Macro N Cheese

** Come to Macro ‘n Chill, our online community gathering, where we listen to and discuss the current episode. This week, Jeremy of Proles Pod will be joining us. If you have questions for him, bring them! Tuesday, April 28th, at 8pm ET/5pm PT. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/G7ijDSVmTcKeDc82AAs0XQ Last year, Proles Pod completed a multi-part series on The Stalin Eras. Now...

** Questions about MMT? Thoughts about the episode? Come to our online gathering, Macro ‘n Chill. Tuesday, April 21, 8pm ET/5pm PT. Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/RkspaP0RSNajdc69bqUmkA Jim Byrne of MMT101 is back for a conversation that moves beyond the technical mechanics of Modern Monetary Theory to ask the tough questions. While affirming MMT’s core insight...

** This week’s Macro ‘n Chill might shake us up. Some of us, at least. Come discuss the episode with the community. Tues, April 14, 8pm ET/5pm PT. Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/PIf2VnjBS-mwX-Bd4BwWYQ In a solo episode, Steve sets out to describe and explain some of the shifts in direction for Real Progressives and the podcast, mirroring his own changing perspe...

Join our community on Tuesday evening as we listen to and discuss this episode. April 7th at 8pm ET/5pm PT. Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/nkkVRy2JQbW2Eh4VDtcNHQ Clara Mattei and her first book, The Capital Order , were hugely important to Real Progressives as we began to expand our focus from Modern Monetary Theory and investigate the political economy of the...

Carlos García Hernández, author of Fiat Socialism: Achieving the Goals of Socialism Through Modern Monetary Theory, joins Steve to revisit their discussion of topics covered in his earlier visits to the podcast. Their dialogue wrestles with a deceptively simple question: if we already have the monetary capacity to guarantee jobs, housing, and public goods, why does capitalism still dominate? Throu...

** Tuesday evening, March 24, we’ll be listening to and discussing this episode in our online gathering, Macro ‘n Chill. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/DeGM2oAyRt2O-Xsj1nc4IQ Thomas Fazi joins Steve to dissect the geopolitical and ideological structures that have rendered Europe strategically subordinate to the United States. Thomas argues that NATO’s true purpose, from it...

** Join our community-building online gathering where we listen to the episode together and discuss it in a relaxed, supportive atmosphere. Tuesday, March 17, at 8pm ET/5pm PT. https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/o3miFIPmSAC2d46Vh14iBA One of our favorite guests is back to talk about the central problem facing much of the Global South. It is not simply bad policy or weak leadership, but the p...

Erald Kolasi is back to attack the bourgeois narrative on immigration, which reduces it to a series of individual choices. He and Steve dig into the material roots of migration, showing how empire, land theft, war, labor exploitation, and capitalist crisis have shaped global migration flows for centuries. They ground the discussion in Wallerstein's world-systems theory, defining an empire not by i...

While we’re being distracted by chatbots and AI gimmicks, Silicon Valley is quietly embedding its products into surveillance systems, border enforcement, battlefield logistics, and even nuclear command-and-control. The real money isn’t in selfies with AI. It’s in Pentagon contracts and permanent war footing. Investigative reporter Peter Byrne is back to talk with Steve about his 10-part Military A...

“...Some are dancing, some are drowning, but in the end everybody’s going to go under.” Dr. Ali Kadri (Sun Yat-sen University), author of the Unmaking of Arab Socialism , joins Steve to talk about imperialism, development, and why the Arab world keeps getting put through the capitalist meat grinder. Ali argues that capitalism isn’t just markets and greed. It’s a destructive social relationship. On...

Can Marxists and MMTers find common ground, or are they doomed to be strategic enemies? Steve’s guest is Australian labor historian and organizer Owen Bennett, who founded the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union in 2015, and more recently, Unionists for a Job Guarantee in 2024. He and Steve explore how to tackle the deep divide between Modern Monetary Theory and the Marxist left. Owen argues that...

This week Steve invited Gabriel Rockhill to talk about his new book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? Vol 1 of The Intellectual World War. The war on communism is about protecting imperial super-profits, keeping cheap labor and resources flowing from the Global South to the imperial core. It has never been about lofty values and freedom fries. So why does the empire care about books, grants,...

