Episode 269 – Finding Your Why with Steve Grumbine

Macro N Cheese – Episode 269
Finding Your Why with Steve Grumbine
March 23, 2024

[00:00:45] Steven Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Folks, I have done five years of Macro N Cheese, and over the five years, I’ve never done a solo Macro N Cheese. For a variety of reasons. When I would do the Rogue Scholar, I had my own show. And I’ve done my own show on a million other platforms, but today’s a little different.

[00:01:09] And today I’m going to dedicate this effort to my mom. My mom passed away for those of you who don’t know on March 3rd, 2024. And it was a very, very, difficult period of time. My mom took a pretty severe fall back in December and she had a spiral fracture in her left leg.

[00:01:37] And when we took her to the hospital, she was unable to, be really treated there because she had a significant number of comorbidities. It turns out that her blood was septic. She had a severe kidney infection that had been repeatedly misdiagnosed as just a simple UTI. And in the middle of the night when she went to use the restroom, she lost her balance, fell, spun, twisted her leg, snapped her femur, and that began a series of very negative downward spirals that my sister and I teamed up on to really support her.

[00:02:18] And, when we were at the hospital in La Plata, Maryland, the urologist and the primary doctor that was seeing her were at each other’s throat. The urologist wanted to immediately put a tap into her kidney to get rid of the pus and to alleviate some of the pressure on the infection. The other gentleman was like flat out, I don’t want you touching her. We are not equipped at this hospital to do the kind of work that needs to be done. And so they were able to call to George Washington University Hospital where they had their trauma unit and they were able to secure a bed and they transported my mom via ambulance from Southern Maryland into Washington D. C. and I followed. And I stayed with her at the hospital for several days as they worked on her leg and they inserted a long rod into her leg to repair the break. But her sepsis would not go away and her blood pressure was bad. And so for several weeks at the hospital, my sister and I would trade off who was in there with her staying around the clock.

[00:03:36] Each trip was three hours down, three hours back. It was a very grueling time. And all the while, really didn’t have time off at work per se, but thank God my boss was incredibly flexible and allowed me to work my hours as I was able, knowing that I had to take care of an awful lot of stuff with the hospital. After a few weeks, it became quite clear that my mom did not have the energy to overcome all the other problems. She had to have a second bypass. She had to have a bypass in the leg that she had the rod placed in. And, the idea at that point was, do we do the surgery or not? Because there’s a strong chance that she’s not going to make it out because she’s got all these problems.

[00:04:25] Well, she made it out and she had good circulation in her leg for the first time in years, replacing an old calcified bypass that had stopped working. And little by little, my mom just… We do something and something else will break. You put your finger in one hole, it would spurt another hole somewhere else.

[00:04:44] It was one thing after another and it was brutal. It was absolutely brutal to see the most important person in the world that I will ever know. My mom. The woman that brought me in and was my rock. Knew my truth and never judged me and never, ever, stopped loving me no matter whether I said something she didn’t like or did something she didn’t like, or a million other things that my poor mom had to go through raising me.

[00:05:15] But there she is and I’m watching her go through dementia, go through delirium, hallucinating. And, it became apparent though that she was just simply not going to be strong enough to do the kind of therapy that was required for her to get out of that bed and quite frankly to deal with insurance.

[00:05:35] Steven Grumbine: Her choices were very limited and the hospital basically told us, we’re either sending you to a rehabilitation center, which my mom was not up for. Away from us. And it was far away from us. It wasn’t like something where we could just pop in and go see her. Even my sister, who’s local, couldn’t have seen her. So my mom made the decision, I don’t want to do that. I want to go home. If they can’t fix me here at the hospital, then I want to go home. So my sister made the very challenging decision with my mom and I, and we called hospice and hospice set up a bed at my sister’s house. Now this is, one of those very, very difficult things because you’re having that hard conversation that, Hey, mom, you know what this means, right?

[00:06:25] And having to have those tough conversations. And then hospice explained, Hey, listen, if you decide that you want to fight through the therapy and try and do these things, if somehow or another your body says, I can do this, hospice isn’t a death sentence. You can get out of hospice and you can go do it. That never happened. And so when mom came home, she was well tended to. My sister quit her job literally so she could be with my mom. And, I came down at that point, I came down on the weekends to visit and help out. But over a period of time from, the end of December, which she went into the hospital to about the middle of January, where she, when she was released, into hospice care at my sister’s. uh, To March 3rd, when she passed away. The decline was severe and it was very tough to watch someone you love and care about die, especially with all the stuff going on in the world. And with all the different people and different personalities that don’t respect you and treat you poorly and don’t consider your value as a human being and don’t consider what you’re doing in the midst of all this.

[00:07:36] And, the whole thing was just brutally mind crushing, soul crushing. And I had to stop in all ways. Really doing Rogue Scholar. I had to put the, my, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, noon, Eastern time, show on the back burner, which was no big deal. I was happy to do that temporarily anyway, anything to be with my mom, anything to help out anything at all. But I just kept glaring at me, that medical system, she was failed by it.

[00:08:06] There were so many opportunities before she ever fell that they could have treated her kidney had they thought about it, had they looked into it, had they done the work. Instead of just throwing some antibiotics at her for a UTI as if she wiped herself the wrong direction and just got an infection.

[00:08:23] They didn’t treat it as the systemic problem it was. And for years, she had this infection. For years, it would come back. And nobody was able to think about doing these things. Maybe it wasn’t insurance cost effective. I don’t know, but one way or the other, that will haunt me for the rest of my life that they didn’t take care of that.

[00:08:48] But it will also haunt me that we had to make that really tough call of, hey, she’s not able to walk around at this point. She really doesn’t have any way of rehabilitating. And the only way to send her home to do this is in hospice care, which means you have to agree to no intervention, just basic treatment of bed sores and, flushing out the kidney, drain and the the Foley there was no fluids.

[00:09:18] So she was beginning to dehydrate. It was none of that stuff. It was just watching her wither away. And the pain of watching that slow, just

[00:09:30] like a fruit that is spoiling, you pick it off the vine and it’s fresh and green and you watch it as it slowly browns and then decays and then…

[00:09:41] Yeah, so this is, this is a tough time for me and it’s a tough time in the world. And you think about how temporary life is and you think about how some get to benefit. A rich person would have never had to make the decision. of, going home in hospice care or staying in the hospital a little bit longer, or getting the right people to come and help and have the IVs going and have a home nurse there constantly actually treating her. Rich person wouldn’t have to even think twice about that.

[00:10:18] They just do it. How do you think Dick Cheney lives so long? Huh? But ultimately she didn’t have that. We didn’t have that. I, I think about my father. He passed away, going back a few years on September 15th, 2016. And for those of you who don’t know, I was in recovery for 10 years when my dad died.

