A roadmap of opportunities for Zohran Mamdani

Dear Mayor-elect Mamdani,

Your decisive victory in the mayor’s race has prompted your opponents—the privileged super-rich and their lobbyists at City Hall—to call you an “extremist,” a “socialist,” or, in Donald Trump’s ridiculous view, a “communist.” Your affordability (i.e. consumer protection) program is so popular that it’s expanding nationally.

Free bus fares already exist in several US municipalities, including Kansas City, Tucson and Alexandria, Virginia. Proposing five city-run grocery stores in New York’s “food deserts” is hardly radical. You could even structure these stores as cooperatives (consumer-owned), as has existed in many communities in the United States for years.

Your rent stabilization proposal is similar to what several major cities have already adopted to protect powerless tenants from greedy landlords, especially today’s very large corporate landlords with their contractual peonage in the fine print. Additionally, some cities in the United States offer partially publicly subsidized child care. New Mexico just launched a statewide universal child care program.

Social democratic countries in Europe have long established even broader social safety nets. What big business really doesn’t like is you projecting a consistent voice for working people, the poor and the powerless in what is considered the financial capital of America. Long-standing corporate statism at the local, state and federal levels has rarely been challenged by the bipartisan duopoly.

Indeed, President Trump has become a corporate socialist par excellence. As the New York Times reported on November 25, the Trump administration has de facto partially nationalized a whole series of private companies for ulterior political reasons, under the artificial banner of national security.

These companies include Intel, US Steel, Westinghouse, Vulcan Elements and MP Materials. This invites corruption in other ways, such as a donation from Trump in exchange for a cherished administration investment. The stealthy Central Intelligence Agency now has a venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, ostensibly to fund commercial technologies to strengthen the U.S. intelligence community and Department of Defense.

Your program is obviously creative and timely. But critics wonder: Will he be able to find the funds to make it work?

A great way would be to support pending legislation to end the impermissible daily electronic remittance of tens of millions of dollars in securities trading taxes (a tiny progressive sales tax of one-tenth of 1 percent on stock sales). You have yet to sign a bill that would end the rebate and specifically allocate $16 billion or more per year for public transportation, education, health care and environmental protection.

Even former Mayor Mike Bloomberg supports the idea, saying during his presidential campaign that there should be a 0.1% tax on all financial transactions to generate the revenue needed to combat wealth inequality, and supporting other measures – such as speed limits on exchanges – 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 in an April 17, 2020, New York Times op-ed, Robert Rubin — a top banker and former Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton — urged raising revenues “on a highly incremental basis by raising corporate taxes, restoring individual rates, and repealing pass-through preferences by imposing a “financial transactions tax” (emphasis added).

You are calling for an increase in taxes on the very rich and big businesses. This is also the case for 80% of the American people. Rather mainstream!

As for your plans to make housing more affordable and available, you should check out the National Cooperative Bank in Washington, DC, which provides loans to consumer cooperative models in 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 “secretive” when it comes to working closely with outside allies. (See “Les Incommunicados” by Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein). You may wish to liaise with those groups whose ideas, experience and members can be of great assistance in what will likely be a turbulent mandate given the status quo of big business.

You led a brilliant campaign, both substantively and tactically, and you have the promise of being a historic mayor. May you be guided by the wise adage that “None of us is smarter than all of us.”

Anticipate your thoughtful response.

Nader is a consumer rights advocate and author of numerous books, from “Unsafe at Any Speed” in 1966 to the recent “Let’s Start a Revolution: Tools to Displace the Corporate State and Build a Country that Works for the People.” A version of this essay appeared in Common Dreams.