LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles County’s homeless services system, expanded and enhanced by Measure H and other investments, helped 72,815 people exit homelessness into permanent housing and placed 85,734 people into interim housing over a span of four years, according to a recently released independent report by Public Sector Analytics.
The report directly attributed 42 percent of those permanent housing placements and 60 percent of those interim housing placements to strategies developed and overseen by the LA County Homeless Initiative and funded in whole or in part by Measure H, a quarter-cent sales tax dedicated to preventing and combating homelessness.
Created by the Board of Supervisors in August 2015, the Homeless Initiative announced its initial set of strategies in February 2016, initially funded by a one-time allocation of $100 million. Voters approved Measure H about a year later, in March 2017, though its projected $355-million annual revenue stream did not start until October 2017. The Homeless Initiative includes many LA County departments, city governments, nonprofit homeless service providers and other partners who work together to implement strategies with Measure H funding.
The Public Sector Analytics report is an annual performance evaluation of the Homeless Initiative, authored by Professors Halil Toros, Dennis Culhane and Stephen Metraux. Data from the first year of their study predated the passage of Measure H. The fourth year did not include data beyond the 2019-2020 Fiscal Year that ended in June 2020, and so, the report covers only the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report noted that annual Homeless Initiative permanent housing placements have increased by roughly 115 percent, from 4,583 in the first year to 9,857 in the fourth year. Meanwhile, the 14,804 Homeless Initiative interim housing placements recorded in the fourth year represent a 90 percent increase from the first year.
When accounting for the impact of Measure H, the report tallied a cumulative total of 25,050 Measure H-funded permanent housing placements over the three-year period since the revenue stream began, accounting for 44.5 percent of total permanent housing placements across the system during that period. Meanwhile, it tallied 46,407 Measure H-funded interim housing placements, or 66 percent of the total since the revenue stream began.
Despite the gains made by the homeless services system, LA County still has a shortage of 517,000 affordable housing units and more than 550,000 severely rent-burdened households who spend more than half of their income on housing, partly because wages have not kept pace with rents. A worker needs to earn $41.96 per hour — almost triple the minimum wage in the City of Los Angeles — to afford the average monthly asking rent of $2,182. Systemic racism and the economic conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic pose additional challenges.
Still, the report said the “Homeless Initiative continues to show progress in the placement of people experiencing homelessness in permanent housing” and welcomed the expected opening of thousands of permanent supportive housing units over the next few years.
SACRAMENTO – Building on previous efforts to protect local communities and vulnerable Californians from the impacts of utility-initiated power shutoffs, Gov. Gavin Newsom March 17, announced the distribution of an additional $50 million in Community Power Resiliency grants through the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES).
The funds released today were allocated through the 2020-21 state budget and are designed to maintain the continuity of critical services that can be impacted by power outages, including schools, county election offices, food storage reserves and COVID-19 testing sites.
The grants awarded by Cal OES were distributed to a total of 225 recipients, including all counties, 51 incorporated cities, 20 federally recognized tribes and 96 special districts, specifically:
$13 million to counties – Each county was allocated based on population. Each county is required to use at least 50 percent of their award to support PSPS resiliency for one or more of the following priority areas: schools, elections offices, food storage reserves and/or COVID-19 testing sites.
$13 million to cities – Cities were allowed to apply for up to $300,000 on a competitive basis. They are encouraged to allocate funds to one or more of the following priority areas: schools, election offices, food storage reserves and/or COVID-19 testing sites.
$2.5 million to California federally recognized tribes – Tribes were allowed to apply for up to $150,000 on a competitive basis.
$20 million to special districts – Special districts that have an identified critical facility or facilities, or provide critical infrastructure, pursuant to the de-energization guidelines adopted by the California Public Utilities Commission were allowed to apply for up to $300,000 on a competitive basis.
This is the second round of PSPS resiliency grants from successive budget cycles proposed by the Governor and supported by the Legislature. In FY19-20, the Legislature approved the Governor’s proposal to allocate $75 million in resiliency grants to counties, cities, tribes and state agencies. Over these two budget cycles, counties have received $39 million, cities have received $23 million, tribes have received $4 million, state agencies have received $37.5 million and special districts have received $20 million.
