Juan González talking:
I began to notice, actually about four years ago, in 2013, that there was something happening in the cities across the country that was actually a movement, a political movement that was not getting much attention. And that is the rise, post-the Great Recession, post-the Occupy Wall Street movement, that many young and progressive people were running for political office and actually winning seats in city councils and some even in mayoral races across the country, and that they were, in essence, the political—the political effect of a mass movement now that has been building across the country for decades, and that Bill de Blasio—and, you know, people say to me, “Well, has Juan González gone crazy? Is he now wanting to praise Democratic politicians?” I think that you have to look beyond individuals, and you have to look beyond positions, and you have to try to understand the systemic things that are happening.
One of the things I realized was that the de Blasio victory in 2013, because New York City is such an important part of the United States—we’re talking about a city with a $70 billion budget back then, with 300,000 employees. It is a huge administrative unit of government in America. And the fact that a left-leaning progressive, de Blasio, complete upstart, who no one expected to win, had captured the most important city in the United States and the center of world capitalism, had captured its administrative apparatus, that that was only a reflection of what was going on across the country. And very few journalists and scholars have begun to look at this as a movement. So I started doing more research into other cities to try to understand how this happened, how real was it in terms of substantive change for the future. So that’s what my book is about.
they actually came by subway from Brooklyn, and they emerged from the City Hall station, just as everyone was gathered around at the inauguration ceremony. And I think it was a clear message being sent, that this was a—first of all, that it was an outer borough mayor, someone who came from—not from Manhattan, which is typically where Manhattan mayors—where New York City mayors come from, but, more importantly, that it was from—it was a part of a movement. And I think that the reality is that Bill de Blasio, interestingly, has been both a political operative of the Democratic Party now for many years, but has always had close ties to the labor movement, to the grassroots organizations that were fighting around protecting public schools and against charter schools. And it was this movement, really, that helped to propel him into office.
The question is—and I think it’s a fair question—is that it’s a lot easier to criticize government and a lot harder to govern, especially in a progressive direction in a capitalist society. So, the question is—many critics have raised of de Blasio and of the other mayors that I deal with, because I deal with more than a half-dozen around other—in Minneapolis, Walsh in Boston, Bill Peduto in Pittsburgh, Murray in Seattle, Gayle McLaughlin’s tenure in Richmond, California, Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson, Mississippi. All of these mayors, in one way or another, were trying to implement a vision opposed to the neoliberal policies that have governed American cities now for about 50 years, and opposed to the growth machine policies that have really run our cities for a hundred years. And they were opposed to those in one way or another and have sought to change the way America’s cities are governed.
Bill de Blasio has got—has maintained very widespread support in the African-American and Latino community, not so much support in the white community of New York City. In fact, he has minority support in the white community. Yet the African-American and Latino community have remained very loyal to his mayoralty so far. I think it’s, one, because of the economic impact of his policies, but also because they see in de Blasio, married to an African-American woman, with biracial children, a living symbol of the diversity of New York City and of a sense of caring about what happens to the poor and to the African Americans and Latinos of the city. So I think that the—in fact, his son is really credited, really, with being responsible for his sudden surge, with the famous commercial that his son did in August 2013.
I think that’s what captivated many New Yorkers, because, until that moment, I would say the majority of New Yorkers did not even know that de Blasio had biracial children and was an interracial marriage. And I think that that sort of awakened a lot of people to say, “Hey, I should take another look at this guy.” And I think that then, of course, the policies were critical, the policies that directly affected the lives of African Americans and Latinos and working-class New Yorkers.
Mayor de Blasio took a lot of heat from all sides of the political spectrum during that period of time, because, as you recall, he had already moved to further dismantle the stop-and-frisk policies of the Bloomberg administration, that were still being battled over in the courts. He settled the Central Park 5 case, jogger case, with multimillion-dollar settlements for those who had been wrongly convicted and jailed for the Central Park jogger case. He had—he was accepting much more oversight of the police department, outside oversight, that City Council had passed, which the police department was opposed to.
