Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Detroit's Rise and Fall: An In-Depth Examination with Urban Historian Josiah Rector
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Picture this - Detroit, from its ascension to the status of the fourth largest city in the U.S. in the 1920s to the infamous municipal bankruptcy and near collapse of the auto industry. How did this happen? Well, that's precisely what we explore with our guest, Josiah Rector, an urban historian, assistant professor at the University of Houston, and author of Toxic Debt. Rector's expertise provides us with a rare, comprehensive analysis of Detroit's environmental, economic, and social issues, drawing parallels with other U.S. cities and global south countries that have undergone similar budget austerity.
In a system where policy, zoning, and bonds dictate a city's trajectory, we dive heads-first into how these factors have shaped Detroit's destiny. Do you ever wonder how things would be different if cities had the power to control their own policies or how the lack of this power has contributed to environmental disasters? Rector compellingly demonstrates how the decline of industrial cities, the impact of deindustrialization, and the role of unions in the auto industry have shaped Detroit's history and offers poignant lessons for other cities facing similar challenges.
Lastly, we address the elephant in the room - the future. As we grapple with the transition to electric vehicles and the increasing pressure on corporations like GM to reduce labor costs, what does this mean for union power and environmental activism? Rector brings invaluable insights from his work on the history of Detroit's environmental justice movement and the declining union membership's impact. This episode is not just a history lesson but a look into the future, offering potential strategies for unions and activists to push for real reform. Join us as we break down Detroit's complex environmental, economic, and social history with Josiah Rector. Buckle up, it's quite a ride!
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Detroit's Municipal Challenges & Environmental Disasters
Speaker 1Hello and welcome to Varmvlog , and today Josiah Rector returns .
Speaker 1Josiah is an urban historian and an assistant professor at University of Houston and the author of Toxic Debt and an Environmental Justice History of Detroit . Now we've talked about the environmental justice part of this before , on our last episode about six months ago , but now we're going to talk about the municipal aspect of this , focusing on Detroit but maybe expanding out to a few other cities , and ways that things like zoning and bonds and the lack of ability to set their own policy limit progressive movements at the city level . And I think , given that there's been some return to localism as a way to build national power , which I think is good , there have been a lot of like over focus on the executive in these cities , such as mayors where you've had electoral victories , so I think of , say , jackson , mississippi , or maybe Dennis Kucinich you know , 40 years ago , but total policy failure because the mayor really can't do anything for a variety of reasons and with Jackson Mississippi their bond market shot , they have no legislative funding , they have a hostile legislature etc .
Speaker 1And Detroit , I think , is a good example , like a paradigmatic example , of a city where this has happened and so I wouldn't say , as go Detroit , so goes the world , but in some ways Detroit is kind of the case study of the the most disciplining you can do to a city .
Speaker 2Yeah , I think within a US context . I mean , it really reminds me of what happened to a lot of countries in the global south with the so-called their world debt crisis of the 80s and 90s and the IMF structural adjustment programs and the way that international banks and the IMF were able to impose these ruthless austerity budgets on countries in Latin America , sub-saharan Africa , parts of South and Southeast Asia , you know , forcing the closing of hospitals , cutbacks and health programs and so on , and something not unlike that was done to places like Detroit , flint , other rest-built cities . Obviously , there are massive differences between a sovereign nation-state , or an ostensibly sovereign nation-state , and a city , but the similarity is that the creditors are calling the shots and the creditors are imposing austerity policies that have , you know , deadly consequences for public health . Yeah , so my book on Detroit is a product of the fact that I went to grad school at Wayne State University , which is a public research university located in Detroit , so I lived in . I'm not from Michigan , originally , I'm from California and I grew up in Seattle , but I lived in the Midwest mostly in the 20s , and I lived in Detroit from 2010 to 2016 , and when I was going to grad school at Wayne State , that was the same period when you had the bankruptcy of the city of Detroit , largest municipal bankruptcy in US history . You had the near collapse of the auto industry , the subprime mortgage meltdown , the last of Detroit's a succession of black mayors that had been elected since Coleman Young in the city from 1974 through 2008 , and then the sort of downfall of Kwame Kilpatrick and a series of corruption scandals , followed by an interim mayor , and then the election of this , the first white mayor since the 70s , mike Duggan , who in many ways was closely partnered with sort of elite billionaire downtown development interests . So I could go on about the context , but when I was writing it , there was a big fight around water in Detroit . There were mass protests going on in 2014 in particular , against mass water shutoffs .
Speaker 2Detroit is a city where it was the poorest large city in the United States for many years . I don't know if it's still technically the poorest , but you know over a third of the city lives under the US federal poverty line . It's about 75% 78% African-American , depending on his counting , and it's surrounded by suburbs , many of which are quite affluent in like over 95% white , although some of the suburbs are more diverse . So you have an impoverished , majority black city , and you had over 250,000 water shutoffs between 2000 and 2015 and 2014 , so over a third of the city's residents had been forced to live without running water , which is not something we often see happening in cities in the global north . Right , you're talking about people who can't flush their toilets , can't bathe , can't wash their hands in their house , have to bring jugs of water into the house lots of people living without water . And at the very same time that was happening in Detroit , flint went through the so-called Flint water crisis , which involved nearly a hundred thousand people being exposed to contaminated water supplies . And in both cities these water crises are happening in the context of fiscal crisis , state takeover under this Republican governor , rick Snyder , and the imposition of sort of structural adjustment program style austerity policies .
Speaker 2So I was writing it like a doctoral dissertation at Wayne State while this was happening . I'm I'm in the in a history program , I'm a historian , so you know there's lots of social scientists swooping in to write about all this stuff , journalists writing about it , interviewing people . So I'm thinking like you know what can I contribute to this conversation ? So I wanted to really put all these events in a long-term historical perspective . So the book I ended up writing is like an analysis of these kind , that sort of the making of these disasters from a long-term perspective .
Speaker 2So I try to do two things in my book . One is to try to make sense of like why are these crises happening in a city surrounded by the world's largest sources of fresh water ? I mean like the state of Michigan is surrounded by the Great Lakes ? Why is anybody living without running water or clean water in a place with such an abundance of fresh water ? How do you explain this ? So most of the book is devoted trying to answer that question .
Speaker 2And then also it's a history of Detroit's environmental justice movement and I have a sort of critique of this sort of potted narrative about the history of the environmental justice movement that we often get from social scientists , and I demonstrate that the United Auto Workers Union played an important role in the history of the movement . And then I also have this sort of critique of foundations and nonprofits , in the way that with the decline of industrial unions , environmental justice increasingly is sort of taken up by nonprofits . So there's a lot there . But I would just say that the two things we could focus on are like how , what happened to Rust Belt cities like Detroit that led to this situation in the 21st century of , you know , abject concentrated poverty and you know these sorts of environmental disasters and then the sort of question about activist politics in that context . So I'm happy to talk about either this sort of political , economic , structural background to these disasters the banker of sea , the water crises or the social movement side .
Speaker 1I mean to me , you can't separate the two my introduction to left-wing politics was actually the alter globalization movement and my response to it was frustration and I didn't you know long story that told many times ended up being kind of paleo conservative , anti-war person for about five years . Then I woke up . But it's interesting to me because these I come from a city that's like a mini Detroit . In fact when you used to look up lists of , like most problematic cities in America , my hometown was usually right after Detroit on the list . It was like Detroit , michigan , macon , georgia , youngstown , ohio , stockton , california .
Speaker 1You know it was those , those cities , and my current partner is from Michigan and my , my first , ex-wife is from Western Pennsylvania , so I'm very familiar with the Rust Belt and that was recently in Lansing . So like to see elderly parents , so like it's not mine , hers , but it's very interesting to go into that area and see the patterns of development and where Detroit is now right , I mean the , the practice one for Detroit was , I guess , late 70s New York City , which I think people forget about , but it wasn't as extensive as what happened to Detroit like it was the , the , the coin of social services was not nearly as pronounced and and there was also not as much in like cultural industry or whatever , to rebound from that you had in New York . So when New York had its crisis , you know you had Giuliani and then the development of like the current hyper gentrified New York that we all know that really wasn't a developmental path .
Speaker 2For Detroit like that's , it wasn't available yeah , I think I sometimes that you could do almost a continuum of deindustrialization and like maybe an extreme would be like a one mine or a one factory excerpt or rural area or a small city like Gary , indiana or Flint , michigan . And then Detroit is like a little bit in a slightly better position than those places . It's a little bit more diversified but still basically a one industry town for most of the 20th century , obviously auto manufacturing . A place like Chicago was somewhere in between Detroit and New York and then New York obviously has this massive financial services industry . So Kim Phillips finds book fear city is really good on the 1976 , early 1970s fiscal crisis in New York and she does show how , you know , new York was hit really hard by deindustrialization and white flight after World War two and you did have an exodus of the white middle class . That's a Long Island and the sort of Levittown , south suburbia and the movement of a lot of the cities like shipping industry to New Jersey and there was capital flight for New York and it did hit parts of like Brooklyn and the Bronx really hard . But you know Manhattan remained dominated by Wall Street and the financial services industry and then of course , as you , as you know , you know there's this kind of . You know Detroit there's excuse me , new York is obviously a center of global capital accumulation and hyper gentrification and and sort of diversified , concentrated economic development in ways that have no parallel in a place like Detroit and have a sort of mini parallel , arguably , in Chicago . So , yeah , detroit is not very diversified
Deindustrialization and Its Impact on Cities
Speaker 2. I mean Detroit actually in my , in my book I go back to the 19th century and before auto manufacturing . You know , detroit was a major center for production for , like railroad parts . It was the biggest producer railroad wheels during the Gilded Age and so there were a lot of factories . But it was like a pretty small city , maybe 20 square miles along the Detroit River , expanding up from the blueprint established by French colonists in the 18th century . And then , you know , you of course had the takeoff of auto between 1900 and 1930 or so the city grows five-fold , from like 20 square miles to 138 square miles . It annexes all this surrounding farmland and prairie and then , you know , the city's population grows five-fold . It goes from like the 13th biggest city to the fourth biggest city in the US . So I guess Detroit was the Houston of the 1920s . Right , it goes to the fourth biggest city in the US in 1920s as the world's biggest factory . The Ford Motor Company is one of the first to like leave the city .
