Podcast
Macro N Cheese
Hosted by Steven D Grumbine · EN
A podcast that critically examines the working-class struggle through the lens of MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Host Steve Grumbine, founder of Real Progressives, provides incisive political commentary and showcases grassroots activism. Join us for a robust, unfiltered exploration of economic issues that impact the working class, as we challenge the status quo and prioritize collective well-being over profit. This is comfort food for the mind, fueling our fight for justice and equity!
45episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Ep 363 - Venezuela's Unfinished Revolution with Ricardo Vaz
Jan 1701:03:28Tap to summarizeSteve 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 media caricatures. Ricardo walks through key turning points in the Chávez era and the social gains that reshaped everyday life. But there’s a bigger question that haunts every revolutionary project. How do you build new forms of democratic power while the old state machinery, domestic elites, and hostile external forces push back?(Does this sound familiar? It will if you took part in RP Book Club’s study of State and Revolution)From there, the conversation follows the oil thread. It’s not a single-cause explanation, but it’s where sovereignty, development, and imperial pressure collide. Steve and Ricardo unpack how the hydrocarbons industry evolved, what “nationalization” really meant in practice, and why the fight over Venezuela’s resources can’t be separated from US strategy in the hemisphere.They then look into the Maduro years, sanctions, economic siege, and the constant tug-of-war inside Venezuela between survival policies and revolutionary horizons. This includes a clear-eyed look at opposition figures and the narratives that dominate US talking points. The episode closes with a grounded discussion of why Venezuela matters as a 21st-century political experiment, and what meaningful solidarity looks like when the headlines are designed to mislead and misdirect.Ricardo Vaz grew up in Mozambique with strong political leanings and a clear anti-imperialist outlook, which led him early on to closely follow the Bolivarian Revolution and Chavismo in Venezuela. After living in various countries and continents, he moved to Venezuela in early 2019. Although trained in theoretical physics, he gradually shifted into journalism and political analysis, joining the Venezuela Analysis staff as a writer and editor in 2018. His main interests include sanctions, popular power organizations, and corporate media coverage of Venezuela. He is also a member of grassroots media collectives including Tatuy TV and Utopix.venezuelanalysis.com@venanalysis on X
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Ep 362 - Debunking the Institutional Theory of Economic Development with Erald Kolasi
Jan 1001:23:35Tap to summarizeSteve 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 “tyrannical dictatorship” vs the “open” society and presents their explanation for these differences.Erald then flips the script: the DPRK outperformed for decades, then crashed not because its “institutions got worse,” but because the USSR collapsed. Cheap, subsidized energy disappeared, wrecking agriculture and triggering famine.The pattern repeats across history. Using examples like China and Venezuela, the episode explores how wars, sanctions, resource access, and global power structures shape economic outcomes far more than abstract institutional rules. Development is a struggle rooted in material conditions and geopolitical realities, not a neutral competition between better or worse policy designs.Erald Kolasi is a writer and researcher focusing on the nexus between energy, technology, economics, complex systems, and ecological dynamics. His book, The Physics of Capitalism, came out from Monthly Review Press in February 2025. He received his PhD in Physics from George Mason University in 2016. You can find out more about Erald and his work at his website, www.eraldkolasi.com. Subscribe to his Substack: https://substack.com/@technodynamics
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Ep 361 - Discernment in the Age of Disinformation with Andy Lee Roth & Shealeigh Voitl
Jan 300:56:14Tap to summarizeShealeigh 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 toward normalized surveillance that received little corporate media attention.Steve and his guests also discuss broader themes, linking media patterns to cultural hegemony and manufacturing consent, where state and oligarchic interests align to shape public perception. Examples include coverage of Israel-Palestine, university crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech, and the hiring of figures like Bari Weiss.Andy Lee Roth is editor-at-large for Project Censored and its publishing imprint, The Censored Press. He is co-editor of Project’s State of the Free Press yearbook series, and a coauthor of The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People.Shealeigh Voitl is Project Censored's associate director. She helped develop the State of the Free Press 2024 teaching guide, the Project’s Beyond Fact-Checking: A Teaching Guide to the Power of News Frames, and The Project Censored Show’s forthcoming segment Frame-Check.Find their work at https://www.projectcensored.org/@ProjectCensored on X
