Episode 375 – (R)evolutionary Struggle with Steve Grumbine

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:43

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese.

Today. I’m talking with me.

It’s been a while since I’ve been on the mic by myself, and we felt that I needed to do an episode that kind of describe some of the shifts within the organization, if they weren’t already obvious to most. We have prided ourselves as being a champion of Modern Monetary Theory for over a decade. This organization has been unapologetically an MMT shop.

We did it our way.

We didn’t wait for permission, but we were consistent and we are consistent, and we stayed consistent and we followed the information where it took us and we asked each of our guests tough questions. Many of those questions still don’t really have an answer.

And I guess you could say that it’s that answer, that missing answer, that drives so much of the work that we’re trying to do.

I think the hardest part about wrapping your head around all this stuff is just sort of thinking about where you came from and where you’re going, because it’s real easy once you’ve learned a bunch of different things and you’ve come into a different worldview, to forget that there was a time where you didn’t know these things. And unfortunately, the time is later, I think, than many of us think the time is.

I remember about seven years ago, I had Steven Hail come on and we did a, we did a show called 11 Years or something like that. 12 Years, one or the other. The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] had just given a report out saying that we had 11 years.

And he was quite adamant. It was like an emergency. It was urgent right now.

Existential crisis right now, that if we don’t radically change what we’re doing, the world is going to not really care about us any longer and we’ll be lost in the sauce. We will be done as a species. Life on Earth will cease to exist, or if it does, it’ll be radically altered.

And that stuck with me, that really, really stuck with me, that urgency.

Unfortunately, as we’ve watched, since I don’t know, 2016, we have watched any veneer of democracy completely and utterly eliminated. The avenues by which Dr. Hail’s clarion call for urgency, at least within the core of the empire, the United States, it’s as if it didn’t happen. It’s as if we’re not heading toward a cataclysmic disaster, an ecological disaster.

It’s almost as if that’s not happening. We are witnessing an administration right now that is starting wars all over the world.

Not to be confused with the Biden administration, who fully funded and fully supported a genocide in Gaza. Never mind that. Never mind that when we took out [Muammar] Gaddafi, there is a track of Hillary Clinton going, “We came, we saw, he died.”

These are the sociopaths that we look to for solutions.

I don’t know why, but, you know, I always thought very naively, by the way, that if we got Bernie Sanders in or if we elected a few more progressives in, that we could in fact have a Green New Deal. Or as Stephanie Kelton likes to say, “It’s not how we fund it, it’s how we source it. And we source it by sourcing the vote.

We need the vote, because votes are how we get bills passed.”

But we have seen in the Biden administration, for example, how even the parliamentarian, I gotta be honest with you, I never heard of the parliamentarian before a day in my life.

I mean, I’ve heard of a parliamentarian, but it’s always been in like some old British, you know, sitcom or some history book or something, but never really thought of the parliamentarian and modern politics as a real thing. But there we are watching the parliamentarian kill the PRO Act. I don’t know how that happens, but it happened.

And we watched the entire Biden administration talking about, “We gotta have bipartisan agreement. We can’t do anything. We can’t stack the court. We can’t do anything to save Roe v. Wade.

We can’t do anything,” because this is a lesson to those people that voted for Donald Trump. It’s kind of like a “hold my beer” moment after we went through part one of Donald Trump, after they stripped away any pretense of allowing Bernie Sanders to win a rigged primary. We are talking about, like, empirical data here, folks. We aren’t talking about, you know, some conspiracy theory.

We’re talking about literally empirical data shows that the DNC and their super delegates and all the insiders, all the elite, people that we are coming to know as the oligarchy, people that we are coming to know as the puppets of the mouths of oligarchs, made a decision that we’re not having Bernie Sanders in there.

I mean, Obama called him to the principal’s office and Bernie folded his tail right between his legs and scampered away and talked about, “We gotta support my good friend Hillary Rodham Clinton. We got a support her.” Then he did it again. And this time when he got swept out, “We gotta support my good friend Joe Biden.”

And then when there wasn’t even a primary and they manufactured after he found out Joe Biden couldn’t even tie his shoes, much less tie sentences together, they, the elites once again chose Kamala Harris, who, I mean, there’s nothing about her, Biden, Trump, any of them that in any way, shape or form represent the needs of the working class in this country. Not one single thing about them. And through all this, people were trying to teach MMT to Congress people, trying to get them to learn.

If you just understood the economy, baby, if you just understood that money is a creature of the state, a creature of law.

If you just understand that when Congress, because of Article 1, Section 8 of your US Constitution, says that Congress alone has the power of the purse.

And when Congress passes a law that money, which is a unit of measure, it’s not a physical representation, it is a legal representation that money is created through law.

And then the nation’s central bank keystrokes those deposits when laws are passed, not willy nilly, not “printing money,” not all the other tropes, but we’re running around telling everybody, “If we just, we just teach Congress this, everything will be okay. Everything. We’ll have a Green New Deal, we’ll have Medicare for All, we’ll have all kinds of- still have free college, we can do great things.”

And you know what?

