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- [00:21]
A
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and, and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Today's program will have a remarkable interview in the second half with Sabrina Salvati, who's just finished a film on gentrification in Boston that will be very important for everyone to understand as it is a phenomena, she calls it, black erasure, that is happening in many cities across the country. We're also going to be talking about the election of Zorans. Excuse me, I almost mentioned his father, Zoran Mamdani, as the new mayor of New York City. He was sworn in to his job at the beginning of January of 2026, and it is therefore an appropriate moment to sort of understand how he got elected, what it means and where it points. And that's what we're going to do in the first half of today's show. But before we begin, I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season, that you are happy, or at least as happy as is reasonable to be at the beginning of a new year. I want to start also to thank you for, for those who contributed to our end of the year fundraising effort. I want to especially thank Erica I. Hardy S, Stephen B, Jerry A and Gina A for their very generous donations. We won't close the books until the end of the week, which means there's still time to help us meet our budgetary goals for the year ahead. And you can do that by going to our website, www.democracyatwork.info donate. And for those of you who have not yet signed up for our Membership Only or Members Only Patreon account, you can support our work by doing so and you can gain access to members Only material that we put on our Patreon account. So just go to patreon.com democracyatwork and follow the link in the description below. So let me turn then in our first half to this remarkable event, the election of a new young Muslim socialist to be the mayor of the city of New York. This is an uncommon event, to say the least. This sort of thing has not happened in the United States for most of the last 75 years. A socialist mayor in New York City. So I want to begin by talking about the significance of Mr. Mamdani's election. First and very important, this is not a new event in American history. It's new in the last 75 years, but not new in the much longer history of the United States. You might be interested to know that before World War II over 100American cities had elected socialist mayors. New York wasn't among them, but other cities were. Bridgeport, Connecticut, for example, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I could go on, but electing socialists was very common in the United States as it was electing state representatives, state senators, congresspersons in Washington who were socialists didn't run away from the label. It was after World War II, and in particular the Cold War with the Soviet Union, that it became impossible to be a socialist and to have a political career. To allow yourself to be called a socialist would have been and was a commitment of political suicide. And no one dared do it for 75 years. You might think that socialism, like a bear, went into hibernation during the Cold War. And now that the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union isn't there. The hysteria around it is a little bit less. Ha ha. Surprise. Socialism reemerges shouldn't surprise you. It was always there, and you know why? Socialism is always there. And even if you repress it for a while, it comes back. The answer is that socialism is the product of capitalism. You might call it capitalism's self criticism. As long as there's been capitalism, its problems, its injustices, its inequalities have provoked people to say we can and we should do better. Those people took the name socialist. And as long as there's capitalism, it creates and sustains the socialist critique. Here's another. Mayors like Michael Bloomberg, himself a billionaire, tried to stop Zoran Mamdani from winning. Bloomberg is reported to have spent $9.5 million of his own money trying to defeat Mamdani. He failed in that effort, and that's important. President Trump threatened to block him from ever becoming mayor. That failed to do the job. People used his Islamic faith against him and that failed to defeat him. His immigrant status failed to defeat him. His sympathy for the Palestinians in Gaza failed to defeat him. He got little support from the Democratic Party officials like Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Schumer, and that failed to defeat him. Wow. He not only won, let me remind you, he won by a lot. It was not a close race. His defeat of Andrew Cuomo, his major opponent, was pretty total, to say the least. Wow. That's an important way to understand how and why this is a historic event. But to be honest, I don't think Mr. Mamdani was elected because he was a socialist. I think he was elected because the people of New York City who voted for him, myself included, were motivated by something else. And I want to talk about that which doesn't take away from the achievement of Mr. Mamdani and the enormity of the volunteer force that swept him into office. Well run campaign moving in its commitment to democracy and transparency. And yet the beneficiary of the following. The people of New York voted against what so much of New York has come to mean. And that's, in the end, why Mr. Mandani was elected. New York City is the home of the largest number of billionaires in this country. It's the biggest concentration of billionaires. They come here, they live here, they want to party here, they want to be rich here. And they bring with them all that that implies. New York City has been and is more than ever a playground of the rich. And for the majority of people who cannot afford to do that, this city is a constant, a constant reminder of the gap between those rich people partying left and right, wallowing in their wealth versus all the rest of us. The city suffers from inadequate schooling, housing that huge numbers of people can barely afford, transportation. Our subway system is an embarrassment when you compare it to subway systems in the rest of the world.