Speaker 2I mean , people think the industrialization is . Sometimes people think like , oh , it goes back to maybe NAFTA in the China shock , or maybe if people have more knowledge of history they might say , oh , it goes back to the 70s . But really , if you , if you really look at it , I mean , and and you know this is probably all laid out in volume three of Marx's capital or something , but it you know it's you have recurrent ways of the industrialization throughout the history of manufacturing and you , you have an early wave of the industrialization , from the sort of cities that grow during the gilded age , as early as the interwar era , where you know , you have , you know US Steel founding , gary , you have the , the movement of factories out of , like St Louis to East St Louis across the Mississippi River and then in Detroit the factory starts to leave the city as early as the World War I era to escape the city taxes . The Ford Motor Company builds the world's largest factory , the River Rouge plant that I think they finished building in 1928 . It's got almost a hundred thousand workers and and you know , that's the sort of paradigmatic example of Fordism and mass production .
Speaker 2And then you know , detroit had 349,000 manufacturing jobs in 1950 . Today there's one auto factory left in the city limits of Detroit , the Jefferson North Assembly , and it's got about 5,000 workers . So you go from 349,000 manufacturing jobs to only a few thousand now , and and , and the factories operated by Stellantis , which is headquartered in Amsterdam , which is also revealing . But yeah , so I mean it's like a paradigmatic case of the industrialization , but , as you know , like the same circuit be told , not just across parts of the northwest and northeast , but major parts of the south , parts of Georgia , carolina's , alabama , and so on .
Speaker 1In the south it hits a little different because we weren't that industrialized to begin with . There was , I think , looking at the early 20th century , our primary industry was textile mills and if that sounds like Bangladesh , that's for a reason , and and that was partly deliberate because of fear of of a reindustrialized south leading to more political problems after reconstruction was abandoned . But it was also partly , you know , at the behest of local elites who kind of didn't want the poor getting up at E with better jobs , so including the white poor in that , but most definitely the black poor . So it was . So we got hit pretty hard between the 70s and got finished off , actually later , denitri , I feel like . So our death mail came , I mean I guess at the same time , 2007 . But it really hit hard because our industries were mostly tied into manufacturing for home buildings and modular stuff like that are for tobacco , and Both those things went away .
Speaker 1It's , I Think , detroit's interesting to me too because I see there's cities that rhyme with it . They don't get as much of attention because they didn't go bankrupt and we talked about kind of the , the precursor in New York . But we should look at other cities in the Midwest because I think the rust belt particularly gets hit with this . So St Louis , it has a similar trajectory . Yeah , there's not many cities on the west coast that had a similar trajectory because of a different pattern development , but the one that I can think of as bocan and then Stockton .
Speaker 2I mean there are parts of West Coast cities that face deindustrialization . In that regard it's a little bit more like New York . Like I recently read Mike Davis's city of courts and he's got a lot of stuff in there about the deindustrialization of South Central Los Angeles . Oh yeah , that's true . Yeah , that's factory . So you do have the shutdown of manufacturing jobs in Oakland and in South Central LA and In some parts of the inland Empire , even , as early as the 80s , the closing of certain steel mills . I think the last chapter of city of courts goes into detail about the closure of a steel mill , I think in Fontana I have to check the details on that , where it , where Davis was from . But that happened .
Speaker 2But of course , at the same time those places were experiencing a population influx and influx of capital , some of which was like outside the US , japanese capital . I mean , another thing too and this is something I didn't really appreciate until I moved to Houston is that Annexation policies established by like state legislators have a huge impact on urban tax bases and and we'll get into municipal bonds and all that . But you know , part of the problem is a place like Houston . Detroit is 138 square miles , which I consider to be fairly large , but Houston is like 650 plus square miles and the reason it's so fucking big is because , under Texas law , cities like Houston can gobble up their suburbs and the suburbs can't put up much of a fight , as much as they might not like to , and and as a Result you have vast inequalities within the city and you have the equivalent of affluent , predominantly white , gated communities within the same city as impoverished areas that are majority black and brown and some like Blue-collar white areas that are just outside the city limits . But but they they were able to sort of gobble up their suburbs and absorb the tax base and we can put aside , like the political economy of the oil industry and how . That's different from , say , the auto industry . You know that they had a depression , sort of in the 80s for lower oil prices , but it wasn't comparable to what happened with auto and their failure to prepare for German and Japanese competition in the 70s .
Speaker 2But the bottom line is like they were able to gobble up the tax base of the surrounding suburbs and so they were able to , you know , not lose all this investment , whereas st Louis , detroit , because of the sort of State laws they couldn't absorb their suburbs and so they're surrounded by these more affluent , mostly white suburbs .
Speaker 2And then there's the whole racist history of the real estate industry , which is a key part of this , both for a place like st Louis and for Detroit , and that sort of dynamics of of these places becoming either black majority or black plurality , but also the fact that they can't annex the tax base of suburbia , and so I Mean , in a place like Detroit , it's absolutely devastating for the city's finances .
Speaker 2I mean , I was just revisiting some of the stats on the number of city workers
Industrialized Cities
Speaker 2in Detroit . In the 1970s , detroit had like 25,000 city workers , that's , you know , all the people who have to cloud the snow in the wintertime and pick up trash and do code enforcement , and and the cops and so on , the firefighters . In 2010 it had been cut down to like 10,000 . Right , so they have less than half of the city employees that they do in the 1970s to maintain all city services , and of course , that means that all the services are continuously being run down , they're shearing through buses , trash is not getting picked up and so on , and complete demolition of the public sector and and the outsourcing of formerly unionized public sector jobs to all these private companies that parasitize on the budgets of impoverished cities .
Speaker 1That's a . That's actually a huge point . I mean the . So the way to gobble up suburban tax bases that actually saved making from total collapse . It's mostly collapsed because it consolidated a bunch of communities Around it , although it was hard to do , because it does require . It does require voting , it's . It can't just be forced upon those , those small communities , but there's enough municipal benefits where that's encouraged to happen .
Speaker 1In Atlanta you kind of see both trends kind of hit a wall . But in Macon , at one point the actual city limits , which wasn't most of where the development was , was literally almost 90% hospitals and churches and schools , so it had no tax base right and the surrounding immediate area which you're , if you were driving around the city , you experienced it as the same city . But like when I lived in that part of Macon , for example , and I didn't even live in the influent part , but I was not technically part of the city and could not vote on city issues , even though city issues affected me , and Because I was like right there , this , it's interesting to look at these different patterns . For me I think it's interesting because you know , you point out , with the West there was deindustrialization , but because industrialization came later and was not as , not as important as a single industry . It wasn't as Devastating to the city .
Speaker 1It was devastating to the city's quote , lower middle class , and so what you see in places like LA and the Bay Area is Just this hollowing out of the center to where , like , yeah , you're either too poor to leave , are you have gotten the fuck out because you can't afford it , and that's , that's those cities now , and that's been a pattern in a lot of Western cities . I mean that's happening to Boise , ohio , idaho , it's happening Salt Lake City . Now those patterns are definitely not the case for the , the upper Midwest , where it's just like . I mean literally I can only think of one municipality that kind of navigated this fairly well in the upper Midwest and that was Pittsburgh , and that's kind of from look Well it's interesting I I Tracy Newman , who is a historian at Wayne State University , who was sort of one of my mentors when I was there .
Speaker 2She has an interesting book comparing deindustrialization in Pittsburgh and Hamilton , ontario , and one of the things she shows is that the steel workers got screwed over worse in Pittsburgh than in Hamilton , which is kind of Canada's Pittsburgh , and that's partly because Canada had a better welfare state and it's partly because Canada had a little more protectionism and it's industrial policy than the United States did . We essentially had no industrial policy or we had a military industrial industrial policy right , we had military Kansy and as and but we didn't have the kind of protectionism that West Germany had or Japan had during the Cold War . And that's part of why the steel industry was just wiped out in so much of Pennsylvania and Ohio and it was able to cling on a little bit longer in places like Ontario . But nonetheless you know the forces of corporate globalization and and the sort of globalization of capitalist firms and the desire to get away from higher wage union jobs in North America and find people you can pay Half as much or a quarter as much elsewhere or just automate the factory and so on also hit Canadian steel workers , but it took maybe another 10 years .
Speaker 2It took a little longer . What happens in places like Pittsburgh is they become meds and ed cities , right , yeah , when that has shown that in his book . The next shift , but yeah , so they become meds and ed cities , which creates its own highly unequal labor market , right , and then some people do really well elite tech workers and doctors , and then a servant , exploited , precarious labor force making the whole thing run and without the sort of middle class provided by those union steel jobs that used to exist .
Speaker 1And well , what you see is a feminization of a lot of those cities which he writes about and Whereas , like , those are decent jobs .
Speaker 1I remember , for example , you know , my mom climbed out of working class poverty basically by supplementing my stepfather's income as a mechanic by becoming a nurse , which was not a job she could maintain for very long Because the conditions for that were actually kind of brutal and her health was already failing in her 40s .
Speaker 1So I Find that interesting and I pointed out to people on the serious , the primary employers are hospitals and teaching and teaching and things that service a city that don't really have that much of a city to be serviced . As far as what else is going on and you know , underprices in the , in the Rust Belt and specifically in the south , this leads to Right flight , which is also followed by economic flight , which , yeah , which then leads to cycles of like weird doughnut Outification where you're just like people moving further and further out and then eventually what's happened to make in is like Downtown Macon is now like a , a loft home for people in Atlanta , an hour and a half away , and so it's saved its downtown that way . But the actual city , even the parts of it that were formerly kind of okay in the aughts have totally fallen away , so this is what's crazy about downtown Detroit ?
