LOCAL NEWS
- People’s Budget LA, a coalition of activist groups including DSA-LA’s Street Watch, Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, and Ktown for All, mobilized opposition to Mayor Eric Garcetti’s proposed budget cuts and flooded social media and public comments periods in an outcry over proposed spending on LAPD at the expense of social services. On Thursday the City Council declined to approve the budget and referred the budget to committee for further discussion, meeting the activists’ demands for more time for public input. The coalition will now pressure the City Council to pass a People’s Budget, centering human services and defunding the LAPD. Currently, police funding takes up over half of LA’s budget. DSA-LA member and endorsed LA City Council candidate Nithya Raman pointed out that “all of the proposed cuts to services total $230 million. LAPD officer pay is simultaneously being increased by $144 million. If officers were to receive the same pay they did last year, we could be saved from two-thirds of the cuts.”
- Health officials announced on Wednesday that LA has reached an important milestone in the fight against coronavirus, with the transmission rate now slightly below 1, meaning that on average every person with COVID-19 infects less than one other person. Simulations show that if this transmission rate is maintained then just 9% of Angelenos will have contracted the virus by December. However, even a slight uptick in the transmission rate — to 1.5 — could result in nearly half the city becoming infected by December. For this reason, county health officials continue to stress the importance of residents abiding by social distancing guidelines even as the city’s lockdown begins to ease.
- The University of California announced that it has fully divested from all fossil fuels, becoming the nation’s largest educational institution to do so and capping a 5-year effort to move the public research university’s $126 billion portfolio into more environmentally sustainable investments. The movement against fossil fuels has bloomed to encompass more than 1,100 faith, educational, government, corporate and nonprofit institutions, with $14 trillion in assets, in the last decade. Among them, more than 50 universities have committed to full or partial divestment.
- After a federal judge ordered LA County to carry out a “humane relocation” of unhoused residents underneath the city’s freeways, local officials have submitted preliminary plans that include a rapid expansion of safe parking sites and pallet shelters, as well as safe campsites based on a pilot program implemented by the West Los Angeles VA. The judge’s order requires that all unhoused residents living under overpasses must be offered an alternate space in a shelter with access to health and hygiene services before police can order them to leave, and that this offer must be given with advance notice.
- Gov. Newsom’s Project Roomkey, a plan to house thousands of unhoused Californians in hotel rooms across the state, is rolling out far slower than anticipated. Only half of the 15,000 rooms leased for the project have been filled.
- School support staff, teachers, and superintendents are warning that the school budget cuts proposed by Gov. Newsom could threaten the ability of schools statewide to reopen safely.
- A 74-year-old man committed suicide in the Mesa Verde detention center in Bakersfield. Choung Won Ahn had expressed concerns over contracting COVID-19 due to his many pre-existing health conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart problems.
- The Guardian has published a deep look at six prisons in California where the failure to implement basic protocols to prevent the spread of COVID-19 has preceded “rapidly escalating outbreaks,” with some fearing worse to come.
- “A restaurant worker without papers has to work twice as hard. You have to constantly say: ‘I’ll do it.’ The day someone is out sick, you have to cover. You can’t get sick. You can’t call out. It’s a hard road to walk,” says Oscar, who now is out of work. Being undocumented, he is not eligible for unemployment or a stimulus check. Undocumented workers account for 10% of the US labor force, and there are about a million undocumented workers in the food and beverage industry. With the government failiing to provide relief to the undocumented community, many groups including DSA-LA are engaging in solidarity campaigns and mutual aid to address the dire circumstances of undocumented Californians. In April, California announced a $125 million relief fund specifically for undocumented workers, however during this week’s rollout, it met a fate similar to that of other COVID-19 relief funds, with its administration being rapidly overwhelmed by a deluge of claims, and most predicting the fund to be fully drawn down very quickly.
- A full timeline of Elon Musk’s erratic behavior on Twitter can be found here, preceding his decision to restart production at Tesla’s plant in Fremont on May 9, flouting shelter-in-place orders. Tesla’s HR department told employees on Wednesday that operations were returning to normal and their attendance policy was resuming as of this week at both their Fremont assembly plant and their Sparks, NV, battery factory. Musk and Tesla dropped a suit filed against Alameda County, and Musk said he would move Tesla’s headquarters out of California and threatened to move manufacturing and future projects away as well.
ELECTIONS
- Judicial Watch (a conservative activist group) and Republican congressional candidate and former member of Congress Darrell Issa filed a legal challenge to block Governor Newsom’s executive order to direct state elections officials to mail a ballot to every voter and conduct an all-mail November election. Newsom’s order would make California the first state to move to an all-mail election in response to the pandemic; the Republican National Committee also said it was weighing legal options in response.