Coup Save MMT

Steve’s recent appearance as a guest on Coup Save America, with host Sean St. Heart. MMT from a working-class perspective.

Recently, Steve appeared with host Sean St. Heart on Coup Save America, a weekly podcast committed to breaking through political rhetoric and focusing our attention on the core problems affecting our nation. The episode’s title was Exploring Modern Monetary Theory with Steve Grumbine, but of course it’s almost impossible to limit an MMT conversation to macroeconomics alone. 

From the Coup Save America show notes: 

“’Are Progressives like 8-bit robots walking into walls when it comes to understanding economics?’ 

“Today we welcome special guest Steve Grumbine, founder and CEO of the nonprofits Real Progressives and Real Progress in Action. Steve is here to tell us how Modern Monetary Theory could benefit the working class American – and why it doesn’t. If you think a podcast on economics will be dry and dull, you’ve never heard Steve’s animated and passionate viewpoints on the subject. 

“Steve and Sean start the episode by reflecting upon the most recent presidential debate, then Steve launches right into the truth about our nation’s economy. While explaining the term “austerity” as it relates to macroeconomic models, Steve dispels the myth that if a government spends money on its people, it will cause inflation. We learn about the history of the Federal Reserve and how it works, what the federal deficit actually means, and what taxes really are and why they exist. Steve teaches us the difference between a ‘currency user’ and a ‘currency issuer,’ along with explaining how inflation works and why he hates using the term Modern Monetary Theory. 

“What would an idealistic economic system look like? It comes down to understanding class, power, and the average working man’s lack of agency. As progressives, we sabotage our own agenda by not understanding how economics work. Steve describes our movement’s ignorance as a ‘self-inflicted gunshot wound to the junk,’ and he tries to clear up some of the more common misunderstandings. He talks about the history of capitalism and how the system is now eating itself alive. When you pay interest rates, where does that money go? Is the middle class even a real thing? Steve attests that Modern Monetary Theory could contribute to fixing our society’s problems, but MMT can’t do it alone. How do we make our progressive goals actionable and not just theoretical? Why do progressives go to sleep whenever Democrats are in power rather than demanding real change? 

“Steve does a brilliant ‘Trumper’ impression as he explains how we need to create working class awareness. We (as progressives) need to accept that Medicare can’t work on a state-by-state level, and Steve calls out our dreams of a Universal Basic Income as being ‘batshit, bullshit crazy’ (although there is still hope in the idea of Universal Basic Services). So, how do we solve our economic problems? Listen to learn about ‘outside the nine dots,’ ‘creating dual power,’ and how ‘education and awakening are two different things.’ 

“Other topics include: Giving Biden credit for the CHIPS Act, price gauging during the pandemic, ‘Dude, Where’s My Car,’ and the economic theories of Clara E. Mattei and Jason Hickel.”  

Coup Save America is a weekly talk show hosted by Sean St. Heart that plants the mental seeds of social change by inciting a politically progressive coup of knowledgeable citizens to challenge the status quo.   

coupsaveamerica.com 

@coupsaveamerica on Twitter     

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FULL TRANSCRIPT with EXTRAS

[00:00:42] Steve Grumbine: Hey folks, this is Steve with Macro and Cheese. Last month I went on a show called Coup Save America. I talked to the host, Sean Saint Heart, about some of the basics of Modern Monetary Theory and why this knowledge is such an important part of our political analysis. So this week we're bringing you my appearance on Coup Save America.

I hope you enjoy the episode. Take care.

[00:01:07] Sean St. Heart: I want to introduce you to Steve Grumbine, the true progressive that we can only wish Kamala Harris might someday become. Of course, it's not going to happen. Steve is the founder and CEO of the non profit Real Progressives and Real Progress in Action. He holds a Master of Science in Technology and Innovation, and a Master of Business Administration, and is a Certified Project Manager.

And this expertise has turned Steve into an evangelist for modern monetary theory and working class analysis. Steve also hosts the amazing podcast Macro and Cheese. Here is a yummy description of his show. "Macroeconomics has never been so . . . delish! Macro and Cheese explores the progressive movement through the lens of Modern Monetary Theory with hot and relevant political takes,

spotlights in activism, and the razor sharp musings of Real Progressive's founder and host, Steve Grumbine. This cheese will follow as experts come in for a full four course deep dive into the hot queso. Comfort food for thought!" And with that, my friends, Steve Grumbine joins us right now. Welcome to the show, Steve.

[00:02:14] Steve Grumbine: Hey, thank you for having me on, Sean.

[00:02:16] Sean St. Heart: So, uh, I want to talk to you about the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris for just, for just a moment. What's your take on the debate?

[00:02:24] Steve Grumbine: You know, if you follow much of what I've done, my journey has taken me from being a true blue believer in Bernie Sanders.

I came from, even before that, [I] had a major shift coming from the Republican Party. So when I came to this debate, I came with a totally different world view. And as I listened to the entire thing, the debate itself was just complete and utter theatrical performance. Yes. There was, no substance to it.

The things that were said, though, were very harming because unfortunately, most Americans simply do not have the time or energy to become truly knowledgeable about the world that they live in. And when you hear the things that come out of people that are supposed to be trusted people, I mean, you would like to believe that someone running for president of your country is someone who has integrity. Someone who is telling you the truth. Someone who's looking out for your children and looking out for you [and] would not put them in harm's way, nor yourself. And,

as you listen to this, there was nothing about it that engendered any form of confidence. More cynically, or I consider it more realistically, I believe that it's a political theater. I believe that this is, these two are basically puppets for a larger battle that doesn't involve the working class. Absolutely. I call this the Oligarch Olympics. And there are factions of the capitalist class that are warring behind us, but overall they need us as labor to do the things they want done. And so as I listened to this, it was pathetic. It felt like I was in a high school lunchroom for a little while.

Um, I felt like, you know, I was watching, like a, one of those hidden camera type movies. It was just really, really bad acting. Harris said a bunch of vaporware, focus group tested marketing comments. Donald Trump brought out his textbook - let me see how stupid I can sound 

in 0. 5 seconds. And see how many people out there are so completely disturbed by the system, yet at the same time knows something's wrong, but they think - Hey, here's this guy that's owning the shitlibs so that must mean that he's on our side. So they listen to him and all of a sudden Haitians are eating cats and dogs in the backyard and everything's, you know, it's just craziness.

I've never seen. A presidential debate this bad, except for maybe watching Joe Biden blur his way through his last debate. That was painful. This was, yeah, for me, it wasn't painful. What was painful, if you will, is the work that I do. It's about trying to bring enlightenment to people about the economic system and how it's been used against us. And how we need to understand what they're doing

so that should we ever have agency - should we ever be able to start over - should we ever, somehow or another, seize the means of governing - then maybe we would be able to make the system work appropriately for us. If nothing else, I'd like people to understand how the system really works to radicalize them so they stop buying into the narrative sold to us on these, focus group tested, nonsensical, political, theatrical engagements.

