ZOHRAN'S FUTURE…AND OURS

I feel This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J. Eskow, produced by the WEAC Radio Network and broadcasting to the banks of the Anacostia directly into the halls of power. And now your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. Thank you. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the program. And this hour we'll talk with Professor Richard Wolfe about this week's election results, including especially the election of Zohran Mamdani. And we'll look at it both in terms of the sweep of American history, American leftist history, and in the context of what that might mean for the future. So please stick around. I think you'll enjoy it.

This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J.S. Gal. Check out our free video archives at YouTube.com slash the Zero Hour. And we're back on the zero hour. Joining me once again is my good friend, Professor Richard Wolfe, who as you probably know as an economist, economic historian, former third party Politico, which I didn't know until fairly laid into our relationship. And of course, keen-eyed observer of national... and world events, and it's in that light that we're speaking today about the surprising break in the routine that happens when there's really good news for a change, the election of Zokran Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, which is course on a lot of your minds as well. So first of all, Richard Wolfe, welcome back to the program. Thank you very much, Richard. I'm very glad to be here. And as I mentioned before we went on, I've been a participant in many elections in my time. I usually come away depressed with the outcome. So it is a very welcome to have gotten up this morning and seen the results. here in New York above all, but also in New Jersey and in Virginia. So I'm Pennsylvania. The Supreme Court Justice elections in Pennsylvania were an important bellwether for the same shift that we see everywhere else. And I would also say... that there's some significance to the election results in California, the referendum measure to basically fight fire with fire on congressional redistricting. And I mean, let's start with the national picture before we zero in on Zohran Mamdani, because of course, The national punditry has been whetting their rhetorical knives for weeks now, trying to figure out ways to minimize the importance of the Zohran Mamdani victory. But before we get to that, I'm glad you mentioned the other races because, first of all, we had in both New Jersey and Virginia, you know, my read of it is that the Democratic Party establishment basically anointed uh two figures it had uh it had uh recruited or whatever encouraged to run in the past for other uh positions uh and they are both one of them is i think ex intelligence for military uh the other is has got an equally moderate background and they're both running on competence so i think that uh in government and as anti-trump candidates um

So I think that the Democratic narrative was spoiled by Zohran Mamdani's victory because otherwise they would have said, see, it's the moderates who always win after they recruit them and fund them and give them preferential treatment. But you're right. It's still significant, I think. And I have some thoughts about it, but since you brought it up, what's your thinking on those two governors' races? Yeah, well, I want to take away from the conventional punditry and the official Democrats what they're trying to say. I think they cashed in on a shift in public opinion that required speaking out against Mr. Trump. I believe it was a referendum on attitude towards Mr. Trump. The outpouring of additional voters. People who have not voted in the past, who were persuaded to register to vote and vote this time, tells you that people who normally believe that it has nothing to do with them were persuaded that this time it might actually make a difference to vote. If I have the numbers, right, over 100,000 new voters in New York City. That's an enormous achievement when you know how hard it is to get that job done. And that's why Mr. Mandan, I'm one of the reasons why he did well. But I think all that the Democratic Party has done is cashed in on the repulsion, if I can say so, of a large part of the Democratic Party base. Now, that repulsion has more to do with the people who stuck their necks out over the last 10 months and not with those who were cautious. I want to remind people. Chuck Schumer did not endorse Zohran Mamdani at all, as far as I'm aware. No. Hakeem Jeffries waited until two days before the election to do it, and I could go on and on and on. These people have shown they weren't the ones to do it. They weren't the ones out there fighting against ICE in terms of its behavior. And they're not the ones speaking out. you know, about killing the people now over 60 a number in those boats around Latin America in the run-up to God knows what adventure in Venezuela is coming. So... I think that the victory of Mr. Zohran Mamdani, I think the fact that his victory was absolute. He got more than 50% of the vote. So in other words, he got more votes than the opposition combined was able to do. That is... Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, but also the three or four others that appeared on the ballot that got another 2% of the vote. He overwhelmed all of them in terms of his vote-geting ability. And for a Muslim socialist to do that in any election, let alone one in New York, which is the home of more billionaires, American billionaires than any other place in the United States.

