Month: August 2020

Black Lives Matter

• Reporting by Yahoo News recounts the intense two days that led to a wildcat strike in the NBA. The action was initiated by the Milwaukee Bucks in response to the police killing of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, WI, and then led by players on the Lakers and Clippers.

• What do the owners of basketball teams have to do with protesting police violence? Clippers owner Steve Ballmer’s organization, the Ballmer Group, has provided $750,000 to the LAPD’s community safety partnership (CSP). This is the type of police program Mayor Garcetti touts as “reform,” but which #Defund activists decry as responding to over-policing with more policing. To understand how CSP is just another way police tighten control over communities, watch this People’s City Council video. If you question whether many professional athletes would bother to draw these distinctions, the official demands of the Baltimore Ravens, released yesterday, may be worth your time.

• Just hours after the NBA meeting, BLM protesters were kettled by LAPD in the 3rd St. tunnel after the police declared that their makeshift shields were illegal weapons. Meanwhile, the city of Beverly Hills has taken the extraordinary step of filing misdemeanor charges against 25 protesters for “curfew violations” related to a peaceful protest on June 26.

• In a process accelerated by protests held in response to the recent killing of Anthony McClain by Pasadena police, Pasadena City Council passed legislation to create a Police Commission that will attempt to provide law enforcement oversight. An editorial written by the president of NAACP Pasadena considers what this legislation accomplishes, and some of the steps it fails to take.

• An editorial in the Sacramento Bee, widely circulated on Twitter, runs down all the common-sense police reforms the Democratic-controlled state legislature is failing or has failed to pass. Reporting in the LA Times observes the power police unions have to water down reform legislation.

Housing Justice

• In April a federal judge ordered the city of LA to suspend the confiscation of “bulky items” belonging to the unhoused, ruling that the summary destruction of property likely violated due process. The latest round of CARE+ sweeps around “bridge” housing violated that order. Now, attorneys representing Koreatown-based advocacy group Ktown For All, have asked the city to be held in contempt, and for fines of $45,000 to be imposed.

• Tweets from the Services Not Sweeps coalition recount the successful interruption of a morning sweep in Hollywood by a blockade of protesters. The coalition moved the unhoused residents impacted by the sweep into a hotel for two nights, challenging Mayor Eric Garcetti, Los Angeles Homeless Services Director Heidi Marston, and Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell. “If we can do it, why can’t [they]?”

• Mayor Eric Garcetti’s “A Bridge Home” program has not met goals in moving program participants into permanent housing. A survey of three PATH bridge housing shelters found that after over a year in operation, only 24% of program exits were into permanent housing.

Transit

• The High Desert Corridor freeway was envisioned as an 8-to-10-lane freeway, until Climate Resolve and others won a legal settlement that forced Caltrans to shelve the project. The Metro Planning and Programming Committee has approved diverting some of that funding to high-speed rail — specifically, the development of a 54-mile intercity rail service between Palmdale and Apple Valley, site of the future western terminus of the XpressWest project (connecting Las Vegas with Southern California).

• This week The Metro Board of Directors will consider awarding key contracts for the Sepulveda Transit Corridor Project — a proposed above-ground rail or subway system between the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles International Airport. This is the first time Metro has tried this kind of public-private partnership on a large scale.

Coronavirus Response

• The California Judicial Council’s statewide eviction moratorium is set to expire on September 1. The state’s legislative branch, though controlled by Democratic supermajorities in both houses, has been unable to move forward on meaningful legislation to address tenant relief in the fall.

• At this week’s meeting of Metro’s Operations, Safety, and Customer Experience Committee a planned vote on whether to cut bus service hours by 20% was cut for time. The item was postponed to next Thursday. The advocacy group Streets For All is encouraging those who oppose a cut to bus service to attend that meeting and give public comment.

• There has been some positive news on the COVID-19 front: active hospitalizations in Los Angeles County have dropped below 1,400 and health officials say that there has finally been a decline in the infection rate among Black and Latinx residents, though they are still higher than that of white residents. Should this trend continue, officials say that LAUSD schools could begin the process of reopening, though school board member Jackie Goldberg has stressed the importance of having a testing and tracing program in place across the district before any applications are considered.

Labor

• In the wake of last week’s California court decision classifying Uber and Lyft drivers as employees rather than “independent contractors,” as well as those companies’ resulting threats to shut down operations in the state, an appeals court has given the companies until early September to determine how to comply with the order. In the interim, the hundreds of thousands of employees of the companies will continue to be classified as contractors, even as both companies continue to fight against the order.