[00:05:39] Sean St. Heart: What is the economic crisis that we're facing? I mean, what is being done to us?

[00:05:45] Steve Grumbine: So you've got to understand capitalism at some level, okay, to get the what's being done to us part. Because, see, that's political economy. You gotta go on the other side of the ledger first. It's more like plumbing.

It's not political economy. It's really - this is how the system goes in and this is how the system goes out - to understand what they're doing. But I'll back my way into that real quickly, and I'll just say - austerity is a tool that capital uses to discipline labor. Austerity is a word that the Europeans know very well.

They've been very used to using the term austerity and an anti-austerity movement. In the US we haven't thought about it that way. But what austerity means is they produce a series of economic rules, or they pass laws, or they cut spending to make life harder on the working class. To make it so that the working class has less options, and to make it so that the suffering working class will do whatever it is that they need them to do. Because, after all, you need to be grateful. You need to eat your peas, as Obama said, right? So what you see now is this lie - and we can get into this - but the idea that they spent money on the pandemic, spent money on the people, so now we have inflation. That's one of the big lies that they tell that is being done to us by saying - Hey, if we spend money on you, it's going to create inflation.

So we can't really spend money on Medicare For All, or a Green New Deal, or free college, or any of these other things. Right? And they're so misrepresented in the way that they're stated. The average progressive is worse than a Republican when they try to describe economics. They don't understand.

Okay, Republicans don't either, but my point is, is that your progressive friends are supposed to be able to be fighting for you. But instead they accidentally end up fighting for austerity. They end up talking about reducing the deficit. Cutting the national debt. They talk about literally reducing spending and why . . . We need to raise taxes!

How are you going to pay for that? All these things they think in their mind, like - Hey, social security, we just have to tax the rich. So then we have social security, everything will be okay. It's like, have you ever once thought where the unit of account for the federal government comes from? Do you think it comes from banks?

No, banks come from a charter from the federal government. Banks don't come and say - Hey, federal government, here's some debt we're going to put on you. That's not how it works. The federal government spoke into existence the Federal Reserve. It created it in 1913 with Congress writing the bill. And there's all kinds of conspiracy stuff about that.

Some of which is probably very legitimate. Doesn't matter. The system still operates the way it operates. Right? And so our government, it literally has the ability, and not just the ability, this is how it works. Our government, when it writes a bill, spends money into existence. And when it taxes, it taxes money out of existence.

So if I spend $10 into the economy, But I tax back $8 of them, then it leaves $2 dollars in the economy. Let's raise that to trillions. If I spend $200 billion, $500 billion, a trillion into the economy and tax back $800 billion, there's $200 billion left in the economy. And that's the deficit - the difference between what we tax and the difference between what we spend.

But deficits are an annual measure. The money from that deficit stays in the economy until it returns back as a tax. So imagine - since the start of the nation - every time we spend money we will often sell bonds. We don't have to sell bonds. We create it out of thin air. Keystrokes. You know, your keyboard -

what creates that money right there, okay? And our constitution gives it authority to do so. Article one, section eight says that the power of the purse belongs to Congress. And article one, section ten says that states cannot create their own currency. Only the federal government can. So the federal government, Congress, is the one who has the power. And money is created by fiat - by law - okay? By decree. 

And so when Congress writes a bill and it's signed off by the president, that money is typed in by the Federal Reserve into the Treasury's account. It's just [done] with a keyboard. Treasury spends that money [into] wherever it's going. So if the bill that they passed is an $800 billion dollar deal to Halliburton, or to Boeing, or to one of these other war manufacturers, they will go ahead and put that money into the Treasury's account. Treasury will send payments out and - voila!

You just, quote unquote, printed money. But that's what we do every time. So when you get social security, they say - Oh my God, social security is going broke! How could it possibly go broke? It's money created by the federal government. Well, no, I pay this FICA tax. Yeah. All federal taxes, be it FICA, be it any other, are literally deleted from the ledger. Because all that happens in a fiat system is the government spends new money into the economy and it taxes away some of it and it deletes it.

It purges it. It doesn't need it. Imagine you're the, general manager of a pizzeria at the mall and you want to drive traffic to your business. You might stand out in the parking lot handing out 50 cent coupons. When the people in the parking lot come in with their 50 cent coupon to get your pizza, are you like hoarding those coupons because you need those coupons?

No! You freaking throw them in the trash! They did their purpose. They were redeemed. Taxes are for redemption not for revenue at the federal level. And so all the lies that we're told every day . . . The entire, debate was filled with moronic, economically illiterate lies that they're counting on us to be uneducated and ignorant and just go with the flow.

 And we, by definition, give it legitimacy because we're at the water cooler and we tell our friends. And we tell our other family members. And we talk about - nothing in this life is free - and we facilitate all these lies. And this is capitalism, right? This is what capitalism does. And to take it a step further, and we can talk more about this because we need to talk more about this.

The United States is exporting this neoliberal framework around the world wherever there's public services. You look at the National Health Service in the UK. You look at Australia's National Health Service. All the countries in Europe, etc. Israel, okay? All of these folks have " socialized medicine," right?

They have government paid healthcare. And so when you think about in the United States, we're told - Oh no, where are you going to find the money for that? How are you going to afford that? But everyone else understands, at least at some level, that it's public money. But, years ago in the '80s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher poisoned the water with telling everyone there is no such thing as public money.

There is only taxpayer dollars. So when I hear well-meaning progressives talk about your hard earned tax dollars. Or, I don't want my tax dollars going to Israel. I don't want my tax dollars going to - Pick your icky poison. I don't want it to go to abortion. I don't want it to go to you lazy whatever's, right? All these things. This is playing on a lie because your taxes never went anywhere. Taxes are never respent. I use some terminology that I like to say - A government spent dollar is only spent once and then it circles through the economy. Spent a million times in the economy. But when it comes back to the government, the government never respends it.

It deletes it. It's done. It's done its job. The dark and light crystal that came together. If there's a reserve that was in the inner banking system, and then there's that dollar floating around in the economy. And that dollar isn't necessarily paper. Isn't necessarily a coin. It's a digital dollar. It's just a representation.

It's a unit of account. In other words, it's an inch. Or a pound. A meter. Whatever. A dollar. How do rich people measure themselves? By the number of units that they have, right? And they measure themselves by assets and other things, but all it is is a measure. A unit of measure. And it's a legal unit of measure.

This is why Bitcoin could never overtake the dollar because the dollar is backed by the tax. Not the tax to pay for things, but the tax that's payable only in the currency of the nation state. So in other words, why does our currency hold up? Because we tax in it. If we lost the ability to tax like the Confederacy did, we could have hyperinflation.

That's a real - I've lost confidence in this unit of account - it serves no purpose. This is what happened to Greece back in the day. Greece could not maintain their tax base, not to pay for things, but just to keep their currency useful. To keep it mattering to the people. And so that tax is what drives, so you say we have tax driven money.