And they used a lot of money. I believe it was either five to one or seven to one in terms of outside money invested in this race, that they were ahead of that many multiples of Mr. Zohran Mamdani. You put all that together. And yeah, I'm sure the Democratic pundits will try to claim it's a great day for them. They've got to do that precisely because it isn't. They've got to make that effort. But for the far left in the United States, the far left to the left of the Democratic Party, this is an extraordinary day for celebration. It is. And before we get to it, though, I do want to bring this back to New Jersey and Virginia, just for a second. Because, you know, the Democratic Party strategy, basically since 2015, has been that what they stand for is not being Trump, which is of limited effectiveness and only effective when Trump's around. So the fact is that I certainly congratulate the candidates in those states for their victories. It did seem to be largely an anti-Trump. campaign in those states, but they did mobilize voters to come out and vote for them because voters, in my opinion, voted for Trump because they were sick of the same old shit, okay? And those that did vote for him.

So he was able to win last year. Now what we're seeing in those states, as voters were saying, well, we didn't want this shit either. So the vote to retain the judges in New Jersey, the state Supreme Court judges, which Republicans put a lot of money into, the public voted to retain them anyway. I think precisely because they don't like the vote tinkering and gerrymandering and so on that these. judges voted against. And so good. I mean, obviously, Trump is overall not a good influence on world events or national event. But that is distinct from, I would call those institutional battles on the part of the Democratic Party. They weren't people driven. They weren't driven. You know, they sit. basically said i think the leadership was very happy with the candidates they got and you know running on competence is not exactly controversial uh but okay good you know congratulations to you but As I said earlier, he spoils the narrative that the establishment always wins because he's anything but establishment. He also did something important, whether he wanted to or not, or I should say the race did something important, which was to expose the utter hollowness of... democratic claims to integrity on certain issues. They ran as the Me Too. party opposed to the exploitation and mistreatment of women. Remember how quickly they got Al Franken out of the Senate because of some allegations against him. They tossed that aside in favor of a guy whose sexual harassment pattern of behavior has been upheld and cost the state millions of dollars, a state of New York. They... allied in if many of them did, Chuck Schumer passively and others essentially allied with Donald Trump to try to defeat Zohran Mamdani and get the serial harasser, elected mayor. And that was not a good look. Then you had other people I think were more artful in their management of it. I'm thinking, for example, Barack Obama, who got a lot of press. for, he's a very smart guy. You know, he got a lot of press for calling Zohran Mamdani, having a half hour conversation with him saying, call me anytime for advice. Well done, Mr. President. But I don't think he actually endorsed him. And.

You know, the other guy, the Chuck Schumer of this world, couldn't be bringing themselves to do even that. The Hakeem Jeffries of the world couldn't even bring themselves to do that. So what you had to me is already you have, you know, the conservative columnist, Rush doubt that, or however it's pronounced, saying, well, there's no lesson to be learned from the left about the Zohran Mamdani victory. You have all those Democratic pundits who wrote their competence sales column months ago and now don't know what to do with it. But I would argue, and everybody said, well, New York City is demographically different. Well, of course, every place is demographically different, right? I mean, it's like a lot of cities. Rural states are like a lot of rural say, yeah, okay. But to me, there are some. clear lessons for the left. If you, do you, first of all, do you agree? And if so, what do you think they are? Yeah, no, the lessons there are. I enjoy that the New York Times needs to go to the extent of saying there are no lessons, since, of course, without being cute, that's a lesson. You know, you're drawing. The statement that there's nothing to say is a very specific meaning that you're giving to this outcome and that he doesn't understand that. Anyway, it tells you more about him than it does about anything else. Look. For 75 years, it has been political suicide in the United States to call yourself a socialist, to do anything other than run away in horror at the label being applied to you. Bernie opened it up in 2016. by taking the chance to show that it wasn't a throwaway vote that millions of people could find it important to vote for him. And then the... The young people, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the others have shown that it wasn't just a kindly elderly man from Vermont who could pull that off. You know, we would have had this same clown from the New York Times tell us there was no lesson because Mr. Bernie Sanders was old. or white or from New England or whatever else he could say. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wasn't the male and wasn't white and wasn't elderly, blah, blah, blah. And now we have Mr. Zohran Mamdani. Well, there was a tableau a couple of nights before the election. In Queens, we're up on a stage in front of what was at least, I don't know, several hundred people, if not several thousand. You had Bernie on the right end.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left end and Zohran Mamdani in the middle, and they were all holding each other's hands in a gesture of, here we are, the three of us, having played this crucial role, well, here's the crucial role, in bringing socialism back in to the political conversations of this country. There are going to be, I would estimate, Hundreds of people who are right now thinking about running for office from the school board in Yipsy Doodle, Minnesota, on across the country, high office, low office, and everything in between because they think it's possible. You know, Mr. Zohran Mamdani proved that with election matching funds, you can do a lot. If you mobilize people, you can do a lot to immobilize the donor class with its money. Bloomberg, I believe, gave several million dollars. The guy who owns and operates Airbnb, several million dollars, they have the numbers wrong, but they were major contributors. And they gave Zohran Mamdani all the money, excuse me, Andrew Cuomo, all the money that he should have required to win in a conventional election. All that money, not only for, you know, early on for the primary as well as for the general election. I mean, Andy had the Democratic Party behind him officially during the primary, unofficially afterwards, on and on and on. And they lost anyway. This is going to take time to sink in for sure. But this is a watershed historical.

