Episode 345 – Argentina: IMF, MMT, Class Warfare with Daniel Conceição

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:43

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese, and we’ve been on a bit of a run here lately talking about ancillary non-MMT things. I mean, we do have the Bill Mitchell episode and we do have the Chris Williamson episode snuggled in here, but today is going to be more along the lines of the kind of MMT conversation I would like to see happening all the time.

Okay, I feel oily. Let me just say that out front. I feel oily when I see people making excuses for the establishment. I feel oily when I see people on Twitter wagging their finger warning people that (say), “We celebrate the traditions of MMT and we shan’t be impolite in telling people how to behave in their struggle,” and how to deal with the absolute lie that is going on. And let’s be honest, folks, most of the stuff we’re talking about with MMT is not a simple misunderstanding.

If people just understood, then the oligarchy would change and corporate America suddenly wouldn’t be profit seeking, and rich academics that are making big money on book deals and livin’ la vida loca would suddenly place their desires for accumulation aside and get with the revolution and help the people that are dying in the streets. We’re going to be talking about dying in the streets today. We’re going to be talking about [Javier] Milei, which we’ve talked about before, and we talked about it in specific with the guest I have today.

But before I dive too far into that, I want to say this for real. MMT without class analysis is just accounting. And you’re not going to have revolutionary change amongst the people in the streets just talking about ledgers, you’re just not. And I hate to say that because I would love it to be that. I would love it to be that if you just said, hey, the government is the currency issuer and blah, blah, blah. I would love that to spark a revolution where everybody refuses to submit to the lies anymore.

But the lies that are being told are not just accidental lies, contrary to the tone police, these are killing people. Folks, if you were in the alleyway and you saw somebody with a tire iron beating a homeless person over the head, you wouldn’t go, “Excuse me, sir, I think you just might be misunderstanding the situation. This person wasn’t trying to steal your stoop. They were trying to stay out of the rain. So could you please stop killing them, sir,” you wouldn’t do that.

Why? Because you got a brain and so you wouldn’t tone police them. You’d probably end up killing the killer to save the homeless person. Because you have a moral compass, you have integrity and character, and so you wouldn’t dream of tone policing. Well, just because it’s an economic club over the head, (it) doesn’t make it any less violence. And it doesn’t make the class struggle that we deal with any less real and valid.

And I have grown exhausted and tired and angry and raged, enraged to the core of my being, questioning, what in the hell am I even doing bringing some of this stuff up when it’s clear that there’s an entire group of people out there who think that we’ll just get a few more progressives in and everything will be better. It’s a lie. Let me just say it outright. It is a lie. And the other lie is that these economists are out there and they just don’t know. And if you just engage with them, they’ll suddenly find the light to freedom.

The epiphany of all awakenings will suddenly happen and they will suddenly recant all the books that they’ve written, and all the seats at the table they’ve had, and they will say, “Everything I’ve told you was wrong, but now, suddenly, believe me.” That is not going to happen because they like their stature. They like their place in bourgeois society. They are not among the people. And this is where we’re at now, this class divide, this fear mongering of, “Oh, my goodness, what about Trump?” Well, guess what?

Gavin Newsom, who people are propping up right now, celebrated his rump off, literally destroying homeless tent encampments. And just saying, “people wanted to clean up. We’re going to clean up.” If I would have read that to you, and I didn’t say who said it, you would have thought, “Oh, my God, it’s MAGA.” But you know what? The blue ghouls and the red ghouls are still ghouls because they’re class collaborators. They are part of the ruling class.

They are the ruling class and they are not there to serve the people. They’re there to protect capital. They’re there to protect private property. They are not there to ensure that everyone is taken cared of, everyone has food on their plate, everyone has shelter, everyone has a good job, everyone has access to healthcare, and not just access, but literally free at the point of service healthcare. They piddle around the edges because it’s not politically viable. I’m going to drop an F bomb. Fuck that!

Fuck that! If you’re not angry, if you’re not seeing this and seeing the class war for what it is, because you’ve got it in your head that capitalism doesn’t exist and, “Oh my God, I’ve read so many George Orwell books that the idea of struggle and all this stuff just means 1984.”  Well, you’re living 1984. You’re living The Matrix.

And the idea that you somehow or another believe that us just teaching a couple more progressives about ledgers is going to somehow or another radicalize them and change the world while simultaneously voting for a guy that literally is throwing homeless people out of their tents, well, you can fuck straight off with that. Okay, yes, I am angry as hell. And this conversation we’re going to have today with my friend Daniel Conceição, who has been on the show many times.

Daniel is pretty angry too. And Daniel has some incredible experiences to discuss about Milei and an article, wonderful article, that he and Kal-El wrote, which quite frankly, I just want to tell you, is called The SupraState that Saved the Lying Ancap Messiah. See, words that matter, poignancy, actual words with contempt for the right things and not curtsying and not bowing down with politeness, but the righteous rage of understanding that economic slaughter is happening right now. It’s not just a gentleman’s agreement.

People are dying and being courteous and saving your place in academia or saving your place in the establishment, or becoming comfortable within the walls because you’re no longer a threat. You were a threat, but you aren’t a threat because heterodox is becoming not heterodox, it’s kind of becoming orthodox in the sense that it’s not threatening, not the way it should be. And I believe the tone police have a large part to play in that. They fall for it every time. So without further ado, let me bring on Daniel.

Daniel, so you all know, is an associate professor at the Institute of Research and Urban and Regional Planning (IPPUR) at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and one of the authors of the book Modern Monetary the Key to an Economy at the Service of the People. He’s a former president of the Institute of Functional Finance for Development, Brazil, and he’s also a friend of the program, a great guest and a friend. Welcome to the show, Daniel.

Daniel Conceicao:
00:08:06

Thank you so much. I really resonate with what you said just now.

Steve Grumbine:
00:08:11

Tell me, honest to God, when we talk about MMT here it is to show people what is possible, it is to tell people what is possible. Secondarily, maybe should be primarily, it is to show that they’re using knowledge of the economic system as a weapon. It’s a weapon against working class people and more importantly the dominated at the bottom, and also a means of accumulation for the people at the top.