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.
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.
– from book,
“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 thirty-four 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 Jesús ‘Chuy’ García 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 Yulín 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.
de Blasio followed three terms of the billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And before that, two terms of a law-and-order mayor, Mayor Giuliani—20 years of basically neoliberal rule in New York. Yeah, you know, I try not to get into personalities or the narratives that are created, even by my own colleagues in the press. So you have the narratives of the inept de Blasio, of the de Blasio who’s always late, who seems arrogant and aloof. I always try to follow the money.
And what has happened, what happened in the first three years of the de Blasio administration in New York City, was an enormous infusion of money into the working class and the middle class of New York. And I actually tabulated it at at least $21 billion. And because of all of the initiatives that he put into motion and the City Council—because the thing to understand about New York City is that de Blasio had the full support of a very left-leaning City Council and other key officials, so it was the most left-leaning government in the history of New York City, in my opinion. What did they do? Universal child care. Universal child care, people don’t forget, that’s 70,000 children now a year are—I mean, universal pre-K, I’m sorry. Seventy thousand children a year now are getting pre-K education. The average parent pays about $12,500 to care for their 4-year-old child. So, de Blasio not only extended a full year of education for children, he also saved 70,000 parents a year now the cost of having to pay for child care for their 4-year-olds. That alone represented about $1.4 billion in savings to New Yorkers.
And he instituted that in the first year. That is larger than most school systems in the United States. No one expected he’d be able to do it within the first year. He did it within seven months, eight months of being in office.
Then there’s also the labor contracts that were negotiated. Before de Blasio came into office, 300,000 New York City union workers, employees, had not had contracts for years. They had not been able to get raises for years—some, like the teachers, for five years. And within a few months, he started negotiating contracts with all of the various unions of the city, which in the first three years delivered $15 billion in raises and back pay and benefits to the workers of New York City.
Then there were the rent freezes for the—rent regulations in New York City averaged increases for private landlords, in all of the years before de Blasio, 3.2 percent per year; 3.2 percent, the landlords were expecting every year, on average, increase on their rents. In the first three years of the de Blasio administration, there was a 1 percent, a zero percent and a zero percent increase—a third of a percent over three years versus 3 percent per year. That alone is about $2 billion that the landlords of New York City did not get, that they were expecting to get and they had historically gotten under previous administrations. You can—and I can go on and on.
De Blasio has not solved the affordable housing problem. There’s still too much luxury housing being built and too much development being—commercial development being permitted. They have not completely solved the issue of police-community relations. But they’ve definitely made great strides, most of them, in some of these areas.
And they are reason to hope. I think that too often, when we look at the Trump administration and Washington and we look at what’s going on in the state capitals, we become discouraged, and we have a sense of hopelessness. But I—it’s my theory or my viewpoint that the cities are a basis for hope. They are not perfect. You have to push these folks. But there is a potential for increasing space for progressive change and progressive policies in our cities today.
I believe the big cities of America and the federal government are on a collision course, over sanctuary cities, over sustainable development, over police accountability. They’re on a collision course in the same way Southern local governments back in the 1950s and ’60s were on a collision course with the federal government over civil rights, only back then it was the federal government that was maintaining the more progressive position. Now it’s the local governments that are maintaining the most progressive positions. And I believe that it’s going to get even more—the battle is going to get even stronger between the cities and the federal government.
my thesis is that these mayors are trying to reclaim their cities for their people, as opposed to for the elites that have governed them and run them, and that since I was focusing in large part on de Blasio, but not just on him, I figured Gotham was something that is short—a short way of saying the big city. And I think that their efforts are aimed at a new way of running cities. And it’s important to understand that the world is increasingly urbanized. And within a few years, 70 percent of the world’s people will live in cities. And so, therefore, the future of cities, how cities are governed, will really determine the future of our planet. And so, I was trying to sort of capture a pithy title, but at least like get people to think, “What’s he talking about? What’s this mean?”
