Joint Economic Committee, Subcommittee on Economic Progress, “Stateand Local Public Facility Needs and Financing: Volume II,” 89th Cong., 2nd sess.,December 1966

In short, the bank had to pay interest on the $1 million, butcould only earn interest on the $770,000.

In short, the bank had to pay interest on the $1 million, butcould only earn interest on the $770,000.

No houses were constructed norwas the computer factory

Matthews & Wright was un-derwriting other huge tax-exempt bond deals inabout thirty U.S. municipalities. These bond is-sues amounted to a fantastic $2.3 billion. The dealswere primarily in poor communities on the main-land that, like Guam, were in great need of hous-ing and financial assistance. Mann and Matthews& Wright were able to get away with such razzle-dazzle because municipal bonds, unlike corporatesecurities, were not reviewed by the U.S. Securities

Another decentralization process that hasbeen occurring overmostof this century and is closely related to the interregional shifts ineconomic activity is American industry's investing in productionfacilities abroad

and testimony to earlier statements made by Senator Kefauver in 1947. " Thecontrol of American business is steadily being transferred from localcommunities to a few large cities in which central managers decidethe policies and the fate of the far-flung enterprises they control. ”Though the tendencies toward what has become known as " externalcontrol” are not a central issue in this study, it is a process found implicit in the regional changes taking place in theU.S. in recent times.

The fact that the process is of more concern todaythan it has been in the past is not only due to the ManufacturingBelt's absolute decline in manufacturing employment in the late1960's and early 1970's. The context of the decline is important, i.e. ,the 1970's are an era of scarce resources

is important to realize that the growth of theSunbelt is in reality the growth of only a few key states includingTexas, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona, and that within thesestates the growth process manifests itself only in a few large urbancomplexes

The traditional manufacturingheartland of the United States, defined as the New England, MidAtlantic, and EastNorth Central regions by the Bureau of Census, hasbeen losing ground to the more peripheral areas of the Nation

This change can be interpreted asthe diffusion of economic activity from the core region of the countryto the periphery (Norton and Rees, 1979) .

-23.0

CHANGES WITHIN

West was led by the tertiary and thequaternarysectors.” In the same veinMiernyk (1976) recently tested the so -calledClark -Fisher hypothesis that suggests rises in per capita income as aregional economy advances from specialization in the primary orextractive sector through the secondary or manufacturing sector to thetertiary or service sector. For 15 southern states between 1940 and1975 Miernyk found that “ per capita income decreases as dependenceon manufacturing increasesand per capita income increases as relativedependence on trade and service employment increases" (Miernyk1976 , p. 22)

Another alternative is to make it clear that the Federal Government will not rescue cities from default, even in the case of the mostsevereemergencies. Evenas a statement of national policy it would bedifficult to make this believable with the history of New York City,Lockheed and Chrysler.

and too little may have been doneabout city suburb fiscal disparities, but the trend toward more Statefiscal responsibility has continued

The secondway in which the State role is changing is in the continuing shift of financial responsibility from local to State governments.

abrogating their responsibilitytoward urban governments is debatable, but the drift toward reducingthe importance of State government in the intergovernmental processseems real enough

This policy of direct Federal-local relations is not inconsistent with theview from some State capitals (e.g. , New York and Ohio) that cityfinancial emergencies are as much Federal as State governmentresponsibilities

In 1977, localgovernments were directly receiving 27 percent of total Federal aidto State and local governments, as compared with 13 percent in 1970

Total grants-in - aid havequadrupled since 1970, but much of this growth has been in directFederal to local grants, with the States being bypassed

Finally, relocationgrants and labor marketinformationsystems are perfectly consistentwith such a strategy in that they facilitate the outmovement

Hence , subsidies to hold businesses in a region are not an appropriate part of acompensation strategy, if it is known that the business will Îeave (orcease operations at present levels) when the subsidy is removed .“ Transition ” grants to States with an overdeveloped public sector,such as New York , are appropriate if they are tied to longer termreductions in the level of public sector activity. Capital grants torenew the city's infrastructure are also appropriate, if the infrastructure investment is based on a " shrinkage ” plan.

