Illustration by Suzanne Matsumiya
Dennis Kucinich’s fight against privatization and his run to become Cleveland’s mayor again By James Preston Allen, Publisher
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[See Kucinich, p. 12]
POLA likely losing millions due to lack of competitive bidding p. 3
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
On July 8, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order calling on all Californians to voluntarily reduce their water use by 15%, and he expanded the regional drought state of emergency to include nine additional counties, for a total of 50 out of 58 counties. “The realities of climate change are nowhere more apparent than in the increasingly frequent and severe drought challenges we face in the West and their devastating impacts on our communities, businesses and ecosystems,” Newsom said.
But, if anything, his actions seem to understate the situation. Over 99% of land across nine Western states is currently abnormally dry, and almost 95% is covered by some category of drought — the worst levels in the 21-year history of the U.S. Drought Monitor. And the weather driving it has been otherworldly. In late June a massive record-breaking heatwave in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia pushed temperatures so high they shattered historical records
July 22 - August 4, 2021
Museum of Latin American Art presents Judy Baca: Memorias De Nuestra Tierra, a Retrospective p. 9
Climate Crisis Hits Home
— 112 degrees at Portland’s airport, 117 in Salem, and a nearly unbelievable 121.3 in Lytton, BC (the highest ever in Canada by 8 degrees), which was then destroyed by a wildfire. Such high temperatures in a region totally unprepared for them led to hundreds of premature deaths — over 300 in British Columbia alone — and drew immediate attention from a group of climate scientists. They concluded it “would be virtually impossible without human-caused climate change,” on the order of a oncein-1,000 years event, but it “would occur roughly every 5 to 10 years in that future world with 2°C of global warming” — just 1.4 degrees F higher than today. Yet, the same underlying mechanism — a “heat dome” — was responsible for similar triple-digit records in the Southwest just a few weeks earlier, and just
Where’s the money, Joe? Nonprofit organizations are asking Buscaino to “Make it make sense.” p. 6
California’s Drought Warning —
Real People, Real News, Really Effective
ver the July 4th weekend, I interviewed two-time presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich about his latest book, The Division of Light and Power. Though he wrote this memoir as a narrative of events that happened many years earlier in his political career, it almost reads like a John Clancy political thriller centered on his battle to save the publicly-owned municipal light and distribution company in Cleveland. What fascinates me about Kucinich and Cleveland is how similar that city is to the San Pedro Harbor Area. This is a cautionary tale about money, power and the conflicts over public ownership for those running for office and those in politics. The public utility, founded in 1907 by Cleveland’s then-mayor Tom L. Johnson, was known as Municipal Light (or “Muny Light” for short) until 1983. The utility did not, and still doesn’t, have sufficient capacity to compete across the entire greater Cleveland area. Instead, it was formed to create additional capacity to create a benchmark price to prevent rate-gouging by local private utilities. During Kucinich’s time as mayor, the privately-owned Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. — better known as CEI — tried in some rather unscrupulous ways to put the Muny Light, its rival, out of business. A number of banks were heavily invested in CEI and refused to roll over the city’s debt as had previously been customary. The idea was to force the city into default, blame Kucinich, then force him to sell Muny Light. He refused. Though Cleveland’s population is four times that of San Pedro, the forest city shares other similarities with our port town, including having similar ethnic demographics and both trying to revamp our respective waterfronts. In this deeply personal narrative, Kucinich, who is of Croatian ancestry, takes the reader with him on his journey starting
[See Crisis, p. 8]
The unvaccinated account for 99% of all new infections in Los Angeles County See latest COVID-19 Report: https://www.randomlengthsnews.com/notebook/covid-19-updates?v=7516fd43adaa
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