Let’s face it, even “good” macro talk can fall into the trap of treating the economy like a tidy spreadsheet while real lives get crushed in the margins. To help us peer beneath the covers, Steve invited Emma Holten, a Copenhagen-based political economist to talk about her book Deficit: How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World. We often discuss deficits around here, but Emma is looking at a different kind. She reframes deficit as what societies rack up when they systematically undervalue care: the paid and unpaid labor (still disproportionately done by women) that keeps people healthy, capable, and alive.

Emma and Steve discuss the way mainstream economics has long treated the home, the body, and the mind as a black box, as if workers spring fully formed from the soil and arrive at the labor market already fed, healed, soothed, socialized, and ready to produce.

They talk about measurement and the way the GDP counts a $3,000 ambulance bill as added value instead of predatory extraction. They also look at power and social cohesion. Steve connects Emma’s thesis to MMT’s real-resources focus and the Job Guarantee as a way to fund socially necessary work that markets underprovide, while also admitting the hard question: even if policy is sound, capital and its political machinery never volunteer to be disarmed.

Emma Holten is a feminist activist and gender policy consultant. Since 2018, she has worked with feminist economics. In 2024 she published her first book “DEFICIT - On the value of care” in Danish. It is available in English, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Dutch, and Italian - and forthcoming in 6 other languages. It has won the Politiken Literature Prize, The Library Reader’s Prize, The Sara Danius Prize, The Sprout Prize and was shortlisted for the Montana Literature Award.

For a masterclass in true bipartisanship, look no further than the guest list of Jeffrey Epstein! We all love a good conspiracy story, but it’s often just business as usual for the class in power.

Nolan Higdon – lecturer, media critic, and author of The Gaslight Gazette – is back for a deep analytical dive into the Epstein saga. Moving beyond true-crime sensationalism, Nolan and Steve frame the scandal as a stark case study in systemic class power, media complicity, and the mechanisms elite networks use to protect their own.

The discussion hinges on several key points: evidence from released emails shows Epstein’s role as a trans-partisan power broker, connecting figures like Trump and Clinton to finance (Les Wexner) and tech (Bill Gates, Peter Thiel).

The media’s failure to investigate is no accident. (Are we surprised?) It’s a function of class interests acting to manage public perception and manufacture consent. The episode goes on to connect Epstein’s documented interest in spyware and AI to a broader project of militarized surveillance for social control.

Nolan Higdon is a founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas, Project Censored National Judge, author, and lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. Higdon’s areas of concentration include podcasting, digital culture, news media history, propaganda, and critical media literacy. He is the author of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (2020); Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (2022); The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People (2022); and the forthcoming Surveillance Education: Navigating the conspicuous absence of privacy in schools (Routledge). Higdon is a regular source of expertise for CBS, NBC, The New York Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Find his work on Substack: nolanhigdon.substack.com

@NolanHigdonCML on X

Historian and journalist Vijay Prashad talks with Steve about why Antonio Gramsci still matters.

Listeners to this podcast know that we have a pretty good grasp of the monetary system. But we’re constantly working to expand our understanding of the systemic underpinnings of real power. How else will we be able to seize it? For help, we turn to Gramsci.

According to Vijay, Gramsci was doing class forensics. His core puzzle was brutal and practical: why did big chunks of Italy’s working-class bail on their own unions and parties and drift into fascism? That’s the real origin story of “cultural hegemony,” “common sense,” and the whole Gramscian toolbox: figuring out how consent gets manufactured and how counterrevolution recruits.

Vijay takes us through Gramsci’s political development and his imprisonment under Mussolini, where he wrote his seminal Prison Notebooks.

Then they get into Gramsci’s key concepts: hegemony (borrowed from Lenin and, per Vijay, more than a “culture theory”), the necessity of a Leninist-type party as the modern Prince, and the need to build alliances to create working-class leadership over society.

After taking a hard look at the left in the US, Steve and Vijay discuss the limits of electoral politics and the missing infrastructure for a serious battle of ideas. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about class power, organizing, and what it actually takes to change how people understand the world they’re living in.

Vijay Prashad is the Executive Director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. He is a historian, journalist, and author of forty books, including Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassination; Red Star over the Third World; and The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World.

thetricontinental.org

@vijayprashad on X