Weird Epistemologies of Money and Trust in Fitzgerald, Ford, and Larsen; or, Isn’t Money Weird?

By Rob Hawkes

What follows is a slightly expanded version of a talk I gave at the ‘Weird Modernisms’ conference at Loughborough University, UK (1-4 July 2026), a collaboration between the UK-based British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) and the US-based Modernist Studies Association (MSA). ‘Weird Modernisms’ brought over 400 delegates together in the midst of an escalating crisis in the UK’s higher education sector (UKHE), which has seen multiple course closures, departmental restructures, and over 30,000 job losses in the last 3 years. Around the world, many academics face similar threats and much worse, and yet, at a time of rising authoritarianism and ecological breakdown, the critical capacity to think beyond the status quo that universities exist to foster and expand could not be more vital. My acute frustration with the ‘shrinking’ of UKHE[1] is that it is driven by a disastrous funding model designed according to the logic of what I describe in my recent writing as the ‘private money paradigm’.[2] As Scott Ferguson and I wrote last year, the private money paradigm:

upholds the backwards idea not only that fiscal outlays merely recycle private pounds, but also that the public good is somehow a burdensome drain on scarce public resources. The result pits communities against one another in a struggle over limited finances and frequently does so along conspicuously classed, gendered, and racialised lines.[3]

As I hope to demonstrate in this essay, however, money is much weirder and more capacious than the austere and exclusionary monetary politics that’s now threatening the future of our universities (and much more besides) will ever allow.

At ‘Weird Modernisms’, I shared these thoughts during a panel on ‘Weird Epistemologies’, chaired by Ruth Clemens and also featuring brilliant presentations by Anna Dijkstra and Graham Borland. My essay considers three modernist writers whose works are centrally concerned with sexual, racial, and classed forms of passing. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), we learn of the transformation of ‘Mr Nobody from Nowhere’ Jimmy Gatz into Jay Gatsby, a transgression of class boundaries that takes place in a novel where several characters, including the narrator, may also be straight-passing queer people.[4] In Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Clare Kendry, a light-skinned African American woman, passes so successfully for a white person that even her racist husband is unaware of her background, and, in Ford Madox Ford’s The Rash Act (1933), Henry Martin Aluin Smith, an American who has been bankrupted by the Wall Street Crash, and Henry Monckton Allard Smith, a British millionaire, switch places after both plan to commit suicide on the same day. Thus, all of these texts feature characters who assume, perform, or inhabit identities that may be regarded as deceptive, fraudulent, or fake. Nevertheless, each novel also complicates the epistemological basis on which these performed selves might be understood to be straightforwardly ‘false’ (or indeed ‘true’). Building on the claim recently advanced by the Money on the Left editorial collective that ‘money is queer’, this essay adds the analogous observation that money is weird.[5] Here, I argue that Fitzgerald’s, Ford’s, and Larsen’s characters encapsulate and express money’s epistemological weirdness, due in part to the way their performances both problematise and depend upon trust. Thus, while financial circumstances appear both to drive and facilitate the deceptive acts of Jay Gatsby, Clare Kendry, and Henry Martin Aluin Smith, they also point towards what I describe elsewhere as the ‘(un)conditional openness’ without which neither monetary tokens nor experimental novels could do the weird things they do in and to our worlds.[6]

Before I say more about the three novels already mentioned, I want to go back to the book I’ve probably thought more about than any other in the last quarter of a century. As it happens, I gave my first ever academic conference paper almost twenty years ago, in September 2006, at the University of Birmingham. At that conference, I considered Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, beginning with this passage:

For who in this world can give anyone a character? Who in this world knows anything of any other heart—or of his own? I don’t mean to say that one cannot form an average estimate of the way a person will behave. But one cannot be certain of the way any man will behave in every case—and until one can do that a “character” is of no use to anyone.[7]

Two decades later, I continue to find this an endlessly fascinating moment in John Dowell’s narrative and I think the reason for this is its epistemological weirdness. Famously, The Good Soldier is obsessed with the problem of knowing: can we really know other people? Did Dowell ever truly know the real Edward Ashburnham (the supposed ‘good soldier’ of the novel’s title)? In Ford’s hands these questions also attain a metatextual dimension: what is the point of writing novels if we cannot know the characters that inhabit them?[8] Indeed, this points towards two ideas that are in productive tension throughout modernist fiction: a profound sense of the textuality of the self, its construction in discourse and its shifting unknowability, alongside the modernist commitment to descending deeper into the self than ever before, as exemplified by the development of the stream-of-consciousness technique.

It is with this tension in mind that I turn to Ford’s 1933 novel The Rash Act. Prior to its publication, Ford described The Rash Act as: ‘the beginning of a trilogy that is meant to do for the post-war world and the Crisis what the Tietjens tetralogy [better known as Parade’s End] did for the war’.[9] So, for Ford at least, The Rash Act was up there with one of his very best works and it was also very specifically about ‘the Crisis’ (in other words, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed). Like Parade’s End, The Rash Act is a time-shifted, impressionist, and fragmented narrative which makes extensive use of free-indirect style. In another sense, however, The Rash Act is a quite simple prince-and-pauper fairy-tale in which Henry Martin, a ‘down-and-out’ American, and the British millionaire Henry Monckton exchange identities after both attempt the rash act of suicide.[10] While Hugh succeeds in killing himself, Henry fails, but sustains a blow to his face which (along with the fact that the two look very similar) enables him to assume the other’s identity. This is from the moment just after Henry Martin’s failed suicide attempt:

A voice said:
‘This is Monsieur Monckton Smeez. . . .’
Another:
‘Vous ne le dites pas! . . . You don’t say! I wish I had his money. But not at the moment his face.’ […]
If he wasn’t at the bottom of the Mediterranean he was at the side of a road under some plane trees and he had changed his identity.[11]

So, immediately upon being mistaken for Hugh Monkton, Henry is thinking in terms of changing his identity and money is already part of the equation.

Henry Martin writhed. […] He tried to say:
‘You must not say that.’ But they were binding his jaw over his head with a lint bandage. . . . After all he had wished to be Hugh Monckton. Now he was.[12]

This refers the reader back to a scene earlier in the book, when the two men meet for the first time in a Provençal nightclub and Henry experiences an intense desire to switch places with Hugh. However, beyond the fantasy of trading places that the novel appears to offer, it also asks typically weird modernist questions about identity and the self: two important markers of Hugh Monckton’s identity here are his money and a facial scar that he acquired during the First World War. During the course of his failed suicide attempt, Henry sustains a similar injury and is thus mistaken for Hugh. If he gets his money and also gets his scar, does this transform Henry into Hugh?

Nella Larsen’s Passing, like The Rash Act, is a fragmented modernist narrative containing hermeneutic gaps, time-shifts, multiple ambiguities, and epistemological uncertainties. Ittells the story of two African American women, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, both of whom are light-skinned enough to pass for white. While Irene only passes occasionally, Clare is married to a wealthy white supremacist who does not know and would not take kindly to knowing that she has, in the novel’s own terms, quote-unquote ‘Negro blood’.[13] Importantly, Clare, we learn, started passing in the first place to escape from poverty as well as from racism and so, like The Rash Act, Passing centres on a character who is motivated by money to take on or create a new identity. This is from the second chapter of Passing, as Irene and Clare discuss the topic of ‘passing’ for white:

“Tell me, honestly, haven’t you ever thought of ‘passing’?”
Irene answered promptly: “No. Why should I?” And […] hastened to add: “You see, Clare, I’ve everything I want. Except, perhaps, a little more money.”
At that Clare laughed […]. “Of course,” she declared, “that’s what everybody wants, just a little more money, even the people who have it. And I must say I don’t blame them. Money’s awfully nice to have. In fact, all things considered, I think, ’Rene, that it’s even worth the price.”[14]

Here, Larsen makes a very direct link between passing and money. The act of passing has apparently enabled Clare to get all that she wants in life (‘what everybody wants’) but it also entails a cost: ‘all things considered […] it’s even worth the price’. But, once again, there is also a sense that passing destabilises the categories and the hierarchies that both race and money have hitherto functioned to hold in place. Both novels, therefore, explore identities as discursively constructed, performed, and open to negotiation, contestation, and creative reimagining, while also placing money at the centre of their narratives of passing.

This essay is titled ‘Weird Epistemologies of Money and Trust’ and there is, perhaps, an obvious sense in which the novels discussed so far raise questions to do with trust and/or trickery, given their concentration on characters who ‘pretend’ to be people other than their ‘true’ selves. However, I would argue that, where questions of money and trust are concerned, these stories are about more than fraudulent and deceptive central characters. As I mentioned earlier, my recent work has made a distinction between the ‘private money paradigm’ of mainstream discourse and the ‘public money paradigm’, which my fellow members of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective and I advance in our writing and our activism. The private money paradigm dominates orthodox economic thought, teaching, and rhetoric as well as framing our political debates (see for example, the idea that a new Prime Minister needs the permission of ‘the markets’ to act in the public interest).[15] It insists that money originates in private exchange, that it is finite, scarce, and that ‘difficult decisions’ about who to exclude and marginalise must always be made according to the rules of ‘budget responsibility’.

This narrative of privation, limitation, and zero-sum binary choices is embedded in the transactional logic of exchange that we can trace back at least as far as Adam Smith’s infamous claim that there is ‘a certain propensity in human nature […] to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’.[16] And, indeed, despite there being no historical or anthropological evidence to support this view, most economics textbooks continue to explain that money is a ‘medium of exchange’ that emerged as a solution to the ‘double-coincidence-of-wants problem’ of barter.[17] This, for example, is from Case, Fair, and Oster’s widely-used Principles of Economics:

A barter system requires a double coincidence of wants for trade to take place. […] Some agreed-to medium of exchange […] neatly eliminates the double-coincidence-of-wants problem. […] Money is a lubricant in the functioning of a market economy.[18]

We can only speculate as to why the language of lubrication is so pervasive in economic writing, but it is echoed in Robert Putnam’s influential Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, where it is also associated with the concept of trust:

A society that relies on generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. Honesty and trust lubricate the inevitable frictions of social life.[19]

This is just one instance of a pervasive trend in the scholarly discourse on trust, which I’ve been tracing across a number of disciplines for quite some years now, and which frequently frames trusting in transactional terms as, if you like, a kind of barter system: I’ll trust you if you trust me back; I’ll trust you if I can be certain you won’t double cross me.[20] Here is another, even more recent, example from Philippa Ryan’s Trust and Distrust in Digital Economies (2019): ‘Trust has proven to be integral to economic development and human security, because trust is central to exchange’.[21] My contention in all of this is that strategic, transactional, or, indeed, ‘calculative trust’ is not trust at all;[22] and that a much better way to understand the concept is to think of it in terms of the openness to the other that Derek Attridge describes as essential to ‘responsible reading’.[23] Indeed, as I’ve previously put it, the ‘openness to newness, strangeness, and otherness’ (a list to which we might also add weirdness) that is ‘fostered and demanded by experimental fiction’ (and, indeed, other works of art) is much closer than we usually think to the trust inherent in the acts of using and creating money, which entail both performative promises to pay and collective acknowledgements of interdependence: IOU or, rather, we owe one another.[24]

For the purposes of this essay, what I want to highlight is that, while there is a way of reading both The Rash Act and Passing as stories in which identities are exchanged in barter-like transactions – Henry for Hugh (which, incidentally, is the title of the 1934 sequel to The Rash Act),[25] and African American for white – and while this reading might also foreground the idea of trust – other characters must trust that Henry is Hugh or that Clare is white to enable them to pass – such interpretations would miss important aspects of these texts. Indeed, from our perspective at Money on the Left, the weird epistemologies and malleabilities that we find in modernist texts, when it comes to questions of identity and selfhood, are neither separate nor separable from public money’s always-already ungraspable, capacious, and open-ended weirdness. So, however tempting it may be to conclude that, although Passing and The Rash Act complicate fixed ideas about identities – presenting them as shifting, ambiguous, and discursively constructed – they perpetuate an orthodox understanding of money as a realm of transactional zero-sum exchange, my colleagues at Money on the Left and I would say ‘whoa, hold on!’

As I mentioned at the beginning, at MotL we have been affirming for some time now that ‘money is queer’. As Scott Ferguson explains in his 2025 article ‘Analog Critique; or, Isn’t Money Queer?’:

By this, we mean not only that public money should be mobilized to serve LGBTQ2+ communities, but more profoundly that money as a social medium is never as straight or alienating as it feigns to be. Like language, money’s many words, sights, sounds, smells and feels never communicate exactly what they intend.[26]

Even more recently, Lea Steininger has added, in an article published just a couple of months ago (and which I heartily recommend):

Just as sexual/gender identities are not fixed but constructed through discourse and power, so too are economic goods and services not stable, preexisting entities. [… M]oney itself is queer in the sense that it embodies polyvalent and contestable public structures and performances, which cannot be reduced to the narrow definitions offered by dominant economic ideologies.[27]

My contention here is that the weird epistemologies that we find in modernist fiction can help us to ‘think queerly’ about money in a number of important ways. Moreover, if it is better understood as (un)conditional openness, and not as calculative exchange, then the trust involved both in reading modernist novels and in creating money is much weirder than we may hitherto have recognised. The recent celebration of weird modernisms in Loughborough, then, demands to be recognised not just as an expression of the weird obsessions of weird scholars, but as academia fulfilling what Stefan Collini has called its ‘governing purpose’, that of ‘extending human understanding through open-ended enquiry’.[28] As ‘choreographers of credit’, trust, and openness to newness, strangeness, and otherness, universities foster the very weirdness that the private money paradigm consistently fails to recognise, comprehend, or value.[29]

At the 2024 BAMS conference in Leeds, Scott Ferguson and I presented a paper on The Great Gatsby which we have since developed into a book chapter that came out in April this year in a volume titled Inflationary Modernities, edited by Wayne Stables and Kieran Brown.[30] In that chapter, we discuss this moment, when Nick meets Gatsby for the first time:

He smiled understandingly […]. It was one of those rare smiles […] that you may come across four or five times in life. […] It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished – and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.[31]

Returning to this passage in preparation for ‘Weird Modernisms’, I was struck once again by the way it exemplifies what Scott and I have described as Fitzgerald’s method of ‘impressionist accounting’.[32] Nick’s idea of Gatsby here wavers and blurs before his eyes so that, again, this is not simply a matter of ‘elegant young roughneck’ Jimmy Gatz pretending to be the extravagant party host Jay Gatsby. Instead, Gatsby complicates and queers (or perhaps I should say weirds) orthodox understandings of gendered, raced, classed, and sexual identity while also offering glimpses beyond the private money paradigm’s austere logic of exclusionary violence.

The image at the top of this essay is the ‘Weird Pride’ flag, co-created in 2021 by autistic writers, advocates, and community organisers Fergus Murray and  Quinn Dexter for the first Weird Pride Day (March 4th), ‘a day for people to embrace their weirdness, and reject the stigma associated with being weird’.[33] In Murray’s words: ‘Creativity is driven by divergent perspectives, and squashed by demands for conformity.’[34] To conclude, then, I want to turn to the words of the neuroqueer theorist Nick Walker and to affirm that, by embracing what Walker calls ‘beautiful weirdness’, we can open up new possibilities not only for rejecting normative attitudes to identity but also for jettisoning the economic orthodoxies embedded in the private money paradigm. I suspect that every delegate at the ‘Weird Modernisms’ conference was there because at some point in the past they’d been willing to approach the beautiful weirdness of modernist art with an attitude of openness and trust. As Walker explains:

[A]nyone can liberate themselves from the strictures of normativity. The already neurodivergent can reconnect with, and cultivate previously suppressed or undeveloped capacities, in order to more fully manifest their potentials for beautiful weirdness, and those whom we call neurotypicals are just potential neuroqueer mutant comrades who haven’t yet woken up and figured out how to unzip their normal-person suits.[35]

My hope is that by embracing weird modernisms and by affirming, not only that money is queer but also that money is weirder than the austerity mindset that’s currently doing its utmost to destroy our universities, and indeed our planet, will ever be able to appreciate or contain, we can build a postnormal, inclusive and sustainable world and unzip our ‘normal-person suits’ (along with our normal-person monetary imaginations) together.

[1] I refer here to QMUCU’s indispensable ‘UK HE Shrinking’ webpage: https://qmucu.org/qmul-transformation/uk-he-shrinking/

[2] See, for example, Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson, ‘Green-Lighting Gatsby: Austere Modernisms, Exuberant Avant-Gardes, and their Orgastic Futures’, in Inflationary Modernities: Literature, Culture, and Economy, ed. Wayne Stables and Kieran Brown (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), 21-47; and Rob Hawkes, ‘“Too paranoid for you?”: Suspicion, Trust and (Post/Meta?)Modern Money in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge’, in Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature, ed. Adam Kelly and Katerina Pavlidi (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), 185-204.

[3] Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson, ‘UK Universities in Crisis? Time to Transform Higher Ed Finance’, Money on the Left, 16 January 2025: https://moneyontheleft.org/2025/01/16/uk-universities-in-crisis-time-to-transform-higher-ed-finance/

[4] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby [1925] (Penguin,1990), 123.

[5] Scott Ferguson, ‘Analog Critique; or, Isn’t Money Queer?’, Public Culture 37.1 (2025), 86.

[6] Rob Hawkes, ‘(Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust’, Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice 1.1 (2025), 1-42. See also Rob Hawkes, Scott Ferguson, and Will Beaman, ‘(Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust’, Money on the Left, 4 July 2025: https://moneyontheleft.org/2025/07/04/unconditional-openness-towards-a-neochartalist-theory-of-money-and-trust-2/

[7] Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard (Norton, 2012), 105-8.

[8] My first academic conference paper subsequently developed into my first academic publication, which was on this very topic. See Rob Hawkes, ‘Personalities of Paper: Characterisation in A Call and The Good Soldier ’, in Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations, ed. Andrzej Gasiorek and Daniel Moore (Rodopi, 2008), 43-60.

[9] Ford Madox Ford, letter to Ray Long, 2 July 1932, Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton University Press, 1965), 208.

[10] Ford Madox Ford, The Rash Act [1933] (Carcanet, 1982), 74. For further discussion of this fascinating novel, see Rob Hawkes, ‘Trusting in Provence: Financial Crisis in The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh’, in Ford Madox Ford, France and Provence, ed. Dominique Lemarchal and Claire Davison-Pégon (Rodopi, 2011), 229-42; and ‘Bogus Modernism: Impersonation, Deception and Trust in Ford Madox Ford and Evelyn Waugh’, in Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism: Continuities, Revisions, Speculations, ed. Bénédicte Coste, Catherine Delyfer, and Christine Reynier (Routledge, 2017), 175-86.

[11] Ford, The Rash Act, 212.

[12] Ford, The Rash Act, 211-12.

[13] Nella Larsen, Passing [1929], in Quicksand and Passing (Serpent’s Tail, 2014), 158.

[14] Larsen, Passing, 160.

[15] ‘Andy Burnham would enter Downing Street already “boxed in” by financial markets’ according to a recent piece in the Guardian by Alex Daniel: ‘“Walking a tightrope”: Burnham’s borrowing plans clash with fiscal realities’, Guardian, 24 June 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/24/walking-a-tightrope-andy-burnham-borrowing-clash-fiscal-realities

[16] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations [1776] (Penguin, 1999), 116.

[17] Karl E. Case, Ray C. Fair, and Sharon M. Oster, Principles of Economics, 10th edn. (Prentice Hall, 2012), 502.

[18] Case et al., Principles of Economics, 502.

[19] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, 2000), 135.

[20] See Hawkes, ‘(Un)conditional Openness’; and Hawkes, ‘“Too paranoid for you?”’ for detailed discussions of these issues.

[21] Philippa Ryan, Trust and Distrust in Digital Economies (Routledge, 2019), 3.

[22] According to Laura Poppo, Kevin Zheng Zhou and Julie J. Li, calculative trust ‘informs expectations by deliberately and rationally assessing forward-looking conditions’ and ‘hinges on the relative values of cheating […] and cooperation’. Poppo et al., ‘When Can You Trust “Trust”? Calculative Trust, Relational Trust, and Supplier Performance’, Strategic Management Journal 37.4 (2016): 725, 724.

[23] See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004).

[24] Rob Hawkes, ‘How can novels help us think about money… and maybe even save the planet?’, Money on the Left, 26 February 2024: https://moneyontheleft.org/2024/02/26/how-can-novels-help-us-think-about-money-and-maybe-even-save-the-planetguest-lecture/

[25] Ford Madox Ford, Henry for Hugh (J.B. Lippincott, 1934).

[26] Ferguson, ‘Analog Critique’, 86.

[27] L. E. Steininger, ‘Against inflation: queer-feminist monetary (and price) theory’, Review of International Political Economy (2026), 18.

[28] Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For? (Penguin, 2012), 91.

[29] Scott Ferguson, Benjamin Wilson, William Saas, and Maxximilian Seijo, ‘Overcoming COVID-19 Requires Rethinking University Finance,’ b2o (2020): https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/scott-ferguson-benjamin-wilson-william-saas-maxximilian-seijo-overcoming-covid-19-requires-rethinking-university-finance/

[30] Hawkes and Ferguson, ‘Green-Lighting Gatsby’, 21-47.

[31] Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 49.

[32] Hawkes and Ferguson, ‘Green-Lighting Gatsby’, 33-6.

[33] Weird Pride Day (n.d): https://weirdpride.day/

[34] Stimpunks Foundation, ‘Weird’ (n.d.): https://stimpunks.org/glossary/weird/

[35] Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (Autonomous Press, 2021), 190.

Money on the Left1 Comment

Public Employment & Training from the Great Society to the “End of Welfare as We Know It”

This month, Scott Ferguson speaks with Mario Rendina about the politics of public employment and training in the United States as they shifted over the course of the late 20th century. Unlike our standard episodes, this conversation is an archival treat: it was originally recorded 11 years ago in 2015, three years before the Money on the Left podcast officially began.

Rendina brings over thirty years of hands-on experience working within municipal government in Tampa Bay, Florida—specifically within Hillsborough County. Grounded in his extensive career as a local administrator, Rendina walks us through the decades he spent supervising county initiatives, sketching out how local experimentation actively moved with and against broad macroeconomic shifts at the federal level.

As Rendina explains, local administrators routinely interpreted federal laws regulating public employment and training rather than passively accepting top-down mandates as fixed or uncontestable. Despite federal directives to prioritize private-sector placement, Rendina and his colleagues routinely found creative ways to bolster and expand public employment—whether by baking future public employment contracts into library building projects or dynamically staffing their own municipal offices.

Throughout the interview, Rendina’s testimony tacitly underscores a core Money on the Left lesson: we must not underestimate the institutional and communal capacities that regional governments always-already have at their disposal. While pro-social change requires funding, local institutions can actively leverage their crediting powers and existing infrastructure to mobilize and value local communities.

