a new york city deputy mayor for a strategic policy initiatives as my guest for the entire program that's this time on the laura flanders show the place where the people who say it can't be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it  joining us is someone who as they say is in the room as the decisions are being made fresh from a starring but all too short appearance on this show last month i am happy to welcome back new york's deputy mayor for strategic policy initiatives j philip johnson welcome back thank you for having you were hit on the our economy show i just want to say that it has been seen globally and i've gotten feedback who is that guy how can we get him to come and work in our city talk about that bloomberg approach and how is different from yours luring billionaires hasn't been your strategic initiative well the mayor believes and ministration believes that the past thirty years have been an economic disaster for the vast majority of american workers and communities and while corporate c e o s income have disparities from their workers have gone from th two hundred and eleven average the vast majority of workers haven't seen their incomes improve at all in thirty years and last year about one percent of new york's population earned over forty percent of all income for every worker in the for every family in the cities bloomberg was saying is not unique to him and a lot of people believe people with money make money money trickles down you want to bring billionaires because they'll make jobs and spread cash around that's what happens well for the finance sector has gone from seven percent of the economy in the one thousand nine hundred and seventy s to over forty percent now and the economy is in what mainstream economists call slow growth and has been for a very are consumers if they're not doing well the economy's not going to do well now the finance sector may find ways to enrich themselves and charge people a lot of money for everything from even accessing their money three dollars to go to an m machine it costs them pennies to actually issue that money but we should not confuse what happens on wall street with how the economy is functioning overall what is your approach how do you do it differently and have in all the other initiatives kind of been tried no they haven't and new york city has roughly fifty one billion dollars in goods and services that we purchase every year so we're working to actually use our procurement power to help create good jobs to help reward and lower companies that treat workers well to promote new forms of ownership of enterprise and ownership of assets where the owners are the communities in the workers themselves so that distribution is more fair more equitable and that's good for the economy overall how do you get around this you speaking are singing our song on this program we've we've covered many cities that have been trying to do this kind of alternative model of development and one of the things that they often run up against are competition rules that were not put in place by them but exist even at the level of the w t o saying you can't discriminate against people who are hiring different sorts of folks or companies coming from internationally like you can't discriminate to favor the local how do you get around those rules well in the case of minority and women owned businesses we actually do disparity studies we actually show that there are certain kinds part we if you are a business and one of the seven surrounding counties the new york city you can be included in our minority and women business own program but the logic is really simple and that is  eighty five percent of our population in new york are women or people of color and opening opportunities for these folks to have a business to get a contract with the city in the city where they pay taxes in the city where they live is actually fair yeah the other thing is we encourage partnerships of them w b ease with companies in other places where encouraging joint ventures we're encouraging companies that have good labor practices good environmental practices to come to new york to bid in new york one of the things we're working on internally is actually being able to identify companies that hire from our job training centers that have collateral benefits i call it that actually are good citizens for the city so that when a procurement officer says look here are two companies that on price are competitive roughly but this other company is actually hiring people coming out of rikers is actually hiring folks from our high schools that has an additional benefit that another company that doesn't honor those things doesn't have so why don't we favor that company so we're looking at changing procurement rules to reflect our goals and you believe you can get away with that legally i'm all for it but i lawyers think so all right we're going to keep at it the mayor and st lady announce j philip thompson is the city's new deputy mayor st policy initiatives thompson will oversee many of the city's signature initiatives including affordable housing sustainability education and health care access talk a bit about why you chose to do this job you touched on it in your last appearance but you were pretty  thought leadership and practice in different places doing field research and yet you listened you used to come to bill de blasio as appeals and came back to new york city why i've known the mayor for a long time we've talked about issues for a long time and he said why don't you come to new york and make it a laboratory let's take some of these ideas and put them into practice and create models and kind of like spread the gospel and i want that to happen in new york so that's hard to turn what are you most proud of having done so far actually getting staff and city hall and in the agencies to understand what's lacking in our democracy a nd understand why it's lacking and why democracy is actually a pathway not only for improving our economy but also improving and restoring our democracy i think we're making progress on that and i think that economic democracy was actually the original american dream and the slave owners overturned it economic democracy was part of the civil war and part of reconstruction after the civil war and the rest ration of the confederacy overturned it so elaborate on that a little bit the th amendment which says was in the chattel slavery in one thousand nine hundred and sixty three also said no more involuntary servitude involuntary servitude in eight fifty three dollars was also called wage slavery at that time and the idea that a person should work for another person because they have no other means of survival that was considered in one thousand nine hundred and sixty three involuntary servitude and the belief was every worker or a forty acres in rural area forty acres and a mule was a popular slogan at the time that people thought they was part of the th amendment it just wasn't just about ending cha slavery for black folks it was actually uplifting all workers that was the