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Winter Call for Port Sponsorships Open Through Jan. 31

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Winter Call for Port Sponsorships Open Through Jan. 31

Nonprofit organizations are invited to apply for the Port of Long Beach’s Community Sponsorship Program, which funds community events and activities that help inform residents about the Port. The events center on the arts, environment, education, social justice and historic preservation.

Community groups may submit sponsorship applications online now through Friday, Jan. 31, at 5 p.m. Due to the application review process, applicants are advised to plan well in advance for their events. Events in this sponsorship call must take place at least 60 days after the end of the call; this allows time for the review, consideration and recommendation process prior to the decision by the Board of Harbor Commissioners.

Applications are judged on how effectively the proposed events and activities can help the Port inform the community of its critical role as an environmental steward, economic engine and job creator. Events chosen should include promotional, marketing and community outreach opportunities for the port. The sponsored events and programs help spread awareness about the Port’s operations, initiatives and community investment.

For more information on the Port’s Community Sponsorship Program and how to apply, go to www.polb.com/sponsorships.

The Port accepts sponsorship applications three times a year, in January, May and September.

Carson Host’s Amateur Boxing Dinner Show

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Carson Host’s Amateur Boxing Dinner Show

 

Friday Night at the Fights, Carson’s celebrated amateur boxing and dinner show will take place on Jan. 17 at the Carson Event Center.

The boxing event will feature 12 amateur boxing bouts. The dinner show will be held at the Community Center in Carson.

Ticket price includes dinner. Round tables of eight persons per table are still available for $360. This is a pre-sale ticket only event. No tickets will be sold at the door.

Doors will open at 5 p.m. for social hour, followed by dinner at 6 p.m. The boxing bouts will begin at 7 p.m.

Time: 5 to 11 p.m., Jan. 17

Cost: $45

Details: Tickets, https://cutt.ly/OnlineReg and more information at Fabela Chavez Boxing Center and Fitness Center 310-830-6439

Venue: Carson Event Center, 801 E. Carson St., Carson

LAUSD Closes All Schools as Fires Devastate LA Area

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LAUSD Closes All Schools as Fires Devastate LA Area

 

The world’s eyes are on Los Angeles as a once in a generation windstorm has devastated many of the city’s most affluent areas and suburbs. Though San Pedro and the Harbor Area are safe from the fires themselves the air quality and strong winds are still a danger to our community. In response to the multiple 10,000 acre plus fires, Los Angeles Unified School District or LAUSD has closed all schools in LA City for today, Jan 9, stating “The confluence of factors – wind, fire, and smoke – have created dangerous, complex situations that present unsafe conditions for our school communities. Select essential personnel will be contacted by their supervisors regarding potential work duties.”

It’s unclear whether or not schools will open back up tomorrow but in the statement by LAUSD, they said that “the District will continue assessing the situation over the next 24 hours while preparing for the possibility of online learning on Friday, Jan. 10. A decision about Friday, Jan. 10 will be announced by 4:00 p.m. on Thursday.”

If you and your family are impacted by the school closure there are resources available:

Mental Health Support Services: Los Angeles Unified students and families in need of mental health support are encouraged to call our Student and Family Wellness Resource Line at 213-241-3840. Support is currently available between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m., Monday through Friday. Employees may access Employee Assistance Service for Education (EASE) by visiting https://www.lausd.org/domain/1438 or calling the 24/7 support line at 800-882-1341.

Other Resources: We encourage members of the Los Angeles Unified family who are in need during this difficult time to visit lausd.org to learn about available City, County, and community-based resources and connect with entities who are prepared to assist.

Further updates will be provided on lausd.org and the District’s social media channels.

 

Montana Recognizes Youth Climate Rights

Paul Rosenberg
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Montana Recognizes Youth Climate Rights

First State Supreme Court Decision Could Lead To Many More

Christmas came a week early for 16 young Montanans this winter. They won the right to a safe and livable climate in a landmark state Supreme Court decision. In 2023, Held v. Montana became the first youth climate case to go to trial and result in the finding of an individual right to a livable climate. The 6-1 Montana State Supreme Court ruling on Dec. 18 marked another first, affirming that right, and adding momentum for other states to follow.

“This ruling is a victory not just for us, but for every young person whose future is threatened by climate change,” said Rikki Held, the named plaintiff in the case. “We have been heard, and today the Montana Supreme Court has affirmed that our rights to a safe and healthy climate cannot be ignored.”

Melissa Hornbein, senior attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center and attorney for the plaintiffs said, “Montana’s regulatory agencies must now evaluate the potential harm to the environment and the health and safety of the state’s children from any new fossil fuel projects, and determine whether the project can be justified in light of the ongoing unconstitutional degradation of Montana’s environment, natural resources and climate.”

They were also represented by Our Children’s Trust, which began youth climate litigation over a decade ago, and has litigation underway in several states, including Alaska, Hawai’i, Utah, Florida and Virginia as well as Montana.

State Republicans responded predictably by accusing the court of judicial activism and overreach. But it was Tea Party Republicans in 2011 who first excluded consideration of climate effects. So while the recognition of an individual constitutional right is new — and significant both nationally and internationally — in Montana the practical effect is simply to restore the pre-Tea Party status quo. It’s anything but a radical departure in an everyday policy sense.

“This ruling is not just a win for Montana — it’s a signal to the world that youth-led climate action is powerful and effective,” said plaintiff Kian. “The eyes of the world are now on us, seeing how youth-driven legal action can create real change.”

Several other states have similar explicit environmental rights — first passed in the 1970s — with courts playing a growing role in enforcing states’ environmental rights amendments, Northeastern University law professor Martha Davis explained in an article, “The Greening of State Constitutions,” at the time of the original trial.

This wasn’t the first time a state supreme court had recognized a right to a stable climate. In March 2023, Hawaii’s top court ruled that a regulatory agency didn’t abuse its discretion in considering climate change. But, “It was a purely administrative issue,” Davis told Random Lengths. “There was no public interest organization in front of it.” The court ruled that Hawaii’s Public Utilities Commission had the discretion to consider climate impacts — but not that it had to.

“The Montana case in contrast was brought by a group of youths,” she said. “They are challenging MEPA, the Montana Environmental Protection Act on the grounds that it affirmatively bars the state from considering climate change. … And so the youth argued that that violated the state constitution, their rights directly,” Davis explained.

In addition, “The fact that it’s based on an evidentiary record of the nature and scope that was presented by first, the trial record and then Judge Seeley’s decision of Aug 14, 2023, of over 100 pages makes this case unique,” co-lead trial counsel Phil Gregory from Our Children’s Trust told Random Lengths. The ruling confirmed “that these cases can be tried. They can be tried very effectively,” he said, “They’re not complicated cases to try,” as judges in other states might previously have thought. So this should further accelerate similar litigation.