Ultimately, the conversation maps a troubling yet instructive historical trajectory from Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society to Bill Clinton’s notorious “end to welfare as we know it.” While the federal government never fully committed to a well-compensated, non-exclusive public job guarantee during this era, Rendina’s account highlights genuine pro-social advances we can still learn from today. Crucially, it recounts how Reaganite and Clintonian neoliberalism systematically undercut these endeavors over time, defunding public training programs and increasingly privatizing their leadership, operations, and aims.

Conducted with an eye toward future struggles for a federal Job Guarantee grounded in an inalienable right to work, this interview provides a vital archive from which to advance modern movements for public provisioning.

Additional Resources:

  • The Full, Raw Audio: Listen to the complete, unedited 2015 recording on our SoundCloud.
  • Conference Presentation: Watch Mario Rendina’s presentation delivered at the inaugural Money on the Left Conference at the University of South Florida in 2018.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Scott Ferguson

So, this is Scott Ferguson. This recording is being done on Sunday, July 12th, 2015. I’m here with…

Mario Rendina

This is Mario Rendina. I have worked with employment and training programs since October of 1969. I remember this because I remember looking down at my very first report. I was the statistician for a concentrated employment program (CEP) and I remember looking down at my first report, and I remember keeping that report in my bottom file drawer, and I would look at it every time I wondered about when did I start working in employment and training?

And I looked down there and there was that October of 1969 report. So I’m pretty sure when I got involved in employment and training programs. That’s when it was.

Scott Ferguson

To explain what has brought us together, I’m interested in Modern Monetary Theory and their ideas about large, publicly funded, full employment programs. These programs would be used countercyclically in relationship to the expansions and contractions of the market. You, Mario, have years of experience not only in job training and in job placement, but when there were opportunities – if I’m understanding you right – when there were opportunities, meaning when there was public funding available, indirect job creation. You have already told me some of these stories about creative ways that this was done. I guess, to me, this conversation, in addition to learning from you, about this history and what we can draw from this history to move forward, but it is basically bringing the power that Modern Monetary Theory or MMT brings us, which is the power to use fiscal policy to fund public works programs as much as we need to. With your experience and know-how – I guess one way of putting this question more simply is – what would you do to bring about full employment in the United States if you had no fiscal limits?

Well, we can start by just talking about your career and let your career be kind of a window into this whole larger history. We should start with where we are right now and what county you’re working in.

Mario Rendina

Right. Well, basically, my career started with the concentrated employment program in Tampa, which was the Tampa CEP, also known as TCEP. There are a bunch of people still around that were involved in the sub-program. 

Scott Ferguson

And what did that stand for?

Mario Rendina

The Tampa Concentrated Employment Program. I can’t remember exactly how many, but I think there were only about nine in the country and they focused on specific areas. For example, in Tampa, it was an extremely poor area of Tampa focused, not the whole of the city of Tampa, but on a specific target area. So it was literally focused down on working at the problems in a very specific area. And it was so highly directed to that area that all the staff, which included coaches for participants in the program, coaches that would get people out of bed in the morning if they didn’t show up for appointments.

You had counselors that were trying to come up with an employability plan for the participant. You had job developers that were going out and finding jobs in the community for folks. You had supportive services. We had a supportive services section, which could buy boots and uniforms or whatever was necessary for the employment of an individual.

Scott Ferguson

Is that where something like childcare could be funded?

Mario Rendina

Daycare was the biggest piece of support services, for us, it was child daycare. Of course, it was a hugely important piece of any US person’s employability plan. So anyhow, it was a concentrated employment program and so all these people were supposed to come from the target area, which made it a very pure group kind of thing. Everybody knew everybody else’s business pretty well. You just live down the block from me, and that’s why you’re coming to get me out of bed in the morning, because I didn’t show up for the job interview. 

Scott Ferguson

Oh, wow. So, it had a community feel.

Mario Rendina

It definitely had a community feel to it. I ended up in the program simply because they couldn’t find somebody that had any kind of a statistical background in the target area. So they had to pull from outside the target area in order to get a statistician in there, even though I had failed statistics once and passed it finally once it was social science statistics for social science sociology majors that had it completed in their major. So, in any case, I was brought in by a friend who, in fact, had gone to Vanderbilt and virtually completed his master’s degree. He said, “you need to come over here.”

Now, I had come from being the first man in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in Hillsborough County. I had engaged them for one year. I said, “I will work for you for one year.” That was my promise. At the end of the year, I went with the TCEP program as a statistician, he had moved to a position of evaluator. These are very, very important things in any programs that we need to look at in the future. It’s evaluating the program. I think one of the major problems that we have is that we’re not doing any monitoring and evaluation of what we do. Did it work?

How well did it work? How is the staff doing? What are the outputs? Where did it screw up in the middle? How does the front end work? So anyhow, the concentrated employment programs were, to my mind, clearly experiments in how we do manpower programs where we have concentrations of poverty and all the things that are implicit there. So that was the CEP programs, and they can be found. You can look them up. There’s very, very little information on the CEPs, but the forerunner of all of that was the Manpower Development and Training Act, MDTA. 

Scott Ferguson

What year was that? 

Mario Rendina

1962. 

MDTA was, as much as I can recall, it went to the school systems for vocational training, manpower development through the school systems, the VoTech system. But it also had an element of on the job training and I think they looked a little bit toward the unions as to what could we do in terms of on the job training?

Basically, it was a subsidy to the private sector for a given occupation. Basically, the policy was that the government would pay one half of the wage for a specific period of time. You had MDTA and so you might have welding going on in the school system and you might have on the job training, doing whatever jobs that the private sector wanted that you were going to pay half for over a specific period of time. That was a pretty limited program, at least in the Tampa area. I think the funding was such that you could maybe put together a complete welding program or something like that, where you’re actually buying the hardware as well as uniforms and that kind of stuff.

Pretty expensive stuff. Then you’d have an OJT (On-the-Job Training) program on the side, which could in fact lead to the skills training, which had a skills training component and you had on the job training components. That is what I remember about the way we operated here. There may have been some other variability, but with the CEP program, you brought in EOA Money, Economic Opportunity Act.

Now we’re talking about President Johnson, right? So it’s “war on poverty” money and it was flexible. That was what brought your counselors, your job developers, the staffing to carry out very much expanded training programs and we’re talking about structural unemployment. There’s no question we’re talking about structural unemployment here. So, virtually, in terms of training, if somebody didn’t have a G.E.D., we’d start there. You do a G.E.D., you get your G.E.D., and then meanwhile, the counselor was trying to develop an employability plan that would go on from the G.E.D. You need the G.E.D. in order to go into clerical training, and so forth.

Meanwhile, of course, for the women, we’re providing child daycare in most cases. We were, in fact, an avenue for welfare recipients. Also, if the case manager welfare could get one of our people into the CEP program, then they knew that we could take care of them and the welfare people didn’t know how to get people on jobs.

So there was the WIN (Work Incentive Program) program, which was later actually. There’s Project Hopeful early on, but, these programs would have a sewing class, that would be your project. So, to be able to get somebody into a program where the client could literally move through the program to reach their capability in terms of education and training, was a big deal.

So they would love to have us take on a participant, and the person was tracked through what was called a central records unit. Now, this was the first tracking mechanism for any of this stuff that was done at a local level. We’re talking about a federal grant, a federal grant to a local area…

Scott Ferguson

One time or ongoing?

Mario Rendina

You would renew it. It was an annual renewal with a contract. It was approximately 3.5in thick. All the regulations related to the CEP are there as part of the contract. And you had assurances that ran on for 50 pages and so forth and so on. Then you probably had a good inch and a half of a programmatic description and budgets.

And so it was a highly structured program in terms of what are you going to do? You’re going to have both statistically and narrative wise, you’re talking about how many you’re going to do? How are you going to bring them into the program? How many are you going to bring into the program? 

What’s the flow through the program? What’s it going to be? How many people are you going to put in on the job training and so forth? But the “and so forth” was the critical part of it, and that was skills training of anything that could be offered by the VoTech system in Hillsborough County, which was absolutely extensive.

We had Erwin VoTech later. I’m not sure that Erwin existed originally. Erwin has everything up to LPN training in the medical area and we had welding and auto mechanics and diesel mechanics and all kinds of other things. But virtually anything that they had and also the things that the community college had. So you have his very, very wide range of available training. On staff, we also had a test administrator. So the test administrator would determine that there was one basic test of adult basic education. I don’t know how I remember that, but, yeah, it was a test on basic education. That would be the first thing that would give you an idea of where the person’s grade level was and so forth.

This test administrator could administer a number of tests. We have ways of determining proper directions of people, whether or not they’re succeeding or not in terms of our design versus the school systems design or what have you, but the central record unit was keeping track of all this, and you would see somebody go into a training component and you would know how long they were there, and you would know what happened to them after they came out of that training.

Where did they go from there? All of this was done on a key punch machine and this is brand new stuff. Nobody else had this kind of a drive system. We had a key punch machine and a counter sorter. The counter sorter is the machine that you see in the old FBI movies when they wanted to show high tech stuff.

It’s the machine that made a huge amount of noise and went “BARARARA” and all the punch cards would go into different piles. Well, we had different decks. We had a deck for intake and it would give you the characteristics of the participants. That deck represented the characteristics of the participants. Then when somebody would move from one place like intake to assessment and orientation.

So, anyhow, you might be in this component, you go assessment and orientation, then you move on to maybe skills training or on the job training or something like that. We had teams that were composed of a coach, a counselor, a job developer – at least those three positions that I can recall. People were being handled by six teams, so we would look at the overall statistics of the program at the end of the month and say, “okay, overall, we had so many placements. We had so many dropouts of different kinds, but we also have evaluations of two types.”

One was of each of the teams. Each team had its own set of statistics that were identical to our inputs and outputs. How many people did you send to orientation? How many people did you send to skills training? How were the exits from your team? So the teams were the output of the total system was the aggregate of the units. So each team was being closely monitored and again, I emphasize, monitoring is the only way that you can achieve anything in these kinds of programs.

You have to know what you’re doing and have responsible staff. In order to affix responsibility, you break it down into units that are small enough to where you can look at it and say, “how come Mary ended up dropping out?” So what do we do? We have a meeting every month with every team. We had one monitor or one evaluator that did nothing but the teams and was responsible for doing reports on six teams every month, on every aspect of those teams. On the other side, we had a monitor that would look at the components. How did we do in welding training? It might be by institution. How did we do in skills training? And we had some subcontractors. So we might be looking at that subcontractor that had a very specific kind of a job.

So anyhow, it was a very comprehensive system in terms of tracking individuals through the system. You often discovered what your problems were as you went along and you would fix the system as you went along. So, you know, people are stacking up here at assessment of orientation. What’s going on there? Maybe we should maybe filter down the front end a little bit so that we can handle all the people that are stacking up. Teams can only handle a case load of so many.

I think we were an unusual program of, maybe, nine in the country. So anyhow, that was an interesting program. That was the first one that comprehensively included all these wonderful things like support services and training and so forth.

The delightful person that ran the summer program, which was a summer program. Delightful lady who was probably someone that was dead serious about making a success of her life as a professional, and ran this program. She had maybe more than a high school education, you know, possibly community college.

She ran an elaborate summer program. We’re talking about a couple million dollars worth of summer programs in all the parks and recreation areas and a lot of county departments. It was a huge job. So it was someone who was taking great advantage of being a staff member in an organization that respected black staff for their abilities.

She had the ability to do this. Wow. Great. Let’s let her do that. Let’s have her do that. I think we tried to figure out how somebody would work out best in the organization. Our counselors were largely degreed people. It started out with the counselors. Under the CEP, that was actually a subcontractor of the job service, the teams of the counselors and job developers were under the job service in our house, but they had a director that was in our house that was the job service. Why? Probably because of the job development part of it. You don’t want to have job placement being done by anybody other than the job service. Right? So you have them over your structure that results in job placement. So that was there. But the counselors could be degreed, and they didn’t have to come from the area because it was under a subcontract.

It was a subcontract of the job service, so they weren’t required to hire only from the target area. So we did have professional counselors, two of which I had brought in later into the social record unit to be monitors or evaluators or statisticians. But in any case, all of these folks worked together as teams.

Everybody we had had quirks. Okay. Weird personal kinds of stories.The fiscal officer was a Vietnam vet. He had fixed F-4 Phantoms at one of the bases in Vietnam. He was about my age, I guess, at the time and he was a tremendous fiscal officer.

He could throw money around pretty well in terms of putting it in the right places and he was known to be a Vietnam vet. I had been a little sailor boy at one time or another, “No, no, I’m not, I’m not the right type to take care of situations.” Right? But we could serve virtually any population that came to us.

Well, we quite purposefully developed training that we knew was in demand that was portable. You are talking about demand occupations, but actually one of the more important things is portability. Portability of an occupation. If you’re a nurse here, you can be a nurse there. LPN, same thing. So the medical stuff is really important in terms of portability.

But anyhow, we saw a demand for therapeutic massage. It paid pretty well. It was portable, and it was the kind of thing that we could buy the table. We could buy the training from a training provider. We could do those things, and we could place them, and that was fine.

The Department of Labor went bananas. Well, when they saw the placement that we had placed a massage therapist with anybody, labor went bananas. “What are you guys doing down there? Somebody is going to get a hold of it, the paper is going to get a hold of it.”

The paper did discover that it was a legitimate placement. That was really flying on the edge. But we knew that that was a portable occupation that had a certain amount of demand. And so we’d risk these things. We’d say, “okay, this is a small school. Let’s give them one. Let’s see if they can turn out one massage therapist where they can place. And if that works out, we’ll give them one more.”

I mean, we were not afraid to do a one off of something. So that’s a pretty good example of what was really pretty out there on the edge of what the government and society was willing to do. You could say it’s therapeutic massage and you could back it up, but it just didn’t sound so.

So we were out there on the edge on a lot of things and we’d have a lot of situations in which we would have two competing privates, like in truck driver training and a CDL (certified driver’s license) will get you a job anywhere. Again, portability. If you can drive a big rig, you can get a job here, you can get a job there. We needed jobs for men, also. I mean, at that point we were just thinking about demand occupations. So you’d have some friction between two privates that both did the same kinds of things. We’d decide on the basis of outcomes on who we’d be using most. We wouldn’t be exclusive to one or the other.

Scott Ferguson

So how often, in these programs, in the late 60s into the 70s, how often did you find that there were always demand sectors that you could train, support, and funnel people into?

Mario Rendina

Yeah. I remember inflation but as the economy receded, we were getting into a major recession eventually. Then it became really difficult. But it was at that point that CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) went to public service employment. Title VI. Title VI of CEDA is public service employment. It was countercyclical.

We were working with structural unemployment. That was our big deal. All of a sudden we’re talking about countercyclical. And we were saying, “what the hell is countercyclical? Counter to what? It’s a cycle, right? Counter to what cycle?” You know, we didn’t know cyclical.

Scott Ferguson

What year is this? 

Mario Rendian

It was ‘73 that the act was made. But I’m pretty sure our recession was getting into the early 80s. You can probably place better than I can.

Scott Ferguson

I think there were several in there.

Mario Rendina

There were several in there. But one that was most profound is when they started pouring a lot of money into Title VI. It was interesting because under the CEP, under TCEP, under the original program, they had, what I now can only assume, was Labor’s attempt at a pilot for public service employment.

We got a small grant for the public employment program and it was like $30,000 or something. What the heck are you going to do with $30,000? And it needed to be a public employee. How many can you hire for $30,000? I amused myself by saying, “look, we’ve got a program that if I hire them into the Central Records unit, they can enroll themselves. They can put themselves into a job, which is to monitor themselves.”

I said, “you know, this could be done with $30,000. You can’t hire more than one person. Why not hire somebody that can also help us out with the rest of our monitoring and stuff.” So anyhow, that was the public employment program and the giggle on that one was I said, “public employment program. Ah! It’s the PEP program!” Labor came down on me like you wouldn’t believe, with Palmdale boots, “No, we’re calling it the PEP program. You can’t call it the program.” “Okay.” But it was this tiny little thing, but it really was the forerunner of the whole Title VI public employment. They didn’t get much of a test out of us.

We had one, right? We converted them. We turned them into full-time employee. They worked up until 2000. They retired from the county. Anyhow, prior to 1970, we were under the hospital welfare board of Hillsborough County. That’s who the grant came to. In January of 1970, we became a county department. So, there’s the transition where we became county employees, but we were funded throughout the whole CETA and so forth. So anyhow, that is kind of a divisor, because all of a sudden you have to have benefits and so forth.

You’re getting into recession and public service employment and Title VI. What does it do? Jobs for people that met the definition of unemployed for a very short period of time. It was the job service definition of unemployed, meaning that you didn’t have a job and you were seeking employment, you had to be seeking employment, and you didn’t have a job for a period of time. I don’t know what it is, two weeks. Whatever it was back then, it was a relatively short period of time.

Scott Ferguson

So this wasn’t really for the long term unemployed.

Mario Rendina

Well, it was because people are coming out of college and they don’t have a job and they don’t have a horizon for a job. We employed a lot of those too. But, what was it for? Okay, it was government jobs that had a huge diversity in Hillsborough County. I’ll get into that in a minute. 

But also for private not-for-profits. And it was jobs. All we would pay is the salaries. So in the county, we built all the boardwalks at Lotus Lake Park, for example, and several other parks. The county would provide the materials and we did all the labor, including a supervisor. You had a contractor that was out of business who knew how to bang lumber together and make boardwalks.

Hire him as the supervisor. What do you do? You hire them at prevailing wages. We need to think about that in MMT, right? We’re hiring people in government at prevailing wages for the job. One guy is banging lumber. He gets that wage and it’s all established in the government structure, right?

We can create new jobs, but basically, let’s say we’re just filling jobs descriptions that exist in, say, the county and city structure and at those prevailing wages. It’s supposed to be a two year term and by that time, the economy will have recovered or the economy recovered enough for the counties and cities to pick up these people.

Okay, the same thing is going on in the state.

Scott Ferguson

Because their tax revenues are increasing.

Mario Rendina

So that’s the presumption. 

Scott Ferguson

Then they can afford to take these people on as full time employees and your funding mechanism ceases to support these jobs.

Mario Rendina

Right, and that’s the concept. Also for private not-for-profits. That was, I think, a very elegant idea because, in a recession, one of the first organizations to feel the pressure is private not-for-profits. I don’t have enough money to give any to the end of the line people. So we had onesies and twosies out there. It would be a job description: “I need a secretary in order to run my whole operation.” So the private not-for-profits, we had bunches of them. They would simply give us a two page proposal saying “I need this for that.”

We ended up with a complete public service employment section. You had the structural unemployment section over here basically doing all the structural unemployment stuff and you have public service employment over here. It was a separate shop. The city did their own and the county did their own.

They simply said, “you’re going to get $6 million and you’re going to get $6 million. Do with it the way you want.” The piece I was looking at was, let’s say, the county’s portion. So we got all the county departments, find out what their needs were and this was over and above whatever they were doing, they had to be over and above whatever they were doing.

Good. So you’re going to create a new library, but you don’t have any staff for it because your budget lines are full-on librarians. You get that built, fine, with public service employment, you can hire librarians that need to meet the eligibility requirements to be libraries, that just an example.

Scott Ferguson

And you can train them if you need to.

Mario Rendina

You could do that. There was a title in which you could do training and employment together. It was designed more for youth, where you do training in a job, and a kind of work experience with related training.

We always wanted it related. None of this business about sweeping the floor over here and learning to be an accountant over here. It had to be related. Anyhow, not too much training. You were usually picking up somebody that had a construction job over here, and see if we have a construction job over here.

So, the areas, in, in the county structure, there were most impacted were, were, things like parks and recreation. Okay. And, where, where you needed staff and where you could train them. You’re training them on the job with county employees at no cost. You know, that’s the cost of doing business is training, is training a new, you know, recreation work.

Okay. Parks and Rec was a big one. That is the single largest part of a summer program when school was out. Where the people in the city, the poor people in the city and in the county send their kids? They send them to the parks. And what we would do is staff those parks.

We had recreation leaders who would take smaller kids and supervise their volleyball or whatever the games were, you’d become recreation leaders. We had park ranger trainees that would help the park rangers with whatever they were doing, which might be emptying the big trash cans into the whatever.

But, it gave jobs for all these people and it provided child daycare for thousands of working parents. It was a marvelous program. Everybody loved that program. So it was fantastic. And it came out under Title 2 at one point. It was the only part that wasn’t structural under Title 2, it was a jobs program. Anyhow, that’s how public service employment was supposed to work, also. It was that you had a need and a way to impact it was staff. If it required equipment or nuts and bolts, that was at the county’s expense. Then the labor was on that side. This is one of the areas where it caught a lot of hell, in terms of the press, because it did have a minimal requirement up front, you could place professionals straight out of college. Okay. They did have student loans. They were people that were going to contribute to the economy if they could get a job. Some of the super examples of that kind of thing that bothers some people sometimes is that the state attorney was E.J. Salcines at the time, and E.J. had come from a school in Texas, this law school in Texas.

And that school became known as EJU, “E.J. Salcines University,” because he would bring them over and they would qualify because they had just been through law school. They didn’t have a job. They had been unemployed for two weeks. They were seeking employment and they would qualify for that. We staffed the State Attorney’s office and if they passed the bar, he’d hire them as full time. Not a bad thing. Mark Ober, our current state attorney? He was from public service employment. 

Okay, there was some high level stuff that went on, as well as low level stuff. I remember a guy that came in under CEDA, but it was the very, very beginning of CEDA and another good friend of mine was a counselor at the time.

I eventually hired him to do monitoring and evaluation of teams, but he was a counselor of one of our teams, and he got this guy, Vietnam veteran, wired to the gills. He was just a wired guy, stringy, strong Vietnam veteran. Crazy. “Yeah, I need a job. I want a job. Get me a job.” Our counselor, my good friend, says, “okay, look, here’s the deal. You give me 30 days retention and I’ll put you on a job. And you know what? You give me 30 days of retention, and you can come back to me, and we’ll talk about it again, and I might put you on another job, but you got to give me 30 days retention.” Playing the statistics game, but to the advantage of the client and to our own advantage. I mean, you know, this kid was beginning to learn how to hold a job. “I gotta hold it for 30 days. I gotta do that or he won’t give me another job.” I went to one of my retirement functions and he was there. He was there after he had gone through the structural program. We eventually got him over into public service employment with the Parks and Recreation Department. He was a multi-trade worker. He could change locks on every park in the county. I saw him one time when he was out there working with some of our summer program people, putting together a dock or floating dock. Yeah, that’s an enormous success. You can see public service employment as being abused. You can see it as being used properly. The whole thing has to do with how you’re going to implement a program. It all has to do with that.

Our implementation, I think, was highly successful, inasmuch as we converted 40% of the people we put into those jobs into full time employment with the county organization or with the private not-for-profit, I don’t think anybody else in the country did that. So it had to do with implementation and taking the regulations seriously.