Speaker 2So the downtown Detroit still has these beautiful , like skyscrapers , just done like an art deco style from the sort of the era when it became the sort of fourth biggest city in America , that era of capital accumulation in the auto industry , when Detroit's banks were flush with cash in the 20s . You know , you get this buildup of these skyscrapers and then , of course , the post-war deindustrialization all of that the downtown hollows out and you you have like vacant skyscrapers in the 70s . That's the era like fucking Robocop , right .
Gentrification, Billionaires, and Urban Decline
Speaker 2But then what happens in the 2000s is that these , these , these billionaires start moving in from the suburbs and buying everything up . There's this guy named Dan Gilbert . I don't know if you know him , but he owns the Cleveland Cavaliers and he has this company called quick and loans . But he moved in and spent like a couple billion dollars one and a half billion , I forgot the exact number buying up like a hundred buildings in town down Detroit . And he dominates downtown Detroit and this guy made it killing off the subprime mortgage meltdown , and I documented my book on how the One of the factors behind the water crisis , among numerous others , was the subprime meltdown and the Devastating impact that had on the economies of places like Detroit that had a sort of a fragile fiscal situation , but the collapse in property values enabled these Billionaire real estate capitalists to come in and buy everything up at bargain basement prices and then and then profit off of the Appreciation of property value .
Speaker 2So Gilbert himself goes from like a net worth of maybe five billion dollars In 2010 to like 50 billion now .
Speaker 2Right , so this guy's seeing his wealth grow like tenfold since the early Obama years and and there's like a handful of billionaires who basically own all the expensive property in downtown Detroit and it's and the gentrification that has occurred , in contrast to the place , like San Francisco , is much more limited , like in Detroit .
Speaker 2You're talking about a handful of neighborhoods where these sort of oligarchs have bought up all the real estate , flipped it , build a bunch of like luxury Properties and brought in disproportionately but not exclusively white educated professionals to live in the lofts and like go to their stupid little bars and whatnot and and and sort of gentrify the core . But it's still surrounded by the same kind of devastation in majority black neighborhoods . There's still , you know , a fair number of like middle-class black homeowners in certain neighborhoods , but you know you're talking about a city where the child poverty rate was almost 60% in 2012 . Half the city is food insecure , right , and like a disgusting level of poverty and inequality . And then this little zone where a couple billionaires are , you know , just like getting a seemingly rich offer of real estate speculation . Same old story , right ? But ?
Speaker 1Yeah , yeah , I Think that's .
Speaker 1That's actually a really interesting and key part of the problem when you think about , like , how much the downtowns became kind of play things of investment and then the upper middle class . But it , since most of the spending is not happening in those cities , it Other than , you know , paying rent , rich , even richer renties , that there's a lot of people who are not paying rent , even richer renties , that there's not a whole lot of investment in the local area , and so you have what I like to call the concurrent donut effect . We used to talk about the donut effect like the downtowns of cities died and then you have the suburbs . But what interesting in the last decade I think it's been talked about and kind of studied , but not really well is like well , people went back into the downtowns , we'll let the rest of the city die , and then you have a first round of suburbs , which is now kind of what used to be right , the urban blight core . But now it's even worse because those suburbs do not have the walkability and social services of the prior downtowns .
Speaker 2Yeah , no , that is what's happening , like in Detroit , for example , in the 50s . That's when you see the department stores of the interworm period and and the sort of street car era move out to the inner ring suburbs where all the whites are moving and African Americans cannot join them because of racist policies from the FHA and the real estate industry and local white homeowner hostility . But the , the shopping malls and the department stores move from downtown out to the inner ring suburbs . But then you know , by the 2000s those department , those inner ring suburban shopping malls are closing and those suburbs , many of them , are entering into decline or moving into X or . But you know there's some like Important differences within those suburbs , but they're definitely are like impoverished inner ring suburbs of Detroit that are also seeing a kind of a repetition of those post war dynamics into the 21st century , like you're saying .
Speaker 1I think yeah , so I guess this gives us to the progressive mayoral movement are the social democratic mayoral movement as it is now ? Yeah , and . And let's talk about that in the context of Detroit , but also in figures like Dennis Q Cinej , which I think is , yeah , a real lesson , because I've always told people Dennis Q Cinej was a ship mayor , but it wasn't his fault .
Speaker 2But it really illustrates the limits of that approach in regards to trying to fix these cities by mayoral ones and progressive mayoral yeah , I mean there there is a kind of a mythology about the decline of Detroit that you sometimes hear , often from like white suburban conservatives , that says you know the city have this like golden era associated with the auto industry and it was like it was peak in the 50s .
Finance Capital's Impact on Cities
Speaker 2But then you know there was unrest in the 60s and that led to a white backlash after the riots and then there was a succession of black mayors which were allegedly corrupt and that brought down the city and and it's highly misleading in many ways of course , and one of the ways it's misleading is that most of the black mayors of Detroit were not corrupt in the technical sense Kwame Kilpatrick , the last major Mayor there's an interim mayor after him , kenneth Cockle Jr . Kilpatrick was corrupt and and and he spent time in prison for his crimes . But but Coleman young , who is the mayor of Detroit from 1974 to 1994 , and his successors , dennis Archer , and then the guy who comes after Kilpatrick , dave Bing , they were not corrupt and the problems of the city are really much more about Political economy and so on , and I don't need to tell you that . But as far as the limits of in which they were operating , I mean , coleman young , really tried hard to do the bidding of capital and he gave them almost everything they asked for . For example , he raised an , by Detroit standards , fairly racially integrated , mostly black and Polish neighborhood called Poletown , or mostly Polish with some African American neighborhood called Poletown in the 80s To create cheap land for General Motors to develop a factory . He , you know , gave endless tax abatements to developers to construct , you know , downtown office towers . He tried very hard to keep Chrysler in the city and he constantly tried to give sweetheart deals . But this is the problem and I mean Cedric Johnson has made this point many times that you know Capital is mobile and cities are not , and so cities can , or capital can , sort of whip-saw cities . It can get them competing over who can give them the most lucrative tax breaks .
Speaker 2One thing I didn't really understand before I embarked on this project that results in my book was it's not only that capital exerts power over mayors Via the downtown business elite . That's important . It is important that mayors rely on the jobs and the tax revenues that are provided by the largest Capitalist operating in the city and the owners of the most expensive real estate . That's true , and a city's budget can be devastated by the closure of a major factory or the you know vacancy of a major property . So mayors do have a budgetary interest In you know , appeasing major owners of property in a city and , of course , they can be punished electorally if a bunch of workers lose their jobs . But it's deeper than that , because it's not only that they need the jobs and the tax revenues from the downtown Investors and the other large investors in the city .
Speaker 2Mayors also rely on a steady stream of credit . They need to constantly borrow money to to maintain , to Embark in infrastructure projects and often just to meet their budget . And this is more Serious for cities that are in a state of fiscal crisis , of course , but all cities have to take out debt and this is done through the municipal bond market . And For those who aren't familiar with the municipal bond , it's basically the way that cities borrow money . So instead of say , borrowing ten million dollars from Wall Street banks to build a bridge , a city will sell ten million dollars in municipal bonds to those banks , but it basically means they have to pay that money back with interest to their creditors . So it's just another way of describing borrowing money . So , you know , cities have been borrowing From the municipal bond market , probably going back to the Italian city states .
Speaker 2But what happens over the course of the 20th century is the municipal bond market gets a lot bigger and there are a series of structural shifts that make cities more dependent on the municipal bond market . In the 20th century , in the New Deal era , all these cities are going bankrupt , is the Great Depression and the Roosevelt administration inaugurates federal aid to cities and that becomes a major source of cities budget . So from the sort of New Deal period , through LBJ and the Great Society and the things like the model cities program , cities are getting increasing percentages of their budget from the feds right and that becomes very important for Maintaining city services , for patronage , jobs , for infrastructure projects and so on . Putting aside all the money going into highways and FHA mortgage is in the rest of it . But what happens in the a little in the Carter years , but especially in the Reagan era , is that the federal aid to cities is cut drastically and so cities are really left in the lurch . They're losing their factories increasingly in the 80s to the suburbs , rural areas and Mexico and China ultimately , and the feds are cutting off this bigot of aid right .
Speaker 2So what do you do ? You have to borrow more money from Wall Street . Well , what happens when a city like Detroit borrow much of money from Wall Street ? It means that Wall Street has more power over the city's budget and that means it can dictate austerity policies , and it does so in part in conjunction with the bond rating agencies like Moody's and standard and poorest . What happens is that the the bond rating agencies Get to influence the interest rates on a city's debt . If they rate a bond is triple a , that means relatively low interest rates , easy Access to credit . If your municipal bonds are rated as junk , that means really high interest rates , more difficult access to credit .
Speaker 2So what happens with Detroit is that mayors like Coleman Young are under massive pressure that they have to borrow more money because they're losing hundreds of thousands of residents first almost all white , and then later the black middle class To suburbia between the 70s and the 90s , and then the factories are all leaving , and so they get it . They have a bigger budget deficit . They have to borrow more money from Wall Street . The Wall Street banks and the bond rating agencies tell these mayors that If we're going to keep giving you money to maintain your dwindling Services and your dwindling budget , we require that you impose austerity policies , which of course means Laying off city workers . It means embracing outsourcing and privatization , breaking the unions right , closing schools , closing libraries , cutting back on bus service , cutting back on snow plow and cutting back on trash collection , shifting from A garbage truck with two employees through garbage truck with one employee who's supposed to cover the same route in the same , on a tiny . That kind of thing , right ?
Speaker 2So the long and the short of it is that the , the finance capital , dictates Austerity on these mayors , and they have not .
