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<h4>&#8220;If you aren&#8217;t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.&#8221;</h4>
<h4><em>— Malcolm X</em></h4>
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<p>This week, the professional journalist twittersphere was thrown into crisis over <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em> Editorial Board’s decision to publish an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html">op-ed</a> by US Senator from Arkansas Tom Cotton. The piece itself was a frothing desire for “an overwhelming show of force,” amidst a mélange of warmed-over consensus dreck drawing feckless distinctions between rioters, “peaceful, law-abiding protestors,” and bogeyman “antifa.” It hardly merits dissecting, but I suspect it wasn’t merely the content that has created uproar. Rather, the well-meaning liberals who populate the nation’s newsrooms seemed at a loss as to why the nation’s putative “paper of record” and bastion for #theresistence could publish something so anathema to their consciences.</p>
<p>Moreover, the response demonstrated that what was lost in the shuffle was a proper grasp of wider political histories. And it fails to locate an institution such as the <em>Times</em> in the politics of class struggle, in which it&#8217;s constantly engaged, despite the well-meaning beliefs of its editors and staff writers. I’m not so interested in the strife within the <em>Times</em>. I have no horse in that race, but it&#8217;s essential to contextualize the <em>Times</em> board’s decision and put paid to the notion that the <em>Times</em> is anything other than an agent of systemic stability.</p>
<p>It’s news to no one that the corporate media is in the midst of a <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/02/27/can-journalism-be-saved/">deep identity crisis</a>. Since its mid-century hey-day, there has been print media consolidation and outright shuttering, the rise of cable news, the capture of local news channels by the likes of Sinclair Media, and, of course, the car crash we can’t look away from: the 45th president. His near daily outbursts provoke endless handwringing for career journalists, who have spent several decades publicly battering Trump, to the point he actually decamped for Florida, ostensibly for tax reasons, but surely also because he was unwelcome among the elite tastemakers like those at the <em>Times</em>, whose approval he desperately craves. The president also makes everyone else seem hinged by comparison, including someone like Cotton.</p>
<p>Thus the outrage was predictable when Gray Lady’s pages were graced by a fascist fellow-traveler’s demands to invoke the <a href="https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R42659">Insurrection Act</a>. An act, judging by the photos accompanying the piece, that seems as though it’s only been invoked in the name of desegregation and not for suppressing slave revolts, breaking strikes, and putting down civic uprisings not unlike the ones now on display. However, the criticism from journalists had its limits. Namely it fails to take into account the long history of liberal collaboration with authoritarians and outright fascists, as well as the <em>Times</em>’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/us/michael-brown-spent-last-weeks-grappling-with-lifes-mysteries.html">less than angelic</a> history of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/15/opinion/disarming-iraq.html">imperialist cheerleading</a> contra so-called journalistic standards.</p>
<p>The uproar seems couched in a belief either that the <em>Times</em> was somehow duped by Cotton, a belief belied by the reports that it was the editorial board itself that <a href="https://twitter.com/PatrickCoffee/status/1268978143748067331">approached Cotton</a> and the historically dishonest selection of accompanying photos, or simply that the board’s commitment to the marketplace of ideas got the better of them this time. (<a href="https://twitter.com/Slate/status/1268598836395728902">According to Slate</a>, Cotton’s piece accounts for the greatest number of <em>Times</em> subscription cancelations in a single hour, and is probably what cost James Bennett his job..)</p>
<p>These are understandable concerns for journalists and editors at the <em>Times </em>and elsewhere that fail to reckon with the larger class interests which the nation’s “paper of record” represents. More than anything, the <em>Times</em>’s editorial board is a rhetorical custodian of status quo. One in which black and brown bodies are the grist for the ever-steady accumulation of capital and Pax Americana. I’m certain that they, and their friends at the Union Club and <a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/withering-vine-tom-frank">the Vineyard</a>, are more than a little bit nervous about the thousands upon thousands of people in the streets, confronting the state’s unilateral claim over sovereignty. A lot more nervous than they are about a Trump White House.</p>
