Mainstreaming Black Power

by Tom Adam Davies

In 1975, leading executives of the financial institutions that held most of the city’s mountainous debt orchestrated an extraordinary and radical restructuring of city finances that drastically reduced the city’s social spending and public assistance programs. This episode not only highlighted the power of entrenched white economic interests but, in hindsight, as political scientist David Harvey has explained, proved a pivotal moment in global economic history. As the first major example of the kind of aggressive corporate-interest–driven economic restructuring that compelled the retrenchment of state responsibility for social welfare provision, it was a landmark step on the road toward the global neoliberal economic revolution led by the Reagan administration and other conservative governments worldwide during the 1980s and afterward.

NYC