Since being elected, Governor Newsom has won critical safety victories from investor-owned utilities (IOUs) to make these utilities more accountable to the state and ensure wildfire safety and reliability are top priorities. All three large IOUs have taken steps to reduce the size and scope of public safety power shut offs by hardening infrastructure, reducing hazards through vegetation management, sectionalizing the grid so that smaller areas can be taken offline and improving weather monitoring technology and modeling.
Proposition 19 is a Constitutional amendment to Proposition 13 that allows seniors and the disabled to sell their home and buy a new one without experiencing an increase in property taxes. However, it also is a regressive policy that disproportionately impacts the ability of working-class and middle-income families to leave their homes to their children (and in some cases grandchildren) without them having to pay an increase in property taxes.
Since November 2020, my office has received scores of inquiries about this challenging new law and it’s important to understand the issues. To not put too fine a point on it, Prop. 19 may actually result in some working-class median-income families of modest means having to sell their homes and family farms as well as other property to avoid a new property tax burden because the property now faces reassessment.
Prop. 19 was approved by the voters last November by a slim margin and it is creating tremendous uncertainty and confusion among taxpayers and assessors statewide. To make matters worse, some of the most challenging provisions are already in effect as of February 16 before many property owners really understood its impacts. Many scrambled to address estate planning and family inheritance concerns before the February 16 deadline.
Let’s review: Under the pre-Prop. 19 law, parents (Proposition 58) and grandparents (Proposition 193) were able to transfer residential and commercial properties to their children and grandchildren without a tax hike because the homes would not be reassessed, allowing the original tax base to be carried over.
Between 60,000 to 80,000 property owners statewide had been embracing this tax savings annually, avoiding as much as $10 billion in assessed property value from reassessment, according to data from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
However, in 2018, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that Hollywood celebrities Beau and Jeff Bridges inherited a palatial Malibu home with access to a semi-private beach and panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean from their famous father, actor Lloyd Bridges of Sea Hunt fame. The Times investigation revealed the brothers rented the home for $16,000 a month, but retained their father’s annual tax property tax payment of about $5,000. This was possible because they inherited their parent’s home under Proposition 58 which has been informally referred to as the “Lebowski Loophole,” named for a character that actor Jeff Bridges played in a movie, 1998’s The Big Lebowski.
Many believe that this was an unfair use of Proposition 58 – the family inheritance law. Under Prop. 19, only a parent’s principal residence may be transferred to their children, and that home must then become the principal residence of the children/child within one-year of the transfer. This was intended to eliminate the “Lebowski Loophole.”
Although it certainly appears the intent of the measure was to eliminate the Lebowski Loophole for the wealthy, the measure does not just impact “the 1%” who benefitted from huge financial windfalls, it also impacts a broader range of the public and includes working-class and middle-income families whose family assets are often in the family home and perhaps other modest real estate investments. This places new stress on the ability to pass along new-found generational wealth.
The campaign for Prop. 19 stressed that the initiative would give much-needed assistance to seniors, the severely disabled and victims of fires and natural disasters, while simultaneously providing revenue for wildfire protection agencies and counties. Indeed, it was titled “The Home Protection for Seniors, Severely Disabled, Families, and Victims of Wildfire or Natural Disasters Act.” And it does have some positive aspects for seniors and the disabled.
However, as I previously mentioned, as of February 16th, parents and grandparents are no longer able to transfer property to their children or grandchildren without the possibility of an increase in property taxes.
There is a solution to this regressive tax, and that is to encourage the Legislature to draft legislation that will serve as a corrective Constitutional amendment to Prop. 19.
Such a corrective Constitutional amendment should aim restore the ability of families to leave their homes and other property to their children that was previously available under Proposition 58 since 1986.
In the meantime, I am working with the California Assessors’ Association and with state Legislators to enact legislation that will address the numerous deficiencies and ambiguities in Prop. 19. I must emphasize that absent legislative clarification, the implementation of Prop. 19 will be a significant challenge and create a great deal of confusion and uncertainty for both the public and administrators.
I will keep you posted as we move forward, but in the meantime, I encourage you to go to my website for the latest information regarding Proposition 19, assessor.lacounty.gov/prop 19.
