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LA Sues Airbnb: City Attorney Alleges Price Gouging, Deception During Wildfires

Reporters Desk
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LA Sues Airbnb: City Attorney Alleges Price Gouging, Deception During Wildfires

 

LOS ANGELES — City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto July 18 filed a civil enforcement action against Airbnb. The lawsuit alleges that the home renting platform, in the wake of the January wildfires in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, increased rental prices of at least two thousand, and possibly over three thousand, properties within the City of LA in violation of California Penal Code section 396, the Anti-Gouging Law.

The protections of this law came into effect on January 7, 2025, when Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles. The law prohibits the prices of essential goods and services – including rental housing – from being increased by more than 10% after an emergency is declared.

Since then, the Governor, Mayor Bass and the LA County Board of Supervisors have repeatedly extended the state of emergency – most recently by the supervisors on June 24 – making it illegal for Airbnb to increase the pricing of its rentals by more than 10%.

In addition, the suit alleges that Airbnb misleadingly represents to prospective renters that Airbnb has “verified” the accuracy of the identities of hosts and locations of properties on the site. In reality, Airbnb’s “verified hosts” include “hosts” with non-existent or false identities, and “verified” property addresses include addresses that are incorrect or non-existent.

Feldstein Soto’s lawsuit, filed for violations of the CA Unfair Competition Law, seeks a permanent injunction barring Airbnb from charging illegal rents during the current state of emergency and from misrepresenting host identities or property locations, and requests restitution to consumers who were charged illegal rents. The suit also seeks civil penalties of up to $2,500 for each violation to deter price-gouging and unfair, unlawful and/or fraudulent representations to consumers.

“It’s unconscionable that Airbnb permitted prices to be jacked up on thousands of rental properties at a time when so many people lost so much and needed a place to sleep,” said LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto. “Although Airbnb subsequently took steps to curtail price gouging, evidence indicates that illegal gouging on the site continues and may be ongoing. This lawsuit sends a clear message that we will not allow people, particularly at their most vulnerable moments, to be exploited without consequences.”

The wildfires in early January created an immediate and overwhelming need for local short-term rental housing. Airbnb, the world’s most popular online advertiser and broker of short-term rentals, had 2024 revenue of $11.1 billion with estimated 80% market share in Los Angeles. It is believed that hundreds and perhaps thousands of Angelenos who were forced to evacuate their homes in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, as well as residents of nearby neighborhoods at risk for being evacuated, booked rentals on Airbnb.

Airbnb is aware that its verification processes are inadequate, yet it continues to falsely, deceptively, unfairly, and/or misleadingly represent otherwise, potentially luring prospective tenants into a false sense of security about its hosts and locations. Tenants at Airbnb properties have been victims of identity theft, robbery, sexual assault, invasion of privacy, voyeurism and other crimes.

This litigation is being managed by the City Attorney’s Public Rights Branch.

Link to press release online: https://shorturl.at/2nKKG

To Resist Injustice in Gaza and the Wider World

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To Resist Injustice in Gaza and the Wider World

 

By Charles Glass

Egyptian-born Omar El Akkad had studied in the United States and been 10 years a journalist when, in the summer of 2021, he became an American citizen. Covering the War on Terror in Afghanistan and at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay exposed him to the “deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing they called “the free world.” Yet he believed the cracks could be repaired – “Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”

The slaughter was Israel’s razing of Gaza following Hamas’s rampage into Israel on October 7, 2023. The Israeli assault escalated to include massive bombardment, enforced hunger, destruction of hospitals and schools, bulldozing of dwellings deprivation of medical care, torture and the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children. The onslaught caused Akkad to despair for Gaza’s Palestinians and for his adopted country, whose financing and weapons enabled it. He channelled that despair into the rage that inspired this excellent and troubling book.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is neither polemic nor memoir, although it contains elements of both. Akkad’s prose is an appeal to readers not to wait for “one day” in the distant future to resist injustice not only in Gaza, but in the wider world: “In the coming years there will be much written about what took place in Gaza, the horrors that have been meticulously documented by Palestinians as they happened and meticulously brushed aside by the major media apparatus of the western world.” When the killing ceases, as with genocides of native Americans, Tasmanians, Namibia’s Hereros and Namas, Armenians, Jews and Tutsis, it will be too late.

Akkad’s condemnation of U.S. policy in the formerly-colonized world sits uneasily beside his choice to live and raise his children in the land that torments people who, like him, are brown or Muslim or doomed to live under American-supported Arab dictators or Israeli occupation. His rationale is as simple as it is understandable: “I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.”

