Speaker 1: All Zone Media. Welcome to that and here podcasts about
Speaker 1: things falling apart and how to put them back together again.
Speaker 1: I am your host, Na Wong. So a week ago
Speaker 1: we did some episodes about the election of Zoran Mam
Speaker 1: Donnie and a lot of the very funny reactions to it,
Speaker 1: and you know, on Executive Disorder, we've talked about what
Speaker 1: this sort of means for politics. But now I want
Speaker 1: to do a slightly different kind of episode, which is
Speaker 1: looking at the challenges that Montdomney is going to face
Speaker 1: attempting to implement his agenda, attempting to stay mayor just
Speaker 1: taking him very seriously at his word, in his attempt
Speaker 1: to you know, make the cost of living lower and
Speaker 1: make people's lives better. And there are unfortunately, very significant
Speaker 1: challenges to this agenda, and those challenges are a mix
Speaker 1: of structural problems and I don't know the president of
Speaker 1: the United States right. We're going to focus on a
Speaker 1: few of them today, and before we really start this,
Speaker 1: I think I want to I want to start this
Speaker 1: to some extent with the conclusion, and the conclusion of
Speaker 1: this episode is not to say that these things are impossible,
Speaker 1: right and to not say they can't be done. But
Speaker 1: it's to remind people that the way that actual politics works,
Speaker 1: electing one person does not immediately make everything better. Right,
Speaker 1: you can't stop organizing because someone has been elected. And
Speaker 1: in fact, if you actually want to see the things
Speaker 1: that you you organize to you know, happen by electing
Speaker 1: this person, do you have to organize even harder once
Speaker 1: they are in power and mobilize even more to allow
Speaker 1: the things that you fought for to actually happen. Because
Speaker 1: there are significant opposition to anything you know, getting better
Speaker 1: for anyone in this country, and that opposition is powerful,
Speaker 1: well funded, well organized, and structural, and also, as we
Speaker 1: saw with the election of Aunt Donnie in the first place,
Speaker 1: it can be defeated. So we're going to start with
Speaker 1: the bond market. Now, many of you may be asking,
Speaker 1: b what does the bond market have to do with
Speaker 1: make buses free? And to do that we need to
Speaker 1: talk about funding mechanisms. So most plans in the US
Speaker 1: for sort of social democratic policy, for how you implement
Speaker 1: welfare state policies, how you implement policies that make people's
Speaker 1: lives better, tend to start from the federal governments and
Speaker 1: the national level, right, and there are very obvious reasons
Speaker 1: for this. Unlike the federal government, city governments don't issue
Speaker 1: their own currency, which means the modern monetary theory things
Speaker 1: that you would normally use to fund welfare programs with
Speaker 1: at a national level don't work. The federal government, again,
Speaker 1: has control of its own debt and money supply, city
Speaker 1: governments don't. That means the city governments, if you want
Speaker 1: to find money to do something, you have to find
Speaker 1: that from somewhere. And as wonderful as it would be
Speaker 1: if you could simply do that by just Okay, we
Speaker 1: raise taxes, and the taxes go to the policy that
Speaker 1: we want to implement, that's not how the system actually works.
Speaker 1: The way the system works if you want to pay
Speaker 1: for things at a city level is the bond markets.
