Over the past four decades, I’ve had every kind of person enter my offices, including, paupers, politicians, procrastinators, princes, pickpockets and plutocrats. This has given me some extensive experience in judging human character as not all or perhaps even many of these people were what they appeared to be upon presenting themselves at the counter. Some of the most honest and honorable of these have frequently been the ones with the least financial resources — the ones who stand out, have something that can’t be bought — integrity. Here are two examples in contrast:
Back in the days when our offices were located on 7th Street in Downtown San Pedro, two different men walked into my office. Both were much older than I, and by appearances could have been the average old working man. Neither wore a suit, nor had a fancy car parked at the curb. And neither tried to impress me with a long line of credentials or even a business card with a title.
In fact, the first man who came in to see if we’d cut off the top of his old letterhead because he was so cheap he wanted to use the paper for writing notes. I tried to sell him a fresh ream of paper but he was adamant about saving on the paper. He didn’t look like a tree hugger, but more like a guy who had worked on the docks wearing a double pocket work shirt and work pants. So we lopped off the letterhead and figured we’d never see him again. Not so.
He came back a dozen or more times and slowly I began to realize who this elderly gent was and he wasn’t your average working stiff.
The second man came in one day with a sheaf of yellow ledger paper under his arms and asked for me personally. He was similarly dressed. His goal was to have me transcribe all of his scribbling into what amounted to be his oral history. I remember saying, “You know, there’s plenty of secretarial services that can do this kind of thing.”
His response was, “I don’t trust anybody else to do this but you.”
We negotiated over the price and I had one of my staff who has far more patience than I to help this old codger spill out his story. I later learned that this transcription went to the archives of Temple University. This caught my passing attention and was filed in my mental-rolodex. I never saw him again. But a decade later, his name appeared in a book by Kevin Owen Starr, California’s state librarian, best known for his multi-volume series on the history of California, collectively called Americans and the California Dream.
Now, the first man I came to know by name was Robert Sutro. Only later did I come to understand that he was a very wealthy Los Angeles mortgage lender who was heir to the San Francisco Sutro fortune. He had multiplied his holdings by buying up much of what is now called Silicon Valley when it was mostly orchards and then selling it off for a huge profit when this became the home to many start-up and global technology companies. Apple, Facebook and Google are among the most prominent. It’s also the site of technology-focused institutions centered around Palo Alto’s Stanford University.
One would never presume this man to be a multi-millionaire; he never came off as anything but a smart, humble guy who in his later years would walk from his home at Point Fermin some 30 blocks to the hardware store. He once told me, “I’ve never worked a day in my life.”
“But Robert,” I said, “you’ve worked for years turning deals and buying properties.”
“Oh, that’s not work. Working is having to do something you don’t enjoy.”
Sutro did teach me a thing or two about buying commercial real estate and which pitfalls to be wary of.
In his later years, my wife passed him by in her car as he was walking down Pacific Avenue one evening. She stopped to offer him a ride. He graciously accepted and after arriving at his place on Paseo del Mar, he asked if she’d like to have dinner with him and his wife. She declined saying she had to go home and feed her cats. “Well, why don’t you go home and get the cats and bring them to dinner, too?” was his response.
The second man’s name was Pat Chambers. He was a retired labor organizer who had spent years in the fields of the Central Valley. By the time he landed in San Pedro, he was living in a retirement home and had spent some time reflecting on his life. He was at home here with the union workers and the blue-collar ethic of this town.
When I ran into his name again, it was a decade later in the book I mentioned above on the history of California. In the chapter on the 1930s labor struggles, I read about a famous cotton strike in the Central Valley. In that chapter, the author referenced a common police practice of arresting everyone on the picket line. The author noted that there was one guy at that time who held the record for the highest number of arrests in a 30-day period. That man’s name was Pat Chambers.
You see, Chambers was arrested some 90 times during that month. This means he was arrested, posted bail and was back out on the picket line three times a day for a month. Starr went on to say that only the communist organizers had money for bail.
So, here we have it. The capitalist and the communist — at first sight you couldn’t tell the difference. Both men came to San Pedro near the end of their lives for pretty much the same reasons with far different life stories. Neither one was full of hubris. Both were men I’d gauged as having something that couldn’t be bought —integrity.
Post-COVID lockdowns, everyone is trying to live their best lives this summer. Think best concerts, the best food festivals, the best dance parties and generally the best of the best of times to be had — especially here in Southern California where life is still slow to return to a pre-COVID normal.
Right now, the Hollywood Bowl is the biggest venue with the brightest and most culturally relevant artists of our time at this moment. Some of these shows are included in this edition’s Summer Vibes calendar such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Peter and the Wolf with the Oscar, Emmy, and two-time Tony winning Viola Davis lending her voice as narrator for beloved children’s story. However, this rendition of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf will be different from the 1930s Soviet-era monument to youth ushering in a new era by including selections from Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations.
The Montgomery Variations was inspired by Bonds’ 15-state southern tour with Eugene Brice and the Manhattan Melodaires (March 12 to April 11, 1964). What the composer saw and experienced during that tour inspired her to pen a series of musical snapshots and commentaries focusing on two other seminal events in the Civil Rights movement: (1) the Montgomery Bus Boycotts from December 1955 to December 1956; and (2) the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala. in 1963. The bombing’s impact in galvanizing national public opinion on civil rights in the 1960s became a galvanizing force for nonviolent protest that had been underway since the 1950s.
Indeed, this version of Peter and the Wolf could just as well be an ode to today’s youth movement that has forced change to happen during a moment that has a few too many similarities to the battles that had to be fought 60 years ago. The inclusion of the Montgomery Variations was also a nod to Bonds making Los Angeles her adopted home. She lived in Los Angeles from 1967 until her death in 1972. Get your tickets while you can. It’s set for July 15.
Other shows to watch for include: Christina Aguilera, July 16-17; Kamasi Washington with Earl Sweatshirt, July 18; Ledisi Sings Nina Simone, July 24.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic — Mozart and Mendelssohn with Ruth Reinhardt, July 27. Reinhardt is assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, where she recently gave her critically-acclaimed subscription debut, when she had to replace Stanisław Skrowaczewski on short notice in a concert selected by The Dallas Morning News as one of the year’s highlights.
Long Beach is another hot spot for music and all around adulting fun this summer. One of the places you should look to is Harvelles in Long Beach, a place unafraid to say “Burlesque is back.”
Between Harvelle’s Underground Comedy and Burlesque on Tuesday night to get you over the hump to the live shows on the weekends, July in Long Beach may prove to be a hot one indeed.
The month will be kicked off with an already sold out show, American Monster and Burlesque Show, which has been described as an excellent night in debauchery. The show features an array of fiery red-hot burlesque dancers performing to the loud, raucous live blues musicians.
The American Monster Burlesque and Blues Show has it all, everything your depraved little heart could ask for — soulful singing, strip-tease dancing, tassle-twirling and some wild offbeat vaudevillian stuff that will blow your mind. So, don’t fret that the July show is sold out. It will be back on Aug. 7 and Sept. 4. So, get your tickets. https://longbeach.harvelles.com.
Other shows at Harvelles you don’t want to miss include Little Miss Nasty The 2021 Resurrection; The Black Veils and the Circus of Sine. The mentioned shows are the remaining ones that aren’t sold out this month as of this publication. Obviously that can change.
