ll want to listen to right before trying to explain MMT to your uncle. Better yet, send him the link. L. Randall Wray is a Professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute. http://www.levyinstitute.org/scholars/l-randall-wray https://neweconomicperspectives.org/modern-monetary-theory-primer.html Steve Grumbine says this article changed his life. Check it out: https://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/05/taxes-mmt-approach.html

If any of our listeners aren’t following The Funky Academic on his website, YouTube, or Twitter, this episode will change all that. Macro n Cheese usually leans heavily towards economics, but Irami Osei-Frimpong arrives at many of the same conclusions that we do, yet gets there by a different route. That helps make this such an interesting interview. In these disturbing times, his strong sense of humor and irony are a welcome respite. Irami is a PhD student in philosophy, which he chose to study because, as an undergraduate, he realized that people are confused about what justice looks like. In a liberal democracy, there’s no need for a minister of propaganda; our thinking is controlled by what is omitted from our education. He says we must know what we’re fighting for because if we’re merely guided by emotions or compassion, we can be easily confused and swayed. “You need actual arguments to ground you so you're not buffeted about when your latest crush is a Republican.” This is how we end up accepting that there’s a “natural” rate of unemployment, for example. The episode is full of astute observations about racism, economic insecurity, and the indisputable necessity of a Federal Job Guarantee. Alton Sterling was selling CDs from the trunk of his car, and Eric Gardner sold loose cigarettes. Imagine if they had guaranteed jobs that paid a dignified wage, which Irami maintains should be $22 an hour. We don’t want a living wage because we want to do more than just live. Irami draws lessons from history as much as from today’s headlines and he often ponders the concept of citizenship. How can we participate in the political process while dealing with unemployment? In a nation of laws, how can we exercise our rights as citizens if we can’t afford legal protection? He tells an anecdote about Hulk Hogan which illustrates why we need a single-payer legal system as much as we need single-payer healthcare. Steve and Irami discuss the marijuana business, reparations for African-Americans, and unprovoked police shootings. While the interview is laced with humor, the themes and implications are dead serious. Irami Osei-Frimpong is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Georgia. Check out his website: funkyacademic.com @IramiOF on Twitter

The coronavirus epidemic has brought about an unprecedented level of unemployment and destitution in the US. Without significant structural change, it could affect people’s lives for decades to come. In this interview, Pavlina Tcherneva talks about the roots of the problem and lays out the kind of imaginative yet practical solutions that we need. Pavlina’s new book, The Case for a Job Guarantee, will be published later this month. It is a call to rethink the assumption that unemployment is unavoidable and that there’s little we can do about it. As a primer on the Job Guarantee, it documents all the benefits of the proposal. It confronts the narratives on competition, the market, and personal responsibility. The book exposes what Pavlina calls a major failure of her profession of economics. Economists have validated unemployment, structuring our thinking about the economy, markets, and their behavior, around the fallacious concept of a “natural rate of unemployment.” This validation brings massive failure at the theoretical, policy, and moral levels. At the time of this interview, ongoing demonstrations across the globe have been erupting -- spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement in the US -- expressing discontent with inequality in country after country. The spotlight on racial and economic inequality, compounded by the public health crisis, makes this an ideal time to look at the Job Guarantee. In addition to providing economic security for individuals, it centers on the creation of jobs that are geared to the needs of each community. This is a time to think long and hard about preparedness for future crises of all types, and environmental rehabilitation is long overdue. The Job Guarantee has a significant place in all of these plans. In the current economic paradigm, work that doesn’t generate profit is undervalued. Yet on a human level, these are the jobs that matter the most: education, health care, environmental protection, and care for the young or elderly are the true essentials of life. The interview is vibrant with the depth of understanding and empathy that we’ve come to expect from Pavlina. Our social, political, and economic problems are not intellectual problems to be played out on charts. Unemployment and underpaid jobs take a devastating toll on individuals, families, and communities. Nobody understands this as well as Pavlina. PAVLINA R. TCHERNEVA, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Economics at Bard College and a Research Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, NY. She specializes in Modern Monetary Theory and public policy. Check out a recent op-ed crafted by a group of international female scholars. It’s been published in 26 languages. https://democratizingwork.org/ Book https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Case+for+a+Job+Guarantee-p-9781509542109 Website: https://www.pavlina-tcherneva.net/ Twitter: @ptcherneva

