Episode 178 – A 21st Century Bill of Rights with Harvey J. Kaye and Alan Minsky

This week, Harvey J. Kaye and Alan Minsky stop by the Macro N Cheese clubhouse to talk to Steve about the 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights. Kaye, a historian, brings stories of FDR’s four freedoms and the impetus for what he called the 2nd Bill of Rights – an Economic Bill of Rights. Minsky brings his experience in progressive politics, both as a journalist and with Progressive Democrats of America. Of course, the Minsky name holds a special place in our MMT hearts – our own Randy Wray studied under Alan’s dad, Hyman. When listening to Alan, one might suspect he’s also related to friend-of-the-podcast Robert Hockett, who coined the term “metabolic optimism.”  

Whether or not we share Alan’s optimism, we agree with his insistence that “our winning political hand is our economic message.” The economy is central to everyone’s life and should be central to our agenda. He believes the 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights is the avenue to achieve that centrality in the left progressive program.  

As Harvey takes us through it, he adds historical details; many of these points can be traced back to FDR. 

1. The right to a useful job that pays a living wage.
2. The right to a voice in the workplace through a union and collective bargaining.
3. The right to comprehensive quality health care.
4. The right to a complete, cost-free public education and access to broadband internet.
5. The right to decent, safe, affordable housing.
6. The right to a clean environment and a healthy planet.
7. The right to a meaningful endowment of resources at birth and a secure retirement.
8. The right to sound banking and financial services.
9. The right to an equitable and economically fair justice system.
10. The right to recreation and participation in civic and democratic life.

Roosevelt believed the American promise of “the pursuit of happiness” is not possible without economic security. FDR’s agenda lived on after his presidency – though without much success. Harvey names Jimmy Carter as the president who dealt the death blow to the New Deal:  

“Let me make it clear, ever since the 1970’s the Democratic Party has not simply turned its back on the FDR legacy – the Jimmy Carter presidency was the launching pad of neoliberalism in the United States. People like to talk about Reagan. They like to talk about Clinton in the 1990s. Jimmy Carter was the first neoliberal president. The deregulation of finance, the deregulation of transportation, it all stems from Carter’s determination … It’s Carter who first used the term austerity to promote the neoliberal agenda.” 

Alan adds: “the truth is, as every listener to Macro N Cheese certainly knows, that one party has been willing to run up deficits, the other party generally has not.” Democrats have wrapped themselves in a mantle of fiscal austerity and would sooner lose elections than change.  

This episode gives you history, it gives you economics, it gives you policy, and it engages in ever-popular political speculation. Did we mention Bernie? Yeah, his name comes up a few times.  

Harvey J. Kaye is Professor Emeritus of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of the newly published “The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great,” “Take Hold of Our History: Make America Radical Again,” and “FDR on Democracy.” @harveyjkaye

Alan Minsky is the Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America.  Alan worked as a progressive journalist for the fifteen years before joining PDA. He was the Program Director at KPFK Radio in Los Angeles, and the coordinator of Pacifica Radio’s national broadcasts.  He was the creator and original producer for the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, as well as the political podcasts for The Nation and Jacobin Magazine.  His many articles can be found at Common Dreams, The Nation, Truthdig and other platforms.  Alan is the son of the late economist Hyman Minsky. @AlanMinsky 

Macro N Cheese – Episode 178
A 21^st Century Bill of Rights with Harvey J. Kaye and Alan Minsky
June 25, 2022

[00:00:04.150] – Harvey J Kaye [intro/music]

FDR went out to San Francisco and he gave a speech at the Commonwealth Club. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness demands economic security. And it’s that economic security which provides actually, for prosperity, not prosperity providing for economic security. So, what he said is, the time had come to take back that American promise.

[00:00:28.690] – Alan Minsky [intro/music]

I think it’s a very sound prediction to make that over the next 18 months to three years, macroeconomic policy is going to dominate politics in the United States of America.

[00:01:35.110] – Geoff Ginter [into/music]

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

[00:01:43.130] – Steve Grumbine

All right, this is Steve with Macro and Cheese. Today is a special day for me. Frequently I talk specifically about Modern Monetary Theory, although we’ve been meandering around the labor movement here of late. But what I’m going to do today is about the need for organizing outside of the party, for getting a movement to drive home these very important things.

The IPCC has given us twelve years, four years ago, to actually take meaningful action on the environment, and we’ve got no traction in Congress at the moment to do these things. So it’s going to take a movement. So I had the distinct pleasure of getting together with one of our guests. Yes, we have two guests today on the Jen Perlman Show, where we talked a little bit about his 21st Century Bill of Rights, where he introduced me to someone else that’s very important; our other guest, who happens to be the son of a famous economist whom I know and love.

And so I’m going to jump in here first with Harvey J. Kaye, who is a professor emeritus of democracy and justice at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, and an award-winning writer who has authored and edited 18 books, including Thomas Paine and the Promises of America to Fight for Four Freedoms, Take Hold of Our History, and FDR on democracy. He’s a labor unionist and historical and political commentator, and a frequent guest on shows in every medium. I can attest to that.

And then we’ve got Alan Minsky. Alan Minsky, the son of Hyman Minsky, and I say this because Randy Wray studied under Hyman Minsky, but Alan Minsky is the executive director of Progressive Democrats of America. Alan worked as a progressive journalist for 15 years before joining PDA. He was the program director at KPFK Radio in Los Angeles and the coordinator of Pacifica Radio’s National Broadcast.

He was the creator and original producer for the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, as well as the political podcast for The Nation and Jacobin magazine. His many articles can be found at Common Dreams, The Nation, Truthdig, and other platforms. And as I previously stated, we’re going to have a Minsky moment! And with that, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you taking the time.

[00:04:05.960] – Harvey J. Kaye

This is great. Steve, thank you very much.

[00:04:08.690] – Alan Minsky

Yeah, I love Macro N Cheese.

[00:04:11.290] – Grumbine

Thank you guys so much. When I started learning about this 21st-Century Bill of Rights, when we wrote our original charter for what Real Progressives nonprofit was going to be, we targeted to reinvigorate Roosevelt’s second Bill of Rights. It was our starting charter, if you will.

[00:04:28.870] – Kaye

Great.

[00:04:29.610] – Grumbine

And so it really spoke to me. I wouldn’t call myself necessarily a New Dealer because I feel like we need more than a new deal, but a new deal is a hell of a lot better than the current deal we’ve got. And the Green New Deal that I have fought tooth and nail for and most of us have been desperate to implement has basically languished. And I kept thinking, how can we make this happen? So I’ve gotten into the class struggle unionism with people like Joe Burns and Sarah Nelson, and you guys have a really powerful idea that I feel could unite the 99%. What do you guys think?

[00:05:06.010] – Kaye

Alan, what do we think?

[00:05:07.810] – Minsky

Well, of course we feel very similar. I think you don’t really have to look any further than probably the most successful candidate from the left side of the party. In the current round of primary elections, we had victories in the House out in central Oregon with Jamie Mcloud Skinner and in Pittsburgh with Summer Lee.

But really the largest victory, because it’s a large state and it’s the Senate seat, is John Fetterman. And John Fetterman is winning as, basically, an economic left-progressive. And there’s incredible enthusiasm. It’s probably the one state that Democrats could pick up a Senate seat in. And elsewhere, you see zero enthusiasm for the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party.

