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Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, A Retrospective

Melina Paris
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Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, A Retrospective

In time for the 1984 Olympics, Judith Baca, with the help of 400 community youth and artists, completed The Great Wall of Los Angeles. The effort was coordinated by the Social and Public Art Resource Center or SPARC. Measuring at about a half mile long and 13 feet high, the work is credited as the longest hand painted mural in the world. Now, ahead of the 2028 Olympics, Baca will lead the effort to expand the original Great Wall of Los Angeles mural.

On July 14, the Museum of Latin American Art celebrated its grand reopening in a most extraordinary way, showing one of America’s leading visual artists, Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, a Retrospective encompassing nearly two square miles of Baca’s work.

Retrospective

Baca’s Retrospective at 9,880 square feet is the highlight of MOLAA’s grand reopening. The exhibition includes more than 110 works divided across three gallery spaces presenting different aspects of Baca’s artistic production. They include the “Womanist Gallery” [women of color’s term for feminist] focused on Baca’s womanist artworks in a variety of media created throughout her career.

Judy Baca as La Pachuca, photographed by Donna Deitch.

It also includes more personal works, many never seen before. “Public Art Survey” includes painted murals to digital works where visitors will be introduced to the breadth of Baca’s projects through SPARC which Baca founded in 1976. The Great Wall of Los Angeles encompasses Baca’s first masterpiece, as viewers participate in an immersive audiovisual experience of the monumental, half mile long piece that occupies the Tujunga wash in the San Fernando Valley.

In not exactly post-pandemic times, after the plight of essential workers and marginalized populations have been laid bare, Memorias de Nuestra Tierra is emotionally striking. Baca, who led the tour of her retrospective, affirmed this response saying she thought it was just her but “It is emotional, isn’t it? We’re going to have to put little tissue boxes around,” she said.

Witnessing the breadth of Baca’s work across 40 plus years should be taken in incremental steps in order to absorb its depth and beauty. Specifically, with the immersive experience of The Great Wall, one must sit to take it all in.

The experience is one that moves beyond the fourth wall — the space between an audience and subject, bringing viewers into the art and augmenting their reality.

The mural is emotionally provocative in its depiction of California’s history “as seen through the eyes of women and minorities” in numerous connected panels.

The Birth of the Vision of the Heart, from When God Was a Woman, a collaboration directed by Judy Baca.

Viewers are immersed with animated scenes of California’s prehistory depicting native wildlife and the creation story of the indigenous Chumash.

The projected animation takes the viewer through seminal events of the 20th century, including Chinese labor contributions, the arrival of Jewish refugees (fleeing oppression and the Holocaust) and their contributions to the culture and history of Los Angeles, refugees from the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, the Japanese-American internment of World War II, the Zoot Suit Riots, the Freedom Riders, the disappearance of Rosie the Riveter, gay rights activism, the story of Biddy Mason, deportations of Mexican Americans, the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, and the development of suburbia.

Baca’s composition uses sweeping lines in a sense of movement from the characters and subjects depicted. To visualize the many lives and the stories they told — through intense coloration and uninhibited narratives — engenders awe. Baca’s muralism uplifts the masses, is honest and not only affirms histories of those who have been marginalized but the interconnectedness of our very human nature.

SPARC

Baca founded the first City of Los Angeles Mural Program in 1974, which evolved into the community arts organization, SPARC. Baca specifically involved poor youth of color to create these murals.

The Great Wall of Los Angeles was their first project. The Army Corps of Engineers hired Baca to help improve the area around the Tujunga Wash flood control channel. Baca jumped in, interviewing people about their lives, family histories, ancestry and stories they heard from their older relatives. She also consulted historians. These chronicles became the first time many of the events portrayed in the mural had ever been displayed in public. Despite its length, the mural is not yet complete. Baca will lead the expansion on her masterpiece which is proposed to continue until it reaches about a mile in length, portraying not only contemporary times, but also a vision of the future.

She spoke to RLn about the process in creating the immersive experience of The Great Wall for MOLAA’s reopening.

“This was done by Latin American animation experts,” Baca explained. “The seamless connection between the projectors is magical … There are seven or eight [projectors] and as [the mural is] project[ed] there’s no seams.”

Baca explained the animators recreated an entire sense of the mural, almost at full scale. The projection is 28 minutes in length. Animators took different vignettes of the mural highlighting what Baca and her team had to do to integrate sections within the overall view of the piece. The photographs of the mural came from The Getty, which photographed the most recent restoration in which Baca led a team of 30 painters to renovate the 1976 mural.

“We had … fading and damage over many years,” Baca said. “When it was all up, The Getty came in with a phase one camera and they photographed every inch of the piece so that it could be reproduced at full scale. So if the mural is lost, we could bring it back in full scale print.”

When asked how it felt to have an entire retrospective of her work in LA where she grew up, Baca said it’s overwhelming because she’s still digesting it.

Josephina by Judy Baca.

“I really understand that I am a river rock,” Baca said. “All the surges and rages and water running, like the river, I’ve been honed and essentially made smooth, made rounded by all these experiences. And now I’m getting to see it all at once … I’ve never seen it all at once. And now it’s this moving thing from my family’s coming across the border to all that they built and gave. And to this notion of being like a river rock, I watched the LA River turn to concrete. And that influenced me. It influenced The Great Wall production and … working with these children and all that they suffered and went through.”

The retrospective also includes one of her most controversial murals, Baca’s 2005 Danzas Indigenas — public art commissioned by Metro for a station in Baldwin Park. The work was a monument to Toypurina, a Tongva/Kizh medicine woman who opposed colonial rule by Spanish missionaries in California.

The monument has several engraved unattributed statements. The most controversial inscription read: “It was better before they came.” Another inscription was no better received: “This land was Mexican once, was Indian always and is, and will be again.”

SPARC, at the time, reported that, “Save our State with ties to the vigilante Minutemen Border Patrol, erroneously believed that quotes on the monument were racially charged, seditious and anti-American in nature. The residents of Baldwin Park believed otherwise … and quickly mobilized into a group of nearly 1,000 people in a counter protest.”

Indeed, Baca’s rise as an artist came out of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, an anti-war action of the Chicano movement, marking the start of Latino empowerment. Baca cannot be separated from the LA mural movement and its populist underpinnings.

She wanted to make art that was accessible beyond the walls of galleries and museums — for the people she loved.

“People in my family hadn’t ever been to a gallery in their entire lives,” Baca said “My neighbors never went to galleries … And it didn’t make sense to me at the time to put art behind some guarded wall.”