Funding white supremacy is a core, not incidental, function of the modern capitalist state in the U.S. It is also the title of economist Robert B. Williams’ 2025 book, Funding White Supremacy: Federal Wealth Policies and the Modern Racial Wealth Gap . Bob and Steve share the fundamental position that capitalism doesn’t just produce inequality by accident, it builds durable ladders for some and tra...

We’ve made the case before, but it bears repeating: MMT is a politically neutral, descriptive lens explaining the operational realities of a sovereign fiat currency system where the availability of real resources, not money, are the constraint. And Marxism is an a nalytical framework for understanding class relations and production. The two are not inherently opposed. It’s a mistake to dismiss MMT...

Steve opens in a subdued mood brought on by the dizzying speed of ‘current events.’ For this episode he’s stepping back and looking at Venezuela. News reports are working hard to create confusion. On social media US citizens claim that kidnapping a sitting president is justified if you don’t like him. Or if he’s socialist. To understand a situation, it must be considered historically, materially,...

Steve welcomes back Erald Kolasi, physicist-economist, author, and friend of the podcast. Erald is here to do a demolition job on “institutional” development fables like Acemoglu & Robinson’s Why Nations Fail . He argues that by treating good institutions as the master key (inclusive vs. extractive) they smuggle in a liberal moral scoreboard while dodging the real motors of history: power, cla...

Shealeigh Voitl and Andy Lee Roth join Steve to talk about Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2025. The book – an annual publication – compiles the year's most important yet underreported or misreported news stories, which they’ve identified through a student-led research process. Andy highlights the point that corporate news focuses on what went wrong today but ignores what goes wrong eve...

Let’s face it, even “good” macro talk can fall into the trap of treating the economy like a tidy spreadsheet while real lives get crushed in the margins. To help us peer beneath the covers, Steve invited Emma Holten, a Copenhagen-based political economist to talk about her book Deficit: How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World . We often discuss deficits around here, but Emma is looking at a di...

For a masterclass in true bipartisanship, look no further than the guest list of Jeffrey Epstein! We all love a good conspiracy story, but it’s often just business as usual for the class in power. Nolan Higdon – lecturer, media critic, and author of The Gaslight Gazette – is back for a deep analytical dive into the Epstein saga. Moving beyond true-crime sensationalism, Nolan and Steve frame the sc...

Historian and journalist Vijay Prashad talks with Steve about why Antonio Gramsci still matters. Listeners to this podcast know that we have a pretty good grasp of the monetary system. But we’re constantly working to expand our understanding of the systemic underpinnings of real power. How else will we be able to seize it? For help, we turn to Gramsci. According to Vijay, Gramsci was doing class f...

In today’s world, anyone serious about anti-imperialism, global development, and monetary sovereignty needs to break through the well-funded US propaganda machine and develop a fact-based, nuanced understanding of China. To this end, Steve asked Yan Liang to come back to the podcast to look at China through the MMT lens, analyzing its economic management, global role, and response to Western villa...

Steve and his guest, Scottish political economist William Thomson, use the fight over Scotland’s independence to dissect how class power hides inside “neutral” economic rules. Will, founder of SCOTONOMICS, talks about his journey from neoclassical training to a heterodox, political-economy perspective grounded in MMT, ecological economics, and class analysis. He recently wrote a paper (with friend...

“We’re at an inflection point – a civilizational crisis. Western imperial dominance is ending, and its dying spasms are only accelerating the collapse.” Aaron Good  Aaron Good, author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, is back to talk with Steve about the crisis of the US-led imperial order and the manufactured “common sense” that keeps people trapped inside a rigged system.&nb...

Randy: “We’re supposed to believe the central bank manages inflation by using interest rates?"   Steve: “It’s ridiculous.”   L. Randall Wray, one of the original MMT economists, recently wrote a paper with Yeva Nersisyan entitled,  No, the Fed is NOT Independent – It is a Creature of Congress .  Steve invited Randy for a conversation abou...

** Want to take a deeper dive into this podcast? Join us on Tuesday evenings for Macro ‘n Chill, where we listen to the most recent episode together. Ask questions, share your insights, or just hang with us. 8pm ET/5pm PT. Find the registration link at realprogressives.org. And while you’re there, sign up for book club. It’s not too late – there are still two more sessions in our&nb...