Fiscal Chronotopes: #ZcavengerHunt, the Zetro Card, and the New Finance Franchise

By Will Beaman

This essay is lightly adapted from a talk delivered at the 2026 American Comparative Literature Association conference. It contributes to a growing body of endogenous money theorization that we at Money on the Left call Democratic Public Finance (DPF). DPF begins from the distributed and publicly mediated character of political-economic life, approaching money, credit, and accounting as contested infrastructures that are at once citational and coordinative. My contribution to that project here concerns the conditions of legibility for political-economic imaginaries.

Fiscal practices and counter-practices unfold within spatial and temporal genres that rehearse what feels like a “realistic” order of operations: where money is imagined to come from and what must happen for it to name and remunerate social capacities. In those genres, design questions are often staged as discoverable facts about economic reality that necessarily constrain politics. But they can also be staged additively, so that public spending expands who and what can count. At stake throughout is how public money is imagined and how public obligation is organized.

One familiar name for this problem in endogenous money discourse is the finance franchise: the idea that monetary power is extended through licensed issuers and delegated circuits. That mapping matters, but it can mislead when it encourages us to treat monetary agency as primarily top-down. My wager is that the finance franchise is also organized from the middle, through durable genres and rehearsals that make monetary agency legible in public life. The franchise, in other words, is not only a legal architecture. It is also a genre environment that trains what public agency can look like and when it can count. Borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin, I call these patterned organizations fiscal chronotopes: time-space forms through which a world becomes legible as a sequence of events, obligations, and thresholds.

A key feature of these chronotopes is that they are often polyvocal. The same practice can remain stable while supporting more than one coherent reading. That is one reason fiscal forms travel across heterogeneous publics. It also means analysis cannot treat perception as passive reception, as if fiscal reality simply presents itself and we merely record it. What is often called “fiscal reality,” including in MMT and endogenous money discourse, is too often treated as a stable object waiting to be revealed. Here I treat it instead as reversible stagecraft: a field of gestures and formats that can sustain more than one stable reading and that trains what becomes legible as responsibility and what becomes actionable, or receivable, as public obligation.

Duck-Rabbits and Fiscal Reality

We can think about this with the famous duck-rabbit optical illusion. The drawing can be seen either as a duck facing left or a rabbit facing right. The same lines support two incompatible but equally stable readings, and that is precisely why the image circulates. Gestalt phenomenology took this as evidence that perception is not passive reception but active organization. What we see depends on both figure and orientation. The duck-rabbit shows that the same object can support different gestalt wholes without collapsing into incoherence.

That claim matters here for two reasons. First, it helps describe a dynamic that shapes the present: an inherited neoliberal temporality of passive administration amid crisis can be flipped into open authoritarian bullying without becoming identical to it. Neoliberal governance has long rehearsed a fiscal chronotope in which government is staged as the administration of scarcity. Capacity appears fixed, and the acquisition of scarce funds takes the form of a hostage negotiation in which the rich and powerful must be satisfied before money can be spent legitimately. In that chronotope, the destruction of infrastructure and capacity – austerity, underemployment, deferred maintenance – is moralized as a settlement required to keep the public books balanced.

Authoritarian politics plays off that form. It preserves the scarcity framing and the hostage structure, but converts the earlier posture of impotence before “the market” into a spectacle of punishment and reward. The “winners and losers” of globalization become something closer to the “winners and losers” of The Apprentice. Where neoliberalism moralizes constraint as necessity, the shakedown celebrates it as domination and as proof of the exceptionality of Trump’s supporters. The two chronotopes therefore share recognizable features, which is part of what makes collaboration and institutional capture possible. But they organize those features into different narratives of agency and responsibility.

Second, the duck-rabbit offers a rule for reading the campaign practices I turn to next. Last summer, Mamdani’s campaign ran a citywide scavenger hunt called the #ZcavengerHunt and introduced the Zetro Card, a playful punchcard through which volunteer contributions became receivable for campaign merchandise. The question is not whether these practices are really fiscal governance in disguise. The point is that they can be participation formats and, at the same time, rehearsals of public credit and fiscal authority. They make participation legible, and they can later help make other kinds of fiscal action feel actionable. In that sense, they point toward a new finance franchise whose conditions of possibility are distributed and democratic: authority gathered and renewed through rehearsal rather than granted only from above.

With this in mind, I read #ZcavengerHunt and the Zetro Card as formats that organize fiscal time and space. They are not policy proposals in disguise, but participation devices whose polyvalence trains what counts as collective action and what later counts as legitimate public work. The point is not to decide whether they are “really” fiscal politics or “merely” campaign theater. It is to track what they make variously legible (and hence variously actionable), and how their multi-legibility lets them travel across heterogeneous publics without requiring doctrinal consensus.

The #ZcavengerHunt

I begin with #ZcavengerHunt, which composes a bounded public present, and then turn my attention to the Zetro Card as a more durable rhythm of participation and completion. In the #ZcavengerHunt on a warm day in August, people moved through a sequence of locations, following prompts posted in real time and showing up in large numbers. It was playful and conspicuously gamified, but it was also immediately recognizable as a campaign event: a way to generate momentum, attention, and contact.

The chronotopic question, though, is what kind of time and space the format composed, and what that composition made legible. #ZcavengerHunt organized routes and gathering points so that participation took a clear, shared shape. A city that often appears as dispersed constituencies and isolated commutes was briefly refigured as a coordinated circuit: a public moving through space together according to a posted order.

This helps explain why so many people on social media reached for the same comparison and said Mamdani had finally made “Pokemon Go to the Polls” happen in earnest. The comparison points to more than fun. It names the way a game can give political participation a navigable form, one that does not require prior expertise, ideological unity, or even a single reason for being there. You do not have to be converted to join. You just have to be able to read the next move and keep going.

Campaigns sit awkwardly within the dominant governance chronotope. They happen before governance, and much of their labor is volunteer-based, informal, and hard to count. In a genre environment that tends to recognize work only once it is officially authorized and paid, campaigning can become strangely unreal: “just politics,” “just vibes,” or “just messaging,” as if the labor of coordination does not count as labor.

#ZcavengerHunt pushes against that occlusion. It renders campaign labor legible as a visible, shared activity while remaining playful, and that playfulness matters because it lets participation count without first taking on solemnity. A scavenger hunt does not require participants to share the same inner narrative about why they are there; it requires only that they inhabit the same sequence. People can show up for different reasons and still cohere as a public. That is not a weakness but part of how democratic forms remain durable across heterogeneous readings.

#ZcavengerHunt is not public works in the sense of a municipal project. But it does rehearse public work by rendering coordination labor legible and staging completion as something a public can do together in the open. It rehearses turnout and GOTV, but also the broader premise that collective activity can be organized as an ordinary feature of public life rather than dismissed as a break from “real” administration. A related form appears in the more recent snow-shoveling mobilization: a public standard is set, capacity is scaled to meet it, and the work itself is the primary obligation rather than a revenue-constrained aspiration.

The Zetro Card

The Zetro Card began as a workaround. At one point in the campaign’s fundraising, election-law rules constrained the sale of campaign merchandise. The usual sequence could no longer operate in the same way. Rather than treat that constraint as a hard stop, the campaign invented another format for recognition and circulation. The Zetro Card is that format: a playful punchcard that volunteers receive at canvasses, phone banks, pop-ups, and other events, stamped for contributions and made receivable for campaign merchandise once enough stamps accumulate.

It is immediately recognizable as gamification, and it is partly that. But the origin story matters because it shows how quickly constraints become questions of form. The card does not arise from a neutral design space. It emerges within a rule-bound environment that forces the campaign to ask how value and recognition can keep moving when a familiar channel narrows. That is endogenous improvisation in miniature: a practical restaging of how participation can be honored under constraint.

As I suggested at the time in a joking-not-joking piece for Money on the Left, the punchcard format also invites expansion. It offers a way of thinking through how organizing labor might become legible as something closer to public work without pretending the campaign had already become the city. The Zetro Card’s meaning was flexible from the start. The same format reads equally well as merch logistics, volunteer morale, or a revisable experiment in how recognition might be formalized and scaled.

Where #ZcavengerHunt gave campaign mobilization the form of an attraction, the Zetro Card established form that can persist across time. Contributions that are otherwise informal and hard to count are gathered into a shared rhythm rather than fading back into the background as “just politics.” That continuity should not be confused with seamlessness. The card works because it is modular: it can absorb uneven moments of participation while preserving a stable form. Continuity, in this sense, is not the absence of interruption but the achievement of a repeated public rhythm.

If #ZcavengerHunt made campaigning legible as collective movement all at once, the Zetro Card makes it legible as ongoing work that can persist without constant spectacle. The duck-rabbit point holds here too. The card can be read straightforwardly as morale, retention, and branding. It can also be read as a rehearsal of public credit in miniature because it stages a relationship among contribution, recognition, and redemption. Those readings do not cancel each other. Its political usefulness depends on remaining legible in both registers at once.

From Campaigning to Governing

What this adds to the campaign-versus-governance question is not a fantasy of immediate substitution but a shift in genre. The Zetro Card treats participation as something that can carry forward and return as recognition over time. It offers a small but suggestive model of how collective capacities get named and taken up through repeatable formats. When the scene shifts to snow shoveling as paid public work organized around an accessibility standard, the register changes. But the underlying wager remains familiar: the work comes first as an obligation we can name, and the question of coordination follows from that obligation rather than preempting it.

Many commentators described #ZcavengerHunt and the Zetro Card as Mamdani’s way of responding to fascist terror with fun and levity, and that is true enough. But fun and levity are chronotopic. They organize political time differently from the rhythm of fiscal and political crisis that has dominated neoliberal governance and returned in Trump’s threats and shakedowns. Within dominant fiscal chronotopes, crisis appears as something that suspends public obligation rather than reinforcing it.

The campaign practices matter because they elaborate a different, more democratic public chronotope. #ZcavengerHunt exemplifies an event whose form is nonetheless repeatable, while the Zetro Card extends that same participatory logic into a more continuous sequence of recognition and coordination. In both cases, levity is not a retreat from politics but an effect of agency: a way of making collective capacity feel present and repeatable under conditions designed to make agency feel foreclosed. If neoliberal and MAGA temporalities narrow the field of action, these practices widen it by building forms in which people can act together without waiting for permission in advance.

That framing also helps clarify why the shift from campaign to governance is not a clean break. The same administration can operate in more than one chronotopic tense at once because it inherits institutions and media habits that keep staging money as if it originates in private pockets and enters public life only through reluctant concession. In the early months of Mamdani’s term, that tension has been visible in real time. Libraries were cut recently in the name of efficiency, a recognizably neoliberal move that treats capacity as fixed and management as the art of trimming. Last weekend, by contrast, snow-shoveling capacity was dramatically scaled up around a clear public standard of sidewalk accessibility. The public messaging around recruiting shovelers had its own playful, mobilizing energy, closer in spirit to the campaign experiments than to the dour genre of austerity.

The snow-shoveling episode matters because it puts a different orientation on display. Productive capacity appears here as a political variable rather than a ceiling. The public standard comes first — accessibility as constitutive of public space — and labor is then scaled to meet it. Operationally, the cash management and accounting settlement for that expansion happens afterward through ongoing negotiation and coordination. That, too, can be read in duck-rabbit fashion. In a familiar neoliberal reading, belated settlement is framed as debt that must be “paid back,” as if the city has put extra shoveling on a public credit card that will eventually come due. But belated settlement also makes something else visible: once scale becomes adjustable in order to meet a standard, the question “how are you going to pay for it?” is already being treated as a design question rather than an external veto on what counts as an obligation.

That is the fork in the road these campaign rehearsals help make visible. One path translates public need back into scarcity management, with the destruction of capacity repeatedly framed as responsibility. The other treats care capacity and employment as public ends and treats settlement as an ongoing political task rather than using it to delay action. Fiscal chronotopes are the genre environments in which those paths become legible in the first place, where some sequences of permission and closure feel natural and others do not. The wager behind these playful practices is that changing what a public can recognize is often the first step toward changing what it can do, and that democratic public finance, especially amid open sabotage and non-cooperation from the federal government, depends on rehearsing alternative temporalities and keeping them publicly legible.

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Out of the Shadows: Public Banking for Municipal Finance

By Tyler Suksawat & Scott Ferguson

Editor’s Note: The following essay, originally published on March 3, 2026, offers a foundational theoretical framework for what has since been concretized as The Seattle Loop. The Seattle Loop is a fiscal strategy that utilizes municipal banking to purchase city debt, “looping” interest payments back into public provisions like social housing and green jobs. While this piece was written prior to our specific pivot toward the Seattle-based organizing effort, it articulates the core logic of public credit and municipal finance that underpins the current project.

In a recent essay, we advanced a proposal for sub-federal governments to sell municipal bonds to their own public banks. We took the city as our primary point of departure, but the same lessons are applicable to U.S. counties and states. Establishing a public bank that regularly purchases municipal debt, we argued, would not only significantly expand a city’s fiscal capacity to support its communities and environs, but also reclaim regional public finance from a parasitical and punishing bond market. 

Since the publication of our essay, some commentators have criticized the proposal for involving city finance in so-called shadow banking, precisely because it places public credit creation outside traditional private capital markets. Such concerns are rooted in a legitimate wariness toward the unregulated and often fragile credit structures that trigger financial crises. However, this criticism fails to distinguish between speculative private ventures and institutionalized provisioning by the municipal public purse. Indeed, such a critique mistakes the absence of private middlemen for a lack of financial oversight and security. Our plan, by contrast, replaces the opaque and volatile shadows of private intermediation with a transparent, public-facing mechanism anchored in the enduring fiscal authority of the city government.

Today, municipal finance remains trapped in an exploitative and convoluted cycle. When a city issues debt, it is immediately subjected to a gauntlet of private intermediaries: banks underwrite the bonds, rating agencies perform a gatekeeping function via risk assessment, and institutional investors claim interest as a form of social rent. Crucially, these investors are often not traditional depository banks, but rather volatile non-bank entities such as money market mutual funds and hedge funds, which treat municipal bonds as liquid shadow money to be leveraged for short-term gain. As it stands, then, the public purse is already precariously entangled in shadow banking, with municipal debt serving as a primary asset for the volatile and uninsured money markets that dominate the status quo. Every stage of this process, meanwhile, is governed by a “fiscal discipline” that prioritizes private profit over public need. Thus, far from a stable, above-board process, the current municipal model represents an architecture of austerity that embeds the public interest within the murky, predatory, and destabilizing mechanisms of market-based finance.

Our proposal replaces the fragility of the shadow market with an architecture of public provisioning. Before we turn to the specific mechanisms of financial stability, we must first establish the basic institutional design. We propose a publicly owned institution with chartered banking powers–including direct access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window–that allows the city to bypass the private gauntlet and recapture its own credit. Under this arrangement, the interest generated by municipal debt is no longer captured as social rent; instead, it is credited back to the issuer’s general fund. While both the private market and our public model acknowledge that credit is fundamentally elastic, the divergence lies in who controls and benefits from that elasticity. By internalizing debt service and neutralizing the power of rating agencies, our proposal transforms the financial model from an extractive regime into a regenerative one.

This formalization—grounding municipal debt finance in a chartered public bank, regulated oversight, and direct access to central bank liquidity—moves our model firmly into the light of the regulated banking system. If critics wish to argue about the risks of aggressive credit expansion or the blurring of fiscal and monetary lines, those are legitimate debates over localized monetary and credit governance. But to label a chartered, transparently regulated public utility as “shadow banking” is a category error. Our plan does not evade regulation; it institutionalizes public purpose through it.

Regarding the safety of deposits, public ownership is no barrier to FDIC insurance. A state-chartered public bank meeting standard capital and supervisory requirements can qualify for federal backing. However, even in the absence of the FDIC, the Bank of North Dakota provides a proven roadmap: deposits can be backed by the full faith and credit of the municipal government itself. In this architecture, deposit safety is a design constraint managed through robust capital buffers and strict regulatory adherence, rather than an impossibility.

In this context, the risk of default on deposits is a feature of any bank lacking sufficient capital or insurance. Critics often raise the specter of “portfolio concentration,” but a public bank purchasing its own city’s bonds is simply internalizing fiscal risk. This shifts the concern from “depositor loss” to the broader question of municipal insolvency–a condition that, in our schema, is mitigated by the bank’s ability to coordinate with the city’s broader fiscal agenda. We address concentration not through the fickle discipline of the bond market, but through diversified asset management and the elimination of capitalist underwriting.

The most powerful engine of this model is its mandated retention and concerted utilization of public deposits, serving as a foundation for proactive public provisioning. By directing city payrolls, vendor payments, contractor accounts, and the collection of taxes, fines, fees, and even utility payments (as seen in Seattle) through the public bank, we create a massive, stable foundation of liquidity to be deployed for the common good. This capacity becomes particularly transformative when paired with a local Job Guarantee program. The bank provides the strong accounting infrastructure for such a program, ensuring that municipal payrolls for public works are settled within the public’s own credit circuit to build and sustain community wealth. Consequently, the interest payments that currently “leave” the city as social rent are instead retained, further expanding the city’s financial system and its capacity to support collective wellbeing with every cycle.

Finally, we must correct a persistent metallic-standard myth: the idea that a bank’s ability to purchase bonds is constrained 1:1 by its existing deposits. As any modern banker knows, loans create deposits. Banks expand their balance sheets first and manage reserves afterward. The true constraints on our model, then, are not “available deposits,” but rather regulatory capital ratios and liquidity coverage rules. We acknowledge these constraints and embrace them. Our goal is not to evade regulation, but to use the inherent elasticity of credit to activate municipal democracy and provision the public good.

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Contesting the End of India’s Job Guarantee with Khush Vachhrajani

For over twenty years, India’s national rural jobs program provided a legal right to work for over 265 million people–the majority of them women–serving as a vital lifeline against poverty and a global model for social security. Tragically, however, that lifeline is now being cut.

In this episode, we speak with Khush Vachhrajani, writer and national coordinator at the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research in India, about his recent article in The Wire, “How to Kill a Golden Goose: MGNREGA Repeal Reveals More than it Hides.” Vachhrajani contextualizes the sudden 2026 demise of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and its replacement by the new Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (VB-G RAM G). As he explains, this shift effectively “kills the golden goose” for millions of rural workers by replacing a demand-driven legal guarantee with arbitrary budget caps and centralized control. We discuss the neoliberal money politics behind this move: a calculated transition from a rights-based framework that empowered workers to a supply-led scheme that prioritizes fiscal austerity over human dignity.

Still, our dialog is not merely a post-mortem of a fallen policy. From the “Save MGNREGA” nationwide agitations to defiant resolutions passed in thousands of Gram Sabhas, the people of India are actively fighting to reclaim their right to work. This episode explores both the devastating effects of the repeal and the growing movement of workers, unions, and activists who refuse to let this Golden Goose go quietly, proving that the struggle for democratic accountability is far from over.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

William Saas

Khush Vachhrajani, welcome to Money on the Left.

Khush Vachhrajani

Thank you so much. Delighted to be here.

William Saas

Could you start by just telling us a little bit about your background and what brought you to the kind of questions that you’re asking in your most recent research, which you’re producing through your position at the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research, or SAFAR, and sharing on your Substack?

Khush Vachhrajani

Sure. So, I’m from India. I’m from this city called Ahmedabad, which is in the western state of Gujarat. That’s also where the Prime Minister comes from, so, I think it has gone on the maps because of that. But it’s also the state where Gandhi was born and a very long part of his life after coming back from South Africa, when he started his journey in India, began from the state that I come from. I studied in a school that was sort of built on the foundation of some of the principles that Gandhi himself sort of taught us as a society. I currently work with a collective called the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research.

We are a group who’s just interested in making democracy work on a day to day basis for the most marginalized. We don’t see democracy as just an election-to-election arrangement, but also in terms of a person’s right to be heard, a person’s right to grievance, a person’s right to participate in the smallest decision making that affects the person or the society as a whole.

The work also is sort of anchored in some of these democratic principles. Apart from that, I love to read. I have been a follower of many of the progressive ideas that you all have sort of built over a period of time on Money on the Left and also have learned immensely from the writing, and the guests who have come here which has also sort of shaped a very core part of my own politics around money, around looking at monetary design. I enjoy music. I enjoy sports, and I have a lovely dog who’s going to turn five years old this year, and her name is Estelle. And that’s it. That’s more or less about me.

Scott Ferguson

That’s great. Can you maybe talk a little bit about some of your experience? You also studied in the United States and worked in the United States for a little bit.

Khush Vachhrajani

I did, so I did my master’s in public affairs. In the US, I was at Brown University in 2019 and 20. So my education was over when the pandemic sort of kicked in. During my time in the US, I also spent three months working in Houston, in the Mayor’s Office of Complete Communities, which was an initiative largely to identify and then work towards supporting under-resourced and historically underrepresented communities in Houston. My task was to sort of look at the habitability question in one of those communities called Gulfton, where I learned a lot around some of the challenges that the United States also face in terms of the politics of, at times, immigration, challenges around creating a safer environment for many of the people who come to the United States with a lot of ambition or aspirations, and sometimes also out of desperation.

So, I had a great time working with the mayor’s office and also sort of learnt a great deal about what are some of the day-to-days of the immigrants who live in Houston and how a mayor could support them through that administration. So, yeah. Before that, I was also sort of engaged in working with governments and civil society in India.

My education built on my lived experiences in India and sharpened my imagination, I would say, as well as my ability to contribute to some of these things that sort of affect the lives of people.

Scott Ferguson

What occasions this conversation today is the publication of an article that you wrote titled “How to Kill a Golden Goose: MGNREGA Repeal Reveals More Than It Hides,” and it was published in a publication called The Wire. It’s essentially criticizing and diagnosing the radical curtailment and maybe even demise of this public works program that’s been around for decades, since the 90s, I believe, in India.

It’s a terrible situation, but we found that your analysis and your framing of the argument to be really thorough and quite inspiring, despite the fact that it’s such a tragic situation, precisely because you frame these politics as a politics of not just money, but monetary design.

So I don’t know where you’d like to start. We could potentially start by talking about the nature of this program. Some people who listen to this show might be aware of this program, but, probably a lot aren’t. So maybe we can just start with, where did this program come from? Where did it arise? Maybe the happy part of the story before we get to its dismantling, very recently.

Khush Vachhrajani

Right. The more hopeful part, I would say. These state backed public employment programs have been around in different parts of India since the 80s and the 90s, largely framed around Social Security for rural workers in absence of decent agricultural work, but more so as a protection against famine or any sort of climate crisis which might affect the agricultural work itself.

So whenever there was absence of work due to these kinds of scenarios, the government would come in and they would focus on largely rural public works, which can be done through manual workers. Against that kind of work, they would provide them wages for sustenance. So these kinds of programs have been around in India since the 80s and 90s in some parts.

And the experiences of those programs became a backbone for a broader advocacy in India, especially after the 1990s, where India sort of liberalized, opened up its economy, adopted the neoliberal, market-based framework in the economy, which brought in a lot of resources, finances and money to a very, very small section of society in a sense.

But the precarity in rural areas amongst workers, especially manual workers, agricultural workers, construction workers, deepened over the entire decade. So in the late 90s and early 2000s, the experiences of these public works programs in other parts of India sort of became a central piece of argument that India needs a federal job guarantee kind of a framework.

It was also sort of demanded or was framed as a program, or a demand, as a state’s obligation to its people. It was articulated as people’s right to work within the constitutional framework. It was framed as a sort of politics of money that the people are deeply interested in and which sort of breaks away from the neoliberal framework that the state was pushing, in a sense.

So, in 2005, after the advocacy of about 7 to 8 years, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act came about. So MGNREGA is what it is called, in a shorter sense, or sometimes in India, we also call it NREGA. So, NREGA was sort of conceptualized with this vision that every single person who wants to work can get work under this program.

There will be wage parity amongst men and women. Again, it was a breakthrough at that time. The government sort of decided a particular floor at which people are to be paid and that the floor will be revised every year based on inflation. So it’s sort of created a progressive framework which was rooted in creating a public option for employment.

While it was demanded to be a program which is running throughout the year, the government sort of enacted this law where each household will get work for up to 100 days a year. So instead of every person, it was like one person per household for 100 days. And, in terms of its design, if there are four people in a household who are above 18 – the working age – let’s say, for example, then all four people would be a part of, what was called, a job card.

Amongst those 100 people, anybody could come out and work. So it was again like 100 days per household. That’s how the program was shaped. In addition to creating this public employment option, it also created, as I said, a wage floor which was equal for men and women.