Climate

• California is scrambling to keep up with 367 new fires that have broken out over the past week, and the state is running out of resources. Firefighting crews are depleted due to the coronavirus outbreak, which hit California prisons hard. The state depends on its inmates, who are paid $1/hour, to fight fires. Twelve firefighter camps have been forced into quarantine, and only half of the authorized “inmate crews” are available. Right now, about 6,900 firefighters are deployed. Gov. Newsom is planning to hire 858 additional seasonal firefighters through October, and the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is seeking to bring in hundreds more from out of state, which will require heightened safety precautions.

• Rising seas are threatening California’s shoreline, farmers, and also areas once considered less vulnerable to flooding — like Marin City, a predominantly Black and working-class community.  California scientists and urban planners say that lawmakers “cannot afford to defer all preparation” until after the state recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, and predict that the sea could rise more than 6 inches in just the next decade.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• From Garcetti to Hertzberg to Lacey, protesting in front of city officials’ houses has become common in SoCal in 2020. Less common is when those officials actually open their doors and respond. Pasadena Mayor Terry Tornek did just that when BLM protesters gathered at his house in the name of Anthony McClain, who was killed by Pasadena police this week. The mayor promised them that he would bring a proposal to the city council on Monday for a police oversight commission. That proposal has been criticized by officials and activists alike, who say it does not go far enough.

• Councilmember Herb Wesson has called for an investigation into the “swatting” hoax that sent armed police officers to Black Lives Matter – Los Angeles co-founder Melina Abdullah’s house last week. Abdullah described what happened to The Nation.

Elections

• ICYMI: Here is a finalized list of all the propositions that will appear on California ballots statewide this November.

• The Trump administration has backed away from many of its more egregious curtailments of the United States Post Service, but it’s unclear if the related multi-state lawsuit against the administration, joined by California, will continue. Testifying before Congress today, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said that the mail sorting machines removed under his leadership will not be reinstalled.

Local Politics

• The state Democratic Party is divided between those who want to fund pandemic relief and other social services with taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and those like Democratic State Senate Majority Leader Bob Hertzberg, whose stimulus package relies on funding from “complex financial mechanisms and vouchers” and hypothetical federal loans from the Trump administration.

• In the aftermath of corruption probes that have implicated two sitting councilmembers in pay-to-play real estate deals, the City Council voted to initiate the process of establishing an Office of Anti-Corruption and Transparency, and to establish an inspector general for land use and development.

• Los Angeles will soon begin its redistricting process, which happens every ten years. An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times explains how the past decade’s corruption within the City Council is linked to the redistricting that occurred ten years ago. Activist pressure has resulted in what should be a more transparent process this time around.

Labor

• A landmark ruling from the California Superior Court compels Uber and Lyft to reclassify their drivers from independent contractors to employees. This will entitle California drivers to health insurance, worker’s comp, and other benefits. Uber and Lyft have already initiated a capital strike in response, threatening a shut down of operations in California if the ruling isn’t somehow reversed. Proposition 22 — a November ballot measure funded in large part by Uber, Lyft and Door Dash — would change the law to allow the companies to continue treating their gig-worker employees as independent contractors.

Climate

• Environmental activists are regrouping after AB 345 — which would require a mandatory setback distance between fossil fuel production operations and homes, schools or hospitals — failed 5–4 in a contentious committee vote last week. The lack of such environmental protections in California means the state lags behind states such as Texas and North Dakota; while the majority of people living in close proximity to drilling are Black, Brown, or Indigenous.

• The sec­ond largest teach­ers’ union in the coun­try passed a res­o­lu­tion in sup­port of the Green New Deal this July. In These Times checked in with the AFL-CIO to spell out what obstacles remain to this support spreading to the broader labor movement, where job security is a concern.

• At a recent hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, testimony from Drew Shindell, Nicholas professor of earth science at Duke University (and a lead author on both recent IPCC reports), revealed that the increase in hospitalizations and premature death that would result from Trump’s rollbacks of Obama’s fuel economy standards and Clean Power Plan are up to twice as large as previously estimated.

