Episode 108 – Knowledge is Power with Rev. Delman Coates

Macro N Cheese – Episode 108
Knowledge is Power with Rev. Delman Coates
February 20, 2021

 

[00:00:03.130] – Delman Coates [music/intro]

A lot of people don’t realize that it was the education classes of the civil rights movement led by women like Dorothy Cotton, which really provided the inspiration, the building blocks for the civil rights movement. And so every movement must focus on education.

[00:00:22.750] – Delman Coates [music/intro]

I waited for the torch to be passed. And you sit on the sideline, you sit on the bench, you do your preparation, but at a certain point, you realize that the torch never really gets passed. You have to take it.

[00:01:26.700] – Geoff Ginter [intro]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:34.050] – Steve Grumbine

Alright folks. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. I’ve got Delman Coates, Dr. Delman Coates. This is a guy who spoke at our Green New Deal summit in Harrisburg. He is one of the sharpest guys I know. He’s the Senior Pastor of Mount Ennon Church in Clinton, Maryland, and founder of Our Money campaign. And I’m just so happy to know Delman.

Delman is just salt of the earth, and I know where he’s come from. And I watched the growth of Our Money, the campaign that they have put forward. And it is just truly inspiring. And as a fellow person from the Clinton era, from the Washington, D.C. area, it’s really nice to know that that area is being served by a guy like Pastor Delman Coates. So with that, welcome to the show, Sir.

[00:02:20.160] – Delman Coates

Steve, thank you so much. And I promise your listeners, I did not pay you for that introduction. Thank you so much for those words.

[00:02:28.470] – Grumbine

You got it, man. So, listen, I think that this is a really important time for us to be talking. You obviously we’re heading into February and we’ve got Black History Month, which should never be a month. It should be year-round. And a little bit of our talk off line we mentioned some things about how history has been written by the victors and oftentimes the voices of the oppressed are never heard.

And we celebrate weird victories for people that are not really oppressed, that are the oppressors, that have been canonized and lionized into our hero complexes that we all have in our subconscious about our founding fathers. And we’re in the middle of a pandemic. We cannot get Congress to serve our needs. We cannot get Congress to take seriously the very serious pandemic that we have.

We have now a Democratically controlled house. We have a Democratically controlled – albeit by a whisker – Senate. And we also have the White House Democratically controlled. So you’d like to believe there’s no more excuses; that things should start happening.

[00:03:34.230] – Coates

Right.

[00:03:34.950] – Grumbine

But the political landscape is very different and we still have no real meaningful relief for the suffering people. I’m just curious, what is your take on the current situation?

[00:03:46.020] – Coates

Yeah, well, when I think about the current situation, I think we’re in this dynamic principally because of how people view the role of government. I think there’s a portion of our society, particularly the elite, who view the role of government as to prop up business, to prop up corporations, and that the government should not get in the way of how it understands corporate profits and things of this nature.

So the real tension that I think we face today is really sort of understanding the role of our government in a democracy, which is to prioritize the needs of the people. Unfortunately, many people don’t understand that it is the role of the government to provide us with an adequate money supply to address public priorities, and there’s no greater public priority than the need to address health care, the need to provide economic sustainability, particularly in a recession and a pandemic.

These are the times when we need to harness the power of the public purse to address public priorities. But unfortunately, the tension that we face is that from a conventional economic perspective, people believe that if the government’s too big, if it’s too large as it imagines that, then it begins to encroach on the potential profits that could be reaped from the private sector.

We’ve got to do more to reclaim the role of government, to relegitimize the role of government in the eyes of the public, and then harness the power of the public purse to address the issues that we care about. And here’s why I think this is so important. Many people don’t realize that the public already provides enormous public supports for the financial sector and for business right now, every night in the overnight interbank lending market, we provide public supports to commercial banks.

We subsidize commercial bank lending in a variety of ways with public supports all the time to the tune of hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars. So we’re already utilizing the public purse. We’re just utilizing the public purse to just prop up one sector of our society and it’s oftentimes principally financial sector and businesses, the corporations. We’ve got to harness the power of the public purse to address our issues.

We’ve got to use our money to address our needs. This is why we call our campaign the Our Money campaign. And folks can go to our campaign by going to our website, OurMoneyUS.org. We have to relegitimize the role of government and harness the power of the public purse to address the issues that we desperately need. And this is the time, as you just mentioned, that we need to do that even more.

[00:06:43.340] – Grumbine

We watch the Capitol surge in D.C. and I want to be really clear here, in no way will I ever support fascism, in no way do I ever support white supremacy, in no way do I support abusive language that causes harm to people. And there’s a lot of bigotry that was found at that siege.

There’s one thing that really troubles me about the whole scenario, and that is that as a lefty, as somebody trying to put this stuff out into the public, this MMT world, these are all things that fall outside the mainstream, they’re heterodox, they don’t fit neatly into a mainstream media narrative, and we could easily be flagged as giving false information and lying.