Right? Now all this to say, back to the debate, they sold us this idea that Donald Trump's plan. She has that nasal sound. Donald Trump's plan - they say at Wharton Business School - will blow a hole in the deficit. It will blow a hole in the economy. It will create a recession, blah, blah, blah.

What happens when we raise taxes? You take money out of the economy. So you end up with a money famine, especially when you hit the regular Jane and Joe six pack on the streets. The wealthy? They never have to care. They don't care what the game is. They just keep making money. They just keep winning. And so I think it's important to understand that this lie

of what taxes are for - how we fund our programs - how money is spent into existence - versus all - they're just going to print more money. Every time they spend - every single tank - every single plane - every single gift to Israel - every single bomb - every single bit of healthcare - every single roadway - tax money had nothing to do with it.

Now at the state and local level, that's a very different story. So there's currency issuers. Currency users. States are currency users. Cities are currency users. We're currency users. Businesses are currency users. The federal government is a currency issuer and has delegated some authority through the fiat system to the Federal Reserve.

It has provided charters to banks that they can, you know, pull away, they could change, they can do anything they want because it's all controlled by law. Fiat by the sovereign, which is the United States government. So that's the short and long of that.

[00:16:20] Sean St. Heart: I'm a little confused on the taxes issue.

Sure. So are you saying that we don't technically even need taxes at the federal level.

[00:16:28] Steve Grumbine: You need a suitable anchor that causes an obligation. That could be done through taxation. It's done through other things too. We pay fines, fees, and penalties to the police. Pretty much everything that we do in this country that has to do with the government requires you pay a $50 fee.

Think about the income tax. It's all meant to create tension. That means we have to keep that dollar. So it is more of an anchor, more of a cage, more of a - you can't do anything without this dollar - right? Bitcoin sounded great in theory. The problem is Bitcoin is completely backed by fiat because how many dollars of Bitcoin do you have?

You know what I mean? At the end of the day - you know how we have green screens for our studios and stuff like that? Imagine the US dollar, or the Russian ruble, or the Chinese yuan, or the Australian dollar, or the Japanese yen, et cetera, in a greenscreen suit holding up Bitcoin like this . . . privately . . . You don't see them because they're the green screen . . . But that's what Fiat does.

And the wealthy know that. And so they hold these things and they wait until they fill up like a Ponzi scheme. Then they dump. And they take it all out in US dollars. Or maybe they buy another crypto at that point, and they do the same thing again. But the bottom line is, is that these are like envelopes full of fiat currency.

And when they're propped up and they're bloated enough, that's when they dump. And that's when you see the bottom fall out every, what, six months, eight months, and Bitcoin and all the different. . . . they all drop out. Why? You can't use that as a currency. There's no way to really use that as a national currency.

There's no price stability. There's no value stability. It's like a sine wave. So in order for you to have a functioning economy, you need to have some relative value set that you can trade in, that you can understand the world around you. These investor guys, they love gambling. So this is fun for them.

But when it comes to regular people that want to go and pay their electric bill. Want to go ahead and buy a loaf of bread. Want to fill their gas tank up. Whatever it is that they have to do to maintain their normal life, okay? They need some predictability. They need that standard. And so the US dollar, even with the little teeny bit of inflation we got, and it's a lot to us because we don't make more,

they've taken more. And now what do we do? Right. And we'll get into that in a minute. Cause that's a really big deal. That's another, what did they do to you moment, right? So with inflation, they've got us believing that they've spent all this money on it and it created inflation. Well, you got to ask yourself what creates inflation?

What are the sources of inflation? Now you ask a libertarian, they're going to tell you that inflation is always created by government spending. Well, if that's the case, we're in real trouble, aren't we? Because every time the government spends its unit of account into the economy, which is all the time, every day is inflationary, right?

Well, they tax away some and the amount of currency is like this. It's like always ebbing and flowing. There's no - we got this much money in the economy. It's ebbing and flowing. Right? And what they've done is, by giving agency to banks to give loans, now you've got private debt in the mix.

Okay. Now you've got a whole host of other financial instruments that can be used in a host of different ways. But ultimately, think about the pandemic. What happened during the pandemic to create inflation? So we would go to Walmart or wherever you're going shopping because Walmart has gobbled up all the local stores, right?

Go into Walmart you go back into the back area where the toilet paper is and you look on the shelves and there's no toilet paper. Oh my god. Where's the toilet paper? And you go out there and you're like, I don't know where the toilet paper is. It's like, well, they didn't produce enough toilet paper and somebody just bought 10 rolls of it.

So there's no more toilet paper for any of us. Right? So this is a supply chain issue. So how would you solve a supply chain issue if that's creating inflation? Might you fix a supply chain? Might you find an alternative producer? That's what the problem is. It has nothing to do with printing money.

Okay? So why would we see all these other prices go up through the pandemic, right? Well, what we found is that sellers inflation was a real thing. Because we have signals that we have all been trained to think in - Hey, they just spent all this money. It must be inflationary. Businesses know that. And what did businesses do? 

They sit there in a back room and they say - Hmm, what price point do we want on our latest gadget? And all of a sudden they say - Well, there's going to be a new $2 a month premium on your Netflix account. Hey, there's going to be a new . . . whatever. And we've been taught, I have an MBA, we've been taught that the cost of production plus labor and all these things, that is what creates the price.

Right? But if you took a marketing class, you know there's the four P's of marketing, right? Product, placement, pricing, and, uh, [promotion] I can't remember the other one, but there's the four P's of marketing. Look it up. And you understand that price is something they choose. So years ago - you and I looked like we might be about the same age, give or take -

so let's think about when the very first PlayStation came out back in the, you know, the, the early, what was it early nineties, I think it was. You go to a Best Buy. And you sit out there in the parking lot at 3 a. m. Right. To get in line so that you can get the new PlayStation. They handed out tickets so each one of you can only get one of them.

But when those tickets were gone, everybody was like - Oh no, I'm not going to get a PlayStation. The guy in line goes, I'll sell you one . . . For a $100 markup or a $200 markup, right? So they control this by making a scarcity of the product, right? And then they drive the cost up. Once they drive the cost up, now you've got inflation.

The other way this happens is the government. When the government - you remember how I told you government spends money into existence? They don't print money. They spend it into existence - And so when they spend it into existence, let's say I have always spent $10 for a hammer. Let's say I always buy hammers at $10.

That's the, the rate card. And that's what we're keeping prices set at because that's the wholesale. I've spent the first dollar into the economy on a hammer and I've paid $10 for that hammer. Well, then, the company marks it up. They pay their employees a part of that $10, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But what if the government decides to spend $15 on a hammer now?

So now the government has, in essence, created the only form of real inflation because they're the one, the first dollar paid for it to be higher price. Right now they're paying a higher price. Let's say they choose to pay a higher price for petroleum products. They can go get an alternative producer.

They can produce it themselves. They can go, whatever. But the price that they pay, if the person producing the goods says - Well, I'm going to raise the price up. And the government doesn't have leverage and it says - Okay, well, we'll pay that price. We all pay that price. And when we pay more, right, cause there's going to be all the overhead for labor and everything else.