[00:10:42] In fact, I had stopped drinking the last time, September 15th, 2006. I’ve told the story a few times, but I think it’s worth repeating. Yeah. My father had a disease called progressive supranuclear palsy. Dudley Moore, who you all probably remember from Arthur and a few other things, passed away from this horrific brain killing disease.

[00:11:09] That basically is like a brownout across your body. Little parts of your brain just shut down and just stop dead. And it was misdiagnosed for years that he had Parkinson’s and then, Georgetown hospital and Johns Hopkins and others looked at him and now you’ve got progressive supernuclear palsy and there’s nothing we can do about it.

[00:11:31] It’s not treatable. It’s a death sentence. It’s you’re going to die. So watching my dad dig into every possible thing out there. You name it. He was freaking out for his life. He was thinking about this therapy where they would drill into your head and they would take teardrops, saline drops and put it onto your brain directly.

[00:11:55] It was a therapy that he was like, maybe this will be the trick. Maybe this is the trick. And just watching his slow demise too, really challenging. But ultimately he had progressive supranuclear palsy. I think it’s less than 0. 2 percent of the world population has this. And go out there and check the stats.

[00:12:15] It’s very low. So you know what that means, right? That means that it will never be profitable enough to actually cure. It’ll always be that thing that’s cheaper to say “I’m sorry” than actually come up with an actual cure for this. But as folks that understand modern monetary theory would know, our currency issuing government literally could fund all cancer research, all medical research, all pharmaceutical research.

[00:12:45] And instead of giving it back to the private sector to profit off of, it could just maintain those patents as part of the public space, as part of the public purpose. It’s part of the commons that are just available to us. So my bitterness at the neoliberal era and those that support neoliberals, whether it be of the Republican variety of the Democrat variety, it disgusts me.

[00:13:14] It disgusts me at my core as an individual. As someone that is looking at his family and thinking about how simple it would have been to invest, to have a different mindset instead of the people that celebrate the private sector and thinking private sector employment is somehow or another better than public sector employment.

[00:13:36] To think that somehow or another the private sector is superior to the public sector. To act like chasing profit is somehow or another a noble cause. The perversion found within the capitalist mind is not to be underestimated. Anywhere there’s an opportunity for growth, anywhere there’s an opportunity to expand, to grow, to steal away profits.

[00:14:01] It’s part of it. It’s okay. And everything that I’ve just talked about with my mom and dad, those are just outliers. Those are just the way it is. People die, get over it. I don’t really believe in that. That’s not a world in which I believe in. And so as I come to a podcast on Macro N Cheese, and on macroeconomics and geopolitics and history and intersectional issues, I’m bringing my own story here because this is what drives me to action, this is what drives this podcast. Each of us have a story to tell. Each of us have these things. Each of us have been warped by a capitalist system that makes us feel like the problems of our own making. That we ourselves are the kings and queens of the outcomes of our lives. Never realizing the impact capital has on the decisions we make. The money famine that we experience, the lack of savings, the lack of access to things that we need to survive.

[00:15:07] And that’s just in the United States where we are the premium empire, the empire that always is elevated to be the good guys. When in reality we find money to support genocide in Gaza and we see people so devoid of character, so devoid of a conscience, ignoring that genocide, ignoring these things. And just falling into a standard vote blue vote red mindedness, and ignore it.

[00:15:41] And nothing will change with that mindset. Nothing. When I learned about not learned, I’m still learning, but when I learned about MMT, I was in grad school and I was finishing a master of business administration. That master of business administration took me on a trip to China. And that trip to China was three weeks for international business, learning about international business and basically learning how to conduct.

[00:16:15] International business, both as a kind of a broker between United States firms and Chinese firms. And just basically understanding the way in which supply chains work on a global level. And it really colored a lot of my beliefs. As you all know, I came from a right wing background. I came from a devoted Reagan household.

[00:16:40] So I learned, I didn’t start as a liberal Democrat. I’m not a liberal Democrat either, by the way, in case you didn’t know that. But I started as a conservative Christian Reagan Republican. As what Hillary would have called the vast right wing conspiracy. I was a ditto head. I was definitely not a Clinton person.

[00:17:05] History has proved me right on that, even though it was for all the wrong reasons. But suffice it to say, my belief system was formed by a right wing upbringing. Not right wing in terms of this MAGA world, even though I think that came later. It was really more of a cloth coat Nixonian kind of Republicanism.

[00:17:31] And this kind of red, white, and blue, these colors don’t run, proud to be an American Reagan style American. Where it was bad communism, bad Russia, bad anybody, not the USA. Bad anybody, really and when you started thinking about that, wasn’t white. Not that you thought about it that way, but that’s really what it was. The countries of Europe that were good guys.

[00:17:55] And it was all those countries in the global South that were the bad guys. They just needed a little bit of social uptick from the good guys. The, they needed a little bit of US of A freedom style coming their way. And all this stuff played into my belief system that led me quite frankly to a lot of the outcomes.

[00:18:20] I’ve still to this day never voted for a Democrat for president in my life ever, not once. Um, I voted straight Republican all the way up until the McCain. I voted for Ron Paul. That was where I was. And then I made that sharp pivot, and you’ll ask me what made me make a sharp pivot? I moved to the left when, back in 2002, going to college, computer broke down in the middle of the night. And I had gone crazy trying to duplicate this paper that was due the next day. I had written a hundred page paper on IP version six Internet Protocol version six IPV6 and how the United States had committed treason against itself. As China had implemented a greenfield fiber optic network using IPV6 and they were so much further ahead than us because they didn’t have to deal with all the legacy infrastructure that the U. S. had. And this was quite a deep dive, but I wrote this thing and the computer gave up the ghost and this is before cloud computing, so everything was on that hard drive.

[00:19:37] Thank God I had printed it. I had to hand smash a hundred pages to duplicate it. But I got so upset that night that after having been sober since June 13th, 1993, at the time, I went out. December 14th, 2002. And got extremely drunk. I think I bought two ounces of weed at a bar and blacked out. Went to see my little brother’s band play.

[00:20:07] And I blacked out. Drove, of course, because what else does a good alcoholic do but drive when they’re drunk? And I got to the nearby 7-Eleven and walked inside and was going to buy a carton of Camel Lites. And, I go, “Hey, I’ll give you a carton of Camel Lites.” I looked at the guy and I looked across at the coffee area and there was a cop there and I said to the guy at the counter, I said, “Do you think they know I’m drunk?”

[00:20:33] And, the guy goes, “if he didn’t before he does now.” So as I’m standing there, the cop comes up behind me and starts giving me the old shoulder massage, back massage. And he walks me outside and he says, I tell you what he goes, is that your car right there? I said, yes, sir. And he goes, okay, because it’s December 14th, I’m going to do you a favor.

[00:20:55] Steven Grumbine: It’s Christmas season. Since I didn’t actually see you drive this car, I’m going to ask you to go over to that pay phone right there. Pay phone, no cell phone, no smartphone, right? Just pay phone. Go over to that pay phone over there and, call yourself a ride home. I said, Mr. Officer. Thank you, Mr. Officer.

