The Los Angeles Riots

Racial Chickens

We have been waiting for the Los Angeles, California (LA) riots for a long time. They could have happened in Atlanta, or Dallas, or New York, and they would have been for the same overall reason. The fact that they happened in LA was the product of the LA Police Department and racism in America. There are many police departments like the LAPD and racism is everywhere. Rodney King is an Angeleno, the cops were from the LAPD, and the Simi Valley jury represents the racism. In this case, police brutality made to look insignificant in a middle class suburban courtroom is the definition of racism. Similar situations, and even worse, happened in the South all the time in the past, and all for the same reason.

Racism is prevalent in the United States today because it has been the political policy of three presidents. They have used it in the election campaigns and they have used it in the policies of their administrations. When Nixon, Reagan, and Bush pit the lower and middle class against the upper class in a classic struggle for the money, and as a result the social fabric of the nation was shredded, racism and the violence that follows it became the justification for the action. The implicit motive behind the action? The poor are not worthy so we are going to give the money to the rich. That's what happened.

Federal budget surpluses of the 1960's turned into deficits in the 80' and 90's. The deficits were produced deliberately to make the nation debt poor so it could not support social programs.

Racism and the debt were coupled with States' rightsism, which brought back the old divisions of the Civil War with more racism. A Supreme Court has been appointed by these three presidents which is hell-bent on transferring most if not all the Federal power to the States, making a Constitutional Convention unnecessary as we move back to the Articles of the Confederation. Ed Meese, Reagn's chief law enforcement officer, said it: "The only things the Federal Government needs to do are foreign affairs and defense; the States can look after the rest." The Supreme Court is taking pains to see that Ed Meese is right.

To say, as President Bush did, that the riots are the fault of the Great Society programs does a couple of things. (1) It smacks of Joseph Goebbels and George Orwell. In the first instance, we were told that if you tell a lie big enough it will be believed; and in the second, we have an example of doublespeak, the concept originated by Orwell that truth is whatever Big Brother says it is. (2) It reveals not only an appalling lack of the sense of history, but identifies the past policy that the whole country has been bent out of shape to vilify. The Great Society programs were great. They were not singled out for attack because they didn't work, but because they supported strong Federalism when the Nixon, Reagan, Bush crowd were pushing Anti-federalism. The Great Society was aimed at improving the lives of ordinary people poor and rich alike whereas the present policy is for enriching the rich and leaving the hind-most to the poor, who by their poorness show they deserve it. The LA riots were twenty years in the making. The fact that they happened in LA was because that is where the tinder ignited first.

The riots present interesting aspects of life in the big city. At first the reaction was to the Rodney King verdict. No one expected nearly complete exoneration of the police officers, and the injustice of the matter provided the first spark. The second phase is murky because of the behavior of the police. The LAPD knew the verdict was coming down and even may have been privy to the nature of the verdict. At any rate, the LAPD took a hike: The commanders went off to a training session, management training presumably, and the rest of the force stood around in the crucial first moments when the riot could have been stopped. Between the first emotional outburst and the full fledged riot, the southern section of LA went up in flames instantly, as if people trained in arson put the city to the torch. In the next phase, white people were beat up, with no interference from the police. Beautifully clear, close-up pictures from a helicopter graphically showed the beating to near death of a white truck driver with nary a sign of the LAPD. It seemed as if the LAPD welcomed the self-immolation of that section of the city. In the next phase of the riot, the street gangs and toughs of the city saw an opportunity to get into the action. Some admitted they found the locations to which to go from watching TV. Finally, in the last phase, plain citizens, by then seeing that the ordinary supply of goods they required for their daily life was going to be interrupted, went out themselves to get the diapers and baby food. (And a few helped the wounded, regardless of race.) Then LAPD all the while seemed to be saying by their inaction that "This is what you get without a macho police force, and let it be an example to you."

According to press reports, the success of the defense lawyers rested on the repeated use of the videotape to make their points, discussing in great detail features of the action by using a stop action sequence where they could show the events in 1/1000th of a second slices. The judge should not have permitted that analysis as the main way to view the action. The human eye does not see in 1/1000th of a second. The human eyes sees 24 frames per second—the rate of a normal movie—and that is the way the witnesses and the camera saw the action. In context, Rodney King was beat up by the police in a series of 1/1000th-second takes. Rodney King was imagery, maybe even balletic art, but not a victim according to the inappropriate showing of the video tape. The defense lawyers were, in a sense, like many men who abuse family members: They knew where to strike their blows so they would not show.

The criminal justice system broke down in LA and Simi Valley because the nation is now pervaded with racism. Racism is immoral, sinful, abominable, demeaning, and wretched, but it happens to have been the policy of three presidents and a successful presidential political party. The so-called Southern Strategy of the Republican party brought to being by Lee Atwater, chairman of the Republican Party, (but decried by him before his death), is based upon the old prejudices and divisions of the South.