It would acceptthe notion that market forces are affecting a reallocation of populationand income within the country and attempt to compensate the mostfinancially pressed governments and families caught in this transitionperiod. The goal would be to protect particularly the low income bysubsidizing both the provision of public service and temporary jobopportunities while the emptying out process goes on . Public servicejob programs, categorical grants in the health and education area andFederal relief of welfare financing would be key elements of such aprogram

Such programs offer State-local governments the kind of flexibilityneeded to cover some of the public service deficits and unemploymentrelated costs of decline, and fit the criterion of being compensatory

. Eventually, as growth in the resourcebase continuesto slow , growth in the public sector in the Northeast will also slow. Theproblemwith this line of reasoning is that shrinkage in the publicsector in the Northwill likely mean a cutting of service levels in thoseareas where expenditures are greatest - health , education, and welfare.This may imply that much of thepainful burden of the transition to alower level of public services will be borne by lower income residentsin the declining regions.1

Reversal of the Northerneconomic decline,both in the central cities and the region ; increased Federal assistanceto the declining region during the transition period ; a strengtheningof the fiscal position of the poorest local jurisdictions through a grantsprogram and Federal welfare assumption, and fiscal planning in thedeclining region to bring about a better balance between the size ofthe public sector and the size of the economic base available to supportthat public sector

Ohio

Garnick argues that these regional shifts in national employmentshares reflect substantialdeclines in large Northern Central cities,with central counties of the large SMSA's in particular having beensubject to absolute declines in employment (especially manufacturing)at least since 1960.99

To theextent that local property tax systems include industrial machinery,equipment, etc., the shift of income composition from manufacturingto services may have depressed the level of property tax revenues.

In the Northern Tier,where reliance is greater on property taxation, even the tax basegrowth generated by inflationary increases in income will not be fullyor easily captured.88

where there is heavy reliance on sales taxes, a combination of realgrowth and inflation will automatically generate substantial newrevenues for expansion of the public sector

Southern States tend to be more State governmentdominant, hence there is heavier reliance on nonproperty taxation.

Where local government involvement in the delivery of services isstrong, there tends to be much heavier use of the property tax

distinct and importantdifferences between the regions. Southern States are more heavilyreliant on sales taxes and Northern States on property taxes (seeTable V - 6 ).

TABLE V -4. - EXPENDITURE AND EMPLOYMENT CHARACTERISTICS OF STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS, BYREGION IN 1977

But perhaps the major regional difference inexpenditure structure is that the Northern States spend proportionately more for public welfare. Only one Northern State - Indianaallocates as little to public welfare as the Southern mean of 11.9percent.

chapter is to describe and analyze the linkagebetween regional variationsin economic and demographic change andState and local government finances

plant is oldest, energyis more costly and labor costs and taxes tend to be high

Plant and employment expansionstend to occur where comparative costs are lowest — in the growingregions, suburbs, and nonmetropolitan areas

ing costs are higher and where physical plant isoldest (i.e. , in decliningregions generally and in central cities specifically )

Even with the strong recovery, manycentral cities have not regained former levels of economic activity asrapidly ashave suburban areas, and cities in the Northeast and industrial Midwest have recovered more slowly than cities in other partsof the country. This unbalanced growth is not widely appreciated andits fiscal implications have not been carefully considered .

This distinction between social, economic,and fiscal distress is an important one. Newark, New Jersey, ranks highest insocial and economic distress, both in relation to its adjoining suburbs and to theother cities included in our analysis, yet Newark has a reputation for conservativefiscal practices

Only ten of thetwenty-nine hardship cities, or approximately 35 percent, account for 40 percentor more of their SMSA total population

Table 3 contains thirteen SMSA's where both thecity and its suburbs are in the second or first quintiles of their respective interareahardship indexes. These are cases of central cities, characterized by relatively ex-treme hardship conditions, adjoining suburbs with similar characteristics

As indicated earlier, it is in these metropolitan areas that flight to the suburbs islikely to be exacerbated as out-migration from the central city causes a furtherdeterioration in the social and economic conditions of the central