Speaker 1: David I. Backer has a very good piece about this
Speaker 1: the Baffler that I deeply recommend people read. The main
Speaker 1: thing that's important here for our purposes is that for
Speaker 1: funding significant portions of anything that you want to do
Speaker 1: as mayor, you are legally required to go through the
Speaker 1: bond markets. And this means that the city is forced
Speaker 1: to beg for money from Wall Street investment banks and
Speaker 1: then also pay those same banks exorbitant fees and interest,
Speaker 1: and a significant amount of money has to go to,
Speaker 1: as Backer points out, a whole bunch of you know,
Speaker 1: lawyers and finance people and consultants and all of these
Speaker 1: you know, sort of mafia of finance schools who are
Speaker 1: standing in between the normal mechanism of you have money
Speaker 1: and you pay for things. And that's assuming again that
Speaker 1: you even have the money in the first place, which
Speaker 1: you quite often don't because cities are very very often
Speaker 1: cash strapped. As Backer points out, using these bond mechanisms
Speaker 1: to pay for programs is legally required. Now, Backer is
Speaker 1: mostly focused on the structural constraints created by servicing debt,
Speaker 1: which can consume increasing portions of a city's budget until
Speaker 1: you know there's nothing left. This is sort of what's
Speaker 1: happened to Detroit to a large extent, and also the
Speaker 1: bank's direct control over the payment mechanism, even when the
Speaker 1: city government brings in tax money. Right, so, even if
Speaker 1: you raise taxes and you bring in money, because you
Speaker 1: have to go through the bond market, it means that
Speaker 1: a bunch of that money is going to be funneled
Speaker 1: into servicing debt and paying interest on debt. But there's
Speaker 1: also a secondary problem here, which is that in very
Speaker 1: extreme cases, and I'm not saying we are immediately facing this,
Speaker 1: but I want to put this on the table as
Speaker 1: something that if you were attempting to run a social
Speaker 1: democratic program in a city, you do need to be
Speaker 1: significantly worried about the bank's direct control over payment mechanisms.
Speaker 1: Means that the banks, you know, the people who buy
Speaker 1: the bonds that you need to use to get to
Speaker 1: fund these things. So let's actually take a step back
Speaker 1: here and explain what a bond is, right. A bond
Speaker 1: is basically you selling a piece of paper that is debt.
Speaker 1: So you go into the market and you sell sell
Speaker 1: a bank of bond and they give you a bunch
Speaker 1: of money right now, and at the exploration of the bond,
Speaker 1: you pay that money back plus interest. This is how
Speaker 1: you have to fund things, because that is what's legally required,
Speaker 1: and also because cities need a way to get extremely
Speaker 1: large amounts of money. But this also means that cities
Speaker 1: that you know, banks and investors can simply not buy
Speaker 1: your bonds if they don't like what you're trying to do,
Speaker 1: and at that point, very little can be done to
Speaker 1: oppose them. The most dramatic version of this problem came
Speaker 1: to the New York City bond crisis in nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 1: where New York City had to sell a bunch of bonds.
Speaker 1: It was significantly in debt, and there's a very famous
Speaker 1: scene in I Think It's I Think It's a hyperd normalization.
Speaker 1: You know, there's film of like the city goverment officials
Speaker 1: who are sitting in this room waiting for the banks,
Speaker 1: like people, for the banks to show up to buy
Speaker 1: the bonds, and no one shows up, so suddenly they
Speaker 1: don't have any money. And then President Ford at the
Speaker 1: time tells the city to eat shit and die and
Speaker 1: refuses to buy any of New York City's bonds, refuse
Speaker 1: to give them any money, and this leaves the city bankrupt.
