Macro N Cheese

Steve talks with Thomas Fazi, journalist/writer/translator/socialist. Many of us know him as co-author, with Bill Mitchell, of Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World.A few weeks ago, we had an episode entitled Trussonomics. It was recorded a few weeks after Liz became Prime Minister, and mere days before she got the boot, making her the shortest-serving PM in UK history. Fazi has a different take on the events leading up to Truss’s removal, and spends much of the first half of this interview breaking it down. Truss is a libertarian free market conservative, so why was she such a threat? The mainstream narrative—left, center, and right—had it that her budgetary package spooked the markets so they forced her out.Truss’s real crime? She understood government finance. As listeners to this podcast know, deficit spending did not cause the current inflation. Fazi talks about the actual causes and makes the case that the markets didn’t oust Truss; the Bank of England did.“...In currency issuing countries, you don't usually see such overt tensions between central banks and government. Even though most central banks are formally independent, they tend to support whatever budgetary or fiscal policy the government decides to pursue. So, what transpired in the UK context was actually quite extraordinary because it was, I think, a rare instance of the central bank of a currency issuing country deliberately acting to sabotage a government.”Fazi lays out the ways in which austerity can now be justified in the UK, warding off the threat of a potentially strengthened working class. There are many layers to this story.The second half of the episode shifts the focus to global geopolitics and the US stance against China and Russia.“This isn't just US versus Russia and a few proxy countries. This new Cold War is a completely different one than the old one. It's one-way. The US is a declining power with declining influence over the rest of the world, where most of the world isn't following the US, for example, with regards to its policies against Russia and China. The US sphere of influence now is pretty much limited to Europe and Australia and New Zealand.”The US ruling class is the most powerful and dangerous in all of human history. The structural changes of the global economy have brought us into a multi-polar world. It's just a reality that the US elites don't seem ready to accept.Thomas Fazi is a “journalist/writer/translator/socialist.” who lives in Italy. He is the co-director of Standing Army (2010), an award-winning feature-length documentary on US military bases featuring Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky; and the author of The Battle for Europe: How an Elite Hijacked a Continent – and How We Can Take It Back (2014) and Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (co-authored with Bill Mitchell, 2017). His articles have appeared in numerous online and printed publications. Find links to his articles on his Substack.@battleforeurope on Twitter

“Austerity is the best weapon they have to try to convince. And if they can't convince, they can't coerce. So in my book, I say austerity plays with a double strategy: coercion and consensus.”Clara Mattei is the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity & Paved the Way to Fascism, published this month. Steve Grumbine, who uses the Twitter display name “Austerity is murder,” was drawn to her position that austerity is not just bad economic theory prescribing bad economic policy. That is a simplistic framing that ultimately depoliticizes austerity.Many on the left tie the birth of austerity to the birth of neoliberalism – which some identify with Reagan/Thatcherism, while others say it goes back to Jimmy Carter and the 70s. Clara traces it back a full century, to the years immediately following the First World War, when capitalism was in crisis. It’s no coincidence that WW1, the Bolshevik revolution and the dawn of fascism all occurred during this period. The post-war period was full of socialist stirrings in Europe and the US. Squashing them required a brutal economic response.US and British capitalists openly celebrated the defeat of labor at home and expressed admiration for Mussolini. The head of the Bank of England wrote to Jack Morgan (son of Pierpont), "Fascism has surely brought order out of chaos over the last few years. Something of the kind was no doubt needed if the pendulum was not to swing too far in quite the other direction.” The alliance of liberalism and fascism in its diverse forms should not be a surprise; they are achieving the same ends. To understand austerity, don’t look to the form of government. Look to capitalism itself.We are reminded there are class antagonisms between countries as well as within. When the US exploits and plunders other nations, it is acting on behalf of the ruling class – the same ruling class that is exploiting American citizens and plundering our communities.Clara says, “If you look at austerity just as a tool to manage the economy, which is a typical stance that most Keynesians take, then you cannot really understand why austerity is so persistent and present and structural to our societies.” Austerity is required to enforce society's organization by class divisions, based on wage labor and exploitation. Destabilizing the economy in terms of economic growth is necessary to preserve the capital order.Clara E. Mattei is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department of The New School for Social Research and was a 2018-2019 member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Her research contributes to the history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between economic ideas and technocratic policy making.@claraemattei on Twitter

