Los Angeles Indymedia : Activist News

Bernie Sanders supporters staged a great rally and march for New Years day at the end of the Famed Rose Bowl parade in Pasadena California. The stands cheered in the bright Los Angeles sun to the oversize visages of Senator Sanders and his merry band of hopeful followers.

Full Story and photos: Bernie At The Rose Bowl Photo Set1 Photo Set 2 by Robert S Lowden

Related: March For Bernie 2, Pasadena and Los Angeles (story and photos) by johnk

More: Bernie Sanders in Lincoln Heights by johnk

Keiro is a non-profit nursing home that's been taking donations from the community since its founding in 1961 to serve the Japanese-speaking elderly in Los Angeles. In 2015 they announced that the board would be selling the facilities to Pacifica (not the radio station) a for-profit developer. Normally, sales of assets from a non-profit to a for-profit require a hearing and approval by the Attorney General.

The AG's office waived this requirement, and pushed the approval through. Community member Mo Nishida wrote a letter and started a movement that snowballed into the Ad Hoc Committee to Save Keiro, which has gathered over 17,000 signatures opposing the sale, and is now researching a lawsuit to fight for the ability of its residents, many who are on Medicaid, to stay until death.

The Ad Hoc Committee is having a "Speak Out" public hearing on the 23rd, to substitute for the public hearing that the state waived, to set in writing the concerns, anger, and objections to the sale, from the community.

See also: Save Keiro Elder Care by johnk, East Wind: Save Keiro by Miya Iwataki

When an oil spill happens, you see it. At a coal fired power plant, you can often see the pollution blowing in the wind. But when a natural gas storage facility pollutes, what do you see? Until now, you saw nothing. That’s because much oil and gas air pollution is normally invisible.

Earthworks uses a FLIR (Forward Looking InfraRed) Gasfinder 320 camera that is specially calibrated to expose otherwise invisible air pollution from oil and gas operations.

This pollution must be stopped: •Methane is 86 times worse for climate change than carbon dioxide over a 20 year period. This one leaking facility in Porter Ranch accounts for an estimated 25% of California’s daily methane emissions. •Natural gas and natural gas drilling operations (mostly hydraulic fracturing a.k.a fracking) often bring up ‘hitchhikers’ like benzene with the natural gas that drillers seek. These pollutants can be harmful to human health and have led to documented health impacts for people living near compressor stations, pipelines, fracking facilities, etc.

Full article and video: Porter Ranch Methane Leak Doesn't Bode Well for Climate by Hilary Lewis

More: Erin Brockovich on Democracy Now! (December 30, 2015)

The corporate culture produces “just war” narratives to satisfy an insatiable appetite for violence, exactly what Star Wars delivers, except this time, I would argue, it’s been turned upside down in the service of a real empire: The US Empire.

I am not saying that The Force Awakens was intentionally made as an imperial piece of propaganda for US wars, but it’s hard not to make the connections between Disney’s history of racism and xenophobia, the total absence of the Dark Side’s politics (other than ISIS like nihilism), and the way in which the “good guys” are always innocent and being attacked by an evil force that literally hates their freedom. The Dark Side in The Force Awakens is reconstituted as The First Order that explicitly engages in an act of mass terrorism to destroy the Republic, i.e democracy.

Review/commentary: Why Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a Parable that Supports US Empire by Chris Burnett Spoilers!

In 2012, wind generators were built in Ocotillo Valley in southern California, an area long known to the Quechan as the Valley of the Dead because of ancestors traveling through en route to the next world. The installation of wind turbines, over the objection of the Quechan and other tribes (as well as non-Native residents), has desecrated sacred sites; disrupted, and even killed, wildlife and vegetation; and oil from the machines has been dripping into the ground.

And the generators seem to be doing little, if anything, to provide alternative energy. There is only enough wind in Ocotillo to keep them active four to five months a year. And when the energy is transported long distances (in this case to San Diego), as much as half gets spent in transmission. Furthermore, turbines require conventional grid energy for their initial start-up and to operate computers inside, which must also be cooled with fans in hot weather.

Much grid energy is also used in maintaining them--and they've required maintenance. One lost a Siemens propeller just over a year after activation (pictured above). Eight months later, another caught on fire.

Story: Greed Energy Update by Ross Plesset, pictures by Jim Pelley