Alexander Cockburn

Blood's Money

New Statesman and Society, v5, no.202 (May 15, 1992). 
ISSN: 0954-2361.

In a month or so, when the camera crews have left South-Central Los Angeles and weeds begin to poke their way up through the tarmac in the burned-out lots, it will be easy enough to see who was just talking and who had a genuine plan.

Of course, the sensible thing would be to put some decent amounts of money into the poorer bits of Los Angeles, and cities similarly afflicted, but that’s the kind of language most white politicians are programmed to avoid.

The right has reasoned the way it always does. Bruce Herschensohn, a TV pundit in California seeking the Republican nomination in an upcoming Senate US race, proclaimed in the wake of the riots that “some people are rotten”, and derided the idea of underlying social causes.
Picking up on Herschensohn’s “bad seed” theory, the federal Centers for Disease Control announced that investigators were being dispatched to investigate the “epidemiology” of the riots. The possibility of viral transmission is not to be precluded, though no doubt a dermatological faction in the CDC will identify melanin as a significant factor.

George Bush has been swerving from side to side as Jekyll battles Hyde for command of the president’s soul. Hyde will inevitably prevail, with South-Central standing in for Willie Horton in the autumn campaign, and a continuing sideline in denouncing LBJ as the prime cause of urban collapse.

Asked why, amid the riots, he was off to yet another fundraiser instead of heading for Los Angeles, Clinton responded that “life must go on”. Since the entire political strategy of his Democratic Leadership Council has been to persuade white folks that the Democratic Party no longer cares for “minorities” and will target no particular money in their direction, Clinton has been predictably low on concrete ideas, coming down from the hills after the battle to suffocate the wounded with great cushions of blather about how “we” have “refused to confront our differences” and “for this neglect we have all paid”.

Though he was careful to say that the solution was not to “throw money at problems”, Clinton is recycling such old Great Society approaches as job-training, education programmes and the like, all part of the package that enabled the Democrats in the sixties to shirk what the party advocated in 1946, namely a full employment act. This is bottom-line anathema for the corporate class, since it would outlaw the pauperised, feminised work force underpinned by immigrant $6-an-hour labour that keeps the profit curve from dropping through the floor.
The only proposal that even remotely echoes the spirit of that full employment act is the $35-billion urban rescue package urged by big-city mayors before the LA riots as a way to combat recession, and now being pushed with fresh ardour by Boston’s mayor, Ray Flynn, Governor Jerry Brown and the Congressional Black Caucus.

Economic proposals by big-city mayors have the newslife of an earthquake in Chile, but this doesn’t alter the fact that it remains the only substantive programme.

The mayor’s plan, targeting $35 billion in fiscal assistance, public works, community development black grants, job training, and low-interest small-business loans, has been taken up in Congress where it has met the famous legislated “wall”, which prevents shift of military funds to social programmes rather than to deficit reduction.

This is a self-defeating battle, since defence cuts have already had a savage impact on greater Los Angeles and, most particularly, LA county. Early this year, some of the nation’s most distinguished economists, among them such Nobel prize winners as James Tobin, Franco Modigliani, Robert Solo and Lawrence Klein, said, given the need for expansion, a short-term increase in the deficit was timely and appropriate.

This is the bottom line. When the talk of renewal and uplift and volunteerism has dwindled and the weeds sprout amid the ruins, we will be left with the options: Plan A, let poor city neighbourhoods rot; or, Plan B, put in dollars and jobs and a plan. We’ve just seen the consequences of Plan A.

There is in fact a detailed expression of Plan B, which we may as well call Plan C. It was put out earlier this week as a joint reconstruction programme for LA by the Bloods and Crips, the LA gangs whose truce in fact, began before the riots began.

From internal evidence, this excellent reconstruction programme does not seem to be the work of a left groupuscular intellectual, speaking in the name of the gangs. For one thing it is devoid of the relentless lilt and terminological tedium of the professional programme writer. It doesn’t seem to be Farrakhanist in origin, though the role of the Rev Louis Farrakhan in the uprising has probably been much underestimated. The programme of black capitalism resurgent was summed up in the wall slogan, apropos attacking the Koreans’ stores: “Day One, burn them out. Day Two, we rebuild.”

The Bloods/Crips programme is so infinitely the best scheme for recovering LA thus far offered that I append it here in its vivacious entirety.