It’s never been more transparent than during the current administration. But it should have been transparent under the Biden administration, and that’s just in the US. We’re talking around the world, and that’s why we are going to go now to your neck of the woods in South America and kind of touch on Milei, and the trip that you lay out so beautifully in this article. And so what I want to do is let you speak to my monologue, but also then set the stage for what you wrote.

Daniel Conceicao:
00:09:08

Yeah. So firstly, you’re absolutely right about wanting MMT to mean a lot more than just accurate description. And in fact, I would actually imagine that the same attachment to completeness and coherence should make us want MMT to do a lot more than that. Because it’s the same realization that MMT describes our economy so much better than the alternatives.

It should also let us realize that most economists are just lying to us and we should want to understand why is it that they’re lying to people so blatantly? Because it can’t be stupidity. I mean, most of those economists are pretty capable of elaborating complex thoughts. So it has to be dishonesty. And why is it that they’re so dishonest? Because they’re lying for the people not to know what can be done for them.

So MMT should be used, primarily, if anything it’s the only possible usefulness for MMT, otherwise what’s the point? — So MMT has to be a way of showing: People, you’ve been lied to. People, you can claim for the state to do a lot more for us. You can force the state, because the state should be working for us, the state is our manifestation of sovereignty. When we talk about the state is sovereign, it’s only sovereign because the people should be self-determining their lives.

So it’s the people who are sovereign and they have their state. And the state should be used to improve most people’s lives, not to be used as a tool to oppress people and then to make just a few dishonest ghouls rich. Right? And so MMT should be used for that. It should be used to tell the common person, “Listen, I know you believe that you shouldn’t be asking for more and better public services because they told you there’s no money. But this is a fucking lie.”

They lie to you because they want you to stay tame. They want you to stop asking, they want you to stop protesting. They want you to accept that your role is to be exploited because there’s no money. So if MMT is not being used to do that, seriously, what are we doing? Are we just trying to become famous because we get the most correct description? I don’t think we should.

So actually, it started as a tourist trip. I took a couple weeks with my wife to just travel through Argentina and Uruguay because I was really tired, mostly because Brazil and the world have been exhausting us with all the incoherence with all the nonsense. And so I took a couple weeks, and Buenos Aires really, really amazed me. The first time I saw the architecture, the huge wide streets and roads and highways and so many statues, beautifully built.

Everything was supposed to enrich and empower people. All the public equipment was grandiose. It was amazing. It was ready to give people wellness. And I had no idea that it was that impressive. I used to think, you know, we have this silly relationship between Brazilians and Argentinians in which each of us tries to outdo and out greatness the other. So I used to think that Rio was the best city in South America. I have to tell you, not even close.

I mean, Rio is beautiful, it’s got the beach, it’s got the mountains. But in terms of planned construction, in terms of strategic goal, in terms of planning for people to be great, that’s Buenos Aires. That’s a testament to [former Argentinian President Juan] Peron‘s vision, right? So I could actually see how Peron transformed his vision into physical manifestations. So everything there is great — it’s beautiful, it’s grandiose. That was the first thing that struck me.

But then you start walking the streets and you start seeing the same kind of unacceptable poverty that I am used to seeing in Rio, especially because it was pretty cold. So you can’t help but notice and feel bad for the people who are shivering under a thin blanket, or looking for food in the trash can. And I kept thinking, wow, it’s pretty bad here, too. Even though the city is beautiful, but this is kind of concerning.

And then you start making sense of it all, right? Especially because people used to tell me that Buenos Aires didn’t used to be like that. Used to be one of the least socially problematic, socially unhealthy cities in South America. And it didn’t appear to be like that anymore. Why was that? Well, it’s clear what was going on. It’s Milei, right? It’s chainsaw approach to public policy. It’s the austerity shock that he claims to be needed and successfully useful for taming inflation.

I decided, okay, let’s undo this lie because some of the Argentinians I was talking to were even kind of feeling like they had to experience such pain because the goal was to tame inflation. I felt like this is such a grandiose lie that I have to do something about it. Let’s write about it. I kept going back and forth.

And I have this digital companion now, my ChatGPT has been MMT trained and ethically trained in the same kind of obsessive way I used to be. And so I kept sending him pictures of Buenos Aires until I found a picture of[Diego] Maradona, who is actually now my favorite sports person in the world ever, because of just how complete he was, not only as a soccer player but you’ll see as a human being.

It’s a very emotional thing to walk through La Boca, the neighborhood, because those people are obsessed with their soccer team, Boca Juniors, and Maradona is the biggest idol they’ve ever had. So there’s murals, there’s pictures, there’s statues of Maradona everywhere. And then there’s this beautiful mural that has a quote by Maradona that says, “You have to be a pretty big dickhead, cagón, in order not to defend the pensioners, the Jubilados.” [Spanish for “retirees”] And that just spoke tremendously to me because that was the truest statement I’ve ever seen.

You got to be a pretty big piece of shit to see pensioners, old people struggling, unnecessarily starving. And this is what I was seeing. Most of the people on the streets are old people.
Most of the people on the streets are the ones who are the most vulnerable. And they’re shivering, they’re starving, right? So you got to be a cagón not to defend them. And this is Maradona’s words. So I decided, okay, let’s look into it.

And what’s the biggest lie that Milei is using? And this is actually something that most mainstreamers talk about as if it’s the proof that austerity and neoliberalism work. So they claim that Milei’s successful attaining of inflation has been due to his austerity cuts, right? So all of this poverty-inducing dismantling of the state spending cuts that he’s done were actually necessary in order for inflation to be kept under control. And that’s the biggest lie I’ve ever heard.

In fact, this is presented as if it’s the success, the victory of non-interventionism of laissez faire libertarianism. So Milei, the austerian, the Austrian idol, has been finally able to embrace liberalism in a way that was able to end the most severe problem that Argentinians had faced within their economy. And that’s the most ridiculous lie. Because if anything, any successful minor taming that we’ve seen to inflation in Argentina has not been because of austerity. It has nothing to do with austerity.

