[00:00:15] Speaker A: Hi, folks. Dick Flex here with another of our Talking Strategy Making History episodes.
And we've got a special today and in maybe a couple of more because we want to talk about. We are inspired by and triggered by what's happened in New York in the Democratic primary, the victory of Zoran Mandani's campaign. And Diraka, what questions do we want to really explore in our diving into that campaign?
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Well, I think first off, it's certainly an exciting opportunity for left governance, like, for, for the left to be in power in a major city in the United States, another major city, I should say. And I'm always, I think we're, both of us are always interested in, like, what we can actually do given the real constraints that we have in the current political environment with an incredibly hostile federal government, a milquetoast and uninspired Democratic Party at the national level. So there's like all kinds of headwinds to Mamdani getting elected, though. You know, it looks stronger and stronger every day, but then even once in office, what he will be able to accomplish and what kind of reverberations that'll have for, you know, winning and governing in other parts of the country and nationally. I'm just very, very keen to hear from smarter, better connected people than us about what they think.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Right. And so we've been looking around for people who have good connection and able to talk with good analytic perspective on what's happened in New York from a firsthand point of view.
Yeah. I'm, of course, also interested in what the fate is of the agenda or the program and the vision once ifman Bandani becomes mayor, which I do agree expect to happen.
What are the problems in implementing what's the meaning of the various parts of his actual agenda in terms of people's lives in New York? That's one big question. But another is the organizing that has preceded and gone into and helped enable this victory. And this all fits with everything we've been trying to do all the time we've been doing the podcast series.
We keep coming back to organizing at the grassroots as a very key part of an electoral strategy for social change going forward. And it seems that, contrary to our, at least my stereotypic view of the Democratic Socialists of America, that they really, in New York, have been the organizational foundation for a rather amazing organizing campaign in the election campaign itself, but leading up to it, and I really hope we can find out more about how that came into being.
It fits with everything we've been trying to do with the podcast and both of us have long time. You eat much more than me. Connections with DSA and its checkered history, you might say. So we don't want to dwell on DSA as such, but what the people of DSA in New York were able to take the lead in seems very significant. So that's what we're hoping to do. And we may have several episodes coming at you folks based on this investigation that we are embarked on. And I frankly think it's going to be a good service because a lot of the reporting, my impression is of the victory is sort of conventional political analysis, like he's charismatic or there's a generational revolt and not enough on the really significant and distinctive specifics that made this all possible and adds real meaning to or real promise to what might happen going forward. At least that's how I'm looking at it.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. I think on the one hand we should try to give listeners and the discussion a really rooted understanding like based in New York politics and New York policy and New York structures of government, which is a really special place, is one of these real special parts of the United States with its own political culture and institutions.
It is in so many ways fundamentally the most left wing city in the United States. The city that has a kind of independent, at least historical welfare state and labor relations regime and all these things. So, yeah, it's a fascinating place to try to do progressive policy, you know, out in front of where the rest of the country is, which it used to do. It used to do a lot more of.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: I grew up. I grew up when Fiorello Guardia was mayor and in the midst of the high point, that's what I was born into in Brooklyn back in the 40s, that all of course went away with the Red Scare and everything else. But there's so many things about this that seem to touch back on that history. So maybe that'll come up in part of our conversation.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: I have a, I have a sense, I have a suspicion that it will. That's history. History will intrude in the conversation. And just one last thing I want to say though is in terms of setting up is sort of the other, the other side of the same coin.
In addition to being rooted and specific, I also think what's often missing is, you know, putting it in a broader, putting what's happening in New York in a broader national context. And like we have, there is a DSA member, Democratic Socialist, mayor of another major city in the United States right now in Chicago that, you know, who's like deeper into a term and you know, all and, and like having troubles of the real world and so forth. So I think making some comparisons there to sort of think through how we can make this more normal. You're like, we're going to need lots of democratic socialist mayors of lots of cities and governors and at least caucuses within legislators, legislatures and so forth. So, you know, we need to not exoticize it too much or not put too much on the this guy's shoulders and so.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, lots to discuss and, and so who we do we already have one interview in the can you want to set that up?
[00:07:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So we, we saw an article in Dissent magazine on, on their website called what can Zorin Accomplish?
And that was really one of our key questions and it was written by Professor J.W. mason. He's a economist at John Jay College in the CUNY system in New York City. He has a history of activism in progressive politics, but also is written widely on macroeconomic policy.
He works with a group called Groundwork that we'll talk a little bit with him about as well. That really is something people should know about. And what we realize, or what he realized is that he went to school with Diraco, which adds a little bit of spice to maybe to what we'll be doing in conversation. So we'll turn to that.
Stick with us here and we'd love as always to hear from you at our website, which is patreon.comtsMH where you can actually subscribe and help us out in what we're doing.
So let's go listen now to the conversation with Professor Josh Mason, Daraka and myself.
Josh Mason, welcome to Talking Strategy, Making History. So Josh, we were excited to see this piece you have just published with Dissent on what can Mamdani accomplish. We both of us, like many others, are excited and intrigued by what has happened in the New York electoral process and Mamdani's bold run and enormous really victory. And then of course the question right away is how can he very question you're raising with that article. How can he accomplish or what can he accomplish as mayor? You focusing on the policy questions and that's what we want to dive into with you.
A lot of people have read what you wrote with very great interest because it really does open one of the more serious long range questions about this whole electoral process that socialists and progressives are trying to get going. And this has been an important moment in it. And this is the theme of our podcast for the last few years has been very much centered around these kinds of questions. So this all fits together.