And in order for us to be able to really make change, history has shown that direct action from the people and you see a host of things that have happened when there has been proper public pressure on elected representatives. We are in a position right now where the establishment has hunkered down, used the veil of the right wing, and is now using it to stifle voices on both the left and the right. I am all for de-platforming fascism, free speech up to a point, but then you guys are doing destruction.

This is harming people. So I want to be clear that I’m not speaking about that, but I am speaking about our own activism. The work you and I might be doing now suddenly falls into a very dangerous trap with what they have done with this capitol siege. Are you in any way concerned about the work that we do being cast aside as conspiracy theory, as fake news or anything like that as a result of some of these clampdowns?

[00:08:28.960] – Coates

Yeah, that’s a good question. And, you know, Steve, I’m not concerned because what we stand on is truth. I say from my faith tradition, our faith tradition says you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. MMT, as you know, is not an alternative economic system. It is merely a description of how our economy actually works.

And I’m encouraged over the last year because I have received so many emails and text messages and calls from faith leaders and folks who have attended our training around MMT who said, “You know, I get it now,” right. As they looked at how the government did the stimulus in March and April of last year, they saw the way in which the public purse was used to provide economic stimulus at the time.

And, you know, no one was taxed to fund the stimulus. The federal government just created that money through deficit spending. So I think that whenever you’re standing on the truth, right, I don’t find myself worried about this because people are seeing the very thing that Warren Mosler and Stephanie Kelton and Randy Wray and Darrick Hamilton, Scott Fullwiler, and others have been saying all along for the last 20 or 30 years, people are seeing it.

People see it, whether it’s being done by the Republicans, whether the deficit spending is being done for the rich by Republicans, or whether it’s being done in a stimulus to give people their checks, people see it happening. And so that’s why I think that there is so much power in MMT. Paulo Freire talked about the pedagogy of the oppressed. MMT is a pedagogy of the people. And as people see their government working and functioning, they understand that the concepts that we’ve been espousing are true. And because of that, I think it’s unassailable.

[00:10:33.130] – Grumbine

I like that.

[00:10:34.120] – Coates

Maybe I’m too optimistic about that, but I think that the veracity of our argument, the veracity of our theory of change is unassailable. It does not compare to the lies that were being promulgated by the former occupant of the White House. And I don’t want to compare the fundamental concepts of MMT with that. There’s no comparison. MMT is a description of how our economy works.

And deficit spending, it can be done by those who want to give tax cuts and benefits to the rich, or it can be done for the people. These are unassailable concepts. And I think because of that, it’s really our charge to educate people all across the political spectrum. I think the way that we reduce the tension or perhaps potentially minimize the tension between people of different ideological perspectives and perhaps even some of the social tension, racial tension that we face today.

We’ve got to educate people in all quarters, in my mind. You’ve got to educate liberals, conservatives and moderates about MMT, figure out how to develop nomenclature that they can grasp and understand. And I think that as we do that, the light bulb goes on. And so I’m actually encouraged. I would not compare our message or our vision to the lies that we’ve heard over the last four to five years.

[00:12:04.840] – Grumbine

Brilliant. I love the way you answered that. So this brings me to another polarizing moment where Ice Cube – and I’m assuming you had something to do with this, was given The Deficit Myth book by Stephanie Kelton. Care to shed some light on that experience?

[00:12:21.610] – Coates

Well, Ice Cube’s contract was something that he and his advisors had been working on for quite some time before we had an opportunity to share. At some point in the process we were introduced around October, September or October of last year, and we had an opportunity to do an hour and a half training around MMT and the future of economic justice.

This is something that Our Money campaign that I’ve been doing for the last two to three years. I’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes outreach with activists, with organizers, with faith leaders and the public, seminarians, folks running for political office and entertainers and athletes as well. And so this was just a part of our normal work. He was very much interested in learning about MMT, power of the public purse.

And in that session, I did have an opportunity to mention The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton. It seems like he really took it seriously and did a deep dive. And it really helped him to understand, as we’ve been saying, we’ve been misled by, frankly, Steve, I think your listeners know this. We’ve been misled about the capacity of the federal government to create money through deficit spending to address our greatest social and economic challenges.

So I find that not just Ice Cube, but many other organizers and journalists, we’ve got to do much more to educate people who are in the public square trying to get their ideas out there. And people may bicker and differ about the solutions that people come up with. But I find the one thing that links all of these disparate organizations, I mean, think about just among black progressives right now.

