A tiny City News Service item in Friday’s Los Angeles Times business section told the tale. Or at least part of it: “A blighted, 32-acre railroad property northeast of downtown Los Angeles will be redeveloped into an industrial park with the help of $11.75 million in grants from the federal government, officials said.”The story was […]
Month: July 2018
Big-Spender Mike
Firearms fans who came downtown to support continued gun sales at the County Fairplex’s gun shows put on a pretty good show of their own this week. Twenty people — some repeats from last time, but a few new faces — showed up to protest the supervisors’ decision to ban the show.It turns out that […]
Breaking Away
If only they had a choice, the people who work at the El Sereno Youth Center would like to forget there ever was a Los Angeles city councilman named Richard Alatorre. Failing that, they’d rather the world knew there’s no current association between the center and the man.”I used to respect him greatly,” executive director […]
County Living
Los Angeles’ organized-labor cadres seemed to be all over the metropolis on Tuesday in their quest for the living wage. Workers and union officials attended a meeting of the city’s Board of Airports to lobby for better pay at LAX, made a strong presentation to the City Council the same morning on USC’s four-year resistance […]
The Anti-Reform Movement
These days it seems that most Angelenos don’t like how their city works. You stumble on this perception in the least likely places. When interviewed recently on the future of Los Angeles, for instance, some Chicano-studies academics said they saw the city splitting, others saw it staying together. Some said they saw one Latino politician […]
The Martinet Mandate
Compare New York’s beleaguered City Hall with L.A.’s and be glad you live here. The last time I looked, Mad Rudy Giuliani’s charming Georgian headquarters was sealed off by cops and barricades. Protesters now get arrested and held overnight under the authority of Gotham’s power-maddened burgermeister, who — having begun his mayoral career with dramatic […]
The Charter End Game
Maybe I’ve just been lucky. But I never before have been compelled to consider who’s the dumbest Los Angeles City Council member. It’s not as important as knowing who’s the smartest, or most venal. Or least honest.As the fiscal year wanes, however, I think we do need a tentative negative-intelligence assessment. So here we go: […]
After the Fall
So what happens now? The Los Angeles City Council’s firm majority stood firm to the last against the passage of the new city charter. Now the members of that same majority get to be the ones who implement it. What a great idea. But nothing here is quite that simple — except, perhaps, the voting […]
Cruel Britannia
IF YOU READ ONLY ONE HISTORY OF WORLD WAR I IN YOUR life, make sure Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War isn’t it. For starters, the book isn’t really a history, or even a systemic commentary on what, to much of Europe, remains the major event of the 20th century. Ferguson defines his task as […]
The Living-on-the-Edge Ordinance
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