Macro N Cheese

**Reminder** Each episode of Macro N Cheese is accompanied by a transcript and an “Extras” page with links to related material and resources. To access, go to realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast. In one sentence: the winners and losers of the 21st century are the countries that attract young people. Parag Khanna is a leading global strategy advisor and best-selling author of numerous books on globalization, migration, the info-state, and the future of the world order. In this episode, he speaks with Steve about his newest book, Move: The Forces Uprooting Us. Most people who pretend to understand globalization reduce it to the rate of world trade growth. Khanna says we need a broader and more nuanced view, even though there are aspects that cannot be quantified. In his work he takes a multi-dimensional and systemic approach. An earlier book, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, was about the functional geography of infrastructure and supply chains. Its “punchline” is that conne

Dirk Ehnts, an economist from Berlin, joins us to talk about his book, Modern Monetary Theory and European Macroeconomics. In addition to discussing the current situation in the Eurozone, he helps us understand the similarities and differences between the Eurozone and the US, especially regarding the relationship between the individual states and the central bank. So in the US, whatever happens in your state ... you always have government spending coming from the federal level. So that's going to pay for the military installation, that's going to pay for the pensions. It's going to pay for some of the public federal infrastructure. And that means that whatever happens in your state, the federal government is always there. And you also have these institutional mechanisms to ensure that states which do not have a lot of employment can somehow make bargains in the political process and basically trade votes for jobs. And that's the main difference. The Eurozone has both the European Central Bank (ECB) and natio

Somber headlines recall the 2008 financial crisis: “Global financial markets have been on high alert,” warns the BBC. “Chinese property giant Evergrande is on the brink of collapse, and analysts warn the potential fallout could have far-reaching implications that spill outside China’s borders,” says CNBC. From the New York Times: “Every once in a while a company grows so big and messy that governments fear what would happen to the broader economy if it were to fail.” To navigate this story, we needed someone immune to hysteria, so Steve invited the infinitely sensible Robert Hockett to guide us through the Evergrande saga. Hockett begins the episode with a brief history of China’s strategy for economic development. Unsurprisingly, it looks a lot like that of the US, Germany, and Japan, in different eras. The so-called export-led growth strategy involves developing industries that can achieve a sizable share of the global market for manufactured goods, starting at the low end and proceeding up the ladder to

This week Steve investigates the cutthroat world of local school board elections. So, get ready to get down and dirty... Just kidding! His guest, Rana Odeh, is the genuine article: thoughtful, straight forward, and unafraid to bring up uncomfortable topics. At a time when the country’s political polarization seeps into every crevice of civic and social life, our school boards have become battlegrounds. Rana is willing to armor up and fight for our youth and their education.   Rana is running for a seat on the school board in Granville, OH, where she lives with her three kids and her husband, Fadhel Kaboub – a dear friend of this podcast. Anyone who follows Fadhel on Facebook has seen their beautiful family of fledgling artists, musicians, and young campaigners.  Steve and Rana talk about the lack of a federal right to education in the US and the need for proper (federal) funding, decoupled from the local tax base. They talk about the mask mandate wars now being waged in schools across the country,

In 2014, Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters engaged in armed confrontation with law enforcement. Bundy had been embroiled in a 21-year legal dispute with the US Bureau of Land Management. The “Bundy Standoff” was splashed across the news, allowing the public to watch as Cliven Bundy became a hero – a symbol of conservative America under attack by the federal government. This week, Jamie Skillen talks with Steve Grumbine about the history and politics of federal lands. Skillen’s book, This Land is My Land, traces three periods of rebellion against federal land authority over the past forty years. The issue wasn’t originally defined by the so-called left/right divide. Prior to the Sagebrush Rebellion (1979-1982) these were regional actions waged by people who shared a common material interest in federal lands, regardless of political identification. Since 1979, however, federal land issues have become flashpoints in conservative politics. In a nation that prizes private ownership and indivi