So welcome very much. Josh, I almost want to ask you, so what can he accomplish? But let's the thing that one thing, the policy thing that really caught my eye right away and you spend a lot of time on is the housing question, because these are the same general kinds of questions we have in California, in Santa Barbara, I'm very involved day to day in housing justice kinds of struggles here. They're different from New York, but not completely at all different. There's a lot of things to be learned all across the board.
So what has Zoran Mandani been saying about housing? What is the promise the campaign so far has made?
And maybe then why don't you explore what you have to say about it? Because I think you're let me guess, that what you're trying to do in the article is not only speculate, but you may be also trying to have some influence on how people in the campaign and if it wins in the administration of Mamdani, how they think about how to implement these promises. Right. I mean, you have some ideas about that. So go ahead.
[00:10:55] Speaker C: Well, what I think is interesting and let me stop and say I think housing is where the affordability agenda is going to sink or fly.
If people ask, if people respond to this message, and they clearly did respond to this message of a New York you can afford, I think the number one thing that people are thinking of is housing.
That is the thing that is distinctively expensive in New York and in some other places, the west coast, the Bay Area, of course you've been and more so. But the thing that defines these areas as being having a high cost of living is housing. And that's the thing that, you know, really limits people's ability to live there and and so on. So I think that is the area if he's successful, people are going to really see that success, even if he doesn't do as much in other areas. And if he isn't, it's going to be hard to overcome that with other things. So I think, I think what's interesting about what the campaign has been talking about is that it's really a sort of all of the above approach. You know, I think some of these debates, as we all know online, can get kind of heated and people pick sides. And I think what's again, striking about the Mamdani campaign is how much it really was a both and message on housing. So what that means concretely is on the one hand yes, you need more private development. You need to change land use rules to make it easier to build housing. And that includes people building housing for profit, which is necessarily, you know, doesn't have to mean the super rich, but it does mean people above a certain income threshold that are profitable to build private housing for. And we do, we want more of that. We want more middle class people to be able to afford to live in the city. So I think, I think, you know, being very upfront about that and to be clear, the obstacles to building housing in New York are a lot less than they are in most of the country. Certainly for multifamily development, there's a lot bigger proportion of the city that is zoned to allow that and the infrastructure is there. But it's still the case that in much of the city zoning is single family housing, zoning requirements for parking and other things. So there's a lot of space to allow more private development.
So that's one piece. And, and again, it's interesting if you've seen interviews with him, he, he says this is an area where his views have evolved, that perhaps a few years ago he was much more skeptical of the role of private development as part of the housing problem, as a solution to the housing problem. And he's, he's, he's shifted his views a bit on that. But that said, we're not necessarily going to get more affordable housing that way because partly because even if you remove land use restrictions, it's just expensive to build housing and there's kind of a floor of the rent you have to get that, that is going to make that justify that decision. But also a more subtle thing is that developers are not just interested in the rent their project is going to get today. They're looking forward maybe five years where they're going to sell this project or maybe refinance it. Because a lot of the model, some of these developers are just developers, they're builders. They sell the project onto somebody else who's going to operate. So they've got a sort of window about before they're going to sell this thing off. Others, developers then continue operating the project. But typically the business model is you're going to borrow more money against it to finance your next project. So either way, what you're really interested in is not just the rent the thing is going to get on completion, but the rent two, three, four, five years down the road, not, not into the indefinite future, but you know, three or four or five years. And that means, and that's a big, big Part of the total return is, is that that appreciation in value.
So if you actually stabilize rents, if you bring rents down, if you slow the growth in rents, that's unfortunately going to discourage a lot of private developers. And that's why, in fact, in, in a lot of parts of the country we see these boom and bust cycles because when the prospects for housing development look good, a lot of developers come in. And slower rent growth really, really cuts into returns and makes it less attractive. So you're not going to get a default in rents just through opening up the door to private development.
So you're going to need public money for the most part in some form. Now, one interesting approach, and I think there's a lot more interest perhaps today than there would have been a few years ago, is to have the government come in on the financing side. Because these developers, they're going to be putting in maybe 50% equity typically and getting 50% loans, and that influences the level of return they can accept.
If the government comes in with what's called a mezzanine loan, and so the developer can go in with 20% equity and 30% public financing and 50% private financing, that project becomes profitable at a much significantly lower return, which means falling or stable rents are going to be acceptable for developers who have that kind of financing. So the attractive thing about that is it's not really a subsidy because those loans are still going to get paid back. And it's something where the city can reasonably be expected to borrow money, lend it on to developers and take advantage of the cities deeper, bigger balance sheet, longer time horizon, the fact that the city does not care about getting those capital gains in a few years, so the city can accept a lower return than a private lender would or a private developer would. So that's sort of step piece two, and that will certainly, I think, delivered lower rents, but not deeply affordable housing. And there you really do need direct subsidies, whether those take the form of public housing, which I think there's a lot of people today who are skeptical about that. But it could mean social housing.
There's an enormous range in New York City, in particular of alternative forms of ownership, limited equity, co ops, Michelle Lama buildings and so on. There's a big space between private for profit owners on the one side and outright public ownership on the other side, which is a very promising place where you can deliver subsidy dollars to generate genuinely affordable housing.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: So the Mamdani campaign is already interested in all of these, is that what you're saying?
