Monthly Archives: January 2021

Nostalgia is not history

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There are more than a division’s worth of soldiers in Washington to assure a safe, if no longer 100% peaceful, transition of power to Joe Biden. In that context, it is hard to live by Tip O’Neill’s adage and my usual mantra, “all politics is local.” The name of this blog, however, includes “local,” and local politics don’t stop because of what happens in the wider world. I’m reminded of Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001. The then City Manager, the formidable Susan McCarthy, kept City Hall open, declaring that to shut down the operations of government would be to hand a victory to the terrorists. I remember because I attended a zoning hearing that morning in City Hall to testify for a neighbor who needed a variance.

If Susan McCarthy could keep City Hall operating after 9/11, I’m not going to let a bunch of lunatic putschists in Washington prevent me from writing about why it’s okay to tear down the History Building at Santa Monica High School.

The entrance to the History Building at Samohi.

You may not be aware of the Samohi History Building controversy, because it has played out more in social media and by means of on-line petitions than in the press (although you can read about it here). What’s happening is that the School District is more than five years into the planning of the “Samohi Campus Plan” (SCP), a 25-year project to remake the Santa Monica High School campus, which itself is the product of many years of agonizing about what to do with the high school campus. Construction has begun; however, the SCP is a project with nine phases of construction, and the District is now only about to start Phase 3.

Phase 3 will require the demolition of the History Building, which is one of a cluster of four school buildings constructed or reconstructed as New Deal, WPA projects after the Long Beach Earthquake destroyed the original campus that dated back to 1913. Under the SCP, three of the buildings (History, Business, Art) will ultimately be demolished; a fourth, the English building, will be adapted and reused for administrative offices.

Current layout of the Samohi campus. The New Deal Cluster consists of the English, History, Business and Art Buildings.

Although the plans to demolish the History Building (and the other buildings) have been public knowledge, and well-publicized, since 2016, it is only now that preservationists, organized by the Santa Monica Conservancy, are demanding that the District “pause” the SCP to evaluate adaptive reuse possibilities. This request for a pause, however, is disingenuous, since preserving the three New Deal buildings, all of which had their historic integrity compromised by later renovations, would gut the SCP. The fundamental principle of the SCP is to realign the academic buildings around open space, to better connect the campus. This would be impossible if the New Deal buildings are retained. Saving them would require creating an entirely new plan, and I have to assume the preservationists know this. Here’s the landscaping plan for the new campus.

The yellow buildings will be constructed. (Note that one existing building, the Innovation Building in the northeast corner, is in fact new, having been constructed in 2105.) (This map is from the EIR; I’ve been informed that since the EIR changes have been made, but that they do not change the functioning materially.)

Ironically, the new plan, in its use of connecting open space, harks back to the original plan of the high school, when the academic buildings were concentrated around open space. Here’s a photo of the campus from 1925:

It was not easy for me to decide to oppose the Conservancy on the fate of the New Deal buildings. The Conservancy is one of my favorite organizations in town. I’ve long been a member. I was pleased to work with preservationists in the effort, probably futile now, to save the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. And speaking of favorite things, one of mine is the New Deal.

But the New Deal was not about buildings as buildings, it was about a vision of the future, a future structured by public investment in buildings, etc., that served the public. Sometimes the history of a place is more important than the preservation of artifacts. The real history of the Santa Monica High School campus—as opposed to the nostalgia—is a history of continual reinvestment, renewal, and rethinking. The buildings themselves (and without regard to intervening modifications) are not the history; they merely reflect the history.

Santa Monica voters passed a major bond issue in 1911 to build a new and bigger campus for the high school on Prospect Hill. The campus opened in 1913. As mentioned, the campus was destroyed by the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, and reconstructed with WPA funds. Then after World War II, to accommodate the Baby Boom generation, more bonds were passed, the campus was doubled in size (with land taken by eminent domain from African American and other historical “minorities,” but that’s another story), and most of the current campus was built. (That’s when the WPA buildings were remodeled. Fortunately no one is protesting the coming demolition of the 1960-era buildings.)

The Santa Monica community has always supported its schools with bonds. That’s the history: Santa Monicans want the best educations for their children and they’re willing to pay.

In the ’90s, when it was apparent that the facilities built generations before were wearing out, voters began passing bond issues to rebuild. Most of the bond money has gone to rehabilitating existing schools, and that’s largely been a good thing for the elementary schools, but the question of what to do with the high school was always there. It was recognized that much of the physical plant was impractical for current modes of instruction, and the campus was hard to get around, especially for students between classes. (My son went there, and he’s my source.) The buildings and grounds were in generally poor condition. For a time, there was talk of using the City’s redevelopment funds to help with some of the rebuilding, but that plan fell apart.

