If Macro N Cheese wasn’t committed to spreading MMT to the activist community, we might have been a history podcast. Nothing excites Steve Grumbine as much as listening to 50 hours of lectures on the French Revolution or the Black Plague. This week’s guest, Aaron Good, checks a lot of our boxes. What he brings to the table is history with a solid class analysis.Aaron is the author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State. American exception should not be confused with American exceptionalism; think instead of the concept of laws applying to everyone EXCEPT one nation or one elite group.During World War II, the US oligarchy saw the opportunity to replace the western European colonial powers with a new empire. They planned and created institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, the CIA — all designed to launch and support this new era of US domination of global capitalism. Imperialism required its own strategy:“To do all of this, they need to have the capitalist world all marching to America's beat. And so the Cold War is more or less ginned up and anti-communism becomes the principle around which the US empire is organized. So it's an empire, but it's not an empire that says ‘we are an empire and we're going out to rule the world.’Instead, it is packaged as a defensive response to a terrible threat. And so communism is the perfect foil because you can basically castigate any left-wing idea that you don't like as being part of this global communist plot, whether domestically or around the world. And they use this to legitimate, really, an attack on the whole world and also on the US population.”Aaron and Steve go on to discuss more of the history of US hegemony, elite criminality, and anti-democratic forces. They look at ruling class manipulation of institutions like academia, politics, and media. They critique Scandinavia as an example of democratic socialism (or social democracy?) with capitalist rule and explore the complicated legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt.Aaron Good holds a doctorate in political science from Temple University. He is the author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, and host of the American Exception podcast. Support him on patreon.com/americanexception@Aaron_Good_ on Twitter

When you realize the national debt is little more than a bunch of interest-bearing savings accounts, you will have effectively neutered the politicians and pundits who wield it like a weapon to keep the people in line and tame the working class. Every year in the US, the debt ceiling alarm is rung right on schedule. Just like Halloween.Interest-bearing Treasury bills are not available to most of us. (Do you have an account with the Federal Reserve? No? Exactly.) Rohan Grey is back to explain how these things work for the select elite. Not only do the rest of us handle money differently—we think about it differently. The words we use have different meanings.“The average person might think money is the opposite of debt. Well, that's not how the financiers think. That's not how the bankers think. That's not how the hedge fund managers think. For them, cash is debt. Debt is cash. It just depends on what they're talking about.”We’re supposed to believe the US is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Every time a Treasury bill comes due, we should hold our collective breath and pray the government has the funds to pay down another installment of the “debt.” Rohan takes us through the day-to-day buying and selling of Treasurys. The financiers, bankers, and hedge fund managers aren’t worried. At least not about US insolvency. We can exhale.Steve and Rohan talk about the trillion-dollar platinum coin and the law that makes it a ridiculously simple solution. If only the ruling elite didn’t have a different agenda.The Macro N Cheese official Rohan Grey cultural references spotter flagged The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a Beatles song (Taxman, of course), Better Call Saul, Seinfeld, and Kaleidoscope, Natasha Lyonne’s new Netflix series. Chuck E. Cheese and McDonald’s pop up as well.Chuck E. Cheese and McDonald’s show up as well.Rohan Grey is an Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, and the founder and president of the Modern Money Network. MintTheCoin.org@rohangrey on Twitter

In September, Real Progressives had a webinar with Michael Hudson. It gave our volunteers the opportunity to ask him about his book, The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism, or Socialism. This week’s podcast brings you the audio of that event.Although his book looks at three economic philosophies, the Q & A focused on contrasting the dynamics of finance capitalism and industrial capitalism. Michael makes the case that in its early days industrial capitalism promoted investment in public infrastructure and basic services, allowing industry to invest in development.Finance capitalism basically sought to break away and consume all of the public infrastructure. Most financial fortunes are made by privatizing the public domain – natural resources and public utilities yield fortunes in economic rent without private investment. This has led to the US, for example, turning over its economic planning to the financial sector.“The objective of finance capitalism, contrary to what's taught in the textbooks, is to make economies high cost, to raise the cost every year.”When asked about debt deflation, Michael explains that the increase in consumer debt leaves less and less money to be spent on consumption.“Right now, you're having the debt-ridden American economy being squeezed. More and more money is paid, not only for debt, but also for other overhead, like healthcare and various monopoly services that are not available to buy goods and services. Debt deflation is when the growth of debt exceeds the rate of growth of the economy. And that's true of every economy.”Since 1945, every recovery in the US and the other western economies has been accompanied by rising levels of debt, making each recovery slower.Michael talks about the current global political economy, oil prices, debt jubilees, monetary hegemony, and the US political parties. When asked for solutions, his answers might be troubling to some. It’s worth hearing him out.Michael Hudson is an American economist, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He is a former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist.