Another Long Beach show blues lovers will want to catch is the free community concert being put on by Long Beach Councilwoman Mary Zendejas and the Long Beach Blues Society featuring The Disciples, Shy But Flyy and the Long Beach Blues Society Allstars. This concert is just one in a series of concerts to be put on during the months of July and August.
Music isn’t all there is to be had this summer. Outdoor theater productions in August in the cool breezes at Point Fermin Park will be the place to be. Featured is the Shakespearian play, Love’s Labour Lost, one of the old bard’s earliest comedies. It is believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth I.
It follows the king of Navarre and his three companions as they attempt to swear off the company of women for three years in order to focus on studying and fasting. Their subsequent infatuation with the princess of France and her ladies makes them forsworn. In an untraditional ending for a comedy, the play closes with the death of the princess’s father, and all weddings are delayed for a year.
Graphic by Brenda López
MUSIC
July 8
Corday
Corday is an awesome cover band fronted by award-winning singer-guitarist Jennifer Corday featuring top-notch local musicians playing classic rock.
Venue: El Dorado Nature Center, 7550 E. Spring St., Long Beach
July 9
Ethio Cali
Ethio Cali pays homage to the Golden Age of Ethiopian jazz and soul, with collaborations with DJs Rani de Leon and Cut Chemist. Ethio Cali is a Los Angeles-based Ethio-Jazz ensemble, its sublime sound is inspired by the golden age of Ethiopian music of the 1960s and ’70s, filtered through a uniquely Los Angeles lens.
Venue: Grand Performances, 350 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles
Black Market Trust
Since their 2012 debut album The Black Market Trust, this jazz quintet has gone on to record two more albums and have been keeping a busy touring schedule.
Time: 5:45 p.m., July 9
Cost: $107 Adult, includes a boxed dinner and dessert with the show.
Venue: Norris Theatre, 27570 Norris Center Drive, Rolling Hills Estates
Keith McKelley
Saxophonist and aerophone musician McKelley will be at Harvelles. In his varied career as a producer and songwriter he has collaborated with the biggest names in the music industry, including Jhené Aiko; Kenneth “babyface” Edmonds; Usher; Tyrese; and Earth, Wind & Fire.
Venue: Harvelle’s Downtown Long Beach, 201 E. Broadway, LongBeach
Vibe
The Vibe is back. Enjoy a new nightlife experience in the heart of downtown Long Beach.
Time: 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. July 15, 22, 29 and Aug. 5
Cost: Free
Venue: The Harbor, 130 Pine Ave., Long Beach
July 16
Burlesque is Back
Come enjoy a night of burlesque with the ladies and gents of Dirty Little Secrets, amazing live music from The Corderman Detail, and all the underground speakeasy vibes that Harvelle’s Long Beach has to offer.
Venue: Harvelle’s Downtown Long Beach, 201 E. Broadway, Long Beach
July 17
Shane Parish and Patrick Shiroishi
Acclaimed finger-picking acoustic guitarist Shane Parish is joined by avant-garde saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi for an evening of instrumental fireworks.
Venue: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles
July 18
Kamasi Washington
Saxophone virtuoso and widely lauded bandleader Kamasi Washington introduced hip-hop audiences to the lineage of spiritual jazz and hard bop with 2015’s The Epic and 2018’s Heaven and Earth.
Venue: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles
July 22
The Salty Suites
Come out and listen to the original songs of traditional music of the world, from bluegrass, Depression era and old country, swing, classical and roots with current edge.
Venue: El Dorado Nature Center, 7550 E. Spring St., Long Beach
July 23
The Winehouse Experience
Come see the show everyone has been talking about. The Winehouse Experience, featuring Mia Karter, pays tribute to the late icon Amy Winehouse, known for her distinctive warm vocals, soulful songwriting and signature style.
Venue: Harvelle’s Downtown LongBeach, 201 E. Broadway, Long Beach
Summer Breeze Concert
Dru Hill, 112, Next, Jon B, Montell Jordan and Adina Howard will be bringing that 90s Summer vibe to Carson. Get your tickets before they are sold out.
Venue: Dignity Health Sports Park, 18400 S. Avalon Blvd., Carson
July 24
Summer Love Jam
SoCal nightlife returns with a night of classic cars and oldies but goodies music including Rose Roycek, Joe Bataan, The Emotions, Blue Magic, Evelyn Champagne King, The Temprees, Sly Slick & Wicked and Little Willie G.
Venue: Dignity Health Sports Park, 18400 S. Avalon Blvd., Carson
Ledisi Sings Simone
Ledisi will be taking on the powerhouse musician’s emotionally searing and socially direct songs on her PBS special Ledisi Live: A Tribute to Nina Simone. Now she brings that spirit to the same stage where Simone herself sang so many times.
Venue: Harvelle’s Downtown Long Beach, 201 E. Broadway, Long Beach
July 25
Sunday Sessions
Grand Park’s Sunday Sessions hosts Los Angeles’ finest house music curators on select Sundays during the summer months. This popular free series showcases how house music defines eras and subcultures, Angeleno-style.
Join Councilwoman Mary Zendejas and the Long Beach Blues Society for a free community concert, featuring The Disciples, Shy But Flyy and the Long Beach Blues Society Allstars.
Venue: El Dorado Nature Center, 7550 E. Spring St., Long Beach
Aug. 7
Summer Swing Nights
Celebrate the return of live entertainment with Summer Swing Nights: Drive-In Edition concert series featuring the jazzy vocal stylings of The Swing Tones, accompanied by a live seven-piece big band plus swing dance lessons.
This small-town Texas girl has recorded with Grammy Award-winning producer John Carter Cash and will be performing music from latest release, Living in the Moment from the EP Leave Her Wild.
Venue: Torrance Cultural Arts Foundation, 3330 Civic Center Drive, Torrance
Tribute to Neil Diamond
Jack Wright’s Tribute to Neil Diamond is a sophisticated, authentic performance of the hit songs that have kept Neil Diamond in the hearts of his fans for more than five decades.
Venue: El Dorado Nature Center, 7550 E. Spring St. Long Beach
Aug. 20
Tom Rigney and Flambeau
The fiery, electrifying violinist/composer, Tom Rigney, joined forces with the finest musicians on the San Francisco roots music scene to form Tom Rigney and Flambeau.
Time: Aug. 20
Cost: $107 Adult, includes a buffet dinner and dessert with the show.
Venue: El Dorado Nature Center, 7550 E. Spring St., Long Beach
Sept. 3
Cornet Chop Suey
Named after a somewhat obscure Louis Armstrong composition, Cornet Chop Suey is best known for a variety of styles while applying its own exciting style to traditional jazz, swing, blues and “big production” numbers.
Time: 4:30 p.m., Sept. 3
Cost: $107 adult, includes a boxed cinner and cessert with the show.
Venue: Norris Theatre, 27570 Norris Center Drive, Rolling Hills Estates
Sept. 10
Beach Life Festival
A one-of-a-kind boutique music festival located on the shores of Redondo Beach will feature performances by Jane’s Addiction, Counting Crows, Ziggy and Stephen Marley performing their father’s songs, and Cage The Elephant.
A young king and his companions vow to swear off worldly pleasures and devote themselves to gaining eternal fame through scholastic pursuits. But a princess and her ladies render their oath difficult to keep in this love letter to love.