After the first section of the Great Wall was finished, in 1977, Baca travelled to Cuernavaca, Mexico for a residency at El Taller Siqueiros where she studied muralism in the workshop of muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Through artistic work Baca has engaged and helped disenfranchised communities speak out and tell their stories. While working as a teacher at her former high school, Baca attended the Chicano Moratorium. The school principal believed teachers shouldn’t participate in protest marches. Subsequently, Baca and several other teachers were fired.

Soon after, she landed a job at Los Angeles Parks and Recreation Department teaching art as part of a summer program in public parks. Rival gangs hung out in these parks. Baca noticed their graffiti as territorial markings and decided to create a mural in Boyle Heights to bring the community together. Her first team had 20 members from four different gangs. The group called itself Las Vistas Nuevas or New Views. Baca said that she wanted to use public space to create a public voice for, and a public consciousness about people who are, in fact, the majority of the population but who are not represented in any visual way. It also marked the genesis of a collective process to utilize art to mediate between rival gangs competing for public space and identity. In this capacity this group completed three murals in the summer of 1970.

After doing the murals she was offered a job in 1970 as the director of a new citywide mural program. She was in charge of creating this program from the ground up, which included choosing mural locations, designing them and supervising the mural painting teams, comprised of youth who had troubles with the police. Members of the original Las Vistas Nuevas group were hired to help run Baca’s multi-site program. This group painted more than 500 murals.

Baca made great progress building community with gang youth. Still, she struggled with how gendered muraling projects were. Most of the youth she worked with were male because, Baca noted, at that time boys were the only ones parents would allow. Further, Baca found hostility towards the idea of women in these spaces and to feminist ideals in general. Subsequently, for the Great Wall of LA project, Baca strived to connect to other feminist artists and to recruit young women to participate in her mural projects.

In 2019, another Baca mural, Hitting the Wall, created specifically in celebration of the first women’s Olympic marathon during the 1984 LA games, was painted over by a Metro LA graffiti abatement contractor. Baca previously reported in about 2004 Los Angeles Police Department Chief William Bratton created a program to eradicate graffiti. She said Caltrans hired subcontractors to remove graffiti, within 24 hours of vandalization. Baca posited the money would have been better spent had it gone to training youth to become the artists they wanted to become rather than criminalization of graffiti arts. This past June, SPARC’s mural rescue crew power washed the paint covering the mural along the 110 Freeway near 4th Street, in preparation to be unveiled.

Raspados Majados by Judy Baca. Photos by Raphael Richardson.

Baca reflected on her work in a statement used by MOLAA, saying:

Of greatest interest to me is the invention of systems of ‘voice giving’ for those left without public venues in which to speak. Socially responsible artists from marginalized communities have a particular responsibility to articulate the conditions of their people and to provide catalysts for change, since the perceptions of us as individuals are tied to the conditions of our communities in a racially unsophisticated society. We can not escape that responsibility even when we choose to try; we are made of the ‘blood and dust’ of our ancestors in a continuing history. Being a catalyst for change will change us also.

Judy Baca: Memorias De Nuestra Tierra, A Retrospective

Time: July 14 to Jan. 2022

Cost: The exhibition is included in the museum admission cost of $10 for adults, $7 for students and seniors, free for children under 12 yrs old and MOLAA members and Sundays are free.

Details: www.molaa.org and www.judybaca.com/artist

Venue: Museum of Latin American Art, 628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach

Random Letters: 7-22-21

RLn
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Random Letters: 7-22-21

On the Buscaino Grants

(RLn, “Joe Announces Winners of ‘Buscaino Grants,’ July 8-21, 2021)

I have respected your reporting in the past but in allowing your name to be attached to bogus claims about The Beach Cities Alliance grant, certainly reduces your credibility. You draw attention by suggesting that BCA was in some way behaving in an underhanded manner in their grant application. After setting the stage for the reader to become suspect of this organization you belatedly slip in “The longtime councilman’s aide explained that Bridge Cities Alliance has had issues with the IRS website reporting their updated status, which the IRS says is due to COVID-19 staffing. The bottom line is that BCA is a qualified nonprofit.” You raised an issue with no “there there”

I have no idea if you have animus toward BCA or members of it’s board; but many of us are aware that James [Allen the publisher] uses his paper to attack leaders and board members of nonprofits in town- often with unfounded claims. He has done it before and no doubt will do it again. His problem this time might be Mona Sutton? If so, it is likely because: 1. She is a very successful businesswoman, 2. She is the long standing president of the Harbor PD CAC, and 3. Refuses to advertise in the RLN. Or perhaps 4. Is that she and her wife Leslie Jones, are highly respected in our community for their good works; for which the community has often honored them.

When James is unsuccessful in his bullying elsewhere, he uses his paper. This disagreeable habit of his has caused many fine people in this community to avoid the Central Neighborhood Council saying they cannot risk his ire being used against their organizations. Others resign from the board not wanting to spend their volunteer time dealing with a bully and his frequent disruption of meetings.. This may sound harsh but actually I am just telling “truth to power” in this case the power is the publisher of your paper.

Linda Alexander, San Pedro

Ms. Alexander,

To your first question, no, I don’t have personal animus towards the board of the Bridge Cities Alliance. My rationale for reporting on these grants the way that I did was not only because it was newsworthy, but that it deserved critical attention given the way the councilman conceived, created and executed the grant program. The story was also intended to address questions of fairness and transparency, which were raised prior to my reporting on the winners of the grants (raised by a few of the nonprofits who participated from throughout the district). But because the grant process was ongoing and no one was willing to publicly “bite the hands” attempting to feed them, they didn’t go on the record. But we did, to the best of our ability, investigate those questions.

For us, Bridge Cities Alliance was just one of the questions that emerged. We first reported on the anti-hate organization in 2018 when it organized San Pedro’s first Pride event after rallying against hate following an anti-gay incident. Originally headed by Aiden Sheffeld-Garcia, his partner and other leading civic leaders representing San Pedro’s LGBTQ community (including Mona Sutton and Leslie Jones) and their allies, the organization provided an important contribution to this Harbor town’s civic life. So we paid attention. But a number of the original board members moved away, and the organization’s website ceased being updated and then disappeared entirely.

At its inception, Bridge City Alliance was founded as a 501(c)(3). When we heard grumblings that their status was indeterminate, we followed up and found, via www.causeiq.com and irs.gov, that the organization’s 501(c)(3) had been revoked in November 2020. We had also searched Guidstar.org and found no listing at all. This is why we reached out to Councilman Buscaino’s senior aide, Branimir Kvartuc, and asked him. While Kvartuc provided an explanation, the lack of a paper trail of a nonprofit that is supposed to exist has been unsatisfying. Their nonprofit status should be of interest to you also because your neighborhood council gave them a Neighborhood Purpose Grant which can only go to qualified nonprofits.