You know, the regulations are saying that you are supposed to convert people as the economy improves and so forth and so on. So, when budget time would come around, we would say, “pay attention to your PSE people, you know, if you can make a spot in your budget for that PSE person, you need to take them.”

And at some point we started paying the benefits too, because to start with, all we were doing was paying the wages. At some point somebody decided, “oh my God, these people would do benefits.” And that came straight out of the public till, fortunately out of the national money, to back pay the benefits.

I say fortunate for local governments because, you know, there was a lot of back pay due. But anyhow, they really became exactly the same as county employees. A lot of those converted. So there were successes and, and there could easily be abuses. It was easy to have an abuse there.

And of course, the abuses are the ones that hit the papers. But as a program, think about the idea of WPA (Works Progress Administration) but think about that as having it go from top to bottom. Okay. Now we’re telling you about block grants again. CEDA was successful in as much as it got the attention of local governments, because it was a block grant to areas of a certain size.

It gave them a lot of muscle in a lot of ways. But what did it do? It could also take care of an awful lot of things that were going on in addition to, maybe, somebody building boardwalks. We had a pothole crew out there. Let me tell you how much people like the pothole crew.

Because, what happens? “I got a pothole in my yard! People are breaking their axles here.” 

“Call the county commissioner for your area.” 

“I got them potholes here.” 

You know, it was a huge success. It’s two guys behind a truck with asphalt, two shovels and a tamper.

By God, you saw that pothole and the politicians were going bananas. “Wow, what a program!” You can do infrastructure stuff at that level all the way up. That’s what I think needs to be done. First of all, you define infrastructure very broadly to include, at the high end of the whole thing, the electric grid.

Scott Ferguson

Sure. And bridges and dams and…

Mario Rendina

Bridges and dams and all that. And you look at the federal block grants to do those things. My God, the interstate highway system, the bridges, etc.. And let’s not forget the power grid. That’s part of our infrastructure. So you’ve got those, but then you do a block grant to the states and to areas of a certain size, and each takes care of its own and you call them infrastructure projects. They have to be infrastructure projects at the local level, at the state level, and at the federal level. Now you’re picking it up from the bottom to the top, okay. And when you’re doing this big stuff up here, you’re also hiring people at this level and the state is doing the same thing and the local levels are doing the same things.

Scott Ferguson

Things are flowing up and down at the same time.

Mario Rendina

Absolutely. My God, money can’t be spent better than that. You can probably follow the regulations. You see what I mean? If you broadly define infrastructure, so that you get to the pothole, but you say infrastructure and by God, I can write a regulation that says this is infrastructure and your projects must be inside of this parameter.

I can monitor that. I can determine whether you’re ripping me off or not as a local government, as a state government, or if I’m a IAG (Industry Advisory Group) at the federal level. I can see if that’s what is happening. So that is what I see as the cure-all of that. You could get a lot of political mileage behind it if people remember what they could do in their Title VI projects, because there were one offs and there were projects and the projects are what I’m talking about here, being the parks, the boardwalks, the, you know whatever.

Scott Ferguson

And this is during the 70s and the 80s.

Mario Rendina

Yeah.

Scott Ferguson

So did Tampa, or Hillsborough County, have a better time than the rest of the country as a result of these projects, do you think?

Mario Rendina

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s sort of like WPA, right? Okay. You go to North Florida and you go to the Suwannee River anywhere on the Suwannee River.

You will find, within two miles, every two miles, you’ll find a concrete boat launch that is made out of concrete, that was done and poured in the 30s and I guarantee you it is the best boat launch you have ever seen in your life. The whole concept of projects can work fine.

That was done by local labor, no doubt. It can also be very high quality stuff, but with the boardwalks and all that stuff, if you live around Hillsborough County, you need to talk to people. I wish some of the people that put people in public service employment were around that you could talk to because it was a very, very broad program and I’m only remembering some of the projects that went down.

Scott Ferguson

So there was a moment of regained autonomy at the county level where you could do a lot of good. Then came this new legislation from the feds. 

Mario Rendina

We pretty much continued to do the adult work. Yeah. All of that worked out pretty, pretty darn well, really. Meanwhile it’s becoming more and more private and at some point, the Job Training Partnership Act rears its head and JTPA is clearly going to be a private sector dominated council. The JTPA council is going to be private sector dominated and it was. So the shift then goes from government control of everything that’s going on, under a council that they have absolute control over. Everybody is getting what they want anyhow, so it’s not a big deal, to a more private sector dominated kind of thing. The whole thing came back together at one point with city staff and county staff.

Okay, you’re backing in two silos.

But I was like, at one point, the director of both of the operating staffs, whether it was county or city, I was now a county staff member. We’ve gone over to JTPA. But the councils wanted to create one council. They said, “we’re not going to have two CEDA councils,” because for a while there we had two CEDA councils chugging along.

We said, “no wait a minute. The superintendent of schools, they have a meeting over here and then two weeks later he has a meeting over here with this CEDa council. All that crap got to be brought back together. Everybody agrees? Yes, it does, but what we’re going to do is we’re going to run parallel until JTPA goes along. We are going to have one council that controls both of them. Okay. Now this is where privatizing comes into it, because at some point, the director of the council and that staff becomes privatized in every county in the state of Florida, every prime sponsor in the state of Florida, with the exception of Hillsborough.

Hillsborough was the last holdout, where it was run by the government, and at that point, county was the government entity.

Scott Ferguson

What are the political forces or legal changes that create this privatization?

Mario Rendina

The JTPA Council is very private sector oriented.

Scott Ferguson

Which comes from legislation. The law was written to be private sector oriented.

Mario Rendina

Yep. Yep. Absolutely. A lot of the councils really wanted the private sector to have the ball and run with it. 

Scott Ferguson

What years are we talking about? 

Mario Rendina

I don’t know. The JTPA, we can look up. But anyhow, when JTPA forms that’s when…

Scott Ferguson

Is this the 90s?

Mario Rendina

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re in the 90s. 

Scott Ferguson

Is this part of Clinton’s?

Mario Rendina

Could be, but he was mostly under CEDA. Nixon formed CEDA. So Ford’s in there, but only for a short while, a couple of years and then Carter. That continues and that was CEDA all through there. Yeah. And I think you can say JTPA is basically a baby of Clinton’s in the 1990s.

I remember my friend and fiscal officer went to work for the Department of Labor, and ended up in Colorado and the Denver office. He said, “You’ll never see a more Republican president than Clinton.” I think he was alluding to the privatization that we were beginning to see.

When the board started becoming private not-for-profits, the law clearly read that the buck stops at the political entities doorstep. Okay, but what would happen is you’d have a bad audit on somebody, and they’d work out some way where the political entity didn’t have to pay money. “Okay, well, we’ll reduce your funding by that $10,000 and then you play games with it up there in Atlanta and make sure that everybody’s made whole.”

So it was never a real threat. Around the state, they became private, not-for-profit, they incorporated. Then they would take the whole show and run with it. Budget, finance, bank accounts, they ran the whole thing. It became a privatized unit and the county was still over here. Here’s the very, very important distinction between the CEDA system and JTPA to follow. As long as it was under the county, for example, or the city or whatever, but under this county, every contract, every modification of contract, anything that had to do with change or new had to go through the county’s budget and finance office. It had to go through the county’s legal office.

It had to go through every office that any agenda item had to go through. It was difficult to do fraud and abuse when it had to go through county legal and county budget and finance, the budgets had to balance. They had to equal the amount of money you had available. They had to add up to something.

They had to do that, you couldn’t put in hidden little items. They might get found. So when you allow the privatization, because it’s the government that allows the privatization, you become a private board. And the county could still say, “oh yeah, we’ll listen to you. You’re a private board. We’ll listen to you. But the money comes through us because we hold the bag on any illegal activities that go on in any of the funds. We’re still holding the bag over here.” And at some point, they gave that up and said, “okay, you guys have got it wrong.” Even though they really were still holding the bag, they gave away the shop.

And when you do that, then you start having things that happened here and other places.

Scott Ferguson

Like what? What happens?.

Mario Rendina

Well, you can decide to have extremely lavish staff parties, like what happened here. The next thing that really happens, though, at the same time as the board becomes privatized, along comes TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) of which is what? Which is Clinton. Clinton’s welfare will no longer be as it has always been. What do they call it?

Scott Ferguson

The end of welfare as we know it.

Mario Rendina

The end of welfare as we know it. It comes in at the same time as these entities are becoming privatized and Mario’s right in the middle of this mess. Okay. At some point, I became the TANF director, also. Staff director. Writer, too. I did the planning for it. We had a contract, right for TANF. I can’t remember what god awful stuff it incorporated. But anyhow, I had a planner write a proposal and it went out to the world and back came Goodwill Industries and Lockheed Martin.

Oh, yes, Lockheed Martin. They make rockets. They also wanted to do – and did – TANF programs. Not in this area. We got Goodwill and then somebody over there had another agency and over the period of a couple of years, this entity would get rid of Goodwill and get in somebody else. I was there the day that Lockheed Martin showed up at the county trying to talk the county into going with them.

But anyhow, I put out the proposal for TANF with a neophyte planner. She was bright. All this stuff has to go in there. You know, you have got to fix that and so it goes out as an RFP (request for proposal).

We got back 2 in. thick volumes about “how we’re going to do this,” “how Goodwill is going to do all this stuff,” and so forth. So TANF got totally inner meshed with that mess. The councils became the same thing. I mean the TANF council became part of the overall council.

Not only that, but critical to the whole thing is the privatized councils at a state level all get together. We all meet together and we have an organization that is an organization composed of all the executive directors, that are executive directors now because they are privatized. We all get together and we form an organization.

Our organization is so politically powerful, particularly with the private sector, that we tell the state we want the employment service and they got it. This employment service here in the city of Tampa, throughout Hillsborough County and throughout the state are run by the workforce boards, the privatized workforce boards those directors are under and literally say yay or nay to who is going to be the next executive director for the chief of that office.

Okay. So all that is basically under a private, not-for-profit. It’s a private sector deal. All of it. That’s the horror of the whole thing. Hey, when was the last time that you heard, “oh, there’s going to be a workforce board meeting that maybe you should attend?” Or, “gee, I wonder what’s going on with TANF these days?”

Scott Ferguson

So, I want to have you spell out, in a bullet point kind of way, some of the key points of fallout.

One is, concentrated power and lack of transparency and lack of open public engagement.

Mario Rendina

Are you talking about now? 

Scott Ferguson

What I mean, what’s happened since the 90s in your experience? Another thing that you’ve told me about previously that I want to have you talk about, but I’m assuming there are other points that followed as well. But, one is about data collection in contrast to your early experience collections and what all this means for people.

Mario Rendina

Devolution. As long as the government held the bag and things needed to filter through its organizational structure in order to become a product of the board of county commissioners or or the mayor, as long as that filtering process was there, I think two things happened. It was basically for the public good. Okay. We’re approving projects that are for the public good.

Whatever they are training, whatever it is, private sector training doesn’t make any difference. We’re doing all this for the public good because that’s what we do as a government. We filter through all these mechanisms to make sure that it’s good, that it doesn’t look like any fraud and abuses in the middle of this thing. It’s for the public good.

And we have all the controls. One I didn’t mention is that you have a county audit. We also got audited by the county as well as a required independent audit. So you had an independent audit, but the county audited you too. Okay. Now you move over to a privatized board and a privatized organization organization.

Let’s say, I run a private school and I get on that board and I say, “Let’s take any non demand occupation. What I teach in my school is a non-demand occupation. It is what I teach.” But I’m a member of the board and this guy over here is a member of the board, and the school system doesn’t like it.

The school system says “we don’t want you to teach non-demand occupations.” So there’s some squabbling going on there, but they have 50% of the board in the private sector, 50% of the board. It has to be more than 50%. So it’s 50% plus a guy or gal, okay.

So he says, “hey private sector guys. What do you think? I mean, can I do this?” he says, “it’s this damn system school system that is giving me a hard time about this. You know these non-demand occupations that I’m training people in, they’re perfectly fine. If you can get enough of your buddies to say “yeah, okay, we’ll let you have that kind of training.”

And I tried to find demand occupations on the computer and I’m going to follow up on it in a little bit, but I think the system has completely collapsed. You know, the school system, I’m sure, does things in demand occupations and community college because that’s the bread and butter. But in terms of the system, I have no idea what’s going on there.

It’s all maneuvering and not for the public good. That’s the point. It’s for yourselves. We’ve gotten independent. We’re a private not-for-profit organization and by God, if we want to go over and have a conference over in Melbourne, let’s go to the space center. Let’s have a conference over there. Another example: we’re going to have one down in Naples. Naples is a very expensive place. So we go down there and of course in a lavish hotel and all that. Like I say, speakers are of no particular consequence. I think I was a speaker at a number of these, and I was of no particular consequence.

We’re going to do this and then, “okay, it’s golf time!” The links out there are horribly expensive, but we’re holding the event in a hotel where the links are, and you just go out and say, “Oh, okay, so it’s 3:30pm. Well, okay, just enough of the stuff over here. We’re going to go play golf.” I don’t play golf. So they went on to play golf and then you have the evening doing evening social and so forth and so on and then get back together for the next day. But, when you’re privatized, you can do that. How about you try to get a party through the board of county commissioners?

Not only that, under government, you get a per diem. I’m sure you run into that in the education system, right? You got a per diem, you’re going to go over here and you’re going to get so much, so much a day for meals and whatever and either, enough to cover the room, or if it happens to be an expensive place, they cover the room and give you the per diem for the meals.

That goes away in your private not-for-profit. You say, “yeah, I think we ought to have a per diem that, first of all, is going to cover the hotel, whatever that is, and then $200 a day? You think we can live on $200, so let’s do $200 a day plus the room,” for example, you could do that.

As long as it’s policy, as long as we all agree that that is the policy, compared to when you try and do it without it being the policy and the director is in trouble. But if you can get everybody to agree that this is policy. The state will have to let it go by the same, let it go by, I mean, well, it’s policy…It’s not very good policy, but it’s policy.

Scott Ferguson

So maybe a final question.

Is there more of a problem matching people with demand sectors? Is that what you see as the crucial task with public works as a supplement in a way where in a counter-cyclical way or what?

I mean, if the goal is full employment, by which we mean, there is always a job made available for anyone who wants.

Mario Rendina

I think what it boils down to is you have to decide one thing. You have to decide whether or not the employment and training of people is a government function or not. I think it’s as simple as that. It’s either something that the government does or it’s something the government doesn’t do. And as long as the government does it, it will be in the public interest in some way or other.

The minute that it’s not the government’s job, who’s the oversight? And it all boils down to that. It boils down to oversight. And that really gets into your whole business about monitoring and statistics and management information systems and all that. As long as it is considered a function of government, I think you’re okay and the funds come down to the government to spend with all of its safety nets and so forth.

When it gets over on the private side, it is completely opaque. I can’t tell you. I’m a product of the business and I couldn’t tell you the name of what the job service is now. It’s changed three times since I retired ten years ago.

It’s changed three times. It’s the Agency for Workforce Innovation or it’s the Bay Area Workforce something or other. Not the job service anymore.

So, you know, that basically boils the nut down to, it needs to be defined either as a government function or not. And if it’s not, you’re going to get what we got and so we’ve got to move back the other way. 

Scott Ferguson

Well thank you so much. This has been so illuminating. 

Mario Rendina

I’ve had a terrific time. As Lois [my spouse] would tell you, I could go on for hours about this stuff.

* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript. 


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(It’s Not) All About Olivia: A Study in Citations, Retroactive & Otherwise

by Jonathan Haynes

A different girl now, but there’s nothing new

— Olivia Rodrigo, “déjà vu” (written by Olivia Rodrigo, Daniel Nigro, Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff & St. Vincent, and everybody’s team)

The Taylor Swift–Olivia Rodrigo “feud” is bullshit. It makes me angry — and, I’ll admit, it breaks my heart — to watch the Livies and the Swifties snipe at each other online. And it frustrates me that every Olivia profiler has to circle back to it, when somehow Swift never gets asked the same question, yet lives by its terms to the degree that her last album often plays like a hymn to a certain celebrity football player’s[1] phallus.[2] I know parasocial investment can be real and even nourishing. But this particular mystery is doing harm. It’s not how art works. It is, depressingly, how oligarchic neoliberalism works.

The story the culture wants to tell about Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift is All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950): the adoring ingénue who studies the star, learns her moves, and then slips the knife in. And the aging star, watching it happen, curdling into vindictiveness as the protégée takes what was hers. It’s an irresistible script because it gives everyone a villain to choose. Either Rodrigo, a self-proclaimed Swifty from early childhood on, is Eve Harrington — the thief, borrowing too much and calling it homage, who echoed Swift’s “Cruel Summer” on “déjà vu” closely enough that Swift’s camp landed a retroactive writing credit to the tune of millions of dollars — or Swift is Margo Channing at her most petty, the elder star so threatened by her younger (self) that she has to litigate a credit. And it’s a stupid bind, because the script only offers those two roles, jealous predator or past-her-prime grudge-holder. The more honest story — the one the All About Eve, Taylor vs. Olivia mythology obscures from us — is lineage.[3]

Call it the Catfight Economy[4], and grant right away that the diagnosis isn’t mine — critics have been describing this for years, and the manufactured rivalry has a whole literature behind it (and about it; among many other works, Brian De Palma’s 2012 film Passion also tells the All About Eve story, via Persona [Ingmar Bergman 1966] and Mulholland Drive [Lynch 2000]). To summarize: two successful women cannot share a professional space without one of them being a threat to the other. The press supplies the frame, the fans supply the labor, the platforms supply the distribution, and that leaves two artists narrated into a fight neither one started, so far as any human who doesn’t actually know them personally knows. And surely their friends don’t even know, really, whether or not Swift and Rodrigo are “frosty” in real life.

What interests me is less the mechanism than its ideology: the things the Catfight Economy quietly trains us to believe. It teaches that influence is theft, that admiration is weakness, that producing art is powerful and receiving art is debt (I fully intend the sexual resonances there). That there is only ever one musical chair and the other woman is already sitting in it. It is a scarcity story dressed as gossip.

The machine is not exclusively aimed at women. Pop has always run on manufactured antagonism, Beatles versus Stones, Beach Boys versus Beatles, Blur versus Oasis, Biggie versus Pac. But the men’s versions tend to read as competition between equals, a sport with two champions, even a spur to better work. Consider the Kendrick–Drake cage match of 2024, which also managed to steal the spotlight from the quiet revolution surfacing at that year’s Grammys, where six of the eight Album of the Year nominees were women, including Rodrigo and Swift (the eventual winner – I’m still throwing beers at the screen that told me Midnights beat GUTS), a changing of the guard that held the stage about as long as it took two megalomaniacal, multi-millionaire assholes to start calling each other domestic abusers and pedophiles in public (I love much of the work of both of them). America crowned Kendrick Lamar the winner of the Drake battle-to-the-death the following year, when a hundred million people, both in the bleachers and at home, sang along as he hurled a blistering insult at his former collaborator at the Super Bowl.[5]

A metaphor for America in general in 2024, I guess.

When turned on women, the same machine sours[6]: the rivalry curdles into a catfight, and only one of them is allowed to survive it. A field with room for only one is a field that never has to take women’s art seriously as a tradition.

Consider the blows Swift absorbed to clear the commercial ground Rodrigo now shares with her. She came up through the Nashville songwriting machine as a teenage girl who had to have the best idea in the room just to be heard by professionals twice her age.[7] She spent years as a target of an online abuse campaign that ran through Kanye West and the people around him. And in 2019 she watched the masters to her first six albums get sold out from under her when Big Machine was acquired by Scooter Braun — who had managed West for years — an event that crystallized, in public and at her expense, exactly how little her little girl self’s signature on a contract was worth. Each of these events is also a Catfight Economy event in its way: each got covered as drama, as personality, as Taylor-being-Taylor, when each was actually structural — a girl up against an industry built to extract from her.

Rodrigo’s generation negotiated in the shadow of that lesson. Where Swift had to re-record her own catalogue to reclaim it — Taylor’s Version — Rodrigo and peers like Chappell Roan entered an industry where creative control had become a thing a young woman could think to ask for, because they had all just watched the cost of not asking. There will never need to be a GUTS (Olivia’s Version). That absence is Swift’s bequest. This is the inheritance the rivalry frame can’t see: the older artist’s losses became the younger artist’s terms.

Which is what makes the recently announced Daisy Chain Fields concert so important. The festival Rodrigo founded is something more than a festival and more than a tribute to the Lilith Fair; it is the Catfight Economy’s exact inverse, built on purpose. Where the Catfight Economy profits by pitting women against each other, Daisy Chain Fields is dedicated — in Rodrigo’s own words[8] — to the belief that “joy, community, and creativity can inspire meaningful change,” celebrating the voices, artistry, and contributions of women in music. Where the Catfight Economy extracts value from women and routes it to platforms and press, Daisy Chain Fields routes its net proceeds outward, to nonprofits advancing and advocating for women and girls. Where the Catfight Economy insists inspiration and curiosity must harden into competition, the mission statement insists on “knowledge, strength, and action.” It closes on an image that is Olivia’s whole argument in one line — daisies are “wild and beautiful,” and “as a chain they are strong and unbreakable.”

Seen this way, Rodrigo’s so-called evasiveness about Swift in interviews[9] stops looking like coldness and starts looking like intellectual consistency. She has been on the record about hating the manufactured-feud framing, and her refusal to feed it is the same gesture as the festival: a person who has built an explicit stand against the Catfight Economy is not going to step into its oldest set piece on cue.

So the mythology gets it backward. All About Eve is a story about a theater with one dressing room and one star, where the only way up is to displace the woman already standing in the spotlight. Eve doesn’t want to make her own work, she wants Margo’s part, Margo’s audience, Margo’s life. That is the only plot the Catfight Economy knows how to run, and it is the plot it keeps trying to cast Rodrigo into. Swift, more than anyone, knows it, and she has spent a career writing it (among millions of other things) down. “Clara Bow,” the closing song on The Tortured Poets Department (2024), is the It-girl assembly line set to music: the industry’s eye slides from Clara Bow to Stevie Nicks to, in the final verse, Taylor Swift herself, each new arrival told she’s the real thing, dazzling, the new god worth worshipping — until the eye moves on to the next one, who has an edge the last one never did. It is Margo Channing’s nightmare written by Margo, the star narrating her own replacement on the same conveyor that carried her in. And believe me, there is a ton of fan and critical speculation that this is one of many Swift songs about Rodrigo, which is so much more than missing the point. It’s a cruel[10] irony.

Swift is the great chronicler of the trap. But the interesting relationship between these two artists isn’t antagonism, it’s transmission: the elder who took the structural punishment, and the younger who studied the wreckage and wrote her way around it. Rodrigo is rejecting the whole theater and building a field of daisies. Swift sings the cage with unmatched clarity, and thus, somewhat like the Jane Austen of D.A. Miller’s monograph[11], transcends it; Rodrigo, standing on the ground Swift cleared, gets to start dismantling it.