Just think about the range of organizations that are out there right now in the public square trying to make a case for addressing issues of social and economic inequality, whether it’s Bishop Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign, whether it is Diddy’s, [Our] Black Party, whether it’s Ice Cube, whether it’s the Black Futures Lab and the Black Future Project, you name it, Until Freedom, there are a range of organizations, Black Lives Matter groups and organizations, the traditional civil rights organizations, National Action Network, NAACP, National Urban League and others, Rainbow Push, the black denominations and faith leaders and the Black Church PAC and others who are in the public square right now trying to get their ideas out there.

And while their solutions may be different, the one thing that links all of us, which I think is similar to what links other progressive organizations, as well as the question of how we’re going to pay for it. And I think that if we spend more time educating people about this question of how the federal government pays for public priorities. I think we’ll come away realizing, you know, what we’ve been asking for a lot less than what we really could get, that the public purse is actually much larger than what we’ve understood it to be. We’ve been limiting ourselves to budget revenue, and it’s because of that we’ve been asking for crumbs when we could get the loaf. You know, who does ask and receives the loaf? The financial sector.

[00:15:50.800] – Grumbine

Yes, they do.

[00:15:51.530] – Coates

So we’ve got to change that relationship and educate more people and more organizations. And that’s really what I’m focused on in a laser kind of way right now, educating the public about how our economy actually works.

[00:16:09.590] – Grumbine

It’s funny you bring up Wall Street. Obviously, we have this thing going with GameStop and now AMC movies with some mid-range pikers that are making some bets against the guys shorting these stocks and the little guys, quote-unquote won. And you think about it’s not even a drip in the ocean as to the level of inequality baked into the system, especially within the Wall Street world whereas they’re not making money, they’re complaining. They get laws and rules made just for them to make more money.

[00:16:42.560] – Coates

Sure.

[00:16:42.560] – Grumbine

And here we are for once, you see the little guy, we’ll call him David, taking on the big guy, we’ll call Goliath, and knocking him down once. That doesn’t happen very often, though. Unfortunately, that’s the exception, not the rule. I think that if people understood what you just laid out and what MMT scholars have been laying out for many, many decades now and current activists that have been spreading this word around.

I think that if more and more and more people realized it, that these sweetheart deals for Wall Street would come to a screeching halt and that the regular people would suddenly not be wondering how they’re going to pay their electric bill and not trying to balance whether or not they pay their mortgage or feed their children. The level of depravity and inequality in this nation, forget race for a minute, is atrocious. The haves and the have nots are ridiculously carved apart.

But then you add in that next layer and this is going to be something I want to spend some time on. You add in that next layer of race, and you realize from the beginning of the colonized U.S., we have seen the founding documents, the laws, the precedents, has always thrown a bone to the poor white guy to ensure that there is no unity amongst the working classes, the people that are not born into privilege, that failed the lottery of birth. And those individuals, they get the wedge issue. They get to suffer the wedge issue. It might be 15 cents extra to the white guy. Just enough privilege,

[00:18:20.630] – Coates

Right.

[00:18:21.320] – Grumbine

To create that separation for unity. How do we create that unity? Obviously, we have a racial component here that has been there from the dawn of time, used by capital to create that feckless lower class from ever fighting back. And yet we know we need numbers. We need massive numbers to be able to defeat this monster.

[00:18:42.740] – Coates

Yeah.

[00:18:43.160] – Grumbine

Wedge issues have really kept black people in bondage much longer than slavery.

[00:18:48.550] – Coates

Well, Steve, not only are poor whites given a bone, as you mentioned, but also there are individuals within the oppressed black population community. And perhaps even other communities as well who are given a bone to serve as gatekeepers, as a buffer, every hegemonic system does this and has done this historically. I think that the way we address this is we have to end the economics of scarcity.

I say oftentimes that the way in which we do monetary and fiscal policy, it makes our economy a lot like musical chairs, Steve. And, you know, in musical chairs, they’re going to be some people who are not going to get a chair, and it’s not because they’re lazy or because they don’t want to work hard, or because they don’t have enough faith. It’s because they’ve been forced to exist in a game where there are insufficient resources. Right.

In this instance called the chairs. And the way we do monetary and fiscal policy today, it makes our economy a lot like musical chairs. And in that environment, they’re always going to be losers. And it’s not because they’re lazy or because they don’t have good morals or they’re not hardworking. It’s because they’ve been forced to figure out how to survive in a context predicated on scarcity.

And I find that wherever scarcity exists, discourses of domination and power will emerge to determine who will get a chair – that is, the resource – and who won’t. I think that if we want to address these discourses of domination and power, we have to lessen the need for people to push and shove for chairs.

By “chairs” I mean, jobs, health care, quality schools, these safe neighborhoods. And the reason MMT is so powerful is that it enables us to eliminate the unnecessary, the imprudent economics of scarcity and austerity that governs the way in which we do monetary and fiscal policy. So that blacks and whites, Latinos, Asians, we don’t have to feel threatened by our neighbor. I’ve done this example, Steve. Let me just say this to you.