Tschaff Reisberg is not only an early proponent of MMT, but is also a union representative with extensive experience in real-world struggles between workers and employers. His story - and that of the flight attendants union - is instructional for anyone fighting for fundamental change. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the airline industry was booming. Flight attendants’ jobs were secure, with expectations of growth and more hiring. When the virus hit, the entire industry shut down. They lost 95% of their passengers. Like many industries during the crisis, there were talks of bankruptcy and furloughs. Tschaff and Steve discuss the impact of the virus on the working class as a whole. When people lose their jobs, they stop spending; when they stop spending, others lose their jobs and it snowballs across the country, as we’ve seen in the record-breaking unemployment figures. In past financial crises, government bailouts served to enrich corporate CEOs and shareholders, while allowing the working class to suffer. Tschaff’s union was able to win unprecedented protections in the CARES Act, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. The airlines were awarded grants that came with stiff conditions: they can’t downsize or do stock buybacks, there are hard limits on executive compensation, and they can’t furlough the employees. Paychecks will be protected through September. Tschaff’s political and economic education included the realization that unions can’t just fight employers but need to work with the government as well. Corporate interests build connections with political officials and apply constant pressure to carry out their agenda. When the unions do likewise, they’re able to get a seat at the table. Organized labor has been weakened over the past half-century but has finally stopped declining. The more the unions flex their muscles the more popular they become. As MMTers, Tschaff and Steve understand the importance of fighting for a Job Guarantee. They talk about the myriad benefits which include protecting labor, stabilizing the economy, and preventing inflation. It also combats anti-immigrant sentiment; if your own job is secure, you have no reason to fear others. They talk about one aspect of organizing that isn’t always considered. The more engaged you become, you don’t just change others -- you yourself are changed because you interact with people you wouldn't ordinarily meet. Awareness of each others’ issues develops into overlapping and united interests. This is how we build a movement. Tschaff Reisberg has been in airlines for 12 years, having worked on the ramp, deicing, customer service, and IT. He’s a union delegate for the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA local 23089. He currently resides in Charlotte, NC, with his wife and 2-year-old daughter.

Howie Hawkins is the Green Party’s candidate in the US presidential race. He joins Steve to discuss not only his platform, but the role of third parties in US politics and, of course, economics. Steve opens the episode by pointing out that he and Howie are in about 90% agreement on all the issues. Howie was the first US candidate to campaign for a Green New Deal ten years ago, in 2010. He ran against Andrew Cuomo for Governor of NY state in 2010, 2014, and 2018. With the suspension of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, progressives are confronted with the choice of “Dem-enter,” which nobody is excited about, and supporting a third party, which many think of as a wasted vote. Here Howie makes a good case: a strong third party can force the media and other candidates to deal with our demands and confront issues that they’d prefer to avoid. There are historical precedents: the Liberty Party put slavery on the ballot and the Socialist Party brought social insurance programs into the forefront, some of which were adopted in the New Deal. Howie’s gubernatorial run in NY put so much pressure on Cuomo that he was forced to adopt some Green Party positions including a ban on fracking, the $15 minimum wage, and paid family leave. One of Howie’s goals in this campaign is to receive a large enough percentage of the vote to get the Green Party on the ballot line during the next election cycle. This will make it easier for down-ballot Green candidates to run. To seriously compete for national power, it must be built from below. Steve and Howie discuss strategies for breaking through the media blackout, achieving rank-choice voting, and forcing third party candidates into the debates, which was easier to do when debates were sponsored by the League of Women Voters -- before the Commission on Presidential Debates muscled them out. The Commission is not a government agency; it’s a private nonprofit corporation controlled by Democrats and Republicans, so everyone has to play by its rules. The majority of the interview is about combating the climate crisis within the time limit we’re faced with. Steve brings up his recent interview with Steve Keen who says we will need a command economy. Howie counters that we need a democratically planned economy. We already have a command economy with giant corporations that are “private tyrannies.” The people don't have a say in whether we're doing more oil and gas drilling or investing in renewables. Howie proposes a socialist economic democracy which he says we will need in the key sectors if we're to make the rapid transition. It can’t be done with carbon taxes, some mandates, and a few incentives. The incumbent industries will always fight those and keep us tied up. We should take over the utilities and companies like Exxon Mobil and Koch Brothers Industries. Howie outlines a plan that includes maintaining a living wage for workers in that sector. The rest of the interview goes into the need for free or low-cost high-speed internet throughout the country, the historic movement for a job guarantee, and international policy. We suggest that after listening, you check out Howie’s website, howiehawkins.us Howie Hawkins is one of the original Greens who has run on the GP ticket numerous times. He became an activist during the civil rights and anti-war movement of the ‘60s and has been involved in the labor movement for much of his life. @HowieHawkins on Twitter Howie Hawkins 2020 on Facebook

