**Check our website for upcoming events such as book clubs, RP Live webinars, and the Tuesday evening discussion group, Macro ‘n Chill. https://realprogressives.org/ This week’s episode is the audio track of a recent webinar with historian Esha Krishnaswamy. Esha is now living in Russia to research and write a people’s history of the Soviet Union. The discussion begins with the story of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution. The formation of the USSR as a proletarian state shook the capitalist nations of the West to their core. As a result, the Soviet Union was regularly under thr ..read more

“Assange is being targeted by the US government because he doesn't conform to the dominant culture of the US prestige media. He's not going to be invited to the White House Correspondents' Dinner. He's not going to be given a Pulitzer. He's not going to be treated as one of them.” Steve’s guest is journalist Kevin Gosztola, author of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange. Kevin has been advocating for freedom of the press since the George W. Bush administration and the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Steve and Kevin discuss the lack of available unbiased i ..read more

**RP Book Club is beginning a new series, Sunday April 7, 14, and 21, at 3pm ET/12pm PT. Register once for all three sessions. realprogressives.org/event/rp-book-club-the-communist-manifesto/2024-04-07 L. Randall Wray talks with Steve about the concept of value in the context of MMT. Randy discusses the labor theory of value and the liquidity premise theory, saying both approaches are critical to understanding how money works in a capitalist economy. Randy looks at the historical development of economic thought and the neoclassical revolution of the 1870s, which aimed to prove that a free-mar ..read more

A hundred years ago, John Maynard Keynes predicted we would see a massive expansion of growth and productivity under capitalism. Bingo. He got that right. He said this amazing efficiency would result in a shorter work week with far more leisure time for everyone. Oops. Not so much. The structure of capital ownership will never permit it. Bill Mitchell’s blog post, Keynes Was Wrong Because He Failed to Consider Class Conflict, was the inspiration for this episode. Bill talks with Steve about many of the truths about capitalism economists and historians get wrong, beginning with the idea that ca ..read more

The American people see through mainstream claims of “the greatest economy ever.” They are confronted by evidence to the contrary every day. Steve and his guest, economist Yeva Nersisyan, take a deep dive into the current US economy, looking at the repercussions of the high costs of education, healthcare, and housing. They discuss different perspectives on the causes of inflation and talk about Isabella Weber’s work on “sellers’ inflation” and its relationship to monopoly power. They argue that the drive for corporate profits, leading to abusive price-setting, has been the primary force behin ..read more

** Reminder: You are invited to listen to and discuss this episode with friends from Real Progressives on Tuesday, March 5th. Find the Zoom link at https://realprogressives.org/rp-events-calendar/ “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” — Victor Hugo Daniel Conceição talks with Steve about Argentina’s economic immiseration under newly elected president Javier Milei. Milei’s aggressive cuts to public spending don’t address the root cause of inflation in Argentina. Because of the country’s depe ..read more

**To discuss this episode among friends, come to our listening party, Macro ‘n Chill, on Tuesday February 27th at 8pm ET/5pm PT. For the link go to our Events Calendar https://realprogressives.org/rp-events-calendar “But fortunately for us, human nature is precisely the capacity to be creative; to imagine a different way of living together and to bring that into being through our conscious and deliberate actions by working together, by fighting for a different world against the class power that is interested in perpetuating things as they are. And so we can, through acting on the world to tran ..read more

** If you haven’t yet come to our Tuesday night listening party, this is the week to do so. Join the Real Progressives community as we dive in and discuss this episode. The registration link is posted on our Events Calendar prior to each Tuesday’s session — it’s usually up by Saturday. Look for Macro ‘n Chill. https://realprogressives.org/rp-events-calendar/ This week Steve talks with our friend, economist Fadhel Kaboub. Followers of this podcast will recognize some of the themes we regularly focus on, including the debt trap facing countries of the global South, and the need for climate acti ..read more

“...the question of how to pay for it is a very complicated question but has much less to do with money than it does to do with social structure and industrial structure. And the quicker we can get away from centering the taxpayer as the goose that holds the golden egg money and more towards the questions of labor and industrial structure that are really going to affect how we provide healthcare, I think we're going to be in a better place.” — Rohan Grey In 2022, Real Progressives helped our coalition partners, March for Medicare for All, organize a three-day educational summit on the healthca ..read more

**Transcripts and “extras” are available for each episode of Macro N Cheese on our website: https://realprogressives.org/macro-n-cheese-podcast/ This podcast’s followers know we cover a range of topics from political theory to international events, but at some point, we always circle back to Modern Monetary Theory. This interview with Warren Mosler was originally recorded for “Let’s Get Ready to Grumble,” Steve’s show on Status Coup. As with any Mosler episode, this one is appropriate for both MMT newcomers and old-timers. They discuss interest rates, inflation, and the money supply. Warren ..read more