Victor Pickard returns to Money on the Left six years after his first appearance on the show to discuss the state of the U.S. media system under Trump 2.0. Pickard is C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Co-Director at the Media, Inequality & Change Center. Placing current developments in broad historical context, Pickard situates today’s media crisis within a century-long struggle to establish and maintain genuine public media against the overpowering dominance and relentless pushback of private corporate media.

In this episode, we speak with Walt McRee (President) and Peter Winslow (Vice President) of the Public Banking Institute (PBI) about their past and ongoing advocacy for public banking. Founded in 2011 by author Ellen Brown and a core collective of advocates, PBI aims to break the monopoly of Wall Street’s private banking system by establishing a nationwide network of publicly owned, democratically accountable banks.

Billy Saas and Rob Hawkes speak with Sheridan Kates, ecological economist, activist and, at present, Green Party candidate for Islington Council in North London in the May 2026 local election. In her academic and political work, Sheridan rejects both the economics and the language of austerity, and instead prioritises democratic, inclusive, and participatory institution building.

We speak with Ely Fair, who holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Missouri, Kansas City and studies structural inequality and poverty in urban geographies from a heterodox perspective. Examining the institutions responsible for social valuation, maintenance, and transformation at the neighborhood level, Fair focuses especially on the role of housing policy in the racialization of U.S. cities. During our conversation, Fair not only spells out important discoveries in this critical research, but also outlines several positive policy solutions designed to remediate the unjust development of urban geographies.

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. In this episode, we speak with Khush Vachhrajani, writer and national coordinator at the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research in India, about how, tragically, that lifeline is now being cut.

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.

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.

We are joined by David I. Backer, associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University, to discuss his new book: As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools (The New Press, 2025). The right-wing attack on education has cut deep. In response, millions of Americans have rallied to defend their cherished public schools. Backer’s incisive book asks whether choosing between our embattled status quo and the stingy privatized vision of the right is the only path forward.

Billy Saas and Scott Ferguson are joined by Will Beaman to discuss Money on the Left’s framework for what we call “Democratic Public Finance” (DPF). According to this paradigm, money is public credit, a capacious tool for mobilizing everyone’s capacities to meet our needs and build a desirable future.

We speak with Caroline Levine, Ryan Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, about her important book The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press, 2023). Building on the theory developed in her award-winning book, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Levine’s The Activist Humanist redirects the critical capacities of formalist literary study to discover and mobilize the democratic potential of political forms thought by many on the left to be irredeemably exclusive, violent, and anti-democratic.

Money on the Left is proud to publish a remastered version of our third episode with Fadhel Kaboub, now with a new transcript and art. Kaboub is associate professor of economics at Denison and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. In our conversation, Kaboub outlines a new critical approach to postcolonial political economy, arguing that re-gaining fiscal agency is a crucial next step for postcolonial nations hoping to achieve social, economic, and environmental justice.

We speak with Vijay Raghavan, Professor of Law at the Brooklyn Law School, about his recent article, “The Radical Potential of Consumer Financial Protection,” published in Boston College Law Review in April 2025. Raghavan builds on the work of constitutional money theorists, as well as his legal experience in the public sector. In particular, he argues that consumer financial protection is an essential and potentially radical response to the “finance franchise,” a predominantly anti-democratic process by which modern governments delegate the money creation process to private actors like banks.

Heterodox economist Jamee K. Moudud returns to Money on the Left to discuss his new book, Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez-Faire? (Routledge, 2025). The phrase “institutions matter” is a common refrain among economists, including many who have proposed progressive alternatives to free market fundamentalism. For Moudud, however, this proposition doesn’t go far enough, leaving a host of problematic assumptions unquestioned. To remedy this, Moudud draws on the Original Institutional Economics and American Legal Realist traditions to propose a robust theory of legal institutionalism or institutional political economy.

In this episode, we share Part 2 of our coverage of The Black University & Community Currencies workshop. Held April 25, 2025 on the campus of Morehouse College, the workshop fostered dialogue between students, faculty, and activists about the radical possibilities of public money for higher education, broadly, and for communities at and around Morehouse, specifically. The occasion for the workshop was the conclusion of a semester in which students enrolled in Professor Andrew Douglas’s advanced political theory course at Morehouse implemented a classroom currency called the CREDO for use by Morehouse students. 

In this episode, Money on the Left shares audio from “The Black University & Community Currencies,” a public workshop convened by Professor Andrew J. Douglas at Morehouse College on April 25, 2025. This episode presents Part 1 of the workshop. It features an introduction by Professor Douglas and two panels. The first panel is titled “What is Public Money?” (Delman Coates, Scott Ferguson & Benjamin Wilson. The second asks: “What is the Uni Currency Proposal?” (Scott Ferguson & Benjamin Wilson). 

Rohan Grey, Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University, joins Money on the Left to discuss his urgent new paper, “Digitizing the Fisc.” During our conversation, we recount the events surrounding Elon Musk & the DOGE boys’ unconstitutional takeover of the Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Service, while explicating the right-wing theory of the “unitary executive” that underwrites such actions.

Money on the Left speaks with Raúl Carrillo, assistant professor of Law at Boston College, about gaming money. In this episode, we explore how companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Roblox are not only harming gamers but issuing “shadow money,” evading banking regulations meant to prevent structural problems.

Money on the Left speaks with Edward Jones Corredera, author of Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2024). What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Odious Debt shows how Latin American nations have wrestled with the morality of indebtedness and insolvency since their foundation, and outlines how Latin America’s forgotten history of contestation can shed new light on seemingly intractable contemporary dilemmas.

Money on the Left speaks with Dr. Jens Martignoni, lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and chief editor of the International Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR). Community or complementary currencies are phenomena of great interest to monetary scholars and activists. We’ve spoken often about them on this show–whether about the Benjamins classroom currency at SUNY Cortland, the DVDs currency at Denison, or our recurring work on the Uni Currency Project. During our conversation with Martignoni, the appeal of such projects becomes clear.

Billy Saas and guest-host Ben Wilson speak with Martha McCluskey about the ins and outs of the Law & Political Economy movement. McCluskey is Professor Emerita at the University at Buffalo School of Law and a progressive institution-builder. She has made foundational contributions to feminist research and activism in and beyond the academy, focusing on interrelations between economic and legal institutions. McCluskey’s expertise with construction and maintenance of durable institutions for the development and circulation of socially- and politically-attuned critical legal scholarship gives good reasons for hope in this time of great political unease.