November 17, 2025 • 23 mins
Mia talks about the bond market, the police, and other challenges Zohran Mamdani will face in office and how to overcome them.
Sources:
https://thebaffler.com/latest/paying-for-it-backer
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/zohran-mamdani-new-york-city-free-buses-kathy-hochul/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone Media. Welcome to that and here podcasts about
things falling apart and how to put them back together again.
I am your host, Na Wong. So a week ago
we did some episodes about the election of Zoran Mam
Donnie and a lot of the very funny reactions to it,
(00:26):
and you know, on Executive Disorder, we've talked about what
this sort of means for politics. But now I want
to do a slightly different kind of episode, which is
looking at the challenges that Montdomney is going to face
attempting to implement his agenda, attempting to stay mayor just
taking him very seriously at his word, in his attempt
(00:48):
to you know, make the cost of living lower and
make people's lives better. And there are unfortunately, very significant
challenges to this agenda, and those challenges are a mix
of structural problems and I don't know the president of
the United States right. We're going to focus on a
(01:12):
few of them today, and before we really start this,
I think I want to I want to start this
to some extent with the conclusion, and the conclusion of
this episode is not to say that these things are impossible,
right and to not say they can't be done. But
it's to remind people that the way that actual politics works,
(01:32):
electing one person does not immediately make everything better. Right,
you can't stop organizing because someone has been elected. And
in fact, if you actually want to see the things
that you you organize to you know, happen by electing
this person, do you have to organize even harder once
they are in power and mobilize even more to allow
(01:52):
the things that you fought for to actually happen. Because
there are significant opposition to anything you know, getting better
for anyone in this country, and that opposition is powerful,
well funded, well organized, and structural, and also, as we
saw with the election of Aunt Donnie in the first place,
it can be defeated. So we're going to start with
(02:17):
the bond market. Now, many of you may be asking,
b what does the bond market have to do with
make buses free? And to do that we need to
talk about funding mechanisms. So most plans in the US
for sort of social democratic policy, for how you implement
welfare state policies, how you implement policies that make people's
(02:39):
lives better, tend to start from the federal governments and
the national level, right, and there are very obvious reasons
for this. Unlike the federal government, city governments don't issue
their own currency, which means the modern monetary theory things
that you would normally use to fund welfare programs with
at a national level don't work. The federal government, again,
(03:03):
has control of its own debt and money supply, city
governments don't. That means the city governments, if you want
to find money to do something, you have to find
that from somewhere. And as wonderful as it would be
if you could simply do that by just Okay, we
raise taxes, and the taxes go to the policy that
(03:25):
we want to implement, that's not how the system actually works.
The way the system works if you want to pay
for things at a city level is the bond markets.
David I. Backer has a very good piece about this
the Baffler that I deeply recommend people read. The main
thing that's important here for our purposes is that for
(03:46):
funding significant portions of anything that you want to do
as mayor, you are legally required to go through the
bond markets. And this means that the city is forced
to beg for money from Wall Street investment banks and
then also pay those same banks exorbitant fees and interest,
(04:06):
and a significant amount of money has to go to,
as Backer points out, a whole bunch of you know,
lawyers and finance people and consultants and all of these
you know, sort of mafia of finance schools who are
standing in between the normal mechanism of you have money
and you pay for things. And that's assuming again that
(04:29):
you even have the money in the first place, which
you quite often don't because cities are very very often
cash strapped. As Backer points out, using these bond mechanisms
to pay for programs is legally required. Now, Backer is
mostly focused on the structural constraints created by servicing debt,
which can consume increasing portions of a city's budget until
(04:52):
you know there's nothing left. This is sort of what's
happened to Detroit to a large extent, and also the
bank's direct control over the payment mechanism, even when the
city government brings in tax money. Right, so, even if
you raise taxes and you bring in money, because you
have to go through the bond market, it means that
a bunch of that money is going to be funneled
(05:13):
into servicing debt and paying interest on debt. But there's
also a secondary problem here, which is that in very
extreme cases, and I'm not saying we are immediately facing this,
but I want to put this on the table as
something that if you were attempting to run a social
democratic program in a city, you do need to be
(05:33):
significantly worried about the bank's direct control over payment mechanisms.
Means that the banks, you know, the people who buy
the bonds that you need to use to get to
fund these things. So let's actually take a step back
here and explain what a bond is, right. A bond
is basically you selling a piece of paper that is debt.