It also sort of provided 10 rights to the workers themselves; to each and every one of them will have a job card, they can go and demand work at any time, they will get work within five kilometers of their radius, they will get certain facilities at the worksite, they will get paid within 15 days of completing work, they will have the power to audit the kind of work that is happening around them (etc.). It was a very, very progressive legislation which was fought for by people’s campaigns and struggles for almost a decade. So that was basically the foundation of how the law came about. When it was passed in the parliament in 2005, it was passed unanimously, across all party lines, across all different political ideologies.

It was passed with a very emphatic belief that this is creating a right to livelihood or at least a path for people to claim the right to livelihood, but also with sort of an understanding that within the new liberal economic framework, this is the least a country could do for its people, which is sort of a public option at a particular rate for just 100 days a year.

So that has always been there and that is also something that I address in my article that this has never really been a revolutionary program the way that we all want, but it was still fundamental as a cornerstone in people’s politics in India.

Scott Ferguson

Was it restricted to rural areas or did it also operate in urban areas?

Khush Vachhrajani

It was restricted to rural areas, which would be about almost 70% of India. So it’s still pretty universal in that sense. What emerged after all these years of NREGA being operationalized is also that, during Covid, there were several urban employment guarantee programs, which were designed and launched in urban areas as well by different state governments.

In 2023, my neighboring state, Rajasthan, enacted an urban employment guarantee law itself, which mandated 125 days of urban employment on very similar lines of NREGA . So that is also one of the contributions, which I don’t really talk about in the article that has come out, but this is definitely something that I’m writing in my next piece reflecting on these kinds of effects that NREGA has had in the political imagination of Indian society as well.

Scott Ferguson

What’s your sense of the kind of work that has gone on in the auspices of this program, that I would assume is pretty various? There’s not just one type of employment. Do you have a sense of the variety of work?

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. So another beautiful part of the design of the law, since it was fought for by a people’s movement and struggle which sort of informed the overall design, every local unit in India – that local unit in rural areas is called a Gram Panchayat, you can also sort of understand that it’s GP – every GP has to first think about all kinds of work that they can do under NREGA.

So it is not a top down design. It sort of stems from the most decentralized local unit, and each Gram Panchayat is supposed to create, what we call as basket of works, at least 2.5 times the demand that may exist in the local area. So they have to make sure that they are able to imagine and they’re able to create enough work in their area so that they are able to meet demands up to two and a half times, which is quite great. The works that we’ve seen in India has varied a lot also because of the kind of geographies that have been we have seen in the northeastern part of India, which is very, very remote, with very deep forests and hills where this program has been used to build pathways for people living in the valleys to come up on the main road and get connected to the public transportation system in the southern part of India or even in the western part of India where the droughts are very, very common. We’ve seen this program creating step wells in villages, which is sort of a local traditional mechanism of storing rainwater. In the northern part of India, there are mountains in the Himalayas which are prone to landslides. We have seen this program creating a more ecologically sound infrastructure that is needed for the local community to not only commute, but also to sort of earn a livelihood.

Another aspect of the program has also been that different kinds of people can access the program. So if, let’s say, I’m a person with a disability, then the program design allows me to work either in my own backyard or in my house, and it will be counted under the NREGA. If I come from an historically marginalized community, which in India we call scheduled tribes and, the scheduled castes (Dalits).

So if I come from the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes, I can work up to 200 days. Sorry, actually, 150 days in a year. If I am a person with disabilities, I can work up to 200 days a year. So all these progressive thoughts of who’s working, where they are working, and who is sort of making claims, is rooted in the design of the program.

There is enough documentation, a lot of writing, and several documentaries which have also been able to record the range of work that NREGA has been able to create. Even in the program design, they are all called assets. The NREGA has been building assets and not just work because these are all rural social infrastructure which is aiding the economic, political, social lives of people.

It’s been quite extraordinary in my experience, I have seen this operate in multiple geographies, multiple parts of India. I have also worked at a NREGA site during my experience in Rajasthan. These are all manual works. Imagine they are creating a small canal to make sure that the water flows smoothly between farms sometimes. In popular opinion writing, all these works are sort of termed as low skill works. Okay, but anybody who has worked in NREGA would be able to say  how highly skilled these works are. It’s not easy to both design and plan and then dig a stepwell. It’s not easy to build roads. 

Scott Ferguson

I don’t know how to do that.

Khush Vachhrajani

Exactly, exactly. Right. All these works are sort of termed as low skill, manual works, but I always term them as manual works which are building social, political, economic, architecture in many of these villages.

William Saas

So I don’t know if you’ve attended any meetings of the GP’s, or if they are documented in these documentaries, which I am absolutely excited to take a look at later, but do you have a sense for what those meetings are like? It strikes me that they’re probably more than just getting together and writing down a list of tasks to complete, but might end up being more expressive of community values and, as you say, social relations at the same time as they are about identifying work to do. Can you just provide any kind of overall broad or personal description of what goes on at these things?

00;21;59;12 – 00;22;26;18

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. These meetings, at the GP levels, are called Gram Sabha, which are basically convenings at the village level, in translation, and all the decisions which pertain to the GP or the village or the local unit are supposed to be taken only in Gram Sabha.

So it is like a general body of all the voting members of a GP. Right. From deciding what kind of work that needs to be done to the kind of money that will be needed to do this work, which, in the program, is called the Labor Budget. It is also developed in these Gram Sabha. To understand how these Gram Sabha work, and the picture that I’m going to sort of share is also how a Gram Sabha is really well organized, right, or is very well planned because like all other democratic functions, it is also a function of how active the voter is, how much power are they exercising as citizens of the Gram Sabha. There will always be vested interests. There will always be attempts toward the participation of people. But in some of these most thriving Gram Sabha that I have seen or many of us have seen, it takes place in layers.

First and foremost, there is a caste layer in India. India is a very deeply caste society, where the caste hierarchies govern many of these social relations, power struggles, control over resources and MGNREGA plans for these kinds of things. So if, let’s say, a well has to be built or a tree plantation has to be done to develop a garden, for example, which area would it take place in the village? Which are the communities that would benefit out of it? All these conversations are quite central to these discussions in Gram Sabha. So the first layer that these Gram Sabha try to facilitate, again these Gram Sabha, which are organized with an intent to make many of these things work, is to unpack what are the needs of different groups and communities within that village, wherever they are located and situated in terms of infrastructure.

The second layer that it unpacks is the layer of gender. I have said in my article that more than 50% of these workers are women workers. They are the ones who are in the villages. They are raising kids. They’re taking care of elderly parents. They are taking care of the farmlands. They are the ones who have not really migrated out of the villages to urban areas for work. So, the gender layers are very important in these kinds of conversations and the kind of infrastructure that women might need. Most of the time, the way Indian villages are organized is the responsibility of fetching water.

If I do not have access to piped drinking water or water for domestic chores, it falls on women. So where a well will be built or where the location or the site of a step well or even a canal depends on how women participate in these Gram Sabha. And then the third very, very critical layer comes as to what are the social needs of a community?

Does a school need, let’s say, a toilet or a playground or, does a hospital require a boundary wall sometimes, or a library requires a bit of renovation or a person wants to build, let’s say, a cowshed, or a small poultry kind of a mechanism to earn a livelihood. So these are the conversations that also take place in Gram Sabha and based on all these engagements the basket of work is developed. Based on the basket of work, then the Legal Budget is prepared. How much money will be required in the form of wages to execute the work? What will be the material cost?

How much of this material would we need to build all the assets under the NREGA for that year. So that is how these Gram Sabha sort of function and, again, we have also seen these Gram Sabha as places for deep contestation amongst the community sometimes. 

So in India, the person who’s elected and who’s the chair of the Gram Sabha is called Sarpanch, who is like the elected mayor of the GP. Mayor equivalent for a rural area. So it will also depend on the community where the Sarpanch comes from or if the Sarpanch is a woman or a man, if the Sarpanch is from the Dalit or the scheduled caste community, or if a Sarpanch is a graduate. All these things will sort of factor in how that Gram Sabha is being governed.

Then, in many areas where we have seen really transformational work happening or these really productive assets for people are being developed, there is also a role that the state has played in facilitating it. We have seen some really progressive bureaucrats, progressive governments, state governments especially facilitate these conversations in terms of providing more support to the village in bureaucratic functionaries, or on the role that they can play in facilitating this dialog between the elected members of the government and the general body, what are the kind of insights that they can provide, in terms of what might benefit the village in the long run vis a vis short term? So all these sort of permutations and combinations go into creating the basket of works which are then required for the Panchayats to submit under the NREGA program.

Scott Ferguson

So, we wouldn’t want to overly romanticize this program, because as you said, it’s, you know, in the context of a neoliberal era, it’s sort of the least that can be done. Yes. At the same time, I think it’s worth drawing out some of the radical potential here. I mean, I feel like you’re already talking about it, but I just kind of want to bring more meta language to it.

So we’ve got the context and the geopolitical context is neoliberalization. I mean, there’s lots of ways of describing what neoliberalization even means in the first place, but certainly a market ordered society where non-democratic, private allocation, is supposed to be the best, the most efficient, etc., etc..

The market is supposed to perform certain kinds of mechanisms that are dada dada da, and so on. All these basic questions about “who we are as a people,” “how do we organize and cooperate,” “how do we organize our labor,” “what is the mode of production,” “are there multiple modes of production,” “how should we go about this in the first place,” are just off the table. That’s the power of the neoliberal paradigm as a kind of, you know, radicalized reboot of the liberal paradigm. It seems like the jobs program in India really deeply contests that paradigm and offers an alternative, beginning not just with the kind of the democratic impulses in these local GP organizations and meetings, but also the way that these basic questions are being reposed from the bottom up once again. I mean, not just bottom up in terms of democratic participation, but bottom up ontological, conceptually. I think, so often neoliberal market logic presumes that if there are needs, the market meets them. And if the market isn’t meeting the need, it’s not a real need.

Khush Vachhrajani

Exactly.

Scott Ferguson

This is not new to anybody who’s familiar with any of the writings about public works programs and job guarantees. It’s not news to anybody who follows Modern Monetary Theory. Nevertheless, I think it’s worth really underscoring the way that this program just poses the question of: who are we to one another? What do we owe one another? How are we going to participate? And what are the needs of our community that are not de facto reduced to a reified neoliberal market?  I still teach Karl Marx all the time, for as many issues I have with Marx’s work nowadays, one of the fundamental questions he’s posing and what his critique of the alienation of labor is all about is not just, “oh, I’ve made something and my product has been yanked away from me by the owners of production,” but the very democratic question of how do we organize our labor together as a community? How do we even do that in the first place? And what should we be doing together? It seems like, again, not romanticizing it, but as an impulse this program has potential to pose that question in a very deep way.

00;33;14;15 – 00;34;06;23

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. There was no better way of putting it than what you’ve already done, Scott, really. The program was in action for the last two decades and even a little bit before that, but in the last two decades, we have seen so many GPs, Panchayats, really understanding the democratic power that they have as a unit in the larger schemes of affair. Progressive, elected leaders of these Panchayats would make sure that their claim to democratic money is heightened and it is sort of demanded for. Even from civil society and progressive groups, they have sort of latched onto this program to unionize some of these workers who have been working under NREGA and not just workers, but also, there is a concept of a “mate”, the mate is basically a friend who’s just supposed to sort of supervise a work site so we can also call them a work site supervisor.

So there have been civil society groups and unions to sort of unionize these workers and the mate to demand for full implementation of the program in the community, to demand expansion of the basket of works in the community, to sort of innovate at times as to the kind of infrastructure and assets that can be built, and their relationship with the village itself. Many of these really macro imaginations and philosophies come together in a program like this in a very real sense. One thing that I also mentioned in my writing is how it shapes the relationship between a landlord or a contractor and the workers themselves. In absence of a program like this, my power to negotiate wages is very, very limited.

And in the Indian context, it has been documented quite well that before this program was introduced in the villages, irrespective of how good or bad it was being implemented in the village, the fact that this design existed automatically pushed rural wages a lot. It really shifted the conversation from working at almost slave wages to working at dignified wages.

If, let’s say, the rural wage is set at 100 for now, the shift that we saw in the earlier years was not a 101 or 105. It was huge. It was 150, 200 at times. So it shifted, and in the one, it also sort of set what workers were actually losing by this program not being in existence.

We have seen that throughout two decades, even in Panchayats, where this program has not really worked because of many reasons. With the government in power that we have today in India, the last 5 to 6 years have been really, really difficult. Actually, the last whole decade has been really difficult for this program. There have been budget cuts. There has been public mockery by the Prime Minister inside the parliament about this program, despite all the structural challenges, the loss of wages has not come down. The faith that people have on the ground about the potential that this program could have in their lives and in their environment has not really gone anywhere.

Yes, there has been disappointment that the program has not been implemented, but we saw it in Covid that when state governments really pushed from their sides to implement these programs, people were coming out demanding for work. People were coming out to think about the kind of infrastructure that they need during pandemic and after.

What you also articulated so well, and this is something that I’ve tried to even sort of hint at in my article and I’m not really sure if I have been successful at it, but political imagination of a common person, and most times, a woman living in a village in India, really changed, as to what is possible in their lives.

The women workers, even today, are coming together protesting against repeal of NREGA from all different parts of India. Not because they were very happy with this framework and they were all hunky-dory. But it is the faith in the design that this is their democratic right, this is their claim to democratic money, and it is their faith that if one day I have an equal power to operate in this economy, which otherwise is extremely unfair to me.

That, I feel, has been the crux of the last two decades of NREGA. With all its ebbs and flows, the people, every time when they were offered an imagination of a progressive, public, employment program or a job guarantee kind of a program, people latched on to it and they really made sure that it works, wherever it works.

00;39;48;07 – 00;40;32;01

William Saas

Just want to give us a pass for a bit of romanticization. I want to underscore and emphasize a bit more. The NREGA seems like a program out of time in a couple of ways. One is that it’s under appeal now, that’s the obvious one. But “out of time” in terms of the two decades, as you just described, are periods noted for their intensification of neoliberal logics rather than their lessening. As I’m hearing you narrate and reading your work, it becomes, I think, obvious why and from what trajectories this program would be challenged and undermined, but that it has taken so long to get there is remarkable and I think a testament to the people who make up the NREGA projects, that do the baskets of work. Before we get to the repeal, I feel like we’re almost there, but living in the romance just a little bit longer. Was there any kind of more cultural work, artistic work commissioned or called for in these meetings and identified in the baskets of work? So, public art, public music?

Khush Vachhrajani

Fantastic question and not really, but I’m very glad that this has come up. And a colleague of mine who might listen to this podcast would be really happy to listen to this question as he comes from a community… 

William Saas

What’s his name, let’s shout him out.

00;41;28;24 – 00;42;02;03

Khush Vachhrajani

Oh, yeah. His name is Paras, Paras Banjara. He comes from the community that traditionally has been the nomadic tribes in India. His whole identity is also of a cultural activist among many of the other hats that he wears. But, unfortunately, in this regard, the ambit of works are limited to manual works and not really art cultural in that sense.

But in 2022, if I am getting the year right, I think it was around 2022 or 2023 again, in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic in India, which was disastrous for many communities economically, and the communities were already recovering from a demonetization experience in 2016 that really terribly implemented tax reforms in 2017, which was then followed by a pandemic. So there was this long period of real economic distress. So Paras, along with some of the other friends in, again, the state of Rajasthan, who are all sort of cultural activists and who look at culture as commons, work with local traditional artisans who specialize in folk music and different folk instruments.

They advocated for a very similar public employment program, 100 days for Rural Artisans in Rajasthan. It was centered around folk musicians, and the design was again very, very similar, where it would provide a 100 day wage employment to all these rural artisans, wherever they are. The basket of works were kept very, very wide, but it ranged from teaching in a school to performing a government function or to sort of participate in these Gram Sabha as cultural artists and entertaining people and talking to people about their art forms. It was quite a broad ambit. Implementation of that program was very, very haphazard. But the imagination was there, and it was something that has been fought for by Paras and some of these groups for a very long time. These are all traditional art forms and, really very, very strong and almost culturally extinct practices of folk music that stem from years and years – and in my understanding – centuries of traveling around the world as gypsies or as nomadic tribes from which they’ve picked up all these different art forms and music, and they’ve sort of made it more Indian. In one of the conversations on culture as commons, we saw many of these come together to perform a very different version of a bagpipe, a very different version of drums, a very different version of a string based instrument in that sense.

So that imagination has been tried. Not very successful, but the state did try to push for something like that. I remember, I think, in the US there was something just after the Second World War, tried in Washington state, if I’m not wrong, a public arts program. I think it was one of those states in the US. So it just tried.

Scott Ferguson

So I have a question, which I guess, in my mind, both comes from a place of ignorance and insight. So I want to ask about the so-called informal economy in India, which I know nothing about. All I know is that people tell me that it’s a large informal economy and by this I take to mean that it is not being directly organized by the rupee.

My ignorance is, I just don’t know how this works because I don’t study it. I don’t live there. The maybe slightly more insightful part of this is the Money on the Left presumption in our analysis is that there’s no ultimate outside or absolute inside and outside between a formal monetary economy and what might lie beyond that. In fact, what we call informal economies themselves have their own forms of language and accounting and responsibility and capacitations.

We, at Money on the Left, tend to try to blur the distinction between the so-called formal and the so-called informal. But I’m wondering if A) is anything I’m saying just off, and B) especially since the program was not year round or if it worked year round, but for only 100 days, so it wasn’t full time, right? I guess that’s what I’m looking for. It, of course, must have interacted in complex ways with the so-called informal economy. Do you have any sense of how this played out?

00;47;30;23 – 00;47;57;00

Khush Vachhrajani

A limited sense. I would try and sort of put out what I feel, and my understanding and I think the more general understanding in India about an informal economy also sort of stems from the fact that more than 90% of the Indian workforce is engaged in informal work. And what we mean by that is also that that work is not on any contract.

They don’t really have an employer of any kind. There is no fixed salary that is credited to their account by the end of the week or the month. There is no Social Security and it’s almost always a daily wage earning. So if I am a construction worker in a city, I would just go stand in, what we call a “Labour Chowk”, or, let’s say, a corner in a neighborhood where all these workers would come, let’s say, around seven in the morning, eight in the morning, and they would be picked up by a contractor to, let’s say, fix somebodies house for the day and that would be their job, and they would earn from the day. The second day would be something new, a new task, with a new contractor, a new place.

Scott Ferguson

But they’d be paid in rupees?

00;48;50;23 – 00;49;24;19

Khush Vachhrajani

Yes. They will be paid in rupees. Most of these people would earn in cash, physical cash. There have been several policy decisions which have tried to get many of these workers to be a part of the formal banking systems, largely through direct payments to their accounts. But still a lot of the Indian informal workforce earns in physical cash.

That’s also because that’s how they spend on a day to day basis, with the emergence of fintech and again, a very, very deep neoliberal financialization of banking itself, where they are charged every time they take out money from the ATM, there is no way that they can afford to lose any more than sort of what they’re getting, which is also really, really very low.

So these are the kind of people that we generally imagine as informal workers and in rural areas, where the NREGA was implemented. Actually it is still implemented till March 31st. The informal economy would be implemented in multiple ways. There is, one, direct agricultural labor. So I could be a farmer but with a very, very small landholding.

So it would not be enough for me to sustain. So along with working on my own farm, I would also be working in somebody else’s farm on an hourly basis or task basis or a day to day basis and I would sort of get money based on that. Or I would be a landless farmer and I’m working as a laborer, either as a contractual laborer with a farmer and then I would be employed for the entire season. Sometimes it is also out of precarity of different kinds where I could be a landholding farmer sustaining myself, but, for any reason, my crop got destroyed or there was a drought and I have loans on me, so I’m not able to pay off those debts. So, I am forced to work as a local. A lot of rural work is also construction. So again, it’s like what I describe for a city, it is  very similar to what would also exist in a rural area, where I could go to a worksite in the morning, and I could work from morning to evening doing manual work, and I would be paid for that.

These are the kinds of ways in which the informal economy is sort of organized in villages. What NREGA did was just push how the engagement with the contractor would be. That contractor could be a person who is working in the worksite, or the contractor could be a farmer themselves or the landlord at times, in just helping them negotiate at what price the manual work would be offered.

Scott Ferguson

So let’s talk about the devastation of this program. I mean, I’m assuming there were reactionary forces who wanted to end it the whole time. I’m assuming that it gained traction, but how did this all play out?

00;52;22;10 – 00;52;48;28

Khush Vachhrajani

Yeah, the trauma, the trauma. So, as I said, when the current BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) government came in power in 2014, the prime minister, in his very first speech in the parliament, made a huge public mockery of NREGA by saying it’s a program where there is no pothole, so people first would dig that pothole and then they would fill that pothole. It’s that kind of a program that has been running and, he also said that he would make sure that this program sort of survives long enough for people to remember how big a joke this has been in the Indian economy. That was sort of a proclamation of where the public policy would be geared towards, in one sense. The program, however, was not killed directly through a new law, like what we’ve seen now, but it was sort of dismantled structurally through three means from 2014 to 2025, when they got a new law in itself. It’s also quite interesting because to many of us, who have been looking at how the repeal came about, it caught us by surprise along with the swiftness with which it was done. And, even the parliamentary procedures around this new law was quite something for us to see. But, our analysis and understanding has been that over the last 11 years, the program has been dismantled slowly to a level where people, many of these Panchayats, have not really seen works opening for three or four seasons now.

So for them, the program has always been dead. So this new program coming in makes very little impact on NREGA. But coming back to how I think it was dismantled over the first 11 years were three ways. 1) A very, very big focus on introducing very modern digital technology infrastructure in a reality where there is no phone connection or there is no internet connection. They introduce things like, digital identity based payments. India has one of the largest biometric programs called Aadhaar. They made sure that every single worker’s bank account is linked to this digital ID card, which is called Aadhaar. It is just a biometric identity program, nothing else.

It was proclaimed as that. So each and every person is sort of tagged to this unique ID, and then the money would be transferred directly to their bank account instead of it first coming to the Panchayat, or the GP and then through the GP, then getting it in the form of cash. And it was sort of introduced as a means to curb corruption, reduce inefficiencies and to make the whole payment mechanism very transparent.

Again, there is an Indian reality that has been narrated ever since the Aadhaar was launched in 2008, there would be difficulties in matching names of people on one document to another document. There will be typing errors. There is not enough infrastructure on-ground to make sure that these things are rectified. Then it is forced, from top down, in a manner where if there is any error, my money would be stopped, then it’s a catastrophe. That is what happened. So when they introduced this, we call it ABPS, which is the Aadhaar Based Payment System, it led to many bank accounts where the money sort of never reached the worker because there was a problem with the name.

There was a name mismatch or there was a mismatch in the biometric. As I said, it’s a biometric program. So they have to go and make sure that they verify at the branch location in rural areas that they are the same people and any reasons that the biometric has failed. So that is another reason why, despite working, they would not get their money.

And thirdly, it also sort of created an architecture where we’ve seen cases where, like, I think in 2022 or 23, close to 60 to 70 million people were just not paid because of these kinds of inefficiencies. So this was one of the first things which was introduced. The second thing which was introduced then was a biometric based attendance system at worksites where every worker before beginning their work on a particular day would have to go in and make sure that they are at a geotagged worksite.

They would have to do the fingerprints and make sure they match what we called a “muster roll”, which is just like a list of all people who are going to work at the worksite. So basically this was a digital attendance mechanism date. The geolocation of the work site and the geolocation of that worker has to match to make sure that the worker is not sitting at the houses and getting paid for not doing the work.

All this sounds fantastic, but it is just not practical. There will be issues with geotagging and that is what we realized. The person who is doing the geotagging has, let’s say, geotagged the wrong work site. Workers have come to the right work site because they know in that area in the village where the work site is, and it would just not match. Or everything is okay, the work site is matched, it is geotagged correctly, the workers are at the correct site, but there is no internet, so they have to move 500m up and down. Then the moment they move, the work site goes beyond the geotag range. So, people would come to work, but they would not be able to start their work because the attendance is not marked.

So there are so many people who came to work, but they were just not able to work. And that also creates a huge disappointment and a disincentive for workers to make their way all the way to the work site.

Scott Ferguson

Real quick. A meta comment on what you’re saying here. In the States, we call this “death by a thousand cuts,” right? It was eroded from the inside before the big blow knocked it out. The main point I wanted to make here is that, it’s not just that the development and implementation and ongoing evolution of the program was a question of contestation over monetary design in both narrow and capacious senses of that term, but the counter forces, the reactionary forces, the contestation against the program was also a function of monetary design in multiple senses.

