News - Page 59 of 941 -

LA Health Services and Harbor-UCLA Launch LA-DROP: A Life-Saving Blood Transfusion Initiative

April 21, 2025

LOS ANGELES — Leaders from across Los Angeles County April 18 gathered to celebrate the official launch of LA-DROP (Los Angeles Development and Rapid Operationalization of Prehospital Blood) — a pilot program that enables paramedics to administer lifesaving whole blood transfusions before patients reach the hospital.

“The first whole blood transfusion by ground EMS in Los Angeles County is a powerful testament to what coordinated, countywide collaboration can accomplish,” said Dr. Kelsey Wilhelm, LA-DROP project lead, director of EMS and Disaster Preparedness at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, and medical director for the City of Compton Fire Department. “This program represents nearly two years of planning, training, and trust-building among partners united by a shared mission: to save lives. We are hopeful that LA-DROP will have a lasting impact and help transform emergency medical services across our community.”

On April 21, 2025, the City of Carson, along with the unincorporated communities of Rancho Dominguez and Willowbrook will join the LA-DROP pilot program, with the City of Inglewood and unincorporated communities of Athens-Westmont and Lennox joining April 25.

The LA-DROP prehospital blood transfusion pilot program is a partnership between the LACoFD, City of Compton Fire Department, Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, and San Diego Blood Bank committed to establishing the first safe and sustainable prehospital blood program in Los Angeles County. Through partnerships and a community-driven blood donor network, LA-DROP aims to reduce preventable deaths and strengthen Los Angeles’ emergency medical response system with innovative prehospital care.

Details: To learn more about LA-DROP click here.

CSULB Students and Faculty Protest ICE, Budget Cuts, and Speech Restrictions

Reporters Desk

April 20, 2025

CSULB Students and Faculty Protest ICE, Budget Cuts, and Speech Restrictions

By Daniel Rivera

On March 26, students and faculty members gathered at CSULB, and marched through the campus, demanding that the university protect its students from ICE, budget cuts, divest from the military, and reduce regulations on speech on campus.

“I’m here out to support this community event to support undocumented students, fight against the budget cuts at the CSUs, and talk about how we do like the new time placement manner policy at the Cal-State system”, said Lisa, a student activist and media liaison, told Random Length News.

The policies include regulations on when, where, and how meetings and events can be facilitated on campus so that it won’t disrupt other students or university business. Limitations like not allowing protest indoors and amplified noise after a certain time, for this protest it was set between 12 pm and 2 pm.

The student protestors called it “too short,” and demanded more time and more access to the school. According to the campus, the policies have been in effect for about 30 years, and after the California Budget Act was passed, it was moved from Campus rules and regulations to its document for easier access.

The protestors moved through the campus, culminating in visiting the Office of the President,(in violation of the Time and Manner policies), where the staff locked the doors. The students began taping their demands to the wall, covering the glass panels in paper from top to bottom.

“So right now, the current plan is that if ICE were to show up on our campus they would be directed to our university police department, who would handle them. But the truth is that our university police departments do not stand in solidarity with the students,” Lisa continued.

The protestors wore masks to protect themselves and limited identifying information for the press because students have been targeted at other universities for participating in protests, especially ones for Palestine that swept the country since the ongoing Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

They want a team to respond to ICE and protect their fellow students from deportation, they want CSULB to divest and cut ties with its various military/aviation partners like Boeing.

“What’s happening at the US and Mexico border is not separate from what’s happening in Gaza. They are connected by the same companies like Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman who make billions [of dollars] on war. . . the CSULB is building the p[ipleines into our classrooms in the guise of opportunity and our tuition pays for it,” Emily, a student speaker said during the rally.

In 2014, the CSULB received a supply of the year from Boeing, which employs the most students, numbering around 1,200. CSULB makes up a corner in the so-called golden triangle, the cooperative relationship between the military, higher education, and industry.

The CSUs have faced increasing pressure on their internal speech policies from the Trump administration, which has set its sights on protestors on visas and targeting pro-Palestinian speech with deportation at universities across the country.

Alongside the increased pressure on immigrant communities, the campus is facing budget cuts from both the state and federal governments, impacting services, limiting course choices, and cutting jobs.

The protestors do not believe that the state-at-large has their back, that the state and more specifically the governor is sliding to the right, especially after inviting rightwing extremists Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk to his podcast in recent weeks.

“We’ve seen the university turn to budget cuts at this crucial moment to say everything is inevitable… that it’s up to a governor who has chosen to court right-wing voices, to sit down with authoritarians rather than investing in the people’s university,” said Rob, assistant professor of sociology at CSULB and California Faculty Association member.

Random Lengths News has reached out to the university for comment and has not heard back immediately.

UFCW 324 Takes Stand Against Self-Checkout, Citing Theft and Job Loss

Labor

Reporters Desk

April 20, 2025

UFCW 324 Takes Stand Against Self-Checkout, Citing Theft and Job Loss

By Daniel Rivera, Labor Reporter

On April 1, members of UFCW 324, alongside community members, gathered at Long Beach City Hall to comment in support of a proposal meant to regulate self-checkout and provide more employment.

“I think we, and certainly the workers who work in grocery and drug retail, have recognized that there for some time that there’s a problem”, said Derek Smith, Political Director for 324, told Random Lengths News. That problem, he says, was created by self-checkout, by the absence of working employees, which has led to increased theft.

“Item 23(proposal) is trying to increase staffing for self-checkout stations under the guise of public safety concerns,” Celeste Wilson, Government Affairs manager for the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce. She explains that the companies should be hiring security guards instead since employees are usually not allowed to interfere with shoplifters. However, the union states that simply having their presence can deter theft.

“The problem is inordinate amounts of theft that are happening, which I think all of us know to some degree, and that the vehicle by which people are stealing things are invariably is self-check,” Derek continued.

In recent years, companies like Costco and Trader Joe’s pulled back it self checkout in response to rising thefts.

It goes beyond the security issues presented by the lack of oversight, but the also calls attention to the diminishing customer experience and lack of flexibility. The union is proposing that not only should there be ideally one cashier per two self-checkout ratio, but also have workers dedicated to watching the self-checkout and assisting customers.

“And if you have a checker there for every two and then someone to help the customers that are on self-checkout, that’s better because… alcohol and stuff like that can’t go through self-checkout,” Shamiko Pekoe, a food clerk at Von’s for about 24 years explained when discussing having to juggle being a cashier, helping on the self-checkout and providing other services necessary to the store.

According to a report from Capital One, self-checkout remains very popular, with about 73% of shoppers preferring it to a cashier.

However, understaffing has remained widespread across numerous industries, years after the pandemic prompted closures and layoffs, and has yet to fully recover to pre-pandemic levels, placing a large strain on workers.

Self-checkout, accordingly, has led to increased losses across the industry. According to a report, self-checkout is about 10 times more likely to be robbed than traditional checkouts, even though it’s slated to grow from 2 billion to about 4 billion in the following year.

However, many of these are accidental, according to the survey, as much as 21% due to various user errors like not scanning an item properly, mis-weighting, faulty barcodes, and a whole variety of troubleshooting and problem-solving that was once left up to a trained cashier to handle.

Over the last few years, since the pandemic, several corporations have reported a rise in shoplifting, from the casual to the large-scale viral shoplifting phenomenon, which has led to some shuttering their operations in California.

These shutterings have left communities in food deserts, pulling away vital services and products in part due to the rising theft.

However, activists and business people argue over the solution, which in this case is either more employee eyes or more security and harsher sentencing. Wilson explained that Proposition 36 was only recently passed, and we should wait for the law to have its intended effect.

Prop 36, among many things, adds a three-strike policy as punishment for repetitive shoplifting charges, and those include charges for shoplifting under $950 worth of merchandise. However, three three-strikes laws have been heavily criticized in the past for their contribution to recidivism and disproportionate effect on communities of color.

However, the activists think that the more eyes cover an area, the less likely they are to steal by sheer presence, while also providing jobs and improving customer experience. However, there isn’t a clear relationship between floor presence and theft.

To keep up with Daniel’s work, follow him on IG!

Letters to the Editor: On Taxes, Democrats, Eaton Fire, Middleton, ILWU Ride, and the Role of the Journalist-Activist”

Reporters Desk

April 17, 2025

Letters to the Editor: On Taxes, Democrats, Eaton Fire, Middleton, ILWU Ride, and the Role of the Journalist-Activist”

Increased taxes are liberation

It takes a special kind of genius to take over a party whose main mantras were “All taxes are theft” and “No new taxes,” and convince them to put the yoke of one of the largest tax increases in American history on themselves.