He is unafraid to speak against the Biden administration’s veto of United Nations resolutions calling for ceasefires in Gaza (“untroubled when they say a ceasefire resolution represents a greater threat to lasting peace than the ongoing obliteration of an entire people”) and its termination of funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that was the primary supplier of food, medical care and education to Palestinian refugees. Yet speaking out seems futile. As the author of the award-winning novel American War and sometime columnist, he does not spare himself and other writers for political impotence: “What is this work we do? What are we good for?” He quotes Egyptian-American poet Marwa Helal:

 

this is where the

poets will say: show, don’t tell

but that

assumes most people

can see.

Too many seek refuge in propaganda that what is being done to Palestinians is necessary. Akkad quotes an Israeli newspaper post’s headline from seven months prior to October 7: “When Genocide is Permissible.” Palestinians are killed every day in Gaza, “but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that’s what those people do, they die.”

This book is not devoid of hope, which he finds in resistance that can be positive (“showing up to protests and speaking out”) and negative (“refusing to participate”). He praises students “risking expulsion and defamation, risking their livelihoods, their entire careers” and Jewish protestors “being arrested on the streets of Frankfurt, blocking Grand Central Station in New York, fighting for peace.” Their efforts, however ineffective, absolve them of the culpability of waiting for everyone else to be “against this.”

___________________________

Charles Glass is a writer, journalist and broadcaster, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past 50 years. He was ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent from 1983 to 1993 and has covered wars in Lebanon, Syria, Eritrea, Rhodesia, Somalia, Iraq, East Timor and Bosnia-Herzegovina. His many books have dealt with the First and Second World Wars as well as contemporary Middle East history.

Evil Scheme to Purge Half a Million Voters

Greg Palast
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Evil Scheme to Purge Half a Million Voters

Will control of the US Senate come down to ugly ethnic cleansing?

by Greg Palast for RawStory and Substack July 17

It’s all over but the official count. Georgia Republicans can’t win the Senate seat now held by Democrat Jon Ossoff — the demographics will drown them: Georgia is now a “majority minority” state with non-whites predominant. EXCEPT. EXCEPT if the GOP can come up with a way to stop those un-white voters from voting.

And they have. This week, the violently partisan Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, announced that he is removing tens of thousands of voters who live in addresses that Republicans rarely haunt: office spaces used as housing [and] homes with 10 or more registrants.

That’s ON TOP OF the 480,000 voters the State is about to remove as “inactive voters.”

Hey, it all sounds reasonable. But consider this: in the entire history of Georgia, since the days of its treasonous attack on America, NOT ONE person has been convicted of voting while dead, while non-existent, while an illegal alien. Not one.

In other words, this is a punishment looking for a crime. And it’s severe punishment, losing your voting rights, happens when you’re convicted of a felony crime.

But what you’re looking at is what we politely call, “institutional racism,” because, from what we learned from our in-depth study for the ACLU, is that the overwhelming number of Georgians purged are voters of color: the color ‘blue’ for Democratic: African-Americans, Asian-Americans, new young voters…you get it.

The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the premier voting rights organization, warned,

“This would create new and unnecessary barriers to voting for Georgia’s unhoused and housing-insecure voters — a population estimated to include over 10,000 eligible Georgian voters. Among the segment of the homeless population that is residing in shelter facilities more than 50 percent of the time, 2022 data found 57 percent were Black and 31 percent were adult victims of domestic violence.“

And here’s one of the most evil schemes announced by Raffensperger. (I use “evil” most carefully). He’s announced Georgia will remove 87,027 voters because they’ve filed Change of Address forms with the post office. If you’ve seen my film, Vigilantes Inc., you know the story of Maj. Gamaliel Turner of Columbus, Georgia, because he filed a change-of-address to get his absentee ballot while assigned by the Pentagon to California. He was one of 4,000 who lost their vote to a challenge by the Georgia Republican Party on or near his military base.

Then there was Christine Jordan, MLK’s cousin, who put in a change of address form because, at 92, she wanted her daughter to review her mail.

Then there is the case of Dr. Carry Smith, expert on voter purges, who herself was removed for cockamamy reasons. But I want you to see the faces of American apartheid’s victims. If these were rare cases, I wouldn’t waste your time. But removing hundreds of thousands of voters can, and has, changed the presidency and control of the Senate.

And let’s not pussyfoot around the purpose of this ethnic cleansing of Georgia’s voter rolls: Governor Brian Kemp is termed out next year, so the only way he can climb up the greasy pole is to challenge the popular Senator Ossoff. Kemp can’t, and never has, won fair and square.

Marc Elias’ Democracy Docket raised the alarm this week about the new mass purges in Georgia. Elias cited my study for the ACLU that showed that 63.3% of voters, in 2020, were purged from the rolls even though the Postal Service and Amazon’s experts (they know where you live) verified that 198,351 of them still lived at their legal voting address. We gave the names of the wrongly purged to Raffensperger — who defied a federal judge in refusing to review our list. Still, Ossoff and Biden won the state: evidence that they can’t steal all the votes all the time.