And by the way, in terms of Macro N Cheese, I really think I should say this maybe at the top: it’s really going to be game on. I think it’s a very sound prediction to make that over the next 18 months to three years, macroeconomic policy is going to dominate politics in the United States of America. You have a situation right now where the progressive left is being cast in the media as being about anything other than its economic program.

And I would argue that when Bernie Sanders appeared on the center stage of American politics in 2016, what drew millions of people to him was specifically his economic program. And yet since that time, not only did Sanders really sort of fail to keep the focus solely on that as a political candidate in a strong way, as he did in 2016, in 2020, but in general, the progressive movement has been able to be defined poorly, as something when people think about progressives, the enemies of progressives talk about woke culture, cancel culture, anything but the economic program.

As I really think the bedrock foundation of the new ascendant left progressive movement in the country is economics. And no other element of the left progressive movement is going to build that movement to what it needs to be, which is a majoritarian movement within the United States of America of, I think, three large political formations vying for power inside our two-party system; the Trumpian Republicans on the far right, you have the neoliberals in the center, from the Romney Republicans to the Clinton Democrats.

And then on the left, you have the Sanders progressives. We are in an economic crisis that is only growing more stark every day right now. And it is only the left progressives that have an economic program that is to the liking of the majority of the population and of course, in a meaningful way, will address the long-standing pathologies of the American economy in the way that the public wants.

So both for Macro N Cheese and for left progressives, who can see this and understand it is necessary for us to elevate our economic program over everything else about the progressive left, make it center. All the other issues that are spoken about in the press, we support those fully, every last one of them. And the way to achieve them politically, not to be defeated and therefore not achieve them, is, of course, to have a winning political program.

Our winning political hand is our economic message. And of course, for all the reasons that economy is central to everyone’s life, it should in no way be marginalized in left progressive messaging. And the 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights is the avenue to achieve that centrality in the left progressive program.

[00:08:46.270] – Grumbine

Alan, you’re absolutely my hero. Now, what you just said is wonderful. Bernie Sanders, in the beginning, he offered up his bold economic policy in 2015 — 33 trillion in new spending, and it was only 19 trillion brought up as taxation over the period of his budget agenda. And people are wondering where this was coming from.

There was an old conservative publication out there called Hot Air that laughed about “where’s the money coming from.” You can remember Hillary laughing, calling it “pie in the sky” and “we have to pay for it.” And these are the things that made this economic messaging, especially going back to your father’s work, and the functional finance of Abba Lerner and, of course, this being an MMT podcast, the Modern Monetary Theory movement that we’ve got going in this country today.

Bernie Sanders alone put Stephanie Kelton up for the Senate Budget Committee and his chief economic advisor, made her a fellow at Sanders Institute. MMT is an important part of the left progressive agenda, and I feel like without it, there is no 21st Century Bill of Rights. This is the engine that allows that to happen. So thank you so much and it’s fantastic to get to finally meet you.

I’ve got this book in my hand called Why Minsky Matters. That’s pretty impressive. I’m really grateful. I feel very humbled. So thank you so much for taking the time to be on here.

[00:10:07.920] – Minsky

Thank you. And I’ll say two things as I toss over to Harvey. One is, maybe later on, towards the end of the podcast, I can tell you some fun things about my dad and Wynne Godley and Abba Lerner, who I know some people claim that there’s sort of a distinction that can be drawn between their theories on money such that there’s been something of a debate in MMT circles as to whose ideas and theories of money are the foundation of MMT, between Abba Lerner, Wynne Godley, and my father.

So I’ll tell a fun story about that later. But I also want to say this: my father wrote a book called John Maynard Keynes in 1975. And, yes, of course, he studied very closely the General Theory from Keynes. And there’s a lot of, of course, great economic theory he studied as a person, but especially in the period after that ’75 book and as he was developing his work for Stabilizing Unstable Economy in 1986.

And I remember this – I’m sure I have a unique perspective on it – the study of FDR, the formation of all of the structures and the bulwark of the federal government, took place in the first and early parts of FDR, so before we get to World War II, of course. It was absolutely central to what my father was studying. He really became very much of a scholar of the FDR administration. And with that, I toss to my co-author, Harvey J. Kaye.

[00:11:27.830] – Kaye

What do you want to know, Steve?

[00:11:29.690] – Grumbine

Our conversation the other day on Jen Perelman really brought to light a lot of things. You and I chatting about “who’s the worst President, Biden or Carter,” and you bringing up Carter. That puts you into a whole stratosphere because so few people are willing to tell the truth. And that really spoke to me. Run out and buy four of your books.

And it’s a real pleasure to have you join me as well. I’m really excited. This whole concept of a 21st Century Bill of Rights really does speak to what I believe is key, not only with unions, but just the progressive movement as a whole. It’s got to have something. We don’t have a good leader right now that can guide us.

This gives us a compass. And to me, that’s what people who are exhausted, desperate… Biden just celebrated $2 trillion in deficit reduction, which is austerity, which ultimately hurts the poor most. We need a 21st century Bill of Rights. Tell me a little bit about what this 21st Century Bill of Rights is.

[00:12:29.340] – Kaye

Well, let me start off by giving the nod to FDR…

[00:12:32.510] – Grumbine

Yes

[00:12:33.280] – Kaye

…to start with. And I won’t spend the whole time giving you a lecture on the last 80 years, 90 years at this point, actually. But actually all of this in a way stems from a speech he gave. Not the Economic Bill of Rights speech will I refer to first, but a speech he gave in San Francisco in the early autumn of 1932. He had already announced for, and then won, the Democratic nomination.

He basically laid out the essentials of a New Deal even before he used the words “New Deal.” But that early autumn he took it a step further. And this is a generally-forgotten speech, but it is one that actually we can think of as the first part of the framing of the FDR Twelve-Year Presidency. And by the way, it would have been longer had he lived beyond 1945.

He went out to San Francisco and he gave a speech at the Commonwealth Club, a very elite club in San Francisco. And in that speech he basically gave a historical narrative in which he laid out the way in which what he called the industrial titans, we would call the corporate elite, the corporate bosses, had essentially hijacked the American promise.

The American promise that he dated to the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And he put a particular emphasis on those three words because he was really thinking that Americans had lost touch with the fundamental meaning of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Which was not simply, Republicans and corporate Democrats would tell us it is today, but actually life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness demands economic security.

And it’s that economic security which provides, actually, for prosperity, not prosperity providing for economic security. So what he said is, the time had come to take back that American promise and the way to do it, and this is late in the speech, he said we need a new declaration, an Economic Declaration of Rights.

Now, he didn’t regularly refer back to that speech, but the New Deal was about establishing a base or a grounding for the ideas of economic security by way of both the initiatives of the New Deal itself; in the formal sense, the Public Works Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the regulation of banking and corporate activity, the empowerment of labor, which was actually part of the first New Deal in the National Industrial Recovery Act.

So those are the New Deal initiatives. But the other thing was, and this was important that I mentioned that empowerment of labor, the other key element, and this comes into play not in his second term, but very much towards the end of his first term, and that involves both Social Security, which was enacted in 1935, and the National Labor Relations Act, which was not simply, if you like, according the right to organize and bargain collectively to workers, because the corporations had found their way around the first effort to grant that.

