Episode 32 – Politics, Public Banking, and the Green New Deal with Andrés Bernal

We’re fortunate to have a close friend and advisor of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez as our guest for this episode. Andrés Bernal’s optimistic and expansive point of view is contagious and inspiring.  Explaining the source of his optimism in this terrifying time, Andrés says he is influenced by historical struggles for justice: the Black struggle, from abolition to the civil rights movement and beyond, the struggle of indigenous communities, and the liberation movements of colonized nations. In seemingly impossible situations, against all odds, people persevered. What emerged are the most beautiful examples of solidarity.

Andrés was a philosophy major, with concern for deconstructing knowledge, questioning what we know and how we know we know it. Perhaps this explains the direction his life has taken. Whether his boundless curiosity is innate or epistemological, his passion for humanity is palpable. He believes that cynicism is the fastest way to destruction and the antidote is a genuine search for knowledge.

He has managed to combine his disciplined pursuit of greater understanding with a belief that we can build a society of abundance that’s grounded in human creativity and based in a caring economy. In this interview he has the same reasoned enthusiasm when explaining the Green New Deal, a federal job guarantee, or public banks.

Andrés relates the story of his long friendship with AOC and how her political evolution coincided with his developing understanding of Modern Monetary Theory, which he shared with her. This magical confluence has had history-altering consequences; she is a major reason MMT has broken through the surface, and the ripples have not yet been stilled. She put the job guarantee on her platform and told a reporter that MMT should be part of the national discussion. She challenged the accepted wisdom that there’s a natural rate of unemployment, below which society will collapse, or face some calamitous fate. The chairman of the Federal Reserve was forced to agree with her, publicly.

This interview covers enough wonky material to satisfy regular fans of Macro N Cheese. But Andrés also inspires us to unleash our imagination, reconsider the nature of work, and plan for a future that meets all our needs.

Andrés Bernal is Lecturer of Urban Studies at CUNY Queens College, Doctoral student in Public & Urban Policy at The New School, and policy advisor, political organizer and Green New Deal scholar.

www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-gr…e4b027f1097bda5b

Andrés-Bernal.com

@andresintheory on Twitter

Macro N Cheese – Episode 32 
Politics, Public Banking, and the Green New Deal with Andrés Bernal
September 7, 2019 

Andres Bernal [intro/music] (00:02): 

That’s kind of the basis of this Green New Deal idea, is bringing together the capacity that we have to mobilize our productive forces with justice and a new foundation of rights. 

Andres Bernal [intro/music] (00:16): 

So she went to standing rock had a very profound experience, came back and then told me and some others, “You know, I decided that I’m going to run for Congress.” So that was AOC. 

Andres Bernal [intro/music] (00:28): 

Where there’s a difference of opinion, which leads to this question of the public banking is this kind of insistence that the government has to make back the money that it spent somehow. 

Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (00:36): 

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

Steve Grumbine (01:38): 

All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today I’m very excited about this. Andres Bernal is a guy who has been just rising up through the ranks. He’s advised Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign. He has been deeply embedded in working on advancing a Green New Deal. He has been on the inside track.  

He’s witnessed these things going on. He’s been around Stephanie Kelton. He’s been around Bob Hockett. He’s had opportunity to talk to the best of the best, and he has traveled around the country trying to make a Green New Deal happen. I’m so pleased to have you on. Andres, welcome, sir. 

Andres Bernal (02:19): 

Thanks for having me. What a pleasure. 

Steve Grumbine (02:22): 

Well, listen, obviously we’re seeing some of these signs right now of a looming recession and you know, we’ve been predicting that between the student debt crisis and, you know, stock buy backs and so forth that there would be a major problem. And then lo and behold mother nature is telling us we’ve only got about 10 seconds to get our act together there as well.  

This Green New Deal thing couldn’t happen at a more important time in our lives and our history in our civilization. I mean, this is big. 

Andres Bernal (02:55): 

Yeah. I think we’re really being tested here to see what we’re made of and whether we can pull through is pretty unquestionable to me that there is a political crisis, an environmental crisis, social crisis. We see it all around us. You know, people are doing the best they can to try to improve themselves and advance their lives.  

But yet the world around us is kind of collapsing. And we’re seeing this very awful, horrible, fascist tendencies, just bubble up and lead to these dehumanizing practices. An escalation of just some awful, awful things that have kind of always been there, but we were able to kind of subdue them or at least make them covert for awhile.  

And now they’re all coming out. And so, you know, these things are all related. These stress that people have, the alienation people feel in their lives, from their work, from one another, the way that we’re already experiencing the effects of climate change with these storms and this weather and the heat and different parts of the world, we’re experiencing droughts and it’s becoming more difficult to just kind of live normal thriving lives.  

And we’re seeing health deteriorate. Somebody told me today that two-thirds of all bankruptcies are coming from healthcare bills. So it’s a scary world out there and even amidst all of this, we’re trying to push forward. We’re trying to persevere. 