**Full transcripts of all our episodes are available on the website, where you will also find an “Extras” page with additional resources. realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/Steve’s guest, Davarian Baldwin, calls himself an urbanist. This affects his prescriptions for reparations in the US, which extend beyond ADOS and beyond individual payments. His bio says he is a historian, cultural critic, and social theorist of urban America – and this episode touches on all those strands. The legacy of slavery and history of racism reverberates through any analysis of, or approach to resolving, this country’s social and economic problems. The New Deal itself helped increase disparity between the races.The interview includes a discussion of “wokeness”—a term which continues to stir up trouble among leftists and pseudo-progressives.“I'm glad you brought up the term identity politics, because what's happened now is that in any discussion of race or racism, identity politics is seen as black and brown, or women, or queer, or LGBTQ, as if straight or white or elite aren't identities. As if those aren't the identities that have guided and driven our society since its founding. So, identity politics is not discriminatory. Everyone has an identity politics.”In the second half of the episode, Davarian explains the concept of racial capitalism, then goes on to tie it to gentrification. He gives a detailed description of the effects on the white working class as well as communities of color. He makes the case that any solution must be both race and class based and must be systemic.Davarian L. Baldwin is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Trinity College, and is a historian, cultural critic, and social theorist of urban America. His work largely examines the landscape of global cities through the lens of the African Diasporic experience. He is author of “In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities,” “Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life,” as well as numerous essays and scholarly articles. He wrote the historical text for The World of the Harlem Renaissance: A Jigsaw Puzzle.@DavarianBaldwin on Twitter

“We have to understand neoliberalism as a particular phase of capitalism dominated by US imperialism. So let's start with the last point I mentioned: regime change operation. Any country around the world, any government that tries to have state oversight over the economy opposing neoliberalism was overthrown through regime change.”Ben Norton’s journalism, according to his bio, focuses primarily on US foreign policy and geopolitics, but that description doesn’t do him justice. If any of our listeners are under the illusion the US government serves a purpose other than making the world safe for neoliberal monopoly capitalism, this episode is for you. If you believe neoliberalism is driven by bad ideas, this episode is for you.Ben and Steve discuss Lenin’s prescience in ‘Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,’ writing about the predatory nature of finance capital a full century ago. But finance capital in 1916 was a far cry from that of today:“No one in 1916 could have imagined the level of financialization of the economy, especially the US economy – and also deindustrialization. Let's not forget that deindustrialization is something quite new in the history of capitalism. This is something that really emerges with the rise of neoliberalism, especially starting in the '70s, going into the '80s forward and this neoliberal phase of globalization.”As the mainstream media is getting our minds prepped for war, we would do well to revisit some of the other ‘enemies’ in our recent past. They all had one thing in common. It had nothing to do with some crazy evil dictator threatening US national security.Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. His journalism focuses primarily on US foreign policy and geopolitics. He is based in Latin America and speaks English and Spanish.@BenjaminNorton and @Multipolarista on Twitter

** Check out the transcript for this and every episode of Macro N Cheese at the Real Progressives website.Grumbine: I follow a lot of Brits on Twitter, and not just regular rank and file activists, but a lot of the actual economists. And the folks that are considered left, very strongly remind me of neoliberals.Wilson: Because they are. [laughter] What we have, you see, is this wonderful thing called the Oxford degree in philosophy, politics and economics [PPE]. And what happens is, when they graduate from that, there's a Sorting Hat, and it just puts them in either the Labor Party or the Tory Party, depending upon what the Sorting Hat thinks. They're all exactly the same. They're all the same graduates, they're all the same set of people. The economists are like that, too. They just get a Sorting Hat when they get the degree, I swear to God.Here in the US, we’ve been watching the administration scramble to deal with inflation. That chaos is nothing compared to what’s going on in the UK. They are soon to be on their fifth prime minister in six years. (As a point of reference, Maggie Thatcher was PM for 13 years; they don’t have term limits.)When Steve asked Neil Wilson to come on the podcast to talk about Liz Truss, he must have assumed she would last longer than six weeks! Oh well. It’s still an informative episode. As we well know, the MMT lens is useful regardless of economic conditions.Neil talks to Steve about the political lessons he has learned from the Tory’s attempt at handling of the economy. He and Steve talk about the EU and Brexit, and how the war in Ukraine is affecting the energy situation in the UK and Europe.Neil Wilson is an associate member of the Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies in London, a co-author of "An accounting model of the UK Exchequer" and a co-editor and contributor to the forthcoming book "Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers"