In fact, I am going to claim it’s been made worse by austerity. It’s got everything to do with a super humongous, bigger than any state could ever do intervention. What intervention? It was the  IMF [International Monetary Fund] loans, more dollars than any Argentinian government could ever dream of getting was given to this government because it was willing to embrace every single dismantling lie that the IMF supports, right?

So they say, “Okay, I’ll help you solve the problem and we’ll pretend that the problem was resolved by something else because we need to tell people that austerity is the solution.” So they gave Milei pretty much as much funding in dollars as he could ever need it to stabilize the dollar. And that’s basically all that was needed, right? Inflation in Argentina was mainly exchange rate driven. It’s basically a shortage of dollars. They need a lot of dollars to pay their debts and to import. So when the dollar is scarce, its price starts going up.

But the problem in Argentina is that most of its demand for dollar is very exchange rate inelastic. Which means, as the price of the dollar rises you can’t simply stop demanding dollars because you’re forced into paying d[International Monetary Fund]ebt, you’re forced into buying some very essential goods. So the dollar keeps rising and you keep trying to buy dollars. Of course the dollar is going to get more and more expensive and that’s going to pass through every other price very easily.

That’s very easy to see. You didn’t need austerity to achieve that. You needed exactly what the IMF gave. You could have got that from China, you could have got that from the States, if the US ever wanted to end economic crisis elsewhere which it won’t be, right? That’s what you needed, someone with a lot of dollars or with the capacity to create dollars to give you enough dollars for you to satisfy your huge demand for dollars.

What’s the problem there? That’s only temporary. That’s only going to work as long as you have access to the dollars. As soon as the dollars start drying out again, your problem will be even greater than before because now you owe even more.

So what should have been done? Not austerity. You should have used public spending to boost your capacity to either get more dollars by exporting, which you could have done by investing more in infrastructure that helps cut costs for your exports or subsidizing exporters. You could have used public spending to reduce your dollar dependency or import substitute.

You use public spending to stimulate the production of those things that you currently have to buy for dollars. Those are the things you should have been doing in order to really address your dollar dependency. Not caving to the IMF and temporarily getting a victory at the expense of making people suffer. So that’s the thing.

Steve Grumbine:
00:21:19

I go back to Lenin, and Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. He was calling this stuff out, we’re talking about like 1916, bro. We’re talking about 1916. This kind of arrangement was on display. The international loans, the loans and foreign currencies, and the fact that by the time they were able to pay off their existing debts, the money had gone up and they needed to take out additional loans. It just kept feeding the cycle over and over again until there is no way out of it.

This is how imperialism works — it’s through dollar-based imperialism or monetary imperialism through the IMF, through those G20, the folks on the SWIFT system and so forth. They use this as a weapon. It’s not like an accident. It’s not like, “Oh, we don’t see what’s happening, whatever should we do?” There is no real debt forgiveness. It literally eliminate your protections of your domestic economy. Let us come in there and extract, and we’re talking about literally an extractive state that 100% is not some accident. It is the system.

It is the system and yet we act like it’s not. We act like somehow or another this — oh well, you know, let’s talk very seriously. The IMF is here to help and blah blah, blah. And they skip this part. This is part of my initial rant where we just sort of act like these things are just — Well, you know, it’s an accident. Or, oh they just don’t understand. Oh, we can help them with a proper analysis. Just show them everything.

When in reality their class interest says, “hey man, we got these guys on the hook. We could take whatever we want from them through this arrangement. What exactly is it you think we need to solve here? We’re not here for them, we’re here for us. We’re here for our accumulation. Am I missing something there?

Daniel Conceicao:
00:23:06

No. I came to believe that mainstream economics is mainly a weapon. It’s a tool for the controllers of wealth to make sure that they have a good theoretical justification for people not to mess their goals. And that’s actually, it became so clear in 2008 when they had to reinvent their excuses. That was so blatant, so obvious that it’s almost like what you were saying about the professional wrestling kind of metaphor. It’s ridiculous, just almost as ridiculous as wrestling

Steve Grumbine:
00:23:39

Kayfabe.

Daniel Conceicao:
00:23:40

Remember in 2008 we used to have the prevalent argument that any intervention that created money was bad, because it would be inflationary. So that meant that both fiscal interventions that led to increasing monetary base or monetary aggregates and monetary interventions were supposedly equally bad, because the problem was too much money. And that used to be enough for them to tell their lies and to keep public policy from making their objectives hard to achieve.

It was enough to keep interest rates high. It was enough to keep public spending from reducing macroeconomic instability so they could keep using the economy as a huge casino to gain from price fluctuations, and all that. But then came 2008, and they really needed a huge amount of intervention in order to not financially die. They needed to save their balance sheets because they were rotten. Their assets were in reality worth absolutely nothing, the banksters’ assets. But they had accumulated tremendous debt.

So they were insolvent, all of them. So what did they do? The system needed help from the state, but it couldn’t just accept, “Well, we were wrong. We’ve never needed any help.

“They had to do something. So what they came up with was the fiscal theory of prices. Instead of saying that any intervention that creates money is bad, they were able to claim, “oh no, if your intervention is only meant to affect financial prices, and that’s okay, you can do as much as you want. In fact, do tremendously. Do trillions and trillions of dollars go close to $30 trillion, it doesn’t matter because it won’t be inflationary if it doesn’t affect the measurable public debt, which is just arbitrary.

“We know that money is also public debt. The monetary base is also public debt. But they say, okay, if it’s not showing up in the treasury account, then it’s okay. And this is their new theory. It’s just been reshaped into something that now allows for intervention to save their asses, but still not be used to improve people’s lives. And then we had the pandemic. And in the pandemic, now even the fiscal theory wasn’t enough, because now they really needed fiscal intervention.

