Nearly three years ago, a city ordinance was proposed that would have limited what people could say to the City Council. This bill ran into so much opposition that it withered away.What did pass was a rule that restrained public comment to five minutes per side for a given agenda item. This theoretically means that […]
Month: July 2018
The Real World Organization
Something important was missing from the Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations. Oh yes, there were, in some proportion, all the just causes I’d ever marched for in the past: balanced ecology, fair wages, equal representation; everything, it seemed, but Vietnam. To pre-boomer sometime activists like me, certainly, there is nothing more assuring than watching subsequent generations marching […]
Health Care for Saints
Now the state must find money to pay for health plans for people who care for the elderly and disabledRichard Devylder knows firsthand the importance of home health-care workers: They feed, bathe, dress, change catheters and take people to the doctor.All the embarrassing little details of our everyday lives which we all hope we can […]
Farewell but Not Good Riddance
Photo by Slobodan DimitrovAll last week they said goodbye to the Richard Alatorre who should have been. Pioneer political role model to the Latinos, lover of family and children. Feminist and forerunner, benefactor of the worker. And, in Assemblyman Gil Cedillo’s words, “the people’s champion.” But as most of those present must have known, by […]
Role Reversal
The last time I looked in, the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission was functioning rather well as the city government’s traffic officer. Not its highway patrolman nor its robbery-homicide detective: It’s not there to handle wild chases or major felony cases. That’s what the D.A.’s Office and the FBI are there for — supposedly.But the […]
Pity Poor San Pedro
Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov Once you get past the refineries, San Pedro looks like many port cities whose generations have lived near the sea. Little homes crowd the hilly, treeless streets that climb the sweep of landscape from the docks to the Palos Verdes heights. The maritime air smells clean, even at 90 degrees. Downtown, […]
Beginning at the Beginning
There’s finally some good news about the future of the downtown park known as the Pueblo of Los Angeles.Since the 1960s, most of the Pueblo, one of the most striking historical sites in California, languished under the very noses of federal, state, city and county government. Yet this collection of old buildings on a handful […]
Wetlands and the Well-Ordered Society
Philosopher John Rawls calls it “overlapping consensus.” What I understand the author of A Theory of Justice to mean here is that even among the most embattled opponents, there can be agreement on certain fundamental issues.Of course, even Taliban clerics can concur with militant feminists that rape and armed robbery are public evils. What gets […]
Where the Man Began
You notice the “Award-Winning Karaoke” parlor here, the smiling teens waving “Free Carwash for Jesus” placards there. But there’s no sign of Dick Nixon — usually termed our nation’s “most controversial president” — whose most flattering biographer to date concluded: “It is sometimes difficult to see where the cynical politician in him ends, and where […]
The Guns of Autumn
The summer is slowly ebbing away. In another time and place, the leaves would already be turning amber and our thoughts would be turning to hunting. This was the great American pastime centuries before Abner Doubleday ever pitched a ball. And now, many decades after I last participated, I can still recall rituals like handing […]