Global California: UCSB Course on California Culture and Society

Restarting Global California

2011-09-22T10:50:00.001-07:00

We are back and will be underway shortly

GLOBAL CAL HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY ABSORBED BY

2009-06-28T21:52:00.000-07:00

Latino LA

2008-12-09T14:02:00.001-08:00

Check out the LA Times story about a new census study of the LA metro area and population shifts from 2000-2007. Use the interactive map.

LA is a Latino city. Latino presence isn't measured just in absolute numbers but in growth rates an population shifts - in population movement as such. The title - the integration of the suburbs - is a euphemism. But it's not clear what it is a euphemism for. Actual cultural mixing? Integration? We can't tell from this.

DA Socialism at Work - Finally

2008-12-09T13:55:00.000-08:00

L.A. sues 18th Street gang members, seeking cash damages for Pico-Union and Westlake neighborhoods
City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo's suit targets criminals' homes and assets. Defendants include Mexican Mafia leaders Ruben 'Nite Owl' Castro and Frank 'Puppet' Martinez.
By Richard Winton
December 9, 2008
A first-of-a-kind lawsuit filed Monday by the Los Angeles city attorney seeks cash damages against leaders of a notorious gang and proposes to distribute their criminal assets among residents of crime-plagued neighborhoods.

The lawsuit targets nine imprisoned leaders of the 18th Street gang, including two leaders of the Mexican Mafia, and demands civil damages on behalf of residents of two city neighborhoods. If successful, the suit would distribute proceeds from seized homes, businesses and other assets to neighborhood residents who cannot file suit themselves because they fear retaliation, prosecutors say.

Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo
"Today, we're sending a message to gang leaders across this city: If you break the law, we will not only find you, arrest you and put you behind bars, we will also take away your money, your property, your homes and your cars," City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo said. "Every penny we strip away will be returned to the neighborhoods."

Delgadillo said the action is necessary because the gang leaders, even though they are in prison, collect profits from illegal "street taxes" imposed on residents of the Pico-Union and Westlake areas, where drug dealers, store owners and even ice cream vendors must pay protection.

The suit seeks compensation for all property damage, property devaluation, emotional distress, personal injury, medical expenses and time in which residents could not use public parks because of gang activity.

The nine leaders of the 18th Street gang named in the suit are: Sergio "Tricky" Pantoja, Frank "Puppet" Martinez, Araceli "Traviesa" Bravo, Michael "Mousie" Pineda, Jose Juan "Wicked" Alvarez, Noe "Lil Duster" Chavez, Efrain "Dandy Boy" Ruiz Torres, Jose "Toro" Morales Perez and Ruben "Nite Owl" Castro.

Castro, 46, is a leader, or carnal, of the Mexican Mafia, also known as the "La Eme" prison gang. Authorities say Castro controls two cliques of the 18th Street gang -- the Shatto Park Locos and the Hoover Locos.

Castro is alleged to have run those gang cliques from a federal maximum-security prison in Colorado, where he is serving multiple life terms and was recently sentenced to an additional 27 years and three months for racketeering. Prosecutors say that from behind bars, Martinez, another La Eme carnal, allegedly made as much as $40,000 a month from criminal activity. Delgadillo said that if a judgment is won against the gang leaders in civil court, legitimately acquired assets can also be garnered. He said many of the assets are concealed by relatives and will be aggressively pursued.

At the home of one Martinez relative, investigators found $444,605 stashed in storage boxes and in a vacuum cleaner bag, according to Bruce Riordan, the city attorney's gang prosecutor and a former federal prosecutor of the 18th Street gang and Mexican Mafia.

"Included on the bank notes were 18th Street marks with streets and collectors' names," he said.

"We have come across investment in juice bars, even," Riordan said.

Another of the nine, Pantoja, owned a local tattoo parlor, Unico’s, which was shut down by prosecutors because, authorities said, it was the center of a cocaine sales operation.

State officials have frozen prison accounts of some Pelican Bay State Prison inmates with large sums on the books.

The gang extorts as much as 30% of the take from some businesses in and around MacArthur Park, Riordan said. A baby was killed last year in that area when, prosecutors said, gang members were threatening a business owner.

City prosecutors can bring the suit thanks to a newly enacted state law, which allows them to act on behalf of members of the neighborhoods affected by gang activity and collect monetary damages awarded in specific civil actions. The law allows such actions in areas with gang injunctions. The 18th Street gang is already the subject of five gang injunctions by city prosecutors.

The lawsuit involves neighborhoods covered by two of the five injunctions against the 18th Street gang. The Pico-Union neighborhood is bounded by James M. Wood Boulevard to the north, the 110 Freeway to the east, the 10 Freeway to the south and Hoover Street to the west. The Westlake neighborhood is bounded by Beverly Boulevard to the north, the 110 Freeway to the east, James M. Wood Boulevard to the south and Normandie Avenue to the west.

"This prosecution will make this community whole again," LAPD Deputy Chief Charlie Beck said.

Fire Number 3

2008-11-16T05:25:00.000-08:00

The Southern California fires seem to be following a foothill crescent from northwest to southeast - Santa Barbara, Sylmar, and now the Anaheim Hills in inland Orange County (all the green stuff is fallout from the fire.

The Orange County Register has good photos from Number 3.

An ordinary So Cal Apocalypse Now:

And here you can see the 2 fires on the newer edges of the LA basin, where people went from 1980 on to find foothills they could still afford.

More Ashes, More Flames

2008-11-15T10:19:00.001-08:00

The LA Times has a good photo gallery of the Montecito fire (the Tea Fire). It's quieting down there, though the fire is only 40% contained. That's the ruins of the Mount Cavalry Monastery above.

It heated up last night north of LA, where the San Fernando valley meets the mountains. he Sylmar fire jumped the I-5 and I-210 Freeways, both of which are at the time still closed. 10,000 people have been evacuated and they have no idea how many houses are gone.

California suburbian once again:

Burning and Burning

2008-11-14T14:14:00.000-08:00

Kind of says it all.

The Zaca Fire, started July 4, 2007, and burned for two months in the wilderness area behind Santa Barbara.

The Gap Fire, started July 6, 2008, burned the front face of the mountains west of Santa Barbara -- burned for days as military planes crossed back in forth in the smoke bombing it with chemicals. I saw fire trucks from Idaho and Wyoming coming and going like columns of tanks.

Today, November 14th, air temperature in Santa Barbara is 85 degrees F. The Santa Barbara Independent reported that "A 2006 study published in Science found that since 1986, the number of major wildfires has increased by 400 percent, and the amount of land these fires burned increased by 600 percent, compared to the period from 1970 to 1986."

Summer doesn't end. Various cities burn.

The house of my friends Karen and Rich Appelbaum, who gave more great dinners and parties there than I can count - one of everyone I know's favorite places in Santa Barbara up in smoke.

R.I.P.324 Sherman Road

Hills Are Filled with Fire

2008-11-14T08:43:00.001-08:00

This time it's Montecito and Santa Barbara - from 0 to 60 in about an hour. The best coverage has been at the Santa Barbara Independent. My mother was evacuated but the house still seems to be there. I'm worried about the houses of various UCSB friends.

What biblical plague will be coming next? This is the third major destroyer in SB in not much more than a year, counting the Zaca and Gap fires. So it will probably just be more fire.

Bush's tax breaks for banks could cost California $2 billion

2008-11-13T01:17:00.000-08:00

Wells Fargo is state's chief beneficiary of change that allows banks to write off losses when taking over failing institutions.
By Evan Halper

November 11, 2008

Reporting from Sacramento — Even as California's fiscal woes mount, the state is slated to lose an additional $2 billion in coming years as a result of new tax breaks the Bush administration created for a small group of banks including California-based Wells Fargo.

A tax change put into effect by the U.S. Treasury Department provides new federal and state breaks for banks that take over other failing financial institutions. The subsidies come on top of the $700 billion in bailout money that Congress authorized as part of the federal rescue plan.

The move is provoking anger among lawmakers and activists from Washington to Sacramento. The primary beneficiary here will be Wells Fargo, which acquired Wachovia Corp. days after the Bush administration changed the tax law.

"It is an affront to the state's taxpayers," said Lenny Goldberg, executive director of the nonprofit California Tax Reform Assn. "While struggling with a revenue crisis, we now have to contribute to the federal bank bailout."

At issue is the extent to which banks can write off losses they absorb when taking over other banks. Decades-old limits on those write-offs were removed by the Treasury Department on Sept. 30. An estimate by the law firm Jones Day, which represents banks, found that the change will save banks as much as $140 billion, mostly in federal tax relief.

Officials at the state Franchise Tax Board, California's tax collection agency, say state law requires them to conform with the new rule.

Days after the tax rule was changed, Wells Fargo successfully moved to acquire Wachovia Corp., whose losses on loans could reach more than $70 billion. Tax experts at Jones Day and elsewhere have projected that those losses will allow Wells Fargo to claim $20 billion to $25 billion in total tax breaks.

Officials at Wells Fargo declined to comment.

Experts say other banks will also benefit, but to a lesser extent. PNC Financial Services Group, which recently acquired National City Corp., could receive as much as $5 billion in tax savings, they say. Banco Santander, which took over Sovereign Bancorp, is expected to receive a smaller boost.

As other banks take over failing institutions in coming months and years, the tax breaks will be extended to them for losses absorbed.

Treasury spokesman Andrew DeSouza said the rule change was not intended to help any particular bank or to be part of the federal bailout package, which was being debated in Congress when the agency acted.

"This was something that was under development for many, many weeks," DeSouza said.

He declined to comment on the cost of the change to the federal and state governments, which he said the Treasury Department did not factor into its decision-making.

Most of the tax advantages will be claimed on federal returns. But state tax board figures obtained by The Times show California will take a $300-million hit this year. In subsequent years, that sum would gradually drop until the $2 billion in tax breaks is exhausted.

The subsidies come at a time when California is facing a severe budget shortfall.

"It's going to cost us $300 million when we need every penny," said Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee Chairman Charles Calderon (D-Montebello).

It will be at least three years before the banks exhaust their tax breaks and the state collects that revenue again.

Late last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called for billions of dollars in sales tax increases and new taxes on retail sales, services, oil companies and car registrations to help close a projected deficit of $24 billion through mid-2010.

The governor also called for billions of dollars in cuts to schools, healthcare, law enforcement and other state programs.

Education officials said the governor's plan would force them to shut down schools in the middle of the academic year.

Schwarzenegger administration officials and state lawmakers Monday were studying the possibility of passing legislation to eliminate the tax break in California.

State Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), who will take over as leader of the upper house next month, said the Treasury's move created an "inappropriate loophole that will have a direct impact on us."

But changing California tax law to eliminate the subsidies could require a two-thirds majority of the Legislature, meaning that at least five Republicans would have to vote for it. Most GOP lawmakers have signed a pledge against raising taxes; elimination of the tax break could be seen as a breach of that pledge.

A spokeswoman for the Assembly's minority Republicans said staffers are still reviewing how the tax break applies to California.

In Washington, some lawmakers are asking whether the tax break is necessary.

U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson expressing concern about tens of billions of dollars in subsidies being created without Congress having any say.

Schumer said the new tax rule threatens to undermine competition in the financial industry by motivating banks to buy other banks just to create tax shelters for themselves

DeSouza said the Treasury Department is working on a response to Schumer's letter.

Halper is a Times staff writer.

evan.halper@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/politics/cal/la-me-budget11-2008nov11,0,2238673.story

While the State is Burning

2008-07-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

Here's a good column by LAT Times Sacra- mento columnist on California's political paralysis. It's sad, our decline from Dream to Disavowal. They're related, but this has been going on too long. Time to wake the hell up.

California voters can't handle the truth
George Skelton
Capitol Journal

July 10, 2008

SACRAMENTO — An e-mailer had it basically right the other day. He likened the public's mind-set about government to what Marine Col. Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson) barked at young Navy prosecutor Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) in the movie "A Few Good Men."

Jessep: "You want answers?"

Kaffee: "I want the truth."

Jessep: "You can't handle the truth!"

Roman, the e-mailer, wrote me that the older he gets, the more he realizes that "the Jack Nicholson moment may be close to the truth" about the public.

"It's always easier to blame someone else," Roman wrote. "As soon as the electorate plays an intelligent role in government, then we can get 'intelligent' representatives."

Although I believe that much of the public and many of its elected representatives live in denial, calling the voters unintelligent is a bit harsh. After all, they're constantly lied to by the politicians whenever the pols' own self-interests are at stake.

But clearly many California voters refuse to recognize the truth, let alone try to handle it.

Here's a good example: Polls always have shown that the public strongly favors California's dopey requirement that a state budget be passed by a two-thirds majority of each legislative house. It's an inanity, given that a 60% vote in elections is considered a landslide.

