Macro N Cheese

** We’ll discuss this episode on Tuesday, March 10th (8 pm ET/5 pm PT) in our online community gathering, Macro ‘n Chill. We’ve invited Erald Kolasi to join us. So bring your questions. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/hvkv5uyKQkG8DvgUMCckcw

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 di...

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 AI Watch series at Project Censored. It’s a chilling and materialist analysis of the military-industrial-AI complex.

Naming names and following the funding trails, Peter reveals how firms tied to Palantir, Google, and other tech giants 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. Once you look at it that way, many of the world’s mysteries stop being mysterious: war, austerity, pollution, and mass deaths aren’t accidents that occasionally happen to capitalism. They are outcomes to be...

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 the left's current dismissal of full-employment policy is a historic break from a time when communists and unionists successfully fought for – and won – some major concessions under capitalism. We should look to establish that kin...

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, and academic careers?

Gabriel’s investigation begins with a potent symbol: the legacy of Che Guevara. We know the CIA hunted and executed him. Less known is their pa...

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 trapdoors for others. Wealth, not income, is the key instrument because it is power that reproduces itself across generations.

Bob lays out the major policy mechanism of stealth wealth-building: how the fede...

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 analytical framework for understanding class relations and production. The two are not inherently opposed. It’s a mistake to dismiss MMT as capitalist apologetics.

Steve’s guest is Dr. Anthony Anastasi, an economist teaching at the Sino-British College, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. They talk about Anthony’s paper: Marxism and MMT: How Modern M...

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, and as a connected process. With that in mind, Ricardo Vaz of Venezuelanalysis, joins Steve to talk about what the Bolivarian Revolution actually was – on the ground – beyond the familiar US me...

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, class struggle, imperial systems, and material constraints like energy, trade dependence, war, and ecological shocks.

To “steelman” Acemoglu and Robinson’s position, Erald uses their favorite showcase case – North vs. South Korea. He lays out their comparison of the “tyrann...

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 every day. “It's the difference between dramatic events and systemic problems.”

The #1 underreported story is that of ICE soliciting private contractors to monitor social media for critics and assess their "proclivity to violence," a move towar...

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 different kind. She reframes deficit as what societies rack up when they systematically undervalue care: the paid and unpaid labor (still disproportionately done by women) that keeps people healthy, capable, and al...

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 scandal as a stark case study in systemic class power, media complicity, and the mechanisms elite networks use to protect their own.

The discussion hinges on several key points...

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 forensics. His core puzzle was brutal and practical: why did big chunks of Italy’s working-class bail on their own unions and parties and drift into fascism? That...

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 villainization. They discuss China’s development ethos and describe China as a state that actively uses its monetary and fiscal sovereignty to guide development towards internal goals (poverty alleviation, technological self-reliance, common prosperity) and external partnership (Win...

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-of-the-podcast Dirk Ehnts) showing how the Scottish government’s plan to copy the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact and delay its own currency would lock an “independent” Scotland into permanent austerity and dependence on markets and foreign owners.

Will expl...

“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. 

Centuries of Western imperial dominance are unraveling, and the US responds with flailing, genocidal actions in Gaza and Ukraine. These aren't signs of strength; they're the death rattles of a corpse that doesn't know it...

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 about how the Federal Reserve is, and always has been, a "creature of Congress," and its supposed independence is a smokescreen that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.

The Fed has a dual mandate of full employment and price...

** 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 current series. ** 

Trump’s “$20B for Argentina” wasn’t aid – it was a heist. Economist Daniel Kostzer joins Steve to explain. Basically it’s just same ole same ole. Milei’s gove...

Heidi Boghosian is an attorney, author, and co-host of Law and Disorder podcast and radio show. She joins Steve to discuss how the US surveillance state is a tool of class discipline and repression. From the Federalist Society pipeline to post-9/11 “safety” theater, both parties helped build a digital police state that criminalizes poverty, protest, and anyone messing with profits. And let’s not forget the copaganda about “crime” and “illegals” to keep folks scared while manufactured austerity produces the very crises the state then punishes. Classic ruling class two-step. 

Silicon Valley’s tech bros are kind of like bouncers. Thie...

"The self-made man is a lie that we have taught people to keep them from complaining, to keep them from whining, to keep them from asking for better from their government, to keep them from asking for better from their employer."  

The two Steves – Hall and Grumbine – get together to dismantle the myth of the self-made man, exposing it as a centuries-old political weapon designed to disempower the working class. 

Professor Hall traces the roots of this "possessive individualism" back centuries, saying it is not a recent neoliberal invention but a deeply embedded cultural force with origins in chang...

Do you know what kakistocracy means? You’ll find out in this episode with guest Bill Black. Because, yeah, this is an educational podcast. A lot of us learned the term ‘elite control fraud’ from Bill in past episodes and you’ll hear more about it here.  