When the South was in the Democratic Party, it had the likes of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and many others to provide the moral leadership for the party and the nation. With the Southern Strategy, the racists of the South and the rest of the nation's racist population, rather than being restrained by the moral leadership of the presidency, were and are corrupted by that very same office.

The Civil War was never brought to a satisfactory conclusion. General Grant told General Lee to take his men and go home in good faith. Post-Civil War rioting, where lots of blacks got killed at the hands of Confederate soldiers who had returned home with their horses and their guns, soon proved that the North would have to occupy the South. The Union Army went south and the era of the South's Republicanism began. Southerners who had taken an oath of office to a foreign government, namely the Confederacy, were not eligible to hold public office. The blacks and carpetbaggers took over.

There was no transition from war to peace, but an abrupt change. The South should not have been disenfranchised but should have been formed into governments of occupation. We did this in World War II and it was the right thing to do. Germany and Japan after World War II benefited from a humane victor and rose from the ashes of defeat to the triumph of economic leadership. Former Confederate officeholders should have been retained in office until they had been taught how to run democratic governments. The South never rose. The occupation was soon ended by the corrupt election of 1876, which will go down in our annals as the depth of electoral depravity. The unrepentant South was left free to work its will on the former slaves. The "Redeemers" took back the governments of the Southern States and then began the deliberate oppression of former slaves and the white poor who happened to be in a class with them. Taxes were lowered and the discriminatory Jim Crow laws were passed. The former slaves were re-submerged into dependent status by the reduction of taxes, by the whip, and by the lynch rope. The post-Civil War Supreme Court, packed with Southern sympathizers, trashed the Fourteenth Amendment, a trashing that still needs to be undone. "Separate but equal" became the result of Plessy vs Ferguson, the law of the land, and the U.S. set the apartheid example for the world. Social and economic opportunity was denied the former slaves, a condition which persisted well into the twentieth century.

One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Great Society legislation enfranchising blacks. The social programs of the 60's were not extravagant, but one thing was sure, without the Vietnam War, there was going to be lots of surplus money. We all know that the senseless Vietnam War took care of the budget surpluses (20 billion in 1963, the equivalent of 100 billion in 1992 dollars). After Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's Morning in America with its trillions of dollars of debt; we were in some ways back in the immediate post-Civil War era. Racism was rampant, and the root problems that were not addressed after the Civil War and which were being addressed in the Great Society, were put on the back burner, as the Federal Government pursued a policy of debt at any cost, inflating the Defense Department's budgets on phony estimates of the Russian threat. The country was lied to and deceived in order to get rid of budget surpluses to make sure they would not be used for social programs. Then came the deficits, first the national deficit, then the trade deficit. Both avoidable.

The tax and spending structure started in the 1980's, greatly favoring the rich, making the poor even poorer, increasing the number of homeless, and dropping the country into the depths of the depression, without a depression. The people who reacted to the Rodney King verdict with the LA riots were people who had fallen through the social safety net years before, both the decent people who looted baby food and the thugs who looted appliance stores. They were losers, some of them welfare recipient families for generations, some of them new immigrants. The forgotten of our huddled masses were suddenly on television.

Ronald Reagan liked to say in a cynical way, "We fought the war on poverty and poverty won." Who won and who lost is a tragic consequence of his own policies. The rich won handsomely. Twenty-six% of the total wealth of the nation since the 1980's went to the top 1/2% of the nation's wealthy people, while the number of poor and the depths of their poverty increased. The money the rich received because Ronald Reagan did not want to collect their taxes, is the money that could have funded education and infrastructure maintenance, and all the other things a Federal Government should be doing to promote the General Welfare of the nation.

It was more important to arm against the Evil Empire on the basis of ginned up estimates than to attend to the nation's well being. George Bush had boyish eagerness to fight Saddem Hussein, but no stomach for the problems of the nation's cities. Nothing that is done in the aftermath of riots will work because neither the President or the Congress is willing to look at the problem squarely.

Senator Phil Gramm, in a speech before the National Press Club, said it was not a matter of the budget but two very different ways of looking at government. The way the President and Senator Gramm are looking at the government is as a minimalist Federal Government with the burden of governance carried by the States. The Supreme Court is transferring power to the States as fast as the cases before it permit. The idea is to reduce the Federal Government to what Ed Meese said, defense and foreign affairs. This, of course, flies in the face of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and accepts the trend of Jefferson and Jackson—weak ineffective central government run by rural people—as opposed to the prevailing view at the Convention, that of Hamilton and Madison, for strong pro-business central government. It also flies in the face of the consequences of the Civil War.

Are we a nation for, by, and of, the people, as Lincoln said, dedicated to the notion that all men are created equal?

The attack on the Federal Government has been occurring within the bureaucracy itself, in the Congress and particularly by the press and the electronic media. Nixon, Reagan, Bush policies for the management of government have reduced the Federal Government's, effectiveness dramatically, as shown in the S&L crises. It could reasonably be said that these were a complete failure of the bank regulators. The banks were looted, everybody knew it was happening, nobody cared, and damn few have gone to jail, certainly no regulator nor any congressman.

