Running Cities For People Instead Of Big Corporations & Wealthy

FROM WELFARE STATE TO REAL ESTATE: REGIME CHANGE IN NEW YORK CITY, 1974 TO THE PRESENT
UNDERNEWS FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
LATEST HEADLINES & INDEX: http://prorev.com

http://www.citylimits.org/content/articles/viewarticle.cfm?article_id=3401

Kim Moody

EILEEN MARKEY, CITY LIMITS - In "Welfare State," Moody, a labor economist and activist who taught labor studies at Cornell University and is now a research fellow at the Centre for Research in Employment Studies at University of Hertfordshire, finds a telling connection between the global financial capital and developing countries. . .

Ever since the Financial Control Board in 1975 imposed "fiscal discipline" on a city that had been operating like a western European social democracy, New York has been run for the benefit of big business, Moody contends. This movement is most dramatically exemplified by the scourge of "developmentalism," in which city government functions are sublimated to the priorities of mammoth development projects, a la the once and future World Trade Center, Atlantic Yards and the far West Side. The city pays wealthy corporations to stay in the city, builds them new campuses, and in the process makes the city harder for the rest of us to live in. . .

Thirty years of structural adjustment have led to lower real wages for the mass of workers who serve business elites, a dramatic squeeze on housing affordable to anyone other than the very wealthy and increased income stratification, Moody writes. Backing up these claims, on nearly every page he cites a flurry of statistics: In 1980 the wealthiest 20 percent of New Yorkers earned 21 times that of the poorest 20 percent, but by 2005 that had risen so the wealthiest fifth of the population earned 52 times that of the poorest fifth. Real wages for all New Yorkers dropped 4.8 percent between 2000 and 2005 alone, from an hourly median of $15.13 to $14.40, according to a Fiscal Policy Institute study Moody cites. And the inflation rate for one-, two- and three-family houses in NYC was 4.1 percent, double the national rate, as housing prices are pushed ever skyward by upscale development, he argues. . .

The book ends with Moody's assertion that neoliberalism triumphed in New York and can only be challenged by a broad and aggressive social movement.

Reading "Welfare State" feels a little bit like homework, but homework for a class that dramatically affects one's understanding of the world. In the end it's a book serious urbanists will want in their library, if they can still afford an apartment with room for such things.

Labels: Cities, Corporations, Social Movement, Wealthy, Abuse Of Power
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