As for the coverage of the local neighborhood councils and your assertion that the publisher of this newspaper uses it to bully people, I assert that he uses this paper as a bully pulpit, advocating for greater civic engagement, transparency and democracy — a pushback against this town’s tendency to take care of the public business in private spaces under manufactured consent. James Allen’s role is obviously complicated by the fact that he serves on the Central Neighborhood Council even while he exercises his bully pulpit at his discretion. It’s the reason why any particular issues he personally wants to address are relegated to his At Length columns while a reporter focuses on reporting on the Harbor Area’s neighborhood councils to the best of his ability.

Terelle Jerricks,Managing Editor

And Then More Criticism

I am tracking your ongoing efforts to exploit the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council from within as a method of generating stories for your newspaper. That is a matter of public interest and our stakeholders, including advertisers in your newspaper, have a right to know that and how you do this.

I share the broadly held concern that your interest in chairing the Port Committee is primarily to force yourself into port meetings to berate port officials and, again, to manufacture stories and troll for quotes for your paper. I have not invited you to port meetings because of your extensive history of throwing tantrums there that undermine the council, its efforts, and its official actions. Such behavior reflects poorly on your council and neighborhood. Further, exploiting a government role to join meetings that are closed to the press gives Random Lengths News a level of press access unavailable to other media outlets. It also gives RLN a de facto press exclusive to which meeting participants have not consented.

Past President Guzman also refused to send you as council representative to port meetings for your combative and counterproductive tactics, and I witnessed you shout at him, question his integrity, and throw a fit about his decision at a public board and stakeholder meeting. Ironically, that outburst illustrated why Mr. Guzman refused to send you in the first place. Soon after, you fired Mr. Guzman from his reporting job, correct? Or did he quit following your attacks?

Be forewarned that as long as you remain on the council, such negative, abusive, bullying, and counterproductive behavior will be exposed and put down. Fight the port on your own time or your paper’s, Mr. Allen, but you will not abuse and manipulate this council into doing your dirty work.

Louis Caravella,President, Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council

Mr. Caravella,

This is the third email from you attacking me personally over issues that are not a matter for our neighborhood council to consider. What should be considered is your continued breach of the Code of Civility with your personal attacks against a member of the council, your open hostility towards me personally and your acquiescence to allowing for the continuation of the “private meetings” with the NC presidents and POLA officials. Which I might add, has no protection from being reported to the general public because you and others often report the items from these meetings in public.

These same public relations initiatives by POLA are readily available through other sources. These are all questions I will toss back to you as well as your continued use of your title of president and email signature to appear as though you are speaking on behalf of the CeSPNC board when you are not authorized to speak for the board — a violation of our bylaws.

That you are more obsessed with blocking any criticism by me or others of POLA or having someone who has the expertise to ask critical questions only shows how you are more interested in being accepted by the power structure than you are in representing the issues of our constituents to the various power structures of the city.

I have to point out that over the course of the last four years there have been more efforts and political maneuvering to limit my influence on the CeSPNC than there has been on actually delivering real representation on the core issues of homelessness, port pollution, critical infrastructure and real quality of life matters.

Yours and Ms. Alexander’s continued personal attacks against me, your unfounded assertions and false claims with no supporting evidence are in fact slander. That many of these same allegations have been repeatedly brought up in the course of official council business only distract from the issues at hand, and I find detrimental to allowing for civil discourse.

You, not I, have continued to disrupt meetings by your biased use of the power of the chair, your unfair use of the parliamentary procedures and the thinly veiled animus you direct towards me and any initiatives I bring forth as motions. All of which are clearly documented in the recorded meetings of late.

As such your actions are considered personal harassment, conduct unbecoming to an officer of our council and simply petty.

Your abuse of power is showing and needs to be curbed.

James Preston Allen, Publisher

Crackpot Corruptionism

The California Employment Development Department and the Department of Fair Employment and Housing (have they ever read the Unruh Act?) are my definition of corruption. Gov. Gavin “CrackpotCorrupt” Newsom paid contractors $236 million dollars to fix the EDD computer system, but not the phone lines. A federal Judge ordered the city’s politicians and lawyers to spend $1.2 billion dollars to fix the County 2% homeless problem.

The city Mayor is poised to sign an anti-tenant harassment ordinance that has as many teeth as a newborn baby gumming away.

(Relocating to LA, anyone?). Drafted in 2017, it is a piece of cake that has taken officials four years to learn how to copy and paste from other laws. LAMC section 41.33 is lifted almost verbatim, but the final draft removed the state law definition of “harassment” (CCP 527.6). The ordinance will apply to single family homes, condominiums, and rent controlled units; “an act or omission” (failure to respond to tenant complaints) will be actionable; refusal to accept rent will be harassment; “substantially” interfering with tenant peaceful enjoyment is unlawful; the tenant must give the landlord “reasonable time” to repair ( civil code 1942.4 says 35 days). The city claims tenants made over 40,000 harassment and housing complaints.

Maybe this harassment law will solve the city’s homeless, housing, harassment, and employment (EDD) problems all at one fell swoop! For more info, see City clerk file number 14-0268-S13 at website LACityClerkConnect.

Juan Johnson, Los Angeles

Re: Mayor Garcetti’s Nomination asAmbassador to India

Governing a city as magnificent, complex and diverse as Los Angeles is no easy feat, and Mayor Garcetti has done a remarkable tour of duty. For more than two decades of service, he has led with head and heart. I salute him for his notable contributions to Los Angeles — and respect his commitment to continued public service.

While a disruption in leadership will bring unanticipated challenges – transition also creates room for ingenuity and opportunity. It is incumbent upon the City Council to lean into this change, and work with collective nimbleness, perseverance, compassion, and the pursuit of justice, to address the myriad of issues facing this city – of which the homelessness crisis and recovery from the pandemic remain front and center. In the end, “It’s all about leadership.”

CouncilmemberMark Ridley-Thomas, Los Angeles

SP Residents Want a Say in Port’s Connectivity Plan

Hunter Chase
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SP Residents Want a Say in Port’s Connectivity Plan

The Port of Los Angeles is putting together a planning document, and many San Pedro residents want to make sure community input is taken seriously.

On July 14, Michael Cham, property manager at the port, gave a presentation on the San Pedro Waterfront Connectivity Plan at the joint Planning and Land Use committee of all three San Pedro neighborhood councils.

The plan will build upon existing public access and private development objectives and guide the future of the waterfront. In addition, it will lay out how each project will be connected to the others using bikes, scooters, pedestrian walkways, sidewalks and crosswalks, as well as public transport, and potentially a rubber tire trolley. It will also include travel on water, such as water taxis.

“It’s going to be periodically updated as things change, as new things come on board,” Cham said.

