LPE Originals
Educational “Ownership” and the Backlash to CRT
When public education is seen as a property entitlement, there is an inevitable contestation over who controls this valuable resource and to what end.
LPE Originals
Metaphors, Analogies, and the Politics of Understanding
Muscles and arteries. Hammers and parasites. Addictions and complexes. Destin Jenkins concludes our Bonds of Inequality symposium by reflecting on the political implications of the metaphors we use to describe municipal debt.
LPE Originals
Towards a Law and Political Economy Approach to the Global War on Terror
By
Zohra Ahmed
To ensure support for its Global War on Terror, the United States has exploited the Pakistani government’s reliance on foreign credit to guarantee cooperation in US counterinsurgency operations. In leveraging its role as a lender to provide Pakistan with short-term financial relief, the United States has deepened Pakistan’s economic dependency, undermined the nation’s chance for a more equal domestic political and economic arrangement, and consolidated the power of its domestic military elite.
LPE Originals
Municipal Debt: Illuminating Old Puzzles, Forcing New Questions
By
Joy Milligan
Municipal financing schemes have often distributed the benefits of spending along race and class lines, yet federal programs have a similarly mixed track record. How, then, can we safeguard public investment to secure just outcomes? The answer may reside in the details of agency and program design.
LPE Originals
Unmasking Racial Capitalism’s Public Face
Can public things meaningfully protect us from capitalism’s bottom line? If not, is our hope in them as a lever of progressive politics misplaced?
LPE Originals
Using Legal Tools to Bring Debt and Equity into Balance
The Fair Housing Act, as written, provides several tools to challenge inequitable urban development. Yet the courts have been reluctant to enforce the law.
LPE Originals
Living in a Capitalist City With No Capital
Elite white capital created housing for middle-class whites built by working-class whites. Nowhere in this process, nor in the profit of lending, the employment of housing construction, or the long-term appreciation of white homeownership, was there a meaningful place for African Americans to bridge racial economic inequality.
LPE Originals
The Same System, the Same Results
Every year, governments and public entities wrestle with tough decisions about how they will fund their communities, and every year we absolve Wall Street of its role in siphoning money away from our public budgets. Enough is enough.
LPE Originals
Making Public Debt a Public Good
Dependence on public debt is a hallmark of democratic capitalist governance. How, then, can we ensure that the interests of private investors do not overtake the needs of the people that debt is meant to serve?
LPE Originals
The Bondholders’ Veto: Fiscal Federalism and Local Democracy
American cities’ reliance on municipal debt must be understood as part of a larger structural reliance on concentrated, mobile capital.
LPE Originals
Histories of Hammers
Municipal bond finance is an important technology, but is it more like a hammer or an automobile?
LPE Originals
Public Money without Public Goods
By
David Stein
By documenting how public debt produced our present nightmare, Destin Jenkins allows us to dream about using public money to mend the ills of our era.
LPE Originals
The Myth of Fair Share/Equal Share Bond Projects
Los Angeles’s King-Drew Medical Center, a public hospital originally intended to provide Black residents with quality healthcare, is a cautionary tale about using bond financing to advance racial equality.
LPE Originals
Market-Based Law Development
To understand courts’ relation to the reproduction of economic domination requires close investigation of how they actually work for different types of litigants.
LPE Originals
School Segregation, Social Closure, and the Anti-Monopoly Analogy
In my new article, Monopolizing Whiteness, I examine the causes and consequences of “white island districts,” i.e. those that enroll predominantly white and affluent student bodies, despite being in racially and economically diverse metropolitan areas. I theorize that white student segregation in districts like GPSD is a product of (what sociologists refer to as) social closure— a process of subordination whereby an in-group works to curtail an out-group from accessing resources constructed as scarce. I suggest that the “essential facilities” framework of antitrust law can help to illustrate what a legal framework looks like that could appropriately recognize and address the process and harms of social closure.