So what the government does is they sell us this lie that they're going to raise interest rates to tame inflation. Well, what is raising interest rates do to the cost of these goods? It raises them up, right? I mean, the cost of credit now it's gone up. So inflation is a function of interest rates as well.

Okay. So when they say we're going to stop inflation by raising interest rates, what they're saying is - we're going to kill the economy. We're going to make it so you can't afford these things. And then when they don't make enough money because you can't afford them, they're going to lay you off. And when more [people] are laid off - people and Larry Summers was talking about, we need to lay 10, 000 people, 10 million people off, blah, blah, blah -

All of these things. Crazy, right? He's sitting there saying, we've got to lay people off. Well, that's simply not true. And to Biden's credit, and I won't give it very often, but to Biden's credit, that CHIPS Act - it was about bringing production of those microchips back to the US - and that was really important because with that supply chain being global, any break in there was creating cost increases. Was creating delays. Was creating problems.

So by doing that, this is the way you solve that kind of inflation when it's a supply issue. Supply side issues. You increase production period. That's the way you do it. if it's because the length of time of production is too much, then you find a way to increase efficiency. But it's not about printing money.

Right. but that's the thing all of us are told is that they printed money. So we got inflation. So the other thing, and this goes back to the seller's inflation, a great economist named Isabella Weber. I don't share her politics, but her economics are pretty damn good. She said, and made a great case that these businesses understood the signaling. 

They understood that people thought - Hey, there's inflation. So these sellers, these companies raised prices ridiculously. There was an article in The Guardian some time ago that showed there were businesses that made a thousand percent profit During the pandemic, a thousand percent. And the reason was because they were able to price gouge.

They were able to literally take, you know, PPP loans that they didn't have to pay back. They were able to do all kinds of crazy stuff. And they were able to charge exorbitant prices based on the idea - Oh, we got supply chain issues or, Oh, we don't have enough employees. Oh, we got to do that. So there was a bunch of stuff going on there, but none of it, zero percent of it had anything to do with printing money.

So I want to give one more point and then I'll yield. [But] the big thing with Modern Monetary Theory [MMT], which is what I talk about. I hate using the term even because I think people get this thing in their head that makes them think - Oh, I think I know what you're talking about. You don't. You don't know what I'm talking about.

Right? Most of the time people just don't, they've heard something from somewhere and it's always wrong. There's answers out there, but they don't seek them. And so when I think of, you know, what you would look at with a modern monetary economy, the issue is always, do we have the real resources? Because the government could afford to pay any price once it creates the currency. It's never broke. It can never go broke unless they have some political choice where they say, Hey, we're not going to pay our bills. Like these debt ceiling games they play. Relitigating past legislation, right? But reality is we create the currency. Period. Full stop. End of story.

We spend that money into existence. If we wanted to give everybody $5, 000 a month in social security, there's no [financial] reason we couldn't. Other than, would there be the real resources available for production if people had all this extra money in hand? Is there an economy backing it that can absorb that spend?

And that's when you start getting into inflationary problems, because now what you've done is you've spent past your productive capacity. That is not about printing money. That is about productive capacity. So yes, MMT says real resources are the - what's the word I'm looking for - the guardrails to spending.

That's kind of the constraint there is real [resources]. That could be labor. Do we have enough workers? If we don't have enough workers, and you know, a lot of times I'm hearing - Hey, there's not enough doctors and not enough nurses, right? How do you get doctors and nurses? You train them. You make a decision to fund the education of doctors and nurses.

So what would prevent us from giving Medicare For All to everyone? Well, Medicare For All, interestingly enough, is a deflationary event. Medicare For All literally cuts out a lot of work. A lot of work that was built to prevent people from getting service. All these layers of marketing that all these insurance companies put out there, all that stuff is real GDP in the economy.

Somebody's earning because one person's spending is another person's income. So when that dries up, guess what? Now you're left with a recessionary pressure because you've reduced spending. You've reduced input to the economy. Okay? So what would you do if you've reduced economic output? You reduce taxes.

So for Medicare For All, this is why progressives fail this one miserably as well, you would actually want to cut taxes. Progressives like, I'm willing to pay more for somebody to have health insurance. Of course I am. Sounds really great, right? They're a noble person. I'll spend more. But the reality is it's not the way it works.

And guys like me have been screaming in the pillows now for 15 years. Trying to get people to understand. And they just keep going like - you know, there's eight bit robots in the old video games. They don't even move. They just march right up against the wall - That's the progressive movement when it comes to economics.

It's devastating. We're our own worst enemies. I always call it a, uh, a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the junk. I mean, this is the stupid stuff we do because we're just uneducated. And we think we're smart. We think we're educated. We think we're the smart ones in the room. But the reality is, is that we don't understand economics.

So everything we say after that point is complete bullshit. And so this is why our own are just as dangerous to us as Republicans, because they think they know what they're doing. And so therefore, they're a full cup and they don't listen. They just reject the information out of hand, and they go along accidentally parroting right wing economic talking points.

How funny is that?

[00:30:07] Sean St. Heart: I'm probably guilty of doing that myself.

[00:30:09] Steve Grumbine: Well, change that.

[00:30:11] Sean St. Heart: How would a modern monetary economy look.

[00:30:17] Steve Grumbine: Like it does now. Really, in fairness, we are living an MMT existence now with buffoons. Actually, that's too nice. If I said it was buffoons running it, that would be like, they're just hapless people that don't understand. But they do understand. And there's a lot of debate because there's a group of people, there's probably eight, -tenths, right?

Or, most of four-fifths of the entire MMT movement believes that, if the politicians just understood. If government just understood the way it worked, you know? But you look at guys like Richard Wolff, who is a hero amongst the Left, right? Richard Wolff says the federal government borrows from corporations to pay bills.

With all due respect. Richard. Stay in co-ops, brother. Leave the macro to the adults. Love him to death. He's got so many good ideas. But once he says that, he has tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people that hang on his words. And so now what happens? Now you're in a debate with somebody, trying to help them understand the way federal finance works.

Well, Richard Wolff said . . . And it's over. Because Richard Wolff holds more water than you do. You're just a nobody. Why should I listen to you? I say well good news. I'm just a messenger. I'm John the Baptist. I'm not the Christ. I'm telling you this is what these experts are saying and they know their shit. So we are stuck in this weird kind of credentialism-kind of appeals to authority . . . I don't know what I'm saying.

So my authority is better than your authority. Let's piss on each other and have a day of it. But in reality, this is very easy to trace and understand once you start really laying the blocking and tackling out. And most people are not going to expend the energy to do that. They're just going to say, well, it's good enough for Richard's good enough for me.

And they're going to keep parroting my hard earned tax dollars or paying for whatever. Now think about this. You're a Republican and you hate all these gay people and you hate these immigrants and you don't want these people. You don't like those people and blah, blah, blah. They're stealing my hard earned tax dollars on and on and on.

