Zohran Mamdani: The Occupy Wall Street Mayor

(soft piano music) Lemonade. - Thanks for listening to Hussam Minhaj, doesn't know. Listen to and follow Hussam Minhaj, doesn't know, add free on Amazon music, or just ask Alexa. Alexa, play the podcast, Hussam Minhaj, doesn't know on Amazon music. Also, with Amazon music unlimited, you can now listen to your favorite music, podcasts, and audio books, all in the Amazon music app. Listen to Hussam Minhaj, doesn't know on Amazon music. New progressive politicians are sprouting up across the country like wing stops, but there is one clear leader of the pack that I wanna talk more about. Not Hussam Piker, someone with smaller biceps and a bigger smile. The mayor of my city, Zoran Mamdani. That's right, it's been almost a year since Zoran was elected, and I'm finally ready to talk about it, because it has been a wild ride. To watch him go from this random guy struggling to get people to talk to him on the street, to this. - A big night for the mayor of New York City who endorsed three far left candidates for Congress, and all three won, raising questions about the future of the Democratic Party. - How did this happen? How does a guy who looks like he would be on a newsweek cover in 2001 titled, "Why do they hate us?" I have so much of America's swimming. Among New York voters, Zoran's favorability is 69%, but for his party nationally right now, it's 40%. So what is Zoran's secret? Well, part of it is that he's not just saying things that voters wanna hear. He's actually doing those things. - New York, the independent rent guidelines board, just froze the rent. - We're done kicking the can down the road. We're announcing a plan to repair the city-owned section of the BQ. I'm proud to announce that our city's budget is fully balanced. - Can I just say that as an American, it feels super bizarre to watch a politician. Do things, you know what I mean? - Like our standards have gotten so low that New Yorkers are reacting to basic street repairs, like their mayor is healing the blind. - See how in the morning I said there was two potholes, right? Look what happened after I come back from work. What nigga? It go. Mom Donnie, I did not know he was like that nigga. Whether it's potholes or red freezes or free childcare, Zoran is reminding people that it is possible for the government to actually improve their lives. Now, the reason he can do this is because the mayor is an executive office. A legislator like AOC can introduce a bill, give a speech, cast a vote, and make in cells lose their mind just by freezing her eggs. But a mayor, oh, a mayor can direct city agencies, appoint officials, and actually run a government. He can use the mayor's office to get shit done, unlike the last guy who used it to get free Wi-Fi on Turkish Airlines. But I think there's a deeper explanation here of why Zoran has become such a political superstar in such a short period of time. Yes, he has executive power in a city that's bigger than a lot of small countries, but more important than that is the platform that he is executing, a platform that when you get down to it, is all about economic justice. When I ran for mayor, I said I was gonna tax the rich. Well, today, we're taxing the rich. If you wanna understand why Zoran's mayorship is important, you need to understand where his politics came from. I'm not talking about India, I am not talking about Uganda. I am talking about a place 10 blocks south of his office in city hall, and no New York post readers, I am not talking about the World Trade Center. I am talking about Wall Street, where on a different fateful September morning, shit went crazy. (upbeat music) The Dow tumbled more than 500 points after two pillars of the street tumbled over the weekend. Lehman Brothers, a 158-year-old firm, filed for bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Merrill Lynch, fearing it could be next, agreed in an act of desperation to a shotgun marriage with Bank of America. The 2008 financial crisis fundamentally changed American politics. Everyone watching this probably takes it for granted that the economy is rigged to benefit the rich. But for decades before 2008, most Americans felt like the economy was basically fair. After World War II, worker paid generally rose, along with productivity. The wealth was spread out. People had decent jobs, houses, cars, pensions, life was good. I mean, mainly for white dudes. But in 1980, Ronald Reagan came along and said, folks, we can do better. Taxing the rich and spreading their wealth to everyone else. That's backwards. Let's not do that. What if instead we let the corporations and the wealthy people make as much money as possible so that their wealth naturally trickles down to everyone else? Our aim is to increase our national wealth so all will have more. Not just redistribute what we already have, which is just a sharing of scarcity. That's right, folks. The wealthiest are gonna take all that wealth and give it right back to all of you, whether you're their golf caddy or their landscaper or they're forger making nannies, raising their two kids. But if you're not one of those