The Progressive

Featuring Alexandra Wandel, Gonzalo Berrón, and Paul Adlerstein on the 1999 mass protest against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and on the giant global justice movement that mobilized unions, farmers, environmentalists, public interest advocates, and various radical leftists all over the world.

Recorded live in Brussels with the European Trade Justice Coalition. First in a two-part series. Next up: a view from the Global South with Jane Nalunga and Walden Bello.

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Featuring Melinda Cooper on Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. Balanced budget conservatism and supply side populism engineered a politics of austerity and budget deficits. Deep cuts to the social wage like welfare reform disciplined labor so severely that Fed Chair Alan Greenspan opened the floodgates of easy money confident it would juice the price of assets alone. Assets like homes, the value of which spiraled ever upward until the Global Financial Crisis. The crash made the politics of revolutionary conservatism that dominate us today with MAGA. But the crisis also revealed powerful monetary tools that we could wield to make socialism—if only we organize the power necessary to seize them.

The SECOND in a two-part series.

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Discussing the changes that would be occurring to the economy in New Mexico at the tail end of the colonial period.

Transcript.

Music:

NeoWestern Incompetech, Kevin McLeod CC-3: incompetech.com

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Music: Desperados by Frank Schroeter

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In this kickoff to our special series on trade, Nick and Goldy unpack why trade policy isn’t just about tariffs and treaties—it’s about people, power, and priorities. For decades, the prevailing narrative has been that trade benefits everyone by lowering prices. But the real question is: who does it help, and who does it hurt? From the false promises of globalization to the overlooked damage in hollowed-out communities, this episode sets the stage for exploring a fresh way to think about trade—one grounded in power dynamics, democratic values, and middle-out economics.

David Autor is a labor economist and professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies how technological change and globalization affect workers. He is also co-director of the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative and the National Bureau of Economic Research Labor Studies Program.

Marc-William Palen is a historian and senior lecturer at the University of Exeter, specializing in the history of international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and political economy. He is the author of Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World. 

Social Media: 

@davidautor.bsky.social

@davidautor

@mwpalen.bsky.social

@MWPalen

Further reading: 

Places versus People: The Ins and Outs of Labor Market Adjustment to Globalization

Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World

Recovering the Left-Wing Free Trade Tradition 

Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com

Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics

Threads: pitchforkeconomics

Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social

Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer, @civicaction

YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics

LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics

Substack: ⁠The Pitch⁠

Our western (Trauma Culture) economies run on two falsehoods - we might go so far as to call them lies.

The first is that economies have to grow to be 'successful'.  The second is that government spending is limited by the tax take.  That is, they need to take money in as taxes in order to spend it out into the economy.  Both of these are untrue, and understanding that they are untrue, and the political forces of ignorance and mendacity that keep them in place, is essential to our moving forward into a future that works. We cannot continue to maintain the death cult of predatory capitalism. We cannot continue with a Zombie economy that extracts, consumes, destroys and pollutes as if there were no consequences. 
So what do we do? Both ecological economics and Modern Monetary Theory have been around for a while.  Degrowth theory is more recent, but it's being taken more seriously. What I haven't seen up till now is a fusion of these: a set of policy ideas worked out in which we acknowledge how money actually works, and look at how a national -or global - economy could be structured to lead us forward into a world where people and planet flourish together. I don't think this is the final destination, but it's definitely a step on the way.

Our guest this week is someone particularly well positioned to answer these questions.  Colleen Schneider is a Doctoral student in Social-Ecological Economics & Policy in Vienna. Her key research areas: Ecological Economics, Environmental Justice, Monetary and Financial Systems in a Post-Growth Economy, Climate Policy.  She says, "I take a sociological and anthropological approach to understanding money as fundamentally a social relation. Money, and the monetary system (as with our economic system) are things we've created, and can create otherwise. I draw on historical examples to help understand how the institutional structure of the monetary system and our ideas about money came to be what they are, and to challenge those. [I seek to] de-naturalize money and point to ways to structure the monetary system as democratized, and (at least somewhat) localized -to realize money as a public good. I focus more specifically on how monetary and fiscal policy can be directed toward meeting human needs within environmental limits, while maintaining macroeconomic stability."

So this is the focus of today's conversation.  This is a field about which I am passionate - I absolutely believe that if everyone understood how money actually works in our current world, a lot of the power inequities that we currently experience would end.  We have endeavoured to minimise the use of jargon, though we did talk about monetary and fiscal policy and I wanted to make it clear that Monetary Policy is about keeping prices stable - about using interest rates to influence inflation, that kind of thing . Fiscal policy is about the spending decisions - do we have austerity or don't we, do we fund social goods or don't we, do we decide to pour money into the military, or don't we… and the nature of taxation - what rates do we levy, what are the bands and what loopholes do we leave wide open so our friends can escape paying taxes altogether - while everyone continues to pretend that government spending is limited by the tax take. Which is nonsense. Taxation is about levelling the playing field. It's not about paying for the NHS.

So there we go. Colleen spends her entire life working in this field, producing fascinating papers and a chapter in a forthcoming book that completely blew me away. So she speaks to these things far more eloquently and intelligently than I can.  Enjoy!