BLE 3Quintile Rankings of Cities and Suburbs on the IndividualCentral City and Suburban Hardship Indexes

e. A big part of the reason that Hartfordranks third on the hardship index is that its suburbs are relatively

Tocqueville meth-od of knowing something firsthand about different metropolitan areas will quick-ly point out that although Hartford does indeed have problems, the city does notface as deep and serious a condition of urban blight as Newark or Cleveland

The top three cities in the table-Newark, Cleveland, and Hartford-showup clearly as problem cases in that, besides their hardship ranking, the centralcity in every case accounts for less than 40 percent of the area's population, whichwould be expected to weaken their influence in dealing with matters of areawideconcern

helped commercial banks protect themselvesagainst increased exposure to sour loans to countries in the Global South as well as to the air-line, retail, and real estate sectors (Jaffe and Lautin, p. 224), and, not incidentally, sharpenedthe urban fiscal crisis

How might attention to the investment activities of the local state challenge or support prevailingaccounts that trace financialization back to the 1970s, and as a response to the breakdown of siloedcapital and credit markets

public author-ities with the power to issue debt.

Given federalprice limits and the NIMBY opposition against public housing, I suspect that a similar pattern ofdevelopment and process of redlined monetization occurred in cities around the country

Throughout the 1950s, the United Statistical Associates, Inc., tracked the municipal bondholdings of insurance companies, some of the major purchasers of new housing authority bonds.Issued by local housing authorities through sales coordinated by the federal government, thebonds propelled the postwar expansion of public housing projects throughout the country. As theWall Street Journal observed in June 1951, it was the “unique feature of unconditional govern-ment backing” that made the bonds “an entirely new factor in the tax-exempt securities field.”

verting the will of the electorate by creating special taxing authorities or fee structures to replace general obligation fund raising?

the result was narrowed room for political and policy actors to maneuver. Intotal, this suggests that the 1980s witnessed not so much a sweeping intellectual or ideologicalsea change, but instead a tentative, pragmatic acceptance of a new policymaking paradigm, thewatchwords of which – embraced heartily by Cleveland’s Reagan Democrats – privileged marketforces rather than enduring but subtle – and normatively bounded – forms of collective initiative

As one of Voinovich’s private consultants put it, echoing the Reagan Administration’s businessworkshops, “businesses need equity capital to start-up or expand.”

Voinovich Administration claimed, leveraged $672.9 million ofprivate investment and ensured the creation of 3,973 jobs and the retention of 7,875 more

Voinovich Administration claimed, leveraged $672.9 million ofprivate investment and ensured the creation of 3,973 jobs and the retention of 7,875 more

As one of Voinovich’s private consultants put it, echoing the Reagan Administration’s businessworkshops, “businesses need equity capital to start-up or expand.”

Target Area Investment Program (TAIP

Voinovich had spoken passionatelyagainst the overuse of tax abatements, but – spurred on by members of the Roundtable – hebecame an aggressive supporter of local, state and national Enterprise Zone legislation

the acceleration toward stimulating private development was notprimarily driven by a Republican’s ideological faith in markets but instead a pragmatic mayor’sconcerns about safeguarding the budget

City of Cleveland must be on guard that it does not assume the position of trying to cover thecosts of programs which have been deleted by a higher level of government. With the city’srecent history of fiscal distress, we must all constantly be on guard that we do not over-commit

A strike in 1981 crippled the port for a month before the President of Liberia dismissed the strikers.[4] In 1990, during the First Liberian Civil War, President Samuel Doe was captured at the port by Prince Johnson and later executed elsewhere

David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the AmericanWorking Class (London: Verso, 1991)

Herbert Hill, “The Problem of Race in American Labor History,” Reviews in Amer-ican History 24, no. 2 (June 1996): 180–208; David Roediger, “Labor in WhiteSkin: Race and Working Class History,” in The Year Left 3: Reshaping the US Left,ed. Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1988); George P. Rawick,From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT: Green-wood, 1972); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made(New York: Pantheon Books, 1974)

