Small and Monopoly Property

We saw Easy Rawlins get screwed out of locally-owned Freedom Plaza in Black Betty. We saw in Chinatown a syndicate of wealthy private interests buy farmlands that they could make a fortune turning into suburbs because of publicly-funded water projects (the bond issue).   Marx is one of our Noir Philosophers for saying why this concentrated power is a problem--for workers and for society.  Below I've posted the 5-point slide plus a second slide.  Below the slides, I've pasted in a story about a Manhattan hardware store that is closing.

In lecture, I suggested a solution that the course materials offer is small property plus democratic control over key aspects of the economy.  This latter issue is very much at issue in the 2020 election.  The "noir" take is that it's completely unrealistic--the strong always rule the weak, who conform to them.  So the critique of monopoly capitalism would need also to deal with those social and psychological issues.

And Happy Thanksgiving!

"The Life and Death of the Local Hardware Store"

Note that the author, a professor at Columbia Law School who writes about tech and internet law, is frustrated with the psychology of people who would rather shop on Amazon than in a hardware store even though Amazon means they often buy the wrong stuff.  Have we learned things in this course that might help explain this mystery?

Chinatown on Noir Capitalism

What's the connection between Gittes and Marx? Here's the slide from Thursday's lecture.

The film Chinatown doesn't say anything directly about 1. It does say something indirectly: Gittes quits the police force, where he is an employee subject to the practice of getting paid less than the value his labor produces.  As a private eye, he is self-employed, which in theory would reduce his exploitation. (He gets to exploit Walsh instead!)

The film has a lot to say about 2 and 3.  Above all, it claims that mega-development depends on the corrupt use of political power.   "Market forces" such as constant migration to California do play a role.  There was quite a bit of migration from the Midwest in the 1920s and 1930s, and some famous literature tried to capture the results, like The Day of the Locust.  But the demand for low-cost housing could have been satisfied by hundreds of small builders rather than by large tract development.  Chinatown is about how moguls override the supposed invisible hand to concentrate their own wealth through force-based control of the political system.  Exploited labor is visible, but mostly around the edges of the film, in the form of mostly Japanese-American servants and gardeners.

Shedding Light on an Especially Violent Week of American Hate

The first question is always the same: can we understand insane acts like the several that made massive news this past week (two senior citizens killed for being black in a grocery store, pipe bombs sent to leading Trump opponents, 11 murdered in a Pittsburgh synagogue)? The course's answer is yes we can. More on that in lecture and section this week.

Two others are, why do people pick the wrong targets? Can detection-like inquiry reduce this problem?  This piece confirms the relevance of this problem in the pipe-bombing case. David Dayen, a prominent financial journalist (author of Chain of Title), starts with this:

Cesar Sayoc, the Donald Trump-loving Floridian who was taken into custody in relation to pipe bombs mailed to prominent Democrats, was foreclosed on in 2009 by a bank whose principal owner and chair is now Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.

Also relevant: this journalist's Twitter thread about the knowledge problems created by "both-sidesism," which, as we know, detectives like Sherlock Holmes scrupulously avoid.

Gangster Warlords and High School Assault & Shaming

There are a couple of good media clips for the weekend.  One is a story about a Sundance documentary on sexual assault and its aftermath in high school.  The film is Audrie & Daisy, and it is about a teen who committed suicide after an assault while passed out at a party, and how her mother pursued the case.  The mother, Sheila  Pott, is rather amazing.  The second is an interview with Ioan Grillo, a British journalist who's worked on drug cartels in Latin American since 2001, and who has a new book, Gangster Warlords, about how the cartels are moving into the political system of Mexico and other countries, and what to do about it.

Chinatown Issues for building a quiz question

First, there are those slides that summarize the real Owens Valley deal on which the Chinatown screenplay is based.

The movie does quite a good job of translating the real history.

What's noir about this complicated, multi-year business deal? Hmm, that could be a good quiz question.

Then there's Gittes' failure, which I rushed a bit at the end of that lecture.

We can decide together when you want to discuss noir economics (monopoly capitalism as Cause #5) or Gittes's middle-class weakness.