Speaker 1: Right it gets to a point where they have fired
Speaker 1: the teachers. There's no one to collect a garbage because
Speaker 1: they literally don't have money to pay anyone because no
Speaker 1: one will buy their bonds. And eventually this crisis is
Speaker 1: sort of mitigated. But the problem is that, you know,
Speaker 1: the task force that was set up to mitigate this
Speaker 1: right to like, you know, get there to be people
Speaker 1: buying New York City bonds. Again, those people were able
Speaker 1: to come in and New York City had a functional
Speaker 1: welfare state, right, had a sort of mini social democratic
Speaker 1: welfare state. And in order to reopen the governments and
Speaker 1: have schools and garbage collection again, in order to get
Speaker 1: that money, the city was required to dismantle it. And
Speaker 1: you know, the financial situation of New York is obviously
Speaker 1: significantly better than it was then, right, And the odds
Speaker 1: of having this kind of just full on macro scale
Speaker 1: crisis is not as high as it was then. But
Speaker 1: because of the fact that this is the legally mandated
Speaker 1: way that you have to do these payments, and because
Speaker 1: unlike the federal government, there are constraints on spending that
Speaker 1: in some ways function like needing foreign exchange currency. You know,
Speaker 1: you can't just issue this money. You have to get
Speaker 1: it from somewhere. And because of someone's usually the banks,
Speaker 1: it means that you have to constantly negotiate with the
Speaker 1: banks and with capital in order to keep the city's
Speaker 1: lights on. And this is a constant threat that they
Speaker 1: have sort of you know, hanging over the head of
Speaker 1: anyone who wants to be governor. And as Backer points out,
Speaker 1: you can even just tax your way out of the problem,
Speaker 1: because payment structures for government projects work out of the
Speaker 1: bond system, so that money just goes to debt payments.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of the other things that Backer
Speaker 1: points out. And obviously the situation in Chicago is different
Speaker 1: in the situation in New York. But the Chicago Teachers
Speaker 1: Union did elect a mayor who was, you know, their guy, right,
Speaker 1: The cholot teachers Union spent a significant amount of money
Speaker 1: and resources and effort getting their guy elected, and once
Speaker 1: he came into office, he basically ended up doing the
Speaker 1: same thing in their negotiations with the teachers union that
Speaker 1: the previous administrations had done. And the reason that happened,
Speaker 1: you know, and the reason that you started to see
Speaker 1: cuts to school services that we're not supposed to happen
Speaker 1: but anyways, was because the bond market stepped in and
Speaker 1: said this is what's necessary in order to do this,
Speaker 1: and they have that kind of power. Now, obviously Chicago
Speaker 1: was in a worse financial situation than New York is.
Speaker 1: Mom Dominie is significantly further left than Brandon Johnson is.
Speaker 1: But these are real constraints, and the social democratic solution
Speaker 1: to this has always been to get money from the
Speaker 1: federal governments. But the federal government won't give money out
Speaker 1: to the things that is legally required to give money
Speaker 1: out to you right now, because obviously it is run
Speaker 1: by one Donald Trump, and obviously Trump in and of
Speaker 1: himself is a significant problem to doing this right. There's
Speaker 1: always a chance that Trump will see something like mean
Speaker 1: about Mondani on Fox News and decide to send the
Speaker 1: National Guards to New York or something, and you know,
Speaker 1: he will probably continue immigration raids. He can, you know,
Speaker 1: just fuck with people's ability to get medicaid payments, which
Speaker 1: is a really significant issue. There will continue to be
Speaker 1: lots of creative and terrible things that the federal government
Speaker 1: can and will do to this administration that will have
Speaker 1: to be fought and can be defeated, but we'll have
Speaker 1: to be organized and fought against. But for our purposes
Speaker 1: right now, the big issue here is that you can't
Speaker 1: get money out of the federal governments. So okay, where
Speaker 1: are you getting money out of then? And the answer
Speaker 1: is the state governments. Now, do you know what else
Speaker 1: gets money out of state governments? Probably not these products
Speaker 1: and services. I don't know who knows, who knows we
Speaker 1: are back. So, okay, let's talk about the state government now. Again.
Speaker 1: This is even with the city the size of New York,
Speaker 1: there still is always significant negotiations in org do things
Speaker 1: in the city that require the aide of the state
Speaker 1: level government. And part of the problem here is that
Speaker 1: the New York State Democratic Party is significantly responsible for
Speaker 1: the Republicans control of the House, particularly in the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two cycle. There's a whole long story here about
Speaker 1: how a a bunch of the Democrats wanted to form
Speaker 1: this sort of moderate caucus thing, where the sort of
Speaker 1: independent caucus that would caucus with the Republicans in order
Speaker 1: to give the Republicans the ability to stop any sort
Speaker 1: of liberal or left wing thing from happening in the
Speaker 1: state governments and handle a whole bunch of seas over
Speaker 1: to the Republicans because of it. But just you know,
Speaker 1: setting all of that aside, the place that you can
Speaker 1: get money from would be from the governor's office. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: that significate problem. So here's Holcial's response to Momdami's plan
Speaker 1: to make buses free. Quote. I cannot set forth a
Speaker 1: plan right now that takes money out of a system
Speaker 1: that relies on fares of the buses and the subways.