Not only was the evidence overwhelming, it was unrebutted. “It’s not like the state introduced testimony that there are no climate impacts in Montana because that testimony didn’t come into evidence. The state didn’t even try,” Gregory said. “The evidence was uncontested that these plaintiffs are being harmed by climate impacts.”

[The state] “had an expert, Dr. Judith Curry, who was supposedly prepared to do that” — contest the evidence. But “Dr. Curry didn’t testify at trial,” he said.

On appeal, Montana’s Supreme Court faced three main legal issues: “Whether the Montana constitution’s guarantee of a ‘clean and healthful environment’ includes a stable climate system that sustains human lives and liberties,” whether the MEPA limitation violated that constitutional guarantee, and whether the youth plaintiffs had standing — the right to challenge the state for that violation. A minor fourth issue was dismissed in two paragraphs.

On the first issue, the state argued that the framers couldn’t have intended to include protections against climate change, because they didn’t specifically discuss it, but only focused on examples in Montana, such as “‘The clear, unpolluted air near Bob Marshall wilderness,” as described in the convention transcript.

“But our Constitution does not require the Framers to have specifically envisioned an issue for it to be included in the rights enshrined in the Montana Constitution,” the court wrote, going on to quote from a 1924 decision: “A Constitution is not a straight-jacket, but a living thing designed to meet the needs of a progressive society and capable of being expanded to embrace more extensive relations.” What’s more, the constitution’s text and transcript reinforce this same point, as the court has noted in previous cases it cited — most notably two cases from 1999 (MEIC) and 2020 (Park Cnty):
The right to a clean and healthful environment is “forward-looking and preventative.” Park Cnty., ¶ 62. It does not require the Framers to have contemplated every environmental harm that is protected under “‘the strongest environmental protection provision found in any state constitution’” Park Cnty., ¶ 61 (quoting MEIC 1999, ¶ 66).

And, of course, Montana-specific harms were at the heart of the case the court confirmed: “Plaintiffs showed at trial — without dispute — that climate change is harming Montana’s environmental life support system now and with increasing severity for the foreseeable future.”

And so the court concluded, “Montana’s right to a clean and healthful environment and environmental life support system includes a stable climate system.”

On the second issue, the court noted, “Obviously, a clean and healthful environment cannot occur unless the State and its agencies can make adequately informed decisions” which can’t be done “when the Legislature forecloses an entire area of review.” And thus the MEPA limitation is unconstitutional. But the decision is policy neutral: “We decide only that the Constitution does not permit the Legislature to prohibit environmental reviews from evaluating GHG emissions.”

On the issue of standing, the guiding principle was clear — a constitutional violation alone wasn’t enough, “But alleging facts stating a claim that a statute violates a plaintiff’s constitutional right is sufficient to show an injury, and seeking to vindicate those constitutional rights confers standing.” Both the state and the one dissenting justice raised numerous arguments trying to cloud the issue, but a 2014 case, Schoof v. Nesbit — involving violations of Montana’s open meeting law — provided excellent guidance in dispelling them.

The lone dissenting opinion began bizarrely and inexplicably with a long quote from a 1950 Saturday Evening Post story about a warming planet, which it blamed on the Sun, with no mention at all of the greenhouse effect. It also incoherently argued that the court shouldn’t get involved in policymaking, while making a stab at doing precisely that: it rattled off a series of geoengineering-type “solutions” no one else had been talking about.

“Like you I’m befuddled. I really don’t know what to make of the dissent,” Gregory said. “The dissent cites to no evidence that the majority opinion should have considered but didn’t.” In fact, “What the dissent is saying here is totally not based on anything that was introduced at trial,” he said. “Typically what happens in the dissent is that the majority relies on evidentiary matters one, two and three, and the dissent says, ‘Ah, but you’re ignoring the evidence A, B and C over here which you should have relied on. Well, that’s not what this dissent is saying at all.”

What it is saying has much more in common with Gov. Greg Gianforte and Republican legislative leaders, who also avoided the facts in case, falling back on conservative talking points. “This Court continues to step outside of its lane to tread on the right of the legislature, the elected representatives of the people, to make policy,” Gianforte said in a statement.

But the claim to represent the people rings hollow in light of the actual record. One of the laws struck down was passed in May 2023, and drew “more than 1,000 comments, 95% of which expressed opposition to the measure,” according to Amanda Eggert, reporting for the Montana Free Press. And the policy in question — to bar considering climate impacts — clearly conflicts with the constitution. If legislators want to change the constitution, a two-thirds vote of either chamber can put it on the ballot for the people to decide.

Thus, the will of the people isn’t being ignored or suppressed by the court. Quite the contrary, it’s the GOP-run legislature that’s been ignoring the popular will. As Eggert also noted, in a 2022 poll of Montana registered voters “three-fifths of those polled said there is enough evidence of climate change to support action and called for a transition to renewable energy.”

What happens next in Montana remains to be seen. Some project evaluations have been on hold pending the decision. There could be further litigation if they fail to meet the new standard. And the legislature may weigh in trying to further complicate matters. It meets in regular session for no longer than 90 days in each odd-numbered year, so “We really won’t know until the first quarter of 2025 what the state is going to do,” Gregory said.

More broadly, “Every state has its own constitution and by my count seven states identify or recognize a right to a healthy environment or something like it,” said Washburn law professor James May, who’s worked with Out Children’s Trust for over a dozen years. “A little more than 30 states address the environment in some way, but not by providing a right,” he said. “It might have a provision about environmental protection or who knows what, but not a right.”

But that’s not the only avenue open. Our Children’s Trust has a case pending in Utah that could help break new ground, Davis explained. Utah’s state constitution does not have specific environmental rights provision, instead “They’re arguing that what’s called the Lockean guarantee — the natural rights provision in the state constitution — establishes environmental rights,” she explained. “There are 39 states that have natural rights provisions of the state constitutions.” So if they’re successful in Utah, “Then potentially there could be litigation in any of the 39 states that have those kinds of provisions.”

In short, Held v. Montana could well be only the beginning of a dramatic shift in state law climate law across the country. But May raised a note of caution. There’s a Hawaiian case, Sunoco vs Honolulu, based on common-law claims for negligence and fraud, which Sunoco appealed to the Hawaii Supreme Court and lost. Now it’s asking the U S Supreme Court to intervene, which would be quite rare. “I’d be surprised if the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case,” May said. “I’d be more surprised if the Supreme Court ruled on the case and I wouldn’t be surprised that if it ruled on the case, it took away the authority of states to get involved.”

