by
Mike Davis
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At first it seemed that Los Angeles could save itself simply by sticking a gilded finger in the dike at Hyperion: a $2.3 billion renovation. But anxious engineering reports to the Mayor, immediately leaked to the press, revealed that the entire system was on the verge of collapse. As the Times caustically observed, ‘planning procedures have been so slack that nobody made that most basic connection between population growth and the carrying capacity of a sewage system’. Although the old trunk sewers were large enough to accommodate the ten million gallons of new flow added each year by urbanization, the treatment plants had exhausted their capacity. The Mayor’s attempt to abate the crisis through voluntary water conservation was ignored, especially in affluent, ‘slow-growth’ Westside and Valley neighborhoods with their swimming pools and acre-sized lawns.
lol. idea for something in the background of pano? feeds into the idea of this being an unplanned system with externalities that threaten to undo everything
Possibly there is a significant internal divide in non-Anglo communities between renters and homeowners, with the latter more inclined toward slow growth. But the crucial point is that the polls themselves, by the exclusive way they frame questions (pro and contra economic development, for instance), simply reproduce the distorted dichotomies of growth war ideology. It is not surprising that poor people, especially renters, will choose jobs over environmental quality when the two are artificially counterposed. If it were the only choice offered, most people would also opt to cut their toe off rather than their leg. Such dubious, but ubiquitous survey methods only reveal people’s relative anxieties, not their substantive opinions.
A major exception was in December 1972, just as Cripmania was first sweeping Southside schools in an epidemic of gang shootings and street fights. The Human Relations Conference, against the advice of the police, gave a platform to sixty Black gang leaders to present their grievances. To the astonishment of officials present, the ‘mad dogs’ outlined an eloquent and coherent set of demands: jobs, housing, better schools, recreation facilities and community control of local institutions. It was a bravura demonstration that gang youth, however trapped in their own delusionary spirals of vendetta and self-destruction, clearly understood that they were the children of deferred dreams and defeated equality. Moreover as ‘hard-core’ Black and Chicano gang leaders have always affirmed, in the handful of other instances over the last eighteen years when they have been allowed to speak, decent jobs are the price for negotiating a humane end to drug-dealing and gang violence.
Without the mobilized counterweight of angry protest, Southcentral L.A. has been betrayed by virtually every level of government. In particular, the deafening public silence about youth unemployment and the juvenation of poverty has left many thousands of young street people with little alternative but to enlist in the crypto-Keynesian youth employment program operated by the cocaine cartels. Revisiting Watts nearly a generation after a famous pioneering study of its problems, UCLA industrial relations economist Paul Bullock discovered that the worsening conditions described by the Times’s ‘Watts: 10 Years Later’ team in 1975 had deteriorated still further, and that endemic unemployment was at the core of the community’s despair. Bullock observed that the last rational option open to Watts youth – at least in the neoclassical sense of utility-maximizing economic behavior – was to sell drugs.
Since the late 1970s, every major sector of the Southern California economy, from tourism to apparel, has restructured around the increasing role of foreign trade and offshore investment. Southcentral L.A., as we have indicated, has been the main loser in this transformation, since Asian imports have closed factories without creating compensatory economic opportunities for local residents. The specific genius of the Crips has been their ability to insert themselves into a leading circuit of international trade. Through ‘crack’ they have discovered a vocation for the ghetto in L.A.’s new ‘world city’ economy.
Peddling the imported, high-profit rock stuff to a bipolar market of final consumers, including rich Westsiders as well as poor street people, the Crips have become as much lumpen capitalists as outlaw proletarians. If this has only underwritten their viciousness with a new competitive imperative, it has added to their charisma the weight of gold-braided neck chains and showy rings. In an age of narco-imperialism they have become modern analogues to the ‘gunpowder states’ of West Africa, those selfish, rogue chieftaincies who were middlemen in the eighteenth-century slave trade, prospering while the rest of Africa bled. The Latino Eastside gangs, by contrast, are still trying to catch up. Dealing largely in homegrown drugs, like PCP, amphetamines and marijuana, with relatively low turnover values in a market consisting almost entirely of other poor teenagers, they are unable to accumulate the fineries or weaponry of the Crips. They have yet to effectively join the world market.