It's an explosion. And, you know, if we had time, I would love to talk also. This is going to put enormous strains on the coalition that comprises the Democratic Party, but likewise the Republican Party. All the people looking to replace Mr. Trump, which I can shorthand by saying all the people, they are now going to take strength from this. They're going to move more aggressively. Vice President JD Vance is looking at a result that is both hopeful for him. Trump is being diminished and terrifying to him. How's he going to navigate that? What issues is he going to disagree in order to create some distance so that if Mr. Trump is on his way out, he's not going down with him? And Zohran Mamdani did an interesting thing. And early in his campaign, when he was a very marginal figure in the conversation about the election, he went to places like Queens and Staten Island, and he talked to Trump voters, which, by the way, Bernie did when I worked for him, too. You know, this was... considered a betrayal, well, it says it's a professional managerial class, class betrayal on the part of many mainstream Democrats. How dare you go to talk to Trump voters? But Bernie was very good with them, given credit for that. Mom, Don, why'd you vote for the guy? And they say, you can't afford food, can't afford rent, you know, is okay. Well, you know, we and the Democratic socialist world have. help for that. We have ideas. We can help you. He did not view them as parietes. And I think that was important. I also think just as his army of volunteers was important to his victory, I think his campaign was important to the volunteers on a personal level. I mean, to me, this is the social dimension. of political change, right? That there was an article in the Times and it's a little bit fuzzy kind of sociological. pop sociology, right? But there was a kernel of truth, and it was something about that Zohran Mamdani's, joining Zohran Mamdani's campaign was an answer for a lot of Gen Z people to Gen Z loneliness that everyone's worried about. Now, I do think there's a little bit of pop trendiness and all that, but I think there's an element of truth to it in every age group. And we'll be right back after this with... Economist and historian Richard Wolfe. I'm Richard R.J. Askow, and you're listening to The Zero Hour. You are listening to the Weact Radio Network produced in Washington, D.C. Visit us online at weactradio.com or at YouTube.com slash weactradio, D.C.

And we are back on the zero hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. Eskow, and we now rejoin economist Richard Wolfe. I've been saying for a long time that a really progressive left movement... will also, going back to the populace in the 19th century, gives people a place to belong. I had Jody Dean on, you know, the professor has written a number of books on the left about her book, Comrade, which I thought was a beautiful little book about how communist movements in the case of Jody's work. provided that for people. And I think that, you know, contrary to what Trump says, we're not talking about a communist here, but I think the idea of the movement is home as collective, as community, is a powerful and understress part of Zohran Mamdani's campaign. Absolutely. And look, American history demonstrates that. One of the ways that the Democratic Party, in a place like New York, became an important institution, was when the Republican Party was shrinking and becoming very clubby with an elite that ran it. That has now overtaken the Democratic Party. It's the same thing. They are not a mass party. They are a party of... big donors who collected a small army of specialists. There's the people who write the speeches, the people who do the PR, the people who mobilize the state authorities to get out to vote. But the notion of a club, which is a living organism all year round, that has atrophy. It exists only in a very, very few places. All of it's now done by a small team. You know, like... The small team that runs most corporations, and you can have rallies of all your people, they know damn well. They are peons in your big business, and all the fun stuff is done up at the C-suite at the top. And I think what Zohran Mamdani understood and what the Democratic Socialists certainly understood was there could make a home for an awful lot of people that are being... given no place in the Republican Party and no place in the Democratic Party other than on three days before the election, you know, folding a lot of brochures or stamping a lot of things or standing by a subway handing out anonymous flyers to anonymous subway goers. I live in Manhattan. So we were visiting, there were knocks on our door during this last six months, four times or five times. Once for another candidate, the other four for Zohran Mamdani. I mean, no contest. The human touch to us. Now, the conversations we had were short because we told them, we are a Zohran Mamdani household. You don't have to spend your time here. We're going to vote for him anyway.