This week Steve welcomes Scott Fullwiler for the first time in two years. Scott is a research scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and associate professor of economics at UMKC, where he teaches the macroeconomics PhD program. As listeners of this podcast know, UMKC is one of the two academic birthplaces of MMT. The episode begins with a look at social security and FICA taxes. Originally, the idea behind FICA was for people to feel like they’re paying into their own retirement. The expectation is that SS will be politically protected as a result. Scott points out that this is an unnecessary narrative and compares it to national defense. “It's not as if the reason why we continue to get national defense spending is because somebody feels like they've paid into it and they’re owed it.” There are three different separate things we need to remember when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, and unfortunately, all three of them get blended together in our public discourse … And those thre

This week we’re checking in with a couple of candidates from The New Liberals (TNL) of Australia. We’ll be learning about the traditional Australian political parties and getting an overview of how their electoral system works. Steve Keen is an old friend of this podcast. In the past he’s joined us to talk about everything from climate change to Marx to the breakdown of supply chains during the COVID pandemic. Now we’re meeting him as a political candidate; soon Professor Keen will be Senator Keen. Victor Kline, the leader and one of the founders of TNL, is running for a seat in the House of Representatives. TNL is only two years old but has already gained wide support. Unlike the US, where third parties have been almost entirely shut out of national elections, Australia’s preferential voting system and parliamentary style of government have made it possible for TNL to gain traction. Voting is mandatory in Australia, which Keen explains is far superior to the farce called democracy in the US: I see it as

Our friend John Harvey is back to answer a question that’s usually accompanied by much wailing and gnashing of teeth: “what happens if people lose faith in the dollar?” The question contains all sorts of assumptions and intentions, which the Cowboy Economist proceeds to dismember, dispelling all sorts of myths – from inflation to the Fed. (He even tells us why China will continue holding US dollars, in case you’re worried.) One approach taken by the “faith in the dollar” Cassandras is that government is bad, therefore non-governmental currency (Bitcoin!) is better... because the free market is more efficient. However, to say efficiency is good means accepting all sorts of negative social conditions and behaviors, including racism. John talks about economic models and their need to mirror real world behavior. ...you go back to Milton Friedman's philosophy of positivism. And this is how you do economic research. The idea was that it doesn't matter how unrealistic the assumptions of a model are, as long as th

Modern Monetary Theory Has a New Friend in Congress said the headline of a New York Times op-ed earlier this month. That friend is House Budget Committee chair John Yarmuth, the 8th term congressman from KY. Isn’t it ironic that it’s newsworthy when the chair of the House Budget Committee understands the basic truth about the workings of the US dollar? That it was a bold move for Yarmuth to appear on C-Span and explain how federal financing differs from our household budgets? This is the world we live in, so we take our MMT victories where we can get them. This week, John and his journalist son, Aaron, talk with Steve about Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth and how it opened their eyes to the contradictions and absurdities of conventional thinking about our government’s economic policies and the national debt. Instead of asking themselves what the US can afford to do, Congress can now ask what the American people need them to do. John describes his second term on the budget committee, when the chairman,

MMT, at its most fundamental, shows us the difference between a currency user and the currency issuer. This reality affects policy decisions in ways it would be foolish to ignore. As Fadhel Kaboub and Bill Black explained here recently, even if it were possible to create some inadequate public programs at the state level, they will stall the progressive agenda. Malcolm Reavell of Modern Money Scotland talks to Steve about the parallel situation he and his compatriots are facing. Scotland’s annual budget is determined and controlled by Westminster, the Parliament of the UK. Every year they get a block grant from Westminster according to certain calculations, and that block grant is supposed to provide enough money for the Scottish government to do whatever it has to do. It's a totally artificial constraint, and it is used to prove that Scotland can't manage its own finances and it's too poor. The Scottish government is criticized for not taking sufficient action to combat climate change, for not properly sup