For more information on Proposition 19 or other tax savings programs, visit assessor.lacounty.gov or call 213-974-3211.
Los Angeles County Assessor Jeff Prang has been in office since 2014. Upon taking office, Prang implemented sweeping reforms to ensure that the strictest ethical guidelines rooted in fairness, accuracy and integrity would be adhered to in his office, which is the largest office of its kind in the nation with 1,200 employees. It provides the foundation for a property tax system that generates over $17 billion annually.
LOS ANGELES — The State announced, March 15, the launch of a CA COVID-19 Rent Relief Program, intended to help income-eligible households pay rent and utilities, both for arrears and future payment. Supported by the Federal Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, the CA COVID-19 Rent Relief provides financial assistance to income-qualified tenants experiencing housing instability and provides rent reimbursement to landlords for unpaid rent accrued between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021.
The decision by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to Opt-In to the statewide program will offer a singular, uniform framework to be deployed throughout California and avoid unnecessary confusion about competing programs among residents. The Board is confident in the State’s selection of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) to serve as the lead agency in the County, tasked with bringing together ground-level partnerships with local communities to assist in the implementation of the program.
LISC will establish and manage the program’s expansive Local Partner Network with community-level partners to ensure that all regional geographies and target communities and tribes throughout California have access to the program.
The Board of Supervisors supports the efforts being brought forward by the State. To that end, the Los Angeles County Development Authority County or LACDA is working closely with the State and its partners to make sure the program will effectively enroll those households most impacted by COVID-19 and whose housing stability has been jeopardized by the pandemic. By partnering with established organizations in hardest hit communities, and continually working together to make the application process seamless, the State will provide person-centered and culturally relevant guidance to Californians most in need of rent relief.
The LACDA will remain actively engaged with the State throughout the rent relief deployment process to provide guidance and technical assistance given the agency’s extensive experience deploying multiple rent relief programs within the past year.
Resources and application information are available at HousingIsKey.com. A CA COVID-19 Rent Relief call center is available to get help answering eligibility questions, for application assistance, and to provide information on local assistance. The call center may be reached by calling 833-430-2122 between 7 am and 7 pm daily.
CARSON -Registration begins today, March 15th, for a Thursday March 18th vaccination clinic at the Carson Community Center, only for LA County residents 65 and older.
First dose of the Pfizer vaccine provided at this clinic and the second dose will be scheduled. All COVID-19 vaccinations are free of charge. Pre-registration is required and begins today. Supplies and appointments are limited.
Please bring a copy of a photo ID and a copy of your health insurance card to your appointment (if you are insured).
Free taxi rides with Yellow Cab for Carson residents to vaccination appointments (gratuity not included): Call 888-677-8863
On March 12, the State announced 2 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered to people in the most under-resourced communities across the state which now allows L.A. County to move to the less restrictive red tier.
The Los Angeles County Health Officer Order has been updated today to closely align with the State’s reopening framework and reflect the changes allowed in the red tier. Additional safety modifications are required or recommended for certain sectors. The changes go into effect today.
The modifications to the Health Officer Order include the following:
Museums, Zoos and Aquariums can open indoors at 25% capacity.
Gyms, Fitness Centers, Yoga and Dance Studios can open indoors at 10% capacity with masking requirements for all indoor activities.
Movie Theatres can open indoors at 25% capacity with reserved seating only where each group is seated with at least 6 feet of distance in all directions between any other groups.
Retail and Personal Care Services can increase capacity to 50% with masking required at all times and for all services.
Restaurants can open indoors at 25% max capacity under the following conditions: 8 feet distancing between tables; one household per table with a limit of 6 people; the HVAC system is in good working order and has been evaluated, and to the maximum extent possible ventilation has been increased. Public Health strongly recommends that all restaurant employees interacting with customers indoors are provided with additional masking protection (above the currently required face shield over face masks); this can be fit tested N95 masks, KN95 masks, or double masks and a face shield. In addition, Public Health strongly recommends that all employees working indoors are informed about and offered opportunities to be vaccinated. Outdoor dining can accommodate up to six people per table from 3 different households.