The plan does not necessarily bind the port to any future actions. While the port will put its actual plans in the plan itself, it is free to change them at any time. The port estimates the plan will take about a year to create.

The port is doing this now because of coming private developments, and to include and consider projects and buildings that were different in 2009, when the port released the San Pedro waterfront environmental impact report. These include progress at West Harbor and AltaSea.

“This connectivity plan is important to do now because it provides … a significant messaging and marketing opportunity,” Cham said.

The port will send out a request for proposal, or RFP, for a consulting company to help. The port estimates this will cost $250,000 to $500,000.

“This is an effort that the port is in the initial stages of,” Cham said. “This is an invitation to the neighborhood councils, as well as other stakeholders to participate in the process with us.”

San Pedro resident Pat Nave suggested the port select people from the neighborhood councils and the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce for a working group to advise the port on the project.

“There have been events where the port has gone forward on its own without really any attempt to really work with the community,” Pat Nave said. “And it’s been disastrous. This is too important for that to happen again.”

Cham said that the port is reluctant to choose people for a working group but encouraged the neighborhood councils to choose their own people for it.

Diana Nave, chair of the Northwest San Pedro Neighborhood Council’s planning and land use committee, said that tenants near the waterfront should be part of the working group.

“I think the working group probably should be set up sooner rather than later,” Diana Nave said. “As you’re developing, finalizing the RFP, that group ought to be involved.”

Doug Epperhart, president of Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council, said the scope of this project is important.

“The port tends to think that the waterfront ends at ports o’ call,” Epperhart said. “As we all know, it doesn’t. Cabrillo Marina, possible new cruise ship terminal … Cabrillo Beach, the aquarium. These are things that draw tens of thousands of people, particularly on weekends.”

Epperhart said he wants the plan to consider these parts of the waterfront, as well as how it will impact nearby residential areas, including 22nd Street and Pacific Avenue.

“Anybody there can tell you about the amount of traffic that moves there,” Epperhart said.

San Pedro resident Jason Herring asked if the presence of the rubber tire trolley would eliminate the possibility of bringing in a rail-based street car, as a modern version of the Red Car. Not necessarily, said Cham.

“I put in a rubber tire trolley because that’s what we use right now,” Cham said. “And of course, I am not going to predetermine anything that’s within the plan ultimately as it comes out, because we don’t have a consultant on board, we haven’t done our outreach yet.”

Frank Anderson, former board member of the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council, was also concerned about using a rail-based system. He cited new developments and improvements to San Pedro, and how they could bring a lot more people, including a revamped cruise line, the upcoming West Harbor Project.

“We really have to focus on a transit or connectivity plan to get these people in and out,” Anderson said.

Northwest San Pedro Neighborhood Council board member Gwen Henry said she liked the plan but criticized its lack of attention to preserving the natural habitat of indigenous species.

“This plan is sorely lacking in bringing back rainbirds, creating sample wetlands, marshlands and interfaces between the freshwater and marine water,” Henry said. “This is an incredible opportunity to bring schools out to see marine creatures and birds in their own habitat and create those places within those connectivity areas.”

She compared it to the Aquarium of the Pacific, which is very industrialized with ships and private marinas, but you can still see local wildlife.

“You can see a blue herring hunting on the rocks over there,” Henry said. “I don’t see any of this incorporated [in the connectivity plan].”

Mobile Home Park Residents Rally Against the Domino Effect

RL Intern
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Mobile Home Park Residents Rally Against the Domino Effect

By Iracema Navarro, Reporter

On July 15, the residents of Imperial Avalon Mobile Estates and their supporters rallied in front of Carson City Hall to protest the announced closure of the facility, which would leave more than 445 residents to fend for themselves in the wilds of an unaffordable housing market.

Three more mobile home parks are slated for closure after the Imperial Avalon Mobile Estates, bringing worry and uncertainty to the city’s remaining park residents.

Most residents of the mobile home park live on fixed incomes, are senior citizens, veterans and disabled people who had expected to live their golden years in the parks.

Eighteen-year Imperial Avalon resident, Peggy Apodaca, warned other Carsonites at the Thursday afternoon rally: “It can happen to you if you have a mobile home.”

The dark side of Carson’s new developments have been discovered, but residents of mobile home parks are still looking for a fair shake.

Some residents have taken one of three offers made by the city from three options: Option A would help residents relocate to another park, option B would give owners a lump sum of money, and option C would relocate residents to interim housing and guarantee an occupancy at a Faring Capital development, the new owner of the Imperial Avalon Mobile Estates.

For the time being, Apodaca is going with her own option — waiting it out and to see what really is going to happen.

“They were supposed to give us interim housing, but they can’t find any interim housing because it’s closed up,” Apodaca said.

Apodaca noted that the problem is rooted in supply and demand. She said she looked online and the cheapest rent she found was $2,250, not including utilities. She didn’t mention its location or its number of bedrooms.

“I pay $412 for my particular space and they’re all about the same, give or take $20,” Apodaca said.

Apodaca observed that some mobile home dwellers took one of the three options offering money. For others, the park owners are allowing residents to rent the mobile home space for around $2,000 or so. Apodaca said the park owner is now making more money renting these spaces at the mobile home park.

“They [park owner] tried to call me the other day,” Apodaca said. “I didn’t even pick up my phone, because I thought, ‘Oh, they’re going to just try to intimidate me and get me to go in there and put my house in escrow.’”

Marcela Steiman and her husband Jeff Steiman, the new Imperial Avalon Mobile Estates Homeowner Association president, bought their home in 2015 and are worried about the mortgage they are continuing to pay.

“Rents are too high, we can’t afford the rent of over $2,000. I can’t afford that,” Marcela said. “If we can’t move the mobile homes, we can’t buy anything with the money that they’re giving us. It’s not good enough for a down payment.”

In a moment of cynical reflection of both the city and the park’s developer, Faring Capital, Marcela said greedy people don’t care about seniors and there’s no compassion.

“What we want is the same-size house —three bedrooms or two bedrooms ­—whatever you have,” Marcela said. “To get the same. That’s all we’re asking for.”

Having a newer home than others, Marcela’s 2015 mobile home cannot find a space in Carson or Torrance; if space could be found, the rent would be triple.

Residents in the three mobile home parks of Park Avalon Mobile Estates, Park Granada Trailer Lodge Mobile and Rancho Dominguez Mobile Estates are witnessing the same process.

“Join the fight, join the fight because it’s coming to them,” Marcela Steiman said.

Eddie Almeida moved back in with his 72-year-old mother after his father passed away to care for her in the Rancho Dominguez Mobile Estates park. He joined the protesters on that hot Thursday afternoon demanding affordable housing. “I just want what’s fair,” Almeida said. “I want to make sure that the seniors are taken care of because we’re not quite sure what they’re going to offer us yet.”

