Lionel Rolfe’s Letter to the World
By LIONEL ROLFE
Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photo is by Lionel Rolfe
I am a retired journalist in Los Angeles and book author who wants the world to respond to America under the would-be dictatorship of Donald Trump, a man who is out to destroy this country and the world—all for the sake of Trump’s power and money.
It is important to explain that the sudden appearance of fascism presented by Trump was not unexpected. Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel during the Great Depression about a fascist government in the ‘20s called “It Can Happen Here.” America has always had to deal with a nativist kind of fascism. Its always been a powerful minority and remains so under Trump in this day and age. Read more
Second Wave Feminists Get Together in New York – Still Feisty After All These Years
Carole DeSaram, left, and Barbara Love, organizers, during the reunion of second-wave feminists at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. Photos by Tequila Minsky
BY MARY REINHOLZ
The pictures flashing across a wall inside Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village showed icons of the women’s liberation movement from the last half of the 20th century: famed activists like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm and Flo Kennedy, all of them taking aim at varied forms of gender inequality in America. Many used their printed words as weapons.
A couple of venerable speakers, who lived through the movement’s early triumphs and disappointments, delivered stinging attacks against Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States. Kate Millett, 82, author of the best selling “Sexual Politics,” a 1970 critique of misogyny she found in esteemed works by male literary lions such as D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, needed assistance in walking to the open microphone but sniped at Trump in her opening remarks. Read more
ON THE FOURTH, JUST GET ME TO THE CHURCH ON TIME
Actor John Raitt with wife Rosemary in 1999
By Bob Vickrey
Nearly two decades ago, my simple volunteer job assignment on a sunny July 4th was to pick up former Palisades Honorary Mayor John Raitt at his home and accompany him to the annual parade VIP luncheon at the Methodist Church courtyard on Via de la Paz. The late actor and singer was set to uphold the long tradition of celebrity mayors who have ridden in the annual parade.
The only problem I encountered on that Fourth was that no one answered the door when I arrived to pick him up at his house on Napoli Drive in the Palisades Riviera. I glanced at my watch and realized I had allowed little time for a glitch in our plan. Read more
What’s the Story on Linkage Fees for Affordable Housing?
Mayor Garcetti at October 2015 Mayoral Summit where he announced his goal of getting linkage fees from developers to finance affordable housing.
Leslie Evans
Los Angeles has the least affordable housing in the United States. It is short some 500,000 units of housing for its population. Rising population, which pushes up land, materials, and labors costs, has made affordable housing in California a mostly unprofitable investment. Cities throughout the state have found themselves facing chronic and deepening housing shortages, with increasingly unaffordable rents. The response has been to look to government subsidies to try to fill the gap. Read more
Trump v. Watergate
Doug Weiskopf
(Two books, The Far Out Story of Vortex 1, by Matt Love, and Radicals in the Rose City, by Matt Nelson, plus a PhD thesis by historian, Dr. Dory Hylton, have chronicled many of the the events mentioned below).Watergate is the Great American Story that will never go away and currently it is again being examined for comparisons to the scandals of the Trump Administration. What many of us who were part of the antiwar protest movement back in the summer of 1970’s in Portland, Oregon have always believed is that the break-in by Nixon’s band of “dirty tricksters”, who were known as The Plumbers Unit and got caught by the police at the Democratic Party National HQ in Wash. DC, had its roots in Portland. Read more
LUNCH CLUB SPICES THINGS UP AT TALPA
All photos by Barry Stein:
By Bob Vickrey
Our monthly lunch club group may occasionally act like giddy teenagers during our get-togethers, but a couple of our companions’ recent medical woes have become a painful reminder that we are now far removed from those earlier carefree times.
Our longtime friend Mary Cole was visiting from Palm Springs and filled in admirably for Josh who is still on the mend and attempting to regain his strength after a long illness. Our small group has resembled a “MASH” unit in recent months with mounting casualties standing between us and a few first-class meals at famous restaurants in Southern California. Nevertheless, our fearless team has pushed ahead. Read more
LA County Supervisors Approve Plan for Measure H Funds
Chris Ko, Director of Homeless Initiatives for United Way and manager of Home For Good, addresses June 13 press conference in front of Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors’ building on West Temple Street, announcing the supervisors’ approval of a $1 billion budget for the first three years of the sales tax money for the homeless from Measure H.
Leslie Evans
The LA County Board of Supervisors approved the recommen-dations of the 50 member Measure H Revenue Planning Group for the first three years of income from the sales tax increase for the homeless, which passed in last March’s election. The quarter-cent sales tax increase is expected to generate $259 million in its first year and as much as $1 billion in the first three years. The money is to be divvied up between six basic strategies to contain homelessness, adopted by the county in February 2016. Read more
Honey once again walks through time to the site of this city’s beginning
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
I met Jodi at Nick’s Café on North Spring Street. A statue of a pig stands in front of Nick’s and a pig offering to be devoured is painted on the wall as you come in.
The cafe was once at the edge of the Southern Pacific rail yard, hazardous waste dump and a refinery. The neighborhood gets crappier and grimmer around the back of Nick’s in Dog Town around the William Mead Housing project is. In 1994, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons tested at nineteen times the safe level in the housing project. In the City’s general plan, this is the North Industrial District, and by people that live around there sometimes Naud Junction or Mission Junction after two Southern Pacific area junctions. Mission Junction is a little to the north of the old road to the San Gabriel Mission and quite a bit south of the original road to the mission.
North Spring was Toma Road until 1876 when Southern Pacific cut off the top end and the city renamed it. Toma Road went to the Toma. The Toma was the dam and headwaters built out of sticks, stones, reeds and clay that pooled water for the zanja, the irrigation system that sucked out river water and sent it past adobe houses and into the agricultural fields. The Los Angeles State Historic Park aka The Cornfield is on the other side of North Spring Street. Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