If you have a democracy, not a “constitutional republic” where the elite wealthy white landowners started the country created bulwarks against popular democracy through the Senate, the Supreme Court, through all kinds of different things, like the parliamentarian, through the parties, the duopoly, conveniently two capitalist parties. Now before some well-meaning person tries to tell me that there’s no such thing as capitalism, Elizabeth Warren said, “I’m a capitalist to my bones. I love markets. I’m a capitalist to my bones.”
Nancy Pelosi, “Of course we’re capitalists.” Every one of them capitalists.
Every one of them, okay with us having our productive time siphoned away, eaten up by employers and having no rights. Because guess what? All the laws that protect us from illegal searches and all kinds of other stuff, well, they don’t exist in the private sector.

Most of the laws that we have, free speech, all that stuff is protection from the government impinging upon our free speech. But as you’ve clearly seen in both the Biden administration, Trump 1 and Trump 2, all of them, Obama, you name it.

W. [George W. Bush]: “We’ve been chasing terrorists forever”, killing free speech on the daily, killing the Fourth Amendment like it’s our job, and somehow or another finding a way to bless mass surveillance. Well, we’re way beyond mass surveillance now. Mass surveillance is but a tiny little piece of the puzzle.

We’ve got AI that’s logically grouping all this information about us and putting us into nice little buckets surveyed by private sector corporations, the police force working through them because the police couldn’t do it directly, but they can get information from private sector entities.

And so all the protections we thought we had, all the democracy we thought we had, all the freedom we thought we had, the veneer of democracy has dropped and fallen away. And so you ask yourself, how the hell do you source the vote? How in the world do you source the vote?

Now, I’ve been at this myself personally now since 2007, 2008 time period, maybe even 2006, actually, now that I think about it, about 20 years, ironically.

It’s just hard to believe that it’s been that long, that I’ve been learning about MMT through my old groups on Facebook called Grumbine’s Political Mosh Pit, and then through Real Progressives, which began in 2015, and then obviously through The Rogue Scholar and Macro N Cheese, this podcast here, which we’ve done for now, I think, seven years. Over seven years, actually. We’re coming up on our 400th episode. We’ve been talking about this stuff like crazy.

And we started digging into the intersectional information that the MMT community prides itself on, you know, interdisciplinary.

The idea that they have to learn what everybody else thinks, all their schools of thought, so they can know how to, you know, unengineer, de-engineer, deconstruct these other schools of thought, these other crazy ideas within economics, neoclassical economics, all the lies. And folks, as a guy with an MBA, I was taught all the wrong stuff.

So you put the lies that we’ve been fed about the economy in the process, in your mind, at the front of your thoughts, and then you put the lies we’ve been told about democracy to go with it. You know, I asked people, do you think you could vote away the genocide in Gaza? Do you think you could vote away the proxy war in Ukraine?

Do you think that you could vote away all of the austerity that the state uses on behalf of capital, on behest of capital to champion capital. Do you believe that you can vote that away? And when I talk to people, they say, “No, you cannot vote it away.

But harm reduction, Steve, don’t forget about harm reduction. We can always try and get 15 minutes extra pee break somewhere.

We can always hopefully, you know, vote for the lesser of two evils and hope that the only evil we get is just a slight sliding to the right.” But no, no, no. What we witnessed was 40 plus years of neoliberal logic, mass privatization, and we all thought it was for our own good.

I say “we all” loosely, some of us didn’t think that forever. Many still don’t understand and many still think the private sector is the answer to the problems we have.

But all this information causes you to ask a lot of questions.

And as you’re out there doing the debate circuit, you’re out there on social media, you’re getting called horrible names and tone-policed by frenemies and all kinds of other fun stuff. You start realizing that, wow, people don’t understand this stuff and they don’t want to understand it.

Because once you understand something different than you understood before, it fundamentally changes a lot of things that you thought were so that just ain’t so.

A lot of the paths, the neural pathways that you’ve carved out in your brain, from history, from experience, from your material reality, from work to family to church to schools to whatever, all the interactions you have, have created these well-worn patterns in your brain, these dances that we do on a daily basis, these ruts like the Oregon Trail, the wagon ruts in our brain.

And when you tell somebody something like, “Taxes don’t fund the federal government, money is a creature of the state, currency is a creature of the state, the unit of account is the state’s unit of account.” This is not always the case, you see this in Europe in particular. But currency-issuing nations are uniquely different, right?

And if you know this, it’s going to fundamentally change so much of what you believe, so much of what you believe is possible. And yet the impact on someone’s identification, their personal view of themselves, how they think of the world, it changes right then, right there.

And they have to consider the impact of accepting this change into their neural pathways. Is it going to create people that don’t like them now that they have a different view? Is it going to create enemies where there were once friends?

What does it mean to my life, to my existence, to accept this new information? And so we talked to people on various episodes about psychology. We explored the psychology of the way people think.

You know, the way we change minds and the way we deliberate. We’ve approached this thing from every angle we knew how.

We talked to people that were adjacent to MMT, trying to pull them into MMT only to have them basically use us in whatever fashion, but in reality, stay where they are and not really change. I mean, there’s been a few people that have remarkably changed.

I mean, watching Jason Hickel in particular be pulled into the MMT world and really, truly understand and kind of push away the idea of Universal Basic Income and embrace Universal Basic Services, that’s a huge change. But most people aren’t changing. Most people, they just have an opinion.