[1] Travis Kelce’s.

[2] Taylor Swift, “Wood,” The Life of a Showgirl, Republic Records, 2025.

[3]A caveat, because it would be ultra-shitty to let it pass without saying so: getting a retroactive co-write on a song you didn’t write is a graceless thing to accept, and Swift accepted it. But the music business is litigious to its bones, and a young artist is so incentivized to hand over the co-credit and the royalty points rather than prolong the online nastiness that — five years later — it is somehow still a story that Elvis Costello did not sue Olivia Rodrigo. None of which is to claim Swift invented the position she occupies. She has predecessors, obviously, and similar All About Eve stories have been told about Madonna and Mariah Carey many times over. But the lineage I’m tracing isn’t stylistic, it’s structural — the terms of creative control a young woman can now think to ask for. And the asymmetry of admiration matters: Rodrigo arrived a self-proclaimed Swifty, modeling herself on a songwriter-auteur with total command of her own persona and catalogue. Swift arrived a girl gushing about LeAnn Rimes — herself a teenage phenom, but the inheritance there was a way of singing, by way of Patsy Cline, not a way of owning your work. The bequest I mean is the one Swift’s own losses created, not the longer history of women in pop, which runs back well beyond her.

[4]I am thinking here of Gloria Steinem’s “Catfight Theory of History,” from an editorial she co-wrote with Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. The occasion was the release on streaming of Mrs. America, an historical film (TV show? Content thing?) that she believed portrayed the fight for the ERA as a catfight between her and Phyllis Schlafly instead of “a battle between the ERA and economic interests.” (LA Times, “Why ‘Mrs. America’ is bad for American women,” July 30, Covid year zero).

[5]“A Minor” is funny and clever. Lamar is also a genius who won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Nonetheless, if I were scoring that Superbowl scene, it would be to “All the lonely people,” and “Eleanor Rigby” (The Beatles, Revolver, Capital Records, 1966) is in E minor.

[6]Olivia Rodrigo, Sour, Interscope Records, 2021.

[7] See Taylor Swift’s interview for the NYT project, The 30 Greatest Living Songwriters (2026). Come to think of it, why isn’t Billy Joel on that list? I haven’t checked, but I bet Swift had him on her ballot. And Olivia – who might have made the list herself had the new one come out before the list dropped – David Byrne nominated her on his own (citation forthcoming, I know I read that somewhere) – well, we already know from “déjà vu” that she was “the one who taught you Billy Joel.”

[8]It could have been her “team.” What is an author?

[9]See (hear?) the NYT Popcast interview with Rodrigo, in which Joe Coscarelli and Jon Caramanica ask her intelligently designed questions about the “frostiness” between her and Swift, so that she can redirect without sounding like she’s hiding something. Good journalism still happens there!

[10]Taylor Swift, “Cruel Summer,” Lover, Republic Records, 2019.

[11]Miller, D.A., Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, Princeton University Press: 2005.

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Invisible Republic (With Apologies to Greil Marcus)

By Jonathan Haynes

Given the miserable state of American life generally, here’s a thing that astonishes me. Two of the best homegrown popular artworks I can think of came out recently, within months of each other, are enormously popular, and are political (I beg you to please stay with me here): Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. You could read each as a defiant argument for the humanities. Of course it’s unclear whether the artists know they’re making that argument, or would say so if they knew.

Listen to how they explain how their new works came to be. Anderson (Esquire): “Vineland was always going to be too hard to adapt, so I stole the parts that spoke to me and just started running like a thief.” Rodrigo (NYT Popcast): “I was really inspired by this book Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux. She’s having this affair with this person and she’s not quite happy, she’s kind of going insane… I was really inspired by all of the ways in which love makes you insane and miserable.”

Wait. Back up. You guys are reading Ernaux and Pynchon? Like it’s nothing. Like it’s just something that you do. Meanwhile I’m sitting here listening to Pod Save America with a gun in my mouth.

After all, these are quintessential LA artists — Anderson out of the San Fernando Valley, Rodrigo originally out of Temecula — who actually get to make art in an industry town that has lost its industry, as devastatingly and, hopefully not but seemingly permanently, as any coal or steel town lost its in the seventies. Brilliant people with decades of experience at every tier of the entertainment business can’t get jobs at CVS or Target in 2026. (I have a friend like this, a superior researcher and writer with excellent pedagogical skills and a stunning depth of knowledge of movie history and culture. If you’re hiring, DM me and I’ll connect you.). But I’m not making the easy point that PTA and OR are privileged to make the art they want. Sure, they have one-percent lifestyles that buy them room to concentrate, instead of lives frantically lived between DoorDash and Lyft shifts. Nor am I saying I’m just glad they’re using that privilege well, though I obviously do think that. I’m not even really talking about them. I’m talking about the astonishing, vertiginous fact that there exists a massive popular audience for their work — an Invisible Republic, if you will — that consumes it not just avidly but ecstatically.

I’ve never actually cried to an Olivia Rodrigo song. I loved “drivers license” in 2021 because of its stylistic mastery; my initial reaction was exhilaration at the rare aesthetic achievement, and I started thinking about the implied connection to the canon of American rock and roll “car songs,” including the previous year’s “Murder Most Foul,” Bob Dylan’s masterpiece about the Kennedy assassination. Great bad trip car songs bracketed the pandemic. Dylan’s arrived in the first month of quarantine, when auto-mobility became a deadly thing. Her song came ten months later, amid the first vaccine roll-out, when it felt safer, but still low-key miserable, to drive your car places.

(Here, my ingenious sister-in-law, the novelist Megan Moores, would interrupt: there is plenty of textual evidence You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is about a romance with a guy with just such an emotional deficit who knows all the words to “Just Like Heaven.”)

Historically, crying to Olivia Rodrigo songs is the primary mode of engagement with her. There is a TikTok genre dedicated to getting deep in your feelings while listening to her songs. My favorite of those that I’ve seen is the guy with red eyes and dribbling snot blurting out the titles of the songs on the new album that turned him into a sniveling wreck: “Fuck you, ‘begged.’ Fuck you, ‘honeybee.’ Fuck you, ‘less.’ Fuck you, ‘cigarette smoke.’” Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is on record as having bawled her eyes out hearing “drivers license” for the first time. Right after the song dropped, there was an SNL sketch about gruff guys wearing flannel shirts getting into their feelings in a pool hall. The whole world was gutted by that song, allegedly. I loved it but experienced it…differently (Dylan, etc.).

But with “honeybee,” Olivia Rodrigo wrecked me too. She did it out of the blue with a couplet on a song that has gotten some flack for being out of the sonic universe of most of the album. It sounds like a Disney tune, a fair description meant as a criticism, to which I retort, one of the most celebrated American directors of all time just released (on the same day as Olivia’s new album) a blockbuster movie that “discloses” that his entire psychic universe — and the universe’s — is organized around “When You Wish Upon a Star.” John Lennon closed the turbulent White Album with a song that was explicitly based on Disney music. St. Vincent did a whole album based on that sound and called it Actor. Olivia Rodrigo, now occasional St. Vincent collaborator, began her professional life as a child actor in Disney shows (do your own research).

The couplet:

I hope I never see what your face looks like going

A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing

The purity of these lines is astonishing and lifts the album lyrically (whatever you think of Disney songs) into very rarified company. I think Lorenz Hart, at least the one played by Ethan Hawke in the new Linklater film, would have been proud to have written them. At the exact second I was admiring the craft, the eleven-year-old who sobbed at ET knocked me on my ass.

I hope I never see what your face looks like going

A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing

I am seeing a lot of faces going these days: my parents’ faces, the childish face of my now-teenage son, my own face.

The mortal irony of this lyric is that if she got her wish, she’d spend her whole life watching this person’s face going.

Fuck you, “honeybee.”

There is another TikTok from a listening party where Rodrigo plays the new album for fans hearing it cold, a live mic resting on her knee. As the chorus of “stupid song” climbs higher than you expect it to go, the room starts leaking into the audio — a gasp, “oh my god,” and then the screaming. Those people weren’t screaming before. The music made them do it. The screams are the flip side of the sobs, and sometimes done simultaneously. And it’s like Dylan — those verses in “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in which the words just keep piling up and you never know when or where they’re going to land. Allen Ginsberg said everything in Dylan was “collected into that one column of air coming out of him and the vibration of the sound,” and that fits Olivia Rodrigo even better. And it also fits the climactic One Battle After Another car chase that Scott Ferguson and I worked through on the Money on the Left podcast, Superstructure.

Switched on Pop names the mechanism better than I can: spiraling. On their recent podcast dedicated to You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the musicologist Nate Sloan hears Rodrigo’s choruses as those coin funnels in children’s museums: you set a penny on its edge and it circles the bowl, faster and tighter as it falls, until it loses its orbit and drops through the hole at the center. The Rodrigo chorus does the same — the line winds and accelerates, as she spins out more and more words and lifts ever higher into her vocal register, until it lands on the title phrase and drops out of motion. “Kiss me and I might drop dead.” “I love you more than any stupid song could ever say.” The orbit, then the hole. And it is the same shape Anderson cuts in One Battle After Another: a VistaVision camera with a telephoto lens strapped to the nose of a Dodge Charger, the car running the undulating California hills, the pursuit going on and on over those swells until Chase Infiniti slams on the brakes. Two funnels, two dead stops. And in both cases, a mixed-race girl behind the wheel. Make of that coincidence what you will. I’ll leave that question open, as I imagine that Greil Marcus would.

But the invisible republic that I borrow Marcus’s title to identify is built precisely out of rhymes like that one — uncanny correspondences the culture throws up without being asked, which it falls to criticism only to notice, and to refuse to explain away.

It brings into unwitting communion beleaguered English teachers grading endless piles of AP exams, college students with gender studies degrees graduating into an American void, rock critic Substackers traveling hundreds of miles in The Paranoid Style band tee shirts to see Hamell on Trial in a beloved local music venue that is closing soon (where will we go?), movie-scene-deconstructing 35-year-old YouTubers who can’t get over the color timing in One Battle and issue their manifestos from their parents’ living rooms, lonely denizens of livvieshq on Instagram with “maggots for brains,” and work from home tech guys with moldy Ph.D.s who spend their days busily feeding their careers into AI tools.

This essay is already piled high with allusions, but I must add one more — George Miller’s masterpiece, Babe: Pig in the City. I’m thinking of the scene – it always makes me sob – when Babe saves the Bull Terrier from drowning and the Bull Terrier says “Whatever the pig says, goes” to all the other animals. And so all of these different species — who are, in some cases, even biologically, instinctively, constitutively driven to hate and fear each other, and in others, to blithely ignore each other — must share the jelly beans. Or everyone starves.

And then they become an army.

UPDATE: 24 hours after the present essay was published, this announcement went out to subscribers from the official Olivia Rodrigo mailing list.

* Note that alphabetical order, asked to do nothing but sort names, quietly places Bikini Kill above some of the biggest stars in the world — including the promoter herself.


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The Barter Myth & the Conceptual Foundations of Economic Modernity

Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice
Vol. 1, No. 2 (2026)
ISSN 2833-051X

The Barter Myth & the Conceptual Foundations of Economic Modernity
By Jean-Michel Servet

Abstract

The barter myth—the claim that money emerged from a prior system of direct exchange—occupies a foundational place in modern economic thought. While standard critiques of the barter myth emphasize its lack of empirical support, this article advances a more capacious approach that situates the myth within the conceptual formation of economic modernity itself. Earlier monetary writings generally treated money as inseparable from political authority and social order. By contrast, the barter myth imagines a world of isolated individuals exchanging goods without monetary mediation, presenting exchange as the natural basis of human society.

Jean-Michel Servet is Honorary Professor at Université Lumière Lyon 2 and Professor emeritus at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. An economist by training, he is the author of numerous articles and books on monetary history, theory, and policy.

Jakob Feinig is Associate Professor at Binghamton University (Department of Human Development). He is the author of Moral Economies of Money (Stanford, 2022).

MotL Servet Barter Myth TranslationDownload

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I Think You’re What’s Wrong With Me: On Influence, Absorption, and Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love’

By Jonathan Haynes

Watch what happens when the reviews of Olivia Rodrigo’s third album — a concept record that tracks a single romance from first date to bitter aftermath — go looking for its value. Almost without exception they find it somewhere other than in Rodrigo: in the older male band she references, in the New Wave gods her producer conjures, in the Gen X canon her sound supposedly pays its respects to. The dominant critical move is to sort the tracks into the Swiftian and the Smithian and grade each by which influence wins (Slate Magazine literally does this), and the songs that come out on top are reliably the Cure-saturated ones, praised as the moments where the record connects to something serious, something legitimate, something a man made first. I want to name this as the symptom it is, and the stakes are larger than one album. We are at a moment when pop music by young women is taken more seriously than it has ever been, and yet the reflex persists — even among women writing the reviews — to locate the worth of that music in a male precursor who authorizes it, rather than in the woman herself. The song-by-song tally is not just a clumsy method. It is the gatekeeping impulse wearing the costume of rigor: the search for the father who makes the daughter’s work admissible. And it is exactly backwards, because You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is an album about a woman who does not borrow her authority from the canon but absorbs the canon into herself, who takes the male precursor everyone is reaching for and makes him sing her words. The critics handing Rodrigo’s value upstream to Robert Smith have the current running the wrong direction. The record reverses it.

Right from the start, in the third line of the first song (“drop dead”), Rodrigo mobilizes the Cure as a narrative instrument. “You know all the words to Just Like Heaven.” The Cure is not Rodrigo’s stylistic frame imposed from above. It is his music — the crush’s — and so when the record itself begins to sound like The Cure, the sound is not homage but possession. We are listening to a consciousness being colonized by a lover’s taste, the way one absorbs a partner’s vocabulary, their sleep schedule, their way of seeing, their taste in music. This is the Annie Ernaux problematic Rodrigo named directly in her New York Times Popcast interview when she cited Simple Passion — that slim, clinical diary of an affair that consumes a whole life — as the inspiration for “stupid song”: passion as affliction, a desire that floods and saturates everything like illness or insanity. Ernaux’s achievement is a collision of registers — flat, exact, diaristic notation applied to total erotic derangement — and that collision is exactly what the album performs. The Swiftian lyric is the deadpan diary; the Cure engulfment is the derangement the diary is recording. You cannot separate them, because the lyric is narrating the sonic takeover as it happens. The title says as much before a note plays: You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is not a description of a moment in the romance but the verdict on the whole of it. Darkness was inside the love from the first date.

This is why the song-by-song method fails in this case. A critic who prefers the Cure-leaning tracks to the Swift-leaning ones believes, ironically, that he is identifying her most original mode (measured against a presumed Gen Z pop-princess archetype). He is in fact charting the depth of the character’s possession, crowning as most hers the songs where she is most someone else’s. The thing the critic likes more is the symptom. And it’s a double bind for her: measured against Smith she is borrowing, measured against Swift she is belated, and either way the verdict denies her any artistic ground of her own. Variety gets closest to the truth with its line that the album “tracks the arc of a love affair: Rodrigo’s love affair with the Cure,” but means it as a witticism about influence, not as a structural argument. The album dramatizes its own sound as a love-symptom. No tally of borrowed gestures can register that, because the borrowed gestures are not influences to be scored, they are characters in the story. And the impulse to score them, to find the songs where the male precursor is most present and crown those the best, is oddly shared by the character Rodrigo has created: the conviction that value must be located in him.

But Rodrigo is too strong an artist to leave the influences as influences, and here the argument turns. She sublates The Cure — cancels it as an external source and preserves it as her own material, lifted onto a plane where it no longer points back at Robert Smith but expresses Olivia Rodrigo. The song “the cure” arrives at rue album midpoint, but it is not about The Cure — nor does it particularly sound like them. This negation is the point. This is what divides what she is doing from pastiche, which stays marked as borrowed. By the back half of the record the Cure-ness is simply her sound, the influence negated as foreign and retained as self. And then comes the benediction, the moment where the structure becomes flesh: Smith himself appears on “what’s wrong with me” — singing, playing bass, embodied inside her track. Not sampled, not echoed. The precursor walks into the song he has been haunting and takes a part, and he takes it on the diagnostic song, the one that asks the Ernaux question directly, which is exactly where an internalized voice would speak. He is not a guest star. He is the second half of her brain — the absorbed half answering the diaristic half, two voices staring down the same dread from opposing ends. This is the form of a dialectic and not the form of a love duet.

Here is a fact underemphasized or ignored in the deadline reviews: Smith is singing her words and her music, in a style that resembles his own. The man has been made to perform a Robert Smith who is now her creation — voicing her reconstruction of his idiom, handed back to him to inhabit. This inverts the entire vector of influence. Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” runs one way: the latecomer swerves from the precursor, clears space against his priority, escapes the father. Rodrigo does the opposite. She absorbs Smith so completely that she can write him, and he ratifies the absorption by consenting to sing her writing-of-him. It is apophrades literalized — the return of the dead made to seem authored by the living — except he is actually there, performing his own style after it has passed through her and come out as hers. The strong artist is not the one who escapes the source. She is the one who can produce the source as her own material and have it agree to perform her. That is the furthest claim anyone can make on a precursor, and Rodrigo makes it on the record, in his voice, with his hands on the bass. The reviews are still at “cool, Robert Smith’s on it.” The album is at “Robert Smith consents to being Olivia Rodrigo’s creation.”

But that consent is not a concession. It is the proof that what she does is additive rather than competitive. The credit-and-citation model the reviews run on knows only two roles, the original and the impostor, and it is built to adjudicate who owns what. Rodrigo is not playing that game. She does not depose the precursor. She brings the whole canon kicking and screaming into a world it has to share with her.

One last observation (finally caught up with her interview on Jimmy Kimmel the other night). The biographical Rodrigo’s father reportedly has seen the Cure thirty times; he wept when he finally met Robert Smith; his phone screensaver is now a photo of the two of them. She has said her dad spent her childhood “introducing me to all the bands he went to see when he was my age” — among them, The Cure. So The Cure is the father’s music before it is anyone else’s in this drama, the canon handed down the paternal line, and her father, as it happens, is by profession a family therapist — an analyst. Now consider the fascinating work the album’s romantic plot is doing with that inheritance. The boyfriend knows all the words to “Just Like Heaven.” He loves The Cure, which is to say he loves her father’s music, the music she was raised on, the sound of the house she grew up in. And the buried logic of the infatuation, never stated outright but everywhere in the songs, is that this is why she falls for him: he loves what her father loves, he carries the paternal music, and so he arrives already occupying the place the father holds. That is the Freudian pattern, stated plainly — the daughter drawn to the man who returns to her the father, the beloved chosen because he stands where the parent stood.

So it turns out that the album itself is not only a concept album that tells a coherent beginning to end story; it’s a double plot. The story of the romance and break-up mirrors the larger one we have been unpacking the whole time — the artist’s relation to the canon she was raised inside. The main plot ends with a painful break-up. The other climaxes with the man who made the music she was raised on — idol to both lover and father — walking in to perform her recreation of him, and the world receives not Robert Smith but Olivia Rodrigo’s Robert Smith, authored by the singular genius of Olivia Rodrigo.

* See here for a follow-up reflection from the author.

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In the Loop: Revolutionizing Public Finance, Ep. 1

The Money on the Left Collective is proud to launch its new podcast series, In the Loop: Revolutionizing Public Finance, hosted by Scott Ferguson, Tyler Suksawat, and Will Beaman. In this debut episode, the hosts lay out a bold vision for Democratic Public Finance (DPF), a paradigm shift that rejects the defensive, austerity-driven mindset of “finding the money” and instead reclaims public finance as a problem of legal, social, and democratic design. By wresting control of public resources from Wall Street, shadow banking, and both neoliberal and authoritarian governance, DPF seeks to protect local communities from federal sabotage and end the false trade-offs that misrecognize collective capacities, while pitting public interests against one another. 

The episode culminates by introducing what we at MotL call “the Loop”—a generative fiscal framework that utilizes a city-owned public bank to internalize municipal debt, capture interest revenues that would otherwise leak to private creditors, and reinvest that wealth back into local infrastructure. Highlighting the ongoing successes and momentum of building a broad-based coalition around the Seattle Loop, the hosts demonstrate how diverse advocacy sectors—including labor, housing, and the arts—can be woven into a self-replenishing, mutually reinforcing network that transforms public finance into a powerful instrument for the people and the planet.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Original music by Josh Klinghoffer 

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The Public Banking Institute

In this episode, we speak with Walt McRee (President) and Peter Winslow (Vice President) of the Public Banking Institute (PBI) about their past and ongoing advocacy for public banking. Founded in 2011 by author Ellen Brown and a core collective of advocates, PBI aims to break the monopoly of Wall Street’s private banking system by establishing a nationwide network of publicly owned, democratically accountable banks. Through this work, PBI seeks to foster a wide-spread monetary and banking system that operates explicitly in the public interest, treating credit as a vital public utility rather than a vehicle for private extraction. 

If private mega-banks are legally bound to maximize short-term returns for external shareholders, McRee and Winslow explain, then public banks operate under a legal mandate to generate shared prosperity, measuring fiscal success in terms of community participation, well-being, and resilience. During our conversation, we discuss the history of the PBI, the myriad projects that public banks can finance, diverse models for establishing public banks, and the organization’s efforts to serve as a catalyst for the growing public banking movement across the United States. 

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Billy Saas

Walt McRee and Peter Winslow. Welcome to Money on the Left.

Walt McRee

Thank you.

Peter Winslow

Thank you.

Billy Saas

It’s great to have you. We’ll start, as we normally do, by asking you to say just a little bit about yourselves and how you came to the Public Banking Institute, which is going to be a centerpiece of our conversation today. Let’s go ahead and start with you, Peter.

Peter Winslow

Oh. Thank you. My background is in business and finance. I received a BA in economics at the University of Pennsylvania State, stayed to get an MBA in finance from the Wharton Graduate School. I was a CPA and practiced in New York for many years.

I’m a Deloitte alum. I’ve had a varied career doing a variety of things. I was doing a lot of work in sustainable economic development, especially economic development within the inner city and depressed sections of the community. That’s how I got invited into public banking about ten or more years ago. I’ve been working at it in Philadelphia and nationally ever since.

Scott Ferguson

Are there a lot of folks who are Deloitte alums who are interested in public banking?

Peter Winslow

That’s a really interesting question.

Scott Ferguson

Well, I’m glad I asked.

00;02;46;18 – 00;03;19;19

Peter Winslow

You know, I haven’t asked. I probably should, but there may be. Accountants approach things in a very meticulous way, but conceptually, and have very definite ideas about money and about how money is used and recorded and valuation and risk and so forth. So it’s banking adjacent.