<p>What the <em>Times</em> board saw in Cotton was a way to have their cake and eat it, too. To decry the rioting on the streets while using Cotton’s conservative bona fides to provide cover for the inevitable flack, “Look,” they say, “how extreme these views are, but, as you know, sunlight is the best disinfectant.”</p>
<p>This tactic is long in the tooth and meant to counter even the whiff of socialism, of people power, even if it means giving voice to someone whose preferred way of handling that threat is to call in the military. As Trotsky <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/08/onlyroad2.htm">once observed</a>, “The big bourgeoisie likes fascism as little as a man with aching molars likes to have his teeth pulled.” The ruling class does not <em>prefer</em> fascism to conservativism or even a mild social democracy. But fascism is preferable to what is happening in the streets at the moment.</p>
<p>Publishing Cotton is the <em>Times</em>’s attempt to give us a binary. Either choose Cotton’s way, with boots on the street, or our way, also boots on the street, just with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/31/the-answer-to-police-violence-is-not-reform-its-defunding-heres-why">failed</a> <a href="https://www.e-flux.com/journal/87/169043/this-is-a-story-about-nerds-and-cops-predpol-and-algorithmic-policing/">Orwellian technocratic</a> reforms <a href="https://medium.com/@BarackObama/how-to-make-this-moment-the-turning-point-for-real-change-9fa209806067">nibbling the edges</a>. Recall, this is the same editorial board that last year deemed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/13/opinion/rikers-island-closing.html">the best solution</a> to closing Rikers was building five new prisons (“good investments in a safer future”), just so long as they look more like 6-story mixed users or college dorms.</p>
<p>We have at the moment a situation approaching the one which Gramsci found Italy in 1924 when <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1924/10/fascism-liberalism.htm">he observed</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>At the current time it is a question of something other than the return of the constitution, to democracy and liberalism. These latter are mellifluous words that the bourgeoisie uses to mislead the workers of the city and the countryside in order to prevent the crisis from taking on its true character, that is the vengeance of the workers and peasants against the fascism that has suppressed them and against the liberalism that has misled them, and which just a few months ago collaborated or sought to collaborate… with Mussolini.</p></blockquote>
<p>Just as liberalism proved no salve against Mussolini’s blackshirts, it has failed us here and this is what the journalists’ anger over the <em>Times</em> decision don’t get at. Bodycams, de-escalation, citizen oversight, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-police-use-of-force-law-signed-20190711-story.html">naming laws</a> after black men murdered by the police, none of these have put even a modest dent in the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/">yearly number</a> of police killings.</p>
<p>Asked how America could “cool it” in the hot summer of 1968, James Baldwin <a href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a23960/james-baldwin-cool-it/">quipped</a><u>,</u> “It’s not black people who have to cool it, because they won’t… I&#8217;m not at all sure that we are the ones who are being hurt the most. In fact I&#8217;m sure we are not. We are the ones who are <em>dying</em> fastest.” George Floyd’s lynching is the spark that has seemingly lit the fuse of a powder keg of problems facing an entire generation. It’s this that is animating the <em>Times</em> and its benefactors to court calls for a military solution to street protests. They apprehend that people are alive to a global order whose gifts are pandemic, irrevocable environmental degradation, continued white supremacy, wretched job prospects, increased alienation in the name of individuality, and usurious landlordism, be it the mortgage agent, the for-profit college recruiter, or the telecom monopoly that controls your data plan. It will kill black people quicker, but it’s coming for us all.</p>
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<p><em>Photo: <a class="owner-name truncate" title="Go to samchills's photostream" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/samchills/" data-track="attributionNameClick">samchills</a> via Flickr, CC BY 2.0</em></p>
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The Times, They Aren’t a’Changin’