[00:21:14] Thank you so much. So I go over to the pay phone, put my head against the wall and try to remember who I’m calling and fall asleep at the pay phone. I don’t know whether it was 20 minutes I was asleep at the pay phone, 15 minutes, 3 minutes, 1 minute, I don’t know. But one way or the other I snapped to and went over to my car and right in front of this guy started my car up and started to pull out.

[00:21:38] I crossed the street and all of a sudden you heard the BOOOOOO! License and Registration. And they found, you know, two ounces of weed. They found me to be blowing a two. Yeah, it wasn’t that .08 thing. It was a two. I was beyond legally drunk. I was so blacked out and crazy drunk. It wasn’t funny. But when I got done, they put me in the police cruiser.

[00:22:09] And I could hear them talking about the weed man. I was dubbed the weed man. I didn’t even remember doing it, folks. I was pitch blacked out, drunk and I guess I did something stupid in the middle of that blackout drunk. But that’s what blackout drunks do is stupid shit. Just do stupid stuff and,

[00:22:28] So they took me to the local jail. They did a search. We won’t get into details on that. But after they did their searches, they put me into a holding tank with a bunch of other folks. There’s probably six young black kids in that jail cell with me. And when I say young, I’m talking about maybe 18 years old.

[00:22:53] And they started talking to me, ‘what did you do, man?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I was drunk and I had two ounces of weed, blah, blah, blah.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh man, that’s crazy, man.’ And, I said, ‘what’d you guys do?’ They said, ‘man, we were busted with a joint and they thought they’d bring us all in here, blah, blah, blah.’

[00:23:08] And who knows what really happened? I don’t know. All I know is that, these guys told me what they did. I told them what I did. And then we just sat there. And the commissioner came and said, ‘Mr. Grumbine, please. Come with me.’ And so they brought me out, walked me down to the commissioner’s office and the commissioner said, ‘Hey, listen, looks like you’ve got a good job.

[00:23:32] Looks like you’re a family man. Looks like you’re a college student. You’re an upstanding member of society. We’re going to go ahead and let you go on your own recognizance. Get yourself a ride out of here since you’re still drunk. And don’t make me feel like a fool and make sure you come back for your trial.’

[00:23:49] And I was like, ‘okay.’ I said, ‘what about them kids in there?’ He goes, ‘don’t worry about them.’ He goes, ‘they’re none of the things I just said about you.’ It just started really hitting me hard. So they put me back in the holding tank temporarily waiting for the, papers to be finished. And so I could make a phone call and get a ride out of there.

[00:24:10] And turns out those kids were going to be held for trial. They were going to be held in jail for trial. And at that point they’d already seen the commissioner and it was like, what’s the deal? And they said, it’s just possession, just a simple possession charge. I was like, wow. So here I am, had two ounces on me at the time.

[00:24:32] And at the time you don’t, doesn’t take a rocket scientist to remember all the uptight people that had a problem with marijuana. Thank God those laws have changed at some level anyway. But at that time, that was a big deal and it changed my life forever. I was officially in the system and it foundationally changed everything about my life.

[00:24:55] I should have been pulled over for drunk driving. I should have been dealt with. I was a sick guy. I had, I was an alcoholic that was in full bloom. I needed help even though I had been sober for many years. When they say that the same person will drink again, they also say that you pick up right where you left off.

[00:25:17] And obviously I knew how to put it down. So I was, I did not survive the blitzkrieg. I was wasted. And anyway, so I had to go to a rehab with work release. I would go at night to the rehab. During the day I had to be a senior executive sales engineer within the federal systems sales space. So I’m dealing with DOD and civilian agencies selling them high end Cisco networking gear.

[00:25:51] The point I’m making here is that I was released because I was considered to be the good guy. And those kids, they were left in jail for weeks to stand trial. And that really radicalized me. That was the first major pivot that I made where I began to realize how distinctly unfair, unequal, how bastardized the system was.

[00:26:17] I had no analysis, by the way, folks, still. I was processing, I was still very much, a Republican. And I was slowly, but surely becoming a libertarian at that time, shifting away from that radical Reagan thing to something a little different. A little bit more radical in its own weird way, a little bit more tone deaf in the right wing libertarian space with Ron Paul, the guys that are every bit as fascist, just minus the anti weed and some of the other weird things. Anti war so to speak. And, felt good for a minute. I was really big on Ron Paul because of some of the things he said stuff about ending the federal reserve. Said stuff about gold standard. So he was playing on all these solid, sound money kind of tropes. And I was knee deep in two master’s degrees and I’m learning all this stuff about how Finance works and the guy was teaching finance in grad school was a CFO from US Air or United airlines, I can’t remember which. Either way it was somebody I had air miles with. So I was getting pumped full of right wing capitalist nonsense from college and in life. And here I am dealing with this other side of the coin that I can’t tell anybody about because after all polite society doesn’t get arrested for marijuana.

[00:27:49] It doesn’t get arrested for drunk driving. It doesn’t any of these things. And this kind of weird, I can’t say anything about my life thing really haunted me for years. My parents saved my neck on September 15th 2006, my last drink to this day. Thank goodness. I was absolutely obliterated and went to my father.

[00:28:17] He took my keys and I told him I would beat his tail. I would beat him to a pulp if he did not give me my keys back. I was driving. I was a big guy too. And I’m not talking on fat. I was muscle bound and angry.

[00:28:30] To this day, I’m haunted by that night, but that night saved my life because my father said, I’m not going to let you die. You can beat me up, but you’re not going to kill yourself tonight driving. I’m not going to let you do it. No, you can’t do it.

[00:28:43] Boy. Oh boy. Dad. If you hear me talking right now, I’m so sorry. I know we’ve talked about it before you died, but my goodness, pop, thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking those keys.

[00:28:55] Boy. Oh boy. That. That changed my life though and getting out of drinking. And thank God I had stopped drinking because July 24th, 2009, I lost my job at Verizon after 17 years. The great financial crisis hit the great recession and Verizon was laying 10, 000 people a week off at the time. And it was an insane month.

[00:29:25] I don’t know what it was, but I was part of a 10, 000 person layoff. And nothing’s really been right since folks, let me tell you. That layoff, that arrest previously, all that together really fundamentally changed me. And it was about this time when a guy named Bruce Patrick introduced me to MMT.

[00:29:51] And Warren Mosler, Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds, and you talk about a moment, a real hardcore moment. Where you realize fundamentally that all the debating and all the fighting about debt and deficits, hard earned tax dollar going to fund abortions, hard earned tax dollar going to fund Israel, hard earned tax dollar going to fund some war that I didn’t like or something I didn’t like, or bailing out banks and all this other nonsense.