So you go into the market and you sell sell
(05:54):
a bank of bond and they give you a bunch
of money right now, and at the exploration of the bond,
you pay that money back plus interest. This is how
you have to fund things, because that is what's legally required,
and also because cities need a way to get extremely
large amounts of money. But this also means that cities
that you know, banks and investors can simply not buy
your bonds if they don't like what you're trying to do,
(06:17):
and at that point, very little can be done to
oppose them. The most dramatic version of this problem came
to the New York City bond crisis in nineteen seventy five,
where New York City had to sell a bunch of bonds.
It was significantly in debt, and there's a very famous
scene in I Think It's I Think It's a hyperd normalization.
(06:39):
You know, there's film of like the city goverment officials
who are sitting in this room waiting for the banks,
like people, for the banks to show up to buy
the bonds, and no one shows up, so suddenly they
don't have any money. And then President Ford at the
time tells the city to eat shit and die and
refuses to buy any of New York City's bonds, refuse
to give them any money, and this leaves the city bankrupt.
(07:01):
Right it gets to a point where they have fired
the teachers. There's no one to collect a garbage because
they literally don't have money to pay anyone because no
one will buy their bonds. And eventually this crisis is
sort of mitigated. But the problem is that, you know,
the task force that was set up to mitigate this
right to like, you know, get there to be people
buying New York City bonds. Again, those people were able
(07:23):
to come in and New York City had a functional
welfare state, right, had a sort of mini social democratic
welfare state. And in order to reopen the governments and
have schools and garbage collection again, in order to get
that money, the city was required to dismantle it. And
you know, the financial situation of New York is obviously
significantly better than it was then, right, And the odds
(07:44):
of having this kind of just full on macro scale
crisis is not as high as it was then. But
because of the fact that this is the legally mandated
way that you have to do these payments, and because
unlike the federal government, there are constraints on spending that
(08:07):
in some ways function like needing foreign exchange currency. You know,
you can't just issue this money. You have to get
it from somewhere. And because of someone's usually the banks,
it means that you have to constantly negotiate with the
banks and with capital in order to keep the city's
lights on. And this is a constant threat that they
(08:27):
have sort of you know, hanging over the head of
anyone who wants to be governor. And as Backer points out,
you can even just tax your way out of the problem,
because payment structures for government projects work out of the
bond system, so that money just goes to debt payments.
And you know, one of the other things that Backer
points out. And obviously the situation in Chicago is different
(08:48):
in the situation in New York. But the Chicago Teachers
Union did elect a mayor who was, you know, their guy, right,
The cholot teachers Union spent a significant amount of money
and resources and effort getting their guy elected, and once
he came into office, he basically ended up doing the
same thing in their negotiations with the teachers union that
the previous administrations had done. And the reason that happened,
(09:11):
you know, and the reason that you started to see
cuts to school services that we're not supposed to happen
but anyways, was because the bond market stepped in and
said this is what's necessary in order to do this,
and they have that kind of power. Now, obviously Chicago
was in a worse financial situation than New York is.
Mom Dominie is significantly further left than Brandon Johnson is.
(09:35):
But these are real constraints, and the social democratic solution
to this has always been to get money from the
federal governments. But the federal government won't give money out
to the things that is legally required to give money
out to you right now, because obviously it is run
by one Donald Trump, and obviously Trump in and of
himself is a significant problem to doing this right. There's
(09:59):
always a chance that Trump will see something like mean
about Mondani on Fox News and decide to send the
National Guards to New York or something, and you know,
he will probably continue immigration raids. He can, you know,
just fuck with people's ability to get medicaid payments, which
is a really significant issue. There will continue to be
(10:21):
lots of creative and terrible things that the federal government
can and will do to this administration that will have
to be fought and can be defeated, but we'll have
to be organized and fought against. But for our purposes
right now, the big issue here is that you can't
get money out of the federal governments. So okay, where
(10:43):
are you getting money out of then? And the answer
is the state governments. Now, do you know what else
gets money out of state governments? Probably not these products
and services. I don't know who knows, who knows we
(11:07):
are back. So, okay, let's talk about the state government now. Again.