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/utla-strike-exposes-heart-californias-inequality-problem/"></div><p>Up until now the teachers strikes that have garnered the most coverage have taken place in the least likely places — deeply conservative states. But now, the #RedForEd movement has come to Los Angeles, thirty years after the city’s last teachers strike. A cursory analysis might suggest that beyond the general lack of funding that K-12 education faces, there’s little that connects the wildcat strikes in Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arizona to the current UTLA strike.</p>
<p>A deeper understanding of the spirit animating the UTLA strike reveals two important things that connect UTLA&#8217;s actions to the last year’s #RedForEd strikes and California’s own complicity in public education’s current crisis. Most readily, teachers in LA are using the same strategies as strikers in red states, where teachers have aligned their interests with the common good to make demands that go beyond wages and hours, the permissible topics of bargaining. It was back in 2012, that the Chicago Teachers Union developed the bargaining for the common good framework for teachers when the union published “The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve.” The CTU document made a clear case for the need for smaller class sizes and host of other issues that have since become standard demands for teachers’ unions across the country. The bargaining for the common good framework is a recognition by labor that fighting for quality public services under neoliberal austerity requires mobilizing beyond the worksite.</p>
<p>Given this context, the UTLA strike is not just the latest teacher revolt in the fight for quality public education that started in Chicago in 2012, but possibly the most consequential, because it is the sleepy suburbs of the San Fernando Valley where the beating heart of the white homeowner tax revolt lies. It is a revolt that over the last four decades has spread across the country, provided the political cover and justification for the neoliberal restructuring of the economy, and consequently, has made necessary the wildcat actions initiated by workers in the #RedForEd movement.</p>
<p>The watershed moment of the taxpayer revolt was the passing of Proposition 13 in 1978; a year before Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain and two years before Reagan would ride the revolt to national power. Its passage signaled a profound change in the direction of the country, and one that other states were keen to follow. The authors of Prop 13, Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, sought to roll back taxation on property, allegedly to protect homeowners from ever increasing taxes. Jarvis even <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080720034219/http:/www.sfaa.org/0406forbes.html">encouraged renters to get on board</a>, arguing that landlords would pass on their savings to tenants, which, of course never happened. Hidden behind the requisite individual choice and anti-State sloganeering was the consolidation of white homeowner power in the California suburbs that had increased under the auspices of white flight and redlining, <a href="https://la.curbed.com/2018/12/3/18114611/city-of-segregation-book-los-angeles-housing-discrimation">a de facto city pastime in LA</a>.</p>
<p>To achieve this, Jarvis and Gann proposed pegging property assessments to 1976 values and restricting tax increases to 1% per year. To prevent its rollback, Prop 13 included a supermajority requirement on all state tax increases, not just those related to property value. This revolt quickly expanded beyond the state borders. Two years later, Massachusetts voters passed a similar law, the same year Reagan was elected president, and commenced the dismantling of the postwar welfare state.</p>
<p>While property owners may have benefited greatly from Prop 13, public education was gutted. Grade school public education funding in the United States relies primarily on local taxes, specifically property taxes, and California is no different. When Prop 13 passed, the state’s most important funding stream for public education was cut off, and <a href="https://calbudgetcenter.org/resources/californias-support-k-12-education-improving-still-lags-nation/">by some estimates</a> California currently ranks 41st in the nation for spending per student. In the short-run, this meant a deterioration in physical plants, overburdened teachers, and the wanton destruction of a what had been, arguably, one of the crowning achievements of California, its public education. In the long-term, this meant a clear opportunity for charters and their wealthy backers to move in and siphon off what little funding public schools do get, which is one of the most contested issues of the current actions in Los Angeles.</p>
<p>However, until 1996, there were still ways for local municipalities to get around some of the restrictions on raising revenue introduced by Prop 13. And so, a decade after Jarvis’s death, Californians voted to expand the power of Prop 13 to hideous proportions with Prop 218, or the “Right to Vote on Taxes Act.” Prop 218 closed loopholes in Prop 13, expanded the supermajority requirements to questions of municipal taxation, and eased signature requirements to get anti-tax legislation on ballots. Today, <a href="http://www.ncsl.org/research/fiscal-policy/supermajority-vote-requirements-to-pass-the-budget635542510.aspx">15 states</a>, including California, now require legislative supermajorities for all imposed or increased taxes, the most recent addition, Florida, where voters chose in November to impose such restrictions on its legislature.</p>
<p>Prop 218 can be seen as the full-throated victory of the California anti-tax regime, and one that, through the expansion of supermajority requirements for local tax initiatives, kneecapped municipalities’ ability to raise revenue on their own. Recent examples of this supermajority requirement in action are the failure of 2018’s Proposition A in Alameda county, which would have raised $140 million for early childhood education and the failure of Los Angeles County’s 2012 transportation initiative Measure J. Both measures received over 66% percent of the vote but failed because the needed 66.67% to pass. Ironically, Prop 13 itself only passed with 62.6% of the vote.</p>
