Portside

The city’s Countering Violent Extremism program is drawing fire from many quarters.

Spurred by the heavily cash-reliant cannabis industry, Los Angeles residents will be the first in the country to vote on a public banking mandate, after the City Council agreed on June 29 to put a measure on the November ballot...

At a community meeting last fall, we asked our members if they feared being pushed out of South Los Angeles. All hands were raised.

Los Angeles is the wage theft capital of the United States. Workers here lose $26 million to wage theft every week according to the UCLA Labor Center. The crime has major impacts on local economies. It decreases taxable income, lowers wage standards, and in California alone is estimated to cost the state $7 billion in lost payroll taxes.

On Thursday, a federal court in California ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) unlawfully detained thousands of suspected immigrants on the basis of unconstitutional requests from ICE known as immigration detainers. “The court’s decision vindicates years of work by the Los Angeles immigrant community to challenge the Sheriff Department’s abuses and throws a major wrench in the Trump administration’s deportation machine,” said Jessica Bansal, litigation director of NDLON.

In a statement issued on its Facebook page, the Palestinian American Women’s Association announced that it is boycotting the Women’s March in Los Angeles. The announcement came after actress Scarlett Johansson was confirmed to speak at the march. Johansson was a spokesmodel for SodaStream, an Israeli company that manufactures home fizzy drink machines in an illegal Israeli settlement, built on land from which Palestinian Jahalin Bedouins were forcibly expelled. Here’s PAWA’s full statement:

A photographic exhibit reveals long-unseen images of the Chicano community at a time of political upheaval and demands for civil rights.

During a early November week-end, nearly 80 local leaders gathered at Debs Park in Los Angeles, to begin framing a justice-based vision of how the second largest city in the United States can go fossil fuel free by 2025. We brought together a spectrum of organizers from the frontlines of Indigenous rights, environmental justice, labor and food justice, and more.

Since the passage of the closed door California climate deal in late July, SCOPE has joined forces with grassroots leaders from across the state to organize town-halls, ground-truth the impacts of polluting industries in our neighborhoods, meet with legislators in Sacramento, and continue to push forward a community-led vision for transformation that starts in our own neighborhoods.