Speaker 2There's nothing they can do about it , because if , if the banks cut off their supply or interest , cut off their credit line or increase their interest rates , it can induce bankruptcy .
Speaker 2And then the other side of it is that the state legislatures Also provide some of the city's money and they can use the city's fiscal crisis as an excuse to come in and try to take over or place the city into receivership , because states have power over cities under state law and that's , and so what ends up happening in Detroit is is like Wall Street imposes all this austerity .
Speaker 2Detroit relentlessly cuts its budget , but it still goes into deeper debt , in large part because of the usurious interest rates of the loans that it's given by the banks and Exacerbated , no doubt , by the corruption of mayors like , or one mayor in particular , kwame Karpatric . And then the state of Michigan uses that as a pretext to take over the city and impose even more ruthless policies than then had been imposed before , and that's what leads to the state's Takeover for and that's what leads to the water crisis , as I show my book , in both Flint and Detroit . It's the combination of the state takeover and Wall Street's Boot on the neck of these cities that lost all their jobs and their middle-class residents to the suburbs .
Speaker 1Yeah , I think that's
Local Governance Challenges and Capital Mobility
Speaker 1. It's interesting , because one thing I point out to people , even at the state level , for example , when people try to go well , let's do like Socialized medicine and a state and I'm like , well , you're gonna have a problem with that because you have freedom of movement within the United States for both people and corporations , right , and you don't have local currency sovereignty at all . Like you can't fuck with the currency in the United States at a local level . You have no control over that , and so , in a way , for people who are most familiar , it makes California like Greece in the EU . There's not a whole lot they can do , even if they have the Austin attack space for it . They don't really want to do it anyway . I mean , like we've seen that too , but as far as like Newsom and whatnot , but that doesn't matter , even if they did , they would hit real budgetary constraints , they that the federal government does not have .
Speaker 1But our country is set up constitutionally in a way that really puts all the social services at the areas that can be disciplined by bond markets , local , local Chamber of Commerce's , etc . And At areas where there is not currency sovereignty . Now , that wasn't on purpose . I actually don't think it was on purpose , because like , yeah , I mean we didn't have unified currency till after the Civil War , for example , so so that that wasn't ever like the reason . But that is the way that the US has set up its , its , its structures , and that has been supported by all the Supreme Court and including the more liberal ones , like the Warren Court . So there's really no way For cities to really push back on that and for states to push back on that either .
Speaker 1And so whenever I hear about a turn towards like policy federalism on the left , I'm like , well , this is probably gonna be a disaster , because the levers really aren't there in the same way that there are at the federal level , for just merely legal reasons , if nothing else . And that's not dealing with . You know tax , farming , competition , industry competition . I mean , you know when's the last time that a Walmart or Amazon Warehouse Center actually has paid its taxes to the local Level ? Almost never . We usually like I remember learning About . You know all these . You know big box stores that came in the place , like Macon , and like , well , we're not even giving the sales tax to the city for ten years . We get to keep it ourselves .
Speaker 2Yeah , you're talking about , you know , multi-national corporations in some cases the majority of whose employees aren't even in the United States , like General Motors . Most of its employees aren't even in the US now , and A company like General Motors , I mean , you know , it's a vast global corporation when most of their cars are produced outside of the United States , and they don't really need the US and they don't need the United Auto workers .
Speaker 2They still have these unionized plants , but right now they're using the EV transition to Cut workforces , whips off the unions and to try to create more non-unionized lower-page job .
Speaker 2And , from an environmental perspective , evs are better than non EVs and public transit would be even better than both .
Speaker 2But we can't do it because of who controls the needs of production .
Speaker 2But to come back to cities , I mean , yeah , like I see this right now in Texas , where you know , like you have a red state with some blue cities like Dallas , san Antonio , houston , I think Fort Worth may be more purple , el Paso , but and they try to do things like past living wage ordinances , but the legislature kills it with with you know , they pass bills to destroy the ability of cities to do that . And you know I've heard as far as Medicare for all the state level , I've heard people like Jaya Paul argue that maybe a block of states could do it together , like some of the northeastern states . But but states also face the problem of capital mobility and in many ways , like we're coming back to this fundamental issues of capitalism and the separation , the constitutive separation , of political and economic power Under capitalism and the fact that , if you have political power but you have no control over Investment decisions that are being made privately , then you can be disciplined by the market , regardless of what laws you want to pass .
Speaker 2And so , and and to do anything about that , you need some kind of , you know , class struggle , or or or organized labor struggle that you know is able to cripple the actions of capital that aren't reducible just to what municipal governments can do , state governments can do or , in some cases , even the federal government can do .
Speaker 1Yeah , I mean , you have to put the fear of God in the courts , if nothing else , I Think a lot of liberals and even progressives and leftists have a very Selective view of the courts function , like , yes , there's this conservative legal mu , yes , it's come to power recently , but actually , if we're honest , um , I think there's a lot of . Some people have a lot of Uh , from the Warren court to the Sandra Day O'Connor court I call it Sandra Day O'Connor court because it really was . She made all the decisions really but the end of the Ring Crest court and the early John Roberts court , yes , the Supreme Court's been moderately conservative , but actually like it's been extremely conservative during most of its history , particularly when it comes to parsing federalism in ways that makes certain kinds of services and controls of capital really hard to do , even when it doesn't involve interstate commerce , and you wouldn't expect that there would be any way in which the federal government could weigh in on it legally , constitutionally . The more you look at that with the Supreme Court , the more you see a lot of the problems with this attempt at federalism . But beyond , even if you got rid of all that , you just threw that out and we didn't have that problem .
Speaker 1So what I was saying is , even if you threw all that Supreme Court stuff out the lack of currency sovereignty , the inability of cities to raise their own funds , particularly when they're in a spiral like this , and the fact that there's going to be capital flight for a city promise is going to be capital flight for a city if it raises its taxes . So there is not a whole lot it can do , unless it's a major hub like New York or LA that could maybe push back on it because there's already concentrated capital . But even there there's real limits to what it can weigh .
Speaker 2Well , I have a vivid memory , actually , when I was in Detroit , I remember I went to a city council meeting and it was in this place called Hamtramac , which is a weird enclave . It was basically like a rural area and the Dodge Brothers auto manufacturers we look at it a factory there , and it was also a center of a Polish immigrant settlement and then when Detroit expanded in the 1920s , it surrounded it . So it's one of these weird suburbs that's surrounded by a city , but anyway , hamtramac . I went to one of their city council meetings around maybe 2012 , 2013 . I remember a lot of the business owners who have established businesses there are , like Bangladesh and Arab immigrants , yemenis and so on .
Speaker 2I went to this one city council meeting and there was a business owner . It might have been Yemeni or Jordanian or something like that , but he operated some small business like a laundromat and he was pissed off about pending tax increase and he was saying , like I can't afford this . I have really thin profit margins . If you increase it , I might have to move out to one of the suburbs , to Farmington Hills . This is an example of you have capital from the smallest operators up to the giants with an obvious interest in evading the taxes , but the ability to do so is , of course , greater for a general motors than for somebody like this guy who is probably just struggling to pay his bills . That doesn't mean he's not exploiting labor within his business , but it's obviously the laws of competition and so on and so forth .
Speaker 2Yeah , so it becomes a double bind , especially because as the cities are deindustrialized and as poverty rates grow , they have more social needs
Effects of Addiction, Schools, Incarceration, and Inequality
Speaker 2. What do you do about drug addiction ? What do you do about underfunded schools ? The solution under our system , of course , is just to respond to crime with cops and locking people up . That's incarceration .
Speaker 2Yeah , and the crime results from the growth of the informal economy . In the vacuum left by the retreat of the formal economy , you lose all these decent jobs for people without , I mean , the traits of city , where 87 percent of the adult population doesn't have a college degree . If you get rid of all the good jobs for people without college degrees , then , yeah , I mean . I know people like this . They got into drug dealing as a result of that . The results are predictable . You warehouse people or allow people to kill each other or die from drug overdoses and so on .
Speaker 1Basically , you prove to the you make a lot of the population lumpenized . You do that to them . That's not something they opt for Exactly . Then you treat them as surplus and have , I don't know , the largest carceral system that the world was ever known on the fucking planet , including beating anything that ever happened there in the Gulag system in Soviet Union . Then on top of that , the people who don't get caught up in that you just let die .
Speaker 2Right , although it's racialized at the level of ideology , because in a place like Detroit these are mostly black people . The same exact shit is happening to poor whites in places all over the country . It's the same process . It sometimes took a little bit longer . Maybe deindustrialization hit I don't know Galesburg , illinois , 30 years after it hit Gary , indiana , but it's the same fucking process .
Speaker 1The way I like to explain it to people is what happens to poor black people will happen to you Exactly . If you are poor , it starts with them . They're like the vanguard of people we shit on . I mean not dealing with the indigenous , but what happens to the indigenous actually is unique to them . But what happens to the black community you will see happen to a lot of the rest of the bottom 50 percent income brackets , regardless of their race , eventually , and it's slower .
Speaker 1But I think that part of this is part of this dialectic of racialization and the way racial fears and racial justice movements . While the latter , I think , are totally justified and I'm not blaming them for backlash I want people to be very clear about that . There is a way in which they're in tandem with each other in the way they talk about this in ways that hide that . Yes , things are disproportionately focused on the black community . Yes , there's both personal and systemic racial issues there that you cannot ignore , but it doesn't stop it in there and won't stop it in there , Right ?
Speaker 1We statistically see this . I mean the lower end of the income strata , even amongst baby boomers , who are theoretically the richest generation in the world , is ever known , as long as they're from the United States . As far as like collective generational wealth , but even amongst poor baby boomers , we've just seen a mass die off younger and younger . I've lived through it actually . My parents started to die about a decade and a half before my grandparents started to die , as far as like the ages where you started seeing real problems hit and there's been a the morbid thing . For example , there's been a decline in the life expectancy gap , but I mean an improvement in the life expectancy gap by its decline between white and minority groups , particularly black groups , but it's because there's been a small uptick in black life expectancy in a very large downtick in poor white life expectancy .