** To donate to the flood relief effort in Pakistan, please visit the Prime Minister’s Flood Relief Fund 2022How do we unpack a problem like this year’s floods in Pakistan? Where do we place the blame? Steve invited our friend Aqdas Afzal back on the podcast to discuss his recent article, “Collapse of Civilizations.”The article’s title is a cheeky play on Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” which predicted massive conflict between the world’s non-white, non-Christian peoples and the global North. Coincidentally, the countries of the global North have profited quite well from their destruction of the environment, whereas those in the global South bear the brunt – like floods of biblical proportions.Pakistan’s contribution to carbon emissions is less than 1% yet, when hit by climate catastrophe, the devastation is not only physical, it is economic, it is political. With an economy choked by foreign debt obligations, Pakistan, in the best of times, struggles to meet basic needs.“Steve, to give you an example, about 40% of Pakistan's federal budget - remember that figure - 40% is now spent on paying interest on external loans that Pakistan has taken over the last 75 years. And this situation not only eats up all the fiscal space that this country has, we cannot spend on health, we cannot spend on education, we don't have enough money to spend on climate mitigation adaptation, on clean drinking water. And the situation is becoming worse by the day. It's a completely unsustainable situation.”Aqdas and Steve talk about debt jubilee and reparations to address the immediate situation, but the overlapping crises are a direct result of capitalism’s failure to deliver on its promises – not just to Pakistan, but to most of the world – causing strife and division.Are we proving Samuel Huntington right?Aqdas Afzal finished his undergraduate and first master’s degree in Political Science from Ohio State University, then returned to his native Pakistan. After working there for five years he won the Fulbright scholarship for his second master’s and PhD in Economics from UMKC. He teaches at Habib University in Karachi and writes a monthly op-ed in Dawn, a leading English language newspaper there.@AqdasAfzal on Twitter

Ivan Invernizzi, of Rete MMT Italia and MMT France, returns to Macro N Cheese to bring us up to speed on the Italian political landscape. He and Steve met at the 2nd International MMT conference in NYC in 2018, and he was an early guest on this podcast.The US mainstream media tends to catastrophize the election of right-wing leaders around the world by lumping them all into a single sensational fascist identity. Ivan brings nuance to the issue. Italy has real historical experience with actual fascism. It originated there. Ivan suggests that a politician can have an abhorrent rightwing agenda without necessarily being fascist. There are gradients. Like in everything else.Unlike the US, Italy is a parliamentary republic. Italians elect the parliament, and the parliament elects the prime minister. In the US, it’s possible to have a president from one party and a congressional majority from the other. Not so in Italy; its government cannot exist without the support of parliament. What has emerged, at present, is a coalition of right-wing parties, with Fratelli d’Italia having the most votes right now.Ivan suggests that external forces, rather than internal elections, may have a greater impact in determining Italy’s future. He talks with Steve about the US proxy war in Ukraine, and its effect on the European Union. He talks about the EU’s power over the economies of its individual member countries, especially the imposition of the 3% deficit limit.Ivan Invernizzi has been an MMT activist since 2012 and is co-founder of Rete MMT Italia and MMT France: two activist groups and web sites spreading MMT respectively in Italy and in French speaking countries. He has a master’s degree in Economics and Global Markets.@invernizziivan on Twitter