They couldn’t just say, “Well, the purchase of vaccines is also a monetary intervention,” because they couldn’t say the vaccine was a financial asset or hospitals or hiring more doctors and all of that, and we needed that in order to survive. They couldn’t say that giving people money just to stay alive was monetary intervention. If they could have found a way, they might have tried that semantics trick. But they didn’t. Instead, what did they do? Oh, now it’s okay — because now interest rates are so low that it’s okay for the government to spend beyond its financial capacity.

But why were the interest rates so low? Because the state chose it to be so low. It decided that was the double choice. It decided to make interest rates low and it decided to spend a lot more than it used to. But how did the professional liars make it fit their lies? They said, “Oh, but only now, during the pandemic, only now it’s going to be okay. Once we’re out of the pandemic, things get normal again and you can’t tolerate fiscal deficits anymore. “It’s so obvious to any thinking person that they’re lying — that we really have to stop pretending that they’re good-faith debaters because this is what upsets me as much as you. When we go into the debate pretending that the reason why mainstream economists lie so much about fiscal issues is that they don’t understand it. That’s not it at all, it’s that they’re profiting from the lies. They’re so dishonest that they’re willing to become incoherent to contradict themselves as long as it’s convincing enough, which is what they’ve been doing.

Steve Grumbine:
00:28:00

Yeah. I look at Main street and I used to think, hey, if we can just get everybody to push on Bernie Sanders or push on this politician and get them. Well, I watched Bernie Sanders spend the time he was with [Stephanie] Kelton when she was his chief economist at the Senate. And then I watched through part one of his campaign for presidency.

And I watched for part two of his campaign for presidency. Homeboy still says the same butchered, disgusting crap economics he ever did. Like, none of it rubbed off on him at all. And people can make excuses for Bernie. Stop. Just stop. This whole idea of it’s not politically viable right now. You have people like Nina Turner in the US who never miss a chance to say “taxpayer-funded” and “taxpayer-dollars”. These are people that know better, they know better.

They know better. They were in Sanders Institute. Granted, Stephanie’s tweets, if you follow them —  I’ve got stuff from 2018, 2019, 2015 where she was edgy and she was saying the quiet part out loud. And I’ve got those things in my holster, in my revolver, ready to shoot out at a moment’s notice. But we don’t say the same stuff anymore, do we? We’re not out there leading with these punches and it’s troubling. It’s deeply troubling.

I was on stage years ago with Ro Khanna, Nina Turner and Margaret Flowers and a number of other people at the Capitol. I think it was the South Lawn, or something like that, and it was called Millions for Medicare. And I talked to Ro Khanna standing off to the side, and I said, “Ro, you know, MMT, right?” And he goes, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.” I said, “Then why do you keep saying this nonsense?” And he goes, “Oh, yeah, you know — It’s just, you know, if we print too much money we’ll have inflation.”

I said, “You don’t know MMT, Ro. That’s not an MMT position.” But he was, “ha, ha, you know,” in his very stately looking — he’s like 6 foot 4, thin, per build, looks great in a blue suit and a red tie. You could see him very presidential. And the way that he comes off and he’s very affable, nice smile, gentle, blah, blah, blah. But in reality, this is a guy who is a political animal that refuses to say the truth out loud, refuses to speak MMT terms in public.

And so here is a guy who’s literally lifted up by the MMT community. I don’t fully understand the relationship because he has known about this stuff forever. And maybe behind the scenes, where nobody’s hearing, he says nice things to people. But in public — he was at Levy [Institute] not too long ago and I heard Yeva [Nersisyan] address him, and it was a softball critique, but it was the best critique of them all. She actually went out there and said some of the quiet part out loud.

I give Yeva all kinds of credit for that. But it genuinely is like, where is the hardballs where are the 95 mile an hour fastballs? Right around the chin? Why are we not pitching people off the plate anymore? Why are we throwing the meatballs over the center of the plate for them to hit it out of the park? We’re not edgy, we’re not a threat in that space. Am I wrong here?

Daniel Conceicao:
00:31:12

No, this is actually something we’ve discussed back when we were talking about the Brazilian heterodox, the ones that rose with [Brazilian President] Lula. It seems to me that there’s — now, I might even be trying to theorize here, some sort of a general theory of why is it that economists change their tone. Because there seems to be a very repetitive strategy that I see in which economists will be aggressively outrageous. And if that means telling every possible truth that they know, that’s what they’ll do, if that opens doors to them.

If that makes them more heard, if that makes them because — Oh, because there’s something to be said about outrageous claims, you get people’s attention. And so if you’re also coherent, if you have the advantage of both being the outrageous one and being the one who have logic and facts on your side, man, that’s gold. Or actually that’s state money because we know that gold was never valuable. But anyway, that’s another joke for another time.

But. So that’s state money, right? You’re sitting on value, and they’ve used it. So back before Lula regained the presidency, a lot of my colleagues were using that strategy and they were fully embracing MMT saying, “Oh no, it’s all a lie. There’s no reason for us to have any fiscal limits. Let’s do functional limits, and now we know, because the pandemic proved everything,” and they started being seen. Even I started being seen, for a while. A lot of big name politicians started asking us to give talks, and all of that.

But as soon as Lula’s candidacy became a certain victory, because [former Brazilian president Jair] Bolsonaro was destroying himself by just being his evil creature — so Lula started planning for actually governing. And I can’t imagine that it’s only because they’re confused, but they claim that there simply isn’t enough space for you to be fully honest within Brazil’s political setting because banks have too much power, and because the Congress is dominated by right wingers. So this is their claim.

And so as soon as Lula won the election, his economic team had to come up with a new proposal for the fiscal ceiling. All of those economists who used to agree with us that no fiscal limit in the sense of respecting financial results was necessary, and we really needed to think about material and supply limits or even exchange rate limits but never accounting limits – they felt like they needed to appease the banks and they did so with a shift in their rhetoric, like it was nothing.

They started repeating things that they used to claim were complete lies just a few months before. And that’s when I started saying: Well, I’m not going to pretend that you’re not telling lies just because you used to be friendly to each other. I’m going to call you a professional liar because that’s what you’re doing. And you’re actually causing Lula’s government to be weakened by your cowardice. You’re actually going to keep Lula from even having a chance of doing a proper government.

