In this episode, we speak with Walt McRee (President) and Peter Winslow (Vice President) of the Public Banking Institute (PBI) about their past and ongoing advocacy for public banking. Founded in 2011 by author Ellen Brown and a core collective of advocates, PBI aims to break the monopoly of Wall Street's private banking system by establishing a nationwide network of publicly owned, democratically accountable banks. Through this work, PBI seeks to foster a wide-spread monetary and banking sys...
Jun 1
1 hr 19 min
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. (Update: Since recording, Sheridan won her seat and is now an elected Councillor.) In her academic and political work, Sheridan rejects both the economics and the language of austerity, and instead prioritises democratic, inclusive, and participatory institution building. Sheridan’s activism extends int...
May 2
58 min
We speak with Ely Fair, who studies structural inequality and poverty in urban geographies from a heterodox perspective. Fair holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Missouri, Kansas City and is presently a visiting instructor in Economics at Knox College. 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 conver...
Apr 1
1 hr 40 min
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 Go...
Mar 1
1 hr 41 min
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...
Feb 1
1 hr 18 min
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 mayoral...
Jan 2
1 hr 15 min
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....
Dec 1, 2025
1 hr 43 min
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. DPF redefines politics as the process of coordinating our abundant human and material resources within ecological limits, rather than as an austere and exploitative competition for scarce funds....
Nov 1, 2025
1 hr 51 min
In this episode of the Superstructure podcast, Scott Ferguson is joined by independent film scholar Jonathan Haynes to discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed new film, One Battle After Another. The conversation centers on the film’s contribution to popular political cinema under the authoritarian violence of the second Trump administration. Scott and Jonathan affirm One Battle’s unapologetically leftist perspective as a breath of fresh air within a current political climate of despair–a fee...
Oct 7, 2025
2 hr
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 ...
Oct 2, 2025
1 hr 20 min
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