CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : Help for a Smoldering Society : Overhaul our nation’s class structure, social priorities and political consciousness for real change.

The split-the-difference verdict in the Rodney King civil-rights case purchased only a reprieve for a system whose social structure still smolders. Since May, 1992, a multiracial group of 50 scholars and activists at the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles has painstakingly studied the history, social dynamics and economic structures of Los Angeles and the nation to form a strategic vision for a more focused and long-term “urban rebellion.” The findings are reflected in our just-released report “Reconstructing Los Angeles from the Bottom Up.” Its central conclusion was that positive proposals must be implemented in the following areas:

* Problem: corporate displacement of the public sector. Promises of jobs by RLA (formerly Rebuild L.A.) have been marked by misrepresentation and poor results. Worse, they have allowed Mayor Bradley and Gov. Wilson to relinquish the role of the public sector and created a self-appointed elite that openly asserts the corporate takeover of government.

Positive proposals: Create community boards in each council district; schedule decision-making meetings of the City Council and county Board of Supervisors on evenings and weekends; translate all public documents into Spanish and a variety of Asian languages, and require the fullest environmental impact report process. It is in expansion of direct democracy that society’s most disenfranchised can best challenge the undemocratic structures of “representative” democracy.

* Problem: Are government subsidies for the corporate or the poor? Between 1980 and 1992 the federal military budget increased 46%, while federal education and housing funds were cut 70% each. In Los Angeles County in 1990, 1,284 firms received Department of Defense contracts worth almost $9 billion, with 10 firms receiving 80% of the money. Meanwhile, only one of four adults below the official poverty line receives public welfare assistance; almost 50% of the African-American and Latino men in South-Central are unemployed, and 500,000 Latino and Asian immigrants labor for annual wages of less than $10,000.

Positive proposals : Increasing federal and state corporate and personal income-tax rates to 1970 levels, which, according to the Children’s Defense Fund, would raise more than the $54 billion needed to lift the nation’s children out of abject poverty; set an $8 minimum hourly wage for all firms receiving contracts or loans from city and county governments; increase the county AFDC budget by 50% until the Clinton Administration finds the jobs and child care to “eliminate welfare as we know it.”

* Problem: white racism vs. a commitment to a multiracial city: During the 1960s, a relentless civil-rights movement convinced a significant minority of white people that poverty and racism were structural failings of our society and that government anti-poverty programs and a multiracial anti-racism movement were central to the solution. Today, a bloated and self-righteous white upper-middle-class sees “our L.A.” as the Westside and the San Fernando Valley and “the other L.A.” as South-Central, East L.A., Pico Union, anywhere that is predominantly low-income and populated by people of color.

State Sen. David Roberti’s attempt to split the L.A. Unified School District, segregating the have-nots from the haves, the Berman/Waxman machine’s perpetuation of the Valley/Westside axis, reflected in Mel Levine’s disgraceful post-rebellion senatorial campaign, and and Richard Riordan running on a not-very-subtle “white L.A.” platform are examples of the problem.

Positive proposals: An anti-racist stand by white residents, including: voting “no” on Riordan; demanding higher taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals to help solve the fiscal crisis of the cities; taking their children out of private schools and joining those of us still trying to make public education work; opposing the segregation of the Los Angeles school district, and signing a pledge of social responsibility that all employees hired for household work be paid at least $8 an hour plus Social Security benefits.

* Problem: ethnic Balkanization. As we watch the events in Bosnia, we all should be worried, if not terrified, about politics that pits the races in a desperate competition for meager government resources, City Council seats and even seats on the RLA board.

Positive proposals: Create and support a unified social agenda--that includes getting more MTA funding for low-income bus riders, stopping the county from contracting-out union jobs, preventing the INS from deporting striking workers and getting the Air Quality Management District to drop its plan to buy and sell pollution credits.

* Problem: police repression vs. social cohesion: Class and race polarization increasingly define Los Angeles’ landscape, as the privileged call on the LAPD to protect them from low-income communities of color. Willie Williams’ community-based policing plans have been criticized by Anthony Thigpenn of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Agenda project as a plan to turn neighbor against neighbor while offering communities no oversight power over police brutality.

Positive proposals: Civilian review boards with authority to oversee police behavior, a moratorium on all additional police funding until social services are funded appropriately and police behavior is radically improved.

For those of us experiencing the disintegration of America’s cities firsthand in Los Angeles, the most positive proposal of all is a social revolution against poverty and racism that will require a fundamental overhaul of our nation’s social priorities, political consciousness and class structure. While obviously quite radical and requiring the construction of social movements that may take a decade to build, it is far more “practical” than repeating the cycle of “keep the peace” and “burn baby burn.”