Steve’s guest, Dr. Jason Hickel, is an economic anthropologist whose research focuses on global inequality, political economy, post-development and ecological economics. After listening to this episode, “degrowth” will become part of your vocabulary. For MMTers, it is a natural fit. Before unpacking the implications of degrowth, we need to understand how the language of growth has served to justify the exploitative ravages of capitalism and, to paraphrase Lenin, its highest stage – imperialism. Jason tracks inequality between the global South and North from the industrial revolution and the colonial era to the present day. You don’t need to be an economic historian to see that growth in the north relied on forms of appropriation from the south. As Marx pointed out in the 19th century, price inequalities are not natural; they are induced through geopolitical and commercial power. So in the colonial era, of course, you drove down wages by enclosing Commons and dispossessing people and destroying subsistence

Scott Ferguson serves as editor of the Money on the Left (MotL) Editorial Collective and co-host of the Money on the Left podcast. In July, he was guest speaker at Real Progressives’ event, RP Live. This week, Macro N Cheese is presenting his talk, Money and the Limits of Sovereignty, in its entirety, along with most of the Q&A discussion. Trying to summarize the presentation would be doing it a disservice. The idea of sovereignty is one that has been a point of discussion – and a certain amount of controversy – among the MMT community for some time. The work of MotL has contributed enormously to expanding our understanding and considering it in a new, multi-faceted light. Scott begins with the semantic history of the term “sovereignty” and its use in 14th or 15th century Europe to introduce a new conception of political rule, though not always with consistency. It has been used to justify political philosophy on both the left and right. Yet fundamentally, for us, the logic of sovereignty is violent bec

Status Coup Media's co-founder and CEO Jordan Chariton joins Real Progressives’ founder and CEO Steve Grumbine for a discussion of our crumbling infrastructure, our inept and complicit corporate media monolith, and they share some ideas about our options going forward. This conversation seems like a perfectly segued culmination of Jordan’s recent RP Live presentation on the corporate media cover-up of issues like Flint’s notorious water crisis and climate change related issues as well as last week’s Macro N Cheese episode on infrastructure with Bob Hockett. As Jordan has repeatedly asserted, the infrastructure issues plaguing Flint, MI are prevalent in hundreds of other cities across the US right now. Flint is the story of America: deindustrialization, the offshoring of jobs, privatization, and the controlled demolition of the working class. In this case, it was the water supply. The financial constraints of a state budget, the corruption of politicians, and an inept media apparatus came together to poison

This week Steve brings back Robert Hockett to help us understand the big “I” word - infrastructure. Our focus on particular infrastructure depends on the social or public goals we have in mind. If we are a society that values mobility, we will concern ourselves with transportation infrastructure. If this were the 19th or early 20th centuries, we would be prioritizing infrastructure that facilitates industrial productivity. There’s also such a thing as “soft infrastructure.” It's probably worth noting that a lot of public policy discussion these days seems to be about social productivity. Right? To what extent are we adding to the material wealth of our society? To what extent are we improving our material well-being, society-wise, and we can think of productivity along those lines, right? To what extent are we producing better material lives for ourselves? Robert and Steve dive into global supply chains, discussing how the Biden regime may be realizing the old methods of outsourcing our domestic supply of c

Marianne Garneau is a labor educator and organizer with the historic IWW, Industrial Workers of the World. She’s the publisher of the website https://organizing.work/ (Organizing.Work). According to Marianne, real-life examples of workers taking successful action anywhere, inspires, empowers and emboldens workers everywhere. The crucial tactic our labor movement currently lacks is the ability to exercise the muscle of collective action, acting in an organized, harmonious fashion, building coordinated disruption that defies authority, while spreading trust, preparedness and the very habit of defiance. Labor has undergone enormous changes from the days of worker-powered assembly lines and shop floors, when workers could engage in day-to-day refusals. One tactic was “whistle bargaining.” The shop steward would blow a whistle, bringing production to a halt. The workers formed a circle around the foreman and voiced their grievances. Another blow of the whistle could send everyone back to work. Steve recounts th

