These are some ways that @moneyontheleft.bsky.social’s Democratic Public Finance framework draws on and is different from other contributions in political economy and heterodox economics. moneyontheleft.org/2025/10/10/d...

Check out our latest podcast with the folks from The Public Banking Institute. moneyontheleft.org/2026/06/01/t...

Wait, what's a "fiscal chronotope"?

Carol Burnett and Rod Serling arm wrestling on set of The Twilight Zone. 1962

André Bazin's point about photography is that its mechanical thirdness can be used to stage a creative perceptual encounter. From the photographic image you create—as he put it—"a hallucination that is also a fact." This points to a different way of thinking about the creativity LLMs can enable..

*Thriving

Turns out people need money. I wish we had known this since the Great Depression

That pits priorities against each other. We can’t do X until we get rid of Y, which means Y is set up politically as a chokepoint. And maybe we DO want to get rid of Y and have X. But by tying these together in a causal way we engineer our own political predicament.

Money appearing as a zero sum “thing” can serve political rhetoric sometimes—if it’s a thing then it can be expropriated. But there’s no material corollary this tracks. You don’t melt down a yacht and turn it into healthcare. And the downside of this rhetoric is it creates causal sequencing..

This image of money being recycling to facilitate production makes production itself look continuous. No form, just a material process. But because investment is discontinuous, political can turn on a dime (haha) and just fund something else. It’s not redistributive, it’s creative and form-giving.

Political economy should look for the seams where credit is endogenously created (i.e. created from inside the system, not taken from some outside place) and politicize them.

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Profitability not a necessary reproductive condition of anything. In fact it wrecks reproduction, it’s just destructive.

I recorded the second episode of a new podcast on Democratic Public Finance with @moneyontheleft.bsky.social 👀 and it has me feeling hopeful. The meaning and trajectory of every institutional form is always and forever contestable. For better and for worse, but most fundamentally for better.

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“I see you still haven’t taken care of ‘the problem,’ Mr. Stoller. The HR ladies seem to have gotten the better of you.”

White male urban professionals love communing with an imagined white male working class that is located somewhere else. It tells them to terrorize and deport the feminized and nonwhite working class they depend on everyday.

Trump’s edict making 8,000 feds at-will employees draws swift outcry www.govexec.com/workforce/20...

The market ontology is a legally designed effect

The problem is not that public entities use financial institutions. The problem is that the financial institutions capable of holding public money have been overwhelmingly organized as private franchises that make even asking for a public banking option appear as this dangerous exotic request.

So the public first creates and stabilizes the banking system, then treats that system as an external market institution into which public money must be placed.

Circular: the state recognizes private banks as safe depositories for public money because private banks sit inside a public legal architecture. They are chartered, supervised, insured/backstopped, connected to payments systems, and meet legal eligibility requirements to hold public deposits.

True fact.

"You can't just print money" is the "there's two genders" for economics. As Keynes said, the ability to create money is the ability to edit the dictionary

The only fight we’ll be debating is who wins the battle of public interest. The only thing we’re demystifying is finance itself. No aliens, MMA, or giving our audience a view of our personal lives that’s a little TMI to chuckle at… You guys are excited as we are, right? 😂

These people all counterpose the materiality of class with the superficiality of identity, media and culture. As if materiality doesn't have form. In the final analysis, it's a fascist politics that separates some parts of the world as real and productive and other parts as fake and parasitic.

Distribution is much weaker and thinner than creation and form-giving. When the imagining of new forms is concealed within the distribution of forms considered objective, someone is being written out of the world

If someone says they found the content underneath the form, what they really did is naturalize a particular form

The practice of finding concrete common denominators is a practice of exclusion

Relatedly, the idea that there are purely economic goods with no form is a real problem. Jobs aren’t just a finite stock to be fought over; they’re a social vision and index of belonging. Healthcare isn’t a substance; it’s a differentiated set of needs that we provision through time.

He did.

What you could say is that the current structure of municipal finance is more an extractive for profit loop. What we are seeking to do is stop profit seeking leakage of public funds. Same banking mechanics that currently exist, but the public sector becomes the beneficiary…without speculation.

Karl Marx’s Value, Price and Profit

So would we!

Why public banks, you ask?

We’re looping this animation to save money.

@publicbanksnow.bsky.social and @moneyontheleft.bsky.social! Give this a listen! Help spark the public banking wildfire!

Public Banks NOW! 📣 moneyontheleft.org/2026/06/01/t...

This is what an angry man telling lies looks like without a feminized reception apparatus to translate it into straight-talk from a damaged man with a heart of gold

I couldn't be a social scientist because all my survey questions would be like "What do you find honest and refreshing about when a guy wearing Carhartt stares directly into the camera and lies to you?"

NEW: A @wired.com analysis of Meta's app for its smart glasses found that the company has been adding code for face recognition since January, while saying that it is still "thinking through" whether to deploy it. @dmehro.bsky.social and @dell.bsky.social w/ the scoop: www.wired.com/story/meta-s...

lol

Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro's "Aesthetics of Development: Modern Industries in the Ehlers Sisters’ Mexican Films (1919-1922)" is now FREE for a limited time! doi.org/10.1525/fmh....

The structure is a circle, not depletion. Money can reshape what is being circularly produced, and direct qualitative transformations. Now compare all this to the idea that money is finite and therefore people and resources are costs to one another. It’s batshit.

Fascism says “you’re in motion which means you better secure the conditions of your motion by any means necessary.” But the only way you COULD be in motion is if the means of your existence are already in motion.

A society capable of absorbing difference, contradiction and change without spinning out should be the goal, but I guess I’m one of the Weak Mean created by Strong Times