But they can try. This year, the state has doubled the number of voters facing the elimination of their citizenship rights. Gerald Griggs, President of the Georgia NAACP, is staring at that list of half a million Georgia voters about to get the heave-ho. He says, “This is Jim Crow 2.0. We’ve warned you, America: what they test in Georgia they will take to your state.”

What about those voters living at “commercial addresses.” That would be me: I lived in a building zoned for business which my friends and me turned into apartments. Who could have dreamed that my right to vote depended on my zoning. By the way, Mr. Raffensperger: if you find illegal voters, arrest them. They’ll be in nursing homes…and, according to the Vera Institute, at least 10,000 are in Georgia’s jails awaiting trial. Mr. Raffensperger, a poor man who can’t make bail, sitting in the can awaiting trial for selling dime bags, should not lose their citizenship. We are not Russia. Yet.

Here’s what you can do:

  • Spread this story. Like it, and share it.
  • Check if you’ve been purged by CHECKING YOUR REGISTRATION at Vote.org — NOW!

Murder Investigation – Los Angeles Riverbed and the 91 Freeway

Reporters Desk
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Murder Investigation – Los Angeles Riverbed and the 91 Freeway

 

Homicide detectives are investigating the murder of a male adult that occurred on July 16 near the Los Angeles Riverbed and the 91 freeway.

On July 16, about 11:18 a.m., officers responded to the Los Angeles Riverbed near the 91 freeway to assist the Long Beach Fire Department regarding a dead body. Upon arrival, officers located a male adult victim with a gunshot wound to the upper body. Long Beach Fire Department personnel determined the victim deceased.

Homicide detectives responded to the scene. The motive for the shooting and the circumstances of the incident are currently under investigation.

The victim is a male adult who appeared to be experiencing homelessness. His identity is being withheld pending notification of the next of kin by the Los Angeles County Department of the Medical Examiner.

Anyone with information regarding this incident is urged to contact Homicide Detectives Oscar Valenzuela and Michael Hubbard at 562-570-7244, or anonymously at 800-222-8477,www.LACrimeStoppers.org.

Supervisors Move to Tackle Drug Use and Smuggling in County Juvenile Facilities

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Supervisors Move to Tackle Drug Use and Smuggling in County Juvenile Facilities

 

LOS ANGELES — In a 4-0 vote with one abstention, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in July approved a motion authored by Supervisor Janice Hahn and co-authored by Supervisor Lindsey P. Horvath that directs the county’s probation department to implement a strategy to curb an ongoing issue with the smuggling and use of illicit drugs within the county’s juvenile detention centers, including through enhanced security screening and expanded substance use treatment. The emergency motion comes after a string of drug-related incidents, most recently an incident at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey in early July in which several youth and staff were hospitalized after suspected exposure to toxic drugs.

“Youth in Los Padrinos aren’t even allowed to hug their moms out of fear of drugs or contraband being passed, yet drugs keep getting in. We are failing our youth, we are failing our employees, and every day, we risk losing another life to substance use,” said Supervisor Hahn, whose district includes Los Padrinos. “I cannot sit by and do nothing to prevent drugs from coming into these juvenile facilities – if it will save lives, then I believe it is worth every effort.”

The Probation Department must now enhance its screening practices, including installing airport-style body scanners and strengthening the use of canines to detect drugs. Additionally, the motion calls for its work with the Department of Public Health’s substance abuse prevention and control (DPH-SAPC) to expand treatment for youth with active substance use disorders.

The suspected overdose and exposure at Los Padrinos was the latest in a string of incidents. In June, the Probation Department announced arrests in two separate incidents of suspected smuggling, first on June 10 of a Deputy Probation Officer accused of smuggling alprazolam into Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall, and then on June 30 of an employee of a contracted provider for allegedly attempting to smuggle more than 170 white pills into Los Padrinos. The motion also directs the Probation Department to cancel the contract with that contracted provider, Student Nest.

Why Did This Farmworker Die In An Immigration Raid?

Terelle Jerricks
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Why Did This Farmworker Die In An Immigration Raid?

 

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/ice-raid-jaime-alanis-garcia/

https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2025/07/why-did-this-farmworker-die-in.html

Community and immigrant rights organizations rally in Oakland’s Latino Fruitvale district protesting immigration raids. One sign says “For my father, who was deported. Watch me from Heaven, Papa. This is Our War!”

Jaime Alanis Garcia died of a broken neck in the Ventura County Medical Center on Saturday. He fell 30 feet from the roof of a Glass House Farms greenhouse, where he’d climbed in a desperate effort to get away from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and National Guard soldiers during an immigration raid on Thursday.