Speaker 2Yeah , and this is a good example . So actually one of the things I show in my book is in the 1960s there was a fall in the life expectancy of black men in the state of Michigan and the reasons for this are really clear and I think it's explained well , for example in Adan O'Hosemani and John Clegg's essay on catalysts . I think it's the economic orders of mass incarceration . But they basically say that the so-called white working class , mostly Western European before the Civil War and then increasingly Southern and Eastern European after the Civil War , 1870s to 1910s , for the restrictive immigration legislation in the 20s those people , those sort of ex-peasants from Europe who are proletarianized and often get jobs in mass production and mining industries if they don't become small farmers when they come to the United States during the Gilded Age . Those people after World War II become so-called white and move into the suburbs and black people are not allowed to do the same thing because of housing discrimination to a large extent . But African-Americans have the same . They come to the cities for the same reasons that European immigrants did a generation before and they do it in the first great migration and then it's often not appreciated that there's a second great migration in the 50s and 60s . That continues into the 70s . That has a lot to do with the mechanization of Southern agriculture and so on .
Speaker 2But of course the cities that they're coming to and start contrast with the ones that the European immigrants came to in the Gilded Age are deindustrializing . So instead of all these mass production industries they can get jobs in the first wave . They come in and they're either barred from the jobs or given the crappier jobs , and usually white men are given the skilled trades jobs and then that engineers a conflict once you get to the Affirmative Action Era where the white men have the relatively better jobs in the auto plants than the steel mills . But they're also about to close and they're facing all this pressure and politicians like Nixon take advantage of the racialized resentments of the white working class towards blacks at that time and so on . But the bottom line is the black working class pro-iterianizes and moves into cities as they're deindustrializing .
Speaker 2It generates concentrated poverty . The term concentrated poverty itself can be used as like propaganda and some people don't like it Like it was used to justify tearing down public housing in the 90s . But the bottom line is you know , you got a bunch of poor folks . The jobs have left . Of course there's going to be crime and of course there's going to be decline in life expectancy from increasing homicides , increasing drug addiction etc . Well , guess what ? You do the same thing to white rural America in the 2000s with the combination of the China shock , the sort of later wave of deindustrialization that really hammers rural America and hammers Appalachia . All the mind closures , but also a lot of those ex-sirvin factories closing so they can get even cheaper labor elsewhere . And then you bring in the opioids and so forth and you see the exact same fucking thing .
Speaker 1Yeah , I think that's crucial , and it's hard for cities to know what to do with this , even if they want to take a progressive attitude for it , because it's way easier to get federal funding for police than it is for about anything else . If for no other reason , then that's where you're throwing a lot of your excess military equipment .
Speaker 2Yeah , and Adonis Mane and John Clegg also point out that a lot of this is not just the federal prison system and the federal police budgets those were massively increasing in Clinton , as we know but also a lot of this is like the state prisons and local police and , as they point out , it's cheaper for capital to pay for those repressive elements of the carceral and policing apparatus than to have a welfare state , and so those things see increased local and state investment at the same time as the welfare system is being dismantled .
Speaker 2I didn't mean to derail your point .
Speaker 1No , no , that's a great point . I think one thing that why it's cheaper it's not just , you know , incarceration is actually often quite expensive , but it's also cheaper in another way , in that having large surplus populations with dire consequences for being pushed into them , is a great way to discipline labor . Like , it is a great way to discipline labor and you can see right now just from population rates . I mean , that's why people are concerned about the birth rate , that's why capitalists are concerned about the birth rate . Is it because , like there being a smaller workforce , yes , you have a declining tax base ? I guess , although that's more true for the local level than it is for the federal , the real issue is that , like , people can , particularly on the lower end of the job market , can demand more because you just don't have people to scare them with .
Speaker 2Yeah , exactly . I mean , like the in Detroit , you had like 4% unemployment and at the time of the riot in 1967 , and what happens is that the plant closures , in the layoffs , increasing the surplus population , weak in labor's bargaining power . And you know again , I you know , if you want to come back to Marx again , you know the theory of the reserve army of labor . In the way that you know , you can increase the profit rate by increasing the surplus population , not only by driving down wages , but by scaring the remaining workers and Hitting them with concessionary bargaining demands . And this is what has happened to the United Auto workers where , you know , in 2007 , 2008 , the UAW workers were told if you don't accept Things like two-tiered contracts , where one worker can be paid half as much as somebody for doing the same job because they got hired after a certain date , then we're gonna close the plan or these , these companies are gonna go bankrupt . So to save the company , you have to eat shit , essentially , and that's of course what they do .
Speaker 1And which also puts the union in a death spiral because it's not , it doesn't have new workers to to To refill its ranks and they they feel really resentful that they got screwed in the bargaining process . I mean , this was particularly true in the auto unions , but we've seen it in other places . Like it it becomes . We've even seen it in teachers unions even . But it becomes like a , a spiral where , where it's like , okay , teachers unions , for examples about that have a real crisis in a lot of states because there are a whole lot of baby boomer teachers .
Speaker 1You've been holding the profession together because they had their pensions and tenure and all that , and the people behind them tend to average three to five years and they don't join the union . Nor has the union focused on recruiting them because , like , well , it's only three to five years worth of union dues . Why do we care ? And and now and this is not all the unions , but it is a lot of the unions and right to work states where they do have some power , but there's no You've seen this really spiral where , like , the people are just aging out of of the of the union and not being replaced and they get smaller and smaller proportion of the workforce . I think you know , and I think we've seen a lot of that . I mean one of the things that we we also have to look at that I've been telling people about .
Speaker 2Like you know , I'm all about green tech , but most of these green tech jobs are shittier than the jobs they're replacing right there and and and of course that's that's what capital is gonna do is it's gonna use any Reorganization of the means of production , shift in the geography of investment to try to drive down wages and break unions and screw over the workers . And they've done that , going back to the earliest automation in the 50s and 60s up to the present , and this is just the latest excuse for them to do that . And it's not because you couldn't do a green transition in a way that was pro-labor if we had power we being people in unions , we being socialists and so on but because capital is designing it on its own terms , they're gonna use it as a weapon in class war and that's what they're doing .
Challenges of Unions and Green Transition
Speaker 2I mean to take the UAW . I want to talk about them , and also the public sector unions , and I'd also be happy to talk more about the nonprofits too , if you want to get to that , but the um I Mean . Actually , I realized there was a factual error in the last interview that I did with you . I said the UAW lost like half its members between , say , 1979 2005 , and actually lost two-thirds of its members .
Speaker 2Right worse than what you said yeah , you're going . I looked at the numbers that you're going from one and a half million in 1979 to like 450,000 in 2008 so , which is why it's like struggling to Be the TA union now , because they're just desperate for anything even . Right now is looking at the possibility of losing a couple hundred thousand auto manufacturing jobs . It remained in the .
Speaker 2EV transition , and this is what is so Really pisses me off about and , but , but who cares about my subjective emotions ? Right , but like . This is what companies like GM are doing right now , is they ? What they really want to do is Shift a lot of the EV jobs to Mexico and China , where you can pay people four bucks an hour two bucks an hour , right , instead of $17 an hour for a new worker in the US UAW plant , eventually increasing the 27 or something an hour under the UAW contract . They want to get rid of that , and , but they can't move everything to China in Mexico . They still need these US plants . So what they would like to do is have non union plants where workers make lower wages or more precarious or more afraid to unionize . A lot of those are going to be in the south , but they want the Midwestern plants to be more union free and that's their long-term agenda .
Speaker 2They just want to roll back the last 50 years of class struggle and reimpose the conditions the 1920s .
Speaker 2That's always been obvious . That's what they're trying to do , and and and whether the UAW got rid of these corrupt , jerk off leaders like Gary Jones , who were like spending union dues on golf clubs and trips to Palm Springs , and now Sean Fane appears to be bringing back a class struggle orientation to the UAW . I don't agree with the hyper sectarian idiots at the world socialist website . I actually think Sean Fane is a good leader . We'll see what happens with them , but so that's the struggle in auto right now , and you know there is going to be a green transition . It's a question of how much the workers get screwed and how much are the unions able to stand up . I mean it makes me think of like Kim Moody's book on new terrain when he talks about how , or he makes the argument that the , the , the area of greatest leverage for labor organizers in the context of Capital abilities that currently exist , is going to be more than logistics , than a manufacturing , because those jobs are less offshoreable and and that's why you know , teamsters and Amazon organizing are so crucial .
Speaker 2If you buy into Moody's analysis and I think that , and I do largely buy into Moody's analysis so that's that's like industrial labor . And then you know , when I was in Detroit , the biggest labor battles were over public sector unions . And there I mean , of course , you still have , I think , 30% union density in the public sector and contrast with it's like 6% in the private sector now . But of course , what the problem with public sector unions is that if a municipality goes bankrupt and If it's in a state of fiscal crisis and if a state takes it over , then they can lay off the public workers and break the contracts . And what happened in Michigan was the state passed a series of laws . Really , beginning in the late 70s , when you have the first wave of municipal bankruptcies because of deindustrialization and the energy crisis and so on , the state passes laws that make it easier for the governor to place a city into receivership . And , long story short , in the 2000s the governor's of Michigan plays more cities into receivership and they passed laws authorizing them to appoint officials called emergency managers . And it's kind of like in Puerto Rico , where you have this financial oversight board , where you have a kind of an austerity czar appointed by a higher authority , who can come in and Impose the structural adjustment package . And that's what the the state of Michigan has been doing and putting a gun to the head of the cities and Saying you're no longer in control . Where appointing this austerity czar ? And they passed laws that really allow these emergency managers To take over the city completely . They the laws even allow things like locking city council members out of city hall , freezing their email accounts completely , disempowering the mayor . It's almost like a government exile under Vishi and Nazi occupation , and that's that's really what it was like when I was there . So that they appointed these of these flags to run Flint in 2011 , detroit in 2013 , 2014 . And what do they do ? Well , in Flint , the emergency manager came in and you know he lays off a lot of the maintenance workers , cuts back staff , outsources all the water testing to a pripe to private contractors who claim the water is safe . Well , like implementing these cost-cutting measures that poison most of the city's population . And then , of course , in Detroit , the emergency manager comes in . He tries to privatize the water department . Another emergency managers were pointed to run the schools . They lay off all the unionized teachers in 2011 . Bust the teachers union , start charterizing the system , closing dozens of schools and they destroy the Detroit Federation of Teachers .