It actually then places the government behind workers’ demands, behind workers’ aspirations to organize. Now, basically, the idea is that he will then articulate, first in 1941 in probably one of the greatest speeches in American history, the speech in which he lays out the four freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

The first two found in the original Bill of Rights of 1791; the latter two emanating from his emphasis on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as necessarily requiring economic security for all Americans. But then we come to the speech, our 21st century Bill of Rights, out of which it grows. In 1944, in the state of the Union message, FDR, after discussing the state of the war effort, after literally calling on Americans not to cease in their efforts to beat the fascists and the Japanese imperialists, he then says with a vision over the near horizon beyond the end of the war.

And he says, you know, we’ve come to a point in our history where we’ve come to realize that needy men, he said, necessitous men, we would say needy people are not free people. And it goes back to the very thing he talked about in 1932. And he says, the time has come for us to create, and Congress to act upon, a second bill of rights—an economic bill of Rights.

And if one goes back to look at that, I’m not going to repeat what’s in there, but it did include universal healthcare for all Americans, free public education as far as students could go by their abilities, and also a guarantee of housing. And there were other things in there. But let me just say, and this is the critical thing, this is something I usually point out, but I want to place an emphasis on this, FDR had this in his mind all the way through his presidency, but it was only really in 1943 that he asked Americans.

Americans had already pretty much ended up telling him four times “we’re behind you.” But in 1943, he commissioned a survey, a poll. And that poll showed that 83% of Americans wanted national health care. A similar kind of percentage wanted that free public education wanted guaranteed housing, a guaranteed job with a living wage.

So FDR, in his State of the Union message of ’44, lays all of this out, knowing that he is articulating exactly what Americans want. This is not the dreams of a progressive politician, this is the dreams of a progressive people. And I want to say that as far as I’m concerned, the most progressive generation in American history was the Roosevelt generation, basically, not Roosevelt himself and the old folks, but the young generation that had confronted and transcended the great depression of the 1930s by radically transforming the United States, and in 1941 through 1945, enlisted in the war to beat fascism and continued to transform America in the process.

Now, FDR did not believe for a moment that it was going to happen overnight, in great part because he knew conservative Republicans and southern white Democrats, the racist white supremacist Jim Crow Democrats, would block it. They would join together to block it. However, he had confidence that if he articulated this, that Americans would seek in the years to come to realize the promise that goes back to the Declaration, but that he was articulating in that Economic Bill of Rights.

Now, in ensuing years, Truman actually tried to pursue a good part of that agenda but failed for a whole host of reasons. In 1960, the Democratic Party, which was still the party of Roosevelt, even though Roosevelt left the scene by his death in 1945, the Democratic Party had as its platform basically an elaboration of the Economic Bill of Rights. And they stated it directly.

This is based on Franklin Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights. And in the course of the 60s, for all of the sins of the Johnson administration, there was an ambition to fulfill the promise of the New Deal. And at the same time, A. Philip Randolph, the great labor and civil rights leader, proposed a freedom budget in which he laid out plans, a ten year project that would literally pursue and create the ideals embodied in the Four Freedoms and the Economic Bill of Rights.

And every major figure on the center to the left, heading universities, foundations, labor unions, endorsed it. And of course, the price paid for the war in Vietnam was literally the draining of resources to enable that pursuit. Finally, in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. himself, not long before his death, called for an Economic Bill of Rights. And yet, it took a good number of years until, really, Bernie Sanders brought it back, laid it out on his website.

The sad part about it is that Bernie never really took it on the road with him. But a lot of us paid attention and Alan and I came together. I did a video for the Gravel Institute, if anyone is interested in the story of FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights and the promise that they’ve offered. But we’ve now laid out in ten lines, ten sentences, ten propositions, the makings of a 21st century Economic Bill of Rights.

And I’m happy to go over that with you, Alan, so everyone knows what it is. But I do want to point out this is also receiving a hearing. The Massachusetts Democratic Party, just about ten days ago, embraced this. Here in Wisconsin there is an initiative. We’re dominated by rightwing Republicans. It’s not going to happen that soon.

But two young Democratic Assembly women have laid out, based on these kinds of ideas and in consultation with myself and also with John Nichols, a Wisconsin Economic Bill of Rights to pursue it at the state level. And there are people I’ve been in touch with around the country who are doing this. Progressive Democrats of America has promoted this phenomenally, and candidates around the country have embraced it.

Nina Turner, who was one of our advisors on this, sadly did not win the primary election in Cleveland, Ohio, but she was enthusiastic and remains enthusiastic about this. And I could go on, but Alan and I can share in the presentation of this, Steve, if you’re interested.

[00:22:29.820] – Grumbine

Absolutely. I do want to point out a couple of things that I find fascinating. Nina Turner, in my opinion, has been a standard-bearer for this movement, and yet the Democratic Party rolled out the money wagon and all the Clyburns it could muster to prevent her from winning against Shontel Brown.

[00:22:54.210] – Kaye

Yeah, devastating. Steve, since you and I came together around the name Jimmy Carter – in a decidedly hostile way. [laughter] Let me make it clear, ever since, the 1970’s the Democratic Party has not simply turned its back on the FDR legacy. The Jimmy Carter presidency was the launching pad of neoliberalism in the United States.

People like to talk about Reagan. They like to talk about Clinton. In the 1990s, Jimmy Carter was the first neoliberal president. And the deregulation of finance, the deregulation of transportation, it all stems from Carter’s determination. And as I think I mentioned to you, Steve, it’s Carter who first used the term austerity…

[00:23:39.460] – Grumbine

Son of a bitch!

[00:23:40.440] – Kaye

…To promote the neoliberal agenda. It’s right there in his most public of addresses. So here’s the thing. What we have seen for all of these years is the corporate Democrats (and I unhesitatingly call them the corporate Democrats) have done everything in their power to suppress the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt in the party other than, on occasion, somebody slips and mentions Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s name.

Well, it remains the case. What we have seen these past several years, ever since PDA convinced Bernie Sanders to run as a Democrat for President, we have seen the corporate Democrats do truly everything in their power, not just as politicians, but in terms of their relationship to folks who would be properly called the billionaire class, to crush the possibility that this kind of thinking and this kind of vision, this kind of promise, might find its way back into the Democratic Party.

And I want to say this, despite the fact that every one of the propositions you’ll hear Alan and I lay out, every one of those has majority support among the American people.

[00:24:50.970] – Grumbine

Before we jump into that, I’m terrified that most people don’t really understand the Mt. Pelerin Society, the Powell memo, the rise of Monetarism and Milton Friedman and the incredible organization that the libertarian neoliberal strain of both the Republican Party and the Third Way Democrats (or corporate Democrats) have been creating this Thatcher-Reagan idea that there’s only taxpayer money, there is no such thing as public money.

And therefore, they have created the scarcity narrative that has made even the best lefties terrified of the national debt. And we’ve been fighting ghost inspectors since then. Every time they throw up some nonsensical trope, it’s always using the household budget concept for a sovereign currency-issuing government.

And yet we have been allowed to be in misery for 50 years as our wages have stagnated. The wealth inequality has gone up, destruction of our environment, the destruction of any kind of vestiges of the New Deal have been ripped away. We have got the worst of all situations about to unfold with interest rates going up. And worse than that, Biden himself just cut $2 trillion from the deficit. How do we make this thing happen? Talk about this Bill of Rights.