[00:30:21] I fundamentally realized that it was all lies and it wasn’t even accidentalized because the people in power know these things. They have to run the goddamn system, the system itself. So they know. Now some of the people that are just the talking heads, they don’t have a clue. And you can see it if you watch the documentary, Finding The Money. Maren Poitras, absolute passion project that has blown up all over the world.

[00:30:49] That is, I just wish it didn’t not have Bill Mitchell in it. That’s a real miss in my world. Bill’s one of the founding members of MMT, period. No matter how we rewrite history, Bill Mitchell is very much squarely part of that and should not be ever not included in any of it because there is no MMT history without a part of Bill Mitchell in it, period.

[00:31:11] Period. Sorry. It’s not. I was reading Billy blog. I was reading new economic perspectives. I was reading CFEP stuff. I was reading Levy papers. I was reading Warren Mosler’s center of the universe. That’s what his website used to be called. Not to put too fine a point on it, huh? Center of the universe indeed.

[00:31:32] But I was reading those things before memes existed. I think the biggest meme that I’d ever seen was we demand aggregate demand. And, I heart MMT. Those were the big memes at the time. Little by little was learning this stuff and realizing that, Holy shit. Federal taxes don’t fund spending and Holy shit.

[00:31:55] States have to raise taxes to fund spending because. This concept of currency issuers and currency users.

[00:32:03] And so as I’m unplugging from this right wing thinking that I had and this sound money finance thinking that I had, and all the hate I had for my brothers and sisters for wanting a free ride. And you just want free stuff, all these tropes that bad Democrats, conservative Democrats and bad Republicans shouldn’t even say standard, conservative minded people. They believe that you got to earn everything. You got to pay for everything. You got to work for everything. There’s no free rides for God’s sakes. And I realized there is no money in the economy if the government didn’t spend it into it. What a revelation. Just a revelation of magnificent levels.

[00:32:48] The idea that banks make loans, but you got to pay back those loans. And if the government did not deficit spend, the interest payments on the bank loans itself would wipe out every dollar in the economy and then some. You need the federal government to deficit spend or no one has any private savings at all.

[00:33:11] No one has any savings whatsoever for a rainy day. But you think about that. That idea of a rainy day. And the idea of thrift. The paradox of thrift and all these other things. Think about this for a minute. In modern monetary theory, they talk about being able to assess the economy.

[00:33:34] We’ll look at that great financial crisis that hit during the mortgage crisis in 2007, 08 09 10, and so forth. And just kept on going because Obama did not do the right things. Fancy that, right? But you think about that, and it’s like… Sectoral balances are a core thing. Stock-flow consistent modeling.

[00:33:54] This is something I learned in MMT land. I had just finished two master’s degrees, folks. I had learned all kinds of standard Mankiw economics nonsense. I had done Harvard finance books. I had done Harvard business review. I had done all the neoclassical economists and the classical economists and the Adam Smiths, the Ricardos, the Milton Friedmans, I had gone through all of this stuff.

[00:34:27] But none of it ever told the money story. None of it ever explained how money came into existence. And so while I’m processing social change in my head and I’m processing, change from being sober and I’m processing change from being out of a job. Folks, out of a job after 17 years of doing a thing on an upward trajectory.

[00:34:51] I had just in August of 2008 had just gone to China for the capstone of my degree. And in 2009, a year later, I’m laid off. That’s crazy, but that’s precarity. And that tells us all we’re one decision away, one business decision away. One decision that you didn’t make away from being destitute like every other schlob in the world. Every other lowlife person lazy fuck. Every person out there that just is undeserving of health care undeserving of dental care undeserving of having their student debt repealed and replaced and canceled. Undeserving of free college, undeserving of a home, undeserving of decent treatment. Just one, one more person falling into the abyss and trying to claw out and never being able to get out of the barrel because crabs in a barrel. Once you’re in there, the crabs want to keep you in there too.

[00:35:58] Doesn’t matter how hot the pot is. And then the standard, standard privileged people. Scowling at the pain and suffering. Scowling at the harsh language, scowling when things expressed in a way that’s not fit for tea time. Tea for two and two for tea. My pinky is out. How about thee? That kind of thing, right?

[00:36:25] Five star dinners for just for the heck of it. Hey, we’re going to go to the movies. Let’s go to this a hundred dollar a plate place for a snack. We’ll buy a slice of pizza. They’ll be overcharged by 500 percent because we’re elite. This Balkanization of society. And it’s funny, I go back to my time at Verizon before I got laid off and I was a senior sales engineer, I flew all over the country selling millions of dollars of Cisco gear and network and designing fiber networks and designing local area and metropolitan area networks. Weigh ins, distribution networks for ISPs and XSPs and all kinds of different, models under that dot com era.

[00:37:10] And I remember standing at the water cooler as I was getting a divorce and I was living in a trailer. A single wide with my then girlfriend would be my second ex wife. But I remember, Oh yeah, can you imagine living in that trashy, like, what are they, a trailer trash? I like, Hey, you know what, man, trailers ain’t so bad.

[00:37:33] I got the chance to live in one. Oh, Oh, Oh, we weren’t talking about you. Oh, yeah. Um, yeah. Um, yeah. Um, yeah. So I’ve always despised that kind of person always despise that elite, the jokes that the elite tell one another about the poors. And so all that kind of played into this transformation, carry it forward here.

[00:37:58] And, I had started a Facebook group years prior called Grumbine’s Political Mosh Pit. And inside Grumbine’s Political Mosh Pit, I was still a libertarian slash Republican minded person, but I was learning and I was learning MMT. And interestingly enough, guys like Warren Mosler would come into Grumbine’s Political Mosh Pit.

[00:38:21] And whenever Warren would give us just a little bit of a like on one of our comments, me and Bruce Patrick would be like, ‘Warren gave me a like! He liked my comment!’ This is 2009, 2010, 2011 timeframe. That was a big deal to, to be acknowledged for saying something with merit. By the people that you revere, by these brilliant people. That nice, decent thing that the activist gets is a like from his, from the people that he has elevated and respects and reveres only to be, ignored most of the time. But whoa, Warren threw a like at you!

[00:38:58] You’re like, wow, maybe I should frame this. Speaking of framing back around 2016, there was an economist for peace. Yeah. I guess you’d call it a panel discussion in D. C. And the night before I went, I had, reached out to Stephanie and Pavlina and went down with Joe Firestone and a couple other people from RP.

[00:39:22] And I sent Stephanie a tweet that said, do federal taxes pay for anything? A couple of hours went by and then finally she replied with one word, “no,” and put the link to her paper when she was Stephanie Bell, Can Taxes and Bonds Finance Government Spending. And this is one of the most important papers to ever cross my brain.

[00:39:53] And it gave me all the ammunition I needed to know. That federal taxes do not fund federal spending, period. If the government itself is self funding, it creates the currency when it spends. And when it taxes, it taxes away reserves that it created when it was spent into the economy. And so, that’s where this spending first and then tax later came in.