Bill is a great storyteller. His experience as a regulator trying to enforce laws against the great crooks of the world gives him a lot of material. If you haven’t already heard our first episode with him, check it out:  “Exposed: A Serial Whistleblowers Story” He’s the author of The Best Way to Ro...

**This week’s Macro ‘n Chill gathering should be a lively one. Whenever we dive into the topic of cultural hegemony, it sparks a thoughtful discussion. Join us on Tuesday, October 14, 8pm ET/5pm PT. Click here to register  

This is the 349th episode of our podcast. Just sayin’.

Steve’s guest is David Fields, talking about his recent article, The Cultural Syndromes of Capitalism. David explains the rise of far-right figures like Donald Trump is not a random accident but a direct outcome of the capitalist system, which creates deep-seated cultural syndrome that poison our minds and...

The Palestinian liberation struggle is a fundamental class and anti-colonial issue. First-time guest to the podcast, Professor Omar Zahzah, talks with Steve about the active collaboration of Silicon Valley tech giants with the US and Israeli governments to censor and suppress anti-Zionist narratives. 

"What these companies are doing is digitally amplifying a physical process of settler colonial dispossession." 

Omar goes beyond labeling digital censorship as simple political bias. He argues that Silicon Valley's actions are a direct extension of imperialist goals in Palestine: the erasure of a people, their narrative, and their history. Big Tech is n...

Economic anthropologist Brett Scott, the author of Cloud Money, talks with Steve about libertarianism’s big lie. Or lies – plural.

From a class perspective, libertarianism is largely an ideological tool that protects elite power by promoting a false narrative of individualism and "free" markets. It serves as a smokescreen, concealing the mechanisms of power in a class society. What worse, it’s presented as neutral. As if all citizens are on an equal playing field. Market transactions replace the natural interdependence at the core of societies. 

Brett and Steve look at leftwing alternatives, including the potenti...

** You are invited to attend Macro ‘n Chill, our community building online gathering where we discuss the current episode of the podcast. Tuesday, September 23 at 8pm ET/5pm PT Click here to register. 

Our friend, MMT economist Yeva Nersisyan, joins Steve to discuss the struggle to communicate MMT's core principles in a media landscape filled with misinformation, including from those who should know better. They call some of them out by name and express disappointment when natural allies on the left reject modern monetary theory.  

“At this point, you cannot just be MMT curious. You have to...

Our friend Daniel Conceição is back for his sixth(!) time on Macro N Cheese. He and Steve share their critique of "neutral" or academic MMT that avoids class analysis. Understanding a government's monetary capacity is meaningless without using that knowledge as a weapon for class struggle against an oppressive economic system. 

Daniel shares his experiences in Buenos Aires, describing a city with grand public infrastructure (a legacy of Peronism) now filled with poverty due to austerity. He dismantles the myth that President Javier Milei's austerity policies tamed inflation. Instead, he argues the temporary stabilization was due to a...

** Tuesday evening, Bob will join our weekly online gathering where we’ll listen to the podcast together and discuss. Bring your questions for him. September 9 at 8pm ET/5pm PT. Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/1HA3nd_5QFSFzBe_cGiHpw 

This is Bob Hockett’s 12th visit to Macro N Cheese. Back in 2022, in an episode discussing the collapse of the major crypto exchange platform FTX, Bob gave us a useful rule of thumb: 

“The irony is that in every one of these cases there is a clue in the name o...

In our 14th episode with Australian economist Bill Mitchell, the conversation focuses on the MMT perspective on international trade. Bill explains what is meant by the statement “imports are a benefit, and exports are a cost,” where it fits into the history of economic thought, and some of its implications. 

A significant portion of the conversation is dedicated to explaining the crucial shift from the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system to the modern system of floating exchange rates after 1971. Bill clarifies that in a floating regime, a currency-issuing government is not financially constrained in its domestic policy b...

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Remember Labour's stunning defeat in the 2019 UK general election? When, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, they won the lowest number of seats since 1935?   

Steve’s guest, Chris Williamson, brings an insider’s view to the story. Chris is a former MP and shadow minister for UK’s Labour Party. He’s currently deputy leader of the Workers Party of Britain, and hosts a show, Palestine Declassified, that has the notable honor o...

Our friend, physicist and economist Erald Kolasi, stops by the Macro N Cheese clubhouse to talk with Steve about the profound effects of AI on the energy grid, water resources, and societal infrastructure. The discussion focuses primarily on large-scale corporate AI, such as generative AI.

Erald’s work bridges physics, economics, and ecology, revealing how AI’s rapid expansion is not just a technological phenomenon but a biophysical crisis – one that’s easy to overlook. Cloud is such a gentle word. Diaphanous. It sounds harmless. Lovely, even.