And that opinion, maybe it’s well researched, maybe they came upon it honestly, or maybe it was just something that they adopted from hearing from friends or sitting around at the fire pit and talking to buddies over a beer, you know, talking to girlfriends at, you know, roller skating rink or wherever the hell they’re going, maybe at the football game, you name it.

But ultimately, there’re so many hegemonic messages, messages that are coming from the elite, from the ruling elite that fill our lives and create “common sense.” They create the institutions that the state is made up of.

And it was only when I started learning about the nature of these institutions and asking, demanding, how could it be?

Look at the crowds that were following around for Bernie and watching snobby, well-to-do people wag their finger at Bernie and wag their finger at Berners and “Oh, they’re rude.” And oh, God, folks, the people that say, “Oh, they’re rude.” I have so little respect for them, so little respect for the tone police.

Because Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The white moderate who cares more for order than justice.” That’s your tone police. That’s your tone police. And they abound.

And they’re there to scold you for speaking your truth, for being angry, for struggling, dealing with your own struggles and wondering why society won’t fix it, why the political process leaves you abandoned and tries to shoehorn you into an ACA, the Affordable Care Act, which was a neoliberal giveaway to the insurance companies that really, at the end of the day, has made our health care system even worse, if that’s possible. And you ask yourself, if everybody…the numbers are ridiculous. How many people wanted Medicare for All?

Now, Medicare for All may not be the be all, end all, but Medicare for All was very popular. And at the end of the day, we all fought for it. We fought for a Green New Deal, and nobody’s talking about Green New Deal anymore.

They didn’t under Biden. They let, they let it go under Biden. They did Build Back Better, which got watered down, watered down, watered down.

I have never seen anything that Donald Trump does get watered down, ever.

He may chicken out, he may not go all the way and whatever it is that he’s doing, but at the end of the day, he would never be tripped up by a parliamentarian. So with that in mind, what do you think? What do you think would come from that? You’d think that we’d have Medicare for All, right? No, we don’t.

In fact, it never came to be. So if it was simply a matter of people wanting it, the will of the people wanting it, we would have Medicare for All right now. But we don’t.

Why don’t we have Medicare for All right now? Is it because, you know, you just voted badly? You didn’t, you weren’t smart enough to vote the right way?

When Biden came through, he swore to God he would veto Medicare for All if it came across his desk, period. That’s not a joke, that’s serious. That made me really, really struggle big time. You know, we had it down as MMTers.

We knew, Medicare for All, it’s very efficient. It’s probably going to cause the layoffs of many people in the insurance business or the care-denial business.

So with that in mind, what do you think? Do you think we live in a democracy? I still couldn’t figure it out. And most people couldn’t figure it out.

They were ready to go back to the well, “We just got to vote for a few more progressives, AOC will champion.” No, she stopped pretty much. Rashida. No, no, no, no. They’re done talking about Medicare for All.

All of them done talking about Medicare for All because of Build Back Better because Biden said he would veto it. Nancy Pelosi calling the Green New Deal “the Green Dream or whatever.” And so, I dug deeper.

Gilens and Page study out of Princeton in 2014 showed statistically a non-existent percentage of influence that everybody, the people, we the people, the working class, the non-rich, the non-elite, the non-oligarchs, okay, the non-bourgeoisie have zero impact on policy. Our votes don’t in any way shape or form at all folks at all, empirically at all, impact policy. We are an oligarchy.

We live in a capitalist dictatorship, an oligarchy. Now I want you to think about this. Donald Trump was impeached not once, but twice. He was also found guilty of a felony. He’s a felon. And guess what?

Donald Trump is midway through his second term as President of the United States, he got re-elected as a felon. It didn’t disqualify him. But ask yourself as a working class person, if you had a felony, what would happen to your career?

What would happen to your life? Doesn’t sound much like a democracy, does it? It doesn’t sound much like justice, does it?

You know, we talked with Bill Black and went through The Con and we went through the great financial crisis and the Big Short and the shorting of the mortgage industry and learned about elite control fraud. You know how many people have been busted for elite control fraud in the United States?

I know Bill Black was able to get after the Keating Five, we got plenty of information on that that came through for sure. But folks, none of them did. In fact, none of the corporations were held in account. They were called “too big to fail.”

Does that sound to you like a democracy? Now some would like me to pretend that all this isn’t real. Some would like to not focus on this and just pretend that we can vote it all away.

And they get really upset when I say we can’t. In fact, one gentleman likes to talk about a “We need a media commons, a commons media.” How would you do that? Look, I’m a project manager by trade.

I’m happy to build anything you bring toward me. I literally put together multi-million-dollar fiber optic systems. I put together huge projects all the time.

Without massive funding, you’re just pissing in the wind. I mean massive funding. And what comes with massive funding? Where do you get massive funding? You get massive funding, typically from rich people.

And rich people want to have a say in everything. And now all of a sudden your idea of a public commons is gone. Because first of all, it’s private sector.

The only way to ensure a public commons is publicly, not privately, publicly.