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Ep 360 - Care Theory of Value with Emma Holten
Dec 2701:02:50Tap to summarizeLet’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 alive.Emma and Steve discuss the way mainstream economics has long treated the home, the body, and the mind as a black box, as if workers spring fully formed from the soil and arrive at the labor market already fed, healed, soothed, socialized, and ready to produce.They talk about measurement and the way the GDP counts a $3,000 ambulance bill as added value instead of predatory extraction. They also look at power and social cohesion. Steve connects Emma’s thesis to MMT’s real-resources focus and the Job Guarantee as a way to fund socially necessary work that markets underprovide, while also admitting the hard question: even if policy is sound, capital and its political machinery never volunteer to be disarmed.Emma Holten is a feminist activist and gender policy consultant. Since 2018, she has worked with feminist economics. In 2024 she published her first book “DEFICIT - On the value of care” in Danish. It is available in English, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Dutch, and Italian - and forthcoming in 6 other languages. It has won the Politiken Literature Prize, The Library Reader’s Prize, The Sara Danius Prize, The Sprout Prize and was shortlisted for the Montana Literature Award.
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Ep 320 - Breaking Out The Master's Tools with Michael McCarthy
Mar 22, 202500:57:55Tap to summarize**Every Tuesday night, we gather online to listen to the episode and discuss it among friends. Everyone is invited to this community building event. Bring your insights and questions. REGISTER HERE for Tuesday, March 25th, 8 pm ET/5 pm PT Steve’s guest is Michael McCarthy, author of 'The Master's Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy and a Radical Plan to Rebuild It.' They explore McCarthy's analysis of financialization as a deliberate class project to dismantle working-class power and exacerbate inequality.They look at the historical shift from a robust Social Security system to a privatized, financialized pension system as well as the rise of neoliberal policies post-1970s, facilitated by monetary policy changes (anybody remember the gold standard?) The conversation goes into the failure of both traditional and direct democracies to serve the working class.The episode also weaves through MMT perspectives and the impact of government policies. They touch on the potential of public banking and democratizing finance to empower the working class as well as the challenges of implementing these ideas.Michael A. McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His book Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal was awarded the Paul Sweezy Book Award as well as an honorable mention for the Labor and Labor Movements Book Award. His most recent book is The Master's Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (And a Radical Plan to Rebuild It). Mike has written for the Boston Review, The Guardian, Jacobin, Noema, and the Washington Post.@its_mccarthy on X
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Ep 319 - DOGE Ball: A True Oligarch Story with Yeva Nersisyan
Mar 15, 202501:16:52Tap to summarizeNear the start of this episode, Yeva Nersisyan talks with Steve about leftist economists who are still wedded to the belief that government spending relies on taxpayer money. She says if an academic on the left uses the ‘taxpayer dollar’ framing, then you cannot be surprised when the right uses it too – to say they’re saving taxpayer money, cutting wastefulness, cutting inefficiency. It’s why being consistent is so important. If one side can use it, the other side can too.“It leads to the Elon Musks of the world using this taxpayer money trope to basically take a sledgehammer or a chainsaw to the public sector.” Yeva and Steve revisit some basics of MMT, including the understanding that a government is not like a household. Our own spending doesn't really affect our own income. We'll still get our wages, we will still have that, and then we will continue consuming, but consuming less and therefore end up with more savings. But it doesn't work for the economy as a whole. Because for the economy as a whole, if spending goes down, that means there is now less income, and less income means someone somewhere is earning less and therefore they have to cut their consumption and they also have to cut their saving. And it becomes this cycle where, okay, someone cut their consumption, now someone else is earning less or the grocery store is earning less, right? And now they have to fire their workers. Now their workers don't have income and they are spending less, and so on and so forth. Yeva and Steve go into other insights of MMT, including sectoral balances and the reality of the so-called national debt. They unravel the absurd dynamics of current economic policy and