On Dec. 10, Joe Biden’s solicitor general submitted a brief arguing that Sunoco’s petition seeking review “should be denied for multiple interrelated reasons,” but there’s no telling when the court might decide. In the meantime, the Held decision is generating state-level hope across the country.

“We hope this decision inspires others across the country and beyond to stand up for their rights to a livable climate,” plaintiff Kian said. “The eyes of the world are now on us, seeing how youth-driven legal action can create real change.”

The Rise Of Big Potato

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By Katya Schwenk

One afternoon in April 2022, Josh Saltzman, the owner of a sports bar in Washington, D.C., opened his inbox to find what looked like a french fry price-fixing conspiracy.

Saltzman had received a notice from his bar’s food distributor that effective April 4, the four major suppliers of frozen potato products, which sell products like french fries and Tater Tots to bars and restaurants around the country, were all hiking their prices in lockstep, each by $0.12 per pound.

For Saltzman, it was hard to believe this was a coincidence. “It was just the most obvious example of collusion I’ve seen in a long time,” he said. “All of them were raising their prices by virtually the exact same amount within a week of each other.”

Frustrated, Saltzman took to the internet. “I was just like, ‘Oh, I’m going to fire off a tweet about Big Potato,’” he said. “Then it somehow took on a life of its own.”

Big Potato was more real than Saltzman had anticipated. That April, Saltzman’s offhand tweet — “Totally not collusion or anything, right?” — went viral. And last month, it was cited in a new spate of antitrust lawsuits brought against the four biggest companies in the frozen potato market, claiming the companies were in fact colluding when they all hiked their prices at the same time in 2022.

The four companies now stand accused of operating as a “cartel” and conspiring to hike prices, jacking up the cost of french fries and Tater Tots around the country. But they’re hardly alone. The case against Big Potato is a window into how consolidation has crept into every corner of the food industry — and how these firms are finding new, sophisticated methods to keep prices high.

After decades of consolidation, just four firms now control at least 97 percent of the $68 billion frozen potato market, the antitrust cases reveal. These four companies participate in the same trade associations and use a third-party data analytics platform — PotatoTrac — to share confidential business information. The lawsuits allege the firms’ collusion has driven french fries and hash browns to record-high prices.

Consumers have felt the impacts of these price hikes. The cost of fries at McDonald’s has increased by 138 percent since 2014, and hash brown prices have more than doubled in recent years at fast food joints including Jack in the Box and Hardee’s. At local dives and mom-and-pop joints — like Saltzman’s bar, Ivy and Coney — the cost of fries is going up, too.

Between July 2022 and July 2024, the price of frozen potato products increased by 47 percent across the board, according to court documents. This rise was initially tied to a jump in operating costs among the companies that peaked in 2022 — but even as these expenses have declined over the last two years, product prices have remained high.

In all corners of the food industry, similar developments have occurred: Industries consolidate, and prices jump. Even niche markets like almond milk and microwave popcorn are increasingly controlled by just a few firms, driving higher prices for consumers and uncertainty for farmers and suppliers — and helping to fund lucrative stock buyback programs and payouts for executives and top shareholders.

“All of these industries are trending toward duopolies — the model of Coke and Pepsi,” said Philip Howard, a professor at Michigan State University who studies concentration in food systems. While concentration is “not always as bad as 97 percent held by four firms like in the potato industry,” he said, “a lot of industries are getting closer and closer to that.”

A spokesperson for Lamb Weston Holdings, the biggest player in frozen potatoes and one of the main defendants in the antitrust cases, wrote in response to questions from The Lever that “we believe the claims are without merit and intend to vigorously defend our position.”

The other three potato firms named as defendants in the lawsuits did not respond to requests for comment.

 

The Potato Cartel

The antitrust battle against the frozen potato market began in November. Since last month, more than a dozen coordinated private class action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of restaurants, grocery stores, and food distributors around the country, all of which claim that price-fixing by the four french fry behemoths has hurt their bottom lines.

“The potato cartel moves prices skyward in lockstep — harming all purchasers of potatoes in the process,” attorneys wrote in a lawsuit filed in November.

Years of consolidation in the french fry market preceded these collusion allegations.

According to the suits, around 40 percent of all potatoes grown in the United States are sold to frozen potato companies — 17 billion pounds annually. These firms buy potatoes from growers, prepare and freeze them, package them, and send them off to restaurants, grocery stores, bars, and distributors as frozen fries or tater-tots.

Over the last 20 years, more than a dozen companies with significant shares of the frozen potato market have been whittled down to just four: Lamb Weston, the J.R. Simplot Company, Canada-based company McCain Foods, and Cavendish Farms, all of which are defendants in Simplot controls another 20 percent, and Cavendish Farms accounts for 7 percent, according to the antitrust lawsuits. Lamb Weston and McCain alone control 70 percent of the market; J.R. court documents.

Back in the early ’90s, industry insiders described competition in the frozen potato industry as “fierce.” According to one copyright lawsuit from 1993, that competition inspired the creation of the waffle fry, an innovation that both Lamb Weston and McCain Foods fought to take credit for and use to dominate the market.

Over the years that followed, however, Lamb Weston — which was for a time owned by major food conglomerate Conagra — McCain Foods, and J.R. Simplot expanded their respective market shares, acquiring or eliminating their smaller rivals and expanding their control over the industry.

Potential new challengers faced major hurdles when entering the market. The dominance of fast food chains had made frozen potatoes a bulk commodity. Lamb Weston, McCain, and the other potato firms weren’t making their money by selling to mom-and-pop businesses — they were increasingly competing for major contracts with McDonald’s and Burger King.

Old-School Hip-Hop Lives On

Terelle Jerricks
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Old-School Hip-Hop Lives On

Egyptian Lover Revives Classic Sounds at JDC Records Performance

On Jan. 3, old-school hip-hop fans packed out the JDC Records to hear the Egyptian Lover on the turntables and his 808 drum machine, an event starting to become an annual New Year’s tradition.

The age demographic of the fans that showed up matched the demographic the West Coast legend has always catered to — his own. As hip hop approaches 60, stories abound of artists who were hot in the ’80s and ’90s no longer wanting to perform the music they created in their youth.
And not because they are embarrassed, but because it doesn’t speak to where they are now.

The jet-setting DJ and producer whose stage name is Egyptian Lover, who also goes by Greg Broussard, performed sets from his albums 1986, 1985, and 1984. But his San Pedro performance came just ahead of the release of his latest album, 1987. The albums are named so following his album 1984.

He called this series of albums starting with 1984 because he went back to the studios he used to back in 1984.