[00:16:44] Speaker C: Yes, yes, I think that's my impression from the relatively limited stuff that he said in public, but that has been clear that you need these different pieces. And the conversations that I've had with people, I think that there's an interest. And then the last piece I should mention, which is maybe the one that's gotten the most attention, is rent regulation. You know, we don't usually say rent control in New York because that is a special status that only a very small number of units fall under. Now we say rent regulation because there's a broader range of regulations. Rent stabilization is the most widespread one that limit how much landlords can increase rents. And you know, the mayor appoints all the members of the Rent Guidelines Board. Those jobs turn over. So maybe he can't do it his first year, but within a year or two of taking office, he will have a majority on that board board and he can simply tell them, you know, put through a 0% rent increase for rent regulated apartments, which is about half of the city's rental stock. You know, people have presented this as something radical. But, but de Blasio, our, you know, mayor before the current one, did this three times, I believe during, during the time he was mayor, his Rent Guidelines board did a 0% increase in regulated rents. And you know, the sky, sky didn't fall. Landlords did not abandon buildings. It's not some kind of radical socialist idea. It's something that has been done already within the past decade. And I think for some people who aren't in New York or familiar with New York, the idea of freezing the rent sounds like a radical proposal. But in some ways it's almost one of the smallest, most incremental kind of things that he's proposed.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: It's the one he can most straightforwardly do under his own power. Right?
[00:18:23] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: And so that's going to be something that I think we want to get into. What are the obstacles to actually implementing a lot of what he has been promising just in terms of where the power actually lies in New York? New York State government has a lot of control and other. But one point you make in the article, just in that we can touch on here, is landlords are not the same as developers. Right. You make that point and I think that's very interesting. Why don't you spell that out? What did you mean by that?
[00:18:56] Speaker C: Well, I mean, I mean a couple of things. First of all, they literally aren't the same people. And I don't know the exact proportions. But my guess, based on talking to people who know more about the mechanics in the series, maybe half of the developers are actually going to own and operate those buildings, and maybe half of them are going to sell them off relatively soon after completion. But more importantly, from the other side, there's an enormous number of individuals and institutions, including some very wealthy ones who own housing and collect rents from it, but are not engaged in the development of new housing. And the interests of these two groups do not necessarily coincide. Because if you have some kind of mix of policies that delivers more housing development but lower rents or even. I really feel like the goal we're aiming for is almost just slower rent growth, bending the curve. But if you can deliver that, that's at worst a mixed bag for the developers because they're still making money on the building side, but it's a pure negative for the landlords. So I think to the extent that you have a policy that can encourage development, that can be attractive to the people who build housing, even if it's strongly opposed by the landlords, and I think politically there may, there may not, but there may be space there to kind of split the business lobby when it comes to housing.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: So, New York, I'll turn this over to Durac in a minute. But I wanted, having grown up in New York during and after World War II, when there was a strong tenant movement, but also this, what you alluded to before, a real tremendous explosion of what we can call social housing in the city. My parents moved to a co op, Kingsview in Brooklyn, that was a smaller version of several other major co op developments, Queens View and then Co Op City, and then all those what you called Mitchell Lama buildings that developed. So co op housing, which is not present really anywhere on scale in the rest of this country, in New York really was developed. And then, of course, there's the public housing, which got a bad name in New York because it was quite ghettoized, I think, and quite regimented in appearance. And not really there are a lot of problems. There are a lot of problems in New York with all the housing right shadow, everything that we're talking about.
So why would there be this kind of business anger and reaction against Mamdani on the housing front? Because what you described is really an ambitious program to really encourage development, including private development.
What's the basis other than hysteria to the opposition, and what does that opposition portend in terms of actually fulfilling even the housing part of his agenda?
[00:21:44] Speaker C: Well, I think it's a little soon to say, I think clearly, and I think this cuts both ways. We have been in an environment for A long time. And then especially now, where rich people, business owners, big names in finance, expect to have the entire world revolve around them. They expect to not just enjoy the immediate direct privileges of their wealth, but to have everybody in the political world, in the media, just catering to them. And so I think anybody who challenges that, anybody who criticizes them, it just has an outsized impact because these people are so invested, not just in being wealthy, but being the sort of dominant, mired central figures in society.
So I think there's a, certainly that kind of narcissism of the rich that is definitely a play here. And incidentally, even much more moderate figures like Obama to some extent got some of the same opposition by being a little bit critical of the billionaire class.
Now, I think the flip side of this, that we should also say is that precisely because we are in this environment, even modest gains, I think are going to be really mobilizing and energizing for people. I think we've really had this message coming, of course from the right, but also from a lot of the Democratic establishment that you simply can't make progress, that there's no way for collective action and certainly for radical politics, mass mobilization to make things better at all. And so I think in a sort of ironic way, a lot of the opposition to Zorad Mamdani's agenda is actually going to mean it will have a greater impact when he does deliver things that something again, like let's say, free buses. Another thing he's talked about, which honestly a lot of places have experimented with, you know, I saw an article, Montgomery county in Maryland, you know, is making their local buses free. This is something a lot of.
And, but if it happens in New York and he's actually able to deliver that, it will look transformative in a way that it might not have if it hadn't aroused so much opposition in the first place. So I think in some ways what's at stake here is the principle of can a government with a real popular base and a real agenda do anything? And there are a lot of people who are very invested in the answer to that question being no.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: So it's a question of power, not really of simply of profit making and business interest. That's, that may be motivating, probably is motivating a lot of this opposition.
[00:24:09] Speaker C: I think that's right. I think that's right. I think, I mean, more housing might mean lower rents for some of the existing housing. I'm not even sure. I think honestly a lot of landlords who are terrified of this agenda might find at the end of the day, they might. Maybe they'll never realize it, but they might end up benefiting from it. You know, I think if you build more housing in New York and you attract more people into New York, New York is going to be, you know, it's going to have even more of the qualities that make people want to live here already.