When Bill Black introduced us to Patrick Lovell and Eric Vaughan, they were just wrapping up production of their documentary series, The Con, about the 2008 great financial crisis. More than a year has passed and we’ve become partners on a podcast and video series, The New Untouchables: The Pecora Files. Both series have a second season; TNU’s is five episodes in, and season 2 of The Con is not yet scheduled for release. Stay tuned. The episode opens with Steve telling Patrick and Eric about the responses to both series. Everyone was affected by the GFC, but many are still struggling to understand it. Eric jumps in to warn we must stop thinking of it as a past event. Just look out your window. We can expect an epidemic of homelessness with the coming spate of evictions and foreclosures. Patrick and Eric originally came at The Con from opposite directions as each sought to unravel the process. Patrick had been looking for the culprits at the top of the food chain – the CEOs and their ilk. Eric was interested

Esha’s last visit to Macro N Cheese inspired Steve to read Lenin’s What Is to Be Done and John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, igniting a new interest in political theory and revolutions. This, in turn, lit a fire under others on the Real Progressives’ team. In the past half year, we’ve been learning about the Russian, French and Haitian Revolutions. (If you haven’t yet heard last week’s episode on Haiti with Pascal Robert, what are you waiting for?) Esha’s Historic.ly podcast aims to decolonize history and debunk myths and misinformation taught in school and on corporate media. She has now added “Late Nights with Lenin” and “Soviet Summers” to her programming line-up. This week Esha is back to lead us through 1917. The Russian Revolution often focuses on individual players: Tsar Nicholai, Kerensky, Lenin. In fact, Russia’s fate was inextricably entwined with and affected by massive geopolitical shifts as the 19th century division of the world amongst the imperial powers of France and Britain was thre

In the US we are taught history from the point of view of the colonizers. The heroes are the victors, and the victors are the ruling class - the oppressors and exploiters - reconfigured to appear dashing and noble. When truth falls outside of this heroic narrative, it’s distorted or buried. Our guest this week, Pascal Robert, pulls back the curtain to reveal the story behind the myths of the Haitian Revolution. His work appears in Black Agenda Report and many other publications, and he’s co-host of the “This is Revolution” podcast. The Haitian Revolution was an earth-shaking event that changed the course of history. It was the first successful slave revolt, resulting in the first Black republic. The stakes were enormous: the 13 colonies of the British empire combined brought less value than Haiti brought to France. Because of its sugar, rum, coffee and tobacco, pre-revolutionary Haiti, called Saint Domingue, was possibly the most valuable colony in the western hemisphere, giving a clue as to why the plantat

 On Macro N Cheese, we often focus on economics - how society organizes real resources, and human life in general. We always seek ways to get our message out, to capture people’s imagination and motivate them. This week Steve talks to the director/producer of The World is My Country, a documentary about Garry Davis, who inspired and motivated millions of people as founder of the World Government of World Citizens. Garry Davis was a song and dance man on his way to becoming a success in show business until the US entered World War II and he was drafted. He served as a fighter pilot, dropping bombs on Hitler’s armament facilities with enthusiasm. When he was ordered to bomb a city of civilians, the realization hit:  "Oh, my God. Why am I killing people in their homes and schools and factories for no other reason than they're on the wrong side of an invisible line? I look from my airplane. I can't see this line. It's imaginary. There's an imaginary line. I'm killing people for being on the wrong side o

L. Randall Wray is a founding father of Modern Monetary Theory and is always a welcome guest on this podcast. This is his SIXTH episode of Macro N Cheese. Our community recently celebrated Congressman Yarmuth’s statement in support of MMT and his shout-out to The Deficit Myth. Randy tells Steve he was invited to speak to Yarmuth and his staff in 2019. He had planned to make a presentation on the data to show deficit fears have never come true. And so I sent them a bunch of slides and they said, "Yeah, this is good, but we really want you to talk about MMT. This is what Yarmuth wants. And he said that we're all talking about this and the Democratic side is pretty much on board, they really do want to hear the explanation." Sounds promising, but we’re far from out of the woods. We’re facing multiple pandemics in addition to Covid - the pandemics of racism, inequality, climate catastrophe are but a few, each linked to each other. The climate crisis has caused a pandemic of fires, of heat, of ocean