And as it stands right now, regular people are so petty and absolutely tribal in their in-group, out-group behavior that the opportunity to have a public commons, it’s already on its face a challenge because you don’t have a democracy. So to be able to vote that in. Remember Gilens and Page? Like every time we go through this, you got to keep the Gilens and Page study handy.

You got to keep your material reality that your eyes have seen handy. People will try, people will, good people will try, they’ll push, they want. But reality is that anything we do is a concession by the elite, if we go through official channels, it’s a concession by the elite. It’s not a guarantee, it’s not a right.

Rights can’t be taken away and rights really can’t be granted. Rights are rights.

So where do rights come from and how do they get enforced? You know, we talked about abolition of police because where did the police come from? The police didn’t come here to protect you and I from evildoers.

They came to protect capital. They came to protect private property.

And they knew that when they made life harder on the people, they just tighten the screws up through austerity, which we’ve learned extensively about from our good friend Clara Mattei.

When you realize that they could literally use austerity as a weapon to keep us where they want us, desperate, broke, hurting, pliable, willing, desperate. And then you realize that the government is capitalist in nature, that it supports capital and it promotes this kind of environment. Why?

Is it because these people that have suddenly been brought into public service are somehow or another just capitalists? Or are they just puppets or bourgeois ministers for capital?

Because without changing the system, capital is always large and in charge, even in the halls of government. And so the very nature of government came into question with me, with us, with our organization. Not because we wanted to, we didn’t seek out to think this, my goodness, we were on a path to a Green New Deal. Hey, folks, unicorns and rainbows, man. I mean, I got the Green New Deal shirt sitting on my bed still.
Nobody’s talking about a Green New Deal. And they weren’t doing it under Biden either. It’s not just Trump, it’s the whole thing.

Once the cultural hegemon, the elites, the ruling elites, change what is common sense, change the institutions, change the messaging that people follow, like they’re almost powerless to resist.

And so I dug into Antonio Gramsci and his Prison Notebooks and I talked to Vijay Prashad about Gramsci, and we began to realize about the organic intellectual and we began to realize the powers that we’re up against.

Folks, I want you to understand that out of nowhere Donald Trump decided, and it’s not out of nowhere because you’re going to realize it goes way, way back. I don’t even know how far it goes back.

I mean, it goes back, but we had always planned to go in there and do something terrible to Venezuela, and we’ve done to Argentina, and we’ve done it to all of the Global South. But to go down there and just snatch up Maduro, wow, it’s kind of like, “Ah, we don’t like Gaddafi, blow him up. We came, we saw, he died,” okay?

That’s the good guy side of the equation, remember? “What do you want, Trump?” “We came, we saw, he died.”

I will never forget Biden’s State of the Union address, where he stuttered and stammered and talked about “China as our enemy” and called immigrants “illegals.” And some in the MMT community said, “He stuck the landing.” Some in the MMT community even said that there wasn’t a genocide in Gaza.

And for daring to push back on those two narratives, we were ostracized and treated really poorly actually. I feel bad about it. But you know what? There was a genocide in Gaza, and China isn’t our enemy, and no one is illegal.

And so that pushed me to dig deeper, and there started being a little bit of a rupture there because the Pollyanna idea that “We’re just going to vote a few more progressives in and change the world,” stopped having any effect. Salt that loses its saltiness is just dirt.

And these idle, empty voting campaigns and electoral strategies and, you know, inside voice, outside voice, in-group, out-group, it became too much. And so we started learning about capital. We started learning about capitalism.

I remember doing the deep research, talking with Sandy Darity and Kirsten Mullen on From Here to Equality, going to Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, reading about Malcolm X, diving back into the French Revolution and then understanding the Haitian Revolution and Saint Domingue and our guy, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and not Toussaint Louverture, who was kind of like the Obama of Haiti, but. But Jean-Jacques Dessalines, he understood. And looking at each of these resistance movements to tyranny, you know, you want to talk about kings?

Well, they had kings. There was monarchies. France, literally got rid of class distinctions, ended the monarchy, and had their own. It was a bourgeois revolution, folks.

Make no mistake about it. But during the Enlightenment and all the rest that came from that, a lot of things carried through to the day.

Intermission:
00:29:35

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Steve Grumbine:
00:29:58

But it made me dig into revolutionary thought because your voting strategies suck.

It’s a false promise to people that are dying, people that are desperate. It’s like they’re in the water drowning, and they’re reaching up and you hand them a ballot. You don’t give them a hand, you hand them a ballot.

You don’t volunteer; you hand them a ballot; you don’t create mutual aid; you hand them a ballot.

You don’t create hostels that people could stay in, a network of hostels where people that are un-homed could be homed. You don’t create tenant unions. You don’t create an underground railroad. You don’t create. You hand them a ballot, you go back to your life.

“I don’t know what to tell you, man. Sorry the vote didn’t go your way. I guess you got to vote harder, you got a phone bank more, you got a door knock more. The problem is you all!

You’re splitters, you’re purity testing.” I remember at the Democratic National Committee, the convention, right in the middle of the worst freaking genocide I’ve seen in my life.

Doesn’t mean it’s the worst that’s ever happened. I mean, the United States is always on the side of genocide, going back to the Native Americans. But they were laughing. I’ve got videos.