And for a lot of the existing landlords, as much as they scream and yell, they may end up being beneficiaries.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: And yet they might still scream and yell if their ability to unilaterally exercise power is being checked.
[00:24:51] Speaker C: That's right. I think that's right. It's much more about that sort of autonomy, your ability to dictate what happens unless a sort of direct material interest. And I think a lot of people have made this, this point about Mamdani in particular. He's not part of the insiders club. You know, why do people, you know, the New York Times editorial board and the sort of people they talk to, why are they so hysterical about him? I think it's, it's precisely because they're used to being able to, you know, call the mayor up when you want a favor. They're used to being able to say, oh, this guy should get a job, and reliably getting that to happen. And so somebody who comes in who's not answerable to them and even worse, is actually seems to have a real popular following, is very threatening, independent of whatever he's actually going to do.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: So in addition to the rent freeze, which could be accomplished within the mayor's power, what does he need from the state government that might become really a problem in terms of implementing. Let's just stick with, focus on the housing piece. He needs a tax increase, he needs a tax program, he needs revenue in order to do the kind of investment that you were saying is key to developing more of the housing that's needed. So what's going on there? What are the barriers there?
[00:26:01] Speaker C: I mean, right, the. What he needs from the state government. There's a one word answer, which is money. You know, there's areas where the city has a lot of autonomy, you know, transportation policy, streets, you know, if you want to, if you want to create more busways or, you know, ban parking or charge for parking, I mean, state has very little oversight over that stuff. But the city has very little ability to raise revenue. So anything with a big price tag is going to require approval from the state. I think the odds there are actually not. I think they're better than you might think. One thing to keep in mind is Zoram Ghani is not some kind of bolt from the blue. He's not Superman who landed here from Krypton.
He's part of a cohort of radical and progressive and quite a number of self described socialist politicians who've been winning election and achieving power in New York for 10 or 15 years or longer now. You know, back in the, in the 2000s, you know, 20 years ago now. Anyway, I worked for a number of years for the New York State Working Families Party, which was an effort to build a sort of labor community group constituency around strategic electoral interventions. And you know, I think there was a lot that was positive in the model. There were some problems and some obstacles that would be interesting to talk about some other time. But you know, one result of that, and then I think in some ways more successful efforts by the democratic socialists over the past, you know, eight years or six years, eight years, has been to bring in a lot of fresh new progressives into the state legislature. You know, where Mamdani is currently an assembly member, one of a number of socialist assembly members, and into the City Council. You know, people talk about the establishment being against him. If you look at the City Council, more members of the city Council endorsed Mamdani than endorsed Cuomo or anybody else. So he is not an outsider to New York politics. He is part of a larger wave of left wing electoral work and strategy and activism that's already in place to support his. Like for instance, rent control. We talk about. Okay, we talked about that a little bit. An interesting fact about this is if you go back four or five years, New York had rent regulation, but it had been steadily getting weaker for a generation.
More loopholes, more carve outs, you know, oh, if the rent gets over a certain amount and it's not that high, $2,000, $2,400, then the apartment is deregulated. Every time the tenant turns over, you get a big bump in the rent and so on. These changes were making it sadly less effective and creating a lot of opportunities for landlords who wanted to kick out their current tenants and replace them with higher paying tenants to do so. Well back.
I wish I knew the knee off the top of my head, but three or four years ago, a majority in the state legislature with real leadership from the newly elected Socialists.
Well, I don't want to name names because I'm not sure which individuals, but the socialists were certainly a big part of this. And the broader obviously progressive coalition legislature passed a major improvement to New York's rent regulation, which really got rid of all those loopholes. There's essentially no way for a regulated apartment to leave regulated status now. You can kick out your tenant if you really want to do it, but you're going to have to accept exactly the same rent from whoever you get in their place. And they also opened up for the first time the option for governments around the state to introduce rent regulation. And that was one of the key political pieces. That's huge because it made it not just a New York City issue, but a lot of other, you know, in the state that were concerned with rising rents. You know, the legislation said you can also now regulate your rents. And in fact, we've seen a wave of different types of, you know, some outright rent regulation, some things like just cause eviction prohibitions, other types, but. But a lot of rental regulation that's happened outside of the city as well. So that coalition still exists. And in fact, I think as a result of this election, assuming Xoran wins in the fall, which I believe he will, it's going to be a lot stronger because most politicians, and certainly including Kathy Hochul, our governor, are not really principled one side or the other. They're very much conscious of what they're going to want to do to win their next election. And of course, they care about their donors. But if they see that there is momentum on the left, they're going to say, well, I need to cover that flank, too. And I think there's going to be a willingness to work with the Mamdani administration. I think the big test in some ways is going to be coming up with reasonable, plausible, workable things that you can actually do.
It's not a matter of convincing people that we want affordable child care. Everybody wants affordable child care. And it's not exactly a matter of getting the money, because I think the state legislature is prepared to vote money for affordable childcare. It's figuring out the right model, how do we do this? So it's actually going to work. So it's plausible. That's the tricky piece, I think.
[00:30:43] Speaker A: Go ahead, Durocco. You haven't had your shots.
[00:30:46] Speaker B: Well, just. I want to pick up right there. And thanks again for all of this, is very helpful. But you could say on the other side of the Democratic Party, there's also a kind of growing conversation or set of rhetoric or set of slogans or frames about, you know, delivering affordability and delivering goods for people that's being, you know, packaged together as an abundance agenda. And it. It sort of aims at or talks about a lot of the same themes that Mandani has, at least, at least in terms of like, government can deliver things, we can make sure that housing is being built to the extent that that is a part of the affordability problem, that's, that's crucial and so forth. But there's also like, obviously a whole bunch of ideology and politics that's being smuggled in in the abundance agenda. Can you talk a little bit about how might Mamdani influence that tension, that discussion on the left and center left as, as a mayor?
