COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : A Billion Pious Words, Zero Dollars : Politicians are programmed to avoid pain; they won’t listen to the cost of repairing our cities.

In a month or so, when the camera crews have left South Los Angeles and weeds begin to poke their way up through the asphalt in the burned-out lots along Crenshaw, Vermont and Western, it will be easy enough to see who was just talking and who had a genuine plan.

Of course the sensible thing is to put some decent amounts of money into the poorer bits of Los Angeles and other cities similarly afflicted, but that’s the kind of language most white politicians are programmed to avoid.

The right has figured the way it always does. Bruce Herschensohn, a television pundit seeking the Republican nomination for the Cranston Senate seat, proclaimed in the wake of the riots that “some people are rotten,” and derided the idea of underlying social causes. This is the logic that leads to bigger prisons or enforced sterilization and long-term eugenics strategy.

Picking up on Herschensohn’s “bad seed” theory, the federal Centers for Disease Control announced that teams of investigators were being dispatched to investigate the “epidemiology” of the riots. The possibility of viral transmission is not to be precluded, though no doubt a dermatological faction in the CDC will identify melanin as a significant factor.

George Bush has been swerving from side to side as Dr. Jekyll battles Mr. Hyde for the President’s soul. Hyde will inevitably prevail, and southern Los Angeles will stand in for Willie Horton in the fall campaign.

Asked why, amid the riots, he was off to yet another fund-raiser instead of heading for Los Angeles, Bill Clinton responded that “life must go on.” Since the entire political strategy of his Democratic Leadership Council has been to persuade white folks that the Democratic Party no longer cares for “minorities” and will target no particular money in their direction, Clinton has been predictably low on concrete ideas, coming down from the hills after the battle to suffocate the wounded with great cushions of blather about how “we” have “refused to confront our differences” and “for this neglect we have all paid.” The core meaning of the past 12 years is the Republicans’ careful confrontations and accentuation of “our differences,” while ensuring that the poor, and the poor alone, pay the price. The impudence of these corporate looters in lamenting the decay of “personal responsibility” in the ghettos is past belief.

Though he was careful to say that the solution was not to “throw money at problems,” Clinton is recycling such Great Society approaches as job training and education programs, all part of the package that enabled the Democrats in the 1960s to shirk what the party advocated in 1946, namely a full employment act, which is anathema for the corporate class since it would outlaw the pauperized, feminized work force underpinned by immigrant $6-an-hour labor that keeps the profit curve from dropping through the floor.

The only proposal that remotely echoes the spirit of that full-employment act is the $35-billion urban-rescue package urged by big-city mayors before the L.A. riots as a way to combat recession, and now being pushed with fresh ardor by Jerry Brown and the Congressional Black Caucus.

Economic proposals by big-city mayors have the news life of an earthquake in Chile, but theirs remains the only substantive program on offer, aside from free-enterprise zones, the only scheme of Ronald Reagan’s old supply-side lobby which hasn’t yet melted down in the crucible of reality, simply because it hasn’t been tried. Shorn of Jack Kemp’s messianic rhetoric, enterprise zones are small-time fantasies about the therapeutic powers of market forces, which, in the ghettos, have long since failed.

The mayors’ plan, targeting $35 billion in fiscal assistance, public works, community development block grants, job training and low-interest small business loans, has been taken up in Congress, where it has met the famous legislated “wall” that prevents the shift of military funds to social programs rather than to deficit reduction.

This is a self-defeating battle since defense cuts have already had a savage impact on greater Los Angeles, most particularly on Los Angeles County. A short-term increase in the deficit was timely and appropriate. Earlier this year, some of the nation’s most distinguished economists, among them such Nobel prize winners as James Tobin, Franco Modigliani, Robert Solo and Lawrence Klein, called for such an increase to speed recovery.

This is the bottom line. When the talk of renewal and uplift and volunteerism has dwindled and the weeds sprout, we will be left with these options: Plan A (let poor urban neighborhoods rot) or Plan B (put in dollars and jobs and a plan). We’ve just seen the consequences of Plan A.