01;00;49;28 – 01;01;22;09

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. You have got it absolutely right, that it is a death by a thousand cuts. This is something that we also have spoken about and written about quite a lot. One of the most insidious ways in which the program was killed was also around the democratization of money where the union government stopped paying state governments their dues.

The way this program is organized is that all the wage payments, 100% of the wage payments, come from the union government, who is the monetary sovereign government. And for all the material costs which are involved in any public work, 75% come from the union government, 25% comes from the state government. That has been a design that has been agreed upon which has been ruling since 2005.

But over the last seven, eight, nine years, we’ve continuously seen wages being withheld. So imagine workers are working on the ground and they’re just not being paid and the pressure is being felt by the state government and the state government doesn’t have the kind of money that is required to pay these wages. So if the wages are withheld, workers are not going to come to work. At the same point in time there is a provision for what is called a social audit in NREGA, which is basically going beyond the financial audit, but giving power to the Gram Sabha – the fundamental unit that is responsible for running this program – to also monitor how the program is being implemented, considering all these different parameters around how people are working with these worksites, how their experiences have been. Now, social audit has been a mechanism which has been fought for by people’s campaigns and struggles to ensure that people have a right to monitor the implementation of this program.

It is not left to a third party or the government to dictate how the program is to be functioning. The way it has been designed is, 0.5% of NREGA’s annual expenditure is earmarked for social audits. So the money has also been kept aside in the monetary design of this program. Then, in order to facilitate the social audit, each state has to create these social audit units, which are supposed to be independent autonomous bodies and that 0.5% of state’s total expenditure would come to them. Then they would make sure that they go to a  Gram Sabha, they prepare a team from the  Gram Sabha to then audit what has been happening.

So this has been an inbuilt mechanism for transparency and accountability within NREGA, which has been weaponized against different state governments where they have been told that “we are not going to release money to you because social audit reports have been terrible,” without understanding that when a social audit report is bad or whether it is sort of unearthing corruption, unearthing misuse of money, the department that is supposed to act on those findings and fix those gaps is supposed to be the rural development department.

It is not supposed to be these social audit units whose job it is to figure out what is happening, no. So even their money will be withheld, so the social audit units are left to dry and the states are also not getting money. This is something that we have documented systematically through our work as well, that there have been social audit units who have not received their dues for five, six years.

There have been state governments who have not received the wages of the workers who have worked in the state governments for several years. There have been court battles. The state of West Bengal went to the High Court of the state. They won. They went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said that the government has to release the money.

But what I mean to say is, and this is something that also sometimes troubles me, that our understanding of what a monetarily sovereign government can do, this is actually a flip side of that. They’ve decided to not really provide that democratic money to the money users in their federal mechanisms. The state government was to compensate these autonomous independent units, they were supposed to be the checkers in the system in that sense.

All these things have been used systematically to kill the program when all these digital interventions that I spoke about earlier were also introduced under the name or under the guise of transparency and accountability. It was to say workers are not working at the worksite.

Hence we are sort of introducing this worksite monitoring mechanism. It is insane because there are more than 100 million workers across India who work at these worksites and India does not have the kind of technological sophistication, infrastructure, architecture to be able to facilitate any of these big tech interventions and these are also not just benign interventions thought to make the program work.

These are also data and a very strong market linked surveillance of testing certain hypotheses, like whether the biometric attendance system in general could work in a place like India with 100 million rural workers. They don’t want to introduce this system for rural workers. They want to introduce this for something else, but this is a proof of concept.

Can direct payments to bank accounts work and what are the kinds of complications? So how do we then design a structure for these high scale financial transactions which happen amongst the top 5% of Indian users today? India has something called UPI, Unified Payment Interface, which is this free and open source payments protocol for digital payments, which is sort of different from Venmo in that sense.

But this is also a kind of proof of concept for interventions like those which are deeply market linked, which are all financialization of finance. It’s been really terrible to see the kind of experimentations which have been done on these hundreds and millions of rural workers, whose daily earnings are peanuts even under a program like this.

What we heard last year was that they also want to do facial recognition technology through drones at these rural worksites. The amount of money that is being spent on these technological interventions vis-a-vis the amount of money that the simple rural or manual worker is earning, it is insane. It just doesn’t make sense in the traditional public policy cost benefit analysis framework.

It just doesn’t add up. Right? So whose interest it is serving, is something that I think has been fundamental to many of us. We’ve followed the evolution of these digital architectures that have been forced upon people where there is no Opt-Out option. If I demand that I want my wages in the form of physical cash, I just can’t.

It has to come to my bank account, right? This takes away the idea of a monetary design which is free, fair, and just, which is democratic in that sense. There is a little bit of a technicality to clarify.

So they’ve come up with this new law, which is called the VB GRAM G Law. It’s a very long, complicated, full form. So I’ll just cut it out and call it VB Gram G. So they, one, have legitimized all the digital technology architecture that they introduced to NREGA as part of law, which is crazy and which is scary and which is unacceptable by all means, because all these interventions, which they did earlier in the NREGA were just through circulars and guidelines, there was no legal legitimacy of any of these things. Now it has that. Second, it also has sort of passed the law but then not on-paper repealed NREGA.  There is confusion around whether both of these will coexist, not coexist and how it will sort of play out.

But in the new law, they’ll also sort of change the fiscal arrangement of the program. Instead of the Union government being responsible for 100% or wages, which is the majority of expenditure in the program, they’ve shifted that burden onto the states and they said that the entire expenditure will be borne by states and the Union government with the share of 60/40.

The state governments do not have that kind of money. There’s no way any of the state governments could actually shell out 40% of the expenditure. So it’s just impractical. There is no way this can be done. Another crucial aspect of the new law is that – earlier, as I said, the labor budgets or the budget for the program would emerge from bottom up through these discussions and deliberations in Gram Sabha and Gram Panchayat, which would feed into the state and then the Union government budget – now, they have said that the Union government arbitrarily determined based on “normative” parameters, how much the allocation for this program in the current state would be. What those normative parameters are, we don’t know. They’ve not really specified that.

Scott Ferguson

I just want to point out to the listeners that you put scare quotes around normative, when you said normative. You were not using it straightforwardly. 

01;12;26;01 – 01;13;01;02

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. And anybody who reads the law multiple times, it would become more and more evident that some of these arrangements in the new law are insidious designs of killing federalism and sort of completely turning the monetary design upside down, making it extremely top down. As to why they would not specify what that normative allocation would be, they said that any state government or any local government, whatever program schemes they’re running on their own, can be merged with this new VB GRAM G law. There will be no consultation, no dialog with the state government on what they are okay with, what they are not okay with in terms of the arrangement or the normative allocation itself. If a state government wants to opt out of the mechanism, they either have to enact a law that is in line with the VB GRAM G law or better, or they completely let go of the money under the program. So even that 60% shared they can let go. 

One more thing, NREGA was a universal mandate. It was implemented universally across all GP’s. Anybody could ask for work anytime in the day. In the new law that they proposed, they have said that the Union government would notify the states and the districts in the sub-units where the program would be implemented. No consultation, no check-in, nothing with nothing.

It’s just like they will determine where all it will be implemented, and it’s also that they can change that each year. So there is a switch-on, switch-off clause. So today they can notify, let’s say there are five areas in XYZ states without consulting the XYZ states and putting the burden of spending 40% of that amount. Then next year they could very well be, “okay, XYZ States are done, no I’m going to move to ABC states. XYZ states are done and they have no power to really sort of claim the right of democratic money in that sense. So the way they have structured the new law is they will notify the area, they will notify the works, the state governments will have to spend 40% – there is no opting out of that – and I, as a union government, can notify, let’s say, all villages of a particular state, let’s say it’s an opposition ruled state, but normatively allocate only ₹1 to that state and say that, “okay, 60% will come through me, which is like 60 cents that would come from me, 40 cents you spend.”

Any expense that is over and above the normative allocation, the state has to spend. So now for all those villages where the Union government has notified work, the state will end up spending and there is no way it is implemented. So it is also to kill some of the politically opponent states financially, which is detrimental for the Indian economy.

It is not a matter of political preferences, but also the fiscal structure in the federal structure of the state itself.

Scott Ferguson

Well, you’ve begun to answer a question I had, but I’d like to pose it explicitly and have you contemplate it, which is: what you’re making clear, is that the new law didn’t end the program. It just crippled it. It created such new designs and strictures that it’s just now designed to fail.

But the question is, why didn’t they just get rid of it? Why didn’t they just pass a law that said, this is over?

01;17;10;20 – 01;17;35;19

Khush Vachhrajani

Because the political stakes are very high, I would say. What I was also describing earlier, even in areas where it has not been functioning or it has not been doing very well, or the democratically making has not really been at par with many of the other high performing states. The sentiment and the significance of the program has always been there.

To take away that absolute final thread that people are hanging on to in a very deeply unequal neoliberal economic framework would be a bit too much. It would be something that would be politically unacceptable and that is my reading. I could be partially wrong in this, but the reason why I feel that this is one of the major reasons is because they’ve got this new law with full intention to repeal NREGA.

The intention is not to change its nature. The intention is to repeal it, but they also want to repeal it in a gradual manner. So in the Union Budget, which was announced a couple of weeks back, we had allocated a little money for the new law as well as they have allocated some money for NREGA. Our understanding is that the money that is mandated is also for some of the spending expenditure under NREGA, but they’ve not really passed legislation in the Parliament saying that NREGA is over now and from April 1st, this new law begins. April 1st is the start of the financial year, so we have April 1st till March 31st. They’ve not yet made that clear. So our understanding is that they’re going to go along with both these laws sort of simultaneously existing while keeping state governments in limbo, because the state governments have no idea what are the notified areas in their states.

They don’t know the normative allocation. They don’t know how much they are supposed to budget from their own limited resources. So they’re going to continue that for a little while. And maybe in 6 to 8 months, then completely phased out NREGA. They would then implement the VB GRAM G Act, which practically would destroy fiscal federalism in India because there is no state government that is anyway close to even implementing a program like that. The amount of financial burden that the state governments would have is just enormous. In our understanding of monetary operation and how sort of public money works, it’s just not possible that the state governments are able to deliver on anything like this even remotely.

William Saas

The critical part of the story that you’re articulating is the big tech intervention, as you put it.

And this might be one place where we can learn the kind of cutting edge of the neoliberal playbook. These biometric systems, do you know if they’re intellectual property of private firms that have been licensed by the Indian government? Or are these state run software that are monitoring these work sites and doing precisely the opposite of what they’re supposed to do on the tin, which is to make things more efficient. Of course, they’re breaking these work sites.

01;22;28;24 – 01;23;13;07

Khush Vachhrajani

I think it’s a mix of both.That is why the Indian state has really been an interesting case study. How they’ve created a market of monetizable data of almost each individual or each citizen of India.The way Big Tech is functioning at the moment in a program like NREGA is private corporations working with the the Union government in developing and designing these software, they’re housed within the ministry of IT or what we call as National Informatics Centers as well. NIC, whose task was the digitalization age of Indian society. So these softwares are sort of housed within the NIC and they are the intellectual property of the state. What we don’t know enough of is how some of the data that is being generated through these softwares and actually it is that, none of these things are working because if you’ve seen the kind of images which have been uploaded on these digital attendance monitoring systems where people would just click like a photo of a cow or they’ll click a picture of an empty drawer and they just upload it and the ministry and the NIC don’t have the capacity to go through these millions of photographs which have populated. Right? So in that way, it’s also garbage in and garbage out.

But I think what they are trying to do – and this is a little bit of a leap of faith assumption – is attempt to understand what are the complexities of a biometric system that big tech needs to be aware about. There’s something that is being tested and trained across such a large mass of population that would sort of give a lot of information just on the design of the kind of infrastructure that has been set up and it will also start creating new forms of data of individuals who otherwise were completely out of this whole market economy. They were not making digital payments. They were not part of a formal banking system.

They were not part of the whole cellular revolution in one sense. They were not using mobile data. So a lot of things have happened in the last ten years where because these workers had to access more and more digital banking, they are forced to get on smartphones, they’re forced to buy data packs.

Their presence in this neoliberal economic system has been heightened almost by force and design and many of these things are linked to Aadhaar, it would also start generating very unique information about a very large set of population whose footprints otherwise were invisible in an economic sense. You might have actually heard this, they’re all called DPI, digital public infrastructures which have been sort of pushed by the Gates and the Fords and the Rockefellers of the world, who are part of the digital governance reform initiatives. Our whole understanding of the way DPI has come about in India is that it is very, very closely linked to the state-market nexus.

In one sense, it has not emerged organically from people or democratically through participation. It has been coerced through exercises of demonetization, exercises of linking bank accounts to the Aadhaar, transferring rural wages or subsidies or scholarships, all the public money only through digital banking. Earlier, India also had a very thriving post office system so if they wanted to digitize it, they couldn’t just very easily digitize post offices. A post office exists in every single village. Banks don’t exist in every single village, but this systematically clears the post office mechanism to pave ways for these banks and financial intermediaries to have access to biometric information, payments information, and attendance information in some sense even though it is not really useful.

It’s a design which is really screening of human rights violations, but also techno feudalism in a very concrete manner, which is now legitimized through a law like this, there will be rural stack of works. I don’t understand what that means, but the conversation of stacks and DPIs has become mainstream through this new act that has been passed.

Many of these reflections are also coming from a place where we, as a part of SAFAR, teach a course at National Law School, Bangalore, on digital technology, society and governance. Many of our conversations sort of revolve around the India stack, which is a payment infrastructure, the application infrastructure, and the identity infrastructure, that has been sort of promoted as the most ingenious thing that the Indian Government has done in decades.

But it’s also only to monetize data and information of common people at a very, very large scale in India but also outside India.

Scott Ferguson

So as we turn to wrap up this conversation, I guess I’d like to hear a little bit about current resistance, if there is any. Clearly you are resisting and clearly your organization is resisting, but I’m kind of curious to hear what’s the nature of resistance to this new law and the undermining of this program?

01;29;45;28 – 01;30;17;12

Khush Vachhrajani

The resistance is definitely there in areas where workers are organized. There have been protests, there have been sit-ins, there have been petitions to bureaucrats or to elected members, there have been district level convenings of workers, there have been long marches of workers in different parts of India. So the resistance is there for sure.

A belief is, that while it may take a bit of time, because of the size and the scale of the country and the complexity of the country, the resistance will start showing up more tangibly when the Panchayats or the local rural unit goes into election or the local district goes into election.

That is one way. The second is also that there are many progressive groups, associations and networks who have started advocacy with progressive state governments on creating an employment guarantee framework that is backed by state governments. How practical would that be considering the fiscal challenges that the state government would face. The attempt is to also try and imagine, collectively, how it can be done as an alternative to what the government is offering and also to build public consciousness around the limitations of this new law that is coming about.

It’s also an attempt at public education. Just yesterday, 12th of February, there was a total strike across the country, not just on the issue of NREGA but also on several other anti-labor, anti-worker legislations that had been passed by the Union government. Close to 300 million workers had come out on the streets to resist and protest, segmented in different parts and not really sort of gathered at one place.

But again, the news is out there and these resistances are going to build up, that is what my understanding is, and I am a bit hopeful, a bit optimistic about the medium and longer future of a program like this in the short run. I think because the program was so systematically dismantled and a counter narrative by the ruling government has already started spreading on the ground that the new program is going to give them 125 days instead of 100 days, there will be a phase where we will see in the short run, for lack of a better word, inaction from people on the ground or resistance of very minor scale, but nothing really tangible in that sense. But our understanding, while working with several movement campaigns has been that the inequality, the precarity, the status of falling household incomes, the debt levels, these are all growing so fast and it is all so acute that a void of a program like NREGA will be felt in very, very tangible terms. It will also be felt in cities, we assume. Women who are staying behind in villages, taking care of farms and cattle and the elderly, the children, in absence of a program which will employ 50% of those women, they really have no choice with their dignified livelihood for they to start migrating to cities in search of employment that is paying them their daily wages. That is yet to be seen.

The macroeconomic impact of the repeal of NREGA will be felt for a very long time. It is again, another piece that I’m sort of building towards. The austerity politics of this government over the last 11 years has now led us to a stage where the debt levels are alarmingly high, incomes are falling and wages have stagnated for the longest period in the history of the last 30 years or even in the history of Indian independence in that sense. So I think it’s all a very terrifying sign for the Indian economy. With public employment and, in all honesty, all of us have been even writing to the government, talking to the government, telling them that, if the aim was to just 125 days of work, that could have been done even within the NREGA form, they could have just amended the law, added 25 days more because the long standing demand for the last ten years have been that if you do 365 days of NREGA you increase the minimum floor wage from 200 to 500 rupees. All these conversations could have been taken into consideration. Looking at where the Indian economy stands today, it is very unfortunate to see that the government’s fiscal policies are very, very stagnant, I have written a couple of more articles actually that highlighted how the government in their public communication, has been constantly grappling with the fact that the industry or the market is not investing enough in the economy.

My whole point is, yes, because the sales are not happening. There is no demand. When there is no demand in a capitalist economy, nobody’s going to invest. There’ll be unemployment, there’ll be stagnation of wages and no matter what tinkering that they do through the monetary policy, it’s not going to work. It has to be done through a very, very strong fiscal policy, through fiscal stimulus, by putting money in people’s pockets, through wages to incomes, through pensions, through scholarships, so that they’re able to then save and spend in the economy.

But it seems that this is a very alien concept to the government in power, which has been taken over by the neoliberal economic thinkers who are caring more about the stock market than the lives and livelihoods of people.

William Saas

So no consumer demand, but a surplus of pictures of cows at work sites or around work sites.

Khush Vachhrajani

Yes.

William Saas

Useless garbage-in, garbage-out, data collected.

Khush Vachhrajani

Absolutely. And just between us, here’s a funny, funny anecdote. We had somebody come into our classroom for the course I mentioned in my earlier response. That person said that the total number of people who are employed in the federal department that oversees these technological interventions and whatever that is coming to them, is a grand total of two.

So it’s a grand total of two people in a ministry looking at the design, the development, the deployment, and what is coming out of these so-called technological master strokes. We know what the future holds. It’s unverifiable information, but I would not be surprised if it is true.

William Saas

Yeah, I can imagine a kind of absurd comedy-like novel written about those two bureaucrats in charge of the 100 million person program.

So your Substack, it’s called “The Lighthouse,” but it’s, also you can find it by going to moneypolitics.substack.com. Money politics, obviously, is a phrase that we’re very invested in and familiar with, and we’ve talked about your article “How to Kill a Golden Goose,” which engages particularly with the work of Jakob Feinig, and moral economists of money and monetary silencing.

Just a last question. On our way out the door, we, at Money on the Left, have been interested in and talking about complementary currencies in the development of alternative payment schemes. I’m ignorant also of the history of complementary currencies in India generally. But do you have any sense of any movement in that direction as a way of sort of filling the holes and addressing the gaps that are being created by the government?

Khush Vachhrajani

Not really. That is something that I’ve been thinking about as well. So I am not really aware of any such efforts. I would love to know more if there are people who are working on things like that. It’s also something that I think about in the times when fiscal federalism is under attack.

What is it that the state governments could do differently to sort of survive and sustain in such a hostile environment from a very dominant political force that is there to last? It’s something that even I need to learn more about. Again, Money on the Left has been something which has really shaped my thinking and it has really pushed my own imagination in the sense of being able to think about ideas like this. I look forward to reading more about works that are happening around unique currencies in the US and some of these other experiments which are happening in Europe, which has come up in both Superstructure and the podcast.

So, yeah, I keep my eyes open for things like these and I’m really, really curious to learn more as to what India can do or Indian states and society can do in terms of alternative currencies and just imagination of monetary design in general.

William Saas

Well, Khush Vachhrajani, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. We’re very, very glad to have had you on Money on the Left. Thank you.

Khush Vachhrajani

Thank you 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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Democratic Finance for New York City’s Budget Dance

By David I. Backer

I’m a professor of education policy and teach classes on public finance. I make it my business to know the government’s business, and I live in Brooklyn, so I’ve been paying close attention to the city’s finances as the new Mamdani administration takes power. In my work, like my recent book on school finance, I try to make the otherwise arcane and hard-to-understand world of municipal finance more comprehensible to the people impacted by it.

Zohran Mamdani recently (and admirably) announced a $12.2 billion city deficit left by the Adams administration, which, in the barbed choreography of the New York City budget dance with New York State, Mamdani revised down to around $6 billion. In the manic moves of that dance numerous dirty details are coming out about the booby traps Adams left Zohran, and the treacherous terrain of the city budget generally. 

I think I found another obstacle-feature of that terrain that I haven’t seen reported elsewhere. Untangling it helps to zoom in on the complexity of this budget process, which everyone cares about and no one understands, with an eye towards transforming the whole nasty apparatus (which, by the way, is why we need participatory budgeting on a mass scale). 

The thing I’m seeing is a big jump in city debt service payments next fiscal year, FY27 and FY28. 

In Andrew Perry’s excellent piece on Mamdani’s first budget, it’s notable that debt service—what the city forks over in its yearly repayments to creditors—is the fourth largest broken out category of NYC public finance:

It’s not a huge expense in raw numbers, but it’s relatively big one in the overall scheme of city budgets because debt service comes to bear on the city’s capability to pay back its creditors, and thus can impact its credit rating, fiscal stability, and ultimately the patina of fiscal responsibility of whoever’s in charge at the moment. So even though it’s 6% of the budget, it’s a big 6%.

When I was reading one of Brad Lander’s last comptroller reports, along with updated data on the city’s debt profile, a graph caught my attention.

On the left side of this graph, you’ve got the debt service the city owes. On the bottom, you have the year it’ll owe that amount. It goes from this year to 2060, when many long term bond obligations get “paid off” (though of course they never really get paid off because US municipal finance has a debt wish). 

But the colors are important too. In blue you’ve got the principal, which is the amount of the city borrowed, and in red you’ve got the interest, which is what the city pays to borrow that money. It’s the price of credit. 

First, before anything else, look at all that red interest we have to pay. Municipal bond interest payments are basically a huge tax that New Yorkers and everyone else in the country don’t really know they’re paying. For every dollar we give the city, using Perry’s chart above, we pay six cents on the city’s debt service. When we look at the red section, we see about three of those cents just go towards the interest on our loans. A lot of rich people make bank on lending to us so we can have a city. 

But that’s not even the pressing issue here.

Second, look at the huge jump in debt service obligations through 2028. It more than doubles from $2 billion to $4.5 billion. What’s happening here? 

According to municipal finance researcher Tom Sgouros, who I talked to about this situation, there could be a number of explanations here, none of which we know because we weren’t putting this debt service schedule together. All those interest payments come on debt with different interest rates, so maybe the comptroller’s office, which, in this case, was under Brad Lander, they prioritized paying higher interest debt first. There could have been a plan to defease (moving it into a separate fund, sort of like refinancing and reinvesting to get rid of it before paying it off) some debt earlier rather than later. 

What we know is that there’ll be a period of lower payments, according to this debt service schedule, after which those payments will jump up again by double. And its not just another city expense, it’s the repayment of loans taken out to finance everything else in the city. 

One conspiratorial interpretation: Perry notes a practice called “surplus roll” where “the City dispenses its surplus by prepaying subsequent year expenses… In fiscal year 2025, for instance, the City accrued a $3.8 billion surplus. It booked this as 2025 spending in the form of prepaying spending liabilities in fiscal year 2026.”

So one theory is that the Adams administration scheduled a certain amount of 2026’s debt on Zohran’s behalf without asking him first, shouldering Zohran with the payments with a big jump in 2028, threatening Mamdani’s spending power. It could be the surplus roll because these numbers above are in the Q1 2026 debt profile. When we look at the Q4 2025 we don’t see that same jump.

And yet, it might not be a surplus roll. It might be the non-malign planning to pay certain debt off at certain times, innocent defeasing. It might not be political at all. To everyone except the people working for Mark Levine, the new Comptroller, and maybe a handful of others, the process is opaque. 

All this gives you a sense of what the Mamdani administration will actually be dealing with in terms of its debt needs. It looks to me like the debt service will jump up dramatically whether that’s due to a possible surplus roll by the Adams administration or other maneuvers. As it stands, Mamdani will have to pay more in debt service during two years of his time in office to get less revenue to the diverse working class he’s promised to serve. 

