Bonds of Inequality – LPE Project

Metaphors, Analogies, and the Politics of Understanding

James Brandt — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post concludes our joint symposium with our comrades at Just Money on Destin Jenkins’s The Bonds of Inequality. Check out the rest of the symposium here. *** Let me begin by thanking JustMoney and the Law and Political Economy Blog for hosting this exciting conversation and convening such a terrific and kind group of respondents. Part of my goal in writing The Bonds of Inequality was to help...

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Municipal Debt: Illuminating Old Puzzles, Forcing New Questions

James Brandt — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post continues a joint symposium with our comrades at Just Money on Destin Jenkins’s The Bonds of Inequality. Expect new posts in this series to appear on Thursdays throughout the fall. *** Destin Jenkins’ compelling book, Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City, helps us better understand how municipal debt deepened racial and economic inequality in the United States...

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Unmasking Racial Capitalism’s Public Face

James Brandt — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post continues a joint symposium with our comrades at Just Money on Destin Jenkins’s The Bonds of Inequality. Expect new posts in this series to appear on Thursdays throughout the fall. *** Like many of us in recent times, political theorist Bonnie Honig laments “the contemporary impulse to privatize everything” in her latest book. Against that, Honig mounts a forceful defense of “public...

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Using Legal Tools to Bring Debt and Equity into Balance

James Brandt — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post continues a joint symposium with our comrades at Just Money on Destin Jenkins’s The Bonds of Inequality. Expect new posts in this series to appear on Thursdays throughout the late summer and early fall. *** Prof. Jenkins’s sobering and painstaking work on the municipal bond market opens a new window onto the depth and range of harm made possible by racially separate and unequal spaces.

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Living in a Capitalist City With No Capital

James Brandt — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post continues a joint symposium with our comrades at Just Money on Destin Jenkins’s The Bonds of Inequality. Expect new posts in this series to appear on Thursdays throughout the late summer and early fall. *** Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City details the rise and fall of the municipal bond market as an economic engine for municipalities. Destin Jenkins...

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The Same System, the Same Results

James Brandt — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post continues a joint symposium with our comrades at Just Money on Destin Jenkins’s The Bonds of Inequality. Expect new posts in this series to appear on Thursdays throughout the late summer and early fall. *** Destin Jenkins’s The Bonds of Inequality drives home points that many of us have experienced intimately—the current municipal finance system is racist and inherently flawed.

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Making Public Debt a Public Good

James Brandt — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post continues a joint symposium with our comrades at Just Money on Destin Jenkins’s The Bonds of Inequality. Expect new posts in this series to appear on Thursdays throughout the late summer and early fall. *** Public debt in the form of municipal bonds permits municipalities to survive and to grow. Public debt is how cities and towns—hampered as they perpetually seem to be by their limited...

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The Bondholders’ Veto: Fiscal Federalism and Local Democracy

James Brandt — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 11:30:00 +0000

This post continues a joint symposium with our comrades at Just Money on Destin Jenkins’s The Bonds of Inequality. Expect new posts in this series to appear on Thursdays throughout the late summer and early fall. *** In The Bonds of Inequality, Destin Jenkins documents the consequences of American cities’ structural dependence on the municipal bond market. He describes how collective decisions...

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Histories of Hammers

James Brandt — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post continues a joint symposium with our comrades at Just Money on Destin Jenkins’s The Bonds of Inequality. Expect new posts in this series to appear on Thursdays throughout the late summer and early fall. Destin Jenkins’s astonishing new book had me reaching for poetry: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.” The new planet is municipal bond...

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Public Money without Public Goods

James Brandt — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post continues a joint symposium with our comrades at Just Money on Destin Jenkins’s The Bonds of Inequality. At the opening plenary of the 1998 Critical Resistance conference, the longtime radical intellectual Mike Davis took the stage with a piece of concrete in his hand. Davis described to an audience of those dedicated to abolishing policing and imprisonment the vexed role of public...

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