Venue: Point Fermin Park, 807 W. Paseo Del Mar, San Pedro
Aug. 25
Closely Related Keys
This Wendy Graf stage-play directed by Saundra McClain is a family drama centered around New York-based African American attorney Julie Dolan. She has a career on the rise which starts to crumble when she finds out she has an Iraqi half-sister, Neyla, who shows up at her door.
Time: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays Aug. 25 through Sept. 12
Venue: International City Theatre, 330 E. Seaside Way, Long Beach
DANCE
July 8
Honest Purpose
Honest Purpose features Heidi Duckler Dance dancers accompanied by a live four-piece band led by Dwight Trible. The piece is an exploration of private and public space as well as a celebration of the reopening of the city.
Venue: The Culver Steps, 9300 Culver Blvd., Culver City
Aug 7, 14, 21
The Ultimate Flamenco Dinner Show Experience
Forget the airport — the quickest way to get from Long Beach to Spain is an evening of authentic Spanish entertainment and cuisine at Alegria Cocina Latina’s “Ultimate Flamenco Dinner Show Experience.”
Time: 7:30 p.m. Aug. 7, 14, 21
Cost: $80
Venue: Alegria Cocina Latina, 115 Pine Ave., Long Beach
FILM
July 15
#BANG4CHANGE Tour Long Beach
Billed as the largest #BANG4CHANGE screening, the Art Theater screening will be the second stop in the historic film screening tour. Immediately after the murder of George Floyd, feeling like he had to do something, activist and filmmaker Ferin Kidd flew to Minneapolis to film a ground’s level documentary of the protests that had erupted there. RSVP.
Venue: Art Theatre of Long Beach, 2025 E. 4th St., Long Beach
Long Beach Movies In The Park
Long Beach Parks, Recreation and Marine invites you to participate in Be S.A.F.E. (Summer Activities in a Friendly Environment) and free movies in the park. Movies and activities will take place throughout the summer.
Time:July 15: Scoob!
Cost: Free
Location: Houghton Park, 6301 Myrtle Ave., Long Beach
Venue: LOTH RHCC Community Center, 735 Silver Spur Road, Rolling Hills Estates
ART
July 10
Building Meaning from the Multiple Multiples
The artists in Multiples share a strategy of building meaning from an expanded concept of the multiple, as found in iterative series, repetition of mass-produced objects and images in new and site responsive works. Multiples presents the work of Nathan Gulick, Colleen Hargaden, Seth Lower, Megan Mueller, Samuel Scharf, Noah Spindler, Katie Thoma and Katya Usvitsky, with a text by Hannah Sage Kay.
Time: 2 to 4 p.m. July 10, opening reception. On view through Sept. 12
Venue: Angels Gate Cultural Center, 3601 S. Gaffey St., San Pedro
Coming Together: An Exhibition of Small Works
Via an open call, local artists were encouraged to submit work. Two jurors then reviewed the submissions — more than 450 were received — and selected 85 to be included in the show.
Time: 1 to 4 p.m, Thursdays through Sundays, July 10 through Aug. 14
Venue: LBCG/Rod Briggs Gallery, 2221 E. Broadway, Long Beach
July 17
Shoebox Projects’ Sculpture Garden at High Beams
A one day drive-through pop-up. Kristine Schomaker of Shoebox Projects has curated a collection of mixed freestanding sculpture that will create its own landscape. On a small scale, it’s texture. On a human scale, it’s a crowd. On a large scale it’s otherworldly, like an alien landscape through the looking glass.
Venue: Torrance Art Museum, 3320 Civic Center Drive, Torrance
July 28
MoLAA Zoom Project With Judith Baca
Dr. Judith F. Baca has been creating public art for four decades. In 1974, Baca founded the City of Los Angeles’ first mural program, producing over 400 murals and employing thousands of local participants which evolved into the arts organization Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC).
Join Cabrillo Marine Aquarium educators and volunteers in a beach cleanup, clearing the shore of marine debris. Meet at the steps in front of the auditorium. Open to all ages. Make reservations by the Thursday before the event: Call Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Venue: Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, 3720 Stephen M. White Drive, San Pedro
July 11
Giant Kelp Micro-habitats
Join Cabrillo Marine Aquarium education staff for a giant kelp holdfast dissection and look into the micro habitats of giant kelp and discover the variety of mollusks, crustaceans and echinoderms that make it their home.
Location: Meet in the lower courtyard, under the coral tree
Venue: Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, 3720 Stephen M. White Drive, San Pedro
July 15
Queer Zines 2.0
Join in-person or on Zoom with artist Ellie Cota for a fun, easy zine workshop. Taking inspiration from last year’s Queer Zine event, there will be a discussion the history of radical self-publishing and produce a completed zine at the end of the workshop. RSVP.
Join Cabrillo Marine Aquarium educators and learn about the Salinas de San Pedro wetlands habitat at Cabrillo Beach by using binoculars and microscopes to observe live animals. Visitors can view the birds of the marsh, learn about native plants and observe the changes in the tides.
Venue: Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, 3720 Stephen M. White Drive, San Pedro
Family Art Workshop
Angels Gate will be holding a Family Art Workshop in-person at Angels Gate, as well as Virtually on Zoom. COVID-19 safety protocols will be enforced. Join artist-teacher Iliana Cuellar for this month’s workshop exploring storytelling. This workshop will explore humans’ natural knack for storytelling through writing, acting, drawing, and more. Children must be accompanied by an adult at all times.
Venue: Angels Gate Cultural Center, 3601 S. Gaffey St., San Pedro
July 29
Aquarium of the Pacific
Take a journey of discovery through the world’s largest ocean at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California. Meet 12,000 animals, and see more than 100 exhibits.
Venue: Aquarium of the Pacific, 100 Aquarium Way, Long Beach
Aug. 15
CicLAvia Open Streets Events are Back
CicLAvia Sundays are back with open streets events for the remainder of 2021. CicLAvia temporarily closes streets to car traffic and opens them to Angelenos to use as a public park. Attendees come from all over LA and beyond, connecting neighborhoods to each other through a spirit of exploration.
Time: Aug. 15: Wilmington, Oct. 10: Heart of LA (CicLAvia’s 11th Anniversary Celebration) and Dec. 5: South LA
Venue: Torrance Cultural Arts Center, 3330 Civic Center Drive, Torrance
Ongoing
Summer Dog Walking Series
South Coast Botanic Garden will welcome your four-legged best friends back to explore its 87 acres on the fourth Sunday of every month through October. Dogs must remain on the leash throughout the garden and aren’t allowed in the Bohannon Rose Garden or Koi Pond area.
Time: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m every fourth Sunday, through October
Conversation Starter: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Join a book discussion of Octavia Butler’s book Parable of the Sower. Published in 1993, the novel takes place in the LA area during the 2020s. The novel shows a climatically and socially chaotic U.S. in constant upheaval. Protagonist Lauren takes to the road, building a community based on the tenets of a new belief system she calls Earthseed.
“It’s not my money. It’s taxpayer money,” Councilman says
Los Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino announced the winners of the so-called “Buscaino Grants” at the start of Independence Day weekend, shaking off concerns about the fairness of the grant process.
On July 2, Wilmington nonprofit organizations received a total of $550,000. The councilman also announced that a portion of the community funds were used to complete the final phase of the Wilmington Park revitalization, including installation of the mosaic art installation and security cameras and a youth job training program called Clean and Green in Watts and Wilmington.