To be able to transform that party into a crowd clapping and chanting “Increased taxes are liberation! Increased taxes are liberation! Viva la tariffs!” is not as much a stable genius as it is diabolical. I mean, increased taxes will set you free, right? That’s what he’s selling.

John Henrichs,

San Pedro

Game Over

Democrats who voted for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris have been tremendously disappointed. Consider also how Biden and Harris ran on the notion that a second Trump presidency imperils our country and democracy itself. This is ‘game over.’

So now what? James Carville says sit on our hands. Corey Booker disrupts Congress. Gavin Newsom has a podcast! Aside from that, we blew it. Life as we know it is forever changed. Democracy is the name of our great experiment no more.

Unfortunately, for our former bff’s such as NATO and the EU, it’s our frenemy, Putin, who’s won the affection of Donald Trump on behalf of the American people. And now this tariff strategy that’s supposedly designed to reclaim our manufacturing prowess appears more like Chinese checkers than the game of chess it was once conceived as.

Our new emperor seems to believe he’s rendered our adversaries panic-stricken, but it’s evident he’s played himself again. Trump has made himself ‘too big to fail’ just as he did back in the days of the Taj Mahal.

It all seems so inescapable. We could move to Canada! But there he is again, yammering about fifty-first statehood. I’m not sure why this brings to mind a tin star with a jerk pinned on, except to say that speaking of Musk, I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t all part of a plot devised subconsciously in the mind of an aggrieved billionaire. I’m as much a licensed psychiatrist as he is an elected official, so I don’t mind saying, “awkward.”

I wonder what’s more embarrassing. Elon Musk wielding that chainsaw, or all those first-time Republican voters who played “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Or maybe it’s most embarrassing that we’re having this Tesla revolt at all.

Justin Leach

San Pedro

Justin, What continues to amaze me is the number of people who, against all common sense, still believe the lies coming from the Orange Felon.

James Preston Allen, Publisher

Lost everything in the Eaton Fire

Unfortunately, I was one of the many who lost everything in the Eaton Fire in Altadena in January. I had rented a duplex bungalow for the past 11 years and the whole courtyard was destroyed. I have relocated to an apartment in Long Beach across the street from the Belmont Pier. Since I lived in Samoa in the South Pacific for two years as a kid, getting closer to the water and away from the fire devastation felt right (though, for now, I still commute a few days a week to my part-time job in Pasadena).

Hope all is well with you and RL. I just read your Feb. 20 editorial. I found the fires to be a great unifier in ways I would have not foreseen. You only need to go through one once to see how non-discriminatory fires are – they don’t care if you’re rich or poor, they’ll burn right on through. I am thankful that the community at large came together to help us. I am most grateful to the local groups of artists and musicians who have reached out and donated art supplies, music instruments, and I made sure to get in on FEMA while Biden was still in office as I knew a shitshow was on the horizon. Keep fighting the good fight.

Teresa Conboy

Long Beach

Middleton Update

This is actually old news but I haven’t had time to send out a message to all of you.

I was appointed to the Port of Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners in 2019 by then Mayor Eric Garcetti. I served on the Board for over 5 years ending my term as Vice President of the Board. Late last summer Mayor Karen Bass declined to reappoint me.

I want to repeat the thanks I extended last year to all of you who supported me while I was on the Board. The Harbor community has meant the world to me. Being in the center of the largest port in the western hemisphere is quite the experience for all of us. I am particularly grateful for the support of the ILWU and the honor I received when I was made an Honorary Member of ILWU Local 13.

Despite no longer being a Board Member, I wasn’t ready to turn my back on this community! You have all taught me a lot and I value everything you have shared with me. Over the years I have developed a hope that the San Pedro Bay Port Complex (including the ports of both Long Beach and San Pedro) will not only remain and grow as a container port but will also become so much more. There are exciting developments on the horizon from the development of rail at Pier B in Long Beach to Alta Sea being the hub of the Blue Economy. The Goods Movement Training Center has the potential to not only continue skill development for the existing longshore workforce but open doors for community members who want to be part of the port economy. West Harbor is getting closer to opening day and Wilmington Park has finally given our Wilmington neighbors a window to the sea.

We are fortunate to have a Councilman who is simply the best! He is committed to the Port of LA continuing to grow and provide jobs but also to doing so in a thoughtful way that improves our health and the environment. Councilman McOsker asked me to join his office staff as his (unpaid) Senior Advisor for Port Affairs and I accepted.

Councilman McOsker has a great staff and you can always follow your usual channels to reach him but I wanted you to know you can also contact me to discuss anything that is port related. Contact me at diane.middleton@lacity.org. I am particularly interested in job development, environmental issues, and growing our union workforce.

Looking forward to making the One Five an even better place to live, work, and play.

Diane Middleton

Senior Advisor for Port Affairs 15th Council District | City of Los Angeles

North to Meet South at the Border

Bicycle Ride for Alex – through every port from Canada to Los Angeles

North is meeting South at an event only the ILWU can design. At the January Southern California Pensioners, Local 63 and 13 meetings, the Union’s fundraiser, ILWU Walk the Coast, revealed a bicycle ride. This is not a short outing on a lazy day or a sightseeing excursion. When the ILWU does something it is often big and unusual. In the name of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, member Paul Zuanich has volunteered to take a challenging 1750-mile, 38-day electric bicycle journey to save children.

To kickstart his ride, Paul will meet some of our Canadian and Yankee brothers and sisters. Local 500 President Rino Voci and Secretary John Urrico have accepted Walk the Coast’s invitation to travel from their Vancouver, British Columbia headquarters on June 5th to gather with Paul and Local 7 President Bryson Tripp and some of his Bellingham members. Peace Park at the USA-Canada border will be the backdrop for this powwow and photo shoot. After North meets South to start the union ride of a lifetime, Paul will spin his pedals from Canada through Washington, Oregon and California. This challenge will take our rider and our ILWU message to Bellingham, Anacortes, Everett, Port Angeles, Port Gamble, Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Aberdeen, Astoria, Longview, Vancouver, Portland, Newport, North Bend, Eureka, Sacramento, Stockton, San Francisco, Port Hueneme and finally to the July 5th Southern California Bloody Thursday Memorial Picnic in San Pedro, California. Time and distance will cause Paul to miss only one beautiful port, Local 29’s San Diego.

The purpose of this great adventure is to do something good for others in need, unite every Division of the ILWU, and bring awareness to the good work our ILWU industry fundraiser is doing to support Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation. ALSF was founded by a beautiful four-year-old child, Alexandra Scott. Near her first birthday she was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, at that time an always fatal childhood disease. When Alex was in the hospital at age four, she announced to her mother that, after she left the hospital, she would hold a lemonade stand to raise money for other children. With her brother’s help, Alex raised $2000. Before her 2004 passing at age 8, Alex had raised over $1,000,000. Her mother, Liz, and dad, Jay, thought the effort ended. Alex was such an inspiration that people wouldn’t quit. The Foundation bearing her name has evolved into a fundraising movement. Today, ALSF is one of the leading funders of pediatric cancer research in the U.S. and Canada. They have raised more than $450 million, funding nearly 1,000 research projects at 150 institutions, and providing travel and support programs to families affected by childhood cancer.

No other union attempts anything like this fundraiser or this ride. As usual, the ILWU is unusual. Locals are free to meet Paul and give support in any way they choose. With the ILWU Credit Union’s help, invitation letters and information on how our members can assist Paul’s ride will be mailed to as many locals and groups as possible. ILWU Walk the Coast encourages longshore locals to connect with clerks, pensioners, auxiliaries, family, friends and, in ports where they operate, the Inland Boatmen’s Union. One thing every port can do to boost Paul’s ride is to take photos of each other with Paul. Email your photos to Local 63 Contract Administrator Robert Maynez, rmaynez@ilwu63.net. Photos will be posted on the ILWU Walk the Coast Facebook page and in The Dispatcher.