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The.
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The things mass people need, the things average people need, are neglected in order to make it a playground for the rich. The inequality beats you over the head every day. I live in Manhattan and I see it everywhere I go. You know what the message here is, even though you dare not speak it? That this city and this system that built this city and runs, it is not a system for the majority of people, it's a system for the rich. It looks like, acts like it, it talks like it, it walks like it. Guess what? That's what it is. And, and people have had it with that. And you see in the election of Mr. Mamdani, the city of New York, the mass of the people that make this city work, run the schools and run the subways and run the restaurants and all the rest, saying to the city they depend on, you have betrayed me, you conventional politicians, Republican and Democrat alike. You have betrayed what we need and what we want and who we are, and laughed at us as you went and joined the rich having the party. They voted against all of that. Against the traditional Democratic machine represented by Mr. Cuomo and the Republicans, who are half a joke politically in this city anyway. They voted against all of them. They voted for a young Muslim socialist letting everybody know we want something different. We want change. We don't want same old, same old capitalist political system. Let me conclude by therefore telling Mr. Mamdani what I'm sure he knows. You're going to have to show that you're different. You're going to have to really do something about the unaffordability of life in New York for so many people. You're going to have to actually reduce inequality and you're going to have to show the people what the state can, you know, rich people try to prevent the state from doing things for average people by calling it the nanny state. And we're supposed to go, ugh, the nanny. You know, the nanny state has always been there. It's just been a nanny for the rich. It's taken care of them like a nanny. The question isn't whether the state is a nanny, but who it's a nanny for. And Mr. Mamdani, you've got to show it can be not the nanny with the negative, but the loving mother and helper that it could have been, should have been, and which you need to make it be. You also need to understand that the rich will not lie down and go away. They are not finished. They will try to undo you after you were elected every bit as hard as they did before you were elected. They failed then and they can fail again. But to do that, you need to mobilize the people who are going to be the beneficiaries of what you do. If you are the beneficiary, you will support. Mr. Mamdani has to organize every block of this city built around the people who brought him the election and who will benefit from what he can do. If he lives up to his potential and to his work. The city is hoping and counting that he succeeds, except for those who will try to do everything possible to prevent it. We've come to the end of the first half of today's show. Please stay with us. I believe you'll find the interview with Sabrina Salvati and her new documentary film Black Erasure in Boston well worth your time. Thank you. Before we jump into the second half of today's show, I wanted to thank you for your very generous response to our fundraising efforts this year and in particular in the last couple of months. And in part responding to that, we are extending the availability of our limited edition linen covered hardcover version of Understanding Capitalism, the book I wrote and that we have been making available now for quite a while. If you are interested, I will be signing copies of that hardcover and they will be available to you as they have been over the last few weeks. Just simply send on email to us@infodemocracyatwork.info and put in the subject line limited edition. We will send you all the Information you need to order and receive your copy signed copy of Understanding Capitalism in its hardback. And thank you again for your kind attention to the fundraising dimension of what we do. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. I am very proud and pleased to bring to our microphones and our cameras Sabrina Salvati. She is a political commentator, activist, and emerging filmmaker. She hosts the Sabi Sabs podcast, which discusses domestic and foreign policy from a left perspective. She recently released her first documentary film entitled Black Erasure in Boston. So let me begin, Sabrina, if I may, by thanking you for giving us your time and your points of view, which is what I want to explore.
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Thank you.
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A
Okay, so let's start with your new film. I'm very interested that you're doing that. As I said, it's called Remove the Black Erasure in Boston. It seemed to me, looking at the trailer that you sent us, that it shows yet another way in which our economic system tries to hide from general awareness some of the awful consequences of the way it distributes wealth and the way it handles one of the most fundamental human needs, namely housing. So tell us, why did you make this film? What was your purpose? What do you hope it will do?