At the First Thursday Art Walk in Sirens Java and Tea on July 1, Buscaino announced the winning nonprofits in San Pedro, which totaled a little over $1 million. Perhaps the most unusual winner was Bridge Cities Alliance, whose 501(c)(3) status was revoked in December 2020 for not filing the necessary tax returns for three consecutive years. Start-up non-profits often have fiscal sponsors who do have 501(c)(3) status, which provides legal cover for them. Bridge Cities Alliance, however, is no-longer a mere startup. The Buscaino Grant process explicitly states that all applicant 501(c)(3) statuses would be confirmed.
Buscaino’s communication director Branimir Kvartuc and senior advisor explained, via text message, that Bridge Cities Alliance had become a 509(a)(2), a private foundation.
“There are five subtypes of 501(c)(3). BCA is a 509(a)(2), which is one of the qualified subtypes, so they are actually both (501(c)(3) and a 509(a)(2)), which makes them qualified,” Kvartuc texted.
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.
Earlier in the day, Councilman Buscaino announced the grant winners in the Harbor Gateway at the newly-opened Normandiegale SkatePark, which totaled just $100,000.
In each of his announcements, Buscaino would say some variation of, “Don’t thank me, thank us,” highlighting that the nonprofits chosen were chosen by community stakeholders and that it was taxpayer money that was distributed. However, despite the public funding and voting, in Council District 15, the grants were called the “Buscaino Grants.” The council member went on to say, “This has nothing to do with me or my money or my office dollars that you all voted on. So thank yourselves.”
Also on July 1, winning nonprofit organizations in Harbor City received a total of $307,000.
Watts, with the overall greater number of applicant grant winners had the most proposals that fell under the Reimagining Public Safety category. Buscaino, a former senior lead officer for the Los Angeles Police Department, has staked his entire political career as the “community policing” candidate for both city council and the mayorship. The councilman allowing constituents to have a voice in the distribution of city funds in their neighborhoods is a welcome change — a shift from the days when community advocates would win grants from the state or federal government, only to have those same funds be filtered through the law enforcement agencies to the communities to force engagement between the youth and the police.
This time around, nonprofit organizations in Watts collectively received $2.5 million. It should be noted that while stakeholders throughout the council district got to pick the deserving nonprofits that applied for the grants, it was the council office that created the parameters for the grant proposals.
Those parameters dictated that all proposals fall under the umbrella of at least one of the following categories, including:
• Addressing homelessness and its root causes, including addressing and preventing poverty
• Addressing racial disparities
• City services/beautification
• Jobs/economic development
• Nonprofit/community investment
• Recreation/youth programming
• Reimagining public safety
WILMINGTON
• The Great Summer Comeback, Boys & Girls Clubs of the Los Angeles Harbor, $60,000
• Wilmington Grow Green fitnessSpace, $50,000
• LAUSD Community School, Wilmington, $25,000
• Banning High School Booster Club weight room transformation, $75,000
The sale of the Jankovich Co., a longtime San Pedro harbor business, was recently completed. The family-owned and operated company was established in 1933 as a full-service, land and marine lubricants, fuels and specialty products distributor.
According to a few relatives of the employees, the workers were given $10,000 as a thank you for their service. The company was sold to TJC LLC, a Washington Limited Liability Company owned by North Star, which is 100% owned by Saltchuk, a privately-owned family of diversified transportation and distribution companies headquartered in Seattle. Sources close to the sale said the Jankovich Company was acquired for $200 million. The company’s operations extended as far north as the San Francisco Bay Area and as far south as San Diego.
Jankovich’s 20-year permit to operate at the Port of Los Angeles, which became effective in 2017, was transferred to TJC LLC. The permits entitled Jankovich the right to use City of Los Angeles Harbor Department land, subsurface, and water areas at Berths 73A and B and Berth 74 in San Pedro for operating and maintaining a retail marine fueling service station that sells fuel and lubricants. This permit also included the operation of a small commercial watercraft mooring facility; the use of an office building and storage; truck access and storage; and docking of barges. Jankovich made the move upon the Harbor Department’s request to accommodate the redevelopment of Ports O’ Call.
The port reported the remediation of Berth 74 as being substantially completed. The premises will require continued ground water monitoring and potential further toxic soil remediation depending on the results of monitoring. Through the termination agreement Jankovich has agreed to perform ground water monitoring and provide the Harbor Department a $350,000 security deposit to secure future monitoring and remediation.
Upon completion of the remediation at Berth 74, there will remain small amounts of soil contamination along the seawall, which cannot be removed without compromising the integrity of the seawall. There is also residual soil contamination along the roadway that could not be accessed.
Jankovich has been working on a remediation plan to address the limited amounts of remaining contamination. Some groundwater contamination will also remain, but is expected to attenuate in time since the source soil contamination has been removed.
Jankovich will initially be required to monitor groundwater for two years and if after the first year groundwater contamination levels have not been substantially reduced, Jankovich will be required to take additional action to expedite remediation of the groundwater. Until such time as groundwater contamination has been reduced to acceptable levels for future unrestricted use, Jankovich will assume responsibility for the remaining contamination through the termination agreement. This will require a $350,000 security deposit that will not be refunded until the Berth 74 is returned to the Harbor Department in a condition that will allow for unrestricted use.
Started by Thomas Jankovich as a San Pedro marine fuel business in 1933, the company grew from a one-man operation to an internationally recognized company. Jankovich’s son, Tom Jr., joined the firm in 1960 and was instrumental in the company’s continued growth.
Until 1970, the company was selling fuel and lubricating oil mainly to the fishing fleet in San Pedro. Then Jankovich and his son formed San Pedro Marine Inc. and started their own trucking business.
In 1982, Jankovich and his son formed a water taxi service, J & S Water Taxi Service. In 1983, Jankovich and Hal Noring formed Petro America Inc., a marketer and transporter of petroleum products to inland and international marine companies not serviced by San Pedro Marine Inc., as well as serving truck lines, railroads, airlines and petroleum exploration/production groups.
The firm also served as a fuel broker for the Jankovich companies, maintaining a working relationship with all major independent refineries and wholesale markets.
The “Recall George Gascón’’ website is paid for by “Victims of Violent Crime for the Recall of District Attorney Gascón,” but two of the the three major donors it cites are billionaires on the LA Business Journal’s list of “Wealthiest Angelenos,” and one of them, Geoffey Palmer, is a Donald Trump mega donor, to the tune of $2 million. The other, Robert Day, made his money the old-fashioned way: he inherited it. So, a more honest name would have been: “Billionaires for the Recall of District Attorney Gascón.” But honesty plays no part in the recall effort, any more than it does in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
The Gascón recall campaign is also an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, but in a more local sense, revolving around race and criminal justice reform. When Gascón defeated incumbent District Attorney Jackie Lacey by 7 points this past November, it was just one of several fronts in this fight. County Measure J, dedicating funding to redress racial injustice — including alternatives to incarceration — passed by almost 15 points, and Proposition 17, restoring parolees voting rights, passed by 17 points, while Proposition 20, which would have rolled back several important criminal justice reforms, was defeated by 16 points. As with the election of President Joe Biden, the voice of the voters was clear: they soundly rejected the failed mass incarceration politics of the past.
Left, Geoffrey Palmer, one of the billionaires leading the recall effort against Gascón. Right, Robert Day, the other billionaire leading the recall effort against Gascón. File photos.
