Dear Mayor-elect Mamdani,
Your decisive victory in the mayoral race has prompted your opponents — the privileged super-rich and their lobbyists in City Hall — to label you as an “extremist,” “socialist” or, in Donald Trump’s ludicrous view, a “communist.” Your affordability (i.e., consumer protection) agenda is so popular it’s going nationwide.
Already, free bus fares exist in several U.S. municipalities, including Kansas City, Tucson, and Alexandria, Va. Proposing five city-run grocery stores in New York City’s “food deserts” is hardly radical. You could even structure these stores as cooperatives (owned by consumers) as exist in numerous communities in the U.S. for years.
Your rent stabilization proposal is similar to what several large cities have already enacted to protect powerless tenants from avaricious landlords, especially from today’s very large corporate landlords with their fine-print contract peonage. Also, there are cities in the U.S. offering partially publicly subsidized child care. New Mexico just launched a statewide universal child‑care program.
The social democratic countries in Europe have long implemented even broader social safety nets. What large corporations really do not like is that you are projecting a consistent voice for workers, the poor, and the powerless in what’s regarded as the financial capital of America. Long-game corporate statism at the local, state, and federal levels has rarely been challenged by the two-party duopoly.
Indeed, President Trump has become a corporate socialist par excellence. As The New York Times reported on Nov. 25, the Trump administration has de facto partly nationalized an array of private companies for ulterior political motives under the contrived banner of national security.
These companies include Intel, U.S. Steel, Westinghouse, Vulcan Elements, and MP Materials. This invites bribery by other means, i.e., a Trump donation in exchange for an administration sweetheart investment. The furtive Central Intelligence Agency now features a venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, ostensibly to fund commercial technologies to fortify the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Defense.
Your program is obviously creative and timely. But critics wonder — can he find the funds to make it work?
One excellent way would be to support pending legislation to end the unconscionable daily electronic rebate of tens of millions of dollars in stock transaction taxes (a progressive tiny sales tax of one tenth of 1% on stock sales). You have yet to sign on to a bill that would end the rebate and specifically allocate $16 billion dollars or more annually to mass transit, education, health care and environmental protection.
Even former Mayor Mike Bloomberg supports this idea, saying during his presidential run that there should be a tax of 0.1% on all financial transactions to raise revenue needed to address wealth inequality, and support other measures — such as speed limits on trading — to curb predatory behavior and reduce the risk of destabilizing “flash crashes.”
Note that Bloomberg went beyond a sales tax on stock transactions to include all financial transactions (such as bonds and derivatives). And an April 17, 2020 New York Times op-ed by Robert Rubin — big banker and former treasury secretary under Bill Clinton — urged increasing revenues “on a highly progressive basis by increasing corporate taxes, restoring individual rates, and repealing pass-through preferences by imposing a “Financial Transactions Tax” (emphasis added).
You call for increasing taxes on the super-wealthy and large corporations. So do 80% of the American people. Pretty mainstream!
As for your plans to make housing more affordable and available, you should check out the National Cooperative Bank in Washington, D.C., which provides loans to consumer co-op models in the housing, food, and other areas of economic activity. The bank was established in 1978 by the Carter administration with my support.
May I also suggest that you avoid the trap of many progressive politicians who become “incommunicados” when it comes to working closely with outside allies. (See “The Incommunicados” by Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein). You may wish to have a liaison to these groups whose ideas, experience, and members can be of signal assistance to what will likely be a turbulent tenure given the big business status quo.
You ran a brilliant campaign, substantively and tactically, and hold the promise of being an historic mayor. May you be guided by the wise adage that “None of us is smarter than all of us.”
Anticipating your considered response.
Nader is the consumer advocate and author of numerous books, from “Unsafe at Any Speed” in 1966 to the recent “Let’s Start a Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People.” A version of this essay appeared in Common Dreams.