I preached a sermon a few years ago to illustrate this and I do this and some of our trainings. I will put 10 chairs on the stage with 10 people. And I’ll ask them to walk around the chairs while the music is playing, and I’ll tell them when the music stops, whoever gets a chair, I’ll give you $100. And Steve, when it’s 10 chairs for 10 people, they walk around those chairs, they’re smiling, they’re peaceful. When the music stops, a very interesting thing happens. The men assist the women in getting a chair. The young people assist the elderly in obtaining a chair. And it’s very peaceful. And I give everyone $100.

Then I ask those same people to stand up and I remove four chairs, and I tell them, “I want you to walk around these chairs.  And when the music stops, whoever gets a chair, I’ll give you $100.” Now, Steve, these are the same people from five minutes earlier. They come from the same race, same religion, same God, same faith community, but now the dynamic is different. There’s tension, there’s hostility in the air. It’s very palpable.

And then when the music stops, the very same people who assisted others earlier, they now go for self. The young people, they now box out and edge out the elderly. The men who assisted the women earlier, they build alliances and push them out so they can now obtain a chair. Now, what happened? Did those people all of a sudden become immoral, self-centered? No. They were now forced to survive in a context predicated on insufficient resources. In this example, chairs.

And so in that example, the worst thing that we could do is to say to the people who don’t get a chair, you know what, if you work hard like those who obtained the chair, if you work hard, like Reverend Coates, if you got an education like Barack and Michelle, if you were great entrepreneurs and worked hard like Jay-Z and Beyonce and Oprah, for example, then you could get a chair as well. That’s the worst thing that we can do.

If you read William Darity’s and Duke University Economics Department, they have an incredible paper called The Ten Minutes of the Racial Wealth Gap. And this sort of elevating of the exceptional person from the oppressed community is the worst thing that we could do to address our issues today. And yet it happens all the time. Changing the race, gender, ethnicity or religion of the people who obtain a chair and making the six who get a chair more ethnically diverse doesn’t solve the problem.

The only way to solve the problem is to add more chairs. MMT helps us to understand that it is financially possible. We have the capacity to do that. Heretofore, we’ve been led to think that it’s unaffordable, it’s not fiscally responsible. It’ll trigger inflation. Whatever the reasons have been used to not do more government spending. The reason MMT is so powerful is that it helps us to understand we can add more chairs.

We can have a true full-employment economy. We can have a federal job guarantee; that there is no relationship between unemployment getting too low and it necessarily triggering inflation, as perhaps economists have thought at one time. We can provide health care for every American and fund it through government spending. We can fund public education, pre-K through college, including our HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges and Universities] without relying on local and state taxes.

And we pay for it using the power of the public purse. So I believe that the way that we address the dynamic that you describe, we have to end the economics of scarcity that has governed the way we do policymaking heretofore. And I believe that’s the solution.

[00:25:09.860] – Grumbine

I want to go back to your great example of what you do with your church, because I’m putting the job guarantee into my head, OK? And I’m envisioning immigrants coming into this nation and the same 10 chairs are sitting there. But instead of it being 10 people, let’s say you have 16 people and the six new people that we’re adding to the mix are Hispanic, maybe they’re Haitian, maybe they’re African.

But the point is that you put these people that don’t look like certain people and now you’ve got false scarcity, in this case, a real scarcity, because we’ve only put 10 chairs out there. But nonetheless, we know we could add 16 chairs and instead we leave those people who have been walking around the chairs for their whole life. And there’s these new entrants into the game and they’re after their job. They’re after their money. They’re after their piece of the American dream. And so the hatred, the xenophobia begins there. So your definition, your explanation, your game can be played out over many scenarios.

[00:26:20.030] – Coates

So think about what the people who obtain a chair in this micro example. Think about what is then produced to prevent the others from obtaining a chair. They’re going to develop discourses of difference and domination to determine who’s going to have and who does not. We see this all the time. You can go to certain countries in Africa, for example, where let’s say there was a time where the water from the river, right – we know water is a resource that tribal nations, they need that – but if a drought happens and the river dries up, and their ability to survive is threatened by this resource now becoming scarce.

The very same people who live peacefully on opposite sides of the river, who are perhaps even related in some way, probably have similar traditions. They begin to develop discourses of difference now to determine who’s going to have access to the water or the river. So who’s going to be able to feed their cattle and then feed their families.

And so in my mind, it’s the problem of scarcity, which I think is fundamentally what the economics is trying to address. It’s the problem of scarcity, which is oftentimes producing this impulse to feel threatened by people of other backgrounds. Either it’s because of how they speak or their practices are different. And the powerful thing about MMT, particularly in this post-gold standard world, is that it helps us to understand that the one thing that is not scarce is money.

[00:27:58.580] – Grumbine

No.