Some of the work I did was involved with securities firms and that was certainly interesting. But in terms of my colleagues, I don’t know. I’m going to my reunion, when we leave here. I’ll ask some of the folks from my class what their opinions are about public banking and see if I can enlist them.

Scott Ferguson

Let us know.

Walt McRee

Yeah. Well, I guess that leaves me. Yeah. I do not have a Deloitte background. Peter brings up that part of our expertise offerings. My background was actually in media. I started in broadcast media, winding up in Philadelphia in major markets, doing radio broadcast and media consulting, voiceover work out of Manhattan. At the same time, then getting involved initially with the public interest activist issues. I started from here in the anti-war movement which was a long time ago, but seems to be ever present. From that, working into discovering something that was powerful, which was working with Bucky Fuller in Philadelphia, when he launched a thing called the Hunger Project. The Hunger Project was a very simple opportunity for people to participate in an issue that was much bigger than them, world hunger. And to do what they want, and to organize around doing new things to end world hunger with a new understanding about why hunger could be ended.

So Bucky said, “there’s no reason why people starve as a public policy. There’s plenty of food, etc., etc.” I mention that because in the public banking application, we were suggesting something that and you all have been suggesting something that hasn’t and doesn’t exist. That is, we are demythologizing banking. We’re demythologizing money. We’re really looking at a new possibility.

So my work there, where I started a lot of national initiatives around media and so forth, was one part of my background. Along the way, I’ve also been a real estate entrepreneur and developer. I’ve been involved in preserving the arts. Another activist campaign was with an environmental fight along the banks of the Delaware River, which involved taking over the government as a citizen action, involving Abbie Hoffman, that’s the name you remember. It was a very exciting, dynamic experience of local people coming from all kinds of a cross-section of ideological, political, financial, wherewithal to come in to stand together around something that they didn’t want, which in that instance was a pumping project along the Delaware River.

Interesting, I think I mentioned before, that being in this Delaware River valley, where Washington crossed the river surprised the Hessians and the English flipped the whole paradigm of possibility. That’s kind of the context in which I have juiced a lot of my involvement here, which has been about 15 years. I started with the Public Banking Institute back when it started.

I was one of the original participating board members and started a media committee, then got on the board and 15 years later, here I am chairing as president, still working at it. Again, to try to qualify my banking bonafides, through all of my University of hard knocks, Harvard would have been cheaper than what I’ve learned. But I’ve learned at the feet of real experts, academics, bankers, banking people, policy people. I’ve been very fortunate to be able to develop my education that way with the likes of you guys.

Peter Winslow

Well, do you want to talk about the origins of the Public Banking Institute and the work with Ellen Brown?

Walt McRee

Sure. That’s a good one, because if you remember, 2008, when the banks collapsed the global economy, financial economist, Ellen Brown, who’s a noted bestselling author who wrote Web of Debt, circulated a new understand, a story and a research piece, an exposé about how our money is organized and how banking is organized and why this failure happened, and the kind of trap, the monetary trap that we find ourselves in in this current, debt driven, financial arrangement.

So, Ellen’s book got to be very successful, and then Occupy Wall Street occurred in 2011, during which time people suddenly discovered that they were in a category, in a cohort that they didn’t know. That is that we are the 99%. Well we didn’t know we didn’t have the money that’s out there. People knew that they were struggling and so forth, but that was a declaration or a distinction that really propelled the public banking movement. It started in California, but it rapidly got buy-in in Philadelphia, becoming one of the core areas in which I helped to start that with Mike Krauss, back in 2011 and 12.

The Public Banking Institute then has been an educational source, an organizing source, a place where resources and collaboration converge. Also, focusing on looking at how the matrix of money management is not in our hands. To realize how the people have abrogated the most powerful tool, one of the most powerful tools they have beside their goodwill and brotherhood and largesse: money, basically.

That’s what the Public Banking Institute is up to now. I will just say one more thing. We’ve come a long way in our work. For the first ten years, what was required was explaining to people how banking works and what we had found along the way was that a lot of legislators and bankers seem to not know the reality that, for example, that banks create our money when they make loans.

Well, that was a huge breakthrough and also, of course, poo-pooed by the institutionalists who think that, “I don’t know, it’s all, you know, something else.” So, that sort of demythologizing education has been part of this ten years. We worked in markets around the country, probably 30 different markets at least, often running into the same sort of obstacles and complexities that are put there by politicians and the banking associations, the ignorance of legislators about banking and their fear of doing anything new.

So we’ve run to a point now where we realize what we can’t easily do, and that is to create these banks outright because the resistance is too strong, for the most part, but we are finding pockets of support and we are finding very large arteries of public support, which we think is going to put this opportunity into a different plane in the very near future, in part driven by the realities of the day that we live in now.

Peter Winslow

You mentioned Buckminster Fuller and one of the phenomena that Buckminster Fuller identified and worked on was ephemeralization. Money is an extremely ephemeral phenomenon in our society that people live with and don’t really understand particularly well. Sometimes ephemeralization is described as the process of doing more and more with less and less until eventually you’re doing everything with nothing.

With the AI future, maybe we’re headed in that direction, but money is inherently an already ephemeral substance in our society that runs through it as information transfer and is interesting to study from that perspective. The banking system performs an alchemy that is really very interesting and does not have to be and has not been in the past the way it is now. It does not have to be that way in the future. We’re looking for a more robust future, and one that’s more equitable.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah. So maybe piggybacking off of that. I know we’ve already started this work, but give us the ground level pitch, why public banking? You know, don’t we have enough banks to finance what society needs? Why more banks and why public banks? What do public banks bring to the picture and why are you two so into this thing?

Walt McRee

Well, the answer to “oh, don’t we have enough banks?” is, of course we do. But that would be the answer of the organized banking industry of private banks and because we deal with private banks in the US, except for one, that is a corporate private industry driven by profit, and therefore it has no universal obligation to serve.

It is not considered a utility other than the fact that people need money to live. But there’s no structural organizational commitment obligation for them to operate that way. When we would explain this, first of all, “what is a public bank?” people think it’s traded on the market.

It’s not that. It’s anything that is owned by the city, county or state, any governmental agency, that would have the people’s money in hand, would be capable of creating a bank, qualified with the other parameters, of course. The idea is to keep our money at home, to invest in ourselves and our message is “look, every time you send in tax dollars to your city, county, state, or whatever fees and so forth, they take that money and they send it essentially to Wall Street.”

It leaves town and that asset leaves the community, a local economy. What public banks do is say, “well, no, leave that in our own bank so that we can do what the private banks would otherwise do with it.” They’ll speculate and invest in all kinds of things we may very well not want them to invest in when in the interest of making a profit.

Whereas if you keep our money at home, we can keep that money and we do the very same thing, but we can invest in our own stuff; our schools, our infrastructure, our affordable housing, small businesses, etc., where we need the money. That’s the transformative opportunity and it is a comprehensively transformative opportunity that we’re talking about here.

I think that at this moment of where we’re seeing the oligarchy and those forces solidifying and controlling and extracting, it’s getting very serious, local economies are failing. So this message is resonating in ways that it hasn’t so much in the past. 

Scott Ferguson

There’s at least two dimensions here about keeping money at home. On the one hand, there’s the question of how you are mediating extant claims? How they are, quote unquote, “traveling through the system or the so-called plumbing.” But then there’s also the other dimension, which I think is even more mind blowing for people, which is the fact that banks create money.

This is not just about appropriating a finite amount of funds, and I have to put scare quotes around all these terms, that are “circulating in a system.” Correct me if I’m wrong, it’s fundamentally about reclaiming the capacity to generate money for the public and for public purposes.

Walt McRee

Yes.

Peter Winslow

Yeah. There’s been a failure of imagination, to a large extent, in terms of how people conceive of things, conceive of money and conceive of banking. The system is not broken. It works very well for the banks that are too big to fail. You know, periodically, there’s a financial crisis and they get bailed out and life goes on and they continue doing what they’ve been doing. It works very well for the people who are involved in that particular line of business of banking and financing. Large corporations and so forth don’t have any problem obtaining the money that they need for the projects that they want. We don’t have problems finding money to fight wars and a lot of things that politicians decide are worthwhile, but there is not enough money available to serve the public, the public interest.

That’s what public banks are for, public interest that is not profit for private interests. There is not enough availability of money, there’s not fair access to credit for many people in our society, in the community. There is a need for a non-extractive form of financial ecosystem.

One that serves the needs of the people, as opposed to private profit just piling money up, like Midas in his vault. That’s what public banking is all about. It’s really an alternative to the extractive model of the economy, to one that is much more dedicated to where the real needs are for housing, for vibrant local businesses, for the development of cooperatives and so forth.

That’s what public banking serves and it is not intended to replace the existing system. It’s intended to, perhaps, provide an alternative and a corrective, maybe serve as a break or trim tab that does some adjustment to the overall economy. But fundamentally, because of its local focus, it is really determined to serve the needs of the people and the places where those people live and have their local financial ecosystem operating.

Walt McRee

I’d like to just correct the metaphor that you gave Peter. I don’t think Midas had the vault. I think you’re thinking of Scrooge McDuck, just to be correct here. On the one thing, are there enough banks? What we found, when we, for example, were involved in the New Jersey Public Bank Implementation Board  study of where the gaps are. The bankers in the state said, “oh, we’re doing a great job. We make community contributions and little leagues and other things and so forth.” As Peter points out, there are enormous sectors of need that are not handled by private banks. The reason is there’s no money or there’s too much risk. What public banks do in reality, at least when we look at the North Dakota model, we see that public private banks succeed like nowhere else in the country because they have a public bank partner.

The rest of the banks around the country are really at that increased risk to take on social emissions and so they’re really constrained, in that way. Whereas public banks really have it as their purpose to extend credit, and that’s an enormous difference.

Peter Winslow

Banks, small banks, local banks proliferated after the Civil War and grew to be the way in which most people did their banking. But, starting in the 60s, there has been a contraction of banks and consolidation has taken place. Now, it’s a healthy environment if you have new banks being created, going to a certain size and needing to have a greater reach, and an exit strategy for those banks is to be acquired by a larger bank and to have a consolidation and so forth. That’s not really functioning very well at this time. The small banks are really very local, and they are not as apt to be properties that the larger banks are requiring. From an historic standpoint, we have fewer local banks and fewer banks overall and one of the things that a public bank can do is nurture the local financial ecosystem and help all of those banks grow and be more robust.

Walt McRee

As an example of the success of that, in Germany, where the Sparkassen, which is a community owned banks, they have thousands of them, but it is that infrastructure, the fabric, the texture of that community-based financing engines that stabilize those economies, and public banks have been shown to do that across the world.

That’s just one of the things they do is they can keep the community resources in place and keep them moving. So we want that here. I think we had about 15,000 private banks in 1980. Now we’ve got 4100. So we’ve lost a substantial number of privately owned community banks.

Peter Winslow

About a quarter of the total assets of the world are held in public banks. The United States is really an outlier in that respect. We only have one public bank in the United States. That is the kind of a bank that we would regard as the model and that’s the Bank of North Dakota.

There are some other examples that are particular anomalies, but the one that really makes the most sense to look at as a model is the Bank of North Dakota.

Billy Saas

Could we talk a little bit about the Bank of North Dakota? How did that bank get started? And if we’re talking about it as the model, what are its key features that other aspiring publics should try to replicate?

Walt McRee

Well, I’d like to just step in with making a reference to my own history. The farmers in North Dakota in 1915, I think it was, were being put out by the banks. The Minneapolis banks, the granaries and the railroads were all conspiring, if you will, to set prices that made the idea of farming in North Dakota even less desirable and certainly less profitable.

The citizens said, “hey, we’re not stupid here.” They created a new political arm called the nonpartisan league, a very fitting sort of a moniker for where we should find ourselves these days, because the common need of the citizens there was clear. They needed to have more economic stability and control on what was happening to their money and their assets.

They wind up taking over the government, which is what we did in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with this water fight. It was just hugely invigorating to find your neighbors out in the streets. Well, in North Dakota, the Nonpartisan League started a group called the Six Bucks Suckers.

Six bucks was their annual fee to become a part of this movement. That was enough money to drive this thing for a couple of years. Then they took over the legislature in 1919. The first thing they did was to create a state granary. That granary was the largest in the country, and it’s still operating, it belongs to the state of North Dakota.

The next thing they did was to create the state bank. That really helped to firm up things. 107 years later, that bank has made North Dakota the most stable state economy. It is also a bank that is the most profitable of any bank in the United States, profitable in terms of a return on equity.

No scandals along the way. One of the beautiful things about having your own bank, and there are many, but the ability to respond to crises was demonstrated in numerous instances in North Dakota. The Grand Forks fire and flood that wiped out Grand Forks, North Dakota and Grand Forks, Minnesota illustrated how important it was for a local bank to be in place, for the public bank to be in place, because that fire and flood wiped out both towns and an enormous amount of damage.

The North Dakota bank was there the next day and said, “look, let’s clean this stuff up. Don’t worry about the money. We’re going to do what you need for machinery and stuff. We’ll handle the money later.” As a result, North Dakota’s Grand Forks recovered within only a 3% loss of population during an extended period of disaster. Across the same river at the same spot in Minnesota they had to go to Wall Street. They had to go to Minneapolis and borrow the money to recover. They lost almost 20% of their population. Now that’s a huge equity loss, huge asset loss, realized because they didn’t have the means to finance themselves. Well, there were other instances that the bank has stepped in like that.

In the 30s, when the crops were drying up, farms were being reclaimed by the banks, the bank came in and said, “listen, guys, don’t go anywhere near the foreclosures. Just stay put. We will buy your farm. You stay there, the weather will change. You know, things will come back. And when the things do come back, we’ll sell your place back to you with the mortgage that you can afford.” I mean, that kind of flexibility and sort of utility is so logical. It’s like a family mentality, you know? “Hey, we’re all in this together, and we’ve got this money, and you can use it and we’ll save it for you. We’ll save your hide.”

That’s a beautiful thing about one of the transformative aspects about having a community owned public bank.

Peter Winslow

Yeah. The public bank can respond to disasters and crises much faster than other resources do. For example, during the Covid pandemic, the state of North Dakota had put in place a PPE program before Congress acted. When Congress acted, it was able to merge its program into the national program.

But it was out there almost immediately. The same thing when there was a government shutdown recently, the state of North Dakota said, “well, for the people who are not getting paid, you know, we’ll provide them with support and with low interest loans to get them through, for people who have a problems with their mortgages as a result of these hardships, we’ll have forbearance and a moratorium.”

The bank allows the whole community to be more resilient and responsive. Public banking, we’re looking to do two things simultaneously. We’re looking for a systemic change, which gets technical when you dig below the surface of it. We’re also interested in the purposes to which a public bank can be put.

These things go hand in hand. But they’re really quite distinct. One of the things about the Bank of North Dakota is that half of its assets are in participation loans, which means that they are taking 50% of the loans that are being originated by the local banks. By doing that, they spread the risk, they have a collaborative relationship with those banks because they’re looking at the books and those obligations together, and it allows those local banks to take on larger projects than they would be able to based on their own capital, because they have the Bank of North Dakota behind them.

This participation model is one that we think is really, very, very sound. It is conservative from a financial and legal perspective, and it’s one that has served North Dakota extraordinarily well and we think it translates to other locations.

Walt McRee

And systemically, on the banking topic, we believe, I mean, it’s very clear, community banks and credit unions are essential financial infrastructure for any community, and our commitment, and the way we devise or design future public bank applications is to make a very clear distinction that we’re in a noncompetitive position, that what we do is collaborative partnering with their loans to build that business and to enable them to do new business.

So we think community banks and credit unions, the private ones, not the Wall Street ones, and up through new ones, not the Wall Street ones, are really, really important. That’s one of our focuses these days.

Peter Winslow

This is something that we think scales that is helpful both for big markets like Philadelphia and for small ones. In Philadelphia, if we want to do a major water project, we float a bond and support it with the bond. The bond is supported by the revenue stream that comes in from the water project and so forth.

A small town in North Dakota can’t go to the bond market. They don’t have the capacity. They’re not big enough. They can’t play in that pool at all. But if they want to do their water project, they can go to the Bank of North Dakota, get a long term loan at 1%, and do their water project.

So, the infrastructure needs across the country are extraordinary. They’re estimated to be in the trillions, like 5 to 7 trillion dollars of infrastructure projects that should be done in the United States to bring it up to world standards. That’s how far behind we are. One way to do that is with the public bank.

There’s a form of public banking, which is being proposed, which is the National Infrastructure Bank. So that’s a form of public banking that we support. It’s a different model than the one of the Bank of North Dakota, but also a public bank.

Scott Ferguson

Right. It’s important, I think, for listeners to realize who are new to public banking, that there’s not just one model there. Like anything, it’s a design question. What do you want to accomplish? Then you can decide what you want to design for. A bank is not like a simple, stable thing, like a pig or a cow.

Not to say that those are simple animals, but, we think of a cow as a cow is a cow is a cow. And maybe they’re not. But we think that way. And a bank is not just a bank, a bank, a bank. You can do all kinds of things with it. So, for example, I think this has been implied in what you’ve been saying, but, maybe to bring it out into the open as a kind of lesson, the Bank of North Dakota model is really a kind of banker’s bank, right?

There’s not a brick and mortar outlet for any old person just to come deposit their money in and get a car loan from. It’s really doing work at a higher level in assisting lower level banks, community banks, credit unions to help them be as robust as they can and socially responsive as they can, or as you can imagine, all kinds of other designs that maybe do dip into offering financial services.

It does seem like you all are more on Team “Not Compete” with the private sector. But you know, I think we at Money on the Left are maybe a little more comfortable with some crowding out, but that can be a productive tension.

Peter Winslow

Well there is another example in North America of a kind of public bank that competes. Yes, you are correct. We are attracted to the noncompetitive collaborative model, but the territorial bank of Alberta, there was a branch bank of Alberta that does full service banking in conjunction with private banks that also do the same thing.

It is a substantial bank that also anchors the community. So it’s not  a bad model, but it is a model that we don’t exactly reject, but we’re more attracted to the banker’s bank, wholesale banking model that is exemplified by North Dakota.

Walt McRee

To look at a variation of of that, if one were to work in an area like Montana or Wyoming or someplace where there are real huge banking deserts, if you had the wherewithal, the means, there was enough capital assets to create a bank in those areas, you could create a retail public bank in that setting where you’re not threatening the private industries.

Peter Winslow

Or even in an urban environment. There are lots of people who are unbanked and underbanked. If that’s the problem that you wish to address, you could have a public bank that would provide them with credit cards, to use their plastic, and that would be available.

Another form of banking that is attractive is postal banking, where all the post offices in the country can be places where people can go to do their banking.

00;37;36;07 – 00;38;22;02

Scott Ferguson

Do you know much about the history of postal banking in general? I’ll just take the opportunity to reference something that’s near and dear to my heart. So they’ve had postal banking in the UK, or they did. I know this because I am, in part, a film and media scholar and historian and during the 1930s, a man, a filmmaker named John Grierson, who nearly invented the form of the documentary. In Britain, he got public financing at an office and the name changed at different moments but for a lot of the period in which he was working and hiring people and commissioning films, it was part of the British Post Office. They made all kinds of public service announcements, advertisements for postal services. There’s a film that includes a W.H. Auden poem called Night Mail.

Some of these are really experimental and they’re part of avant garde cinema. In any case, there was one film that was commissioned to be made by a New Zealand filmmaker who had traveled to London, named Len Lye. He made several films. But the one film in particular that is so near and dear to my heart, is called Rainbow Dance, and it is for public banking.

You can tell that public banking kind of comes in at the end and you can tell he’s just kind of flexing his experimental cinema chops. I don’t think it would fly today, per se, but it’s a gorgeous film. It’s so lively. It’s so experimental. It’s so vibrant.

Every time I watch it, I think, “Wow. To live in a world where, you know, avant garde artists at the top of their game are creating incredible experimental esthetic works to celebrate postal banking, public banking. Oh my God.” So anyway, that’s my one in. But I’m curious what you all know about postal banking, its history and where did it go?

Peter Winslow

But, if you have the itch, you can still go to your postal service and get a money order. That’s what’s left.

Scott Ferguson

Right. What counts is banking? 

Peter Winslow

But public banking was pretty widespread in the 30s. It was really promoted, I think, by the Roosevelt administration.

Walt McRee

Postal banking disappeared in the 60s, I think. I believe it was from the pressure from the monopolists who control our banking world these days. There has been a desire to resurrect it, in part, because of the Postal Service’s own financial difficulties. But if you’ve been following those stories, you recognize that it’s one of the targets of the monopolists that want to privatize the Postal Service and keep their monopoly on banking, as well.

The unions of USPS were all in support of it, and they were ready to try a couple of models, a couple of examples of it, but it got shot down. And of course now, the postal board of directors, Scott, are all eight appointees of the Trump administration.

So everybody’s into where they can get a pound of flesh out of public assets and so you really have to fight for that. But I think that that’s one of the many fights that we’re faced with these days.

Billy Saas

So I know that there are, in Louisiana, publicly commissioned artworks, murals, from the New Deal era in those very post offices that would have been probably providing some of those banking services. The public-ness of the public bank does not exhaust itself in the finance question, it can be so much more.

Right. You mentioned, Walt, now a couple times, our current moment, and the urgency of public banking. I’m wondering with respect to your observation that the message is resonating more with more audiences today. If you could maybe reflect on what has worked and what has not worked as well, as you have been spreading the good word of public banking over the last 15 years. As you were talking about your history with PBI, there are, in terms of the timeline, many points of potential overlap and alignment between your story and Modern Monetary Theory as such, getting its own kind of national pseudo-mainstream moment. Part of their mission, as they’ve articulated it — I’m speaking of folks like Stephanie Kelton and Randy Ray — has been that, they might call it a little bit more directly, debunking, or where you’d call it demythologizing, clearing the way for an actual conversation to happen on the grounds of reality. They have talked and reflected in different ways about their approaches, their strategies for talking to audiences that are unable to see it clearly because of the mythology, because of the mystification, we might call it. I wonder what has worked best for you.

Do you have some strategies that you use? Certainly in talking to you, you have gone seamlessly into your description and history with us, with a sympathetic audience. But what does it look like when you approach folks who are maybe a little bit more cynical, skeptical, or flat out not having it?

Walt McRee

Yeah. The moment that we live in is fraught with all kinds of risk, danger and loss in terms of what the public has access to and what our assets have been and what we would like to have for the future. I think because that’s getting to strike home and so much in the way that the people are losing their assets and their prospects and feel disconnected from the economy that they’ve been working in, that there is a more receptive listening, that doesn’t help them understand banking too much.

I think if you tell them that money is made out, ex nihilo, of nothing, and it’s unlimited, and all of the principles that guide the wisdom of MMT, is still very much a skeptical word for a lot of people and yet people are hungry for some sort of parity, or at least fairness, in the economic world.