[00:40:24] It used to be TABS, taxes before spending. And then it was STAB spending before taxes, basically, because the government is the creator of the currency. You can’t pay a tax in a currency you don’t have in your hand. The government had to spend it into the economy for you to have it.

[00:40:44] And I couldn’t quite get that part because it was like, but what about private banks? Cause you know, I’m coming from the Ron Paul side. People think I don’t get this part of it, but I came from the gold bug and the fetish crowd. Okay. And I realized, wait a minute. The government created charters and gave it to banks and says, ‘here’s what you can do with our unit of account because you can’t print money because that would be counterfeiting. However, you can provide loans without having that money by going ahead and marking up accounts with US dollar denominated debt and putting a corresponding reserve to hold that. When you think of accounting, you have a asset and you have a liability. The bank giving you money, that’s your asset. The money’s your asset, but the liability is the debt and the bank itself holds your debt.

[00:41:44] And when you pay your loan back, the only thing the bank keeps is the interest you paid.

[00:41:51] So, there’s a fundamental difference between bank money

[00:41:55] and government spent money. Government spent money can create what we call ‘net financial assets.’ In other words, after taxes and everything else go away, what the government spent still exists and doesn’t have to be paid back. And when you do pay a tax- because when the government spends, it puts a reserve on the other side of the ledger, remember, assets and liabilities, two sides of the same double entry accounting- and when that tax comes home, it knocks out one of those reserves that- by the way- never leave the banking system.

[00:42:32] And voila, you’re at zero again. Loans zero out. Government spent money does not. So, there is a huge difference between bank money and government money, if you will. And banks are not above the state, the state created the banks. They gave them the right to exist. They gave them the unit of account that the United States government holds the patent on.

[00:42:59] And our Congress- in the United States, that is- and around the world, central banks and governments work the same in different fashions, different words, but the same exact thing. Whether it be in the UK with the pound, whether it be in Japan with the yen, whether it be in China with the yuan, or whether it be in Australia with the Australian dollar or Canada with the Canadian dollar, even Venezuela or Argentina with the peso.

[00:43:28] Screw Milei. It’s all the same thing. But ultimately, the idea of selling bonds and things like that, I’d always thought that was a funding operation. In fact, I spent years in grad school, two master’s degrees, learning that governments finance themselves via bond sales.

[00:43:48] I had to unlearn $125,000 worth of student debt… worth of propaganda and lies about economics.

[00:43:57] But ultimately governments have a policy choice. They’ve decided to sell bonds. Why? Because bonds are a safe investment. Why? Because the government itself pre-funds them. It knows that those funds will be created. It knows the interest rates. It knows what the payout will be. It understands the stuff. And when it pays interest, interest money is new money spent into the economy.

[00:44:24] It didn’t come from your ‘hard earned tax dollar.’

[00:44:27] So, all this played into my head. And then when they started talking about the national debt… man, what a boogeyman, right? The national debt is the sum total of all the Treasuries that have been sold. And guess what? Guess what you can’t buy Treasuries with? You can’t buy Treasuries with a foreign currency.

[00:44:43] You can only buy Treasuries with US dollars. You do some sort of conversion, whatever, but in the end, it’s US dollars. Because the intent of Treasuries and selling bonds is multiple-fold. It’s to balance out an interest rate desire- a desired interest rate- to be able to offset that. And so, it also serves as a means of reducing aggregate demand by pulling money out of the active economy.

[00:45:14] People can get to it, they’re still fungible. They can still sell them, trade them, do whatever. But in reality, when people put savings, that savings is- basically- taking the money out of play. It’s taking it out of the game. It’s in the finance sector, maybe, but it’s out of the game.

[00:45:32] And so, back to that sectoral balances idea that I was talking about a few minutes ago. You have the way that the federal government- or a nation’s government- spends money into the economy, that’s one way of getting money in. You have banks loaning money in. And then you’ve got sales for exports, bringing money in.

[00:45:51] And it’s the balance of each of those three things. And when the government turns off the spigot and doesn’t spend, money isn’t getting into the economy via the government channel. And when you’ve run out of interest, or you’ve run out of available debt room, you can’t take on any more debt as an individual.

[00:46:12] And as a nation, that shrinks up. You’ve cut off the spigot with the federal government. You cut off the spigot with loans. And what happens when you’re a net importer? You’re not bringing any money in from the export channel either. Now you’re looking at a recession. But when you think about the rest of the world, you think about that- kind of- imports and exports side of things.

[00:46:35] There’s something called a ‘demand leakage.’ And that demand leakage is brought on by offshoring money, and by savings. Private savings. Because, in effect, you’re creating monetary austerity. You’re creating a money famine, when you pull that money out of the active economy. When you’re not spending, because, as Warren Moser always says, ‘one person’s spending is another person’s income.’

[00:47:02] And so, when you’re not spending, someone else isn’t earning. And when the federal government isn’t spending, there’s no money coming into the economy, they’ve got to take on a private debt. This is the neoliberal playbook. We’re going to cut off federal spending, we’re going to tighten up on the trade, and we’re going to crack down on TikTok and we’re going to do this, that and the other. But you feel free to do your part by taking out loans to keep the economy going, because guess what? It’s Christmas time and you gotta get your kids presents. And so, now the banks get their interest payments on your debts. You get chocked full of debt. And now, all of a sudden, the government and everyone else has a more compliant workforce, because a compliant workforce is required for capitalism to thrive.

[00:47:49] Because if you can’t be controlled, then it can’t demand and frame things the way it wants to. And so, it’s not a fair game. It’s not in any way, shape or form balanced. The whole thing is a big giant oppressor versus the oppressee structure, because of capitalism. Capitalism is a creature of state law.

[00:48:14] It’s not outside of state law. State law has created markets. It’s created the quote unquote ‘pseudo-free market.’

[00:48:22] Without the state, there is nothing like this. So, the idea that capitalism thrives on its own, is a bit of a misnomer. Without the state bailing it out, and boom/bust cycles, without the state enforcing contracts, without the state enforcing everything, capitalism would crumble. Private property would crumble.

[00:48:42] Whoever wanted to take, whatever they wanted to take, could take it. In other words, the proles could rise up and take the rich’s property with impunity, if it were not for the state and state violence against the poor, in defense of wealthy landowners. Which is what the founding documents in the United States were created for, and by wealthy landowners, to the exclusion of the people out of doors.

[00:49:08] Here we are today in the year 2024, faced with a genocider in chief, Joe Biden, and an orange genie Trumpalope that is just as scary. But neither of these people are serving the common man. Neither of them are actually doing anything. In fact, there was a Princeton study that showed that there’s almost 0% impact from public opinion whatsoever, with politicians or policy.