Steve Grumbine (04:25): 

It sounds to me like you have got your finger on the pulse because I watched you in several different Green New Deal forums. You’ve been very eloquent and it looks like the youth are definitely buying into this. The millennials are definitely getting on board. There is hope. And this package, this idea of a Green New Deal, it seems, dare I say pie in the sky – I hate that term – but it seems broad and vast and people aren’t sure what it means.  

And you know, we’re sitting there trying to say, “Hey, this is the way forward.” Tell me in your words, what the Green New Deal is. 

Andres Bernal (05:09): 

Yeah, well, so the Green New Deal is a political project, I would say, that is drawing inspiration from the original new deal and improving on its limits in order to offer, you know, a pretty simple, straightforward proposition and that’s that we have to mobilize our resources and our labor, our technology, our economy, everything about ourselves.  

We have to mobilize in a very similar way like we did when we were going through the great depression; and when we had to prepare for World War II; or when we said that we were going to go to the moon, even though we really didn’t know how. But instead of doing that, we’re going to save the planet by attempting to stop the earth from seeing over a two degrees Celsius increase, which would be devastating.  

And by changing the way we consume, the way we produce, what economic growth means. By changing the quality of all of these aspects of our institutions and our economic and social relations and moving those things towards a renewable economy that’s based on human thriving and taking care of one another, and really unlocking like all of the creative potential that we are not able to truly access under the economy the way that’s organized right now.  

And so what the Green New Deal is trying to say is that we have this environmental emergency that is here now, and that we should have acted on a long time ago. And so, so many people are trying to tell us that there are two oppositions – either we take care of the environment and we deal with this crisis, or we continue to experience economic prosperity and growth and all that kind of stuff, right?  

That these two things are completely opposed that if we try to address and deal with environmental stuff, we’re going to crash the economy. That’s kind of what a lot of those cynics try to tell us. But what the Green New Deal says is that contrast from the way environmental policy has worked in the United States since 1970, since the first earth day, we’re actually proposing to build, to use our capacity, to use fiscal policy, to use government spending, to mobilize our productive capacity and build out an entire new infrastructure in transportation, in housing, in agriculture, in energy, all of these different forces and convert the old systems that were based on the fossil fuel economy towards the new renewable economy – build out the kind of infrastructure, the grid, the systems needed for this new kind of economy.  

And that’s going to create prosperity. That’s going to create income. That’s going to create good jobs, better jobs. And on top of all of that, on top of that stimulus of giving people good work, to be able to build all of these things and do all of these things, we’re also going to provide certain kinds of rights that go back to the new deal.  

But were cut short that we never really truly achieved, right – this whole idea that Roosevelt had that the legacies then carry through into the civil rights movement of guaranteeing a economic bill of rights. That’s saying every person has a right to healthcare, to an education, to housing and to a dignified job.  

And so in addition to providing all of this economic stimulus in order to build this new infrastructure, we’re going to guarantee certain kinds of rights because we see them as human rights; and this includes making sure that we know that toxicity and hazards and all these kinds of terrible things are not in our air and in our water, in our communities.  

And in addition to that, we’re going to say, we’re going to put in a federal jobs guarantee, so that unemployment becomes a thing of the past. We’re going to guarantee health care so that if you get sick, you have access to quality care because that’s your right as a person. We’re going to say that once you go through high school and you want to continue your education, you want to continue your formative experience as a human being, you’re going to go to college and you’re gonna have access to learning different kinds of things, and you can choose different kinds of routes and you can get training.  

You know, you can build your knowledge and different kinds of things, and that’s another right as well. And so that’s kind of the basis of this Green New Deal idea. It’s bringing together the capacity that we have to mobilize our productive forces with justice and a new foundation of rights. 

Steve Grumbine (09:50): 

That’s great. I look back on, and I know the Green Party had championed a quote, unquote “Green New Deal” previously. And as you look at somewhat of a continuation, as we expand the dialogue, I think it’s instructive. We don’t have the level of support, even though people want these things. They may not realize that we can have these things, but it really depends on them, on us.  

You know, not me, us, the idea that, you know, we can just yell our way into these programs is I believe naive. I believe we’re at a point now where the concept and this is what I like about what you said and about the approach that is being taken with this Green New Deal. It’s about dialogue. It’s about mobilizing.  

It’s about getting people to realize that our existence is on the line and it’s not just our existence, but we could actually flip the script and lead a life of abundance. And not just for some people, not just for the white people, not just for the capitalist and the upper class, but for the fullness of our human experience and a just economy.  

As you travel around the country, what is the feedback you’re getting from folks like in the Sunrise Movement and other people who come to these events and listen in. Do you feel the hope? Do they see it? Are they embracing it? Are they diving in? What kind of take rate are we talking here? 