So I think the listening is changing out of the necessity to have some bright shining something or others somewhere on this. Also, as we see the corruption of the exploitation and how at every little point of juncture between the privately held powers of economic influence and connection are just sucking out the wealth of the people.

So the banks have been bullies. Will you come along with the idea that a bank can be a community asset? And you describe what public banks are and keep our money at home, invest in ourselves. So, we don’t have that already? Where is that? That’s the instinctive response. “We don’t have that already?”

So they’re still learning that they’re trapped in a system that has got them by their cahones and they don’t like it. So they’re willing to listen more to what we have to say about that.

Peter Winslow

We have to engage with multiple audiences. When we’re talking to most people, you go to a community meeting or your neighborhood association meeting and you talk about public banking, people get excited. They love the idea because at 35,000ft, what’s not to like? To have, in addition to the private banking system, a banking system that’s in the public interest rather than for private profit.

People get that and they love it there. Their concerns tend to be that if it’s public and it’s something that’s put together by our legislature or city council, how do we prevent this from being a slush fund? How do we prevent it from being corrupted with favoritism and so forth? So, discussion about governance becomes really, really important and all of that. When we’re talking to the people in the legislature, they get it and they can get pretty enthusiastic about it. Then it’s a question of convincing their colleagues, and then there are people who get campaign contributions from the people who are supporting the interests that oppose public banking. So you have that consideration. 

When we talk to our friends, our local bankers and credit union folks, they are interested, but they have some concerns about how that upsets their existing relationships. They have correspondent relationships with different banks. They have relationships with banks that give them investment advisory services and things of that nature. The same thing when you’re talking with officials who have connections with Wall Street and with investment banks, where they place their bonds. What’s this going to do to our bond rating? If we have a public bank, we say this will improve your strength and so forth. 

So each of these audiences has different concerns, and we talk to the people who are involved with affordable housing or business development and so forth. They get it for what their needs are. Same thing when we talk to the people in unions. It depends on who the audience is, what the concerns are and how we go about addressing those concerns.

Scott Ferguson

How about the mainstream press? And by mainstream, I mean a pretty broad swath. So like, it doesn’t have to just be our ill fated CBS News and The New York Times. It could also be, you know, major progressive magazines like The Nation and things like that. We have our own publishing platform and we do the best we can.

I’m assuming that maybe there’s a little bit more legibility with public banking. But, what about your own efforts? You know, Walt, you were involved in broadcasting and various forms of media, what’s your relationship to the press and to the journalistic world?

Walt McRee

We do exist on the periphery of development thought and policy and so forth. Because money is a bit of an esoteric pursuit, you have your own section of the newspaper for that. Of course, because we really find ourselves at odds sometimes with some of the principles of economy, that they’re operating a debt structure, a debt monopoly, and we’re talking about something that’s not that, that it’s entirely a different world, It’s kind of out there. They don’t think it’s maybe necessarily a mainstream concern. I would also say that our resources are limited and so we haven’t done a major job in moving the media forward as much as I would certainly love to do, but we’re working well past our weight already. But I do think that that is a conversation that’s going to change, in part because, I’ll give you an example, we have a national conference coming up in October in which we will build some awareness.

It’s called Public Banking, Public Prosperity: Declaring Financial Independence on America’s 250th anniversary, is an opportunity for us to focus on how we’re still trapped by the Bank of England. We’re still locked into the financial structure that made that, in part, as Ben Franklin said, was the reason for the revolution, which was because they wouldn’t allow us to create our own currency here.

That was the primary driver, according to him, in Philadelphia. And by the way, the public banking thing started in Philadelphia with the Quakers back around 1720-1730. It was community funding. Hey, you want to build a barn? Yeah. Here’s some money. We know where you live, and we’ll help you build it.

No taxes at all. We were all taking care of each other. I think you guys did a brilliant job illustrating the kind of liquefaction of public assets that can become part of a democratic financial policy and  platform. It’s a lower and smaller “d” but that’s part of the moment too.

We are at that point where the citizens are so threatened by their own survival, in their own futures, that we think they’re going to be paying a whole lot more attention about how we keep our money at home and not double the cost of our infrastructure by paying Wall Street. That’s the fact. When we go to the bond market, that immediately costs double, whereas if we find our finance ourselves, it’ll be a lot cheaper and we’ll also keep the profits as the Bank of North Dakota’s wonderful history has proved about how it’s grown.

Peter Winslow

So in Philadelphia, the leading newspaper is the Enquirer. We have access to the editorial pages of the Enquirer. When we do place editorials about public banking and public banking related issues that are important for the city, we’ve had that relationship for quite a while. We are not reported on a regular basis in the business section.

It would be nice if we were, but that’s not what the business section readers are interested in right now. So we do not really have access to the business section. However, at our conference in October, I’m pretty sure we’re going to have access to the front page of the Enquirer and that we’re going to be making news that is worth the Enquirer paying attention.

I think that will follow for other media. We have a monthly zoom program that we’re doing now. Coming up on our 54th edition of Financing Philadelphia’s Future. We invite the press to that, and periodically we get channel ten that will come in depending upon what it is that we’re discussing, we may get somebody from the media who will come and listen in. They don’t necessarily report on us, but they are keeping track of us.

I should mention that we do have some folks that are knowledgeable about public banking and interested in it and report on it, such as New City, and that’s also based here and has a national reach. It’s not the mainstream media, but it is a viable media outlet.

Walt McRee

I would just add that where there are local public bank initiatives like in California; Los Angeles, San Francisco, East Bay, Sacramento all have visible campaigns. They’ve been doing a great job. They’ve got a lot more people involved in their effort and focused on media work. This is a great story, and I think that it becomes increasingly relevant as we’re able to bring in the legislators who want to speak to it and look for an advantage.

In New Jersey, for example, Governor Phil Murphy, the outgoing governor of New Jersey, made it part of his public campaign for office. It was a winning message. It was very simple. He said, on the stump, “last year we spent a billion and a half dollars on building the infrastructure of the future in Japan because we would spend our money, then the Bank of America put it there. What did Bank of America do for us, for New Jersey? $250,000 in loans for the whole year.” 

The comparison was, are you investing locally or investing elsewhere? Another thing on our agenda is public pensions. Trillions of dollars of public dollars sit in the hands of private managers. They do not have a stellar track record of returns. They’re only focused on returns. The money’s not going into your communities, by and large. That’s one of the things that the Public Banking Institute is focusing on making some impact.

Peter Winslow

There are many ways in which a public bank can be capitalized. One of the simplest and most straightforward is to have the local municipal pension fund invest in the public bank.

Scott Ferguson

Absolutely. We had a behind the scenes call a little while ago and we were getting into some of the weeds and technicalities of public banking. How do you start a public bank? I don’t want this to get too wonkish or too nerdy, but I think a couple of examples might be helpful just to give our audience a sense of how there’s different ways of doing this.

I’m going to make a gesture and then you guys clean it up. You add and correct me. One of the dominant models here is you need a movement at the state level with state legislatures who are willing to create what often gets called a legal framework, a set of laws that make it possible to to charter a bank at the state or municipal level.

Then that clears the way, as they’ve done in California, to have local movements for a Bank of San Francisco or a Bank of Oakland, etc., etc. but that’s not the only way of doing it. We learned from you on our call that there are efforts to kind of circumvent that state process because, you know, that’s hard, and instead develop a kind of a public investment authority of some kind. You were even telling us about one model where somebody who was involved was a former banker and somehow had a legal charter already and so it’s allowing for the possibility of acquiring a bank. These are just radically different paths up the mountain.

Correct to me, flesh it out, paint a better and bigger picture than I’m able to.

Peter Winslow

As a practical matter, there are two pathways that we usually follow toward creating a public bank. One is, in one step, to go get a bank charter. You can get a bank charter by buying one, taking one that is already in existence and convincing the banking authorities that you want to convert that to public ownership, or to create it anew, in one step. What we found in Philadelphia and also is true in other places, is that sometimes it’s better or the pathway is to do it in two steps.

The first step is to establish an authority that does all the things that you want your public bank to do as a revolving fund, and have that authority seek a charter to become a bank. So those are essentially the two ways that we see as pathways. If, in Philadelphia, we could have done it in one step, we would have.

But, for a variety of reasons, we took a different path. We use the Pennsylvania economic development finance law, acts 1 and 2, which is on the books and has been used over and over again to establish public authorities for particular purposes and to establish the Philadelphia Public Financial Authority.

We were successful in doing that. We had legislation that was passed 17 to 1 in the city council. So there’s a veto proof majority and Mayor Kenney at the time declined to sign. So it went into law and is now an ordinance of the city of Philadelphia without his signature.

But in order to take the next step, the mayor needs to appoint the initial board of directors for the financial authority and mayor Kenney declined to do that and his successor, who voted for the legislation when she was on city council, Mayor Parker, has also not yet appointed the initial board of the financial authority.

Scott Ferguson

Are there reasons given? Is it just a kind of a timidity, a political risk aversion? What’s going on?

Peter Winslow

I think that there is a political power struggle that’s involved. In Philadelphia, we have the PIDC, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, which has been around since the 50s and is very large. It is governed by the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, which are the established business and financial interests of the city.

They see a public bank as being a competitor, and they are not comfortable with the democratic governance structure that we have for the Philadelphia Financial Authority.They are saying, “well, you know, we already have institutions that can do all of these things.” We don’t because we don’t have a bank.

If you wanted to establish a bank, you could do it. We invite you to, and we would invite you to have democratic governance rather than the governance that exists for PIDC. So that’s the primary problem that we have. The other problems that they have are sort of saying, “can we afford it? Is there a risk that is involved in this, will the city have to be on the hook if things go belly up?” Questions that we really would like to have a conversation about, because we think that all of these objections really are smoke and that we like to blow that smoke away so we can see it more clearly.

Walt McRee

There are lots of reasons, or not reasons, but excuses that are put in the way and I think Peter touched on several of them, but one of them really is about the power structure. The power power politics. People don’t get into office these days without having money. The interest behind them, banks are very much a part of that scene.

As Dick Durbin said about Congress, “banks own the place.” That reality is part of our democracy. That is part of the corruption that is part of this moment. But starting a bank, it’s not against the law to create a bank, North Dakota proved that back in the 20s and 30s.

It’s not necessarily against the law. Depends on what your state constitution might say or what your limitations are for your municipal authority and so forth. They’re all different situations, but they’re not generally prohibitive of a community having its own bank. It depends. Obviously, it’s a complicated affair on some level.

But, the willingness to do so comes from the need. People say, “look, we really have to do something about our housing or our infrastructure,” and they don’t see a way that their tax base is going to swing it, then what, what kind of outcomes? The state of Washington is looking at that situation now yet again.

They’re out of their borrowing capacity. They’re running out of money, which is sort of a systemic failure of the monetary system. So we’re talking about a whole new horizon frontier of the ability for us to create our own money out of our own equity, in our own terms, and with our own mission.

This is the public option that exists not just for banking, but for other utilities, for the schools and environment. I mean, all of these things deserve to have the public power in place. So this is really about a systemic rejuvenation and renewal and I want to see a transformation into a new day where we’re not dependent on being supplicants to big money interests.

I would just say there are all kinds of things that happen along the way of making a public bank. A revolving fund, which is where they want to send you, which is what happened in New Jersey. They send it to a revolving fund. People need to know the difference between a revolving fund and a bank.

A depository bank enables your capital to be leveraged ten times, roughly speaking. Okay. Well, that’s a money tree, that’s a money cranking machine that has to be tempered and operated properly and balanced with risk and all of that. But it is a much different thing than a revolving fund now. To answer your question a little bit better, Scott, I would say, and as Peter pointed out, these intermediaries among municipal financial authorities or organizations are interim steps, fine. As long as they are part of a continuum of a purpose, that once we get this system working, once we demonstrate that we know how to do this, once we’ve got the public governance structure in place, once we’ve established the separation between this and government political control, then we can get on with formulating a working model for a local public bank. Totally doable.

I think you’re going to see that illustrated. I will give you one more example of how that has worked and I think it’s working excitingly in Vermont. Back in 2014, when we were working on that, the treasurer, who said, “look, I understand this, but I don’t like it though.”

Even though the state Congress approved it, she said, “as treasurer, I’m not going to do it. But I will tell you what I will do. We’ll put in a new plan called ‘10% for Vermont.’” What that was, they would use 10% of their available cash balance on deposit in a Canadian bank, but in a big bank.  “We’ll use 10% of our balance and you can use that for local investment. We’ll do it through our economic development agency.” That was 10-12 years ago? Well, since then they have had $30 million that wound up in local investment out of that effort. Now, 12 years later, it has gone from 10% to 12.5% and grown to one over $110 million of investment in the bank.

I think they’re in a different place where they say, “you know what, this is a good pile of money. We can really make this into a bank.” That is one approach that would be another way of starting a bank. Use your industrial or development authorities and agencies as vehicles, as capital sources to transform them into a depository, singular depositories, narrow banks, the things that are just used for specific public investment.

Those are very real, very available opportunities that do not require a great deal of heavy lifting or fabrication.

Peter Winslow

There are green banks around the country.

Walt McRee

…That are not banks.

Peter Winslow

…That are not banks, but they’re called green banks for solarisation projects and things of that nature. There are a lot of them around, but none of them are banks. If there were a bank, like in Philadelphia, we would be able to support the Philadelphia Green Capital Corp, which is our green bank in Philadelphia.

We’d be able to support them and their programs and be able to expand their programs enormously. But one of the things that may happen as the federal government starves the states and the cities, public banking is going to become increasingly attractive to the politicians because it’s a solution to their problem.

It’s a case that we have to make strongly because it’s the case that holds whether they’re starved from the federal government or not. It’s a question of the ability of a government agency in our federal system to exert its own sovereignty.

Walt McRee

The National Association of Counties recently did an assessment of that and said, because of the cutbacks at the federal level, these counties are looking at, in the next ten years, potentially a $1 trillion lack of resources that their budgets are not going to be able to compensate for because they weren’t designed to do this without federal support.

So, that’s part of this moment, the very dynamic moment for our money. It’s our money and people forget that it’s our money.

Peter Winslow

The public bank also can be a source of liquidity for local governments because the nature of the tax revenues are periodic and the nature of the expenditures are not.

Billy Saas

Well, as we start to wind down here, I want to direct our listeners to check out publicbanking institute.org, where you have more of your resources. But I want to ask both of you, pertinent to what you were just sharing, where else can people who are interested in following the latest in public banking, where should we be looking?

Where are the most exciting sort of moments for public banking right now?

Walt McRee

Well, I think we need to pay attention to what our neighbors’ needs are. What is needed? What is wanted? What must we stand for? To be driven by a mission. It’s always about a mission. The Bank for North Dakota had a mission. Every public bank has a mission. When you discover what it is that’s missing and needed, then you have a reason but also focus an energy that can be aligned around it.

I think that one of the things that we’re starting at the institute is a public banking community action network, which will be very much like an individual declaration of “I’m in favor of starting publicly owned financial institutions in my town.” We will be networking and creating a collaborative understanding where we can communicate with each other.

Not just within the sector of public banking interest, but in all of these other sections, like working families, community environmental justice and fairness, all of these other organizational frameworks become part of a common thread of community, of how we’re going to get this institutional framework established. The politicians are going to need to see the people standing together around this, because it takes an enormous amount of courage and even when they’ve got it, like Bob Asagawa, God bless him, up in Washington state, has been at this for ten years in the Senate. He’s still at it and it will take a while. When people stand together, that’s a whole new possibility. Again, part of this moment we’re in is where people are standing together.

We’re not going to be fooled forever about how we are being treated and how people are taking this opportunity to take our stuff away from us. 

Peter Winslow

It’s a national movement at the local level and people can watch what’s happening in the build up to the conference in Philadelphia in October. People can see what’s happening in their local states and cities. New Mexico has a very vital program that is looking toward success.

California has a framework, where a variety of cities are working on this. I don’t think we’ve mentioned New York very much, but New York is also a place, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Vermont, Oregon, Colorado, Colorado is very big.

You see on the Public Banking Institute website a map that shows where there are state and local initiatives underway and have links there to get in touch with your local effort.

Walt McRee

Yeah. I just want to reinforce that if you go to publicbankinginstitute.org, there’s an enormous amount of resources there to give you a background and links to things to really get the inside scoop on how the Bank of North Dakota works. There are five videos that are made of a presentation that Don Morgan, the president of Bank of North Dakota, made in New Mexico back in January.

Easy guy to listen to. He really lays it up straight. It’s not difficult at all to understand. But you see how beautiful the symmetry and the synergy is of how that bank works.

Peter Winslow

Individual websites in Philadelphia, like the philapublicbanking.org website. In addition to information about our combined effort that’s called, Project Beloved Community, which is built upon Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s concept of a beloved community, which is based upon a non-extractive economy.

All of the videos of Financing Philadelphia’s Future are there and on YouTube, and similar information is available in Colorado and Washington state and so forth. So there’s a lot of information that people can get, and through the Action Network, be in a position to join and coordinate with their neighbors.

Scott Ferguson

Well, Walt and Peter, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. We so look forward to future collaborations with you and we so thoroughly enjoyed this.

Peter Winslow

Thank you so much.

Walt McRee

Thank you very much for having us and guys, we really admire your work and, indeed, look forward to the future collaborations. We’re going to need each other’s brains and courage to press on. So, thanks.

* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript. 

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Zooming in on the Loop

By Tyler Suksawat & Scott Ferguson

In previous writings, we advanced an inventive new model for municipal finance: what we call the Seattle Loop. By establishing a city-owned public bank, we propose, Seattle can not only expand public investment through municipal lending and provide residents with low-cost financial services; it can also purchase its own bonds and “loop” the interest back to the city itself, rather than to Wall Street. Over time, the Loop promises to save Seattle (and any other municipality that adopts the Loop) hundreds of millions of dollars in interest payments annually. More important, it stands to turn the city’s public debt into a self-reinforcing system of public finance, capable of addressing community and environmental needs far more democratically and robustly than ever before in the city’s fiscal history.

Here, we take a more granular approach to some of the Loop’s key operations—capitalization and maintaining reserve balances—zooming in, as it were, to address logistical specificities that our broader model facilitates.

How precisely can a city like Seattle capitalize a public bank? That is, how will Seattle secure enough funds to, first, acquire a banking charter, and second, steadily marshal sufficient owner equity, or “capital,” to meet ongoing regulatory requirements? Concomitantly, how can a Seattle Municipal Bank attain and maintain adequate reserve balances, ensuring daily liquidity in managing interbank payments with the rest of the U.S. financial system?

In what follows, we explain both processes. Ultimately, we demonstrate that capitalization and reserves are not separate stumbling blocks to be surmounted, but deeply interrelated operations that—when designed in tandem—create a mutually reinforcing engine for public provision.

No Cap: A Closer Look at Capitalizing the Loop

Since we first introduced the Seattle Loop, several interlocutors have expressed concerns regarding the city’s capacity to sufficiently capitalize a new public bank. Frequently, these anxieties rest on the erroneous notion that much of Seattle’s current holdings are functionally off-limits, either because they are supposedly locked in high-yield investments or because tax revenues earmarked for future spending are deemed unavailable for democratic deployment.

In reality, all funds Seattle presently holds in private banks and investment portfolios are readily available to the city. This includes earmarked revenues, waiting to be spent according to legislative directives. No city, state, or federal laws prevent the city from mobilizing its assets toward the capitalization of a new public bank.

The scale of Seattle’s public wealth is immense, totaling over $8.1 billion in managed assets. This figure rests on two primary pillars: the city’s $3.8 billion Treasury Investment Pool, which handles daily operating cash and earmarked reserves, and the $4.3 billion managed by the Seattle City Employees’ Retirement System (SCERS).

The trouble is, under current municipal arrangements, this $8.1 billion foundation is sequestered in private financial institutions, reducing the city’s greatest strength into a passive subsidy for Wall Street. As a result, Seattle is forced into a perverse position: the city pays hundreds of millions of dollars in predatory fees and exposes retirement savings to volatile speculative markets, all while providing the very liquidity that private banks use to underwrite their own exploitative and destructive regime of lending.

Seattle possesses the capacity to liberate its public wealth from private capture, reallocating its massive holdings to capitalize a democratic municipal bank. While this transition demands adept financial management—including the careful disaggregation of funds and a move away from speculative vehicles—the challenges are solely logistical. Potential liquidity bottlenecks and termination fees from private vendors represent one-time and short-term transitional hurdles rather than systemic barriers. Any payment or dip in yields marks the final extraction by private intermediaries, a cost that will be swiftly recovered as the Seattle Loop commences in earnest.

After Seattle secures this initial capitalization and, with it, a banking charter, the city’s reclaimed equity then serves as its public bank’s regulatory foundation, providing the balance sheet capacity necessary to absorb municipal debt and extend credit at a scale far exceeding the initial investment. From here, Seattle can begin issuing bonds directly to—and, when necessary, receiving loans from—its own public bank. Henceforth, the city will systematically retire its legacy obligations to private investors. However, all future interest payments will remain within the public circuit. Consequently, Seattle recuperates wealth once lost to the rentier class, looping interest back into the general fund to support social provisioning. It also effectively democratizes debt issuance, wresting control from bond rating agencies and private intermediaries to empower local government and the voting public.

Throughout this process, it is essential to recognize a more fundamental point about the entire logic of capitalization. Capital requirements do not obey immutable natural laws; they are legal constructs subject to democratic redefinition. 

As California Assembly Bill 857 (2019), or Public Banking Act, demonstrates, it is entirely possible to legally codify what counts as capital in the first place. This landmark legislation reclassifies existing investment portfolios as suitable for bank capitalization, providing a clear regulatory roadmap for municipal entities. Recognizing that these definitions are flexible opens the door to creative capitalization strategies that were previously unimaginable. Indeed, Assembly Bill 857 utilizes the same powerful assumption to endow California public banks with depository functions. In addition to reclassifying what assets can be used to capitalize a bank, the legislation also legally redefines what counts as a public depository to explicitly include public banks. All this is to say that when we treat monetary terms and procedures as flexible tools of governance, the perceived limits of municipal finance reveal themselves to be legal constructs that can be rewritten for transformative action.

Of course, legal redefinition is nearly always a complex process. Bill 857, for example, explicitly reclassifies anticipated state tax revenue as credit that can be counted toward the capitalization of a public bank. Currently, however, federal law excludes projected tax revenues from Tier 1 bank capitalization requirements. What this means is that, while the State of California cannot use anticipated taxes as credit to capitalize its initial public bank, Bill 857 does give the state and its municipalities legal authority to leverage future taxes toward the capitalization of a second, third or fourth public bank. After the first public bank is founded, in other words, California may leverage future taxes as credit to create more public banks. The federal requirement for Tier 1 capital is met at each step, but the actual source is the anticipated taxes revenues. Hence, even though state and municipal legislation is never at total liberty to restructure monetary rules, it can effectively establish the strategic legal scaffolding necessary to expand the boundaries of public finance over the long term.