Companies have been very supportive, but a business is simply not built to do what our union can do. We have longtime friendships made and cultivated during committee meetings, caucuses and conventions. ILWU Walk the Coast is uniquely positioned to organize a fundraiser that joins ILWU Locals and Divisions from Canada, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon and California, with pension groups, auxiliaries, industry companies, family and friends. This ride is a mission where everyone in our industry can meet and enjoy working together to do something good. The ILWU is proud to boast that our fundraiser is responsible for more than $1.3 million in total donations to Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation and the fight against childhood cancer. If you have any questions, please contact Robert Maynez or ILWU Credit Union VP Rob York, ryork@ilwucu.org. Every local that donates any amount will have their logo printed in The Dispatcher’s annual Thank You ad. If you don’t have a logo, Rob York will create one for you. A donation of any amount is appreciated and acknowledged. The amount of your donation is not the goal. Uniting for children is paramount. For more information, to donate or to see your local’s donation on the Donor Honor Roll, go to www.ilwuwalkthecoast.org. Paul’s ride schedule can be found online and will be printed in a future copy of The Dispatcher.

Dan Imbagliazzo

San Pedro

RE: Journalist/Activist response to Warren Furutani letter to editor March 20 edition

Warren Fututani is far too modest about his stature and effort to preserve and perpetuate the history of Terminal Island and the Japanese colony known as “Furusato.” Hear him reveal more in the oral history project Stories Of Los Angeles Harbor Area: For Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow (SOLAHA Volume I) available at website: www.storieslaharborarea.comwhere he relates his intrinsic connection and how his family was compromised under the Executive Order 9066 (February 19, 1942) by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt “reacting” to the bombing of Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941 by the nation of Japan, that caused the USA to finally and fully enter WWII. The indignity suffered by the residents and property owners has never been fully rectified, though his own mother in law who was relentless and legendary in her effort to achieve reparations as documented in the superior informing documentary Rebel With A Cause: The Life Of Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga (2016, 88 min., dir. Janice Tanaka) that has its Port of Los Angeles (POLA) premiere at the LA Harbor International Film Festival .

Over a decade ago Mr. Furutani and I met at the Los Angeles Maritime Museum (LAMM) “Caught, Canned and Eaten: The History of San Pedro’s Tuna & Canning Industry permanent exhibit (since 2007) and discussed the potential for museum to be located at Terminal Island (possibly in defunct SW Marine across from the Japanese Memorial) dedicated to the Japanese community and its venerable history. Subsequently LAMM created a permanent exhibit “Taminaru: A Day in a Life of a Japanese American Fishing Village” that is another testimony to documenting and preserving the venerable community. The Terminal Islanders also deserve much credit for their diligence and dedication. erecting the monument in Terminal Island and contributing to the exhibit.

In 2010 when Janice Hahn was Los Angeles City Councilwoman District 15 representing the harbor I was in conversation with her and the City of Los Angeles Office of Historic Preservation about how to propose a Motion in City Council about designation Fish Harbor with historic classification to protect its heritage. To my knowledge the Motion was not made, though it would need to be researched.

With regard to the POLA “demolition by neglect” is apt description of the lack of adhering to their pledge made May 28, 2013 in the Cultural Resource Policy that included among other (empty) promises: Establishing priorities for preservation and adaptive reuse, where possible, of historical buildings, structures, districts and other sites owned by or located on property owned by the Harbor Department. Staff will consider historical resources at the earliest stages of planning, adaptive reuse in leasing transactions will be encouraged. and most recently, in spite of much objection, the harbor commission decided to demolish the last (Starkist) tuna canning plant building in Fish Harbor. Our family legacy in the tuna canning industry is well known and we had long and valued relationships with the Japanese community who were friends and worked alongside my grandfather and father Joseph M. Mardesich, Sr. and Jr.

As I am often quoted, “If we do not save our history today, it’s gone tomorrow” and there are no better examples than “Beacon Street” and “Ports O’Call” – both gone with the sea. Current and future generations deserve better and thankfully there are some who valiantly strive to preserve and protect.

Cordially,

Stephanie Mardesich

From San Pedro to Honolulu

Terelle Jerricks

April 17, 2025

The Ultimate Offshore Sailing Challenge

The Trans-Pacific Yacht Race is a sailboat race from San Pedro to Hawaii and it returns July 1. The race features single-handed sailing to teams of 12 or more on sailing vessels.

The race from the buoy at Point Fermin to the Diamond Head Lighthouse in Honolulu is a “downhill” race with the wind blowing from behind, pushing the boat forward. This allows for faster, smoother sailing and often involves using large sails like spinnakers to catch as much wind as possible.

The starting line looks like chaos with a bunch of boats circling, trying not to hit each other. It’s one of the most counter-intuitive starting lines in all of sports because you can’t line sailboats up and just say “Go.” It’s fluid. The boats have motors and minimal gas, but they can’t use them during the race or at the starting line. The motor and fuel on a Transpac boat are for emergencies and docking before and after the 2,225-mile journey by sail.

On the way back, sailing vessels have to go north to the 40th parallel, then head east because they are sailing against the wind, requiring the vessel to zigzag (tack) at an angle since a sailboat cannot sail directly into the wind. This manner of sailing is slower and more technical, demanding precise vessel handling.

This is a sport where competitors endure weather conditions that can change from one hour to the next, going from calm waters to violent squalls. Sometimes sailors steer between them on the return.

As of April 2025, the Transpacific Yacht Race (Transpac) has attracted a diverse fleet of 60 registered entries. Notable participants include:

Extreme H2O 2.0: an M&M 72 multihull owned by Patrick Benz, marking the 50th entry for this edition.

Westerly: a Santa Cruz 52 skippered by Dave Moore, returning after a strong performance in the 2023 race.

Pyewacket: Roy Disney’s renowned Andrews 70, a past first-place finisher, demonstrates continued commitment to the competition.

Merlin: the iconic Bill Lee-designed sled, celebrated for its storied history in Transpac races.

Ragtime: the Spencer-designed yacht that made its Transpac debut in 1973, returning to add another chapter to its legacy.

Akua Kai and Favonius 2: two TP52 class yachts aiming for top honors in this competitive fleet.

Peligroso: a Kernan 68 now skippered by Cecil Rossi, who secured a division win in 2023 with the Farr 57 Ho’okolohe.

The entry list also features a mix of veteran racers and newcomers, with various boat classes such as Andrews, Beneteaus, Santa Cruzes and J/Boats represented.

The 2023 winners include the Bakewell-White 100 yacht RIO100, skippered by Sebastian Moshayedi, who won the prestigious Barn Door Trophy with an elapsed time of 7 days, 13 hours, 16 minutes and 38 seconds. This marked the third Barn Door Trophy win for RIO100, having previously claimed victory in 2015 and 2017.

The King Kalakaua Trophy, awarded to the overall winner on corrected time, was provisionally granted to WESTERLY 52, a Santa Cruz 52 skippered by Dave Moore.

In the multihull category, the MOD 70 trimaran Orion, skippered by Justin Shaffer, achieved line honors, finishing the 2,225-mile course from Los Angeles to Honolulu approximately six hours ahead of its closest competitor.

The Barn Door Trophy is given to the monohull yacht (a traditional single-hull sailboat with a single sail) with the fastest elapsed time without powered assistance. It is considered one of the race’s top honors, traditionally awarded to the first monohull to finish the 2,225-nautical-mile race from Los Angeles to Honolulu.

Originally, the trophy was for the overall fastest yacht, but in 2009, race organizers introduced a separate trophy for yachts using powered winches, keeping the Barn Door Trophy exclusive to manually operated boats.

The King Kalakaua Trophy is named after one of the founders of the race, which recognizes speed and strategic sailing skills.

New technology has been a game changer in sailing races over the past 30 years. Traditionally, Transpac racers have sailed by the stars ever since its inception in 1906.

Today, boats use Starlink for reliable internet access, allowing for the close monitoring of Pacific Ocean weather and helping sailors avoid slow spots while finding fast ones during the race. Before the advances in communication technology, reports could be received periodically. Now, regularly updated reports are at the navigators’ fingertips on vessels with Starlink.

Wetlands vs. Oil

Reporters Desk

April 17, 2025

This article was updated on 4/22 to reflect the fact that Synergy/Beach Oil Minerals has not committed to restoring the full 150 acres that were transferred to the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority. While all wells across this site will be plugged and abandoned, the restoration effort is focused on enhancing the portion known as Steamshovel Slough and about 30 acres directly adjacent to it.

A High-Stakes Gamble in Long Beach’s Forgotten Marsh

By Emma Rault, Community Reporter

The Los Cerritos Wetlands are full of contradictions. Great egrets proudly stand guard in front of nodding pumpjacks in a historic landscape that, despite a century of heavy industrial use, is still teeming with resilient life.

