While most of you, my dear readers, don’t live here in LA I think there’s a lot to learn from other town’s local news. I sometimes buy tools from a company located in a small town in Maine. They use the local newspaper to cushion their packages. I always carefully pull out the packaging and reassemble the newspaper. The controversies of a small town I’ll probably never visit speak to the universality of the challenges we all face. And I especially like one of the quirks of this paper: a weekly column that consists of the stream of consciousnesses ramblings of the resident of a nursing home. You can learn a lot from listening to the voices of people and places outside your own bubble.

So what’s can you learn from my Los Angeles bubble? Imagine twenty years worth of corruption, brutal austerity measures, woke posturing and mismanagement packed into one completely bonkers week. Some of the high(low?)lights:

• The mayor opened up retail and restaurant service in the middle of a not-going-well pandemic with no notice.
• Police fired rubber bullets and drove cars into crowds of peaceful protesters.
• News that a city councilman paid off a mistress with money from a Chinese billionaire.
• Conflicting and contradictory curfew notices at all hours of the day and night.
• The suspension of all public transit with 40 minutes notice at the end of the day and the conversion of city buses into a network of improvised prisons.
• The mayor pledged not to call in the national guard and then, three hours later, called in the national guard.

That’s not even of fraction of what happened. You can hear a day by day breakdown of the craziness on episode 122 “Seven Days in Mayday” of an excellent podcast called, appropriately, LA Podcast. Even if you’re not a local it’s worth listening to because the problems here are everywhere in this country.

Oops.

It’s been a week of conflicting curfew alerts. Each time my phone buzzes with these alerts my already simmering anger boils over, mainly because I think that this mess we’re in could have been easily avoided. Rather than simply stew in my own anger this morning, I thought I’d sit through the Los Angeles Police Commission’s emergency Zoom meeting held, ostensibly, to address the unrest that’s taken place over past few days.

The meeting reminded me of many in-person city meetings that I’ve attended in the past. As is typical of other commissions in Los Angeles the police commissioners are an assortment of the mayor’s cronies. The lone African-American is the chairman of a company that builds municipal infrastructure (no conflict of interest here!). There’s a developer and failed mayoral candidate. Another commissioner is a member of what a friend of mine calls the “non-profit industrial complex.” One commissioner didn’t bother to show up. The president of the commision is a former prosecutor and current law professor and a walking, blabbering, embodiment of the Professional Managerial Class. She kicked off the meeting with a canned statement of performative wokeness while underlings attempted to deal with technical problems that prevented anyone over the initial 500 people (including many members of the press) from joining the meeting. Over 6,700 people joined later via a hastily improvised YouTube live stream.

As is typical of Los Angeles City meetings they are held during the day when normal working people can’t attend them. We all had to sit through an hour of empty posturing before public comment was opened. Once public comment was opened speaker after speaker mentioned the years of requests for reform, for community oriented policing, for a police chief who will take community concerns seriously and for a diversity on the commission that would reflect the makeup of this city. One speaker called out the police chief for a behavior that’s all too common at city meetings: looking at your phone while the public is speaking.

We’ve had 26 years since the last unrest to reform the Los Angeles Police Department. We could have moved the LAPD towards a community oriented model and away from a failed para-military strategy. Instead, the awkwardly sculpted bust of Daryl Gates, one of the main architects of militarized policing in the U.S., still gazes towards the mediocre cafe at the police academy. Meanwhile politicians accept donations from the police union and seem unable or unwilling to ask for even modest reforms.

I had a brief job in the 1990s editing police training videos. It was at time when police, including most of the police I dealt with, were seriously thinking about things like improving community relations, understanding how to deal better with issues like domestic violence and non-violent ways to manage demonstrations. The majority of the officers I dealt with (who were in charge of training) supported these reforms. A minority, however, was intransigent and unwilling to acknowledge, even after the civil unrest in Los Angeles in 1994, that there was a problem. This minority won and we’ve seen even more militarization of police departments over the years. As an aside there was one other thing I learned when on this job. The police I worked with told me that the LAPD was especially troubled, insular and had a toxic culture (it’s no coincidence that the evil cop in Terminator is an LAPD officer).

Unfortunately I believe nothing will change as long as we have what Cornell West calls “milquetoast neo-liberal” politicians in charge. The challenge is clear, we need to vote out most of our local, state and federal leadership. That’s not going to be easy to do. It will take years. But we have to do something soon. As Tana Hargest put it in Twitter, “This live action production of Parable of the Sower sucks.”

I stole the title of this post from an editorial by Adam Weinstein, “This is Fascism”.

Still from Children of Men.

There’s no nice way to put it. Here in the U.S. we live in a failed state. I sincerely hope that I’m wrong but it looks like were in for chaos.

As Nassim Taleb suggested on the Twitters, “Do a total reset professionally, economically, personally. Treat this thing as if it were here to stay & make sure you can do with it. If it goes away, it will be a bonus but remember that the shadow of the following one will be progressively built into the system.” The fatal flaw of “crapitalism” is that these crisis are baked into the system and each one is worse than the last. Even if we skate past this one there’s another crisis coming.

On top of household level adjustments we need to work with our neighbors, friends, faith communities and associations to deal with this crisis. I have no patience for right wing leaders whose Ayn Randian, individualist ideology makes the ancient Romans seem compassionate. But neither do I have any faith in centrist, neo-liberal Democrats who were part of the failed response to this crisis and who are only too happy to push for austerity measures.

I feel especially bad for people who live in states that are opening prematurely and forcing people back into dangerous working conditions. The real strategy here is to kick people off unemployment benefits.

As a household we’re going to map out a plan that combines many of the skills we’ve profiled on this blog over the years with a more engaged community involvement. We’re baking a lot of bread and we plan on volunteering for Nithya Raman who is running for city council and offering a real alternative to the corrupt status quo. Until we see the numbers going down here in Los Angeles, we’re minimizing trips to grocery stores and eliminating non-essential activity. I want to see 14 consecutive days of declines in cases before changing our plans. We do this both for our own health and for the health of vulnerable people. We’re fortunate to not have to worry about housing or income right now. But the days of casually going out and doing stuff are over for now.

If, in the end, I’m being alarmist the worst that will happen is that we’ll be more engaged with our neighbors and know ten different ways to cook oatmeal.

On May 1, 1886 a coalition of American labor groups organized a general strike in support of an eight hour work day. Today, 134 years later, we can honor the memory of those who gave their lives for better working conditions by supporting Amazon, Whole Foods, Target and Instacart workers and not crossing their picket line.

Workers at these dystopian corporations are walking out during their lunch break to ask for protective equipment, hazard pay, paid sick leave, cleaning supplies and contact tracing. Chris Smalls, a former Amazon worker fired from his job for complaining about conditions tweeted, “It’s time to join up! Protect all workers at all cost we are not expandable or replaceable enough is enough TAKE THE POWER BACK!”