[00:27:59.120] – Coates

Labor, resources, supplies may be scarce and we do need to pay attention to the extent to which spending may cause us to trigger inflation. Right? But money is not scarce in a true fiat money system, and that’s a good thing. It is good that our money is not a scarce commodity like gold. And so in my mind, Steve, the way that we address the problems that we see today is we have got to eliminate the economics of scarcity that governs the way in which we do policymaking.

Even when I hear politicians talk about a jobs program, I mean, I’m all for a jobs program. But I think the goal needs to be full employment, because when you listen to what they say, on the one hand, it’s like, “yeah, we want to have a jobs program, but we don’t want to create too many jobs. You know, you don’t want to create too many jobs because if we create too many jobs, then that’ll trigger inflation.” No, that’s a fallacy.

And we do hear that from some of the economic advisors that are advising even this president. I say that respectfully. But no, our goal needs to be full employment. Our goal needs to be health care for everyone. Our goal needs to be decent quality public schools in every community. And we can pay for that clean water, getting to zero emissions, addressing our greatest existential threat. We have the financial power, the economic power to solve that. And to me, I think we have to end the economics of scarcity, which is producing the issues that we’re facing.

[00:29:51.740] – Intermission

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, and Instagram.

[00:30:40.890] – Grumbine

I appreciate that very much. One of the things I told you, I was going to take some hard shots here because I want to make sure that we get people that are listening.

[00:30:49.950] – Coates

Sure.

[00:30:50.550] – Grumbine

They hear these kind of arguments, that they hear a coherent and logical response that is different than probably what they’ve heard before. And one of the things that I’m most concerned about, and this goes back to not only 2016 but 2020 – Bernie Sanders created an intersectional movement that I’ve never seen before.

I have never seen such a diverse group of people fighting for the same stuff. Young people feeling empowered, older people feeling hope, remembering what it was like to dream a better dream. And it was just amazing. But then there is a portion of activists that I would consider fellow travelers for sure. They said, “You know, I’m not supporting Bernie Sanders.”

And many of them were African-American. They said because Bernie doesn’t support reparations. And Bernie didn’t address this head-on. And I thought to myself as a supporter of reparations, as someone who read Sandy Darity’s book From Here to Equality and has been a staunch advocate of the federal job guarantee, I’ve always asked, what does reparations actually mean? Because you can’t just throw money at people and say, “Now why aren’t you doing better?” That’s not fair. It’s not a complete solution.

There is a cash component to this, but there’s a lot of structural things that take place that have to do with the inequality baked into the country. I know part of it or a lot of it can be addressed by understanding the monetary system, but a lot of it is baked in going way back and passed on from generation to generation. The political climate for reparations.

On one hand, this would be a great time to really address such an egregious sin that was committed against an entire group of people in the United States, but on the flip side to that, there’s no political will for this right now, no matter how moral, righteous, no matter how affordable, quite frankly. It doesn’t seem like there’s any energy there. There’s not even enough energy to get us survival payments.

People are not taking to the streets to get survival payments during a pandemic. So how do you see us organizing? How do you see us working collaboratively together in this enlightened phase where we’ve educated people, etc.? How do we get our government to serve us, you know?

[00:33:21.420] – Coates

Well, I think the work we have to do really needs to center around helping people to understand that when we talk about the government, we’re talking about ourselves. You know, there’s this way in which people imagine or talk about the government as if it’s a creature.

[00:33:37.560] – Grumbine

Right.

[00:33:38.370] – Coates

Separate from themselves. Right. So when I talk about the government, that’s ours, that’s us, you know. We are the government. Right. And the public purse of the federal government is ours. It’s our money. This is us. So we have to really change our nomenclature. And Steve, we’re here because there’s just so much miseducation about the one thing that links all of us.

There’s no doubt we need a multiracial coalition of Americans, multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious, non-religious coalition of Americans who are coming together to make our world better. The one thing that links us, however, is the one thing that we’re most miseducated about, and that’s money. Black, brown, Latino, white, the one thing that links us in my mind is money.

We are very educated about the household model of finance, but we are miseducated about macroeconomics for the federal government. And so I think that the path forward is education, education, education. A lot of people don’t realize that it was the education classes of the civil rights movement led by women like Dorothy Cotton, which really provided the inspiration, right, the building blocks for the civil rights movement. And so every movement must focus on education.

I think that we got to do more on this question because I support H.R. 40, and I’ve had really wonderful conversations with Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, and I understand her passion and vision for advancing reparations. I’ve had wonderful conversations with Dr. Ron Daniels, who is overseeing the reparations movement as well. But at the end of the day, people are going to want to know how are we going to pay for it?

But if activists are locked into these outdated assumptions about how to pay for these priorities, it’s going to continue to divide the public. And I think through education. I just can’t say enough about Modern Monetary Theory and how I believe it is the key to helping us to address the unfinished work of the civil rights movement. It’s a tragedy that the most important part of Dr. King’s more prominent speeches, the I Have a Dream speech, and his last speech on April 3rd, 1968 at the Temple of Deliverance Church in Memphis, Tennessee, focused on economics.

