President Nixon
Article
President Nixon is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 04, 2021 and April 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “President Nixon simply declared the urban crisis over”; “President Eisenhower’s grandson married President Nixon’s daughter”. It most often appears alongside 2008, 9/11 attacks, A Brief History Of Neoliberalism.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 04, 2021
- Last seen: April 04, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 2008 (1 shared issues)
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- 11 attacks (1 shared issues)
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- A Brief History Of Neoliberalism (1 shared issues)
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- Aaron Peskin (1 shared issues)
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- ABHoN (1 shared issues)
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- ABHoN (1 shared issues)
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- ACLU (1 shared issues)
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- Afghanistan (1 shared issues)
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- AGI And The Efficient Market Hypothesis (1 shared issues)
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- Algernon (1 shared issues)
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- alt-right (1 shared issues)
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- Amanda Askell (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
The New York City fiscal crisis was an iconic case. Capitalist restructuring and deindustrialization had for several years been eroding the economic base of the city, and rapid suburbanization had left much of the central city impoverished. The result was explosive social unrest on the part of marginalized populations during the 1960s, defining what came to be known as ‘the urban crisis’ (similar problems emerged in many US cities). The expansion of public employment and public provision—facilitated in part by generous federal funding—was seen as the solution. But, faced with fiscal difficulties, President Nixon simply declared the urban crisis over in the early 1970s. While this was news to many city dwellers, it signalled diminished federal aid. As the recession gathered pace, the gap between revenues and outlays in the New York City budget (already large because of profligate borrowing over many years) increased. At first financial institutions were prepared to bridge the gap, but in 1975 a powerful cabal of investment bankers (led by Walter Wriston of Citibank) refused to roll over the debt and pushed the city into technical bankruptcy. The bail-out that followed entailed the construction of new institutions that took over the management of the city budget. They had first claim on city tax revenues in order to first pay off bondholders: whatever was left went for essential services. The effect was to curb the aspirations of the city’s powerful municipal unions, to implement wage freezes and cutbacks in public employment and social provision (education, public health, transport services), and to impose user fees (tuition was introduced into the CUNY university system for the first time). The final indignity was the requirement that municipal unions should invest their pension funds in city bonds. Unions then either moderated their demands or faced the prospect of losing their pension funds through city bankruptcy.
In the US case I begin with a confidential memo sent by Lewis Powell to the US Chamber of Commerce in August 1971. Powell, about to be elevated to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, argued that criticism of and opposition to the US free enterprise system had gone too far and that ‘the time had come—indeed it is long overdue—for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it’. Powell argued that individual action was insufficient. ‘Strength’, he wrote, ‘lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations’. The National Chamber of Commerce, he argued, should lead an assault upon the major institutions—universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts—in order to change how individuals think ‘about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual’. US businesses did not lack resources for such an effort, particularly when pooled."
10: Did you know: President Eisenhower’s grandson married President Nixon’s daughter.