This is even with the city the size of New York,
there still is always significant negotiations in org do things
in the city that require the aide of the state
level government. And part of the problem here is that
the New York State Democratic Party is significantly responsible for
(11:31):
the Republicans control of the House, particularly in the twenty
twenty two cycle. There's a whole long story here about
how a a bunch of the Democrats wanted to form
this sort of moderate caucus thing, where the sort of
independent caucus that would caucus with the Republicans in order
to give the Republicans the ability to stop any sort
of liberal or left wing thing from happening in the
(11:51):
state governments and handle a whole bunch of seas over
to the Republicans because of it. But just you know,
setting all of that aside, the place that you can
get money from would be from the governor's office. Unfortunately,
that significate problem. So here's Holcial's response to Momdami's plan
to make buses free. Quote. I cannot set forth a
(12:13):
plan right now that takes money out of a system
that relies on fares of the buses and the subways.
But can we find a path to make it more
affordable for people who need help? Yes, of course we can.
Social does not want to raise taxes. Any proposal that
would involve raising taxes probably has to run through New
York City's City Council, and thus through her. I'm going
(12:34):
to quote this some Spectrum news about Montdammie's proposal to
expand universal childcare. Culchel said she's also looking at expanding
a universal childcare program statewide, but the total price tag
is fifteen billion dollars childcare I already committed to, she said,
I'm committed to this as a mom governor, I get it.
But also to do it statewide, it's about fifteen billion dollars,
(12:55):
the entire amount of my reserves. Culcial says she prefers
to phase an expansion first within certain AIDS groups and
geographically underserved communities. So, okay, what is happening here in
a macro sense is that Cultural is trying to slow
roll both of these things. She is outright opposed to
making buses free. She wants to do weird means testing
(13:16):
stuff to it that will make it very difficult to do,
and extremely annoying bureaucratic layer meant to deny people services
that you have to do instead of just having them
be free. The childcare thing she probably does want to do,
but again, because she is not a democratic socialist, because
she is a regular Democrat, she wants to do it slowly, expanded,
(13:38):
through a whole bunch of phases and taking a whole
bunch of time. And this is a pretty significant problem
because you know, at every step of this, not only
are you going to have to be negotiating with the
banking system, you're going to have to be negotiating with
the statewide Democratic Party. And the statewide Democratic Party is
(14:00):
fairly conservative. Hotel is not as conservative, and she can
be sort of dragged kicking and screaming into good policies
like what happened with congestion pricing, and if something works
and is really popular after you do it, she will
sign on to it. But it's a significant hurdle that
you have to deal with. I want to move from
(14:21):
this into a kind of related problem that's a more
structural constraint on on Dommy's time in office, which is
that he is now in charge of running a capitalist economy.
When you take a position in a capitalist government. It
is now your job to make the economy run, and
that means maintaining economic growth. But okay, what does economic
(14:44):
growth actually mean in a capitalist economy. It means that
corporations make more money than they did the year before.
And this is a structural problem for all of us,
because we all have interests that are diametrically opposed to
corporations making more money every year because their profit comes
directly from our exploitation. Right, we have fundamentally opposed interests
(15:05):
from the corporations and the capitalists and the billionaires. But
in order for there to be capitalist economic growth, those
people have to keep making more money every year. And
obviously you can make arguments about how redistribution enhances economic
growth by creating a larger consumer base, and that's obviously true.
We're in an extremely deformed economy right now. Where as
(15:27):
I keep saying on this show, fifty percent of all
consumer spending is happening from five percent of the population,
which is just a completely unsustainable way to run an
economy and is also absolutely miserable for every single other
person who's in that bottom ninety five percent. And you know,
there are things that you can do to some extent, right,
(15:50):
but at some point you are going to have to
choose between workers and capital. And if you're the mayor
of New York City, your job is to make capital
more money. And this is a structural constraint that every
social democratic government has faced. And it's worth noting that
we are not in a world that is surrounded by
(16:11):
social democratic governments. And part of the reason why, again
is that they need the economy to keep growing, and
that their reliance on finance institutions to make money. And
the most grim versions of this tend to happen at
a sort of national scale. But if you look at
morally in Jamaica and the seventies, where you have a
democratic socialist who gets elected and is running Jamaica and
(16:34):
then has to implement austerity because the country runs out
of money and the IMF comes in, right, these things
can get really bleak. Now they don't have to, right, like,
sufficiently well organized populations can force the hand of capital
to do things that they don't want to do. Significantly
well organized populations can you start trying to fundamentally redistribute
(16:59):
economic but it's difficult, and the difficulty is magnified by
the third really massive constraint, and that constraint is the police.
