Download Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics AudioBook Free

An epic, riveting history of New York City on the border of catastrophe - and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today. When the news headlines broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country's most significant metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the location was indeed vast amounts of dollars in the red, without way to repay its bad debts. Bankers and politicians as well seized upon the problem as data that public liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable. The town had to slash services, freeze salary, and fire a large number of employees, they insisted, or financial apocalypse would ensue. In this vibrant accounts, historian Kim Phillips-Fein instructs the remarkable account of the turmoil that engulfed the town. With unions and typical citizens refusing to accept retrenchment, the budget crunch became challenging over the heart of New York, pitting fundamentally opposing visions of the location against one another. Attracting on never-before-used archival options and interviews with key players in the turmoil, Dread City shows how the brush with bankruptcy permanently transformed New York - and reshaped ideas about government across America.

Category: State & Local