It's a legislative straitjacket that has led to chronically late budgets, low bond ratings and the stiffing of private vendors by a cash-strapped state. It's tyranny by the minority, staunchly defended by Republicans because it makes them relevant inside the Capitol.

Only two other states -- Arkansas and Rhode Island -- require a supermajority legislative vote for budget passage.

Not surprisingly, California and Rhode Island recently tied for dead last when all the states were graded on fiscal management. The grader -- the Pew Center on the States -- gave California and Rhode Island only D+ marks. Arkansas managed a middling B-, the national average.

Term limits is another example of the public's inability to handle the truth. Voters believe that term limits keep lawmakers in check. But the truth is that they rob Sacramento of legislative experience, policy knowledge and the incentive to plan long-range for California's needs.

On Wednesday, the Legislature's two Democratic leaders -- Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland) and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) -- expressed hope that the public can be persuaded to handle the truth about the need for tax increases to balance the books without whacking more government programs.

"We've heard so much about the greatest generation," Perata told reporters. "Is it too much to ask, in the memory of someone who died at Normandy, to pay a nickel more for a latte?"

That's a nice sound bite -- and that's why I'm using it -- but I'm not sure what he's talking about.

Democrats are not proposing a tax on lattes -- or a sales tax hike on anything. And it's unfortunate. The sales tax system badly needs updating for a 21st century economy. Sales taxes should be extended to services and overall rates lowered.

Maybe next year, Capitol leaders say, in their best L.A. Clippers imitation.

On Tuesday night, Democrats did propose nearly $10 billion in tax hikes. Of that, $5.6 billion would come from adding higher income tax rates of 10% and 11% on the wealthiest Californians -- couples with taxable incomes above $321,000 and $642,000 respectively. The top rate currently is 9.3%, reached by couples with taxable incomes above $93,000.

Democrats also proposed freezing the "indexing" of income tax brackets, which would result in higher taxes for the middle class. Indexing is what prevents wage-earners from automatically moving up to a higher bracket whenever they receive a cost-of-living raise.

Perata said that if the impoverished aged, blind and disabled are denied cost-of-living benefit hikes -- which they will be -- income taxpayers also should be denied adjustments in their brackets. That does make sense.

Democrats also proposed closing some corporate tax loopholes, reducing the dependent tax exemption for couples earning more than $150,000 and raising the corporate tax rate to 9.3% from 8.4%.

Actually, much of this tax-raising merely involves returning taxes to what they were before Sacramento, in boom times, went nuts with tax-cutting and spending.

Bass contended that the Legislature has cut spending by more than $12 billion over the last three budgets.

"We just can't cut anymore and still be the kind of California anyone would hope to live in," she said.

"Californians are telling us don't decimate education, don't shred the safety net, don't close parks and don't keep kids out of health clinics. The straight truth is that takes revenue. And the straight truth is we can solve this [$15-billion] budget deficit by closing tax loopholes and rolling back overly generous tax breaks that were given to big corporations and the wealthiest Californians."

The straight truth is Californians want good schools, the safety net, clean parks and kids' healthcare -- and want someone else to pay.

But when people hear the truth about the state's dire predicament, the legislative leaders predicted, they'll support higher taxes -- just as they did $42 billion in infrastructure bonds two years ago. Problem is, that bond money only recently has begun to get spent. Not a real confidence-builder for the public.

The real truth is that Sacramento leaders don't have much credibility with the public. Even Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has lost his clout -- with the public and the Legislature.

For any tax hike to pass, the governor will need to execute a perfect flip-flop -- from "guaranteed" veto to "oops, new position" -- and perform politically for Republicans. Some fund-raising for them would help.

And Democrats will need to give into GOP demands for budget reforms that would help staunch the bleeding.

Col. Jessep presumably was convicted for telling the truth. Politicians can be tossed from office for being too candid. But in California, legislators are protected by gerrymandered districts.

So the lawmakers might as well be straight with voters and lead -- not fret about whether they can handle it.

george.skelton@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-skelton10-2008jul10,0,1147429.column

Trapped

2008-05-11T12:37:00.000-07:00

The L.A. Times covered the mass fight and arrival of LAPD riot police at Locke High School in South L.A. on Friday. One story is the conflict between Latino and African American students that went from smaller conflicts to a mini race war. Or was that the story? Most kids were trying to get away from the fighting while teachers complained bitterly of the continual cutbacks in security by the school district as it prepares to hand over the high school to a private contractor, Green Dot. The Governor's mid-year cuts to school budgets probably played a role. Your tax cut dollars at work in our era of Pitiful Government.

South L.A. has undergone a demographic revolution over the past 25 years, as formerly black neighborhoods became majority Latino, and no less poor. The only thing that ever allows massive social change to be good is massive public support - infrastructure, community development, education. That's the "Rebuild L.A" that didn't happen. The results are always the same.

LA County's Non-English Majorities

2008-03-23T10:57:00.000-07:00

The Asian Pacific American Legal Center released a study of linguistic diversity in LA County that shows that about one-third of the county's population faces language barriers in accessing health care. Click on the simplified map from the LA Times story, or look at the original report, and its complex maps starting around page 15.

This is an interesting situation that needs to be discussed carefully, and without interruption with stories about gangbangers and crime or quotations from Samuel Huntington on unassimilable Hispanics. LA County looks less like Northern California or heartland America more like some of the borderlands of the Balkan states with their large ethnic and linguistic minorities. Economic equity and social development could keep it together, but we're not getting much of that at the moment.

Miracles Do Happen

2008-03-21T11:49:00.001-07:00

The L.A. City Council actually rejected a huge development in a part of Northern LA County that developers had proposed annexing to the city. Fans of Chinatown might remember how the Owens Valley project water moguls annexed the San Fernando Valley to the City of Los Angeles after they bought up lots of its farmland for development.

This project was above board and had its merits. The developers say they've spent $20 million on an approval process that has dragged on for at least six years. I'm not a fan of this kind of expensive red tape and endless delays, but am even less a fan of building new cities on the edges of old ones rather than infilling what we have and saving the empty land. It's a little like oil: it took billions of years to creat an amount of oil that we've used half of in 100 years. Californians have done the same thing to land, having built on most of the best land in the state - the most temperate, the most irrigated, etc. - in 100 years. If humans are supposed to continue for more than 100 years from now, we obviously have to slow down.

Check out the picture above. Look at the sprawl that's already covered most of the land out there already. My uncle Jack moved to Newhall with his family in the late 1960s because he wanted country life and a chance to write. That lasted about five years out there. We're really just throwing land away like there was an infinite supply.

If you think it's necessary, go to Europe. Fly into Paris and notice that you can see farmland and defined villages and towns right up to the edge of one of the biggest airports in the world. Same for flying into Vienna, or Budapest, or even the gigantic Berlin. They save their countryside because it's valuable.

A Steve Lopez column shows how hard it will be to do infilling in L.A., since that means increased density. There isn't much in LA life to compensate folks for the loss of direct sunshine due to taller buildings. If we're going to infill, we might have to offer better attractions than Ventura Blvd's minimalls.

How Low Can We Go?

2008-02-20T09:08:00.001-08:00

We haven't bottomed out yet, but here's a good piece by LA Times columnist George Skelton on the total absence of intelligent leadership in California government.

time was, it was hard to imagine California being so completely rear-guard.

***

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cap18feb18,1,3533042.column
From the Los Angeles Times
George Skelton Capitol Journal

Poor won't have the luxury of a tax loophole

February 18, 2008

SACRAMENTO — When you've got Republicans who won't even close a tax loophole for yacht buyers, there isn't much hope of honestly solving California's budget mess.

How can anyone take seriously lawmakers who insist on protecting a "sloophole," as Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez calls it? Why should anyone regard them as anything but rigid ideologues, unwilling to compromise even as the state tumbles toward bankruptcy?

Shamefully, the longest, most intense debates in each legislative house over a $7-billion deficit-reduction package Friday concerned whether to continue allowing purchasers of yachts, RVs and airplanes to avoid the California sales and use tax. They do that by taking delivery out of state and parking the toy there for 90 days. The bill that Republicans blocked in the Assembly would have required the plaything to be stashed outside California for at least a year.

Oregon doesn't impose a sales tax, but offers temporary moorings that are popular with rich California boat buyers.

There was a more logical debate in both houses over whether to cut the already miserly medical provider fees for treating poor patients who are covered by Medi-Cal, California's version of Medicaid. This state right now has the lowest Medicaid reimbursement rates in the nation. And the Legislature voted to slash them 10% starting July 1.

Lawmakers of both parties winced.

Republican Assemblyman Rick Keene of Chico called it "a bad move," warning that rural hospitals, patient transportation firms and pharmacies "will be going out of business," denying poor people access to care.

"Thank you for your Democratic speech," Nuñez told him.

In the Senate, Republican Sam Aanestad of Grass Valley -- a dentist -- said he already had stopped serving Medi-Cal patients because of low rates. Under the new cost-cutting, he said, "there'll be hundreds of doctors dropping out of the program. I predict it's going to lead to the demise of the Medi-Cal program as we know it."

Aanestad added: "It's also an unfair action. We're not reducing salaries of teachers or prison guards or highway patrolmen. But this is easy, because these [providers] don't have a [union] contract."

Democratic Sen. Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica responded that when Republicans won't consider raising taxes, they can't be too picky about what spending to cut.

A few Republicans also objected to postponing the appointment of new judges in their districts.

Nobody seemed to cringe, however, before delaying meager cost of living increases for 1.3 million impoverished aged, blind and disabled from June until October. Welfare moms also had their scheduled July benefit hikes put off until October.

Actually, these people will be lucky to receive any kind of benefit boosts in the foreseeable future. By the Legislature's calculation, there's still a $7.5-billion hole to fill for the next fiscal year. And that's just the latest depressing figure. The hole is expected to grow even larger Wednesday, when nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Elizabeth G. Hill delivers worse news about the state's declining tax revenue.

Closing the yacht tax loophole would provide mere nickels and dimes: $26 million in the current and next fiscal years.

You can argue over the amount -- and lawmakers did -- but the dollars are less pertinent than the principle.

"It's pretty hard to consider cutting people's medical care without also cutting other people's yacht tax loophole," declared Assembly Budget Committee Chairman John Laird (D-Santa Cruz).

But the committee vice chairman, Republican Roger Niello of Sacramento County, rose to protect the tax break. "I do not believe -- and our [Republican] caucus does not believe -- that raising taxes is an appropriate way to solve our budget problems," he asserted, looking a little uneasy.

In the Senate, Republican Tom McClintock of Thousand Oaks agreed with Democrats that "this is not a tax increase." The loophole, he said, has been "a way to avoid paying the California sales tax. It's tax avoidance, no question." But he still opposed closing it because, the senator insisted, that would hurt California boat-builders and the economy.

The loophole previously had been plugged, but was restored during last summer's protracted budget negotiations by sailboat skipper Dick Ackerman of Irvine, the Senate Republican leader. Closing it again would result in "a severe economic impact," he cautioned. There'd be layoffs of boat craftsmen.

Democrats didn't buy it.

The loophole is a "subsidy for those who are very fortunate to own yachts, planes -- God bless 'em, already," said Sen. Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles). But the subsidy needs to end. "I miss Gov. Wilson," Cedillo added. "I respected his courage to confront head-on the challenges of this state."

In 1991, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson raised taxes a record $7 billion and cut spending a like amount to fill a giant deficit.

Today, Cedillo said, "the real crisis is a crisis of leadership."

That was a shot at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's unfortunate how little influence the Republican governor has with GOP lawmakers. Blame that largely on his failure to help them more politically, especially in raising campaign money.

Schwarzenegger, I suspect, would be willing to consider a temporary tax increase to balance the books if there was any hope of coaxing Republicans to follow his lead.

It was the governor who suggested closing the yacht tax loophole. But only three Senate Republicans voted for it, barely enough to pass the measure. In the Assembly, however, just two Republicans voted for the bill, and it fell nine short of receiving the necessary two-thirds majority.

Nuñez will push for another vote Tuesday.

Politically, Democrats would love for Republicans to continue carrying water for tax-dodging, multimillionaire yachtsmen. But for public policy, it would leave budget negotiators dead in the water.

george.skelton@latimes.com

LA Supervisor Hates Mural

2008-01-13T23:56:00.000-08:00

The article below seems silly but features the classic elements of Los Angeles politics: the centrality of gangs and security to every topic, the region's dependence on volunteer groups to offer basic social services, and the unpleasant combination of anger and inaction in LA politicians. Plus there's a nice dose of the hypocritical prudery that has long been a staple of the region.

When I lived in Echo Park in the early 1990s, some local kids would steal cars in other neighborhoods and bring them back to the alley behind my apartment to chop them for parts. We'd call the City to get the stripped skeleton hauled away. They would never come. The next time I saw these guys out back working on stolen car, I reported a "crime in progress." In addition to the cops who arrived too late, as I knew they would, a police tow truck showed up the next morning to retrieve the "evidence" of a reported crime. In other words, response to a "crime in progress" was the only social service LA city was willing to provide. (See my previous Echo Park example.)

