Month: January 2022

Issue No. 94 – January 28, 2022

State Politics

• Article 34 of the California Constitution prevents any public housing from being built in the state without first being approved by a citywide referendum. Senate Constitutional Amendment 2 would strike that, removing a major obstacle to the creation of public housing. This week, SCA 2 passed through the Senate. It will also need to be approved by statewide referendum.

• On Monday the state Assembly will vote on AB 1400, the proposed plan to create a universal healthcare within California. Capital & Main covers some of the political terrain. Toolkit for supporters here.

City Politics

• Councilmember Mike Bonin has announced that he is dropping out of his reelection campaign, citing mental health concerns. Bonin, currently serving his second term, had become a reliably humane voice on the council; he and Councilmember Nithya Raman were consistently the only two votes against 41.18 anti-unhoused enforcement zones. There is still a small window for someone with similar commitments (or better) to take his place in the CD11 race. Upsetting news.

Transportation

• Los Angeles’ elected leaders once embraced Vision Zero, a plan to redesign city streets to eliminate traffic fatalities. These promises have not been followed through on, and deaths have only been going up. Biking in LA parses the failure.

Housing Rights

• On-the-ground reporting from Knock LA covers the displacement of unhoused encampments that’s been happening around SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, in the weeks leading up to the city’s hosting of the Super Bowl.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Several whistleblowers spoke to LAist about the absolute disregard for COVID safety protocols from the sheriff’s deputies who oversee Twin Towers correctional facility. “It’s chaos in there.”

• Cerise Castle live-tweeted the candidate forum for Los Angeles County sheriff.

Climate Justice

• While some have argued that the proposal to remove incentives for installing home solar panels are a retrograde cash grab for utilities, an editorial in Grist counters that the current subsidy rewards high-income households, and that the proposed changes would better socialize the benefits.

• On Wednesday, Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to ban new oil and gas drilling within city limits and phase out existing oil and gas production over the next 20 years. A huge victory!

Issue No. 93 – January 21, 2022

State Politics

• Hey now, AB 1400, the California Guaranteed Health Care for All Act, has passed out of the Appropriations Committee and now heads for a floor vote in the state Assembly! Here’s the toolkit to easily write your assemblymember asking for their support, as shared by the DSA-LA Healthcare Justice Committee.

City Politics

• DSA members voted heavily to endorse Fatima Iqbal-Zubair in her campaign in Assembly District 65, as well as Eunisses Hernandez, who is running to replace Gil Cedillo in CD1. Statement here.
• A petition to recall Councilmember Mike Bonin seemed like it might have gathered the required number of signatures to force a vote, but an entire third of the signatures were found to be invalid, and it failed to meet the threshold.

Police Violence And Community Resistance

• Whistleblower reporting from L.A. Taco revealed that the increase of package thefts off of Union Pacific trains was preceded by the railroad slashing its security budget. The public will pick up that check from here on out, as Governor Newsom has announced a new “multi-agency” task force to prevent rail theft.

Housing Rights

• Video: Pete White and General Dogon of LA CAN dismantle Councilmember Kevin de León’s assertion that the reason he has failed to care for the unhoused in his district is that activists are bribing unhoused people to decline services.

Education

• The LAUSD Board of Education meets Tuesday, to approve over $620 million in service and procurement contracts and to discuss tentative agreements with the Teamsters and California School Employees Association, among other unions. Up for announcement: Board Members propose a resolution on “Climate Literacy,” to commit LAUSD “to transforming our teaching of climate change to meet the scale and urgency of the crisis.”

Transportation

• Now that Metro has resumed fare collection, Curbed considers what we’ve learned from Los Angeles’ unintentional two-year experiment with free bus service. (It’s good and we should keep having it).
• Streetsblog critiques Metro’s participatory budget survey, while still recommending that everyone with a stake in public transportation participate.

Climate Justice

• Residents of the city of Carson are suing several local warehouses and a refinery over air pollution after the South Coast Air Quality Management District failed to hold anyone accountable for pollution. Air quality gets so bad there that, in the words of one plaintiff, “when you’re driving through your city, you have no option but to slam on the brakes, bust open the door, and start throwing up on the road.”
• CalGEM is deploying drones to detect methane leaks from oil and gas facilities. However, with only one drone patrolling all of Southern California, some sites might be monitored only once every two to three years.

History of the Ruling Class

• Former Wall Street Journal editor Ronald Schafer tells a little bit of Los Angeles history this week in a story about the oil baron Edward Doheny and the 1923 Teapot Dome corruption scandal. That library on the USC campus that bears Doheny’s name? The donation came after USC President Rufus B. von KleinSmid testified as a character witness at Doheny’s trial for bribing the Department of Interior for oil leases.