But, also as with Biden’s election, the conservative losers refused to accept reality. Immediately after Gascón took office on Dec. 7, announcing he’d implement the policies he’d campaigned on — an end to cash bail, the death penalty, trying children as adults, and the use of sentencing enhancements to lengthen prison sentences — the first shots were fired in an effort to recall him. That same month saw a dramatic uptick in the effort to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom (who appointed Gascón as San Francisco police chief in 2010 and district attorney in 2011), even as Republicans tried and failed to block the certification of Electoral College results in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
While national attention focused on Trump’s far-flung efforts to hold onto power in purple and formerly red states — efforts that culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection — the situation in deep-blue California was in some ways even more troubling, because of how strikingly it showed contempt for the will of the voters. Newsom was elected governor in 2018 by almost 2-1, 63% to 32%. The recall petition attacked him for not having a Republican agenda, and only found traction because of frustrations over COVID-19 restrictions — restrictions that probably saved tens of thousands of lives. Gascón won by a narrower, but still substantial margin (53.7% to 46.3%) against a well-funded incumbent (the first to lose since 1992) backed by more than $5 million from the law enforcement establishment. It was an unmistakable rejection of the status quo, made possible by years of grassroots organizing, supercharged by Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in March 2020. Now, Gascón also faces a recall for not embracing the agenda he defeated at the polls.
“The people that are supporting the recall are not interested in public safety,” Gascón said on NPR’s Air Talk on June 24. “They want me to put kids in adult prison. They would like to see the gas chamber back again. They want to see the death penalty working. They’re really interested in punishment as opposed to safety.”
To understand the recall, Gascón urged people to follow the money.
“When you look at the funding on the organization, what you’re seeing is very conservative right-wing people, much like we see in other parts of the country, trying to undo the results of an election,” Gascón said.
Gascón went on to cite Palmer, as well as former District Attorney Steve Cooley and police unions.
“So it is very clear a) what they want and b) where it’s coming from,” he said. “And, it’s not about safety, it’s about punishment.”
Indeed, the idea that crime victims and their families want punishment is just another lie. Some do, of course — and the recall campaign highlights them, as if they speak for everyone. Tania Owen, a recall campaign co-chair is a prominent example. Her husband was murdered in 2016, but she’s not your typical survivor. Her husband was a sergeant in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, and she herself is a detective in the department, as well as a public speaker who’s made a second career based on her identity — primarily speaking to law enforcement audiences, according to her website. So, she’s a victim, yes. But hardly a representative one. She’s far more representative of law enforcement — the part of law enforcement that’s bitterly opposed to any change.
A more representative view can be found in a survey of 724 LA County crime victims (including families of murder victims) by David Binder Research, conducted in early February. It found that “few get victim support services,” and “Most say they were not informed about these services, and majorities say they would have wanted services they did not receive,” thus giving the lie to the notion that the existing system prioritizes victims’ welfare, interests and concerns.
The survey report went on to say:
Most violent crime victims want changes to the criminal justice system that emphasize rehabilitation and crime prevention, rather than more incarceration. Large majorities support policies to shift resources away from incarceration and invest in prevention, rehabilitation, and support services. Asked about criminal justice preferences, the vast majority of violent crime victims support community-based victim services, mental health crisis response, and violence prevention outreach workers as well as alternatives to incarceration and reducing sentences for people in prison that participate in rehabilitation.
When asked specifically, “Which of the following should be a prosecutor’s primary goal?” only 25% said “Prosecuting crimes to get as many convictions and prison sentences as possible,” while 69% said, “Solving neighborhood problems and stopping repeat crimes through prevention and rehabilitation, even if it means fewer convictions.”
What crime victims want is well supported by the data that Gascón points to as guiding his policies. In fact, the evidence goes even farther in some respects. A 2015 study based on data from Harris County, Texas (home to Houston), from 1980 to 2009, found that “incarceration generates net increases in the frequency and severity of recidivism, worsens labor market outcomes, and strengthens dependence on public assistance.” In short, sending someone to prison makes them more likely, not less, to commit future crimes. This makes perfect sense, if prisons act more like schools for criminals than places of rehabilitation.
In addition, a March 2021 study based on data from Suffolk County, Massachusetts (Boston), from 2004 to 2018, found that “non-prosecution of a non-violent misdemeanor offense leads to large reductions in the likelihood of a new criminal complaint over the next two years.” So, even prosecuting someone makes them more likely, not less, to commit future crimes.
Recall proponents blame Gascón for increased crime in Los Angeles County, but it’s hardly credible, he told AirTalk.
“I have been in office for six months,” he pointed out. “And, actually, the day after I was sworn in, the recall process began and they were told they’d have to wait 90 days. You could hardly say that my policies are causing an increase in crime when you look at the last seven years of increase in violent crime in the county, the spike in homicides last year, and I’ve only been in office for six months.”
There’s also been violent crime increases across the country since last summer. But here, as elsewhere, the recent rise still leaves crime rates well below what they were 15 or 20 years ago, before California began reversing its tough-on-crime policies.
The county’s top cop, Sheriff Alex Villanueva, has joined the recall effort, but Villanueva himself has been severely criticized over allegations of excessive force, retaliation, lack of transparency and mismanagement. This past October, the Los Angeles County Civilian Oversight Commission called for him to resign, the next month the Board of Supervisors began investigating how they might fire him, and in January, the state launched a civil rights investigation. In early June, the County Democratic Party also called for his resignation.
In the Air Talk interview, Gascón said that Villanueva’s opposition came after he refused to join the sheriff’s “crusade targeting all his political enemies.” More than a dozen smaller cities served by the Sheriff’s Department have since endorsed the recall, apparently relying on Villanueva-generated propaganda. His opposition has also been promoted by Epoch Times, a pro-Trump conspiracist media outlet run by the Chinese Falun Gong religious cult. Fox News has also played a role, promoting unrepresentative “crime victim representatives,” so the recall campaign has all the hallmarks of a typical Trump-era GOP operation.
So, if the majority of Americans want Scandinavian/European healthcare, schools, unions, wages and taxes-on-the-rich, why don’t we have these things?
Some time back a woman living in Sweden, “Caroline” @SweResistance on Twitter, posted a thread that said:
“I live in Sweden. We have social security, affordable health care, strict gun laws, 5 weeks paid annual leave, 1 year maternity leave, etc.
“For example, health care can cost a maximum of around $130 per year for visits to health care centrals etc., hospital nights costs $12 per night with a $175 roof per month. Prescription drugs have a yearly roof of $250.”
Sweden is a democratic republic that practices an economic system often referred to as “democratic socialism” or “social democracy.” Although Karl Marx popularized the word “socialism” in 1848 to describe his proposed utopian economic/political system, outside of the realm of Marxists and rightwing cranks, Marx’s system is usually today referred to as “communism” and “socialist” is the modern tag used to describe countries like Sweden.
As such, it’s describing an economic system made possible by the political system of democracy. Swedes have what they have because the majority of their population has repeatedly voted for politicians who promised to put democratic socialism into place.
And it’s not just Sweden. Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland have remarkably similar systems in place, and the rest of the European Union isn’t far behind.
Nobody in any of those countries, including the entire EU, will ever, for example, go bankrupt because of medical debt, something that happens to over a million American families every single year.
Nobody who has the ability and wants to go to college or trade school is turned down and, outside of a few private universities, education is not just free or very cheap in most all of Europe but many countries pay a subsidy or monthly stipend to students to cover the cost of rent, food and books.