One of the other big structural problems that comes with
running a state is that it relies on armed men
to enforce the laws. And those men, especially in the
(17:19):
United States, are at best one step removed from straight
up neo Nazis. A lot of them straight up are
neo Nazis. The cops are the most consistently right wing
group in the entire country. They are a bunch of
racist shitheads who exist to perpetuate right supremacy and protect capital,
and they're also again a fundamental organizational unit of the state. Right.
(17:43):
Without the violence of the police, laws are just suggestions.
And if you're going to run a capitalist government, and
if you're going to run one in the US, you
have to deal with the fact that your power depends
on the loyalty of a bunch of Nazis, and these
people will riot if you attempt to do oversight of them.
(18:04):
They very famously did this in nineteen ninety two. They
had this whole giant riot, right, They had the thing
I was supposed to be a protest rally where they
all went on strike, and then the cops who were
supposed to be policing the protest obviously didn't do anything
because again, there are also cops. And in nineteen ninety
two they did this for a really really really minor
(18:26):
oversight attempted oversight, right, and obviously they actually didn't win
that direct fight, but they were able to cause enough
of a political ship storm that they were able to
force the last sort of like vaguely social democratic mayor
out of power and install like Rudy Giuliani, who is
a weird face melty dipshit righth was an incredible tough
(18:49):
on crime right winger. And obviously Mamdani has been trying
to kind of trying to do his best to negotiate
with the police and not to overtly threaten them, but
that kind of doesn't matter because they just hate him,
like they think that a Muslim socialist is just inherently
an illegitimate person, and they think that anyone who is
even vaguely liberal is someone who is their enemy and
(19:10):
who is their target. And we have seen them take
actions to just directly threaten mayors fairly recently. Right in
twenty twenty, they kidnapped Bill Deblasio's daughter, at a protest
and then sort of like paraded her mugshot around and
posted it everywhere and did this whole big show of
how they were holding her. To say it was a
(19:31):
thinly veiled threat is a dramatic understatement of how incredibly,
incredibly blatant this threat was. Right, they kidnapped the mayor's daughter,
Dreen a protest movement, and that was Bill de Blasio,
who was not some kind of like wild anti police
(19:51):
radical right, and especially now as sort of fascism is
on the march and with the backing of the US
federal government, right, the police form a very significant threat
to Mandami's ability to do anything. Both on a sort
of political level, they are going to be constantly, you know,
(20:13):
putting out giant press releases about how Mamdami's like turn
the city into a Liverpool hellhole and how they can't
do their jobs, ceda, et cetera. And also just in
terms of just directly threatening him and trying to influence
his policy, they're going to be a real problem and
his ability to prevent them from, for example, smashing in
the skulls of pro Palestime protesters even if he wants to,
(20:34):
was going to be very limited because the police have
become a kind of semi autonomous fascist force in this country.
They have always been a ticking time bomb on statist democracy,
and that clock is closing in on zero in this
in this sort of moment of assented fascism. Now again,
(20:58):
I want to close this by saying, these are not
all the challenges that he's going to face, but Comma,
none of this also means that the things that he
wants to do to make people's lives better are impossible.
Every single one of these problems are problems that you
can defeat by organizing. Right, you can put enough pressure
on capital to prevent them from doing a kind of
(21:19):
like capital striker or a bond strike, right to force
them they continue to fund things. Right, with enough public pressure,
you can make a whole lot of things happen. You
can make the police, you know, at the very least,
be acting on a kind of defensive front to where
they're not, you know, rioting and trying to run city politics,
but are kind of forced by mass popular and mobilization
(21:43):
and pressure to at the very least not be openly
attacking the mayor. You can put massive political pressure on
Kathy cultel to you know, do things that are good,
which which is how we got how New York got
congestion pricing in the first place. Right, like, that was
a result of a masses like organizational campaign that went
(22:03):
extremely well, and husholds like tried to sabotage it because
she thought it would be unpopular, and eventually it got
implemented and it's really popular now and now she's really
in favor of it. So these people can be pushed around, right,
They are not invincible, Their victory is not inevitable. They
can be defeated, and they can be forced to accept that,
Oh wait, hold on, the extremely sensible policies that we
(22:27):
want that make our lives better are good, and that
requires mobilization. But you know that's not impossible. We know
how to organize. We've been doing it for ages, and
it was you know, what had to happen to make
all of us possible in the first place. And so
instead of demobilizing now and going, oh, our jobs are done. No, no, no, no, no,
our job our jobs have just begun. But you know,
(22:48):
the better organized VR and the more we're able to
push this, and the more we're able to push all
of these people, the better our lives will get, and
this election to begin with is a reminder that another
world is as possible and it could be better than
this one. We just have to build it together. It
Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
(23:10):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
All Zone Media. Welcome to that and here podcasts about
things falling apart and how to put them back together again.