[00:31:49] Speaker C: I think he's going to have a big impact. I think, I think the reality, at least, certainly among the people I talk to and the impression that I have is there's a lot of uncertainty. If you look at the sort of Democratic Party and I'm not talking about the very top levels, but you know, the sort of rank and file legislators and their staff and the organizations that interact with those people, there's just a lot of uncertainty about exactly where to go. I think people are really, really struggling. It's like just keeping your head above water but not knowing which way you should be swimming. And I think a lot of the appeal of the abundance thing is precisely that it showed up at this moment when people are really looking for a direction. And so I think it didn't necessarily. People weren't particularly invested in the content. It was just like, okay, here's something we can do. But I think, I think a Mamdani administration that actually is in office and is able to deliver, and I think there's a decent chance they can deliver something substantial in their first year. I think that's going to change the conversation a lot throughout the country. It's partly showing you can win an election. You can come from being somebody nobody's ever heard of, going against up literally the biggest single name in New York state politics. And you can overcome those endorsements and those resources and that name recognition. That's something that people are going to be looking at, people who want to run that sort of campaign and people who are scared of having that campaign run against them. And then the fact if you can deliver and this again, I think he's going to come in benefiting in a way from the extremely low expectations of this moment. If he can deliver anything concrete, it's going to make him into a model that people are going to want to follow in the rest of the country.
People forget, you know, Bill de Blasio is kind of a punchline now. Our mayor, you Know, for eight years here. But in his first year, you know, he came in, he had an agenda which was pre K, universal free, pre kindergarten, through the public schools. And, you know, I was living in the city at the time. I had a small child. I thought, well, this is a great idea. I'm for it, but my kids are going to be, you know, grown and aged out of this before, before he's ever able to get it through. But no, my. Both my kids went to, you know, pre K, thanks to Bill de Blasio. And, you know, he did that really in the first year, and it was extremely successful. I mean, you know, I think you see polls, 97, 98% of New York City parents are happy with it. Like, you don't get those kind of numbers if you ask people whether they're okay with the sun rising in the morning. So he was actually very successful. And then. And this maybe is something we want to talk about, but it's definitely lurking out there in the background. Of course, he hit one of the most explosive issues in New York and urban politics in general, which is, you know, the police. And he ended up, for good reasons or bad or circumstances or choices, he ended up in this real confrontation with the police department and the police unions, which he just could not win. And it really kind of crippled his administration. But that first year, he was very, very popular.
And the 3K model that new York introduced then was actually adopted a lot of other places. So I think. And de Blasio, incidentally, was a historically terrible communicator. I think he was actually quite a smart guy. People who worked for him said he was absolutely brilliant on policy detail, but he was just the worst politicians I've ever observed at making people understand why he was doing what he was doing and articulating any kind of principle behind the specific choices. And, of course, John Mamdani is the diametrical opposite of that. So I think the chances of this administration really becoming a sort of banner, a flag for the national Democratic Party, like, this is the way we can go and we can mobilize people and we can win. I think the chances of that are quite good.
[00:35:28] Speaker A: Well, it's very refreshing and exciting that you have that degree of optimism about that, which tends to be my personality as well. But the key. Let's get back to the revenue raising issue. So the key proposal that, as I understand it coming from the campaign has been a 2% tax on wealth of people or of income of people earning over a million a year, 2% of $1 million earnings a year would generate several couple of billion dollars I think for a lot of this agenda. Maybe, maybe it was, was that tied to the child care agenda mostly or, or whatever. In any case, that seems to be likely to be one of the most difficult things to pass in the legislature, don't you think?
[00:36:22] Speaker C: I don't think so. I mean New York has raised taxes on the wealthy several times in not too distant past. It would not be by, I mean New York is a high tax state, so is that a problem?
But the fact is New York and California are very high tax states and they're also states with enormous numbers of rich people living in them and enormous numbers of successful businesses choosing to locate here.
You know, I, I would, I don't know off the top of my head, I'd have to, I'd have to go back and look, but I think we probably had three increases in the top personal income tax rate in the last 10 or 15 years. It's not, it's not that crazy. It's not that unusual.
[00:37:01] Speaker B: And New York, New York has an income tax right. It has a municipal income tax, but doesn't have the ability to change the rate.
[00:37:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:37:08] Speaker B: Of the state.
[00:37:09] Speaker C: That is correct.
There is a New York City income tax, but it is entirely a function of state law. The city has no ability to change it in any way.
[00:37:19] Speaker B: And can we pick back up on the question of expectations that you were raising, which I think is really important because you talked about de Blasio who was coming up in Democratic politics when I lived there and was generally thought of as a good guy progressive Democrat and certainly like had a movement background and people knew him from that, that stuff. And it seemed like expectations were very high and he failed to meet them. And even if we go back and look and say, hey, all things considered, he had some, some policy wins and was fighting the good fight on other things. As you say, his name is kind of a joke. Like what, what are some things that either a Mamdani administration or the, the, the, or DSA or the, the movement, his well wishers, however you want to put it. What are some things that the good side can do to keep him from. Yeah, being a victim of overly high expectations.
[00:38:16] Speaker C: Well, honestly, I don't think expectations are that high. I don't think anybody expects him to implement socialism in New York tomorrow. I mean, maybe there's somebody out there.
[00:38:27] Speaker B: That'S good to hear.