These wetlands were once part of a sprawling marsh at the mouth of the San Gabriel River that totaled more than 2,400 acres. Following Euro-American arrival, large swaths were drained and filled for development and agriculture. Today, some 500 acres remain.

Like many other waterways in the American West, the river was channelized — encased in concrete — for flood control in the early 20th century. Along with the discovery of crude oil reserves around the same time, this dramatically changed and degraded a once-pristine ecosystem.

Last month, the California Coastal Commission approved a plan to restore the southern area of the wetlands.

The restoration has been decades in the making. It is spearheaded by the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority (LCWA), a government entity made up of the Cities of Long Beach and Seal Beach, the Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, and the State Coastal Conservancy — which last year earmarked $32 million in funding for the project.

At the Coastal Commission hearing, the LCWA — and various supporters, such as Long Beach District 3 Councilmember Kristina Duggan, Friends of Ballona Wetlands, and the Los Cerritos Wetlands Land Trust — celebrated the plan as an exciting step forward.

But other wetland advocates — the Sierra Club’s Los Cerritos Wetlands Task Force, Puvunga Wetlands Protectors, and several tribal leaders — are concerned about the project, describing it as “greenwashing” due to the relationship between the restoration efforts and ongoing oil extraction.

Trading increased oil production for wetlands protection
In recent years, wetlands have gained growing appreciation. These rare and vital ecosystems house endangered species, filter pollutants, provide flood and erosion control, offer valuable open space to city dwellers, and combat climate change by being particularly good at storing and capturing carbon.

The Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority was formed in 2006 and took on the mission of restoring the wetlands, a cause first championed by grassroots community organizations.

Then, in 2015, a company called Synergy Oil got involved.

Synergy Oil had bought a property in the northern part of Los Cerritos Wetlands from the Bixby Land Company after its heir, Mark Bixby — along with local developers Tom Dean and Jeff Berger, who owned part of the wetlands — died in a plane crash in 2011.

Synergy’s CEO, John McKeown, proposed an idea: the company would combine the restoration of some of the wetlands with relocated and increased oil production elsewhere on the site.

To be more precise: Synergy sought to retire 74 old wells on its large parcel in the northern wetlands in exchange for 120 new wells at two nearby plots totaling 12 acres. This would increase oil production from 300 to 24,000 barrels daily and produce 70,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually.

At the time, there was talk of a China-based equity fund financing the restoration effort.

One of the two plots — seven acres known locally as the Pumpkin Patch — was owned by Lyon Communities. The other was a site owned by the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority.

Years passed. Synergy partnered with Lyon Communities to form Beach Oil Minerals. In 2018, Synergy/Beach Oil Minerals and the LCWA agreed on a land swap: Synergy’s original, northern site — 150 acres — in exchange for the LCWA’s five-acre plot.

Puvunga Wetlands Protectors and its director, Anna Christensen, sued the California Coastal Commission over its approval of the land swap but lost. Last year, the deal was finalized, with some tweaks. (Most importantly: No new wells on the LCWA plot, just on the Pumpkin Patch.)Meanwhile, Synergy haspartnered with global insurer Munich Re to fund the restoration of a portion of the 150-acre site that it deeded to the LCWA. The restoration effort is restricted to Steamshovel Slough (about 45 acres) and approximately 30 acres adjacent to it.

The LCWA’s restoration efforts, then, have hinged on agreements with oil companies from the outset. To the project’s opponents, the net increase in oil production onsite calls for alarm, not celebration.

Dr. Charles Lester, who served as executive director of the Coastal Commission until 2016, was worried too. “We need to think about … not putting ourselves in the position to have to make those tradeoffs when the planet is in such a dire situation in terms of CO2 and petroleum development,” he said in 2020.

Risks to the surrounding community
Beach Oil Minerals plans to use techniques such as “directional drilling,” a method allowing horizontal drilling paths that could extend for miles under the wetlands.

FINAL Los Cerritos Wetlands Ownership Map — Ownership of the Los Cerritos Wetlands. Source: Updated from the 2021 Los Cerritos Wetlands Habitat Restoration Plan by Coastal Restoration Consultants.

In addition to Synergy/Beach Oil Minerals’ activity on the Pumpkin Patch, Hellman Properties still operates a 45-acre oil field in the wetlands’ southern half, next to the LCWA site greenlit for restoration.

Eric Zahn, the principal restoration ecologist at Tidal Influence — a consulting firm that played a key role in designing the areas to be restored — says that having oil extraction continue next door is “not ideal.” But just like having PCH nearby, he sees it as part of the confines that it’s his job to work around.

To Zahn’s knowledge, the LCWA trying to buy out the oil companies is “not [on the table] at this stage.” A more realistic scenario, he says, might be a similar arrangement to the one reached at Banning Ranch in Newport Beach, where the “mineral rights” are owned by one party and the “surface rights” by another.

But to the project’s opponents, such deals are just too risky. Advocates have pointed to the Newport–Inglewood fault line that runs through the wetlands.

And there’s also the direct impact on the surrounding community. Studies have found people living near oil wells are at greater risk of cancer, asthma, respiratory disease, and premature birth.

This is especially relevant since several high-density residential developments are planned directly adjacent to the Los Cerritos Wetlands. Three apartment buildings on Pacific Coast Highway, totaling more than 1,200 units, have cleared the Long Beach Planning Commission.

California’s Senate Bill 1137, signed into law last year, bans new oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of homes and schools. But it doesn’t prevent developers from building new homes near existing wells.

A sacred Indigenous site
In addition to their ecological role, the Los Cerritos Wetlands also have profound importance to the Gabrielino/Tongva and Acjachemen nations indigenous to present-day LA and Orange County.

The wetlands lie within the village sites of Motuucheyngna and Puvungna, with a history going back more than 10,000 years. Puvungna is central to the creation story, held sacred as the place where a deity called Chinigchinich emerged and told the people how to live.

The LCWA worked with tribal groups to understand the location’s significance, which it plans to feature prominently in onsite signage, according to Zahn. But some — such as the Gabrieleno/Tongva San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians — vocally oppose the planned earthwork due to the likelihood of disturbing human burials.

It wouldn’t be the first time this happened. In 2001, Hellman Properties began work on a gated community named Heron Pointe on the eastern end of the wetlands, farther east of its current oil field. The Coastal Commission ended up issuing a cease-and-desist order when contractor John Laing continued grading work after human remains had been found.

Like the project’s other critics, Native advocates also worry about the risk of oil spills contaminating groundwater — crucial in Long Beach, which gets 60 percent of its water supply from wells.

“This is our Standing Rock,” Acjachemen elder Rebecca Robles wrote in a 2020 letter to the Coastal Conservancy, referring to the 2016 anti-oil-pipeline movement on Dakota and Lakota land.

Ann Cantrell, co-chair of the Sierra Club Los Cerritos Wetlands Task Force, is concerned that, with the constant arrival of new technologies to optimize oil extraction, there’s no telling when the companies will decide to abandon operations.

She feels that local and state authorities are being unassertive.

“From the beginning, nobody ever said, ‘Well, can we use some muscle to end oil drilling on the wetlands?’”

She also considers the planned restoration too drastic. According to Zahn, the grading work is necessary for the legally mandated buffers around the oil fields and to create a sloped landscape that can adapt to sea-level rise.

Zahn says that giving the tide greater access to the wetlands will improve biodiversity. Cantrell and her co-chair, Anna Christensen, are worried about the earthwork and increased flooding displacing existing animal and plant life.

“This idea of ‘erase and replace’… This is how we do redevelopment with people, too,” Christensen said. “We erased the low-income people of color from downtown, and now we’re building giant apartment houses for people who can spend $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom.”

The restoration of the southern area will begin this fall and wrap up in 2027. In the meantime, people interested in seeing the wetlands for themselves can join a guided walk with the Los Cerritos Wetlands Land Trust or El Dorado Audubon, or explore the trails at the previously restored 10-acre Zedler Marsh on Fridays and Saturdays from 9 am to 2 pm.