• The Trump administration is not alone in ignoring science in service of capital. City Council District 4 candidate Nithya Raman called out the Los Angeles City Council for voting 12–1 in favor of relaxing pollution-reduction requirements at the Port of LA for China Shipping despite opposition from the NRDC and the California Air Resources Board.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• At a dystopian press conference, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department attempted to rationalize the killing of Andres Guardado by sheriff’s deputies… by noting that the location of the shooting had previously been the scene of unrelated violent crime. A department spokesperson theorized that the deputies who killed Guardado were “probably drawn to that location in being proactive.” A lawyer for the Guardado family called out this narrative as “nothing more than an attempt to justify the killing of this young man.”

• At a press conference earlier this week, Compton Mayor Aja Brown called on the state’s attorney general to investigate allegations of excessive force and discriminatory policing at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Compton station: “We demand the same treatment that deputies provide to the residents of Malibu, Rancho Palos Verdes and other affluent communities.” The deputies who killed Andres Guardado worked in the Compton station.

Housing Justice

• On July 29 the City Council voted in favor of resuming sweeps of unhoused encampments around “bridge housing” shelters, a process that had been suspended as a result of the pandemic. Mitch O’Farrell voted in favor of sweeps, but insisted that they be referred to as “deep cleans,” as the approach would be “very very compassionate” and take care to focus on cleaning without displacing anyone. Monitors from Street Watch LA observed a scheduled sweep in O’Farrell’s district, which their coverage demonstrates was undertaken without proper notification. Unhoused residents who did not happen to be around during the sweep had their tents destroyed.

• Relatedly, a detailed article on michaelkohlhaas.org demonstrates, using many internal emails from within Los Angeles’ municipal government, how these sweeps get initiated, commonly without any checks or balances.

Coronavirus: Resurgence and Response

• Time is running out in both Sacramento and Washington, DC, to save tenant and unemployment protections. Talks between top Democrats and Republicans are going nowhere, and California legislative leaders are asking the state judicial board to extend their eviction ban through September 5 to give them time to pass legislation to protect millions of tenants.

• The recent resurgence of coronavirus in Los Angeles County has hit especially hard in the predominantly Latinx hub cities of Southeast LA, driven by the “huge blind spot” in pandemic response that failed to protect workers.

• Los Angeles County has resumed the enforcement of evictions, following similar actions in Orange and San Bernardino counties. A planned round of lockouts will be enforced by the sheriff’s department, with the “currently highlighted” eviction orders limited to those that predated the shelter-in-place order. “How do they expect people to shelter in place if they have no place to shelter?” asked tenants’ rights activist Elena Popp.

• Los Angeles County has not met thresholds set by the California Department of Public Health that would allow schools to apply to reopen. A waiver process was being developed that would allow certain schools to reopen if they demonstrated a broad base of community and labor stakeholder support, but it can only be put into effect if the number of coronavirus cases in the county drops below 200 per 100,000. It’s still at 355.

Labor

• After a yearlong standoff and collective action, the Writers Guild of America has reached an agreement with ICM Partners that will make ICM the second of the “Big 4” talent agencies to end the predatory, but long-standing, industry practice of negotiating packaging fees.

• A new LA Times report shows that Cal/OSHA, the safety board meant to protect the state’s workers, hasn’t even been able to protect its own employees. Anonymous staffers say the organization is not providing testing or other COVID safety measures in its offices, and depleted ranks have left Cal/OSHA without a bilingual inspector or enough staff to do in-person inspections.

Climate

• Despite demands from environmental groups and frontline activists, the California Senate Committee on Natural Resources voted 5–4 against passing AB 345, a bill that would require the CA Natural Resources Agency to adopt an environmental justice program and require buffer zones between oil wells and at-risk areas like schools and homes. Public comment preceding the bill’s hearing was flooded by callers who work in the oil and energy industries. The bill will be reconsidered for a final vote on August 12.

Elections

• Black Lives Matter-LA will now have the chance to take their case directly to voters, as the County Board of Supervisors approved 4–1 to add the Reimagine LA Initiative to the November ballot. The initiative would permanently shift 10% of the county’s unrestricted funding — approximately $1 billion — away from law enforcement and toward programs like community counseling, mental health services, youth development programs, and affordable housing.

• The husband of Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey will face assault charges related to his pointing a gun at Black Lives Matter activists in March.

• Ground Game LA  organized a discussion among four leftist candidates for office in Los Angeles County: Godfrey Santos Plata and Fatima Iqbal-Zubair, running for state assembly seats, and Nithya Raman and Konstantine Anthony, running for city council seats in Los Angeles and Burbank.