Speaker 1: But can we find a path to make it more
Speaker 1: affordable for people who need help? Yes, of course we can.
Speaker 1: Social does not want to raise taxes. Any proposal that
Speaker 1: would involve raising taxes probably has to run through New
Speaker 1: York City's City Council, and thus through her. I'm going
Speaker 1: to quote this some Spectrum news about Montdammie's proposal to
Speaker 1: expand universal childcare. Culchel said she's also looking at expanding
Speaker 1: a universal childcare program statewide, but the total price tag
Speaker 1: is fifteen billion dollars childcare I already committed to, she said,
Speaker 1: I'm committed to this as a mom governor, I get it.
Speaker 1: But also to do it statewide, it's about fifteen billion dollars,
Speaker 1: the entire amount of my reserves. Culcial says she prefers
Speaker 1: to phase an expansion first within certain AIDS groups and
Speaker 1: geographically underserved communities. So, okay, what is happening here in
Speaker 1: a macro sense is that Cultural is trying to slow
Speaker 1: roll both of these things. She is outright opposed to
Speaker 1: making buses free. She wants to do weird means testing
Speaker 1: stuff to it that will make it very difficult to do,
Speaker 1: and extremely annoying bureaucratic layer meant to deny people services
Speaker 1: that you have to do instead of just having them
Speaker 1: be free. The childcare thing she probably does want to do,
Speaker 1: but again, because she is not a democratic socialist, because
Speaker 1: she is a regular Democrat, she wants to do it slowly, expanded,
Speaker 1: through a whole bunch of phases and taking a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of time. And this is a pretty significant problem
Speaker 1: because you know, at every step of this, not only
Speaker 1: are you going to have to be negotiating with the
Speaker 1: banking system, you're going to have to be negotiating with
Speaker 1: the statewide Democratic Party. And the statewide Democratic Party is
Speaker 1: fairly conservative. Hotel is not as conservative, and she can
Speaker 1: be sort of dragged kicking and screaming into good policies
Speaker 1: like what happened with congestion pricing, and if something works
Speaker 1: and is really popular after you do it, she will
Speaker 1: sign on to it. But it's a significant hurdle that
Speaker 1: you have to deal with. I want to move from
Speaker 1: this into a kind of related problem that's a more
Speaker 1: structural constraint on on Dommy's time in office, which is
Speaker 1: that he is now in charge of running a capitalist economy.
Speaker 1: When you take a position in a capitalist government. It
Speaker 1: is now your job to make the economy run, and
Speaker 1: that means maintaining economic growth. But okay, what does economic
Speaker 1: growth actually mean in a capitalist economy. It means that
Speaker 1: corporations make more money than they did the year before.
Speaker 1: And this is a structural problem for all of us,
Speaker 1: because we all have interests that are diametrically opposed to
Speaker 1: corporations making more money every year because their profit comes
Speaker 1: directly from our exploitation. Right, we have fundamentally opposed interests
Speaker 1: from the corporations and the capitalists and the billionaires. But
Speaker 1: in order for there to be capitalist economic growth, those
Speaker 1: people have to keep making more money every year. And
Speaker 1: obviously you can make arguments about how redistribution enhances economic
Speaker 1: growth by creating a larger consumer base, and that's obviously true.