When the Ocean Sends a Cry for Help

Reporters Desk

April 17, 2025

Answering Looks Like This

By Evelyn McDonnell

I never imagined I would be here, kneeling astride a juvenile California sea lion. I’m trying carefully to keep her still while the animal hospital staff conducts an intake evaluation of their newest patient. The poor pinniped wants to thrash with fear, understandably. She’s less than a year old, probably recently separated from her mom, and was found — like the heroine of a Patti Smith song — washed up on Redondo Beach, tired and hungry. Our rescue team brought her to the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, where I’m now sitting on top of her, trying not to crush her.

She may be stressed but she’s a fighter, and my bad ankle is starting to ache by the time the staff performs the final task: shaving her identification number into the brown fur on her side. I ache more when I hear the digits. In a typical year, MMCC receives a total of about 300 animals. This is not a typical year. It’s only April 8, and I’m already restraining the 247th marine mammal brought to the center in 2025.

An unusually early and toxic algae bloom has caused a massive domoic acid poisoning event affecting pinnipeds, dolphins and seabirds all along the Southern California coast. While there have been other serious outbreaks in the 24 years since DA was first identified on the West Coast — the summer of 2023 was also harrowing — the early arrival and the morbid intensity of this event are straining local resources. Ash and runoff from the fires may be exacerbating the natural phenomenon, leading to heartbreaking scenes of dolphins stranding on public beaches, gasping for breath.

IMG 3071 Enhanced NR 2 — Evelyn McDonnell restraining a juvenile sea lion during intake evaluation.This pup was not afflicted with domoic acid but was found weak and hungry on Redondo Beach. Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

This is why MMCC, the International Bird Rescue Center, and other coastal wildlife centers have an immediate need for more folks like me: volunteers who can help feed, clean, input data, make gruel, wash dishes and educate. I work full-time as a university professor and writer. I came to animal care with little training besides a lifelong love of nature. But from my first visit to MMCC, when I discovered the people I was watching throw herring into pools of leaping sea lions were civilians like me, I was hooked. I realized I needed to learn from a “form of life that has much to teach us about … vulnerability, collaboration, and adaptation,” as Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes in her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.

So for the last eight and a half years, on Tuesday mornings, I join the crew of staff and volunteers who have become a kind of family. It’s grueling, sometimes disgusting work. But I get to go home and feel like maybe I helped save a life that day, like I did something to try to remedy the mess my species is making of this planet.

IMG 2947 Enhanced NR — MMCC volunteers teresa Johnson, right and Francene Miyake, left , taking a break. Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

“We couldn’t do what we are doing without volunteers,” says Dave Bader, chief operations and education officer at MMCC. “From care and feeding to response and rescue, to education, volunteers help us with all of these things.”

Mutual aid has become a buzzphrase of our times, as people provide the material, moral, and spiritual resources for each other that our government has abandoned. With President Trump also cutting funds and personnel at earth-protecting institutions such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, humans need to extend our support to the other life forms with whom we share the planet. Marine mammals particularly compel attention, because they are like us in so many ways — we are the same breastfeeding, warm-blooded, live-birthing family — and yet here we stand rooted to the land, and there they go, hunting and feeding and playing and thriving in the water.

And sometimes not thriving.

Sea lions sick from domoic acid poisoning at the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro. Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

FEBRUARY STRANDINGS

The first inklings of the current DA event were detected back in December in Baja California, according to Dr. Clarissa Anderson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The cold-water upwellings were indicative of La Nina, a cyclical weather event that has caused DA outbreaks in the past. It takes a while for Pseudo-nitzschia plankton blooms to work their way up the food chain to marine animals. Sea lions, dolphins and seabirds began stranding in February. It looks likely that the 2025 dolphin and bird strandings will surpass those of the past three years. “This is just larger numbers than we’re used to,” Anderson says.

Evelyn McDonnell on meal prep for MMCC patients. Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

DA particularly affects adult female sea lions who have consumed large numbers of fish to feed the fetuses they are carrying inside. This year, numerous adult males have also been affected. At MMCC, that means our animal rescue team netted and transported dozens of XXL sea lions — I’m talking hundreds of pounds here — to our facility tucked between Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, Fort MacArthur and the John Olguin campus of San Pedro High School. Many come in so weak they barely move. The mothers may miscarry, or give birth to pups that they are too sick to nurse. With fluids and medicine delivered subcutaneously or orally until they can eat on their own again, less than half of sea lions recover enough to be released. The rest die or are euthanized. DA is fatal for dolphins.

Patients are brought to MMCC year-round with injuries and illnesses that we can’t always save them from — many of them human-caused, including fish-net entanglements, gunshot wounds and cancers likely triggered by human poisons such as dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT. Late winter is always the start of our busy season when pinniped pups separate from their mothers and sometimes wind up in our care. Rehabbing juvenile elephant seals, sea lions and harbor seals generally just takes our highly nutritious fish gruel, daily vitamins, and maybe some medicine. Helping an elephant seal, with its round Keane eyes and ridiculous braying laugh, go from being tube-fed gruel to hand-fed fish to hunting for live fish on its own is a deeply rewarding experience. We are careful to not let the patients bond with us — we avoid eye contact, or talking to them. If they are to be released back to the ocean — the ultimate and usual goal — they must stay wild.

But it’s impossible not to have a soft spot for certain flippered beings. I will never forget the first sea lion neonate — just a day or two old when he came in — whom I got to help bottle feed one summer. I wrapped him in a blanket and held him while the veterinarian made sure he sucked down his special infant formula.

ASHES TO ALGAE

But you can’t restrain and tube-feed a 700-pound sea lion. There is little romance in treating large pinnipeds being ravaged by domoic acid poisoning. With good care and luck, they revive, but the neurotoxin wracks their brains, and then, as they come to their senses, they understandably want out of these cement pens and to return to the sea. They are angry, scary, sad, difficult. And plentiful. From Feb. 20 to March 28, MMCC responded to 191 live animal strandings, compared to 51 for the same period in 2024. Our rescue hotline receives an average of 4,000 calls a year. We had 2,120 calls just in March.

The intensity of the bloom is also indicated by the Pseudo-nitzschia counts from samples taken at the Santa Monica Pier. “We’re seeing high cell abundances — like, really high, higher than I’m used to seeing in general in coastal California … like, millions of cells per liter,” says Anderson, who directs the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System. “Our bloom threshold is 10,000 cells per liter. So seeing those kinds of numbers at Santa Monica Pier in particular really stood out to me. I haven’t seen that maybe ever at that pier.”

Santa Monica Pier is less than two miles from the Palisades Fire burn site. While there is no definitive proof that nutrient runoff from the fire has exacerbated the bloom, previous studies have shown that nitrate from ash can stimulate plankton production. “It stands to reason there could certainly be local stimulation,” Anderson says in the measured tones of a scientist.

Bader is certain other factors are exacerbating the fourth year in a row of DA crises. “Climate change, ocean acidification, nitrification — we’re changing ocean conditions to favor the formation of harmful algal blooms,” he says. “These are naturally occurring algae that are blooming with greater frequency and intensity because of the aforementioned factors.”

Anderson says oceanographic data shows that the Pacific Ocean’s water has been changing, though researchers are still trying to understand why. “From the long-term time series we’ve looked at from data off the California coast, from these deep waters that fuel upwelling, those waters have changed in nutrient composition over the last 20-plus years,” she says. “Why? Is that climate change? Is that something else? Well, it’s happening at a very big basin scale, and the way that the nutrients are changing in that water is exactly the way you need it to be to stimulate domoic acid production.”

A sea lion enjoying a meal at the MMCC. Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

RESOURCES SLASHED

Unfortunately, scientists’ ability to monitor and track data to help us understand what is happening to the oceans and the animals who depend on them is under attack. According to NPR, Trump plans to eliminate the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, that conducts vital research on our oceans and climate. “The monitoring that we do, which is mostly NOAA funded, is reliant on instruments and personnel that exist because of NOAA funding, and then if we suddenly cannot continue to operate them, that will be pretty devastating,” Anderson says.

Cuts and layoffs this year have directly impacted our ability to understand the current DA crisis, according to Anderson. Tissues from impacted animals “typically go to a NOAA lab in the Pacific Northwest, and that lab cannot spend a dime there,” she says. “They’re not able to process any samples right now and may have to even get rid of their lab technician who does all of these samples for the West Coast and Alaska. So that is a big problem, and that’s hampering our ability to say much about what’s happening to these animals.”

“We are strong partners of NOAA and rely on them for our support,” Bader says.

