Working Class Solidarity

“The roots of the recent escalation of the fiscal crisis of state and local governments in the United States lie in demands of capital on these governments in the corporate-initiated game of locational competition for the past three decades or so, as capital itself relocated and reorganized. Cities and states desperate for new investment or even to stave off plant closings, as older industries withered or moved and new ones scanned the field of spatial possibilities, have offered businesses a variety of tax breaks, exemptions, subsidies, and incentives that cost states and cities at least $50 billion a year by the early 200s. By 2012 a New York Times expose reported that “states, counties and cities are giving up more than $80 billion each year to companies” in incentives alone.”

“To a considerable extent during the Reagan years and followed in the 1990s by Clinton’s ending of “welfare as we know it” and his declaration that “the age of big government is over,” the federal government increasingly got out of or deemphasized the business of social support as much as was feasible while still maintaining social order–this latter goal being accomplished by the increasing militarization of the police and the expansion of the racialized “carceral state.””