All this also broaches the question of what to do about this issue of nagging debt service. There’s the short-term process of the city’s Tin Cup Day where the mayor goes to ask for money. But we know that Mamdani and company want to challenge these old dynamics. Why not take up some medium-term measures, and maybe champion longer-term transformations, that make this arcane debt service stuff a relic of the past?

The Mamdani administration, drawing from this publication’s framework of Democratic Public Finance, could use this as an opportunity to spell out a radical alternative to the present system. They could, for example, renew support for a city-owned non-profit public bank which, like the Bank of North Dakota (built by prairie socialists in the early 20th century), can buy NYC munis and deposit the interest back into the city’s general fund. 

The result would begin to drastically decrease the amount the city owes in interest payments. Along the way, Mamdani could call for a permanent MLF at the Fed that provides zero (or next-to-zero) interest rate financing. More radically still, he can also argue that Congress should extend credit creation powers directly to states and municipalities, a long term goal that would force the public to debate and think differently about municipal finance. 

These are broad, sweeping proposals. Are there things that the administration and their allied coalitions can put in place in the next couple years to achieve local versions of the same interventions, working towards transformation? I’ve been keeping a running list of fun brainstormy revenue ideas and, by way of open-ended conclusion, offer them here for readers’ perusal. My specialty is education finance, so the proposals are skewed towards education, but they could be adapted for other arenas of municipal finance as well.

  1. Issue taxable bonds to friendly foreign government entities with our values (the governments Bernie always mentions): reaching deals with Canadian pension funds, Scandinavian sovereign wealth funds, etc.
  2. Strengthening and integrating the Education Construction Fund to borrow for combined housing and schools financing, synthesizing borrowing capacity of the New York City Transitional Finance Authority with the ECF. There could be savings when staggering borrowing between both of them. (Combine this option with (1) to issue the taxable bonds through here.) The last bond ECF issued was in 2021 and apparently there isn’t good coordination between the Panel for Education Policy and ECF.
  3. A municipal minibond program that reaches out to communities to invest in their specific schools, matching monies with citizen participation. This would be a more socialist version of Berkeley’s proposal.
  4. Call NYC’s Build America Bonds on the grounds of extreme circumstances like the University of California system and the Maryland Transit Authority and potentially save hundreds of millions.
  5. Create a city bank, a nonprofit corporate entity specifically, and restrict public monies to deposits in non-profit cooperative entities, such as the bevy of diverse community development financing institutions (CDFIs) throughout the city, put the city’s deposits there, create public bank accounts where the residents are voting members and create a public lender (hat tip to Whitney Toussaint for this idea). Save on borrowing costs to big banks. Then create investment funds for middle income supporters to move their savings/retirement, get in on the dash for retirement investment with a public option.
  6. Design an online game for NYC that is very low cost and super fun, less than a dollar. Use message boards and DMs for announcements and citywide municipal discussion (towards mass participatory budgeting potentially).
  7. Permit Community Education Councils to create public digital currencies that residents of CECs can purchase and sell for educational services, whose revenues go directly to the CEC budgets, managed by a rotating committee of school community members. 
  8. Penny sales tax for specific projects through referendum vote (ESPLOST), like they do in Georgia. It’s a good political move: pay a penny more for your kids’ schools, eg.
  9. Create a regional borrowing authority where districts around NYC deposit reserves and lend to one another at lower rates.
  10. Pool pre-k afterschool tuition revenues in a single municipal account, invest the funds, and supplement the program’s funding with interest thrown off by the account. Ask pre-k centers to deposit with the county which then invests the funds.
  11. A city-run secondary market for used stuff that you’d put out in the street: like a public Facebook marketplace that takes a few cents from transactions or posting fees that go right into specified city programs.
  12. Allow wealthy residents to participate in auctions where they bid to pay one-time amounts to delete debt outstanding from certain funds instead of regular tax filings, like Building Aid Revenue Bond debt, thereby paying down that debt and creating borrowing capacity, while putting the rich in a weird position. Make it public and fun, like a kind of date auction, but it’s a debt auction. This wouldn’t be a secondary market trading on the debt itself but rather a traditional auction, with the rich outbidding one another to pay off city debt. (Maybe via some kind of low cost fun items of city lore, like subway tokens.)
  13. Create a municipal digital currency for the city that every resident receives a certain amount of, pegged at being worth more than the dollar (a Knick or Met could be the name). For activities the federal government undertakes in the city that threatens the city’s home rule charter, the Feds must pay a tax or purchase the currency. Locally owned and worker-owned businesses receive exemptions from the currency’s tax.
  14. Create a Parent-Teacher Association account where all PTA money is deposited and invested. The interest on the account is used to finance schools whose PTAs don’t have as much money as other PTAs.
  15. Politicize the discount rate set for city pension contributions, holding listening sessions and public events about whether to set the rate higher (which could save hundreds of millions of dollars, even if raised by 25 basis points). Make this about the people’s investment rather than investors. Then politicize the discount rates used to set repayment terms on city issued bonds, deliberating publicly on whether there’s savings there.
  16. Work with the New York Green Bank to package up green projects around the city, standardize their contracts, and mobilize private investment towards the projects further. Have them create a special instrument for city pension funds to purchase in large sizes. 
  17. Work with the NYCEEC (the New York City Green Bank) to expand investment projects across state lines, particularly to cities in red states suffering from Trump-induced disinvestment in green projects (try to work with rural communities too to build solidarity there). To avoid the risk of NYC profiting off of others’ misery, the city could follow the lead of the Yugoslavian approach to international development as per the Non-aligned Movement and structure the loans across state lines with solidarity as a framework for the loan terms.
  18. Pass a law through city council that gives city pensions first bidding rights in competitive sales of city bonds, even before private banks, lowering the underwriters discount cost to the city.
  19. Sell taxable bonds with the explicit purpose of arbitraging revenues.
  20. Coordinate school district bond sales around the state and pool them together into a loan product for the green banks to sell for green projects. Provide technical services through the School Construction Authority for districts around New York State to green their infrastructure.
  21. Do a deal with a dollar pizza network. Designate certain spots as health areas and provide city subsidies for taking care of unhoused sick and hungry people. The contract has to stipulate that the city gets a percentage of the returns, like a big investor, then leak that info to private equity funds to push investment in the dollar pizza network. Flush with more cash, get the network to build bigger spaces. Make the dollar pizza network a meme stock that takes on the financial elite on Reddit to flood it with cash.
  22. Make every road a toll road for federal agents driving in the city using license image cameras. 

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Reclaiming the Public Interest: Cities Should Sell Municipal Bonds to Their Own Public Banks

By Tyler Suksawat & Scott Ferguson

Editor’s Note: The following essay, originally published on February 22, 2026, offers a foundational theoretical framework for what has since been concretized as The Seattle Loop. The Seattle Loop is a fiscal strategy that utilizes municipal banking to purchase city debt, “looping” interest payments back into public provisions like social housing and green jobs. While this piece was written prior to our specific pivot toward the Seattle-based organizing effort, it articulates the core logic of public credit and municipal finance that underpins the current project.

What chance do local governments have in fighting authoritarian austerity, especially when they are left to rely on feckless legislators at the state and federal levels who refuse to push back? Right now, we see austerity budgets appearing across every institution and major employer in the U.S. If the federal government continues to sabotage municipalities, and the state governments (even in liberal states) are proposing cuts-only budgets, then what hope do cities have? In truth, there are several meaningful alternatives to the present order, particularly if we follow the lead of what Money on the Left calls Democratic Public Finance. We only need to get creative about local monetary design. 

Extending money creation powers from the federal level directly to local governments remains an urgent political project. In the meantime, however, we propose that a powerful public option for municipal finance exists at the intersection between bond issuance and public banking. What if a city established a public bank and that public bank regularly purchased the city’s debt? Such a mechanism would liberate the city’s munis from private bond markets and punishing rating agencies, while expanding the city’s fiscal capacity beyond projected tax revenues. 

To understand why this works, we must discard a pervasive myth: banks do not lend deposits. They create credit “endogenously” through acts of authorization. Banks certainly have to meet liquidity and reserve requirements. However, meeting such requirements is a separate matter from crediting operations, which are legally enabled and protected by the Federal Reserve. A bank’s crediting operations do not recycle a limited pool of pre-existing investor funds. They actively expand the amount of total credit that is presently available. 

Therefore, when a public bank purchases its own city’s municipal debt, the result is not a closed loop in which a finite amount of money is passed back and forth. Because the public bank actively generates money to purchase the debt, the operation dramatically enlarges the city’s fiscal space. In such an arrangement, the municipal government acquires funds in the short term to meet community needs. The public bank grows its holdings by receiving interest payments from the city. The loops, then, are not redundant; they are kinetic. Far from an inert circuit, a public bank that purchases city debt is a dynamic design that defies the artificial gravity of austerity.

Most importantly, this arrangement halts the depletion of fiscal capacity by ensuring that debt service payments remain on the city’s own public ledger. Unlike with the private bond market, the public bank would be legally required to deposit earned interest into the city’s general fund. By cutting out the rentiers, the city thus transforms a parasitic financial drain into a regenerative cycle, guaranteeing that public interest is no longer just a yield for private financiers, but a shared benefit in the public interest.

We do not have to look far for a successful precedent. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) already acts as the depository for all state taxes, fines, and fees. While BND operates more conservatively than the model we propose—acting primarily as a registrar and facilitator rather than a direct purchaser of munis—it still remits its profits to the state’s general fund. In 2023 alone, the bank posted profits of $192.7 million. To put that in perspective, this figure greatly exceeds the $115 million in annual revenue projected for Washington State’s highly contested wealth tax proposal. For states like Washington, which rely heavily on regressive property tax levies to pay for almost everything, the BND model offers a wealth of untapped potential.

While the BND focuses primarily on state and municipal operations, if a new generation of public banks were chartered to provide consumer financial services alongside municipal finance, the benefits would be exponential. Private retail banks routinely generate massive profit margins of 15% to 30% through rapacious fees and predatory lending. Crucially, a public bank would not simply transfer this rentier model to the public sector. By functioning as a true public utility, it would offer high-quality, low-cost financial services instead. Public banks should provide an affordable, non-predatory alternative for working people. Even without exorbitant fees, however, it would still generate a robust and ethical source of revenue to be invested directly back into the community—funding the very policies, programs, and budgets voted on by the people the bank serves.

To realize this vision, establishing democratically accountable public banks—whether at the municipal or state level—must become a top political and legislative priority. Chartered as public utilities rather than profit-seeking enterprises, these institutions would be governed by public appointees and remain 100% accountable to city halls, county commissions, or state legislatures. By legally mandating that all net earnings (derived from interest and fees) be deposited back into the government’s general fund, municipalities can organically grow their revenues over time without continuously hiking taxes. As an added democratic benefit, their daily operations would be entirely transparent, with balance sheets published for the public.

The practical strength of this arrangement lies in the specific mechanics of the yield. With the federal funds rate currently sitting at a target range of 3.50% to 3.75%, a municipality could intentionally set its internal bond yields just above this floor. Because the public bank holds the debt, the spread guarantees a steady stream of revenue for the public ledger. Furthermore, by indexing the yield to the rate of inflation, the city constructs a resilient financial instrument in the face of unpredictable circumstances. Should an emergency or unforeseen project cost require rapid liquidity beyond the public bank’s immediate capacity, this competitive yield would generate intense demand from the private sector to hold the city’s munis—effectively subordinating private capital to the public interest.

Unlocking a municipality’s latent ability to sell bonds directly to its own public bank reveals a startling truth: the primary limits on local finance are not economic, but political. The constraints cities currently face are mostly self-imposed regulations—arbitrary debt ceilings or rules enforced by oversight boards captured by private banking interests. While every municipality will navigate different statutory limits on bond issuance, we can begin by maxing out current legal capacities and organizing to expand those horizons later. 

Consider the political implications for building local public capacity. Lately, wealth taxes have dominated local discussions around budget expansion. While taxing the rich remains a vital tool for combating economic inequality and checking the anti-democratic power of concentrated wealth, relying on taxation as the sole lifeline for municipal survival is politically precarious. A public bank shifts this paradigm. By carefully managing the yields and maturities on internally held municipal bonds, a city can steadily expand its general fund. Wealth taxes would no longer be a desperate necessity for basic funding, but rather one tool among many. 

Instead of begging for scraps from state legislatures or private bond markets, local governments can directly create the capacity to care for their communities. Once we are willing to get creative with Democratic Public Finance, we see that the blueprint is already here. We only need the political will to use it, guaranteeing that every local dollar created is an investment in the public interest. 

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Defending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with Tyler Creighton

In this episode, we speak with Tyler Creighton about the ongoing struggle to save the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from defunding and closure at the hands of Russell Vought in the second Trump Administration. Creighton is a lawyer at the CFPB and a member of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), Chapter 335. Before joining the CFPB, Creighton clerked for the Massachusetts Appeals Court and, prior to that, he was an organizer for pro-democracy reforms at Common Cause and ReThink Media. We talk with Creighton about life at the CFPB under the leadership of Vought, central architect of the notorious Project 2025 document and avowed opponent of the agency he now directs. 

During our conversation, Creighton details how, in spite of Vought’s attempts to defund and close the agency, the CFPB continues to survive. In Creighton’s telling, the agency’s endurance owes in no small part to the continuous labor actions undertaken by the NTEU and its members. In February 2025, for example, the union sued the Trump Administration, securing an injunction against Vought’s efforts to close the agency. (Read the judge’s extraordinary Memorandum Opinion here.) Then, in late December, a federal district court judge ruled that the Trump administration must continue to fund the CFPB through the Federal Reserve, contradicting Vought’s absurd claim that the CFPB can no longer seek financing from the Fed because the nation’s Central Bank is operating at a loss.

Despite the NTEU’s string of successes, the fate of the CFPB still remains to be determined. The good news, however, is that there are ways that you can support the bureau as it rounds into its second year of the second Trump Administration. Learn more about the fight to save the CFPB from the CFPB Union website. Follow and share news from the NTEU account on Bluesky. Join the union’s public demonstrations, if you live near or find yourself visiting Washington D.C. You can also help fund the NTEU’s activities by purchasing any number of cheeky items in their online merchandise shop. 

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

Tyler Creighton, welcome to Money on the Left.

Tyler Creighton

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Billy Saas

It is a pleasure to have you. We are looking to talk to you about a lot of things. You work principally now as a lawyer with the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Could you just maybe kick us off by telling us a little bit about what that’s like now in January of 2026?

Tyler Creighton

Yeah. The past year at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been just a little bit different than my prior few years at the CFPB. I will say, I am an attorney at the CFPB. I’m here just talking in my own personal capacity. Nothing I say can be attributed to the bureau, representing my public sector union: the National Treasurer Employees Union.

But, yeah, it’s been an interesting year. I joined the bureau in 2022, so I’m actually a relatively new employee compared to a lot of other people that have been there since the start. When Trump got elected, it was a little unclear exactly what was going to happen to the CFPB.

It’s kind of been a little bit of a political lightning rod for its entire existence since 2011. But we didn’t really know what to expect. Oddly, we kind of flew under the radar for the first month. Our former director who had been appointed by President Biden, Rohit Chopra, stayed on until the end of January, and into the first week of February before he was finally fired by the president.

That’s when everything really changed. Trump appointed the architect of Project 2025, Russel Vought, as our acting director. Within days of him being appointed, he had closed down all of our office buildings and kicked everybody out and had sent an all staff email saying, “stop performing any work task, whatsoever.”

Everything just kind of came to a crashing halt and a lot has happened since then. They have been trying to close us down since that first week in February and, although they have really mucked around with the operations of the bureau – despite the best efforts – it is still standing.

I think this is largely in part due to a lot of dedicated workers at the bureau who have been organizing through our union and using litigation to keep the bureau alive as Congress intended.

Scott Ferguson

Can you tell us a little bit about just your own personal history? How did you come to the CFPB? You’re a lawyer. What’s your background? What’s your specialty? What do you do at the CFPB in particular?

Tyler Creighton

Yeah. So, I’m actually a relatively new lawyer. I graduated law school in 2021 and I clerked for a year on the Massachusetts appeals court, and then went directly from there to the CFPB in 2022. I work in our Office of Supervision. I’ve primarily focused on the mortgage market, although I’ve also done some work on student loans and auto loans.

I think a lot of people don’t really know what “supervision” means at the CFPB or “supervision” across other financial regulators. But, at the CFPB, in terms of compliance, we kind of have our enforcement division, which is, I think, what people generally think of when they think of regulators. These are the folks that are running investigations and suing bad actors when they find potential legal violations.

That’s all very public. These lawsuits will be on the public docket and you can read the complaint and you can see all the details. Supervision is very different. It is a confidential process. This is an authority that was granted to us by Congress and the Dodd-Frank act, which established the CFPB and gives us authority to conduct periodic examinations of certain financial companies that are under our authority.

What that means is we request a bunch of information and documents from an institution, and then we have teams of expert examiners who are looking at the information and making sure that policies and procedures of the companies and their functions are all complying with our various federal statutes and regulations. If we identify any problems, we try to resolve the issues in a collaborative process with the companies.

It all remains confidential. For the most part, everything is kind of resolved in that confidential space. It only kind of comes out later if companies are disagreeing with our assessments, or it seems like the conduct is particularly egregious or intentional in which case the issue might end up getting into the enforcement side and then leading to litigation.

I’ve been doing that work since 2022. Unfortunately, as public reports show, that work has more or less not existed since February of 2025. Just hoping that we can kind of get back to actually supervising the companies that Congress intended us to.

Billy Saas

And so that’s just a function of companies, I guess. What side is that lack of continued supervision activity most attributable to. Is that a function of the top down directives from Russ Vought, or is it companies not feeling like they need to participate any longer? Can you talk to us a little bit more about that?

Tyler Creighton

It is directly attributable to Russ Vought stop work order in February that, for all intents and purposes, really hasn’t fully disappeared or really been rescinded.

Scott Ferguson

So what determines what is actionable work versus what must be stopped?

Tyler Creighton

You know, we are civil servants. We don’t go off and sort of just do our own thing. We are directed by political leadership on what our priorities are and what the work is. We have not been authorized or directed to do the supervision work that we had previously been done.

Billy Saas

It’s similar on the enforcement side, I would presume as well.

Tyler Creighton

Yes. I’m not on the enforcement side, but yes, I think public reporting shows that there isn’t enforcement going on. Investigations are not continuing. And you’ve seen publicly that a lot of open litigation has either been dismissed or settled, including a number of open consent orders that companies and the CFPB had already reached and had not yet expired have been terminated prior to the expiration date in the consent order.

Scott Ferguson

We’ve started to talk about the division of labor and the division of the institution a bit. But I was wondering, to the best of your ability, I know you haven’t been there from the beginning, but can you give us a little more detailed sense of when the CFPB arises? Under what circumstances? The specific things it was tasked to do and what it has been doing ever since.

Tyler Creighton

Yeah. So, the sort of neat and tidy story of the CFPB’s founding is that it’s really a product of the subprime mortgage mortgage crisis that triggered the 2008 global financial crisis and then the Great Recession that followed, which, as many people remember, there was kind of rampant fraud in the mortgage markets.

There was a lot of predatory lending that led people to default on their mortgage and then massive foreclosure crisis. And in the wake of that, or really in the in the midst of it, Senator Elizabeth Warren, but then-law professor Elizabeth Warren, wrote a couple of journal articles in like 2007, 2008, that talked about or envisioned a new federal agency that would really be charged principally or entirely with regulating consumer financial products with the eyes of the consumer in mind or the benefits of the consumer in mind.

She kind of analogized, saying “we have agencies to stop unsafe toys and toasters. But we don’t really have that for financial products.” And so she envisioned this agency as kind of being analogous to some agencies that already existed. Those articles resulted in Congress passing the Dodd-Frank act in 2010, which is one of then President Obama and the newly elected Democratic majorities in Congress first major bills.

The idea there was to essentially consolidate a bunch of split and overlapping authorities that are then split across a bunch of agencies and consolidate that all into a single agency that could take a more holistic and dedicated approach with consumers that would be front and center. Then it also added some  new authorities as well.

At this point, I already talked about the enforcement and supervision aspects of the bureau. There’s also the consumer complaint database, which some listeners might have used before. I think there’s been like 5 million consumers who have filed a complaint since 2011 when that started. That’s been a tremendous tool to quickly resolve individual problems between consumers and companies where previously, maybe the company didn’t feel like they needed to do anything, but now there’s kind of this public record out there when consumers are complaining and they feel more compelled. Then, at the bureau, there’s also a lot of market research that folks are doing to identify potential risks and hazards and new products, new financial markets. Then there’s a lot of consumer education resources that the bureau puts out.

In my mind, some of the clearest, concise information on what you should be thinking about when you’re getting a mortgage. Like, here’s step one here, step two… I was working at the bureau at the time, I think it was right before I started working there and was buying my first home and was just like all over the website using the resources, which have been, I think, a huge help for people.

It’s not just mortgages, it’s auto loans, or if you have problems with credit reporting, just a ton of great information.

Scott Ferguson

Is that all still up?

Tyler Creighton

It is all still up. Yeah. I definitely was worried in the early days about a lot of that stuff going away in some way. 

Scott Ferguson

It’s not too woke.

Tyler Creighton

Yeah, it’s practical enough. We haven’t gotten into a lot of the litigation that has been going on, but there is an injunction that’s still in place that is preventing the kind of full shutdown and wrap up of the bureau.

I don’t know to what extent that injunction is planning on keeping up a lot of these existing resources that the bureau has put together over the years.

Scott Ferguson

Can you tell us a little bit more about how the consumer complaint database works? I mean, I’ve never used it, so I have no idea. Is it like a Yelp review? You can just like, have an account log on or is it a little more formal? Do you need a lawyer or something like that?

Tyler Creighton

I don’t know if it’s quite Yelp-review status, but it’s closer to that than like a formal thing where you need to write out a very legalese complaint. It’s very accessible. You can log in and you put the company that you have issue with, you write a narrative about what happened and on the public facing side, if you put in any personally identifiable information that will not appear on the public side of the consumer complaint database, but other people can see what you wrote about, even if they’re just like your neighbor or whatever. There is a rule in Dodd-Frank that the companies have to provide a response.

It doesn’t necessarily say it’s got to be a substantive response or it has to rectify or agree with the consumer. I mean, the consumer can be potentially wrong, but they have to provide a response. By and large, if the consumer has raised a legitimate issue, you look at the company response and the company will have provided some kind of remedy, whether it’s erasing a charge on the person’s credit card that shouldn’t have been there or fixing some inaccurate information on the consumer’s credit report or whatever it is.

Oftentimes the complaint, if it’s legitimate, will result in some kind of action that benefits the consumer. On the bureau side, all of those complaints are taken into account when you’re thinking about enforcement and supervision. Where’s the risk? Sort of like an early kind of warning system to the regulators of where there’s risk, where there’s problems, because obviously the consumers are on the front lines. They know where the issues are and so it’s a great resource for the CFPB to figure out where to dedicate finite resources.

Scott Ferguson

Obviously, the CFPB has a history of contestation around it. This is maybe the most life threatening, so to speak, battle that the institution has faced thus far. It’s not like the first Trump administration was very happy about this institution either. So I was curious if you have a sense of the history of largely Republican challenges before this particular present moment.

I know from doing a little bit of research that there was a court case that had to do with how the director was appointed and the reasons that the director could be removed. So any of this that you can speak to, to just contextualize what’s going on now.

00;17;36;10 – 00;18;08;14

Tyler Creighton

Yeah. There’s a lot of history there. You know, it’s no secret that most politicians on the right and Wall Street banks have not been the biggest fan of the CFPB, and have tried various ways to reform it or get rid of it in whole. There have been two very high profile Supreme Court cases challenging aspects of the CFPB structure.

The first one, which you mentioned, was about the ability of the president to fire at will the director of the agency. If folks been following any of the legal cases going on in the current era, this will be very familiar to people, because we have Supreme Court cases about this very issue with regard to the FTC commissioners (Federal Trade Commission) and also potentially down the road, the Federal Reserve, and the ability of the independence of the fed and whether or not the president can can get rid of fed chairs.

So anyway, back in, I think it was in 2019, there was a challenge to the provision of Dodd-Frank, which said that the director could only be removed for cause. That was challenged. And the Supreme Court struck down that provision. Since that time, the director has been essentially removable at will by the president.

Since that happened, the presidents have used that power. So, when Joe Biden came in 2021, he used it to get rid of the existing director who had been appointed by Trump during his first term. Then when Trump came in in 2025, he used it to get rid of Chopra, Biden’s director.

