Posts About Los Angeles Politics
Dorothy Healey, Los Angeles Advocate for Progressive Change
By Peter Dreier
Few progressive activists under 60 will know the name
Dorothy Healey -- who died yesterday at age 91 -- but she was a remarkable
organizer and activist. Tiny in stature, she was a charismatic and inspiring
speaker, a feisty firebrand with a great sense of humor, who began her activism
as a teenager and persisted through her late 80s. The obituary in today's
(Tuesday's) LA Times is reasonably thorough, but doesn't really capture the
energy and enthusiasm that was so forceful and contagious. Even people (like
myself) who disagreed with some of her political views - she was a leader of
the LA branch of the Communist Party from the 1940s through the 1960s -- learned
a great deal from her organizing skills and her lifetime commitment to social,
economic and racial justice. Like her colleague Frank Wilkinson, who died last
year, she was a long distance runner for progressive change. I haven't made
contact with her son Richard yet, but I assume there will be an LA memorial
event for her at some point.Continue reading "Dorothy Healey, Los Angeles Advocate for Progressive Change"
Gail Goldberg - Planning in LA
By Amanda Shaffer
Last May, when the search for a new Planning Director for the City of LA was announced, UEPI, as part of the Alliance for a Livable Los Angeles, helped draft a letter to the new planning director with a vision for a new Los Angeles. A little over a year later, it seems that the vision has a good shot at becoming a reality.
On Saturday, July 22nd, the Alliance for a Livable Los Angeles hosted a community forum with the new planning director, Gail Goldberg. Over 150 residents filled a meeting room at the LAANE office, for a dialogue with Gail about the future of planning in Los Angeles. Community groups presented on a number of issues including affordable housing/gentrification, transportation, fresh & health food access and the impact of new developments on surrounding communities. Overall, Gail’s responses were, as one of the event organizers put it, “music to our ears.”
Continue reading "Gail Goldberg - Planning in LA"
The South Central Farm: What Next?
By Robert Gottlieb
As this is being written, the 14 acre South Central Farm on 41st street and Alameda is being bulldozed, the fences that separated the magnificent plots torn down, and an urban landscape that was in many ways truly magical will no longer be present at that site.
Continue reading "The South Central Farm: What Next?"
Double decker highways and additional highway lanes on the 710 Freeway..do we really need more?
By Robert Gottlieb
It's unfortunate, but buried within the legislative package of infrastructure projects that the Legislature passed last week, and that otherwise includes important goals such as affordable housing and education, will be a big chunk of change that will go to freeway building, particularly for increasing the ability to expand the movement of goods that flows through -- and pollutes -- the Southern California region. Translated: more freeway lanes or even a double decker of that most notorious of Southern California freeways, the 710.
Happy MLK Day
By Peter Dreier
Many of you have seen the LA Times' 4-day series last week criticizing the United Farm Workers. In response, I wrote this op-ed, published in the Sunday LA Times (yesterday), criticizing the paper's general coverage of labor and workplace issues.
On a positive note, the NY Times Magazine yesterday ran a great cover story on the growing "living wage" movement around the country, focusing on ACORN staffer Jen Kern.
And Holly Sklar has a great article about Dr. King's views about economic justice and labor on the TomPaine website.
The new (Winter 2006) issue of Dissent has my tribute to Rosa Parks.
CommonSense last week published a tribute to civil liberties and housing activist Frank Wilkinson by Jan Breidenbach and me. It was also published in The Nation as part of Katrina Vanden Heuvel's column.
Also in The Nation, I recommend "A Top Ten List of Bold Ideas" by Gar Alperovitz and Thad Williamson. Even if you don't agree with all of these ideas it is important for progressives to create a positive forward-looking agenda, not just be against things.
Something to be against, though, are the huge tax break for the wealthy, including that part of the homeowner deduction that goes to the richest folks with the biggest homes. My article in the current issue of Shelterforce examines President Bush's tax reform task force and its recent recommendation to reform what I call the "mansion subsidy":
Finally, I recommend a new report by Columbia University economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes, who estimate the cost of the war in Iraq at $2 trillion - four times more than the Bush administration's projections.
Frank Wilkinson's Legacy
By Peter Dreier
The obituaries for Frank Wilkinson, who died January 2 at 91, primarily focused on his role as a leading opponent of McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and government spying on citizens. In 1958, Wilkinson was one of the last people ordered to prison for defying HUAC. He appealed his contempt citation all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled 5 to 4 against him. After spending nine months in federal prison in 1961, Wilkinson through the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, spend more than a decade fighting to dismantle HUAC, which was finally abolished in 1975. Wilkinson also fought the FBI. He sued the FBI to obtain its files on him, eventually getting 132,000 documents, which revealed that the agency had been spying on him for 38 years. A federal judge order the FBI to end its surveillance of Wilkinson.
Continue reading "Frank Wilkinson's Legacy"
Can there be a planning vision for Los Angeles?
By Robert Gottlieb
Shortly after the
June 17th mayoral election, Antonio Villaraigosa appeared as a
keynote speaker at the Congress for New Urbanism convention in Pasadena and
proclaimed that he would appoint a new Planning Director (the previous
Director, Con Howe, had announced he was stepping down six months ago) who
would be 100% in accord with the smart growth and livability positions of the
New Urbanists. No word yet on how such a decision is going to be made, nor what
planning issues the mayor sees as crucial, and perhaps most importantly whether
the Planning Department or for that matter Planning itself will have any
special role in the Villaraigosa Administration.
The possibilities are
there to take Los Angeles down a very different road from the past when
planning at best was an afterthought, the Department was understaffed, and its
priorities skewered towards the latest big development. For Los Angeles has no
pedestrian plan, no bike plan, no transit-oriented development plan, no broader
commitment to a livability agenda at either the regional or the neighborhood
scale. Social and environmental justice advocates, filling out the smart growth
agenda with a commitment to equity and sustainable community economic
development, have laid out the road map for a planning vision and a vision for
planning for Los Angeles.
Mayor Villaraigosa, please take note!