I go into the impact and the effects of urban renewal on the modern American city, which I think most people today who are dealing with local politics really have no sense of the key role that government, the federal government especially, have played in the modern city. And the urban renewal really started in 1949 with the Housing Act that Harry Truman got passed, the Housing Act that had as its goal a decent living quarters for all American families, but which, in essence, became the financier of the razing of all of—many central city areas, so the inner cities, because it financed the governments, local governments, beginning to clear land. “Slum clearance,” it was called at the time. And it was supposed to not only clear slums, but then also rebuild housing.
Well, it cleared slums, but it largely built commercial developments. You know, it was responsible for civic centers in Hartford and St. Paul. It was responsible for all of the development that went around Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It razed most of downtown Atlanta. Urban renewal became the process by which African Americans and Latinos were removed from many inner-city areas. However, because housing, sufficient housing, wasn’t built for them, many were then forced into neighboring communities that previously had been all white, then became integrated, then became black and brown, then became the new ghettos. So all they did was push the ghettos further out into the other rings around the central areas of the cities.
Throughout the 1930s and the 1940s, as the federal government, through the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration, was helping to ensure the growth of America’s suburbs, the federal government’s own policies for—underwriting policies were racially based. They specifically said that African Americans and Mexicans and other people of color lowered property values, and therefore you should not—the federal government would not insure homes that were financed to African Americans and Latinos.
The result was the growth of the all-white suburbs. And I mention in the book that some 300 private home subdivisions that were erected from 1935 to 1947 in Queens, Nassau and Westchester counties of New York, 83 percent had written deed covenants against the sale of those homes to black people. You had the growth of completely all-white developments. Levittown, the largest housing development ever built in the United States, with—more than 70,000 people lived there in 1953. Not a single person in Levittown was black, because there was a deed covenant that the owners of Levittown had. You could not sell a house to a black person.
Chicago and all these cities. So, you had—eventually, court battles and open housing marches and protests eliminated this stuff. But this created this situation where entire generations of Americans, especially African Americans and Latinos, were excluded from home ownership. This was a federal policy. And then, of course, the building of places like Stuyvesant Town—again, no black people were allowed into Stuyvesant Town when it was built.
Stuyvesant Town was a huge development built by the Metropolitan insurance company, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, with the backing of Robert Moses, the great planning czar of New York City, and with city subsidies, but which specifically forbid any African Americans from being able to rent in the Stuyvesant Town development. So, you had this entire history of exclusion of African Americans and Latinos from the best housing in cities, and certainly from the suburbs. And so—and you had, during the ’50s and ’60s, race riots, on a regular basis, by whites attempting to prevent blacks from moving into their neighborhoods, several hundred in Chicago, several hundred in Philadelphia, in Detroit, constant attempts to maintain African Americans and Latinos in inner-city housing.
And then, the problem was that the federal government did not build enough affordable housing. So you had a constant housing crisis that has been here in the United States since the 1950s, a growth of more and more low-income families, but less and less low-income housing. And so you have the situation where, in New York City today, one-third of all renters in New York City are paying 50 percent of their income for their rent. One-third. Fifty percent of New York renters are paying at least a third or more of their income in rent. That’s rent burden. But a third are paying more than half of all the money they make just to put a roof over their heads. So this is the housing crisis that the big cities are facing.
this is all a switch from the cities being largely people of color to people of color, particularly poorer people, and poorer whites being pushed out to the suburbs, and now wealthier people seeing the cities as their domain and their playground.
the new technocratic class, the gentrification that has accelerated. And the point that I make is that after the riots of the ’60s and ’70s, the elites of America realized that they had to re-engineer the cities. They had to lure the middle and the upper classes back into the cities. And to do that, they needed to remove the existing residents of the cities and push them into the suburban rings, as is the fact in Paris or London or many of the other European cities, because the European cities were largely destroyed during World War II. They got to rebuild after World War II, and the pushed all their poor out. American cities didn’t experience the bombings of World War II, so it took longer for American capitalism to re-engineer its cities to push the poor out, which they’ve been doing more and more in recent decades.