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So there was a group of activists that reached out to me called the Franklin Park Defenders, and they reached out to me to tell me that there is a new project that is underway in Boston that is going to lead to more gentrification. And that project is the takeover of White Stadium, which is inside of Franklin Park. Franklin park is a public park, and White Stadium was a public stadium. Boston Public schools utilized White Stadium for football games, for track events. So it was for the public. And unfortunately, a group of private investors have come along and they decided to steal White Stadium because they want to create a U.S. women's soccer team in Boston. And they felt that that would be the perfect spot to. To have it. After listening to the Franklin Park Defenders, I realized that I should probably dive a little bit deeper in this, and this should go far beyond an interview and because I thought it was important for me to explain to people how we got here. How is it that private investors could just show up and say, we want to take this stadium away from the public and we want to use it for our own benefit to make money. During the research, what I found is that there is a historical precedent for this. If we go back and we looked at the research of Roxbury, which was once a thriving black neighborhood in Boston, we were able to identify four harms in Particular that have led to the black erasure in Boston. And those harms were redlining, urban renewal, gentrification, of course, and last but not least, mass incarceration. Now, this is not unique to Boston. This has happened in major cities all across the country. I think San Francisco was probably the best case study to look at. But Boston in particular has seen a rate of gentrification that has increased, I would say, pretty rapidly over the past couple of years. I've been here since 2011, and I've seen a lot of this take place. And unfortunately, what I have seen is that with neighborhoods like Roxbury, parts of Dorchester, parts of Jamaica Plain, investors see these areas as profit for them because the property is cheaper, so they don't have to spend as much money and they can create what they want there. Now, ultimately, that leads to displacement of the people who grew up in those neighborhoods, because everything around them starts to increase, and they just simply can't afford it. So it's not just about White Stadium, but that's a big part of the documentary. But we go through the history of how we were able to get to this point, of all the harms, all the things that happened in Roxbury that led to that displacement of the black residents. And people ask, well, where were they displaced? They've been sent to these suburban towns outside of Boston, like Brockton, Taunton. It gets further and further away from the city as time goes on. And ultimately, you're taking people that grew up in the city, many that didn't need to have a car at the time because they were taking public transportation, and they're displaced to towns that don't have readily accessible public transportation. So now they do have to get a car. So you're making things more hectic and unaffordable for them and less convenient. So that's why we decided to make this documentary. And the hope was that it would put pressure on city council members, Mayor Wu, who greenlit this White Stadium takeover, to do the right thing, to stop taking from these communities and to build affordable housing that's actually affordable, because the affordable housing that they build here really isn't affordable when you look at the income requirements. But to stop taking from these communities and to get these communities back in a thriving state once again.
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A
Yeah, it's remarkable to me because it's such a theme that we encounter on this program all the time, the sort of in your face subordination of people's needs who have large numbers of people in order to make a profit, which will, in the end go to a relatively small number of people, most of whom are already pretty well off. It's absurd if you think about it. What a way to run a community to take from those who don't have much in order to further enrich the those who already have a system that works like that. Well, I won't belabor it. Let me ask you a little bit to expand on that. Is it the case that what you're describing in Boston is going on in other cities? You mentioned San Francisco. Give us a sense of this as a social process across the country.
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B
Absolutely. One example to look at, one of the more recent examples is the SOFI stadium in Inglewood, California, which I believe the LA Rams now play there. That's another example. Stadiums have been known over the years to displace black communities. There are other examples you can look at as well. Another one is the Washington D.C. nationals ballpark that displaced an entire community of people. So whenever I see that there's a new stadium that is coming, it makes me worry because they usually try to put those stadiums in places where the land is relatively cheaper so they don't have to pay as as much. So we've seen this happen all over. Sometimes it happens after natural disasters. New Orleans, Louisiana is a good example to look at. I don't know if people are aware, but there's a lot of gentrification that's happening in the 9th Ward of New Orleans, Louisiana, which is a predominantly black neighborhood. But after Hurricane Katrina, developers came in and they decided to buy the land because it wasn't worth as much anymore. And they build what they want on it. And there's usually certain signs that you can point to. One of the big red flags here tends to be a Whole Foods supermarket. If that comes into a low income neighborhood, you know what they're trying to do. The juice bars, the breweries, when they start to bring these things in, they are building a community that is not for the people who grew up there, there. And I think what a lot of people get wrong about Boston, if they've never been here, they still think Boston is the old Boston of yesterday. They think that Boston is like the movie the Departed or the Town and that that's actually not the case. Boston has become greatly unaffordable for a lot of people who grew up here. And even for some who moved here for college or for work. It's just not affordable for the average American. And essentially I think Marty Walsh put the call out when he was still mayor in Boston and he said, we Want Boston to become an entertainment hub. We want it to be a place where rich people want to come and live. So all of these venues that they're building, these are not things that are being built for people who are lower income or people who are working class. These are for people who have money.