In announcing his death, Alanis’ family called him, “not just a farm worker [but] a human being who deserved dignity. His death is not an isolated tragedy.” The raid, they said, inspired “chaos and fear” among hundreds of farmworkers in the company’s two cannabis farms in Camarillo and Carpenteria, an hour north of Los Angeles.

ICE announced that 319 people had been detained in the raid, and Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin denied responsibility for Alanis’ death. “This man was not in and has not been in CBP or ICE custody [and] was not being pursued,” she claimed.

Of course, Alanis was being pursued. All the workers were, by dozens of agents in battle gear as they fanned out inside the greenhouse. That pursuit was the reason he climbed to the roof.

Another worker was recorded in a video during the raid after climbing a tall scaffolding. “Do what you want. Say what you say. I’m not coming down,” she cried out. “They say they will come and get us. They are saying whatever they want to get us down. We ask them who they are but they won’t answer.” The video was uploaded onto a website, @mrcheckpoint, used to track raids. The woman’s fate is still not known.

Chaos and fear are deliberately used as weapons to terrorize workers and their families. At Glass House Farms, agents arrived in unmarked tan troop transports whose license plates had been removed. They were dressed in military camouflage uniforms reminiscent of the Afghan and Iraq wars, with balaclavas covering their faces.

Arrests were indiscriminate. After a security guard-a US citizen and US Army veteran-was detained, his family couldn’t even find out where he was being held. Jonathan A. Caravello, Ph.D., also a US citizen and professor at the California State University Channel Islands campus in Camarillo, was also arrested by ICE. A judge finally ordered him released from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center on July 14.

After the raid President Trump claimed the agents were under attack, and gave ICE “Total Authorization … using whatever means is necessary.” A few days earlier, after sending mounted agents and National Guard soldiers into Los Angeles’ Macarthur Park, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said no one could stop these military-style deployments. “You have no say in this at all,” he told Mayor Karen Bass. Miller has given DHS a quota of 3,000 arrests per day

Immigration authorities knew that a death like Alanis’ would happen sooner or later. There is a long history of people dying while fleeing from ICE. Santos Garcia and Marcelina Garcia were two indigenous Mixtec farmworkers killed when their car overturned, trying to escape from ICE agents in Delano in 2018. Agents had been staking out roads to stop laborers going to work-a terror tactic during Trump’s first administration, but not one he invented. Five migrants were killed in the 1992 crash of a van fleeing the Border Patrol in Temecula, and two years later another seven died in another truck pursued by agents in the same area.

Inspiring terror, as a tactic, is openly acknowledged. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official in charge of the Southern California region, said “Illegal aliens had the opportunity to self deport. Now we’ll help things along a bit.” Bovino earlier led a January raid the day after Trump’s election victory was certified, targeting farmworkers in roadblocks and Home Depot parking lots in the San Joaquin Valley. “Self-deportation” is the euphemism used by immigration authorities when people are made so fearful that they leave their homes to return to their countries of origin, or simply to another safer place.

But the military deployment of ICE agents is also a response to rising protest that is defying this campaign of intimidation. Within minutes of the arrival of agents at the greenhouses, calls on cellphones brought family members and community activists to the sites. They were met with tear gas, “flash bang” grenades and smoke bombs.

Immigrant communities have been preparing for raids since Trump’s election. For months in the state’s farmworker towns young people (mostly documented and US citizens born here) have organized marches to defend their parents, in an inspiring demonstration of courage and determination. The conduct of the raids, by armed soldiers in combat fatigues, is an effort by ICE and Homeland Security to intimidate them into halting any action that might interfere.

In many communities activist groups like Union del Barrio and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles have formed teams to monitor the movements of ICE and Border Patrol agents. They carry bullhorns, and warn community residents not to open their doors when a raid seems likely. White House border czar Tom Homan was explicit about consequences. “The rhetoric keeps rising and rising and rising – someone’s gonna get hurt,” Homan told NBC News a month prior to the Glass House raid. “If this violence isn’t tamped down, someone’s gonna die, and that’s just that’s just a cold fact of life.”

The Trump administration was careful to target a marijuana-growing operation because it provides headlines appealing to its MAGA base, while not threatening its big ag supporters. Fox News accused California Governor Newsom of receiving big campaign donations from Glass House co-founder Graham Farrar. Like most big marijuana operations, Glass House Farms donates to state politicians from both parties because it depends on their votes for the license to operate. Marijuana is still illegal under Federal legislation, and Federal law enforcement has long made California cannabis a target.

ICE even claimed that its raid had “rescued” a handful of minors. A statement by the United Farm Workers responded, “detaining and deporting children is not a solution for child labor.”