**Our weekly online gathering, Macro ‘n Chill is the perfect place to discuss this week’s episode, especially since it includes terminology you might not be familiar with. Or there may be someone who needs your help understanding it. Community-buidling on Tuesday, August 12 at 8pm ET/5pm PT. Use this link to register 

What do you know about blockchain?  Surely you’ve heard our episodes with Brett Scott or the Blockchain Socialist or Rohan Grey. Now we have another one. Steve’s guest is Victor Vernissage, co-founder of the project Humanode, which aims to use blockchain to create a b...

Charles Derber, a sociology professor at Boston College, talks with Steve about his book, 'Bonfire: American Sociocide, Broken Relations and the Quest for Democracy.' Steve suggests the book aligns with his own assessment that US sociocide (social disintegration) demands revolutionary change. Electoral politics are a distraction and a dead end.

The conversation covers the need for a deeper understanding of a system that manufactures and perpetuates inequality. They discuss the historical continuity of fascism as the logical endpoint of capitalism. Indeed, Trump’s presidency has exposed the latent fascist character of the US state, stripping away li...

If we had the power to design our own political system, what would it look like? 

Stanford Professor James Fishkin talks with Steve about deliberative democracy, a method that brings together diverse, representative groups to weigh policy trade-offs in a fact-based, civil environment. He maintains that when people get the chance to discuss issues in depth, they often move away from extremes, suggesting that polarization isn’t as unbreakable as pundits claim. James presents some examples, like how deliberative polling in Texas led to a massive shift toward wind energy. 

Steve acknowledges his skepticism and asks w...

Dr. Charles LeBaron is a retired CDC scientist and the author of Greed to Do Good: The Untold Story of CDC's Disastrous War on Opioids. He talks with Steve about the ill-considered response to the opioid crisis and the tragic and preventable consequences of the CDC’s 2016 guidelines. Restricting prescriptions without providing treatment (whether for pain relief or addiction) drove users to illicit opioids like fentanyl and a surge in overdose deaths.

The conversation expands to systemic issues, including the corporate greed of Big Pharma, political exploitation of the crisis, and the punitive rather than rehabilitative approach to...

**You’re invited to join us Tuesday evening for Macro ‘n Chill, an online gathering where we can listen to and talk about this episode. Tuesday July 15, 8pm ET/5 pm PT

Click here to register

This week we're releasing an interview Steve did as a guest of Jim Byrne, host of MMT101 podcast.

Steve and Jim have much in common, so it’s interesting to hear how their approaches differ. In part, this is related to the conditions of their nationalities. Jim, in Scotland, isn’t faced with the myth of political democracy. They hav...

**Tuesday evenings, we host an online listening party, Macro ‘n Chill, to discuss the current episode. It’s a great way to get to know other members of the community and talk about the ideas expressed in the podcast. Join us this Tuesday, July 8th, at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT Click HERE to register 

Scott Ferguson and Ben Wilson of the Money on the Left collective discuss their ‘Blue Bonds’ proposal with Steve. They explain how states can issue bonds to mitigate the federal austerity measures being enacted under the Trump administration. The conversation explores how this approach c...

Part of our mission is to introduce MMTers to socialism and socialists to MMT. We’ve had a few metaphorical doors slammed in our faces along the way. Former friends from the MMT community now delight in slinging accusations worthy of a HUAC hearing, while some socialists suspect modern monetary theory is just a sideshow of bourgeois economics. So, we didn’t know what to expect when we reached out to Justin and Jeremy, co-hosts of a podcast we’ve long admired. Compared to the vicious rejection we sometimes encounter, their good faith skepticism felt like a warm embrace. They invite...

If civilizations are judged by how they care for their elderly, our report card is already written. Should there be anyone left to judge us – should humanity exist long enough to judge us – we’ve flunked.

Steve’s guest is Judy Karofsky, author of 'DisElderly Conduct: The Flawed Business of Assisted Living and Hospice,' who provides a critical examination of the elder care industry. Judy discusses her own struggles with assisted living facilities and hospice care, highlighting the systemic issues driven by the profit motive and lack of federal oversight. 

Assisted living is meant to be for...

**On Tuesday evening, C. Derick Varn will join us AGAIN for Macro ‘n Chill, our weekly community gathering. While listening to this episode, we will have the opportunity to ask questions and engage in discussion about Part Two. June 17th, 8 pm ET/5 pm PT Click HERE to register 

The second half of Steve’s conversation with Derick Varn goes into the history of the socialist movement from the 1960s to the present.  

Derick traces some of the current factionalism back to the ideological battles between Trotsky and Stalin covered in Part One of this series. This in...

**This Tuesday evening, C. Derick Varn will join us for Macro ‘n Chill, our weekly community gathering. While listening to this episode, folks will have the opportunity to ask questions and engage in discussion. June 10th, 8 pm ET/5 pm PT Click HERE to register 

This episode is the first of a two-part discussion delving into historical splits within socialism. C. Derick Varn, the host of Varn Vlog, has an extensive background in philosophy, anthropology, and history. He takes us from the First and Second Internationals to the ideological divergences of Trotskyism and Stalinism. He also discusses the factions...