Left to themselves and the principles of Adam Smith, the consortia of Medellin investors would no more see themselves as criminals than did the Dutch or English venturers into the Indies trade (including opium), who organized their speculative cargoes in much the same way . . . the trade rightly resents being called a mafia. . . . It is basically an ordinary business that has been criminalized – as Colombians see it – by a U.S. which cannot manage its own affairs.
In the meantime gang members have become the Stoic philosophers of this cold new reality. The appearance of crack has given the Crip subculture a terrible, almost irresistible allure. Which is not simply to reduce the gang phenomenon, now or in the past, to mere economic determinism. Since the 1840s when tough young Irishmen invented the modern street gang in the slums of the Bowery, Five Points and Paradise Alley (making the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits just as dreaded as the Crips and Bloods are today), gang bonding has been a family for the forgotten, a total solidarity (like national or religious fervor) closing out other emphathies and transmuting self-hatred into tribal rage. But the Crips and Bloods – decked out in Gucci T-shirts and expensive Nike airshoes, ogling rock dealers driving by in BMWs – are also authentic creatures of the age of Reagan. Their world view, above all, is formed of an acute awareness of what is going down on the Westside, where gilded youth, practice the insolent indifference and avarice that are also forms of street violence. Across the spectrum of run-away youth consumerism and the impossible fantasies of personal potency and immunity, youth of all classes and colors are grasping at undeferred gratification – even if it paves the way to assured self-destruction.
reminds me of jesse mccarthy's notes on trap
Miller’s concept of Fontana was presented as an alternative to aristocratic citrus colonies like Redlands as well as to the more speculative settlements in the eastern San Gabriel Valley. Fontana was envisioned as an unprecedented combination of industrialized plantation (Fontana Farms) and Jeffersonian smallholdings (subdivided by Fontana Land Company). Fontana Farms was a futuristic example of vertically integrated, scientifically managed, corporate agriculture. Its primary input was the City of Los Angeles’s garbage which, from 1921 to 1950, it received in daily gondola car shipments by rail. (The garbage contract was so lucrative that Miller was forced to make large payoffs to corrupt city councilmen – igniting a 1931 municipal scandal.) The five or six hundred daily tons of garbage fattened the sixty thousand hogs that made Fontana Farms the largest such operation in the world. When the hogs reached full weight they were shipped back to Los Angeles for slaughter, recycled garbage thus providing perhaps a quarter of the region’s ham and bacon. The coincident accumulation of manure was no less valued: it was either utilized as fertilizer for Miller’s citrus grove (also the world’s largest) or peddled to neighboring ranchers. Fontana Farms even made a small profit reselling the silverware it reclaimed from restaurant garbage.
im sorry WHAT
While Fontanans were watching their trees die, Kaiser was shattering the illusion of starry-eyed San Bernardino County supervisors that the plant would be an enormous tax windfall. Assessed at normal rates in July 1943, the Company rejected the County’s bill out of hand, warning that they ‘might be forced to close the plant’. Although reporters scoffed at the obviously absurd threat to shutter the brand-new, $110 million mill, overawed supervisors obediently reduced the assessment to a small fraction of the original. Their concession set a precedent that allowed Kaiser officials to protest any prospective tax increase as undercutting the economic viability of the plant. As a result, San Bernardino County saw its major potential tax resource evolve into a net tax liability (a fact that helps explain official apathy to the plant’s closure a generation later).
The Vietnam War – which jump-started the Japanese export offensive – dramatically transformed economic relationships around the Pacific Rim. In 1965 Japanese steel imports claimed a tenth of the US West Coast market; by the war’s end, a decade later, nearly half the steel in California was Asian-made and the state was officially included in the Japanese steel industry’s definition of ‘home market’. Kaiser Steel made large profits exporting iron and coal to the Japanese only to see these raw materials shot back at them in the form of Toyotas and I-beams for skyscrapers. Together with US Steel’s Geneva mill (still entirely open-hearth since USS’s plant modernization had been concentrated in the East), Kaiser Fontana could supply barely half of Western demand, and they were constrained from adding capacity because of their technological inability to compete at cost with the foreign steel. Thus the Japanese, and increasingly the Koreans and the Europeans as well, were able to confiscate all the Vietnam-boom growth in Western steel demand. The so-called ‘trigger price mechanism’, adopted by the Carter administration at Big Steel’s urging, only worsened the situation on the West Coast. Trigger prices were too low to prevent Japanese imports and, because they were calibrated higher in the East, they actually encouraged EEC producers to dump steel in California.
very interesting