Universal Basic Income—Is Robert Garcia Down for the Struggle? (Part 2)

The following is a three-part series on what a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Long Beach could mean for the city, its residents, its politicians, and the wider nation.

Yesterday, in Part One, we explored the basics: What is a UBI? Who supports it? Why? What might the city’s proposed pilot version look like? And how do supporters hope to fund the program?

Today, in Part Two, we will explore the local context: What does the mayor’s support of a UBI mean? Can he be trusted with it? And how does this relate to the rest of his record?

And tomorrow, in Part Three, we will explore the ideal: How should we fund a basic income? Why? And what could this mean for our city and our world?

PART TWO

KEEP YOUR APPROPRIATION OFF MY POLITICS

Folks like me, who are very supportive of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in general, are very skeptical of Mayor Robert Garcia’s interest in it. Skeptical for a few reasons…

First, for the obvious reason that Garcia has no problem telling flat-out falsehoods to the press and the public if it helps boost or defend his image. I don’t trust him, and I therefore definitely don’t trust something as sacred as the UBI being anywhere near him.

Second, while Garcia said in his recommendation to City Council that a pilot UBI is necessary in part because, “Housing is becoming scarcer and less affordable,” he somehow also failed to acknowledge that his policies have helped make housing scarcer and less affordable. Maybe Long Beach residents wouldn’t need a UBI if Garcia got the other stuff right.

He also failed to mention what would happen if you gave people a basic income and, as a result, rents went up. Couldn’t a basic income make housing even less affordable? Couldn’t a basic income just end up in the hands of landlords? Has Garcia thought any of this through?

Those are real concerns, and any discussion of a UBI should be centered on dynamics surrounding rent.

And so there’s a third reason to be skeptical of Garcia. It’s perhaps a bit obtuse, or maybe a bit romantic. The history of this dream for a UBI—to share the earth equally, to share the wealth, to provide for all people without the need to ask or beg or fight—goes back very far. Different folks will have their different starting points, or different paths they’ve followed, but they all unite in this shared, utopian vision.

For me, I think immediately of 1797, when maybe the best of America’s founders, Thomas Paine, published a short essay entitled “Agrarian Justice,” which I encourage the reader, and the mayor, to check out. Paine argued for a kind of basic income provided from a tax on land values—i.e., from a tax on economic rent.

This hints at my fears when someone like the mayor begins to impede here. A UBI, properly instituted, has the chance to radically shift power and wealth dynamics in this country, and around the world. The dream of a basic income is one in which we finally liberate the masses of people from work—in fact, we transform work into just another kind of leisure, just another form of human play.

In an ideal world, it would be international, and involve a huge transfer of wealth from the global north to the global south, as well as from the banking and corporate industries in urban centers to working peoples in more rural populations. Mainly, it would involve taking money and power from the banks, which own much of the earth through the mortgage system, to be distributed to working peoples of every age, color, race, background, culture, nation, etc. Such a venture could instill among all people on the earth deep, mutual feelings of shared heritage and shared responsibility.

If you cannot pursue or advocate for a basic income at a large scale, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fight for it locally, but you should at least be aware of these other contexts, and allow a global poverty lens to inform your local application of the program. And does anyone really think Garcia has any interest in global poverty? For that matter, has Garcia ever shown any interest in Long Beach poverty?

Yet without leadership, and without sacrifice, any UBI program could end up as not just a false promise, but worse: a twisted capitalist appropriation of a once-radical utopian vision.

So I am skeptical most of all because of the transformative hope woven into such a policy proposal, and because Garcia has yet to touch upon any of that hope, any of that radical potential, in his words on the subject. Instead, Garcia’s words show how little he understands it, and certainly his actions as mayor prove he cannot be trusted with it.

ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER

Even if we assume the best possible intentions from Garcia, we would still be left with the very odd sight of the mayor of Long Beach trying to lead this struggle. When has Garcia ever shown an interest in taking from the rich and giving to the poor? For that matter, when has he even shown an interest in stopping the rich from taking from the poor?

Tomisin Oluwole
Fragmented Reflection I, 2021
Acrylic on canvas panel
24 x 30 inches

Click here to check out our interview with Tomisin Oluwole, a literary and visual artist based in Long Beach.

Instead of gunking up our site with ads, we use this space to display and promote the work of local artists.

Under Garcia’s mayorship, the public land beneath the old city hall was sold to a private developer—and the folks experiencing homelessness were all booted out of Lincoln Park—in exchange for the new city hall, which the city is now leasing for 40 years from private hands with public funds. The city could have asked the public for money to build its new city hall, but they elected to join into a private partnership to bypass the voters completely, losing public land in the process. Until the developer pulled out, the old city hall was to be replaced with two eight-story buildings containing 580 housing units—with zero of those units set aside for low or very-low income residents. It’s an incredible theft, but predictable given Garcia’s gentrifying legacy in the downtown area.