State Politics

• Governor Gavin Newsom has released his first budget proposal for the next fiscal year (here), with a record-breaking $45 billion surplus. CalMatters has an early breakdown of what’s inside.

• AB 1400, the statewide single-payer healthcare bill, passed out of the Assembly Health Committee, 11-3. It will be voted on in the Appropriations Committee, on January 21. The Newsom budget contains funding to make MedCal insurance available to all undocumented residents, closing a loophole that excluded those aged 26-50. Newsom campaigned on a single-payer system and the two proposals don’t compete, but he has struck a cautious note while bragging about creating “universal access” to health care.

Transportation

• Despite the surge in COVID infections stemming from the omicron variant, LA Metro resumed fare collection on its buses on January 10, as scheduled. Fares were suspended to allow boarding from the rear, but transit activists argue that bus rides should be made permanently free. A Metro survey is soliciting feedback on its budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

• StreetsBlog breaks down the transportation elements of Newsom’s budget.

Labor

• A study published in the Los Angeles Times revealed that two-thirds of Kroger employees struggle to afford basic needs. Employees of Kroger-owned supermarket chains are striking for higher wages in Colorado

Housing Rights

• Despite the surge in COVID infections, which include numerous outbreaks in the city’s shelter system, the city council approved 70 more sites for 41.18 enforcement on Wednesday, with only councilmembers Nithya Raman and Mike Bonin voting no. Organized public comment in opposition provoked councilmember Kevin De Leon to baselessly accuse activists of literally bribing unhoused people to resist services.
• The surge in COVID cases was justification enough for delaying the greater Los Angeles homeless count by one month.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Despite calling for the resignation of current sheriff Alex Villanueva in 2021, the Los Angeles Democratic Party will not endorse any of his opponents in the 2022 election until after the primary. As Knock LA has reported, Villanueva’s two most serious opponents in this race have problems of their own. Neither was able to meet the endorsement threshold. Candidates for sheriff are required to have law enforcement experience, per a 1989 state law that was written to keep criminal justice reformers out of office. SB 271, a 2021 proposed law that would once again allow civilians to run for sheriff, appears now to have been entirely rewritten.

Environmental Justice

• Newsom’s budget earmarks $22.5 billion for fighting climate change and protecting at-risk communities from changing weather patterns.

• Meanwhile, Newsom has effectively backed out of the debate on the state’s controversial proposal to slash financial incentives and add fees for new home rooftop solar systems.

City Politics

• The authors of AB 1400, which would create a historic universal healthcare system in California (called “CalCare”), have now proposed a tax measure to fund the program. The assembly will discuss AB 1400 on January 11. With the political fight over CalCare about to re-intensify, a coalition of activists have begun organizing to get this bill passed. Toolkits here.
  
• DSA-LA is holding a candidate forum Saturday, and will consider whether or not to endorse three additional candidates in 2022: Bryant Odega and Eunisses Hernandez, who are running for Los Angeles City Council seats, and Fatima Iqbal-Zubair, who is running for state Assembly. The forum will include a Q&A open to all and a closed session for DSA members in good standing. RSVP here.

Labor

• Workers at the Jon Donaire Dessert plant in Santa Fe Springs, CA, remain on strike after voting to reject the company’s “final offer” in December. Senator Bernie Sanders has now joined local politicians in supporting the strike. The DSA-LA Labor Committee has been organizing members to join the picket line.

• Labor Notes looks ahead to the potential strikes of the new year

Housing Rights

• Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is conducting its annual count of the Los Angeles County unhoused population, after failing to do so last year due to the pandemic.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Officer William Jones was named as the LAPD officer who opened fire inside a clothing store on December 23, killing an unarmed suspect and a 14-year-old customer. Even in a month in which the LAPD killed nine people, this attracted national attention, and also triggered the usual spasm of copaganda media spin, in this case suggesting that Jones was a well-meaning officer who had been trying to improve the LAPD from within. Knock LA’s coverage dispels this myth.

Environmental Justice

• The holiday break saw record rain- and snowfall. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada measured at 200% of its December 30 average, according to the Department of Water Resources. However, CalMatters reports that the drought isn’t over, as the state has adopted new regulations aimed at stopping residents from wasting water.

• A failure of the sewer system in Carson caused a leak of millions of gallons of sewage, shutting beaches in Long Beach over the weekend.

• Environmental justice groups argue that the state’s cap-and-trade program has failed on its promised emission reductions.