Enjoy!

***

ARROYO SECO MURAL FEUD
Nipples are out, as the county declares an “emergency” — and blames Friends of the L.A. River

BY MATTHEW FLEISCHER
LA Weekly January 9, 2008

STANDING ON A BRIDGE overlooking the confluence of the Arroyo Seco and Los Angeles rivers, Friends of the Los Angeles River founder Lewis MacAdams stares at the cement-walled streams and indulges in a moment of nostalgia. “This was the birthplace of FoLAR,” he says of the desolate area. “I came down here one day and saw how blighted and disgusting it was and just thought, ‘I have to do something about this.’ ”

Twenty-two years after MacAdams founded FoLAR, however, the stretch of river that inspired him has landed his group in a bizarre battle with County Supervisor Gloria Molina, leaving the nonprofit organization potentially liable for thousands of dollars in cleanup costs.

It all stems from last September’s well-attended international graffiti event, “Meeting of Styles,” co-sponsored by FoLAR and Crewest Gallery, operated by graffiti artist Man One. Thousands of people gathered to watch more than 100 graffiti artists from around the world create a giant mural along the intersection of the two flood-control channels.

Colorful and eclectic, the mural was seen as a vast improvement over the barren, gray void of cement it covered. But while written about glowingly in the press and the blogosphere, the mural inspired the wrath of Molina.

On December 18 the County Board of Supervisors, led by Molina, passed an “emergency measure” ordering FoLAR to whitewash the mural, or pay the bill if the Department of Public Works has to paint it over for them. Molina spokeswoman Roxane Márquez went so far as to call the mural “a public nuisance and a safety hazard,” justifying the board’s invocation of an “emergency.”

Molina will not comment to L.A. Weekly on the nature of the supposed emergency, but was quoted in the L.A. Times last November bashing FoLAR as having “violated their own mission,” and declaring, “with friends like this, who needs enemies?”

Molina’s harsh words have baffled the river organization, which generally gets kudos for its attempts to beautify the flood-control channel, one of the most barren and infamous spectacles in Los Angeles.

“She’s on the warpath,” says MacAdams of Molina. “She’s really trying to bring us down over this.”

Though MacAdams doesn’t fully understand Molina’s rage, he has his suspicions. Surveying the Arroyo Seco section of the channel, he points to a large, purple-haired wood nymph spray-painted on the south side of the floodwall and notes her bare, green chest.

“Those are the tits in question,” he says, shaking his head.

Could the Arroyo Seco mural fuss really be over a pair of green breasts?

Last year, FoLAR petitioned the City Council to allow a mural to be painted along the Los Angeles River floodwalls near the César Chavez bridge. The council approved the proposed mural — of utopian visions of the Los Angeles River. A lack of funds shelved the project, however.

With the utopian mural on hiatus, Man One and “Meeting of Styles,” whom MacAdams had earlier recruited to help with the César Chavez project, needed a new location for their own event. FoLAR offered its support, and it was agreed that the Arroyo Seco would be the perfect spot. “Why not paint someplace like that?” asks MacAdams. “It’s a completely degraded area.”

The county, which has jurisdiction over the Arroyo Seco, granted Man One the permit for his event, but after the mural was finished, it became clear that the county regretted its decision.

On the morning of October 18, FoLAR received a call from the office of Gloria Molina stating that the supervisor and several members of her staff were coming to FoLAR’s office in a few hours. When she arrived, Molina was livid and less than subtle about her distaste for the mural’s content. According to MacAdams and other FoLAR members who were present, Molina burst into their office and demanded: “Why don’t you put a pair of tits on your FoLAR T-shirts?” — a presumed reference to the topless green wood nymph.

Man One, who was at the meeting, says, “I asked them specifically what they found offensive, because if it was something specific we could consult the artist and have it touched up. But they just said ‘you know what’s offensive,’ and left it at that. There was no dialogue. They were there to flex some muscle, and show who’s boss.”

“When you have a permit to create a mural,” he explained later, “and then you have to remove it because someone in power doesn’t like it, without any dialogue, that’s censorship. That’s being a dictator.”

“THIS ISN’T ABOUT defining what’s art and what’s not,” insists Molina spokeswoman Márquez, who implied that the painting on the river wall could cause the same problems as tagging by gangs, saying, “This is a matter of public safety. We lost two constituents this year to graffiti-related violence.”

Asked why the permit for the mural was granted at all if such graffiti art — not gang tagging — can lead to violence, Márquez started talking about a different mural project altogether. Clearly confusing Man One’s Arroyo Seco mural with the utopian-themed mural proposed near the César Chavez bridge, Márquez erroneously stated, “The mural was supposed to be about visions of the Los Angeles River.”

Beyond her office’s confusion over which mural is which, Molina’s staff is now involved in a war of words over who is responsible for removing the additional graffiti that has sprung up. Molina’s staff says FoLAR should be responsible, and FoLAR has agreed — to an extent.

“We reached an agreement with them that we would remove the surrounding graffiti one time,” says FoLAR executive director Shelly Backlar.

“Quite the contrary,” counters Molina’s policy director, Gerry Hertzberg. “In my one telephone conversation with [MacAdams], I restated that as long as the mural provided a magnet to tagging and graffiti we expected them to do the graffiti removal.”

Though tagging around the mural was minimal early last fall, soon after Molina’s meeting with FoLAR in mid-October a large portion of the mural was mysteriously and professionally whitewashed; the message “Cultivate Love” was painted over, but the nymph with nipples was left undisturbed.

Molina denies she ordered the section removed. Department of Public Works officials insist they are not responsible. “If it was us, we would have finished the job,” says Public Works assistant deputy director Mark Pestrella. Whoever the culprit, the partial whitewash has created a blank slate for taggers, leading to an explosion of tagging — which the county is now holding FoLAR responsible for.

One such tag depicted a man sporting an uber-erection and saying, “We rock when we want, where we want.”

Another tag simply said, “Gloria Molina 187”; 187, for those who slept through the gangster-rap era, is police code for homicide. That particular tag brought police to the doorsteps of both FoLAR and Man One, and, rhetorically at least, helped bolster Molina’s otherwise tenuous association of the now-obscured mural with violence.

In reaction, shortly before New Year’s Eve, the Department of Public Works buffed over all the new, unauthorized graffiti. (Curiously, according to Pestrella, the 187 tag had already been removed — but again, not by the county, he insists.) Pestrella says he intends to bill FoLAR for the buff job — on orders from the Board of Supervisors. “We expect the bill to be upwards of $1,000,” he says.

That bill could be just the first of many for the nonprofit FoLAR.

With the county’s emergency deadline to remove the entire mural approaching in mid-March, FoLAR members don’t know how they’re going to handle a nasty feud with the county government that they did not invite, involving a county permit that was not granted to FoLAR but to the artist Man One. If more graffiti shows up, FoLAR could be billed by public works again — and again and again.

Backlar of FoLAR is perplexed that something as seemingly innocuous as a mural can be wasting so much time — both the county’s and her own. “Like there aren’t more important things to deal with,” she says. “You’ve got homeless people living in the river, for goodness’ sake.”

MacAdams, however, sees a larger point.

“We’re out ahead of the bureaucrats and it’s making them nervous. This event opened doors to whole new communities who had never been around the Los Angeles River.”

The coming months will reveal just how costly that introduction is going to be.

To see before and after images of the mural, go to blogs.laweekly.com/lurker/river.

Black LA Today

2008-01-05T12:23:00.001-08:00

In December, the LA Weekly ran a good memoir of growing up and leaving an apparently shrinking Black Los Angeles. It's worth reading, but has a problem endemic to memoirs, which is a "c'est la vie" attitude towards long term change. LA was a seriously black city, then it wasn't. Black folks lived in central LA, then they started to leave.

This fatalism comes from narcissism. You need some to write a decent story but if you are always at the center social forces disappear. The memoir also ignores the big story. LA, the city, the government, the people, very much including the white people with money, let its poorer neighborhoods go to hell. The city didn't take care of the people or the place. They didn't rebuild anything. They shrugged and said what can you do and the shrug became a prophecy.

More Davis on the Fires

2007-12-12T01:06:00.000-08:00

Mike Davis had a nice Diary entry in the London Review of Books on the ecology of fire in San Diego County. His grower friend Tom says that in the 2003 Cedar fire, "his trees put up a 'bloody stiff fight,' providing a firewall that saved several of his neighbours' large houses. 'Except in an extreme conflagration, fire will only penetrate about 10 or 15 metres into orchards when the ground is cleared and well irrigated.' He takes a pen-knife and scrapes at charred bark: the flesh is still green. 'Most of the burnt trees are still alive, although they won't bear fruit for several years.'"

Davis says that "The loss of more than 90 per cent of Southern California's agricultural buffer zone is the principal if seldom mentioned reason wildfires increasingly incinerate such spectacular swathes of luxury real estate." And much more - read!

Mike Davis This Time

2007-11-02T02:14:00.000-07:00

Last week I posted a couple of Mike Davis commentaries on the 2003 fires. Here's his first commentary on the fires this time.

Let's Point Some Fingers

2007-10-25T07:22:00.001-07:00

It's never too soon to start the blame game, so let's start while the fires still burn. The LA Times has a piece today about the shortage of fire equipment in California, one that becomes obvious during hideous disasters like the hundred-mile fires that are still going on. After lots of homes were lost in the Cedar and Running Springs fires in San Diego and San Bernardino counties in 2003, an expert panel recommended that 150 new trucks be bought. Four years later, only 19 have been ordered. Exactly zero out of 150 have arrived. 19 new ones are expected in time for next fire season.

Why is this? It's simple. State finances are in a permanent state of crisis. There is a continuous budget deficit and endless battles about cuts. All human services, including and education, are underfunded, year after year. Fire protection is the same.

Why can't the state get more money? Because legislative Republicans block any and all new taxes for any imaginable reason. And they do this on the grounds that all public services are pretty much a waste of money and time.

You may think that's a parody of their argument, but it's only a slightly shorter version. And it's been going on like this since the mid-1970s.

Most of the lost homes are in the newly-built far suburbs of the LA-SD metroplex. These neighborhoods are among the most Republican in the state. Capped property taxes have helped them afford inflated housing prices, and the burden of high housing costs maintains a permanent Republican constitutency for low taxes.

You would think fires like this would change their minds about the public sector. It didn't in 2003. Will this time be any different?

More on poor fire staffing in the real O.C.

Ben Marcus eyewitnesses Malibu on fire, and Judith Lewis offers an overview and climate perspective, both in the LA Weekly.

SoCal Is Burning

2007-10-23T02:08:00.000-07:00

I've been through L.A. burnings all of my life, but I've never seen this ring of fire. Where are we supposed to run? Is this the last time we'll see this or with climate change etc. will we be looking at this map once a year? Or once every few months as the fire season grows from one season to two or three?

Who is getting burned? See the details.
If you have downloaded Google Earth onto your computer, you can click the KML tag just above the Google map, then load the kml file into your Google Earth application. The images aren't real time, but better than the map.

Here's a little causal pondering, even at a time like this: get a jump start on the 20-20 hindsight that you'll be deluged with in the coming weeks (along with piteous noises from insurance companies). You'll see most of the damage is to houses in the border country of the SoCal metroplex. Why are those houses there?

Some folks love nature. Some folks love the city but afford it anymore. Some white folks are fleeing black and brown folks.

Housing in the burnable former wilderness arrived in large part via ongoing white flight coupled with absurd housing price inflation. White flight is partly an effect of
systematic underinvestment in old city cores and "inner ring suburbs" near the cores. Those places degrade, stores close, services including education get worse, all of which makes changes in racial balance seem even worse to whites than it would otherwise. (Imagine a world where whites would greet new Latino neighbors as making their neighborhood a lot more interesting: that would be a world, among other things, that had the social muscle to make increased diversity or destiny a boon - as it is in Copenhagen or Paris). This social underinvestment also drives up housing prices, since people are willing to pay a premium for a "good" neighborhood - one undamaged by government-enabled decline of the old core.

Sure it's all complicated, but there's a major social and economic component to these now-annual natural disasters. For one of the leaders in linking natural disaster to socio-political origins, see Mike Davis on the 2003 fires, and being interviewed about them.
And for El Nino fans, check out his book on the conjunction of El Nino and British colonial policy in the 19th century "making of the third world."

Tale of Three Cities

2007-10-19T10:12:00.000-07:00

Race, race and race in these three stories from Southern Cal this week:

*Aliso Viejo, the Real O.C., manufactured city of white flight, is flipping out about the Latinos that followed to do their work. Do I exaggerate? Read up.