[00:26:17.490] – Minsky

Well, I also want to point out we’re in a very difficult political reality in the United States of America. And I think one could speculate that a centrist Democrat would be less likely than Donald Trump, because of Trump’s narcissism, because of the manner in which Trump is also willing to aggressively go against elements of the American ruling class, would maybe be the more likely character to, in light of a recession, if he were president again, given his narcissism, given his willingness to be in conflict with the establishment ruling class in the United States of America to actually launch something along the lines of a deficit spending program that would be broadly short-term advantageous for the general public.

And I bring that up to point out  – and don’t get me wrong, I think it is essential, absolutely essential, that left progressives and Democrats recognize the existential threat that Trumpian Republicans are to our republic. They are that reactionary when it comes to the consolidation of power ultimately for an oligarchy class. Basically, Trump himself has an ideology that is very much in line with the organization of American society, similar to what you do see, not saying that Putin is any kind of puppet master over Donald Trump at the sort of oligarchic structure that we have now in contemporary Russia with Putin and that you see with these sort of strong right wing figures around the world and their relationship to elite oligarchy, of course they’re very particular about which oligarchs and all that.

So it’s even antidemocratic within the oligarchic class when you get these strong men like Trump. Having said that, we have to recognize, and again, we are progressive Democrats of America. We do advocate, again, in light of the Trumpian reactionary Republican right, that people vote Democrat in the general election.

However, the truth is, as every listener to Macro N Cheese certainly knows, that one party has been willing to run up deficits, the other party generally has not. The party that’s been willing to run deficits has been the Republican Party, albeit in reactionary ways, going back to reactionary Keynesian military spending in the Reagan years, to the tax cuts galore, galore, galore that you see during Bush and then even further with Trump as president.

The Democrats actually are, then, the party of fiscal austerity, at the federal level; of course, the Republicans are more so at the state level, but at the federal level, the ones who say balance the budget, balance the budget. The whole just nonstop adherence to the neoliberal ideology against running deficits is completely counter to the FDR tradition.

It’s counter to the social democratic or democratic socialist traditions of the postwar economies around the world where you have things like universal single-payer healthcare. Of course you have none of that in the United States of America. We need to get there. And the way that we get there is to take over the Democratic Party and return it to its FDR roots, return it to exactly what Steve outlined, which is we’re not going to be in trouble.

We’re going to be in no trouble whatsoever if we do the things by running up the deficit, if it is in the service of progressive policies that lift up poor, middle class, the precarious classes, the vast majority now of the American population, by delivering social spending that will create a vibrant economy here in the domestic United States for 75% to 80% of the population on the order that they haven’t seen for decades in the United States.

And it is the Democratic Party, not the Republican Party, that lives in this constant fear of deficits. And we have a big political lift to overcome that within the Democratic Party. But we have, as Harvey just said, the support on issue after issue after issue of the general American public, the 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights is a narrative that allows people to see this.

[00:30:25.760] – Grumbine

What is blocking it?

[00:30:27.200] – Kaye

What’s blocking it? Oh, that’s a whole heck of a lot of discussion about culture and institutions and public discourse. But also there are two parties. We have a two party system. We have to make a fundamental breakthrough in order to have the balance of one of these political parties represent the interests of the people, not the oligarchs like Republicans, even though they’re again, as I said, yeah, one can conceive a scenario where Trump—and that’s dangerous, that’s incredibly dangerous about Trump, too.

One can conceive of a way that if you were president in his narcissism, that he would throw a lot of money in a very short term way, and of course, all that would lead to the dismantling of our democratic republic. So we have to have a popular party, a democratic, small D party firmly committed to democracy, reclaim these positions in a very loud and aggressive way.

In fact, I would make the argument, look, we’re going to see a slaughter in the midterms if things proceed the way they are. Biden has proven to be one of the most inept presidents we’ve seen in years. And I look, of course, like everybody else. I look at the day by day details, and it doesn’t all fall on the person of Joe Biden.

But nonetheless, to borrow from Harry Truman and the buck stops here. That’s the perception and what the president we know, Steve knows, I know, Harvey knows what the President should be doing and if he did it, just like John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, his electoral prospects would improve so much. So they should do this tomorrow.

Every minute that passes that he doesn’t do it, he’s not only digging his own burial politically in the midterms, but probably again, given his age and his prospects, pretty much be a failed president, one term president. But if you elevate the opposition at this hour, the blow to constitutional democracy in the United States and the implications of that even globally, are catastrophic for humanity.

At a time when we need a vibrant democracy to address things like the climate emergency, because we cannot allow global governance to be controlled by unaccountable authoritarians, when we need to have science, when we need to have checks and balances on power so that we know we are adequately addressing something like the climate emergency. So this is huge right now.

It’s a huge political moment and at the heart of it are the needs and interests of working people, middle class people in the United States of America in this ancient constitutional democracy that is the sort of flagship society in the world for the maintenance of democracy. As tattered as our democracy is, as corrupt as it is, that’s generally the perception if democracy is wounded in this country, we’re in deep shit as a species right now.

And how the heck can have a democratic society when you have this level of wealth inequality just right there? The Gini coefficient in the United States is just a telling fact that shows we have a democracy in trouble. And the way that we return the Gini coefficient of the United States to where it was in the heyday of at least something resembling a fair and just economy, albeit of course it was a racist economy, it didn’t include all of society.

But in the post war years now, we’re not going to recreate that level of manufacturing power. We need to lift manufacturing. We need industrial policy. All of that fits, by the way, with the economics of this podcast. So there’s so much that we have to lift people, but it’s not that difficult because the narrative is simple and the narrative I think, can be captured by this. Again, organizational concept of the 21st century technological and rights that we’re promoting.

[00:34:15.250] – Intermission

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[00:35:06.290] – Grumbine

What I want to say is this: you watch polls, you check demographics. Your fingers are on the pulse. So you know that there’s a huge part of the Bernie Sanders movement that feels very disaffected based on not only the way the primaries were handled by the Democratic Party, but the various state races and House of Rep races, we have experienced a lot of reason to doubt whether the party can deliver.

So there’s a huge disaffected group of people that have become nihilists. It’s not because they wanted it, necessarily. Their hopes and dreams were dashed, and I have nowhere to go, even though I know full well that your solution would be to elect more progressive Democrats. But for those people who are skeptical of the Democratic Party who have struggled, to me, your 21st Century Bill of Rights allows them a non-partisan way to re-engage in productive political discourse, to fight for something greater than party or politician or each election cycle.

This is a set of citizens rights which are not means-tested, that are universally true, that means everyone benefits. There’s no one that loses. And so I think this is one of the most incredibly eclectic ways of pulling diverse groups together that have a common desire as human beings: the need for housing, the need for clothing, the need for food, the need for quality opportunities for employment, health care, getting rid of this burden of debt on people’s backs with student loans.

Why in the hell aren’t we investing in our country? So to me, the beauty of this is I can support what you’re saying. And both people that are not interested in the Democratic Party who have lost faith, maybe by doing this, they re-engage, and those people who are still knee-deep in the Democratic Party, who have been flailing about because there’s never been a real standard bearer other than Bernie Sanders.

So in my opinion, this is setting True North. You’re in the middle of a horrible storm in the sea. You have no way back to shore, but you got True North. This gives us something to rally around and to me, can pull us all together and make the kind of change we’re looking for. I think this is a great way of bringing independence back into political discourse, as well as rank and file Democrats, especially progressives.

