LOS ANGELES

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-The column hopefully begins to examine the connections between City Hall and real estate investments pouring into Los Angeles. While this story gets to the foundation of municipal politics, the mainstream news media either ignores it completely or only reports small snippets of the big picture. 

EASTSIDER-The news media is all over their headline that Kevin De Leon and “progressive dems” at the Democratic Convention in San Diego this weekend “denied” right-wing Senator Dianne Feinstein the party’s endorsement. So, is it true or is it horse puckey? 

MY TURN—(Jasmyne Cannick is an LA writer and a contributor to CityWatch.) If you ask Vincent Cook about the first 56 years of his life he’d probably tell you his proudest moments were were being handpicked by the late comedian Richard Pryor and singer Luther Vandross to be their opening acts during their respective tours. But mention former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Cook lights up and smiles as he recounts opening for Clinton during one of his California Primary appearances.

ALPERN AT LARGE--Increasingly, ours is a society who acts based on emotions and "feel-good" politics instead of smart, outcomes-based and tough decision-making.  We expect our children and student population to go out there and protest, and the adults are supposed to follow their lead...or something like that. 

RESISTANCE WATCH-High school students have courageously led a national conversation about ending gun violence after the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, and have prompted the planning of school actions across the country. This has been an urgent reminder that one of the primary purposes of public education is to prepare students to be engaged citizens. It's pretty clear the Parkland students are more than prepared. 

TRUMP WATCH-Leave it to Donald Trump to parrot the most demented proposal out there to try and finally respond, even in some small way, to the epidemic of gun massacres in America. We all know the problem is too many guns. And the answer is supposed to be more and more guns out there? 

OTHER WORDS--Let’s do a mental exercise.

Imagine that Jose moves to the United States from El Salvador. He comes here legally — he applied for the diversity visa lottery and he won! Then he quickly gathered together the required papers to prove to the U.S. that he was who he said he was, and he wasn’t a criminal, and he moved to New York.

CAL MATTERS-Early in 2011, Bill Allayaud was so fed up with what he saw as dereliction of duty by California’s oil and gas regulator that he began to catalog grievances: unregulated fracking, allowing companies to inject oilfield wastewater into clean water aquifers, little or no oversight into critical practices affecting public health and safety. 

CAL MATTERS--As California’s Democrats wrapped up their party’s annual convention Sunday, they left San Diego as they arrived: a party still fraying at the seams after the 2016 election, held together by one strong bond—a unifying dislike of President Donald Trump.(Photo above Billionaire activist Tom Steyer at Dems convention.)

BELL VIEW--Can America pay attention long enough to do anything to save itself from destruction? The massacre in Florida already feels like ancient history to everyone except the people who lived through it. The slaughter in Syria quietly churns on beneath the surface while Americans have lost the ability to connect two opposing ideas to create a real debate. 

CORRUPTION WATCH-The crime of bribery has two sides – the bribe payer and the city officials who accept the money. On Friday, February 23, 2018, Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey felt the heat from David Zahniser’s and Emily Alpert Reyes’ October 30, 2016 LA Times article exposing the bribery racket that runs Los Angeles City Hall. Thus, she tried to cool the furor by issuing felony warrants for the developer Samuel Leung and his secretary Sophia David. But things are deeper than they seem from the warrant. 

THE POWER OF BIG PHARMA-The opioid epidemic has left no part of the country untouched, yet California can be considered one of the luckier states. Close to 115 Americans die each day of an opioid-related overdose, but California’s death rates have begun to taper off. Public experts surmise that a diverse demographic makeup and the type of heroin available in the area have contributed to the stabilization. But, this is only one barely shining light at the end of a long tunnel. 

FIRST PERSON-For quite a while now I have believed that the longstanding, preprogrammed and well-orchestrated failure of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) (along with other public school districts like it around the state and country) can only be changed for the better by a radical restructuring of its openly entrenched self-serving bureaucracy. It is a system that, by its very nature, has put the interests of its vendors before those of its students, teachers, families, and communities. 

VOICES--In nearly every corner of Los Angeles, there are homeless encampments — collections of flimsy tents, usually within mere feet of a school, a park, a business, or someone’s home. Their presence invariably sparks a neighborhood debate, with loud voices proclaiming that “those people” are there by choice.

@THE GUSS REPORT-In the nearly three years he has been a Los Angeles City Councilmember, David Ryu has been silent on the issue of inhumane living conditions at thousands of South Korean dog meat farms, where the terrified and tortured animals are eventually killed and eaten. 

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-According to the San Jose Mercury News, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti conditionally supports Senator Scott Wiener’s proposed Senate Bill 827, which has been amply pilloried – for good reasons – at CityWatchLA. The mayor’s one condition is that an amendment to this real estate bill should protect existing rent stabilized apartments from demolition. 

CORRUPTION WATCH-We are ignoring the mechanism by which a predatory society brings incessant violence upon itself. The United States is one of the most abusive, predatory societies on the planet. Whether a person is sane or not, a person’s national culture is the major factor in whether he or she murders masses of people. These shootings arise from our nature. 

WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH Y OUR MEASURE HHH DOLLARS?--City Council President Herb Wesson, who has watched Mayor Eric Garcetti drag his feet for more than a year, building NO units of housing to shelter the homeless with voter-approved “Measure HHH” homeless funds, tweeted out a catchy PR campaign today that in no way moves the dime.

BCK FILE--Politics is big business -- and the impact of hefty campaign contributions on policy is problematic, whether the issue is meaningful gun control, environmental policy or closer to home, approval for development projects. 

DEEGAN ON LA- “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water” was the chilling slogan for the movie “Jaws” many years ago. But just as locals at the beach thought they had their shark problem fixed, yet another swimmer was pulled out of the surf with half her body turned into a shark’s dinner.  A few days ago the LA Times announced in its headline, “LA County's Homeless Problem Is Worsening Despite Billions From Tax Measures.” This was less than one week after the City Council approved a plan to house 60 of the area’s estimated 58,000 homeless in a city parking lot.