[00:38:28] Speaker C: I think people are, I think people are inspired just by the fact that he ran this campaign at all. Incidentally, in that we should mention the fact that he was an unapologetic defender of Palestinians and of the rights and humanity of Palestinians and an unapologetic critic not just of Israel's war in Gaza, but Israel's apartheid regime in general. The fact that they brought out every kind of accusation of anti Semitism and, and so on, as we all know. And you know, it just, it just fell flat. It didn't, it didn't scare people anymore. And I think, you know, just, just being able to show that this, you, you know, you don't have to be terrified of these, of these accusations anymore, I think is really almost transformative by itself.
I mean, I do think there's going to be, when the, you know, when the concrete stuff happens, there's going to be, there's going to be criticisms. And I think, I think there is a difference, my impression between New York and the west coast in housing politics. My impression is that there's a lot more hostility towards private development period in California and that you have a larger number of leftists who are going to be actively hostile to higher density housing is my impression, which I think is, I'm not going to say non existent in New York, but I think is a, a smaller part of the landscape here.
[00:39:55] Speaker B: Right. As long as it's not community gardens.
I'm just saying that was the only like progressive NIMBYISM I ever saw in New York.
[00:40:06] Speaker A: Yeah, well, well, the thing is, I don't actually, I know that's what Ezra Klein keeps saying is going on in California. There certainly can't be denied that there's NIMBYism, but that isn't the, the progressive housing position is for social housing, which is not at all on the agenda in the state legislature or in the governor's office in California. It's just not being developed at all as a significant initiative. It is very much the emphasis is on zoning in such a way as to maximize private development on the grounds that the supply of housing is the problem.
And most of us in the activist community don't think increasing the supply will actually affect the housing prices that much or that effectively for the working class and the broad workforce of California, which is the part of the population that is having the most serious difficulty in housing affordability right now. And so that's where New York leads because as we mentioned earlier, New York has this long history of social housing sort of taking it for granted. So I would hope that that can come into play in what comes forward. The thing I imagine the difference between MAMDANI and de Blasio very much has to do with the. Mamdani's part of a much broader movement that de Blasio really was not. Maybe he pioneered, in a way, de Blasio opened the door for some things or made things seem possible, but he was being judged purely and simply on his own political leadership, I think not in terms of what he represented.
Whereas Mavdani comes right out of.
Didn't start as an elected president official. Right. He comes out of this. To me, I wasn't aware till now of how widespread this New York DSA organizing effort has been over several years. And I hope we can do a podcast devoted to understanding more of that. And then what he personally is part of is a coalition between that and the rising ethnic populations in New York, Muslim and others that have not been well represented politically. But it's part of New York's history, right, going back decades and decades, that the immigrant population becomes a dynamic political force once organization begins. So am I romanticizing this? I think that.
[00:42:52] Speaker C: No, not at all. I think you're 100% right.
There is a movement, and that's de Blasio. First of all, the movement didn't exist in its present form, but he wasn't part of it in any case. His personal background was a campaign staffer for Hillary Clinton. You know, so it's just a different. Different environment and. And different individuals. But I think, I mean, there's going to be growing pains. You know, DSA is, Is going to be adding enormous numbers of members. It already is adding enormous numbers of members in New York. And, you know, it's a very decentralized organization. And, you know, I think that's a real strength. But it also is going to be challenging to keep its. Its coherence and its culture with all these new people coming in. And, you know, I think, of course, I'm sure when, again, when we get down to specific policies, there's going to be people who are going to be critics of Mamdani. And that's fine. It should be. But I think, in general, I think there's been a kind of positive feedback within New York esa. And I should say I'm not. I pay dues. I'm a paper member. I'm not an active participant, but I talk to quite a few people, including quite a few of my students, but also other people I know who are active. So I have a little bit of an inside perspective. And I think that there's been a kind of positive feedback between the electoral work and the sort of and the culture, the kind of non sectarian, you know, kind of open, energetic culture. Because working on elections gives people something concrete to do instead of just arguing with each other. And it creates a real payoff for cooperating and working together and finding, you know, building alliances, you can achieve more. Whereas an organization that doesn't have that concrete outlet, there is not the same incentive for working together across what might otherwise be lines of conflict. And I think in the short run at least there's going to be enormous enthusiasm for more electoral work. And I think, I suppose some people who might criticize New York City DSA for being so electorally focused will find more to criticize. But I think in terms of maintaining the sort of coherence and energy of the organization, I think it's going to be very positive.
[00:44:53] Speaker A: Well, yeah, and the way that there's stuff being written now about the pre campaign organizing that has developed and it reminds me of growing up, when I was growing up in the, in the 40s after World War II in Brooklyn, where, you know, one of the most popular politicians in Brooklyn was Peter Caccioni, Communist Party open, you know, ran on the Communist Party line and got elected to City Council. I remember huge picnics in Brooklyn for Caccioni. And that wasn't just because I was a red diaper baby. It just seemed like there was. And there were other neighborhoods in Manhattan too, the Upper west, the up, Lower east side, in particular in Harlem, where a large progressive, lefty socialist communist culture existed. And I'm getting the feeling that some of that is reminiscent of that is present in some of what, what seems like to be going on in parts of New York right now, which to me would be amazing. So. But is it. There's something kind of a contradiction in what I understand the DSA activist perspective is they want to elect these, elect people to office. They're interested in a practical, victory oriented electoral effort, but they also want these people elected to be true to quote unquote, democratic socialism that is to the DSA policies.