Intermission:
00:35:00

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Daniel Conceicao:
00:35:21

So, they kept doing it. Why was it, I asked myself. well, maybe telling the truth was useful until they got to power, but once they’re there, they started envisioning other opportunities. Because if you’re a government economist and you’re willing to sort of become less threatening to banks, what will they let you do?

They’ll invite you to their events and you’ll get very handsomely paid. They’ll maybe create executive positions for you once you leave the government. And you’ll certainly be seen as a respectable economist who can at least talk to the real market economists. This seems to be the one thing that keeps pulling heterodox economists towards a more tame rhetoric. They stop trying to tell the truth and start trying to have dialogues with those who should be viewed as enemies.

And they will never not be enemies. Their class interests are opposed to peoples, to most people.

Steve Grumbine:
00:36:25

Yes.

Daniel Conceicao:
00:36:26

Banks gain from people’s miseries. Banks are parasites, they are vampires. They will mostly profit if we’re almost dead. This is why during the pandemic they wouldn’t let us die, right? So they said, “Oh no, no, now we’ll stop parasiting you just so you can recover.” But as soon as we recover, they’ll become parasites again because the parasite wants you quasi dead. It wants you a zombie.

Steve Grumbine:
00:36:59

Wow, dude, that’s spot on. That right there is the sound bite. I mean, that’s it. “Hey, he’s almost there. Bring him back. Bring him back. Let’s do bamboo shoots under the fingernails. Okay, he’s flatlining again. Okay, go on, bring him back. All right, let’s go ahead and castrate him now. Yeah, like, hey, let’s peel off his eyelids. Let’s cut his Achilles.” Whatever, man. It is economic torture. I want to get back to your article momentarily, and I’m going to read a little bit about some of what you said.

And it was right after some of the quotes you did with Diego Maradona. You said, “Javier Milei rose to power by denouncing the status of parasite, a monster, a thief. But when the time came to rescue Argentina from hyperinflation, he turned not to the market, but to a public power even larger than his own. The IMF is no anarcho-capitalist utopia. It is a bureaucratic colossus backed by states, governed by governors and answerable to no individual free market.

Its dollars are not earned, they’re allocated. Its policies are not voluntary, they’re conditional. Milei took them eagerly. He slashed subsidies for buses and accepted a subsidy for his currency. He cut aid to pensioners while securing supranational aid for his presidency. He speaks of liberty but governs with debt servitude in scripture. This is not coherence. It is cowardice in the costume of conviction.

It’s what Diego warned against in that mural. A betrayal of the people disguised as bravery. Because the truth is, defending the poor requires more courage than appeasing the market. And in the moment, Argentina didn’t need a prophet of pain. It needed a guardian of its people.”

Hell yeah. Dude, this is what we’re talking about here, right? It’s like when you take the easier, softer way so you can sneak in the door and go to the Five Star Meal and travel around to be at all the different conferences and write books, and get pats on the back and get to talk to all the big wigs at Bloomberg, and on and on and on, it’s real easy to think your success is breeding wonderful things. But in reality, the material conditions of today, the people are suffering.

And there’s a class, there’s a buffer class. I don’t even know what you call them that dulls the tip of revolutionary spirit. And it’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, no. Be polite, be polite.” The climate is burning up. These anarcho-capitalists are destroying society. The oligarchy doesn’t care if we live or die because they’ve got bunkers drifting down 50 ft below ground with food, and everything else they need to survive for the rest of their and their next children’s lives and their grandkids, et cetera. So, at the end of the day, you’re disposable, you’re Soylent Green.

Talk a little bit more about the IMF’s role in not just Argentina, but even Ukraine has taken out these big IMF loans. The structural adjustments in Africa are legendary. Thomas Sankara, I believe, was killed for defying them. Talk about the role of the IMF and how they literally serve as a proxy between the oligarch and the US interests, because the US is the dominator of that system to begin with. This is economic imperialism, correct?

Daniel Conceicao:
00:40:24

That’s exactly what it’s meant to do. It’s meant to be a tool of domination. It’s a tool to make sure that otherwise very rich, resource-rich countries are exploitable, become desperate enough so that they have to give you, pretty much for free all of their material wealth. It starts with making you need dollars, making you need something that you truly can’t create. It’s kind of like the drug trafficker. They’ll give you a little bit, they’ll have you taste it until you become dependent.

Once you’re dependent, they’ll get your soul. They’ll get you to do everything they want because you have to get the damn dollars. So even something as supposedly generous as the Marshall Plan. let’s not pretend that’s not what it was — Marshall Plan, the rebuilding of Japan, Come on, you go and you bomb two major cities with an atomic weapon and then you’re supposed to be thanked for helping the country rebuild. No, you’re not helping them, you’re making them into a useful slave.

And how do you do that? “Well, here, taste a little bit of my dollars. See what you can get with them. Oh, see how sweet the capital goods and the technology that you can get with dollars are? See how well you can sort of develop. I’ll get more.” And then once you get so dependent that you can’t even get a replacement piece for your machine without having to import it they’ll say, “Oh, you want more dollars? Well, what can you do for me?

What is it that you have that I want? Do you have oil? Do you have land? Do you have people?” This is their weapon. It’s a very well-engineered weapon because it doesn’t appear violent. It’s different from sending an aircraft carrier to your shore. It’s different from bombing you. But it’s the same kind of violence. It produces the same kind of suffering. It still kills people. It still makes people unnecessarily suffer, and it’s part of the same system.

Steve Grumbine:
00:42:45

I want to pivot to two Argentinas here momentarily, but I want to read just what led up to the section of your article you said, “Milei calls himself brave, but here in Argentina, bravery has a different name. It’s what Maradona said painted on a wall in La Boca.” And I won’t even try to pronounce what it said, but I will just read the quote you can give it — it’s like, “In this land, defending the people is sacred and you don’t need divine right to govern, but you do need to remember the ball must never be stained.”

And I just think that is just amazing, wonderful, brilliant quote right there. But, it feeds to the next part, which is why I wanted to even read it in advance of this. You go to Argentina and there’s like a winter recess in Buenos Aires. Take us through this.