[00:37:30.300] – Kaye

Well, I think we better tell people what’s in the Economic Bill of Rights.

[00:37:33.080] – Grumbine

That’s where I was going.

[00:37:34.220] – Kaye

Okay. So I’m going to go through this, and Alan, interrupt me at any point to embellish upon what I’m saying. Okay? To add to what I’m saying

[00:37:40.950] – Minsky

Take it away.

[00:37:42.020] – Kaye

Number one, the right to a useful job that pays a living wage. That one goes right back to the FDR Economic Bill of Rights. Two, the right to a voice in the workplace through a union and collective bargaining, which actually was not in the original Economic Bill of Rights FDR proposed, but he did not think it essential because he had already signed into law the National Labor Relations Act.

Three, the right to comprehensive quality health care, very much in the spirit of FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights. And in fact, so people know when they enacted the Social Security Act in 1935, FDR’s original vision for Social Security was going to include universal health care, but it was blocked by the American Medical Association and the Southern Democrats.

Four, the right to a complete, cost-free public education and access to broadband Internet. Five, the right to decent, safe, affordable housing. Again, going back to the original plan that FDR envisioned. Six, the right to a clean environment and a healthy planet, which I know FDR would embrace. The environment was practically number one on his list of priorities when he was governor of the State of New York and remained so throughout his presidency.

Number seven, the right to a meaningful endowment of resources at birth and a secure retirement. Now, meaningful endowment of resources at birth, I want everyone to know it goes all the way back to the original vision of Social Security as proposed by Thomas Paine in the 1790s in the pamphlet “Agrarian Justice.” Eight, the right to sound banking and financial services.

Number nine, the right to an equitable and economically fair justice system. And last, but by no means least, number ten, the right to recreation and participation in civic and democratic life. Just a footnote to that: I want to say that the commission that FDR created in the ’30s that helped him develop his Economic Bill of Rights actually said that Americans should have the right to adventure, and we have in mind recreation and participation in civic and democratic life as a great American adventure.

[00:40:01.250] – Grumbine

In your article in Common Dreams, the thing that I love about this is this isn’t just like symbolic moralizations. There’s actually legislation tied to almost every one of these, already out there. And I think that that’s a pretty powerful statement that if you believe in the 21st century Bill of Rights, there’s legislation and support to make this so. Can you talk a little bit about the legislation that is tied in?

[00:40:28.820] – Kaye

I’m going to hand that back to Alan. He really was essential, the critical guy in creating that roster of rights and legislation together.

[00:40:37.680] – Minsky

Everything, as you know, is out there. When you get to the first one, we had Pavlina Tcherneva, longtime friend of mine, and I imagine someone whose work you’re familiar with on Macro N Cheese, and she was working with Ayanna Pressley’s office proposing basically an employer of last resort program. That remains, I think, a resolution.

It wasn’t fully worked out as a bill, in part because the work of Congress was really overwhelmed by the negotiations on Build Back Better. In fact, one of the central points we make is that in the first two articles we wrote, we wrote three for Common Dreams, and it’s the second article that we wrote. If people were to Google Common Dreams, Minsky, and Kaye, you’d see all three of our articles come up.

Again, Common Dreams is the website we publish them on, and the second one goes point by point on all ten of these with the bills that are attached to them. A lot of them come out of the Green New Deal programs, but they go much deeper than that. So all ten of those, there are bills in the Congress and they’re put forward by progressives.

And you actually look at the co-sponsors and yes, guess who they are. They’re the squad plus; getting to usually about half the co-sponsorship of the Progressive Caucus. Some of them, of course — Medicare for All, which would be the only bill that we really focused on. Though, I think we do have something on the reduction of pharmaceutical drug prices, which actually is of course, independent of Medicare for all, though Medicare For All would achieve it through negotiating drug prices, through even larger Medicare program, of course, than currently exists.

And that’s the primary progressive strategy to lower the cost of drug prices and to bring them into balance with the rest of the world, which is what we have to do because as people probably know, the American public pays exorbitant amounts for pharmaceuticals, way more than any other country in the world. So I think there are just two bills when it comes to the right to a comprehensive quality healthcare, that entry in the Bill of Rights, but every single one has one, whether it’s housing again, housing as a human right, housing established as a right, as in the ten amendments to make up the original Bill of Rights within the United States.

And that’s the idea. Now, we have no illusions about trying to actually, literally, amend the Constitution. Now, we would hope to get there. But right now this is of course primarily a document that in the pragmatic reality of the moment is an organizing principle so that people understand basically the economic-social contract that the left progressives in the United States really do stand for.

The bills show that when you look at the politics of Bernie Sanders plus the squad, plus more than just the squad, Pramila Jayapal is a co-sponsor on almost all of the legislation that we cite. So the left side of the Congressional Progressive Caucus out to the whole caucus will pretty much sign on to this. Now the problem is, of course, you need 218 members of the House of Representatives to support it.

And currently, of course, we need 60. Though if we had 52 or more, if you just had 50, actually, plus a president who was a Democrat, who was the left progressive Democrat, we could eliminate the filibuster and we could proceed to get all of this passed. So it’s not an impossible political lift, but at this hour, we need to build an electoral movement. Now, I want to speak a little bit, if I can, right now, to what you mentioned, Steve, about the despair that’s setting in.

[00:44:06.610] – Grumbine

Sure.

[00:44:07.220] – Minsky

And look, this isn’t going to be easy. We saw how difficult it was for Bernie in 2016, and he never actually, other than after the New Hampshire primary, where obviously the Clinton people thought they had a firewall at South Carolina coming up, other than after New Hampshire in 2016, Bernie never had an angle on winning the nomination like he did in 2020.

And I think in some respects, even the Clinton campaign – it’s a little bit hard for Sanders-heads to process this, but I thought and I think Bernie felt this way, too, they sort of dealt with him with kid gloves. And I think that’s correct because you look at how they behaved after the Nevada primary in 2020, when it looked like Bernie Sanders had a direct line on the Democratic Party nomination and they had to organize behind the scenes.

President Barack Obama went into action to organize, to bring Buttigieg and his campaign when he was way ahead of Biden and all of the results so far, to have Klobuchar end their campaign, to bring Beto O’Rourke back and have them all endorse Joe Biden before Super Tuesday. And you had James Carville and Chris Matthews going ballistic like they never did in 2016, going ballistic against Bernie Sanders.

You saw the force of the American political establishment that we would have to overcome to achieve the political victories that we need in our society in the way that I find the last time I spoke, and that the American people need for their welfare, and that we need so that we can maintain a democratic society in this country and address things like the climate emergency, which, by the way, the American political establishment is completely failing to address adequately, and by the way, structural racism, all of the other attendant issues that we know we need that are wounds upon American society and the body politic to have them addressed.

Only left progressives are going to address them. And the pathway to left victory is through the welfare of average households and average people, through the economy. So there’s political despair right now, yes, but this is not going to be easy, and it was never, ever going to be easy. Bernie Sanders understood it would never be easy.

Look, if Bernie Sanders was elected president, think of the hurdles he would still have to cross, before any of this could be put into place. And of course, the major hurdles would be the barriers to having a working majority for his policies in both houses of Congress. So we have a ways to go, but we have the people on our side. Issue after issue in the 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights really throws into relief that on point after point after point, we are the political formation that the American public wants.