Herbert Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” in Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays inAmerican Working-Class and Social History (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1976); Bruce Laurie, The Working People of Philadel-phia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Wilentz, ChantsDemocratic; David Montgomery, “The Working Classes of the Preindustrial City,1780–1830,” Labor History 9, no. 1 (1983): 3–22

6 Foner, "Tom Paine's Republic: Radical Ideology and Social Change," ibidi87-232.

Alice Mah's second monograph, Port Cities andGlobal Legacies, interrogates the ‘legacies of radicalism’ in the port cities of Marseille, Liverpool, and New Orleans,finding that ‘grassroots radicalism and solidarity are (still) rooted in old working-class and migrant communities’,despite the loss of employment. However, the strength of popular political action has declined, and these legacies ofradicalism can actually be deeply exclusionary on the basis of race and class (Mah, 2014).

There were also practical reasons to keep up the appearance ofworld power. With so much unfinished colonial business from HongKong to the Falklands, where predatory neighbours harboured expan-sive ambitions, great-power prestige was a valuable asset, and perhapseven vital to a dignified exit

Britain would remain at the centre of anempire of both influence and identity, the head of a civic association (theCommonwealth) and a ‘British world’ held together in part by ethnicand cultural ties. But, as British leaders half-acknowledged, and as theiradvisers insisted, the fate of this ‘project’ depended almost entirely onforces that lay beyond Britain’s control. As the 1950s unfolded, thesewere to turn London’s uphill struggle into a headlong descent

Despite the damage of Suez andDe Gaulle’s brutal ‘Non’, many bastions of empire still spangled themap to produce the illusion of power.

By mid-1960, the British seemed to have made (or be in theprocess of making) a largely successful transition from colonial masterto post-colonial ally, from imperial rule to post-imperial influence.

t also sprang from the feeling that Britain’sparliamentary, industrial and cultural achievements embodied a wealthof experience and conferred a moral authority that no other countrycould match.

moral reputation of British colonialrule and of British foreign policy generally

Perhaps as a consequence, British leaders began to talk enthu-siastically about the need for imperial unity and a common foreignpolicy to which Britain, the dominions and the rest of the Empire,including India, would be tied

he seismic shift in Americanpolicy meant that Britain’s importance as an imperial ally had beengrasped in Washington, as well as the need to support its imperialclaims, for the time being at least. In a war-shattered world, the sterlingeconomies also accounted for around half of world trade. For all theirritation that London’s breach of faith had caused on the other sideof the Atlantic, this was too large an egg to think of killing the goose.The sterling area had to be given a last-minute reprieve.

Without a strong sterling economy or the great powerleverage conferred by their Middle Eastern imperium, the British claimto world power would look threadbare indeed. The huge expansion ofthe Cold War conflict that Korea had signalled sealed their geopoliticalfate. It marked the final arrival of the bipolar world that had advancedin stages since 1943. It meant that British dependence on Americanpower would not lessen but grow. It forced British policy into a stanceboth defensive and brittle, and driven more and more by the searchfor prestige. After 1951, the best they could hope for was to be thethird world power: within a few years, they had become somethingdifferent – a power in the third wor

In the course of the last two decades, inspired by EJ concerns for social inequalities and discrimination, a number of scholars worldwide have contrasted the idea that the environment is a luxury that becomes socially appealing after a country, or a particular human group, has achieved material wealth. Empirical research has demonstrated how the subaltern classes, manual workers, indigenous peoples and the poor in general are often the first to defend the environment in which they work and live, or from which theyget their livelihood. The Catalan scholar Joan Martinez Alier has elaborated a unifying definition for these subaltern environmental struggles as ‘environmentalism of the poor’, highlighting how they are tied to material issues of primary importance to the groups most vulnerable to environmental degradation in terms of human health, livelihoods and well-being.

public health

Thus, as a research program, EJis the analysis of social inequality face to the environmental costs of economic activities. As a social struggle, EJ constitutes a challenge to legal and political systems in the sense of recognizing the protection of the environment as a civil right, crucially affecting marginalized and discriminated social groups.