*Florence-Firestone, "North of Watts," gets in the news for its "race war." The reporter's contribution to world knowledge is that there's more than just the hits on the dwindling number of black kids and residents on alleged orders from the Mexican Mafia. This "war" has, uh, two sides. The picture is the arm of a "gang member" taking a can to re-graffiti the garage a guy has just de-graffittied. There is exactly one sentence in this piece about poverty and de-development, which is a central player in the drama whose moral for the white westsiders who read the Times is always the same. Black and brown - they're going down. Could we have a new story please?

*Echo Park, central LA, my old home town: the idiots that run city services have cut out the paddle boats that have been there for a century or so in one of the best used parks in the city. I felt compelled to comment:

I grew up near the 16000 block of Sunset Blvd in Pacific Palisades, and then lived quite happily in the early 1990s near the 1600 block of the same street. The only drawback to moving to Echo Park was seeing firsthand - and none too soon - the outrageous inequality in basic city services between wealthy and poorer neighborhoods in the city of LA. This starts with the complete inability of the city to synchronize traffic lights through Echo Park and Silver Lake, and carries on to trash collection, tree maintenance, public safety, etc. It's typical of the city's de facto contempt for the densely-populated brown and black neighborhoods that need public services the most (and use them most effectively) that they would get rid of the core activity - paddleboats - in one of the most-used and most-beloved parks in LA.

Isa-Kae Meksin is a local treasure and is always right about what makes for good neighborhoods. It's really too bad she and her allies aren't running the city.

Many people have only seen the paddleboats in the form of the scene in Chinatown (1974) when the detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) goes out in a boat to take clandestine pictures of the Mulholland character with his alleged mistress. But the paddleboats were much more than that. They were there for the local people who use the park - and not for the tourists who never come there. The boats represented them - all the people who work, play, sleep, love, fight, and eat in the neighborhood, and who kissed for the first time in the park. The boats were the normalcy of everyday life in a neighborhood defined as bad by crime stories, by the racism, and by the moralistic, antidevelopmental phobias of a berserk Christian culture that treats the poor people who build and clean their houses and then dress granny in the back unit as though they were the damned. And damn their neighborhoods too - make sure they feel like the valley of the shadow to you. Same goes for today's Echo Park of race and class mixtures - why have boats floating around when you can fence the docks and paddlock the fence?

So there. Cutting the paddleboats, for gods sake. We have all these problems - could we be serious for five minutes?

Nice Little Crooked Story

2007-10-12T13:50:00.000-07:00

MTA's $1 Billion Development Scheme
Eleven transit honchos were barred from voting due to money conflicts. So they drew straws.
By Patrick Range McDonald

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 8:00 pm

Dwarfing Hollywood & Highland: The NoHo Artwave megaproject

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE strange, somewhat sleazy situations that seem to plague the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Two weeks ago, 11 of the 13 powerful board members who control the MTA cited personal “conflicts of interest” preventing them from legally voting on an up-to-now obscure, $1 billion, high-rise development project in North Hollywood. Yet a few minutes later, a quorum made up of prominent politicians including Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and County Supervisor Gloria Molina voted anyway.

The public may be virtually unaware of the massive density planned for the 15.6-acre site in the NoHo Arts District, but press reports tout it as the most expensive and biggest mixed-use venture in the history of the MTA. Sprawling across about the same amount of land as the Grove, the NoHo Artwave would be far more dense, including the biggest skyscraper to hit the low-rise San Fernando Valley in decades, with nearly a half-million square feet of space. If the economy doesn’t bottom out, it would make at least a few people much richer.

Beyond the lack of any real debate over the project — a trademark of the current rush to transform many L.A. neighborhoods into high-density corridors whether residents want it or not — is the bizarre way in which powerful MTA board members veered around a state law that prevented their voting on a project by Lowe Enterprises, from whom 11 of the 13 have accepted money.

To get around state anti-corruption laws, Villaraigosa and the other board members used a so-called “lottery-based vote” — essentially drawing straws to randomly select five conflicted board members to achieve a quorum. Claiming that a special state law written just for the MTA existed for such embarrassing moments, the five conflicted members, including Villaraigosa and Molina, joined the two non-conflicted board members — and voted for Lowe.

After the vote, an MTA spokesman, media reports and some board members claimed that the loophole was written by former state Senator Tom Hayden of Santa Monica. But when contacted by the L.A. Weekly, Hayden was stunned to hear that his name had been invoked as the author of a voting loophole, saying he never pushed through any backdoor mechanism.

“There’s nothing in that law that mentions anything about a lottery-based vote,” insists Hayden. The practice, he said, is “bordering illegal, if not illegal.”

In fact, the Weekly has learned, the MTA has been citing Hayden for more than seven years. Three of the seven prominent leaders who voted for the North Hollywood project, in interviews with the Weekly, gave muddled explanations of the alleged loophole, with two of them pointing to Hayden. An MTA spokesman was surprised to hear of Hayden’s consternation, insisting that Hayden’s law created the MTA loophole.

But that spokesman, after seeking advice from an MTA ethics officer, called the Weekly back twice, abruptly abandoning the MTA’s longtime claim that Hayden had created a loophole for them — and offering confused answers as to why the board thinks it can ignore state anti-corruption law.

THE GYRATIONS at the MTA stem from 1997, when Hayden authored Senate Bill 89 in response to the MTA’s flawed history in constructing the underground Metro system. Workers were injured during unreported construction mishaps, stretches of Hollywood Boulevard sank due to subway tunneling, and accusations flew that contractors improperly gave money to MTA board members.

Hayden came up with a strict law to cap those contributions as well as to force construction firms to report injuries. Under Hayden’s bill, board members could not accept more than $10 from companies seeking a contract from the MTA. The bill came with a tough, four-year ban on participation in any contract decisions by any MTA board members who “knowingly accepted” any gift over $10 from those same contractors.

“I’ve always believed the MTA is a gravy train for contractors,” says Hayden. “The law is meant to attack obvious conflicts of interest.”

Two weeks ago, Hayden’s law collided with 11 board members who took money from Lowe, and whose conflicts of interest prevented them from voting on the “NoHo Art Wave” — the largest development project ever by the MTA. Lowe Enterprises plans 562 apartment units, a skyscraper and two shorter towers, a YMCA (Robert Lowe, the firm’s founder, happens to be chairman of the board of the Los Angeles Metropolitan YMCA), community buildings, and space for 6,200 cars, all to be erected above and around the last stop of the Red Line subway near the Orange Line busway at Lankershim Boulevard.

The vast parking facilities would dwarf the parking lots at infamous car magnets like the Hollywood & Highland Center (3,000-plus spaces), Westside Pavilion (3,350 spaces) and the Grove (3,500 spaces). The 6,200 parking spaces signal to critics that MTA board members, rather than addressing Valley congestion, are in fact creating a new hub for gridlock, mirroring the nightmare at Hollywood & Highland — another “transit-oriented development” with a subway line and ample bus service that has nevertheless jammed up the streets with cars.

Yet MTA board member David Fleming, an influential Valley lawyer and former city fire commissioner, insists, “NoHo has been looking for development for 20 years. This is a piece of the puzzle that’s been missing.”

According to Fleming, 10 of his colleagues took money from Lowe Enterprises. Fleming, who made number 11, was also conflicted because he is “of counsel” to the politically well-connected law firm Latham & Watkins, which had represented Lowe Enterprises.

A quorum of seven board members was needed to push the project forward, and only Villaraigosa’s appointee Richard Katz, a former state legislator, and John Fasana, a city councilman from suburban Duarte, were totally free of entanglements with Lowe. So an MTA staffer suggested a loophole they had used for years without much notice: the lottery-based vote, which, says Fleming, staffers actually call “The Hayden Procedure.”

On September 27, a board secretary placed the 11 names of the conflicted members in a box: Villaraigosa, Molina, Los Angeles County Supervisors Mike Antonovich, Yvonne Burke, Don Knabe and Zev Yaroslavsky, Santa Monica City Council Member Pam O’Connor, Long Beach Vice Mayor Bonnie Lowenthal, Glendale Mayor Ara Najarian, Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks and Villaraigosa appointee Fleming. She then randomly pulled out the names of Villaraigosa, Fleming, Lowenthal, Molina and Najarian.

Those five joined Katz and Fasana, voting unanimously to award Lowe Enterprises the exclusive right to negotiate the $1 billion project with the MTA. The developer must hold public hearings, complete an environmental-impact report, and win further approvals — but Lowe is in the catbird seat now, with the connections to push it through.

Hayden suggested to the Weekly that MTA lawyers likely dreamed up the loophole, and in a subsequent e-mail stated, “I’d like to see someone question the legality of [MTA’s] counsel advice. [It] seems to me the [drawing] straws vote still allows the MTA to be totally dominated by interest groups using contributions to drive funding.”

MTA spokesman Dave Sotero, informed that Hayden insists his law does not create a special MTA loophole, went quiet. Then he said he was “just repeating” what MTA’s legal eagles had told him and promised to “look into it further.”

Board member and attorney Fleming, told of Hayden’s denial, declared, “That’s news to me.” Fleming then complained about the law’s “low threshold” of $10, and the need for politicians to raise cash to stay in office. “What are you going to do? Not have a board with elected officials?”

Fleming says the 13 board members receive e-mails from MTA staff a week before every board meeting, informing them of their upcoming conflicts of interest. “We know several days in advance who’s conflicted,” the attorney says. “It’s no mystery.” Over the past two years, Fleming remembers the controversial loophole being used “two or three times.”

“The problem is,” he says, “what do you do if you don’t have the vote?”

Hayden retorts: “There’s ample room to appoint [MTA] board members who have nothing to do with contractors. You’re telling me there’s no one in Los Angeles who can’t fill that seat? Of course not.

AT THE POORLY PUBLICIZED September 27 meeting, only MTA watchdog John Walsh disagreed with the plan. “This [project] is a traffic nightmare,” says Walsh, who has been credited over the years with blowing the whistle on the MTA’s blunders. “They’re plopping a project the size of Warner Center into the middle of NoHo, and there is no mitigation for the traffic, other than the Red and Orange lines.”

Walsh believes the Valley is set to become the next Westside with its endless bumper-to-bumper traffic. “The Westside is gridlocked out,” says Walsh, “so now the big projects are going to North Hollywood and other places in the Valley, and the same thing will happen there.” Although two related studies, conducted by UC Berkeley and Cal Poly Pomona, showed that 78 percent of residents who move into “transit-oriented” housing never use the nearby bus or subway, and merely add more cars to local congestion, board member Fasana counters, “Unlike the Westside, you have rail and buses” in NoHo.

There is, in fact, another motive turning the MTA into a big-time land developer rather than simply a less-than-successful people mover. “The MTA is operating at a deficit,” says Fleming, “so it’s very important to get the dollars we can by building these projects.”

According to Roger Moliere, chief of development for the MTA, Lowe Enterprises will pay $11 million in “guaranteed” ground leases to the transit agency.The MTA’s conflicted role, as a developer drawing thousands of cars into neighborhoods, and the entity that is supposed to relieve congestion, could explain why spokesman Sotero and MTA ethics officer Karen Gorman stumbled around for hours trying to explain who dreamed up the so-called Hayden Procedure.

Gorman, chief ethics officer for Metro, vaguely explained that “case law” — she couldn’t cite an actual case — as well as an obscure section of the California government code, specifically allows a “lottery-based” vote.

Gorman admitted the loophole was not “written in Tom Hayden’s law.” Yet she flatly dismissed Hayden’s suggestion that MTA lawyers may have fashioned it. “No,” she said, “it’s absolutely not true. It’s state law.” Board members Fasana of Duarte and Lowenthal of Long Beach gave different answers. Fasana cited Hayden’s law — as “explained” to him by MTA staff — and Lowenthal suggested that a ruling by the California state attorney general had created the loophole. (Attorney General Jerry Brown’s office couldn’t find such a ruling.)

MTA board member Yaroslavsky’s press deputy, Joel Bellman, when told that ethics officer Gorman had admitted the loophole didn’t come from Hayden, said he would try to resolve the confusion. Two hours later, Gorman and Sotero contacted the Weekly. “I’m sorry for not making myself clear,” Gorman said. She cited Title 2, Division 6, Chapter 7, Article 1, Section 18708 of California’s Code of Regulations. In a subsequent e-mail, Sotero cited yet another justification — “the long established common law Rule of Necessity,” upon which he says the MTA has relied.

It will be news to those who have long cited the “Hayden Procedure” that the regulation in Section 18708 is not a special law for the MTA, does not mention the MTA — and might not even legally supersede Hayden’s anti-corruption law. The regulation states that “a random means of selection may be used” to produce a quorum for a vote. “The lottery-based vote,” Gorman said, “was our ‘random means of selection.”