But these are people being elected representing vast constituencies that are not the dsa. And I think that's a real, I assume that's a conversation going on in one way or another within New York. DSA is how do you hold people accountable without interfering with their ability to make the political judgments that have to be made when you're in office and when you're trying to deal with diverse constituencies, when you're dealing with power issues, the word betrayal comes up very quickly, I think in DSA language But betrayal can really mean selling out, or it can mean we can't achieve that goal, but we can achieve something short of it, or we can build towards something in the future. You know what I mean? Because that's already been a real issue with aoc, with other people who've been elected. So what's your understanding of that whole?
[00:47:19] Speaker C: I mean, look, this is the big problem. This is a very fundamental problem. You know, my friend Michael Kanukin, who was very active in New York DSA for quite a few years before moving over to work for SEIU in the labor movement, he wrote a nice piece on my personal blog saying there are no political parties are illegal in the United States. And I think he's right in a very precise sense, which is that New York election law does not allow something that we would think of as a political party, something that has some kind of defined membership, that has affiliations with other organizations, that has any control over who runs on its party line, that has any control over people once they are elected on a party line. The things that the Labour Party, let's say, for better or worse, does very vigorously in the UK are simply impossible in the US and, you know, that was part of the issue with Working Families Party when I was there.
So you elect these people and you don't have any control over them. That is the reality. There isn't any accountability and there's. There's just no structure that could provide accountability.
So I think one piece of that, which is not maybe what a lot of us from the socialist tradition like to think, but I think is part of this reality, is that you are very dependent on the particular individuals who get into these roles. You don't have the ability to structurally say, well, we're going to elect somebody who's a good, reliable party member and they've paid their dues and done their time, and now they're going to go off and represent us in the legislature. That person is going to immediately be subject to a completely different set of social influences and go their own way. The only people who you can really count on are people who have really deep personal commitments, who have strong enough personalities to stick with the program even when there's no institutional forces really holding them there. And that's not how I would like politics to be. And I would always say in any context, union context, anywhere else, we shouldn't depend on just these leaders. It should be all of it. But American politics is not set up to work that way. And I think, you know, I think we're fortunate having Zoran Mamdani who I believe, although who knows that he will has a real internal commitment to his political vision that is going to carry him even when. But the ability of New York ESA to exert any sort of discipline and I think, I mean people I think are probably, I think fairly realistic about this. I know there was the whole thing with Jamal Bowman and, and right. So, you know, this stuff I think maybe the national DSA is a little, little more in that direction than the New York.
So, you know, it's not a problem that has a solution and, and you know, there's going to be people who are, you know, look like from somebody's point of view that they're just in it to get a job and they don't care. And there's going to be other people who look from somebody else's point of view like their doctrinaire sectarians who, who want to blow things up as soon as they've got a little power. And I don't think there's a magic formula that tells you who's right, but I do think you can't institutionalize. DSA has been tremendously successful at electing people to office in New York and I think that's great and I hope they continue following that strategy and build on. But you can't institutionalize that success as a party that actually has the coherent ability to dictate positions to those people once they're in office. You just can't do it well.
[00:50:35] Speaker A: But one thing you can do, which you didn't yet mention but keeps occurring to me is if you're in office is to be part of the movement. In other words, to say, look to keep constantly in dialogue and conversation with the base to say you cannot go back home and settle in and expect the government to fulfill the program that you're hoping for.
We need your active engagement. We need. And every time there's a blockage in and achieving something that people really want being being able to speak to those, to people and say you got to mobilize and don't ever trust an individual to carry the weight of all this.
That's not how democracy works. It's not how our movement wants to work. So you see what I'm saying.
It's not so much a question of holding the individuals accountable accountable, it's keeping the movement as a force after the election.
And there's a history of failure to do that. Like Jesse Jackson did not really build on the basis of his pretty successful primary campaigns when he ran for president, a long term force. Obama deliberately abandoned the kind of army that he had set up and so forth. Even Bernie Sanders has not really put together, you know, and maybe we're glad that these individuals didn't lead an army. But now in New York, it sounds like there's really the opportunity for this. Am I making any sense?
[00:52:10] Speaker C: No, I think that's right. I think that's right. And I think, you know, that will be a critical question is whether the people who worked on the campaign remain mobilized. And you know, because that's going to be a critical ingredient for him to deliver is the ability to really keep the pressure up on the whole political structure.
[00:52:28] Speaker B: Actually. Yeah, I don't think any of those are like very relevant examples. But the. No, but there was Chicago and there was the election of Harold Washington, which I think. Yeah, you know. Right. And one of the things that like older DSA veterans when we lived in Chicago were always talking about, about the Harold Washington days was that, you know, a lot of people went to go and work at City Hall. So people that had been effective parts of the movement that would be, yeah, I mean, to use a forced metaphor, would stay out in the streets and be part of the movement and putting pressure on City hall to stay true to the message, blah, blah, we're like inside now, so. And that's gotta be something on the minds of folks in New York even more. So there's even more jobs to fill, even more positions to fill. And so I think it's going to be interesting to see to what extent some of these really, you know, smart, young, you know, emerging activists and leaders end up staying out on the movement side, you know, trying to elect more Mamdanis or more friends of his for the city council, etc. And who's going to be like in the administration, which is a different job.
[00:53:33] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. Although, you know, the administration is going to need a lot of new energy and a lot of good people too. So it's not, you know, there's some hard trade offs there.
[00:53:43] Speaker A: One thing just to say about Chicago that I understand is that that has really maintained the grassroots base has been the Chicago Teachers Union and maybe other labor activism as well, but basically that.
And so unions, and I'm noticing that unions have fallen into line in supporting and endorsing Mamdani now. And that may be the most, you know, best assurance that the campaign is going to be successful. You know, we've got several months. A lot can happen between now and November. That we can't foresee nationally that maybe, you know, God knows what, what is happening. But I would rather think about Mamdani than Trump, frankly, at any moment. So I'm very happy that we have this opportunity.