Almeida said when it first started, developers were offering less than what the park residents actually put down as a down payment — $18,000 to $20,000 for a mobile home with a purchasing price of $97,000.
“We’re not going to be able to afford anything around here,” Almeida said. “We’re going to have to live further away from our families and everything and it’s stressful just having to move.”

The 81-space park community mobile home park was developed in 1962, before Carson was incorporated. The mobile homes are at least 20 years old and contain one to three bedrooms. More than half of the 81 mobile homes are owner occupied with a quarter of them being tenant occupied. The park owned by Carter-Spencer Enterprises, LLC submitted the application in 2019 to close the park, eight years after the LLC was registered to the state of California.

“They’ve been trying to shut us down for a lot of years,” Almeida said. “They scare the people. It’s like a scare tactic to use or is going to get shut down. ‘You guys can’t sell; you guys can’t rent, but we’ll buy it from you,’” Almeida said. “Now it’s to the point where all these other parts are getting shut down and it’s only obvious that not only is it continued but they’re trying to shut down all the low-income housing.”

On July 15, the city council held a public hearing on the relocation impact report for the Rancho Dominguez Hills Estates closure.

For new Imperial Avalon Homeowner Association president, Jeff Steiman, the fight now is to have a formal process to allow residents time to make a plan.

They are taking the lives of all the people that lived in that park, Jeff said. Most of the people who live in that park are in their 80s. They spent at least the last two decades there. So their lives are there. For their lives to go on, they’re going to have to move to Arizona or even with their kids or become a ward of the state. Public run housing is not nice, Jeff said.

Carson’s mayor pro tem Jim Dear attended the rally and spoke with the residents. Cognizant that the city’s efforts to protect mobile home residents was coming up short, Dear explained, “The idea behind that is that it will be more neutral and the residents would be more trusting and get reliable, accurate, unbiased information. That’s the idea behind it. Some of the residents have complained that it’s not working out the way they had hoped,”

Dear says he is pushing to create a mobile home park zone in Carson so that anyone who wants to buy a park with the intention of closing it (which has been happening over the years) would have to apply for a zone change with the city. This would make it more difficult for developers to flip the mobile home parks.

“This will help future crises because this is going to be repeated,” Dear said. “I’m a history teacher. [I know] history [will] repeat itself if we don’t fix it.”

POLA Secretively Shuts Down Air Pollution Monitoring at “Highest Exposure” Site on Pier 300

Paul Rosenberg
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POLA Secretively Shuts Down Air Pollution Monitoring at “Highest Exposure” Site on Pier 300

The volume of cargo ships entering the Port of Los Angeles is at an all-time high, and the port hasn’t been shy about celebrating — a June 10 press release bragged about becoming “the first port in the Western Hemisphere to process 10 million container units in a 12-month period.” But the port didn’t make a peep one month earlier when it was time to measure pollutants, not profits. It’s not that the environmental figures were underpublicized or talked down. Without any explanation at all, the port simply stopped reporting emissions from the Source-Dominated Air Pollution Monitoring Site on Pier 300 — the spot where the port, in more talkative times, has repeatedly said “is expected to have the highest exposure to emissions from Port operations, as it is in direct proximity to terminal operators which use a large number of diesel engine sources.”

Andrea Hricko, USC professor emerita of public health, was the lead author of a letter bringing this to the attention of the Harbor Commission, port staff and the two relevant government oversight agencies, the California Air Resources Board and the South Coast Air Quality Management District. She was joined by representatives of San Pedro & Peninsula Homeowners Coalition, San Pedro Peninsula Homeowners United, Inc., West Long Beach Association, Coalition For A Safe Environment, Earthjustice, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, Sierra Club, Community Dreams Wilmington, NAACP, San Pedro-Wilmington Branch, California Kids IAQ, Wilmington and EMeRGE, Wilmington. Hricko’s efforts to get an explanation from staff have been fruitless, even with a public records act request.

“The volume of cargo ships entering the port is at an all-time high,” Hricko noted. “It is definitely of concern that the port has chosen to suspend the monitoring station that is at the ‘center of Port operations’ at exactly the same time when cargo volume and ship calls at the Port of Los Angeles are at record highs. We note that the Port of Los Angeles has issued six press releases in 2021 alone touting its record cargo volumes.”

She went on to note that “A fact sheet by the California Air Resources Board is attached documenting that up to 40 ships at a time have been seen anchoring in the San Pedro Bay Ports, raising concerns about increased pollution.” That fact sheet shows a 47% increase in TEU volume from March 2019 to March 2021. It estimated health disbenefits of 20 excess deaths a year in the South Coast Air Basin.

The letter called for the immediate reinstatement of the Source-Dominated station, along with the continued monitoring of black carbon as a marker for diesel emissions at the Wilmington and San Pedro monitoring sites, as well as continued posting on the Clean Air Action Plan website.

Disinformation vs. the Pandemic

James Preston Allen
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Disinformation vs. the Pandemic

Only now is the strategy being revealed, is it too late to stop it?

The truth seems to always arrive too late these days to actually make a difference. But late is better than never. Back in 2017, The Guardian reporter Tom McCarthy published a story with the headline: How Russia Used Social Media to Divide Americans. The subtitle read: Russian trolls and bots focused on controversial topics in an effort to stoke political confusion.

What was published by The Guardian on July 15 only solidifies the evidence reported by McCarthy four years ago: Russian trolls and bots focused on controversial topics in an effort to stoke political division on an enormous scale — and it hasn’t stopped, experts say, reads the latest subhead. So what’s this got to do with the current state of disinformation? It hasn’t stopped.

The disinformation programs continue to divide the Americans left, right and center, even to the point that many Americans have shut the news off, preferring ignorance of the facts than confusion. This turn of events is the result of a classic psyops attack, one successful enough to make our own CIA proud if it weren’t executed by our country’s adversaries. As you can see the ex-president and his allies are still propagating the lies about stolen elections, vaccines, masks, critical race theory and transgender rights. In fact, pick a disruptive topic on any given week and the echo chamber of MAGA conspiralists will organize on social media then gather outside a random Korean day spa in Los Angeles to cause confusion and chaos. The cops are called in and arrests are made and then there’s another battle over free speech, police brutality and suppression.

All of this disruption is to what end? According to The Guardian, Russian President Vladimir Putin, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them ‘social turmoil’ in the U.S. and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.

And currently this all plays to the benefit of Trumlicans, who are intent on blocking any of President Joe Biden’s or the congressional Democrats legislation for infrastructure, expanded voting rights and even the investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building. Yes, that was an insurrection, not a riot, not a parade nor a peaceful demonstration, but an indisputable attempt to overthrow our federal government.

