For the past two years, I have been documenting from every direction that Los Angeles is “Crossing of the Rubicon,” its point of no return at which we have become an old dying city divided between the rich and the poor with a diminishing middle class.
I use the phrase crossing the Rubicon advisedly because it refers to Caesar’s 49 BC crossing of the river on his way to conquering Rome and ending its democratic traditions. The writer-philosopher Cicero, a senator who fled Rome for his life, spoke truth to power as few have ever done.
“Freedom,” he said, “is the participation in power… a possession of inestimable value.”
In endless articles on my blog, at my citizen journalism/community networking site OurLA.org, on radio and TV and at many community meetings, I have tried to convey the vision I developed of our city as a newspaperman for 30 years in Los Angeles.
It is a struggle for democracy against a narrow network of powerbrokers and special interests that served themselves even as they sharply raises taxes, rates and fees, chased away good jobs and let the streets, sidewalks, water and power systems deteriorate.
Along the way, they resisted every effort at reform, only embracing the most modest progressive changes in the face of the most overwhelming evidence of police brutality against the poor and minorities and the threat of secession by the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood and San Pedro.
What we learned from that secession debate is that the City of Los Angeles is a corporation under the law. It owns everything: Streets, lights, every part of the DWP, all the parks, libraries and city buildings.
The city is no more owned by the residents and businesses, the taxpayers, than the customers of General Motors or any other corporation is owned by its customers who supply the money that feeds their executives, staffs and shareholders.
Many people are upset at the recent Supreme Court ruling that lifted the
ban on direct contributions to political campaigns by companies and
unions because they don’t understand that we have given them the same
rights under the Constitution as people.
We have personified
corporations and unions and we have personified the City of Los Angeles
as if it was made of flesh, a living human being.
We find
ourselves now in this time of crisis bestowing personhood onto the
unitary actor we call “City of LA”. It is an easy metaphor, an easy
prosthetic for an entity whose head and tail are hard to find.
In
our discussions it is very easy to attribute properties we associate
first with human beings – rationality, identities, interests, beliefs,
and so on. Many of us have assumed that the idea of personhood is
meaningful at some fundamental level and makes sense.
Where
did this idea come from?
Alexander Wendt, an international
relations theorist, confers that the idea of corporate ‘personality’ is
of medieval origin, its application was not routine in the West until
the 18th century – further proof, if any were needed, that LA has
behaved in very medieval tendencies from its Council members’ fiefdoms
to its archaic bookkeeping systems.
“Almost anything can be a
person by social convention, but only some can be a person by nature,”
he said.
If the city is a person under the law, it raises the
question of just what does it mean to be a person?
To be a
person one must have the capacity of first person subjective experience
and a clear identity. That is to say, it has to be more than
Villaraigosa’s ego, or the Council’s pompous attitude, more than “I love
LA… I really love LA,” as the mayor put it.
Personhood means
LA must have a desire that motivates it, and the ability to make choices
on a rational basis — a test we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that
City Hall has failed miserably.
If LA were truly to be a person
it would need be a psychological, legal and moral constituent. It would
need to possess certain mental or cognitive attributes, to be an
organism of some sort that functions just like an individual.
LA
can barely meet its rights and obligations under the law let alone
operate in a moral manner as proven by its stream of sweetheart deals
and giveaways to special interests.
Individual persons have
internal authority, sovereignty, over themselves as well as external
sovereignty as a member of society. City Hall has displayed its internal
authority with early retirement and layoffs plan but the chaos that has
ensued and the ballooning budget deficit have cost it the confidence of
the public and its workers
LA has failed the tests of its
personhood as surely as it has failed to provide the leadership the city
desperately needs.
Yet, we see it wield its power on the lives
of workers, taxpayers, and stakeholders as if its legitimacy were
unchallenged. We see the mayor wield it against the neighborhood
councils and completely disenfranchise them as if they were not created
by the same Charter that creates the city government as a whole.
City
Hall today is nothing more than an artificial power, its legitimacy,
its personhood, undermined by its failures.
The collective
actions and intentions of those we elected must be judged and those
responsible held accountable.
We, as constituents and
constituted members of this society, must not allow them to wash their
liability behind the political agency that comes from their election to
office. Those election themselves are of dubious legitimacy because of
the overwhelming role of the campaign money supplied to the favored
candidates by the same special interests that benefit from the city’s
actions.
There may be better forms of governance to restore
legitimacy to the personhood of the city government, such as a system of
boroughs that devolves authority to the local level and allows for the
diversity necessary in a city so complex and sprawling.
But no
system of governance will change things much, as we have seen with the
endless and ineffective structural changes in our schools. We need an
uprising from the persons who make up the body politic of Los Angeles,
new leadership and most of all, a new vision and a new spirit of LA that
redefines us and the city we call home.