The School District decided some years ago to go bold, and that boldness resulted in the SCP. Most of the existing buildings will be torn down, and a spectacular new campus will take their place. Bravo. Look, I don’t pretend to know anything about the best way to teach adolescents in the 21st century, but if you study the SCP (you can read about it in the Environmental Impact Report), you have to be impressed with how much thought the District has put into the plan.

The purpose of the School District is to educate, not to preserve buildings if they no longer serve that purpose. Frankly, it’s outrageous for the Conservancy, especially since it’s been four years after the plans to demolish the buildings were publicized, to now tell the School Board to throw out its plans for the high school.

Thanks for reading. And all the best to Joe and Kamala! Let’s help them save our country.

To save democracy: 1. Prosecute. 2. Reorient the economy.

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“It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.” From Section 1 of the National Labor Relations Act.

In my last post I wrote that the first necessary step after last week’s failed insurrection is to prosecute the perpe-traitors, relentlessly. Arrests are taking place across the country. Prosecutors should find plenty incriminating and illuminating information when they have warrants to search the perps’ phones and computers.

Included in this first step is the immediate impeachment of Trump. That bit of justice is moving forward; I won’t add much to the discussion. Impeachment or even conviction would not preclude criminal prosecution. If the Department of Justice files criminal charges against Trump, prosecutors should be able to obtain warrants to search his cell phone, too. I wonder what they would find in that search.

The second necessary course of action will be longer-term. It must begin now, however. That step is a reorientation of the American economy to benefit working people. Judging by the appointments Joe Biden is making, and what he’s been saying since the election, this will be the primary focus, beyond fixing Covid-19, of the Biden administration. This is not only a matter of justice, but also will be crucial for the Democrats to win the 2022 mid-term elections, the next “most important election” in our lives.

The cretins who stormed the Capitol are the latest iteration of a long history of renegade, often racist, violence in our culture. These malevolent forces have always been present, notwithstanding our “shining city on a hill” self-image. I suspect that the great-grandparents, or even the grandparents, of many of those who stormed the Capitol instigated or joined lynch mobs—and bought the postcards afterwards.

Yet the impact these atavistic forces have waxes and wanes with the amount of oxygen they receive from the broader culture. Today what fuels them comes not only from an amoral president who feasted off their adoration, but also from what has fueled him: the grievances of people who have been left behind by a globalized economy organized for half a century on neoliberal principles that favor capital over labor.

There will always be demagogues who feed on grievances, using them, twisting them, for their own purposes, without any regard for the well-being of the aggrieved. The aggrieved are means to their ends of having power for the sake of power. John Maynard Keynes and others recognized that economic ruin led to totalitarianism. They argued that liberal government had to have the substantive purpose, beyond its own liberal structure, of ensuring that the people were secure in their economic lives.

During the Depression and after World War II, these economists and others (“New Dealers” here in America) were able to shape the economic rules to create a system that was capitalistic, but that had as its primary purpose the raising of the standard of living of, and the creation of a social structure that protected, working people, while also protecting middle-class investors by regulating the world of finance.

Regulated capitalism, joined with public investment in capital projects and social services, was wildly successful in the industrialized democracies and in many other countries around the world. However, although capitalists made money, the controls on capital and the costs of the social benefits rankled the worlds of finance.

When Republicans took control of the economy, with the elections of Nixon in 1968 and Reagan in 1980, they began to dismantle the post-War system, decontrolling movements of goods and capital while weakening the power of labor. Since then, the economic lives of working people have been in decline in both absolute and relative terms. Whole regions of the industrial world, and great cities, were left to fend for themselves. What had been good union jobs in factories became, at best for those who could find them, poorly-paid service jobs, which have now devolved into “gigs.”

While Trump’s base centers itself in the white working class in the “Rust Belt,” and extends into small towns and rural areas also left behind, the damage wasn’t limited to those areas. Here in Los Angeles, for instance, African-American and Latinx workers and communities were hit hard when factories shut down. Cities in the Northeast and Midwest with large African-American populations were devastated.

Fixing the economy, post-neoliberalism, in no way should be considered catering to the Trump base. In fact, Democrats, after the November election, are acutely aware that Trump made inroads in certain Latinx, Black, and immigrant communities using economic fears. Democrats must address the concerns of all victims of neoliberal capitalism, no matter where they live or now they vote.

President-Elect Biden understands this. While job number one will be to stop the pandemic, I expect his administration will meanwhile be the most favorable to labor since the Kennedy and Johnson administrations more than half a century ago.

