The Thorn West is a state and local news roundup compiled by members of DSA-LA. Our goal is to provide a weekly update on the latest developments in state and local politics, and to track the issues that are most important to our membership.

Issue No. 191 - February 16, 2024

City Politics

• If you haven’t caught it yet,  the DSA-LA has released its voter guide for the upcoming statewide primary election. Ballots for the upcoming primary election began being mailed on February 5, and voting closes on March 5. Here’s how to vote.

• Former city councilmember Mike Bonin co-penned an article in the Nation about the growing corporate and police campaign to “reverse the tide of DSA extremists,” with significant support from real estate villains such as Rick Caruso and Douglas Emmett.

Transportation

• At a rally this week six councilmembers spoke in favor of Measure HLA, the Healthy Streets Initiative. Opponents of the measure to increase pedestrian and cyclist safety include members of the firefighters union (who warn that the measure was devised by Democratic Socialists), alongside Traci Park, who this week introduced a scaremongering motion to spotlight the costs of implementing HLA. Streets for All has already released a statement debunking the city’s inflated claims about the program’s cost, which were also interrogated at today’s city council meeting.

• As worker pushback against Lyft’s potential takeover of the LA Metro bikeshare program becomes a national story, Jacobin platforms an interview — conducted by a DSA-LA organizer — with a field technician with Bicycle Transit Systems, the unionized company that currently holds the bikeshare contract.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• LA Public Press reveals that nearly 40% of sworn employees of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department do not live in Los Angeles County, with several living out of state.

• State regulators on Thursday voted unanimously to find two LA County juvenile correction facilities —  Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey and Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar — unsuitable for use, the latest in a series of scathing judgments of the county’s Probation Department. The facilities must close if dramatic improvements are not made.

• Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto has initiated another malicious lawsuit against the journalist who published police headshots he had received through a public records request. An OC Register op-ed puts this in the context of a national trend of judges and other government authorities wildly overstepping their authority, to censor the press.

Climate

• California banned plastic bags nearly a decade ago. However, stores have worked around this ban by making technically reusable bags available inexpensively at the register. These bags are frequently treated as disposable, and are made of a plastic that is even harder to recycle than standard grocery store bags. A newly proposed state law would ban these, as well.