Andres Bernal (11:29): 

Well, I think that people are very hungry for something and the more people are provided with a sense of support and hope and ideas, you know, the more exhilarated I think people feel and the more they’re willing and wanting to contribute. I think even though we’re in this very difficult, depressing in many ways, situation, terrifying situation in many ways, I’m very influenced by the tradition of the Black struggle for freedom and liberation all the way back to struggle for abolition up until the civil rights movement and beyond.  

And when you think about that struggle or the struggle of indigenous communities or the struggle of nations that have been colonized for their freedom, you see that there is this longstanding history of very difficult situations that seemed unwinnable, but yet people persevered a lot of times that is where the most vivid and beautiful aspects of culture and of solidarity and of human expression come from these very difficult times, these very trying times.  

So, you know, I think that there is tremendous opportunity in this moment of struggle and in this moment of darkness, and it’s just a matter of building hope through action. And so, you know, the key here is that we have to learn, or in a sense, we have to remember what it means to organize. We have to remember what it means to organize.  

And then we also have to learn lessons from the past and organize better than we ever have before. So, as you said, you know, there is a time and place for screaming for what we want, but that’s not going to get us where we need to go. We need to be able to organize with one another in our communities, in our workplace, in our families, through our friendships and whatnot.  

We have to be able to see that we can have a better future, that we deserve a better kind of future, and that we can bring that about when we come together and demand that, you know, as you said, we can live in abundance. And of course, the interesting thing about that is when we’re talking about abundance, we’re not talking about everybody just doing whatever they want with an unlimited amount of resources.  

We’re talking about a kind of abundance that’s grounded in what truly represents human creativity, human flourishing, human thriving, the kinds of deep relationships and connections that we can build, and I think more importantly, all the healing that needs to occur – in so many of us who have been traumatized by various forms of oppressive systems.  

That’s the kind of abundance that we can have once we build an institutional material infrastructure that’s based in regenerative systems and recycling and sustainability and renewable energy and a care economy and taking care of one another and rights. That’s I think when we are going to see ourselves as human beings, beginning to flourish and do what we’re truly made to do on this earth, which is to be infinitely creative and to learn from one another. 

Steve Grumbine (15:04): 

You know, I like that. I remember when I was growing up and, you know, I don’t want to make this sound like a make America great again, cause that’s not what I’m doing, but I do remember a simpler time. And I think a lot of people remember a simpler time, but it wasn’t simple for everyone. And you look back and you say, you know, what has happened?  

And I look at, for example, my kids’ schools and there is no art. There is no music. There is very little in terms of physical education anymore. Even with playing in the school sports teams, things have become so austere that parents have to pay for the gear and not every parent can afford the gear.  

You look, and I mean, I remember my daughter got in trouble because she came to school on like the fourth Wednesday where they were supposed to have gym class; and she came in boots and not tennis shoes. And I’m thinking to myself what once every like four weeks, and this is how austere everything has gotten, it’s become very, very limited.  

There is no humanities. There are no more arts. There is no more beauty in the world. I mean, there’s tons of it, but we’re not able to capture that because we have turned this thing into such a neoliberal nightmare, being able to reinvigorate the arts, being able to bring about culture. I loved soccer.  

I never played, but I loved watching it because it was so incredible to see all the world’s countries come together and share their culture and witness this thing that was so very different than in the US and it’s that type of hope, you know, that type of beauty, if you will, that I think that we can bring about culturally and I look at the Green New Deal and I think to myself, my goodness, how many people would be so much better off if there was a job guarantee in place that set the wage floor, that they were able to go to school without fear of being bankrupt because of the oppressive usury with the student loan industry.  

That they were able to get preventative care before they ever developed diseases and were able to have a strong, healthy mind and so forth. And you look at oppressed communities and, you know, these kids are going to school and sugar drinks and stuff, cause that’s all they can afford. That’s all that’s accessible.  

Health and well-being is just out the window. We have a real opportunity to change that. Is that feasible? Is that something that’s too big, too big to happen? Or is that within our control? Can we make that happen? 

Andres Bernal (17:58): 

I think we can absolutely make that happen. What you’re describing is just the way that we’ve all been forced to accept this kind of imposed scarcity. And we already feel stressed out because of how overworked and underpaid we are. And because of that, we kind of always have to be thinking about our bills and where we’re going to hustle the next amount of money that we need.  

And so then our entire worldview becomes shaped by this experience and the sentiment. And so we feel that this is just kind of normal and that we don’t deserve to have arts in school, that we don’t deserve to have certain basic rights. And if you’re a person that’s struggling or part of the working poor or unemployed, or you’re living in an impoverished, the industrialized neighborhood, eventually people just start to think that that’s just the way it is.  

And of course we have the culture that’s constantly telling people that it’s their fault. That they’re not trying hard enough. That they’re not clever enough. That they’re not reading the right kind of books or this and that, you know, and justifying all of this misery and whatnot. So I think that something significantly different is not only feasible, but it’s absolutely necessary.  