In March, Rohan Grey was the guest speaker on a Real Progressives National Outreach Call. He talked about his forthcoming book, Digitizing the Dollar: The Battle for the Soul of Public Money in the Age of Cryptocurrency. The title says it all.  In the midst of the pandemic, people are living with unprecedented financial insecurity. There’s no real sense of when they’ll be able to return to work or whether there will be jobs awaiting them. Rohan had been working with Representative Rashida Tlaib on her emergency assistance act, which is designed to provide relief funds of $2,000 a month to every man, woman, and child in the US. He explained the thinking that went into drawing up the bill, which is far more generous than any other coronavirus stimulus bill to this day.  Of special interest to proponents of MMT is the fact that the Treasury would finance the program through minting trillion-dollar coins. Rohan told us how this provides a legal workaround to arguments about the debt-ceiling.  The distribution method is also of interest to MMT-ers and it leads to the central topic of the presentation: digital currency. A debit card would be issued to everyone, sent by mail or available for pickup at numerous distribution centers. The debit cards themselves are to be privacy-protected. That issue - privacy - must be at the heart of any plans for cryptocurrency. The goal in designing the bill was that it be as simple, universal, and accessible as possible, but there’s nothing simple about the reasoning and planning that went into it. Rohan walks us through the process, showing the logic behind each choice.   Fans of this podcast are familiar with Rohan Grey’s ability to explain complicated issues in a clear and fascinating way, making connections between ideas and facts, contemporary and historical. He refers to ancient Mesopotamian temples and Seinfeld plots to make a point. He is the ideal teacher to guide us through the maze of technical and moral issues we confront when dealing with digital currency.   When asked about the phrase from the title of his book - the battle for the soul of public money - Rohan says that this is the soul of the human race. It’s the soul of democracy. We put our hopes and dreams, our personalities, and our experiences into our computers every time we use Google or Facebook. More to the point here, every time we use Venmo or Paypal. The net that holds those souls either respects our freedom and privacy or it doesn't. It’s either a tool of emancipation that connects us as equals or it’s a tool of control and subjugation. Do we entrust it to private corporations? In the battle for the soul of public money, “it's hard enough to learn about money -- and about law. Now we're adding technology. Those three worlds are converging at a rapid pace. The fight we’re facing is for a just money system, and when we get that money, it isn't a snitch, isn't a traitor.”   In discovering why we need to struggle for the soul of public money, this episode takes us straight to the heart of the matter.    Rohan Grey is the founder and president of the Modern Money Network, a research scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and a J.S.D. candidate at Cornell Law School, where his research focuses on the law of money in the internet society.   https://modernmoneynetwork.org/ @rohangrey on Twitter

MMT seems like a natural fit for Marxists so why has there been some resistance to it? MMT explains the monetary system. Period. If we build a post-capitalist society we’ll need to understand how currency works. If we want to discuss getting rid of money altogether, we’ll still need to understand it. In this episode, Steve called upon Nathan Tankus to break it down and explain the objections to MMT among some on the left, particularly Marxists. Along the way, he tries to dispel some of the fears and objections. Marx devoted himself to studying and developing a theory of capitalism. He left a huge body of work and, occasionally, some parts of it contradict other parts. There’s a strand of Marxist tradition that influenced Post-Keynesians, Chartalists, and MMTers, so it’s hard to make the case of incompatibility. A criticism of MMT from the left is that it is only relevant to a monetary sovereign nation, especially one, like the US, that doesn’t hold foreign-denominated debt. MMT is explicit about the perils of holding debt in a foreign currency, whether in the Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, or the Eurozone. In fact, Stephanie Kelton made an early call on the unsustainability of the Euro. (For an in-depth discussion of the economic problems of the post-colonial world, listen to our episode “The Spectrum of Monetary Sovereignty in developing Nations with Ndongo Samba Sylla and Fadhel Kaboub.”) Steve brings up the specter of capital flight, which Nathan describes as a non-Marxist issue that Marxists argue about. Marx demanded clarity; to understand an issue, one must look at what is really going on. In the case of capital flight, Nathan asks what kind of capital they’re worried about. Is it commodity capital? Variable capital? Constant capital? We must understand which processes and mechanisms apply. What are the underlying biophysical relationships, ownership relations, and payment systems? By tracing various hypothetical cases of capital flight, Nathan demystifies this often exaggerated problem. It’s practically canon among leftists that we prioritize raising taxes on the rich. Our listeners know that MMTers are sometimes criticized for decoupling “taxing the rich” from our demand for social programs. Nathan and Steve discuss the irony in the fact that raising the marginal tax rates on billionaires may decrease their household wealth, but it does nothing to change the fundamentals -- the ownership and control of the means of production. Universal healthcare will immediately save lives. A Green New Deal will immediately save the planet, thus saving lives. Free college education will improve lives, as will student debt forgiveness. A federal job guarantee will transform the social fabric, benefiting communities, families, and individual lives. What do we gain from increasing taxes on the 1%? It’s not a Marxist proposition: he never suggested that taxes would alleviate exploitation. Nathan makes the point that tying these vital programs to the collection of taxes implies that capitalists fund the government with their tax dollars and it limits us to what we can squeeze out of them. This interview is packed with important ideas and facts. They consider the irrational fear of robots replacing human labor. They look at some of the endless possibilities opened up by a job guarantee, including as a way to finance workers’ coops, creating laboratories for other means of organizing labor. Nathan explains the bathtub analogy for understanding stocks and flows. And there’s much, much more. Nathan Tankus is the Research Director of the Modern Money Network and Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He has written for the Financial Times, Business Insider, Naked Capitalism, The Appeal and JSTOR Daily, and currently has a blog, Notes on the Crises, at NathanTankus.substack.com