So you belong to a structure that I wanted to ask about for the interest of our listeners, which is groundwork. Could you talk about that a little and how people can connect to that as well as any other things, things you'd like people to.
[00:54:46] Speaker B: Yeah, plug. It's, it's plug time.
[00:54:48] Speaker C: Well, I, I do have to make a couple of plugs first. Yes, plug number one. I teach at John Jay College of the City University of New York. Yes, John Jay College has a master's program in economics where I teach, which is one of a handful of explicitly radical heterodox economics programs, graduate programs in the country. We don't have PhD program, but we do have a master's program. Many of our students go on to get PhDs. I suspect we actually have one of the highest, highest rates of any economics master's program in the country of having students who successfully go on to get PhD and they come to us because they want a rigorous economics education, but they also want to read Marx and they want to read Keynes. They want to study feminist economics and environmental economics. And so if anybody who happens to listen to this podcast is graduating from college and thinking about graduate economics education, thinking about living in New York or know somebody who might be, we are, we are always, always desperate for more, more students. So that's, that's the first and most important plug. Second plug. I have a book coming out in the spring, in a few months called Against Money from University of Chicago Press, as a matter of fact, which is, is a little different from the stuff we've been talking about here. It's trying to go back and look at the big picture of, of debates about money and why they matter for, you know, things that we care about more directly.
What is the role of banks and so on.
So that's, yes, Against Money coming out probably in February, March of next year. And then the last thing is the Groundwork Collaborative where I'm a senior fellow, just, just recently joined them in that role and I think they're one of the more interesting to me, one of the most exciting places doing the sort of, of left of center policy work in D.C.
the person who runs it is Lindsay Owens, who was a staffer for Elizabeth Warren. So it's coming out of that world. But what they've been really, I think, successful at is Sort of politicizing parts of the economic conversation that had been kind of left to technical experts before. One of them was in debates about inflation. Groundwork, probably more than anybody else, really elevated the idea that we have to think about this in terms of pricing decisions by individual businesses. It's not just forces of supply and demand or, you know, supply, you know, chain interruptions that are beyond our control. There are, there are human beings who are making choices whether or not to raise prices and by how much. And we should ask, you know, why are they making these choices? And that, that is a domain of politics, you know, so I think that's, that's. And then they've also been very critical of our consensus view that the Federal Reserve is the only decision making authority for macroeconomic policy. If the question is how many people should be unemployed next year, well, just ask the economists and bankers at the Fed.
They'll decide that. And I think a lot of us in the left heterodox economics world have been critical of the idea that this is a technocratic decision that can be insulated from the democratic process for a long time. But I think Groundwork really has been effective at bringing that perspective into the policy debate. So to me, they're really pushing the envelope in some interesting ways. I think people at Groundwork, like everybody else, are trying to figure out now where is the strategic place to focus right now. And I think a lot of folks probably there and I would tend to feel that housing and affordability issues, the same things we've been talking about in the context of New York City, are also going to be a very important area for kind of a progressive agenda more broadly and maybe picking some pieces out of that abundance agenda that you talked about, but doing it in a way that really supports our broader vision of an economy that's subject to more public control.
[00:58:29] Speaker A: Well, this is great. So I'll email you and you'll send me back the email addresses for these where people can get connected to what you're the program, the master's program, your new book and Groundwork and anything else that you would like to share with, with people would be, would be great.
[00:58:50] Speaker C: Oh, well, I have a blog, jw.
[00:58:53] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:58:53] Speaker C: Anything I write usually.
[00:58:56] Speaker A: So any final word, Daraka, you're saying.
[00:58:59] Speaker B: I think this has been great.
[00:59:00] Speaker A: This is what we, this is what we need. In fact, it's very good for generally what we're trying to do, not only about understanding what's happening in New York with Mamdani, but we wanted to have a whole series of programs about specific policy podcasts about policy questions and progressive potentials. So you've opened up a good avenue for further discussion about housing, which is something that's very much on our minds as well. Anyway, thank you. Josh Mason, professor of economics at John Jay College and author of this article, which people can find on the Dissent website.
What's the title of the article?
[00:59:44] Speaker C: I believe it's just a very boring what can Zoran Momdani Accomplish? Or maybe it's just what can Zoran.
[00:59:50] Speaker A: What can Zoran accomplish? And that's going to be the question for all of us as the days and months go forward.
So thank you to you, Josh. Thank you to Raka.
And people should get in touch with our
[email protected] TSMH all right, well, thank you very.
[01:00:14] Speaker C: Thank you very much. I enjoyed this conversation. I have to go get dinner now with. With the family.
Thanks for having me on.
[01:00:21] Speaker B: Enjoy.
[01:00:21] Speaker A: Thank you.
[01:00:23] Speaker B: Thanks again.
[01:00:24] Speaker A: Even without our help. Look at the way he won. Everyone sold him short.
[01:00:29] Speaker C: You think they'll ask for a recount?
[01:00:32] Speaker A: We got a winner. But what good is that to us? Not if he doesn't feel grateful for our support.
[01:00:40] Speaker C: You mean no patronage, huh?
[01:00:41] Speaker A: Ben, I gotta talk to him.
[01:00:44] Speaker C: Someone pinch me. Maybe this is just Just a beautiful dream I'm in a bad state of shock I'd like to know just how the hell it happened what we did Right, fellas. The whole thing is cockeyed. We got a winner at last we got a star which is in the.
[01:01:12] Speaker A: Ascendant if he feels that we sloughed him off.