We need a united government. If the Nixon, Reagan, Bush people, and the magnates that support them want to return to the Articles of Confederation, they should ask for a Convention to decide the question. They should not use the power to appoint and to subvert the law so that present laws cannot be administered properly. If they can't get a Convention, then they should work within the system instead of continually subverting it. What we have seen happen to the nation can be laid at the feet of a minority president and a majority congress, neither of whom will cooperate with the other. The burden is with the President since he takes an oath to faithfully execute the laws. The Congress has been just as bad in failing to reform itself. The election laws and laws relating to campaign funds are especially immoral and degenerative. The Federal Government has become one big orgy of PAC money with damned little governance and little or no accountability.

The easiest solution is to elect a president and congress of the same party. Failing that, we should change the government so that the House of Representatives replaces the Electoral College and elects the president. The people would elect known representatives instead of unknown electors, and the representatives would elect the president. Every transaction would be above board and in plain sight. If a congressional party elected the president, then the whole party would have to change to change the president. This feature would take care of term limitations as well as allow a president to serve beyond eight years if his party was successful in governing the nation. Throwing the rascals out, all of them, would be a necessary condition to getting a new president. Furthermore, incumbents would not have nearly the advantage they have today since they would be colored with their party's colors (they elect the president), and they would be subject to party discipline (otherwise their party wouldn't be able to govern). No boll weevils in such a republican system. No wishy, washy votes on Supreme Court candidates either.

In any case, we have to abandon the form of social welfare that simply invites attack - without solving the problem, and replace it with a system that will guarantee results.

The liberal view of social progress is leading to the welfare state; a number of which exist in the world. The Conservatives' programs, on the other hand, are leading us to the police state. Do we want socialism or fascism? We don't want either. We don't want the socialism of the liberals and we don't want the fascism of the conservatives. What we do want is what the founding fathers guaranteed, to each of us when they declared the nation independent of George III and England.

We want a government that recognizes that the people are the sovereign, the citizens-sovereign. This means, to begin with, that there must be a radical shift in the way government officials view the public, from the president on down, and there must be a radical shift in the way the citizens-sovereign look at government. We citizens-sovereign have consented to be governed, but the quid pro, quo is that we are, here to be served. The Declaration states emphatically that governments are formed to obtain and secure to the people the unalienable rights. That should be the first and foremost objective of government at all levels. "Do the people have their unalienable rights?" must be the dominant question. If they don't, government is a failure and should be replaced. The Declaration' says we can change our government if it fails to serve us, by force if necessary. We were born in a contest of arms, so we have revolution as a birthright. We don't need father figure leaders, we don't need benign authoritarians who will take time out of a busy day to help us. We need citizen servants who will serve us according to our just rights. We all have the right to live in a humane ecosystem. We have a right to live in a society governed by humane morality and ethics. We have the right to have the government secure unto us the unalienable rights—the rights necessary to survive and thrive in our society.

The Unalienable Rights:

• Life
• Liberty
• The Pursuit of Happiness
• Privacy
• Health
• A Humane Environment
• Humane Nutrition
• Humane Habitation
• Education
• An Equal Share of the Commonwealth
• Participation in Free Enterprise
• The Right of Residency and Movement
• The Constitutional Guarantees of Citizenship
• Voluntary Association

The LAPD deprived Rodney King of his civil rights with the compliance of a racist jury with the consequences of riot. If the police officers who stopped Rodney King had their unalienable rights and recognized that Rodney King also had his, nothing would have happened. The humane ecosystem would have prevailed. Nobody would have had to tell the officers that Rodney King was a citizen-sovereign and deserved to be treated properly. The beating, the jury trial, and the subsequent riots are all part of the racist fabric of our society.

A president who blames another president's social program when he doesn't have one of his own simply underscores the distance we have traveled away from a humane society. Do our elected representatives, the people with whom we the citizens-sovereign share power in this republic of ours, really represent us? Are they using the power we bestow upon them wisely, or have they divided us for their advantage, so they are free to represent anyone, any group, or any idea they choose?

We are a divided nation. The Rodney King episode, the jury verdict, and the riots testify to this blatant fact. We the People can do some thing about it. Racism is the aftermath of slavery. The slave trade was abolished by the British clergy and interested citizens who formed voluntary associations and told their government to stop the slave trade.

The United States is supposed to be a very religious nation. If it is, it is now time for the clergy of that very religious nation to rise up and smite the sinners. Presidents and political parties should be condemned by name from the pulpit for their racism. Racism in all forms and in all places has to be condemned. Voluntary associations caused the British government to quit the slave trade. It was the first time in history a people told its government what to do. It's time we had some voluntary associations speak to the question of race and our divided government. It's about time our moralists earned their keep.?

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1992
Institute for domestic Tranquility