Rohan Grey always uses cool cultural references. Six minutes into the episode he brings up Tintin. Later we hear about Wile E. Coyote, Star Trek, Teletubbies and Wagnerian opera.The Tintin tale concerns a treasure hunt that required Tintin to find three maps; only when they were overlaid could he see the location of the treasure. Rohan Grey relates this to the critical juncture of law, political economy, and technology. He reviews the relationship of all three throughout the history of money.Rohan and Steve also revisit the (relatively short) history of the MMT community – what they got right as well as missed opportunities. Brett Scott was at the first MMT conference talking about privacy and the war on cash. These issues are more vital today than they were then, yet have never become part of the MMT canon, which tends to stick to the original hits, like the Rolling Stones still performing “Satisfaction” half a century later.“If crypto, quote/unquote, wins the public consciousness, I think that's a net loss for a lot of things MMT cares about. I'm anti crypto in that sense – as in capital C, crypto. What it stands for as a historical phenomenon right now is the empowerment of a group of people, the dominant strain of which is pro capitalist, pro massive wealth inequality, pro grift and fraud, pro right wing libertarian monetary theories, pro contempt of collective governance.”Rohan and Steve discuss how to organize around what is useful from the crypto space without defending it. The distrust of government is healthy – many are illegitimate and corrupt – but Rohan asks why the same critique isn’t applied to property rights. How can it be acceptable for Ted Turner to be a billionaire owning half of Montana? Why does the state become illegitimate only when it wants to tax him? Rohan suggests leaning into pockets of relevance. There’s value to be gained by understanding the opposition.Rohan asks our listeners to support #MintTheCoin and to check out the Freedom Box Foundation as well as the work being done with Creative Commons and copyleft.Rohan Grey is an Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, and the founder and president of the Modern Money Network. MintTheCoin.org@rohangrey on Twitter

When you Google John Kiriakou, the descriptive label that pops up with his name is Whistleblower.John was an analyst and case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency during the anti-communist era and then the anti-terrorist era. (Where did all the communists go? Aren’t they a threat anymore? Were they ever? Those will have to be questions for another day.)He is also an author, activist, and co-host of Political Misfits on Radio Sputnik. He and Michelle Witte regularly have Steve on their show as a guest to talk about (what else?) macroeconomics. Now we get to hear his story, working with—and then against—the CIA.Of the 14 CIA agents who were offered to be trained in ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques during the hunt for al-Qaeda in 2002, John was the only one who declined. He also came to be the only CIA employee to go to prison in connection with the torture program. He was charged with passing classified information to a reporter.In addition to sharing his personal experience, John talks with Steve about the history and role of the deep state, how it has transformed over the years, and both the public and political level of tolerance for it. If you still think power rests in the hands of our elected officials, you should listen to this episode.John Kiriakou is an author, journalist, and whistleblower. He is co-host, with Michelle Witte, of Political Misfits. Kiriakou was a CIA analyst and case officer. In 2007, he became the first U.S. government official to confirm that water-boarding was used to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners, which he described as torture. In 2012, Kiriakou was convicted of passing classified information to a reporter and received a 30-month sentence.He is the author of Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison; The Convenient Terrorist: Abu Zubaydah and the Weird Wonderland of America's Secret Wars; The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror; The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis.Find his work on johnkiriakou.substack.com@JohnKiriakou on Twitter

**Happy New Year from Real Progressives and Macro N Cheese. If you would like to help us continue to bring you great content, please consider becoming a monthly sponsor at patreon.com/realprogressives. Your contributions help pay for the tech platforms and equipment that keep this podcast alive.**This week’s episode is the recording of a recent RP Live webinar with Brett Scott, author of Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets.In terms of its politics, the digital money movement is largely only discussed by the mainstream media, ever ready to promote the interests of big finance and big tech. Brett makes the case that leftists and MMTers need to get involved. Those of us with knowledge of the monetary system are particularly well-situated to recognize potential minefields and see through lies that are being passed off as fact. For example, there is the notion of inevitability. Once the automobile was invented, it was only a matter of time before the horse cart would disappear. We’re also led to believe that the move to replace cash with digital comes from the bottom up—from ordinary people. We need only consider who is pushing this so-called cashless society. And who profits from it. Crypto itself is simply another commodity to be bought and sold with... money.Brett presents interesting ways of considering the war against cash and the future of money. In the second half of the episode, he takes questions from attendees. If you haven’t heard his interviews on Macro N Cheese, now would be a good time to do so.Brett Scott is an author, journalist, and activist, who explores the intersections between money systems, finance, and digital technology. He’s the author of The Heretics Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money. His latest book is Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets. Find more of his work on brettscott.substack.com@suitpossum on Twitter