Now you got progressives over here saying, well, I want my tax dollars going to this. And that Republican goes, Ooh, they're trying to steal my tax dollars for their immoral trans people and their immoral gay people and their immoral abortion, baby killers. They want to take my hard earned tax dollars. you see how this whole game works.

And now you've got this thing, that's Spider Man meme where they're pointing at each other. But it's not real. It's that other one where the, rich guy has a pile of cookies here and he gives a cookie to the one guy and he looks at the other guy and he goes - Hey, he's taking your cookie. Even though he's got a pile of cookies right there, right?

The difference is, is that the government, which is supposed to be, we, the people by the people for the people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is not serving we the people.

We don't, we don't even have agency.

Would you vote? I mean, like just seriously, like I remember the debates where it was Reagan and, what's his name?

Oh my God, Paul Tsongas and others from the early nineties. Even Ross Perot. Big sucking sound, right? I mean, he had it going on when it came to these free trade agreements. He understood. We don't have real debates anymore. Right? Haitians eating cats is a debate issue at a presidential level?

Are you kidding me? Not one mention of genocide. Not one mention of anything. It was just complete and utter garbage. So to convince yourself that if I just vote for Kamala, I save democracy and, therefore, now I have the ability to leverage all my knowledge of Modern Monetary Theory and I'm going to give you a green new deal!

No. You've got to understand class and power now. Now we enter into a new realm. MMT is 100 percent correct. I mean, literally it is a spot on to the nickel, to the penny, to the ha'penny, description of how a fiat system works. It is literally airtight. It is phenomenally detailed.

It knows its shit. However, where it goes awry is that they're teaching a theoretical way of talking about this, right? They're telling you the truth. The system works this way. What they're not saying, because they're not political scientists, right, is that in this "representative Republic", we don't live in a democracy to begin with. right? In this representative republic, the laws and all the framework for our country's institutions, you name it, was drafted up by wealthy white landowners. We are a colonial project. We have always been a colonial project. And after World War Two, we became the global hegemon because we had watched Europe get bombed to hell and back and their productive capacity was completely diminished.

So the US took on that role. And they created things like the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. The World Bank. They created the Peace Corps. They created all these different things that were there to counter the Red Scare of Joseph Stalin. And this fear mongering of Soviets, and fear mongering of communism, fear mongering of the Bolsheviks, fear mongering of workers empowerment.

And you watched in that moment. Ever since then you have never seen labor continually diminish. The power we had as a nation, as people, is literally a fairy tale from yesteryear. We talk about the American dream. There is no real American dream. It is American nightmare. And what we're dealing with is the facade, the veneer of a democracy, and they do enough to make us feel like - yeah, we voted.

They counted the votes. Look, they really counted the votes. Honestly, we can trace it. They counted the votes, but there is layer upon layer - upon layer - upon parliamentarian - upon superdelegate - upon electoral college - upon, upon, upon. And a rotating villain, like a [Kyrsten] Synema, a [Joe] Manchin, whoever. There's always a bulwark against popular democracy.

And so when you think about it, Modern Monetary Theory is like on this other side of a glass wall. You're looking through. You're like, I see it. I know it's the promised land, but it's soundproof glass. I can see, but I can't feel. I can't do anything about it.

So there's a great author named Clara Mattei. Clara Mattei is a socialist. And she's a historian. And she's an economics teacher, professor, at the New School. And she wrote a book called The Capital Order - How Economists Invented Austerity, okay? Austerity was codified into law back during the Great Depression and coupled with the Bolshevik Revolution. 

Why? The world was falling apart. This is why the Federal Reserve was created in their minds, you know, to bring about price stability and full employment and all these mandates that went into the bill, blah, blah, blah. What has happened was they didn't have some of these things to protect the savings institutions.

And people were literally just living drunk off of finance capital. Okay. And the whole thing came crashing down. At that point in time, FDR in 1929 could have done a lot of different things. But what did they do?

They threw a hail Mary to save capitalism and they created austerity, okay? So all these things that came out of the New Deal, uh, all these things that came out of that time period were just bargains with capital. Because they were trying to save capitalism because, at that time, capitalism was not so old, right?

Capitalism is not some forever thing. It's a relatively new construct in the world history, okay. It was one of those things where Capitalism was still serving a good many, you know, things. I mean, even Marx said that, you know, these things would work out in the beginning, but the contradictions would grow so great that we would have to change it out, eventually,

right? And that's what we're seeing now. We're at, I hate the term end stage capitalism, but capitalism has kind of gone on a way that's devoured itself and it's eating itself alive. And it's not eating up all the public safety and public services because they privatize. That's the way capitalism survives - is to privatize things that were once public, turning them private.

And now, capitalism has a new market to deal with. They create these markets for surveillance capitalism. They create these markets for private prisons. They create markets for, the drug industry. Everything you can think of that was once public as termed private is all about the profit motive and expanding capitalism.

So what happens when you run out of all this production? You do it on the global South. So we've got the long arm of the US empire through the IMF giving these sweetheart deals. They're not sweetheart deals at all, by the way. They're destruction with structural adjustments and everything else put down to, like, Chile and, Venezuela and Brazil and Argentina and Africa in particular.

So the US is able to survive and thrive by extraction from the world, austerity at home, and ensuring only the rich get the benefits.

I want to say one more thing about the interest rates. When you pay higher interest, that money goes somewhere. Where do you think interest goes? It goes to people who already have money.

So the people that are holding bonds. The people that are holding savings accounts in the markets, and so forth. Those people saw their money go through the roof. Now, why is this a problem? Because, hey, after all, right, rich people are expanding their wealth exponentially, but so are poor people, kind of. Pensioners have their money in bonds. These pension plans put bonds, buy bonds to protect them from market fluctuations. They do all sorts of stuff. Cities and states invest in bonds so they have rainy day funds if the tax base dries up. There's so many things that go on that make bonds necessary.

So by raising the bonds, raising interest rates, you create a whole new form of inequality. Those who have money, make money. Those who don't have money get poorer and poorer and poorer. Prices go up. They get less money. The wealthy get more money. And then you got Kamala Harris in the debate the other night talking about how the middle class, these policies are for the middle class.

And the middle class is a construct of capitalism because the only classes there really are is the working class, the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. I mean, really, we're . . . and the merchant class, I guess you could throw in there, too. I mean, you go back to feudalism. You had those who fought, those who prayed and those who worked.

That was the three classes. You know, the clergy, whatever, the warriors, and then you had the people that were just worker grunts. But they all worked together. Because those who prayed, prayed for the poor, prayed for the Warriors. Those who worked made sure that the clergy ate and that the warriors were fed and clothed and whatnot.

And those who fought made sure that the clergy was safe and the people were safe. And that's kind of the, give and take, if you will, of feudalism. But, now it's kinda like a neofeudal state. There's only a few that are benefiting and the rest are suffering miserably.

So MMT can show us how to fix that. But it leaves out, and this is because it's not a theory of everything, it's a theory of economics. You need a political theory, a theory of change, to ride with MMT to make this matter. And that's why we introduce it at Real Progressives and Macro and Cheese. That's why we bring class to the picture.