The MTA’s topsy-turvy claim that they could draw straws thanks to a special MTA law by Tom Hayden has arguably discouraged legal challenges against the MTA’s practice. While not commenting on the MTA case, professor of law emeritus Michael Asimow of UCLA Law School, an expert in state administrative law, said that “If the regulation is inconsistent with [state law], the regulation is invalid.”

“It sounds suspicious,” says professor Greg Keating, who teaches legal ethics at USC’s School of Law, of the MTA’s tortured explanations. “And it’s definitely a loophole that undermines [Hayden’s] law.” Keating notes that if deep-pocketed developers know a lottery-based vote can be conducted when board members have ethical conflicts, developers may contribute money to every board member to cover their bets when names are pulled out randomly. “It may be expensive,” says Keating, “but if you have the money...”

UC in Decline: Read All About It

2007-10-07T11:05:00.000-07:00

Today's Los Angeles Times has an excellent piece about the public funding crisis in the University of California and California State University systems. I've archived the text only version. Or see the photo version with a bonus picture of me: I did a lot of the research on which the story is based. Hats off to author Richard Paddock, who tells the crucial but sadly unknown story that great public universities require great public funding. High tuition and corporate gifts, no matter how large, just won't cut it. The story's subtitle says it all: "Educators fear a 2004 funding deal has schools sliding toward mediocrity." Time to stop that slide.

Photo: Victor Vincent, a custodian at UCLA for 17 years, attended the UC regents meeting in July. “We can’t even afford to send our kids to the university, and we don’t understand why you don’t understand that,” he told them. “We are suffering, and we need somebody to help us.”

Traffic Bad and Getting Worse

2007-09-19T01:35:00.000-07:00

Today's LA Times covered the annual Texas Transportation Institute study of national traffic delays. The news for Southern Cal is horrible as usual. Commuters spent close to an average of two work weeks a year in "extra" hours caused by congestion.

The chart shows another disturbing finding. Very bad delays have spread from the center to the far peripheries of the LA area. The increases are shocking: San Bernadino-Riverside residents spent 5 extra hours in traffic in 1982; by last year they were spending 49. Oxnard-Ventura commuters wasted 4 hours a year in 1982 but now waste 39 hours. In the past 25 years, traffic in the "undeveloped" semi-rural hinterlands got 680% worse (to the east of LA) and 875% worse (to the northwest).

The numbers are terrible elsewhere too. Even when you average newly-bad areas with their already-rotten central traffic areas, thereby keeping the overall number lower, you see San Diego worsened by 375%, Washington DC (where our genius policymakers live) by 275%, Dallas by an incredible 480%, and even a more compact city like Austin by 308%.

And guess what? Transportation authorities say this report is way too upbeat. The report assumes rush-hour traffic moves at 35 MPH, an obvious absurdity in any city where I've ever commuted (L.A., SF, Houston, Seattle, Philadelphia, Atlanta . . .). The Southern California Association of Governments say the average is more like 20 MPH. And we all know that averages conceal experiences that are much worse than average, as in major freeway corridors where like the 405 between Redondo Beach and the San Fernando Valley were peak-hours speeds are usually closer to 10 MPH. Even the average is about 40 % worse than what the Texas folks say.

From time to time I've talked about traffic on another blog (here and here). That blog is called "Middle Class Death Trips" in reference to middle- and lower-income people's tendency to support policies that hurt them. In all cases, bad traffic is the result of

underinvesting in mass-transit infrastructure
sprawl; which is in turn caused by
tax-cutting Proposition 13 in California, which cut spending on public services, artificially lowered the cost of oversized, distant housing, forced cities to build big (car-based) retail because they needed sales taxes to replace lost property taxes (what a mouthful!) and
white flight, accelerated by the 1992 Rodney King events.

We pay for these choices in dead time, time lost in commuting. If we didn't have cellphones and PDAs to pass the time, we would have had some real political change by now.

It doesn't have to be this way. If you don't believe me, come to Paris (or Berlin, or Bonn, or Barcelona, or even somewhat crapped-out London). Driving is hell, and busing or biking is heaven, and mobility is easy and cheap. This is not just a dream, the way it is in California.

Maybe we are still talking about the California Dream because we can't keep ourselves from moving away from it.

Developer Government

2007-09-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

The LA Weekly had a good story about Hollywood housing being declared historic moments only to have city politicians override the designation at the request of developers who seem to have mysterious pull with them. It's an old story in LA - developer rule - but it would be nice if it had a different ending once in a while.

Actually Agreeing with Arnold

2007-08-31T05:33:00.000-07:00

L. A. Weekly columnist Bill Bradley has a good piece about how gerrymandering congressional and assembly districts has in effect eliminated elections. This is because nearly all districts are set up to have a preponderance of one party such that the incumbent is never in danger. In 2004, 50 of 53 California Congressional elections were won by more than 60%.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is on the correct side this time - if he doesn't throw his side a bone.

Referring to idiotic districts like the one above. that don't "represent" any meaningful grouping of people. Bradley notes that "Previous redistricting has been marked by the application of Cubist art theory and backroom deals."

There's good stuff here too about the crappy budget politics in Sacramento and the Missing In Action status of LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, which helped LA get screwed yet again on transit funding.

EastSide Story

2007-08-28T00:35:00.001-07:00

Here's an article from the LA Times about a "gang killing" in Pico Rivera. It's a piece with unusual depth and decent sympathy for both of the two main families involved, including the one from which the most recent shooters came. The victim, Maria Elena Hicks, is shown above. R.I.P. for a woman who worked endlessly and looked out for her town all of her life.

"The tragic intersection of 2 families"

By Sam Quinones
August 27, 2007

For years the 40-foot-long cinder-block wall at the entrance to Durfee Village in Pico Rivera stood largely untouched.

Then the graffiti began appearing. PV. BXA. The city painted over it, but the graffiti reappeared. The city planted ivy. It died; the graffiti returned.

Neighbors thought the scrawling was the work of taggers.

But the graffiti was a sign of the ongoing war between Pico Viejo, a street gang that dates to the town's inception, and a longtime rival it was trying to suppress, Brown Authority.

On Aug. 10, Maria Elena Hicks, a 57-year-old medical secretary and grandmother who had lived in Durfee Village all her life, found herself at the center of the feud when she spotted a youth spray-painting the wall and attempted to stop him.

Hicks honked and flashed her car lights at the teenager. Suddenly, another car pulled up behind her, a gunman emerged and fired into her rear window, hitting her in the head. She died three days later.

Since her death, another story has emerged in the tight-knit community. It is the tale of two longtime neighborhood families: the Quinteros -- Hicks' family -- and the Tafollas.

Both had lived in Pico Rivera for decades. Their children played sports there and attended local schools together.

But while the Quintero family worked to better their community, the Tafollas' neighbors campaigned to force them out.

The Quinteros pushed their children to go to college. Some Tafolla kids went to Juvenile Hall.

Of the four youths charged in the murder of Hicks, two are Tafollas: Jennifer Tafolla, 19, and the accused shooter, Angel Rojas, 16, who will be tried as an adult.

The other defendants -- Cesar Lopez 19, and Richard Rolon, 21 -- are members of Brown Authority, a gang allegedly formed by Tafollas, whose house was the gang's hangout.

Although the two families lived six blocks apart, they were only vaguely aware of each other.

Then "their paths crossed in such a tragic way," said Gregory Salcido, a city councilman and high school history teacher raised in Pico Rivera. "It makes you want to holler."

Vigilant residentsRay and Mary Tafolla arrived with their family from Compton in 1965, moving into a four-bedroom stucco house on Greenglade Avenue. Their oldest son, Tony, was 18 at the time.

"Where we lived there was all these shootings," said Tony Tafolla, now 59, "then the Watts riots happened."

Ray was a hardworking man, a radiator refurbisher. Mary was a housewife. They were typical of the young families moving into the new subdivisions of north Pico Rivera.

The family settled in as the rural county outpost was just beginning to take shape. In 1958, unincorporated Pico merged with nearby Rivera. East Los Angeles was a main tributary at the time, but people now mostly migrate to Pico Rivera from the heavily immigrant southeast cities of Huntington Park, Maywood, Bell and South Gate.

Though Pico Rivera was a predominantly Latino suburb, sweet sixteen parties were as common as quinceaneras and football was more popular than soccer. Most families spoke English and owned their own homes.

When the city began publishing a small part of its newsletter in Spanish in 2005, several Mexican American families complained.

Although the city has 12 gangs, it is generally free of graffiti, partly because of the vigilance of residents. The city pursued taggers, increasing penalties and recouping thousands of dollars from their families.

In this city, the Tafolla family grew. The Little League field at Streamland Park became their social center. Tony was a coach for 14 years; other family members also participated.

Although he admits to spending little time at El Rancho High School before dropping out, Tony said he vaguely remembers a pretty, cheerful girl everyone in school called Quita, as Maria Hicks was known to friends and family. But Tafolla never spoke to her.

In the 1970s, Tafolla's younger brother, Joe, and a few others tried to start a small gang, Pico Flats, according to neighbors. They had run-ins -- including one or two shootings -- with Pico Viejo.

Joe was given the choice of joining the Army or going to jail; he chose the Army, Tony said.

His troubles, however, were a sign of things to come.

Slowly, Tafolla's parents seemed to lose control of the family. Their house got more crowded. Generations of Tafollas lived with them, including their son, Tony, whose daughter, Mary, got into drugs and disappeared, leaving him and his wife to raise two grandsons, Angel and Bubba.

It's unclear when, but Tony said Brown Authority was formed at the family's Greenglade house. He said he didn't know much about their activities and there wasn't much he could do about it anyway.

"You can't tell them to get out," he said. "It's all family." Besides, "it wasn't my house. I was just there. It's my mom and dad's."

Neighbors remember gang members congregating outside. There were loud late-night parties. And the house and driveway were painted with graffiti.

"Pretty much the whole gang is made up of blood relatives," said Sheriff's Sgt. Mark Bailey. "It was a party crew, a tagging group."

Accent on collegeRuben and Elena Quintero settled in Durfee Village in 1953. It was a small subdivision built along the banks of the San Gabriel River.

The couple ran a strict household. Their son, Ruben, and two daughters, Melinda and Quita, always went to summer school. Elena was in the PTA. When her daughters were old enough to go out on dates, she stayed up until they came home at a designated hour.

In the backyard of their small stucco house, the family planted fruit trees and palms. With stones from the nearby San Gabriel River, they built an outdoor grill, a walkway and a shrine with a statue of St. Teresa.

Ruben Quintero Sr., a former farmer turned steelworker, was a high school dropout. But he pushed his children to go to college.

"We've got nothing but farmers in this family," he would say.

His son Ruben, who studied physics in college, would eventually earn a doctorate from Harvard in 18th century British literature. He now teaches literature at Cal State Los Angeles.

The son set the Quintero family on a path to higher education. Melinda went to college and became an elementary school teacher, and all but one Quintero grandchild has a college degree.

Quita was the rebel. She never liked school and dropped out at 17. But she never stopped working. She became a medical secretary, working for doctors at convalescent hospitals and for the last 11 years at Monterey Park Hospital.

"She never had a lazy bone in her," her mother said. "That's the one thing we can't stand is anybody who's lazy."

Indeed, Quita embodied the best traits of the town, a sense of pride and ownership of their community, her family said. She knew many of her neighbors and spoke out when she found something wrong.

Her son, Matt Hicks, recalled how his mother once reprimanded some kids who were writing on a park picnic table.

"Do you want some paper? I'll get you some paper," she told them. "But don't write on the tables."

New gang rivalryIn July 2002, sheriff's investigators noticed a spike in gang shootings in Pico Rivera's north end. The shootings involved Brown Authority.

The gang was small, with never more than 50 members. But it was large enough to attract the notice of Pico Viejo, the same street gang that Joe Tafolla had battled years before.

At some point, sheriff's investigators believe, Pico Viejo presented the Tafollas with an ultimatum: Join up or face the consequences.

"Brown Authority didn't want any part of it," said Bailey, the Sheriff's Department sergeant. "They started warring with one another."

The Tafolla house on Greenglade became a target. The once-tranquil street was a "battle zone," said one neighbor. "They were firing AK-47s."

Sheriff's deputies were constantly called to the house. Neighbors' homes, cars and fences were shot up. Even SWAT showed up once.

"That family was a plague," a neighbor said.

Finally, in 2004, residents went to the city. Sheriff's Sgt. Steve Sanchez helped them form a Neighborhood Watch. Code enforcement officers cited the Tafollas for housing violations. Deputies constantly patrolled the street.

"We hammered them hard," Sanchez said.

Then one summer night in 2005 came the "big shooting," neighbors said. About 3 a.m., several youths, armed with an assault rifle, opened fire on the Tafolla house.

"It was shot after shot after shot," a neighbor said. "I yelled 'Stay down.' We stayed down for a good 15 minutes. Tony came out. He was shaking like a leaf."

After that, the Tafolla family sold the house and moved to Rialto.