Last Thursday, in a talk the President-Elect gave introducing his economic team, including his nominee for Labor Secretary, he said something that I don’t recall ever hearing a politician say. Namely, Biden reminded us that federal labor law does not merely provide that workers may form unions, but that the policy of the United States is to encourage collective bargaining. (See the language above from the National Labor Relations Act.)

In his talk, President-Elect Biden spoke about how he intended to work (with the new Secretary of Labor, and with a shout-out to Bernie Sanders) on an “agenda of increasing worker power.” Unfortunately, he won’t get to appoint his own General Counsel for the National Labor Relations Board (a crucial post) until November, or reestablish a Democratic majority on the NLRB until 2022. In the meantime, though, he will immediately push for an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 and we can expect other measures to help workers. (Now that the Democrats control the Senate’s agenda.)

These measures will only be a start on reorienting the economy to benefit working people. But they will be a sign.

Thanks for reading. And stay safe.

Prosecute the Perpe-traitors

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I watched more C-SPAN into the wee hours Thursday than I’d watched ever before. My main purpose was to be “there” when Congress certified the election of Joe Biden, but along the way I was fascinated by the rhetoric.

The senators and representatives often quoted from Abraham Lincoln. I, for one, can never get enough Lincoln, but I was infuriated when Republicans trying to subvert the election twisted sacred words for their dark purposes. I didn’t hear anyone repeat, however, the words of Lincoln that came to my mind when watching the vandalism of the Capitol. Those words are these, from the Second Inaugural Address:

“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Lincoln was reminding the nation that the Civil War was the price they, both North and South, were paying for centuries of slavery.

The storming of the Capitol, the breaching of the portals of liberty, democracy, and law, was the price we all paid for a society and a culture and a politics that allowed, and that perhaps made inevitable, a criminal charlatan, a wannabe dictator, to become president. I have my views as to how our society, culture and politics became what they are, and who is to blame and in what degree, but that’s beside the point. As Lincoln also said in the Second Inaugural, “let us judge not that we be not judged.”

The issue is what to do. I see two necessary courses of action, one of which I’ll write about now, one I’ll write about in my next blog in a day or two.

The first necessary step is prosecuting the perpe-traitors, all of them who can be identified, to, and let’s mean it for once, the full extent of the law. That won’t be enough, however. We must continue to use the law to suppress political violence, which in this country has nearly always come from the Right. I am hopeful this will happen.

On Thursday, the day after the attack on our government, President-Elect Biden introduced Merrick Garland to be the next Attorney General. In his remarks, Biden reminded us of a historical fact that he and Garland had just been discussing, namely that the Department of Justice (DOJ) was only established in 1870, specifically because the federal government now needed prosecutors to protect the federal rights enshrined in the three post-Civil War constitutional amendments. This effort tragically ceased with the Compromise of 1877 and Supreme Court decisions that handed the fruits of the North’s victory in the war over to the South.

The Civil Rights Act of 1957 is not as well remembered as the stronger legislation of the ’60s, but it did create the Civil Rights Division in the DOJ. This was a return to the DOJ’s original purpose, and federal prosecutions were crucial in marginalizing and to great extent crushing the KKK and similar white terror groups, as well as protecting voting and civil rights. This effort faltered in recent years with more conservative Republican administrations and with their Federalist Society judges coming to dominate the courts. (The Supreme Court’s decision to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act was particularly damaging.) This path, of course, reached the nadir with Trump, who has positively encouraged right-wing vigilantes and militias.

While he is best known for his doomed nomination to the Supreme Court, as a federal prosecutor Merrick Garland supervised the prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombers (remember, another attack on a federal building). We can be hopeful that he understands the crucial role the DOJ will play. As is often said these days, “elections have consequences.” Attacking elections must have consequences as well.

In the meantime, until Jan. 20, the FBI has vowed to track down and prosecute every criminal who invaded the Capitol on Wednesday. They need to do so, and to start at the top.

I hated the Trumpian cheer “lock her up,” and so I never liked the idea of prosecuting Trump once he was out of office. That was then, this is now. With this attack on democracy, I’ve changed my mind. When you look not only at Trump’s speech on Wednesday to the mob, but also at all the tweets he sent in December telling his followers to come to Washington on the very day that Congress would be certifying the election, the evidence indicates that he intended to incite the riot that took place for the purpose of disrupting the transfer of power.

A riot that resulted in the death of a police officer. Accessory to murder?

Prosecute the perpe-traitors.

Thanks for reading. Stay safe, and take care.