goal all of those meanings of the th amendment the th amendment and so forth were overturned by a conservative supreme court and conservative government after the violent suppression of black folks who couldn't vote four hundred years after the civil war of progressive whites who were imprisoned and also repress their the civil war and then there was a movement called the populist movement right on the heels of this when poor wife farmers poor black farmers again said no we want to fight for economic democracy for equity for freedom for a chance for ownership in this economy and that is what led to racial segregation when they ran a candidate for president in one thousand nine hundred and six on a progressive party platform populist party platform the supreme court did plus he versus ferguson that literally use federal government to physically separate poor blacks poor whites and that is what created a national system of racial segregation so this is been a fight over and over again something the civil rights movement has was fully aware of and fifty four brown versus board of education lawsuit which brought about racial integration of schools if you go back and read the c p s amica brief they said the reason we have racial segregation is to divide workers poor white workers from black workers that's why it exists in the st place that's why we have to end it in schools so this is been a long fight in america if you would a pain in broad strokes your initiatives today what would you call them how are they different from what we've seen before and is it just a tweaking of the system that you're talking about or a whole new system well i think what happened with the new deal which was created actually  in opposition as you said to this notion of laissez faire capitalism or business can solve all problems free enterprise will solve all problems other failure the new deal though made major compromises that actually i think we're grappling with to this day mostly around race and class and gender yeah and particularly race black and latino workers agricultural workers domestic workers were excluded from labor protections unionism when it was built in this country was done on a segregated basis in the main so workers solidarity never really emerge martin luther king in one thousand nine hundred and sixty one went to the a f l cio national convention and said i will in the civil rights movement we don't need to movements of poor people fighting for the same thing i'll bring forty million black people into the labor movement then we can have our social democracy only for seventy two dollars union supported king and that and we saw the labor movement decline steadily after that when nixon and reagan continued to use race to divide folks and what does trump doing now exactly that and so i think the problems that that more public in gage meant more public ownership economic democracy have faced in this country from the beginning have had sensually had to do with race and now gender to me it's a good thing women are beginning to say hey we want our rights in the economy as well as everywhere else and so i think there's more opportunity now than ever before to maybe win on these issues but we see trump using the border crisis immigration everything in his power to try and resurrect and revive that traditional narrow racist individual istic kind of approach to the economy and restore he's a billionaire billionaire is going to be the savior is a poor white folks even though there's no basis in fact or reality about that he appeals to people's emotions and that legacy of racism to say someone else is out to get something away from you your hardworking decent person these other people in no good how with this huge expanse of both knowledge and perspective do you seek to affect a city and why do you think a city is a place of the kind of macro change that you're i think talking about well let me say st of all that i think cities are great learning laboratories and almost the new deal before it became national policy was local policy was merely guardia it was many other cities who experimented with different ways to improve the economy different ways to improve housing conditions different ways to improve health condition so i think cities are that cities are where universities tend to be where knowledge tends to be cultivated developed and so these experiments are scrutinized and evaluated and then out of that come programs so i think cities are great for that the other thing i think is that thinking of the economy as somehow a system that has an internal logic that operates all by itself separate from society and politics is an illusion and i think we've had enough experience around the world with various forms of socialism various forms of capitalism to actually say for this kind of market a sector of the economy say health care this approach doesn't work well this other approach does in housing it's structured differently this kind of approach works well we've seen this other approach doesn't i think modern economies have to be approached that way and what's most important is that the population is involved in setting goals what are we what to come out of our economic policies out of our government policies and cities are the best place for local citizens to really engage in what it means to run and determine your own economic future which is tied to your educational system is tied to your social welfare system side everything else so how's that going here in new york how are people participating in it and to people feel insofar as you're aware that something different is going on we're talking to a lot of local groups in the city about how do we stand collective bargaining at the workplace which has been around since the eight hundred and sixty dollars s to collective bargaining around consumer purchasing like how do we bring communities and labor unions together to say we're all buying cable t v we're all buying cell phones many of us are buying diapers why don't we all come together in the goshi with the internet providers be they amazon or big box stores and everyone else to get those prices down and exercise that power as workers and communities together and let's take a portion of that savings and use of community organizing or to fund politics so that politicians don't have to go to wealthy donors in order just in order to get reelected but they can be more accountable to the people now this isn't just pie in the sky you have experience of some of this particularly around the kind of group purchasing describe some of your what i want to call them experiments exactly but experiences well this is something that is not new either jewish housewives in the lower east side and one hundred years ago started consumer organizing against kosher butchers who were overcharging for meat and there lots and lots of examples of this in the u s and all around the world a bunch of folks in boulder colorado fifteen years ago five thousand dollars of them came together and bought cell phones and they got six hundred thousand dollars a year