Basically, Environmental Justice is concerned with the unequal distribution of social costs between different human groups according to distinctions of class, race/ethnicity, and spatial placement. Environmental injustice is strongly related to space, i.e. to the unequal distribution of pollution and environmental degradation at local, national or transnational level: distinctions such as urban/rural, center-periphery or north-south are of primary relevance for the understanding of environmental injustice (Bullard 2000,Schlosberg 2007, Faber 1998, Sandler and Pezzullo 2007).

social costsproduced by a history of ‘uneven development’in the capitalist system have unequally affected different social groups, especially

‘socialist eco-feminism’, based as it is on the centrality of reproduction, instead of production, so effectively showing the way out of modernist and productivist paradigms of social relations (Merchant 2005)

In order to maximize profit on a given investment, entrepreneurs need to minimize relative costs: in the existing legal and political structure of the US economy, Kapp observed, entrepreneurs found it possible and profitable to shift the real cost of human and environmental health and safety on third parties, namely the workers and society as a whole. This socially accepted entrepreneurial behavior translates, in economic theory, in the concept of ‘negative externalities’ –that is to say, in the idea that human suffering and environmental degradation be the unavoidable price to be paid to economic growth.

working-class people arethe most threatened by the destruction of the environment because they workin hazardous environments, live in the most polluted neighborhoods, and havefewer possibilities to move to some uncontaminated area or buy healthy food

as a primary agent of energy and matter transformation through thelabor process, workers –broadly defined as those performing physical labor, including non-paid housekeeping and life-supporting work–are the primary interface between society and nature: therefore

e.g. including rural communities, or meta-industrial jobs such as the, mostly women and non-white, cleaning workers

As William Kapp had argued, environmental and health costs represent a large part of the social costs of production in advanced industrial societies. The historical evidence demonstrates how these costs are paid in the first place by workers through the labor process itself and by the most vulnerable social groups. Not surprisingly, being the most affected by the negative effects of pollution and environmental destruction, the working class has developed an active role of primary importance in the formation of a modern ecological consciousness of social costs

With its participatory action-research methodology, the Brazilian EJ Movement reflects a clear perception of occupational, environmental, and public health as interconnected social costs of the country’s economic growth, seriously affecting the Brazilian working class and disenfranchised groups (landless peasants, indigenous and non-white communities in general).

by rural workers in the formation of a popular environmental consciousness, bringing up its own vision of ecology and of environmental policies.

‘militant medicine’ p

popular epidemiology and environmental data collection

The awareness of environmental health connections as a shared bodily experience among factory workers and local people

nature conservation as an elitist concern and –by contrast –put workers' bodies firmly at the centre stage of a true environmentalism.

This movement began to take shape since the early 1960s, when a group of sociologists at the University of Turin formulated what was to become the new methodology of research into occupational health, based on the direct production of knowledge on the part of workers.

ess devoted to conservation than in the past and more concerned with the toxicity of industrial production, especially petrochemicals (Gottlieb 1993)

Thegoal is to ‘shape the perception that environmental protection is antithetical to economic expansion

political scenario a perception of ecology as something having to do with the human body and its situatednesswithin the configuration of power relationships, both inside the factory and in the local space. Moreover, consciousness of the political link between occupational, environmental and public health was not a philosophical speculation for a few militant scientists: in fact, it was largely shared within the Left, and in the union confederations, and led to a series of social struggles both at the workshop and at the community level.

The ‘jobs-vs.-the-environment’ discourse has been construed in connection with the international business cycle, and with the imposition of neo-liberal politics: in ‘mature industrialized countries’, such as the US, that discourse evolved and acquired social hegemony between the end of the 1970s and the first 1990s, when it has been finally opposed by a recovery of social movements struggling for environmental justice and ecological democracy

Trade unions have had a fundamental role in the struggle for better work conditions in industry, but with several ecological limitations. Generally speaking, this struggle has been conducted within the factory, with a weak questioning of the political ecology of industrial production and pollution in society, both at the local and at the global level. Second, insufficient connections have been posed between union’s health and safety grievances and more general social struggles for safe and healthy environments. Third, productivism and the paradigm of economic growth have generally not been questioned by larger unions, which continue to this day advocating for faster growth rates in order to either exit the current crisis, or to address social problems.

annotating