Speaker 2What do they do in the lighting department ? Now those are asking workers in the lighting and sanitation . They lay off a lot of those workers , replace them with temp private contractors Waste collection , street lighting now what ? What happens with these private contractors ? Well , now a lot of the street lights are burning out because they're not being replaced properly , because these private contractors do shitty work . They do shitty work on Running a water system , which is why Flint was poisoned . They do a shitty work , shitty work on street lights , which is why a lot of the street lights don't work in Detroit like . So , you , you , you like . Outsource things to these like cost-cutting Operators who play fast and loose with the rules , leading to , like repeated , cascading disasters . I know this is like a very like ugly picture that I'm painting , but that's what has happened .
Speaker 1No , that's part of why our infrastructure sucks . Because when you explain it in terms of public-private partnership , I like to explain it okay . A Public-private partnership is a pseudo market . There's no risk , but there's also no real consumer that you have to attract with anything . So all the normal things that you can argue if even if you're a capitalist about , about market disciplining leading to better services , none of that applies to this . None of it at all .
Speaker 2What is someone in sweat whose kids are poisoned right now . Right , Right .
Speaker 1What does apply , however , is private rent seeking and Trying to . The only way to make ends meet and we learn this from for-profit charter schools too Is basically scams . That's the only way that that's profitable , even from the for the private part right , and of course , that's what people are going to do , and so you have yeah , you have the situation in Flint . You have . You have all these power companies that this has been taken out of community control , that are all fucking a disaster . You have , and it didn't deliver any of the promises of like market competition , driving down prices , because they have monopsony power anyway right .
Speaker 2That's the thing is that they often don't want to take over the entire public entity because they don't want to take on the costs .
Speaker 2So like , for example , let's say , you have a water system Like Detroit , has this vast water system that supplies the entire region with water and the wastewater treatment plant , and much of the Infrastructure is controlled from within the city and it was city property from like the 1850s until the bankruptcy in 2014 , 2014 , at which point it was regionalized .
Speaker 2But if you have a system like that and you have a city where like a third to half the people depending on how you measure it or living in poverty , then you're gonna have a lot of people who say are behind on their bills . Now , if you're a private entity , the most profitable thing is not to take over that whole system , because then you are responsible for giving everyone , including very poor people , water . That's not very profitable . What is profitable is to parasitize upon the budget by , like , taking over parts of the Unionized workforce , being hired as a contractor , charging a lot of money , and oftentimes various kinds of corruption and patronage can grease that process . But you know , you , you , you , you . You divert city funds into revenues for your shareholders and you make everything crappier Without having to shoulder the cost of actually running the whole system .
Speaker 1Hmm , yeah , I think you're . Yeah , that's exactly what happens , and it's shisho and and that leads to like our current infrastructure crisis , which , yeah , the feds are gonna throw my money at it , but since it's all handled in these more and more contractory ways , there's no way to do proper quality assurance or whatever easily for municipalities , even in the way the feds kids . So the money is gonna seem to be largely wasted , which , of course , is gonna lead to more public dissatisfaction With investing in this , and you have a feedback loop there . And that's before you even get into the bond stuff , because one of the things that we know is that , even amongst conservatives , municipal Provided services are actually quite popular when they're run Wow right , even in highly conservative areas . Like you know , the idea of the community power plant actually goes just as well in red states as it does in most blue ones . It's it's just been taken off the table for most people . And yeah , I mean we we've talked about the limitations of this , particularly with the bomb market . We've talked about how the neoliberalization really contributes to a general social infrastructure decay .
Speaker 1One of the things I'm now interested in is what's gonna happen to these cities that are highly financialized , as some of these financial markets get
Decline of US Cities and Prosperity
Speaker 1More precarious . The United States as a whole is actually still relatively industrially productive . I know it doesn't seem that way because we employ so few people in it directly , but it but it's still like the second largest producer of material goods on the planet , the . The thing that makes me worried , though , is Looking at what's happened to Britain , which is not a big industrial producer at all . It is not a fan . Your manufacturing leader , and the moment that it's that it's currency Schemas with the , with leveraging the pound versus the EU and an open labor market fell apart , so it could , like , artificially suppress its low-end labor through Basically leveraging the difference in the value between the pound and the in the euro . In regards to places like Poland , by removing that , you basically seen its country go into freefall as , as debt conditions have changed . I mean , like I was joking that , like I was joking bitterly , that , basically , the European Union Is becoming Argentina , but I was like , actually , argentina is probably more solvent , it can do more , and so you've seen this massive decline in economic prosperity , and if our municipal models are what we're gonna base our things off of , this may happen to parts , but not all , of the US in the coming years , and so you're gonna see these regional problems that we saw really kind of pop up for the first , you know , in an undeniable way , in places like st Louis , in Detroit , etc .
Speaker 1In 2007 we're gonna probably see them come back again in this weird new context of like it's hard to even call it stagflation , because I don't think we're gonna have high unemployment . I mean we'll have higher unemployment than now but we're not gonna break it down . I mean we'll have higher unemployment than now but we're not gonna broach the over 10% mark which we did in 2007 and in 1980 and and in the depression , what I think we're gonna see it's just increasingly stagnant wages and higher costs , and so people are gonna have work but they can't demand anything from it and it's gonna get harder and harder to get by and some of these cities may start to really collapse . I Don't know that is my dark vision future , but like I haven't seen a whole lot of things that aren't gonna go that way in , particularly since there's a new fiscal authority Mechanism being imposed on every well , not everybody , but I was reading that like the vast majority of households under the age of 40 are gonna lose $400 a month in income due to student loans kicking back in .
Speaker 1I'm not here to get into the fairness of those arguments and nor do I think Biden's forgiveness , even if it had happened , was actually any kind of fix , because it wasn't systemic . It was one time , you know and it was like what $10,000 to $20,000 , yet I mean Honestly a more .
Speaker 1A bigger relief of student loans would literally be at this point . Just let people declare bankruptcy on it like it was any normal fucking debt . Impossible to do any of the senator . Yes , he did , I'm also with medical debt as well .
Speaker 1So , which is our ?
Speaker 1Which has always been crazy to me , because I'm like , oh so , the two kinds of debt you really , if you're trying to Just maintain your class position , you can't avoid , or the two kinds of debt you can't discharge for hardship now , yes , they'll adjust it for you forever , but it's not gonna ever go away , yeah , until you die , like I mean , you know , I guess we're lucky that student debt doesn't follow a state , but but it's , it's kind of it's , it's obscene .
Speaker 1But when you , when you think about that also in the terms of , like we are providing all these things through municipal services and In a lot of places like we're talking about , we've seen a decline of civic workers , and yet civic workers are also the only real industry in the area of any size . You can see how a lot of these cities are gonna spiral , which should be worrying for us because it's there . I mean it's an environmental disaster , it's a crime disaster If you look at where a lot of the crime is , if you care about that sort of thing . Yes , it's gotten worse in places like LA and San Francisco and Chicago , but like it's an increase from like 3% to 6 or 7% percent percent 3 , 3 per hundred thousand , like six or seven per hundred thousand for violent crime and and in places like Detroit or Jackson Mississippi or New Orleans or Jefferson Parish , it's like 64 per hundred thousand , which is like Honduras levels of viral ones .
Speaker 2Yeah , and it's scary to think about . I mean , like I recently read Karen Benena's book automation in the end of work . Mm-hmm and I don't know if you've had him on on your show , but not yet , he's probably now .
Speaker 2He was a student of Robert Brenner and he kind of subscribes to Brenner's analysis of sort of you know .
Speaker 2You know it's the classic Marcian thesis about the declining rate of profit combined with an analysis of like manufacturing over capacity , global level , you know , leading to falling rates of profit .
Speaker 2And then , you know , putting aside , like Brenner's more recent claims about like politically engineered upward revision vision , ben and I was , like you know , critiquing the automation theorists from a sort of renairian perspective and saying that you know , the Employment crisis is not because the robots are taking all the jobs , but it's because of chronic under demand for labor , because capital can't find a high enough rate of profit because of over capacity .
Speaker 2But but either way , whether you buy in a Brenner or the automation alarmists , or or Ben and I've been Brenner or the automation alarmists , either way , it's obvious that a lot of jobs that currently exist are Not going to exist in 20 years . And whether it be the SAG after strike and the AI stuff and how that might impact , like writers and actors , or the fact that the EV transition appears to be shaking out in such a way that there will be fewer auto workers , hopefully those jobs can be unionized and so on . I mean , I remember my first job , when I was like still in high school , was like bagging groceries and you go back to the same grocery store 15 years later and , as you know , it's like it's all self-checkout .
Speaker 2Yeah , there's like one thing in one bagger in the entire , yeah so so that Spells more surplus population and therefore more crime and social disorder . So yeah , that appears
Labor Struggles and Political Economy
Speaker 2to . I mean , you know , mike Davis has some interesting reflections on this toward the end of his life , like in his book . I think it's like is it old gods , new enigmas , or something .