The slashing and burning of the agencies tasked with studying and saving our slashed and burned planet directly impacts human beings and their own ocean-based activities. There are statistical indications that DA could be related to high incidences of Alzheimer’s, but without labs to process those samples, we may never know. DA is not the only poison out there; Saxitoxin is causing paralytic shellfish poisoning, which can sicken and kill creatures who eat mussels, clams and oysters, including people.

Saving our oceans and their inhabitants from the harm humans have already caused them is just the right thing to do: for us and them. Among the many tasks the MMCC needs volunteers to do, the most critical is education: Teaching people who these close human relatives are, and how we can help them.

Animal releases — watching a rehabilitated being return to the body of water that is his home, that he might not have seen for months, or maybe never swam in — are my favorite volunteer task. Almost one year after I got to help feed that first neonate sea lion, I watched him jump off a boat near San Miguel Island and swim away with a handful of other yearlings. He porpoised happily through the waves and never looked back.

Visit https://marinemammalcare.org/ to find out more about the Marine Mammal Care Center, sign up to volunteer, or donate. If you see a stranded marine mammal, stay 50 feet away and call 800 39 WHALE. If you see a politician, gently restrain them and explain why institutions such as NOAA, NASA, MMCC, and IBR need our support, now more than ever.

Evelyn McDonnell writes the series Bodies of Water — portraits of lives aquatic — for Random Lengths. She is a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University. Her most recent book is The World According to Joan Didion.

AOC, Sanders Lead Massive LA Rally Against Oligarchy

Mark Friedman

April 17, 2025

AOC, Sanders Lead Massive LA Rally Against Oligarchy

By Mark Friedman, Member International Association of Machinists

Nearly 40,000 people joined labor unions to fill downtown Los Angeles’ calling all in earshot to fight oligarchy on April 12. This was a labor rally, but it was also for anyone looking for an opportunity to push back against the Trump administration and its anti-democratic, anti-labor, and anti-civil liberties policies.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one-half of the headliner for the rally channeled deep concern over the growing concentration of power, corruption, and wealth inequality in the U.S., attributing it to a political system increasingly dominated by billionaires and corporate interests.

Ocasio-Cortez highlighted disturbing events, including the targeting and harassment of marginalized groups, unlawful detentions of activists like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, and attempts by ICE to access children in schools under false pretenses.

She argued that democracy is being eroded not only by authoritarian actions but also by economic systems designed to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the working class. The message calls for solidarity, especially across class lines, and urges collective resistance — not just through political institutions, but through everyday people standing up for one another — emphasizing that only through unity and sustained grassroots action can democracy and justice be preserved.

April 12 Protesta Contra Trump Por Los Derenchos De Los Trabajadores Inmigrantes Mujeres 1 — Thousands gathered in downtown Los Angeles to protest Trump’s actions. Photo by Mark Friedman

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders called for a mass, working-class movement to confront rising authoritarianism, corporate dominance, and extreme wealth inequality in America. Noting the rally organizers, supported by labor unions and prominent musicians, Sanders emphasized that millions of workers seek union representation for better wages and dignity while denouncing billionaires like Elon Musk and politicians, both Republican and complicit Democrats, for undermining democracy and enabling systemic injustice.

Sanders criticized Donald Trump for fostering a cult-like, authoritarian government that disrespects the Constitution, attacks public institutions, and supports violent foreign policies — especially in Gaza — favoring elite interests over human rights. Domestically, Sanders condemned the gutting of social safety nets, corporate tax breaks and growing economic disparities that leave millions living paycheck to paycheck or in poverty.

Rep. Alexandria Cortez with Sen. Bernie Sanders during a moment of levity at the April 12 rally. Photo by Rueben Garcia

They demand fair wages, affordable housing, universal healthcare and education as basic rights, insisting the path forward lies in solidarity, collective resistance, and economic justice for all — not just the wealthy few.

But this wasn’t just a Sanders and AOC show. Prominent labor speakers included Local 13, ILWU Vice President Brandi Good and UNITE-HERE’s Aida Briceno. Local and state politicians also spoke.

California AFL-CIO President Lorena Gonzalez exhorted the mass of humanity in downtown LA by asking, “Which side are you on? “Are you with working people or the greedy corporations like SpaceX, and Amazon, making billions off our labor and who are now trying to take away our rights?”

Gonzalez followed that powerful start with, “When they come for us, we respond: I am sticking with the union. Are you on the side of workers fighting to organize unions? When we exercise our power, use it collectively in our workplaces and our country. When we fight we win.”

Union delegations from the Garment and Restaurant Workers Union (UNITE-HERE), the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the National Nurses Union (NNU), United Autoworkers (UAW), United Teachers of LA (UTLA) and members of several Hollywood unions that were on strike this past year joined the rally.

One of the best-received speakers was April Verrett, President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) representing two million workers who keep this country running hospitals, schools, airports and city halls.

Verrett delivered a powerful call to collective action, urging people to unite across lines of division to confront the interconnected forces of corporate greed, systemic racism and political corruption. Emphasizing that billionaires and oligarchs fear the organized power of the people, Verrett highlighted economic injustice — from workers struggling while corporations profit, to courts stripping away rights in favor of the wealthy.

She spotlighted the fight of Uber and Lyft drivers in California for union rights, calling it part of a broader movement to dismantle exploitation and rewrite the rules of a rigged system. Through solidarity disruption, and mobilization, they argue, transformative change is possible — just as it was in past labor struggles — insisting that when people fight together, they win together.

All Governments Lie

Reporters Desk

April 17, 2025

Why We Need a Radical and Independent Free Press Now

If the Government makes a mistake, the newspapers will find out and the problem may then be fixed. But if freedom of the press were lost, the country would soon go to pieces.
— I.F. Stone

By Mickey Huff

https://www.projectcensored.org/governments-radical-independent-free-press/?doing_wp_cron=1744051460.4863109588623046875000

Media scholar Carl Jensen was deeply influenced by the independent muckraking journalists of the 20th century — so much so that he founded Project Censored at Sonoma State University, in 1976, in the wake of the Richard Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal, as a watchdog organization focused on exposing “the news that didn’t make the news.” Project Censored began in a sociology course Jensen taught at Sonoma State, but quickly evolved into a national effort to promote independent journalism and news literacy. The project produced an annual list of the most important investigative news reports, which attracted attention — and praise — from some of Jensen’s best-known contemporaries, including broadcast journalists Walter Cronkite and Hugh Downs, reform activist Ralph Nader, and a contemporary muckraker, investigative journalist I.F. “Izzy” Stone.

Jensen’s purpose was not to tear down so-called “mainstream” media outlets, but to constructively criticize their news judgment. By showing what the major media missed, or even “censored,” he hoped to improve what he saw as the lifeblood of democracy: a truly free press. Industry professionals didn’t always take kindly to such criticism, which led Jensen to turn his critique into a systematic study of what they did cover. He discovered a morass of fluff, sensationalism, and pap — what used to be called “yellow journalism” in the early 1900s. Jensen called it Junk Food News in 1983. He saw that the public would ultimately pay the price for the major media outlets’ myopic focus and critical omissions, in the form of accelerating civic decay. Sadly, he wasn’t wrong.

Today, we are awash in 21st-century versions of junk food news, as produced by corporate media and propagated on social media. Worse, we are also subject to ’round-the-clock infotainment and propaganda masquerading as journalism, what Jensen’s successor, sociologist Peter Phillips, called ”news abuse” in the early 2000s (now also referred to as malinformation). Of course, numerous media critics and scholars — including Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky, Ben Bagdikian, Neil Postman and Robert McChesney — have long warned against rising levels of mis- and disinformation, increased consolidation of media ownership, and their combined toll on press freedom and a well-informed public. In the last decade, with the moral panic around the weaponized epithet of “fake news,” these challenges have spawned a cottage industry of so-called fact-checkers — supposedly objective third parties trying to reverse the troublesome trend of declining public trust in the Fourth Estate.

However, most of those efforts have been exposed as Trojan horses for re-establishing corporate media dominance in a digital era of podcasts, TikTok, Instagram reels and “tweets” (or “posts” as they are now called on X). As Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker bemoaned last year at the World Economic Forum or WEF in Davos, news industry leaders are losing control of the narrative (emphasis added):

If you go back really not that long ago, as I say, we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well. If it said it in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, then that was a fact. Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news, and they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying. So, it’s no longer good enough for us just to say, this is what happened, or this is the news. We have to explain — almost like explain our working. So, readers expect to understand how we source stories. They want to know how we go about getting stories. We have to sort of lift the bonnet, as it were, and in a way that newspapers aren’t used to doing and explain to people what we’re doing. We need to be much more transparent about how we go about collecting the news.