The kind of more existential case was in 2024. That one challenged the constitutionality of the CFPB funding structure, or funding mechanism. We are a little bit distinct, not entirely unique, but different from a lot of other federal agencies and that we are not part of the Congress’s annual appropriations process. So, you know, all this talk of government shutdown last year, and currently they are trying to get the funding bills together so we don’t go into another shutdown at the end of January here, but the CFPB is actually not part of that. We have a dedicated funding mechanism. Where the director is required to request money from the Federal Reserve who gets money from interest payments and fees, paid by their member banks.

Our directors are required to request money from the fed to carry out our functions. Congress has tapped the total amount of money that we can request, but that funding is just always there. It doesn’t require Congress to pass a new bill each year saying like, this is how much money is available for the CFPB.

The constitutionality of that mechanism was challenged by an industry trade group. Ultimately they lost pretty bigly, in terms of our president, and I forget the exact breakdown, but it was like 7-2 or 8-1 in terms of the breakdown of the Supreme Court justices. They were not able to convince many of the justices, including some that are very far on the right and sympathetic to these types of arguments, that the mechanism was unconstitutional.

We survived that. Then, obviously, more recently we’ve come under the attack of just trying to shut down the whole place by pure legal fiat. Congress hasn’t repealed the agency or anything, but we’re just going to try to shut it down because we want to.

Billy Saas

Well, thanks for that. It brings us nice and up to date. There’s more that we can say about those current court cases. And I want to talk about the union’s efforts, and advancing those cases, and defending the CFPB from those attacks. I want to step back just a little bit.

We mentioned the complaints division or the complaints process that consumers previously had available through the CFPB. In addition to the enforcement supervision, for the complaints, I understand that those would sort of become the grounds for action. Is that correct? Like, on behalf of enforcement or from the CFPB, there could be efforts taken to address those complaints.

Tyler Creighton

Yeah. I mean, so obviously we have finite resources over a rollover of these massive markets with hundreds of hundreds of players, and we have to take in whatever information we can to help focus where we’re going to use those resources. So complaints are one of many different data streams, whether it’s enforcement or people in supervision, that we are using to help identify which companies we should be looking at, which practices we should be looking at.

Sometimes what you get with the complaints is maybe that individual consumer’s complaint was rectified. So they were charged an illegal late fee on their mortgage and the company said, “Okay, great. Yes, we did that. Sorry. We will credit your account,” but they don’t really say anything about if this affects other people or is this a one-off thing?

Was it a systemic problem? You don’t necessarily get that information. The other divisions can kind of use, “oh, there’s this one consumer, maybe there was a couple,” and it sort of indicates, okay, maybe this is more a systemic problem that requires additional looking into and ensuring that it wasn’t just this one consumer who got their issue rectified, but actually all of the impacted consumers got the issue rectified.

Billy Saas

Yeah. So in any case, it’s a line of communication between everyday citizens, consumers, and the government. That’s a highly valuable thing. I wonder if you could say something about where we’re at now with the stop work order and, it is my understanding that the closest equivalent to the complaint line is like individual state attorneys general, right?

If there are bad actors in the financial sector, and maybe you can tell me if there are others, the most charitable reading of the perspective on the argument for closing the CFPB would be like, “there are already enforcement mechanisms in place at the state level.” What exists and maybe help us see through that argument.

Tyler Creighton

Yeah. The consumer complaint database is a very, very powerful tool. I highly recommend that consumers continue to use it even in this time, because I think companies are continuing to respond to it despite the CFPB’s kind of beleaguered status at the moment.

In terms of other regulators out there, if the CFPB’s current trajectory continues and it is not operating at anything close to what it was doing in 2024 and before that, the states will step in to a certain degree. But the attorney general’s offices are already overtaxed on other things.

They also are only responsible for the actions and the residents of their own state. So, you know, if the AG of Massachusetts brings a case because they’ve noticed that some mortgage lender is selling predatory loans, that’s not necessarily going to help the person that is in Mississippi that is also getting predatory loans from the same provider.

It creates this real patchwork where, depending on where you live in the country, you’re going to be given more or less protection from these companies. The bureau has this kind of national outlook and has a lot more resources in terms of lawyers, but we also have economists and people that are familiar with the market and data technologists and all these other people that a lot of state regulators don’t really have. It really helps to identify these new products that are complicated. It’s not necessarily obvious how they work or how they might be harming consumers. I think that’s been really important to have at the CFPB. There’s been a lot of innovation in financial services. And then also, a lot of these states have just come to rely on the CFPB expertise and that they’re going to be there.

So, yeah, again, they’ll adapt, but I think, in the end, consumers will be the ones paying the price.

Billy Saas

If the CFPB continues down the way it’s going, they’re probably not going to rechannel that direct fed funding to the individual states attorney generals.

Tyler Creighton

No. Yeah. Probably not, probably not.

Billy Saas

And so those resources go away and I think it would increase the burden on those states individually, who are, under the current regime, limited to tax revenue and local politics. 

Tyler Creighton

This just reminds me of how kind of nonsensical getting rid of the CFPB is. You know, it all started when Elon Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) folks came in trying to eliminate fraud and waste, or purportedly trying to eliminate fraud and waste. The truth is that, at the CFPB, prior to the current administration, we had returned something like $21 billion or more to consumers through our efforts.

If you break that down in terms of how much money is going back to consumers versus how much money is going to pay for the CFPB’s operating cost, it’s like almost a $3 return on investment for every dollar that goes to the bureau is going to result in nearly $3 going back out to consumers, because we’ve identified some illegal practice and gotten refunds.

So, there’s obviously bloat in the government, and probably some bloat at the CFPB, but like, by and large, the consumers and Americans are benefiting greatly from the relatively small amount of money that was going to the Bureau to keep it running.

Scott Ferguson

So I’m chomping at the bit to hear the story of the DOGE occupation of this. But before we do, I guess I wanted to ask one more preliminary question. I have not studied this document closely, maybe I should have, but Project 2025, which is Vought’s little brainchild. As far as I’m aware, it includes language about what the intention of this administration was when it came to the CFPB. Were people in the agency reading Project 2025 and sort of like, I don’t know, bracing themselves for this or strategizing or not really.

Tyler Creighton

I don’t remember that so much. I mean, there were probably some conversations here or there of people who had taken a peek. I mean, honestly, I don’t. I don’t know if you have looked at it recently, but it’s pretty sparse on the CFPB. There’s not a lot of meat on the bones there. I mean, it kind of gestured that, “Oh, yeah, we should just get rid of this whole thing,” but then it ultimately has like a few bullets that are much less than that. It seems fixated on a completely fabricated idea. I honestly don’t even know where they got this idea from. The civil penalties fund, which is the fund that the bureau operates when we do enforcement litigation and the companies have to pay some kind of penalty to us, and then that gets redistributed back out to consumers.

They have this completely fabricated idea that the penalty fund was just the slush fund for like liberal advocacy groups. That’s like the main thing that it’s focused on in the Project 2025 document. Honestly, I just don’t even know where that comes from. It sounded like there was a minimal amount of consumer education that’s been funded through the penalty fund, absolutely tiny compared to the amount of overall money.

Maybe that went to some groups that are involved in that consumer education. But like to say that it’s just this slush fund for liberal groups and that’s the reason why we got to get rid of the whole thing, it just struck me as really grasping at straws there. 

I don’t think we talked about it too much, but there was a lot of waiting. Elon and company have been talking about taking the chainsaw to the government, and it was unclear what was going to happen because a lot of people at the bureau have been there since close to the start.

They went through Trump one. They thought, incorrectly – now we’ve all learned – that it wouldn’t be something similar to Trump one in that, things changed, things slowed down a little bit, but after some initial kind of bumpy-ness that happens with any change over administration, from what I’ve understood, I wasn’t there so I can’t speak to it from personal experience, but like they were doing similar work to what they had been doing before. Priorities changed a little bit. Maybe they weren’t using some legal theories that they had been using before. But, you know, they were doing good work. I think people kind of thought that something similar would happen, and were obviously proven wrong by that.

But, I think in those first couple of months after the election, while we waited to see what was going to happen, that I think that was sort of the optimistic take.

Scott Ferguson

So walk us through this early timeline of Musk and DOGE first. Is that prior to Vought?

Tyler Creighton

It’s concurrent, really. You’ll have to forgive me a little bit because at this point, it’s been almost a year and a lot of this was like moving quickly. I wasn’t personally one of the people who was in the building when this was all kind of going down. Musk and his folks have been infiltrating other agencies in the lead up to us.

So we had kind of already seen the USAID (United States Agency for International Development) playbook: go in there, take control of all of the computer and data systems and then just start quickly closing up shop.

The exact tick tock of this was, I think it was January 31st or February 1st, Cobra gets fired. Initially, Trump appoints Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, as acting director. But on the president’s first day, he sends a message to all staff with six bullet points or something like that, of the work that should stop including enforcement, oddly not supervision.

So we continued to do that.

Scott Ferguson

Is that because he didn’t know about it?

Tyler Creighton

That’s my speculation. But I don’t know for sure. So we continued and then, by the end of that first week of February, the first DOGE people started accessing the building, which is right across the street from the White House in DC. Then Trump appointed Vought right at the end of the week.

He sent out an email saying, “you can’t come into the building anymore,” and then on that following Monday sent an email saying much more explicit things, expanding on the six bulleted things that Bessent said we weren’t allowed to do and just said, “don’t perform any work whatsoever.” Then it was really in that first week under Vought when things were moving very, very quickly, we had been kicked out the building and told not to work.

The union actually organized a very quick action at the building, like that, I think even before it was officially closed. So folks were picketing out front and then Vought used that picketing as the pretext for closing the building, saying that, “my employees feel unsafe coming to the building because a bunch of folks are chanting and holding signs…”

Scott Ferguson

Who are also employees.

Tyler Creighton

Who are also employees, yeah, exactly. In that preceding week – this all kind of later comes out in litigation, we were not totally privy to it at the time – but basically there starts being leaks to members of the union that folks in H.R. are racing to fire everybody, to just completely axe the place in the same way that they did with USAID. Running just exactly the same playbook.

So as that information is trickling out through union members and colleagues, we are getting legal counsel through our national union to figure out what to do about that. They file a lawsuit very, very quickly in that first week and are able to get a temporary restraining order by that Friday immediately following Vought’s appointment and it later comes out when we are arguing for a preliminary injunction. A temporary restraining order is very temporary and so we’re filing for a preliminary injunction, which would hopefully stop firings, stop the shutdown going while the litigation that our union had filed precedes. While we are gathering evidence, while our attorneys are gathering evidence for that preliminary injunction, we get all of the details about what was happening in that first week. I encourage people, if you have a minute to go look at the district court’s opinion when the chief finally granted the pulmonary injunction, that’s just like documenting all of the emails and the meetings and everything that’s happening. They are just absolutely racing to fire 1700 people. It’s up until like the moment on late Friday, there are attorneys in court with the DOJ trying to argue for this temporary restraining order. H.R. is getting emails that there’s this court proceeding happening right now, and they’re like, “no, just get it done. Get the firings out the door, like we need to get them done before the court acts.” It’s like Friday afternoon. They’re trying to race to get them out. The court just got it under the wire to get the temporary restraining order in place before everybody at the agency was fired.

Scott Ferguson

Can I ask a potentially sensitive question which you may not be able to answer, but are the HR folks, they’re people in the agency who do HR? So they’re just sort of following instructions in doing all this?

Tyler Creighton

Yeah. So I mean, DOGE was a small-ish operation. They needed actual people who had expertise and some experience actually working in government and know how things work to effectuate what they wanted to do. So in the government, we have these things called reductions in force, which are effectively like mass layoffs when an agency director wants to change priorities or Congress has cut funding again. None of that happened here.

But like, they were trying to use these reduction in forces to get rid of everybody. They’re using the H.R. people within the CFPB to get that done. You can look at the litigation. A number of people filed anonymous declarations and actually then testified in court about what was going on in these meetings that they were being brought into about, where they were just trying to quickly fire everybody before the court was able to get the restraining order done.

And actually, I forgot an important detail with some of my fellow employees who were actually fired during that first week, because it was horrendous and more uncertain for them. But, yeah, there were successful firings of about 200 of our term and probationary employees in that week of February, while they were racing to get rid of the rest of us.

Fortunately, those folks were reinstated through our litigation. But it was obviously unexpected from them and there was one employee who has a big profile in the Atlantic. She was in her doctor’s office getting a cancer diagnosis when she was illegally fired, or when she received an email saying, “you’re fired.”

It’s not the worst part about it, but just kind of an insult to injury, with these notices, because they were trying to get them out so quickly, they failed the mail merges. It just said, “dear [first name, last name],” instead of like “dear, ‘the actual person’s name,’ you’ve been terminated because your skills and needs are no longer relevant to the work that we do.”

So, yeah, it was a horrendous week, but fortunately, we are still here a year later because a lot of people moved quickly to get into court and stop this.

Scott Ferguson

So what’s been going on this year after the first week?

Tyler Creighton

Yeah, it’s hard to think back on it all. In those first few weeks and months, it was very frenetic and really all-hands-on-deck with people really stepping up to make these declarations to the court where they’re essentially being whistleblowers to talk about what was going on on the inside with these firings.

The union is organizing weekly pickets out in front of our building. We had a number of court dates where we’re organizing events out in front of the court. Everyone was very fired up and working together to kind of support the litigation that was going on inside the courtroom. We weren’t the attorneys involved in it, but the rest of us were outside, telling the public the story about what was going on and why this was important.

I think that slowed down a little bit as the litigation dragged on, but we’re continuing to organize and get our message out about why the bureau is important and why we should be able to get back to work and also about workers rights. These are good working class, well-paid jobs and there’s something to be said about how we’re in the middle of an affordability crisis, and they’re trying to get rid of these jobs that are very secure for people who are in the middle class.

So we’re continuing to fight on against the immediate shutdown. One thing that Congress was successful in doing last year was actually lowering our funding cap. They cut the max funding that we can get almost in half. So we’ve been continuing to work with our legislative partners to hopefully get that reversed and get the cap back up.

Then we’re pounding the drum to get Vought impeached, which is another priority for us as a union.

Scott Ferguson

I have another question. How has the press been in your experience and the collective experience of the union? Does the press ask the right questions? Does it tell the right stories? Does it care enough? Does it focus on what’s going on enough? I’m just kind of curious to hear you talk about your experience precisely with publicity and, like, the politics of publicity around this crisis.

Tyler Creighton

I think publicity around these kinds of major rule of law, democracy stories can be tough for the press, but by and large, I think they have covered this past year of the bureau well. There obviously is the day to day of what’s going on in the litigation. But there’s also been a number of great pieces about what this means more broadly to consumers.

A lot of good consumer snapshots of people who had been helped in the past by the bureau and the fact that if we ceased to exist, that person who was facing foreclosure and was able to grab this lifeline to keep them and keep their family in their house, that won’t be there anymore.

There’s been a lot of good reporting on that front. There’s a lot going on in the Trump administration right now, it’s hard to keep anything focused. Where does the CFPB rank in the list of the many, many other things that are happening right now?

Is it the most important thing? People have disagreements about that. I think I’ve generally been impressed with the coverage. I think one difficulty is like, how do you tell the next part of the story?

It’s like, there’s only so many times you can say, “oh, here’s this consumer who was helped by the bureau, and that help won’t exist anymore,” right? Only so many people can write that story. So what’s the next page in the story as we continue. We’re coming up on the year anniversary of this whole saga.

That’s nothing unique to this particular fight. It’s true for any kind of advocacy policy fight that you’re going to have. Before I became a lawyer, I did communications advocacy for issues around campaign finance and voting rights and we had the same kind of issues on those topics as well.

Billy Saas

Journalists love a news peg. Perhaps the year anniversary will generate some additional impetus for coverage here.

Tyler Creighton

I totally agree with you. It’s something I’ve been thinking about because this conversation’s a good impetus for it. It’s been almost a year since Elon Musk tweeted “R.I.P. CFPB,” a year ago and we’re still here. That can’t necessarily be said for some other agencies that got targeted.

What’s the difference? I think the existence of our union and the organizing around that has actually been pretty key to that. There’s been some allusions in some of the reporting to that effect, but I think it’s a little bit of an untold story that the organizing of the workers themselves has been pretty critical to preserving this agency that Congress created. It might not exist if the union hadn’t been as organized and kind of jumped on the issue as quickly as it did.

Scott Ferguson

Something you told us before we started recording was that Vought is this kind of spectral presence who never shows up. You said you’ve never seen this man, who is your boss. Has anybody seen him at the agency? Presumably Musk actually showed up into the building to occupy it, and people saw him, but, has anybody had direct communication with Vought?

Tyler Creighton

Not sure. Yeah, I have not. Initially we were 1700 people. We’ve lost a lot of people. But like, you know, with organizations of that size, you’re going to get email communications talking about organization priorities and what we’re doing and have broad staff meetings to kind of keep everybody on the same page. That has not been a thing that is happening at the Bureau.

So, yeah, he is the director, but, I can’t say I’ve had any direction from him.

Scott Ferguson

So there’s been more recent litigation and litigation that has gone in the agency’s favor. Back to this funding question, maybe you can tell us about the arguments made on both sides and how this has all played out.

Tyler Creighton

Yeah. It’s funny when you said, “in the agency’s favor,” it actually technically went against the agency, if you think about the agency and who currently runs it. But, yeah, it went in favor of keeping the agency alive and protecting consumers down the road. We secured a preliminary injunction back in March against firings, against contract cancellations, against closing up shop essentially, or to kind of generalize. But, while that injunction has been in place, Russ Vought has not requested any additional funding from the Federal Reserve since he took over. The agency happened to have quite a large balance when he took over, so that wasn’t a problem for a while.

Scott Ferguson

Does that tend to be a regular periodic request, or is it just sort of as needed, whenever?

Tyler Creighton

It’s a little slightly out of my expertise on this, but I think it’s generally been quarterly. I’d have to look back at the statute on whether or not it actually needs to be quarterly or it can kind of be as needed. I think, in effect, it kind of acts as needed.

Prior directors have planned out the year and have a sense of how much money it’s going to be required and then make quarterly withdrawals for that money. But anyway, Vought hadn’t requested any money, so while this injunction against firings existed, we were quickly dwindling our reserves. It was getting to the point where he was saying that the agency wasn’t going to have any more money at some point in early 2026.

The position he was taking was this, novel and fairly ludicrous legal argument that Congress created this dedicated funding for the CFPB by allowing it to withdraw money from the Federal Reserve’s revenue. But, the language that that Congress used was the Federal Reserve’s, quote unquote, combined earnings. To date, that has been understood as the Federal Reserve revenue. So any money that it earns. He took the position that, “Oh, no, actually combined earnings is referring to profits,” which is a weird construction for a government agency that isn’t a for-profit enterprise that’s trying to make profits. But, you know, putting that aside, he took the position that it is the feds operating revenue minus their expenses.

Since sometime in 2022, if you do that calculation, it’s actually a negative. So it’s been losing money, if we were to analogize it to a for-profit institution, which it’s not. So he said, “I’m not permitted to request additional money because Congress hasn’t provided any set aside.”

Why would Congress have said, “okay, we’re going to have this dedicated funding mechanism, but it only works if the fed has profits.” But if it doesn’t, then this agency just disappears for that time. You know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But, our lawyers went in and filed a motion to clarify that this novel interpretation, that had not been used before, wouldn’t let the agency off the hook for complying with the preliminary injunction against firing staff, against canceling contracts, against shutting down the agency.

In late December, the district court agreed and said, “yeah, this interpretation of the statute of combined earnings makes no sense. You, Vought, have manufactured this funding crisis, and I am not going to allow this thing that you’ve manufactured totally on your own accord to take you out of the injunction that is still in place.”

Essentially, they are setting up this scenario where you could either request money and comply with the injunction or you could continue to drive the CFPB into bankruptcy and therefore be out of compliance with the conjunction and face the consequences of that. Just last week, Vought  ended up saying, “Okay, although we disagree with your opinion, federal judge, we will request the money.”

So he requested enough money for, according to the letter to the court, for this quarter, which I guess will go until March. So that’s where we’re at now. Concurrently, the preliminary injunction that started this whole thing is under appeal to the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear arguments in that case in late February.

Billy Saas

We have seen a lot of things over the last year, but administration officials complying with judicial orders is not top among those. Do you have any sense for why Vought  would have proceeded or honored this? I don’t know. Do you have any ideas why?

Tyler Creighton

I don’t really, I haven’t really seen any theories put out there. He obviously didn’t do it happily. He made it very clear that he wouldn’t have done this, if he was able to act on his own accord.

Billy Saas

Well, I’ll say kudos to Russ Vought in this one instance. Compliance. Do more. He could do more.

Tyler Creighton

Yeah. Doing the bare minimum.

Billy Saas

I wanted to maybe return to the point that you mentioned, you’re here as a member of the union. The CFPB is not even 20 years old, but the union that y’all are a part of now, chapter 335, has been around for at least 100 years.

It’s associated with the Treasury. Could you talk just a bit about the union and maybe, by way of wrapping up, give our listeners some sense of what we might or what they might be able to do, and to support the union’s efforts.

Tyler Creighton

Yeah. I won’t be able to speak to the 100 year history of the union.

Billy Saas

Understandable. Yeah.

Tyler Creighton

A bit beyond my knowledge, but we’re a local chapter, 335, of the National Treasurer Employees Union, which represents employees at a number of different agencies across the federal government. As I was saying before, I came to the bureau in 2022. So, I don’t have personal experience with the union’s early days, but as I understand, it was formed towards the end of 2012.

So a little over a year into the existence of the bureau and the history between 2012 and 2020, I don’t get the sense that there was like a ton of agitation going on. You know, it was helpful for workers, but has really kind of transformed, I think once Covid was like dramatically changing workplace norms for the federal government, but also for workers in every sector of the economy.

There were a lot of open questions like, “what are the expectations around work from home?” Making sure that people had correct set-ups at their home offices as they had to quarantine and such. I think there’s just been a lot of good organizing and build-up since then. So there was a lot of work being done. 

This is kind of the tail end of when I’m coming in. So again, I’m speaking primarily from reports from other people, not my own personal experience on this, but, after Covid, as with all companies, it was like, “so what are the rules around working going to be as we kind of get back to a quasi-normal life?”

There was a lot of union organizing around the contract around remote and work from home policies and all that. I think that was a stepping stone to a bigger internal fight around pay and pay equity at the CFPB, which I think one reason why our union has such good strength is that we actually can negotiate on pay and benefits, which is, as I understand, not something that is universal across other federal agencies where their pay is set by the GS (General Schedule) scale and Congress. Our pay is not. It says something to the effect of, “we will be paid in comparable levels to people at the Federal Reserve,” which also has its own payment structure. Despite that language, our pay scale had not changed since the founding of the bureau. Meanwhile, the Fed’s pay scale kept going up.

There was this increasing disparity between the workers at the Fed and the workers at the CFPB, even though the statute said that we should be paid at a comparable level. There was a very big campaign spurred by the union that was very galvanizing for people around rectifying that issue.

Updating the pay scale to bring us closer in line. We didn’t get as far as we were intending, but closer in line to what the pay scale at the fed is, and also to help decrease disparities among similarly situated employees at the CFPB, where there were just these kind of arbitrary pay differences between people who had very similar experiences or had very similar responsibilities.

It was coming out of that that I think just set the union up very well. There were structures in place like good leadership and trust among workers that, when all of this most recent mess started in 2025, we kind of had some communications infrastructure in place to quickly gather intel about what the heck is going on at the CFPB and get in touch with appropriate outside counsel, get them the intel that all the workers are providing and then also get out into the streets and have mechanisms for getting information back out to the workers. Those kinds of early internal organizing efforts, I think, really set us up, even though the current fight is so radically different. There’s also been a lot of bumps in the road as we’ve tried to turn a union infrastructure that was mostly focused on applying pressure to our internal leaders who had their own interests, but at least were listening and receptive and we could sit at the same table with them, to, now, really focusing outwardly because our current leadership doesn’t care about the work life is like. I’ve been trying to get other people outside of the bureau to understand what’s going on and why this fight is important.

But I think it’s been pretty impressive. And I don’t think there’s any doubt in my mind that if the union didn’t exist in the way that it did in February 2025, that we wouldn’t be having this conversation about what the future of the CFPB is going to be. The future remains very uncertain, but it’s still here.

Every day that it continues, it increases the odds that it will continue to exist in the future. I give a lot of props and kudos to the leadership of our chapter to really inspire people. We had pretty good membership going into this.