And it’s something that we build as we go. I think sometimes people become cynical when they expect a silver bullet that’s gonna solve all of our problems overnight; but I think that’s a very mistaken approach. I mean, we change things as we go and as we go, we learn and that’s kind of what the Green New Deal is about.  

Thus far, it’s a nonbinding resolution that was offered in Congress and that resolution creates this framework. It sets this basic framework that kind of says, number one, we acknowledge that climate change is an emergency and it’s an existential threat to human civilization, right? We also acknowledged that that same kind of system or economy that is contributing to climate change with the fossil fuel industry has also done undeniable damage to working people and various communities across the country and across the world.  

And then it goes on to say, all right, the way we’re going to deal with this, the way we’re actually going to make sure that we don’t keep the earth above a certain level; and that we start to address these things is by investing, by investing in people and by investing in our abilities as people to create a better system.  

And we’re going to do this step by step. So thus far we have this framework that’s out there and it’s up to us now in our various roles, right? Some of us are politicians, others are academics, others are activists or advocates. And we work in different industries, right? We have different skill sets, different experiences in different areas of the economy and whatnot, and all of it matters.  

And so what needs to happen now is we need to start to think about what do our communities need? How is the climate emergency affecting my community? How is it affecting different people disproportionately; figuring out what is going on at your level local level. And then also trying to understand what do we have?  

What abilities do we have? What universities do we have here? What kind of people with what kind of experiences? And through that kind of organizing, discussions, community building where people are coming together to say, “We want a Green New Deal. We want a society that is more just, and it’s healthier, and it provides what we need to thrive.”  

You know, as we’re doing that, then that’s going to start to put pressure and the right kind of momentum into political hands to develop legislation that are going to be required to make these things happen. So for example, what we might need right away is massive investment in infrastructure and building a renewable energy grid and challenging the power of all of these fossil fuel based utilities that are kind of like a central component of that kind of economy.  

As we move forward, we’re going to have to start thinking about transportation, what the communities need. Well, I’ll tell you this much, communities need good, quality public transportation in cities and connecting different cities. We have a right to be able to move and get to different parts of this country without having to be privileged or having to be wealthy.  

So we have the capacity to build out a massive train system based on renewable energy. We can make changes to the way that trucking happens in the country or add aspects of infrastructure that are going to just offer new kinds of alternatives and ways that we can move things across the country. So, you know, some critics were saying that we want to ban flying.  

That was kind of like a Fox News talking point, just kind of hilarious. The idea is so obvious, so common sense that you literally need to like, just scare people by lying to them in order to avoid, you know, mass support for something that’s just completely obvious. But you know, to answer that point, nobody’s talking about banning airplanes.  

What we’re talking about is building more alternatives for people to move around that are more grounded in sustainable technologies, renewable technologies. As we also invest and here is an opportunity for another piece of legislation, heavily invest in research and development to develop the knowledge and the technology that we need to continue advancing the degree to which we can have these kinds of renewable and clean based things that we need to the point where, you know, we may very well eventually be able to fly on significantly lower carbon emissions and perhaps one day without any whatsoever.  

Right? So these are the kind of advancements that we’re calling for, that we need. On top of that, we need to completely upgrade regulations on things like our water systems and our air, because there are significantly more toxic and hazardous elements that are out there that we just have not updated since like the nineties.  

And so, you know, these things can very well be making us sick. We haven’t really been able to study them to know how they’re affecting all of these pesticides and other chemicals. They very well may be contributing to the health crisis that we’re all experiencing. So there’s so many pieces to what needs to happen.  

But the important thing is for people to start understanding that things need to change and that it happens when we mobilize ourselves to build the alternatives that we need. 

Intermission (25:26): 

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

Steve Grumbine (26:12): 

Yeah. I am going to bring us back to the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and your involvement in that campaign. You know, from the outside, looking in, I saw you and Raul (Carrillo) working very, very hard. I know you were very close to the campaign and you know, we’ve seen some great pictures, man, you guys having dinner with Stephanie Kelton and then Pavlina Tcherneva.  

And I don’t know all other names at the table that were there, but we also got to see you standing there with Bill Mitchell’s macroeconomics textbook with her standing there, and she’s taken some bold steps to speak about Modern Monetary Theory. And she just opened up a can of whoop ass in discussing the Phillips curve with Powell, the Fed chair.  

You’ve been able to be close to some really cool stuff. Can you walk us through that campaign and the excitement and the hope and what this really means to change in America? 

Andres Bernal (27:17): 

Yeah, absolutely. So it’s very interesting and it’s kind of a crazy story. I had heard about MMT and it’s all related, it’s all connected in very wacky way. I had heard about MMT in 2014, but I really didn’t pay enough attention to it then. I was at a conference and I saw like the logo for the Modern Money Network.  

And I was like, Oh, these guys seem cool, but I never really got around to it. And so I went the next couple of years, just doing my thing, doing my research. And eventually what happened is the Standing Rock Crisis – right, when they wanted to force the pipeline – and that whole thing happened. While that was going on, one of my good friends in New York City was like, you know, I’m going to go, I’m going to go to Standing Rock and I’m going to document it on Facebook.  

