Hordes of children go hungry. People without housing die in the street. Innocent people are gunned down by state forces, or locked in cages by the thousands. Public funds, instead of being used to help the poor, are funneled into the police state and the pockets of the oligarch class, who segregate themselves far away from the crushing exploitation and state violence imposed on a racialized proletariat.
Given this humanitarian crisis, the international community is completely right to be talking about regime change — but not for Venezuela. The evidence suggests that the arguments made for why Nicolás Maduro should not be in power apply at least as strongly to those who rule Los Angeles, most of all Eric Garcetti.
It’s time to seriously examine the question that our depleted press corps refuses to: is Eric Garcetti’s mayorship illegitimate?
For starters, Garcetti’s democratic claim to his position is weak. He was reelected in 2017 with just 200,000 votes in a city of 4 million people. Additionally, a full one-third of the city’s voting-age population cannot vote in our “democracy” due to citizenship status. The Latinx population is particularly disenfranchised; they make up roughly 50% of the city’s population, but only 24% of voters. Whites, on the other hand, comprise 54% of voters despite being only 28% of the population. And, post-election, those who want access can get it by donating to Garcetti’s record-shattering donations fund.
This is not a democracy in any meaningful sense, but one that allows Garcetti to serve an increasingly small sliver of our population: the elite millionaire and billionaire class (which remains overwhelmingly white – white households in LA have on average 100x the wealth of Black and Mexican households).
Garcetti sits atop of a pyramid of power that starves its own people. 650,000 children in LA County go hungry, despite this being one of the richest places in the world. Yet our mayor continues to brag about providing swimming lessons to youth of color as a testament to his leadership.
Under Garcetti, at least 50,000 unhoused people sleep on the streets every night in LA; some estimates put this figure closer to 100,000. The UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty compared the conditions on Skid Row to a Syrian refugee camp. There have been 3,615 unnecessary deaths of unhoused people since 2014.
Considering how the unhoused population in LA is disproportionately Black relative to the general population, these deaths amount to a racialized genocide.
Beyond that, Garcetti’s forces wage an active and unending war against the poor every day. Arrests of unhoused people are at a record high, numbering 14,000 in 2016, and a recent report showed that a full third of “use of force” incidents (i.e. instances of police violence) were perpetrated against people experiencing homelessness. LA also runs “one of the largest systems of human caging that the world has ever known,” according to UCLA Professor Kelly Hernandez. Over 17,000 people are confined in jails, and more than half of those have yet to be tried and are presumed to be innocent by law.
With an imprisonment rate of 618 people per 100,000 residents, Garcetti’s Los Angeles locks people up at over 3x the rate of Maduro’s Venezuela, and 10x the rate of Sweden and the Netherlands.
And the LAPD has murdered roughly 400 people since 2012. Garcetti, of course, encourages this bloodbath — he’s just enthusiastically endorsed Jackie Lacey, the DA who has refused to bring charges against a single cop.
Finally, how the city spends money under Garcetti only make these problems worse. In 2016-17, LAPD received $1.5 billion in funding, at least $30 million of which goes towards brutal encampment sweeps, while only $65 million was devoted towards housing and community development. $1 billion in subsidies have been given to private developers for just 8 projects since 2005. And he’s spent enormous political capital — and promised an unknowable amount of public money — on the LA 2028 Olympic bid, which is yet another land-grab posing as a sports event.
Eric Garcetti is nothing more than a media-polished autocrat who rules by force. He doesn’t have a democratic claim to the city; he allows his people to die on the street and children to go hungry; his police forces hunt down, harass, and cage the most vulnerable. He complacently presides over a regime of brutal racialized oppression, patting himself on the back and promoting himself as a national figure despite all this.
And even though he just declared he’s not running for president — after two years of soft campaigning — he’s still out of town on a regular basis, chasing some unquenchable thirst for more personal attention when he theoretically is supposed to represent Los Angeles.
But he’s never represented Los Angeles, literally or symbolically. He’s always represented the ruling class. His time here carrying water for killer cops, developers, and tech libertarians has been a complete wash.
It’s time for (regime) change.