So the result was, he had a near insurrection among the rank-and-file police and the police unions for several months, especially after two police officers were shot and killed by a crazed -- a crazed gunman a few months later. So, suddenly, de Blasio was confronted with -- and I think this is one of the problems that many of the progressive mayors have had across the country, is that the police department is the army of a local government. And if the army rebels against the leader, it is very difficult for that leader to govern.
So, I think one of the things that happened with de Blasio early on is that he chose a controversial figure, Bill Bratton, to be his police commissioner, even though many advocates against police brutality were critical of Bratton, because he feared that the same thing would happen to him that had happened to David Dinkins, the last Democratic mayor, which is that the police department would rebel and allow crime to soar, and make his time in office ungovernable. So he decided to pick Bratton, who had loyalty among the rank-and-file police, because -- believing that that would at least prevent the police from rebelling and allow him to implement his social agenda. To some degree, it worked; to some degree, it didn't. And so, he has rightfully taken criticism for that decision, for backing the broken windows policy of Bill Bratton, although now that Bratton has left as police commissioner, so has, effectively, the broken windows policy that was pursued previously.
AMY GOODMAN: Juan, we're going to break and then come back to this discussion. Juan Gonza'lez, yes, co-host on Democracy Now!, but also the author of a new book, Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America's Tale of Two Cities. When we come back, we're going to talk about his thesis around race, class and the urban growth machine, and de Blasio's $21 billion revolution. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Pa'lante" by Hurray for the Riff Raff. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. We're talking to Democracy Now!'s Juan Gonza'lez. He just wrote a new book, just published this week, Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America's Tale of Two Cities. Juan, talk about the central thesis here, on race, class and what you mean by the urban growth machine.
JUAN GONZA'LEZ: Well, the urban growth machine is not a term that I coined. It's been around now for decades. Scholars Molotch and Logan, in their famous book, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, talked about the urban growth machine. And it is basically a theory of how cities are managed, and that basically that capital seeks to get the maximum possible profit from land, because in a city, the land is the most important commodity in terms of how you can get profit, and so that there's -- that the urban growth machine seeks always to see the land of cities, the streets, the parks, the housing, for the highest possible exchange value. And so, we have seen in American cities now, for more than a hundred years, the elites of these cities -- the bankers, the real estate developers, the politicians funded by them -- always seeking maximum possible profit from the land, through commercial development, through luxury housing, any possible way to increase profit from the land.
But the residents of a city see the land of that city in a different way. They see it in its use and how it can better their lives. And so there's a constant conflict between those who have power and wealth in urban America and those who are the working class and live in these cities, over how the land of the cities will be used. And the urban growth machine has always seen that cities grow through economic development and through the highest possible use. Working people see that cities grow when they service the people of the cities.
So, I think that the urban growth machine has dominated urban policy, first in its conservative phase, in the '20s, '30s and '40s, when it was really -- overt racism dominated land use policy in the United States. Then it went into a more liberal phase with the urban renewal programs of the '50s and '60s, and then into a neoliberalism, neoliberalism of the last 30 years, which privatizes government -- seeks to privatize government, which seeks to drive down wages, which seeks to push the poor out from the cities into the suburbs, really, along the European model. And so, the urban growth machine has had these different stages.
What happened in beginning -- after the Great Recession and after Occupy is that a whole new host of leaders came to office who seek a different way of governing cities. And that's, I think, the point that I try to make in the book. It's not just de Blasio, it's not just one city or two cities, but it is a movement that has begun to develop in America, and that the cities are the only hope right now for progressive governance in America, because the states are, for the most part, captured by conservative elements, and Washington -- forget about Washington for the next few years in terms of being able to get any kind of progressive legislation.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you read from your book, Juan?
JUAN GONZA'LEZ: Yeah. Well, I wanted to -- the section where I try to show how this movement has spread, I say:
"The turning point for the new progressive revolt in urban America came in 2013. That May, Chokwe Lumumba, a veteran civil rights lawyer and former member of the radical Republic of New Africa, startled the political elite of the South when he won an election to the mayor's seat of Jackson, Mississippi -- thus signaling that an unbowed black revolutionary was taking charge right in the heart of Dixie. Then in November, the same day that Bill de Blasio prevailed in New York, Bill Peduto, a maverick member of the Pittsburgh city council and persistent critic of the city's Democratic establishment, won election as mayor; in Minneapolis, Betsy Hodges, an experienced nonprofit executive and two-term member of the Minneapolis city council who had opposed public subsidies for a new Minnesota Vikings stadium, emerged from a crowded field of 34 candidates to capture that city's mayoralty; and in Boston, trade union leader Martin Walsh cobbled together an alliance of organized labor, white liberals, and key African American and Latino leaders to become the first labor official to be elected mayor in Boston's history. Out west, Ed Murray, a state legislator, won election as Seattle's mayor, in part by promising a $15-an-hour minimum wage, the same issue championed by a radical software engineer named Kshama Sawant, who became the first socialist elected to the Seattle city council since 1916.
"More local victories by new grassroots movements ensued over the next two years. Ras [J.] Baraka, the son of the famed black poet and revolutionary Amiri Baraka, pulled off a surprise win in Newark's mayoral race in [May] 2014, while new progressives won city council races in Tempe, Arizona; Austin, Texas; and a half dozen other cities [later in the year]. Then in 2015, voters elevated another group of left-oriented newcomers elevated to office in Denver, Seattle, Philadelphia, and other cities, while a durable anti-machine challenger nearly pulled off an upset in the race for mayor of Chicago. Cook County commissioner Jes'us 'Chuy' Garca forced [incumbent] Rahm Emanuel, a centrist Democrat who had been expected to coast to victory, into a run-off election before finally succumbing to him.
"As their victories mounted, the new mayors and councilors started to fashion their own alliance of big-city politicians committed to attacking income inequality, and they [even] reached out to like-minded counterparts in other countries." I mention Sadiq Khan in London; Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris; Ada Colau, the mayor of Barcelona; Carmen Yuln Cruz, the mayor of San Juan. This is an international movement of cities, of which the American cities have now become a key and important part.
And so, this is how I try to lay it out. This is not one politician here, another politician there. This is the reflection of the grassroots movement that has been building in America for years now and is now beginning to capture local power. The question is, though, when you capture local power, there are always problems with governing. There are -- and as I say in the book, many of the mayors found their key initiatives blocked by conservative forces. "In others, the alliance that secured the initial victory began to fracture over the sudden eruption of volatile incidents, such as police killings of African Americans. At other times, unresolved policy issues among them frayed the alliance: how to address, [for instance,] the spread of charter schools ... or how to create more affordable housing while also promoting economic development," or even the issue of the sharing economy. Some of the progressives were behind Uber and others in the sharing economy, while others opposed it. So there are things that have begun to fray the alliance and divide the alliance, but you cannot mistake that there is an alliance. There is an urban alliance in America.
AMY GOODMAN: This weekend, the New York Daily News published a significant piece of the book and headlined it "De Blasio's $21 Billion Revolution." Talk about the shift of money, where it comes from, where it's going. And let's remember that de Blasio followed three terms of the billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
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