All digital currency is not created equal. Its technology can potentially be used as a force for good or a force of evil. Robert Hockett joins Steve to discuss both. Let’s start with the evil. The collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, is still sending shock waves through the mainstream and financial media. It seems that only MMTers are unsurprised by it or the chain reaction, as other crypto schemes are tumbling apace. Bob describes how the collapse follows the same pattern as the junk bond bubble of the 80s and the sub prime mortgage crisis in the aughts. Prices are driven up as more people crowd the market, eager to hop aboard a new investment opportunity. You don’t need a Ponzi to have a Ponzi scheme. And apparently you don’t need to produce anything of value in order to generate huge profits... for a while. “The irony is that in every one of these cases, there is a clue in the name of the product in question that ought to warn you. If it's called a junk bond, there's a reason for that word "junk" being used. And if it's called a sub prime mortgage loan or sub prime mortgage-based product, there's a reason for that “sub prime” term. Similarly with cryptocurrency or crypto assets, one of the most ironical names ever conceived for this kind of product. If the word "crypto" comes into it, then that's a pretty good tip-off that there's something non-transparent about it, that there's something opaque and occluded and difficult to understand about it.” Bob and Steve talk about the development of Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC, which will be as safe as a nation’s fiat currency—Bob likens it to the introduction of the greenback dollar in the 1800s. None of this is to say that we at Macro N Cheese approve of the Federal Reserve’s ideology or actions; a neoliberal system will have a neoliberal central bank. No big surprise there. Robert C. Hockett is an American lawyer, law professor, and policy advocate. He holds two positions at Cornell University and is senior counsel at investment firm Westwood Capital, LLC. His latest book is The Citizens’ Ledger: Digitizing Our Money, Democratizing Our Future. @rch371 on Twitter

**After the episode, visit our “Extras” page where you’ll find links to Bill Mitchell’s blog, books, MMT education course, and more. Every episode of this podcast is also accompanied by a full transcript. realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/**Usually when Steve and his guests talk about culture, they’re referring to that of neoliberalism. As Scott Ferguson says, neoliberalism isn’t just enmeshed in our popular and esthetic culture; it is our culture. “There’s no enmeshing; it IS neoliberalism—what in the Marxist tradition we call etiology, the kind of background assumptions and values that structure our innermost thoughts and feelings and desires and, you know, what makes us laugh, what makes us cry, what makes us horny. What makes us, you know... everything.”In today’s episode, our dear friend, Bill Mitchell, talks to Steve about Japanese culture, which predates neoliberal culture by eons. Bill has recently taken a fellowship at Kyoto University, giving him and his wife the opportunity to experience the day-to-day life of Japanese society while pursuing his research into their economy.Bill’s interest in Japan coincides with the start of his academic career:“As I was entering my first tenured position, Japan had the biggest commercial property collapse in history. It went neoliberal in the late 1980s and had an extraordinary explosion of debt, typically concentrated on commercial property in Tokyo and Nagoya and the big cities. And that collapsed in 1991.”Despite the huge decline in property values, Japan had just one negative quarter of GDP. He had to ask, “How the hell have they been able to avoid a deep recession and get out of this huge property market collapse?” The answer was found in the government’s response—providing fiscal support to the economy.“The fiscal deficits went up to 10% or 11% of GDP. And in historical terms, that was huge; that was sort of like wartime shifts in fiscal positions. So that's what started me on my Japanese research agenda and my interest in following Japan. Then I met Warren (Mosler) and we started the MMT project in the mid-90s... And Japan was my laboratory—my real-world laboratory.”Some suggest that the government’s fiscal behavior could be explained by the difference in culture. But the way the monetary system works is identical to that of the US or Australia.Throughout the episode, Bill and Steve continue to compare Japanese culture and economic policies with those of their home countries.We at Macro N Cheese are always looking for answers, but often the learning experience is more valuable when we come away with new questions. Throughout this episode, Bill and Steve compare Japan’s culture and economic policies with those of their home countries, yet they make no definitive statements about cause and effect.Japan has managed to maintain a high standard of living for its citizens—first-class health care, first-class public education, first-class public transport. Unlike the US, Japan does not see unemployment as the cure for inflation. Bill describes the many service workers in jobs that would make neoliberal bean counters pull out their hair—greeters in stores, parking guides, maintenance workers in Japan’s beautiful public spaces. These jobs are not busy work; they improve a community’s quality of life. Bill sees Japan as an ideal candidate for a job guarantee.Japan faces vast challenges, yet its monetary and fiscal policies continue to defy the pressured expectations of hedge fund speculators, austerity evangelists and self-styled experts (hello, Paul Krugman!) This demonstrates that mainstream macroeconomics is not knowledge, it is fiction. Only MMT has it right.Bill Mitchell is a Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. He is also a professional musician and plays guitar with the Melbourne Reggae-Dub band – Pressure Drop.@billy_blog on Twitter