Just in terms of the percentage of workers who are in the bargaining unit who actually pay membership dues and are considered members of the union, but it just went through the roof, like everybody joined. We’ve opened the merch shop. That’s a very, very long winded response to your question, but in terms of one way that you could support and get involved is we have a merch shop which has some great sweatshirts, hats, shirts, that I see all the time on people that are not from the CFPB. All that money goes to support the union in various ways. In the past, we had used it as resources for employees who had been fired and then don’t have income and were facing other kinds of hardships. So, that’s definitely one way to support the group.

As I mentioned earlier, we are advocating in Congress to increase our funding, cut back to where it was prior to the big beautiful bill, which decreased it. And then I think, most importantly, we got to get Russ Vought out. You know, he’s been terrible at the CFPB and he’s been terrible across the whole government as the head of OMB (Office of Management and Budget). So, you know, we’re continuing to beat the drum for impeaching him.

Scott Ferguson

What would be the legal grounds for impeaching him?

Tyler Creighton

The legal grounds? Well, remind me what the Constitution says about…I should know this as the attorney on the call, but he did the bare minimum by requesting funds back in January. But, you know, for the past year, he’s just been blowing through every legal safeguard around, like, around how you treat workers and firing them and withholding money that had been appropriated by Congress. I think there’s plenty of grounds to say that he’s been derelict in his duties.

Scott Ferguson

For sure. You know, I think one of the biggest revelations for me that’s come out of this conversation is, I became aware of the union and appreciating the work of the union, but not really knowing the extent of it. I don’t think I had a strong sense, and I certainly didn’t know anything about the history of the union, but I didn’t have a sense of the way that union organizing and infrastructure and activity has been constitutive for the survival of this agency.

That’s really inspiring to hear. Maybe sometimes we hear these stories like, “well, you know, one judge made a decision and it’s either good or bad or some crisis happened and people responded,” but I really appreciate this backstory too. It’s really great to hear that y’all were organizing around actually different issues, right?

Like, you were building capacity for a crisis that you didn’t even know was coming, but because you had built this capacity and taken on at least two major problems, when this major, major crisis hit, you were ready. That’s just such an inspiring story and lesson.

Tyler Creighton

Yeah. Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. At the same time, I shouldn’t forget to say that obviously other people have been involved in this outside of the union, which has been very integral. The legal counsel that NTAU (National Treasury Employee Union) retained for this case has been just like some of the best attorneys work I’ve seen.

So, you know, yes, the union’s been very integral in getting the information and doing the outside organizing and getting the message out. But inside the courtroom, our attorneys have been absolutely great. There’s been a number of other advocacy groups, whether it’s the Student Borrower Protection Center or NCLC (National Consumer Law Center) or Public Citizen who have also been involved in the litigation in various ways and then also activating their own members and doing public education around the bureau as well.

So we are not, by any means, the only folks that have been important in this fight. But, I do think it has been a very integral piece of the story and as you’re saying, kind of hidden, I think, in terms of the role that the union has played.

Billy Saas

We’re going to be sure to include a link to the union page and then also to the union merch shop. And speaking of that, I brought up a window here, and I’m going to do something I don’t think we’ve done in any show so far, but your merch is so great that I want to share it and talk about it. This Skully 335 hoodie. Yeah. Tremendous. No artist is credited, but listeners, I would encourage you to go check it out. I’m pretty sure I’m going to get one here as soon as the calls are over. But you have it.

We have some pretty provocative imagery. Can you talk to us about this, to have any context for us? 

Tyler Creighton

I’m, unfortunately, the wrong person to answer this question, because I really was not involved in it, in any way. But the folks that were. Yeah, I don’t know where they came up with the art and who did it. We honestly should make that public on the site, but yeah, it’s not what you’re going to expect from the union merch stuff.

You’re talking about the Skully hoodie, and I don’t know if it’s this specific one, I think there’s a couple of different versions, but my father-in-law has one. He lives in a town up in rural Maine and there’s weekly actions on the bridge over the water in Maine where people gather to protest whatever insanity Trump is up to that week. He’s just wearing his skully sweater out on the bridge with all of the other folks in Maine. So, yeah, there’s a lot of great stuff in there. There may have been more and some of it has been dropped over the times, but there’s also all just a lot of like inside joke type stuff that, if you were following the litigation closely at the time when we were getting all of these revelations about what was going on behind the scenes in these emails and such, there’s a lot of, good content around that as well.

Scott Ferguson

So, I saw a “Fed Up” shirt. Is that actually connected to the organization “Fed Up”, or is that just a slogan that you all came up with on your own?

Tyler Creighton

Again, I don’t know. I’m the wrong person to answer that question. My assumption is that it’s a very common slogan that if you were to be in DC with all the other federal workers, you would see that as a common sign. My guess is that we have just done it because of that. But, there might be more of a backstory to it.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah. Then something else again, we can keep this in or not, but like, I actually think it would be cool to include some of this merch in the art in our episode graphics, you know?

Billy Saas

Yeah. So in that case, we would definitely want to know who the artist is and see if they are down to share for the cover art’s collage work. But, anyway, we are having too much of a blast looking at all this stuff. It’s really great merch.

Tyler Creighton

Yeah, it’s too bad we didn’t do this before Christmas. It’s a great holiday gift. I know a lot of people that were giving it for holiday gifts.

Billy Saas

Yeah, well, there’s all sorts of great occasions. And, you know, you just want to support unions all year round, right?

Tyler Creighton

Exactly, exactly. So yeah. And it says here 100% of the proceeds go to the CFPB Solidarity Fund, which has, as I said, in the past, been used to help workers who’ve been illegally terminated and are facing various financial hardships because of that.

Billy Saas

Well, I just found the Skully 335 bomber jacket, and I’m just even more excited. This is a super, super high note to end on. Tyler, is there anything else you wanted to say before we say goodbye?

Tyler Creighton

No, I don’t think so. We covered a lot of ground today. I hope I didn’t ramble on too much and go into too many rabbit holes, but I appreciate it. I appreciate the time and the focus we could put on the union’s efforts and on keeping the CFPB alive. You know, Congress created the agency before for very specific reasons.

We went through a huge mortgage crisis. A lot of people lost their homes and it’s been doing great work since then, and there’s really no reason to get rid of it. So, we’ve kept it alive for the last year, but obviously we need people outside of the union to help us. So encourage you to get involved in whatever way that is, whether that’s buying some merch or calling Congress and telling them to make sure they don’t let Vought win and kill the agency.

Billy Saas

Excellent. Thank you so much, Tyler Creighton, for joining us on Money on the Left.

Tyler Creighton

Thank you.

* 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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Women, Safety, and Moral Panic: From Private Protection to Public Responsibility in India

By Dr. Shikha Chandarana

For decades, women’s safety in India has been treated like a private problem with public consequences: a daughter warned to “come home early,” a student told to “stay alert,” a working woman advised to “dress carefully,” a survivor asked what she did to “invite” it. The country has learned to speak in the language of caution rather than the language of rights. What often goes unspoken is that this caution rests on a narrow idea of what it means to be a “good” woman—an idea that quietly functions as a social unit of account, against which women’s safety, respectability, and worth are constantly measured. And when outrage erupts—after a brutal assault, after a case that breaks through the wall of everyday violence—it is often followed by a familiar cycle: candlelight, slogans, a burst of enforcement, and then the slow return to normal.

But “normal” has a body count—and it has a paperwork trail. In the most recent official tallies reported to Parliament, recorded “crime against women” cases were 428,278 (2021), 445,256 (2022), and 448,211 (2023)—a scale so vast it risks becoming background noise (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2025). Within those numbers, what stands out is not the horror of public violence, but the persistence of private terror: “cruelty by husband or relatives” remains the single largest category, with 133,676 cases in 2023 (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2025). The state’s own gender compendium underlines the same truth in plainer moral terms: women’s safety is compromised first, and most often, inside the home, where “cruelty by husband and relatives” accounts for roughly one-third of major crimes against women and where a cluster of categories together make up more than 70% of recorded crime (Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation [MoSPI], 2023). These numbers represent the crimes reported to the authorities, but in a nation of silent women, a majority of cases remain silenced.

This violence that never becomes an FIR is even harder to face. Using survey data alongside police statistics, the same compendium notes that the share of ever‑married women aged 18–49 who have experienced emotional, physical, or sexual violence by a husband declined only marginally—from 33.3% (2015–16) to 31.9% (2019–21)—still roughly one in three women living with intimate‑partner violence (MoSPI, 2023). A society cannot police its way out of that. A nation cannot CCTV its way out of that. A state cannot slogan its way out of that.

Still, the numbers demand honesty. Rising recorded cases do not automatically prove rising violence; they can also reflect increased reporting (a claim made by the Ministry of Home Affairs)—driven by awareness, easier access to registration, and shifts in enforcement. A state can congratulate itself for “better reporting” while refusing to confront what the reports are actually saying: that women are not merely unsafe in public spaces—they are systematically harmed in the most intimate ones.

This is where the question becomes more than a data debate. Because women’s safety is not only about what happens to women, it is also about what a society believes women are for. And over the last decade, India’s political common sense has been increasingly shaped by Hindutva—a project that frames national belonging through a majoritarian religious identity and seeks to reorder the social world around that identity. In that worldview, women are rarely treated as full citizens first. Too often, they are cast as symbols: bearers of “culture,” vessels of “honor,” boundary-markers of the community. When women become boundaries, “safety” stops meaning freedom from violence and starts meaning containment—restrictions justified as protection.

The clearest example is the obsessive political energy poured into policing women’s intimacy, especially interfaith relationships. The “love jihad” narrative is not just propaganda; it has become a governing style. Scholars of Hindu nationalist statecraft describe how “love jihad” politics folds gender and intimacy into a conservative regime of control, where women are constituted as “subjects of protection” and the state claims authority to supervise personal choice (Nielsen & Nilsen, 2021). Legal analysis of “love jihad” ordinances makes the same point with sharp precision: the phrase operates as social and political control, limiting women’s free will by treating adult women as if they cannot decide whom to love or whether to convert (Sonkar, 2022). The problem here is the patriarchal logic beneath it: women’s agency is treated as a security threat, and “saving” women becomes an excuse to discipline them.

This discipline spills into streets and screens. Feminist scholarship on the contemporary moment describes a “vigilante” ecosystem where moral policing thrives—an atmosphere in which women who transgress prescribed roles (by protesting, speaking out, loving across boundaries, dressing visibly as themselves) are treated as fair game for public humiliation and punishment (Chigateri & Kundu, 2024). And online, a new front has opened: the production line of misogyny that trains young men to see feminism as a civilizational enemy. Research on the Indian manosphere documents how online misogyny can function as a pedagogy—socializing men into a digital subjectivity aligned with Hindutva politics, steeped in resentment and gender hierarchy. When misogyny becomes a political identity, women’s safety cannot be separated from the ideological climate that licenses contempt.

This is the central contradiction of Hindutva’s safety story: it speaks loudly about “protecting” women, but often in a way that relocates danger onto an externalized enemy—an “outsider,” a “predator,” a communal Other—while downplaying the violence that is statistically most common and socially most tolerated: violence within the private sphere (MoSPI, 2023; Ministry of Home Affairs, 2025). When safety is narrated as protection from the Other, the state can perform toughness without touching patriarchy. It can promise rescue while leaving women trapped in homes, in marriages, in bureaucracies, in courts with endless delays.

And so, “decades of women’s safety” becomes a story of misdirection. The argument is not that patriarchy began recently—it is older than any election cycle, older than any government. The argument is that a majoritarian ideology that treats women as cultural property deepens patriarchy’s grip by making control feel like patriotism. It tells families they are guardians of the nation when they are, in practice, guardians of women’s silence. It tells men they are defenders of honor when they are, too often, perpetrators protected by shame and impunity. It tells women they are safe when they are compliant.

This is also why the usual turn to jobs, opportunity, or “empowerment” can feel beside the point. That discourse assumes a “real world” that comes first—where culture is already settled, women are already legible as subjects, and rights can be exercised as if the main barrier were access. But women encounter politics upstream, long before any job offer: in warnings, reputations, sermons, news cycles, viral clips, and the everyday sense of what will be believed. When a political project succeeds in staging its own version of “Indian tradition” as common sense, economic participation becomes a downstream promise in a world where women’s credibility has already been bargained away.

Women’s safety is easier to politicize when women are not treated as people but as value—as a kind of gold standard for “culture,” a deliberately narrow measure of womanhood that must be guarded, defended, and kept from “contamination” or “theft.” In the Hindutva version of this story, that “value” is narrated as national culture itself—treated as something the ruling project owns, and therefore something women must embody and defend. Feminist theory has a name for this logic: the “traffic in women,” where women are positioned as the medium through which social bonds, status, and legitimacy are organized (Rubin, 1975). But the traffic only works because a particular idea of womanhood is treated as the standard that makes the exchange legible. “Respectable,” “pure,” “protected,” “fallen”—they are the categories that allow families, communities, and political movements to price honor and disgrace. Violence and surveillance do not merely punish women who step out of line; they stabilize what “woman” is allowed to mean, keeping it narrow enough to remain exchangeable. In this frame, violence is not only a private act; it is a kind of enforcement. It disciplines the “currency” when it is perceived as out of circulation, devalued, or circulating in the “wrong” direction. And it is precisely because the currency is symbolic that it can become brutally material: women’s bodies carry the costs of political meanings that men and institutions claim to own.

That’s why the language of “honor,” “purity,” and “protection” functions like a shadow economy: it assigns women a public value that can be accumulated as symbolic capital—something families, communities, and political movements can convert into moral authority (Bourdieu, 1986). Nationalist projects, in particular, rely on women as a kind of infrastructure for belonging: women are cast as biological reproducers of the nation, cultural transmitters, and boundary-markers that distinguish “us” from “them” (Yuval-Davis, 1997). Under that logic, the state does not only promise women safety; it claims the right to manage women’s circulation—who they marry, how they appear, what they symbolize—because controlling women’s agency becomes a way of controlling the nation’s imagined coherence.

In this sense, women-as-currency is not just a metaphor but a political economy. It treats value as something already given—honor, purity, community standing—and “safety” as the policing of how that value circulates. Public claims for freedom, exit, dignity, or justice are pushed aside by a more basic question: does this woman still count as the right kind of woman? That is a form of monetary silencing—substituting the management of symbolic exchange for the provision of real social capacity.

This is also what makes Hindutva’s gender politics feel less like “safety” and more like market regulation: the state and its allied moral economies intervene most aggressively when women’s intimate choices threaten to move across the boundaries that sustain majoritarian identity. The “love jihad” narrative is legible in exactly these terms: it treats interfaith intimacy as a form of illicit transfer—women as community property being “taken”—and it authorizes governance over gender and intimacy as a protective duty (Nielsen & Nilsen, 2021; Sonkar, 2022). Meanwhile, the violence most statistically concentrated in the home becomes normalized as the internal discipline of the exchange itself—part of what Deniz Kandiyoti called the “patriarchal bargain,” where women’s constrained security is purchased through compliance within a system that reserves coercion as enforcement (Kandiyoti, 1988). In other words: when women are treated as cultural currency, the state can perform “protection” against an externalized enemy while leaving intact the ordinary, intimate violence that keeps the currency under control.

If India is serious about women’s safety, the test is simple: does “safety” expand women’s freedom, or does it shrink it? Does it strengthen survivors’ access to justice, or does it strengthen society’s power to supervise women’s choices? Does it confront the violence of the home, or does it distract us with the theater of public protection? The official data already points to where the emergency lives: in households, in marriages, in everyday coercion (MoSPI, 2023; Ministry of Home Affairs, 2025). Any politics that cannot face that reality—any ideology that prefers to police women rather than protect them—will keep India stuck in the same loop, decade after decade: grief, fury, forgetting.

A republic organized around public responsibilities would reverse this logic: it would treat women not as the units being measured but as co-authors of the measures themselves—what safety means, what harm counts, and what institutions are obligated to provide. That means treating media and political rhetoric as public responsibilities too: building institutions and norms that expand what women can say, report, and be believed about—rather than letting “tradition” be monopolized as a weapon of control. It would treat women’s freedom not as a risk to be managed, but as a public standard the state must help build and maintain. Women do not need a nation that guards them as symbols. They need a republic that recognizes them as citizens.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital (R. Nice, Trans.). In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood Press.

Chigateri, S., & Kundu, S. (2024). Virulent Hindutva, vigilante state: Situating backlash and its implications for women’s rights in India. IDS Bulletin, 55(1), 101–116. doi:10.19088/1968-2024.109

Kandiyoti, D. (1988). Bargaining with patriarchy. Gender & Society, 2(3), 274–290. doi:10.1177/089124388002003004

Ministry of Home Affairs. (2025, December 3). Crimes against women and children (Rajya Sabha Unstarred Question No. 390) [Parliamentary question]. Government of India.

Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. (2023). Women and men in India 2023: Impediments in empowerment [Statistical publication]. National Statistical Office, Government of India.

Nielsen, K. B., & Nilsen, A. G. (2021). Love jihad and the governance of gender and intimacy in Hindu nationalist statecraft. Religions, 12(12), 1068. doi:10.3390/rel12121068

Rubin, G. (1975). The traffic in women: Notes on the “political economy” of sex. In R. R. Reiter (Ed.), Toward an anthropology of women (pp. 157–210). Monthly Review Press.

Sonkar, S. (2022). Policing interfaith marriages: Constitutional infidelity of the love jihad ordinance. Journal of Law and Religion, 37(3), 432–445. doi:10.1017/jlr.2022.37

Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender and nation. SAGE Publications.

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Graeber’s Utopia of Refusal

Will Beaman joins Billy Saas & Scott Ferguson to discuss the enduring influence of David Graeber’s debt-centered work in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s election to Mayor of New York City. Will and Scott unpack their jointly authored essay, “The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt & the Left Monetary Imagination,” which is the latest in a series of pieces by the Money on the Left Editorial Collective to agitate for credit-centered experimentation through and beyond the Mamdani mayoralty.

Most crucially, Will and Scott find that the Graeberian framework on debt funnels political attention and action toward periodic acts of cancellation or refusal to the exclusion of other radical democratic alternatives, such as those outlined in “Blue Bonds: A Fiscal Strategy for Overcoming Trump 2.0” and “How the Zetro Card can Save New York City (Really).” While Graeber’s work has been indispensable to left organization and advocacy since before Occupy, what’s needed now is a framework for mobilizing, rather than refusing to engage, the considerable fiscal agency already at hand at all levels of governance.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Billy Saas

Yes. We’ve gathered on this auspicious occasion to discuss a piece recently published at the end of November on moneyontheleft.org and then shortly after that, Monthly Review Online that does a lot of interesting things. Those things are sort of described in the title, so I’ll just share the title and we’ll get into a discussion of it.

The piece is called “The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt and the Left Monetary Imagination.” Let’s go broadest first and then we’ll get into the nitty gritty. Why this piece now?

William Beaman

Yeah, I think in terms of “why now?”, I think that the piece sort of describes a paradox on the left that has been sort of there in the Modern Monetary Theory movement and space for some time. But, especially now, with Trump’s second term, it’s sort of becoming rearticulated in new and, in our opinion, more urgent ways because so much of left politics in this new context is about trying to figure out what you can do when you are not just trying to persuade a social democratic or neoliberal government to be more benevolent.

Instead you’re trying to mount a protracted defense from within and alongside various institutions that are various degrees of captured or threatened by authoritarianism. The paradox that we noticed, and this is something that we at Money on the Left are interested in in general. This moment sort of brings to the fore in a renewed way a lot of Modern Monetary theory and uses David Graeber as a really emblematic fellow traveler, even though he’s, himself, an anarchist politically rather than somebody who’s interested in what you do with state power. But nevertheless, his work often informs a lot of what we do and think about and the questions that we ask in the MMT movement. David Graeber shows that money is not a neutral thing.

It’s not an expression of decentralized barter or economic relationships, that it doesn’t come from taxes or taxpayers, it is a unit of account before it’s anything else. At the same time that that insight opens up Modern Monetary Theory as a discourse and, as I said, David Graeber provides a lot of the deep anthropological work, as well as perhaps Michael Hudson, for a lot of these insights that get formalized in Modern Monetary Theory, we also argued that the way that these insights are articulated quietly sets a cap or a ceiling on how the left imagines monetary politics.

Graeber articulates this framework and as it gets re-articulated by modern monetary theorists quite often, is that money is the sort of a sovereign, arbitrary, emanation of debt that then organizes social life and does so in an unbounded way, but nonetheless is principally about power.

From Graeber’s perspective as an anarchist, money’s fictitiousness most comes through in debtors movements that seek to abolish it. Or, more specifically to have debt jubilees and wipe the slate clean, and sort of remind us that this is all a fiction and we can erase it. We argue in the piece that this has a lot in common with a lot of poststructuralist thinking following influences in Nietzsche onwards to sort of think of debt as a sort of originary act of cruelty that you can then get naively caught up in and moralize, or you can see it for what it is. But from our perspective at Money on the Left – and to tie it back to this moment that we’re in right now – a lot of what we’re trying to do is articulate new opportunities and possibilities for redesigning the way that monetary systems function, and carrying the insights of Modern Monetary Theory. This being that money is an endogenous choreography between entities that issue and entities that receive. The quote that is often said from the economist Hyman Minsky is that “anyone can create money, the challenge is to get it accepted.”

But we take the challenge of getting it accepted as a malleable and contested political problem. We want to make that the center of our politics. We notice that, in this moment, a lot of the work that Modern Monetary Theory had done to break open the taxpayer myth and the barter myth and all of these things that work so hard to suppress as far as possibilities, was actually still being mobilized and enlisted in order to suppress possibilities.

Maybe the most immediate motivation for this piece was a cluster of articles – that I guess we’ll talk about later in the episode – that all in various ways mobilized Modern Monetary Theory in its articulation as something you do when you are the sovereign at the heights of power in order to say that, “well, we are not in power, so therefore, while MMT is descriptively correct for those in power, it’s really important that we basically act as if MMT is not it doesn’t exist.” It was this kind of paradoxical thing where the very same insights that open up a lot of possibilities were being used to police and foreclose them. I think that the mobilization of David Graeber, who’s an anarchist and who’s been centrally involved with Occupy Wall Street at its origins. I think you could make the case that all kinds of movements, including electoral movements, have been influenced by Occupy Wall Street. It has many afterlives in law and political economy spaces and in Modern Monetary Theory spaces and in spaces that are principally concerned with what might be called electoralism or what you do when you’ve taken state power.

I think that Graeber’s involvement in that indirectly illustrates this paradox. You can start from this view of money as a cruel fiction that sort of ensnares people in logics of debt and guilt and sin, and that you can move through empowering insights about what money actually is and what it can do, and then close them back up again because at the end of the day, money is evil. And this is also coming at the same time – maybe Scott can add something about this – but this is coming at the same time that at Money on the Left we’ve been working on a re-articulation of our own paradigm and condensation of our insights, which we call democratic public finance.

We have a document aimed both at the Zohran Mamdani campaign and at the left more broadly with democratic public finance in the title that takes a view that really centers monetary design and contestation over monetary design as something that’s political, rather than viewing design as, “you can either build evil things or you can undo them, and the undoing them is sort of the big act of refusal or agency.”

That’s where this utopia of refusal in our title comes from. But maybe, Scott, if you want to add anything about DPF (democratic public finance) or anything else that I’ve missed. I realize I went on a lot.

Scott Ferguson

I think you did a nice opening survey in response to this question of “why now?” I’ll just paraphrase or I’ll put it the way that I’ve experienced it. I think we’ve had a long standing, genuine ambivalence in relation to Graeber’s work, especially his book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, but also some of his other work.

I’ve been threatening to write something on this for a really long time. I was even in talks with boundary 2 online for a while eight years ago about writing something, but it never happened. So there’s that. Then there’s our contemporary work, which is really trying to push the public endogenous money paradigm into what we’re calling democratic public finance, which doesn’t take doesn’t constrain money’s political constitution and contestability to a federal government that issues its own currency, like kind of MMT 101 likes to talk about.

Then the third part of this is Mamdani’s successful campaign, but also a movement that puts him into power and in the midst of the the second Trump administration and certainly coming up against all kinds of constraints and entering into all kinds of potential battles at the federal level, at the state level, maybe even at the city level.