people, you don't get any of the money. At the end of the day, the promise that tax cuts for the wealthy would benefit everyone. Shockingly, did not pan out. During Reagan's presidency, the taxation rate for the top bracket dropped from 70% to 28%, but inequality widened. And even if the slogans, some of the policies were different over the years, from Reagan to Bush 1.0, to Bill Clinton to Bush 2.0, that trend of increasing inequality continued. From 1979 to 2007, three-fifths of all income growth went to the top 1% and CEO pay went from 30 times average worker pay to 351 times average worker pay. America was becoming a two-tiered society. Now, in case you missed it, because you were like five years old and you were watching SpongeBob at home, Wall Street banks, mortgage brokers, and other players spent years building a massive market in mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. That helped create a bubble in housing prices and the stock market. But when the scale of the fraud inside that mortgage machine was exposed, those bubbles popped, bringing the global economy right up to the edge of complete collapse. Literally. They came in described a financial meltdown of epic proportions. And when that was finished, the chairman of the Fed said, "If we do not act now, we will not have an economy by Monday." We will not have an economy by Monday. We're talking about ATMs not working. Knife fights at Kroger's over the last three containers of hummus, every downtown looking like the Eagles just won the Super Bowl. So Congress passed a $700 billion bailout to stabilize the financial system. And the Fed would ultimately pour trillions of dollars in emergency loans and liquidity into it. But a big chunk of that bailout money was used to pay for Wall Street executives huge salaries and bonuses. In no major Wall Street CEO went to jail for f*cking blowing up the economy. The financial crisis was a daylight bank robbery where the bankers were the robbers. And instead of being punished, they were rescued. Meanwhile, regular people who lost their homes, jobs and retirement savings weren't. The closest thing regular people got to a bailout was HAMP, a program that promised to help millions of homeowners avoid foreclosure. And then guess what, it didn't. The government's HAMP program was set up with almost $30 billion in federal funds, designed to help three to four million people through this current foreclosure crisis. But so far, HAMP has spent only $1.2 billion and has helped only 670,000 homeowners. The president had bailed out the big banks. And now the big banks don't want to bail out the little people. The Obama Administration did tighten bank regulations and passed the Affordable Care Act and shot a guy in the face and then dumped his body in the ocean. But even that wasn't enough to change this feeling that the rich were running the board and everyone else was getting f**ked. Between 2005 and 2009, the net worth of US households fell 28% and the net worth of black households fell 53% by the summer of 2011 as the economy kept stalling. And the waves of foreclosures kept coming. Obama's approval rating hit an all-time low of 38%. And all that anger that had been building since the '08 bailout exploded onto the streets. They are 100 strong. The protesters calling themselves Occupy Wall Street. Here in New York, thousands of demonstrators descended on the financial district. 700 protesters were arrested as they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. 25 cities from coast to coast have seen the financial industry protest this weekend. The anti-corporate rally is intensified over the weekend spreading around the globe. More than 145 cities have joined the cause. Thousands of people took this feeling. This feeling that something deeply unfair was happening in the economy and gave it a voice. Occupy Wall Street wasn't about finding solutions. It was about articulating a language to describe the problem. - B-R-99%. - Protesters call themselves the 99%. Frustrated over economic inequality and what they describe as corporate greed. I mean, the country's richest 1%. I think that the wealthiest 1% has benefited by just taking advantage of where it can class people. - 99% of the people need to be prospering. Not just the top 1%. - Inequality and economic justice have been in the discourse for so long that it's easy to forget how outside the mainstream this was at the time. The media was taken completely off guard. CNN's Aaron Burnett literally had a segment on her show where she went around and made fun of protesters for being ungrateful. Seriously, the Occupy Wall Street protest entered its third week today. What started as less than a dozen college students camping out in a park near the New York Stock Exchange is now hundreds of protesters and it spread to other cities. But what are they protesting? Nobody seems to know. So this afternoon we went to Wall Street to find out. This is unemployed software developer Dan. So do you know that taxpayers actually made money on the Wall Street bill out? I was not aware of that. Imagine Aaron Burnett at Tiniman Square. Blocking