We are the political formation that the American public would support. Now, there’s no doubt, of course, we understand the huge cultural issues that are really existing barriers. But I believe, and maybe I have rose-colored glasses on here for a moment, I believe, first of all, we’re about to move into a period, as I said earlier, where the focus on the politics of the macroeconomy are going to dominate American political discourse because we are handing, with what the Fed is doing, basically tipping the hat that we’re heading towards austerity in a Biden presidency.

We have an opportunity to reach and speak to the American people. And let me have one other thing about the economic crisis at the moment. There’s complete abject bullshit in the American economy, really, since the Bill Clinton presidency, and this idea of populist investing as a way to have the American public buy into the idea that they can get their American dream through the current system.

But the latest variation of that is crashing and burning as we speak, which is the bullshit Ponzi scheme of the crypto bubble. And don’t forget, as recently as 2006, you had millions upon millions of Americans thinking that the American Dream was working for them. They had their house, the value was going up,  and up, and up. They could use it as an ATM, and they had it on Easy Street in 2004, 2005, 2006 when people didn’t see—they weren’t reading Minsky, right?

They didn’t see that this whole house of cards was about to collapse. But ever since that time, you haven’t had any semblance of the general American public, the non-top-10%, say, of the population having access to that American Dream through working hard, through the classical means of getting there. I think the crypto bubble was one of the first times you actually had people start to drink the Kool Aid believing that that could work for them again, it lasted about a year and it’s completely collapsed.

I mean, there are obviously other attendant forces that led to its immediate and rather dramatic collapse, as it’s ongoing. But since there’s no there there, we can’t really expect it to come back. But I think there is a significant portion of the population who was thinking like, oh wow, yeah, if I only really understood this investment game, it could work for me. Well, poof—that just went up in smoke. People are going to be angry, people are going to be upset, and people are going to be looking for answers, and we have to be bold about the way we present our answers.

[00:49:05.630] – Grumbine

I absolutely agree with you. I want to raise something else. The questions I’m bringing out are questions I know others will ask. We’ve typically had what we call a rotating villain within the Democratic Party that is a Democrat: Cory Booker—Kyrsten Sinema—Joe Manchin. There’s always this rotating villain. We  can have a super majority, the White House, Congress, and the Senate.

You haven’t done anything for us. Why should we believe it can be better? And so one of the things that I think is clear and you’ve made this point, but I want to make sure we touch on it again, is the difference between corporate Democrats and progressives couldn’t be more distinct. The issue becomes one of the way the Democratic Party is structured.

How in the world do you take over the Democratic Party? The longstanding nonelected people that are running the ship play gatekeeper and all the past presidents that play on the “vote blue, no matter who” mindset, have an incredible amount of sway over rank and file Democrats. And being one myself, I’m immune to it. But people see it and they wonder, how can you ever reform that? Because hope is contingent on there being an outlet.

[00:50:26.480] – Kaye

Okay, I think there’s at least a two-dimensional answer to that.

[00:50:29.550] – Grumbine

Sure.

[00:50:30.270] – Kaye

First of all, and I’m going to be blunt about it, we offered this, if you look at the original article, as something that we believe progressives should embrace, progressive candidates and progressive legislators. When we issued that first article, we had a number of races coming up that we thought might well be enhanced in favor of the progressive if this was the way in which they pursued the campaign in favor of in pursuit of this.

So at this point in time, let’s face it, this is not a legislative agenda. This is a political agenda. And we think it essential because money talks. And it’s got to be that the voices of the progressives are appealing, they are attractive. They will gather support. So in that sense, this is a call for progressives to embrace this in order to secure a greater hold from the bottom up on the Democratic Party.

And I’ll leave Alan to go further on that. But I do want to add another part of it, which to me is essential. None of this, none of it will succeed in the short or long term without a more dynamic and vibrant labor movement. And I know that you’ve just interviewed Joe Burns. I can’t emphasize enough the imperative that these kinds of ideas find their way into progressive unionism.

We know that the first task is to organize, and beyond that, to take hold of labor itself, create a larger, if you like, force in American civil and economic life. But it’s also the case that the Democratic Party will not be moved only by progressive voices coming out of politics. They must be moved by way of working people’s actions, and that is best organized through labor unions. And I’ve talked at length.

I’m not giving anything away here. I’ve talked at length. Joe Burns is very close with Sarah Nelson. I take pride in my friendship with Sarah. We’ve talked at length about the imperative of labor in the pursuit of saving democracy. But it must be the case that labor itself not merely be “labor itself;” labor has to take the lead in progressive politics outside of the legislative, and specifically political, arena. That’s what I meant by two-dimensional. It has to be, if you like, an inside and outside campaign.

[00:53:01.740] – Grumbine

Yes. Thank you. That’s perfect.

[00:53:04.070] – Minsky

I also think it’s true that coming off of the Sanders campaign. There’s been a proliferation of left-progressive national organizations; of course, in the last two years, they’ve operated almost entirely digitally. And it’s really essential. And PDA is fully committed to bringing that energy, especially with younger Americans, though we see a lot of enthusiasm for union movements among younger Americans right now, have, of course, grown up in a world in which labor unions have been weak and have not been prominent in the lives of maybe even their parents or many people that they know relative to previous generations.

Obviously, as union density is declined, especially in the private sector, but unions are around, people get wind of them, they’re gaining more traction among younger people, it’s essential that these mass membership, almost like civic civil society organizations like PDA, our allies, like Our Revolution, are definitely on board with this, but all of the other ones, too.

But PDA is definitely prepared to lead on and saying that, yes, we are a civil organization; no, we are not affiliated or organized by an official labor union, but we stand fully with the union movement and understand how essential it is that union drives are successful, that union growth occurs in the United States of America. So we’re fully committed to participating in exactly what Harvey outlined.

[00:54:24.410] – Grumbine

This is wonderful. So what are the next steps in a perfect world? What would you like to see people do? What would you like to see us take note of? How would you like to see us get involved? What are your thoughts?

[00:54:37.010] – Minsky

Well, of course, one thing coming to this particular interview with is that I would, of course, love to have PDA anchor the energy of the MMT movement. And we’re working on building out the infrastructure at PDA since I’ve come in as executive director. We’ve launched a new 501c4 and we are launching a 501c3 research organization.

As you know, by the way, my father, of course, died before the term Modern Monetary Theory was coined, which was largely attributed to one of his closest students, L. Randall Wray. The coining of the term Modern Monetary Theory. My dad was, of course, a huge advocate for employer of last resort, meaning everybody who needs a job, everyone who’s unemployed, can basically go down to a government office and they can sign up, and they can get employment at a wage that will extrapolate out if it’s a full-time job to a living wage.

And he wrote papers on this. He’s best known, of course, for his work on financial instability and money in financial markets and banking. But this was a second full body of work. So certainly I am a lifelong advocate of that, and I’m very interested in having our organization be able to anchor a political movement about advocating for, again, full employment, real full employment in American society and all of the policies that are promoted by people like Stephanie Kelton and Randy Wray.

Whether – and this maybe is a little bit not something that you’d want to hear on Macro N Cheese – of course, in PDA, we would be doing that for people who are adherents of MMT and otherwise. Everyone is welcome. But we want to advocate around public policy and we need to have a large portion of the population and particularly in the left progressive movement not be shy about talking about economics.