Anybody want to see them? No. They’d skip right by because it would hurt their brain. It would hurt the ruts that they’ve carved out for themselves where they believe-

they believe in a fake world, a world that doesn’t exist. An electoral world where we can change capital and we can tame oligarchy by voting.

With a voting sticker right on your forehead and, “Oh, aren’t I a good person? And I go right back to doing whatever it was that I was doing.” No sacrifice. Just fly a first class, live la vida loca.

Use big words to feel proud about ourselves. “The ontology Steven. Chauncey.” The people, they could be all for a Green New Deal. And guess what would happen? It would do nothing. It would go nowhere.

Not because they don’t want it properly. Not because we don’t want to survive an environmental apocalypse, but because they have faith in a system that doesn’t produce results.

They have faith in a system that is built to extract, to provide maximum comfort to the elite and maximum pain to the working class. Are there times when things will be good? Temporarily. But there is no such thing as a steady state economy. They’ll blow someone up.

They’ll destroy an industry. They’ll create AI and suck up all the water and literally destroy our jobs. And what little bit of security any of us have is swept right away.

How are you voting away AI, huh? You know, I think one of the big ones that really got me, made me really struggle, was Social Security.

You know, Social Security, that thing FDR gave us. FDR wanted to make sure nobody could take it away. So he made it a “paid in benefit.” “You got skin in the game.

You’re paying into Social Security. You’re hard-earned FICA dollars going to Social Security.” Except it’s a lie.

See, like, there’s little rumble strips, those little rubber hoses where they track the number of cars that drive by an intersection. That’s all your Social Security payments are. They’re like a little tally. It goes into a spreadsheet somewhere. But there is no trust fund.

The trust fund’s not real. The trust fund doesn’t fund Social Security. The trust fund is an authority to make payments.

So they created this whole system that was supposed to prevent it from going insolvent or prevent it from being stripped away, keep it as a right. But in reality, it was always a lie. And that lie was that you were funding Social Security.

And when I learned this stuff, I realized it was just a technical little detail that anybody with a little bit of a brain could figure out. Even, even Alan Greenspan told Paul Ryan, “Hey, dude, no, private savings accounts won’t make Social Security more solvent.

There is nothing preventing us from giving people as much money as we need to give them.

The question is, can we create a market or an economy that can absorb the spend, that can take that on, that the real goods and services, the real resources are available for purchase.” Plain as day on public television. Said the truth accidentally. And how many people you think actually took that in? A handful.

And they still want to raise the cap because, “Social Security is going bankrupt, it’s going insolvent.” Cultural hegemony locks people’s brains. And they hear their favorite Democrats and Republicans talking about stupid shit.

And because they have more sway with them, they keep the lie alive. And that prevents any kind of popular uprising fighting back. And so what do they do? They gut it more. They privatize it more.

They shrink payments more because they believe that it could go insolvent.

So all these lies that MMT helps us unearth, the fact that the country, the government, the federal government in the United States, in Japan and Australia and the UK through their central bank, they could spend to infinity and beyond. Not without consequences, mind you. If they spend too much and there’s not an economy that can absorb the spend, you will have inflationary pressures.

So nobody’s saying that taxes aren’t necessary to keep a currency alive and well. They’re just saying they’re not a funding operation. You just need to have enough tax to be able to keep the currency stable.

Not for funding, keep it stable. And you would think this would be easy as hell. You would think this would be super simple. But it’s not. And nobody gets it.

And the oligarchy, the elites, know it and they run with it. They don’t care. It’s been written about so many times. Jamie Galbraith has written Save Social Security from its saviors.

Stephanie Kelton’s written about on and on and on. And don’t get started on the national debt that they’ve got everyone bamboozled with. Why do you think they do these things?

Why do you think they tell you that “The country is broke,” and that “We’re dying,” and that “Oh my God, we’ve got 42 trillion in debt, whatever are we going to do? We got to tighten our belts again,” and people believe it. And there’s Rand Paul running around unabated. “Yeah, I got a plan. We can fix this.”

It’s an austerity plan. It’s a lie. Socialists, God love you, on your side. You don’t get monetary sovereignty. You don’t understand the way currency operates.

But you do understand the way oligarchy and capital operates.

And because you don’t lie, because you don’t mealy mouth these fake election things and you don’t sit there and sell people a bill of goods that we can do all these great things electorally. I have a lot of respect for you. I’m one of you. I just happen to know MMT and believe in the empirical data.

Just like the empirical data about Gilens and Page and the fact that we live in an oligarchy. It’s the same with MMT because I know how a sovereign currency works. And the question isn’t whether or not they could do these things, the question is why they won’t do them. Do you think the people that run the Federal Reserve don’t know that taxes don’t finance the federal government?

Do you think they don’t know that? Bernanke said it outright, plain as day, “No, we don’t spend tax dollars. We got this thing called the printing press.” They say the stuff out loud but people don’t hear it.

The media keeps the lie going, the pundits keep the lie going and they act very serious on CNN and MSNBC and Fox News and all the other arms of oligarchy, all these propaganda institutions for the ruling elite, the pitched battle between Republicans and Democrats when in reality guys like Gavin Newsom singing the praises of Netanyahu and Zionism out there literally ripping down a homeless encampment and bragging about it like he’s a hero.