But they were young people. They were not the same people. So it was a completely different atmosphere. I also think that the donors, if I can put my hat on for a minute, the donors now have to wonder. They have to wonder in a new way. Yeah, of course, they will give mostly their money to the Republicans. I expect that will continue. But I think more of them will now give money to the Democrats. And the reason why is because they are going to be approached by the Schumers. If I were Mr. Chuck Schumer's advisor, just as I tell him, here's your message. You better give us the money or else you're going to get that. In other words, they are going to catch in. They are the bulwark against this happening anymore. And if you're not careful, Mr. Donor, I would have Mr. Chuck Schumer say, you're going to see a backlash against Trump that might get you legislation. worse for you than Trump was good for you. So he may be producing a tsunami the other way, and you don't want that. And we are the only ones who can give that to you, because Mr. Trump is determined to do what he does, and he's going to produce the backlash. So we're the bulwark against it. And that's how they're going to... try to, and they'll have to show the donors that they mean it by becoming down hard on the left. And, of course, they've been doing that in a sense since Bernie came around in 2015. And by the way, and you mentioned, you know, the sort of clubby atmosphere of the Republican Party and then the Democratic Party in New York, just to punctuate Zohran Mamdani's victory day yesterday, this tweet from Kamala Harris. uh and i quote i am saddened to learn of the passing of former vice president dick cheney vice president cheney was a devoted public servant from the halls of congress to many positions of leadership in multiple presidential administrations his passing marks the loss of a figure who with a strong sense of dedication gave so much of his life to the country he loved and she goes on the the fact is dick cheney uh was, I suppose when his service of the halls of Congress, she's referring to when he was one of only six members of Congress to vote against the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, perhaps. And she overlooks his stalwart efforts to overthrow the democratically elected presidential candidate in the year 2000, Al Gore, much less the massive scope of his war criminality. And I think puts him on a level with maybe King Leopold in the Belgian Congo and a few others. So.

You know, you'd think from the rhetoric that this guy is social, nationalizing everything in New York City and seizing the wealth of the oligarchs and so on. So I went through it. Just line by grocery store pilot program, 60 million. New York City has a budget of about $116 billion. So what's that? Roughly half a percentage point. free fast bus service. While the free part, there was a study showing that 48% of the city's bus riders board the buses without paying. So it's half free already. We're just talking about the other half. Now, the New York Times estimates, I think they're overestimate, 600 million in lost fares to make the buses free. As I say, I think the real cost is the cost of operating the buses. But that's also, excuse me, that's one-half of one percent of New York City's budget. The other number is even more trivial. The rent freeze that he's proposing wouldn't cost the city anything. And lower middle income New Yorkers would have more cash to spend on things they need, which would boost the economy of the city. Now, the biggie is for universal child care, $6 billion. But when you start to look at that, okay, $4 billion from a city tax increase of 2% on income over $1 million. uh maybe that would offset the tax cut that all billionaires got from the first trump tax cut but i'm not sure we would even do that it certainly wouldn't put them any near the 92 percent top tax bracket uh higher ultra high earners were paying during the glory days of the Eisenhower era so When I look at the fiscal impact of Zohran Mamdani's proposals, they ain't that radical. What? The state raises its sales tax to New Jersey's or so, you know, I mean, it's not crazy stuff, but what I think has people scared. is the way he packages it. I mean, New Mexico has free universal child care. This county, Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live now, has some free buses, even Bloomberg proposed some free buses. It's not just the ideas. It's the packaging of those ideas on a pro-working family Democratic Socialist agenda that hasn't cared. What do you think of my thesis? It's absolutely correct. It is a, it's shameful, the abuse of numbers that are in fact trivial, which any economist who's knowledgeable about what we call fiscal. policy or fiscal issues. Public finance is a subdivision of the discipline of economics. A graduate or an undergraduate who gets majors in economics is required in many places to take an elective in public finance in which all of these issues, it becomes very clear, if you understand it, that many, many of the things that Mr. Zohran Mamdani has pointed out have either been tried, have a history.

