LOS ANGELES

PUBLIC ED IN PERIL?-That noisy rumbling sound in LA County comes from teachers who are in “teacher jail” rattling their cages at the news this week that the bought and paid for LAUSD Board of Education announced they hired Wall Street billionaire, Austin Beutner, to finally privatize the District.

PERSPECTIVE--Serious issues are surfacing at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). These issues are reflected in disparities’ that involve civil rights, education, discrimination and employment. An adverse treatment that has a direct impact on members of a particular minority group and the failure to enforce implicit rules that regulate behaviors seem to be non-existent.

ALPERN AT LARGE--For the past several decades, honest and generous taxpayers have bravely offered their hardworking dollars to creating an Expo Line, a Wilshire Subway, a Foothill Gold Line, a LAX/Metro Connection, and a Downtown Light Rail Connector to help wrap these projects together in a coherent rail network. 

GUEST WORDS--The City has a problem. The Urban Forestry Division (UFD) has scores of trees sitting in boxes in storage that it can’t plant. Why is this? In large part it’s because when developers remove trees to build projects, they agree to replace them by purchasing new ones for the City to plant elsewhere.

AT LENGTH-For as long as I can remember, the narrative pushed by the Port of Los Angeles and other boosters of industry and commerce has been this: the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are an “economic engine” that are jointly responsible for more than $400 billion in annual cargo value and create some 190,000 jobs in Los Angeles and Long Beach. That’s 1 in 12 jobs with an impact of creating 2.8 million jobs nationally in direct or indirect employment. 

VIEW FROM HERE--Loyalists of the western empire have been growing increasingly honest about their desire to use censorship and propaganda in order to win an “information war” against Russia.

GELFAND’S WORLD--I took a swipe at the annual Neighborhood Council Congress in a previous column and got some positive feedback. In brief, I suggested that the yearly meeting spend less time on goody-goody subjects.

GELFAND’S WORLD--Earlier this week, Donald Trump was shown on television pulling the United States out of the Iranian anti-nuclear deal. Trump likes to say that unlike other politicians, he keeps his word. We got a bit more of that bragging this time around: 

FIRST PERSON-In the selection of Austin Beutner as the new Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) permanent superintendent last Tuesday, those against his choice found his biggest deficit to be his lack of a background in education.

@THE GUSS REPORT-It was a brutal suggestion, to say the least, from a member of the public at Friday’s LA City Council Jewish Heritage Month event, where Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti spoke a few minutes earlier at the same podium: 

BCK FILE--A GOP candidate for the Senate seat held by longtime incumbent Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Little was removed from the Republican state convention in San Diego on Saturday. Patrick Little, a Holocaust denier who characterizes himself as a “Counter-Semitic” and a white nationalist, polled as high as 18 percent in an April 27 SurveyUSA poll. 

ALPERN AT LARGE--There's been a lot of increases in the Mar Vista region (which is smack dab in the center of the Westside), and a lot of decreases as well.  We've got increased commute times, increased cut-through traffic through residential neighborhoods, potentially an increased response time for first-responders, and certainly an increased division among neighbors, thanks to "the Road Diet".