The Trump administration, however, has been careful not to conduct raids targeting big corporate farms. California’s central coast, where Glass House Farms is located, is the nation’s biggest strawberry-growing area. While fear in the coast’s farmworker towns is endemic, the strawberry crop is getting harvested. In Washington State’s Wenatchee River Valley-the largest apple growing area in the U.S.-Jon Folden of Blue Bird farm cooperative says, “We’ve not heard of any real raids.” The Border Patrol’s Bovino says, “For us, targeting agricultural workers at their job, absolutely not.”

The Glass House raid didn’t even make it into the news section of the website of the Western Growers Association, which includes the country’s largest growers of fruits and vegetables. Their silence, in fact, is deafening. There is no WGA statement opposing raids, and its website reassures growers, “While enforcement activities have not targeted agriculture, here are some prudent proactive steps to respond appropriately to potential [ICE] visits.” Among them, it advertises, “Western Growers H-2A Services available to support growers during this complex labor environment … helping members secure a capable, reliable and legal workforce.”

Last year growers recruited 384,000 H-2A workers (a sixth of the country’s farm labor workforce), mostly from Mexico, under temporary work contracts. These laborers can only work for the grower who recruits them, and can be fired and deported for protesting, organizing or simply working too slowly.

In the fields surrounding Glass House Farms, central coast strawberries are picked because growers increasingly rely on this program. According to the Employer Data Hub of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, agribusiness has brought 8,140 workers to Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties, about a quarter of all the farm workforce.

Trump has promised to make this program even more grower-friendly, and big ag has supported him overwhelmingly. The current secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, told Congress that she’d modernize the H-2A program “to do everything we can to make sure that none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business [by immigration enforcement].”

At the end of June Trump scrapped the Farmworker Protection Rule, regulations put in place by Julie Su, Biden’s Secretary of Labor, that provided minimal protections for H-2A workers. By getting rid of it, growers can now bar outsiders (community groups or unions) from labor camps, give workers contracts in languages they can’t read, retaliate against workers who complain of bad conditions, and even stop using seat belts in the vehicles transporting laborers to the fields. In 2019 Trump froze the minimum wage for H-2A workers, and growers are calling on Congress to support a bill that would do that permanently.

Pushback against ICE, however, continues to win in court. The day after agents arrived at Glass House farms, U.S. District Judge Maame E. Frimpong in Los Angeles made permanent two temporary restraining orders which would limit the ways ICE can conduct immigration raids. One prohibits agents from stopping and detaining people based on skin color, language or other general factors used to profile immigrants. The second mandates legal representation for detainees held in the notorious B-18 jail in downtown L.A.

DHS’s Tricia McLaughlin attacked Judge Frimpong for “undermining the will of the American people,” and claimed “”enforcement operations are highly targeted.” That was certainly how Jaime Alanis must have felt before he fell.

So who gained and who paid in the Glass House raid? The Trump administration hyped up the MAGA base once again with images of extreme force deployed against immigrant farmworkers. Big Ag growers, meanwhile, seem immune, continuing to pay wages at the bottom, with government-sponsored access to a labor program that has been described as “close to slavery.” Terrorized farmworker families risk deportation if they try to organize and raise those wages, while living in fear that parents will be picked up when their kids are in school.

Newsom to Trump: End the Occupation of L.A. — Governor Stands with Communities, Shares Resources to Resist Militarization

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Newsom to Trump: End the Occupation of L.A. — Governor Stands with Communities, Shares Resources to Resist Militarization

 

LOS ANGELES — Providing support to local communities impacted by federal immigration enforcement actions, Gov. Gavin Newsom July 16 met with business owners and faith leaders in the Los Angeles area.

Economic impact

Because of Trump’s actions, the state’s economy is likely to contract later this year due to fallout from global tariffs and immigration raids in Los Angeles and other cities that have rattled key sectors, including construction, hospitality, and agriculture, according to a UCLA Anderson forecast.

Mass deportations in California could slash $275 billion from the state’s economy and eliminate $23 billion in annual tax revenue. The loss of immigrant labor would delay projects (including rebuilding Los Angeles after the wildfires), reduce food supply, and drive up costs.

Undocumented immigrants contributed $8.5 billion in state and local taxes in 2022 — a number that would rise to $10.3 billion if these taxpayers could apply to work lawfully.

New resource for community

Trump’s militarization of Los Angeles has also led to increasingly concerning tactics by federal immigration enforcement, including violating the law and people’s constitutional rights. Families are being terrorized by the broad enforcement efforts targeting Latino neighborhoods, harming U.S. citizens, and racially profiling families and workers. That’s why it’s important to remember the following if you are affected by a federal immigration action:

You can observe and record public immigration arrests, but stay calm and at a safe distance to avoid risk to yourself and others.