traffic? Seriously? As the protests spread throughout the country they got the attention of politicians. President Obama started to echo the language of the streets. In the last few decades the average income of the top 1% has gone up by more than 250%. To 1.2 million dollars per year. And yet over the last decade the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about 6%. But one politician in particular really got behind Occupy Wall Street, a guy who had been trying to bring more attention to inequality for decades. This old dude in the Senate named Bernard. I think it is absolutely appropriate that the protesters are now forcing a debate and a discussion in this country on the huge issue of income and wealth inequality. We do have to ask whether it is morally and economically appropriate that 400 people in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of America 150 million people. Bernie Sanders took the baton from Occupy Wall Street and then ran with it all the way to a presidential campaign. He was the first politician to connect the outrage articulated by Occupy Wall Street to a national political program. Let me be very clear and let the top 1% understand this. There is something profoundly wrong when the top 1/10th of 1% owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% and when 99% of all new income goes to the top 1%. Occupy Wall Street was criticized for not being specific, so Bernie got specific. Free tuition at Public Colleges in Universities, Universal Child Care, Medicare for All, policies that benefited the 99% of regular people. But when it came time to explain who would pay for this agenda, the 1%, CNNs, Erin Burnett was back on her bullshit. Is sound. It is paid for Erin by attacks on Wall Street speculation. When Wall Street's illegal behavior destroyed our economy, middle class bailed them out. It is now time for them to help the middle class. You know, during the midst of the financial crisis, when people said let Bank of America go under, let them go under. They don't deserve to survive. You know, you're not just talking about the tens of thousands of people that would have worked for that bank. But also the millions of Americans that have own shares of that bank and their 401k their IRA. Those millions of Americans own stocks now, middle class Americans, who could end up paying for this. He mentioned the bailout in passing and she was like, oh, you mean the good idea? The bailout? You know, the best idea of all time that Americans actually made money off of? Did you know that? Did you know that, Bernie? Seriously? I think Erin watches Oceans 11 and roots for the casino. Not only was corporate America hostile to Bernie, so was the Democratic Party establishment. Nancy Pelosi said Medicare for all isn't going to happen and we're not raising taxes. And FYI, we heard capitalism. We're capitalist. And that's just the way it is. So the party boss is one and lost. Four years later, when Bernie was again showing momentum, they ran back the same play and lined up behind Joe Biden before Super Tuesday, helping him clinch the nomination. Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg ended his campaign yesterday. He signaled the decision is designed to stop frontrunner Senator Bernie Sanders from amassing an insurmountable leave in delegates on Tuesday. But Sanders continues to be the frontrunner. Pulse show him a head in Delegate Rich California and Texas. Bernie had built up enough political capital to get some of his priorities into Biden's agenda, which led to some progressive wins like lower prescription drug costs. But the rich kept running away with it while the rest of the country grew more and more concerned about their own economic situation and when Kamala Harris was asked what she would do differently than the guy who was about to lose, this is what she said. Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years? There is done a thing that comes to mind. Yeah, wow. Okay, that might be the easiest question I have ever seen a politician mess up that badly. That is like an actor getting asked, hey, what are you most excited for people to see in this movie and then answering, Bill Cosby is innocent. This was a layup, okay, and just 15 days after Kamala fumbled it, Zoran Mamdani entered the race for New York City mayor. And that's where I'll pick up the story right after this quick break. My name is Hassan Minhash and I'm a very hairy guy. I'm very particular about what razors I use on my face and it's got to be Harry's Plus. But hey, I'm a professional clown. You should listen to other customers. From Charlotte, North Carolina says, "A remarkably pleasant shaving experience, the razor performed perfectly." Felix from Los Altos, California thinks this, "Better than the original Harry's Razor I purchased several years ago." Reggie from Memphis, Tennessee says, "It was a major improvement in the overall shaving quality, period." Eli from Bozeman, Montana says, "Exceeded in my expectations in every area, had high expectations and you surpassed them. Run on sentence, no period." James from Portland, Oregon thinks the handle feels like it was custom