<p>What started with the taxpayer revolt has resulted in severe restrictions country-wide in how local citizenry and governments can fund everything from transportation to education. The anti-democratic consequences can be seen clearly in the contours of the UTLA strike. As both sides argue over the fiscal responsibility of the teachers demands, the simplest solution — let citizens vote for a new tax revenue — can be held hostage by the forces of reaction; an entirely predictable consequence of Proposition 13. The fever dream of the free markets is little more than a sleight of hand trick to take autonomy from localities and place it in the stewardship of tiny minorities of voters or legislators, an irony that should be obvious.</p>
<p>Over the summer the <em>Los Angeles</em> <em>Times</em> <a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-property-taxes-elites-201808-htmlstory.html">reported on the gross abuse of the Prop 13 regime</a>, highlighting <a href="https://slate.com/business/2018/08/californias-proposition-58-has-created-a-whole-lot-of-second-homes-and-rental-properties.html">how feudal California</a> has become. Thanks to the taxpayer revolt, property owners are able to bequeath assessments to children, such as the case of the poet Dorothy Bridges, wife of the actor Lloyd Bridges, who willed her tony Malibu beach property to sons, Jeff and Beau, and daughter Lucinda. The siblings were able to avoid an extra $300k a year in taxes because of the current system. Ostensibly, this was designed to prevent children of the deceased to be saddled with massive bills. However, the <em>Times </em>reported that “In Los Angeles County, as many as 63% of homes inherited under the system were used as second residences or rental properties last year” and that comparable situations existed in many of the most desirable locations in California, such as Sonoma and Santa Cruz. We take some hope, however, from the fact that voters rejected the 2018 attempt by fiscal hawks to extend the reach of Prop 13 via Prop 5, which would have allowed homeowners 55 years or older to transfer their assessments to new home purchases, enabling them to carry literally their title of nobility wherever they move.</p>
<p>Clearly, this system is untenable, and its effects reach well beyond public education. As Mike Davis points out in <em>Ecology of Fear</em>, “savage budget cuts, meanwhile, in the wake of California’s 1978 tax reduction revolution (Proposition 13), shrunk the [Los Angeles] fire department by 15 percent at a time when demand for its services had increased by more than 50 percent.” This led to understaffed stations and an inability for fire marshals and other officials from ensuring the safety of the most vulnerable of the city’s residents, with massive conflagrations consuming whole tenements in the Westlake District, which alone killed 43 people between 1982 and 1993. Davis also argues that what little services the fire department could provide went overwhelmingly to wealthy property owners in Bel Air and Encino.</p>
<p>If there was ever a time that historical circumstances were so well in alignment, this is it. California’s uneven development has reached a critical juncture, and as teachers go out on strike demanding higher wages and better working conditions, we must ask, why were they forced into this in the first place? The answer is simple, but the remedies will be difficult. At this moment, we must not lose sight of why LAUSD workers are on the picket line. The voters put them there by believing, some 40 years ago, that the boom mentality that drapes over the state like a Tule Fog could last forever, even if only in their minds.</p>
<p>Like drawing an infection closer to the surface, the LA strikes have the chance to expose a contradiction that is at the heart of California’s, and the nation’s inequality. But this can only be done if we take a wide view of the situation. The rank and file teachers and school workers already realize that their plight is one they share with fire fighters, nurses, and the myriad other workers who have chosen to work for the common good and the communities they serve. What is needed is to make explicit that the fate of public sector workers are bound up with the consequences of Prop 13 and that the regime of austerity unleashed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation needs to be dismantled.</p>
<p>Rolling back the consequences of Prop 13 will take more effort than just  qualifying a ballot measure because the influence of Prop 13 extends well beyond funding for public services. As Peter Schrag argues in <em>Paradise Lost</em>, Prop 13 influences “how California communities are planned and shaped, and on the sense of the community — or lack of it — in which they exist.” We will need to do the hard work of  rebuilding communities that privileges common purpose over individual gain. To do so will require labor moving beyond transactional coalitions and embracing all the struggles their members face. It will take more experiments in bargaining for the common good and more strikes that center the concerns of all stakeholders. Toppling Prop 13 will also take renters and tenants unions doing work on the ground to connect the gutting of public services to the plight of renters across the state who daily face the prospect of being priced out or evicted for another Airbnb experience or spectacle for the bi-coastal rich to enjoy on their winter sojourns.</p>
<p>The very public and very long-term attack on public sector workers and unions in states like West Virginia and Oklahoma has its origins in the white suburbs of LA now snarled with UTLA picket lines. What stalks the edges of the LAUSD strike, and what has been haunting California and the nation for 40 years, is the specter of Prop 13 coming home to roost, and any fight for the common good must confront this legacy.</p>
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UTLA Strike Exposes the Heart of California’s Inequality Problem

