Homeless activist Bob Erlenbusch’s usual eloquence ebbed slightly during his last attempt to get the Board of Supervisors to stay this month’s General Relief termination, which would drop 7,000 people from the rolls. You saw him wondering just how many times he had to say, “They’ll return to homelessness, to the streets and alcohol.”The supervisors […]
Category: LA Weekly
Jail Time! – Or how to get higher-caliber L.A. public officials
Herewith a local conundrum: Why has no Los Angeles politician been arrested, sentenced and jailed for corruption for almost 60 years? Is it because, ever since the 1937 Frank Shaw scandals that dumped a mayor, a police chief and, ultimately, most of a City Council, they’ve all been so clean and respectable?Or is it, as […]
Fulfillment
Words were more real than the world. I’d been an avid, sheltered reader since age 6, long on facts and fancies and short on ideas. So in 1965, when it came time to make a living, I thought words. As in the business of books. Back then, publishing was still a gentile – make that […]
Waiting for the World
LAST WEEKEND, WHILE THE OP-ED BATTLE DRUMS beat ever louder, George W. Bush finally called the United Nations chicken for not endorsing his war plans against Iraq. Naturally, I took refuge among the World Federalists, whose local chapter was meeting at the local center of the Ba’hai faith — itself as internationalist a religion as […]
The Otani Affair
Here‘s a friendly hint for LAPD-chief candidates John Timoney and Bill Bratton. Assuming you really do want the highest-paying job in Los Angeles, it’s bad taste to be caught staying at the state‘s most notorious anti-union hotel. Let alone being followed there and interviewed by L.A. Times reporters. I mean, no elected official in the […]
Grand Illusion
Bill Simon looks the camera square in the eye and walks right toward you. He‘s wearing a beautiful shirt the color of the Ionian Sea. He’s trying to smile. He says: ”Do you know me?“ Then he explains who he is: an honest, humble Republican candidate for governor, defamed and marginalized by the huge-spending Gray […]
Take Heed, Chief
LAPD Chief-Apparent Bill Bratton talked a lot and talked tough last week, and he seemed to be saying what everyone wanted to hear. He said his new department was slack and inefficient. He told LAPD consent-decree dissidents, who not long ago were extremely vocal, to get out. He said he could reduce violence and cut […]
A Stretch for Garcetti
FOR A WHILE LAST YEAR, I SEEMED TO RUN into former District Attorney Gil Garcetti every week. He was hyperactive in his son Eric’s successful campaign for the City Council, and wherever Eric, a dogged campaigner, turned up, so did Gil, his top adviser. On one of those occasions, I asked the elder Garcetti what […]
A Stormy Port
President George W. Bush’s court order opening the shuttered West Coast ports was either a good or bad thing, depending on whether you talked to the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) or the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). The order ended the management lockout of 10,500 dockworkers in 29 Pacific ports, but disappointed some local […]
Plato on the Beat
Every police-chief confirmation I’ve seen in this city has been a ceremony of anticipation. Last Friday‘s was something more: It also evoked the failed hopes in three past police chiefs — Daryl Gates, Willie Williams and Bernie Parks — and threw them onto the willing shoulders of 54-year-old William Bratton. That’s over a quarter of […]