I am your host, Na Wong. So a week ago
we did some episodes about the election of Zoran Mam
Donnie and a lot of the very funny reactions to it,
(00:26):
and you know, on Executive Disorder, we've talked about what
this sort of means for politics. But now I want
to do a slightly different kind of episode, which is
looking at the challenges that Montdomney is going to face
attempting to implement his agenda, attempting to stay mayor just
taking him very seriously at his word, in his attempt
(00:48):
to you know, make the cost of living lower and
make people's lives better. And there are unfortunately, very significant
challenges to this agenda, and those challenges are a mix
of structural problems and I don't know the president of
the United States right. We're going to focus on a
(01:12):
few of them today, and before we really start this,
I think I want to I want to start this
to some extent with the conclusion, and the conclusion of
this episode is not to say that these things are impossible,
right and to not say they can't be done. But
it's to remind people that the way that actual politics works,
(01:32):
electing one person does not immediately make everything better. Right,
you can't stop organizing because someone has been elected. And
in fact, if you actually want to see the things
that you you organize to you know, happen by electing
this person, do you have to organize even harder once
they are in power and mobilize even more to allow
(01:52):
the things that you fought for to actually happen. Because
there are significant opposition to anything you know, getting better
for anyone in this country, and that opposition is powerful,
well funded, well organized, and structural, and also, as we
saw with the election of Aunt Donnie in the first place,
it can be defeated. So we're going to start with
(02:17):
the bond market. Now, many of you may be asking,
b what does the bond market have to do with
make buses free? And to do that we need to
talk about funding mechanisms. So most plans in the US
for sort of social democratic policy, for how you implement
welfare state policies, how you implement policies that make people's
(02:39):
lives better, tend to start from the federal governments and
the national level, right, and there are very obvious reasons
for this. Unlike the federal government, city governments don't issue
their own currency, which means the modern monetary theory things
that you would normally use to fund welfare programs with
at a national level don't work. The federal government, again,
(03:03):
has control of its own debt and money supply, city
governments don't. That means the city governments, if you want
to find money to do something, you have to find
that from somewhere. And as wonderful as it would be
if you could simply do that by just Okay, we
raise taxes, and the taxes go to the policy that
(03:25):
we want to implement, that's not how the system actually works.
The way the system works if you want to pay
for things at a city level is the bond markets.
David I. Backer has a very good piece about this
the Baffler that I deeply recommend people read. The main
thing that's important here for our purposes is that for
(03:46):
funding significant portions of anything that you want to do
as mayor, you are legally required to go through the
bond markets. And this means that the city is forced
to beg for money from Wall Street investment banks and
then also pay those same banks exorbitant fees and interest,
(04:06):
and a significant amount of money has to go to,
as Backer points out, a whole bunch of you know,
lawyers and finance people and consultants and all of these
you know, sort of mafia of finance schools who are
standing in between the normal mechanism of you have money
and you pay for things. And that's assuming again that
(04:29):
you even have the money in the first place, which
you quite often don't because cities are very very often
cash strapped. As Backer points out, using these bond mechanisms
to pay for programs is legally required. Now, Backer is
mostly focused on the structural constraints created by servicing debt,
which can consume increasing portions of a city's budget until
(04:52):
you know there's nothing left. This is sort of what's
happened to Detroit to a large extent, and also the
bank's direct control over the payment mechanism, even when the
city government brings in tax money. Right, so, even if
you raise taxes and you bring in money, because you
have to go through the bond market, it means that
a bunch of that money is going to be funneled
(05:13):
into servicing debt and paying interest on debt. But there's
also a secondary problem here, which is that in very
extreme cases, and I'm not saying we are immediately facing this,
but I want to put this on the table as
something that if you were attempting to run a social
democratic program in a city, you do need to be
(05:33):
significantly worried about the bank's direct control over payment mechanisms.
Means that the banks, you know, the people who buy
the bonds that you need to use to get to
fund these things. So let's actually take a step back
here and explain what a bond is, right. A bond
is basically you selling a piece of paper that is debt.