So our organization has watched this and studied this and learned this, and we are MMT’ers through and through, but we are socialists through and through, and we don’t believe we’re gonna vote our way out of this. And as nice as people that want to vote it away might be, they might be great grandparents. They might even be excellent dancers.

Hell, they might even be good at water skiing. But the pie in the sky idea that we’re voting our way out of this, there’s not evidence; there’s no evidence that suggests any of that is real.

So we don’t focus on specific elections and things like that, but we do focus on history, and we do focus on philosophy and political economy and the plumbing of the economy, which is Modern Monetary Theory.

Thank you, Bill Mitchell, for being one of the good ones and helping me see class and realizing, to the chagrin of many others, that MMT is not the theory of everything. So to answer all these other questions, why can’t MMT make it into the big world? Because the institutions are locked down.

Because the institutions represent the ruling elite, the donor class, the rich. Every single one of these things is a rich man’s game. I mean, Smedley Butler talked about. Everybody knows, folks, everybody knows.

Until it comes to election time…we see these No Kings marches. And how badly I wish it was No Capitalists, but it’s not; it’s No Kings. Because in reality, they think that they are going to go back to brunch once we get Donnie Tiny Hands out of the White House, things will just go back to the way they were and everything will be hunky dory.

But they don’t realize that the reason why things are bad, the reason why strongmen and fascists have any foothold at all, is because of the lies of the liberal identity politics that took away class identities.

And all you have to do is read Gabriel Rockhill’s book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism to realize how involved the CIA was in destroying class solidarity. You know, we’ve had union leaders on here, too, including Sara Nelson, who leads the airline union.

We’ve had so many people like Joe Burns come on and talk about class struggle unions. Let me ask you a question. Do you see class struggle unions? Unions have been gutted, destroyed, beaten down. Why is that?

Because labor solidarity is a tough pill to swallow when you’re a capitalist. And so the balance is so far out of whack, and the controls of all the systems belong to the few, the elite, the Capital Order.

How do you un-wedge that kind of power? They’re not going to let you vote it away.

Rosa Luxemburg said, “The character of a socialist inside of government is irrelevant because as long as capitalism is around and in control, the socialist does not transform the government into a socialist government, but the socialist is instead transformed into a minister of capital.” You see it with AOC. You see it with a bunch of them.

Now, I’m not here to tell you that we need a violent revolution- although I’m not here to say we don’t either. Right? I’m not here to say what we need.

I’m here to tell you that our organization is not going to hide from these truths and we’re going to explore where they take us.

And when you think about writings like Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare, and you understand the way small groups of people work together, I’m not telling you to like Che Guevara. I’m not telling you to hate him either. But you learn from people that struggled.

You learn from people that fought the system, that fought against empire, that fought against propaganda, that fought against capitalism, that fought against people being preyed upon. Oh, and of course, you got the “Oh, but did you see how many millions so and so killed?”

Hey, folks, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention or not, but capitalism has been wreaking havoc, slaughtering millions and millions of people. And as long as they’re the right people, we’re okay with that, aren’t we? You know, we can castigate “Putin puppets.” We can ignore NATO.

We can ignore all of the things that the United States and its 900 military bases around the world do. We can ignore all of that. We can ignore the President literally saying he’s going to steal Greenland away.

We can literally pretend that we didn’t see Donald Trump bomb Iran. Do you think that Donald Trump was the first one to want to go to Iran? No. It’s the military industrial complex, the permanent state.

So am I doing you a service by pretending otherwise? Am I doing you all a service by ignoring the truth so that you can hear a comfortable lie?

It’s tough when your mind is wired to accept lies, because we’ve all been there. We all are still there, even now as we fight to claw out of this stuff. Capitalism is a virus. It morphs, it changes, it learns.

It’s a system that continuously learns, like AI. And when those contradictions of AI, it starts hallucinating.

Like our guy, Mr. Byrne, Peter Byrne, who has done an excellent Series on the militarization of AI. As you learn this stuff, ask yourself how you’re voting away Peter Thiel. Ask yourself how you’re voting away Palantir.

Ask yourself how you’re voting away Daddy’s Home [Where’s Daddy?] Drones that kill the kids in Gaza and ignore your lying eyes as snipers wasted children and kids burned as tents were firebombed.

You want to pretend you can vote that all away? So our mission has been to integrate the knowledge of Modern Monetary Theory. We’re not changing MMT. MMT is MMT.

But the things that people say, that just ain’t so the Pollyanna Normie shit about voting for a few more progressives. And we’re going to call that out. We’re going to call that out because we are all struggling.

None of us that volunteer and do this work are living in mansions. We’re all struggling in our own ways. We’re all one business decision away from destitution.

And so we’re going to explore struggles of the past and try to figure out how they work for the future. In fact, I have long said that we need to build parallel institutions and dual powers. Very, very much like the Black Panthers.

We used to know this stuff and we’ve stopped. If you think going through official channels is somehow or another going to yield the outcomes that we need to survive, you are absolutely crazy.