Do not interfere or argue with federal agents. Physical obstruction or verbal escalation can put your safety at risk and may lead to criminal charges.

Agents don’t need a judge-signed warrant to arrest someone in public — but do need one to enter non-public areas of private property.

Prepare yourself and your family in case you are arrested. Memorize the phone numbers of your family members and your lawyer. Make emergency plans if you have children or take medication.

For more information on helpful community resources, the Governor’s Office has released new factsheets here in English and here in Spanish.

End the militarization of LA now

For over a month, about 4,000 National Guard members have been stationed for the President in Los Angeles, pulled away from their families, communities, and civilian jobs. While half are just now beginning to demobilize, many remain without a clear mission, direction, or a timeline for returning to their communities. California urges Trump and the Department of Defense to end this deployment and send all remaining guardsmembers home immediately.

The federal government can enforce immigration laws and keep Californians safe without violating our rights, terrorizing entire communities, breaking the law, disrupting the economy, and raising costs for families.

Groups Sue EPA Over Toxic Refinery Chemical that Threatens Fenceline Communities

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Groups Sue EPA Over Toxic Refinery Chemical that Threatens Fenceline Communities

Community and environmental groups July 9 filed suit to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to address the threat of an unnecessary and dangerous chemical used in dozens of American refineries despite its potential to form toxic acid clouds.

The groups are filing the suit after the EPA rejected the groups’ petition to address the needless risks from use of hydrogen fluoride (HF)—an extremely corrosive chemical that, if released to the air, can form a lethal, ground-hugging plume that can travel for miles, causing severe injury or death to anyone in its path. More than 40 oil refineries across the country — owned by companies including ExxonMobil, Marathon, Valero, and Delta Airlines, among others — use HF.

Several refineries across the country have started to replace HF with safer commercial-scale alternatives. HF can dissolve skin, muscle, and bone, disrupt essential bodily functions, and kill or permanently disable people who inhale or touch it. The chemical is still being used in refineries around the country, including at the Torrance and Wilmington refineries in the Los Angeles area and the Trainer refinery south of Philadelphia, putting millions at risk of exposure. HF endangers not only people near the refineries but also those along train and truck routes used to transport the corrosive chemical.

The groups’ petition to the EPA highlighted the horrific risks associated with a potential release of HF. It also discussed numerous near-miss incidents, some of which narrowly avoided exposing tens of thousands of people to the chemical. The federal government and oil industry have known for decades that a dense, ground-hugging cloud tends to spread from an HF release into the air. This propensity to form clouds makes HF harder to contain, and more dangerous, than alternative chemicals used in other refineries around the United States. Exposure to as little as 1% of one’s skin (about the size of one’s hand) to liquid HF can cause fatal injury because of how easily the chemical penetrates the skin and disrupts vital functions. Inhaling HF vapor or aerosols (small airborne droplets)—the most likely way people would be exposed if there were a major release — can also be deadly.

The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California by Clean Air Council or CAC, Communities for a Better Environment or CBE, and NRDC or Natural Resources Defense Council. The groups have developed materials to inform the public if they live near a refinery using HF and have included other information about each facility, such as its parent company, safety measures in place (or missing), and the number of people it puts at risk. If the case prevails, the court will order the EPA to develop a regulation to eliminate unreasonable risks from HF use at refineries.

 

Following are quotes from groups lodging the complaint:

“Needlessly risking release of this extremely hazardous chemical in our densely packed region where so many people could be injured or killed is reckless. All the other refineries in Pennsylvania manage to use safer alternatives,” said Alex Bomstein, Clean Air Council executive director. “The Philly refinery explosion in 2019 was a breath away from being a mass casualty incident due to HF. The EPA needs to confront this risk, and we’re going to court to make sure it does.”

“HF is so dangerous, industrial safety experts have asked why it is still in use. L.A. County found the local refineries using it put millions at risk, so we are going to court to end this unnecessary and unnerving risk to the public,” said Alicia Rivera, Wilmington community organizer with Communities for a Better Environment. “Why should this hazard continue in a densely packed earthquake zone, even though all the other refineries in the state use far safer alternatives? This recklessness has got to stop.”

“Poison acid clouds engulfing refinery communities and transit corridors sounds like a horror movie, but it’s a real possibility as long as EPA refuses to engage,” said Matthew Tejada, senior vice president of environmental health at NRDC. “This is an unnecessary threat to the communities around dozens of refineries. Since the agency won’t fix the situation, we are going to court to address it before people are hurt or killed. At a time when oil companies are making tens of billions of dollars every year in profit, the least they can do is adopt safer alternatives that better protect the communities near their facilities.”

