CommentsTHE VIEW FROM HERE - With Los Angeles’s being infused with corruptionism, one can forget that the entire state has increasingly become one gigantic criminal enterprise.
Our nation’s unwitting blindness to what has been occurring around us is reminiscent of the mid-1950's when one could deeply inhale the fumes from buses and autos and think, “Isn’t progress wonderful?”
The Delusions Which Fuel Our Folly
Perhaps, it began in kindergarten where we pledged allegiance to “one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” (I’m old; that is what it was when I was in kindergarten.) By high school, we were taught that working towards an ideal did not mean that the goal had been realized. In the early 1950's, Hollywood started cranking out Westerns which showed how far we had to go as a nation to live up to our founding value that each man had inalienable rights. Broken Arrow, produced by Julius Blaustein for 20th Century Fox, is credited as the first post WW II film to portray Indians (aka Native Americans) in a sympathetic light. Although coined for Superman comics in the 1930's and 1940's, “Truth, Justice and the American way” became ingrained in kids’ minds by the 1950's TV Series Superman. The TV show The Rebel (1959 - 1961) with Nick Adams often showed White Northerners as morally challenged. The Civil Rights Era proved how far short we had fallen of our founding values. William Ernest Henley’s 1875 poem Invictus’ heralded the noble value to overcome overwhelming odds as reflected in Martin Luther King’s 1963 I Have a Dream speech.
“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.” Henley 1875
“With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. MLK 8-28-1963
Then Regression and Corruption Set In
While some saw the regression and corruption relentlessly advancing like the second hand on a clock, others were blind and only saw a seemingly stationary hour hand and thought nothing was changing. How wrong they were.
Socially, the striving for freedom was replaced by Victimology (renamed in the 2000's Wokerism) where America was all oppression, and its minority victims were helpless pawns who could only give their fate over to a national patronage system under the guise of Affirmative Action. Equity Funding (1964-1978) was the first large scale post WW II Wall Street corruption. Even those who recognized its evil, naively thought that America had the moral fiber to right itself. Noted Conservative George J. Benson had gone so far as to propose stricter government regulation, but he too thought that our ethics could rectify the system. Business Ethics in America, by George C.S. Benson, (1978) pp 197-199. Rather than spurring reform, Equity Funding became the prototype for the 1980's Savings & Loan Scandals and later for the massive Wall Street Subprime frauds which crashed the economy in 2008. Since then, there has been only ersatz, make-believe reform, e.g. The Dodd-Frank Act, 12 U.S.C. § 1465.
The APSA’s 1950 Pernicious Subversion of the Political System
In 1950, the American Political Scientists Association (APSA) had unleashed a lethal attack on Truth, Justice and the American Way, with its proposal that cooperation between the two political parties should be replaced by a strict ideological polarization so that the GOP and the Dem would present separate and distinct social, economic and political agendas. Then, voters would adopt one and shun the other. Centrism was an evil to be killed off. July 2, 2018, The New Yorker Magazine, The Rise of McPolitics, by Yascha Mounk The cultural wars were made for extremism. Bolstered by Barry Goldwater’s “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!,” extremism became a virtue often phrased as, “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”
The great divide was that the GOP preempted Liberty for white male Christians, while the Dems shunned MLK’s Liberty in favor of Equality and Group Rights.
The Common Meeting Ground
The two political parties did, however, have a common meeting ground – corruptionism. Both the GOP and the Dems supported the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act in 1999 and the legitimization of Credit Default Swaps in 2000. North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan (1992-2011) sounded the alarm, but greed demanded the end of Keynesian moderation. As Sen. Dorgan explained, “. . . [C]reate a free market that works with price competition and product differentiation and so on, but there needs to be a referee with a whistle and a striped shirt, I mean the free market sometimes needs referees." [Dec 6, 2027 Huff Post, Glass-Steagall Act: The Senators And Economists Who Got It Right, by Sam Stein] Referees keep the game fair for all which is the antithesis of extremism.
The extremism also made us forget that we are a republic and not a democracy. By its nature, a republic is chocked full of restraints on power, but in a pure democracy, whatever the masses want is the supreme virtue and all else be damned. Thus, nothing is more vital than capturing votes by any means possible. Trump’s denial of the November 2020 election results was mandated by the extreme polarization which both the Dems and GOP have created. When your side is all good and extremism in pursuit of virtue is no vice, lies become mandatory.
California’s Big Lie
California’s Big Lie is that there is a housing shortage. A state, which has been losing population, does not have a housing shortage. When demand declines, prices do not increase, unless there is systemic fraud. The only segment of housing with a shortage is at the bottom and that is due to the mass destruction of tens of thousands of poor people’s homes. The City of Los Angeles has enough vacancies to house every homeless person in a decent apartment or house and still have about 100,000 vacancies. This situation has been known for years. April 21, 2016, Zwartz Talk, Help Los Angeles Now!!!
What does mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, King of LA Developers, propose?
“The solution is obvious: we must build more housing, of all types, in all neighborhoods . . .” For Caruso, arsenic is the antidote for arsenic poisoning.
Asking a developer what to do about a housing glut is like asking Pablo Escobar what to do about narcotics. Their Answer: More is better. California and Los Angeles in particular are addicted to construction dollars. Who else will pay a councilmember to waive any and all zoning restrictions? Tearing down the old to construct the new not only adds dollars to the economy, it also greatly increases the city’s property tax revenue.
Excessive density creates another bonus for developers – the claim that we need to pay them hundreds of billions of dollars to construct subways and above ground light rail systems. The reality is this: When a huge urban area like Los Angeles thinks its density requires fixed rail mass transit, it has exceeded its saturation point.
Urban Areas Have Saturation Points
Different societies have different saturation points. What is culturally acceptable in Japan is unwanted in the US. Americans still want a detached home with a yard. When the core areas cannot have ingress and egress without subways and light rail, it is too dense. The developers’ response is more densification as that means more profit per sq inch for them, but Americans do not like being crowded and never liked long commutes.
Angelenos voted down mass transit in 1968 and again in 1974 until voters approved a ½ cent sales tax in 1980 for one reason: to reduce their own traffic congestion. Mass transit lines, however, are not designed to relieve traffic congestion, but rather to justify more densification along those routes. The developers argue that high density is required to create the ridership to pay for the lines. It’s a vicious cycle: density requires mass transit which requires more density to pay for the mass transit. NYC Metro, which is the nation’s most financially successful, runs billions of dollars in the red each year.
California’s addiction to densification has deteriorated the quality of life so badly that our urban middle class is leaving. Since Wall Street knows there is no market for densification, LA corruptionism now looks to the federal government to fund density. Eventually, Los Angeles can be renamed Elysium [Matt Damon film - Photo above].
(Richard Lee Abrams has been an attorney, a Realtor and community relations consultant as well as a CityWatch contributor. You may email him at [email protected])