“I went back to the same studios I went to before, and produced the album the same way, with the same equipment, to get that same sound as I did in 1984,” Broussard said. “And they worked.” Broussard did the same with the albums 1985, 1986, and 1987.

When Random Lengths caught up with him a week before Christmas, the Egyptian Lover, whose stomping grounds as a young artist in the early 1980s were the South LA and the LA Harbor cities, had no such compunction regarding his music. He continues to eat off his old music and the new music based on the original flavor that brought him fame. He had just returned from a tour in Europe and when he returned he was on grandpa duty with his grandchildren.

“I’m living the dream far beyond even my wildest dreams,” the legendary DJ said.

Back in the day, when the Alpine Village was an epicenter of hip-hop in the South Bay and Los Angeles Harbor Area, the Egyptian Lover was a part of the scene created by Uncle Jamm’s Army, a funk/hip-hop collective that evolved from putting on parties at Alpine Village. It drew large crowds from Carson, San Pedro, Gardena, Westchester, Compton, Los Angeles and Harbor City, bringing a generation of hip-hop under a groove.

The West Coast elder statesman of hip-hop noted that in the early days of Uncle Jamm’s Army, Rodger Clayton from Uncle Jamm and Alonzo Williams from the World Class Wrecking Cru were doing shows together — a time that represented the golden age of West Coast hip-hop to Broussard.

“They were both DJing and I was up there as a dancer, dreaming that one day I’d be up there with them,” Broussard said. “But then they got mad at each other and broke up.”

But Rodger Clayton of Uncle Jamm’s Army and Alonzo Williams of the World Class Wrecking Cru were competing that whole time. “But when they were together, it was amazing. They would play nothing that you would hear on the radio. I would just choose stuff from off of their albums,” Broussard said.

“Roger was the one who picked the songs to play. He passed away on Oct. 10, 2010, he was the master programmer for the night. And there were times he would play, Nobody Walks in LA, Hey Mickey You’re So Fine, we would play Flamethrower by the J Geils Band and a lot of different cultures would come to places like the Sports Arena to see us party. Even though most of it was hip-hop, rap, dance music, rock, and electro. We had all kinds of music, all kinds of people, and most importantly all of us got along.

“The gangs would fight against the gangs once a night, then break it up then go back to partying. When the gangs did start fighting, Roger had the idea to put on Flashlight and they would actually stop fighting and start dancing, doing their C-Walking and B-Walking and all that,” Broussard explained.

Uncle Jamm’s Army disbanded by 1988, giving way to gangster rap. But recently rapper Snoop Dogg, a legend of a later generation than Broussard, formed Uncle Snoop’s Army, an entertainment management firm that references Uncle Jamm’s Army.

“Snoop Dog is a businessman and everything he does, it’s about business. He’s always putting himself out there and I love it,” Broussard said. “He’s keeping the West Coast alive but just keeping his face out there.”

Broussard isn’t like a lot of aging artists in hip-hop, wondering if they still have anything to say, either to their demographic or younger ones. This is why he’s continued to not only play the music he created going back to the 1980s but continue to create music with those same sensibilities.

“These are kids who’ve never seen an old-school DJ. So I’m doing it the old-school way. No using CDs or USBs. I’m using vinyl records like how we did back in the day so they can learn how we did it,” Broussard said.

RFK Jr.: Prescription For Death

Paul Rosenberg
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RFK Jr.: Prescription For Death

 

“There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe andeffective.” —RFK Jr., July 6, 2023

“Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children younger than 5 years of whom 101 million were infants younger than 1 year.”

— The Lancet, May 25, 2024

Much like Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. loves saying things without any concern for the truth. If it feels good, in the moment, he’ll say it. And so, when he went on a popular podcast with Lex Fridman in July 2023 and was asked if he could name any good vaccines, he said the following:

I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.

He said this even though vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives. In addition to smallpox, in the U.S., diphtheria, pertussis, polio, measles, mumps and rubella have almost entirely been eliminated, where a million cases a year were once the collective average. We live in a miracle health bubble that vaccines have created, taking it entirely for granted.

Fast forward to a PBS Newshour interview with Amna Nawaz in November 2023, with a very different audience, and he sang a very different tune:

Nawaz: You have said previously that no vaccine is safe or effective, which is…

(Crosstalk)

Kennedy: I have never said that.

Nawaz: You did say that in a podcast interview in July.

Kennedy: No, I never said that.

Nawaz: You did say that. There are quotes, and that recording is there.

Kennedy: You are wrong. And you’re making something up.

What RFK is doing here isn’t just generically lying, he’s using a specific gaslighting technique called “countering,” where an abuser vehemently questions a victim’s memory in spite of the victim remembering things correctly. Trump engages in countering all the time — most insistently in rewriting the violent Jan. 6 coup attempt as a day of “love,” so it makes perfect sense for him to appoint RFK Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services or DHHS, where he will be free to do all manner of mischief harming the nation’s health.

The RFK nomination was hardly the only dangerous one. There were accused sex criminals, like nominees Matt Gaetz (attorney general) and Pete Hegseth (secretary of defense), security risks like Tulsi Gabbard (director of national intelligence, known for promoting Russian disinformation), and billionaires out the wazoo, alongside Fox News personalities.

They’re all dangerous in different ways, but RFK is particularly so. Dangerous enough that 77 Nobel laureates — 31 in medicine — wrote a letter to senators urging them to reject him, saying RFK Jr.’s appointment “would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences.”

If anything, the letter was reserved and understated, making no mention of his complete rejection of vaccine safety, much less his unstable personal life (heroin addiction, sexual assault, etc). Instead, it calmly listed his lack of experience, opposition to vaccines “such as those that prevent measles and polio” (instead of his oppositon to all vaccines) and fluoridation of drinking water, his promotion of conspiracy theories about AIDS and other diseases, and being “a belligerent critic of respected agencies,” which is a vast understatement.

In fact, RFK has accused at least one agency, the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, of being fascist, of being engaged in a cover-up similar to the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child sexual abuse, and being staffed by people who should be imprisoned or worse, as described in a November article by NBC disinformation reporter Brandy Zadrozny, drawing on speeches he’d given at the parent-run AutismOne conference, dating back to 2013. The false idea that vaccines cause autism derives from since-retracted research from the 1990s whose author, Andrew Wakefield, later lost his medical license. But much of RFK’s anti-vax crusading hinges on it, equating autistic children with victims of sexual abuse. “The institution, CDC, and the vaccine program is more important than the children that it’s supposed to protect,” he said in a 2019 speech. “It’s the same reason we had a pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church.”