So she went, she had a very profound experience, very formative, profound experience. She’d already been going through some things in her life that were very, very challenging and difficult. And it kind of said, you know, was wondering what is my, I feel like she would always tell me, “I feel like I have to do something big, but I don’t know what it is.”  

So she went to Standing Rock, had a very profound experience, came back and then told me, and some others, you know, “I’ve decided that I’m going to run for Congress.” So that was AOC. And, you know, it was like, great, that’s amazing. Let me know any way I can help, but it was still kind of just like, you know, do we think we can win? I don’t know. It’s kind of a long shot here. Cause you know, Joe Crowley is third, most powerful Democrat in the House, decades old incumbent, Machine Boss in Queens.  

Nobody really thought that she had a chance. At the same time, I finally decide to start looking into this MMT thing and things just kind of started spiraling very quickly. I spent that year getting to know like the first level of what this stuff is all about, getting that kind of initial dive in. And so these things kind of evolve in parallel in my life, at least with one another.  

On one hand, AOC is doing her thing and I spoke at some events for her. I brought her to an event or two, you know, things were going, I was getting to know some of the people on her staff more, uh, the campaign was growing, but there were a lot of ups and downs. There were a lot of moments that seemed very, very difficult.  

Like, you know, there’s no chance we can win like that kind of thing. Uh, but she just stuck to it. We stuck to it. We kept believing in her. I mean, I’ve always believed in her and simultaneously I’m like learning all this stuff and wrapping my head around it on a deeper level as every month goes by.  

Eventually she does a couple interviews and releases this video that goes viral because we can’t deny that she has this ability to just capture a room when she speaks with hope and energy and just a sharp wit. And so when that campaign video goes out and it goes viral, I all of a sudden, I’m like, wait a second.  

This is happening. And she’s going to sneak up on this guy. I really started to believe that we had a real chance to make some things happen. So I had been working with her, talking with her. We go way back. We’re friends from like 10 years ago. And I had been saying, No, what happened was I think somebody on her campaign asked me at an event what I thought about UBI.  

And I said, I used to kind of be very sympathetic towards it, but I have grown skeptical of it because I was learning about these new ideas and that what stuck out for me now was the potential of a federal jobs guarantee because of its history in the civil rights movement, because of the way that it addressed real social, environmental needs that we have now because of the economics of it, because of its desire to transform what work entails in this country, which is so important.  

So I brought her to a conference at my university, The New School, and I remember very clearly that when she arrived to the conference, Stephanie Kelton, Darrick Hamilton and Randy Wray were presenting I believe. And so she just kind of sat there and watched and took notes while they spoke. And so we continued talking about these things, building that dialogue.  

And soon after that, she put the jobs guarantee on her platform. And it also blew up as an idea that had returned because we hadn’t really heard about it since, you know, late seventies. And then all of a sudden Bernie was going out with a jobs guarantee and then Booker was talking about a job guarantee and even Gillibrand and everybody was talking about jobs guarantee; but it kind of AOC from my memory, she was that first person to really go out there and be like, we deserve this.  

We have the right to a dignified job in a public option. So I kept building these relationships with the folks in the Modern Money Network, who I’m now doing outreach for and very closely working with Kelton with Pavlina, with Fadhel, Forstater, all of these tremendously important thinkers, and Bob Hockett, who have all become great friends of mine now.  

And so I just kind of saw, I think this is the important part. I saw that there was no way to really achieve the things that we wanted unless we broke from the prison – that’s this mainstream orthodox narrative that has even infected so many minds on the left. 

Steve Grumbine (33:07): 

Yes. 

Andres Bernal (33:08): 

And that’s when I was like, you know, this is big because I’m sick and tired of bullshit debate where we’re always speaking on conservative terms and we can’t do anything because we believe in these myths. And so I had always been very skeptical of economics because I studied philosophy in college.  

And, you know, in philosophy you learn a lot about epistemology. You learn about a methods and methodology and all these ways of deconstructing, what is knowledge and how do we know things and all these very important questions. Economics, and at least mainstream economics, the orthodoxy, marginal economics, neoclassical, whoever you want to call it, is just some of the crudest crap you could ever imagine.  

I mean, this whole idea that we’re all just like these rational agents maximizing our utility and therefore everything’s going to balance out into equilibrium – all seemed like complete and total bullshit to me from the very beginning. So I was always interested though, in political economy, it poses different question.  

It kind of says like, how does the provisioning that we do through our production and consumption and distribution and whatnot , how is that connected to power? And by the time I got to my doctoral program, I was starting to really become skeptical of any theory that spoke about economies as if they were natural or as if natural laws, govern them, rather than social fits.  