Clint Ballinger is an economic geographer, a path he followed in search of answers to what he calls fundamental questions of political economy. Why did the Industrial Revolution occur in England and western Europe? What is the reason for the radically uneven distribution—radically unequal material well-being—around the world? It exists not only between countries, but within countries. As listeners to this podcast know, economics departments aren’t teaching this stuff.Modern economists take money out of the equation. How absurd is that?“You have incredibly complex mathematical models being developed all through the forties, fifties, sixties... but they don't discuss all the things about money that matter. Because as we learned in 2008, they didn't even have money or a banking system in their equations, basically. So that's a huge problem.…Regardless of how you get it, once you have some kind of basic monetary unit, everything that comes after that in a monetary production economy is what got ignored.”Steve and Clint talk about the history of money and David Graeber’s book, Debt: The First 5000 Years. Debunking the “myth of barter” and understanding the history of money allows us to break through the misconceptions of money at the root of the misguided political stances that abound in our society. We can’t fix what’s broken without this clarity.Money is a token, not a commodity. Steve likens it to a concert ticket; the little square of cardboard has no intrinsic value. Yet not a single politician gets this right.Clint takes the discussion into property rights—not the rights of the rentier class, but the state’s role in protecting an individual’s resources.“We always have to get back to the real economy. That's always the fundamental thing. We make things—goods and services. People use those goods and services. Money per se, it's all accounts, accounts are always property rights. Every account in the world is a claim on real resources in some way. So that's why it gets back to the very basic ideas of property rights.”Much of this interview connects to topics covered in past episodes with Fadhel Kaboub and Rohan Grey, among others. Links can be found in the “Extras” section on our website, where you will also find a transcript of the episode. realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/Clint Ballinger got his MA in Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he focused on modern uneven economic development and went on to specialize in the interpretation of global econometric data for his PhD in Geography at Cambridge University. His book, 1000 Castaways: Fundamentals of Economics, was published in 2019.@clintballinger on Twitter

** Check out the transcript for this and every episode of Macro N Cheese on the Real Progressives website. This week’s episode looks at using a recently developed economic model application developed by frequent Macro N Cheese guest, Steve Keen. The software is aptly named “Minsky” and Steve Grumbine’s guest, Tyrone Keynes, is an experienced user of the Minsky software modelling tool. Tyrone is a consultant whose specialties are economics, health, and ecological modelling systems. Steve and Tyrone walk through the steps to develop processes that they both similarly follow to build a model. Tyrone then talks about his latest work using Minsky to build an unnamed U.S. State a model that will describe how to manage the state’s retirement system to improve the disparities between low and high wage state workers. They discuss the prep work before running the model and validating results. Additionally, Tyrone describes examples of how Minsky has been used to validate MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) thinking and how the tool can be used in the future to help bring about consensus within the MMT community and acceptance in the economic community. Most Macro N Cheese episodes are unique, this one reveals how to focus the MMT lens with some tips on why other tools fail. Tyrone Keynes is a System Dynamicist, independent researcher, and professional consultant at BD Consulting, (https://www.bdconsulting.ca) showing how systems thinking can be applied to economics. He specializes in modeling economic, health, and ecological systems. He is also the main beta tester for the Minsky software and does most of the social media for it. @TyKeynes on Twitter