Earlier comments “include claims that the CDC is a ‘cesspool of corruption,’ filled with profiteers, harming children in a way he also likened to ‘Nazi death camps,’” Zadrozny reported. In a 2013 speech he “vilified a nebulous group, including vaccine scientists,” allegedly involved in the coverup conspiracy. “Is it hyperbole when I say these people should be in jail? They should be in jail and the key should be thrown away,” she quotes RFK saying. But then he goes farther:

“What Jesus Christ says is that anybody who harms a hair of these little children, that it would be better if a millstone was tied around their neck and they were thrown in the deepest part of the ocean and it would be better yet if they had never been born.”

But in reality, it’s RFK who’s harming children. In Samoa, there were over 5,700 cases of measles and 83 deaths in 2019, in an outbreak that occurred a few months after RFK visited, promoting anti-vaxx resistance to the measles vaccine, in the wake of a temporary pause that gave anti-vaxx activists an opening. “When the government did restart its vaccination programme, people were reluctant: when the epidemic was declared on 16 October, the rate had dropped to 31%, down from 84% four years previously, according to WHO data,” the Guardian reported, looking back in November. It’s impossible to quantify how many children died or “merely” got gravely ill due to RFK’s influence. We can’t tell precisely how much blood is on his hands. But we know it’s there.

And there could be so much more.

As an anti-vaxx completist, he spreads lies about new vaccines such the HPV cancer-prevention vaccine (25 false claims by one critic’s count) as well as golden oldies about AIDS: no need for a vaccine at all, since it’s not caused by a virus, but by “heavy recreational drug use in gay men and drug addicts.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, RFK became a booster of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, two antiparasitic drugs with no demonstrable value in combating COVID. He also promoted a baseless racist and antisemitic theory that COVID “ethnically targeted” white and Black people but not Ashkenazi Jews or Chinese people. He’s a promoter of raw milk, a potential vector for the spread of bird flu. The list of dangerous beliefs he holds goes on and on and on.

While it’s hard to correlate such beliefs with specific quantifiable harms, there’s no doubt that harms would occur — and not just harms. People will die.

But there’s another way in which the harm can be very concretely understood.

In November 2023, while still running for president as an independent, RFK Jr. told an anti-vax conference that if elected “I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, God bless you all. Thank you for your public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” He says he wants to focus on chronic disease instead.

There’s so much wrong here, that one hardly knows where to begin. However, Dr. Andrea Love does a detailed analysis in her Immunologic newsletter. The big picture message is that you can’t just address chronic diseases while ignoring pathogens, because they’re intimately connected. Many chronic diseases are caused by infectious diseases, which are always going to be a big deal — always evolving (no eight-year pause for them!) — and will inevitably impact us in the U.S., even if the greatest impacts are elsewhere. Chronic diseases like cancer are a greater concern for us, precisely because vaccination and other public health measures mean we’re living longer, to the age when those diseases become much bigger health threats. The good news is that research focused on fighting infectious diseases has applications to chronic disease as well.

And, finally, she underscores the not-so-hidden role of privilege involved:

Affluent people in developed nations aren’t the only people on the planet.

While RFK Jr. and the MAGA crowd fixate on chronic diseases in their bubbles of affluence, their rhetoric reeks of privilege: the privilege they have growing up in a country that has benefited from infectious disease research and vaccines. Ironic, eh? People who are anti-vaccine are those who have benefited the most from vaccines.

But billions of other people are still contending with acute infectious agents as leading causes of death. In low- and middle-income countries, tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS are leading causes of death – because these countries don’t have the privilege we have.

In recent weeks, the “both sides” media and a few Democrats have begun to talk about finding “common ground” with RFK. There are criticisms he’s raised that they share. But the number one problem with the “common ground” approach is that it’s based on an assumption of good faith that’s simply not justified in dealing with a gaslighter — a point succinctly driven home on Bluesky by Canadian writer, Dr. Jen Gunter.

“I am enraged by the media, doctors, and politicians who are sane-washing RFK Jr and claiming some common ground. Common ground only exists when there are genuinely good intentions, but anti-science grifters are not presenting good-faith arguments. There is no common ground, only a slippery slope,” she wrote, and then gave the following example:

RFK Jr wants to end pharma ads. A good idea, except he doesn’t extend it to supplements. If he cared about negative effects of advertising he would want to target both. So there is no common ground here, bc his goal is not to improve health, rather to help his buddies sell supplements.

One politician who gets it is Sen. Chris Murphy.

“Why are we giving RFK Jr. a pass?” he asked on MSNBC. “Okay, he wants to ban pharmaceutical advertising. That’s nice. He also wants to kill our kids by withdrawing vaccines from our schools and taking fluoride out of our drinking water.”

And it’s not just RFK: “Democrats have to fight these nominees. And not just like once a week. Every day. Because the only way that Republicans even consider voting against them is if the temperature has been turned up all across the country. and I’m just worried that we are not working the way we need to work against a nominee slate that is just absolutely bonkers and out of the American mainstream by a million miles.”

This is not primarily about changing people’s minds. It’s about reminding them what they already believe. Only a handful of sickos really want to see a resurgence of childhood diseases. Samoa took RFK’s advice so we don’t have to. All we have to do is learn from their tragic mistake before we make one of our own.

 

Winning the Long Game

Terelle Jerricks
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Winning the Long Game

Jesse Marquez’s Fight for Wilmington’s Health

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the release of the second Multiple Air Toxics Exposure Studies. The South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) conducted five such studies to assess air quality and associated health risks in the South Coast Air Basin, the first one released in 1989 studying the years from 1986 to 1988. Each study has built upon the previous ones, incorporating advanced monitoring techniques and modeling to better understand and mitigate air quality issues in the region.
MATES II study, released in March 2000, however, is what kicked off the environmental justice movement and arguably its most powerful champion, Jesse Marquez.
In an interview with Random Lengths News last month, Jesse Marquez recalled the moment he and his Wilmington neighbors would get activated to protect the health of Wilmington residents for port emissions.
Between 2000 and 2001, the port hosted a public meeting at a gym in Will Hall’s Park in Wilmington to sell residents on the idea of putting up an ivy-covered, 20-foot tall chain-linked fence on C Street that ran 1.4 miles long.
“The port called it mitigation,” Marquez scoffed.
“Do you know what the mitigation was? It was to prevent some of the trucks from driving through there. And it’d be a little bit of a noise barrier,” Marquez said.
The reason they were doing this was because the port was going to expand, doubling and tripling in size over the next 15 to 20 years and that’s what caught his and other Wilmington residents’ attention.
This is March 2001.