“Lift the bonnet.” “Explain to people what we’re doing.” It’s almost as if the public wants more fact-based, transparently sourced reporting in their news, not partisan propaganda. And, go figure, in a rabidly consumerist culture, they want receipts too. Tucker seems to agree, though the corporate media and their advertisers/investors from Big Pharma, Big Tech, the military-industrial complex, and other powerful institutions whose narratives the public is questioning, likely do not. For Tucker and other gatekeepers, this public scrutiny is inconvenient, perhaps even impertinent, but also a market reality news organizations must now at least pay lip service to addressing. Perhaps this is what has contributed to record-low levels of approval and trust of the news media among the public.

Indy Journalism Can Build Public Trust While Fighting Fake News
Media scholars have described this conundrum as an epistemic one, the ushering in of a “post-truth” world “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The mis- and disinformation ecosystem that has emerged in this post-truth climate has establishment institutions from the WEF to Congress and the mass media themselves clutching pearls. Even the American public has come to believe that the lack of trustworthy information is a greater threat than terrorism. With the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, these concerns, along with increasing existential attacks on journalists and the news media itself, including ABC, CBS, NPR/PBS, and even the Associated Press as “enemies of the American people,” are growing rapidly and in unprecedented ways.

There certainly are major issues with corporate media and establishment outlets, which we at Project Censored have documented for nearly half a century. However, our critiques are not meant to undermine major media for partisan gain. Instead, the project’s criticisms of corporate news expose systemic gaps and slant in coverage, in order to pressure the nation’s most prominent news outlets to use their massive budgets and influence to serve the public good, rather than private interests, by holding corporate and government abusers of power accountable. Given the well-documented limitations of corporate media, we support a robust, independent, and public media system, because a commercial, for-profit model cannot “tell the people what is really going on,” as George Seldes once put it. The solution to our present journalistic woes does not lie with industry leaders, biased fact-checkers, or Big Tech content moderators. It rests on critical media literacy and a fiercely independent free press.

In support of this proposed solution, Project Censored advocates for a healthy democracy by promoting news literacy education, especially by providing hands-on training in critical media literacy for students, through our curriculum, student internships, and Campus Affiliates Program, each of which distinguishes Project Censored from other news watch organizations and press freedom groups. Further, each year, Project Censored also recognizes some of the best independent journalists, reporting factually, transparently and ethically in the public interest, pointing out that these are among the best advocates of news literacy, literally teaching by example. So, ironically, the very solutions to the revitalization of our failing Fourth Estate are its most radical independent practitioners, not their owners/employers or meddling partisan outsiders. History shows this to be the case, and we should listen to what the past can teach us.

“All Governments Lie”
Among the many books Jensen published, one of the most significant might be Stories That Changed America: Muckrakers of the 20th Century. In it, he collected exemplary work by nearly two dozen legendary journalists, his selection of the previous century’s most significant truth-tellers, including excerpts from decisive reports by Ida Tarbell (The History of the Standard Oil Company), Lincoln Steffans (The Shame of the Cities), Upton Sinclair (The Jungle and The Brass Check), George Seldes (In Fact), Edward R. Murrow (In Search of Light), and I.F. Stone (I.F. Stone’s Weekly). As Jensen wrote, “Their words led to a nationwide public revolt against social evils and [decades] of reforms in antitrust legislation, the electoral process, banking regulations, and a host of other social programs.” The reporting Jensen collected in Stories That Changed America continues to inspire those of us who believe journalism can make a difference.

“All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out,” the iconic muckraker “Izzy” Stone once wrote. But Stone had great faith in the power of the press to expose and counter those lies. We need brave, independent journalists and newsrooms to tackle the most controversial and suppressed issues of our era. Stone relentlessly exposed governmental prevarications and injustices throughout his career. He also saw the shortcomings of his own profession, to the point of resigning from the National Press Club in 1941, rather than kowtowing to its racism and political sycophancy. After realizing he had limited influence in the establishment press, he started I.F. Stone’s Weekly and dared to report the truth on his own. He took on McCarthyism at a time when his peers were being attacked, arrested, deported and disappeared. He fought for truth and peace in the face of the unjust, murderous conflicts of the Cold War, especially in Vietnam. Sound familiar?

Governments lie. Stone’s insight is timeless, but it seems more relevant than ever in 2025. The Trump administration and its enablers bombard us daily with lies and half-truths, what Reporters Without Borders has characterized as “a monumental assault on freedom of information.” At best, the establishment press seems capable of little more than chronicling the barrage; at worst, they capitulate to it.

The notion of a press “watchdog” on a governmental leash did not begin with the current administration — as Jensen and his students at Sonoma State noted in 1976 looking back on the eve of Richard Nixon’s re-election, no major news outlet even mentioned the Watergate scandal — and the roots of a subservient press reach back to the earliest history of American journalism on the presidency. But the return of Trump to power is a nadir for many of our cherished freedoms, including those of the First Amendment, which links freedom of speech and press with the rights to assemble and petition — and the public, our democracy, needs journalism that can help us awaken from what historian Timothy Snyder has described as a “self-induced intellectual coma” that is characteristic of “the politics of inevitability.”

The Izzys Are Coming!
Calling out counter-democratic measures is one way to resist the onslaught of authoritarianism. A free press provides the means for this, but people need to act in response. Rather than complain that “the left” needs a media power like Rupert Murdoch’s to “compete,” we should open our eyes and support the amazing people and organizations doing this invaluable work already. Project Censored highlights the most important but under-reported independent news stories each year, promoting the work of independent journalists, news outlets, and press freedom organizations that exemplify “media democracy in action.” Their work embodies the very spirit of resistance and amplifies the voices of those trammeled by oligarchs and would-be despots.

The Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM) at Ithaca College shares this ethos, supporting independent media as a bulwark against everyday injustices and creeping tyranny. Among the only academic centers of journalism in the United States focused solely on independent media, each year, PCIM honors the leading independent journalists of our time with its Izzy Award, named in honor of I.F. “Izzy” Stone. April 30 marks the 17th annual award ceremony, which will also be the occasion for numerous muckraking journalists and free press organizations to convene and build coalitions, strengthen solidarity and fight to protect our democratic republic from anyone, whether they bat for team red or team blue, who would subvert it for their own private gain.
The Izzy Award celebrates the practice of radical muckraking journalism in the public interest, and its continuing relevance in our current Gilded Age of Big Tech plutocracy. The work at PCIM and Project Censored reminds us that we cannot wait for change to simply emerge; we must create it ourselves. If past is prologue, we also have much to learn from and pass on to the next generation, whose experiences and voices will inform and express the stories that change America again, to paraphrase Jensen.
Now is not a time for cowering; it is a time to exhibit what political activist and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg called civil courage, regardless of the odds. Or, as Izzy noted, it is time “to defend the weak against the strong; to fight for justice; and to seek, as best I can to bring healing perspectives to bear on the terrible hates and fears of [humankind], in the hope of someday bringing about one world, in which [people] will enjoy the differences of the human garden instead of killing each other over them.”

Hear, hear. Let’s not get lost in the smoke of the hashish blown in our faces by elite media and government actors. Let’s instead recognize and support the reportorial canaries in the coal mines, from the climate crisis and Kafkaesque raids on the vulnerable among us to the dismantling of education, attacks on the arts, and an ongoing genocide. Let’s act on the information independent journalists share at their own risk, for we ignore them at our own.

Mickey Huff is director of Project Censored and president of the Media Freedom Foundation. He joined Ithaca College in 2024 as distinguished director of the Park Center for Independent Media and professor of journalism. Since 2009, he has coedited the annual Censored book series and has co-authored several works on media literacy and critical thinking, including The Media and Me and United States of Distraction.

Artful Metamorphosis

Melina Paris

April 17, 2025

A Survey of Jan Govaerts’ Work Across the Decades

Jan Govaerts: Through the Years, A Survey of Work, showcases the evolution of Govaerts’ artistic journey. It is a joyful exhibition, spanning decades. Through the Years explores the artist’s career from painting to sculpture, revealing a deep connection to nature, memory and transformation.

Govaerts, along with artist Sam Arno in 1996, founded The Loft Galleries, the 1913 building in San Pedro, now called Los Angeles Harbor Arts or LAHA. The two came to the Lofts with artists Muriel Oguin, Ann Marie Rawlinson and Bob Doughty. Govaerts said that it was really nice to see how interested the landlord was in the program they were starting at the Lofts — and he still is, she noted.