It’s the unfinished work of Dr. King. And yet we’re deeply miseducated about how that mechanism works. And because of our miseducation, it causes us to be divided. It causes us to be divided within our own communities, where even black folks have a range of views and thoughts about reparations and some that are not always so supportive of it when you think they would be.

The Our Money Campaign, I’m encouraging all of our listeners to go to ourmoneyus.org. Pull up our policy agenda. We are putting out right now a policy agenda, Steve, that we’re calling Repair and Restore. This policy agenda is regarded as our solution to the reparative economic justice needs of the black community, and address the moral imperative of America to atone and repair for the injustices that it has visited upon its citizens.

This Repair and Restore agenda is created within that spirit and it is centered around a federal job guarantee, free health care, and federal funding of public education pre-K through college. I believe that these three central policies constitute the biggest, broadest and most robust form of automatic stabilizers to benefit the American people and black folks in particular.

I use the word stabilizers very intentionally because we have got to move away from thinking that stimulus is the solution; and what we need are stabilizers. Stimulus, Steve, is temporary and short term. We got the stimulus money last March and April, and every four to six months we’re back at it trying to get more stimulus. And we are held hostage based upon who’s in charge of Congress at the time to whether they are going to give us more of our money.

[00:38:37.400] – Grumbine

It’s also a lagging response, too, right? I mean, it’s never preemptive, it’s always lagging, it’s always after the pain.

[00:38:44.240] – Coates

It’s always lagging, it’s always short-term and temporary. Stimulus, like any stimulant, whether it’s coffee or whether it’s alcohol, you know, you get a short-term buzz, right? But eventually it wears off and these stimulus proposals provide a short term relief. We need to move towards demanding automatic stabilizers that guarantee full employment, provide health care for every American, and addresses our need for quality public education.

And so we’ve got to demand automatic stabilizers. Black people need hope, but we need more than hope. Black people need opportunity, but we need more than opportunity. We need to start demanding guarantees. And you know something, Steve? Whenever we start talking about guaranteed health care, guarantee jobs, guarantee public education, we are not talking about welfare.

We are not talking about welfare in a Ronald Reagan kind of sense, where people imagine this kind of lazy person sitting at home in the projects who just wants to receive public supports and benefits without working for it. When we talk about a federal job guarantee, we’re talking about ending involuntary unemployment. We’re talking about people who want to work. We’re talking about people who want to work and as a result of that should be able to get child care and health care and be able to send their kids to great schools.

We’re not talking about welfare in this sort of Ronald Reagan Cadillac queen kind of sense. We’re talking about harnessing that same public supports to the same extent that policymakers have no problem providing to the financial sector each and every day. When we give central bank reserves to subsidize commercial bank lending, we are giving banks public supports.

When we provide FDIC insurance for banks to go out here and treat the commercial lending market like it’s a casino, we are providing public supports to the financial sector. So I want to be clear that when we talk about the power of the public purse, we’re not talking about giving people something that they don’t deserve. And I just wanted to kind of say that.

But I think the only way we’re going to get there, Steve, I think, is to educate, educate, educate. This is primarily what we’re doing. And right now, we’re going all across the country to present the Repair and Restore agenda to the major civil rights organizations, to the major black denominations, to the leading activists right now, so that over time, I’m hoping that over the next 15 to 18 months, you’re going to hear more black people telling politicians what we want in exchange for our vote.

I think the greatest tragedy in this political season is that we have not connected a vision for the future with our voice and our vote. We’ve raised our voices after George Floyd. We’ve exercised the right to vote. We have got to connect our voice and our vote to a vision for the future. And right now, I’m challenging black leaders and black organizations to articulate a public policy vision so that we can hold politicians accountable.

We have no metric right now to hold politicians accountable for bringing these victories in Georgia, for South Carolina, really changing the game for the Biden campaign. So as a result, because we haven’t defined what we want, we’ll get anything. We’ll get people saying, well, I guess the goal is to just diversify the cabinet – which we need to do, I want to be very clear about that – I guess the goal is, you know, if we can get a few more black CEOs and if we can get more blacks in certain corporate board seats, maybe that will satisfy the black community.

If we can get more black coaches in the NFL, in the NBA, and we can kind of diversify things, then that should appease black folks. No, it won’t. But it does because we have not articulated a vision to benefit the people. It does not benefit the masses to have a few more people from the oppressed group who are able to benefit from the fruit of the economic tree. We have got to raise the plight for the masses. And I’m telling activists and leaders in the public that the way to do that is through a federal job guarantee.