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/requiem-media-execution-la-weekly/"></div><p>Americans have a strange and abiding trust in the corporate. There is an inherent problem with this trust, and it’s easy enough to spot, though our legal system has done everything it can to occlude it. Corporations are not people. I repeat: corporations are not people. Actual people, the kind who can be physically placed in a jail cell, are denied the framework to conceptualize this chasm; instead, we tend to transpose our own moral frameworks — the ones that allow us to operate daily with our neighbors, bus drivers, grocery cashiers, our friends — onto corporations. In <a href="http://www.laweekly.com/news/invitation-homes-and-other-corporate-landlords-are-squeezing-tenants-with-rent-increases-8901051">a recent report</a> from <em>LA Weekly</em> on Invitation Homes, the largest landlord of single-family homes in the city of LA, you can see this logic at work. In the report, a tenant expresses surprise that in the face of crippling rent increases, Invitation Homes wasn’t “negotiating and being nice with each other and com[ing] to an agreement.” <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/requiem-media-execution-la-weekly/#more-5937" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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Requiem for a Media: On the Execution of <em>LA Weekly</em>

Requiem for a Media: On the Execution of LA Weekly

Politicon 2017 - Day 1

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/politicon-cheers-jeers-important-political-engagement/"></div><p>My grandfather was a Rockefeller Republican for most of his life. He served in the Eisenhower administration and was a state representative in Massachusetts for eight years. However, by the time I was old enough to know him, he had retired to New Hampshire, mostly because of the state’s allergies to taxes, and had become an increasingly crankish capital-C conservative. Though he never attended, he started giving to Hillsdale College because it didn’t accept federal funding. He mailed me ridiculous anti-Clinton literature. Something of a proto-Fox News dad, but without the unpleasant bigotry or resentment. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/politicon-cheers-jeers-important-political-engagement/#more-4890" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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Politicon: Where Cheers and Jeers Are More Important Than Political Engagement

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/dont-expect-liberalism-come-defense-keeanga-yamahtta-taylor/"></div><p>If you haven’t read <em>From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation</em> by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, you should. It has already found its place as essential reading on the intersection of race and class in recent US history. Sadly, Taylor has been in the news this last week for far more unsettling reasons, ones that should cause you (as they do me) grave concern — both for her personally, and regarding the liberal conception of absolute free speech. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/dont-expect-liberalism-come-defense-keeanga-yamahtta-taylor/#more-4402" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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Don&#8217;t Expect Liberalism to Come to the Defense of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/making-meaning-coachella-era-collapse/"></div><p>On Saturday, as nearly 100,000 youths blissed out to <a href="https://www.coachella.com/guidebook/set-times/">a lineup</a> that included Lady Gaga, Bon Iver and ScHoolboy Q on the Empire Polo Grounds in Indio, California, 500 miles to the north antifascist and alt-rightist forces fought in pitched street battles in Berkeley. The day before, on my way from the dusty day parking lot to the 330 acre chunk of emerald sod plopped in the desert like so many of its golf course cousins, I spoke to a 25-year old festival-goer from Encino about his plans for the weekend. It was his first Coachella, and he sincerely hoped his weekend would be devoid of anything political. It was a sentiment that seemed to pervade the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and stands in sun-bleached contrast to the darkness shaping up around us. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/making-meaning-coachella-era-collapse/#more-3869" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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Making Meaning at Coachella, in an Era of Collapse

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/events/breakup-sex-hamlet-mobile/"></div><p>We climbed onto pillows, pushed up against the back of the driver’s and passenger’s seats, as the doors to the van closed. Hamlet lay on the floor, drinking a beer and wearing sock garters that I don’t think were holding anything up. He didn’t speak. Was he sizing us up, maybe waiting to see if we would say something first? Or was he just catching his breath? He was halfway through a three-hour marathon of performing the same 15-minute show on repeat; perhaps all his psychic energy had been drained by our 9:30 slot. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/events/breakup-sex-hamlet-mobile/#more-2640" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
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Breakup Sex in a Hamlet-Mobile

The Sinking Middle Class

<strong>John W. W. Zeiser is a poet, journalist, and critic, currently living in Maine.</strong>

John W. W. Zeiser

The Dreams Matter More

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins

Politics

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

“A Mix of Malcolm and Milton”: On Corey Robin’s “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas”

“The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.” — Aristotle

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Kafkaesque

Keep Even Man Where He Belongs

"All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated." — Comics Code, 1954

Comics

Carceral Capitalism

Beyond “Carceral Capitalism”

Economics and Finance

Et in Arcadia Ego

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." — George Bernard Shaw

History

Fire!!

Zora Neale Hurston: “A Genius of the South”

<p>"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead." — Samuel Goldwyn</p>

Biography &amp; Autobiography

A Greater Music

Bae Suah’s Narrative Collapse

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Vaseline Buddha

Lost in Thought

Red Rosa

Beyond the Biopic

Without You, There Is No Us

Secrets and Lies

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">— Fernando Pessoa, <em>The Book of Disquiet</em></p>

Around the World

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

John W. W. Zeiser is a poet, journalist, and critic, currently living in Maine.