Professor Lynne Weikart, PhD

  What most people don't know. Our federal government employees' salaries take up only a tiny proportion of the federal budget. Our spending on employees is relatively small. In FY2022, the federal government only spent $271 billion to pay 2.3 million civilian workers. In FY2024, our federal government spent $6.9 trillion. Do you really think cutting this tiny portion of federal salaries will make a dent in our federal budget? Our national budget is really just an insurance company with an accompanying military expenditure. The majority of spending is mandatory in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, not employees' salaries but payments to citizens. It's like insurance. This attention to our minuscule federal workforce is misplaced and disastrous for our citizenry because it takes away from the real problem, which is the extraordinary shift in wealth in this country from the working and middle class to the rich. The country's focus should be on the revenue s...

 January 25, 2025 " Atul Gawande, a former professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and former United States Agency for International Development official, took to social media over the weekend to sound the alarm.  "I ran USAID health programs for the last 3 years. Trump’s 90 day Stop Work Order on foreign assistance does serious damage to the world and the US," Gawande said. "Citing some purported "examples," Gawande said the stop work order "stops work battling a deadly Marburg outbreak in Tanzania and a wide outbreak of a mpox variant killing children in west Africa before it spreads further," "stops monitoring of bird flu in 49 countries, a disease which already killed an American on home soil," "stops critical work to eradicate polio," and even "stops >$1B in corporate drug donations and coordination eradicating tropical diseases like river blindness, elephantiasis, and others on the verge of elimination ...

 I am writing a second edition to my first book, Follow the Money, and have found interesting events that I had never heard or read about before. My book is an examination of how New York City mayors responded to the demands of federal and state officials as well as financial elites to the city's 1975 fiscal crisis in which city officials were forced to reduce the city's expenditures in order to balance the budget and avoid bankruptcy. Before I write about an interesting event, let me discuss the two political theories are often used to explain decision making around city resources. The first competing theory is pluralism.  The best example of a community power study examining liberal pluralism is Robert Dahl’s famous study of New Haven, Connecticut, Who Governs ?  Dahl concluded that there were multiple centers of power in which groups would come together in different configurations for a particular urban issue. In effect, there are a collection of interest groups all s...

In this article, a corporation is defined as a legal entity describing the large " Anglo-American publicly traded business corporation as opposed to small, incorporated businesses...." Over time the Supreme Court legitimated this type of capitalist institution. In Dodge v. Ford  (1919), the Supreme Court created the principle, "the best interests of the corporation; that is, the managers and directors of the corporation must put the interests of the shareholders above all other interests. This means that if a CEO or board wished to give donations to a charity, other shareholders can sue and claim that such an action is not in "the best interests of the corporation." The Supreme Court opened the door to a very greedy corporate culture. Over time, corporations grew into large monopolies sometimes gaining 90 percent of an industry's market. Part of their success relates to our federalist system in which every corporation chooses in which state it wishes to i...

 August 17, 2022 Austerity Politics: The Difference in Mayoral Leadership Lynne A. Weikart, PhD Introduction This book is a book about leadership. It is the story of how each of six New York City mayors since the 1975 fiscal crisis coped with state and financial interference. New York State government in close cooperation with the major banking institutions strongly asserted their power over New York City during the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis. Both state government officials and bankers created strong institutional structures that prevented the City from investing in its citizens in a myriad of ways – City officials no longer had control of its resources – institutions created by these two external powers did. By the summer of 1975, City officials could no longer sell its bonds in the bond market. Because the city had accumulated billions of dollars in short-term debt, it faced bankruptcy unless it could borrow the money in the bond market to meet payroll. Bankruptcy was not ...

 Voting is a form of speech . And this country has had trouble with free speech since its inception. America was split ideologically at its beginning. When John Adams won the presidency in 1797 following eight years of George Washington's two terms of office, he demonstrated the split in our countrty., He proceeded to weaken the First Amendment - freedom of speech and press - by jailing those who criticized his administration. Since his party, the Federalist Pary, had taken the legislature and the presidency, he had the legislative support to get the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1797 passed by Congress to charge all those who opposed him with sedition. It was an ugly time. Fortunately, the Alien and Sedition Acts had a sunset provision so that those legislative acts evaported at the end of his one presidential term in office. But it set the precedent for the First Admendment to be under attack and not so sacroscant as you might have been taught in your education   Since th...

 Main Street is hurting. Inflation has arrived; the kids are still not back in school on a regular basis; Covid is worse than ever. Wall Street is still booming although it is increasingly edgy. President Biden enters the room and tells us all the good things he has done. He even called on Tom Hanks to put out a video sharing the good things that have happened. But that is not the way Americans are feeling. And yes, job growth is terrific and unemployment is low. But what Biden doesn't get is that the kids are still not back in school, and that we are paying more for groceries, and the cost of a new car is out of sight. Biden needs to take a page from FDR. Yes, the Democrat who changed the course of American history. FDR did not deny that times were bad. He said so and then he told the American people everything he had done to improve their lot. And then he asked them to do something - in FDR's case, the people had to go to the banks and put their money back into the banks. FDR...

The state action against Benton Harbor’s citizens has received little attention from the mainstream media. The Republican leadership of Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder, and legislative leaders passed Public Act 4, Fiscal Accountability Act, which literally takes over the administration of towns or other local government entities, such as school districts, if the state finds a financial emergency. This takeover involves the state hiring an emergency financial manager who literally runs the town without input from local elected officials. The emergency manager can nullify contracts, hire whomever he pleases, reallocate funds, fire any employee or board member and sign any contacts he deems appropriate. Local elected officials are left with no power; in effect, local government officials were suspended. As of August, “the number of local governments and school districts under the control of the Governor now stands at seven. That number is ten if you count the de facto state...

Bloomberg took office two months after 9/11. The results of 9/11 - the city lost over 100,000 private sector jobs in one year. The city was devastated. Corporations were fleeing the city as were residents. Bloomberg created an economic development machine that roared through all five boroughs and brought over 400,000 new jobs.    Just about the time the city recovered from 9/11, there was a national recession and Bloomberg guided the recovery. That recovery was cushioned by the fact that Bloomberg had raised taxes twice and the city had surpluses to help navigate the recession. Very early in his mayoralty, Bloomberg made it very clear that he would not tolerate discrimination against Muslims. In 2002 shortly after Bloomberg became mayor, he announced he was against a city council bill that would ban the Palestine Authority from their offices in the city. A few years later in the hysteria surrounding the proposed building of an Islamic Community Center a few blocks from the d...