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Jesse Marquez, right, participating in a Diesel Death Zone demonstration at a local hospital circa 2002 and 2005. File photo

Marquez and other Wilmington residents asked for a meeting the following month with port officials to get more information and confirmation of the information they just heard.
The answer to the question they wanted to know was: “Does the Port of LA have any plans to build anything on the other side of that wall in the next five to ten years?”
“The Port of LA said, ‘Well yes,’” Marquez recalled. “‘We’re going to build a six-lane truck highway that’s going to connect with the Harbor Freeway. The port railroad line is going to expand further north and the TraPAC Container Terminal is going to expand and move further north into Wilmington.’”
Marquez said that’s when he blew up and said, “Hell no. Not over my dead body. We will not accept that. We will fight it.”
Marquez turned to fellow residents at the meeting and said, “If anyone wants to come to my house this Saturday around lunchtime, we’ll have a meeting.”
Thirty-one people showed up, and those residents formed the Wilmington Coalition.
“Real simple,” Marquez said of the committee’s name. He said it wasn’t until about a year later that people said they need to apply for grants and they changed the committee’s name to the Coalition for a Safe Environment.
“You have to realize, none of the 31 of us knew anything about ports other than the fact that it was involved in importing and exporting goods,” he said.
In the group’s meeting, aside from talks about fighting the port, the organization’s members started talking about the refineries.
“It’s always on fire. … It smells like the terrible odor of chemicals.
“Then someone says, ‘Well, I have two kids and they have asthma. And then someone else says, ‘All three of my kids have asthma.’
‘My mom has asthma.’
‘I have asthma.’
‘Well, my mother has COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease].’ We started realizing there was a connection between port pollution, refinery pollution, and our health.”
“We knew zero about ports; zero about refineries. And so I started looking into it,” Marquez said.
Not long after this, at another port meeting involving the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, he was introduced to the president of the Harbor/Palos Verdes Sierra Club, Tom Politeo.
Marquez recalled the moment.
“‘It’s a pleasure. We’ve been reading about you. We see some Latino leaders in the community. We would like to work with you and share what we’ve learned and we can work together on campaigns and stuff.’
“Then he tells me to ask the Port of Los Angeles guy talking about the MATES II study.”
So Marquez raised his hand, “Can you tell us about the MATES II study?
“‘It has nothing to do with us,’ the port guy replied. ‘We didn’t do it. The Army Corps of Engineers did not do it. It was the South Coast Air Quality Management District. They did this study called the MATES study and it was completed a year ago.’
“Okay. Then why were we never notified? And why were there no public meetings? There was no story in the newspapers. Nothing has come out about this,” Marquez recalled saying.
Marquez recalls getting some unsatisfying answers before he asked the coupe de grace question: “Did the study find anything about Wilmington … conclusion or any type of bad thing, as well?”
Answer: Yes.
Out of the whole South Bay and Los Angeles Harbor Area, Wilmington had the highest risk of cancer due to exposure to diesel exhaust.
Marquez recalled Politeo telling him he needed to go online to look up the MATES II study.
“You have to remember, in 2001, no one had computers,” Marquez explained. This meant that computers with internet access were still largely confined to students on college campuses and workplaces.
No one owned a personal one, Marquez explained. “I knew what the internet was. I knew all about it.”
Marquez found he had a cousin who had a computer given to her by her job for home. He worked out a deal with her where he paid for internet access to use her computer.
His high school-aged sons taught him how to search for information on the internet.
“That was my first time on the computer,” Marquez said. He tells his sons, “Well, I want to look up air pollution. Okay, type in air pollution. They start laughing and giggling. You see, they already knew, since they were learning how to use computers in school, the results can be overwhelming when you type in a search.
“There wasn’t that many. It was still a lot for that time. It was in the thousands. Search for it now, the results numbers in the hundreds of thousands.”
Marquez bought reams of paper and dozens of printer cartridges to print as much as he could to learn as much as he could about pollution and the ports.
The year 2001 is very historic. Not just here locally, but the impact became worldwide. Marquez started CFASE in April 2001.
Marquez highlighted another activist, Angelo Logan, who was active in East LA and the City of Commerce and co-founded his organization, the East Yards Communities for Environmental Justice, to fight the railyards. Today, Logan serves on the boards of directors for the Harbor Community Benefit Foundation and Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs and is the co-chairperson of the California EV Charging Infrastructure Strike Force.
Marquez also highlighted the work of Andrea Hricko, an associate professor at USC, who had gotten grants to open up a community center to inform communities and community organizations about public health research. Today, Hricko is professor emerita of preventive medicine at USC Keck School of Medicine.
During her career, she directed several NIH-funded Centers’​ outreach and engagement programs at USC. Her program at USC is concerned about environmental exposures that might affect children’s health … though increasingly, their investigators have been looking at mothers, seniors and others.
Hricko read about Marquez and his group and others in the media and convened a meeting in Long Beach.
“About 150 of us showed up,” Marquez explained. “There were activists from all over who came to that thing.”
Politeo invited Jesse to become co-chair with him on the Harbor Vision Taskforce — a task force that was focused on matters regarding the ports. Marquez accepted the invitation at the beginning of the year.
Then the San Pedro Peninsula Homeowners Coalition was formed and filed the China Shipping lawsuit in 2001. That changed the whole history of the Port of LA, California, the United States, and even the world.

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A mobile “Diesel Death Zone” billboard participating in the same demonstration. File photo.

“All those things happened in 2001. Andrea Hricko came up with the idea of forming a special task force to deal with the ports. And so, I was part of it and Angelo Logan was part of it. And then we found out that in Long Beach, there was LBACA [Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma], a community organization that worked with asthma. They didn’t deal with port issues, just asthma as a health problem.”
Then in Riverside, there was Penny Newman and the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice. They became part of it. And then there was Bob Gottlieb, Professor Bob from Occidental College who worked on studies with Andrea Hricko at THE (Trade, Health, Environment) Impact Study.
Together, this collection of activists and researchers became like a think tank. Within three years, they started writing policy briefs.
Marquez wrote one on importing harm, and another on freight transportation he co-authored. Then Newman wrote regarding warehouse distribution centers; Logan worked on one regarding the railyards.
Marquez and fellow environmental justice powerhouses won a grant to host a conference, three in all — hosted at the Carson Community Center. About three to four hundred people showed up for the first conference. The next conference came a couple of years later, and 500 came. The third one was about six or seven years ago and about 700 people came.
“Then we asked the attendees, where would you like to go from here? And then they said we’d like for you to help create a national organization,” Marquez recounted.
In the last decade, the Moving Forward Network was founded with more than 50 organizations belonging to it nationwide — port communities, railyard communities, and distribution center communities.
MFN centers grassroots, frontline-community knowledge, expertise and engagement from communities across the U.S. that bear the negative impacts of the global freight transportation system. MFN builds partnerships between these community leaders, academia, labor, big green organizations and others to protect communities from the impacts of freight.