Colleen on LinkedIn

Colleen's papers:
How to Pay for Saving the World - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800923002318

Democratizing the Monetary Provisioning System - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15487733.2024.2344305

On universal public services to end the cost of living crisis - https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/economic-growth/cost-of-living-crisis/2023/01/state-end-cost-of-living-crisis-climate-change

Papers by others:

The political response to Inflation: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/mexico/governments-survived-inflation

Workshops:

Public Money for Public Good: Why MMT Matters | Vienna
September 27th and 28th 
Gleis 21, Bloch-Bauer-Promenade 22, 1100 Wien, Austria

https://events.humanitix.com/public-money-mmt-vienna

Public Money for Public Good: Why MMT Matters | Sheffield

(Colleen is not a part of this one, but says that wonderful people are running it!)

September 20th and 21st 

https://events.humanitix.com/public-money-mmt-sheffield

Regenerative Economy Lab - Money and Finance Workshop

Vienna, October 23rd and 24th

https://www.regenecon.eu/

Online masters program on which Colleen teaches - grounded jointly in ecological economics and modern monetary theory: https://www.torrens.edu.au/studying-with-us/employability/industry-led-learning/co-delivery-partners/modern-money-lab

Documentary 'Finding the Money'. https://findingmoneyfilm.com/

MMT group based in the UK : https://modernmoneylab.org.uk/

What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass

If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Death Awake' (you don't have to be a member) it's on 2nd November - details are here.
If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

In many ways neoliberalism is an extreme ideology, much like fascism and communism, but we very rarely recognise it as such. It hides behind the free-market, deregulation and privatisation, but in reality it’s quietly increasing isolation, inequality, poverty, disease and environmental threat.

In this episode, Richard Kemp speaks with Peter Beresford, author of ‘The Antidote: How People-Powered Movements Can Renew Politics, Policy and Practice’, about the problem neoliberalism poses, both in politics and in our everyday lives.

They discuss how neoliberalism has undermined democracy, the power of new social movements, and what can be done to create a better society for everyone.

Peter Beresford OBE is Visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia and Co-Chair of Shaping Our Lives, the national disabled people’s organisation.

Find out more about the book at: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-antidote

The transcript is available here: https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2025/09/01/podcast-from-faultlines-to-frontlines-neoliberalism-vs-people-powered-movements/

Timestamps:

2:03 - What is neoliberalism, what make it extreme and how has it clung on for so long?

5:06 - How was neoliberalism first sold to us?

8:13 - How does neoliberalism affect our day-to-day lives?

9:15 - How is the murder of Sarah Everard connected to neoliberalism?

18:50 - How did neoliberalism affect COVID-19 responses, and what policies went unscrutinised during the pandemic?

24:26 - What are new social movements and what are they doing differently?

34:46 - How has neoliberalism shaped digital space, particularly social media?

41:14 - How is neoliberalism related to slavery and white privilege?

43:53 - Is left-wing populism a danger?

47:16 - Why do we need radical changes, and what should these changes be?

53:35 - What actions can we, individually, take to move away from neoliberalism?

Intro music:

Cold by yoitrax | @yoitrax

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We’ve all heard the story: In a fair market, workers are paid exactly what they’re worth. Economists even have a name for it—marginal productivity theory. It’s neat, simple…and completely wrong.

In this Back-to-Basics episode, economist Marshall Steinbaum and labor leader Saru Jayaraman dismantle the myth that the market fairly rewards labor. Steinbaum reveals how this theory has been weaponized to excuse wage stagnation, justify corporate power, and erode worker bargaining rights. Jayaraman shows what that looks like in the real world, from restaurant workers stuck at subminimum wages to entire industries built on underpaying the people who keep them running.

They make the case that your paycheck isn’t determined by some neutral law of economics—it’s the result of choices, policies, and power dynamics that can be rewritten to ensure everyone is truly paid what they’re worth.

Marshall Steinbaum is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Utah and a Senior Fellow in Higher Education Finance at the Jain Family Institute.

Saru Jayaraman is an attorney, President of One Fair Wage and the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United), and author of One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America. 

This episode originally aired September 10, 2019.

Social Media: 

@Econ_Marshall

‪@econmarshall.bsky.social‬

@SaruJayaraman

Further reading: 

One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America

Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com

Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics

Threads: pitchforkeconomics

Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social

TikTok: @pitchfork_econ

Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer, @civicaction

YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics

LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics

Substack: ⁠The Pitch⁠

We speak with Vijay Raghavan, Professor of Law at the Brooklyn Law School, about his recent article, “The Radical Potential of Consumer Financial Protection,” published in Boston College Law Review in April 2025. Raghavan builds on the work of constitutional money theorists, as well as his legal experience in the public sector. In particular, he argues that consumer financial protection is an essential and potentially radical response to the "finance franchise,” a predominantly anti-democratic process by which modern governments delegate the money creation process to private actors like banks. The consensus in contemporary left sociological and legal scholarship dismisses consumer financial protection as a rearguard effort to sustain neoliberal capitalism. Raghavan, by contrast, reconceptualizes consumer financial protection as a vital counterweight to legally structured domination in financial markets. By tracing the history of this struggle from the early 20th century to the present, Raghavan provides a powerful legal framework for today's debtor movements, including the national campaigns to cancel student and medical debt. In doing so, Raghavan offers a forward-looking vision for how to build a durable consumer financial protection regime capable of reclaiming democratic authority in the post-Trump era.

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