Built within that is a Green New Deal and a whole host of infrastructure spending. You know, the American Society of Civil Engineers says we need $4.6 trillion dollars of infrastructure spending right now, federally funded, administered at the state and local level. We can change the game so that we can strengthen black communities, black families, and strengthen every community in America. And that’s going to come by articulating a vision for the future that’s connected with our voices and our vote.

[00:44:02.020] – Grumbine

You brought up two very important particular ones that stuck out to me, and I want to go back a bit to the automatic stabilizer. One of the things that I think is not talked about nearly enough, obviously, the job guarantee serves as the ultimate automatic stabilizers, superior to just about everything that I know of at this point. But one of the concerns to me is that automatic stabilizer takes the politics out of the situation.

It’s automatic. It’s already been decided. It’s like a decision for or against Jesus Christ, so to speak. I mean, it’s done. [laughter] And by having that automatic stabilizer baked in there, oppressed people needn’t worry about whether the politician of the day is a bigot. They need to worry about it, but not for the same reasons. Now, all of a sudden the legislation is done.

It doesn’t require hands-on. It requires simply a condition to be met that’s triggered by whatever economic condition. I want to bring that up that it is another side perk, if you will, to an automatic stabilizer is that the people that would otherwise be impacted by this are, in fact, protected from bigotry to some large extent.

[00:45:20.320] – Coates

Well, when you study the history of a federal job guarantee, you’ll learn that a black woman named Sadie Alexander in the 40s, she was the nation’s first black economist. And I encourage your listeners to look up the research of Dr. Nina Banks. She is a professor of economics. She’s on Our Money Advisory Council. And go to our website, ourmoneyus.org.

You can look up a range of economists and researchers who are on our advisory council. But Dr. Nina Banks talks about Sadie Alexander. She was the nation’s first black economist, not the nation’s first black female economist. She was the nation’s first black economist. She was not allowed at that time to practice in her profession. But in any respect, a federal job guarantee was the policy solution that she was pushing.

She said the best way to deal with the race issues that America faced in the 40s was to provide economic security for blacks and to reduce the economic fears of whites that blacks would take their jobs, and the job guarantee was the solution for that. That’s why Dr. King and A. Philip Randolph and others did the march on Washington. The full name of the march was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”

Some kind of way in the memory of that march, the jobs and freedom part and the legislative solution to provide jobs and freedom kind of fallen by the wayside. And I’ve said in other places that Coretta Scott King tried to continue this message in the 70s by leading 1.2 million people in marches and rallies around a federal job guarantee.

Unfortunately, the dual mandate of the Fed in the late 70s waters down the aim of the federal job guarantee. But you’re right, it does take the politics out of these questions. And why should the ability of the American people to provide for their families be subject to who the Speaker of the House is?

[00:47:24.170] – Grumbine

Amen!

[00:47:24.660] – Coates

Why should our ability to get health care, to be able to put food on the table, and keep a roof over our heads depend on who the majority leader of the Senate is, right?

[00:47:37.380] – Grumbine

That’s a travesty.

[00:47:38.610] – Coates

Whether you’re black, white, Latino, Asian, it shouldn’t matter. That should not be a part of our calculus and fear who the majority leader is of the Senate, whether we can keep food on the table. And the way we do monetary policy today, it ensures that we will always have unemployed Americans.

The four to seven or eight percent of the American population will always be unemployed, regardless of how much education they have, how much they pray, whatever. They’re always going to be unemployed. People of color, that turns out to be double-digit unemployment oftentimes. There’s no incentive for businesses to raise your wages.

If you make $10 an hour and you want $15, $20 an hour, why should the business raise your wages when there’s a whole pool of unemployed people out there who will be glad to get the $10 an hour? So the federal job guarantee, this public option for jobs, puts a floor to wages. It raises benefits for people, whether they have a job or they don’t. It’s going to raise benefits for everyone. And there’s so many positive benefits. And like I said, it’s this economic stabilizer. And, you know, I think, Steve, you said you’re from D.C., correct?

[00:48:58.350] – Grumbine

Yes, sir.

[00:48:59.160] – Coates

You’re from this area, well…

[00:49:00.240] – Grumbine

Born and raised.

[00:49:01.410] – Coates

Right. So I pastor right outside of Washington, D.C. Many of our nine or 10,000 members work for the government in some form. And one of the things that I’ve noticed for the 17 years that I’ve pastored Mount Ennon Baptist Church is that when there are economic shocks in other parts of the country because of perhaps the recession is kicking in, or perhaps there’s some business or corporation that sends their jobs overseas in some city or some community, we’re oftentimes buffered here in D.C.

You know why? Because we have a federal job guarantee. The job market and the economy, to a large extent, is buffered here in the metropolitan area because so many of the jobs are provided by, you know, the federal government. I only use that to illustrate how the federal job guarantee, this public option for jobs, is an incredible way to buffer the economic cycles that can occur from time to time.