A Quarter Century Later
Jesse Marquez believes he’s won the war he started in 2001.
“We have defeated the ports. We’ve defeated the shipping industry. We defeated the political structure, and we defeated the government agencies,” he said.
Marquez, a survivor of the 1969 Fletcher Oil Refinery explosion (he lived across the street); the Banning High School track star, and too smart for his own good community activist knows a thing or two about relentlessness.
When he started CFASE, the Baby Boomer generation revolutionary noted that no one wanted to support him.
“The Boys Club [The Boys and Girls Clubs] said, no,” Marquez said. “Even my own Teen Post center said no. Why? Because they all had an office for $1 a year and they all received $50,000 plus every year for all their projects. No one’s going to give that up.
So Marquez started going door to door, passing out flyers, and engaging everyone who was not beholden to community dollars port businesses were doling out.
“Our campaign was to stop that wall,” Marquez explained. No one thought we could stop the port. Well, we did stop it.”
“Our committee of 31 people asked our families and neighbors, we interviewed everybody: What happens if we were to take back that land? What would you want?”
Marquez recounted a young woman in one of those sessions who said, “We need to have like a patio so we can work out and do exercises.”
Jesse noted that AYSO, (the American Youth Soccer Organization) would not support them, but there was the Hispanic version (Liga Latino soccer clubs) that had like 30-40 teams throughout the South Bay Area that would.
“Señor Marquez. Mas campos. We need more parks and places we could practice and have our games. So we’ll support you,” Jesse recalled.
Keeping in mind all the things his neighbors desired for Wilmington, the ‘60s fashioned activist applied pressure by opposing all Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach projects. By the time Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger went on his China trade mission, he got beat up over there.
“They told him, you’re the governor, how can you allow residents of communities to sue you against our China shipping projects, and then you lose? You go back and get your country together, your state together.
“Schwarzenegger calls a cabinet meeting and he tells his cabinet, ‘All you cabinet people, you go find out in the harbor. Who the hell are all these activists and organizations that are stopping all the projects? I want to bring them to a meeting and I want you guys to draft a goods movement plan for the State of California.’ So, the hard core of all of us were part of that committee to draft that plan.”
Marquez and fellow activists learned something else at the time: All our elected officials were elected to their offices receiving campaign donations from all these polluters and refinery guys.
“So we told everybody, ‘We got to run for office. It’s got to be us!’ So every run for city council, run for mayor … and after that, the assembly, the state senate, then run for Congress,” Marquez rattled off.
Twenty-three years later, there are a lot of environmental justice-aligned assembly members and state senators who have started passing laws to bypass part of our problem, Marquez explained.
The first piece of legislation came in AB32 in 2006. The Global Warming Solutions Act is intended to reduce greenhouse gases from all sources.
Marquez explained that the law had done something none other had done before: it created an environmental justice standing committee and a technical advisory committee. Marquez was a member of both. The law also called for the AQMD to research and within six months, adopt early action measures that could begin reducing greenhouse gases immediately, while they’re working on the 5, 10, and 30-year plans.
The environmental justice committee wrote 31 measures. This is also where Marquez made history. Citing the example of China Shipping and their application of electric shore power, he called for all the major ports in California to apply electric shore power.
“I am the godfather of the at-berth shore power rule,” Marquez said. “Ask anybody today, CARB made it law and regulation. But that came from me.”
The career activist and moonlighting archeologist noted that CARB, AQMD, and the federal EPA have lost to him and his allies in the courtroom for violating the law. It was in those battles Marquez said environmental justice activists couldn’t trust politicians or regulatory agencies.
“A lot of people graduate from college and go straight to a regulatory agency,” Marquez explained. “So like 50, 55 years old retired, 20 25, 30 years, they’re looking for another job and they go work for industry.”
So what’s happened in the past 23 years is that he and his allies have elected people to office. The result was the signing into law three years ago, AB-32 and AB-617, legislation aimed at reducing emissions from all stationary sources and all mobile sources.
“The regulatory agencies didn’t pay attention to the fine print,” Marquez noted, because that law took power and authority away from them and gave it to the communities.
Now they had to identify environmentally disadvantaged communities where they now have to do several things, such as creating a committee with the AQMD in that area; writing a community air monitoring plan with the community; and a community emissions reduction plan with the community from all sources.
What has also happened over the past 23 years is that environmental justice activists encouraged their children to graduate from college and get them into government regulatory agencies, and other key positions.
“That’s what’s happened under President Biden,” said the godfather of shore power. “He appointed Martha Guzman to be the Region 9 administrator. We knew little Martha when she was in college. She is an environmental activist as well.”
Then, “The second thing that happened: Gov. Newsom selected Jana Garcia to be the cabinet secretary over California EPA,” he recalled.
“We knew Jana when she worked for CBE (Communities for a Better Environment), during her internship for law school,” Marquez explained. “Also, the worst racist managers, directors, and supervisors within all the agencies 23 years later are retired and gone. So now, new staff has come in. And even if they’re not Hispanic or a part of an ethnic minority, they have grown up in a better world, with civil rights, equal rights and equity.”
In addition, “Another committee organization was created — California’s Clean Freight Coalition. It was a mixed environment group statewide and we were fighting for clean transportation. We then decided to ask Gov. Gavin Newsom to issue an executive order.
“We made a draft and then our committee met with the governor’s staff and with him. Then he issued an executive order that California will transition to zero emissions freight transportation by 2035. All trucks, all cars, and all trains must be zero-emissions.”
Then Marquez’s friends in the EV car world went to him to issue another executive order saying that by 2030, no new car could be sold in California that’s gas, diesel fuel, or fossil fuel, which means all electric.
“So when I say we have won the war,” Marquez said with a smile. “We have won the war. We’re just fighting for the implementation and to get it done as soon as possible.”

