Good morning. It’s Saturday, Nov. 16. Let’s look again on the week in Opinion.
Should you search hope on the finish of this dismal election season, look no farther than Los Angeles. In passing a handful of reform poll measures, voters right here indicated they need stronger moral oversight and extra responsive management. 4 election leads to specific are price noting — three for town of L.A., and one for L.A. County.
For the latter, Measure G could be essentially the most earth-shattering good-government poll initiative you barely keep in mind; The Instances’ editorial board called its passage “essentially the most transformative resolution county voters have made in many years.” Three main reforms had been packed into the measure accepted by L.A. County voters final week: the institution of an ethics fee by 2026, the election of a countywide chief govt beginning in 2028 and the growth of the Board of Supervisors from 5 members to 9 in 2032. All three reforms are apparent requirements, however that final one is the simplest for example with a private, geographic anecdote.
I dwell in Alhambra, in a neighborhood simply barely inside Supervisor Hilda Solis’ District 1. If I stroll north for 30 seconds, I cross into Kathryn Barger’s District 5 — and I must hold strolling north, by Pasadena, Altadena, the San Gabriel Mountains, Palmdale and Lancaster, lastly to someplace within the Mojave Desert, to depart the huge, unwieldy district that Barger has the unimaginable job of representing.
Extra supervisors imply smaller districts with extra responsive management. Good on L.A. County voters for serving to themselves.
Then there’s town of Los Angeles, residence to a recent spate of humiliating corruption scandals. Voters there handed Constitution Modification DD, taking away Metropolis Council members’ energy to attract their very own district strains and giving it to an impartial redistricting fee. Voters additionally handed Constitution Modification ER to strengthen town’s Ethics Fee, and residents of Council District 14 ousted incumbent Kevin de León, who refused to resign after he was caught in a recording making racist feedback with two different (now former) council members. “Two years after the leaked audio scandal rocked Los Angeles Metropolis Corridor, voters lastly had their say on this election,” said the editorial board. “And converse they did.”
A record number of teachers are leaving the job; this is one of them. Lauren Quinn, who taught highschool English, says her causes for quitting aren’t the oft-cited morale disaster in schooling or low pay, however the truth that she’s a mother or father herself. Instructing was as soon as seen as a ministry-like calling for girls in lieu of parenthood; although that’s now not the case, lots of the structural parts of the job from that bygone period stay.
What did the Asian American vote this year tell us? Historian James Zarsadiaz writes: “Asian People did again Kamala Harris, who obtained 54% of their vote, based on Edison Analysis exit polls carried out with a consortium of reports organizations. But the 39% who supported Donald Trump — regardless of Harris’ South Asian background and efforts to solicit voters of colour — replicate the decline of the Democratic Occasion’s grip on Asian American voters.” He says this transformation has been “brewing for years.”
Trump’s staggering win isn’t a landslide. Democrats, learn the lessons and move on. Columnist Jackie Calmes encourages Democrats to finish the recriminations over what was actually an in depth election and deal with the extremism that awaits this nation with out efficient opposition to Trump. She reminds them that for all their “self-flagellation about seeming arrogantly out of contact with People … voters in lots of circumstances took their aspect on poll measures for abortion rights, the next minimal wage and mandated paid depart, even in crimson states.”
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As climate change worsens, so too will natural disasters. How do we pay for them? Erin Coughlan de Perez, a local weather scientist at Tufts College, says the same old sources of funding for catastrophe response haven’t come near assembly the wants of poor, hard-hit international locations. She suggests methods of anticipating occasions and having funding in place earlier than disasters strike, and creating “novel types of insurance coverage that may present predictable financing for these altering catastrophes.”
Don’t forget the sordid history of mass deportation in this country. Trump “border czar” Tom Homan mentioned in an interview that mass deportation might be carried out with out separating households, as a result of “households might be deported collectively.” USC professor Natalia Molina says this chilling remark brings to thoughts previous deportation efforts that resulted within the mass expulsion of U.S. residents, and “Donald Trump’s appointments are a stark reminder of how simply historical past can repeat itself once we fail to confront it.”
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