B (17:38)
We are back. So, okay, let's talk about the state government now. Again, this is even Even with a city the size of New York, there still is always significant negotiations in order to do things in that require the aid of the state level government. And part of the problem here is that the New York State Democratic Party is significantly responsible for the Republicans control of the House, particularly in the 2022 cycle. There's a whole long story here about how a bunch of the Democrats wanted to form this sort of moderate caucus thing where this 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 state governments and handed a whole bunch of seats 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's a significant problem. So here's Hochul's response to Mamdami's plan to make buses free. Quote, I cannot set forth a 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. So Hochschul 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 to quote this from Spectrum News about Mondame's proposal to expand universal childcare. Hochul said she's also looking at expanding A universal child care program statewide, but the total price tag is $15 billion. 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 $15 billion, the entire amount of my reserves. Hochschule says she prefers to phase an expansion first within certain age groups in geographically underserved communities. So, okay, what is happening here in a macro sense is that Hochul is trying to slow roll both of these things. She is outright opposed to making buses free. She wants to do weird means testing Stu that will make it very difficult to do an extremely annoying bureaucratic layer meant to deny people services that you have to do instead of just having them be free. The child care 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 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 fairly conservative. Hochschule's 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, you will sign on to it. But it's a significant hurdle that you have to deal with. I want to move from this into a kind of related problem that's a more structural constraint on Rami'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. And that means maintaining economic growth. But, okay, what does economic 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 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 a extremely deformed economy right now, where, as I keep saying on this show, 50% of all consumer spending is happening from 5% 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 95%. And you know, there are things that you can do to some extent, right? 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 social democratic governments. And part of the reason why, again, is that they, they need the economy to keep growing and that they're reliant 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 in the 70s, where you have a democratic socialist who gets elected and is running Jamaica and then has to implement austerity because the country runs out of and the IMF comes in, these things can get really bleak. Now they don't have to, right? 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 start trying to fundamentally redistribute economic power. 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 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? Without the violence of the police. Laws are just suggestions. And if you're going to run a capitalist government, if you're going to run 1 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. They very famously did this in 1992. They had this whole giant riot, right? They had the thing that 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, they're also cops. And in 1992, I did this for a really, really, really minor oversight. Tempted oversight, right? And obviously they actually didn't win that direct fight, but they were able to cause enough of a political shitstorm 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, right, who's an incredible tough 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 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's even vaguely liberal is someone who is their enemy and who is their target. And we have seen them take actions to just directly threaten mayors. Fairly recently, right? In 2020, they kidnapped Bill de Blasio'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 thinly veiled threat is a dramatic understatement of how incredibly, incredibly blatant this threat was. Right. They kidnapped the mayor's daughter during a protest movement. And that was Bill de Blasio, who was not some kind of like wild anti police radical. Right? And especially now as sort of fascism is on the march and we're with the backing of the US Federal government, right, the police form a very significant threat to Mondami's ability to do anything, both on a sort of political level. They are going to be constantly, you know, putting out giant press releases about how Mamdami is like, turn the city into an unlivable hellhole and how they can't do their jobs, et cetera, 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 Palestine protesters, even if he wants to, 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 status democracy. And that clock is closing in on zero in this sort of moment of ascended fascism. Now, again, 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 capital strike or a bond strike to force them to 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 mobilization and pressure to, at the very least, not be openly attacking the mayor. You can put massive political pressure on Kathy Hochul 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. That was a result of a massive, like, organizational campaign that went extremely well. And Hushel 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 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 this possible in the first place. And so instead of demobilizing now and going, oh, our jobs are done. It's, no, no, no, no, no. Our job. Our jobs have just begun. But, you know, the better organized we are, 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 possible, and it could be better than this one. We just have to build it together. It Could Happen.