You know, whether that be contracts we make, the relationships we build, the kind of institutions that we have, the laws that we have and the way that those things form these social relations amongst one another, right, and these different like tools and institutions that we use. So when I started reading about Modern Monetary Theory, MMT, I realize that money plays this central role in what I call naturalizing economics or making people think that there are these natural laws to what constitutes economic life rather than social, anthropological, political things.  

And that’s kind of where it starts to draw me to it the most. And I start to then, you know, of course, a lot of people know these things, right? So you start to realize the history that money is a form of a government or authority, some kind of legal authority provisioning itself and establishing sort of debt obligations, creating accounting system, that kind of stuff.  

Right? And so it’s like we’re in this crisis and everybody’s debating how to pay for this stuff? Are you kidding? Serious? We have all of these people who are willing and ready to work to do things. We have, you know, all of these incredible minds that have the ideas and the projects that can create value if we just do it.  

And we’re talking about how to pay for it as if like we gotta find . . . right? And so all this whole story about like, well, you know, who does the US government owe it’s debt to? Jupiter? Like becomes more and more obvious to me as I’m going through it and demystifying myself, all this stuff. And so I made a strong effort to get all of this communicated to Alexandria and to set up conversations, you know, with very important people as well.  

And to make sure that this paradigm and this perspective was part of the conversation, you know, because for a long time it was very marginal. It was something that you read about in blogs and that some people knew about, but it wasn’t really something you heard very much in any kind of mainstream political sense. 

Steve Grumbine (36:50): 

Yes. 

Andres Bernal (36:52): 

So history just opened up that moment, the stars aligned and we were able to do, I think, some very important things, which, you know, for example, the thing I’m talking about in terms of challenging notions that naturalize the economy, one example of this is the way Alexandria challenged the Phillips curve and all of these theories about inflation at the hearings.  

Because for the longest time mainstream orthodox economists just told everybody that if we ever allowed unemployment to go below a certain rate, all hell would break loose and everything will fall apart, and we’d be Zimbabwe because everybody knows that there’s these economic laws out there, right.  

And that’s complete nonsense. It’s a political, social thing. And so, you know, that’s something I think that resonated with her, that she understood. She understood that the way that people play with people’s livelihoods, when they make these calls that don’t have the kind of evidence that they act as if it does – they talk about like a 4%, 3% unemployment rate is fine, that’s millions of people without access to a job who were trying to work, were trying to take care of themselves and their families.  

So it’s a very, very serious thing. And I was very, very pleased and happy when I saw her at that hearing making those moves. But there’s been a lot of steps forward and gains that we’ve made and there’s still a lot of work to do. But that’s part of what this is all about. 

Steve Grumbine (38:29): 

I want to interrupt you for just a second, because first of all, I want to applaud you. I mean, this is, I don’t do this very often, But I want you to know you brought tears to my eyes when I saw these things happening. I’ve been doing this for a long time and, you know, I put everything I got into it and it is what it is.  

Right? You put what you got into it and to see this moment happen, you know, even if it’s a work in progress, let’s be fair. We’re not to the finish line. We’re not the finish line with AOC. And we’re not to the finish line with a Green New Deal. We’ve got work out the wazoo to do to get everything right.  

But you, my friend, saw an opening and I don’t know the exact phraseology that will make what I’m about to say work, but it’s something about, you know, opportunity and time and preparation and all these other things come together in this moment and whammo. Here’s this thing that happens. And I can tell you so many people were so elated to see this happening.  

It brought about hope. I really, I do, I want to applaud you. It’s not intended to puff you up so much as to say, thank you for taking that shot. And, you know, there was a shot that we all felt like you took for us. And I just want to thank you for that. I want you to know that that was a big deal.  

And I think it’s worth mentioning that, you know, you did step out in faith, you understood how important this was now that you had your own understanding. You took a shot and big things are happening. Everybody has that opportunity. Maybe they don’t get to talk to AOC. Maybe that’s not who they get to talk to.  

Maybe it’s somebody at their church or their school, or even a family member. But these light bulb moments are on each one of us. This is the whole hashtag not me, us thing. That is how you create that grassroots movement that you don’t wait for someone else to do. You look for your own spots and Andres, you took it, man. Really, really thank you on behalf of my world. Thank you so much for that. 

Andres Bernal (40:38): 

I appreciate that. Thank you as well for the work that you do. I mean, I feel like that’s just what I’m here to do. It’s kind of the purpose that I’ve found in my life is to push hard on these things, because I want, you know, the next generation of people kind of growing up in this world to have a better shot than we do. And that’s really important to me. 

Steve Grumbine (41:00): 

You brought up something to me offline that I think is worth bringing up at this point in, this is all comes together with, everybody’s trying to do something, right? They’re all trying to do something. The thing about MMT and understanding how these pieces fit together and understanding not only the money story that Warren Mosler talks about, but understanding the credit relation and the legal arrangements, et cetera, it really does demystify a lot of things that are going on in the world today.  