When it comes to maintaining capital requirements, meanwhile, the Seattle Loop departs from the reactive logic of private banking. Rather than viewing the bank as a mere vehicle for attracting private investors or balancing risk against maximized yields, we approach the Seattle Loop as an actively constructed system of public coordination. We can strengthen this system and insulate it from the volatility of private markets by requiring partner community lenders to open and maintain deposit accounts within Seattle’s public bank. This creates a symbiotic effect wherein the public bank serves as a stable foundation for the entire local financial ecosystem.

The partnership model allows the Seattle Municipal Bank to pursue projects that are currently beyond the reach of smaller, mission-driven lenders. Through participation lending, the bank can supplement loans for critical public works, such as low-income housing development. If a developer requires $50 million for a housing project but a local credit union only has the balance sheet capacity for $10 million, the municipal bank can purchase the remaining $40 million of the loan. This is not a theoretical novelty; it is a proven model of public coordination successfully utilized by the Bank of North Dakota—which is primarily a wholesale lender to other banks—for over a century to anchor regional development.

To safeguard the long-term vitality of the public bank, we can also augment its capital base by instituting a policy of retained earnings. In mandating that a small portion of the bank’s net interest income remain within the institution rather than being fully remitted to the general fund, we establish an autocatalytic growth curve for public credit. In technical terms, these retained profits build up the bank’s Tier 1 capital—the core, loss-absorbing equity that serves as a primary regulatory buffer.

Because banking operates on the logic of leverage, this public accumulation of capital has a disproportionate impact on the city’s provisioning power. Given that the minimum Tier 1 capital ratio is typically set at 6%, every dollar retained by the bank potentially unlocks over sixteen dollars in new lending capacity. Committing to this steady internal capitalization, the Seattle Municipal Bank does not only maintain its solvency, but also structurally expands the horizons of what the city can afford to build, fund, and sustain.

The bank further strengthens its capital base by integrating the city’s broader economic transactions into its circuit. For example, city contractors can be auto-enrolled to receive funds—from grants to large-scale construction payments—directly into Seattle Municipal Bank accounts. While contractors remain free to move their funds at any time, the Loop Bank can offer unique institutional benefits and seamless integration that incentivize them to remain within the public circuit.

The Seattle Municipal Bank can extend this invitation to the city’s most vital resource: its employees. If the city invites public sector workers to hold payroll accounts directly with the public bank or its partner banks, it can offer exclusive financial services and benefits tailored to the needs of public servants. This transforms payroll from a seemingly neutral administrative task into an active tool for expanding the fiscal reach of the public bank, ensuring that Seattle’s wealth continues to circulate in the interest of those who make the city run.

Finally, the Seattle Loop achieves a structural advantage regarding fiscal retention that private intermediaries simply cannot match: immunity from federal taxation. While private commercial banks are subject to federal corporate taxes—representing a steady loss in municipal wealth—public banks operate as tax-exempt governmental entities. Therefore, the Loop does more than shield the city from Wall Street’s extractive fees; it ensures that the surplus generated by public credit remains entirely within the local circuit. This effectively closes a major valve of fiscal siphoning, retaining every dollar of generated value to support the city’s own provisioning.

Settling In: Building Reserves & Internalizing the Clearing Process

To operate as a viable financial institution, the Seattle Municipal Bank must participate in the complex infrastructure of interbank settlement. This process is mediated by reserves—the specialized, high-powered money that banks use to clear and settle obligations with one another. Unlike the commercial bank deposits used by the public for daily transactions, reserves exist as digital entries on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve, serving as the ultimate medium for the final settlement of payments.

Only the Fed has the authority to issue and destroy these reserves, whether through routine open-market operations and repurchase agreements or via emergency lending facilities and large-scale asset purchases during periods of systemic crisis. Critically, these reserves are not redeemable outside of the central bank circuit; they are a wholesale instrument for institutional settlement, not a retail medium for public commerce. One cannot use reserves to purchase a cup of coffee or a car. Instead, they function as the specialized money, which banks use to cancel out debts with one another as their customers transfer and transact between financial institutions.

In the current financial landscape, every time a check is cleared or a wire is sent between different institutions, a corresponding volume of reserves must move across the central bank’s ledger to satisfy the debt. For most municipal entities, the requirement to maintain and manage these balances has long been framed as an insurmountable barrier to entry into the specialized world of chartered banking and interbank settlement, often resulting in a costly and forced reliance on large private correspondent banks to handle the technical plumbing of settlement. With the design of the Seattle Municipal Bank, however, we build our own public system of liquidity, enabling the city to insulate itself from the extractive pressures of the settlement circuit, while also meeting ongoing reserve requirements.

One of the most common technical objections to our proposal is the problem of reserve acquisition. Critics ask how a new public bank can possibly compete in the interbank market without a pre-existing stock of Fed funds. Our answer is simple: reserves follow deposits. When the City of Seattle transfers its holdings out of private accounts and into its own municipal bank, the banking system mechanically expedites that move by transferring the corresponding reserves across the Fed’s ledger. In this light, the problem of reserve acquisition disappears. The city’s deposits furnish the very liquidity needed to settle the city’s payments.

While acquiring initial reserves is a mechanical byproduct of capitalization, maintaining them is a separate operational challenge. To see how this works, consider a simplified scenario: the City of Seattle receives a $10 million deposit from a private institution. In the interbank system, this deposit is accompanied by a transfer of $10 million in reserves. So far, the bank is flush. However, if the city then sells $10 million of its bonds to its own bank, it creates $10 million in new deposits. The moment the city attempts to spend that credit at vendors who bank in the private sector, the Seattle Municipal Bank must have enough reserves on hand to clear the payment. In this sense, reserves are the exit fee for transactions leaving the public circuit.

Still, a critical point remains: any payment clearing within the public-to-public system requires no reserves at all. When the city transfers funds between departments or pays an employee who also banks with the Seattle Municipal Bank, the transaction is settled via a simple ledger update—pure municipal bookkeeping. This allows for the creation of a relatively insulated, high-volume system of payment clearing, which lessens the demand for the Seattle Municipal Bank to keep up with settlements in the Fed funds market.  

That said, the Seattle Loop’s capacity for internal settlement reaches its full, transformative scale only through the project we have previously championed: a comprehensive digital public payment infrastructure. By establishing a municipal payment utility—akin to a “Public Venmo” or “Seattle Square”—the city will broker both free and surveillance-free transactions that circumvent exploitative credit card companies and tech oligarchies.

Imagine a digital municipal wallet that serves as the primary interface for civic life: your ORCA card, your library card, and your portal for utility payments and local event tickets, all integrated into a singular, public circuit. As payments circulate and clear within this internal system, the exit fee of private reserves effectively vanishes. This infrastructure is particularly vital for rewarding care work, as it allows the city to directly recognize and pay public service workers tending to our community. At its core, however, creating a digital public payment system expands the city’s internal clearing capacity, diminishing the burdens involved in attracting and maintaining reserves in the Fed funds system.

The Seattle Loop ensures that fiscal expansion is no longer tethered to the liquidity bottlenecks of the private market, but is instead limited only by our collective capacity to provision for the public good.

Conclusion: The Future is Fiscal Resilience

By zooming in on the technical foundations of the Seattle Loop, we see that capitalization and reserves are not mere obstacles to be overcome, but the very instruments of a new municipal financial architecture. Once this architecture is in place, the Seattle Loop functions as a vital automatic stabilizer for the regional economy.

Unlike private commercial banks, which are structurally compelled toward pro-cyclicality—lending aggressively during booms and retreating during busts—the Seattle Loop operates under a mandate of counter-cyclical investment. During economic downturns, when private credit freezes, the city can strategically expand its lending capacity, acting as a public credit guarantee that maintains the city’s future wellbeing when the present is uncertain or unstable.

As part of this mandate for counter-cyclical investment, the Seattle Loop can endow the city with a powerful tool for public refinancing. The public bank can systematically retire the city’s extractive legacies by purchasing older, high-interest loans currently held by private institutions. It can also extend refinancing options to non-profits and community organizations that have long been burdened by predatory private debt.

In the final analysis, what all such possibilities demonstrate is that the Seattle Loop is not merely technically feasible. It is an active and generative construction that supplies the city with maximal fiscal resilience. By re-engineering the city’s financial plumbing into a permanent infrastructure of social and environmental stewardship, the Loop guarantees that Seattle’s wealth is never again treated as a compliant subsidy for Wall Street, but is rather deployed as a powerful tool for a just and plentiful tomorrow.

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Green Politics and Public Money with Sheridan Kates

Billy Saas and Rob Hawkes speak with Sheridan Kates, ecological economist, activist and Green Party candidate for Islington Council in North London in the May 2026 local election. (Update: Since recording, Sheridan won her seat and is now an elected Councillor.) In her academic and political work, Sheridan rejects both the economics and the language of austerity, and instead prioritises democratic, inclusive, and participatory institution building. Sheridan’s activism extends into a commitment to public economics education via her work with Modern Money Lab UK, which held a series of public workshops in London and then a 2-day anti-austerity conference in Bristol in 2025. As a signatory to the Greens Organise ‘Pledge to Oppose Austerity in Local Government’, Sheridan both welcomes the gathering momentum behind campaigns for a UK wealth tax and argues that they do not go far enough. Amidst a new wave of excitement surrounding green politics in the UK, especially since Zack Polanski’s election as Green Party Leader in September 2025, Sheridan looks to a future where our economies are redesigned democratically to put people and the planet before profit.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Billy Saas

Sheridan Kates, welcome to Money on the Left.

Sheridan Kates

Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

Billy Saas

We are interested in talking to you about many things, but we want to start by asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found yourself where you are in your thinking now on economic and public policy.

Sheridan Kates

Yeah. Well, I have a bit of a circuitous route to where I am now. My background is completely unrelated to all of this. I started out as an engineer. I initially did a master’s in general engineering. I didn’t know if I was going to specialize in civil. I really loved the idea of building things that actually exist in the real world.

But my dad was a software engineer, so I basically went that route instead, specializing in electrical and computer science. I really did that for a long time. I worked in the tech industry. I ended up getting into the big tech worlds right out of college.

We probably knew it was starting along the evil routes but didn’t know quite as well some of the challenges that we see with some of these big tech firms that we are seeing nowadays. I was working at all these different types of companies and seeing that we were, in theory, really trying to do good by our users, right?

We wanted to create products that made their lives better. Then you’d find the things would start to really go towards the profit motive rather than what was good for the user. I don’t know if I should be naming names, but one of my big companies I worked for at the start of my career was Google.

When I started at Google, it was super clear what that ad was, right? You had a different colored background for the whole ad section. These are the ads, these are the search results. And over the years that’s become less and less obvious. I struggle as a relatively sophisticated computer user to see what an ad is on Google.

Now, there’s this tiny little badge that says ad. A lot of that is to get people to click more on ad results. They try to make sure that the users are getting a good result when they click through, but it just feels like it’s moving towards money and not actually good things for people.

I started moving through different companies and trying to see, “okay, well, you know, I’ll try and work on a company that’s like trying to help people through fighting the climate crisis or these types of things.” But then you would just find that all of them sort of ended up in this world and not necessarily even in a bad way.

They were just forced to compete in this world of capitalism where people have to choose the profit margin over what is good for users. At this climate company I was working at, in theory, it was doing this demand response for energy. So basically rather than firing off a gas power plant in the middle of the day when you needed more energy, it would say, “okay, you’re using a whole bunch of energy. Stop using energy for now, then other people will be able to use that,” and that in theory is good, right? You know, it basically means you don’t have to deploy another power plant. But they didn’t tell me before I joined the company that some of their biggest customers they were working with to turn off were bitcoin mines.

In theory, you’re helping the environment, but do we really want all these bitcoin mines? Could we not invest in battery technology instead of having all of these mines using energy? So again, this theme continued and it felt to me like I would never find a company that actually was going to be doing things in the way that I wanted.

And I came across Doughnut Economics in 2017, Kate Raworth and also Jason Hickel’s The Divide. At the time, I was very ignorant of the global north and my country’s role – both the UK and I also lived in the US for a very long time –  in subjugating the global South and then putting us in the situation that we’re in now.

Then I came across the concept of degrowth and I have gone on a journey of many masters. That was my second master’s, my master’s at the University of Barcelona. That degree is really fantastic. You can do it online, but it really gives you a very broad sense of what degrowth is.

Within that, I think you can kind of find your place and for me, the thing that really stood out was economics. We are told all over the place that we will not get the good things that we want if we do not continue to have growth. That’s how, in theory, governments are providing all of these public services, but understanding money for what it is, it basically meant that I felt that I really needed to understand this from a left perspective and so I did a final master’s. As part of that degrowth master’s was really understanding that I wanted to drill into post growth economics and how that could actually work in practice, how that really works with the money system. Steven Hail’s degree, at Torrens University, Modern Money Lab really felt like the right fit for me because that gave me the grounding that I would need to really be able to speak to how money works, why I’m moving towards a post-growth economy that wouldn’t crash the economy.

In fact, it would just be a really different way of thinking about things. I ended up quitting my job to do that master’s a couple of years ago. I was lucky. I have to be clear on that. The tech industry gave me this cushion that meant that I could go and try this other thing.

I’m very grateful for that. I think it’s important to not let yourself get sucked into that world where you’re just trying to get the bigger house and then just end up living up to your means. So I did try and set that up such that I could change into this other way of giving back.

I decided to go into economic education and Modern Money Lab is the place where that final degree was offered. We wanted to put together courses, like, Steven Hail is just so generous with his time, so we facilitated some of those courses here in the UK.

We also put together a conference which I think Rob came along to, which is great, but we just really wanted to get the word out there, to try and give a political education, which I feel is missing especially around money. It’s this big scary thing.

It’s really presented to be like, “oh, you know, don’t worry about this. You can’t understand it.” I really wanted to change that. I think the approach I’m taking right now is throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, because I also got very involved in the Green Party about four years ago and now in local elections here in Islington, which is where I live in the UK. 

What I like about the Green Party approach is that it is all about listening to people. I’m part of a team that’s been door knocking in the area that I’m working in for a decade or more. We started for this election that’s coming up in a couple of weeks two years ago. We started door knocking to find out what people had to say about the local area. We want to know what the green spaces were like, what the bin collections were like, just the stuff that really makes a difference in people’s lives. We’ve built up deep connections with people in that area now, and I think, as part of that, hopefully we’ll get elected, but we’re not going to stop door knocking after that. We want to keep doing it. We want to try and keep pulling people into forums like Peoples Assemblies where we can do participatory budgeting. I really love what Clara Mattei has been doing at the University of Tulsa with the FREE (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation) projects where she’s been doing lots of political education.

I’d love to be doing more of that locally. So yeah, it’s really kind of a wide range of areas. Oh, and the thing I didn’t mention on top of that is also the national policy. So we can probably get to this as well, separately. But, the Green Party of England and Wales, all of the policy is member driven and so we have these policy working groups and I’ve been working with the Economics Policy Working Group for about the last 3 or 4 years and then last year I took on the co-convening role of that group. So really trying to help both at a local level, but then also like a national level from the economics policy side for the Green Party.

Rob Hawkes

That’s really wonderful. Yeah. There’s so much we probably want to come back to many of the topics you’ve already raised there. I think that the point about education, about opening up conversations about money and economics, though, is such an important one. One of our friends and colleagues, part of the Money on the Left group is Jakob Feinig, his concept of monetary silencing is a really important one for us as a group.

It’s such a powerful concept. All of the conversations about what money is, to how it works, to who creates it, who gets to make decisions about where it will go, who can create money, why it can be created, what its purposes are and functions and the kind of mechanics of monetary design, monetary silencing kind of takes that off the table. Like you just said, it kind of puts us in the position of like, “:this is just the way it is, and you just have to kind of just get on with it or it’s too difficult for you ordinary people to understand.”

So, yeah, I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about those events. I was hoping to come to one of the events in London last year, and I think we were in touch around that time, but in the end I couldn’t make it. But yeah, there were two workshop events in London that Steven Hail ran as Modern Money Lab UK events and then of course the conference in Bristol that, again, I was unfortunately not able to get to in person, but I attended remotely. Can you say a bit more about what happened at those events, how they worked?

Sheridan Kates

So Steven Hail and then also Gabby Bond, who is the director of the Modern Money Lab group in Australia. Steven and Gabby put together some fantastic courses. I really love the way they’ve done it, actually. It’s broken out into modules throughout the day.

It’s almost like a taster, actually, for the two intro modules for the master’s that I did. Basically, the way that it works is that Steven will give a lecture for like 30 minutes at the start, but then they have breakout groups and they’ll randomize everyone in the room. So it’s super social.

You get to meet all these different people and then you talk about the concepts that you just heard. It might be like, you have a section on exchange rates or a Doughnut Economics crash course and then you come back into the room about what you’ve learned, but it’s kind of putting everyone on an equal footing and hopefully encouraging people by saying things like, “you know, no silly questions.”

You know, everyone is just sharing their knowledge and getting that out there. It also pulls in the Finding the Money film, which I think is a really useful pedagogical tool, which I US-focused. We need to get the UK Finding the Money. That always blows people’s minds too.

It’s just a really, really good overview. A really key feature that I really think we should be focusing and centering in all of our work is food, right? You know, there’s food included and people are eating together over lunch and there are snacks all through the day.

Clara Mattei does this as well with her FREE gatherings. I say FREE gatherings, it stands for the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation. That kind of community is really built around food and then safety around questions and unsilencing or demystifying money.

So that was incredibly powerful. I should definitely plug – or Steven will kill me – that he’s coming back in the summer to the UK and all over Europe. Maybe we can share this in the show notes or something? He is coming to Brighton and various other places over Europe, so we should definitely let your listeners know about that.

And then the conference, what we wanted to do with that was try to open up these concepts outside of just the people who come to economics conferences. We have had like three areas of focus; health, housing and employment and making sure that there are jobs out there.

What was really compelling about that is that you can get people from groups who weren’t necessarily thinking about this and just sort of present, “okay, well, is this a different lens of thinking about how government spending works and the power of public money to fund the things that you are advocating for.”  I don’t know how these organizations feel about it, but it’s almost like you either want the funding or you want to put yourself out of a job, because this should be provided by the government. I don’t think we’re ever going to put ACORN [Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now] out of a job because ACORN does fantastic community organizing. Even if everyone had a house I’m sure we’d still need that. Some of the charities around poverty and all this kind of stuff, in the ideal world, I don’t think would exist.

If we can help all of these organizations understand how government finances actually work and what the real world constraints are to spending rather than the perceived ones. That was really the goal. So we specifically didn’t call the conference like anything around any school of thought, we called it The Anti-Austerity Conference. We pulled in the Keynes quote, “anything we can actually do, we can afford.”

I think it went down well because of pulling together academics, but also people from the different groups. We really tried to make sure that the online experience was as good – as much as possible – as the in-person, again, really prioritized food. There was a fantastic onsite cafe in Bristol, who did really good catering for us.

But yeah, I think those are themes of how we try and put these things together. The thing about the conference is, we’ll think about how that should evolve and we’re all doing different things, throwing the spaghetti at the wall just to see what sticks, but I do like the goal of reaching out beyond our own community. That is where we want to continue to go.

Rob Hawkes

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. The online experience was great as far as I was concerned, although it was Bring Your Own Food if you were an online participant. But yeah, I’ve got the full title:  “The Anti-Austerity Conference: Anything we can do, we can afford,” which is, like you said, the Keynes quote, “debunking money myths to end austerity in the UK.”

One thing that did stick in my mind from being an online delegate at that conference was a moment where you were directing a Q&A after a panel, after a paper, and you quite deliberately said, “I want to hear from someone who’s not a man next.”

I think those were your exact words.

Sheridan Kates

Yes.

Rob Hawkes

Why did you say that? I mean, why do you think that was an important move to have made and perhaps how it speaks to a kind of a wider issue and an ongoing one in conversations around economics?

Sheridan Kates

Yeah. I mean, obviously there are very few non male voices in this space and often they are the loudest. I think it’s really crucial to just remind people that their voices are as important and the more that you hear someone else who isn’t a man ask questions, and they sound like you, even though it might seem small, but, I think it really does matter. It also just shows that the space is for you. It was also part of the outreach, honestly, like, we really tried to make sure that we didn’t just have a room full of the usual suspects, I do keep getting that feedback at the events that we run. They are more diverse than the ones that you typically see.

Like, we also had an event actually in UCL (University College Longon) that was a screening of Finding the Money. We had an entirely packed out, very hot room, where Zack Polanski came along and ended up doing a panel with Patricia Pino, Josh Ryan-Collins, chaired by William Thomson and that had such a range of people, like ages, genders, I think it’s just really important to make sure that we understand that economics is for everyone and keep calling that out.

Rob Hawkes

Yeah, absolutely. The Modern Money Lab master’s has ringfenced scholarships for Global South students that are specifically for women. So, so yeah, that’s kind of a little part of this wider, important conversation, isn’t it?

Sheridan Kates

Absolutely. And again, I would be remiss to not say if anyone who has money would like to sponsor more of those you can definitely reach out to Steven and Gabby we’d love to get more of those available to people. Every bit of support helps.

Rob Hawkes

It’s a wider question, isn’t it, in terms of who studies economics, who feels that they’re kind of entitled to contribute to conversations around economics. It’s bound up with other questions. When this episode goes out, Billy will have introduced it with our usual introduction to Money on the Left as a podcast that reclaims money’s public powers for imaginative intersectional politics.

Yeah. How important is intersectionality to the way we think about economics?

Sheridan Kates

Yeah, huge. Obviously, so much of the issues we see are exacerbated along racial lines. Looking at, for example, health inequalities. We see in the NHS (National Health Services) that people of different racial backgrounds are treated differently. We need everyone’s voice at the table to be inputting exactly how money should be spent and not just with equality, but from an equity perspective.

There are areas that have been massively underserved for many, many years. Where can that be improved?

Billy Saas

So part of your activation and your mobilization post-Modern Money Lab master’s has been these events and the organizing and being active in the Green Party, you’ve also been writing in those contexts. I wanted to ask you a bit about a piece that was published in November where you talk about wealth taxes in the UK. The piece that we’ll also link to in the show notes is called “Wealth taxes don’t go far enough.” Per the Modern Money Lab conference, there’s some debunking work that needs to be done around wealth taxes. Could you walk us through the scene there in the UK around progressives advocating aggressively for a wealth tax and where you’re wanting to see that argument go and evolve?

Sheridan Kates

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I’m hugely supportive of wealth tax from an inequality perspective. The thing that advocating for wealth tax really helps us is pointing to the enemy in a lot of ways. Right? The elites have just been allowed to run away with money accumulation.

Pointing out that there’s going to be a shift towards ensuring that those types of people are taxed fairly. Why should someone who’s earning an income be relatively taxed a lot more than someone who’s getting money from capital gains and dividends? That kind of thing.