People in town looked on the Tafolla campaign as a successful example of civic involvement, emblematic of what the city was about.

"It was a community realizing they had a right, or an obligation, to get involved," said Salcido, the city councilman. "That's an American trait."

Nevertheless, the young Tafollas kept returning to Pico Rivera to hang out with members of their gang, the Brown Authority.

"They never completely stayed away," Sanchez said. Angel Rojas ran away from the Rialto home several times. He fled again two weeks before Hicks was killed and never returned.

'It's a shameful thing'On the day of his sister's funeral, Ruben Quintero sat under the lemon trees and 90-foot palms that his parents had planted in the yard back in the 1950s. Puffing on a cigar, he reflected on the Tafolla family.

"It's a world without measure, where you can do whatever you goddam please," he said. "Those people have seriously wrecked their own family. . . . It's a shameful thing."

In Rialto, Tony Tafolla said he hasn't slept well since the arrest of his grandson, whom he raised from age 5. Angel is hyperactive, he said, and suffers from attention deficit disorder.

"He has the brain of a kindergartner," Tafolla said. "He can't read his own name. I dreamed last night. . . seen him in chains, being treated like a dog. But I say, 'You got yourself into it. I can't help you.' "

Tafolla said he won't return to Pico Rivera for a while, though he still feels it is home.

"A lot of people hate us over there," he said. "I understand why. I feel so bad. It's a stupid, coldblooded killing."

Last week, the city replanted vines along the wall at the entrance to Durfee Village. A candlelight vigil was also held in the neighborhood.

"The group of people who knew my mom, they're touched by what happened," Matt Hicks said. "I think they'll try to continue on in her spirit."

It was his mother's love of the community that made her stand up for it, Hicks said.

"If you have something invested, you're not going to let it be destroyed," he said. "That neighborhood was hers."

sam.quinones@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-pico27aug27,1,7126098.story?track=rss

Working Class California Millionaires

2007-08-05T05:52:00.000-07:00

Read the sad story here about folks like Hal on the left, worth $3.5 or $10 million plus house and still feeling like losers. “`You’re nobody here at $10 million,'” Mr. Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar here."

Makes me feel real bad! You work hard in a money industry, you cash in, you get to the top, you have the big CA house, you remodel it a few times, you give your old Saab to your maid, and you're still not happy. Or relaxed for five minutes.

Laugh, then cry. Then do something healthy like gag. Then ask: could it be because you're working 70-80 hours a week, and just for more money?

The other factor: crazy multiples of what was once regularly called "unearned income" - the piles of money from ownership positions and investments. The cost of great things has multiplied accordingly - 5 bedroom houses in wooded hills that cost $1 million in the mid-1990s going for 4-5x times that today.

People don't know how to criticize piling up unearned income anymore, nor how to analyze the economic or social effects. But they feel it anyway. Working hard in its midst doesn't feel good.

Dumb Coverage of Diversity

2007-07-17T11:18:00.001-07:00

I've posted a bad piece on Venice, California - not mine, but from today's LA Times. The article implies that this nice real estate developer (above) was nearly killed by Venice's "diversity."

It prompted me to send the following into the email ether:

Dear Ms Hall, that's quite a misframed piece you wrote. "Diversity" and class-mixing didn't attack Jack Hoffman. A particular guy did - angry or schitzophrenic or screwed-over by Hoffman - you don't actually have any idea. You contribute to the idea that racially and economically mixed neighborhoods are bad for decent white people, doing your small if accidental part for white flight and resegregation.

please try not to get cheap mileage out of untreated crazy people, poverty, gross and growing economic inequality, ongoing racism, and all the rest of it.

Sincerely,

I'm sorry: in a state where whites are a minority, you're not allowed to be this dumb.

Very Cool Triumph

2007-05-27T21:23:00.000-07:00

Dream defies loss of limbs
Kellie Lim, a triple amputee at 8, is now ready to graduate from medical school.
By Larry Gordon
Times Staff Writer

May 27, 2007

Kellie Lim knows all too well what it is like to be a very sick child.

Struck with a ravaging bacterial infection that destroys limbs, she became a triple amputee at age 8 and soon faced a life of prosthetics, wheelchairs and often-painful rehabilitation.

But from that suffering, Lim forged a life of achievement. On Friday, she will graduate from UCLA's medical school and then will begin a residency program at the medical center there.

Her chosen specialty? Pediatrics, with a possible concentration later on childhood allergies and infectious diseases.

"Just having that experience of being someone so sick and how devastating that can be — not just for me but for my family too — gives me a perspective that other people don't necessarily have," the 26-year-old Michigan native said recently.

And of all the topics she sampled during medical school, only her work with children left her "smiling at the end of the day."

Lim carried out her medical training with a determination that awed her professors and fellow students and won her the school's top prize for excellence in pediatrics.

Opting not to use a prosthetic arm, she showed that she can perform most medical procedures with one hand, including taking blood and administering injections. She lives on her own in a Westwood apartment with no special features for the handicapped and drives a car with only one adaptation: a turning knob on the steering wheel. She is learning to swim, is trying horseback riding and even went tandem skydiving recently.

Lim, whose legs were amputated about 6 inches below her knees, gave up her wheelchair years ago and walks so well down the long and crowded hospital hallways — with a slightly bouncy stride — that new classmates and patients often don't have a clue for weeks that artificial limbs fill her shoes and pant legs.

She reluctantly will accept a seat during hospital bedside rounds when painful ulcers erupt on the skin that touches her prosthetics. (She has undergone grafts and additional surgeries over the years to help with the fittings.)

Colleagues say Lim's calmness in a hospital's hectic environment puts others at ease.

"With Kellie, at first you notice her hand is not there. But after about five minutes, she is so comfortable and so competent that you take her at face value and don't ask questions so much. She has an aura of competence about her that you don't worry," said Dr. Elijah Wasson, who supervised Lim during a rotation in internal medicine at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar.

Lim attributes some of her gumption to her dreadful childhood bout of bacterial meningitis. The resulting toxic shock, with internal clotting and bleeding, wrecked her extremities, leading to the amputations. When she went back last year to the Michigan hospital to read her voluminous medical file, she found an evaluation stating that 8-year-old Kellie Lim had an 85% chance of dying of the meningitis.

Her parents urged her not to give up during her four months of hospitalization and the following years of rehabilitation. Just five months after she became sick, Lim returned to regular school in suburban Detroit.

Previously right-handed, she learned to write and do chores with her somewhat diminished left hand, having lost three fingertips on it to amputation, along with her entire right hand and forearm. She has been fitted with prosthetic arms, but does not wear one in public anymore and uses it at home just for rare tasks, such as assembling an IKEA desk by herself.

"I hate failing," she said. "It's one of those things that's so ingrained in me."

That view was intensified by another disability in the family. Her mother, Sandy, went blind in her 20s and, except for not driving, sought to continue as normal a life as possible in raising three children. She cooked, cleaned and walked the youngsters to school.

"She definitely was a great role model for me," Lim said. "It was hard for her to overcome her blindness, and I think she definitely instilled a strength in me."

Just before her mother's death three years ago, Lim promised her that she would finish medical school — a pledge she will fulfill when she and her UCLA classmates take the Hippocratic oath.

"She wanted me to be a pediatrician," Lim said, "and I know that somewhere out there, she knows I am going to be one."

Lim is a soft-spoken, gracious woman, but she can be fierce in resisting being typecast as a disabled doctor who should focus just on rehabilitation medicine. She also is reluctant to accept what she sees as unnecessary assistance, even if it sometimes takes her longer than others to get things done.

Neil Parker, senior associate dean of student affairs at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, recalled how Lim resisted some of his early efforts to adapt or substitute medical equipment for her. "I think at the beginning we were perhaps a little at odds because I wanted to help her a lot with what I felt she needed," he said. "She wanted me to help her, but only with what she was willing to use."

In some cases, that meant finding older equipment, such as blood pressure cuffs that seemed better for a one-handed person, or practicing IV insertions.

One hurdle involved percussing, the lung exam done by placing one hand on a patient's chest and using the other hand to tap on it. Parker suggested using a hand-held ultrasound machine, but Lim declined. Instead, Veterans Affairs experts in Westwood designed a short metal-and-plastic extender that Lim straps onto her residual limb to help with the tapping. It is not pretty, but it works fine.

Of course, Lim is not able to perform surgery or intubate a patient by herself. But those skills probably won't be needed much in her likely fields. "There are certain things she can't do, but there are a million things she can do," Parker said.

Lim was assigned, on her final medical school rotation, to the pediatric allergy and immunology division under the supervision of Dr. Robert L. Roberts. On a recent Monday afternoon, she did the preliminary interviews and examinations by herself, deftly taking notes, pointing a light into ears, listening to hearts with a stethoscope.

She made no attempt to hide the residual limb, which she skillfully maneuvered to hold down papers; following medical protocol, she briskly washed the right limb and her left hand before touching patients or instruments.

First came a 14-year-old boy, who despite severe asthma, allergies, nosebleeds and migraines wants to play more baseball. He displayed the closedmouthed shrugging of boys his age, but his concerned mother detailed his middle-of-the-night breathing emergencies. Lim soon spotted evidence in his nose of inflamed tissue and recent bleeding. After a consultation with Roberts, the youth was prescribed a trial of new asthma medicine.

The boy's mother, Karen St. Louis, said she and her family talked about the doctor during the drive home as a "phenomenal" role model: "The conversation was that you can do anything you put your mind to."

Lim's next patient that day was a heartbreaker: a 5-year-old girl born with severe immunodeficiencies and numerous other medical problems.

The tiny child, wearing a green pantsuit, white-and-pink sneakers and thick glasses, is not toilet trained and does not speak, though she seemed to understand what her mother told her in Spanish and English. Her parents, clearly devoted to her, worried about seizures she suffered during a recent vacation. The girl whimpered a bit while Lim examined her but did not resist. Roberts and Lim scheduled more testing.

With everything else going on, the girl's parents seemed almost oblivious to Lim's missing hand.

Out in the world, Lim's partial arm sometimes attracts odd comments and stares, but her patients have shown overtly negative reactions only a couple of times, she said. Some small children were frightened by it and had to be soothed. Lim said she knows that some parents may be wary of her and that she will have to prove her competence.

"I'm not going to force myself on them in any way, but it still affects me personally," she said. "It kind of wears you down a little bit."

Still, Lim clearly identifies with the struggles of families with very ill youngsters.

"It is amazing to see family dynamics like that," she said a few minutes after the girl left. "It's very tragic, but the parents love their kids and will do anything for them and know so much about them."

Her own parents, immigrants from China, loom large in her life. Besides stressing her mother's influence, she thanks her father, Norman, a chemical engineer who kept the family going — financially and emotionally — through its unusual burdens.

Lim also credits her older sister, Nellie, who was protective of her and supportive of her moves toward independence, such as attending college away from home, at Northwestern University in Illinois.

Nellie Lim, now an attorney in Michigan, recalls the family philosophy:

"It wouldn't do you any good to sit and cry about it. We just went on and kept doing what we had to do like any other family. You need to make dinner. Go to the basketball game. Go on vacation."

Kellie Lim recently completed the last assignments for her medical degree and took a four-day pre-graduation celebratory Mexican cruise with classmates.

And this spring she began taking swimming lessons at a public pool in Westwood, even though she had been afraid of the water. During a recent session, Lim took off her prosthetic legs and was lowered into the water on a mechanized chair.

At first, Lim relied on a blue Styrofoam "noodle" to help her float. Then her coach took it away so Lim could practice a dolphin-like propulsion that used her torso, her one full arm and the remnants of her legs to move up the lane with a force that had some other swimmers doing double takes. It was tough work, but most of the time Lim was smiling.

larry.gordon@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-kellie27may27,1,6513369.story

15th Anniversary of 1992 Riots Not So Happy

2007-04-29T16:49:00.000-07:00

News Flash: private sector failed to Rebuild LA! Sorrowful anniversary views 15 years later (1, 2, 3).

The Road to Nowhere

2007-04-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

I've just posted a link to a story about the great new prison boom Gov. Schwarzenegger has agreed to on our behalf. There's absolutely nothing good to say about this mixture of borrowed money that your kids will still be paying, forced shipment of prisoners, and nothing at all for reducing the nation's highest recidivism rate so that we can be sure that California will keep building more prisons until our fearless leaders figure out how to fry the planet once and for all. This is why Gunnar Kaufmann retreated to his apartment to watch blind Samurai movies and why I put in a Deep Space 9 DVD (the pilot is the best TV pilot every made) whenever the local news comes on. How much dumber can they get? What are we going to do?