look at the implications of proposed spending cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Fallout from the government's ruthless abandonment of social programs will be disastrous. Yeva Nersisyan is an associate professor of economics at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. She received her B.A. in economics from Yerevan State University in Armenia, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in economics and mathematics from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is a macroeconomist working in the Modern Money Theory, Post-Keynesian, and Institutionalist traditions. Her research interests include banking and financial instability, and fiscal and monetary theory and policy. She has published a number of papers on the topics of shadow banking, fiscal policy, government deficits and debt, and the Green New Deal. Nersisyan is currently coediting the Elgar Companion to Modern Money Theory with L. Randall Wray. Find her work at levyinstitute.org/publications/yeva-nersisyan
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Ep 318 - The Death of the Left? with Simon Winlow & Steve Hall
Mar 8, 202501:00:30Tap to summarizeIf you ever find yourself asking “What’s left?” you’re in good company. Today’s left is often indistinguishable from neoliberal centrism. Steve’s guests are Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, authors of the book, The Death of the Left: Why We Must Begin from the Beginning Again. They talk about the historical shifts that have led to ideological collapse, disconnection from the working class and the embrace of individualism over collective action.The conversation emphasizes the urgent need for a revival of working-class politics that transcend identity divisions and focus on collective struggles against economic neoliberalism and austerity. Simon Winlow is Professor of Social Sciences at Northumbria University, UK. A fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, his work is particularly well known in the fields of criminology, sociology and contemporary political analysis. He is the author or co-author of the following books: Badfellas (Berg, 2001); Bouncers (Oxford University Press, 2003); Violent Night (Berg, 2006); Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture (Willan, 2008); Rethinking Social Exclusion (Sage, 2012); Riots and Political Protest (Routledge, 2015); Revitalizing Criminological Theory (Routledge, 2015); Rise of the Right (Policy, 2017); Death of the Left (Policy, 2022), and The Politics of Nostalgia (Emerald, 2025). @winlow_s Steve Hall is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at the University of Teesside. He is a polymath who has published in the fields of criminology, sociology, anthropology, history, economic history, political theory and philosophy. He is also co-author of Violent Night (Berg 2006, with Simon Winlow), Rethinking Social Exclusion (Sage 2013, with Simon Winlow), Riots and Political Protest (Routledge 2015, with Simon Winlow, James Treadwell and Daniel Briggs), Revitalizing Criminological Theory (Routledge 2015, with Simon Winlow), The Rise of the Right (with Simon Winlow and James Treadwell) and The Death of the Left (with Simon Winlow). He is co-editor of New Directions in Criminological Theory (Routledge 2012, with Simon Winlow). In 2017 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the international Extreme Anthropology Research Network at the University of Vienna. @ProfHall1955
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Ep 317 - Fatal Distraction with Shealeigh Voitl
Mar 1, 202500:58:53Tap to summarizeControl of information is a vital weapon of the ruling class in its war on the people. Critical media literacy is more important now than it has ever been. For the past year we’ve been drowning in imbalanced coverage of the war on Gaza. (How many times did mainstream news outlets use the word ‘genocide’?) It’s just one example – and it’s an outrage. Steve’s guest is Shealeigh Voitl, Project Censored’s digital and print editor. They discuss the media’s role in shaping public perception and delve into the systemic disinformation propagated by corporate and academic institutions. While sensational inconsequential stories dominate the headlines, the voices and experiences of the working class and the marginalized are silenced. Steve and Shealeigh look at the power dynamics inherent in media ownership, reinforcing inequality and promoting working class subjugation. Passive news consumption is the equivalent of unilateral disarmament. Shealeigh Voitl is the digital and print editor at Project Censored. She first began her research with the Project at North Central College alongside Steve Macek, co-authoring the Déjá Vu News chapter in the State of the Free Press 2022 and 2023 yearbooks, and the Top 25 chapter in SFP 2023. In addition to her editorial contributions to the yearbook series and work with the Campus Affiliates Program, Shealeigh helped develop the State of the Free Press 2024 teaching guide and the Project’s “Critical Media Literacy in Action” social media series. Her writing has also been featured in Truthout, The Progressive, and Ms. Magazine.
