Jim Stanbery and the Campaign to Change District 15 By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor
Most people involved in current San Pedro Harbor Area politics have long ago forgot Jim Stanbery’s campaign for the Los Angeles City Council. Some locals only know of him as a teacher at Los Angeles Harbor College. But back in 1977 and then 1981 Stanbery had a vision for a different kind of city, and decades later some of it actually came to pass. Some of the issues touched on are still with us today. Ten years ago, former Random Lengths News editors Eric Kongshaug and senior editor Paul Rosenberg wrote about the beginnings of RLn for its 30th anniversary, noting that:
ior S en
[See Impeachment, p. 8]
[See Stanbery, p. 2]
December 19, 2019 - January 8, 2020
, erg “Democrats brought a gavel to an enb s o R l u impeachment gun fight.” That was the headline a By P of a weekend op-ed by Kurt Bardella, a former spokesperson Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who switched parties in 2017. Democrats might have all the facts on their side—as 17 witnesses had previously confirmed — but they were failing miserably at messaging. Not one of those witnesses contradicted the basic structure of Trump’s scheme to extort a phony investigation of Joe Biden out of Ukraine, illegally withholding military aid to accomplish it—a damning fact record that, thanks to GOP obfuscations, has failed to fully sink in with the public. A Fox News poll showed that only 24 percent of Americans thought such actions were OK, versus 60 percent who said they weren’t. But almost double that number—45 percent—thought that Trump shouldn’t be impeached and removed for it, versus 50 percent who said he should. The Fox poll doesn’t tell us what’s going on in so many people’s heads, but it does tell us there’s an enormous disconnect—and that Trump’s political survival almost entirely depends upon it. In between those two figures, Fox found support for both articles of impeachment. By 53-38 they agreed that Trump had abused his power and by 48-34 they agreed that he had obstructed Congress. So, the more focus there is on what actually happened, the worse it will be for Trump. Creating a theater of partisan fighting— distracting from the underlying facts—is Trump’s surest line of defense. And no one understands this better than former Republicans like Bardella.
From left to right: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Los Angeles Rep. Maxine Waters, chairwoman of the House Committee on Financial Services, Rep. Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Jerry Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, acting chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee.
or Edit
Random Lengths published a few stories on Stanbery’s 1981 attempt to win the 15th council district seat. When the editors of 2015 looked back at the Stanbery of three decades earlier, they described him as a young liberal in the Kennedy mold who in 1977 forced the seemingly invincible Councilman John S. Gibson into runoff. Just a few years later, in the early 1980s, Stanbery was described as a populist. A quick perusal of Random Lengths’ coverage of Stanbery’s candidacy bears this out. More importantly, a perusal of RLn’s Stanbery coverage reveals the degree to which his platform and his ideas anticipated the ills our communities still face or rather how entrenched our communities are in the ills fostered by the city of Los Angeles. Stanbery anticipated the growth of neighborhood councils and community policing (though he doesn’t attempt to take credit for the development of either), community planning and renters’ rights. Stanbery even anticipated the trajectory of conservative attacks on international institutions such as the United Nations, World Trade Organization and NATO. Kongshaug and Rosenberg didn’t spend a great deal of ink on Stanbery’s candidacy or his activism, focusing instead on the large sweep of history that carried this newspaper forward. Gibson was a Christian fundamentalist who loathed laws and regulations he felt hampered free enterprise; his probusiness, pro-growth views often angered environmentalists
Real News, Real People, Really Effective
From the beginning, Random Lengths has stepped quite consciously in the footsteps of muckraking author Upton Sinclaire and his populist paper Epic News. Sinclair funded and wrote that historic newspaper to wage his political campaign to “End Poverty in California” (EPIC); the founders of Random Lengths began with a $2,000 donation from liberal candidate Jim Stanbery, then a resident of Point Fermin.
1