I See Your Hair is Burning

2007-04-01T00:15:00.000-07:00

More or less the biggest Hollywood Hills fire since Morrison recorded "L.A. Woman" burned 160 acres yesterday, burning from the back side in Burbank toward the Hollywood side. The fire was started by two teenage boys playing with fireworks, and they turned themselves in. Firefighters kept the fire from burning any structures, and saved the broadcasting equipment too. The symbolism of the images was something else. One firefighter noted that because L.A. has had only 3 inches of rain this year (a record low), brush conditions are now, in early spring, what they normally are in late fall, when Southern California chaparral is invariably a powder keg. This is a picture of Mike Davis's "Ecology of Fear."

Questions and Answers, Second Half

2007-03-19T17:25:00.000-07:00

6. Why did Golden Age California rebel in the 1960s?
A1. Less favored: Racially segregated & unjust; economic inequality
A 2. More favored: conformity and “soft” despotism that restricts freedom
A 3. Vietnam war on TV: Cold War policy loses credibility in Vietnam
A4 . Disposability of the “little people” (e.g. Didion’s Maria).

7. Why did Golden Age California start to fade?
A: economic and racial anxiety led to public disinvestment, increasing social fragmentation and private costs.

8. What do you do when the civil rights movement is both unfinished and over?
A: after the Civil Rights movement, and with no Golden Age public world, racism and division persists. Instead of the “white-boy shuffle,” lead yourself.

9. Why is California still an immigrant destination?
A1. Post- “nationalist era”(or “free trade” era) produces economic decline in Mexico and elsewhere, encouraging departure.
A2. California still appeals to migrants’ creative impulse - borderlands, hybrid music & culture (pleasure as well as necessity).
A3. The contemporary California middle class, working more hours for more expensive schools, homes, etc., maintains its standard of living with low-wage labor.

10. If most or all of the course’s books identify a crisis of leadership in California, what solutions do they recommend?
A1. Learning to fight and lead
A2. Learning to build collaboratively

11. How do most or all of the works in this course say the “Three California Dreams” should fit together?
A1. Dream 2 works against Dream 1 and Dream 3
A2. Dream 1 is the basis of Dream 3

12. What is the basis of California’s New Economy?
A. creative energy that broke with conventional wisdom and harnessed great collective labor.

13. Will California leaders drastically shrink the California middle class?
A1: conventional wisdom says No: the Golden Age returned via the New Economy
A2 Yes, unless Californians demand that Dream 3 be based on high-quality Dream 1 - on public systems built for everybody

How The US Makes People Not Like Taxes

2007-03-17T20:55:00.000-07:00

Anton wrote me with a good question, and I've posted his question and my answer here. He said,

You are promoting the agrarian dream, where everyone is better off because of government provisions. For increased provisions, there should be increased taxes. Right now, my father has a good job, but he pays approx. 45% of his salary to taxes. So, in your opinion, what percent of people's salaries should go to taxes? What was it like in the 1950's era, when Golden CA was in bloom?

I ask you this because to me (and to the average Joe) almost half each paycheck seems excessive to be paying to taxes.

Good point. That seems like a lot of taxes. Here's what I said back.

Hi Anton, you ask an excellent question. it contains 3 separate ones:

1. what is the overall income tax burden in a country or state?
2. how is the tax burden distributed?
3. what does the tax burden pay for?

number by number:

1. The overall US tax burden is pretty low. You can see international comparisons in a bunch of different categories at an OECD data page. There's also one at the top of the page, from an Australian government report.

2. The US tax burden is falling increasingly on the middle class. Corporations paid 1/3rd of all income tax collected in the 1950s. They now pay 1/8th. Effective marginal rates for middle-class folks have been rising for years due in part to technical changes (or failures to change) that almost on one pays attention to. You can read about one piece of this problem - the Alternative Minimum Tax - in a New York Times article from last year.

It's also worth noting that, rhetoric aside, the Bush administration's tax policies have explicitly favored the top over the middle. For example, Bush's tax reform commission recommended in Fall 2005 that the estate tax be cut or eliminated (only the largest 1 of every 200 estates pays any estate tax), and that it be paid for in part by eliminating the mortgage deduction for primary residences (the major form of personal wealth for nearly all of the non-rich). There are other examples of this skew which have made things worse for folks in the middle.

3. what do we get for our taxes? My general sense is that if people get accessible and affordable health care, good public schools, good public transit, etc for their money, they are willing to pay it. The core ideas behind public services is that they are a) neutrally administered, i.e. not serving the financial interests of a small clique) and b) take advantage of economies of scale (if everyone pays a little, no one has to pay a lot, and everyone can use a high-quality product, e.g. the old UC). If people get very little they can use - if most of their money goes to defense, public health care so overcrowded they won't go near it, always-clogged freeways, etc. - they will want to pay little or nothing.

In lecture I was arguing that Californians used to be willing (though of course never happy) to pay more taxes (1) because the burden seemed fair (2) and they got good stuff they used (3). "Post-Golden" is when the specific conditions that allow a higher-tax / higher-return to exist are eroded or destroyed. This has been happening for several decades, starting with a vengeance in 1978 with the passage of Proposition 13.

Smarter Than Their Parents

2007-03-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

The LA Times has a story covering the UC Regents meeting yesterday, where they voted 13-6 for a 7% increase in undergraduate fees next year, raising the average annual tuition for a UC undergrad to about $7350. The frame successfully created by the Office of the President (UCOP) was that it would be worse for you if you lived in Texas or Virigina, where fees are higher, so look on the bright side. This doesn't change the fact that the state is steadily replacing public with private funding, and that the university's social and personal impacts will change as a result. We'll talk a little about this in lecture today. Another ominous note is that the Regents approved a proposal led by the law schools at Berkeley and UCLA to remove the cap on tuition increases there, meaning that they will soon rise from their current level of around $25k to $35k or more. The damage to public-interest law is obvious, since now even graduates of public universities can't afford to take the five-figure jobs that those non-profit entities can afford to pay. The damage to the concept of public higher education is subtler but just as deep: as students and parents pay more for eduation out of their own pockets, they are naturally less interested in paying more for education in taxes. A few of the protesting students mentioned that the "high-tuition, high-financial aid" model wasn't working for them, but most people haven't figured out that only public funding can support higher ed that combines high-qualty with high-volume. That includes the middle-class folks who in many cases are middle-class only because they took a few steps up the social ladder because of very cheap but very good college instruction. To repeat a lecture question: will the California middle-classes give away the conditions of their own existence?

Moore's Law Extended at UCSB

2007-03-12T15:31:00.000-07:00

Silicon Valley in Santa Barbara: This is a picture of the UCSB and Intel researchers who are developing a way of making silicon-based semiconducters work at the nano scale. The lead UCSB researcher is Prof. John Bowers (second from left). The others pictured here are, left to right, Hyundai Park, Mario Paniccia, Richard Jones, and Alexander Fang. You can read a pretty accessible explanation at the College of Engineering web site.

Where Ana Was From

2007-03-08T07:52:00.000-08:00

Town Square, Tepatitlan, Jalisco, Mexico

Migrant Origins of the British Isles

2007-03-08T07:38:00.000-08:00

The Science section of the New York Times has an article about new research that erodes the "racial" difference between the Irish and the British.

First, formally, the piece is a good model for a research paper in that it states with great immediacy the existing assumption that the British and Irish are genetic and cultural contrasts. Once this is done, the appearance of the new theory has much more impact.

In terms of substance, this research suggests that the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons are much more closely related that previously believed. The result is the migrational map to the left. It shows that a category like Anglo, as in the euphemism for "white" Californian, or the term "Anglo-American," or the term WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) always already represents a mixture. This is parallel to the meaning of the term "Spaniard," which designated not white European - Castillian - and specifically non-Arab stock arriving in the future California, but a mix of Catalan, Majorcan (Fr. Serra was himself from Majorca), Greek, Italian, and other Mediterranean peoples including of course Arabs.

Cultural scholars often imply that if you can show people how mixed their own backgrounds are, they will feel comfortable with the mixtures they live with in their own lives. On the other hand, this article ends like this:

As for his thesis that the British and Irish are genetically much alike, "It would be wonderful if it improved relations, but I somehow think it won't."

Our Mountains of Stuff

2007-03-08T06:38:00.000-08:00

A good article in the Home section of today's New York Times writes about how our houses have grown and grown but our piles of stuff have grown even more. The piece itself is not a memoir, but like most feature articles it introduces a character or two who are meant to illustrate the point and then offers a little data. So in this article you meet the Wagners and some of their crap. Then paragraphs 4 and 5 dish out some stats:

They are not the only ones taking this approach to clutter. According to Michael T. Scanlon Jr., president of the Self Storage Association, a trade group, 11 million American households currently rent storage space, an increase of 90 percent since 1995 — even as the size of new American houses has grown and the size of the American family has shrunk.

In the last two years, close to a million more households have joined the ranks of storage renters, and there is now more than two billion square feet of rental storage space in the United States, earning more than $22 billion in gross revenue in 2006.

Take a look at the structure. It's very conventional, but in addition to the content you can see how professional writers and editors try to mix story and factual data.

Jim Clark and Silicon Valley Finance

2007-03-07T08:46:00.000-08:00

Check out a good Wall Street Journal piece on The New New Thing Jim Clark's 2000s project, MyCFO, tax sheltering included.

Global California Weather

2007-03-06T07:46:00.000-08:00

Two stories this morning: "L.A. Facing its Driest Year Ever," and "Asian Air Pollution Affecting Our Weather." Are they connected? The air pollution seems to be increasing rather than decreasing cloud cover. But weather is as contradictory as culture, if not more so.

The Golden Gulag

2007-03-04T09:40:00.000-08:00

The front page of this morning's Los Angeles Times links globe, golden state and gulag with stories about drug smuggling in Central America on a trail that leads inexorably to El Norte and California in particular and about Harbor Gateway. Links and my brief comments on these avoidable and disgusting situations can be found at the Crime Log blog.

Hollywood Losing Its Grip?

2007-02-25T16:58:00.000-08:00

In today's L.A. Times, media critic Neil Gabler has a piece that actually argues that movies don't captivate us anymore because we're too narcissistic to give the silver screen's narcissists their due. Instead we're starring in our own shows on FaceBook and YouTube, etc etc. The piece has that feeling of a piece written by an older guy who has just spent too much time watching his granddaughter post on My Space, but it is trying for the big picture and is better than the usual crap about the Internet killing film.

Free Screening: LA and Hollywood Film

2007-02-22T13:51:00.000-08:00

FILM SCREENING + TALK: Los Angeles Plays Itself
director Thom Andersen (CalArts) presents
Friday, March 2 / 7:30 pm
IV Theater 2
FREE!!!!

Los Angeles may be the most photographed city in the world, but it has never been captured with such complex layers of meaning and fascination as in Thom Andersen's remarkable Los Angeles Plays Itself. This analysis of how the mega-burg is used and abused by the Hollywood fantasy machine, as well as his loving embrace of the city's nature and history, will become essential viewing for Angelenos and movie lovers worldwide.

Thom Andersen has taught film history and filmmaking at SUNY Buffalo and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at CalArts. His films include Melting, Olivia's Place and Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer. His work with Noel Burch on the history of the Hollywood blacklist and the filmic writing of its victims has produced the book Les Communists de Hollywood: Autre chose que des martyrs (1994) and the videotape Red Hollywood (1995).

Sponsored by the Graduate Film Society, Department of Film and Media Studies and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.

The Paul Beatty of "Tuff" and "Hokum"

2007-02-22T08:03:00.000-08:00

The Rest of This Week

2007-02-14T15:37:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone, there are some changes to report:

1. Per the students' call for a strike and the AS Legislative Council's endorsement of the strike, I will not lecture on Thursday February 15th. I will post a version of the lecture on this webpage, and everyone will be responsible for learning it. Thursday sections are also cancelled, including the honor's section.

2. To facilitate participation in Thursday's events (and to avoid putting those who wish to participate at a disadvantage), I am extending the paper deadline to Friday at 4:30 pm (due to section leader mailboxes in the English Dept's Sankey room in South Hall 2nd floor.

3. I will schedule a makeup / review session that will among other things give particular attention to this 60s & 70s material.

I will miss lecturing and talking with you on Thursday, but have fun talking with each other instead, stirring things up as necessary, and in general avoiding the Waldie Syndrome.

Midterm Materials: the 6 Questions

2007-02-09T07:47:00.000-08:00

Q1. Can business and government act differently to make mass migration unnecessary?
Answer: yes.
A1) challenge the Hostile Welcome to migrant labor
A2) ethic of tough solidarity. Collective provision (Rose of Sharon’s ethic of giving)
A3)Public provision (government camps, New Deal)

Q2. Did the new suburbs fundamentally change California society after World War II?
A1) Yes, in terms of building practices, housing stock, the landscape
A2) No - they were still largely working-class and retained major elements of “agrarian” culture

Q3. What are the effects of this working-class search for security and peace in the suburbs?
A1) a sense that peace and adventures lie in self-revelation (not upward mobility)
A2) a sense of self that DID NOT enable building their neighborhood & society. (Did choose - no agency)

Q4. How do women and/or racialized groups get access to a “California Dream”?
A) Golden California will exist for you only if you are able to fight for it
Q4(b). If so, how do you become able to fight - a (woman) warrior?
A) anger spoken -> no fear

Q5. How could California Society reconcile the Two Californias - racialized/ immigrant California and Surfer California?
A). Socio-economic development for all

Q6. Why did Golden Age, affluent California join and even lead 1960s protests & rebellion?
A) threat of “oligarchy”
- resentment of a required conformity, passivity, powerlessness (Savio, Kerr, Ike, Steinham)
- The sense of the disposability of the “little people” (like Didion’s Maria).