Swedes and the residents of most of the rest of Europe have voted for democratic socialism because their political system is largely open, voting is not restricted, and wealthy interests find it much harder to corrupt politicians than here in the US.
As the Nordic Council of Ministers notes on their website about, for example, Sweden: “Everyone who is entitled to vote and who is registered in the Population Register in Sweden is automatically included on the electoral roll (röstlängden) and receives a voter card by post.”
This is true of all the Nordic countries and most of the rest of Europe: if you’re a citizen you’re automatically enrolled to vote when you turn 18 and voting is super-easy whether it’s done at a polling place or by mail.
Here in America, the majority of people would very much like an economic system like Europeans have, particularly the Scandinavians.
A recent Harris poll asked, “Do you support a proposal that would make public colleges, universities and trade schools free for all and cancel all student debt?” Americans said “Yes” by a 58% to 42% margin.
Europeans enjoy higher wages and radically less income and wealth inequality than Americans for two main reasons:
Second, taxes in Europe in general, and Scandinavia in particular, are often above 50% on the morbidly rich and many countries have an added annual wealth tax on the billions those same people have accumulated.
The answer is actually pretty straightforward: “Conservative” billionaires and the Supreme Court they created.
Ever since Lewis Powell wrote his 1971 Memo on how the morbidly rich could seize total political and cultural control of America — and Richard Nixon put him on the Supreme Court the following year — rightwing billionaires have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get their people on the Supreme Court, elect “conservatives” to Congress and in state legislatures, and influence public opinion.
In 1976, Powell’s Supreme Court in Buckley v Valero ruled that when billionaires pour so much money down the throats of individual politicians that they essentially own them, that’s not bribery or corruption as we’d thought of it since 1776 — instead, it’s First Amendment-protected “free speech.” Two years later, in First National Bank v Bellotti 1978, the Court ruled the same was true of corporations, and doubled down on both decisions in 2010 with Citizens United.
By the Reagan Revolution of 1980, the GOP had been entirely subsumed by the money of the morbidly rich and big corporations, and in the 1990s quite a few elected Democrats joined their ranks (and continue to support them by opposing ending the filibuster, for example).
“[These Supreme Court decisions] violate the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”
“Conservative,” though, doesn’t just describe people who want to use their riches to own politicians who will, in turn, keep their taxes low by depriving the American people of the “nice things” we’d mostly all like to have. It also describes racist white supremacists both among the conservative billionaire class and the Republican base.
It was “conservatives” who fought against the abolition of slavery prior to the Civil War, and who fought every attempt at Reconstruction or Civil Rights legislation from 1865 to today. They did so in the name of “conservative principles,” which white supremacists have fought to preserve since the founding of our republic.
And one of the main ways they maintain their political power is by using a system unique to America, started after the failure of Reconstruction in 1872, of “selectively registering” voters, “purging voter lists,” and putting up barriers to reduce voting by anybody who’s not white.
To maintain white supremacy post-1872, most states developed elaborate systems requiring “undesirable” people to jump through multiple hoops to register to vote, to vote, and even to ensure their votes are counted and they can stay on the voter rolls. This Jim Crow vestige of Confederate ideology now pollutes our ability to vote in most of our states.
No European country has anything that even vaguely resembles this byzantine labyrinth people must navigate to become eligible to vote and have their vote counted.
Meanwhile, as Lee Fang reported, Republican politicians and the billionaires who own them are now dropping any pretense at all to caring about the fate and future of our country’s fiscal health, so long as they get their tax cuts now.
Conservative billionaires, who know if we can all vote we’ll soon raise their taxes and give ourselves healthcare, education and good pay, are funding voter suppression efforts in every state in the union as well as challenging voting rights at the Supreme Court.
This is also why they fund rightwing TV & radio networks and “news” websites to freak out white people about “Black Lives Matter and Antifa” so the white majority in America will be so terrified of Black and Brown people they’ll keep putting corporate- and billionaire-shills into office.
Most Democrats in Congress, impeded both by Republicans and a few of their own members who’ve sold out to these dark-money interests, are trying to break the stranglehold conservative billionaires have on American politics through their dark money.
The For The People Act takes a good first step in this direction, although reshaping the Supreme Court itself is probably going to ultimately be necessary to break dark money’s stranglehold on our political system.
If we ever want to have the “nice things” enjoyed by average Scandinavians and Europeans, it’s going to take one huge lift to break the filibuster and get legislation like the For The People Act into law.
Modern democracy began in 1789 in America, but “conservatives” have fought a truly multiracial democracy every step of the way, particularly as low-wage workers and racial minorities have struggled to gain equal representation and equal rights.
It’s a tragic commentary that countries like Sweden that initially emulated us have now become more “free” than we have…just because rightwing billionaires here have so successfully mobilized racism as a political strategy.
Americans deserve better, and the only thing standing in the way is a group of billionaires who’d rather shoot themselves into outer space than let unions into their workplaces or pay reasonable taxes…and can pay politicians and stack our courts with racist judges to keep it that way.
Chime, a “neobank” serving millions, is racking up complaints from users who can’t access their cash. The company says it’s cracking down on an “extraordinary surge” in fraudulent deposits. That’s little consolation to customers caught in the fray.
The day after Jonathan Marrero’s federal stimulus payment landed in his bank account, he took his 5-year-old twins out for lunch at an Applebee’s near where he lives in New Jersey. When he went to pay, his only means of payment, a debit card issued by the hot financial technology startup Chime, was declined.
He didn’t understand why. Marrero had checked his account earlier that day and saw a balance of nearly $10,000. With the Applebee’s server standing next to him, he quickly pulled out his phone to check his Chime app, just as he had hundreds of times since he signed up in January.
Marrero couldn’t log in. He immediately checked his email and found a message from Chime that read, “We regret to inform you that we have made the decision to end our relationship with you at this time. Your spending account will be closed on March 18, 2021.”
Read more at: https://www.propublica.org/article/chime?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailynewsletter&utm_content=feature
OAKLAND, CA. — Most of the media coverage of the recent Supreme Court decision about the farmworker access rule took for granted the way growers, and the court, defined this regulation. Jess Bravin in the Wall Street Journal called it “a regulation giving union organizers the right to visit farmworkers.” The first line of the rightwing majority’s opinion called it “A California regulation [which] grants labor organizations a ‘right to take access’ to an agricultural employer’s property.”
The court, and the growers, deliberately confuse the mechanism of the rule with rights, calling it a right of organizers or organizations. It is not. The right the rule implements is simple. When workers are protesting and organizing a union in the fields, they have a right to talk to union representatives at work. It’s a right of workers, rather than a right of union representatives. Rolling back this right, and the ability of farmworkers to organize against their endemic poverty, is the main target of the Supreme Court’s attack.
At Cedar Point Nursery, the grower that filed the case heard by the court, the stakes were clear. Cedar Point is a nursery growing rootstock for commercial strawberry growers in Dorris, a remote town in northern California near the Oregon border. Hundreds of workers migrate here from their homes in central and southern California every year to harvest, trim and pack the plants.
In 2015 Cedar Point laborers walked out to protest conditions that included, according to worker Jessica Rodriguez, low wages, dirty bathrooms, and harassment from supervisors. They called the United Farm Workers, which sent organizers and implemented the access rule to talk with them on the property. The strike lasted for just a day, and after the strikers returned to their jobs, the organizing effort fizzled out. No election was ever held to begin the process of trying to get a contract.