The reality was that, in 2013, the people who were expected to be the real contenders for the race to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor—and remember, Michael Bloomberg had served three terms. He had overturned term limits. He had spent $250 million of his own money in three elections for mayor. And so, the expected victors were going to be either the City Council speaker at the time, Christine Quinn, or a former comptroller who had run against Bloomberg previously, Billy Thompson. Those were considered the front-runners. And then there was the second-tier candidates, which was the existing comptroller, John Liu, and the—and a former congressman, Anthony Wiener.
All of those were considered more likely to win the mayoral race than Bill de Blasio. But de Blasio somehow skyrocketed up quickly, largely because he was the main person who fought Michael Bloomberg’s changing of the charter to maintain—to end two-term limits, largely because he stood up against racial profiling and stop-and-frisk before any of the other candidates did in any measurable way, and largely because he saw, after Occupy Wall Street, that the issue of income inequality was a burning issue in America, and he latched onto the issue of income inequality, called it the moral crisis of our time, and, pretty much as a harbinger of what would later become the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, basically rallied people behind a crusade against income inequality, and therefore garnered support from all of the budding grassroots movements. The Fight for 15, he spoke at the first rally held of striking—of striking fast-food workers around the Fight for 15. And he rallied the parents fighting to maintain their public schools from being closed by Bloomberg. And he rallied the immigrant rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement, really, to propel him into office.
And he, as public advocate, you know, actually spoke at a rally there, right. So, in all these ways, he identified himself with the grassroots movements that were rising in New York and across the country at the time. And I think that’s what made it possible for him to win his come-from-behind victory.
de Blasio’s family is an interesting—his father, Warren Wilhelm, and his uncle, Donald Wilhelm, were both intellectuals. Both went to Yale, and as de Blasio’s son, Dante, also has gone to Yale. And both were initially New Deal liberals. The uncle, Donald Wilhelm, actually became a—apparently, a CIA operative, researcher and operative, for many years, eventually went to Iran, where he became a confidant of the shah of Iran and ghostwrote the shah of Iran’s autobiography. And Warren Wilhelm was a World War II hero, lost a leg in World War II in the Pacific and came back and tried to work for the government.
His father was, Warren Wilhelm. But both his father and his mother became victimized by the McCarthyite period. Both were suspected of being sympathetic to communism. Both were, essentially, not allowed to have government jobs. And as a result, Warren Wilhelm became a very bitter man, because of that experience, and eventually became an alcoholic and left his family, his children, and eventually committed suicide. And this has been part of this—I think, part of the—what affected de Blasio, in terms of his understanding, that both of his parents had been victimized by the McCarthy witch hunt.
And part of the transformation of Bill de Blasio is his name change, that he—starting in high school, because of the estrangement of his father, from his mother, who was much more radical—his mother really was a socialist—that he then decides to change his name to his mother’s maiden name. And he not only gets rid of Warren, because his parents had always called him Bill anyway, but he also gets rid of Wilhelm, and he changes his name to Bill de Blasio.
I think that that really happened earlier on. And it is clear, because I remember John Wilhelm, who is a cousin of Bill de Blasio, the former president of UNITE HERE, the hotel and garment workers’ union. John Wilhelm says he met Bill de Blasio only in 1999, because their families had been estranged, had not had much contact for years. And back then, Bill de Blasio introduces himself and says, “Hi, I’m your cousin. I’m Bill de Blasio.” And John Wilhelm says, “Oh, well, fine. I do remember that there was a section of my family that I didn’t have much contract with, but how did you get to be de Blasio?” And Bill de Blasio explains that when he was in high school, he was reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and he began to question what the names mean and last names mean, and that he had decided, back then, that he wanted to change his name from Wilhelm to de Blasio. His mother’s name. His mother was Italian.