Speaker 1: We're in an extremely deformed economy right now. Where as
Speaker 1: I keep saying on this show, fifty percent of all
Speaker 1: consumer spending is happening from five percent of the population,
Speaker 1: which is just a completely unsustainable way to run an
Speaker 1: economy and is also absolutely miserable for every single other
Speaker 1: person who's in that bottom ninety five percent. And you know,
Speaker 1: there are things that you can do to some extent, right,
Speaker 1: but at some point you are going to have to
Speaker 1: choose between workers and capital. And if you're the mayor
Speaker 1: of New York City, your job is to make capital
Speaker 1: more money. And this is a structural constraint that every
Speaker 1: social democratic government has faced. And it's worth noting that
Speaker 1: we are not in a world that is surrounded by
Speaker 1: social democratic governments. And part of the reason why, again
Speaker 1: is that they need the economy to keep growing, and
Speaker 1: that their reliance on finance institutions to make money. And
Speaker 1: the most grim versions of this tend to happen at
Speaker 1: a sort of national scale. But if you look at
Speaker 1: morally in Jamaica and the seventies, where you have a
Speaker 1: democratic socialist who gets elected and is running Jamaica and
Speaker 1: then has to implement austerity because the country runs out
Speaker 1: of money and the IMF comes in, right, these things
Speaker 1: can get really bleak. Now they don't have to, right, like,
Speaker 1: sufficiently well organized populations can force the hand of capital
Speaker 1: to do things that they don't want to do. Significantly
Speaker 1: well organized populations can you start trying to fundamentally redistribute
Speaker 1: economic but it's difficult, and the difficulty is magnified by
Speaker 1: the third really massive constraint, and that constraint is the police.
Speaker 1: One of the other big structural problems that comes with
Speaker 1: running a state is that it relies on armed men
Speaker 1: to enforce the laws. And those men, especially in the
Speaker 1: United States, are at best one step removed from straight
Speaker 1: up neo Nazis. A lot of them straight up are
Speaker 1: neo Nazis. The cops are the most consistently right wing
Speaker 1: group in the entire country. They are a bunch of
Speaker 1: racist shitheads who exist to perpetuate right supremacy and protect capital,
Speaker 1: and they're also again a fundamental organizational unit of the state. Right.
Speaker 1: Without the violence of the police, laws are just suggestions.
Speaker 1: And if you're going to run a capitalist government, and
Speaker 1: if you're going to run one in the US, you
Speaker 1: have to deal with the fact that your power depends
Speaker 1: on the loyalty of a bunch of Nazis, and these
Speaker 1: people will riot if you attempt to do oversight of them.
Speaker 1: They very famously did this in nineteen ninety two. They
Speaker 1: had this whole giant riot, right, They had the thing
Speaker 1: I was supposed to be a protest rally where they
Speaker 1: all went on strike, and then the cops who were
Speaker 1: supposed to be policing the protest obviously didn't do anything
Speaker 1: because again, there are also cops. And in nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: two they did this for a really really really minor
Speaker 1: oversight attempted oversight, right, and obviously they actually didn't win
Speaker 1: that direct fight, but they were able to cause enough
Speaker 1: of a political ship storm that they were able to
Speaker 1: force the last sort of like vaguely social democratic mayor
Speaker 1: out of power and install like Rudy Giuliani, who is
Speaker 1: a weird face melty dipshit righth was an incredible tough
Speaker 1: on crime right winger. And obviously Mamdani has been trying
Speaker 1: to kind of trying to do his best to negotiate
Speaker 1: with the police and not to overtly threaten them, but
Speaker 1: that kind of doesn't matter because they just hate him,
Speaker 1: like they think that a Muslim socialist is just inherently
Speaker 1: an illegitimate person, and they think that anyone who is
Speaker 1: even vaguely liberal is someone who is their enemy and
Speaker 1: who is their target. And we have seen them take