 

“The Buddy Holly Story” is all about the music, which this production gets right

Greggory Moore
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“The Buddy Holly Story” is all about the music, which this production gets right

The Buddy Holly story probably doesn’t get told on either screen or stage were it not for the tragedy that brings it to a halt. There wasn’t much drama in the life of Charles Hardin Holley. He was just a sweet little guy from Lubbock, Texas, whose instincts were perfect for the narrow confines of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, scoring seven Top 40 singles in two years before the snowy December night when an airplane crash killed him — along with Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson (a.k.a. “the Big Bopper”) — at the tender age of 22.

Ah, but the music. Limited in range as it may be (let’s just say that learning how to play “Peggy Sue” means you know like 30% of his entire oeuvre), the tuneful primitivism is infectious even now, let alone how it felt to people in a world where The Beatles had yet to exist. And a select few of his songs truly transcend their place in history.

Despite its corny humor and anemic drama, the jukebox musical that is The Buddy Holly Story works because it’s primarily about that music, finding a small but smart variety of ways to showcase not only the greatest of Holly’s hits, but breathing new life into a few of his best minor compositions. And Musical Theatre West’s production works because they’ve hired the right people for the job.

That starts, of course, with our buddy Buddy. Will Riddle not only looks the part, but has the voice, guitar chops, and stage presence as a musician to be completely believable and a pleasure to see and hear. And although his and the entire cast’s acting is adequate, because playwright Alan Janes’s hasn’t created a work of dramatic substance, acting is not what this show is about. It’s the music, dummy.

One of the delights of The Buddy Holly Story is that all the music (well, almost all) is performed live on stage by the cast. As perfect as Riddle is, bad support from any of the musicians that join him — first Omar D. Brancato (bass) and Laura Leo Kelly (drums) as his fellow Crickets, then several others as Holly’s short career progresses — would degrade the overall effect. But that never happens.

Some of the highlights are unexpected. Rendered here solo by Holly/Riddle on acoustic guitar, “Words of Love” has a luminous yearning that the original recording lacks. For the classic “Maybe Baby”, music director Ryan O’Connell gives Riddle’s Stratocaster a subtly modern treatment coming out of the amp, foreshadowing the sounds that subsequent generations of musicians were going to create by building on Holly’s rudiments. Most notably, with his arrangement of “True Love Ways”, a late Holly recording that strays further from his bread-and-butter 1-4-3 than anything else he tried, O’Connell unearths such beautifully dark atmospherics that even an out-of-tune guitar on opening night could not ruin. (Having never heard this song, at home after the show I listened to Holly’s original recording: nice, but nowhere near as good as this.)

Then there are the ones we know by heart, which you damn well better do right. “Peggy Sue”, “That’ll Be the Day”, “Peggy Sue Got Married” — all fab. But the highlight of highlights is “Everyday”. Janes’s conceit of creating the song in a single take at the end of one marathon recording session (a subtle metafictional touch, considering that all performances in a musical on a given night are single takes) is a great one, because the audience knows exactly how this quietly remarkable piece of music (the celeste!) is supposed to sound, and so we hold our breath as the band starts in. And like magic, right in front of our eyes, voilà.

The invisible challenge in staging a show where all the music is produced onstage is how to handle the spread of the physical locations of the sound sources. On this front, Musical Theatre West nets mixed results. It’s not that the sound is ever bad, but by funneling everything through the house PA, we are somewhat disabused of the illusion of seeing early rock ‘n’ roll, where a guitar at stage left came at you from the amp on that side, the bass at stage right from there, the piano from the piano, the drums from the drums (here the only instrument that we get to enjoy coming from its locus). During one number, for example, two pianos are offset a stage left and stage right — but rather than get the sonic benefit of the spatial arrangement, both come at us from the center, partly defeating the purpose of having two pianos at all. I have to imagine that the Carpenter Center PA has stereo capabilities — it’s as upscale a performance venue as we’ve got in this town — but if so, MTW has not availed themselves of this possibility.

Although mostly spot-on, O’Connell and director Keith Andrews have made a few minor miscalculations. Although Laura Leo Kelly’s drumming brings the primitivistic excitement while keeping a lid on the volume, the snare is too quiet on several songs, particularly “Not Fade Away”. And while the band’s frenetic antics on Act 1 closer “Oh, Boy!” are a treat, some of Omar D. Brancato’s acrobatics render him unable to execute his bass part in a given moment, which hurts the song’s momentum several times.

Also, enjoyable as Marlena Madison (vocals) and Tyrone Jones (trumpet) are when they perform The Isley Brothers’ “Shout”, Andrews’s choice to hide the t band behind a giant red curtain (which increasingly highlights how little is happening onstage as the seconds turn into minutes) ultimately handicaps Madison & Jones’s efforts, because a song with such a big sound just ain’t the same when we don’t get to see its main source. I’m sure this was done because the musicians behind the curtain are ones we see in other roles — perhaps even including Riddle, who for obvious reasons we can’t see as part of the backing band at the Apollo Theatre — but this is not a good solution.