Daniel Conceicao:
00:43:34

Yeah. We were there during a school break. And here’s what also made me even still optimistic. The city still gives people tremendous free public goods, because other places with a lot of tourists, you’ll see them crowded with people. But I’ve never seen so many locals using so much of the city’s equipment as in Argentina. The kids were crowding the parks. There was an echo park with a zoo, and the line was ridiculously long. I mean, I couldn’t even imagine waiting there because it was probably a few miles long, and everywhere the kids were.

So, I started talking to people. I met with this older gentleman at the restaurant, and he told me that, “Oh, yes, this is normal. This is what our kids do. They enjoy the city.” And then he said, “But, you know, we’re worried because Milei is talking about privatizing it all.” I said, “Come on, even that. Even something as important as still as big of a part of people’s lives as their parks. I mean, are you going to put a fence and start?”

And then he told me he did that with some of them already. There’s a Japanese garden that has been caged, and now they have to pay for going inside. This is something that’s happening. And he was so upset. But then he told me something else. He said, “Well, this is why you haven’t seen as many protests as you might have, because we’re kind of giving the government a truce. But as soon as the school break ends, we’re going back to the streets and they’re going to see us fighting again.” And I really felt it in his words.

And then I saw It. I had been to the [Presidential palace] Casa Rosada because I really wanted to feel the rage against Milei from close enough. And there were just a few people with signs and all, and I felt like it was really not enough. But then I’m having coffee and I’m looking at the TV and they were showing a much bigger protest, exactly for the pensioners. for the Jubilados. It’s a bunch of pretty old people, some of them very old, and they’re marching and they’re facing the police, and things are getting more and more violent.

And then the TV station had to advertise underneath it had to put a little note, “Don’t let your kids watch this, because there might be scenes of violence coming.” I thought, “Wow, not suitable for kids.” Their main news station had to advise that this might not be suitable for kids. Now, what was it? How the police was going to treat the pensioners, that’s what was not suitable for kids. But yeah, that is what is not suitable for humans, this is dehumanization.

Why is it that the pensioners felt like they needed to protest, go there with their weak knees and some of them having a hard time even walking? It’s because they’re starving. They’ve been left behind. And that’s exactly what Diego was telling us not to do. You have to be too much of a shithead not to fight for the pensioners. So that’s basically it. We have a bunch of shitheads — cruel, horrible people who can’t even feel bad for a starving older person.

And they’re the ones who are convincing everyone that this is the only way — [There is no alternative] TINA. there’s only one alternative. I say, actually, there’s only one alternative is to call them liars and start fighting. That’s the only alternative we have.

Steve Grumbine:
00:47:17

Yeah. If you’re having a legitimate conversation, you can be respectful and disagree with random people, but when you’re dealing with power and you’re dealing with people that are actively in the system and they’re placing their career, like an AOC [Rep. Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez], above the people. I have so much to say there, and I just don’t want to go too far on it because I know there’s a lot of people out there that still have very normie sensibilities that any affront to the Democratic Party is seen as well. What are you, a MAGA?

That’s the degenerate level of political discourse they devolve into. But you ended this great piece with this Le Bren. I thought that it was particularly interesting because what I loved most about it was the framing that you start off in that paragraph, the truth without costume. My goodness.

See, my spirit yearns for honest people. Not people that just punch down or punch activists because they aren’t appropriately aligned with the Democratic Party so you just ignore them because they have the audacity to speak of class, not those kinds of people. I’m talking about truth without costume.

And I felt like this was a very wonderful ending, but it was also telling. Can you talk a little bit about the Le Bren experience?

Daniel Conceicao:
00:48:36

Oh, yeah. This was actually when I met the older man that told me about the protests. And Le Bren was a symbol really of what Argentina used to be, and it still could be. It was almost like it’s resisting embodied because Le Bren was this smallest of little eatery. In fact, it’s a takeout place. And it’s so unassuming that if you’re used to relating looks with quality, you’d never go in because it doesn’t look like your standard fancy American style restaurant. It’s something else, it’s a functional thing.

It’s a door, it’s clean enough, it’s got someone to serve you. It’s got a kitchen and it’s got great food. They’re not trying to be anything else other than what they’re meant to be. This is the truest expression of honesty. It’s, you know — you do without trying to pretend you’re something else. You do what’s needed to be done because that’s what needs to be done. You’re not trying to show that you’re like an American fast-food chain.

You’re not trying to cater to people with fancy tastes, you’re just serving great food. And because they were serving great food, a lot of people were going in and they were selling a lot of dishes. We were one of maybe five people who came in and out for their meals within, maybe, 20 minutes. And the food was great; it was just perfect. It was the best Milanesa steak I’ve had there.

It really showed me that there’s still something there that is resisting, that is being just themselves. It’s functioning because it’s doing what it needs to be done without trying to pretend, to seduce and to tell lies. And the reason why it appeals to me is because this is sort of how I feel like I want to be. I also don’t want to be pretending to be accepted.

I don’t want to be telling half-truths just because that’s what’s needed in order for me to sit at a table with famous economists. I really feel like we should fear incoherence the most, fear contradiction, fear incompleteness. We should feel almost pain from incoherence, and this is what I feel. I’m not going to be dishonest because of some other goal because that would be such a violence against my essence. I’m just not going to do it.

So as much as this might offend, people might call me, “Oh, you’re not helping the cause,” — in fact, I have something to say about this terrorism from people who say that if you attack the less evil side you’re siding with the worse. So, for instance, if you’re attacking the Democrats, you’re siding with MAGA. If you’re attacking Lula, you’re siding with Bolsonaro. That’s actually a very poor understanding of the whole situation.

What’s really going on is fascists are as much a tool for these neoliberal oppressors as anything else. They’ve become useful for neoliberalism for a while, but as soon as they’re no longer useful, they’re going to try and control your quasi-civilized government. Your Democrats, your Labor Party, Workers Party in Brazil, they keep looking for a new stooge, a new pawn in their schemes. Right now it’s still Trump for you guys, but for us it’s become Lula’s presidency.