from a cell phone company for that collective contract and thirteen years ago knights of residence tested the market what if we bought cable together public housing residents they got offers of over thirty million  from cable companies if they would just do that one thing and so this is something that has been tried in many other places i think with big data with online purchasing where the vendor companies  they already have the data they can tell any of us who buys what block by block where they buy it when they buy their data can be a powerful organizing tool when it's in the hands of the people so one of the things we're doing now is  unpopular education people need to own their data ninety seven percent of facebook's profits last year were selling people's data without their permission or knowledge people need to own that data it can be powerful the digital economy can be used as a social an organizing tool or liberating tool it doesn't have to be just for corporations to extract but we have to organize and educate ourselves to take it and we have to do it fast well that's right new  and fifty plan one in y c with thirteen volumes of specific policy proposals and ideas about what should the future of transportation be in new york what how should new york deal with climate change how should new york deal with affordable housing how should new york deal with change in the economy all that's written it was submitted to the un and it doesn't mean that these are the only ideas that make sense but it means here's a vision for what urban america for what cities around the world really are engaged with two last questions the green new deal some people are afraid that the right will seize on and sell people on the idea that it is a stick to beat the poor with and small businesses forcing what's your alternative for that well on the issue of a green new deal or greening cities climate change is happening it's inevitable new york city has over five hundred miles of coastline sea wat coastline the oceans are expected to rise at least six feet in this century and so this is something we have to deal with it's not a choice we have to deal with it we are  we have to reduce carbon we see the changes in climate we see the changes in weather buildings are about forty percent of our carbon load in the important power plant is closing in a few years as twenty percent of our energy we have to retrofit buildings i think a lot of the reaction against this is because people don't this is not a system yet how do you easily retrofit your buildings not the money that it will pay for itself in reduced energy costs over time but banks are used to it financial institutions aren't used to it the companies that actually can do it they're not here or there not many of them whereas the work force for this how is this going to work germany created an agency to actually work on these problems and they've been around for decades and it's worked so we have to do that in order to make this something easy and simple logical for building owners but the necessit questions and i think it can create jobs for a generation when we talk about these problems america's infrastructure is crumbling i read the national association of civil engineers reports every year it's not popular reading but they're far more radical th c or anyone else is talking about green because they just detail all of our infrastructure problems that are happening and they're calling for five trillion of them of immediate investments to maintain our infrastructure great opportunities for making new york beautiful for eliminating poverty in the course of dealing with these issues for really engaging the citizenry together in a common effort and enterprise it can be great for our democracy so there  upsides as far as prison i don't work specifically on this my main goal with the mass incarceration is actually let's create job opportunities for people who are at  risk of going into prison at risk of come over when they come out of prison i mentioned earlier that one in four or so when our construction projects will be from vulnerable neighborhoods the construction trades have created a program for people coming out of prison so that they can go in and become carpenters and other trades and we need to do a whole lot more of that kind of thing terms of writers shutting down and building new prisons most communities are accepting  the construction of new prisons but to me that is the beginning what we really need to focus on is how do we minimize the number of people who are in prison in the st place when people w in prison how do they learn how to reshape their lives how do they get an education how do they get mental health services if they need it was a vision for that how can communities interact more with prisons there's a prison in alameda county  california where it's totally off the grid and the prisoners are trained on how to do green infrastructure work while in prison and when they come out they have marketable skills how do we begin to do that in our prisons you mentioned alameda my last question who do you call when you want an air to talk to who are your allies globally or nationally who are doing this kind of work at the level that you are because you're i don't say you're pretty unique i would say you are unique  i'm sure you have allies and colleagues so for many years i've worked with people in the basque region of spain i have many friends in britain i've worked for many years with the global alliance for banking on values i've worked in south america quite a bit we had thirty businesses come from colombia two weeks ago to partner with them w b ease here in new york city and it's around the same framework how do you avoid civil war reemerging in colombia well let's have economic democracy in colombia i work with tri otos in the netherlands and global alliance for banking on values it's  continents now and it's a movement amongst banks how do we actually finance economic democracy how do we make it transparent for banks so that people can see when you put a deposit in my bank here's the company we put i invest in here's what they pay their workers here's how they treat the environment own own your be responsible every dollar is like a vote so how do you actually vote for what you believe in so there are many many i'm learning more every day cities around the world much we always reached out to the new government in mexico city the chief of staff of the new president has lost a low card in us who himself was governor of mature worker who is very much a believer in these kinds of approach so i think there's a move it around the world that's on the way the u s is a little behind you cheering me up and i thank you for that and i will continue to cover what you're doing and what's happening in this city and cities that you mention are many of them already on  check out the continued reporting that we're doing here on economic democracy and community wealth building and i want to thank you so much diplomatically for having them coming it's a pleasure likewise you watching othe