But O’Connell and Andrews have created some wonderful work choreographing “the Jingle Singers” (not identified in the program, alas), as well as a lovely sequence that expertly shifts our attention back and forth across the stage as Holly’s star rises.

The star of the mise en scène is Paul Black, whose lighting design is quietly bold and sharply pristine, the kind of thing that many people won’t notice and yet will register in their overall experience. The goat is whoever forgot to kill a radio-station “ON AIR” sign during a joke that hinges upon the DJ talking off-air, then making a quick 180 when he rejoins his listeners.

If you’re wondering how Holly’s death is handled — and really, that’s about the only mystery when you take your seat before curtain-up — while you won’t get any spoilers here, suffice it to say that it’s the single best thing about Janes’s script, surprising, tasteful, and poignant.

But the show doesn’t end there, because the music lives on. That’s the Buddy Holly story in a nutshell, and it’s unlikely anyone buying a ticket to The Buddy Holly Story will come away disappointed.

The Buddy Holly Story at Musical Theatre West
Times: Fri 8pm, Sat 2pm & 8pm, Sun 1pm; plus Thurs July 17 8pm and Sun July 20 6pm
The show runs through July 27.
Cost: starting at $20
Details: (562) 856-1999, musical.org
Venue: Carpenter Performing Arts Center (6200 W. Atherton, Long Beach)

Enjoyable ensemble performance makes “Witch” wholly worthwhile

Greggory Moore
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Enjoyable ensemble performance makes “Witch” wholly worthwhile

Have you been feeling like all is lost? Think our capitalistic reality is so far gone that maybe the only way out is to burn it all to the ground and start again?

If so, the Garage Theatre has a play for you. Starting off as a tale of how life in a rural olde towne is disrupted when the devil comes ‘round looking to buy some souls, ultimately Jen Silverman’s Witch is a meditation on how reducing life to the transactional has sent our world to hell in a handbasket.

But as timely as the theme may be, the reason to come is the cast, who make absolutely every scene watchable even when the script comes up a bit short.

Like every Christopher Nolan screenplay this side of Dunkirk, Silverman’s Witch is best enjoyed without analyzing it too deeply. For some reason Scratch, our demon-about-town (Rory Cowan), doesn’t seem to know whether he’s the devil or simply a “junior colleague.” And despite the play’s title, Elizabeth’s (Colette Rutherford) being thought of as a witch by the gossipy townsfolk is barely a plot point. And ultimately the main action, which concerns whether wealthy Sir Arthur (a properly orotund Paul Knox) will choose his effeminate son Cuddy (Bobby Zelsdorf, who earned the biggest laughs) or the manlier foster Frank (Rob Young, getting some big laughs of his own) as heir, is largely irrelevant to Silverman’s fuzzy mediation on whether there’s any hope of extricating ourselves from the growth spiral of a capitalism that is choking the life from us.

But even if the script can’t quite win on points, Silverman does provide enough intelligence, pathos, and humor (chock full of intentional anachronisms so there’s no mistaking that this is a play about today despite being set in colonial times) to give the cast a fighting chance — and they win by a knockout. Co-directors Alexandria McGinness and Eric Hamme couldn’t have cast the show any better, with every actor holding his/her own when they’re doing little and finding the most of their big moments — including several that come from the Garage rather than Silverman. It’s not the writing that holds your interest from start to finish, but the presentation.

A few minor shortcomings keep that presentation from verging on a perfect score. Technically, opening night was rough, with maybe half the lighting cues fractionally off and a few sound cues coming as much as 10 seconds too late, forcing the actors to talk over music that simply would not yield. But while we can expect that aspect to improve as the run wears on, McGinness & Hamme come up with effective scene changes. Yeah, we can suspend our disbelief, but some do hurt the momentum — especially since otherwise the pacing is perfect.

The worst thing about this show, though, is the seating. A great charm of seeing plays at the Garage is the creativity they display time and again in reconfiguring — sometimes totally — their black-box space so as to maximize the viewing experience to serve the needs of whatever particular work they’re staging. But for once this talent has failed them, as a dearth of risers means that unless you’re well over six feet tall, choose the wrong seat and your view will be obscured by the heads in front of you.

So if you’re going to this one, show up early and plant yourself in the front row. Then you’ll be in the best position to appreciate a set of truly enjoyable performances.

Witch at the Garage Theatre
Times: Thursday–Saturday 8:00 p.m.
The show runs through August 9.
Cost: $23–$28 (Thursdays 2-for-1); closing night w/afterparty: $40
Details: thegaragetheatre.org
Venue: The Garage Theatre, 251 E. 7th St., Long Beach

 

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