So you go into the market and you sell sell
(05:54):
a bank of bond and they give you a bunch
of money right now, and at the exploration of the bond,
you pay that money back plus interest. This is how
you have to fund things, because that is what's legally required,
and also because cities need a way to get extremely
large amounts of money. But this also means that cities
that you know, banks and investors can simply not buy
your bonds if they don't like what you're trying to do,
(06:17):
and at that point, very little can be done to
oppose them. The most dramatic version of this problem came
to the New York City bond crisis in nineteen seventy five,
where New York City had to sell a bunch of bonds.
It was significantly in debt, and there's a very famous
scene in I Think It's I Think It's a hyperd normalization.
(06:39):
You know, there's film of like the city goverment officials
who are sitting in this room waiting for the banks,
like people, for the banks to show up to buy
the bonds, and no one shows up, so suddenly they
don't have any money. And then President Ford at the
time tells the city to eat shit and die and
refuses to buy any of New York City's bonds, refuse
to give them any money, and this leaves the city bankrupt.
(07:01):
Right it gets to a point where they have fired
the teachers. There's no one to collect a garbage because
they literally don't have money to pay anyone because no
one will buy their bonds. And eventually this crisis is
sort of mitigated. But the problem is that, you know,
the task force that was set up to mitigate this
right to like, you know, get there to be people
buying New York City bonds. Again, those people were able
(07:23):
to come in and New York City had a functional
welfare state, right, had a sort of mini social democratic
welfare state. And in order to reopen the governments and
have schools and garbage collection again, in order to get
that money, the city was required to dismantle it. And
you know, the financial situation of New York is obviously
significantly better than it was then, right, And the odds
(07:44):
of having this kind of just full on macro scale
crisis is not as high as it was then. But
because of the fact that this is the legally mandated
way that you have to do these payments, and because
unlike the federal government, there are constraints on spending that
(08:07):
in some ways function like needing foreign exchange currency. You know,
you can't just issue this money. You have to get
it from somewhere. And because of someone's usually the banks,
it means that you have to constantly negotiate with the
banks and with capital in order to keep the city's
lights on. And this is a constant threat that they
(08:27):
have sort of you know, hanging over the head of
anyone who wants to be governor. And as Backer points out,
you can even just tax your way out of the problem,
because payment structures for government projects work out of the
bond system, so that money just goes to debt payments.
And you know, one of the other things that Backer
points out. And obviously the situation in Chicago is different
(08:48):
in the situation in New York. But the Chicago Teachers
Union did elect a mayor who was, you know, their guy, right,
The cholot teachers Union spent a significant amount of money
and resources and effort getting their guy elected, and once
he came into office, he basically ended up doing the
same thing in their negotiations with the teachers union that
the previous administrations had done. And the reason that happened,
(09:11):
you know, and the reason that you started to see
cuts to school services that we're not supposed to happen
but anyways, was because the bond market stepped in and
said this is what's necessary in order to do this,
and they have that kind of power. Now, obviously Chicago
was in a worse financial situation than New York is.
Mom Dominie is significantly further left than Brandon Johnson is.
(09:35):
But these are real constraints, and the social democratic solution
to this has always been to get money from the
federal governments. But the federal government won't give money out
to the things that is legally required to give money
out to you right now, because obviously it is run
by one Donald Trump, and obviously Trump in and of
himself is a significant problem to doing this right. There's
(09:59):
always a chance that Trump will see something like mean
about Mondani on Fox News and decide to send the
National Guards to New York or something, and you know,
he will probably continue immigration raids. He can, you know,
just fuck with people's ability to get medicaid payments, which
is a really significant issue. There will continue to be
(10:21):
lots of creative and terrible things that the federal government
can and will do to this administration that will have
to be fought and can be defeated, but we'll have
to be organized and fought against. But for our purposes
right now, the big issue here is that you can't
get money out of the federal governments. So okay, where
(10:43):
are you getting money out of then? And the answer
is the state governments. Now, do you know what else
gets money out of state governments? Probably not these products
and services. I don't know who knows, who knows we
(11:07):
are back. So, okay, let's talk about the state government now. Again.
This is even with the city the size of New York,
there still is always significant negotiations in org do things
in the city that require the aide of the state
level government. And part of the problem here is that
the New York State Democratic Party is significantly responsible for
(11:31):
the Republicans control of the House, particularly in the twenty
twenty two cycle. There's a whole long story here about
how a a bunch of the Democrats wanted to form
this sort of moderate caucus thing, where the sort of
independent caucus that would caucus with the Republicans in order
to give the Republicans the ability to stop any sort
of liberal or left wing thing from happening in the
(11:51):
state governments and handle a whole bunch of seas over
to the Republicans because of it. But just you know,
setting all of that aside, the place that you can
get money from would be from the governor's office. Unfortunately,
that significate problem. So here's Holcial's response to Momdami's plan
to make buses free. Quote. I cannot set forth a
(12:13):
plan right now that takes money out of a system
that relies on fares of the buses and the subways.