This week we’re bringing back a conversation Steve had with journalist and researcher Claire Connelly in 2017, which explores all the best arguments in the job guarantee vs universal basic income debate. Claire says that the American nostalgia for a more prosperous era supports the case for government involvement in employment even beyond the New Deal. The fact that the US had almost full employment during WW2 is largely responsible for much of the prosperity in the postwar era. Even today, it could be said that the military is the closest we have to an employer of last resort. Conservatives object to government involvement in the economy - but Claire points out all the ways in which the government subsidizes large corporations and enriches the lives of those at the top. Since the government creates the currency, a job guarantee wouldn’t require a tax increase that would decrease anyone’s stash of money. We’ve given the government permission to abdicate its responsibility for employment and both sides of the political aisle are comfortable with the idea. That being the case, Claire asks why not dissolve government entirely and elect the CEO of Goldman Sachs? The implications are directly responsible for the situation in the Eurozone. The EU, IMF, and World Bank have more power than the national governments themselves. Most of those countries have not benefited from the arrangement. Even the Greek bailout did more for the German banks more than the people of Greece. One of our objections to a UBI is the fact that it doesn’t set a price anchor or a wage floor. It simply serves to funnel more money to these same corporations and rentiers. Claire talks about the rentier economy being one of the largest detriments to economic growth. The level of personal debt in the developed nations implies that income derived from a UBI will simply go to the rentiers - in the form of mortgages, rents, payment of credit card or other debts - doing little to improve the lives of the citizens and possibly making it worse by effecting a rise in prices. Elsewhere in this episode, Steve and Claire discuss a range of topics from Georgian land value taxes to autism, all within the context of the jobs and income. Anyone who gets involved in arguments about the UBI and FJG will want to listen.

April was the 33rd anniversary of the Keating 5 Savings & Loan scandal, so we brought back our favorite former bank-regulator, Bill Black, to talk about it. It turns out that Bill has been involved in a documentary series about banking fraud and suggested that we should also hear from the directors, Patrick Lovell and Eric Vaughan. He calls them “the Coen brothers of documentaries.” The Con is a 4-part series that was inspired by Patrick’s own experience during the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. He was a successful producer and entrepreneur who had built a business and owned a home for his young family. The financial crisis wiped him out. Listeners to our podcast will be struck by the similarities to Steve Grumbine’s story. People who were hurt by the crisis say that they were struck by the disconnect between the media portrayal and their own real-life experiences. The victims were said to have been greedy and irresponsible, trying to “use their homes as ATMs.” The perpetrators were dismissed as a few bad apples. Patrick and Eric set out to uncover the true story behind 2008 and other financial crises. They were fortunate to find Bill Black. To produce a financial crisis, Bill says there must be two crucial components: elite crimes at the very top of the private sector and corruption by their political allies in the public sector. The Keating 5, in fact, were US Senators who got together with the specific purpose of pressuring S&L regulators to go easy on Charles Keating, the owner of Lincoln Savings & Loan. Bill calls it the first act in the three-act tragedy that produced the GFC. In making The Con, Patrick and Eric began looking for a top-down explanation of the financial deception that trickled down to ordinary people and caused tens of millions to lose their homes. But when they heard Bill Black say that the targets of people like Keating were “the meek, the weak, and the ignorant” it opened a new lane of investigation for them. Whether being conned into taking a risky mortgage or putting their life savings into uninsured junk bonds, the scams were carefully orchestrated to target the most vulnerable among us. The Con tells their stories as well. The series is made in the style of a true-crime documentary, which seems like a good way to emphasize that these were not just boardroom shenanigans. They were crimes, perpetrated by criminals on real-life, flesh-and-blood victims. The people who tried to do the right thing were also victimized; they were silenced and, for many of them, their careers were ended. Bill Black always has important lessons for us. It’s fascinating to hear what these two film-makers learned from him; they clearly value him as much as we do. The Con should be released sometime this summer. We hope they’ll come back then to talk about it. Bill Black is a professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City (UMKC) and the Distinguished Scholar in Residence for Financial Regulation at the University of Minnesota Law School. He is a serial whistleblower and authored The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Patrick S. Lovell is a 30 year veteran of media production. He is producer and protagonist of the upcoming 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. Eric has recently completed his long-form documentary series directorial debut, THE CON.