That is necessary. If you see candidate after candidate across the country, and this is a sad fact and I think it’s very important for the listeners of Macro N Cheese to process, you see a lot of even the highest-profile progressive candidates, who are running against moderate Democrats in this primary season, not foregrounding economic issues.

Well, guess what the top polling issue of concern is for the American public right now? It’s the economy. And you know what it’s been over the last five decades when they take that poll and consistently that poll is taken it’s the economy lapping all other issues over and over and over again. And yet for progressives you even sense that some of the candidates are intimidated in the way that like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and CNBC just intimidates the general public.

Like, “you don’t think about economics.” That’s too specific. You need the vocabulary, you need the argot of the professional commentating economic class and of economists and nobody really understands it, right? What a bunch of hokum and what a bunch of crap. Okay? And we need to get people confident about what it means to talk about economics.

We need to get people confident to support very clear templates like the 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights and to understand that talking about economics is anchored in the idea of a prosperous middle class in a society with as much wealth as exists in the United States and the fact that that is being shredded and ripped apart these recent decades.

And there are existing non-utopian public policies that exist across the rest of the world – in almost all of the other rich industrialized countries in the world – can and must be brought to the United States for the welfare of this society, for the welfare of the people. So that’s not a specific answer to how we overcome the money power that anchors the moderate wing of the Democratic party.

But the fact is that third party strategies—they’ve worked once in the history of the United States of America, local and regional third parties have minimum success but the national parties have basically come in and slaughtered them pretty quickly. And so unless something unexpectedly develops momentum, and there is nothing on the horizon that is anything except a utopian fantasy when it comes to third parties in the United States of America, we have to accept that there are two parties and the fight is inside the Democratic party and yes, we’re going up against all the money power in the country against us.

The avalanche of money that has come against us has been astonishing in this primary. We’ve never seen anything like it. That’s something we have to overcome. We have to overcome it. How? We have communication mechanisms and we have to build a movement and not ever shy away from the point. Markets, as we know, are social constructs. Who oversees the organization of those social constructs in our society? It is the government.

That’s why the right wing from the Powell Memo people back in the seventies through the Koch brothers today and then all the time in between and the Third Way people and the DLC  [Democratic  Leadership Council], et cetera, that’s why gajillions of dollars have been invested in winning elections. Because in our society, the government does have – almost everywhere in the world of course, at this point, for the last 200 years almost everywhere in the world – the government has what?

A monopoly on legal violence. And as the source of the monopoly on legal violence, people have quickly understood the government gets to set the general regulatory structures that define how we operate inside our lives, inside our economy. We need to be able to establish our political power inside our political system.

That’s the way that we change the structures of the way our economy works and lift up the welfare of people in our society so that they can get their lives back, so they don’t have to work 60 hours a week. So they don’t have to exist inside an alienating job. And right now, right now, at this moment, we are being told that the slight degree of wage increases that people have seen: not allowed, not enough.

We have the arguments to tell people it can be a very, very different way. It can be much, much better. We’re the only people with a sound set of arguments for that. And the work that this podcast does is so essential to giving people a framework that allows them to understand that this is possible, this is doable and we can win. So I think economic education is at the core of it and the recognition that unfortunately, probably,

[01:01:00.860] – Minsky

but the reality is in the United States of America with the absolutely deep-anchored reality of our political systems, we have two political parties; we have to win in one of them. The Republican Party is off-limits to us for obvious reasons and it has to be a victory inside the Democratic Party. I view it as a friendly takeover of the Democratic Party with hostile expulsions.

Jamie Dimon, Larry Summers, these guys, they’re Republicans. Get them the hell out of the Democratic party. Welcome in the totality of the working class, the precarious middle class and let’s overwhelm them through democratic process. Let’s protect our democratic process.

[01:01:42.050] – Grumbine

I’m not going to lie, I’m still skeptical, but I really appreciate the way you approach that. It was very helpful.

[01:01:48.650] – Minsky

I don’t not share your skepticism, believe me. There’s a lot of moments that are “live to fight another day” in all of this, but I think it is a question. I don’t mean to be patronizing, not towards you, but to some fictional listener out there. I think it does require a mature perspective on it, a long-arc perspective.

But at the same time, as 2016 showed with Sanders, something magical can happen very quickly, and let’s hope we can achieve that, too. And the only way to get there anyway is to build towards it. And by the way, I don’t want to take any credit for what PDA did back in 2014. I became Executive Director in 2018. If people are unfamiliar with the organization—and why is it that they are?—when it did this incredibly famous, history-transforming thing of drafting Bernie Sanders to run for president, and we were the only organization doing it.

A gentleman from Vermont himself by the name of Bernard Sanders was calling out Elizabeth Warren to run for president. When we launched our “Run Bernie Run” campaign, we were the only organization in the country to do it. What happened is, we had a very charismatic Executive Director who died in 2014. In fact, Bernie’s speech at his memorial service was a central moment in Bernie getting drafted by PDA to run.

But the organization went through a lot of drift, and after Tim died, I  was brought on as an executive. The person who followed Tim, a fantastic, brilliant activist, had a lot of health problems, too. I was brought in in 2018. We’re rebuilding, but in between 2014 and 2018, a whole bunch of other organizations with larger balance sheets came into existence: Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, there’s been the growth of the Working Families Party.

But we’re still a very pure, mass-membership, grassroots-up organization with a lot of great veteran lefties involved in it, with a lot of economic sensibilities. So people should check out PDA. But I wanted to clarify, I can take no credit for the drafting of Bernie, though I did go to the political retreat where we voted on it in 2013, and I voted, “yes! Let’s draft this guy over,” because I knew him from The Thom Hartmann Show.

[01:03:44.270] – Grumbine

The reason why I fell in love with Bernie was Stephanie Kelton, because I was an MMTer before I was even a progressive, because I was still in transition, as you guys know, from our offline conversations. And it’s just been an amazing journey. And so I really appreciate your candor. Harvey, what are your parting words.

[01:04:04.360] – Kaye

When you mentioned Stephanie Kelton, I just want to tell you I’m not going to tell the full story, but I didn’t know who Stephanie Kelton was when you probably did. She contacted me in January of 2016, specifically on the question of the Economic Bill of Rights. She knew I had been talking and writing about this stuff, and she asked me, is it possible we could do something together on this?

And then, no need to go into what transpired later, but—it is the case that we’re now in 2022. I’ve been writing about this Economic Bill of Rights, actually ever since maybe 2014; my Four Freedoms book, I originally intended to do a book on the Economic Bill of Rights. When I came upon this speech and read about the ways in which Americans wanted it, they wanted this Economic Bill of Rights.

I knew that this was the thing to resurrect. And the only reason I didn’t, this is a literary story is that Cass Sunstein, the Obama mentor in law school, well, I guess at University of Chicago, where Obama was part-time teaching, Cass Sunstein had just then brought out a book on the Economic Bill of Rights, which, yeah, it’s okay. It’s nothing I would endorse, by the way.

And I thought, I can’t reinvent the wheel after he’s just written on it. But I do want to make it clear that I have seen this aspiration for an Economic Bill of Rights, not just me. What I’m saying is we have seen this among the American people. I want to go back into the campaigns of 2015, 2016 leading up to that campaign. Consider the movements that were emerging in the United States at that time.

Whether it was the fight for 15 or the Moral Monday movement or the antifracking movement, all across the progressive spectrum, these movements were occurring. The problem is, the left has a marvelous tradition, it’s now become, if we consider the last 50 years, a marvelous tradition of not knowing how to unite, of not knowing how to develop a story.