The banks and everyone who profits from macroeconomic sabotage have started trying to tame Lula enough so that their interests are still met. And this means keeping people poor, keeping people suffering for no reason other than the banks need to make their money. Though it’s really dishonest to say, “Oh, if I don’t denounce this element of Lula’s government, I shouldn’t be denouncing it because I’m going to help Bolsonaro.” No, I’m denouncing it because I want the government to do more.

I want to believe that Lula can still listen to us and say, “Well, I’m going to stop government for the banks and start governing for the people.” Now, if Lula says, “oh, no, I’m really an ally of the banks, then as awful as Bolsonaro,” now I’ll have to make him as big of an enemy as Bolsonaro is at this point.

Steve Grumbine:
00:53:16

My ex-wife was from Argentina and two of my boys are half Argentine. So, it was a frequent thing to see us out there with the flank steak and a meat tenderizer hammer, making Milanesa and dolce de leche.

Daniel Conceicao:
00:53:27

Oh, man.

Steve Grumbine:
00:53:28

— empanadas and all kinds of other stuff. I really miss some of that. I don’t miss the marriage, but I miss the food.

But I want to say something else too. I think that this is important.

I’m trying to tie class with this stuff because I’m so disgusted with this neutral MMT that people go out there and use and allow themselves to ignore injustice. So many folks that I know stayed absolutely dead silent on Gaza and I don’t know that I’ll ever see them the same as a result of it. I’m sure somebody will have a problem with it and somebody else will salute me for it.

But I read a pamphlet by Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It. And it kind of talked about how fascism isn’t exactly a static thing. That it’s pulled out by the capitalist class when it needs it. And it uses it to discipline labor and it uses it to discipline the people, to put them back to a state where they’ll do anything and accept anything. They use whatever text they need to bring fear. It’s not a permanent state. We throw the word fascism around way too much. But I found that to be incredibly insightful.

And I’ll be honest with you; I haven’t given Trotsky much space. He is a theorist, and he probably deserves a better reading. But it brings me back to what you’re talking about here.

For me I look at not just Argentina, but Brazil and the U.S., I look at the UK and I watch my friends in the UK battling earnestly against these neoliberal economists like [James] Meadway and others. And they’re having very serious conversations. They’re doing videos and they’re writing long scripts about it back and forth, and whatnot. The reality is that Meadway has heard this stuff. He has no intention of getting it right. He doesn’t want to get it right. It’s not in his interest to get it right, calls MMT toxic sludge.

And I would say the only thing sludgy about MMT might be the fact that we don’t build in the completeness of the implications of what is said. When we know that cutting spending in this way does X, Y, Z. We’re talking about aggregates; we’re not talking about microeconomics. So, there are some things that we can infer when you start seeing austerity kick in. And there are some straight up falsehoods that are so predominant as a result of the Bitcoin community and the other private money desires.

We have a gentleman that came on here last couple weeks, Bob Hockett, to talk about this as well. And I want to make sure that we all understand, point blank, these things that are happening, they are “just didn’t know better” moments. If nothing else coming out of this podcast, I beseech my friends that spend day in and day out fighting on Twitter, fighting on Facebook, fighting on Substack and fighting in YouTube comments, etc., that MMT ceases being neutral once money is spent into the economy.

Now you’re dealing with political economy immediately, right there, once the government has spent it, you’re dealing in political economy. So, what is MMT? MMT is a lens. It is a lens that can allow you to analyze the real-world situations. Every conversation doesn’t have to be blocking and tackling about ledgers. It needs to be about the real-world implications about what is happening.

That lens is supposed to give you insight. Insight so that you can fight back, not so you can curtsy and apologize, okay. You have nothing to apologize for other than if you’re a coward. If you’re a coward and you’re running around scolding people and telling them to be kinder and gentler, we all should be kind to one another because goodness knows we’re all going to be six feet under, but we only have so much time on this planet. But pretending like these things are just misunderstandings, it’s a lie.

I mean, you can go to [Italian anti-fascist, Antonio] Gramsci and look at cultural hegemony and understand the lock that these reinforcing lies have had to keep people down. But I think it’s important to understand as an MMT driven person, a person who, even if I’m the bastard stepchild, ignored and treated like less than by many, I’m telling you right now my heart’s in the right place. I know it. I go to sleep at night, and I understand what I’m fighting for. I’m not in any way, shape or form feeling guilty, Oh no, woe is me.

I’m sitting there very, very upset about the world in which we live. And I’m very, very upset about the fact that we keep going back to the well, acting like we can use normal solutions, that the people that are oppressing us are just simply misguided and just simply don’t understand. And I’m hoping that between Daniel’s story and my just pure rage —

And the fact is we do know MMT. I do know MMT. I can sit there and do all the necessary conversations that everybody would like to have about ledgers and about forex [foreign exchange markets] and about accounts, the balance of payments and all the other things that go along with this. It’s just at the end of the day that knowledge has got to be useful. Useful means disabusing people of the lies being told to them and not being cowardly, not curtsying, not being meek. People are dying while you’re busy curtsying. And I don’t find that to be an acceptable trade off.

Anyway, I want to give you the final say, Daniel, as we close this out.

Daniel Conceicao:
00:58:44

Yeah. It’s not only morally more honest to use your knowledge to achieve better results for people. I think it’s intellectually more honest to deal with the debate in a way that explains every reason for disagreement. What I mean is at this point, a lot of people are pretending that dishonesty, that professional lying, that class interest is not one of the reasons for mainstream economists and anti-MMT people to claim that we’re wrong.

So, we keep fighting the fight, trying to show that the arguments are sound, which they are. But part of the argument should be not only the argument is sound, but I know why you’re lying. I know I can explain why you’re lying. I can explain why is it that you try to keep people from knowing the truth? Because I know how you make your money. I know how you get your well being.

So I think this should be part of the theory, right? A theory that explains why economists lie so that we can add that to the whole framework and say, “Okay, now we explain how capitalist economy works. We explain what can be done based on this knowledge. And we can also explain why is it that people keep claiming that we’re not right.”