The progressive movement is still coming to terms with the suspension of Bernie Sanders’ campaign and his endorsement of Joe Biden. We decided to check in with one of our favorite people in independent media, Jamarl Thomas of Progressive Soapbox.&nbsp;&nbsp;Steve and Jamarl spend an hour (give or take a few minutes) addressing the two questions that seem to be on everyone’s mind: what went wrong and where do we go from here?&nbsp;&nbsp;Jamarl’s critique of Sanders is fairly straight-forward -- he went to war against a powerful enemy with no powder in his gun. Would it have helped if Bernie had allowed his team to use opposition research against Joe Biden and others? Jamarl thinks that's part of what the campaign lacked. We’ll never know.&nbsp;&nbsp;To understand 2020 we have to understand that the Democrats’ number one priority was beating Sanders. His movement was a threat to the oligarchy. When they picked Biden they understood all his defects, but in their calculations, they figured that he could get the Black vote, which was enough to beat Sanders. Whether it’s enough to beat Drumpf is secondary. Jamarl makes the case that none of the Democrats in power are actually hurt by Drumpf; they may find him distasteful, but their material interests are not threatened.&nbsp;&nbsp;They know if that if Sanders were to win, they’d lose the party for a generation. They’d be exposed for they truly are. Despite paying lip service to identity politics and concern for the poor, they don’t fight to materially improve people’s lives.&nbsp;&nbsp;They were threatened by Sanders but couldn’t mount an effective attack on him due to his long history of authenticity and consistency. So they went after his supporters. They made the same accusations of racism and sexism against Bernie’s supporters as against Drumpf’s.&nbsp;&nbsp;In Jamarl’s view, the left has been weak and cowardly for 30-40 years. The Democratic Party can neglect and ignore them because they continue to get away with it. In the end, the opposition always buckles.&nbsp;&nbsp;To succeed the movement has to be willing to withstand the accusation that they’re the reason Donald Drumpf was elected. Steve brings up the question of building a third party but Jamarl insists that the left has to unite around policy, not party. Everyone needs to agree on some basic demands and stand up to the Democrats. That’s playing hardball.&nbsp;&nbsp;The conversation goes well beyond campaign politics. Jamarl and Steve talk about the Labour Party’s bungling of Brexit, and how the lack of monetary sovereignty is crippling the economies of the Eurozone. Jamarl explains why African Americans always vote Democratic, and whether it’s possible to make a change. They look at FDR’s deft use of the New Deal to ward off the imminent threat of socialism in the 30’s and visit a number of other issues, domestic and international -- past, present, and future.&nbsp;&nbsp;For more from Steve and Jamarl, check out Steve’s appearance on Political Misfits:&nbsp;https://www.facebook.com/SputnikNews/videos/586423068641351&nbsp;&nbsp;Find Jamarl and the Progressive Soap Box on YouTube:&nbsp;https://www.youtube.com/user/jamarl31&nbsp;&nbsp;On Twitter:&nbsp;@theProgSoapbox&nbsp;@JamarlThomas

If you missed our recent episode with Professor Steve Keen, you’ll want to go back and listen to it soon. In January he spoke of the inevitability of disastrous climate crises. Now here we are, a few months later: different crisis, same chaos, inescapable tragedy. Although there is much agreement between Steve Keen and our friends in the MMT community, there are a couple of areas where the views diverge. At Macro n Cheese, we’re not afraid of a little disagreement. In fact, we welcome it. We’re all on the same side. Keen believes that during a crisis -- climate or pandemic -- we need a centralized authority to take over and maintain civilization. We've been following the advice of neoclassical economists for about half a century. During the stagflation of the 1970s, Milton Friedman vanquished the last remnants of the Keynesian approach. Thus began the unshakable belief in deregulation, privatization, and globalization. Reduce the size of government and let the market take control. This ideology ignores the crucial fact that the economy exists inside the ecology; without the ecology, there is no economy. Without the ecology, there are no humans. Steve Grumbine brings up Warren Mosler’s assertion that imports are a real value, exports are a real cost. As Mosler asks: which would we rather have, the little green pieces of paper or the cars, phones, and cheap goods we can buy from other countries? Steve Keen vehemently disagrees with this premise. It certainly doesn’t hold up during the kind of crisis we’re facing with the coronavirus. The supply chain is broken and the US is unable to get its hands on an adequate number of ventilators, masks, food and other necessities. He says that we need regional production capability for essential goods. Loopholes in US export tariff laws make it cheaper for companies to spread manufacturing across the globe, wherever they find the cheapest labor and resources. 43 countries are involved in producing the iPhone, for example. During the pandemic, 20 of these nations aren’t shipping to the US. While we can survive without iPhones, some products can be a matter of life and death. Keen and Grumbine discuss the unavoidable comprehensive solutions required in the face of a widespread crisis like this one and debate the concept of a universal basic income. The episode gives us a lot to think about. Professor Keen is a Distinguished Research Fellow at UCL and the author of “Debunking Economics” and “Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis?” 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. @ProfSteveKeen on Twitter Most of his content on Patreon is free. Subscribe: https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Can+We+Avoid+Another+Financial+Crisis%3F-p-9781509513727 https://www.zedbooks.net/shop/book/debunking-economics/