The movement for free universal healthcare is under attack. Groups like March for Medicare for All, National Single Payer, and others, have been criticized for not buying into the Democratic Party’s agenda promoting individual state healthcare initiatives. The party wants us to stop pressuring Congress. They tell us to go home. They say there’s more likelihood of success in our statehouses.Well, MMT-informed activists can see through the party’s obfuscation. The single-state solution is no solution at all. The US federal government is the currency issuer; it creates US dollars by spending them into existence. States and cities are currency users. Before they can spend, they must somehow earn or borrow that money, ultimately placing the burden onto the citizens, whether through taxes or cuts to other programs. It doesn’t matter how fat their tax base is, even the state of California and the city of New York must balance their budgets. The difference between currency issuer and currency user is at the heart of the matter.Since its founding, Real Progressives’ stated mission has been to help arm activists with a useful understanding of Modern Monetary Theory.“We're not going to move the needle unless we mobilize and organize. And as I say, sometimes it's not enough to be angry and it's not enough to raise the pitchforks. We want not just organized pitchforks but well-informed pitchforks. And I think MMT provides the right framing to mobilize this movement.”This week’s episode comes from the webinar we hosted as part of our RP Live series for our friends at M4M4ALL. It gave them the opportunity to talk with one of our favorite economists, Fadhel Kaboub, who spent the hour answering their questions and arming them against the “taxpayer dollars” bamboozlement of those in power. In the Macro N Cheese clubhouse, we like to say we’re weaponizing knowledge.*****Be sure to check out our website, realprogressives.org, where you will find additional resource material. Use the Media drop-down menu and select Macro N Cheese to access past episodes of this podcast (192 so far!), each accompanied by a transcript and an “Extras” page of useful links.Visit m4m4all.org to learn how you can help their efforts.Dr. Fadhel Kaboub is an Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.@FadhelKaboub on Twitter

Grumbine: Can we have too much money? Wray: Yes, we surely can. Usually, our problem is that there's too much bank money, and the usual consequence is a financial crisis. Obviously, Steve and his guest are talking about the nation, not their own wallets. In this episode, he welcomes L. Randall Wray to Macro N Cheese for the eighth time to talk about Randy’s new book, "Making Money Work for Us: How MMT Can Save America," which will be released in America in November. Our listeners know they can count on Randy to explain MMT principles clearly without drowning us in a sea of wonkiness, but, also, without oversimplifying the subject. Consider the above exchange... and then this: Wray: Money cannot cause inflation. I can state that unequivocally. MMT understands that those two statements are not contradictory. Randy talks about the banks financing too much speculative activity that goes bad, usually resulting in a financial crisis. Extensive government spending – when it’s targeted, as in a job guarantee – does not cause a crisis, does not cause inflation. He contrasts this to the wrong kind of government spending, and describes how it is inflationary (cough, UBI). Steve and Randy go through the other questions that MMT is uniquely able to answer in a way that isn’t disconnected from our real-world observations. What is money and how is it created? What does it mean when you say “taxes drive money”? They discuss deficits and debt – and why it is that the few times the US repaid part of the national debt, it led to a depression, except under Bill Clinton, when it led to the great financial crisis. You’ll want to listen to this episode just for the discussion of the Fed and the banks. The CEO’s should all be locked up. L. Randall Wray is a Professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute. www.levyinstitute.org

Cory Doctorow writes when he’s anxious. He has eight books coming out soon. Yep, it’s been a tough couple of years.The number of upcoming books gives us a sense of the wide range of subjects Doctorow concerns himself with. His upcoming Chokepoint Capitalism, co-authored with Rebecca Giblin, is about monopoly, monopsony, and fairness in the creative arts labor market.Cory and Steve return to several themes throughout this episode, including the crushing effects of concentrated power. The past 40 years have seen an expansion of copyright laws, but the share of income creators receive from their labor has been in free fall and shows no sign of slowing. We know how Amazon treats its employees, so we shouldn’t be surprised that it abuses writers. Amazon’s audio book platform, Audible, controls about 90% of the market, making it able to steal from artists in multiple ways. (After listening to this podcast, go check out #audiblegate on social media.)Excessive corporate power and monopoly concentration have captured and neutered regulatory bodies and strong-armed the unions. Cory’s book focuses on the labor of artists and creators, but workers in every industry are fighting to stay afloat. Monopolies also have a choke hold on us as consumers – and as citizens facing social and environmental catastrophe.Neoliberalism relies upon our isolation – our belief that each of us is facing the world alone and powerless. By effectively starving the machinery of the state, it too is rendered impotent. At the end of the road, there is only capital. Margaret Thatcher said, “there is no alternative.” As a science fiction author, Cory Doctorow has a problem with that. His job is to imagine alternatives.Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults; HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly and conspiracy; IN REAL LIFE, a graphic novel; and the picture book POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER. His latest book is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER; his next nonfiction book is CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM, with Rebecca Giblin, about monopoly, monopsony and fairness in the creative arts labor market, (Beacon Press, 2022). In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.@craphound on Twitter