[00:50:10] There is no ‘democracy.’ That’s a lie people tell you, because it’s scary to admit the truth. It’s scary to look the devil in the eye and realize the system that we’re operating in, is not a democracy. It’s not even… it’s not even debatable. It’s like literally the word of law. We’re talking about a Constitutional Republic, with a representative democracy, with a thousand stop gaps to prevent any form of populism, any form of popular movements. Controlled by a police force and propagandized to hate protesters, while elevating those who just ‘go along to get along’ within the capitalist system.

[00:50:51] This is why you see so much apathy towards the genocide that’s going on in Gaza right now. People that are bourgeois, that are well to do, that are in elite circles. That have friends on both sides and don’t want to upset anyone, so they stay silent. That’s crazy stuff, right? But when you think about MMT as a whole, and you think about all that it enables and all that it allows us to do… you start saying, ‘hey, sign me up, how do I make this happen?’ And you oftentimes hear people- even in the MMT space- say, ‘we’ve just got to source the vote.’

[00:51:26] But that would imply agency, within a system where there is no agency. Folks, so many studies have come out to prove that we do not live in a democracy, but yet the talk of the town is ‘we’ve got to save our democracy.’ What democracy, I ask?

[00:51:41] What democracy is it- specifically- that you’re talking of saving? Walk me through this, show me this ‘democracy.’ If you can’t, if you stutter and stammer and prove that you really don’t have one, maybe I suggest that you consider what I’m saying. Maybe you realize- ultimately- that there’s always going to be a parliamentarian there to block it.

[00:52:05] There’s always going to be a rotating villain. And I’ll say this, I remember- years ago- Cory Booker coming out of the woodwork to stop Bernie Sanders’ pharmaceutical plan. There was some presidential candidates that ran, that you haven’t heard anything from. You don’t see them around at all anymore.

[00:52:23] There’s a handful of people they’ve elevated, like Pete Buttigieg and others. This is a rotating villain, they’re always there to stop important things. They always put it on you, the voter- we, the voter. ‘ Hey, you didn’t door knock enough.’ ‘Hey, you didn’t donate enough.’ ‘Hey, you didn’t save enough people.’ ‘You didn’t sell the truth.’ ‘You didn’t sell the fear of Trump.’ ‘You didn’t whatever enough.’ ‘Vote harder, try harder, work harder, donate more.’

[00:52:48] And then you go back to the case down in Florida, where they took the Democratic Party to court said, ‘Hey, you guys aren’t running a fair primary.’ ‘You’re not giving the donations that the people are paying, to the candidates.’ ‘You’re not doing what you said you’d do.’

[00:53:05] And they said, ‘Hey, we’re a private corporation, we have our own bylaws’, we’re going to do what we want. We have no responsibility whatsoever to run a primary, much less, honor the results of one.’ That’s a shocker, right?

[00:53:15] That just shakes you at the root of your soul, if you’re paying attention… unless you’re gaslighting yourself in denying these things.

[00:53:26] So, this MMT thing became- I don’t want to say- problematic for me, because I love MMT. It’s the thing that I’ve been doing now for over a decade, with RP. We’re coming up on our 10th year here. 10 years, folks! Never taken a day off in 10 years. This is a job that I work harder for than anything I’ve ever done.

[00:53:45] Very little support, but in the end, that’s okay… I know I’m doing the right thing. I’m trying my ass off, and our little organization puts on webinars and does all kinds of stuff trying to help educate people. We don’t get a lot of adulation, we don’t even get that simple ‘here let me go ahead and put a like on that tweet there for you, baby.

[00:54:02] Let me give you a little air cover and help you hit the airwaves. Let’s go and share that podcast out there. Give you a little bit of air under your wings so that you can grow your base.’ Nope. We’re going to smother you with a pillow by not even giving you so much as a like.

[00:54:17] Okay. Thank you. Message received. Message received. But that doesn’t change the truth of what we’re saying or what I’m saying.

[00:54:25] And little by little, you start realizing MMT is a great tool for radicalizing people in this dawn of inequality, in this age of climate breakdown and this warring xenophobic rise of fascism, brought on by austerity, around the world And neocolonialism, through IMF loans and structural adjustments, led by the United States, no less. And all the geopolitical insanity that we’re doing that creates the instability around the world that allows military Keynesianism to even have the slightest bit of legitimacy. And all the backlash that occurred after World War II, the stop the Russkies and communism, and all that worker led stuff. My God, we can’t possibly have that.

[00:55:19] So, all this stuff can’t be divorced from itself. We oftentimes- in the MMT space- hear of the base case, the natural rate of interest is zero. This is the base case. The base case is that a government spends its currency into existence, and it taxes it out of existence… the base case. There’s all these base cases, that government created unemployment by instituting a tax, because now the first unemployed person exists, because they have to find a way to get the tax to pay the tax. Because otherwise, if they don’t do something to earn that money, payable only in US dollars- by the way- or whatever the currency is of your nation… you’re screwed. So, there’s all these things there in play. We’ve got a dysfunctional, non- functioning democracy, that people keep hanging their hat on and pretending we’re saving it. We’ve got politicians that are on the take. We’ve got people that are propagandized. We’ve got little blips of celebration here and there. But really, all we’re talking about is making capitalism a little nicer, a little less jagged.

[00:56:28] FDR did. He made the Grand Bargain to allow capitalism to reign supreme. Unfortunately, Wallace didn’t win that out, and we ended up with this. I know some will celebrate FDR and out of all the presidents out there, it’s a mixed bag, isn’t it? A lot of good things came from FDR, a lot of really awful things too- like Japanese intern camps and different things about Pearl Harbor- that you can go out there and listen to historical tapes on and begin to realize how really bad things were.

[00:56:59] And the bombs we dropped, Oppenheimer, you name it, the Manhattan project. We went to the moon. We did all these things, we had the money to do it, we never thought twice about it. But now, when you bring up something like taking care of the people, it’s always asked ‘where are you going to find the money?’; ‘how are you going to do it?’ And with politicians that are completely trained to ignore you. Up and coming rising political operatives out there that refuse to learn, always talking about ‘my hard earned tax dollar and taxpayer money and blah, blah, blah.’

[00:57:35] That’s an incredibly uphill battle and that’s just to get people to understand money. You haven’t gotten to the point where you understand that we don’t have a democracy, to take that knowledge and do something with it. So, as we’ve learned in some of our other podcasts, MMT is a phenomenal tool to radicalize people, once they realize what the government could do… but doesn’t do.

[00:57:58] You begin to realize, ‘wow, okay, we’re up against it, we’ve got some hardcore stuff going on, we’ve got a problem, we realize that our government institutes austerity, but why?’ And you hear no one in this country talk about class. Class is completely eliminated. You’ve got identity politics everywhere. This is why conservatives get away at taking swipes at quote unquote ‘woke’ people, because people didn’t understand what ‘woke’ meant to begin with.

[00:58:29] Thank God we did interviews with Davarian Baldwin and talked at great length about this stuff. But every time we allow identity politics to splinter the working class, the working class as a body politic loses ground, and it fights itself.