As The Intercept’s DC Bureau Chief, Ryan Grim is well-positioned to assess the American political scene. This interview took place a few days before Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign, but the writing was already on the wall. We all know that the movement still has work to do, but we're faced with different possible strategies now that we no longer have Bernie to shine a light and bring media attention to it. Steve and Ryan discuss where to go from here. Between the energy and attention generated by Bernie’s campaign and the coronavirus pandemic, the people have never been more open to progressive policies. For the first time, the idea of public health is taking hold. The US handling of the COVID-19 crisis is worse than anywhere else in the world. There’s an inescapable connection between that and the fact that we don’t have a real public health system in place. The patchwork quilt of private healthcare simply doesn’t work. The mainstream media joined Bernie’s opponents in insisting we can’t afford universal single-payer healthcare -- and they’re all now exposed as economic illiterates. Those who claimed that 165 million people who are insured through their employers “love their insurance companies” now look like clowns. The left has a real opportunity to expose these things and rethink what is possible. Ironically, most Democrats agree on the issues much more than Republicans do and yet are unable to build an effectual coalition. How did we end up with a candidate who represents almost none of the policies that the constituents want? Steve and Ryan analyze what went wrong with the presidential campaign and speculate on what the next steps might be. What will the left do to make sure this revolutionary moment turns into something serious and long-lasting? They look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “Squad.” Have their tactics changed? Will coalition-building be more effective than a more aggressive approach? For the first time, the left has been able to envision itself with an inexorable voice. Now we have to ask ourselves whether we are simply here to engage in the conversation or if we want real power. Ryan points out that historically the success of a third party is contingent upon one of the two main parties failing. The Whigs were torn apart by the issue of slavery. Ryan is unconvinced that big money and corporate power will rise to that level. People won’t fight over capitalism the way they fought over slavery. The conversation ranges from the very real threat of climate change to the very realistic depiction of contemporary dystopia in the film “Joker.” We’re not saying we have the answers, but you’ll certainly come away with a lot to think about. Ryan Grim is The Intercept’s D.C. Bureau Chief and author of the book “We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.” @RyanGrim on Twitter https://theintercept.com/staff/ryangrim/ https://strongarmpress.com/catalog/weve-got-people/

This week’s guest is a bit of a departure for us. We don’t usually interview political candidates but Lauren Ashcraft is a stand-up comedian, a Democratic Socialist, and an ardent proponent of MMT, so how could we resist? She was introduced to us by our friend Andrés Bernal, who must have recognized how well all these attributes would serve her in the US Congress. When someone’s convictions are born of their lived experiences, the roots run deep. Corporate greed literally killed her grandfather who was a victim of a notorious coal mining accident. Her grandmother could not have survived without Social Security. Ironically Lauren became radicalized from working in the belly of the capitalist beast. She worked for one of the huge financial institutions where she received daily messages about profits being down. Staff was constantly being laid off or forced to relocate, at a time when these companies were receiving billions of dollars in incentives. And somehow the compensation to those at the very top continued to grow. She was witnessing the “socialism at the top, rugged capitalism for the rest of us” that Bernie Sanders talks about. Lauren is running as a Democrat in New York’s 12th Congressional district, challenging incumbent Carolyn Maloney. The district includes some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country (we’ve all heard of NY’s Upper East Side, right?), but also extends to the Queensbridge Houses, the nation’s largest public housing development. Steve and Lauren debate whether it will be possible to change the Democratic Party from within, and agree that it’s really not about Democratic vs Republican. They talk about strategies to continue expanding the movement, breaking away from partisanship, and how the COVID-19 pandemic is shining a light on - and exacerbating - the need for the very policies in Lauren’s platform. There’s much more to her story, including her journey to becoming a stand-up comedian. Let’s just say it began with a Groupon coupon -- you’ll have to listen to the episode to hear the rest. Lauren Ashcraft is a candidate for New York’s 12th Congressional District. She has been endorsed by Brand New Congress, Marianne Williamson, and Shahid Buttar, among others. https://laurenashcraft.com/ @voteAshcraft on Twitter

