Memory is not only highly selective, but fatefully idiosyncratic. We remember – or forget – based on where we were, who we were with and, more elementally, who we are.
In April 1992, I was a 28-year-old editor of a now long-defunct weekly, the Village View. When violence erupted following the unfathomable not-guilty verdicts in the Rodney King beating trial, I was where I usually was in those days – knee deep in the grind of getting a paper to press. I wish I could recall exactly what I was doing, or who I was with, but those details are lost to history.
What I do know is that, because of who I was – the news editor of an alternative paper with few of the traditional restrictions that most journalists live with – my reaction to, and experience of, the civil unrest were defined not only by the fear and dread shared by many Angelenos,
» Read more about: 1992 Remembered: Memory, Truth and Justice »
By Zack Kaldveer
Consumer Federation of California
As California families continue to reel from the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, health insurance premium rates have soared by 153 percent since 2002, nearly five times the rate of inflation.
Businesses are finding it difficult to pay for these rate hikes, and pass the increased costs on to workers. Business owners and employees are forced to absorb these rising costs or search for less expensive – and less comprehensive – coverage options.
This injustice isn’t so hard to comprehend considering only four insurance companies control 71 percent of the California market – setting premiums behind closed doors and without accountability.
While businesses and families struggle to pay unaffordable premiums that have double digit increases every year and workers face high unemployment and stagnant wages, Blue Shield lavished its CEO with a $4.6 million salary and then proposed premium rate hikes as high as 59 percent in 2011 (but later revoked the proposal due to a massive public outcry).
» Read more about: Ballot Proposal Would Regulate Health Insurance Rates »
What I mostly remember about the riots is the smell of an urban fire – not the consoling, woody scent that wafts from a campfire, but the melting-telephone smell of a city’s guts ablaze. There was also the smoke, thick as tule fog – and the not-knowing, when you drove into it, if you’d come out on the other side.
There was something else about that week – a feeling that the world had been jolted a bit off its axis and nothing would ever be the same again, the way you feel after a breakup or car accident. The worst of it came on April 30. I had gone to a film screening in Santa Monica, and took my friend Kent to cheer him up from losing his job repairing pay phones. I was reviewing the movie for the L.A. Weekly, where I worked as an editor.
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If absence makes the heart grow fonder, distance makes reality look rosier. From a long way off Santa Monica appears like a liberal’s fantasy of justice in paradise. After all, we have a tough rent control law and we’ve had a mostly enlightened city council, government and school board for more than three decades. But from up close, the picture’s not that sweet.
A recent hotel approval exposed the reality. A developer wanted some special consideration for the 710 Wilshire hotel project that was oversized and out of conformance with zoning standards. Hotel workers in the city wanted to guarantee a decent wage for the people who would work in the new hotel as well as those who would build it. The city staff likes hotels because they provide an easy source of revenue. But the developer wouldn’t budge on the wage issues.
He wasn’t willing to require an operator to pay a decent income to hard-working,
» Read more about: Santa Monica Dreaming: Trouble in Rent-Controlled Paradise »
Ralphs had already left my neighborhood in Gardena — known as one of the most diverse cities in L.A. County — at the time of the ’92 riots. I remember the brightly lit grocery store with wide aisles being replaced by a Payless Foods with cramped aisles where food items like Sunny Delight and Cool-Ranch Doritos all of a sudden were double the price.
I remember a lot about ’92. I was 13 and lived in an apartment with my sister, mom and dad in the black part of Gardena, a trend we started where brown folks were creeping slowly into traditionally African-American neighborhoods.
It was the year before I entered high school. At the time, I attended Maria Regina Catholic School across the street from where I lived. Most of the students and my friends were African-American or Latino. I had to make a choice about which school to go to,
(Note: This post first appeared April 28 on L.A. Progressive.)
According to US Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, more people die in the American workplace in a single year than have been lost in nine years of war in Iraq. “Each day in America, twelve people go to work and never go home,” she told the audience at the Action Summit for Worker Safety and Health held at East Los Angeles Community College on April 26, one of many events leading up to Workers Memorial Day, April 28, an annual date of remembrance for those killed, injured, or sickened on the job.
María Elena Durazo, Executive-Secretary-Treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, reported there were 500 work-related deaths in 2011 in California and “Workers are still being fired for speaking out in order to avoid death.”
This loss of life and countless serious injuries,
» Read more about: Killer Jobs: Policing America's Dangerous Workplaces »
By Shomari Davis
It’s no secret that the disappearance of manufacturing in Los Angeles and other urban centers over the past few decades has hit communities hard. When the factories closed, they took with them not only jobs, but the path to a better future for countless residents.
What you may not know is that, for the first time in a long time, we have a real shot at bringing an important manufacturer back to L.A. – and along with it jobs and hope.
The company is Siemens, one of the world’s largest railcar producers. Siemens is one of the finalists for a $1 billion railcar contract, which will be awarded by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). If chosen, the company will bring more than 1,100 jobs to the U.S., many of them right here in L.A.
Here’s the bad news: MTA staff has recommended that the board go with a bid from the Japanese firm Kinkysharyo.
» Read more about: MTA, Bring Manufacturing Jobs Back to LA! »
April 29, 1992. For me, at the time an 11-year-old Black child living in a low-income section of Long Beach, that date represents more than a civil disturbance. While too young to clearly understand concepts like oppression, I was old enough to know the profound frustration associated with being poor within an economy that continued to deny the aspirations and dreams of many in my neighborhood.
Those were the years immediately following Reaganomics and the George Bush “read my lips” tax plan. The good ol’ colored people in communities like South Los Angeles, Compton, Watts and Long Beach were supposed to wait quietly and patiently for the day when the free market, through the trickling down of quality jobs, health care and good schools, delivered the gift of liberation we had all hoped for. Unfortunately, with each passing moment, those promises faded deeper and deeper into a dark empty background – with no hope of ever resurfacing.
» Read more about: 1992 Remembered: Why Los Angeles Had to Burn »