And interestingly, his mother wrote a book about the Italian resistance fighters against German—against Germans during World War II. His mother was very steeped in the communist and socialist movements of her homeland of Italy and, I guess, imbued some of that in de Blasio, because the first place he went to visit when he became mayor was he went to Italy with his wife and children.
De Blasio started out as a—right out of—when he finished NYU and Columbia Graduate School, he went into the movements in support of the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador and was very much a leftist in the 1980s, late 1980s, but then gets recruited by the campaign that is starting for David Dinkins to be elected mayor of New York. So he begins his involvement in political—in electoral politics in the Dinkins campaign and eventually becomes a low-level aide to Mayor David Dinkins. That’s where he really starts making the shift from radical politics to electoral politics, and subsequently becomes much more involved in the efforts to build independent political parties. He was actually involved in one of the early campaigns of the New Party, which was the predecessor to the Working Families Party. And so, he begins to get involved in electoral campaigns that way and does so well that the Democratic Party folks eventually ask him to run Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign in 2000. And that’s where he begins to enter the world of establishment Democratic Party politics.
He delayed his endorsement for many months, insisting that he wanted to see what Hillary Clinton’s platform was on income inequality. And I think he took enormous heat from that, from the press, from the Democratic Party establishment, and because, really, his political perspective was much more in line with Bernie Sanders. But as the mayor of New York City, for him not to support the candidacy of Hillary Clinton for president was going to doom him within the Democratic Party establishment. So he made a choice, that I might not have made, others might not have made, to say, “I will hold out my endorsement, but I will eventually endorse Hillary Clinton.” And he did so.
But I think that that’s part of the problem with de Blasio. He’s always been very much attuned and supportive of the grassroots and the progressive movement, yet he’s always had a foot within the Democratic Party establishment. And some people could say that about Bernie Sanders today, that he’s not decided to go off in an independent candidacy, but remains part of the Democratic Party leadership, despite how he was treated during the campaign.
Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who is the new mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. His father died office, Chokwe Lumumba.
he initially did not win the seat to—the race to replace his father, but then, subsequently, won the new election, which was an important win because his father was really instituting major changes in the South, in Jackson, Mississippi—we’re not talking about the North now—and so that he was able to win election was an important moment in assuring that it was a movement, not just a personality, that was involved.
I think the key issue that this new movement is looking at is, one, building sustainable cities. They’re all—all of the progressives are very much into sustainable development in the cities, the issue of police accountability, the issue of affordable housing, although I’m not—the record of several of these people, including Peduto in Pittsburgh, and the Seattle situation and the New York situation are not good. There’s still a long way to go. But they all are committed to building more affordable housing, and also raising the income levels of the lowest sectors of the society. And I think the—all of the reforms, whether it’s a $15-an-hour wage or whether it’s paid sick time, whether it’s family leave—all of these things are improving the situation of the lowest rung of city dwellers, and therefore raising the city as a whole. I think those are all aspects of their main thrust, and, of course, immigrant rights and sanctuary cities, which I believe are now going to become the cutting edge of the battles between Washington and urban America. It is going to be over sanctuary cities and the DREAMers and immigrant rights. And we’re pretty soon going to see not only legal battles, we may see like troops in the streets on some of these issues.
I think what you’re getting is you’re getting to the point where the president of the nation can’t go into major city without enormous protests occurring. even though he comes from one, right. But how many times has he been in New York City since he became elected president? And because he knows that he’s so hated at this point in these cities, that he’s not welcome there. You just heard the mayor of Boston say he’s not welcome in Boston. And so that that is a pretty bad situation, when the president of a country can’t go to any of the major cities without huge protests breaking out against him. So I think that is a sort of a sign of where we’re heading under the new Trump administration.
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Juan González
author of the new book, Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America’s Tale of Two Cities. He was a staff writer at the New York Daily News from 1987 to 2016. He is now a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. His other books include Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media and Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse.
— source democracynow.org 2017-09-10