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Ep 316 - Lions & Lambs with Thomas Fazi
Feb 22, 202500:52:13Tap to summarizeThomas Fazi joins Steve once again, this time to explore the current geopolitical landscape under Trump 2.0 and the absurdity of an American empire that creates enemies out of thin air to justify its ongoing military and economic interventions. The conversation touches on the implications of austerity measures on the working class and the irony of billionaires like Elon Musk advocating for cuts to government spending while enjoying the benefits of public funding via massive subsidies.With a touch of sarcasm, Thomas & Steve critique how the political elite manipulate narratives to maintain control and distract from the real issues facing ordinary citizens. They remind us of the need to critically examine the intricate relationship between power, propaganda, and the everyday lives of people.Thomas Fazi is a “journalist/writer/translator/socialist.” who lives in Italy. He is the co-director of Standing Army (2010), an award-winning feature-length documentary on US military bases featuring Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky; and the author of The Battle for Europe: How an Elite Hijacked a Continent – and How We Can Take It Back (2014) and Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (co-authored with Bill Mitchell, 2017). His articles have appeared in numerous online and printed publications. Find links to his articles on his Substack.@battleforeurope on Twitter
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Ep 315 - Confessions of an Economic Hitman: A Conversation with John Perkins
Feb 15, 202500:50:24Tap to summarizeJohn Perkins is a storyteller. His stories tell of his work as an economic hit man, creator of a death economy that is polluting and consuming itself into extinction. He has served as advisor to the World Bank, UN, IMF, Fortune 500 corporations, and government and business leaders across the globe. “You know, my job was pretty easy, generally speaking, because I was offering the president of a country or his finance minister, whoever, a big loan. And the fact that this loan would help him and his family, his friends – they owned the businesses in most cases – they were the ones who benefited from big infrastructure” “They knew that if they didn't accept this deal, the people we call the jackals would come in and they would either overthrow or assassinate the President, whoever was responsible. And, you know, the United States has admitted to this over and over. Allende in Chile, Mossadegh in Iran, Lumumba in the Congo. My two clients. We haven't admitted to that one yet, but we have admitted to Diem in Vietnam and more recently [Manuel] Zelaya in Honduras. We've admitted to these things.” For seven out of his ten years as an economic hit man, John believed what he was taught in business school: to help a poor country pull itself out of poverty, you invest heavily in infrastructure. Statistically this can be shown to increase the country’s economy – its GDP and GDP per capita. Per capita implies that everybody in the country is participating, but that's just not true. “GDP primarily measures how well the wealthy are doing and the big corporations.” John’s insights are not merely theoretical; they are rooted in personal experience. In other episodes of this podcast, we’ve talked about cycles of debt that sink global South nations into dire poverty. In this conversation, John recounts the manipulative tactics for securing lucrative contracts for US corporations across the globe, thus creating these debt traps. To repair the damage, John urges a radical shift towards a ‘life economy’—one that focuses on sustainability, equity, and regeneration. John Perkins served as Chief Economist at a major consulting firm and was advisor to the World Bank, UN, IMF, Fortune 500 corporations, and government and business leaders in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the United States. Before that, he apprenticed with shamans when he lived in the Amazon rainforest from 1968 to 1971 and has since studied with shamans from many different cultures. His eleven books on economics, shamanism, and transformation include the Confessions of an Economic Hit Man trilogy; Shapeshifting; The World Is as You Dream It; and Touching the Jaguar. They have been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 70 weeks, sold millions of copies, and are published in at least 38 languages. https://johnperkins.org/
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