RANDOMLetters
from p. 8
terrorist attacks! Fucking genius! And mega fail!! You don’t wager money on terrorist strikes. Period. But I can see the same smirk on the face of that smartfella who thought it up telling himself (after his program was cancelled) that the world is just too stupid to understand. Well, I wager that the world is too stupid to understand. But you can’t escape its wisdom. A bank that is betting the farm to offset its total amalgamated risk portfolio is smart, surely. But it just goes to show that smart can be pretty stupid indeed. William Below Paris, France
The Failure of “Change” Rhetoric
Gray Panthers Surprised
Cherry Avenue. The parklets are part of larger redesign scheme championed by entrepreneurs like Kerstin Kansteiner, owner of Berlin and Portfolio Coffeehouse, who want redevelopment in Long Beach to follow an incremental process of revitalization and restoration that adds both charm and functionality to the city. Bohn speaks passionately about urban architecture and its potential to raise the quality of life for city dwellers. He believes thoughtful redevelopment of urban centers like downtown Long Beach should include the revitalization of
from p. 3
Thumbs Down on Rancho vate citizen…We don’t want to lose commerce, we don’t want to lose jobs. We want new siting, and how can the commission take leadership in that role. That’s what we’re asking... However you deal with the PCAC motion today, I would like to see leadership beyond that…We’re in the sandpits in the coliseum. You have 10 hands and 10 thumbs. “Are they going to be up? Are they going to be down? Please partner with us. Help us.” While other speakers directly attacked Rancho’s facade of absolute safety and regulatory compliance, some went out of their way to make a different argument. “I don’t think that an accident at this facility, to a worst-case scenario, or even a modest accident, is likely to happen,” said Tom Politeo, of the Sierra Club. “Fukishima was not likely to happen. But it did.” Politeo referenced a long string of disaster sites—Three Mile Island, the British Petroleum oil platform, Fukushima, the accident that happened here at San Onofre recently, or, closer to home, the terminal where the Sansinena exploded, the GATX site, which had a very big explosion in 1972, or back in the late ‘40s the location of the SS Marclay in Wilmington, where another crude oil tanker exploded. “If you toured these sites the day before distaster struck them, you would see operations that to you, to me, to anybody in this room looked safe,” Politeo said. “And, may have even had all their paperwork in order. (And yet,) every one of these accidents happened.” Dr. John Miller, head of PCAC’s EIR review subcommittee, cited the example of commercial airplanes. They are all regularly inspected, meeting the highest safety standards, and yet airplane accidents still happen anyway. There is simply no way to eliminate all risk, the argument goes, which is why large enough risks, though they be rare, should be relocated in order to limit the number of possible casualties. A decade ago, in the China Shipping case, the port was the lead actor, trying to build a terminal without doing a project-specific environmental impact report. This time, it was simply being asked to hold a tenant accountable. But both times, legalistic reasoning seemed to be preventing a more fundamental process. The China Shipping appeals court decision put it like this: The EIR is intended to furnish both the road map and the environmental price tag for a project, so that the decision maker and the public both know, before the journey begins, just where the journey will lead, and how much they—and the environment—will have to give up in order
to take that journey…Here, the port and the city have reduced (California Environmental Quality Act) to a process whose result will be largely to generate paper, to produce an EIR that describes a journey whose destination is already predetermined and contractually committed to before the public has any chance to see either the road map or the full price tag,” Here once again, the public voice and the real potential costs are both being marginalized in the process. Some voices may seem extreme but sometimes that’s what it takes to break through the bureaucratic inertia. Another repetition from the China Shipping conflict involved a stand-off between Janet Gunter, one of the original China Shipping plaintiffs and longtime ILWU leader
Urban Dwelling/ to p. 22
Dave Arian, now vice president of the Harbor Commission. “You’ve been in opposition to the Port for years,” Arian told Gunter. “You represent something that’s not in the interests of this Port, it never has been.” And yet, the very change of course that the China Shipping lawsuit forced onto POLA is now the source of its signature identity as America’s premier green port, in part because the ILWU itself joined the effort to press for clean air, recognizing that its members were on the very front lines of exposure to toxins, carcinogens and other pollutants. If cooperation could replace enmity in the past, can it do so again? The question is: Where will it come from? And what form will it take? Perhaps those questions will begin to be answered when Councilman Buscaino holds his public safety hearing at 6 p.m. on June 27. Read the Community Alert on page 8.