We're not academics. We're talking to activists who want to make this stuff actionable, not just theoretical. And so that's why we have to bring the working class analysis in, as well.

[00:42:27] Sean St. Heart: And how do we do that? The divides in this country are so great that you've got workers literally fighting against their own interests.

Fighting against each other. How do we break through and create a political action that results in change? Because it seems like the whole thing is just collapsing.

[00:42:46] Steve Grumbine: I think this is tough, right? Because you don't want to appear as a nihilist. You don't want to appear as somebody who has lost their brains.

You know - oh, they're crazy. They're out there. Whatever. But I think they always tell you trust your eyes. Trust what you see. Look into what you're seeing, right? Don't just write it off because it doesn't match a narrative you wanted to be true. Actually look and see. And over the last, I don't know, I'm 55,

so I look back in time and I say - we've not gotten any of the things ever, yeah, ever, ever. Not some, ever. So, show me your democracy that's serving the people. I keep wondering, who are they serving? Because when Democrats are in power, they go back to sleep. The voters go back to sleep. And the people in power do Republican things, but they say it more nicely.

Yep. However, when Republicans are in office, Democrats suddenly remember - Hey, what about a green new deal? And what about Medicare For All? And, we can't do it right now. There's no way. But what about these things? Hey, you guys. So you have to see that and you have to ask that crazy question from the movie - Dude, Where's My Car? –

When Ashton Kutcher is at the Chinese restaurant takeout window and he goes, I'll take this. And she goes, and then? He goes, ah, and then put it in a bag and give it to me. And then? You know, and it's like, you got to ask yourself, and then? So if you're on a Metro, a subway, and you always get off at the third stop

and you never look to see what's at the next 15 stops, you think that the subway ends on the third stop. But the reality is, you have to ask yourself - if you don't have a political agency within the political system that supposedly governs you - you have to say, and then? And so people aren't doing that. They go, well, what do you want, Trump?

That's the shunting of the brain. The brain shunts off right there. And it just goes back - What do you want, Trump? Trump? What do you want, Trump? What do you want, Trump? What are you, a Trumper? Yeah, you know. And that tiny, what is it? T, little T, big R, rump - tRump. You know, you know, Donnie, tiny hands, whatever. After a while, orange man bad stops resonating when your teeth are falling out of your mouth. And you start saying, well, how come all these crazy kooky, white folk - these poor white folks - are supporting Trump?

They're voting against their interests. They don't know any of what I just said. Everything that I just said probably sounds like I'm crazier than hell. But, I assure you, I could take you through everything I said. Boom, boom, boom, boom, like, it's not even speculation. This is this academic.

It's theoretical. It's legal. It's all the above. It's well understood. Good condensed analysis. And so you think to yourself, they're saying, I hear quote, unquote, shitlibs, making it easier for trans people, making it easier for immigrants. What about me? I need something. You haven't taken care of me.

You just keep saying how white people are bad. We're bad. It's all we hear. So they are just like reflexively saying - Hey, you're shitting on my God. You're shitting on my country. You're shitting on my flag. You're shit, you know, and all - it's these damn Mexicans, these damn immigrants coming into this country. Damn queers and this and that, these, this . . .

And you know, and if you're lost and you don't know what's going on. And you're being fed propaganda and you don't understand the way the system really works? You can certainly feel a modicum of sympathy for the Trumpers. Because they're being misled, they're being used. But they're not being used for any kind of power play.

It's not like they're doing anything for them. What's happening is they're being used to keep the working class fighting one another. Distracted on things that are irrelevant, mean nothing, like Haitians eating your neighbor's cat, right? That kind of nonsense will keep them going for years. We got to build a wall down in Mexico.

Well, now Kamala wants to build a bigger wall. She wants to out-trump Trump, right? I mean, after a while, you understand why these people - they're like - I don't know . . . What do you want, Harris? I mean, you can hear them saying the same thing. What do you want, Biden? And, th' . . . You just feel like a ping pong ball. And I'm not talking about me, because I'm out.

I don't buy into any of it, right? This is not, I know that there's no hope in dope, so to speak. There's no hope in this. This is a dead end. So your question was, how do we create this working class awareness? And the problem is you need to be vigilant and making people look. I mean, look at the thing.

Look at this. Did you vote for genocide, Sean? Did you vote? You know what I'm saying? Did you vote for that war? Did you vote for cutting spending? I mean, think about this. This is one of the big ones. Let me tell you one of the worst, most awful things. Two major plans that progressive activists get hung up on because they're so easily economically challenged that they fail every time. But they don't care because as long as everybody's doing it, they'll go with the herd.

Right? One of them is state-by-state Medicare [For All]. How many people do you know? Calcare! New York care! Washington care - you know - Whole Washington! This, that, and the other, right? And you say to yourself, well, since you want to do it at the state level, how are you going to pay for that? Cause I could tell you right now,

if you have a pandemic, you're screwed. If you have people that are in a state bordering yours that don't have healthcare like that, and realize that right across the state line, you do have healthcare like that. All of a sudden, you're going to get an influx of people trying to get healthcare. And guess what?

Now, all of a sudden the state, which doesn't have enough revenue, it's called the CAFR [Comprehensive Annual Financial Report] report - which is the annual financial report of every state - they have to turn it in to the government to let them know how many rainy days they could survive with a tax shut down. Do they have resources to survive their pension?

How much is their pension? State pensions funded, on and on and on. Most states don't have 30 days backup. I mean, there's some states that are well off, but most aren't. So the idea of selling state-by-state health care is another bounced check. It's another false hope, right? Then the other thing is the UBI [Universal Basic Income]. 

I see so many friends pushing for a UBI. So many friends that don't understand what a UBI actually is. Now, if I give you, Sean, $10, but you don't have a house. You don't have food. You don't have healthcare. You don't have transportation. You're unsafe. Your kids are unsafe. How much money is it going to take for me to give you that?

Right? Right. Well, what happens when I just give you money without production to back up that money? Now you really are dealing with an inflationary situation. Now you're dealing with a situation where I've given you buying power, but it has not increased supply. And more importantly, what happens to businesses that are already giving wages out that are substandard.

They're going to subsidize shit wages with your UBI. And what did I tell you at the beginning of this thing? What businesses see money is out there, what do businesses do? When they do their four P's of marketing and they look at the pricing they want, they're looking at absorbable expendable income. And they want to know how much of that pie they can grab with their product. 

And so now you end up with middlemen and , like, PayPal taking a fee. You end up with the next mid-level skimmer in the middle of the transaction, skimming a fee. And all of a sudden, before long, the money that you had is swallowed up. And everybody's prices have gone up, right? Now, what's the worst thing that could happen?

Let's say, I say I'm a libertarian. I say here, take a thousand dollars because the libertarians, Milton Friedman, one of the Kings of the school of idiocy was a big UBI guy. His negative income tax or helicopter money. And what he thought was the only problem with capitalism is we need more capitalism.