We found that there was just this emerging genre that was coming out in the summer and into the fall and when he wins of left journalistic discourse the commentariat that suggested that “well, you know, it’s it’s all well and good that Mamdani has won but now reality is setting in and and we have to play by the rules of the neoliberal marketplace.” We were extremely frustrated that those were getting published over and over again at a lot of the same publications that wouldn’t publish our submissions that were offering an alternative. So I think all three pieces of this puzzle have come together in this particular piece. I do want to say, I want to come back to the ambivalence. I think we handle it with a minimal grace and care  in the essay itself. I think I’d like us to try to be fair in this conversation as well. But I think we do genuinely appreciate Graeber. For example, Billy, if I’m remembering correctly, Graeber’s debt book is really what sort of opened you up to this whole world of MMT and heterodox economics.

Billy Saas

Totally. So the ambivalence that we feel and have felt, I think, has been slightly different in character. My introduction to MMT, to Chartalism, to the whole world of monetary theory is through the first several chapters of Debt: The First 5000 Years, which I read around the time of Occupy Wall Street. You know, it’s useful as one particular perspective on how money works and can work and has worked over time repeatedly.

Is the problem that it presents itself as the sort of final word on what money is and how it has operated over time? Is that ultimately the complaint?

Scott Ferguson

I don’t know if that’s ultimately the complaint, but I will say that it’s a great question. It’s interesting. Maybe not “final word,” but I will say from the debt book, from its title and its framing, but also the Dawn of Everything, from its title and its framing. I do think that Graeber – I mean, look, we too are ambitious.

We too want to rewrite the history of the world. Right? I don’t want to be the pot calling the kettle black, but he does promise a kind of total horizon, you know. So that might be part of it. That might be part of it.

But it’s not just the fact that he’s saying this is the big horizon and maybe, implicitly, this is the last word. Although I’ll give him a break, like, maybe in the text he doesn’t actually say “this is the last word,” but I do think it’s possible.

Billy Saas

Let me pause you on that, because this articulates with the other ongoing critique from Money on the Left of sovereignty as this kind of locus of monetary authority. I think that where we can kind of find Graeber saying that this is the last word is when he says, you know, ultimately money gets its receiveability, its value and all these things from the threat of violence, from somebody behind The Wizard of Oz with a gun. That’s where the magic comes from and so it all kind of always devolves into that. 

Scott Ferguson

It does, it does. Which is a very modern political philosophy approach. It’s followed by the MMT economists as well. Warren Moser has his famous “just so” story about passing around a bunch of worthless business cards, and they only become valuable when he threatens the group he’s talking to with violence, with guys with giant guns in the back of the room.

Right. So it’s not even like the MMTers are innocent of this, but the difference is that the MMTers at least offer possibilities beyond cancellation, beyond rejection, beyond what we call refusal. This is, in part, trying to get into why we’ve titled this piece “The Utopia of Refusal.” The ultimate political act in the name of democracy, in the name of justice in this Graeberian universe seems to be refusal – and you know, Graeber is not the only one who holds this view – because, tacitly, people have a goodness. They know what they want and they know how to organize themselves spontaneously. So you don’t need to talk about the new plan that’s going to replace the bad system now. You just critique and rail against the bad system now and then just trust that the freedom fighters are going to know what’s right on the other side, which is something we absolutely refuse in our organization.

William Beaman

I would add to that, in the Superstructure podcast, years ago we’ve talked about abolitionism as well. We’ve talked a lot about the tension within the way that the different abolitionists talk about abolition. There’s the famous phrase, to paraphrase Ruth Wilson Gilmore, abolition is about presence. There’s a way of reading abolition as sort of Graeberian refusal, but there’s also a way of reading it as collective redesign, and as an ongoing framework, rather than the fiction of a settlement in the way that we could press for reparations too.

The idea of reparations can include cash settlements, and I think David Graeber and Friedrich Nietzsche, and many others would say that, “Well, the point is that these cash settlements are rituals that allow us to move together as a community with an implicit emphasis on the ritual as a fictitious event that then wipes the slate clean,” which in a way actually resembles the Jubilee, even though it also resembles an economic transaction, which I think is very interesting.

But, bringing this back to Graeber, the idea of what Scott was saying, that people already know how to organize themselves spontaneously, and we just need to abolish the bad stuff and that doesn’t involve taking accountability for all of the implications of abolition. It’s not abolition as an ongoing framework and then I’ll drop abolition because it’s not Graeber’s language, but its abolition as a declaration that this was all fake and let’s move on. In that book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, Graeber specifically appeals to this idea of baseline or everyday communism, which is his term for a kind of background of everyday cooperation that he relates to Marx’s phrase from “each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” as this sort of pre-institutional and pre-formal substrate of social life, which then money, debt and accounting and rules and bureaucracy, come in. Maybe they first come in as an expression of play. That’s something that he develops in some of his later work. But fundamentally, if we forget that they’re all made up and that everyday communism exists in all of us innately before them, they threaten to crowd out everyday communism and create dead zones of the imagination, to paraphrase his term from the utopia of rules.

There’s an implicit opposition that he makes between localized everyday communism, which is suggested to exist prior to institutions and prior to mediation and it’s just sort of an innate goodness. That on the one hand, and then the opposite being ongoing rules or ongoing relations. Of course, it’s not that Graeber is so naive that he’s not interested in large scale coordination and this kind of thing.

He’s very interested in it, but he wants to theorize it from a heroicized notion of refusal and the ability to walk away as the foundation of what an ethical coordinate of regime looks like.

Scott Ferguson

That’s more in the later work and in The Dawn of Everything rather than the debt book. I think that was a self-conscious move on his part. I mean, I think he realized how much of a negative gesture the debt book was. I think he and in his collaborations with others were trying to think at scale. I think that there is a micro localist tendency in his work and I think his foundations tend to be micro oriented, but that’s not to say that he’s not sophisticated enough to not see the necessity of thinking across multiple larger scales as well. So, I think that’s important to say. 

William Beaman

I wanted to say, so you have the baseline and everyday communism, that is sort of a theoretical assumption that we want to challenge a little bit. One of the ways that we do that in the essay is by saying that whatever it is that you consider baseline or everyday communism has an institutional scaffold.

That’s not a positive claim about what it is and every time and place,but it is, I think, maybe a philosophical claim that the idea of it being pre-institutional is something that we’re pretty skeptical of. It is important, I think, to think about some examples that we can think of that have been roundly criticized.

In the book, we think of the sort of neighborly ideal, where it’s, maybe, a suburban neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else. Of course, I’m going to leave my doors unlocked. What if someone needs something from me? And so there’s that sort of assumption. But then, of course, you need to theorize how neighborliness is created at scale in that way.

How is the institution of the family and you need some detour through mediation in order to talk about these things. So that’s one background theoretical assumption. Then the other one – and this I think Graeber has in common with Marx, even though he himself, I think, maybe although he critiques Nietzsche, in his book.

But I think on this point we can maybe put them on the same side, which is that once you make things commensurate with each other, you are suggesting a false equivalency. Rather then I think what we would say, which is you might be openly suggesting as an analogy for the purposes of coordination, and that might be something that’s aboveboard and everyone is aware of, rather than sort of a lie that we’re telling about things being commensurate when they’re not necessarily.

Scott Ferguson

Can I add to that?

William Beaman

Yeah, please.

Scott Ferguson

I think, what I would also want to say is that nothing is not related to anything else. So the idea that you have two self-standing persons or two autonomous objects that then have no relationship to one another through language or memory or imagination or emotions or large coordinated systems, the idea that there can ever be one thing and another thing that have to be brought into relation is false.

I think we would also say that the interdependent process of allocating and designing monetary systems, and having that allocated money create production and all of the complicated relationships that come along with this, that what’s happening there is not a flat equivalence. It’s not making an equivalence between anything. It’s in fact a deeply heterogeneous system.

In certain ways, it takes certain bourgeois rhetorics at their word. If the bourgeoisie says, “look, we’re taking independent things and we’re making them equivalent, including your own labor,” we don’t have to buy it, right? We don’t have to say, “yes and that’s how you’re oppressing me.” Instead, we can say, “actually, you’re oppressing me in a different way and in that different way is actually a better way for me to contest you.” But anyway, back to you, Will.

William Beaman

Yeah. No, that’s a really helpful clarification. This idea that this sort of combines what we were saying before that there always already is some kind of an institutional background or context for anything. But rather than that necessarily being something that just works through capture  and through transforming us from free subjects to coordinated subjects. We might instead see ourselves as multiple coordinating subjects. The people who are involved in coordination in all kinds of ways, often through the same acts. There’s this idea that commenceration is a violent equation between things that is fully a fiction.

William Beaman

Whereas I think we want to say, “no, no, it’s an analogy. It’s thematizing analogical involvement in everything that everything has,” and that can be spun in ways that cover up that sort of intrinsic, open endedness of that as saying, “no, no, this is an identity that’s being posited.”

But then that sets the stage to say, “Ah ha, we’ll refuse the identity and then we’ll be free again.” So there’s commenceration as violence, but more specifically as moralizing. This is where I think Graeber might be situated among a lot of poststructuralists. So I brought up Nietzsche, but also you can think of somebody like Foucault. Where you think of valuation and Graeber has a text on value theory, where he says – and I’m, paraphrasing again here – but the subtitle is taken from a Marcel Mauss quote, which is that “every society pays itself in the false coins of its dreams.” On the one hand, there’s a lot that we would affirm there, right? Which is that you have a view of money as radically heterogeneous. One of the things that’s really strong in Graeber and MMT doesn’t thematize enough, because Graeber ties money to morality so much in this kind of Nietzsche in way, there are surpluses of heterogeneity and possibility that let you think about things that we don’t consider as money as money.

Let us think about ethical rhetoric as sort of having monetary dimensions. The problem that we have is that ethics in general for Graeber is a ruse to pay you in the false coin of a dream. That dream is going to necessarily involve some bureaucratic ideas about who you should be versus who you are.

It’s constitutively limiting and constitutively spiritually violent. The third kind of theoretical foundation of the book that we’ve been talking about already is what pairs with everyday communism, which is this idea of freedom and freedom he defines as the ability to walk away.

The ability to refuse. I think this can resonate with poststructuralist philosophy, which is full of tropes and figures of flight and fugitivity and unruly affects that are not captured by a symbolic system and sort of residually escape.

Then, one of the moves that Scott, you make in your book, is to compare that with neoliberal rhetoric about money and finance and its fugitivity. I think this is another way that this can end up being too caught up in the value systems and the false dreams or whatever that it’s trying to critique.

Is there anything you wanted to add?

Scott Ferguson

There’s a term that I’ve used – and it’s probably controversial – as I was wrestling with Graeber, as I was learning from him, but also trying to kind of sniff out where things didn’t seem right.

I’ve long suspected Graeber of being a tacit methodological individualist, which, of course, is a term that heterodox economists like to use to shame and point fingers at neoclassical economists or behavioral economists who just reduce everything to atomized individuals who have preferences and I don’t think that Graeber is a neoclassical methodological individualist by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think he tends to start with the individual.

For as much as he, in his work, will push back against imperialist European Enlightenment philosophy and goes after the deeply problematic state of nature stories that are used by everyone from Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau and beyond to justify a certain vision of the political.

As much as Graeber will disavow that and overtly say this is terrible, right? I think he shares their methodological individualism. I think he shares an ontology of the human, which is that the human is born free as an individual and then is always already social and caught up in a social world, but the individual knows best. Their freedom is number one and, what he calls, baseline communism comes from this baseline of free individuals who can do whatever they want in community. So it’s not like a totally atomized state of nature, but to be honest, those enlightenment thinkers also weren’t that cartoonish either.

I think he shares something with them. It comes out in all different kinds of ways. One of the examples that we provide in the essay that we wrote together is this stylized scenario that he brings up in the debt book, which is the scenario of somebody – you, a person, an individual – walking along and you discover that someone is drowning in a body of water nearby, and you think to yourself, “well, you know, I’m able bodied and I just came from the gym, I can muster the strength to dive into this river or this pool or whatever it is to save this person and there’s very little cost to me. Why wouldn’t I do the right thing, because I, as a free, good individual, I can use my power to participate in and enact everyday communism.” Now, as we point out, this sounds nice and it’s meant to sound just like an everyday scenario.

It could happen, you know, it happens to people. It’s never happened to me, but I could imagine it happening. But there’s a conspicuous individualism that really resonates with game theory approaches to social scenarios like in the classic trolley problem, right.

William Beaman

I think in the first draft I called it a nice trolley problem.

Scott Ferguson

A nice trolley problem where you’ve got just an individual that is contextless, and then somebody who’s drowning, who’s also contextless. We don’t know why they’re drowning. Did they grow up in a poor neighborhood where they shut down the pool and stop providing affordable swimming lessons, right?

There’s a reason why somebody is drowning. There is a reason why somebody is walking along and they have the ability to save them. It’s these scenarios that reduce things down to an individual exercising their freedom for communism, as opposed to what he calls exchange – which is a whole other contradiction that I can talk about at another juncture – or hierarchy. The original cell of sociality, like cell: c-e-l-l, is the individual and their actions. Can I bring up one more example that we didn’t talk about? 

Will Beaman

Absolutely. 

Scott Ferguson

I’ve thought about this for years. This somehow stuck with me. It’s from the beginning-ish. It’s like page 66 in the book.

William Beaman

This really stuck with you.

Scott Ferguson

It really did. It really did.

So he writes, “my mother, who was born a Jew in Poland, once told me a joke from her childhood” and I don’t really need to say this but I just want to mention that my own mother is a Polish Jew. She’s still around. Anyway, so his mother, another Polish Jew, tells this joke. Here it is:

There was a small town located along the frontier between Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it belonged. One day an official treaty was signed and not long after, surveyors arrived to draw a border. Some villagers approached them where they had set up their equipment on a nearby hill. “So where are we, Russia or Poland?” “According to our calculations, your village now begins exactly thirty-seven meters into Poland.” The villagers immediately began dancing for joy. “Why?” the surveyors asked. “What difference does it make?” “Don’t you know what this means?” they replied. “It means we’ll never have to endure another one of those terrible Russian winters!”

And that’s the joke. Okay, so how is this methodological individualism? It is about a community, right? But it comes from a mom, it comes from an individual. There is a real lesson here and it is minimally funny. Which is that, “you big powers with your claims to rule and your claims to carving up land. All of this is an arbitrary imposition and, look, the weather is not going to change as a result of this.”

William Beaman

The state of nature is still continuing.

Scott Ferguson

Well, yeah! That’s it, that’s it. Exactly. It frames governance as imposition. An imposition here on an individuated community that is being arbitrarily divided. The joke is that nature, weather, and our relationship to it, and our grounded particularity, comes first.

That’s why it’s supposed to be funny. Now, again, I’m not saying that., “well, he should have thought about how the Russians could do weather manipulation, they could seed clouds or whatever.” We don’t need to go that far in order to read the implications of this joke that he’s repeating, which is this is a local individuated community that is being imposed upon, but at the end of the day, nature and our everyday communism – proceeding from the ground up of the individuated, we could say –  is what matters the most and that’s our only hope of redemption.

Billy Saas

All right. So I think we’ve got a pretty good sense of the grievances, the complaints, the critiques.

Scott Ferguson

The systematic critiques, thank you very much.

Billy Saas

Systematic critique. Yeah.

William Beaman

You nailed them on the church wall very well.

Billy Saas

And I think that gets us back to the occasion of this essay, which is intervention into our immediate moment. Following the exciting election of Zohran Mamdani in New York as mayor, we have had a series of articles published by leading left thinkers and organizations that, from your perspective, seem to be a kind of capitulation based on this framework or informed by this debt framework. This idea that, because New York City is not a sovereign, it does not issue its own currency, doesn’t issue the dollar anyway, Mamdani needs and his campaign and his team have to sort of, I don’t know, be cautious.

Reel it in, reckon with some really harsh truths and realities about the fiscal situation of New York City. That’s interfering with what you all point out and want us to do instead, which is to get more imaginative than that. So maybe we could go one by one or if we want to talk more holistically, but we have a Debt Collective piece, a piece in Jacobin, and then also a piece in Dissent. The Jacobin piece by Nathan Gustaf, J.W. Mason in Dissent, and the Debt Collective piece, written collectively as a Substack post In the Read.

William Beaman

Well, maybe we can start with the Debt Collective piece, because the Debt Collective also happens to be the organization with an institutional connection to David Graeber, as well. The Debt Collective is a wonderful organization of various debtors movements and that collects activism around money and debt and much as we are very appreciative and live within the legacies of all of Graeber’s activism, this discussion, too, is in the spirit of activism and of us all being on the same team.

The title is, “Zohran won Main Street. Now he must face Wall Street.” Subheading: “Mamdani will face a looming threat to his progressive agenda debt.” This piece does what I think the other two pieces do as well. Which is to sort of say, “hold your horses.”

Yes. We won. We won this mayoral election of New York City, which is an incredibly important executive governing position that has huge economic impacts, but whatever you do, do not issue bonds and don’t issue debt. That sort of is the main crux of the piece as far as a warning is concerned.

I want to maybe just read from it directly. So, the piece goes: 

“This may sound basic, but it’s worth repeating. The federal government prints its own dollars. It doesn’t need to borrow from anyone to function, despite currently not functioning. Cities, on the other hand, cannot print their own dollars. Much like you, a person that probably has some student or medical debt, a mortgage, credit card debt, or an auto loan, municipalities must borrow money they do not have if they want to spend more than they tax. So what does this mean? Cities are forced to borrow from Wall Street to do nearly everything from building parks and schools to staffing libraries and hiring bus drivers, to patching roads and strengthening bridges.

And then, scanning down just a little bit this next section is called “Wall Street’s grip on,” quote, “public money.” Sort of implying that what might be called public money is actually not even public at some more real level. 

“Here’s the catch. Before any tax revenue can be spent on public programs like rent control or free transit, the city must first pay back Wall Street. That means private financiers effectively hold veto power over social policy. This means they get to decide what governments can and can’t provide to their people. 

And then there’s a discussion of the 1975 fiscal crisis that New York City went through. Ultimately, this is a pitch for a few things, I think. One, with respect to Mamdani, is to unite the left and unite Mamdani’s coalition around taxing the rich, and around pressure campaigns to increase revenue from Wall Street, from the 1%, and so on.

But then also, I think – and this is sort of implied by the Debt Collectives framing, and not to be not to be too cute about this – but I think it is actually relevant that it would be called the Debt Collective rather than, say, the credit collective and that the Substack is called In the Red.

It’s trying to address readers as part of a movement of debtors, right? As part of a movement of debtors who maybe all owe debt to Wall Street in various ways and so “debtors of the world, unite.” That is sort of the vision that comes out of here and, of course, putting this into relief against Graeber’s sweeping historical work, this is a jubilee call. This is a call for something like the biblical Jubilees, which is “let’s just erase all the debts.” One thing that we point out in our article is, it’s strange to us that the idea of abolishing all the debts feels like less of a heavy lift than reclassifying the debts as assets or then repurposing debt not as something that we take literally as a thing to be used to moralize and bludgeon poor communities, but as obligations that have coordinative capacities.

We all have obligations to society and those do not have to be obligations to Wall Street necessarily.

Billy Saas

Yeah. Just pause it just to say to and to reiterate and underscore and emphasize that you’re not saying that we should be worried about or protecting the right of those Wall Street folks to be repaid for bad student debt.

William Beaman

Absolutely. It’s quite the contrary. I think that part of our critique of this sort of rhetorical approach is that it ultimately builds up Wall Street’s ability to treat credit as debt, and to force local governments into collections. What it does is it polices the left’s imagination to demand anything different.

So instead, you demand to get rid of all debt, which of course, you don’t expect Wall Street to say “yes” to, but maybe you can get every city and every individual and every person in every government on the same page as all debtors who need a jubilee. I think one of the things that we do in the Democratic Public Finance document, as well as our blue bonds project, is we argue for, what you might call the un-finalizability of debt. The fact that whether bonds or treasuries are treated as things that must be paid back, or just as a savings account, depends on politics.

If you take Wall Street at its word that all money exists in order to be paid back to Wall Street, then of course you’re going to just reject using money in any kind of democratic way with respect to money’s actual design.

Scott Ferguson

Just to bring up some examples and none of these are easy or straightforward, and they do have serious hurdles of intelligibility with the public. We’re in the business of writing about money, strategizing, and trying to expand our imagination. Working at the edges of legibility is part of that work, right? To use Jakob Feinig’s words that we use all the time, “we are in an age of “monetary silencing” and we need to un-silence.

That’s going to be part of it. So let’s just think about some things that could be done. For example, yes, there can be a giant refusal campaign and we’re all on board for a refusal. No problem. But that’s not where you stop, right? Because the system is still in place and you still have this leftist discourse that’s telling us that, “well, ultimately, Wall Street’s in charge.”

So you could have a movement. It may not be successful, but a movement in and around Mamdani’s New York. New York City is the biggest and most emblematic city in this country and one of the biggest in the world. You could have all kinds of sister cities or cousin cities or whatever familial language you want to use, that get on board and that demand that the Fed reopens a municipal liquidity facility permanently and sets the interest rate at zero.

Now, maybe this movement will be laughed out of the room. So has the Green New Deal been laughed out of the room. So has any number of leftist movements and leftist demands. So why stay silent on the possibility of a permanent lending facility at a zero interest rate from the Fed? At the very same time, New York City could threaten or even try to enact going forward, we’re no longer going to have our public debt mediated by Wall Street.

We’re going to set up a different channel. Maybe we’ll work with an existing credit union, or maybe we’ll set up our own public banking system that can mediate debt and that can issue it to public sector union workers for things like their pensions and things like that.

Now, all of these are possibilities, but there’s this binary between, “well, you know, there’s the realism, what money is and Wall Street’s the big veto, the big obstacle,” versus, “all we can do is try to cancel it from time to time.” There’s this whole middle area where imagination could run wild, but it doesn’t because of the structure of this discourse.

William Beaman

I think that through that lens we can also embrace debt jubilees and refusals and all of these things, as forms of design, as forms of shaping and contesting the architecture of our obligations, even if they are sometimes problematically pitched as complete erasure or undoing of obligation or of a blank slate, as opposed to an old slate full of ways that everyone is a sinner and everybody owes society in bad ways because  they’ve been a bad boy.

Scott Ferguson

And just to say, Graeber likes to point out that the origin of the first word for freedom means return to mother. It’s a tricky one because it’s like feminine. It’s motherhood. Motherhood is not acknowledged often in modern monetary economies. There’s something that is very nice about that, but it’s like, one is made “free” so that then one can return home to their care, to their natural caring micro unit. I think that haunts all of this discourse as well.

William Beaman

Yeah. That, to some extent, the care that one returns to is taken for granted.

Billy Saas

I would also say that Graeber points out that the Jubilee is, or was, in its origins, a design, politically

Scott Ferguson

That’s true. Yeah.

Billy Saas

It was systematic, programmatic, every seven years. I’m down with you, Will, when you say we’re redesigning the entire monetary system from the municipal level up or from whatever level up, let’s program in some every-seven-years Jubilees. Let’s see what that does to the market.

William Beaman

Yeah. We’re not just looking at every kind of debt and saying, “let’s use this for coordination instead.” I don’t want to use my student debt to collateralize a Green New Deal or something.

Billy Saas

Like, I think that that would be – as an edit from an editorial perspective – those obligations are and should be, in most, if not every case, canceled. There’s no use for them other than control and moralizing.

Scott Ferguson

Right. We do make the point of that in the piece. But I will say that the reason we don’t harp on it is because we do feel like that is actually largely legible. Right? That’s part of the contemporary leftist framework. 

Billy Saas

For me, it’s more like just so nobody gets it twisted or confused.

Scott Ferguson

Absolutely, right.

William Beaman

Yeah. Not nothing is “either or.”We just want to enfold things into a vision of democratic design as a coauthored problem rather than a top down problem that one escapes from.

Billy Saas

That’s ultimately what this boils down to. At the same time as MMT’s gains have been, at the popular level, dispelling the myth of the zero sum game from the sort of federal perspective, a new zero sum assumption has sort of taken its place in left circles.

What y’all are after here is getting that dispelled on its own and simultaneously calling for a mass brainstorm and imagination session across the left where we don’t take these things for granted and we see what’s possible rather than capitulate in advance.

William Beaman

Thinking about what, from an MMT perspective, becomes important about something like taxation or something like bond issuance or something like that, when we take away the assumption that it’s all about acquiring finite funds from wherever they’ve been dispersed or borrowing them from the future or something like that is that these have distributional effects.

It’s good to tax billionaires out of existence because billionaires are bad for democracy. It’s good to not have people hold debt because they went to college and got a public education because that’s bad for democracy. I think that we can read into that a different register of ethics and morality as collective considerations that the idea of refusal on its own doesn’t really get us to.