Speaker 1Yeah , that book is great , by the way . I mean it's depressing as fuck . Yeah , it's great . Mike Davis , his last couple years was , I Remember , his last little piece for the new left review . Sanitize yeah , yeah , which was just like the bad guys one . Yeah the bad guys one and they're , they're , they get it and corrupted , but there's no one to replace them and it's like wow , but it definitely feels true . I mean , I yeah .
Speaker 2I think about . I think he never , you know I he never let go of optimism , of the will , but yeah , no , no , I mean well , actually , what he would say , because I have a quote from it .
Speaker 1He would actually say , like it doesn't matter if one is pessimistic or optimistic , like you have to fight regardless .
Speaker 2Yeah , and that's my stance to you , yeah .
Speaker 1It's like I , the odds are not great right now .
Speaker 1I mean from if I was like looking at the things that winning calls a revolutionary , revolutionary condition in the country , we actually have checked off all the boxes like a Ruling class that that doesn't seem to know how to maintain their current .
Speaker 1It's not just that there's a crisis for the , for the , for the oppressed classes and for the exploited classes , but there's also a crisis for the ruling class , and yet in our system it seems like they're kind of hanging on , but there's , they can't do anything , like they no longer have the freedom of action either , and so you just sort of See , like , well , where there's all this gonna go . I mean , I think that's why we talked you there's all this interest in , like the professional manager , oh , class , I want to get it sidetracked in that . I don't think it's a class , but I do think it describes something real as far as sectors of the economy . But even that , I'm like , well , that's all gonna end now too , because , like look , ai just took out half of that as well , and the occupational ladder in the credentials ladder slowly right and we've been warned and and it also does it shittier than people .
Speaker 1I'm just want to , you know , like point that out , but I Mean like .
Speaker 2I'm sorry to interrupt you , but I just can't resist saying this . Look at what's happened to academia . I was lucky enough to become a college professor , which is an increasingly shrinking privilege , although we have little structural power vis-a-vis the administration and and and the state that I'm an employee of . But I was looking at the stats and I think in the 1970s Less than a third of professors were adjuncts and now it's over 70 percent .
Speaker 1Yeah , though it's interesting , it's the conservative Historian , jack bosom , who was really worried about them , using TAs and adjuncts for actual instruction in the 60s Don to decadence guy . Yep yeah but he actually has a book about education in the 70s where he predicts this .
Speaker 2Yeah , so . So it's already happened to a lot of .
Speaker 1It's already happened , like all around us In all of these ways , but yeah yeah , I mean charter schools have done it to breaking the teachers unions , although the thing about breaking the teachers unions is they're easier to break because they're not covered by the , by the National Labor Relations Act and that's not subject to National Labor Relations Board at all . They're all . They're all handled by municipal law . So I think there's probably like half the states where the teachers , like can't strike . If they do a work action , they can be fired on site or they can't even negotiate or they don't have contracts .
Speaker 2I mean I Grew up in a teachers union family . My dad was a public high school teacher . It was evolving the union and if it wasn't for the union contract I would be in a much worse position on my own life right now . I I mean I think you know the upside is like the red state teachers revolt is a product of those conditions and the strike at Rutgers and the kind of higher ed Strikes that we've seen , the University of California system , or a product of these conditions . We'll see what happens . I'm not ready to throw in the towel on organized labor in the public sector .
Speaker 1I'm not yet either . However , the the red state revolt has been reversed yeah , a large part in the last four or five years , not because like of Like of legislative victories . Actually , it's just because people have given up and left the profession , like oh , totally .
Speaker 2I mean , right now the Houston school district just got taken over by the state and I , and I keep telling my , my Teachers union friends in Houston , like I saw , this already happened in Detroit . But we could , you know it's , it's the same Agenda , the same pro chartered billionaires behind the scenes across the whole country . But it , yeah , it's . But you know , we could , we could all be sitting here in 1995 having a similar conversation in some ways , because these processes are continuous .
Speaker 1Well , one of the things that I find very frustrating about charter schools and I guess maybe this is my , this may be my critique of bureaucracy here Is one of the things that I have seen over the past 20 years is an expansion of public sector Secondary and primary school and district level administration to an absurd degree . So like that's growing something like 200 percent since the economic downturn , whereas teachers have not , and that's why I have like doubled in most states . Yeah , but teachers pay has declined as part of you know , compared to inflation for Significantly . For a long time there were some gains in the poorest states . They see rest of Europe Utah is one of them is one of the poorest paid states . It's no longer the case for starting teachers .
Speaker 1Yeah but those are . Those are you would think , given the level of our labor shortage , like we're in the 30 percent shortage Capat , like we are 30 percent under capacity , that we'd be able to demand more at all levels , not just injury level positions . And we are not . So I think you know , I think I Think we have to fight .
Speaker 1I think one of the interesting things right now is For until about this year , there was a delusion that we have seen a Rebirth of organized labor .
Speaker 1The rebirth of organized labor actually happened about 10 years ago . We've actually seen a lot of defeats , but one thing it is different than before and it's a question that I think about all the time right , there's a lot more labor militancy right now , in a very real way . Then there was 10 years ago , but there's no organization for a lot of it and it's hard to know where that's gonna go , and I Think that's gonna be a very unpredictable political thing for these cities in the very near future , particularly as things don't change . I mean , you know , one of the one of the most frustrating things about the the Biden administration is how little has changed from the Trump administration . Really , there are differences I'm not saying they're exactly the same and I want all the progressives to come at me . But Even in terms of things that people really cared about , like immigration and whatnot it's been remarked Tariffs on Chinese goods , that sort of thing it's been remarkably consistent .
Speaker 2Yeah , of course , and , and you know the Obviously , if we're talking about political economy then we're operating at a higher level of abstraction and analysis . Then the partisan Horse race and the back and forth . I mean I think you know you can make the case that Biden's NLRB appointments have like marginally helped labor , although they're too understaffed to actually seriously crackdown on the illegality and spying and repression operations of Starbucks and Chipotle and the rest of these companies that can engage in these kind of ruthless union-busting campaigns with little Legal consequences or fines . The Pinkerton's are back , yeah , so and that's that's continuous through Trump and Biden .
Speaker 2It's a little easier to win a union election now without an overtly anti-union NLRB and so on , but the class struggle is the same as was before , yeah yeah , I think it's important to point that out .
Speaker 1Like things are for labor 1% better and the legal standpoint than it was exactly .
Speaker 1You know , yeah , three years ago , yeah , three years ago . But there are some things where things have been set back , like the Making sure . We know that all these things that are accepted from the , from the NLRB , like railroad labor and all that , that stays in its place . And , yes , there might be backdoor deals with certain parts of certain guild unions in the railroads that have been done , but it's not gonna apply to all of them . And and I think we have to be very careful about that going forward , because I think I Don't want to get too into pitting labor academics against each other . But I've read Kim Moody's book and Jim McIvry's book , and Jim McIvry's book has a lot of good stuff in it , but a lot of it seems very focused on , even though it's about rank-and-file strategy , about political wins , largely with the Democratic Party .
Speaker 2Yeah , I know .
Speaker 1I mean , I'm a fan of both of them but and I have some critiques of both of them , but I I think they're both worth reading and engaging with well , my , my , I Don't want , like I'm not here to get you to show my , my , my approaches , like there are virtues , and both approaches , the problem that you're going to have is the discipline . The one is the independence of union bureaucracy from its , from its rank-and-file as a problem into the discipline of things like property values on the labor fund . For these unions is going to be really hard to get around because right now the unions are flush with with , with theoretical funds because of their property holdings . But good luck valorizing those funds and actually using them . So it's , it's a problem , yeah well there are no easy answers here .
Speaker 2I mean , I recently read Timothy mentions but labor under fire which is like a history of the AFL CIO since to since 1979 and it's very depressing reading just because of the sort of the obvious diminishing returns of the strategy of dumping all this money into Democratic races . Kim moody's break in the impasse , I think has a compelling argument about Socialist strategies for electoral independence from the Democratic Party with a focus on single-member districts , and he has a critique of some of the dirty break stuff . But he ultimately is a clean breaker . But anyway , like that's a whole other conversation .
Speaker 1Yeah , I do go there , if you want but . I don't . I don't want to get into like socialist or a strategy today because I am also a . I'll just state my bias . I'm a clean breaker . I'm like we just need to break , break openly , break loudly .
Speaker 2That's Kim moody's argument , and I think he lays out a compelling case for how to do that .
Speaker 1The question is is the labor movement large enough for it to matter Right now ? And so my , my focus is like okay , we have to do something , and now we don't have . We don't have the capacity to break right now , and we do have the reality of us election law at a state-to-state level . Yeah , so you , you're kind of stuck in my mind building capacity and having to deal with these parties . I Wish we were more mercenary about how we dealt with the parties , though I do wish we were , even if we didn't have our own socialist Representation , that we were willing to play these people off of each other more directly . It's hard , because , I mean , the Republicans want us gone , no matter what , but we know that . What we've been kind , what I've learned , though , is the Democrats also kind of want us gone , like , like they're okay , they can make concessions to labor , but at the national level . But what if you look at local level stuff ? Absolutely not Like .
Speaker 1And I guess that ties us back to like Detroit and all this . Like the moment things get hard in a city . They're going to break the unions first .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean what it comes down to is with regard to the public sector unions , they're usually at war with Democratic big city mayors . I have a friend , for example , who's a member of our local DSA chapter in Houston , roblox . He's a firefighter . They've been fighting with the Democratic mayor to get a contract for a long time and they've been getting jerked around for a long time by the city and so a lot of the public sector unions are locked in conflicts with Democratic big city mayors and then often you have like Republican governors who just want to destroy them . Right , the Democrats are kind of split between them and you know , and capital .
Unions and Nonprofits in Environmental Justice
Speaker 2But then with regard to the private sector , I mean you know like the bottom line is like the unions haven't gotten any real labor law reform by the Democrats since Carter .
Speaker 1No , you're right .