or could be financed. beyond what we know from the empirical record by all kinds of financial arrangements, and that it is childishly easy to make an estimate come out any way you want, for example, the cost of doing something, like not charging for bus rides. Yes, but then you have to answer the question. What will happen with the money that people are not on the thing? They will do this, and how many jobs will that create? We know how to do that. What you're getting here are advertising men and women who know that the name of the game is to say everything positive about your client and nothing negative. You know, the opposite of rational speech is advertising for capitalism, which is another reason to get rid of it. But let me make another point. I ran for mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, myself. In 1985, when there wasn't the groundswell of support, when the Democratic Socialists of America, if they existed, were a tiny, you know, we called ourselves then the New Haven Green Party because that was more in people's minds. And in the headlines when I ran for mayor, the joke was the red green was running for it, right? Okay. But I had occasion for that to really spend time studying. what used to be called municipal socialism. I'm assuming that Mr. Zohran Mamdani either knows that or has people around him who know that. There's an immense, I could spend five hours simply going through with you or with the audience all the things that socialists have figured out how to do in cities here in the United States. I could do the same thing again with other countries who've gone even further. But we have plenty of examples here of all kinds. You know, there was a time when many American cities were run by socialist mayors and socialist city councils. Bridgeport, Connecticut, one that I studied in detail, Milwaukee, St. Louis, I mean, on and on, big cities, small ones, all kinds of... There's an accumulated history, things that worked for socialist, things that didn't, and why they didn't. All of that is available to Mr. Zohran Mamdani. He needs to listen to what you said. RJ, you said, it's how he defines it, how he packages it, how he explains it, the order in which he presents them so that the things that people can see and touch and feel are the things they first encounter to make them willing to go with him the next step, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, and it's, by the way, it has to be done both on the side of the revenue, money coming in.

taxes and so on, and on the side of money going out. Let me give you just one example. One of the big sources of income for the city, the property tax. Okay, the property tax depends, among other things, on the estimated value of the property. What is the corner of 37th Street and 1st Avenue? What is that worth? And we have a tax assessor, all cities do, to assess the value upon which the tax rate is levied to generate the revenue. Well, a famous ploy of inequality in our society is to revalue land very unregulally. Why? Because the longer the gap between estimating value... year one, an estimated value year two, the more time for the value to go up, which is where real estate has gone before the tax kicks in because of the revaluation. So, you know, cities are required by state law to do it no less than once every 10 years or once every five. All of that can be changed. And when it's changed, the revenue coming in from whom? from those who are sitting on the most highly upvalued real estate. But those are precisely the ones who ought to pay more. And if you want to know why real estate is the largest category of major donors to Mr. Andrew Cuomo, there is... Against Zohran Mamdani, they know that he can do that. That is within his bailiwick and all kinds of ways. And that's where the wealthy are vulnerable in this town, et cetera, et cetera. Earlier this year, unpaid property taxes in New York City were estimated at $880 million. nearly a billion dollars. That's, you know, billion here, a billion there. You're talking about real money. If you deal with the revaluation, the way I'm talking about, it's worth many, many billions, much, much more than that, because that's unpaid given the assessment. It's the assessment issue and the procedure which has to be examined. Here's another one. An enormous portion of the value of land in New York City. is in the hands of tax-exempt institutions. The Roman Catholic Church, Columbia University, I could go on, all right? Now, the NYU, a huge owner of land. Those questions have to be right. Why are they getting a tax exemption? That usually was done decades ago when these were completely different, smaller institutions. It was done to help them do what? educational function. NYU doesn't need that money for its educational function. That's ridiculous. Why don't we deal with this? Here's a way to do it. It's called, by the way, just so you know, this is all very well-known, part of a curriculum, the pilot programs they're called. Payments in lieu of taxes. P-I-O-L-T. Connecticut is full of them. I've helped write some of them. The state mandates

Not that you tax, let them keep their tax exemption, but they can be required. Connecticut has been doing this for decades. They can be required to make payments in lieu of taxes based on the taxable property. And that is something which, guess what? Yale, which is the monster that runs the show in Connecticut, Yale has accommodated that. Why? Because they understood if they didn't, they faced the risk of taxes. Well, led by the mayor of the biggest city, you're going to find allies in Syracuse and Binghamton, Buffalo, because they see the revenue for them that comes in from the, so they can put the pressure on the state legislature to give the cities the right to impose and collect pilots on and on. To hear the rest of my conversation with Richard Wolfe, please go to zero hour report.com. We'll be right back after this. I'm Richard R.J. Eskow, and you're listening to The Zero Hour. This is The Zero Hour with Richard, RJ Eskow. Check out our free video archives at YouTube.com slash The Zero Hour.

And we're back on the Zero Hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. Escal. Well, in closing, I'd say this was pretty much no Kings election. We had people in New Jersey, Virginia. and elsewhere around the country in some elections too small uh so small we haven't even covered them repudiate the uh the reign of king donald and his bloated gout-like addition to the White House and his hyper-militaristic ice gooms and everything else, but not a good day for Trump and the Republicans, which means it's a good day from most of the rest of us. And I think from here on, the message is that's a good place to start. Now let's have some real adventures. We'll see you next week.