So you’ve got the legislative folks who develop an agenda, and you have theorists and others who develop some grand idea. Americans don’t want theory, and they are tired of hearing about legislation. They need a story. And the Economic Bill of Rights conjures up the best of the American story, going back to the Declaration and following all the way through to, probably alongside of Lincoln, the greatest president in American history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It links together not only Roosevelt, it links together, as I said, A. Philip Randolf, Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement and the labor movement. This is the promise, the vision—I’m absolutely convinced of this—that could bring together folks across the left, including labor, if we can hold on to our democracy long enough in favor of creating—and I haven’t used the term before—a social democratic America at the least.

[01:07:01.370] – Grumbine

I really appreciate the commentary. I know that we’ll never please everyone, but I feel like this was a very well-rounded conversation. I feel like we’ve got good history, we got good practicable discussion points, and we have a vision for the future. I can’t ask for more than that, gentlemen. I want to thank you both. It was very nice to finally meet you, Alan. And it was nice to get back together with you, Harvey, and I see this as a very important tool for all of us to find our voice. And I just want to thank you gentlemen once again, and hopefully we can talk again in the future.

[01:07:41.520] – Kaye

Thank you.

[01:07:42.440] – Minsky

Yeah. And I’ll just tease the audience going out with… I could talk to MMTers, who want to see a difference between Abba Lerner, Wynne Godley and Hy Minsky’s theories of money to tell you about how tight the friendship my dad had with Wynne late in his life and earlier in his life with Abba Lerner. And I can even talk about my relationship with Abba Lerner and Wynne Godley and how much fun we all had together.

So the thing about intellectual history is these things are oftentimes not really one person’s ideas. They really are the product of shared communication and even shared research, especially when the kind of cooperation existed, as it did between Abba Lerner and my father, and later with Godley.

[01:08:22.130] – Grumbine

Well, I’d like to have you on and have a conversation purely about why Minsky matters. I think that would be a fantastic conversation, to go back to the history of Hyman Minsky. Let’s make that happen.

[01:08:32.020] – Minsky

I’d love that. I’d love that, of course.

[01:08:33.490] – Grumbine

I would love it, too. All right, this is Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese, my guests Alan Minsky and Harvey J. Kaye. We’re out of here.

[01:09:06.060] – End credits

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

Harvey J. Kaye  –  Podcast Guest 

An American historian and sociologist. Kaye is an author of several political books including “Thomas Paine and the Promise of America”, and “The Fight for the Four Freedoms”. 

The Fight for the Four Freedoms 

Other Books by Kaye 

Harvey J. Kaye Common Dreams articles

Alan Minsky  –  Podcast Guest 

A lifelong activist, who has worked as a progressive journalist for the past two decades. Alan was the Program Director at KPFK Los Angeles from 2009-2018; and has coordinated Pacifica Radio’s national coverage of elections. Before that, Alan was one of the founders of LA Indymedia. He is the creator and producer of the political podcasts for The Nation and Jacobin Magazine, as well as a contributor to Commondreams and Truthdig. 

Alan Minsky Common Dreams articles 

L. Randall Wray (Randy Wray)

A Senior Scholar and a professor of economics at Bard College. His current research focuses on providing a critique of orthodox monetary theory and policy, and the development of an alternative approach. 

Modern Money Theory – A Primer

Macroeconomics (textbook) 

Publications 

Hyman Minsky 

An American economist, a professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis, and a distinguished scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His research attempted to provide an understanding and explanation of the characteristics of financial crises, which he attributed to swings in a potentially fragile financial system. Minsky is sometimes described as a post-Keynesian economist because, in the Keynesian tradition, he supported some government intervention in financial markets, opposed some of the financial deregulation of the 1980s, stressed the importance of the Federal Reserve as a lender of last resort and argued against the over-accumulation of private debt in the financial markets. 

The Minsky Archives at the Bard Digital Commons

Jamie McCleod – Skinner 

An American attorney, engineer, and politician who is the Democratic nominee for Oregon’s 5th congressional district in the 2022 election. McLeod-Skinner defeated incumbent representative Kurt Schrader in the Democratic primary for Oregon’s 5th district.

Summer Lee 

An American community organizer and politician serving as a Democratic member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for the 34th district.

John Fetterman 

An American politician who has served as the 34th lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania since 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as mayor of Braddock from 2006 to 2019. Fetterman is the Democratic nominee for the 2022 U.S. Senate election in Pennsylvania.

Abba Lerner 

Russian-born economist whose contributions included theoretical works on inflation, unemployment, and international trade. 

Books by Lerner

Bernie Sanders 

An American politician and activist who has served as the junior United States senator from Vermont since 2007. He was the U.S. representative for the state’s at-large congressional district from 1991 to 2007. Sanders is the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt  –  (FDR) 

Often referred to by his initials, FDR was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As a member of the Democratic Party, he won a record four presidential elections and became a central figure in world events during the first half of the 20th century. Roosevelt directed the federal government during most of the Great Depression, implementing his New Deal domestic agenda in response to the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. As a dominant leader of his party, he built the New Deal Coalition, which defined modern liberalism in the United States throughout the middle third of the 20th century. His third and fourth terms were dominated by World War II, which ended shortly after he died in office.

Mt Pelerin Society 

An international organization composed of economists, philosophers, historians, intellectuals and business leaders.[2] The members see the MPS as an effort to interpret in modern terms the fundamental principles of economic society as expressed by classical Western economists, political scientists and philosophers. Its founders included Friedrich Hayek, Frank Knight, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler and Milton Friedman.[2] The society advocates freedom of expression, free market economic policies and the political values of an open society. Further, the society seeks to discover ways in which free enterprise can replace many functions currently provided by government entities. 

The Powell Memo

A confidential memorandum to his friend Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., Chair of the Education Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memo was titled “Attack On American Free Enterprise System” and outlined ways in which business should defend and counter attack against a “broad attack” from “disquieting voices.

Milton Friedman 

An American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy

Third Way Democrats

A political position akin to centrism that attempts to reconcile right-wing and left-wing politics by advocating a varying synthesis of centre-right economic policies with centre-left social policies.

Gini Coefficient 

A measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income inequality or the wealth inequality within a nation or a social group.

Thomas Paine – Agrarian Justice 

The title of a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine and published in 1797, which proposed that those who possess cultivated land owe the community a ground rent, which justifies an estate tax to fund universal old-age and disability pensions and a fixed sum to be paid to all citizens upon reaching maturity. 

Text of Agrarian Justice

Ayanna Pressley

An American politician who has served as the U.S. representative for Massachusetts’s 7th congressional district since 2019. This district includes the northern three-quarters of Boston, most of Cambridge, and parts of Milton, as well as all of Chelsea, Everett, Randolph, and Somerville.

Pramila Jayapal 

An American politician serving as the U.S. representative from Washington’s 7th congressional district since 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, she represents most of Seattle, as well as some suburban areas of King County. 

The Squad

A group of six Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives. It was initially composed of four women elected in the 2018 United States House of Representatives elections: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. They have since been joined by Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri 

A. Philip Randolph

An American labor unionist and civil rights activist. In 1925, he organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African-American led labor union. In the early Civil Rights Movement and the Labor Movement, Randolph was a prominent voice. 

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