June 15 - 28, 2012
Re: Iowa Fever (expanded online version) http://wp.me/p2ovOp-d8 It is hard for me to believe the Gray Panthers would be a sponsor of this project [refurbishing the USS Iowa]. We are a strongly anti-war organization. There is no Gray Panthers network in San Pedro and the national organization has not authorized the use of our name in support of this project. It is possible a member of the Gray Panthers has decided to volunteer as a welder, but my guess would be you are using our name to refer more generally to an older person. We are always happy to have the Gray Panthers name in the media, but would like to be sure that your readers know that we are an intergenerational social justice activist group fighting for universal health, environmental justice, economic security and peace. Sally Brown Gray Panthers National Leadership Team and Board member
By Danny Simon, Contributing Writer “There’s no sense of place in suburbia,” says urban architect Michael Bohn beneath the shade of an umbrella on Berlin Coffee House’s nearly completed parklet, an outside seating area that juts into the street taking up 1.5 parking spots. “Long Beach has an authentic history and architecture that we shouldn’t destroy.” “I think 26 [parklets] have been built [in San Francisco] and another 40 are on the boards,” says Bohn, a partner at Studio One Eleven, the locally-based design firm that created the first Southern California parklet in front of Lola’s Mexican Cuisine located near 4th Street and
The Local Publication You Actually Read
Attorney General Eric Holder: formerly of Covington & Burling law firm, in 2008 Holder himself represented big banks such as UBS and MBNA Bank. Holder was Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign co-chairman and raised $50,000 for the president’s campaign. Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli: a managing partner at Jenner and Block law firm, whose clients include Merrill Lynch, Perrelli stepped down from his number-three position at DOJ in March. A former member of Obama’s National Campaign Finance Committee, Perrelli bundled$ 500,000 in campaign contributions. Deputy Associate Attorney General Karol Mason: Karol Mason of Alston & Bird previously chaired the firm’s public finance group. She also bundled $500,000 for Obama. Holder awarded her a “Distinguished Service Award” for her work at the Department of Justice. Now, after almost three years at the Department of Justice, she has returned to Alston & Bird to work on their real estate finance and capital markets group. Associate Attorney General Tony West: West was a partner at Morrison and Foerster law firm, whose clients include MF Global, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America. West was also co-chairman of Obama’s campaign and, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “was instrumental in helping the candidate raise an estimated $65 million in California.” Formerly the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, West is now number three at the DOJ and bundled$ 500,000 for the president’s campaign. Despite Holder and Obama’s “get tough” rhetoric against Wall Street, to date, there has not been a single criminal charge filed by the federal government against any top executive of the elite financial institutions. Don Gaudard Professor of Law Emeritus Washington, D.C.
Michael Bohn, Urbanist
historic structures such as the Kress and Walker buildings, sidewalk tree planting, and the expansion of bike lanes. A steady stream of out-of-town projects recently forced him to rejoin the freeway gridlock. He misses commuting to work by bike. Not everyone can do this, Bohn admits, but the city needs to attract a “creative class,” which he describes as individuals who crave short commutes and want to live in a rich and diverse cityscape. If you build it, they will come, and if they do, Long Beach just might give birth to the next Google. “We need to be farming for the next harvest,” says Bohn, who argues that attracting this creative class is imperative for Long Beach’s long term financial security as it loses aspects of its iconic corporate base like Boeing. Architects like Bohn aren’t grown in a lab. They
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