Indoor Shopping Malls can increase capacity to 50% with common areas remaining closed; food courts can open at 25% capacity adhering to the restaurant guidance for indoor dining.
Institutes of Higher Education can re-open all permitted activities with required safety modifications except for residential housing which remains under current restrictions for the Spring semester.
Schools are permitted to re-open for in-person instruction for students in grades 7-12 adhering to all state and county directives.
Private gatherings can occur indoors with up to 3 separate households, with masking and distancing required at all times. People who are fully vaccinated can gather in small numbers indoors with other people who are fully vaccinated without required masking and distancing.
Businesses must implement all the requirements in the sector specific Public Health protocols. It is critical that directives and infection protocols are followed to minimize COVID-19 spread as much as possible. The comprehensive protocols for all sectors that reopen has been posted online.
Public Health March 12, confirmed 101 new deaths and 947 new cases of COVID-19. To date, Public Health identified 1,208,913 positive cases of COVID-19 across all areas of L.A. County and a total of 22,404 deaths.
To date, nearly 2,742,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered across the county. Of those vaccinated, 899,527 people have received second doses. The week of March 15, Public Health expects to receive 260,000 doses of vaccine, approximately 60,000 less than it received this week. The vaccine supply next week once again falls far short of the more than 600,000 doses that Public Health’s provider network is currently capable of delivering. Public Health will not receive the Johnson & Johnson vaccine next week, or the following week. It expects to begin receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine again at the end of the month.
The County continues to expand mobile vaccination services to better meet the needs of those in underserved communities. Beginning the week of March 15, county mobile teams will go out to 79 senior housing and senior services locations to provide vaccinations, approximately double the number of sites reached this week.
Custodians and janitors, public transit workers, and airport ground crew workers are all now eligible to be vaccinated. Emergency service workers including social workers who handle cases of violence, abuse or neglect and foster parents providing emergency housing for young people, are also eligible to be vaccinated.
In addition to the residents and workers already eligible for COVID-19 vaccine, on Monday, March 15, vaccine eligibility will open up to residents between the ages 16 through 64 who have underlying health conditions or disabilities that put them at the highest risk of becoming very sick from COVID-19. Providers and healthcare facilities are working to use their health record systems to identify patients who have these conditions and reach out to them so they can be vaccinated.
While the county has started vaccinating these high-risk groups, vaccine remains in very limited supply. For information about vaccine appointments in L.A. County and when your turn is coming up, to sign up for a vaccination newsletter, and much more, visit: www.VaccinateLACounty.com (English) and www.VacunateLosAngeles.com (Spanish). Vaccinations are always free and open to eligible residents and workers regardless of immigration status.
Ken Burns made his bones with uniquely styled long-form documentaries of epic sweep. The Civil War. Baseball. Jazz. His more recent contributions (often joined in the director’s chair by co-producer Lynn Novick) cover big topics like Prohibition, World War II, country music, and Vietnam.
Only once has he narrowed his focus to eponyms. But even that outlier, 2014’s The Roosevelts, used a spotlight broad enough to illuminate three separate characters — Teddy, Franklin, and Eleanor — spread out over two generations. By contrast, Burns/Novick’s newest opus is the first in their oeuvre to set its sights on a single individual. Not surprisingly, their subject is famous enough to be known by a single name: Hemingway.
Although he’s not history’s most famous English-language writer (Shakespeare’s not giving up the title anytime soon), only Mark Twain rivals Ernest Hemingway for wearing that crown on American soil; and Hemingway made a far more significant impact on the art of fiction, tacking away from the era’s cutting-edge modernism (practiced by the likes of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner) to form his own vanguard, a “terse, declarative style,” says Peter Coyote (a Burns/Novick staple) in voiceover, that “eliminated everything but what was necessary and strengthening.” With that style — which he himself said used only words that could be understood by anyone with a high-school education — Hemingway sold tens of millions of books, won a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize, and placed multiple works in the English literary canon.
But all this can be gleaned from Wikipedia. Burns/Novick’s big hook is Hemingway’s deeply flawed, highly idiosyncratic humanity, a bigger-than-life life with a scope almost as broad as any of the filmmakers’ earlier subjects.
