Macro N Cheese

Ep 359 - Epstein: Power, Corruption & Media Complicity with Nolan Higdon

For a masterclass in true bipartisanship, look no further than the guest list of Jeffrey Epstein! We all love a good conspiracy story, but it’s often just business as usual for the class in power. Nolan Higdon – lecturer, media critic, and author of The Gaslight Gazette – is back for a deep analytical dive into the Epstein saga. Moving beyond true-crime sensationalism, Nolan and Steve frame the scandal as a stark case study in systemic class power, media complicity, and the mechanisms elite networks use to protect their own. The discussion hinges on several key points: evidence from released emails shows Epstein’s role as a trans-partisan power broker, connecting figures like Trump and Clinton to finance (Les Wexner) and tech (Bill Gates, Peter Thiel). The media’s failure to investigate is no accident. (Are we surprised?) It’s a function of class interests acting to manage public perception and manufacture consent. The episode goes on to connect Epstein’s documented interest in spyware and AI to a broader project of militarized surveillance for social control. Nolan Higdon is a founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas, Project Censored [https://www.projectcensored.org/] National Judge, author, and lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. Higdon’s areas of concentration include podcasting, digital culture, news media history, propaganda, and critical media literacy. He is the author of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education [https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520347878/the-anatomy-of-fake-news] (2020); Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (2022); [https://www.routledge.com/Lets-Agree-to-Disagree-Critical-Thinking-and-Civil-Discourse-in-Contentious/Higdon-Huff/p/book/9781032168982] The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People (2022) [https://www.sevenstories.com/books/4465-the-media-and-me]; and the forthcoming Surveillance Education: Navigating the conspicuous absence of privacy in schools [https://www.routledge.com/Surveillance-Education-Navigating-the-Conspicuous-Absence-of-Privacy-in-Schools/Higdon-Butler/p/book/9781032812274#:~:text=Description,ways%20to%20ameliorate%20their%20impact.] (Routledge). Higdon is a regular source of expertise for CBS, NBC, The New York Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Find his work on Substack: nolanhigdon.substack.com @NolanHigdonCML [https://twitter.com/NolanHigdonCML] on X

Ep 358 - Now Is the Time of Monsters: Gramsci on Counterrevolution with Vijay Prashad

Historian and journalist Vijay Prashad talks with Steve about why Antonio Gramsci still matters.  Listeners to this podcast know that we have a pretty good grasp of the monetary system. But we’re constantly working to expand our understanding of the systemic underpinnings of real power. How else will we be able to seize it? For help, we turn to Gramsci.  According to Vijay, Gramsci was doing class forensics. His core puzzle was brutal and practical: why did big chunks of Italy’s working-class bail on their own unions and parties and drift into fascism? That’s the real origin story of “cultural hegemony,” “common sense,” and the whole Gramscian toolbox: figuring out how consent gets manufactured and how counterrevolution recruits.  Vijay takes us through Gramsci’s political development and his imprisonment under Mussolini, where he wrote his seminal Prison Notebooks.  Then they get into Gramsci’s key concepts: hegemony (borrowed from Lenin and, per Vijay, more than a “culture theory”), the necessity of a Leninist-type party as the modern Prince, and the need to build alliances to create working-class leadership over society.   After taking a hard look at the left in the US, Steve and Vijay discuss the limits of electoral politics and the missing infrastructure for a serious battle of ideas. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about class power, organizing, and what it actually takes to change how people understand the world they’re living in.  Vijay Prashad is the Executive Director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. He is a historian, journalist, and author of forty books, including Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassination; Red Star over the Third World; and The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World.  thetricontinental.org [https://thetricontinental.org/]  @vijayprashad on X