What happened at Cedar Point is not unusual. The following spring in McFarland, in the densely farmed San Joaquin Valley, hundreds of workers struck the blueberry fields of Gourmet Trading over similar issues. Support for the organizing was overwhelming. They called the UFW after they’d struck. Once they returned to work the union filed for access, and workers held meetings after work at the ranch. They voted for the union a few days later, and today they work under a union contract.
In 1996, during a huge campaign to organize the strawberry industry in Watsonville, UFW organizers visited picking crews in dozens of fields. They taped butcher paper on the walls of the portapotties during lunchtime meetings. Strawberry workers wrote down their demands for raising some of the lowest wages in agriculture, and planned marches to the company offices to announce them.
In all these cases the access rule provided a way for workers to understand the organizing process and get help with it. Farmworkers need this because of the nature of the work. They are often migrants, working in a harvest in one area of California although they live in another. Cedar Point’s workers lived hundreds of miles from Dorris, and during the work season slept in motel rooms and temporary housing. At Gourmet Trading some pickers traveled an hour or more to get to the field every day. Those distances make it hard-and sometimes impossible-for people to meet with union organizers at home.
According to the Handbook of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which administers California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act, “The access regulations … are meant to insure that farm workers, who often may be contacted only at their work place, have an opportunity to be informed with minimal interruption of working activities.”
Organizing a union is a collective process. Workers need to talk with each other about it. When the Pacific Legal Foundation argued the Cedar Point case in 2017 before the Ninth District of the U.S. Court of Appeals, and lost, its attorney Wen Fa asserted, “All the workers live in houses or hotels. Many have cellphones.” Even if this were true, forming or joining a union at work is not like buying insurance. It is something people do together.
When organizing starts, and workers and the union announce they want an election, California’s labor law says voting must take place within a week (within 48 hours if there’s a strike) because the work only lasts as long as the season. The law requires the grower to furnish a list of names and addresses, but according to longtime organizer and former UFW vice-president Eliseo Medina, “those lists are notoriously bad.”
During the UFW campaign to organize grape pickers for the huge VBZ grower in Delano, organizer Yolanda Serna talks to workers eating lunch under the vines. (2007)
For the tens of thousands of H-2A guest workers brought to California by growers every year, home visits are often forbidden in their company housing. “H-2A workers are even more impacted by losing the access rule,” Medina charges. “They don’t have the legal right to organize and they’re living in housing under the growers’ 24-hour control.”
But the most important thing about the access rule is that it demonstrates that the grower doesn’t have absolute power at work. As an organizer for the UFW in the 1970s, and now as a journalist, I’ve seen what normally happens in the fields when workers start to organize. The crew foreman usually begins talking all day about how terrible the union is. He makes threats: if people join the union they’re going to be fired or the company is going to move its crop production elsewhere.
Supervisors buzz around the field in their pickup trucks, watching everyone and making sure the workers know they’re being watched. Very often the company hires union busters. They talk to workers, while they’re working, as long as workers are in that field.
When union organizers come into the field at lunchtime, it shows that the union has power too, and can actually change things. That’s really why growers hate the rule – because it’s a limitation on their power. According to Medina, “It gives people confidence that change is possible.”
Growers hated the rule because it made organizing easier, and called it a “taking.” In an important way it is. Unspoken in the Supreme Court decision is that the real damage growers suffer is that farmworker wages will go up if organizing is successful. If the access rule helps them, it will cost the growers money.
That’s not a respectable argument, though, even for rightwing lawyers and justices. Instead Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Wen Fa claimed (and the Supreme Court agreed) that access damages growers’ property rights. Property rights trump the right of workers to organize. The majority opinion asserts, “No traditional background principle of property law requires the growers to admit union organizers onto their premises.”
However, William Gould III, former chair of both the National Labor Relations Board and the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, says the access rule creates “a kind of public forum where everyone is congregated [that] is vital to union organizing efforts and our public policy which supports them.”
He warns that the impact of the court’s decision will not be confined to farmworker organizing. “One of the Courts casualties,” Gould charges, “may well be the constitutionality of legislation [the PRO Act] passed by the House in Washington, pending before the Senate, which would give expanded access to reply to employer captive audience speeches filled with anti-union propaganda on company time and property.”
While the PRO Act’s passage is far from certain, the sights of growers and the Pacific Legal Foundation are also trained on a target closer to home. The Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, another rightwing legal think tank that filed an amicus brief in the Cedar Point case, has been trying to knock out another key provision of California’s farm labor law: mandatory mediation. Under this procedure, when workers vote for a union and the grower won’t agree to a contract, the ALRB can appoint a mediator to craft a settlement. That can then be adopted by the board and imposed on the grower as a first contract.
The Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence supported a challenge to mandatory mediation by Gerawan Farming, Inc. In 2017 the California Supreme Court ruled against Gerawan, and held the process constitutional. It would not be unlikely to see growers take a challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking a decision upholding property rights. Ultimately, the Agricultural Labor Relations Act itself could either be taken off the books, or, as it was in the 1980s, rendered so weak as to be virtually useless to farmworkers and farmworker unions.
Aquiles Hernandez, an indigenous Mixtec farmworker, was a teacher and union activist in Mexico. He became an organizer for the United Farm Workers, and informed Mixtec-speaking workers at Gourmet Trading about their labor rights at lunchtime, during the access period. (2016)
In 1975, when California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the UFW had a big impact on the wages and working conditions of California farmworkers. At that time the base wage in a union contract was about two and a half times the minimum wage. At the end of the 70s the union had 40,000 members paying dues at any given time. During those years, when I was an organizer for the union, we’d won elections to represent about 160,000 workers.
That’s not the case today. In her defense of the access rule, ALRB attorney Victoria Shahid argued that it was not used often enough to impose a real burden on growers. In 2015, she noted, the UFW only used the access rule on 62 of California’s 16,000 farms.
The decline in the union’s strength has had a direct impact on the living standards of farmworkers. Today their wages hover around the minimum wage. Each year growers bring a mushrooming number of H-2A guest workers into the state’s fields. “Even undocumented workers have more rights than H-2A workers,” Medina charges. In this context, eroding the right of farmworkers to organize will have immediate consequences.
For the UFW and other unions trying to rebuild their strength in the fields, access has been a very important tool. On the ALRB’s current agenda is an access request filed by the Teamsters Union to go onto the property of a cannabis grower. Workers in the industry today are organizing rapidly, and unions use access to go into the greenhouses to talk with them.
Losing the access rule is not going to stop farmworkers from organizing in California and elsewhere-or stop unions from helping them. That is the key to raising their wages and fighting this country’s epidemic of rural poverty. Farmworkers were not helped, however, by the relative silence of the labor movement in the face of this attack on their rights. And because other workers need these same rights desperately-to access and mandatory mediation-the labor movement’s silence hurts their efforts as well.
The Supreme Court may have made a predictable decision in the Cedar Point case. But a much more vocal and militant response can and should push hard to force its rightwing majority to retreat. Start with the question the court so artfully dodged – when growers enforce poverty for the country’s 2.5 million farmworkers, who is “taking” from whom?
The two biggest cities on the shores of Lake Erie are now centers of political upheaval. For decades, Buffalo and Cleveland have suffered from widespread poverty and despair in the midst of urban decay. Today, the second-largest cities in New York and Ohio are battlegrounds between activists fighting for progressive change and establishment forces determined to prevent it.