But can we find a path to make it more
affordable for people who need help? Yes, of course we can.
Social does not want to raise taxes. Any proposal that
would involve raising taxes probably has to run through New
York City's City Council, and thus through her. I'm going
(12:34):
to quote this some Spectrum news about Montdammie's proposal to
expand universal childcare. Culchel said she's also looking at expanding
a universal childcare program statewide, but the total price tag
is fifteen billion dollars childcare I already committed to, she said,
I'm committed to this as a mom governor, I get it.
But also to do it statewide, it's about fifteen billion dollars,
(12:55):
the entire amount of my reserves. Culcial says she prefers
to phase an expansion first within certain AIDS groups and
geographically underserved communities. So, okay, what is happening here in
a macro sense is that Cultural is trying to slow
roll both of these things. She is outright opposed to
making buses free. She wants to do weird means testing
(13:16):
stuff to it that will make it very difficult to do,
and extremely annoying bureaucratic layer meant to deny people services
that you have to do instead of just having them
be free. The childcare thing she probably does want to do,
but again, because she is not a democratic socialist, because
she is a regular Democrat, she wants to do it slowly, expanded,
(13:38):
through a whole bunch of phases and taking a whole
bunch of time. And this is a pretty significant problem
because you know, at every step of this, not only
are you going to have to be negotiating with the
banking system, you're going to have to be negotiating with
the statewide Democratic Party. And the statewide Democratic Party is
(14:00):
fairly conservative. Hotel is not as conservative, and she can
be sort of dragged kicking and screaming into good policies
like what happened with congestion pricing, and if something works
and is really popular after you do it, she will
sign on to it. But it's a significant hurdle that
you have to deal with. I want to move from
(14:21):
this into a kind of related problem that's a more
structural constraint on on Dommy's time in office, which is
that he is now in charge of running a capitalist economy.
When you take a position in a capitalist government. It
is now your job to make the economy run, and
that means maintaining economic growth. But okay, what does economic
(14:44):
growth actually mean in a capitalist economy. It means that
corporations make more money than they did the year before.
And this is a structural problem for all of us,
because we all have interests that are diametrically opposed to
corporations making more money every year because their profit comes
directly from our exploitation. Right, we have fundamentally opposed interests
(15:05):
from the corporations and the capitalists and the billionaires. But
in order for there to be capitalist economic growth, those
people have to keep making more money every year. And
obviously you can make arguments about how redistribution enhances economic
growth by creating a larger consumer base, and that's obviously true.
We're in an extremely deformed economy right now. Where as
(15:27):
I keep saying on this show, fifty percent of all
consumer spending is happening from five percent of the population,
which is just a completely unsustainable way to run an
economy and is also absolutely miserable for every single other
person who's in that bottom ninety five percent. And you know,
there are things that you can do to some extent, right,
(15:50):
but at some point you are going to have to
choose between workers and capital. And if you're the mayor
of New York City, your job is to make capital
more money. And this is a structural constraint that every
social democratic government has faced. And it's worth noting that
we are not in a world that is surrounded by
(16:11):
social democratic governments. And part of the reason why, again
is that they need the economy to keep growing, and
that their reliance on finance institutions to make money. And
the most grim versions of this tend to happen at
a sort of national scale. But if you look at
morally in Jamaica and the seventies, where you have a
democratic socialist who gets elected and is running Jamaica and
(16:34):
then has to implement austerity because the country runs out
of money and the IMF comes in, right, these things
can get really bleak. Now they don't have to, right, like,
sufficiently well organized populations can force the hand of capital
to do things that they don't want to do. Significantly
well organized populations can you start trying to fundamentally redistribute
(16:59):
economic but it's difficult, and the difficulty is magnified by
the third really massive constraint, and that constraint is the police.
One of the other big structural problems that comes with
running a state is that it relies on armed men
to enforce the laws. And those men, especially in the
(17:19):
United States, are at best one step removed from straight
up neo Nazis. A lot of them straight up are
neo Nazis. The cops are the most consistently right wing
group in the entire country. They are a bunch of
racist shitheads who exist to perpetuate right supremacy and protect capital,
and they're also again a fundamental organizational unit of the state. Right.