The rich are building freaking billionaire bunkers to survive whatever holocaust they unleash on us through unfettered, unregulated- just capitalism, period. If you ever saw the movie Elysium, we’re closer than that than I think anybody would give credit to, living on a destroyed, polluted planet while the rest go up there in some spaceship by Elon Musk or some other oligarch. The rich will pay their way through. The rest of us will just die. So we’re going to study theory, we’re going to study history.

We’re going to talk about building parallel systems. We’re going to talk about building actual capacity, not voting capacity, because you’ve been voting your whole lives and you’ve gotten bupkis.

Anytime you want to bring up socialism and the deaths of the dictators and all the other good stuff you like to bring up, I’m going to talk to you about counter revolution.

I’m going to talk about how the royalists took back wanted to bring back the monarchy in France, Napoleon, all that. So we’re going to talk about the blowback in Haiti from the capital order. We’re going to talk about the blowback in Cuba. Look at what’s going on now.

Finally, somebody let an oil tanker through, but they were starving out children. They were literally destroying hospitals. They were destroying the little bit of life. These folks survived, even though they had been under embargo by the United States, they still survived. And lo and behold, because we think we can vote our way out of this, we just sort of hand them a ballot while they’re drowning in the ocean.

Hats off to the people that went down there in a caravan to Gaza. Hats off to the people went in a caravan to Cuba. Hats off to the people that went down to Venezuela. Hands off Venezuela.

To the people that put their lives on the line and their freedom on the line. But this mealy mouth appeals to order instead of justice. It’s just not for me. You want a Green New Deal? Well, guess what?

By what means will that happen? You can’t vote it away unless an oligarch decides. Hey, maybe you ought to take this seriously.

“Sir, please, sir, perchance sir, could you give me a little more porridge, sir?” Real Progressives, Macro N Cheese will always be an MMT organization. We were founded on MMT. We’re based on MMT.

We still support MMT, but we want people to understand what’s happening in the economy to them, not for them, but to them.

It’s one thing to talk about all the possibilities, but you need a democracy, a functioning democracy, which we don’t have, which is oligarchy, which capitalism and elections are not copacetic. Because the first rule of capital club is maximizing shareholder value. Not doing right by the community, not doing right by the environment.

Not controlling excesses, but to maximize shareholder value. If they can shave a quarter point by laying a bunch of people off, guess what they’ll do?

You use things like NAIRU, this fake idea that we’ve got to lay people off to keep the economy down. This idea that we got to raise interest rates so that we can kill inflation. Folks, as Warren Mosler would say, they got it backwards.

The interest income channel, when they raise interest rates, is just like a basic income with a huge sucking sound to the wealthy. Folks like my good friend Erald Kolasi, who talks about physics and talks about all things being connected. He gets it.

Folks like my friend David Fields. He’s a Post Keynesian, but he’s friendly to MMT, but he understands political economy. He understands labor versus capital.

And we see clearly whose interests are always served. So as an organization, we will be talking MMT, but we will be talking about resistance.

We will be talking about class struggle, we will be integrating things that you can’t vote your way out of. And for the people that say MMT is class based, I’ve got 400 interviews, of which 350 of them are with MMT economists, pretty much.

And I am telling you right now, not a single one of them would say that.

At the end of the day, Bill Mitchell told me flat out, you know what, when I was younger, we thought about, you know, fighting this, blah, blah, blah. But we’ve seen what happens. The US government use the IMF, uses its military to kill resistance wherever it is.

Anyone that resists the will of capital is slaughtered. And you believe this is all just very natural. “USA, USA,” flags a waving. But as an American, I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed of what we are.

I’d say what we become, but I don’t know that it’s something we became. I think it’s just something that the contradictions of the lies told just became so much that there’s a rupture, not enough of a rupture.

But these No Kings parades, gatherings, protests, they’ve been blessed by official channels. That tells you that they’re not a threat.

There’s no demands, there’s no, there’s no nothing. And I see, “Well, what’s your plan, Steve?” Well, guess what? You’ve got to identify the problem, No Kings is not an identifier for the problem.

It’s capitalism. And it was there before brunch ended with Biden, it was there with Obama, it was there with Bill Clinton, it was there with Jimmy Carter.

It’s not just when it’s a Republican in office, because these guys, they play two different roles for the oligarchy. One is the mean blah, blah, blah, and the other guy is the nice guy, the, the good cop, bad cop. But they still do the same thing.

They still serve the same masters, they still serve capital. And so we’re going to keep covering that. And I think it’s important to grow class consciousness, to grow and understand revolutionary theory.

Even the founders said, when this government doesn’t do its job, you should overthrow it, you should get rid of it. Even as we’re watching the death and slaughter in Iran now, but in particular Gaza. Gaza is really bad.

And then Iraq and Syria and Libya, Venezuela, you name it. How you can sit back and act like this is a democracy and you voted for it and all’s well and blah, blah, blah.

I don’t know, folks, I just have a real problem with that. And I think you do too. I think you’re just afraid to admit it. I think you’re afraid to look that devil in the eye and say, “We don’t have agency here.”

We don’t have agency within the official channels. Without agency, all this stuff about Modern Monetary Theory, in a positivist lens, it’s just fool’s gold.