Proponents of this disinformation virus are not unlike those Confederate soldiers and sympathizers who for years, decades even, after the American Civil War never accepted the victory of the North over the South. Seventy years afterwards, whole Southern states were commemorating the “Lost Cause” with statuary for a war that even Gen. Robert E. Lee said was best buried and forgotten. There’s no such humility or circumspection from the anti-vaxxer crowd, MAGA-true believers, Proud Boys acolytes and Three Percenters! Nor should you expect it. These folks are seriously intent on starting the next civil war.

If you have any doubts about this perspective, after some 579 people (neo-confederates ) have been charged with crimes and were arrested from the capital insurrection, I would direct you to read the news report on our website titled, Anatomy of an Insurrection: How Military Veterans and Other Rioters Carried Out the Jan. 6 Assault on Democracy (https://tinyurl.com/Anatomy-insurrection).

“Every single person charged, at the very least, contributed to the inability of Congress to carry out the certification of our presidential election,” prosecutors wrote in a memorandum filed with the D.C. district court.

Under any other circumstance, this would be called treason — a charge with which all who participated in the insurrection should be stuck. Even the orange guy himself should at least be charged with incitement to riot and conspiracy to foment insurrection if not treason for attempting a coup d’état.

The evidence is just now beginning to leak out with books like Michael Woff’s Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency; Michael C Bender’s Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost and I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonning and Philip Rucker.

All of this along with Gen. Mark Milley’s assessment of Trump’s intentions to hold on to power regardless of the vote was reported this way. “In the days leading up to Jan. 6,” Leonnig and Rucker write, “Milley was worried about Trump’s call to action. ‘Milley told his staff that he believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military.’”

Yet, instead of charging these trespassers of our democracy with misdemeanors and minor felony charges like Anna Morgan Lloyd, of Indiana, who was ordered by a federal judge to serve three years of probation, perform 120 hours of community service and pay $500 in restitution after admitting to entering the Capitol, she easily should be serving 5 to 10 years in prison. She pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge under a deal with prosecutors. The latest one convicted, Michael Curzio, was sentenced to just six months imprisonment.

And still from Arizona’s Cyber Ninja recount to Texas’ stalled voter suppression laws and across this nation in every red state and county as the disinformation flies, vaccination rates stall and the COVID-19 Delta variant spreads the one thing we can be certain of in these times is that the virus may do for the Democrats what legislation can not. The current data shows that the highest rates of infection are occurring in the same counties with the lowest vaccination rates and those just happen to be where Trump won the most votes.

Perhaps this is the proof that Charles Darwin was right.

The Original Comeback Kid

James Preston Allen
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The Original Comeback Kid

Dennis Kucinich’s fight against privatization and his run to become Cleveland’s mayor again

Over the July 4th weekend, I interviewed two-time presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich about his latest book, The Division of Light and Power. Though he wrote this memoir as a narrative of events that happened many years earlier in his political career, it almost reads like a John Clancy political thriller centered on his battle to save the publicly-owned municipal light and distribution company in Cleveland. What fascinates me about Kucinich and Cleveland is how similar that city is to the San Pedro Harbor Area. This is a cautionary tale about money, power and the conflicts over public ownership for those running for office and those in politics.

The public utility, founded in 1907 by Cleveland’s then-mayor Tom L. Johnson, was known as Municipal Light (or “Muny Light” for short) until 1983. The utility did not, and still doesn’t, have sufficient capacity to compete across the entire greater Cleveland area. Instead, it was formed to create additional capacity to create a benchmark price to prevent rate-gouging by local private utilities.

During Kucinich’s time as mayor, the privately-owned Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. — better known as CEI — tried in some rather unscrupulous ways to put the Muny Light, its rival, out of business. A number of banks were heavily invested in CEI and refused to roll over the city’s debt as had previously been customary. The idea was to force the city into default, blame Kucinich, then force him to sell Muny Light. He refused.

Though Cleveland’s population is four times that of San Pedro, the forest city shares other similarities with our port town, including having similar ethnic demographics and both trying to revamp our respective waterfronts.

In this deeply personal narrative, Kucinich, who is of Croatian ancestry, takes the reader with him on his journey starting with his election to Cleveland’s city council at the age of 23 to his election as America’s youngest mayor at age 33.

Along the way, he takes the reader through corporate espionage, sabotage of Cleveland’s electric system, sabotage of the city’s finances via bank co-conspirators and even a mob directed assassination plot. This is a must read for any young people thinking they want to run for political office.

“You know, in writing the book, of course, I documented everything,” Kucinich said. “I saw the utilities that were taken over before the battle over Muny Light and since then privatization is happening all over the country and all over the world.”

Kucinich noted that even before the fight over the Muny Light, hundreds of billions of dollars in assets were being transferred from public ownership, which allowed energy rates and taxes to be kept reasonably low, to private ownership where people would pay an arm and a leg for service. At the start of the interview, the two-time presidential candidate issued a stark warning:

“When the American Rescue plan-money runs out — and it will — cities are going to be looking for ways of getting more revenue and privatizers will descend like vultures for services to privatize.”

The privatization model has been promoted on various levels, particularly starting with the Ronald Reagan administration to defund government. It’s a phenomenon we’ve seen all over the country. But what I wanted to know was about his run to get back into Cleveland’s mayoral seat and what that means.

Kucinich ran for the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States in 2004 and 2008. He earned his chops young in life as both city councilman in the city of Cleveland and then becoming the youngest mayor of any large city. Now, he is running to become one of the oldest mayors of any large city — a career trajectory reminiscent of California’s former governor Jerry Brown.

“Cleveland is a much different city than it was when I was elected mayor 44 years ago,” Kucinich noted.

It is about half the population it was then; And of that half, 20% of the people are making $10,000 or less a year. About a third of the city is at or below the poverty line and half of the children are living at or below the poverty line. And there’s a serious problem with crime. Cleveland, Kucinich noted, has one of the highest crime rates in the country and it was tied according to a recent detailed study with other cities for being the most violent city in the country. So there’s a mix of challenges, Kucinich said.

The eight-term representative for Ohio’s 10th district said he feels that his years of experience at the local level and the legislative, judicial and executive levels, and having served at state and federal government positions, shows that he has the depth of knowledge and experience to address today’s problems in Cleveland.

Kucinich added that he also has the willingness to take these challenges on and the energy, the enthusiasm and the ability to confront interest groups who just want to pick over whatever’s left of Cleveland and use it for their own narrow concerns.