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A
Yeah, it's remarkable. You know, in a way, we shouldn't be surprised, since the whole economy is geared to function in that way. It's the poorer neighborhood that is the land is cheap. And so you can see the logic in which this system keeps doing the same thing, pushing the poor people out whenever it's profitable to do so. It's extraordinary. You do talk about, and I want you to feel free to tell us, this seems to be particularly targeted in a racist way. In other words. Yeah, you're going after the poorer. And there have been white gentrifications in white poor neighborhoods, but in modern American cities, it seems to surely have a very pronounced racial dimension. Tell us a little bit about that.
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B
Absolutely. There was a study that was released a couple of years ago, thankfully, to the research of Dr. Sandy Darity, that the average net worth for the typical Boston Black family was $8, and the average net worth for a white family in Boston was over $250,000. When I did the research for this documentary, now it all started to make sense. When I first saw that report, I couldn't believe it. I know we have great wealth disparities here in Boston and in Massachusetts altogether, but I was just shocked by those numbers. And then I had to take a deep dive into what net worth actually means. Right. It's what you own, minus what you owe. And then when I did the research for the documentary, I realized, well, we don't really own black people in Boston. We don't really own much, so there's that. And we tend to have more debt. Right. And then I looked at the harms that I talked about. The redlining, the urban renewal, tearing down housing and displacing people. There's a gentleman that's in the documentary named Rod Sterling. Back in the day, his family actually owned their home in Boston. But after policies like urban renewal, that was demolished, the goal was to build new housing that was going to be nicer for them. They were displaced into an apartment. So they lost potential generational wealth by losing their home. And so all these things started to. Started to make sense. And it's. It's really unfortunate when people come to Boston for the first time, at least, including my friends. One of the things that they say is they say, where are all the black people? And there are black people in Boston. But over time, what you'll see in the documentary is that we have been pushed further and further away from Boston property. At one point, we did live in downtown Boston. At one point, we lived in Beacon Hill, which you'll also see discussed in the documentary. They pushed us out of the places that were productive and sent us further, further south of the city. And that's why you're less likely to see us. If you come as a tourist and you're in Boston proper, that's usually where a lot of the tours are. You're less likely to see us unless you come into Roxbury, Mattapan, parts of Dorchester, parts of Jamaica Plain. And that's the really unfortunate part. I think at the end of the day, a lot of the politicians and of course, the billionaire class, they just care about money. They don't really care who is removed or displaced because of it. And they're trying to turn a lot of these cities into a place for the rich.
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A
I know we're running out of time. Is there a fight against this that you can tell us something about?
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B
Yes, the. The Franklin Park Defenders are holding press conferences. They have proposed an alternative proposal for White Stadium. They've been speaking out about this greatly and 100% supportive of the documentary. So there are multiple press conferences that they are holding, and they have spoken to Mayor Wu as well. So they have been pushing back against this.
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A
Finally, tell us where people interested by all that you have been telling us, where can they find your film? Where can they watch it? How can they get to see it and hopefully be inspired to do similar research and similar work wherever else this.
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B
Is going on, you can watch it on YouTube, on my channel, Sabi Sabs. It's called Removed Black Erasure in Boston. And for other people who are aspiring filmmakers or who are filmmakers, I would like to see other removes as well. I would like to see a documentary for San Francisco if someone wants to produce that, or one for Los Angeles. I think we need as many of these as possible.
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A
I couldn't agree with you more. I'm speaking to you from New York. We need it here in New York City. We just had a tumultuous mayoral race in which one of the major factors that produced the upset that won that race was people's reactions to the kind of running of a city for the rich. Just the same as you described for Boston. Sabrina Salvates, thank you very much for your time and the important message, both of your film and of your appearance. I really appreciate your doing it.
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B
Thank you.
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A
And to all of our audience, let me thank you again for participating. I hope you learned as much as we did. And I look forward, as always, to speaking with you again next week.