Speaker 2You know , every time under Carter , under Clinton , under Obama and now under Biden , the unions want labor law reform , actual , you know . You know , removing some of the remnants of Taft-Hartley , obviously , but you know , up to the pro act . But before that we could say FCA or the Labor Law Reform Act under Carter . And every single time they get jerked around by the Democrats because the Democrats are a party of capital which is less explicitly anti-union than the Republicans . But always it's play the good cop , bad cop routine . And that doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense , in a variety of contexts , to have tactical alliances with Democratic elected officials on the part of certain unions in certain places . But there needs to be a bigger strategy because obviously the larger strategy has been failing for a long time and that's a much bigger conversation . Obviously .
Speaker 1So I guess this leaves us at a point of both hope and pessimism at the same time . We have labor militancy . We do have the return on progressive mayors . We've seen it in Chicago , In Johnson , yeah yeah , but I don't know how much those mayors are actually going to be able to do . I mean , some of the promises I've heard , I'm like there's no way you can do that Like , like should be .
Speaker 2Well , my argument would be it's better to have them than it's better to have Brandon Johnson than Larry Lightfoot . Absolutely it is better . But the key thing is the labor , militancy and the organizing and being able to exert power in those ways , and if you don't , then you're going to get rolled every time . That's always been obvious , but I mean OK . So to come back to where we started , so I got into this because I was interested in the environmental justice movement and I found that the concept of environmental justice was first popularized at a conference that was funded by the United Auto Workers , which almost no one in the scholarship acknowledges , and there was an attempt to create an alliance between the unions and some of the representatives of the kind of 50s and 60s era civil rights groups that remained into the 70s and some of the environmental organizations which had a heavily middle class white membership . And those alliances didn't really survive the 70s for a variety of reasons . And in the 80s and 90s the term environmental justice increasingly is associated with struggles against toxic waste dumping and pollution from dirty industries , oftentimes in like poor black and brown and Native communities and things like the dumping of PCBs in Warren County , north Carolina , and the resistance movement against that that was led by a coalition of anti-toxics and civil rights groups et cetera . But what I found looking at the case of Detroit and this type of activism was that , with the decline of the unions , increasingly environmental justice activism is based on the nonprofits . And I know that the United States has been a very good place for the United States and I know people who work in nonprofits and there are lots of good people who work in nonprofits and sometimes nonprofits do good things .
Speaker 2But the bigger problem is twofold . Number one , as capital is neoliberalizing cities and you're getting the public sector , then increasingly these nonprofits are expected to sort of fill the void of public services and instead of having , like , a functioning school system , a functioning transit system , a functioning welfare system , you instead have these small nonprofits doing little projects here and there , providing services here and there and really not filling the void of an actual functioning government and an actual state . And that's one part of the problem with nonprofits is they are not a replacement for actual public services . The other problem with nonprofits is that they're funded by capital via the grant system , they're funded by foundations and private philanthropy and they're not combined with the state and of course , the state is dominated by capital . So what that means is that if you're a nonprofit , even if you use radical sounding language , there are serious limits on how radical you can be if you need to continuously apply for grants and a peace foundation officers .
Speaker 2So in the case of , and sometimes you just get outright corruption , like in the case of Detroit , there's one nonprofit called Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice that I write about in chapter nine of my book , and this was founded by a woman named Denelle Wilkins and she she was an African American woman from Detroit and she had been involved in these fights around toxics and pollution and she worked for an organization that was allied with organized labor and did work on occupational safety and health . In the 80s she attended the first people of color environmental leadership summit in DC in 1991 , which was this important conference where the so-called 17 principles of environmental justice were agreed on by activists who were like a mix of Pacific Islanders , african Americans , native Americans , some Asian Americans and so on . But she found this nonprofit in Detroit in 1994 . I forget when they became a 501c3 . And they start getting grants from foundations , they get grants from the EPA , they get grants from , I think , the state of Michigan . Fast forward to 2007 .
Speaker 2Marathon Oil , which is based in Houston , texas , where I am , this multinational oil company that operates rigs all over the world . They operate a big refinery in Southwest Detroit in the zip code . It's the most polluted zip code in the in the , I think it's the state of Michigan , and in 2007 , this is around the time that a lot of the tar sands oil was coming on the market and oil companies were expanding their refineries to be able to process oil from the tar sands . And in Detroit Marathon wanted to do this big refinery expansion , which would have increased the pollution in this already very polluted zip code . It's about 80% black , largely working class , poor , so middle class , and this nonprofit Detroit is working for environmental justice . You would have thought they would have opposed the refinery expansion . A lot of local activists were trying to fight it , but Marathon hired the chair of the board of this nonprofit as like a private consultant and he ended up supporting the project .
Speaker 2And later the founder of the nonprofit was pushed out and two of these , like white businessmen , were brought under the board of directors of this environmental justice nonprofit , who were both tied to finance and real estate , and this nonprofit became like really dominated by these corporate guys , but it was still calling itself Detroiters working for environmental justice .
Speaker 2So if you look at like who sits in the board of directors of these nonprofits oftentimes they're people who are or are connected to , like corporate elites and then you look at where they get their money from and it's like , hmm , really surprising that they aren't more radical . But the one , one of the radical groups that I do describe is the Michigan welfare rights organization . I know we're probably running out of time so maybe I can sort of wrap up with this . In the water struggle I described , where you have mass water shutoffs , one organization that led the fight for the turning off poor people's water was Michigan welfare rights . And if you look at Michigan welfare rights , it's largely led by working class black women and a few Latinas and white women , but almost all women , very working class . They don't get any of this grant money , or if they did , it's very low . It's basically a member funded organization run by poor and working class women , and they were militant . They were getting arrested .
Speaker 1They were getting arrested .
Speaker 2They were getting arrested . They were like blockading the contractors , trucks that were shutting off people's water , constantly in street demonstrations . And when I was running with these groups I was like , okay , why is the nonprofit so quiescent and weak when it comes to these fights ? But this organization is not and it's like , yeah , follow the money .
Speaker 2Member funded organizations that are not dependent on capital can be way more militant and in the case of unions they're in a structurally antagonistic relationship with capital . Their leaders can be bought off like not just corruption like the union leadership , like in the UAW , the sort of petty corruption I talked about before . Some of the UAW leaders on GM stock I don't think Sean Fain does but like that means like when a plant closes and the stock price goes up , the union president makes more money . That kind of shit has happened in unions . But because unions are member funded , they they're in a position to challenge capital in a way that a nonprofit usually isn't . And a group like a welfare rights group or attendance rights group can be similarly radical because it's not dominated by capital , at least if it's designed that way . But it just comes down to the funding structure in so many ways .
Speaker 1Yeah , that's why tenants unions are preferable to tenants NGOs as far as that , exactly , yeah , exactly .
Speaker 2Ngos just become creatures of capital .
Speaker 1Right , it's one of these things when people are forming like a left disorganization and they're like what , what ? 50 , whatever , whatever , I'm like , whatever you do , don't do the one that makes you an NGO . Like , like , just don't do it . Like .
Speaker 2Right , that's it , and that's the same thing with politics . It's like you know , G . Why are politicians who get lots of small donations able to promote more pro working class policies than people who get their money from super PACs ? I wonder why . It's a mystery .
Speaker 1Hmm , that one . That was kind of funny , I mean it's although , for our , for our people , that cuts in a lot of directions , because conservative politicians have glommered onto this as well . Sure , they're not in the same way , though , because their constituency is still different , I think . I think this is actually , though , a good point , a good portion , and because , a good place to end , because it does , you know , there's a whole lot of like . Well , you know , we're disciplined by by capital . Here we're disciplined by capital . Here we're disciplined by capital . Here , we're not actually disciplined by capital in our ability to to do self funded organizations . We don't have the amount of resources , but we have better control over our money than if we have to take it from rich people .
Speaker 2That's it . It's as simple as that .
Speaker 1Well , hey , which ? Which is why I tell people like , don't totally rely on donations , have dues , even if the dues are minimal I mean , like you know , it could be a few bucks , you know , and you can waive them for certain people who can't pay them but you need to have something , because , one , it does involve a certain amount of investment in the org and literally , and two , it gives you a freedom that you don't have if you rely on donors . I mean , when I was dealing with NGOs here , I'll just tell you a story we were trying to deal with an immigration prison that no one wanted .
Speaker 2Right .
Speaker 1And we discovered that the private owner of this private prison corporation had had given to every progressive charity in the tri-state area . So guess what we couldn't get help on ? The exception was the Wyoming ACLU , and that's because it's two people . No , that's it .
Speaker 2I mean , it's like I have a section on my book where I talk about the local private utility in Detroit and how they were like cutting off gas and electricity for poor people behind on their bills during the wintertime and there was a big fight against that . And I know this activist who was trying to get nonprofits to join this campaign to stop the utility from forcing people to live without electricity in the middle of winter in Michigan and she said you know , like the utility set up a private foundation and they could just give a few hundred dollars to a nonprofit to get them to close their mouths . Right , and these little entities have small budgets and it's just easy to buy them off period . Yeah .
Current Projects
Speaker 1Well , thank you so much , Josiah . You will probably have you on sometime in the future , as things progress , because there's always more stuff to do . Is there anything you're working on and want to promote right now ?
Speaker 2Yeah , right now I'm working on a project on the origins of the Just Transition concepts . I've been doing research on the Oil , chemical and Atomic Workers Union and the work of Tony Mazzocchi and that may be coming a book project , although I am supposed to be writing a book about Houston and the you know like race , class and the environment on the Gulf Coast . But right now I'm doing a project on Just Transition and the sort of the climate and jobs versus environment debate within organized labor , with a particular focus on the oil , chemical and atomic workers .
Speaker 1All right . Well , when you're done with that , maybe we'll have you back on the show to talk about it . Thank you so much .
Speaker 2I'd love to Thanks a lot , Derek .
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