And we have a situation that has come up – it’s another part of the left with this concept of public banking. And there’s all kinds of valid reasons for being interested in seeing banks more accessible, providing more opportunities to people that are otherwise iced out of these opportunities. But, you know, we talked a little bit about this.  

There’s some concepts of public banking paying for a Green New Deal and so forth, and it’s pretty misguided. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Andres Bernal (42:03): 

Yeah, sure. So, you know, I think there are good intentions out there where people think that setting up this network of public banks to finance the Green New Deal is the way to go. I think a lot of this comes from people’s rightful skepticism of the way that the private banking system works, but you know, it falls short and ultimately gives in to the very neoliberal paradigm that they’re fighting.  

I think public banks are great. I think we need more of them in our economy, but we have to understand the role that different institutions have and what’s best for the goals that we’re trying to achieve. So when we’re talking about a Green New Deal, we’re talking about achieving certain social and environmental goals.  

So first of all, a lot of the criticism from the right wants to say that it’s too expensive and that it’s going to crash the economy, right? So if you know MMT, you understand that question doesn’t make any sense and that costs have to do with real resource constraints and real resource costs, not some arbitrary budgetary costs.  

That’s the first thing. The second thing though, is that it’s an investment and this is something that pretty much everybody that is supportive of the Green New Deal talks about that this is an investment you’re mobilizing this, you’re using power of the federal government to make this happen because it’s going to bring about good things that are going to have good impacts on the economy.  

I think where there’s a difference of opinion, which leads to this question of the public banking is this kind of insistence that the government has to make back the money that it spent somehow. And so some people try to kind of think of all these different ways in which whatever investment goes into the Green New Deal is going to come back in the form of financial returns.  

And I understand the intentions there that might be good, but the issue is that we don’t just want financial returns. In fact, for a lot of things, we don’t really care about financial returns. We care about what some of my colleagues and I are calling real returns, which is like real improvements in people’s lives, real improvements in well-being, real improvements in health indicators.  

You want to add like a happiness indicator? You can do that. We want to talk about the environment, all right, what kind of returns we want to see in terms of the environment, reducing carbon emissions, reducing toxicity and hazards in our water supplies, all of these things. Those are the returns that we’re interested in.  

And sometimes that’s going to come into conflict with like whether or not it can bring profit or financial returns. And so that’s unnecessary. We shouldn’t be limiting ourselves because it’s really a way to put our foot in our mouths when we think that we have to measure everything in terms of monetary financial returns, and that’s something that’s special about the capacity of the United States federal government in using its fiscal policy, because through this concept of functional finance, it can set certain goals to determine whether or not it’s been successful.  

And those goals have to do with the lives that we’re living and whether they’re good and whether that’s something we want and how we’re then kind of moving forward and participate in the economy. So that’s very important. The other thing too, is that the fiscal policy, the public finance and the spending of the US government can do to mobilize this Green New Deal, because again, we’re talking about an urgent, massive undertaking here.  

That’s something that we don’t want to reduce or rely on loans, because why would you put the whole future of saving a planet within 12 years, or it’s 10 now, I’m not even sure. Why would you place all of that within some loans, even if they’re low interest, that’s ridiculous. 

Steve Grumbine (46:11): 

Can I interject? I think this is the neoliberal aspect of our society. It really has permeated every . . . when I talked to Scott Ferguson, I said, you know, “It’s permeated society.” He goes, “Steve, we live in a neoliberal world and it’s everywhere.” And you look at this in this concept of privatization an so forth, looking at private solutions and not respecting and understanding the power of a currency issuing sovereign national government.  

It’s left the likes of Detroit, Michigan with bad water, still. It’s left Puerto Rico thinking somehow or another that you know, that they can just get out of this by getting some vulture capital that parse out the Island. It just defies any sense of logic until you realize that people have just been conditioned to believe that the government doesn’t have the ability to do it.  

And yet they somehow, or another believe the government has the power to blow up the rest of the world because it shows every day that it can. 

Andres Bernal (47:17): 

Right, right, right. 

Steve Grumbine (47:18): 

What is the disconnect? What would you say to a cynic? 

Andres Bernal (47:22): 

Well, I mean, you know, cynicism is the fastest way to destruction. You know, cynicism contributes to the speed at which everything’s going to break down. I mean, I’m not saying to be unrealistically optimistic, but you work towards hope with discipline and you can be a realist while still having aspirational goals.  

I think that’s totally plausible. But you know, in terms of this question, because oftentimes supporters of this strategy for financing the Green New Deal will say like, “Well, public banks are different. They’re different from vulture capital. They’re different from private banks. They’ll have like low interest.  

They’ll have like triple bottom line schemes.” And so like, that’s kind of their argument, but you know, again, the problem is that this is a massive undertaking that needs to happen yesterday. And so if we just think about all that needs to be mobilized at the rate that it needs to be mobilized, even if it’s low interest loans, you’re going to end up with another student debt crisis, except there’s going to be all these activists and all of these Green New Deal workers and whatnot who are getting all of these loans and then it’s going to blow up in their face.  