“I’m prepared,” Kucinich said. “The book will inform readers on how much I know about local government [and government’s] ins and outs. When I was mayor from 1977 to ‘79, I was able to run the city on a cash basis. We cut city spending by 18% without reducing city services through the elimination of waste, fraud and abuse. So I run a pretty tight ship. We didn’t borrow any money at all. There’s probably no mayor in America who could have said that then and perhaps not now. So, you know, I’m looking forward to the opportunity to serve the people of Cleveland again if they decide that’s what they want.”

This pragmatism that Kucinich expressed is a hallmark of progressive leaning politicians in this country. Conservatives always want to call us tax-and-spend liberals. But the progressive element, particularly of the Democratic Party in the 20th century, has been one of fiscal conservancy, continued ownership of public utilities and things like that. The City of Los Angeles, long ago, during the Progressive Era took back its water and power system.

Kucinich noted that his book has been favorably compared to the film China Town, which was centered on the battle over water rights here in the City of Los Angeles.

The Division of Light and Power is a battle over the public’s right to own an electric system, Kucinich said. Look at the Northern California-San Francisco area where PG&E fought to control Hetch Hetchy much to the disadvantage of the people in San Francisco. And of course we know PG&E is famous for being instrumental in burning down Paradise, Calif.

Private utilities have their own agenda, which is to improve their stock profile. The financialization of our economy has encouraged them even more to do that and therefore, raise the rates.

Kucinich noted the words of legendary muckraking investigative journalist, Lincoln Steffens, on the Cleveland mayor who created Muny Light, Mayor Tom Johnson. Steffens said of him, “he was the best mayor of the best governed city in America.”

It was at the turn of the 20th century. Mayor Johnson said:

I believe in public ownership of all municipal service monopolies of water works, of electric systems, of parks, of schools. Because if you do not own them, they will, in time, own you. They’ll rule your politics; corrupt your institutions; and finally, destroy your liberties.

So The Division of Light and Power was a fight for Democratic control and democratic tradition.

I think these are very wise, cautionary words. Visit www.randomlengthsnews.com to see the complete video of our interview with Dennis Kucinich.

Managing Editor Terelle Jerricks contributed this article.

California’s Drought Warning

Paul Rosenberg
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California’s Drought Warning

Climate Crisis Hits Home

On July 8, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order calling on all Californians to voluntarily reduce their water use by 15%, and he expanded the regional drought state of emergency to include nine additional counties, for a total of 50 out of 58 counties.

“The realities of climate change are nowhere more apparent than in the increasingly frequent and severe drought challenges we face in the West and their devastating impacts on our communities, businesses and ecosystems,” Newsom said.

But, if anything, his actions seem to understate the situation.

Over 99% of land across nine Western states is currently abnormally dry, and almost 95% is covered by some category of drought — the worst levels in the 21-year history of the U.S. Drought Monitor. And the weather driving it has been otherworldly.

In late June a massive record-breaking heatwave in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia pushed temperatures so high they shattered historical records — 112 degrees at Portland’s airport, 117 in Salem, and a nearly unbelievable 121.3 in Lytton, BC (the highest ever in Canada by 8 degrees), which was then destroyed by a wildfire.

Such high temperatures in a region totally unprepared for them led to hundreds of premature deaths — over 300 in British Columbia alone — and drew immediate attention from a group of climate scientists. They concluded it “would be virtually impossible without human-caused climate change,” on the order of a once-in-1,000 years event, but it “would occur roughly every 5 to 10 years in that future world with 2°C of global warming” — just 1.4 degrees F higher than today.

Yet, the same underlying mechanism — a “heat dome” — was responsible for similar triple-digit records in the Southwest just a few weeks earlier, and just nine days later Death Valley registered a world record 130 degrees — the day after Newsom’s announcement.

The next week, Western Europe was struck with the worst rainfall and floods in a century, with dozens killed and thousands initially reported missing. Many places reported more rain in one day than normally falls in a month — or even two — at the same time it was announced that a major section of the Amazon Basin had now become a net emitter of greenhouse gases, rather than part of the world’s largest absorber of them, as it has been throughout human history.

“These are examples for the context for thinking about drought and climate change — multiple extreme events coinciding around the globe, often breaking records,” environmental scientist LeRoy Westerling of University of California Merced told Random Lengths. “It’s that broader, global, interlinked pattern that is indicative of climate change.” Global warming doesn’t just mean hotter temperatures, but more extreme weather of all kinds, more variability, with increasing frequency.

“Yes we have seen drought in the past, and we will have wet years in the future,” he said, “but climate change is making the west more arid, by:

1) Increasing temperatures — increasing evaporation.

2) Average precipitation is not changing here significantly, so it cannot compensate for the increased evaporation — increasing aridity.

3) Increasing variability of precipitation means more wet and dry extremes within the broad trend towards intensifying aridity as we become more arid, and see more extremes in precipitation and temperature, we will experience with ever increasing frequency what we used to think of as extreme, impactful, but rare drought events. They are no longer rare, and what used to be considered extreme will quickly be eclipsed by even more extreme events.”

The wildfire threat could grow even faster, Westerling explained.

“Fire needs flammable fuels. Since we still get wet extremes, and still get similar precipitation on average, we still produce lots of new potential fuels,” he said. “The increasing aridity means they are flammable sooner, and for longer. So fire risk continues to increase.”

And the landscape itself will change.

“As the West becomes increasingly more arid, the kinds of vegetation it can support will change as well,” he explained. “Fire, beetles, and drought related mortality are some of the processes that are quickly rearranging the landscape to better reflect what the new climate can support.”

California’s most high-priced agriculture — Napa Valley red wines — already faces ruin from a quadruple threat, as the New York Times just reported: Direct loss to wildfire, grapes ruined by smoke, lack of water to irrigate, and loss of insurance. The last is ultimately the most devastating. Random Lengths first reported on the insurance problem of global warming 16 years ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The insurance industry depends upon knowing what is normal. But the old normal has been crumbling for decades, and there will be no “new normal.”

“The problem is that the climate will continue to change for the rest of our lives. So the situation on the ground will also be shifting rapidly,” Westerling warned. “That makes mitigation to moderate future climate change more important than ever, but it also makes adaptation both more important and more difficult.”

This only intensifies the need for scientific understanding.

“The only way we can get enough information about the future risks we need to plan for in building and protecting infrastructure, homes, and services like agriculture, carbon storage, water supply, habitat, recreation, forestry, etc., is with science-based observation, modeling, simulation and scenario analysis,” he explained.

“We are watching as accelerating climate change transforms the world around us in real time.”

Good for Growers, Bad for Workers

David Bacon
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Good for Growers, Bad for Workers

The Nation, 7/21/21

https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2021/07/good-for-growers-bad-for-workers.html

If the Senate passes, and President Biden signs the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, U.S. growers and labor contractors will benefit, but most farmworkers will not.