It’s an automatic stabilizer. So once the private sector and the business community is strengthened and they’re able to employ and they need to employ more people off of the rolls, then government spending goes down as they can hire more people. So it’s just an incredible policy. I want everyone listening to make sure you begin to demand.

I think churches, faith leaders, civic organizations right now need to make a federal job guarantee a condition for your support of whoever is running for Congress the next time around. It’s something that we’re going to be pushing and organizing people around very soon.

[00:50:46.770] – Grumbine

Let me close this out with a final question that I think one of the things that is beautiful about MMT is it gives you a roadmap to understanding what is in the realm of possibilities. It takes away the question of “how are you going to pay for it?” And it also provides us with a neutral setting by which we can debate our priorities. I love that, right.

But one of the things that comes out – and I’m going to bring us back to Ice Cube for just a minute. As they had worked through their Contract for Black America, he had then in turn gone to the White House and said, “Hey, here’s our demands.” He was the one that was in the White House at the time. He was pilloried and beaten down as an opportunist, as somebody who was working with a fascist.

But in reality, many people are terrified of speaking out and speaking up because going back to In Living Color, when a leader speaks, that leader dies, whether it be a real death or social media death, we see that people that raise their voices. Bernie’s former press person, Brie [Briahna] Joy  Gray, who has been trying to “force the vote,” whether you agree with that strategy or not, is irrelevant.

The idea is that these are people that didn’t ask a gatekeeper whether it was acceptable to demand Congress to serve them. And Ice Cube, once again, did the same thing. And each of these individuals was torn to shreds by people that felt like they were stepping out of line. Here we are in a pandemic and, to bring it full circle, we still don’t have survival checks.

We couldn’t get the past administration, we can’t get the current administration to buy into things like Medicare for All. What gatekeepers do we have to watch for? Are we allowed to speak truth to power or do we have to wait in line? What would be your strategy for people that have just about had enough?

[00:52:44.140] – Coates

Yeah, someone asked me what my personal theme is for the year. What’s my personal goal. What’s my personal vision for the year. And I told him that my theme for the year is taking the torch. They wondered what I meant by that, and I said, “You know, for a long time, as a young man aspiring to be a faith leader and to serve our community, serve our country, I waited for the torch to be passed.

And you sit on the sideline, you sit on the bench, you do your preparation. You serve honorably and you wait for the torch to be passed.” And there’s probably a role for that, perhaps. But at a certain point, you realize that the torch never really gets passed. You have to take it. And all of our great leaders that we think about historically, in all of our great faith traditions, all of our great political movements, these were young people.

And so when you wait for the torch to get passed, you wake up one day and you realize I’m almost 50. I’m close to retirement. You know, Steve, I’m 48. Right? And so it’s like, “Wow, how long am I going to wait for the torch to be passed?” And so no. I commend people, regardless of where they are, regardless of their age, regardless what they do professionally for stepping up. I mean, you think about AOC’s story and to see her voice and her leadership at such a young age.

The time is now and we don’t have time to allow the gatekeepers to hold us back when they’re oftentimes trying to get crumbs for themselves from the master’s table. And so I commend individuals and organizations for getting out there using their platforms, their voices to try to address the issues that we care about. We have to work together because the entities that we have to fight aren’t always those outside of our community.

00:55:00.400] – Grumbine

Hmm.

[00:55:00.910] – Coates

I remember years ago, Dr. Jeremiah Wright. This is probably in the early 90s at a sermon where he said, “Everybody your color ain’t your kind, and all of your skin folk ain’t your kinfolk.” What he’s really trying to tap into this notion that takes issue with people who look to benefit from meritorious manumission.

I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but during the time of slavery, there was some states that passed meritorious manumission laws which enabled some blacks if they helped white slave masters by dropping a dime on black folks and dropping a dime on revolution or revolts when it was going to happen, they could, quote-unquote, “earn their freedom” by helping the master.

Meritorious manumission in states like Virginia, I’m from Virginia, had meritorious manumission laws. And so the entities that have to be challenged aren’t just those outside of your community who might be in seats of power. There are also some within your community who see themselves as gatekeepers, as buffers between the people and those in power. And those individuals have to be challenged.

[00:56:21.450] – Grumbine

This was so good, so sharp, so on point. Delman, thank you so much for your time today. This was so powerful. I’m going to leave it at that. I really appreciate this. This was a great interview. Fantastic. Thank you, sir.

[00:56:36.330] – Coates

Thank you, Steve. Look forward to seeing you very soon. Let’s make this a year of impact. Let’s make 2021 a year impact for our nation.

[00:56:45.840] – Grumbine

Amen. All right. Well, with that, I’m Steve Grumbine, Pastor Delman Coates. Macro N Cheese. Folks, we’re out of here.

[00:56:59.800] – Ending credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham.  Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.