Sometimes it seems like economists forget that economics is a social science which is why we’re excited to bring the new generation of MMT to Macro n Cheese. Matthew Robinson is a doctoral student at UMKC, which has been an academic home base to many friends of this podcast, including Mat Forstater who brought Matthew to our attention. Matthew talks to Steve about the personal and academic journey that led to his current work. As an undergrad at Fresno State, he saw a disconnect between what he was being taught and what he was seeing as a volunteer in the community. The west side of Fresno was a segregated neighborhood, with as much as 20% unemployment -- a reality that wasn’t reflected in the textbooks. At UMKC’s Center for Economic information, there’s a group working on health issues, recognizing that minority neighborhoods experience the worst cases of childhood asthma, lead poisoning, and a myriad of other problems, exacerbated by years of poor housing conditions and inadequate healthcare facilities. Matthew’s area of focus is violent crime, with the understanding that people make certain choices out of necessity. Reaching out to the community is a great use of economists’ time. It’s a field that isn't known for advocating for the people most in need. There’s a lot of theory but the least served populations aren’t included in the conversation. Matthew talks about what it means to serve as a support role for those on the front lines. He is also involved in bringing MMT to the HBCU’s -- Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Before the coronavirus pandemic brought things to a standstill, he had been to Morehouse, the alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, who advocated for a job guarantee more than half a century ago. There’s no doubt of the value of a federal job guarantee but Matthew talks about the level of skepticism in the Black community. There have been so many promises made, matched only by the numbers of failed results. In these pessimistic times, our listeners will be encouraged by hearing a voice from this new generation of activist-scholars. Matthew Robinson is getting his PhD in Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He went to Fresno State and got his master's degree at the University of Denver. @econ_robinson on Twitter

When asked to talk about public health needs during the current coronavirus pandemic, Fadhel Kaboub immediately brings up climate change and expands the concept of public health to a degree that some will find surprising. After giving it a moment’s thought you can’t help but agree. Even if COVID-19 isn’t related to climate change, the effects of the climate crisis will accelerate in the coming years and we’ll see more pandemics and other disasters. We were caught flat-footed this time, but our inexcusable lack of preparedness cannot happen again. As Fadhel warns, there can be no “return to normal.” This pandemic illustrates why it’s impossible to think of public health needs in narrow medical terms. This kind of crisis requires massive intervention early on. Clearly we need the infrastructure and medical capabilities to handle screening, testing, treatment, and hospitalization of huge numbers of patients all over the world. To slow the spread of the virus requires decreasing the intensity of human contact by working and shopping from home. Businesses and their customers, schools or universities and their students, all will need broadband internet access as a public utility. Privatization and deregulation of the telecommunications industry will have to be reversed, which means going up against entrenched interests and their representatives in the government. Everyone deserves paid sick days and universal medical coverage. We need contingency plans across the system, including efficient means of providing goods and services during the crisis. We have to keep the supply chain moving as much as possible, keep the quality of life maintained -- these are enormously complex problems, as Fadhel explains. An overarching impediment to this level of emergency planning is the fact that the market considers it a waste. To have enough hospital rooms, ventilators, ambulances and test kits during the crisis, they must be constructed beforehand. Capitalism doesn’t produce excess goods out of a sense of civic duty. Only the federal government can afford to do this. The pandemic demonstrates what MMT has been emphasizing all along: that it's not about having the money. To transform our system to handle public health emergencies, what matters is the real productive capacity of the economy -- the physical and technical resources, human capabilities, and knowhow. Fadhel says it’s time to reframe our current crisis within the economic policy agenda that we've been talking about for years. Understanding the monetary sovereignty of the US government, we need a three-point program: 1 - Universal public services: education, childcare, healthcare, and broadband access. It’s the responsibility of the federal government to guarantee these things as human rights. 2 - Job guarantee for people who want to work. The program should be resilient and flexible enough that you don't have to be physically present. 3 - Generous income support for people who cannot or should not work. As always with Fadhel, the discussion covers too much to recount here. He tells us how to address the “cost” of the Green New Deal and what to say to someone who thinks the federal budget should be treated like that of a corporation. He reveals a serious flaw in our understanding of the GDP. It’s easy to forget that we’re still in the throes of the political primary season, but Steve had to ask him to weigh in on that. Fadhel leaves us with a reason for optimism. Bernie Sanders and his supporters have proven that there’s an alternative to rule by super-PACs and corporate interests. People believe in the transformational nature of the movement and many dozens have been inspired to run for office with a progressive agenda. Dr. Fadhel Kaboub is an Associate Professor of Economics at Denison and President of the Global Institute for...