Hemingway is told in three two-hour episodes. Among the life-defining tidbits covered in Episode 1 (“The Writer”) are a mother who sometimes dressed him as a girl, a depressive streak that eventually resulted in four suicides among his eight-member nuclear family, and a first newspaper job with a style sheet exhorting short sentences/paragraphs, “vigorous English,” and an avoidance of adjectives.
But much of the most striking Hemingway material is the treasure trove of photographic and film footage. Although most of us picture “Papa” as the paunchy, mustachioed, overly tan middle-aged man he would become, for his first quarter-century Hemingway was a clean-shaven, well-built youth with movie-star good looks. We even get a few frames of film featuring the handsome teenage ambulance driver in Italy during World War I.
By the end of Episode 1, Hemingway’s hard living is already catching up with him. But with The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and the feted short story collection In Our Time in his rearview mirror, at 30 he’s atop the literary world. Episode 2 (“The Avatar”) devotes much time exploring the mythological Hemingway, a myth largely of the man’s own making, even though the facts should have been more than enough: he was an active participant in no less than three wars (and displaced by a fourth). He covered the D-Day landing from a troop transport off the shore of Omaha Beach. He refereed boxing matches for fun. He survived two plane crashes in two days. Etc. Etc.
1935 Ernest Hemingway stands with sons on the docks at Bimini, Bahamas. (L-R) Patrick Hemingway, John “Bumby” Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway, and Gregory Hemingway. Key West Years, 1928-1937: Box 10 Folder 1. Photo by, “Photographer unknown. Papers of Ernest Hemingway. Photograph Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston”
To discuss Hemingway’s work, the filmmakers enlist a small array of scholars and authors Edna O’Brien, Tobias Woolf, and Mario Vargas Llosa. They’re all big fans — but not always of the same works. For example, whereas Llosa regards The Old Man and the Sea as Hemingway’s masterpiece, O’Brien labels it “adolescent,” “schoolboy writing.”
But perhaps the most poignant meditation on Hemingway’s output comes from John McCain, the senator and decorated war veteran who died in 2018. Although Llosa finds much of it laughable, McCain cites For Whom the Bell Tolls, the 1940 novel concerning an idealistic young American’s experience fighting against the fascists during the Spanish Civil War, as his all-time favorite book. “Robert Jordan [i.e., the protagonist] is as real to me as you are,” McCain says. “[…] I always wanted to be Robert Jordan.” He goes on to read a particularly personal passage that sends extra shivers considering how it comes to us now from beyond the grave: “‘The world is a fine place and very much worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.’”
No-one will mistake Hemingway for hagiography, discussing as it does his intermittent tendencies toward emotional cruelty and physical violence (including with his four wives), his lifelong “pleasure in killing [animals],” and a journalistic ethos that could be “despicably opportunistic,” such as his omitting all reference to Soviet atrocities during the Spanish Civil War for the sake of the angle he wanted for his articles.
For all that, Burns/Novick sometimes seem to shy away from just how ugly the truth could be. In examining Hemingway’s racism, for example, the filmmakers redact the word “nigger” from his correspondence and manuscripts — the kind of thing they never did in earlier docs, including The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, and as recently as 2017 in The Vietnam War.
Ernest, Mary on steps. Finca, Vigia.
A far more glaring sanitization, however, is Hemingway’s homophobia, which is completely ignored despite its seemingly obvious and deep-seated significance in a man renowned for desperate machismo while apparently repressing his own sexual ambiguity until late in life. You’d never know from Hemingway that the man said anything along the lines of what he wrote to close friend Bill Smith in 1925 [all of the following sic]: “[W]hen a male competes agin the fairy on his own grounds he loses out on acct. the fairy will do stuff to get on that a male is barred from. No Fairy ever starved nor was hungry. [… T]he Royal Road to quick Literary success is through the entrance to the colon. Gaw it disgusts a male. There’s a homosexual claque that make a guy overnight. Once in with the buggaring pooblic he’s made.”