And so by dumping money on the problem, we'll solve this problem. Well, wrong. The capitalists get money because you're spending is their income. But what do you get? You don't know. The only guarantee you had is you had pieces of paper in your hand. Nobody gave you healthcare. Nobody gave you transportation.

Nobody gave you education. Nobody gave you help. Nothing. So you better hope you are a damn thrifty little homeless person that knows how to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies. And knows how to negotiate with colleges. And knows how to negotiate with realtors, and everybody else. Because that amount of money? They're all fighting to get more of it. They're all, they know that there's loose money out there.

That's their job - to maximize shareholder value in a capitalist economy. Real Progressives and people like Jason Hickel, and Jason Hickel is a remarkable economist slash anthropologist. Brilliant South African guy. One of my favorite thought leaders in this space. 

And what Jason Hickel talks about is the dual purpose of democratic socialism. Which is universal basic services. So if I provide you from the government, if I provide you the service, do you care how much it costs the government?

[00:51:58] Sean St. Heart: Yeah, no,

[00:51:59] Steve Grumbine: No. If the cost goes up $10 per person, do you care? No.

Why? Because the currency issuers fund the issue. They're funding it. You're getting the service. The government's just simply paying it. That's why when you say single-payer, the federal government makes the payment. So the people are getting paid. Their work is getting paid.

Whatever they're selling you is getting compensated. But you, as a citizen, are getting a service. Who wins there? Everybody, right? But in this case, because the UBI people don't understand this stuff, it's filled with good intentions and all kinds of great ideas, but it's full of stupidity. It's full of economic illiteracy born from the most heart-wrenching, wonderful desires for everybody to be made whole.

They want people to be whole. But they assume it comes with money. But money isn't the real thing. The real thing - if I charge you $1,001 for your healthcare plan, but your UBI is only $1,000, what are you doing now? What happens? Are you going to get a subsidized shit wage from a gig economy? Because that's what's going to happen also, the rotten gig economy has already taken us all by storm, right? 

We're all trying to find a side hustle to survive. So what happens when you have a UBI? Now it's nothing but side hustles. Now it's nothing but Gig economy. And so this is why it's a libertarian paradise. For everybody else that's not a libertarian it's a hellscape. So UBI is a Trojan horse brought to you by libertarian logic that says - Hey, here's some money.

It'll fix everything. And in these little teeny pilots that they do, remember they're pilots, they're not universal. And they're not coming from the currency issuer. So none of the tests they're doing actually married a real world events. None of it. It's all not real. It's all not the way it works.

So if I give somebody in some small little town - and the rest of the world's still functioning as it does - you won't ever be able to really tell what the outcome of providing a universal, unconditional basic income is. Will we give people more money? Like, for example, social security?

It could be modified. It's a law. We can modify anything we want to. We could eliminate FICA [Federal Insurance Contribution Act] [tax], altogether, FICA was a creation by FDR meant to stave off a political battle. It's a political economy. It's not economics. It's a political economy. If you're skin in the game by paying into FICA, now people are going to fight.

They're going to say - Hey, hands off my social security, right? Right. But if you notice, the Republicans and the Democrats have used this as a weapon. Because they know that if they fully fund Social Security, that you will never, ever, ever have a chance of privatizing Social Security. And privatization is the only thing they care about because that's the next frontier with capitalism.

It's got to eat away the public space. The public space has to be eradicated. The libertarian paradise. Eliminate all public services, all public protections, all public works, everything. Eliminate it. And we will find a way to build a market around it. And then we'll build sub markets in it. And then we'll build more markets in it and then we'll automate them and nobody will have jobs, but rich people will get richer and you guys will have to pay the price.

So this is why a UBI, on so many levels, is just batshit bullshit, crazy. Libertarian bullshit that made it into the progressive movement. And if I could find the source, that patient zero that brought that trash into the movement, that would be a good let me go back in time and fix that fuck up. You know, I would definitely go right back to it and say, dude, you have no standing here.

Get the hell out of here. The other thing that Hudson, Michael Hudson talks about, which I think is interesting. Uh, Michael Hudson is not an MMTer or, though he would claim to be an MMTer, Michael Hudson is a Michael Hudson economist. He's heterodox. He touches on MMT at times, but he's got his own way of thinking, 

right? But what Michael Hudson does is talks about the history of money. And he talks a lot about days of Jubilee, and the Bible, and the fact that they used to do debt forgiveness. Massive debt forgiveness. And they knew that they had to do this because, even then, Kings and Queens, what did they do? 

They put out little coins with Caesar's face on it, right? And what did they do? They got it sent back to them [in taxes]. Well, back in the day, those gold coins, what did they do if they didn't have enough gold to expand the economy? They go out there and fricking start a war. Get all the gold from the the nation that they just took it from. And more, you know coins, right?

I want you to go back to the dawn of time. That's not the dawn of time, but the dawn of kind of like fiat currencies. The king would go to the peasant and say - Hey, I want you to build a, uh, an aqueduct. And the guy would say, yeah, you know, I don't really feel all that interested in building an aqueduct.

How about build a road? Eh, not interested. I'm here. I'm spending time with the family. I'm fishing. I'm picking potatoes out of the field. I'm okay. I see your point. How about if I give you one of these coins? He goes, well, what am I going to do with that coin? What do I need your coin for? Ah, that's a good point.

He goes, how about this? What if I put a 10 coin tax on your hut that you live in? That you have to pay every year? And if you don't pay that, we take your hut from you. What do you think about that? Oh, wow. Okay. What do I do to get those coins? Ah, funny you should ask that. Let me tell you what you can do for me.

I want to build an aqueduct. I want to build a, you know, a castle. I want to build a road. I want to build a stand. Oh, okay. So this is how fiat systems work. The imposition of the tax, the King already had the gold, he isn't taxing the poor person for money cause he's lacking gold. He's actually giving him the gold first

and making him pay a tax back with the same gold he just gave him. So, these are things that if you understand that the money isn't the thing that you care about, it's the real resource. It's the rent. ' Rent's too damn high.' Well, hey, I got my $1,000 UBI. I got my $2,000 UBI, man. Well, hey, man, out here in Soho, a house is like $4,000 a month to rent.

Oh, well, I got my UBI. Yeah, that the bag of chips. , So you want to give people housing, give them housing. You want to give people healthcare, give them healthcare. You want to give them education, give them education. Let's not do with this affordable healthcare. Affordable school. Affordable rent. And that's what Kamala is about. That's what maybe, sort of, Trump is about.

I don't know if he's about anything, really. But they're selling, they're selling a persona to the people that need to hear whatever shit they're saying to feel like, Oh, okay. But in reality, nothing's going to change until we make it change. And we're not doing it in the voting booth, unfortunately.

[00:58:38] Sean St. Heart: Yeah, no.

And that was going to be my next question. It's not going to be solved in the voting booth. How is it going to be solved? Because I mean, we hear people talk about civil war, revolution, which I think is unrealistic, frankly.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, What do we do? Because I mean, our politicians are owned by their donors and it seems like an insolvable problem.