[00:58:46] And so MMT shows us what the government could do. Class analysis shows us who’s on ‘team us’ and who’s not on ‘team us.’ And if we could get ‘team us’ to work collaboratively together, we might be able to force an oligarch driven government- that has no interest whatsoever in serving us because its purpose is to maximize capital accumulation, while simultaneously oppressing the working class who has to be labor for that capitalist system to function- to serve us.

[00:59:19] And then you’ve got people in high places, that pretend like there is no such thing as class. That these situations aren’t real, that we’ve just got to source the vote and ‘vote blue no matter who’, or whatever. And as a result of that big time miss, MMT loses a lot of its saltiness. And salt that loses its saltiness, is just dirt.

[00:59:41] MMT without class analysis gets you Reaganomics, gets you Bidenomics, trickle down, gets you a big ol’ military, gets you cold wars with China and Russia, gets you funding genocide in Gaza, as a jobs program here in the United States for military-industrial complex workers. See, without a class analysis, without understanding geopolitics, you’re liable to just bump your head on a wall like an eight bit arcade character. Not realizing that you are fundamentally giving legitimacy to the system that produces genocide, to the system that produces war, to the system that produces austerity, and austerity is murder. Austerity, the intentional withholding of goods and services, of raising taxes to make life harder on people. We talked to Clara Mattei. We learned about the trinity of austerity.

[01:00:41] Why isn’t this stuff talked about more, when we talk about MMT? We’ve got an ecological crisis breaking in. We’ve got green colonialism, literally raping and pillaging global South countries and putting them in deep IMF debt, where their entire society is ripped asunder. So the US and the global North can live excessively off of the fat.

[01:01:05] This is the high cost of low prices.

[01:01:08] But if you’re not paying attention to this stuff, you’re liable to listen to the regular news and put a yellow and blue flag up and support Ukraine, as you watch the United States expand NATO, against all international law. Literally expanding NATO and putting weapons around the border of Russia. Going back to 2016 when Hillary lost the election to Trump, they began saying that China and Russia messed with their elections, and Putin this and Putin that and Putin the other. Rabble rousing, ‘let’s go ahead and get everybody ready for war.’

[01:01:48] That’s not good enough for me. I’m not okay with that.

[01:01:52] There are better ways to institute a job program. There are better ways of getting resources And it’s not for our freedoms, folks. It’s so a capitalist can make more money, have more power and more control over the workforce, by pumping it out to the global South. The global South is basically creating goods and services for everyone else to pay off their debts, but not enough for their own internal use.

[01:02:21] And this is all in the name of empire, which, we don’t talk about enough. We just don’t talk about it enough. We act like we’re just this neutral Switzerland, just describing the monetary system. When in reality, the monetary system is used as a weapon as well, through sanctions, through debt peonage, through games, with commodities. And literally leveraging entire countries and creating and inducing poverty in those countries, through these arrangements.

[01:02:55] But we don’t talk about that, do we? We have. I’ve done several podcasts with Bill Mitchell. I’ve done them with Nathan Tankus and Rohan Grey. Talked about it with Warren [Mosler]. Talked about it extensively with Fadhel [Kaboub].

[01:03:09] Steven Grumbine: Macro N Cheese, folks. We touch it all. Because you can’t look at this thing in a vacuum. And if you do look at this thing in a vacuum, when people begin to wonder why the hell none of these things are happening. And there’s somebody there sheepin’ them to go to vote for Biden or sheepin them to go do something like support Beto O’Rourke, or- somehow or another- get behind Buttigieg or whatever.

[01:03:32] When, Norfolk Southern frickin put toxic shit all over East Palestine, Ohio, and can’t even get the government to take care of making these people whole. Children peeing blood. Jordan Chariton has done great work out there. Anybody covering it? Not really. ‘We keep our hands off those things, because we don’t want to besmirch the Democratic Party’ or whatever.

[01:03:57] We just don’t say it, we don’t speak ill of these things, we just let them happen. That’s not okay. Because ultimately, when you realize the same mechanisms that allow that, are the same mechanisms that create monetary austerity and fiscal austerity. And create the means by which we don’t have universal health care, create the means by which we don’t have a Green New Deal.

[01:04:17] Because this government is illegitimate. It’s a government for the wealthy. And it uses the working class as fuel for its machine, nothing more. But if you just La Dee Dah and bounce your head against the wall, like an 8-bit video game character again, you’re liable to get mad at the person saying these things, instead of the people doing these things.

[01:04:41] And that’s a problem, isn’t it? My mom and dad were both conservatives. They didn’t know any better. They just knew the government wasn’t serving them. That’s all they knew. And because of the lies of taxation, they believed that taxes funded spending. They believed that taxes, their taxes, were paying for people’s bad decisions.

[01:04:58] And because of the way we are such a racist country, and because of the way that policies are written to ensure that there is an underclass- a permanent underclass. They see black and brown people struggling in the inner city and watching gentrification, and they thought it was just because they were bad. They weren’t behaving. They weren’t behaving correctly. They weren’t making good choices.

[01:05:21] The fear of immigrants all stem from this poor understanding of money. We could have a federal job guarantee to employ every single person that comes to this country. We don’t lack money, we lack real resources. You want health care, we’ve got to get doctors and nurses trained up. We’ve got to build health care centers in rural areas, so people aren’t driving six hours to get to an appointment.

[01:05:45] We’ve got to build mass transit, so people can get to and from these things. We’ve got to build sustainable cities, so we can survive climate crisis. We’ve got to do an awful lot, and none of it’s going to happen with a government that is- literally- not here to serve the people. It is only there to serve wealth.

[01:06:03] You know what? With bunkers- these luxury bunkers- and big massive yachts that can fit entire cities inside of them, the regular proles will be sucking on dirty air, and drinking poisoned water, and living in houses that should be condemned… while the rich and the opulent just get more and more out of touch. And we just sit back and go, ‘Hey, this is natural, this is fine.’ You can see that meme where the dog’s just staring, cuckoo eyed, ‘this is fine’ as the world’s burning up around them.

[01:06:38] That’s what’s happening. So, MMT is vital to understand. You need to know the system. You’ve got to get the word out. You’ve got to tell people about it. But that comes with another side there. And that comes with the fact that we do not have a functioning democracy.

[01:06:54] If you don’t have the Supreme Court destroying populism, you’ve got the Senate destroying populism. And if you don’t have that, you’ve got the rotating villain from the private corporations, known as our political parties. And no 3rd, 4th, 50th, 90th party will ever change that, within this system, that is not meant to be won. It’s meant to manufacture consent. It’s there to give you the appearance.