Nonetheless, Hemingway well succeeds in exploring his complicated legacy and humanizing the man away from his myth. And for all his failings, even if (like me) you’re not really a fan of his work, it’s hard not to feel for the recent Nobel Prize-winner in Episode 3 (“The Blank Page”), just 55 but seeming decades older from a lifetime of alcohol abuse and numerous traumatic brain injuries, as he limps through one of his extremely rare on-camera interviews, so fractured that at times he actually enunciates the punctuation on the cue cards at his feet: “The book that I am writing on at present is about Africa, [pause] its people [pause] in the park that I know them, the animals, comma, and the changes [pause] in Africa since I was there last, period.”
Ernest Hemingway’s depiction of humanity, both faltering and triumphant, is the undeniably great part of his artistry. Likewise, it’s the exploration of the author’s own complex humanity that makes Hemingway worth every minute of its six-hour runtime. And knowing about his sad end before beginning the miniseries makes it all the more affecting. “Everybody knows life is a tragic show, i.e., born here, die there,” Hemingway wrote as a young man. Between here and there was quite a life.
The three-part miniseries Hemingway — featuring the vocal talents of Jeff Daniels, Meryl Streep, Keri Russell, Mary-Louise Parker, and Patricia Clarkson — premieres 8–10pm April 5, 6 and 7 on PBS.
Rahm Emanuel has never been associated with the word “diplomatic,” but news reports say that President Biden is seriously considering him for a top position as U.S. ambassador to Japan or China. Naming Emanuel to such a post would be an affront to many of the constituencies that got Biden elected. The saga of Emanuel’s three decades in politics is an epic tale of methodical contempt for progressive values.
One thing Emanuel can’t be accused of is inconsistency. During his political career, he has steadily served elite corporate interests, and rarely the interests of the broad public or the causes of racial justice or peace.
Emanuel rose to prominence as the finance director for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. He excelled at pulling in large checks from super-wealthy individuals. As a high-level Clinton administration aide, he played a major role — and bragged about it — in the passage of the disastrous NAFTA trade bill, which was strongly opposed by unions, environmentalists and most Democrats in Congress. He also was a spark plug for passage of the mass incarceration-oriented 1994 Crime Bill, with prison term-lengthening provisions like “three strikes.”
In 1996, Emanuel boasted to a Washington Post reporter of the administration’s “tough” policies on “wedge issues — crime, welfare, and recently immigration.” In a memo that year, he urged Clinton to move rightward on immigration policy by working to “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” The next year, Emanuel’s approach was explained by a senior staffer at the Immigration and Naturalization Service who worked closely with him: “As long as we dealt with illegal immigration, we could be to the right of Atilla the Hun. Rahm felt that Americans believed too many people were coming into this country, too many foreigners, so he wanted to show the administration returning people, deporting them, putting up bigger fences, sending them back.”
In July 1996, the Republican-controlled Congress pushed through its punitive “welfare reform” bill that ended the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, added work requirements and gave states the power to slash support. In the intense White House debate over whether to sign the bill, Emanuel was one of the strongest voices urging Bill Clinton not to veto the bill, as the president had done with earlier GOP welfare bills. Clinton signed the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996,” prompting an outcry from anti-poverty activists and high-level administration resignations.
After leaving the Clinton administration in 1998, Emanuel made a quick $18 million in two and a half years as managing director of the Wall Street investment bank Wasserstein Perella, working out of its Chicago office.
Elected to Congress in November 2002, Emanuel supported George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq invasion, and defended the war after most Democrats in Congress and most of the public had turned against it. As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, Emanuel seemed oblivious to the change in public opinion. While he took credit for Democrats regaining the House majority, his selection of right-leaning candidates, including Iraq war supporters like himself and former Republicans, ultimately led to GOP gains.
While serving as President Obama’s chief of staff in 2009 and 2010, Emanuel argued for mollifying healthcare reform opponents by significantly weakening Obamacare. (He acknowledged years later it was a good thing Obama didn’t listen to him.) In a 2010 meeting with liberal leaders who planned to publicly pressure the Democratic Party’s conservative wing into supporting healthcare reform, Emanuel famously called them “fucking retarded.”
Emanuel was known in D.C. for hyper-combativeness (earning him the nickname “Rahmbo”) and his ability to gain positive spin from corporate media: “He is on a first-name basis with every political reporter in Washington,” a Washington Post columnist asserted.