The Irony of the New Year

James Preston Allen
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The Irony of the New Year

A Nation Mourns While Justice Falters

President Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, died on Dec. 29, 2024, at 100 years old and will be honored with a state funeral on Jan. 9. He was probably the most beloved and respected president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, especially for his work after leaving office.
On Jan. 6 Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the certification of the national vote that returned Donald Trump, probably the most widely despised, corrupt, and distrusted president since Richard Nixon, back into the Oval Office as president. Trump will then be sentenced at the end of the very same week for 34 felonies that he was convicted of for bribery in the 2016 election. Let us not forget that this past Monday, Jan. 6, was the fourth anniversary of the capital insurrection that Trump himself ignited and was charged with, but never convicted of because of the slow and inept judicial processes.
In America, there is swift justice for the poor and defenseless and something less than just for the wealthy and corrupt. There are still some 100 cases against the capital rioters who still haven’t been tried in court. And after the felonious president is sworn in, those cases may be dropped, and those previously convicted — pardoned. That will be one of the first miscarriages of justice of the new regime — probably not the last.
However, it is the irony of this moment in history that is stunning, perhaps baffling when you think about it until you stop and realize that this resembles past events.
President Carter, who had brokered a peace accord between Israel and Egypt, won the Nobel Peace Prize but was denied a second term after his defeat by Ronald Reagan. Even if history is not conclusive on whether Reagan’s campaign played dirty tricks with the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, Carter’s defeat ushered in an increasingly darker U.S. foreign policy of deposing leftist governments with illegal arms sales to Iran and the drug sales in South LA, as exposed by journalist Gary Webb.
After leaving office, President Carter didn’t go out to play golf. He committed himself to doing good deeds according to his Christian faith. By the time he came to San Pedro in 2007, Carter, who had become the face of Habitat for Humanity, had built a set of homes overlooking Harbor Boulevard. He had already built houses in South LA, Wilmington and elsewhere across the nation. I remember that moment well when he had dinner with then-Councilwoman Janice Hahn and her brother Mayor James Hahn at The Whale & Ale on 7th Street in San Pedro. It was captured on the front page of this paper at this time.
What we didn’t fully recognize then, but what seems prescient today is that IF the government had gotten behind the Habitat for Humanity model of building homes the current housing crisis might not be what it is today. Habitat houses are sold for what they cost to build. The actual dollar amount varies depending on the specific project. However, homeowners make only a $500 down payment and put “sweat equity’ into building their own homes. Homeowners’ payments consist of the mortgage loan amount (principal), real estate taxes, and homeowner’s insurance. And according to their website, they have helped some 13.4 million people build or repair their homes.
If you compare Carter’s post-presidency to every other president over the last 70 years there’s really no one who comes close to his charitable works. And when you compare his generous core Christian beliefs to the current set of white Christian Nationalists who want to put Bibles in every classroom and make praying mandatory, well there are just two different versions of Christ going on here. That in and of itself is just one further irony of our times.
What we now see with this recent election is the third time that true progress has been stopped cold by conservative monied interests that are more interested in profits over people, who will dedicate themselves once again to dismantling environmental protections, failing to enforce anti-trust laws and allowing billionaires to buy elections and access to the Oval Office. With this second term of the Orange felon, the corruption will just be more obvious but possibly more clandestine. And like the time before and time before, the conservative neo-libertarians will drive the country into yet another crisis, that some as yet unelected Democrats will have to dig us out of. Think Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and then Joe Biden.
The true irony of these recent events is that we’ve lived through the same kinds of betrayals of democracy for over half a century and clearly half of the voters can’t see because of the fake news on their social media feeds or is it Faux News? Or is it because the corporate-owned news media fails to explain the connection between past and present?
Just maybe the senior citizens in red states will wake up when the Republicans come after their Social Security and Medicare benefits. In the meantime, the Orange savior of the Christian Nationalists is going to invade Greenland, rename the Gulf of Mexico, and save us from the brown immigrants at our southern border — the ones who pick our crops and process your foods, the ones who mow the lawns at Trump’s golf courses.
Hey, but who cares about all the chaos? Let’s all just go golfing and pray for the best.

Saving Brouwerij West

Reporters Desk
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Saving Brouwerij West

San Pedro Comes Together to Keep te Brewery Going

By Rosie Knight, Columnist

Although San Pedro has been part of Los Angeles since 1909, it has a culture and vibe all of its own, with artists, radicals, musicians, and more calling it home. At the heart of that community are local businesses, which allow all of the above and more to mingle, eat, chat and drink. In 2016 Brouwerij West opened its doors in an old WWII warehouse, marking a vibrant new chapter for the LA Waterfront. Since then the brewery — run by Brian Mercer and David Holop — has become a staple for San Pedro locals and visitors alike. So it took many by surprise when on December 19, Brouwerij West announced that they would soon be closing.

In a statement posted on Instagram the beloved local business said, “Almost 9 years ago we opened our doors and launched this ambitious project that is Brouwerij West in San Pedro. This brewery has been more than a business — it’s been our heart and soul, a gathering place, and a home away from home for so many. You all have filled our tasting room and courtyard with so many great memories. You have always embraced our unique style, celebrated our creativity, and stood by us through thick and thin. For that, we will be forever grateful.”

It wasn’t just an appreciation of their loyal customers though as the statement revealed that time was up for the brewery in its current location. “That said, it looks like the time has come to say goodbye. We’re doing everything we can to see if we can figure out a way to continue to be a part of the San Pedro community, but short of a holiday miracle, we only have a short time left here – maybe a month or two, we’ll post more info as we know it.”

Citing COVID, changing social habits, and more the statement seemed to be a bookend to the near decade of business that Brouwerij West had brought to the Pedro waterfront. But potentially that very “holiday miracle” that they’d been looking for began to appear as the business was inundated by support and love from those in the community who were shocked to hear about their closure. Residents flooded social media to share their memories of the brewery and what it meant to them and just a few days later, Brouwerij West launched a GoFundMe in the hopes of earning enough money to stay in their Warehouse 9 location.

On GoFundMe, the owners of the brewery shared just how much that community support means to them. “On Thursday, December 19, 2024, we shared the news that without a holiday miracle, our San Pedro brewery and tasting room will close in the next month or two. The support from the community in the days since has been overwhelming. We knew there was a lot of love out there, but to see it all has been incredible. Truly, thank you. Your response has heightened our resolve to stay open and to remain a part of this amazing community.”

They’ve garnered over 250 donations already, including support from local business and regular Brouwerij West food truck, Ciao Bella Pizzeria and GoFundMe itself.

The brewery also has the support of Councilmember Tim McOsker, who spoke to Random Lengths at the annual Polar Bear Plunge.

“Brouwerij West has been really a great business and an important part of this community, a great place for families to get together,” McOsker said. “I love that it’s family-friendly. My kids and my grandkids can go and can enjoy time together in that central area. So I think it’s going to be really important for us to support Brewery West, as they’re continuing to operate, and also to support them in the efforts for their fundraiser.”

No matter what happens, McOsker has been proactive in looking for options for the beloved San Pedro business. “I’ve also been talking to folks to make sure that we can come up with other alternatives. If there’s some other alternative to assist with the business plan or with business assistance, or a way to keep them here, if possible. I don’t want to over-commit on that, but it’s important that we look at every option and make sure that there are, you know, healthy family-friendly activities, everything from jumping in the water to being able to enjoy time together with family at Brouwerij West.”

You can support the GoFundMe here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/brouwerij-west-community-gofundme

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