Ep 357 - Socialism with Chinese Characteristics with Yan Liang

In today’s world, anyone serious about anti-imperialism, global development, and monetary sovereignty needs to break through the well-funded US propaganda machine and develop a fact-based, nuanced understanding of China.  To this end, Steve asked Yan Liang to come back to the podcast to look at China through the MMT lens, analyzing its economic management, global role, and response to Western villainization. They discuss China’s development ethos and describe China as a state that actively uses its monetary and fiscal sovereignty to guide development towards internal goals (poverty alleviation, technological self-reliance, common prosperity) and external partnership (Win-win cooperation, Belt and Road Initiative).   Illustrating the difference between state steering and the so-called “free market,” the conversation goes into China’s mobilization of real resources through strategic state guidance, like Five-Year Plans and state-owned enterprises in key sectors.   Yan talks about the use of capital controls and a managed exchange rate. She details lessons from 2015 and the application of MMT principles to insulate domestic policy from volatile external forces.  Without romanticizing China, Yan also walks through its real challenges. But from an MMT-aware lens, these are seen as problems of policy design and resource use (issues a sovereign, planning-oriented state can address!) rather than proof of an impending collapse.  Yan Liang is Peter C and Bonnie S Kremer Chair Professor of Economics at Willamette University. She is also a Research Associate at the Levy Economics Institute, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Global Development Policy Center (Boston University), and a Research Scholar of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.  Yan specializes in the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the Political Economy of China, Economic Development, and International Economics. Yan’s current research focuses on China’s development finance and industrial transformation, and China’s role in the global financial architecture.  https://www.linkedin.com/in/yan-liang-1355b91a2/  [https://www.linkedin.com/in/yan-liang-1355b91a2/] @YanLian31677392 on X

Ep 356 - Scotland's Economic Suicide Pact? with Will Thomson

Steve and his guest, Scottish political economist William Thomson, use the fight over Scotland’s independence to dissect how class power hides inside “neutral” economic rules.   Will, founder of SCOTONOMICS, talks about his journey from neoclassical training to a heterodox, political-economy perspective grounded in MMT, ecological economics, and class analysis.  He recently wrote a paper (with friend-of-the-podcast Dirk Ehnts) showing how the Scottish government’s plan to copy the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact and delay its own currency would lock an “independent” Scotland into permanent austerity and dependence on markets and foreign owners.  Will explains that more foreign direct investment, supply-side reforms, and 3% deficit caps aren’t “responsible” policy – they are mechanisms to protect external and domestic elites at the expense of workers and communities.  Steve and Will stress that MMT is just a lens without an explicit socialist or working-class political economy. The same monetary tools can be used for empire, war, and repression. They argue for an independence project built on monetary sovereignty, full employment, ecological limits, and economic resilience... not on appeasing markets and Brussels.  William Thompson is a Scottish political economist and founder of SCOTONOMICS. He worked for almost a decade in the financial services sector in London. He has an MSc in the Green Economy and MEcon in the Economics of Sustainability. Based in Dunblane, Will writes regular blog posts and articles on economics in various publications including The National newspaper in Scotland and the Scottish Left Review. Support SCOTONOMICS: patreon.com/Scotonomics.  @Williamgallus on X  https://scotonomics.org/ [https://scotonomics.org/]

Ep 355 - Dialectics of Dominance with Aaron Good

“We’re at an inflection point – a civilizational crisis. Western imperial dominance is ending, and its dying spasms are only accelerating the collapse.” Aaron Good  Aaron Good, author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, is back to talk with Steve about the crisis of the US-led imperial order and the manufactured “common sense” that keeps people trapped inside a rigged system.  Centuries of Western imperial dominance are unraveling, and the US responds with flailing, genocidal actions in Gaza and Ukraine. These aren't signs of strength; they're the death rattles of a corpse that doesn't know it's dead yet.  “Realizing you’re not voting your way out of it might be the most terrifying ‘aha moment’ of them all.” Steve Grumbine  At home the two major US parties are presented as alternatives, the ballot is a participation trophy in the “managed spectacle” of elections. Obama? Trump? Biden? Different brands, same oligarchy. Corporate media and algorithmic “alternative media” work together to keep people confused, divided, and clinging to the fantasy that if they just vote harder, donate more, and binge the right “left” YouTubers, they can reform a system designed to crush them. The empire’s to-do list (crush dissent, steal resources) remains the same.  What are we to do? Maybe we can't break the system yet, but we can stop being dupes. See the Matrix.  Aaron Good holds a doctorate in political science from Temple University. He is the author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State. He is the host of American Exception podcast https://americanexception.com/podcast/  Follow Aaron’s work at americanexception.substack.com/   @Aaron_Good_ on X