So that’s really the huge problem that I see. I think that public banks have a very important role in supplementing the private banking industry or in providing for credit to kind of keep a green economy going. But that is not the core. That is not the driving force of industrial policy, which is really what we’re talking about here. 

Steve Grumbine (48:55): 

Well stated, well stated one last thing, cause we’re coming up to the end here. As we look and we see, you said you were introduced to MMT back in 2014 and you know, your first pass, it didn’t stick. You moved on, you started doing your own thing. Then you ran into some things that brought you to it again.  

And for whatever reason it clicked. And it’s been an evolution. I mean, you may have had that blinding flashing light, the burning Bush moment that made the light bulb go on, but it’s been a journey. And I think that people, as they begin to start dreaming about what is within the realm of possibility, well, how did we go to the moon before and we can’t do it now?  

What’s wrong? What’s different? I think that immediate gratification is so difficult in the culture that we’re in to get past and understand that sometimes the right answer, isn’t the quickest story. Sometimes it takes time and effort. And for me watching your maturation and watching you grow and seeing .  

. . you’re full of enthusiasm and positivity, and I’ve witnessed seeing these things, obviously from some distance, but the average person can have that too. And I think it’s incredibly important for not only our listeners, but for folks within the progressive, quite frankly, let me not just put it in progressives.  

I think when you change the narrative, the base understanding of how the economy works, you’ll be surprised how conservatives change their stance as well. I mean the 99% doesn’t look at party tickets. The 99% is all of us, us workers, us regular people, and we’ve all been lied to for so long. And now the price of that lie is climate change.  

The price of that lie could be the end of civilization as we know it – another mass extinction. And I think that just grappling with our existence and understanding how fragile life is and realizing that money should be the last thing we have to worry about because money is just an enabler in this case.  

It’s not the thing. It’s the one thing that we can’t run out of. The thing that we can run out of is these resources and how do we make it so that we can leverage them for everyone’s good. Andres, I’d like to get your final word on that. What do you tell somebody who maybe has heard about MMT or as you heard about the Green New Deal and maybe feels like that’s too much to think about. It’s too big for me? What would your advice be to them? 

Andres Bernal (51:49): 

I mean, I think that a curiosity for how the world works is I think one of the strongest cures to cynicism. I think that it’s possible to lose that curiosity on journeys from time to time, we can lose that, but to have like this good faith drive, to try to understand something, because it’s interesting that a lot of the haters that we’ve dealt with since MMT became kind of popular, almost all of them come in bad faith.  

And that’s been something really interesting for me because it’s almost all been coming out of fear that, you know, somebody might not be like the expert anymore, or just no interest in actually reading anything that MMT has published and making up kind of like these big generalizations that are wrong.  

It’s been coming from this place of opportunism that’s been kind of nasty. But I think the antidote to that is to have a real, genuine curiosity for knowledge and to understand the world. And that means going beyond MMT too, in a sense that, I mean, to understand the way that these set of principles, these ideas that we’re calling MMT, how do they connect to other things that are important?  

Because we also don’t want to get stuck and kind of like, then I guess this message goes more to many of the people that have kind of gone into MMT. We don’t want to get stuck on this portion of the knowledge because it’s very difficult to build a movement and to organize when we kind of stay in a certain place.  

We have to see how these principles apply to all of these different things, to the environment, to the ecology, to women’s issues, to racial justice issues, to workers’ issues. I think the proudest thing for me, believe it or not lately, it was actually the relationship that I’ve been building with organized labor and unions, particularly the collaboration I’ve had with Sarah Nelson, who’s president of the flight attendants union, who came to our MMT inspired Green New Deal conference and gave a keynote.  

And she’s just absolutely wonderful. I think she’s the most important labor leader in the country right now. If you haven’t heard of Sarah Nelson, you definitely should. And you know, one of the things that came out of that was this plan to begin to introduce the jobs guarantee to unions as part of like the labor movement itself.  

And so these kinds of questions you don’t get to them if you kind of just stay in one place, you got to keep expanding, right? I always advocate and in my journey to MMT in like a really fascinating place now going through the history of post-Keynesian economics and how MMT came from that and where it split with the other kinds of Keynesians and their beliefs.  

And at this point, some of the projects that we’re doing is to connect the macro ideas of MMT with some of heterodox micro research. So the project is continually growing, right? Like MMT is not a finished thing by any means, it’s continually growing. So I guess to answer your question, have the curiosity to understand what is being said and ask questions in good faith. 

Steve Grumbine (55:17): 

Thank you very much, Andres. That was incredible. And I want to thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a pleasure and I hope that you’ll come back with us real soon. 

Andres Bernal (55:27): 

Sounds good. I’ll be happy to come back. Thank you so much. 

Steve Grumbine (55:31): 

You got it man. This was a great show folks. I hope you’ll join us again. We’ll see you soon. 

 
Ending Credits (00:01:35.280)  

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

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