made for your hand. Amos from Beckley, West Virginia, he says, "No second shave to get the missed ones. Marcus from Tulsa, Oklahoma." Here's what he's got to say. The Harry's Plus handle is a premium man's razor. Carlos from San Antonio, Texas says, "My husband and I both use Harry's with no issue. We're big fans. He has his head with them since he has a beard and I should have my legs, armpits, etc." "I think you know what it's better is." Boyed from "Adomnua, Iowa." I'll just say Iowa. Boyed from Iowa says, "Who needs therapy when you can achieve the perfect chin strap with Harry's?" Levi from Muncie, Indiana says, "My mutton shops have never been so precise." Hassan from Davis, California says, "Zoran was a direct descendant of Bernie's political movement. He is called Bernie, the single most influential political figure in my life. But crucially, he didn't do a shot-for-shot remake of Bernie's campaign. Zoran saw what happened in 2016 and 2020. Bernie fought the establishment head-on and he got shut down. He said, "The rich is screwing you." The establishment was like, "Hey, that's divisive! And when you think about it, it's kind of sexist." So instead of talking about economic justice explicitly, Mamdani did a brilliant jujitsu move. He hit a message about economic justice inside of a politically neutral concept, affordability. We deserve a mayor who puts every single tool at our disposal to use in delivering working people a life that they can afford. This is a city that needs to be affordable for the people who build it every day. And I remember the words of Dr. King who said, "What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford a hamburger?" What good is the right to live in New York City if you can't afford your rent? Do you understand how politically potent this issue is? You can go up to any cab driver, any boomer, any random dude from Staten Island. Just pull out a Clementine and be like, "You believe this thing's four bucks?" It's four bucks! This is four dollars! They'll be like, "Yeah, it's right. It's four bucks. It used to be a dollar." I mean, this is instant connection here, folks. Even when they were still tossing people in volcanoes as an offering to the gods, you could still find a guy in a hard hat being like, "Three virgins for about the full harvest? Are you f***ing kidding me?" But here's the critical move that Zoron pulled off here. By focusing on affordability, Zoron was able to attack the rich indirectly because affordability is about more than prices. It's about corporate greed. It's about oligarchy. It's about labor power and organizing to demand higher wages. Because if workers made more money, they could afford more of what they need. Zoron's entire affordability agenda is really about making the economy more fair. I'll make buses fast and free so I can just get where I'm going. I'll make childcare available to all New Yorkers at no cost. I want to raise my kid in New York. And I'll freeze the rent for every single rent stabilized tenant. By framing his policies as making life more affordable, they were harder to portray as somehow ideological or dangerous. I mean, what politician in their right mind is going to come out against affordability? That's f***ing crazy. You know, there's this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about affordability. They just say the word. It doesn't mean anything to anybody. Affordability drives Donald Trump crazy because it is saying something. It's saying something about economic fairness, but it's hiding in the subtext. And Trump doesn't understand subtext. He doesn't even understand text. He called the Pope "Weak on Crime." Literally, he called the Pope "Weak on Crime." Now, even though Zoron was able to hide the ball a little bit with affordability, the media, uh-oh, they smoked that brown boy out because you know if any politician is offering policies that help poor people, they're going to get that question. The question that never seems to come up with corporate tax cuts or the Pentagon budget. or Rocket propelled grenades for ice agents. - How will you pay for these programs? Can you explain how you will make buses free? - You have to be able to pay for what you've promised. - I just wanna know where the money coming from. See, I count. Okay, I count. The people who love Mom Donnie the most are not people who pay bills every day. - Steven, you can't start complaining about NEPO kids when Draft King's pays you 500 grand a week to say, "Proposalist!" But it's a fair question. Who's gonna pay these bills? In a city where 43 fortune 500 companies are headquartered with annual revenue of $2 trillion, home to 123 billionaires, worth a combined $759 billion. A city where helicopter taxis are a growth industry. Where could you possibly find the money to pay for all this stuff? - We will do so in two key ways. The first is to match the state's top corporate tax rate to that of New Jersey. We are at 7.25%, they're at 11.5%. Corporations can pay it over there, they can pay it over here. And the second is taxing the top 1% of New Yorkers. We're talking about people who make a million dollars a year or