So I think that’s fantastic. I think the trap that you can get into is when you claim that it’s going to pay for everything, that the money that you’ll get from wealth taxes will cover all of the things that we need to do. I point out in the article that the numbers are vast.

There’s hundreds of billions that need to be found every year just to get our public services back to a few years ago when they were already highly degraded, they need to be much better. We need massive programs of both building, but also buying back homes to turn them into social homes, because we used to have some of the best social housing in the world here in the UK.

Now the government spends the vast amounts of money that it used to spend building council homes on funneling money directly to private landlords via housing benefits. That is just absolutely shocking. There’s a lot of money that needs to be found and the numbers don’t add up if you’re just going to be looking at wealth taxes.

This is just the start of a long journey and I think that with that blog was, there’s a particular kind of audience that will read a big blog like that, but I’d love to work more on getting some short form video stuff out there that could appeal to a range of people, but trying to get people less terrified about the idea of government spending.

What does it really represent? How does it compare to like, for example, the private credit or private credit creation that no one talks about. It’s obviously vast. Just speak to the power of government investment, especially in these industries where private companies aren’t going to get the returns.

I think Brett Christophers speaks so well about the shift towards renewable energy. The profits that you get from renewable energy are so much lower than the ones you get from fossil fuels, even nuclear to an extent.

You are not going to get the private sector to build all of this. It really has to be from the public sector, or you get into a situation where the public sector has to subsidize the private sector to build all these renewables and then the benefit of the lower prices doesn’t filter through to consumers.

You then get what we see in the UK, where net-zero is seen as a dirty word now, because there’s been all of these renewables and yet, energy prices are at all time highs. So yeah, really drawing attention to the fact that it’s not just about wealth taxes is just super key in this environment.

Billy Saas

It’s such a great conversation starter. I mean, talking about the political education of thinking about money and thinking through money, it’s something we talk about a lot. How financial literacy and the conventional refrain is sort of apolitical, but financial literacy and the critical frame that we prefer and assume is very active to what you’re up to is political to the core. I know that you’ve been doing a lot of listening and canvasing, but have you had much opportunity to share these ideas with those who have not been previously initiated into them? And if so, what’s the reception been like?

Sheridan Kates

I think it does make sense to people. I think you have to adjust for where they’re coming from because, if you’re talking to someone who thinks they know how this stuff works. You know, maybe they’re a bit of crypto investing on the side. You don’t know what you’re going to get when you’re doorknocking, right?

You have to be really careful to think about where that person’s at and whether it makes sense to be having this big conversation on the doorstep if you’ve knocked on their door unless it comes up. I think that’s tricky.

I think a lot of people came to the Bristol conference without a huge understanding of this stuff. I think like some people were saying they’ve basically been lying to us like when they learn this stuff. Obviously there’s a lot of nuance that comes on top of it.

We’re not trying to say that this is limitless, but it’s just a different kind of constraint. We know we want to be thinking about the real resources as the constraints and environmental constraints. There are planetary boundaries. Just because we can afford to reopen coal mines, should we? From an environmental perspective, probably not.

There is somewhat of an excitement in learning this stuff, but I think it’s on us to find better ways of getting to the point across snappier and in a faster way because I don’t know that I’m always the best at it. Sometimes, I think you can lose people.

Obviously people care about their bills right now, right? The cost of living crisis in the UK is horrific. If you can explain how these things will make their lives better, then, great. We have to get to the point where we’re making it clear to people we’re not trying to prove something to them that there’s a reason why we’re talking about this, that we understand what their real issues are and then get to the point where you capable people are telling me that we can’t afford this unless you increase everyone’s taxes. Look at that. Now we can have a conversation about this. But yeah, I think it’s about picking your moments.

Billy Saas

And knowing your audience. I think that’s critical. This person I knocked on the door of, do they want to talk about money or am I interrupting their dinner?

Sheridan Kates

Quite so. I will make it clear that that does not come up much on the door. Really, people care about the potholes and when their bin doesn’t get picked up. 

Rob Hawkes

Right. It makes sense, in lots of ways, why the wealth tax conversation happens in the way it does. For anyone that’s kind of broadly willing to get on board with the idea, it makes sense. We can see that, there are the rich people, they have the money and so if we want to do more things for the public, we need to get some of that money. That’s an easier concept for most people to get their head around then. Well, money is a public utility that is inexhaustible and we just need to decide democratically on how we go about using the power of public money creation…

Sheridan Kates

…to mobilize the scarce, real resources that we actually have and then that’s the hard conversations, which I think is really compelling. I think what’s fascinating right now is this whole AI situation, right? Obviously this is like booming and people really don’t have any say in this. Some people find it can be cool for certain situations and stuff, but ultimately people feel like they have to learn this stuff otherwise, they’re going to get left behind. But if we can have democratic conversations about, “okay, well, these are the real resources that are actually having to be used for this whole AI boom. Do we want to be using this for this purpose? What is the impact on the environment?” and have conversations around this and maybe change the way that we approach this. I think that’s really compelling.

Rob Hawkes

Yeah, absolutely. In your piece, I’ll quote you, “In a world where we’re no longer scared of losing rich people’s money because we know it doesn’t fund our public services, we can set up direct democratic institutions like people’s assemblies and use them to decide, as a society, how much money we want to allow anyone to have for themselves.” And potentially lots of other things, too. How does that kind of democratic institution building feed into your thinking?

Sheridan Kates

I think there are multiple levels of which this needs to start happening. A lot of the local doorknocking we’re doing is about wanting to set up participatory budgeting and people’s assemblies. Also, there’s a pledge from the Greens Organise organization that 800 councilor candidates signed up for, where essentially we would try and mobilize people locally through trade unions, through local councils, but basically have them lobby up to central governments that we need like wealth taxes. It is still important to push for those, but also things like restructuring the way that we deliver social care. So right now that is completely delivered by private equity, pretty much. We want to restructure that to then take those organizations back into local economies and employ local people, making sure the money stays locally.

Building those blocks needs to start locally. But then there’s also other initiatives here in the UK around abolishing the House of Lords and potentially replacing that with the House of the People. Maybe you could get people elected through sortition, to do a four year term that they would get trained for. That would mean that anyone could come and do this like extended jury service or something like that, so that the interests of people are actually coming in rather than the interests of unelected representatives as in the House of Lords and not really democratically elected in other cases.

Rob Hawkes

Yeah. I just wondered if we should do that with the head of state as well. We should just sort of draw lots and everyone gets a turn.

Sheridan Kates

Yeah, absolutely. With the right training, I feel strongly that that should be within reach.

Billy Saas

I feel like there were a series of films in the 1990s that that was their central premise, more or less. Just like average-Joes making it to the highest…

Rob Hawkes

King Ralph wasn’t it? There was King Ralph.

Billy Saas

So there you go. I think there’s one called Dave.

Rob Hawkes

But yeah, we can include the pledge in the show notes as well because it is a really great set of commitments and talking points. One of them being an emergency summit to make communities heard, which is a commitment from all the signatories. Do you want to say more about that? 

Sheridan Kates

Yeah, I mean, basically we want to keep this momentum. We have some kind of green wave happening. I’m touching all the wood around me. If we live up to this expectation, we should see a lot of green councilors coming up after the elections in the next couple of weeks.

We’re in a crucial decade for the climate crisis. We’re in a crucial time for people’s affordability. Everyone is having a really hard time right now. The rejection of the two main parties is happening right now. So with the Tories and Labour, many people are going towards Reform on that because they feel like they have this different story.

But a lot of people now are coming to the Greens and we need to show them that we are not just like the other parties. We are going to do things differently. We are going to take the trust that they’ve put in us and build something in a democratic way and this summit is key to making sure that that momentum continues and we don’t just end up being like the other people who just get into power and don’t have anything happen. So yeah, active planning happening on that. Like I said, we want to make sure that trade unions are involved because it’s a very exciting time.

Billy Saas

For those of us in the United States maybe, but elsewhere in the world, who aren’t as up to date on the Green wave, could you catch us up on the more exciting moments.This episode will be published in the middle or certainly close to those elections.

Sheridan Kates

Like six days before.

Billy Saas

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what should we be paying attention to or what should we know as that ramps up?

Sheridan Kates

Yeah. So a quick summary. There was kind of a little bubble back in 2015 for the Green Party, which kind of got eclipsed by Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party. There were very similar values. A lot of those people went over to Labour. We know what happened there with the election in 2019. Since then, there’s been a bit of a languishing. There’s been various things cropping up, but last year Zack Polanski ran for leader and I mean, Zack’s really awesome. I think I wish he’d been sort of on our radar from the economic side as well for a long time, because I went to a Green Party conference in Bristol in 2023, and he was deputy leader at the time and in his speech said, “government’s budget is nothing like a household.” And I’m like, “oh, well, I wasn’t familiar with your game, Zack!” I then reached out to him to try and get him to be a speaker on our panel at the UCL Find the Money event that I mentioned earlier..

So we’ve been trying to get him along to all of these events and actually we had asked him for the MML (Modern Money Lab) Bristol event, literally as he announced his leadership bid. I think we got very lucky because he ended up doing our conferences as one of the first things he did when he was leader and massive kudos to him that he didn’t cancel.

He really believes in his commitments. So thank you so much to Zack for coming and speaking about the political situation in the UK.

Rob Hawkes

It was like the days after he was elected, wasn’t it?

Sheridan Kates

It was days after. I think we just got so lucky because we asked him months prior. I knew that Zack would do really well. It’s been fantastic to see his rise, but I think what’s really key, though, is to call out that nothing has changed in terms of Green Party policy.

We’ve always had these really good social policies. We’ve always had these really strong environmental policies. Zack is just an incredible communicator. He’s really gotten out there. He really understands social media. From the start of Zack’s campaign, he added a lot of members to the Green Party, but after he got elected, it’s just been this crazy trajectory. Like we had maybe about 60,000 members roughly, and now we have more than 225,000. It’s only been just over six months. We are probably the second largest party at this point in the UK because the Labour Party has stopped reporting its membership numbers.

Reform is still up ahead, but we are quickly closing. The other really amazing thing that happened was the by-election in Manchester. So, Hannah Spencer is amazing and she ran an amazing campaign against both Reform and Labour, coming out on top. That’s the first time the Greens have ever won a by-election. So I think all of these things compounding are just really showing that the Greens are no longer a small party.

We’re one of the major parties. It’s also kind of wild because we have five party politics now in the UK with our first-past-the-post system. This is really causing, I think, a lot of instability. I think we are kind of lucky in that we do have this situation where an insurgent party could come in and create this kind of upset.

I know in America it’s a lot harder with the way that everything is structured. I think we are going to have to try and move towards a proportional representation approach, because otherwise we really run the risk of an unstable government, year-to-year.

Rob Hawkes

Right. For any listeners unaware in other parts of the world, Reform UK is Nigel Farage’s party and is likely to turn into a very kind of Trumpist government if elected and for a long time the opinion polling has been really frighteningly showing a big lead for Reform.

And yet, as well as membership numbers for the Greens surging, the polls have been kind of creeping closer and closer. At least one recent opinion poll actually put the Greens kind of slightly ahead or a fraction of a percentage point ahead. 

Sheridan Kates

That’s right. The average of polls are showing definite drops for Reform now and Greens on the way up. So we just have to keep at it with the hard work. But I think it’s quite an exciting time.

Rob Hawkes

I want to just go back to that sentence you mentioned from Zack Polanski about the government not being like a household. Zack Polanski said the government is not like a household, as you say, before he was elected leader, but he said it on the day he was elected leader. He went on BBC, the flagship BBC Newsnight program.

I think it’s difficult to maybe get across to listeners outside the UK of just how that was quite an extraordinary moment, actually. It was the first time I’d heard anyone on a kind of mainstream BBC flagship news program, sit on the sofa and say, “government budget’s not like a household.”

He said something similar again in a major speech of, around a month ago, at the New Economics Foundation, on economics. I imagine that most Money on the Left listeners will be familiar with this, though, and it’s not a surprise to many of our listeners.

But, why was that such an important thing to say and such an extraordinary thing for a leader of a major British political party to say?

Sheridan Kates

Especially since the 80s when Thatcher told us “there’s no such thing as public money, it’s only taxpayers money,” we very much have adopted and endorsed this idea that we need to balance the budgets. Austerity years, like we were sold by George Osborne, that we had been very irresponsible as a government before the financial crisis and the only way to address this was via austerity. I think he actually even referenced that Rogoff and Reinhart paper that was discredited and I don’t think that was ever actually a big kind of reckoning to that publicly. Basically saying that we needed to reduce our debt, where all of the measures for austerity only increase the debt.

So we’ve really been playing in this sphere where the government doesn’t have any money, and we need to be taxing it and we can’t be borrowing because look at those yields, look at the interest rate that it has to pay on the bonds.

It’s much higher than all these other countries and she’s really got to tighten her belt. So I think just having a major politician out there saying, “well, you know, actually this is not the analogy we should be looking at.” The BBC actually has been pulled up in the past for saying things like “maxing out the credit card” and saying that there is no money left, but they continue to do it.

Having a politician on there challenging them, and I think honestly really throws them and it’s delightful to see presenting this alternative. I think he does it in really good and interesting ways as well. Speaking to things like multipliers where it’s just common sense, right?

That if you spend money into the economy and it goes to a place that’s going to then be circulated multiple times in the economy, rather than just going directly to subsidize some billionaires to provide Covid personal protective equipment, which is like a large part of what happened on our side, then this is actually a really big benefit to the economy.

So, yeah, I think it’s just a real game changer. The thing that we really need to do now is find more people in Zack’s position, because he can’t be the lone voice out there. I think we need to give him cover and make sure that more people are talking about this publicly.

Rob Hawkes

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think the other thing that has really struck me from the things that he’s been saying is the emphasis he places on storytelling. He often says, telling a different story is really important. Of course, as a humanities kind of person and at Money on the Left where, you know, we’re all about kind of narratives and metaphors and storytelling as so fundamentally important.

I’ve said and written myself saying that storytelling is another word for accounting. The way we account for things in monetary terms is all to do with how we tell stories about who’s important, who matters. It comes back to those questions we were talking about before, of the kind of intersectional questions of whose voices are loudest, whose voices are being pushed to the margins. It is partly to do with how we tell stories and how we account for people.

Sheridan Kates

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

00;43;51;16 – 00;44;16;25

Rob Hawkes

Kind of tied to that point and going back to the documentary Finding the Money, Maren Poitras’ brilliant film. Maren’s a former guest on Money on the Left many years ago when she was making the film. But, another former guest, Lua Yuille, says in the film a line that really sticks in my mind from it, “if money is natural, then who has the money is natural as well.” Again, it comes back to the kind of monetary silencing thing. If we accept that everything is the way it is, that is just the way it is, then, the kind of the status quo is natural as well.

Five men have all the wealth and the power. But once you start to realize, “oh, the system has been designed this way, but we could design it differently,” that’s when we can open up new kinds of conversations and new ways of imagining the future.

Sheridan Kates

Yeah, exactly. Actually, I really loved one of Zack’s Bold Politics podcast episodes recently. This author, Zakia – I have completely forgotten her last name, I hope we can drop that in the show notes as well – (Zakia Sewell) wrote this book called Finding Albion. It is all about finding the old folk tales from thousands of years ago that center completely different people.

So,even the name Albion is the old name for England. It references white, but it’s not necessarily clear what that white was. Was it the white cliffs of Dover? There’s also a story about this Syrian refugee who went to England. Her name was Albia and she set up a matriarchal society there.

These stories that got lost through history, the ones that got kept are the ones that they wanted to be kept right. The ones that they had was the history that they wanted to teach people, to believe that we were just amazing in the two world wars and don’t think about what we did in the Empire. It’s all about thinking how we frame stories, which stories we bring to the forefront.

I think that is also the way to convince people that the story might be living through right now could also be different. So I think that that episode is really great.

Rob Hawkes

There was a bit of a hooha, as we say in the UK, about the potential redesign of banknotes about a month ago, wasn’t it? The Bank of England announced that the banknotes were going to be redesigned and the new designs were going to feature animals on them.

Nigel Farage in particular got very upset. A man in the Newsnight and in the BBC Question Time audience got very upset about it as well and blamed those Greens and he said, “oh, it’s those greens with that kind of woke agenda that are responsible for all of this.”

Nigel Farage posted a video about replacing Winston Churchill with a beaver, and he literally said, “I’m not making this up. They’re going to replace Winston Churchill with a beaver.” He obviously was making it up because the Bank of England quite clearly has said they haven’t decided which animals are going on the banknotes anyway.

Sheridan Kates

That was not to mention the fact that it was voted for by the public. 

Rob Hawkes

Yeah, it’s a democratic monetary design. 

Sheridan Kates

Exactly.

Rob Hawkes

It seemed sort of silly or you could dismiss it as a bit of a silly media moment, but it was telling, wasn’t it, that he was upset about replacing Churchill, but he wasn’t upset about Jane Austen or Alan Turing.

Again, it sort of comes back to question kind of whose stories are we telling and who’s the center of the story.

Billy Saas

Perhaps we could find our way down by doing a little bit of storytelling – Sheridan, if you’ll indulge us – about the kind of the future that you see yourself fighting for that is motivated by or at least sort of supported in some way by this kind of public money perspective, we’ll call it. What do you see coming down the line? I think we could all use a little bit of that optimism that you referenced or alluded to before. How do we be positive about where we’re going?

Sheridan Kates

Yeah. Gosh. When you’re so focused on helping people with the problems of the now, and then you have to jump back up to e visions of the future, I do think that is really compelling. I think ultimately, democracy, but proper democracy, direct democracy underpins all of this.

Just thinking about, collectively, how we can design a better society. If we were thinking about the kinds of jobs we thought should exist in the world or just in our country to start with, just look at even the NHS situation where resident doctors are graduating their programs and there’s no placements for them to move on to.

Understanding that that’s a designed world. The world that we could create would make sure that all of the placements that we need for all of the doctors and to staff the struggling NHS, this would be a conversation that we could have together. Money should not be the thing that holds that back.

It’s the real resources. Here we have resident doctors who literally could be going into these placements, and so extending that to every part of your life. Obviously, the unions won the five day working week, but you know, with fewer jobs available, why shouldn’t we be thinking about making these four day working weeks so that we have more time to spend in our communities, with our families, and think about all of these things about how we should design the world. 

I think moving towards a framing of efficiency, which is something that we don’t really talk about. In this world where we talk about growth, how do we keep growing the economy so that, in theory, some of that will trickle back down to provide the services that we all care about.

Well, what if we actually were just designing the economy to provide those services in the first place? I think it’s just an incredible rethinking of how, rather than just leaving things up to the market, we can work together collectively. There are huge multinational businesses already who are doing this kind of design, like at Google, where I worked, you couldn’t launch a new product until you talked to the team that controlled all the machine resources. If you needed to launch something that was going to increase the amount of traffic to a Google service by a certain amount, you need to make sure that those machines are there because otherwise, the whole thing’s going to fall over.

So they want you to believe that it’s far too complicated for us to design our economy in this way. But, some of these companies have annual revenues that are higher than entire countries. If they can do it, why can’t we do it? When you start to understand that this is within your control, we could be completely transforming our streetscapes in city areas, we could be training up people to restore the beautiful parts of the environment. We could move away from ads everywhere.

It could be public art, or it could be advertising community events. There are all these things going on in people’s areas, but they don’t know about them. The epidemic of loneliness is another huge issue in the current situation that we’re in. Then obviously, as part of this as well is moving away from fossil fuels. We are in a scary time. It’s hard to talk about it without freaking people out but the temperature rises that we’re seeing are pretty intense. This was supposed to be the decade that we were stopping the increasing EV emissions and getting that back down again. Understanding that through public money, we could be investing in that complete transition, but also not in a way that just requires business-as-usual, but just with renewables. We get back to this “efficiency” conversation here, right?

Do we need AI, for example? Like if we didn’t have AI, maybe we could have far fewer data centers and require far fewer renewable resources. Everything is connected. I think it’s work. It’s a different kind of work, but I think it’s a nourishing work that actually puts us in a kind of communion with the people who are around us and makes us realize that we’re not just all individuals.

Billy Saas

That’s beautiful. I’m all in.

Rob Hawkes

That’s really wonderful.

Billy Saas

You’re a great storyteller, and I appreciate that. Yeah.

Sheridan Kates

Oh thank you. So sweet.

Rob Hawkes

Yeah. Absolutely. That’s really wonderful. You might have just answered what I was just about to ask you, but one of the things that still comes up or one of the lines of attack now against the the Green Party of England and Wales is that it’s not really green anymore or it’s been kind of it’s just been taken over by the Corbynites who left the Labour Party and it’s about these kind of crazy economic ideas or it’s about wokery, but it’s not really interested in the environment anymore. I think you may have answered that, but do you have any more to add? 

Sheridan Kates

Yeah, I think it’s wild. I think a lot of these attacks are coming from people that it’ll take a while for them to kind of come along to this way of thinking. Anyway, those policies are not going anywhere. It’s just that people already know that we are for the environment. The brand that we need to be building is that we are about people and planet.

Zack likes to say this thing, “Our vested interests are not big businesses. We only have two vested interests: people and planet,” and so many of these things are connected. This kind of goes back to the start of my journey. Seeing the relentless quest for profit, all of these things are connected to the continuing stress that we’re putting on the planet. There’s evidence that we can decouple carbon emissions from GDP because of renewable energy, but then obviously, there’s also the issue of the sacrifice zones. We mean the mining areas in Chile or the Congo where we’re taking these minerals or deep sea mining right now, which is a terrifying idea. There’s all these minerals on the bottom of the ocean that they can scrape them up with big trawlers, but they don’t understand what that will actually do to the whole ecosystem.

Just as a normal person and just thinking about, “would this be a good idea?” It seems like a terrible idea. Yes, there’s some decoupling from GDP and emissions, but there is no evidence whatsoever that there’s any GDP decoupling from material use, anything that is driving GDP is very much increasing material use.

Even with the emissions, decoupling is not happening fast enough. We need to be on a pathway where we are massively reducing, especially in the global north. People will say, “okay, the UK is a small percentage of like the overall emissions,” but historically we are not a small percentage. The Industrial Revolution started here.

It is on us to be at the forefront of making sure that we decarbonize, and we’re very much not at the forefront right now. Obviously, China’s doing a fantastic job, but it, overall, still has high emissions. But it is on us and why should any other country do this if the people that originated the Industrial Revolution don’t do it as well.

So, yeah, I could talk about green stuff all day, but, I also want to talk about the way that people’s lives could be different because that’s so connected.

Billy Saas

That feels like a splendid place to end it. Sheridan Cates, thank you so much for joining us on Money on the Left.

Sheridan Kates

This was an absolute pleasure. Thank you. 

Rob Hawkes

Thanks so much.

* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript. 

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