After being elected mayor of Chicago in 2011, Emanuel’s administration faced a series of scandals that included concerted warfare against the teachers’ union and the closing of 49 public schools, many in black neighborhoods.
In his 2015 bid for re-election, he was forced into a runoff by progressive challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a contest that would be decided largely by African American voters. Emanuel very likely would have lost the election except for the fact that for 13 months, through the duration of the campaign, his administration suppressed a horrific dashcam video showing the death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, an African American who’d been shot 16 times by a police officer as he walked away from the officer. (The city had paid $5 million to McDonald’s family without a lawsuit having been filed.)
Soon after a judge ordered the city of Chicago to release the video, polls found that only 17 percent of Chicagoans believed Emanuel when he said he’d never seen the video and that most city residents wanted him to resign as mayor.
When it was reported last November that Biden was considering him for a cabinet post, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “Rahm Emanuel helped cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald. Covering up a murder is disqualifying for public leadership.” Then-Congressman-elect Mondaire Jones added: “That he’s being considered for a cabinet position is completely outrageous and, honestly, very hurtful.”
Emanuel’s 30-year campaign against pro-working-class policy reforms is unending. Asked last August how he would advise the Biden administration, he told CNBC: “Two things I would say if I was advising an administration. One is there’s no new Green Deal, there’s no Medicare for All.”
If Rahm Emanuel becomes the ambassador to China or Japan — countries with the world’s second- and third-largest economies — he will gain new leverage in a region bristling with ethnic and military tensions. Everything about his record indicates that such power would be vested in the wrong hands.
Days after Biden’s election, AOC told the New York Times that Emanuel’s inclusion in the Biden administration “would signal, I think, a hostile approach to the grassroots and the progressive wing of the party.”
We’ll soon find out whether Biden is willing to send such a signal.
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Jeff Cohen is an activist, author and co-founder of RootsAction.org. He was an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College and founder of the media watch group FAIR. In 2002-2003, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC. He is the author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. 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.
LONG BEACH — The City of Long Beach’s Development Services Department has partnered with the Arts Council for Long Beach to deliver phase three of the Artist COVID Relief Grant.
This grant program is for individual artists across disciplines who are struggling to have their basic needs (shelter, food, and medical) met due to loss of artistic income from COVID-19. Applicants will be asked to provide a short narrative that addresses how COVID-19 has impacted their ability to generate income from their art form and halted their artistic expression. Artists must meet the following criteria to apply:
● be a professional, working Long Beach artist (age 18 or older)
● be a member of the Arts Council registry
● meet federal low-income thresholds and be able to demonstrate with documentation or certification
Applicants will be eligible for up to $3000. The applicant, once approved, will receive a monthly allocation of the grant. The online application will ask applicants to declare if they have received other relief funds in order to grant the allocation accordingly. Applications open at noon on Wednesday, March 10, 2021. The Arts Council will accept all applications submitted by 11:59pm on March 31, 2021 and create a lottery for the application review process. We will prioritize applications by income: very low-income, low-income, moderate income, previous grantees.
“Artists contribute to our economy, to our communities, and to the future of this city in ways that are irreplaceable,” says Mayor Robert Garcia. “It’s so important for us to support artists during this pandemic so that they can continue to create and sustain Long Beach’s incredible art scene for years to come.”
A total of 90 artists and 14 arts organizations have been supported with the ARTSLB Relief fund and the City of Long Beach Long Beach CARES funding for artists and arts organizations impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. With this new Community Development Block Grant program, relief dollars total $1,975,000.
“The artist relief fund is reflective of the Arts Council’s community orientated values in which I’m proud and grateful to be a part of!” stated Samantha Reynolds, a Long Beach artist and COVID Relief grant recipient.
The City recognizes the Arts Council’s efforts during the pandemic and by including the arts and culture sector in the CARES funding it demonstrates that artists are essential to Long Beach’s success. “Giving back to those that make our city a creative hub is crucial. It is great to see the City recognizing artists and performers for their contributions.” stated Griselda Suarez, Arts Council for Long Beach executive director.
LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health or Public Health has confirmed 119 new deaths and 1,514 new cases of COVID-19. To date, Public Health identified 1,206,713 positive cases of COVID-19 across all areas of L.A. County and a total of 22,213 deaths. Cases reported today include a few hundred backlogged cases from faxed provider reports.