[01:07:18] Just like social security. We pay into social security, we believe that’s our money. Reality is, FICA taxes are just another tax, they’re deleted upon receipt. But just like those little rubber ropes that they put in front of your house for cars to drive over to track how many cars have come through, that’s what those FICA dollars do. It’s like tick, tick, tick, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. But guess what? The only thing about the social security law that needs to be changed, is the authority to pay. We believe that we’re funding social security with our ‘hard earned tax dollars.’ That’s not true either. None of it is true.

[01:07:57] Everything we’re told is a lie. And when you sit there and you watch these politicians lie and you fap- like a circus seal- clapping for them, . It’s embarrassing. It’s sad. It’s a sad statement of propaganda. But the wealthy, their class interests, align with these politicians. The petty bourgeoisie align with these politicians. Because they’re so far removed, looking at their phones, that they would step over a dead body on the sidewalk, because they’re not paying attention.

[01:08:29] They’re off for their skinny latte. They’re out to pick the best select piece of filet mignon for their lunch. They’re trying to figure out what part of the Mediterranean they’re going to go for a weekend getaway. They’re not thinking about how to pay their electric bill. They’re not thinking about how to fix broken teeth in their mouth that there’s no dental insurance, enough to fix.

[01:08:51] They’re not making tough choices like we had to make with my mom.

[01:08:55] They’re living their best life and they don’t give a rat’s ass about anyone else. And even if they’re a nice person, a kind, gentle person, it’s not really about the individual. It’s about the system. It’s about a system that’s meant to have a permanent underclass that will serve the needs of the permanent upper class.

[01:09:18] And then you’ve got a bunch of ’embarrassed future millionaires’ in between,

[01:09:23] hating everybody, hating their neighbors because of this system, because of the sickness called capitalism. And because we don’t address that head on, we don’t address class, when we talk MMT. We just talk very esoteric stuff about federal reserve policy, and Maastricht this and bond that, bond vigilantes, this and that.

[01:09:46] We never look at it from the impact. Why? Why don’t we look at it from the impact on regular society? Because it’s not our class interests that the people in the upper classes think about. They think about the investor. They think about the person who’s got stocks.

[01:10:01] They talk in terms of basis points. They don’t talk in terms of lack of access to dental care. They don’t talk about losing sleep for a week because you’ve got an abscessed tooth. They just wonder why you didn’t make better choices. So, looking back at my mom’s life, I think to myself, that woman, she put up with me when I was unlovable.

[01:10:27] She loved me through every one of my foibles, all of the problems. But in reality it shouldn’t come down to whether my mom loved me or not, whether or not I had somebody taking care of me and helping me out through my stuff. We know that the state itself has the power to ensure that every person has a house. Every person has health care. Every person has dental care. Every person has got an education for life. Every person has right to a job. Every person has the right to thrive. And that we have a government that should take care of that, but we don’t. And until we fix that- until we either build parallel systems and allow the system collapse on its own weight, or until we actually become ungovernable and do something other than just go along to get along, phone banking for trash neoliberals, that people in elite places brag about ‘sticking the landing’ during their state of the union address for Christ’s sake, until we get past that and we start thinking for real about what people need- we’re going to complain about the magas, the rise of fascism. Why do you think fascism is on the rise? Yeva talked about it. Yeva Narcissian talked about it.

[01:11:46] The fact is that austerity is murder and it creates fascism and all this identity politics and, means testing, and all the other crap that comes with a neoliberal perspective and the mass privatization, creates fascists, creates disgruntled regular people that would otherwise be fellow soldiers, fighting for righteous things. But instead, because of weaponized identity politics, and because of a government that understands, by inducing weaponized identity politics, they eliminate the working class as a whole, from being a real force.

[01:12:28] And eliminating unions and their power. We see a slight uptick right now, but it’s nowhere near sufficient. And I know there’s people that are eternal optimists out there and good for you. But for those of us who are suffering, that optimism is gaslighting.

[01:12:44] And I hope that my mom and dad are in a better place right now. I hope that they’re not suffering anymore. Or I hope you know, the saying to be absent of the body is to be present with the Lord, I pray that is true. I pray that my mom and my dad truly are in paradise.

[01:13:04] But the world that I’m having to deal with, that I’m going to give to my son who has autism and my other children who are, you grown, I’m worried. I’m worried about the world we’re handing to our children. And this podcast that I’m doing right now is my attempt to change the world for them and to pay it forward for my mom and dad who took good care of me, but shouldn’t had to.

[01:13:30] And others shouldn’t have to, for those that don’t have family, for those that don’t have a mom that loves them, for those who lost their parents when they were children and were orphans before they had a chance to get with life. It shouldn’t be dependent on your mom and dad’s income. It shouldn’t be dependent.

[01:13:46] You should have access to everything as a citizen. And why we allow people with minimal vision to soak up the entire oxygen level and to prevent us from having those conversations is beyond me. And why people deny sharing media that actually produces the truth as opposed to this neoliberal lie is beyond me.

[01:14:14] But in the end, all I can do is the best I can do. And that’s what I hope I did with this podcast. This is our first time with Steve doing it solo. And with my mom passing and my dad long since passed, I hope I did him proud. So with that, there’s a lot more that could be said. I’m gonna end it there and hope that you’ll listen to other future macro and cheese podcasts, that you’ll do more work with real progressives that you’ll check out our past Rogue Scholar.

[01:14:48] It’s out there on podcast, but it’s also on our YouTube channels for real progress and action and real progressives. It’s on our Facebook pages, it’s on our Instagram. We’ve done so much with so little, and for those of you who have actually been donors. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting us.

[01:15:08] Thank you for making this work. Just have enough fuel in the tank to keep going. 10 years, folks. Coming up on 10 years. And we have been dealing with people left and right trying to knock us down for 10 years. And for 10 years, we’re one of the only ones left standing still. Everybody pops up the latest and greatest on our heels.

[01:15:32] But we just keep moving. We just keep doing it because we believe in what we’re doing. Sometimes we’ve got a better team than others. Sometimes we’ve got a bigger team than others. Sometimes we have people that just don’t buy in that much and we end up losing them. And that’s okay because I’m going to keep going.

[01:15:49] And with that, I’m Steve Grumbine with Macro and Cheese. Remember, Real Progressives is a 501c3. We are a tax deductible organization. We also have Real Progress in Action, which is a 501c4. That one allows us to step out and do a little bit more on the political side, although we don’t really focus on electoral politics. But with that I hope you’ll consider being a donor. I hope you’ll consider donating, in support of our efforts so that I can continue doing this with my team. And hopefully we can bring more of you all in, help us write. Help us do webinars and do, panel discussions to bring about good debates and help suss out some of these ideas.

[01:16:36] Come to our Tuesday night Macro ‘N Chill. Tuesday nights, every Tuesday night at 8 p. m. Eastern time, we do a webinar where we talk about the prior episode. Come join us. Go to our website, realprogressives. org. Check out our calendar, check out our media, check out all the resources. And with that, I am Steve Grumbine.

[01:17:00] I’m the host of Macro N Cheese, and we are out of here.