Similarly, old redevelopment land—ostensibly public—has been handed to private, luxury developers instead of being set aside for more public uses, such as affordable housing. Even the once-public area around Harvey Milk Plaza has shrunk since Garcia entered office.

This is hardly the behavior of someone interested in defending working class peoples. In fact, Garcia’s entire housing record is full of such betrayals. During his time as a leader in this city, Long Beach has built or approved more hotel rooms than affordable homes. The mayor has never shown any imagination for such subjects as a basic income, or abolishing poverty, let alone the principles underlying them, in the past. So the sudden UBI pitch is both out of character and suspiciously timed: after all, the mayor at the time was facing a recall campaign.

And yet, establishing a UBI in the city is an even more daunting and earnest task than keeping public land public, or building some affordable homes. If the mayor has failed on the easy stuff, I find it impossible to believe he is serious about a radical redistribution of power. The fight for a true UBI will necessitate standing up to wealthy interests and taxing the heck out of them; yet Garcia has only ever accepted donations from the wealthy and given away the city to them.

PICK A SIDE, SIR

So what exactly does the mayor hope to accomplish here other than saving face and generating buzz? Is Garcia going to be standing in solidarity with this cause 10, 20, 30 years from now, when we’re prying the economy out of the hands of the rich and giving it back to the people? Because that’s what a basic income demands.

I have more questions than answers here because this move by the mayor strikes me as cynical, in that he appears to want the short-term benefit of looking progressive without having to be around later on to work out all the crucial details—let alone fight to implement them while the rich fight back. When has Garcia ever fought the rich?

Recall that his solution to homelessness was to have people donate their spare change into parking meters—not all parking meters across the city, just four meters—complete with a smiling ad campaign and media blitz that probably cost more money than the program has since raised. His sudden advocacy of a basic income reminds me of that same charity-based, self-promoting mentality.

After all, charity is much friendlier to existing power structures than actually challenging those structures to share their power. Charity (private or otherwise) has always been the surest way for the wealthy to have their cake and eat it too, allowing them to leave untouched the structures of alienation and domination they have implemented and profited from, while feigning a revolutionary, or at least humane, politics—one which still ultimately benefits their own bottom line.

We have reached a point in capitalist development where the previous contradictions surrounding charity are more pronounced than ever: it’s actually easier for them to hand us a basic income in order to prop up demand than it is for them to share access with us to resources and power.

It would be difficult for the mayor to stand up to the same interests that have always funded his campaigns; but it’s really, really easy to accept a handout from billionaire capitalists to run a very limited, short-term program that he may not even be around to deal with the results of.

Which brings us to a final concern with any elitist implementation of the UBI: the fact that, whatever its advocates may intend, it could later be used as a back-door for defunding other social safety-nets.

Where would Garcia stand on that? Well, recall that the mayor has opposed social safety-nets like rent control for years, often by spouting the long-debunked logic of trickle down economics, which he has also used to justify replacing existing affordable housing stock with market-rate housing, to disastrous effects. Nor has the mayor ever fought for even small policies like just-cause eviction. And just this past year he opposed defunding the police to pay for social services like libraries or parks.

Yet now he wants a basic income? How does he propose to get there from here without pissing off the people he has spent his entire career pandering to?

SILICON VALLEY 2.0?

And that’s just it: this is merely another chance for Garcia to pander. This time, it’s the corporate tech industry that Garcia has hovered around for years, which happens to be the same industry now pushing for a basic income. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Slack’s Stewart Butterfield, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, are all on record as supporting a UBI; and recall that Dorsey is providing the big money for Long Beach’s burgeoning pilot program.

Garcia started pandering to this crowd as soon as he was elected mayor. Less than a year into office, he was profiled in the L.A. Times and said he wanted to turn Long Beach into “the Silicon Valley of the south.” The pandering then continued with the city’s rather pathetic bid to get Amazon to build their next headquarters here. And of course the mayor is still at it today on Twitter, where he frequently attempts to slither himself into the national spotlight by hanging on to Democrats like former presidential candidate, and tech industry favorite, Andrew Yang, or tech giants like Dorsey. During the City Council meeting discussing the UBI, Garcia even referenced Dorsey by first name only: “The founder of Twitter—we all are familiar with Jack.”

Performative politics is always somehow both too little and too loud. We asked the mayor to pay back the hundreds of thousands of dollars he has accepted from the police union, and we asked him to defund the police. He responded by signing the city up for a basic income pilot. Hugs and kisses to Jack.

And so the UBI the mayor is interested in will undoubtedly be the most powerless version possible. Yet when it comes down to doing the very arduous work of actually helping the half a million residents of Long Beach escape high rents and low wages, we will need to stand up to the billionaires, not kneel before them with our hands out.

If we really want to pilot a basic income program, we need to pilot how we’re going to eat the rich. For that, we’ll turn to Part Three tomorrow.