You need to source the vote for it to matter. And if voting itself does not yield the will of the people, then you’re just picking the next dictator.

You’re just picking the next oligarch, the oligarch Olympics. And you got to come into grips with that. You got to look that in the eye. “Oh, we’ll just get money out of politics.” How the fuck do you do that?

Tell the truth. How do you do that? You could fill the streets like we did to protest Gaza, and guess what?

The police will come take you out and there’ll be some libs sitting there going, “You should have followed the law. You should have been more respectful. You shouldn’t have talked mean like that.” So with that going forward, Real Progressives is a dual mandate.

We’re not just MMT, but we’re going to show you how MMT is used against us. We’re going to demonstrate where the austerity lie kicks in and we’re going to call it out. And we’re not going to give them a break.

We’re not going to pretend like “They just don’t know any better.” The people, or the people are absolutely under the hegemonic spell of the oligarchy, of capital.

They’re tired, they’re beaten down, they’re stressed out. They want to be happy, they don’t want to have to focus. They want to binge some Netflix man.

Eight million people went out there to protest against No Kings, and it was all about Donnie Tiny Hands and “Orange Man Bad.” Yes, there were some groups out there that were protesting against the war.

Yes, there were some groups out there talking about Gaza and thank God for them. But that No Kings thing, we don’t have an issue with kings. We have an issue with capital. We have an issue with oligarchy.

There’s a reason why Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi supported No Kings, by the way. If you didn’t, if you didn’t know that there’s a reason. And wouldn’t it be great if the regular working class spontaneously rose up against oligarchy?

But they didn’t. It was a very partisan effort where they’ll begin to start managing consent and manufacturing consent for the next oligarch.

The next, you know, minister of capital, the next puppet for the ruling class. And folks will lose all sense of class struggle. They’ll lose all sense of understanding capitalism.

And they will begin to make excuses for “how wonderfully well-spoken Obama is” and “how regal Michelle Obama is,” and “how wonderful Hillary Clinton so, so, so qualified is.” And all this stuff will just fade right out of memory. And the homeless will still be shit on. There’ll be no health care, there’ll be nothing.

And if they do grant us a few things, it can be snatched away at any moment. And we’re here to talk about that. And we’re here to make sure that in whatever fashion there is at least somebody saying these things.

We’re just a bunch of regular people, folks, but we believe and we want to make a difference. And we’re hoping that people will think about what we’re saying and not just pretend that we don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.

Because it’s not coming from me. It’s coming from experts, coming from people that have done deep research, people who have practiced.

Go look through our Rolodex and you can kind of see of all the episodes we did, how we have grown and moved on and we’ve built. I know folks are doubling down on electoralism. I know that they are passionate about trying to get XYZ candidate in. And that’s great.

And you know what? I hope I’m wrong. I hope you can vote all your dreams into existence. But I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that is the way it’ll work at all.

If voting changed anything the way we think it did, they’d already have made it illegal. Just like the police, who now look much more like Green Berets and just ridiculous. I’m sure you voted for that too, right? Yeah.

Anyway, my name is Steve Grumbine. I am the host of Macro N Cheese. This podcast is a part of Real Progressives, which is a 501c3, not for profit.

We teach people, we educate people, we do tough stuff with good people.

The systems that we use to produce these podcasts, and do our webinars, and do our different gatherings, they’re all paid for by our donors and we appreciate those people. We don’t have any rich oligarch dumping money at us. In fact, anyone with money has pretty much said, “Yeah, no. No, thank you.” We need help.

You want to come to patreon.com, go to Real Progressives, become a monthly donor. You would help out a great deal. We need it. You can go to our Substack. Real Progressives become a monthly donor there as well. Follow us, folks.

Go to our website, realprogressives.org. We’ve got tremendous resources there and we’re telling the truth. Not just on the MMT side, but we’re telling you the truth about class. And the issue is, “What are you going to do about it? What’s your plan?”

Our plan is to educate people about what the problem is and provide the opportunity for them to fight to create the world that they want once they understand the real foe. Just because we can’t lay out how everything will happen doesn’t mean that we don’t have a plan. The issue is so we’re not a bunch of tyrants.

We’re not a dictator. The people will decide. But the people are not living in truth right now.

They have been lied to so long that their version of the world isn’t in line with reality. We want to help educate people. That’s what we’re here to do.

To help build outside of the official channels, to help build dual power, to help build class consciousness and muscle in that space, and to put the information that we have to use toward building class solidarity and not identity, but not in the absence of identity. So with that, I hope you’ll come back. Every Saturday, this podcast drops at 8am Eastern Standard Time.

And every Tuesday night we have something called Macro N Chill. Macro N Chill is a webinar where we get together and we talk about this stuff.

Sometimes our guests come and join us, sometimes it’s just us talking, but either way, we’re learning and we’re growing. We’d like you to be a part of that. If that sounds interesting, become a volunteer. We need help. We need donors, and we need help.

And we hope that you like the fact that we are willing to take a stand and not just go along to get along when it’s wrong, when we don’t agree, and we hope you’ll be there to talk through it with us. And with that, my name is Steve Grumbine. On behalf of the podcast Macro N Cheese, the nonprofit Real Progressives, I am out of here.

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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.