more, taxing them just by flat 2% tax increase. - Now, it's crazy that I even need to say this because it's so obvious. But guys, taxing the rich, it's very popular. Over 70% of Americans think billionaires should pay more in tax, but this policy plank of taxing the rich might have been the single biggest barrier to Zoron's election. Wall Street CEOs and other billionaires are so threatened by his agenda that they spent over 40 million dollars trying to stop him. And once again, a familiar face showed up in the media to run defense for Wall Street. - If you're gonna be adding two percent to people at a million, I'm not saying cry for them. I'm saying if they leave, you're not gonna get that money. That corporate tax rate that you're talking about, that's a big increase. Do you like capitalism? - Aaron, this is getting crazy. We have 15 years of footage of you going go-go-go-gaga over the top tax bracket. God damn it. If you love Wall Street so much, why don't you just marry it? What's that? - She married it? Oh shit, I mean, really, about that life, huh? I mean, seriously? Now, I wasn't sure if I even wanted to mention this because I didn't want to platform them, but it's worth taking a beat to talk about Zoron's opponent in the campaign because there's a good reason Mumbani was such a long shot at winning. He was up against the challenger with huge name recognition in very wealthy backers. I am talking about the New York Times. After announcing it would stop endorsements for local races, the Times came out of retirement to tell voters not to vote from Mumbani, don't you dare do it. They wrote, quote, we do not believe that Mr. Mumbani deserves a spot on New Yorker's ballots. His experience is too thin, which is fair. Unlike Andrew Cuomo, Zoron has zero experience being accused of groping female employees. He was a total noob at using public transit money to bail out ski resorts. And my man hadn't even killed one senior citizen. It's like, how the fuck are you gonna run this city with no dead bodies in the trunk? These attacks from the media and Cuomo on Zoron's experience and his economics ultimately didn't have much of an impact. So critics, they shifted their focus to his identity. Now, obviously, the New York Post did their usual thing and played six degrees of 9/11, but the rest of the media and the rest of the political establishment was a little bit more subtle. They latched on to one particular phrase to try to portray Zoron as outside the mainstream. Do you condemn that phrase, globalize the interferon? This is a man who believes in globalizing the interferon. Globalizing the interferon. Globalize, globalize, globalize, globalize, globalize. Globalize the interferon. I'm not gonna get into the details of how this phrase got attached to a New York City mayoral candidate because we know Zoron is a Muslim, so he has to prove that he's not anti-Semitic. But since there's no evidence that he's anti-Semitic, he was asked to disprove something that had no proof, which is impossible. I mean, punch full news actually summed up this entire controversy perfectly with the correction at the bottom of one of their articles. Quote, in this edition, we previously wrote that Mamdani had said globalize the interferon. He has not said that, but he has refused to condemn the phrase. We regret the error. I mean, goddamn. Good thing that correction was buried at the bottom of a newsletter from over a year ago, so nobody would ever see it again. It's so embarrassing, punch full news. In spite of all that opposition, voters had the final say and they elected Zoron Mamdani as the mayor of New York City in just 10 blocks north of where Wall Street banks blew up the economy in 2008 and five blocks north of Zucati Park where Occupy Wall Street blew up Aaron Burnett's brain in 2011, a politician who inherited Occupy's political language, Bernie Sanders' economic program and an actual executive office entered City Hall. Zoron is the end result of decades of anger over inequality, but the crazy thing is, in spite of all this political drama that I just went through, that inequality and that anger, it continues to get worse. The top 0.1%. Now owns about 13% of America's total assets. The mayor of New York City isn't just gonna single-handedly fix that. This is bigger than a pahole, but if his party follows his lead and focuses on improving the lives of the 99% by yes, taking from the 1% or the 0.1%, or just these three psychos, there might be a pack out of the place that we're in. And if that seems scary, remember, the only thing we have to fear is a dystopian future of techno-futilism where the ultra-rich living fortified enclaves while the rest of us toil in co-bought minds to feed the almighty algorithms orbiting in space-based data centers, controlling all of us from above and of course fear itself and of course, well nuclear war and pandemics. Honestly, that'll probably be what gets us in the end. Stay safe out there, though. Watch best of the best streaming now on Netflix. It's a great movie about friendship, family, and sisterhood. Stream it now. ♪ Hurry right away ♪ ♪ The only place I'm safe for me ♪