Episodi
-
Fadhel Kaboub & Steve Grumbine talk about unemployment and the job guarantee. They go into the meaning of “buffer stock,” the importance of the 4th estate, and why Silicon Valley is so hot for a UBI.
-
You’ll get a hit of nostalgia listening to Steve Grumbine and Patricia Pino in this 2017 interview about the Corbyn and the first Sanders campaign, Brexit, Greece, the history of the EU and, of course, MMT.
-
Episodi mancanti?
-
Emma Caterine of DSA joins us to talk about why we need to organize in 2021. It has to do with class warfare, austerity politics, and Biden’s love affair with the financial industry.
-
Our 100th episode features labor badass Sara Nelson. She talks about MMT, union organizing, and dealing with Congress. What would it mean to have a caring economy?
-
Steve Keen compares the government response to COVID and WW2. Which one did more for the people? He tells us why mainstream economists need to die.. but even that might not be enough.
-
Randy Wray joins us to discuss the country’s vast needs and Washington’s inadequate response.
-
Joe Burns, a labor negotiator and lawyer, talks about the past, present, and future of the labor movement. If capital is global, working class solidarity must be international.
-
Mnuchin just killed the CARES Act.. in the middle of a pandemic. Why does Bob Hockett say it’s a gift in disguise? And what is the CARES Act, anyway? Why should we #SpreadtheFed ??
-
If the 1% are amassing their wealth through ownership of unproductive land, and if idle, abandoned land is a blight on our communities, how can we kill both birds with one Georgist stone?
-
Rohan Grey talks to Steve about the limits of electoral politics and the importance of reality-based analysis. The election is over. What now?
-
Rohan Grey helped craft Congresswomen Tlaib & AOC’s Public Banking Act. He’s here to explain how it works and why it’s so important for people, states and communities in crisis.
-
We take a historical materialist look at today’s politics with the host of historic.ly podcast after she consults a few philosophers from Locke to Lenin.
-
In part 2 of our interview with Warren Mosler, he talks about some disagreements within the MMT community regarding the job guarantee, swap-lines, and “mint the coin.” He gives his observations on lessons learned from the pandemic and how it can change the way we live and do business.
-
The OG of MMT takes us back to basics with the story of money itself. Where does it come from and how did it get into your pocket? He explains the true function of taxing, the “national debt,” the cause of unemployment, and how MMT saved the world.
-
Aussie MMT economist Bill Mitchell talks Biden and Trump, climate crisis, US healthcare, UBI, and where the movement must go from here.
-
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 -
Renowned economist and author Michael Hudson joins us to discuss debt, the parasitic kleptocracy, and the remnants of feudalism. He and Steve look at the monolithic two-party system, where slogans like “hope and change” mean the death of hope and obstruction to change.
-
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.
@SWFLMom2020
https://www.cindybanyai.com/
https://www.news-press.com/story/news/2020/08/14/social-security-florida-protecting-our-seniors-cindy-banyai-congress/3343662001/ -
We speak with a candidate of Florida’s 19th Congressional District about MMT, universal healthcare, social security, and jobs. Cindy Banyai is a mom of 3, a small business owner. and has been involved in community development for almost 20 years, collaborating with nonprofits around the world on issues such as homelessness, children’s services, education, and sustainable development.
-
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 Senior Columnist for Black Agenda Report. Her first book, “Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents” was published in February.
@freedomrideblog on Twitter
http://steerforth.com/titles/prejudential/
https://bookshop.org/books/prejudential-black-america-and-the-presidents/9781586422486 - Mostra di più