Govaerts began her painting career drawing inspiration from her childhood memories of the Nebraska prairie. Early works captured the vast landscape of her upbringing before transitioning into dream imagery.

Her painting, Reflections, depicts a pond in Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp in Owens Valley, California. A tree of undulating branches and gold leaves sits in a pond of glassy blue water. The saturated color and light emanating from this beautiful painting envelope the scene inviting closer exploration.

Braided River, a painting in three panels, is from a photograph Govaerts took when she visited Alaska. She explained the river channels through the land, and there are little islands in the middle of the river, which provide many different climates along the water body. The tributary exemplifies any braided river, such as the one that was flowing next to the Nebraska town she grew up in.

Braided River’s serene, aqua hues emit light from within the painting. A horizon scene places the viewer at the edge of a fertile riverbank. The river resembles a soft, pale seafoam green pillow where, through Govaerts’ skilled hand, the water’s depth is palpable in this meditative piece.

In a series of four paintings on display, Govaerts made discoveries both of an artistic and mythic nature.

“As I was finishing the day of painting, I would take the leftover paints from my palette and smear them onto another board,” Govaerts said. “Eventually, the board was filled with colors, and I started scraping through the layers … The images just revealed themselves and I brought the figures forward by pushing the background back. Then I would add from there to reveal figures.”

Govaerts said she got this idea from Muriel Olguin (1923-2017) whose method was to simply pour the paint onto the canvas and turn the canvas. The paintings in the series are titled: Dance; The Gaze; They Turn Away; and Hand of the Banshee. Govaerts explained that the Banshee helps you across the veil when you die. She said this painting symbolizes her youngest daughter when she died and is the first in this series.

These are tactile works that one could gaze upon extensively while still discovering new forms. A common factor throughout Govaerts’ paintings is the light that emanates from within them. She said because of the way she developed these works, they were a real adventure to paint.

“It actually turned into a little story,” Govaerts said.

This story was inspired by a book titled Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language by Mary Daly and Jane Caputi.

A Children’s Story for Grown Women

“She offers herself in all her beauty, they turn away. Finding her strength, she purposely walks toward her own future. She walks in the verdancy and lushness of Earth, drawing up her strength. Alone, she celebrates her connection with the sea, the ebb and flow of life, absorbing the power of the wave. She dances her own dance, sings her own song, celebrating the fire, energy and ecstasy of life. She opens to the powers of air: new dawn beginning. She soars with inspiration, dreaming of her flight with Fox Woman. Circling with her sisters, she increases her powers three times three. Recognizing her strength, in respect he makes his offering.”

The artist wrote to the authors of ‘Wickedary’ sharing her inspiration with them. She discussed how she struggled to name the paintings until their book sitting on her shelf “pulled her eyes” and “woven within were the words for her paintings.” She wrote that being pulled in by the book was a very magical experience which increased the mystery and wonder of making those paintings.

“First came the inner journey of discovering the imagery, then the fun and synchronicity of discovering their ‘tidals,’” she wrote.

In 1999, Govaerts shifted her focus to sculpture, working primarily with clay. Her sculptures explore the extraordinary within the ordinary, finding beauty in overlooked aspects of nature. Govaerts got into making her seed pods after a moment of awe.

“I was driving along and I saw a tree and it was dropping seed pods, so I stopped to look at this little seed pod that caught my attention. I looked at it and it was so intricate, so beautiful, something we don’t really even look at.”

Fascinated by its intricate form, texture and organic symmetry, she translated this inspiration into sculpted forms. These enlarged seed pods transcend their physical beauty, evoking presence and wonder. Her recent Stone series follows this pattern in her creations of cairns, or small pebbles as references for larger works.

IMG 2624 Enhanced NR — Jan Govaerts approaches her “Seed Pod Boats.” Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

While sculpting her Seed Pod Boats, Govaerts recalled that she wondered if Indigenous people saw the pods floating downstream and got the idea to make boats. Her Seed Pod Boats, which are 7 feet long, 20 inches wide and 18 inches deep, are made of paper clay (liquid clay) that has processed cellulose fibers (like paper pulp) added to it, and slip fabric on a wooden armature, so they are not fired. They did not take long to make — as big as they are, she noted, once she built the armature.

“Those are my favorite,” Govaerts said. “I [made] it one time in the studio and I had slip everywhere … It was worth it to do these pieces, but never again.”

Her Guardian Towers 1, 2 and 3, Govaerts said, remind her of the hoodoos, which are tall, slender rock spires formed by erosion, located in the Bryce Canyon area of Utah. She built her towers in sections that were only fired one time, and with no glaze, “and they last perfectly.”

Indeed, Govaerts’ calm ‘Guardians” epitomize the hoodoo’s statuesque, jagged and protruding terra rossa formations. She meticulously constructs her towers by layering 500 to 600 hand-formed clay coils, creating towering structures up to six feet tall.

Her inspiration for the ‘Guardians’ came after Govaerts enrolled in a ceramics class at Los Angeles Harbor College.

“I got started, but I really started doing it full time when I had a little vision of these [towers], she said. “I had an idea for them … and I think that bubbled up from the memories of the hoodoos.”

She began her Guardian Towers series in 2007 and has 21 towers in total.

IMG 2793 Enhanced NR — Jan Govaerts poses alongside her piece Wings. Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

Govaerts’ Wings is made of two pieces. This earth-colored sculpture resembles something one might see as part of an avatar’s anatomy in a sci-fi film, with its repeating stripe pattern within its biomorphic shape. At the same time, this extraordinary piece has a fossilized appearance.

“There are so many processes in making clay,” Govaerts said. “They all take different amounts of time. My pieces are single-fired with no glaze; they have different stains and underglazes. Sometimes I polish them. People see all kinds of things in the seed pod pieces from something that came out of the ocean to something from outer space.”

The most joyful piece in this retrospective Singing Bowls is just what it sounds like; a collection of small ceramic bowls, of all different colors, strung in rows and hung from the ceiling on a large frame. It’s a big mobile of sorts (you can actually, but carefully, walk within) which Govaerts gladly provided chopsticks to play the bowls.

A joyous Jan Govaerts poses in front of her painting “Prairie River.” Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

A dedicated artist and educator, Govaerts earned her bachelor of arts in Studio Art in 1991. She served as president of Angels Gate Cultural Center and taught ceramics for many years. In 2018, she and her partners established Blue Water Clay, a full-service ceramics studio where she taught until her second retirement in 2023. Today, she continues to create in her studio.

Join two more events around this exhibition:

Artist reception from 2 to 5 p.m., April 19

Closing reception, from 2 to 5 p.m., May 10

Details: 310-547-3624; https://www.laharborarts.org

Venue: LA Harbor Arts, 401 S Mesa St., San Pedro

1...585960...941 Page 59 of 941

LA Health Services and Harbor-UCLA Launch LA-DROP: A Life-Saving Blood Transfusion Initiative

CSULB Students and Faculty Protest ICE, Budget Cuts, and Speech Restrictions

UFCW 324 Takes Stand Against Self-Checkout, Citing Theft and Job Loss

Letters to the Editor: On Taxes, Democrats, Eaton Fire, Middleton, ILWU Ride, and the Role of the Journalist-Activist”

RE: Journalist/Activist response to Warren Furutani letter to editor March 20 edition

From San Pedro to Honolulu

The Ultimate Offshore Sailing Challenge

Wetlands vs. Oil

When the Ocean Sends a Cry for Help

Answering Looks Like This

AOC, Sanders Lead Massive LA Rally Against Oligarchy

All Governments Lie

Why We Need a Radical and Independent Free Press Now

Artful Metamorphosis

A Survey of Jan Govaerts’ Work Across the Decades

EDITOR PICKS

Gal Pals & Pet Pals: Storytellers & Rescuers Unite for a Night of Community

Ai Weiwei’s Turandot

The American Years: Guillaume Zuili’s Cinematic Vision of the West

POPULAR POSTS

Reverberations, On View at Sala Gallery San Pedro

“Is ICE Planning My Deportation? A Citizen’s Crisis in a Post-Constitutional America”

Art, Authenticity vs. Hypocrisy Why the Arts Matter to Downtown Communities

POPULAR CATEGORY

ABOUT US

FOLLOW US