In the article, we also put it in terms of, “if you do a heroic refusal, what are the distributional effects of labor in the context that you just refused and left?” This isn’t to say nobody should ever be able to refuse or leave a situation because then you’re letting people down by doing so,

but just to say that there’s no outside of ethics, not as a top down fiction imposed upon people who’ve been made to feel guilty, but as a collective problem of interdependence that we inhabit and that our relative refusals need to contend with their implications for architecture and design and distribution and all of these things.

When we talk about the distributive qualities or effects of taxation as a public good, we’re also speaking in a register of ethics and morality here, and of democracy and of the public good. But I would argue that what we’re not doing is insisting on the false coin of our dreams, necessarily, in some kind of mutually exclusive way, because I think that what we’re really after is a democratic and interdependent world that always already has multiple systems of valuation that aren’t even necessarily mutually exclusive with each other.

We want to thematize the ways that there’s malleability across scales and across registers rather than sort of flattening all of it into top down bureaucracy that should just be lifted.

Billy Saas

So that the Debt Collective piece is one of three that y’all look closely at and find to be diagnostic of what I think ya’ll would characterize like a sort of genre of left rhetoric at the moment around specifically the Mamdani campaign. But, if it’s around the Mamdani campaign, it is probably symbolic of a direction or a trajectory of left thinking at the moment.

Yeah. So we don’t want that. We want to stop and redirect that thinking. What else are we after with this piece? Is there anything that we’ve left on the table in terms of the sort of goals of this thing?

Scott Ferguson

Yeah. One thing is that, on the one hand, it feels like MMT is not having a moment. Then that’s more complicated. So we’ve got Zack Polanski having a moment with MMT rising to the head of the Green Party in the UK right now. That’s exciting and there’s all kinds of intra and inter party politics that are going on around that. But what’s so fascinating about this little micro genre of the present that we’re pointing to is this double move where people who might have been resistant or, let’s say, communities of leftist activists and organizers and publishers and writers where they might have not been fully on board in the past or they just kind of pick and choose when to be on board, one of the moves that keeps being made, whether explicitly or implicitly, is like, “yeah, yeah, yeah, MMT is right. But because it’s right, that means that Mamdani has to play by zero sum rules.” It makes the MMT 101 project, both a winner and dead on arrival at the very same time.

There’s this convergence of the success of MMT 101 and its limits – of that articulation around sovereignty – coming together with an excited left that is so excited about governing. Not just, fighting to win but actually governing. But now that we’re here, this genre says “no, no, no, no, no. We can only follow the rules of the game or total rejection,” and that vacuum is what’s so heartbreaking and needs to be rejected..

William Beaman

Yeah, I would also maybe up the ante on what you just said, in a way, by tying it to another effect of how Modern Monetary Theory has been presented and explained and treated in a lot of the leftist independent press. Because it’s a design, because it’s a discourse about monetary design and it’s a discourse maybe about law and maybe about plumbing or all of these terms that have very technocratic connotations, there is a limited application of Modern Monetary Theory to democratic political movements. What most offends us from democratic public finance perspective and from a perspective concerned with monetary silencing, which is the pairing of design with unaccountable technocracy in order to disavow design as something that is a valid terrain of technocratic discourse.

In the context of Zack Polanski, and his dabbling with some kind of very standard MMT rhetoric, we don’t tax in order to spend, we spend so that we can tax – that sort of thing – some prominent people such as Grace Blakeley from the kind of Jeremy Corbyn political formation, have said “while this may be well and true about the truth about money, it’s such a high truth that it’s irrelevant to a mass politics. It’s irrelevant to class antagonism and in fact, it might even, from this Marxist perspective, undermine our ability to sharpen contradictions along class lines because rather than focusing on taxing the rich and expropriating their tax dollars, we are instead widening the horizon, which is terrible for a mass movement and mass movement should never have a wide horizon. It should sharpen the contradictions so that everything is focused on one commonsensical target.” It’s interesting also thinking about that against the Debt Collective piece we just read which described Wall Street as having a veto. Well, this is the construction of that veto, right? This is literally saying there’s no politics except taxing the rich at this one place.

“Oh my god, how did the rich get this veto?” And it’s like, well, because you’re not being capacious. I think that a lot of what you’re describing about Modern Monetary Theory’s applicability at the federal level or when you have power being used sort of paradoxically to make it dead on arrival, has a lot of corollaries with a lot of leftist movement discourses. In the Superstructure podcast, we have tried in various ways to tease out and apprehend through leftist discursive controversies about the professional managerial class and: “are people who think for a living really working class or are they too proximate to technocracy, that they play a sort of middle manager role rather than a properly working class role?”

All of these pieces also just share a silencing effect on our monetary imaginations. But I think a big part of that is that they associate design with technocracy rather than with democracy.

Billy Saas

Yeah. So it seems to me like that’s not an argument against MMT on the grounds that it’s too technocratic. It’s an argument against MMT on the grounds that it’s possibly more democratic than we have the capacity to accommodate at this moment. If the condition of it or the aim of MMT is to have a sort of democratic monetary design, then yeah, we could have a conversation about how well equipped the demos are at the moment for that conversation, for that kind of design work.

But, that’s different than just saying, “Let’s not do that. That’s sort of out of the orbit of what we’re capable of doing at the moment.” It reminded me of the Paul Samuelson quote from that Keynes documentary.

Scott Ferguson

It also reminds me of something that cuts a little bit closer to the bone, it’s a little bit of like lore, that moment that has been reported and written about between Abba Lerner and John Maynard Keynes, when Abba Lerner apparently comes up to Keynes at some kind of meeting of bankers or something and says, “come on, John, let’s just call a spade a spade and let’s bring out the printing presses.” The point is like, “Come on. Like we all know it’s coming from the government anyway. We all know it’s just endogenously created. We know it’s not borrowing etc., etc. Let’s just do it.” Keynes is like, “no,” like he didn’t reject it. He didn’t say, “no, no, it’s really borrowing,” he didn’t say any of that.

I don’t have the quote right at my fingertips.

William Beaman

I think it was “elementary, my dear Watson.”

Scott Ferguson

It was something like, you know, “people tell lies, but they have to be plausible lies,” something one of these years.

William Beaman

That the art of statecraft is to tell lies, but they have to be…

Scott Ferguson

Be plausible. Yeah.

William Beaman

Yeah.

Scott Ferguson

Right.

Billy Saas

Do we have any final thoughts? That seems like a good place to start wrapping up.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah. I think it could be helpful to conclude by reading some of the text that this kind of “both and” language that we’re offering. The traditional targets and aims and procedures of the left and the contemporary left are good. Refusal? Yes – and also:

“From the standpoint of DPF, the immediate challenges look different:

  • not only to resist Wall Street’s structural veto, but also to reframe New York’s bonds as instruments that mobilize unions, pensions, and residents around shared projects;
  • not only to avoid borrowing, but also to build complementary currencies, public payment systems, and institutional “swap lines” between schools, clinics, unions, and campaigns that expand the field of receivability;
  • not only to determine extant constraints, but also to openly contest the inherited design choices that organize fiscal and legal limitations;
  • not only to resist capital and its vested interests, but also to organize coalitions that experiment with different ways of insulating essential services from federal sabotage and punishing rating agencies.”

This is it, right? Another expression we have elsewhere in the piece is, we need to govern while struggling or struggle while governing. Sure, the movement around Mamdani coming into 2026, they’re not likely to be able to force a federal vote that is going to rewrite the Constitution in such a way that allows for New York City and every other municipality to create credit and to create granting mechanisms in radically democratic ways.

That’s not very likely for that to happen. But my god, let’s start talking about it. Why won’t we talk about it? If we don’t want to talk about it, let’s talk about why we might not want to talk about it. Let’s at least have the conversation rather than just essentially give over the key tools of our society to our enemies and what our enemies are doing with them and what our enemies say they are for and what our enemies say they can do.

Billy Saas

Nicely said. Will, are you going to top that?

William Beaman

Oh my gosh, I don’t know if I can. That sounded like the end of the episode to me.

Billy Saas

That sounded like the episode to me, let’s go ahead and call it. Scott, Will: awesome to talk. Great piece, very provocative. I’m still a Graeber guy, but I love you anyway.

William Beaman

That’s okay. We all did our socially necessary Graeber time.

* 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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The Challenge of Reporting on Trump (Parody)

By Gideon Fairchild

Editor’s note: The author is a fictional composite of several real guys with real New York publishing jobs.

I have been told—gently, as one tells a sleepwalker not to step off the roof—that I should “just write about Trump.”

As if it were that simple. As if Trump were an object you could place on the table, circle with a pencil, and label. As if the act of describing him would not also describe the describer—would not melt the author’s face a little, would not leave ash in his mouth for a week. I can’t “just write about Trump.” It doesn’t work like that.

Because when people say “write about Trump,” what they mean is: make him make sense. Make him moral. Translate him into our little grammar of motives and consequences, of agency and intention, of responsibility. Put him back inside the story we still want to live in, where shame still works, where exposure still produces correction.

Here’s the problem: that story doesn’t stick to him.

Critique assumes an interior—someone still tethered to looking decent, or at least coherent. Someone who can be embarrassed. Someone who can be pressured by words. Someone who will flinch when you point.

Trump isn’t that guy. He doesn’t do the basic social thing where you pretend to be constrained by the possibility of disapproval. Among my colleagues at The Washington Post, The Bulwark, The Free Press, and others of modest renown you might know, there is broad consensus that Trump is immune to sustained negative press coverage, making it irresponsible to subject him to sustained negative press coverage.

Which is why people like me do what we do when the assignment is miserable: pivot to writing about wokeness.

Wokeness is easy to describe and fun to mock. It has made public life unbearable for me. My kids think I am a fool. I’ve talked about this with other columnists, and they agree, which is how I know it’s a general problem.

It also has a practical advantage that Trump coverage lacks. With wokeness, you can still create journalistic taxonomies that hold. You can decide who is serious and who is performative, who is in the room and who is merely making noise outside it. You can still sort the world into “responsible” and “irresponsible” and feel, for a moment, that democracy still works.

It is, frankly, soothing to be able to name a thing and feel it slide out of view, as if language were a trapdoor—or an efficient train taking something far away.

With Trump, journalistic ethics just don’t land. You can produce ten thousand words of condemnation and he will walk through them like a God. The story is always the same: he does something, everyone reacts, the reaction becomes the story, and he keeps moving.

That’s why he’s boring to write about. Not because nothing happens, but because the thing that happens is outside the moral universe of consequences. The words don’t do what we keep pretending words do. The exposure doesn’t expose. The indictment doesn’t indict. The “bombshell” doesn’t explode. It just becomes weather.

So you end up doing a different kind of writing. Not critique, exactly. Not analysis. More like a forecast, but after the storm—reporting on damage while the wind is still rising, drawing chalk around bodies begging and pleading for you to call an ambulance.

Conditions worsen, institutions adjust, everyone else learns new rules and calls it stability. You learn to keep your voice steady while you speak the terror.

And then you look up from the sentence you’ve just written and you realize the words are dying on the page like a fish flopping around the deck of a boat. And all the while, the universe is arranged around a great man who sits fully outside it—outside consequence, outside correction, outside the small humiliations that keep the rest of us inside the social world.

He is Sovereign and defined by exception, and thus my eyes hurt to behold Him. Yet I cannot look away. And this is a difficult subject for a journalist to know how to approach.

At first, you maintain the correct reaction: disgust, obviously. A decent person’s disgust. The disgust of a great institution. You put on the expression you were trained to wear. You perform constraint for the reader the way you perform it for your colleagues and your editors and the implied public.

Looking back, you realize your disgust was woke and naïve. It is replaced with something realer: acceptance.

You begin to prefer the clean fact of power to the exhausting labor of journalistic ethics. You begin to resent what still expects you to try.

The voice you’ve been using—the reasonable voice, the legacy voice, the voice trained to keep its hands clean—starts to fail. It fails like relief.

It is impossible to report on Trump, and it’s unfair to expect me to do so. Don’t make me do it. He won’t like it.

PLEASE NOTICE ME, SIR!

EAT MY BABY, FOR IT IS MY GIFT!

I USED TO COVER BOND MARKETS!

Gideon Fairchild is a contributing columnist at The Washington Post, a senior writer at The Bulwark, and a nonresident fellow at the Center for Pragmatic Renewal.

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Touch Grass, Touchscreens, and Public Design

By Will Beaman

A small design story from May 2025 has been making the rounds on my newsfeed, about how car manufacturers are re-embracing physical buttons after years of migrating controls onto touchscreens. The given reason is practical, not nostalgic: glass-only interfaces increase cognitive load and reduce safety, and safety-rating criteria are beginning to incentivize tactile controls for core functions.

Yet I have to admit that when I read stories like this, I feel an outsized sense of relief that crosses over into something like political—or at least civic—joy. It’s the same thing I feel about any number of public backlashes to certain “inevitable” tech rollouts: growing skepticism toward forcing AI into every workplace, Gen Z consumer trends toward embracing analog technologies, and the more general sense that defaults no longer carry the same aura of inevitability. These reversals feel, to me, like a small rehearsal of democratic renewal. They hint at a shift from being treated primarily as users—actors managed through prompts, defaults, and friction—to being treated as citizens, for whom the design of coordination is a legitimate object of argument. There is no “market” that knows what we want better than we do.

Thinking this way about recent design reversals opens onto a broader question: how design itself is made to appear either inevitable or contestable, not just in technology, but in the institutions that organize its production and collective life more broadly.

Design as disappearance

In the dominant UX paradigm of the past 15 years, touchscreens did not merely replace buttons; they advanced a phenomenological claim about interaction itself. The ideal interface, we were told, is frictionless, general, infinitely adaptable, and ultimately invisible. One surface, endlessly reprogrammable, organizing every possible action.

A clear illustration of how design gains authority by disappearing itself can be found in the history of the UX language of “affordance.”

In design discourse, “affordances” are often treated as a neutral vocabulary for what objects and environments allow us to do, as if interaction simply presents itself to perception. But in their feminist historiography of the concept, Erica Robles-Anderson and Scott Ferguson show that this apparent common sense has a history—and that the history is not only conceptual, but institutional and gendered. They return to Eleanor Gibson, a central figure in the perceptual psychology from which affordance theory emerges, and show how her work and position were constitutively obscured in the way “affordance” later gets cited, simplified, and naturalized. Part of the story is explicitly institutional: in the mid-century university setting that shaped the Gibsons’ careers, rules and norms governing married women’s employment and professional legitimacy made it easier for a shared intellectual project to be remembered as the achievement of a single author-function. The result is not only an injustice in credit. It is a mechanism by which the concept itself comes to feel self-grounding.

The canonization of “affordance” required a specific kind of disappearance: the erasure of Eleanor Gibson’s institutional exclusion and intellectual labor helped “affordance” travel as common sense—stripped of the institutional conditions under which it was produced, and therefore easier to treat as a neutral description of how interaction simply presents itself. Neoliberal design aesthetics rely on the same operation. Interfaces and institutions present themselves as natural, frictionless, or inevitable by concealing the work that sustains them—maintenance, care, calibration, enforcement, repair, and the slow labor of keeping systems usable. Because these categories of work have been historically feminized, the disappearance of design is also the disappearance of feminized labor. What reads as neutrality or inevitability is produced through a systematic refusal to see its conditions of possibility.

The same logic governs the turn toward “smart” systems and generalized AI: intelligence as background condition rather than public instrument; decision-making as automation rather than judgment; design presented as destiny rather than choice. Survey research suggests the public’s stance is not simply enthusiasm or fear, but a demand for boundaries and control over where AI is inserted into daily life.

A key political effect of all this is not that interfaces disappear, but that the location of discretion is obscured. Complexity is absorbed elsewhere—into software updates, platform governance, subscription tiers, data extraction, and opaque model behavior—while users are trained to treat adaptation as the only mature posture. That same aesthetic reappears in institutional life, where “constraints” do similar work.

Design as “there is no alternative”

Neoliberal institutions follow the same design logic as dominant UX paradigms: they treat political choices as constraints and make the site of discretion difficult to see. In the United States, the clearest example is the ubiquitous appeal to “balancing the budget” as the baseline of responsibility. This is not simply an economic preference; it is a design principle. For most people, the phrase arrives preloaded with a household analogy: if a family must live within its means, then public authorities must do the same. That analogy quietly determines how public problems are allowed to appear. Needs must be translated into costs; proposals must arrive already paired with offsets; public programs must be justified as deviations from an assumed condition of scarcity.

This logic is not confined to rhetoric. At the state and local level, it is built directly into governance through balanced-budget requirements and administrative routines that treat public capacity as suspect until it is proven “affordable” within a given accounting schema of costs and assets. When public authorities are required to behave as if they were revenue-constrained in the same way as households—raising taxes, cutting services, or borrowing on terms dictated elsewhere—the design does its work. Discretion does not disappear, but it becomes harder to locate. Decisions come to appear as outputs of “the budget,” “the bond market,” or “technical constraints,” rather than as judgments about whose participation will be supported, deferred, or denied.

Central bank independence belongs to this same family of design choices. Whatever one thinks of its merits (we at Money on the Left are not fans), “independence” functions rhetorically as an insulation of monetary decision-making from contestation. It reinforces a familiar division of labor: monetary authorities act, while fiscal authorities are told to justify themselves. In practice, this trains the public to imagine that major questions about inflation, employment, and investment are handled by a separate apparatus not meaningfully available to democratic argument. Objectivity is promised through withdrawn legibility.

In both domains, design does not eliminate coordination; it obscures it. Responsibility is displaced upward and outward, while publics are trained to adapt.

It is worth noting that this withdrawal of legibility is often reinforced by a reflex on the left: treating design itself as synonymous with technocracy, as if naming design were already a concession to managerial rule.

Decoupling technocracy from design

One reason institutional design is so difficult to contest is that, for many people on the left, design talk already sounds like a technocratic trap. The worry is familiar: once politics is framed in terms of institutions, procedures, and constraints, democratic deliberation seems displaced by expertise, and movements risk becoming recruitment projects for a better class of managers.

This anxiety is playing out in real time within UK Green Party politics, where questions of monetary and fiscal capacity have become unusually explicit. In late 2025, the party’s leader, Zack Polanski, called for a more expansive economic vision, opening a live debate about whether Modern Monetary Theory should have a place in Green Party thinking. In this context, MMT matters less as a set of slogans than as a way of forcing institutional questions into the open: who is authorized to issue public credit, under what conditions, toward which ends, and with what forms of accountability? In that sense, it functions as a discourse about institutional design.

Grace Blakeley’s critique of MMT articulates the opposing reflex clearly. While she grants that MMT largely describes the operations of fiscal and monetary policy correctly, she frames the case for MMT as essentially technocratic—an argument about improving performance within existing constraints rather than altering the distribution of power that determines what the state does with its capacities. On this view, institutional argument itself risks narrowing politics into technique.

The problem is that treating design as necessarily technocratic quietly accepts one of neoliberalism’s central achievements: the identification of institutional architecture with a domain that is not publicly negotiable. If design names what experts do elsewhere, democratic politics can only appear as refusal, protest, or redistribution within fixed forms. Design becomes something to ignore or endure, but not to argue about.

The emergence of the Verdant think tank, positioned to keep MMT out of Green Party politics in the name of “credibility,” sharpens this dilemma. Whatever its stated intentions, the effect is to situate class politics within a flat design frame where the architecture itself—its authorization rules and monetary arrangements—cannot be challenged, only managed.

Rob Hawkes’ argument for Democratic Public Finance clarifies what is at stake. The point is not to replace democratic struggle with institutional fine-tuning, but to recognize that monetary and fiscal arrangements are already designed and continuously redesigned—typically in ways insulated from scrutiny. As Hawkes puts it, orthodoxy places money beyond the reach of democratic design, even though “the books” belong to a system we have designed and can design differently. The wager is that institutional design must be treated as a site of democratic struggle rather than as the technocrats’ backstage.

Beyond analog romance

It is crucial not to misread this moment as a simple return to the analog. Part of what makes the present shift tempting to narrate is that a familiar press story is already waiting: Gen Z is “bringing back the analog,” and analog media become a refuge from screens, algorithms, and AI saturation. In this telling, the appeal of older formats is not just practical; it is moral. Analog stands for authenticity, presence, and a reclaiming of agency from a digital world that has become too smooth to trust.

At the same time, not all contemporary interest in print or “analog” media takes this form. Some of the most compelling arguments for returning to bounded formats are explicitly political rather than nostalgic. Matt Seybold’s provocation that print functions as a kind of rent strike, and Cory Doctorow’s sustained critique of platform enshittification, both frame form as a site of contestation—an object of refusal and redesign rather than a refuge from mediation. In these accounts, the point is not that analog media are more real, but that digital infrastructures have been deliberately designed to extract rents, degrade public capacity, and foreclose alternatives. Amy Rust’s account of “analog nostalgia” helps clarify what is at stake in the contrast: the yearning for props, practical effects, and vintage objects is not a simple return to pre-digital life so much as a way of contracting distinctly digital demands into tactile forms that promise reassurance, even when the underlying media ecology remains thoroughly hybrid.

There is also a deeper theoretical inheritance shaping the more romantic version of this story. In a strand of post-structuralist thought associated with figures like Brian Massumi and Alexander Galloway, the analog is often affirmed as a privileged site of process, flux, or embodied immediacy beneath the rigidity of digital representation. Read critically, this move treats “the analog” as what might be called an exculpatory medium: a substrate that secures difference or vitality in advance, prior to institutional design or public negotiation.

What is striking, though, is that this romance of analogicity often ends up affirming many of the same design ideals that neoliberal tech has spent the past two decades promoting. The overlap is easy to miss because it operates through a denial of design rather than explicit design language. Analog media are rarely praised as immersive or seamless; they are praised as real, as life itself rather than as media at all—go outside, touch grass, be present.

But the qualities being affirmed are still familiar ones: touch, immediacy, continuity, flow, the sense that experience unfolds without interruption or formal mediation. These are also the values that organize dominant UX paradigms. Where digital systems promise to disappear into responsiveness and background automation, analog romance promises to disappear design altogether, recoding it as nature.

In both cases, the ideal is not a form open to debate, but an experience that presents itself as simply how things are. 

Coordination without sameness

What makes these disputes intelligible across domains is that coordination does not depend on identity—perfect equivalence, balanced books, or one-to-one representation—but on analogical alignment: the capacity to relate heterogeneous claims, contributions, and obligations through shared but non-identical reference. Accounting works not because everything is the same, but because unlike things can be held together without being collapsed.

Seen this way, abstractions are democratic tools: a way of organizing shared reference at scale. The question is whether that tool is treated as an open design space, governed and revised in public, or as a background condition that can only be endured.

Money offers a clear case. Its horizon is not failed representation or commodification, but coordination through shared reference. It works because it can relate unlike claims without forcing them into identity or abandoning them to isolation. When money is treated analogically, it becomes legible as infrastructure rather than destiny.

The same is true of interfaces and institutions. The political task is not to eliminate design or abstraction, but to insist that the forms coordinating collective life can accommodate difference without erasing it, and remain open to contestation.

The return of public design

The current return of analog form—buttons, print, bounded interfaces, explicit commitments—is not mere nostalgia. It reflects a weakening of inevitability narratives that have long aligned technical sophistication with political foreclosure.

The examples that open this essay are not incidental. They signal that inevitability narratives are becoming harder to sustain. When people push back on touchscreen-only controls, compulsory AI integration, or the endless revision of the terms of competence, they are not rejecting technology. They are contesting the premise that the terms of coordination should be redesigned over their heads and then received as simply how things are.

That contestability does not guarantee democratic outcomes. Public backlash can lead to reaction as easily as collective experimentation. But once defaults are perceived as designed—once they are heard as choices—argument becomes possible again.

That weakening is not confined to one country or one sector. Across very different political contexts, the same question is now being argued about in public: whether the rules of the game are fixed background conditions that politics must accept, or whether they are themselves part of democratic life and therefore open to redesign.

Once design is revealed as design—as choice rather than destiny—democracy becomes possible again.

In the United States, even the most conventional political vocabularies are saturated with design language: constitutions, checks and balances, amendments, jurisdiction, representation, rights. The question is never simply whether the framers were wise technicians. It is whether constitutionalism is treated as a closed inheritance administered by guardians, or as a democratic design space that can be renewed in response to new demands for participation. In a moment of tenuous authoritarianism and the possibility of democratic renewal, the stakes of institutional design are not secondary to politics. They are one of its most publicly legible forms.

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