Recent presidential primary results have been disappointing for supporters of Bernie Sanders. The corporate media and mainstream pundits say that Bernie’s weakness is his failure to attract Black voters. Steve’s guest, Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, tells us that, in fact, Bernie’s agenda is quite popular among blacks, especially the younger generation. The problem lies elsewhere. Our two-party system of governing reflects the realities of our capitalist and racist nation. One side of the duopoly is always the party of white supremacists -- the white man’s party -- which must be kept out of power. In the past the Democrats had been the white man’s party, switching roles in 1968. For Black voters, the presidential primaries are about choosing the candidate who can defeat the Republican. Most Blacks understand Joe Biden’s culpability in the murder and mayhem caused by police in their communities. They know the part he played in the passing of the crime bill. Many would prefer a Sanders presidency, but they see that Biden has the support of the corporate media and the ruling class. Under capitalism, that means that Biden will be the nominee. The powerful elite will oppose Sanders; if he were to be nominated they would undermine his candidacy, making way for another term with the white man’s party in power. Glen talks about the Blacks who hold elite positions within the Democratic party and serve as gate-keepers between the Black community and the corridors of power. He refers to them as the “mis-leadership” class, calling them a profoundly reactionary element within the community. Their fortunes are tied to the party establishment, making them unwilling to upset the status quo. Consider the effects of Representative Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden prior to the S. Carolina primaries. “We have two governance parties,” Glen says, “and both are capitalist.” People are pressured to fashion their politics accordingly. Electoral politics can be important; politicians pass laws and enact programs. However, the duopoly serves as a cage for Black America because of the critical need to oppose the white man’s party. In fact, the duopoly suppresses all anti-corporate politics, making it difficult to build a left movement via the electoral route. Glen and Steve look at the acute crisis in capitalism. Young people of all races know this, which is why they favor Bernie. The contradictions are evident all around them, as reality butts up against the false narrative of neoliberalism. There has been a 40-year race to the bottom as wages, working conditions, and security are being systematically degraded by the oligarchy. The youth, especially, have no illusions about their bleak future under capitalism. Without mentioning MMT, Glen is crystal clear on the reasons behind the shredding of the social safety net. It has nothing to do with affordability or budget deficits. Destroying social programs serve the capitalist class by creating desperation and precarity among the working class, so they will be forced to accept lower-quality jobs and paltry wages. They are deprived of all other options. Bernie's platform is the antithesis of the race to the bottom -- universal childcare, a minimum wage, affordable housing, and national healthcare, all create conditions in which workers can turn down inadequate jobs. He has been the biggest threat to the ruling duopoly in the postwar era. Glen has fascinating insights into the real reasons behind Mike Bloomberg’s recent candidacy. It had nothing to do with buying the presidency. Listen to the episode for more on this as well as the catch-22 in the handling of the coronavirus! Glen Ford is the Founder and Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report. See his full bio here: https://blackagendareport.com/about-us...

Our guest is the OG of MMT. Listeners always appreciate Warren Mosler’s ability to slice through to the clear and practical fiscal implication of any policy consideration. Today he talks to Steve about the deflationary bias of Medicare for All, the countercyclical effects of a federal job guarantee, how to apportion the resources that will be freed up by M4A, and why it makes sense to replace the income tax with some kind of asset tax.     You don’t need a degree in economics to understand why expanding Medicare’s coverage from age 65 to age zero will result in an immediate reduction in overall spending on healthcare. Warren estimates $600 billion in savings. Meanwhile at least 5 million jobs will be lost. Economists call it a massive “positive productivity shock.” Whenever you can produce the same amount of goods or services for less money, it’s good for the economy, despite the job loss. Now those people can be deployed for something more useful than the advertising, marketing, and administrative tasks of private insurance companies.     With M4A, the costs for private firms drop because they’re no longer buying medical coverage for their employees. This is another good thing. There’s no sensible reason for the cost of healthcare to be built into the cost of products; business expenses go down substantially, putting downward pressure on prices. It’s a deflationary event.     The two things described above - increased unemployment and downward pressure on prices - work together to reduce inflation. As Warren says, “when you have that kind of impulse you don’t raise taxes or cut spending to offset it. That’s nonsensical. It just makes it worse.”     Eventually moving to M4A could have inflationary effects, but Warren explains the importance of timing. We have to think about what happens on “day one.” People and firms will have more money in their pockets because they don’t have to buy healthcare. Ultimately they’ll begin spending some of it. Increased consumer demand will cause prices to rise; corporations might increase production. But these effects don’t play out immediately. So, again, it’s ridiculous to start with a huge tax to offset the inflation that hasn’t yet occurred. There will be time to decide what’s needed.     In light of the number of people who will become unemployed from M4A, Steve asks whether it makes more sense to have the Federal Job Guarantee in place first. This leads to a broader discussion of the FJG. Warren compares it to the joke that says, to avoid being eaten “I don’t have to outrun the bear; I only have to outrun you.” The FJG doesn’t have to be perfect; it only has to be better than unemployment. There are no economic criteria where it's worse than unemployment, so even if it's merely equal, economically, we should do it because by every other measure it's superior.     Mosler has always maintained that it must be transitional, while some MMT proponents see it as a chance to expand the public sector workforce, including within a Green New Deal. Despite some disagreements, the conversation has brought MMT awareness into the mainstream. This is a huge plus.     Once we get past the household analogy for the federal budget we can begin determining priorities for allocating resources, including labor. The US needs less than 1% of the population to grow all the food and 7% for manufacturing. Our productivity gains give us the luxury of allowing more time to be spent taking care of each other - with education, research, healthcare, and infrastructure, for example. In assessing the value of government expenditure, we aren’t limited to old notions of productivity. Solar energy requires more man-hours to produce than an equal amount of energy from coal, but that’s no reason to continue using coal. When planning for the public purpose we can take the greater good into account.     Warren Mosler’s books...