Macro N Cheese

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. @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 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

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 dimensions.  @rch371 on Twitter

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, 1869-1973https://bookshop.org/books/racial-taxation-schools-segregation-and-taxpayer-citizenship-1869-1973/9781469638942

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 Amazonhttps://www.amazon.com/Richard-Dien-Winfield/e/B001HP3FH2?ref_=dbs_p_pbk_r00_abau_000000