(17:43):
Without the violence of the police, laws are just suggestions.
And if you're going to run a capitalist government, and
if you're going to run one in the US, you
have to deal with the fact that your power depends
on the loyalty of a bunch of Nazis, and these
people will riot if you attempt to do oversight of them.
(18:04):
They very famously did this in nineteen ninety two. They
had this whole giant riot, right, They had the thing
I was supposed to be a protest rally where they
all went on strike, and then the cops who were
supposed to be policing the protest obviously didn't do anything
because again, there are also cops. And in nineteen ninety
two they did this for a really really really minor
(18:26):
oversight attempted oversight, right, and obviously they actually didn't win
that direct fight, but they were able to cause enough
of a political ship storm that they were able to
force the last sort of like vaguely social democratic mayor
out of power and install like Rudy Giuliani, who is
a weird face melty dipshit righth was an incredible tough
(18:49):
on crime right winger. And obviously Mamdani has been trying
to kind of trying to do his best to negotiate
with the police and not to overtly threaten them, but
that kind of doesn't matter because they just hate him,
like they think that a Muslim socialist is just inherently
an illegitimate person, and they think that anyone who is
even vaguely liberal is someone who is their enemy and
(19:10):
who is their target. And we have seen them take
actions to just directly threaten mayors fairly recently. Right in
twenty twenty, they kidnapped Bill Deblasio's daughter, at a protest
and then sort of like paraded her mugshot around and
posted it everywhere and did this whole big show of
how they were holding her. To say it was a
(19:31):
thinly veiled threat is a dramatic understatement of how incredibly,
incredibly blatant this threat was. Right, they kidnapped the mayor's daughter,
Dreen a protest movement, and that was Bill de Blasio,
who was not some kind of like wild anti police
(19:51):
radical right, and especially now as sort of fascism is
on the march and with the backing of the US
federal government, right, the police form a very significant threat
to Mandami's ability to do anything. Both on a sort
of political level, they are going to be constantly, you know,
(20:13):
putting out giant press releases about how Mamdami's like turn
the city into a Liverpool hellhole and how they can't
do their jobs, ceda, et cetera. And also just in
terms of just directly threatening him and trying to influence
his policy, they're going to be a real problem and
his ability to prevent them from, for example, smashing in
the skulls of pro Palestime protesters even if he wants to,
(20:34):
was going to be very limited because the police have
become a kind of semi autonomous fascist force in this country.
They have always been a ticking time bomb on statist democracy,
and that clock is closing in on zero in this
in this sort of moment of assented fascism. Now again,
(20:58):
I want to close this by saying, these are not
all the challenges that he's going to face, but Comma,
none of this also means that the things that he
wants to do to make people's lives better are impossible.
Every single one of these problems are problems that you
can defeat by organizing. Right, you can put enough pressure
on capital to prevent them from doing a kind of
(21:19):
like capital striker or a bond strike, right to force
them they continue to fund things. Right, with enough public pressure,
you can make a whole lot of things happen. You
can make the police, you know, at the very least,
be acting on a kind of defensive front to where
they're not, you know, rioting and trying to run city politics,
but are kind of forced by mass popular and mobilization
(21:43):
and pressure to at the very least not be openly
attacking the mayor. You can put massive political pressure on
Kathy cultel to you know, do things that are good,
which which is how we got how New York got
congestion pricing in the first place. Right, like, that was
a result of a masses like organizational campaign that went
(22:03):
extremely well, and husholds like tried to sabotage it because
she thought it would be unpopular, and eventually it got
implemented and it's really popular now and now she's really
in favor of it. So these people can be pushed around, right,
They are not invincible, Their victory is not inevitable. They
can be defeated, and they can be forced to accept that,
Oh wait, hold on, the extremely sensible policies that we
(22:27):
want that make our lives better are good, and that
requires mobilization. But you know that's not impossible. We know
how to organize. We've been doing it for ages, and
it was you know, what had to happen to make
all of us possible in the first place. And so
instead of demobilizing now and going, oh, our jobs are done. No, no, no, no, no,
our job our jobs have just begun. But you know,
(22:48):
the better organized VR and the more we're able to
push this, and the more we're able to push all
of these people, the better our lives will get, and
this election to begin with is a reminder that another
world is as possible and it could be better than
this one. We just have to build it together. It
Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
(23:10):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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