For Buffalo’s entrenched leaders, a shocking crisis arrived out of the blue on June 22 when socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary for mayor, handily defeating a 15-year incumbent with a deplorable track record. “I am a coalition builder,” Walton said in her victory speech that night. But for the city’s power brokers, she was a sudden disaster.
“This is organizing,” Walton said as rejoicing supporters cheered. “When we organize, we win. Today is only the beginning. From the very start, I said this is not about making India Walton mayor of Buffalo — this is about building the infrastructure to challenge every damn seat. I’m talking about committee seats, school board, county council. All that we are doing in this moment is claiming what is rightfully ours. We are the workers. We do the work. And we deserve a government that works with and for us.”
To the people running City Hall, the 38-year-old victor seemed to come out of nowhere. Actually, she had come out of grassroots activism and a campaign that focused on key issues like “food access,” “pandemic recovery,” education, climate, housing and public safety. And for corporate elites accustomed to having their hands on Buffalo’s levers of power, there would not be a GOP fallback. Mayor Byron Brown had appeared to be such a shoo-in for a fifth term that no Republican bothered to run, so India Walton will be the only name on the November ballot.
Alarm sirens went off immediately after election night. The loudest and most prominent came from wealthy (net worth $150 million) real-estate developer Carl Paladino, a strident Trump supporter and former Republican nominee for governor, who became notorious in 2016 for racist public comments about Michelle and Barack Obama. Walton’s victory incensed Paladino, who made it clear that he vastly preferred the black incumbent to the black challenger. “I will do everything I can to destroy her candidacy,” Paladino said, and he urged fellow business leaders in Buffalo to unite behind Brown as a write-in candidate.
In tacit alliance with Paladino while keeping him at arm’s-length, Brown announced on Monday evening that he will mount a write-in campaign to stay in the mayor’s office. Brown cited among his mayoral achievements “the fact that the tax rate in Buffalo is the lowest it’s been in over 25 years.” Then he began scaremongering.
“I have also heard from voters that there is tremendous fear that has spread across this community,” Brown said. “People are fearful about the future of our city. They are fearful about the future of their families. They are fearful about the future of their children. And they have said to me that they do not want a radical socialist occupying the mayor’s office in Buffalo City Hall. You know, we know the difference between socialism and democracy. We are going to fight for democracy in the city of Buffalo. The voters have said that they don’t want an unqualified inexperienced radical socialist trying to learn on the job on the backs of the residents of this community. We will not let it happen. It will not stand.”
Such attacks, with McCarthyite echoes of Trumpism, are likely to be at the core of Brown’s strategy for winning the general election. But he’ll be in conflict with the formal apparatus of his party in Buffalo. After the write-in campaign announcement, the chair of the Erie County Democratic Party issued an unequivocal statement about India Walton, “to strongly affirm once again that we are with her, now and through the general election in the fall.” It added: “Last Tuesday, India proved she has the message and the means to move and inspire the people of Buffalo. It was a historic moment in Western New York politics. The voters heard her message and embraced her vision for the city’s future, and we look forward to working with her and her team to cross that final finish line on November 2.”
Two hundred miles away, in northeast Ohio, the clash between progressives and corporatists has been escalating for several months, ever since Rep. Marcia Fudge left a congressional seat vacant when she became President Biden’s HUD secretary. Early voting begins next week, and the district is so heavily Democratic that the winner of the Aug. 3 primary is virtually certain to fill the vacancy this fall.
On Tuesday, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, Rep. Jim Clyburn, went out of his way to be emphatic that he doesn’t want the frontrunner in the race, progressive stalwart Nina Turner, to become a colleague in Congress. Though nominally endorsing Turner’s main opponent, Shontel Brown, the clear underlying message was: Stop Turner.
Clyburn went beyond just making an endorsement. He provided some barbed innuendos via an interview with the New York Times, which reported comments that say something about Clyburn’s self-concept but nothing really about Turner. “What I try to do is demonstrate by precept and example how we are to proceed as a party,” he said. “When I spoke out against sloganeering, like ‘Burn, baby, burn’ in the 1960s and ‘defund the police,’ which I think is cutting the throats of the party, I know exactly where my constituents are. They are against that, and I’m against that.”
In fact, Democrats are overwhelmingly in favor of programs being championed by Turner, none more notably than Medicare for All, a proposal that Clyburn and many of his big funders have worked so hard to block. “Clyburn has vacuumed in more than $1 million from donors in the pharmaceutical industry — and he previously made headlines vilifying Medicare for All during the 2020 presidential primary,” the Daily Poster pointed out on Wednesday.
The corporate money behind Clyburn is of a piece with the forces arrayed against Turner. What she calls “the commodification of health care” is a major reason.
In mid-June, Turner “launched her television spot entitled ‘Worry,’ in which she talks about how her family’s struggle to pay health care bills led her to support Medicare for All,” the Daily Poster reported. “The very next day, corporate lobbyists held a Washington fundraiser for Turner’s primary opponent, Shontel Brown. Among those headlining the fundraiser was Jerome Murray — a registered lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers Association, which has been backing a nationwide campaign to reduce support for Medicare for All.”
Whether Clyburn’s endorsement will have significant impact on the voting is hard to say, but it signaled that high-ranking Democrats are more determined than ever to keep Turner out of Congress if they possibly can. His move came two weeks after Hillary Clinton endorsed Brown, who has also received endorsements from the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Joyce Beatty, and the chief deputy whip of House Democrats, Rep. Pete Aguilar. On the other hand, a dozen progressive members of the House have endorsed Turner, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Carmen Yulín Cruz, the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico — who, like Nina Turner, was a national co-chair of the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign — is a strong supporter of Turner for Congress. This week, summing up the fierce opposition from power brokers who want to prevent a Turner victory, Cruz used words that equally apply to the powerful interests trying to prevent India Walton from becoming the next mayor of Buffalo: “They’re afraid of a politician that can’t be bought.”
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Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
The West Marine US Open Sailing Series continues the summer swing through California this week in Long Beach, one of the nation’s most popular sailing locations.
The site of the Olympic Sailing competition for the 2028 LA Games will be in the spotlight as sailors in eight classes will race over three days on July 9 to 11. Men and women sailors will be racing the 29er, Finn, Foiling Kite, iQFoil, ILCA 7, ILCA 6, ILCA 4, and Nacra 17.
West Marine US Open Sailing Series – Long Beach is hosted by Alamitos Bay Yacht Club, Long Beach Yacht Club, and the US Sailing Center Long Beach. The regatta will be sailed in the waters of San Pedro Bay off Long Beach.
The West Marine US Open Sailing Series launched in January 2021 in Florida with events at major sailing venues in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and Clearwater. The series resumed in San Diego on June 12 – 13 and racing was conducted in five classes. Read the Recap from San Diego.
Following the stop in Long Beach, the series continues up the California coastline to San Francisco on August 13 to 15.
Mike Van Dyke, Rear Commodore of the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club and Event Co-Chair, discussed the Olympic Sailing legacy in the Long Beach area. “Southern California has a long legacy of producing Olympic and Paralympic athletes. Due to the weather and the almost year-round ability to train, the presence of youth development organizations, like CISA, promoting pathways to international and Olympic competition, we continue to be a hub for those with Olympic aspirations.”