The Suburbs Now

2007-02-07T17:22:00.000-08:00

"Poor Among Plenty:For the first time, poverty shifts to the U.S. suburbs."

By Peg Tyre and Matthew Philips

Newsweek 2/7/07

Six years ago, Brian Lavelle moved out of the city of Cleveland to the nearby suburb of Lakewood for what he thought would be a better life. Back then, Lavelle, 38, was a forklift operator in a steel mill making $14 an hour. He had a house, a car and was saving for his retirement. Then, three years ago, the steel mill closed and Lavelle found that the life he dreamed of was just that, a dream. The suburbs, he quickly learned, are a tough place to live if you're poor. For starters, there isn't much of a safety net in his community. Food pantries, job-retraining centers and low-cost health clinics are hard to come by. He can't afford either gas or car insurance, and inadequate public transportation hurts him, too. Not long ago, he was offered a job in another suburb, "but it just wasn't doable." The commute by public bus would have taken him three hours each way.

Once prized as a leafy haven from the social ills of urban life, the suburbs are now grappling with a new outbreak of an old problem: poverty. Currently, 38 million Americans live below the poverty line, which the federal government defines as an annual income of $20,000 or less for a family of four. But for the first time in history, more of America's poor are living in the suburbs than the cities—1.2 million more, according to a 2005 survey. "The suburbs have reached a tipping point," says Brookings Institution analyst Alan Berube, who compiled the data. For example, five years ago, a Hunger Network food pantry in Bedford Heights, a struggling suburb of Cleveland, served 50 families a month. Now more than 700 families depend on it for food.

That's not to say that all suburbs are struggling. In areas such as New York and Los Angeles where the regional economies are booming, the surrounding suburbs are doing just fine. It's another story altogether in the South and Midwest. As the nation's manufacturing sector continues to contract, cities like Cleveland, Dallas and Detroit are feeling the pain, and so are the suburbs that surround them.

The suburban poor defy stereotypes about how and why people slip into poverty. Howard and Jane Pettry, of Middleburg Heights, Ohio, see themselves as working-class—just facing hard times. In December, Jane was laid off from her job at a local supermarket, and a week later Howard had a heart attack and missed a month of work from his job at a grain mill. Now Jane's collecting unemployment and they're staring at the poverty line as they struggle to pay the mortgage and the bills. "I've worked all my life and paid my taxes," says Jane. "Now we're living off credit cards. It's terrible."

Suburban poverty can also be invisible. Poor people who live in the city tend to be concentrated in subsidized housing or in neighborhoods where the rent is low, which in turn attract retail businesses that target customers with low incomes. Poor suburbanites often live in the same ZIP codes as their affluent neighbors, shop at the same stores and send their children to the same public school. And if people don't see themselves as poor, they often don't seek the help they need.

Help appears to be on the way. The new Democratic majority in Congress is trying to make good on its promise to raise the minimum wage for the first time in 10 years. Bills upping the hourly rate from $5.15 to $7.25 by 2009 have passed both the House and the Senate. But analysts at the Economic Policy Institute, a D.C.-based think tank, say that while some 4.5 million suburbanites will benefit from a minimum-wage hike, it's not enough. "It's not a living wage, it's a minimum wage," says EPI senior economist Jared Bernstein, who says there's still a yawning gap between what people earn and what it costs to live that must be addressed.

Brian Lavelle says that any help would be appreciated. It's winter and his gas bill is sky-high—$185 last month. A single dad with two kids, Lavelle is making ends meet, but just barely. "It's tough out there," he says. He never thought he'd be saying that about the suburbs.

Kingston Fairly Recently

2007-02-01T08:45:00.000-08:00

Maxine Hong Kingston at 14

2007-02-01T08:39:00.000-08:00

Holy Dogtown

2007-01-29T09:08:00.000-08:00

Lakewood, USA

2007-01-19T15:40:00.000-08:00

Photo Credit: http://www.yesterdayla.com/midcities.html

Robert Kennedy Visits Lakewood, 1966

2007-01-19T10:10:00.000-08:00

Photo credit: Dave Wyman, http://www.pbase.com/davewyman/image/41702572

Steinbeck in the 1930s

2007-01-18T10:10:00.000-08:00

The Worst Hard Time

2007-01-14T10:35:00.000-08:00

That's the title of quite a good recent book on the Dust Bowl by journalist Timothy Egan. I'd thought there wasn't much more to be said on the subject, and hardly anyone has improved on Steinbeck's version anyway. But Egan's Introduction is called "Live Through This." And it gets at the experience that the Dust Bowl massively intensified but that is already there on the Great Plains.

On those days when the wind stops blowing across the face of the southern plains, the land falls into a silence that scares people in the way that a big house can haunt after the lights go out and no one else is there. It scares them because the land is too much, too empty, claustrophobic in its immensity. It scares them because they feel lost, with nothing to cling to, disoriented. Not a tree, anywhere. Not a slice of shade. Not a river dancing away, life in its blood. Not a bump of high ground to break the horizon, give some perspective, spell the monotone of flatness. It scares them because they wonder what is next. It scared Coronado, looking for cities of gold in 1541. It scared the Anglo traders who cut a trail from Independence to Santa Fe, after they dared let go of the lifeline of the Cimarron River in hopes of shaving a few days off a seven-week trek. It even scared some of the Comanche as they chased bison over the grass. It scared the Germans from Russia and the Scots-Irish from Alabama - the Last Chancers, exiled twice over, looking to build a hovel from overturned sod, even if that dirt house was crawling with centipedes and snakes, and leaked mud on the children when thunderheads broke.
It still scares people driving cars named Expedition and Outlander. It scares them because of the forced intimacy with a place that gives nothing back to a stranger, a place where the land and its weather - probably the most violent and extreme on earth - demand only one thing: humility.

California was in theory the antidote to all those things. No violent weather. No hostile land and sky. An end to the emptiness. And no more forced humility.

Steinbeck was asking, so how did California do?

The California Section

2007-01-14T10:15:00.001-08:00

The "California" section of this morning's Los Angeles Times has a classic combination of prototypical California stories. It's not everyday that they cover the bases like this:

Anti-Gang Plan Faces Key Hurdles
Gov. Attuned to Waning of Party Loyalty
Compton School Finds a Singular Road to Academic Success

And that perennial favorite:

Traffic Disaster Towers Over L.A.

Finally, last but not least:

A 'Literary Feast" Held Quietly in Long Beach

Not bad for one Sunday morning!

Course Syllabus (Feb 1 Revision)

2007-01-07T17:35:00.001-08:00

Global California
ENGLISH 133GC Winter 2007
Embarcadero Hall Tuesdays & Thursdays at 5:00pm
Prof. Christopher Newfield cnewf@english.ucsb.edu
Office: CNSI 1229; phone: 893-4474 Office Hours: Thurs 2-3 & by appt

This course is an introduction to California literature and culture after 1940. It seeks to answer the following questions:
• How have California culture and society changed since World War II?
• what is the “California Dream” and what is happening to it?
• What does "globalization" mean and how is it changing California?
• How is the racial and cultural composition of California changing, and to what effect?
• How can literary and cultural knowledge address real-world problems?
• What the heck is going on now, and what can we do about it?
To address these questions we will consider the major California themes: crime, money, moguls, tech booms, development, immigration, suburbanization, sex, drugs, celebrity, silicon, surfing, alienation, racism, multiculturalism, self-actualization, happiness, and the natural environment.

1. Jan 11 Introduction: We Have Always Been Global
STEINBECK, The Grapes of Wrath, chs 1-11 (Okla.)

2. Jan 16 Before the Golden Age
STEINBECK, The Grapes of Wrath, chs 12-21

Jan 18 Thirties to Forties: Working Class California
STEINBECK, The Grapes of Wrath, ch 22 - end

3. Jan 23 The Fifties: Inventing the Golden Age
WALDIE, Holy Land, pp. 1- 115

Jan 25 NO LECTURE (finish Waldie reading, pp 116-79)
Screening: Stacy Peralta, Dogtown and Z-Boys: The Birth of Extreme

4. Jan 30 The Mysteries of Suburbia
discussion: Dogtown and Holy Land

Feb 01 Duelling Californias
KINGSTON, “At the Western Palace” and “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe:” in Woman Warrior

5. Feb 06 CHANGED: The Sixties: The Political Foundations of the Golden Age
DIDION, Play It As It Lays. MID-TERM POSTPONED

Feb 08 The Seventies: From the New Hollywood to the Blockbuster
DIDION, Play It As It Lays
Discussion includes The Player and Berkeley in the Sixties

6. Feb 13 MID-TERM EXAM (note new date)

Feb 15 The Seventies and the Coming of Prop 13
DIDION, Play It As It Lays
The Player and Berkeley in the Sixties
PAPER 1 DUE as arranged with section leader (NOTE NEW DATE)

7. Feb 20 The Eighties: The Rise of the Gang
BEATTY, White-Boy Shuffle, pp 1-58

Feb 22 Multicultural California
BEATTY, White-Boy Shuffle pp 59-150

8. Feb 27 NO LECTURE
final project planning with section leaders

Mar 01 The Nineties: The New Migration
MARTINEZ, Crossing Over, Book I (selections)
Dissing Your Leaders
BEATTY, White-Boy Shuffle pp 151-226

9. Mar 06 The New Economy I: Immigrant Labor
MARTINEZ, Crossing Over, Book II (selections)

Mar 08 The New Economy II: The Digital Domain
LEWIS, The New New Thing (excerpts on reserve)

10.Mar 13 NO LECTURE
final project discussions with section leaders

Mar 15 Paradise Lost and Found
Review

BOOKLIST: (no reader)

Beatty, Paul, The White Boy Shuffle Picador USA; ISBN: 031228019X

Didion, Joan, Play It as It Lays (1970); Noonday Press; ISBN: 0374521719

Kingston, Maxine Hong, Woman Warrior Vintage Books; ISBN: 0679721886

Martinez, Ruben, Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001) ISBN: 0805049088

Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath Penguin USA (Paper); ISBN: 0140186409

Waldie, D.J., Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir St. Martin's Press;, 1997 ISBN: 0312168640

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

1. section attendance and participation (20%). You will need to plan carefully to keep up with the reading, some of which is intense. You are allowed two unexcused absences without affecting this part of your grade. Section work will include at least one formal writing exercise, due week 3, on how to identify an issue to write about.

2. Two papers (20% and 25% respectively).
The first is due Thursday, Feb 13, in class (1000 words). Assignment: find an article or review about one of the texts or films we’ve considered. First, accurately summarize its claims. Then, disagree, and explain its flaws.
The second paper may be one of two things:
a) a research paper about a topic in the course (see guidelines below).
b) a memoir about your experience of life in California, one which elaborates or challenges a theme of the course. This second paper is due Tuesday, March 20 by 4:30 pm. Both formats will be discussed in lecture and section.

3. two exams (15% and 20% respectively). The mid-term will be held Tuesday, February 6. The final exam will be held as scheduled on Thursday, March 22 at 7:30 pm. The exams will follow lecture & section material, not the overall reading.

Guidelines for research paper:
-- find a topic that matters to you. You should formulate this topic as a research question.
-- have a strong thesis or claim about that topic. "Strong" means 1) focused and clear; and 2) non-obvious.
-- find a good example (or story) to illustrate your thesis. You may want to build your paper around a case study.
-- pay careful attention to the details of the text. Let the text help you.
-- be explicit about the assumptions you are bringing to your topic. In other words, know your own views and paradigms, and be explicit whenever its necessary.
-- take risks. (see “strong thesis” above.) Posit something debatable and push it! If you can't think of several people who would disagree with your claim, it's probably too bland to bother with.
-- remember while arguing for your thesis that you are trying to persuade real people. Remember how people need to have things explained one step at a time, so don't rush them. Think about what they might not know that keeps them from seeing things your way. Lay out your argument step by step. When in doubt, imagine you're trying to be interesting to a friend of yours about your issue.
-- you will be graded on the strength of your thesis, the coherence and clarity of your argument for your thesis, and the accuracy of your use of empirical evidence.
-- you will not be expected to possess skills or data outside the purview of this course, but you are invited to be ambitious in your attempt to use information.