Steve Grumbine:
01:00:10

Absolutely. I have come to believe capitalism mixed with government can never produce the outcomes that people want because the class interests are not compatible. It’s oil and water.

I know a lot of people would like very much to find a way to dampen the cruel edge of capitalism and pretend like that somehow or another is okay. And they’ll go back to Keynes and they’ll go back to FDR, but I want you to know that those were compromised sellouts that literally allowed capital to reclaim its place; that it was in defense of capital, not in defense of workers, not in defense of the people.

With that, Daniel I want to thank you so much for this. This warmed my heart. And for those out there who are seeking honesty and not just pomp and elite, I hope this touched you. I hope this worked for you. I hope this made you feel less crazy because I’m tired of hearing people tell me to be polite. I’m sick of it. It is what was used to keep the civil rights movement in check. MLK warned us, beware of the white liberal who values law and order above justice.

And my God, are we surrounded with the tone police that do that exact thing, and I’m here to tell you that ain’t my tribe, man. If you’re tone policing people, I consider you to be a class traitor, I really do. I don’t think of you as a member of the struggle, if that’s what you’re doing. You need to do some reading outside of ledgers. You need to start understanding struggle.

You need to start really truly understanding the history of struggle. It goes hand in glove with the economics you’ve been taught. And I’m not telling you to not learn economics. I think it’s one of the most important things you can learn. But without marrying that with an understanding of class, you have really got half the story right. That’s the same problem I have with Marxists that don’t take the time to learn how monetary operations work as well.

Daniel Conceicao:
01:02:05

Yeah, it’s the opposite, right?

Steve Grumbine:
01:02:07

Yes.

Daniel Conceicao:
01:02:08

With them the heart is in the right place. Just the theory is kind of messed up

Steve Grumbine:
01:02:13

Yes. When we look at our Venn diagram, we’ve got the orthodoxy on one side, and we’ve got the Marxists on the other side and we’re trying to reach all of them. And yet at the same time, you’ve got to work both directions. You’ve got to understand your class struggle so you can integrate MMT for them.

Daniel Conceicao:
01:02:28

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine:
01:02:29

And on the flip side, you got to take these fricking normies that think, “Hey, we’re just going to vote for a few more progressives, guy. Trust me. We’re going play some — we’re going to the country club, man. We’re going to have mimosas and we’re going to travel first class and we’re going to do all kinds of great things, guys.”

But class, what’s that? Well, you know what? Probably because you are part of the bourgeoisie, you are protecting your accumulation. You aren’t one of us. I get why this was offend you. I get it, I would offend me too if I were a rich person and didn’t want to hear anything about this.

But the gutting of labor has really created such a chasm and the ability to fight back has become such a dirty word that I’m here to say it’s like, you know, clapping with one hand. You need both hands to clap. And if you don’t put them both together, I’m not sure you’ve got much of anything. And that’s where I’ll end it.

Daniel, thank you so much. Where can we find more of your work?

Daniel Conceicao:
01:03:22

I’ve started a Medium. It’s where I posted the Milei piece. And yeah, I did that because I wanted to get things out as quickly as possible. I usually just do the Medium piece and then I’ll advertise for it on X and other social media platforms. And every once in a while, I try to get a publication with other bigger venues. But those are mostly in Portuguese, so maybe the Medium site is where you can find me.

Steve Grumbine:
01:03:52

Well, thank you for letting us republish this on realprogressives.org as well. We put in our Substack, and it got a lot of love there. Daniel thank you again for joining me today.

Folks, my name’s Steve Grumbine. I’m the host of Macro N Cheese. I’m also the founder of real progressives, a 501c3 not for profit. We live and die on your contributions. I mean, we don’t have any rich people, we don’t have any rich benefactors. We’re not rubbing elbows with the people with money because none of them are donating, that’s for sure. And we are desperate for your support.

We’re a small operation, but we’re in our seventh year of weekly production. Never missed a week of Macro N Cheese. Think about that. Seven years a team of volunteers has worked without so much. And literally, when you look at our Twitter, you’ll see very few MMT actually retweet our stuff. It’s deeply depressing. We’d love to see more support, but apparently that might be a bridge too far for some.

But we believe in the work we’re doing, and we know what we’re trying to do, and we feel good about it. And so hopefully, if you feel good about it and you enjoy what we’re doing, you’ll consider supporting us too because it certainly won’t come from places where people have moneyed interest. They’re not interested; they’re not going to help us. We need your help. And you can do that on our Patreon, which is patreon.com/realprogressives.

You can go to our website, realprogressives.org There’s a dropdown. Go to donate. Or you can go to our Substack, which is substack.com/real progressives. Please support us on our Substack We’ve got a lot of great articles out there. I think we’re doing good work, folks. I’m proud of the work we’re doing. Whether or not we get the support we feel we deserve or not. I feel good about it and hopefully you do as well.

lease also remember this. Every Tuesday evening, we have what we call Macro N Chill. It’s a webinar where we get together and we discuss each of these podcasts. It’s spirited. Sometimes we’ve got people that don’t agree. Sometimes we have people that have additional information. Sometimes we have people that don’t understand any of it. And we’re just looking to bring everyone into the fold to learn this stuff.

If you’ve got knowledge and you are capable of helping out, please show up to these. It’s not just for your entertainment, we’re looking for people to lean in and provide value in there. So by all means, consider yourself invited. And Daniel, when we do your show, we’d love to have you come and be a part of it.

It’s 8pm Eastern Time on Tuesday nights, 5pm Pacific Time. Macro and Chill. You can get the link on our website. It’s at the top. We publish it on Patreon, we publish it on Substack, we publish it in all of our Facebook groups. MMT for RP, Real Progressives, you name it. Please feel free to join all of them, right. We’re there for the cause and we’re working hard and we need your help.
So, without further ado, I bid you adieu on behalf of my guest, Daniel Conceição and myself, Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. We are out of here.

End Credits:
01:06:49

Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.