Speaker 1: actions to just directly threaten mayors fairly recently. Right in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, they kidnapped Bill Deblasio's daughter, at a protest
Speaker 1: and then sort of like paraded her mugshot around and
Speaker 1: posted it everywhere and did this whole big show of
Speaker 1: how they were holding her. To say it was a
Speaker 1: thinly veiled threat is a dramatic understatement of how incredibly,
Speaker 1: incredibly blatant this threat was. Right, they kidnapped the mayor's daughter,
Speaker 1: Dreen a protest movement, and that was Bill de Blasio,
Speaker 1: who was not some kind of like wild anti police
Speaker 1: radical right, and especially now as sort of fascism is
Speaker 1: on the march and with the backing of the US
Speaker 1: federal government, right, the police form a very significant threat
Speaker 1: to Mandami's ability to do anything. Both on a sort
Speaker 1: of political level, they are going to be constantly, you know,
Speaker 1: putting out giant press releases about how Mamdami's like turn
Speaker 1: the city into a Liverpool hellhole and how they can't
Speaker 1: do their jobs, ceda, et cetera. And also just in
Speaker 1: terms of just directly threatening him and trying to influence
Speaker 1: his policy, they're going to be a real problem and
Speaker 1: his ability to prevent them from, for example, smashing in
Speaker 1: the skulls of pro Palestime protesters even if he wants to,
Speaker 1: was going to be very limited because the police have
Speaker 1: become a kind of semi autonomous fascist force in this country.
Speaker 1: They have always been a ticking time bomb on statist democracy,
Speaker 1: and that clock is closing in on zero in this
Speaker 1: in this sort of moment of assented fascism. Now again,
Speaker 1: I want to close this by saying, these are not
Speaker 1: all the challenges that he's going to face, but Comma,
Speaker 1: none of this also means that the things that he
Speaker 1: wants to do to make people's lives better are impossible.
Speaker 1: Every single one of these problems are problems that you
Speaker 1: can defeat by organizing. Right, you can put enough pressure
Speaker 1: on capital to prevent them from doing a kind of
Speaker 1: like capital striker or a bond strike, right to force
Speaker 1: them they continue to fund things. Right, with enough public pressure,
Speaker 1: you can make a whole lot of things happen. You
Speaker 1: can make the police, you know, at the very least,
Speaker 1: be acting on a kind of defensive front to where
Speaker 1: they're not, you know, rioting and trying to run city politics,
Speaker 1: but are kind of forced by mass popular and mobilization
Speaker 1: and pressure to at the very least not be openly
Speaker 1: attacking the mayor. You can put massive political pressure on
Speaker 1: Kathy cultel to you know, do things that are good,
Speaker 1: which which is how we got how New York got
Speaker 1: congestion pricing in the first place. Right, like, that was
Speaker 1: a result of a masses like organizational campaign that went
Speaker 1: extremely well, and husholds like tried to sabotage it because
Speaker 1: she thought it would be unpopular, and eventually it got
Speaker 1: implemented and it's really popular now and now she's really
Speaker 1: in favor of it. So these people can be pushed around, right,
Speaker 1: They are not invincible, Their victory is not inevitable. They
Speaker 1: can be defeated, and they can be forced to accept that,
Speaker 1: Oh wait, hold on, the extremely sensible policies that we
Speaker 1: want that make our lives better are good, and that
Speaker 1: requires mobilization. But you know that's not impossible. We know
Speaker 1: how to organize. We've been doing it for ages, and
Speaker 1: it was you know, what had to happen to make
Speaker 1: all of us possible in the first place. And so
Speaker 1: instead of demobilizing now and going, oh, our jobs are done. No, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: our job our jobs have just begun. But you know,
Speaker 1: the better organized VR and the more we're able to
Speaker 1: push this, and the more we're able to push all
Speaker 1: of these people, the better our lives will get, and
Speaker 1: this election to begin with is a reminder that another
Speaker 1: world is as possible and it could be better than
Speaker 1: this one. We just have to build it together. It
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