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May 30, 2007
The bosses' takeover of New York
Socialist Worker Online
Review by Aaron Hess
Kim Moody, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present. New Press, 2007, 352 pages, $26.95.
Socialist scholar and activist Kim Moody’s new book, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present is an angry, accessible and scrupulously researched account of how the city’s rich and politically connected have consolidated their power over ordinary New Yorkers in the last three decades.
Among the strengths of Moody’s book is that it shows how the inequality and racism in the Big Apple today are not accidental features of “development” or the inevitable consequence of uncontrollable market forces. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the city’s business and political elite consciously planned out its war on workers and the poor.
Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner joins the titans of corporate welfare:
While gutting funding for affordable housing, the city and state have doled out hundreds of millions of dollars in tax exemptions and abatements to the upscale housing market and corporate welfare to “public-private” partnerships run by real-estate titans like Bruce Ratner and Larry Silverstein.
Posted by lumi at May 30, 2007 7:32 AM