There should be no question that undocumented farmworkers need and deserve legal status in this country. They have fed us, not just during the pandemic, but for as long as we’ve had wage labor in agriculture.

But farmworkers, along with all other undocumented families, need and deserve a bill that provides legal status without imposing the notorious H-2A and E-Verify programs as the price. Growers need labor, but farmworkers need a sustainable future that promises dignified and well-paid work, not just for this generation, but for generations to come.The Farm Workforce Modernization Act passed the House once under Trump, and then again this spring. With no discussion of it’s possible negative impact, every Democrat in Congress voted for it, except for Maine’s Representative Jared Golden. Yet this bill, presented as a legalization program for undocumented farmworkers, will likely lead to the replacement of as much as half of the nation’s farmworkers by workers brought into the U.S. by growers using the H-2A guest worker program. That, in turn, will cement in place the existing deep poverty in farmworker communities, and make it much more difficult for farmworkers to change this.

Rosalinda Guillen, director of the women-led farmworker organization Community to Community in Washington State, has a long history pushing for equitable opportunities for farm workers and their families to build community. “The nation’s farmworkers,” she says, “should be recognized as a valuable skilled workforce, able to use their knowledge to innovate sustainable practices. Most are indigenous immigrants, and have the right to maintain cultural traditions and languages, and to participate with their multicultural neighbors in building a better America. This bill instead treats farm workers as a disposable workforce for corporate agriculture.”

Last year growers were certified to bring in 275,000 H-2A workers. That is over 10% of the farm workforce in the U.S., and a number that has doubled in just five years, and tripled in eight. In states like Georgia and Washington, this program will fill a majority of farm labor jobs in the next year or two.

This program has been studied in many reports over the last decade, from “Close to Slavery” by the Southern Poverty Law Center to “Ripe for Reform” by the Centro de Derechos de los Migrantes to “Exploitation or Dignity” by the Oakland Institute. All document a record of systematic abuse of workers in the program, and the use of the program to replace farmworkers (themselves immigrants) already living in the U.S.

In 2019 the Department of Labor only punished 25 of the 11,000 growers and labor contractors using the program despite extensive violations, and the punishments were small fines and suspension from it for three years. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act continues this abuse, and will accelerate sharply the replacement of the existing workforce.

The bill freezes the minimum wage for H-2A workers, already close to minimum wage, for a year, and opens the door to abolishing the wage guarantee entirely. This will not only hurt H-2A workers themselves. It will effectively push down the wages of all farmworkers.

A long record documents the firing, deportation and blacklisting of H-2A workers who organize or strike. Familias Unidas por la Justicia, the new union for Washington farmworkers, has helped those workers protest, but seen them forced to leave the county over and over again as a result. Growers are currently permitted to violate anti-discrimination laws by refusing to hire women or older workers. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act does not protect them.

The bill, however, does have a provision making it mandatory that growers use the notorious E-Verify system to check the immigration status of workers, and refuse to hire anyone undocumented. This provision will have an enormous impact. Half of the nation’s 2.4 million farmworkers are undocumented. While some will qualify for the bill’s tortuous legalization program, many will not. Denying jobs to hundreds of thousands of farmworkers will cause immense suffering for their families. This would be a bitter reward for feeding the country through the COVID crisis.

Those who qualify for legalization will be required to continue working in agriculture for a period of years. Losing employment will therefore mean losing their temporary legal status, making it extremely risky for them to organize unions or strike. Growers, meanwhile, will use the H-2A program to replace domestic workers who can’t legalize or who leave the workforce for other reasons, including local workers who organize and strike. There are no protections in the bill at all for farmworkers’ right to organize – either for H-2A workers or workers who are living here.

This is a very threatening scenario for farmworker families. Ramon Torres, president of Familias Unidas por la Justicia, says, “In Washington State we have fought with labor contractors and growers for years to protect farmworker rights, of both H-2A and resident workers. Our lived experience tells us what the impact of this bill will be.”

Short-Changed!

Paul Rosenberg
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Short-Changed!

Lack of competitive bidding likely costs POLA millions annually, new lawsuit reveals

A recent lawsuit filed by Vopak brings to light a startling reality: The Port of Los Angeles does not normally use competitive bidding to get market value from its long-term leases — its primary source of revenue — resulting in the loss of millions of dollars annually.

Vopak operates a marine terminal and storage facility at Berths 186-190 of the Port of LA, where the company handles petroleum products, chemicals and biofuels with 82 tanks and a total capacity of almost 2.4 million barrels. Vopak also has a terminal at the Port of Long Beach, with 55 tanks and a capacity of almost 350,000 barrels. These are just two of 72 terminals it owns worldwide, either in whole or in partnerships.

On May 24, Vopak filed suit against its former West Coast sales and marketing manager, Anthony Santich, alleging breach of his employee confidentiality agreement and his separation agreement, interference with a business relationship and a prospective relationship, misappropriation of trade secrets and conspiracy. All these allegations derive from claims that Santich provided information arguing that the Port of LA was significantly undervaluing the 30-year lease it was negotiating with Vopak—which would become apparent if the port opened up the lease to competitive bidding via a request for proposal (RFP). Santich also allegedly provided evidence of discriminatory practices to Joe Gatlin of the San Pedro/Wilmington NAACP.

Three days later, Judge Michael P. Vicencia denied Vopak’s application for a temporary restraining order, and on July 13, Santich filed an “anti-SLAPP” motion to dismiss. That motion stated, in part:

It is indisputable that the people of Los Angeles have a “public interest” in the operation of the Port of Los Angeles. That includes, of course, whether operators at the Port have diverse hiring practices. That also includes whether the Port’s operators are conducting business in a manner that benefits the community, or in the alternative, are seeking to extract benefits at the expense of the community. The Port conducting a Request for Proposal (“RFP”) is an excellent way to get at the heart of both such issues, providing a transparent process to assure that these valuable leases on public land are awarded to the operators that serve not just themselves, but the community’s goals as well.

Yet, plaintiff Vopak Terminal Los Angeles, Inc.’s (“Plaintiff”) complaint (“Complaint” ) seeks to silence a former employee for speaking out about these very issues…. This is the essence of a strategic lawsuit to prevent public participation, and it is for such circumstances that California’s Anti-SLAPP Statute exists.

However this lawsuit is ultimately settled, the underlying situation is profoundly troubling. The crux of the matter comes through clearly in a Jan. 13 email to Councilman Joe Buscaino’s chief of staff, Jacok Haik, from Daniel Xia, another former Vopak employee, whom the Vopak lawsuit accuses of being a go-between:

“I think the main takeaway is that the POLA is likely leaving more than $100M plus on the table with the current Vopak negotiation…. An RFP open bid process of the terminal is the best way for POLA to get their terminal assets’ real value.”

 

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