[00:58:59] Steve Grumbine: It is, within the system. So you know, that old saying "outside the nine dots?" Have you ever heard that? They do it in all kinds of corporate training. So they're trying to teach people sort of how to walk outside the nine dots. But you have a box. You have your three dots here, three dots there and so the nine dots that make up the box.  

And so what they do is how do you make this line go all over the place? And the idea is you have to actually go outside the nine dots to connect it all. And so in this case, you've got to go outside of the system that's producing this stuff. 

It's a closed system. It doesn't give you results. So you've got to go outside of the system. And I think about Fred Hampton. I think about guys like Fred Hampton. I think about guys like Vladimir Lenin, quite frankly, and the Bolsheviks and what they did. The revolution that they had was largely bloodless, ironically. 

I mean, the people were warlorn from world war one and they didn't have the heart. They didn't want to kill their fellow countrymen. They had been a Czarist Russia for all this time. They had Rasputin doing crazy shit. And they had, Nicholas doing crazy shit. 

And, you know, ultimately the people, themselves, wanted to be free. And so, you gotta want that, right? So for revolution with what we have - we are living in a visual auditory prison, basically, where we are surveilled on every level - so what we have to do is we have to do what I call building dual power. 

We have to build institutions outside of institutions that represent our interests. We tried with Real Progressives and failed, unfortunately, to build a four pillar think tank. One was education. One was policy. One was, media and the other was activism. That was the four pillars. We had seven key knowledge areas.

Still have them. We haven't been successful because we can't get people to understand you keep throwing good money after bad going into establishment systems meant to give you the belief that you have agency, but you don't have any agency. You know what I mean? It's like this veneer that, that just circles through.

You don't actually get anything out of it. Nothing perceptible will ever change that way. But you just keep going through the mill, like, you know, it's working. Oh, I'm so happy. And Hey, it's good. Oh, no, it's bad again. Hey, it's good. No, it's bad again. And you just keep going through that shit show.

Never did anything that you want come true in that, at all. You know what I mean? I mean, think about the level of fight we had to get the shitty Obamacare - Mitt Romney's ACA, right? The heritage foundations, ACA.

[01:01:31] Sean St. Heart: What healthcare plan?

[01:01:32] Steve Grumbine: Obama literally without any fight from Republicans took the public option off himself. He chose to take the public option away. So that, should have been the wake-up call right there. It should have been a million other wake up calls, but that right there really was the one that cemented it for me.

Bill Clinton and his balanced budget and we're going to reinvent the government and all this stuff, literally put single moms and - well, he went after the welfare queens where Ronald Reagan merely eulogized that made these mythical figures. Bubba really was the one that took the hammer to them.

He, and that Contract with America with Newt Gingrich, and all the other crap that the Third Way Democrats did. And after that it really was a libertarian paradise. You go back to the Powell memo. You go back to the John Birch Society and, all of this 

libertarian think tank, right? Pete Peterson Foundation is a bipartisan Fix The Debt. The national debt's too high. We got to fix it. It's going to be a tragedy to our children. The national debt is nothing but the sum total of every untaxed dollar in the economy. That's it. That's your national debt. 

Think about this. If I'm China, China sells goods and services into the United States. What did they get? They get US dollars back. China looks at US dollars and goes, But what do they do with them? They keep them at the Fed earning a nominal interest rate to facilitate transactions and to buy up things that they need and want in the United States.

Right? So ultimately debt is not debt at all. They're taking their US stocks because you can't buy a bond with Chinese money. You can only buy bonds, US bonds, with US dollars because bonds are meant to pull money out of the productive economy to delay purchasing power. Which is what they did in world war two.

So all this to say, what do you do? You've got to build dual power. You've got to build institutions. You've got to build media that doesn't rely on the government's run stuff. You've got to build education outside of their education to show these things. You've got to show them what working class interests are, because otherwise you listen to Kamala Harris and

she's telling you she's a blue collar working class girl. Right! Right. Sure you are, right? And so, they don't know any better. They just don't know any better. I like her. She looks nice. He was a good looking president, I like him. Right? We need to be able to a), wake them up. We need to educate them. See, education and awakenings are two different things, right?

I need to educate you. You can know all this MMT stuff till the cows come home. But you know what? A lot of these great minds of MMT have a heterodox understanding of economics, but then they go back to an orthodox understanding of politics. They refuse to have the same awakening that they had on the money side

with the political side. And so they're trying to take a heterodox idea and blend it in with an orthodox understanding of politics, and it won't work. We need to create power outside of the duopoly, okay? We need to build it outside. Not, and I'm not talking third parties to everyone's chagrin, right? Third parties are good in the sense that if you're not trying to sell the idea that you're going to win an election.

If you're really willing to sell the idea that you're here to represent the voice of the people and to educate people to be a voice for words and things that are never said, then I'm all for it. But this idea that if we just vote for him, we'll win. Right. Fundamentally misses the structural, and I'm not talking about any of the nonsense that Democrats rail on third parties for, because I've always supported third parties, but for different reasons.

But right now the mindset is we can win this thing. No you can't because they run the system. It's their system. They don't want you in it. You don't exist. The system isn't meant for governance. The system is there to give us puppet power in front because as you know, I mean, some call it the deep state.

Some call it career government workers. Some call it just the establishment. But ultimately, Joe Biden couldn't tie his own shoes, much less to get putting together a sentence. He was not running the country, folks. Okay. He was not running the country, at all. And look at Donald Trump. The guy can barely tie sentences together himself.

Look at Kamala Harris. She is just a self righteous little bougie queen, and she is not running anything either. At the end of the day, you've got to recognize that. And if you can wake people up to that - and you don't need a million people at first. You just need a core of people that really understand this stuff. And start building out propaganda, quality propaganda. Educational propaganda. Thought propaganda that makes people understand what's going on in their world.

If you can do that, then you're good to go. If you can't do that, then you're not good to go. So I think we have to build media literacy. We have to build media for ourselves. We have to build education for these things for ourselves. We have to take action, direct action, where possible. Like, so for example, those people that were on the 405 out there, blocking traffic out in California. 

I mean, if you understand what moves capital, the thing to do is to block the shipping lanes, block a roadway, block access to an office like a union strike, right? Create the union of people. And with that, Sean, I'm so sorry, but I have to drop right now, brother. I hope I can come back on again soon.

[01:07:08] Sean St. Heart: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Steven.

[01:07:10] Steve Grumbine: You got it, man. Take care.

[01:07:11] Sean St. Heart: You too. And this has been Coup Save America, everybody.

[01:07:15] Steve Grumbine: I just want to thank you, again, on behalf of the non-profit Real Progressives, and this podcast, Macro N Cheese. Folks, as we're parting, remember: Real Progressives is a 501c3 not for profit. We survive on your donations. They are tax free, so there's a little benefit to helping the little guy trying to get this information out.

 And with that, Macro N Cheese. We are out of here.