The seven-day average number of cases by episode date has decreased to less than 700 per day as of March 2.
To date, Public Health has confirmed a total of 47 cases of COVID-19 U.K. variant, 9 cases of New York variant and one case of the P.2 Brazil variant in Los Angeles County. All the cases of the U.K. variant have been identified since Jan 15, and the first case of the P.2 variant from Brazil was identified two weeks ago. All 9 cases of the NY variant were identified since March 3. There have been 262 California variant cases identified, with the vast majority of these cases identified since Dec. 1 of last year. There have been no cases identified in L.A. County with the South African variant. This latest analysis of specimens is the first time the New York variant was identified in Los Angeles County.
Public Health continues to work with the Board of Supervisors and sector partners to prepare modifications to the Health Officer Order to permit additional activities allowed in the red tier.
L.A. County schools will be able to open on-site learning for grades 7 through 12 once the county moves into the red tier. One effective strategy for reducing the risk of transmission of COVID-19 is for schools to create stable learning groups. A stable learning group is a fixed group of students and staff that stays together minimizing any mixing with any other groups for any activities. Creating and maintaining stable groups is required for students attending in person instruction in grades TK through 6 and strongly recommended for in-person learning for students in grades 7 through 12. Schools all need to maintain distancing, masking and infection control practices for re-openings to happen with as much safety as possible. While vaccinations and testing are additional available tools, they are not a substitute for core public health practices that, when used with fidelity, significantly limit virus transmission.
Vaccine Eligibility
Custodians and janitors, public transit workers, and airport ground crew workers are all now eligible to be vaccinated, as directed by the State. Emergency responders like social workers who handle cases of violence, abuse or neglect and foster parents providing emergency housing for young people, are also eligible to be vaccinated. Public Health is coordinating with unions and employers to set up vaccination sites and make appointments at large county sites available for these groups. For the janitorial and custodial workers, Public Health is in the process of creating appointments this weekend — both Saturday and Sunday at the Forum and on Saturday at the LACOE/Downey vaccination site.
On March 15, vaccine eligibility will open up to people ages 16 through 64 who have underlying health conditions or disabilities that put them at the highest risk of becoming very sick from COVID-19. These conditions include:
Cancer, with a current weakened immune system
Chronic kidney disease, stage 4 or above
Chronic pulmonary disease, oxygen dependent
Down syndrome
Solid organ transplant, leading to a weakened immune system
Pregnancy
Sickle cell disease
Heart conditions, such as heart failure, coronary artery disease, or cardiomyopathies (but not hypertension)
Severe obesity with a BMI of more than 40
Type 2 diabetes with A1c level greater than 7.5%
Or Having a disability that: makes serious illness from COVID-19 likely; would, if positive for COVID-19, limit the person’s ability to received care vital to their well-being and survival; or would make the treatment for COVID-19 particularly challenging.
Providers and healthcare facilities are working to use their health record systems to identify patients who have these conditions and reach out to them so they can be vaccinated. It is the understanding of Public Health that the state will be releasing guidance on other ways people with these conditions can verify their eligibility to be vaccinated.
Throughout the pandemic, people living in low-resourced neighborhoods and people of color have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. While cases are dropping overall, there remains a gap between Latino/Latinx residents and other groups, though this gap is narrowing. The rate dropped from a peak of 2,452 new cases per 100,000 people in early January for Latino/Latinx residents to 139 new cases per 100,000 people as of Feb. 27. Black/African American residents have the second highest case rate of 78 new cases per 100,000 people. White residents have a case rate of 73 new cases per 100,000 people and Asian residents have a case rate of 63 new cases per 100,000 people.
For information about vaccine appointments in L.A. County and when your turn is coming up, visit: www.VaccinateLACounty.com (English) and www.VacunateLosAngeles.com (Spanish). Vaccinations are always free and open to eligible residents and workers regardless of immigration status. L.A. County sites are only vaccinating people who either live or work in L.A. County. If you do not live or work in L.A. County, please do not make a vaccination appointment at an L.A. County site, and if you have an appointment at an L.A. County site, please cancel it, you will be turned away if you come to the appointment.
