AAS100 - Discussion Post

I think the most telling of the three readings was "Anatomy of a Rebellion: A Political-Economic Analysis". This piece looked at not just the simple and easily identifiable cause of the LA riots, but combined more systematic and less obvious reasons other than the Rodney King trial. While yes, the verdict for the Rodney King trial was the tipping point of the riot to start, I don't personally think it was the root, motivating factor. On page 122, we can see how in the span of four years, South LA lost 70,000 well paid jobs, which when also looking at the racial makeup of the area is mainly minorities. Public policies implemented helped promote companies to relocate overseas, however as seen from page 126, only fifteen of one hundred and thirty three favorites relocated to outside of America. I did not particularly like this part of the paper because I felt they wrongly assigned blame to the laissez-faire policies and tried to say these companies left for other countries, when only 15 out of 133 actually left America. I feel as though the larger problem at hand was not the Reagan administration allowing companies to leave America, but encouraging them to find cheaper labor in other states. We saw this in the documentary we watched in class about the closing of the spark plug factory. Companies were moving out of highly unionized states in favor of other states. That being said, the paper still raises the valid point of divestment from the South LA region as the kindling for the riots.