mayor antonio -

thank you for representing the great city of los angeles.

you must be very confident of your skills, wanting to be mayor and take over the school district.

if you can't be bothered to care about how people feed their kids, why should anyone believe you about the schools?

you can set in motion eminent domain proceedings to save the farm in south la.

i know, antonio, coming out for the people against a land speculator takes balls - and ends political careers in la.

so tell us, antonio - if you can't take the heat for saving one farm, why are you asking us to believe you can save a massive schoold district?

Cleaned up a little, this would make an excellent letter to the editor (Times, Daily News, LA Weekly, other local papers). It might make some people out there think twice about what Antonio is doing...and it might make Antonio himself think twice.

...and then, maybe, Antonio might think twice about he's doing. maybe.

Otherwise, it's bu$ine$$ & bull$hit as u$ual.

in a conversation yesterday with a liberal who identifies with the interests of the oppressors, it was pointed out that Antonio Villatraidora shouldn't be targeted, after all, he just inherited this problem and has done the best he could. What a crock of liberal shit. If poor Tonyosito didn't want to inherit this "problem", then he shouldn't have run for mayor, and he most definitely shouldn't have stood there making promises he couldn't keep, glad-handing the farmers in a campaign photo-op whose race and class dynamics he deeply exploited to get him into office.

Antonio is just another lame-ass robot politician who serves the interests of the rich. The LA Times is part of their propaganda machine. okay, send them a letter. But make sure you send some dollar bills to the mayor too. Another option: Take things to the streets. Mount your own propaganda campaign. Make things uncomfortable for Horowitz, Villaraigosa, city leaders, etc. Put REAL pressure on them, not just polite letters that start with "honorable mayor". And for christ sake stop being so apologetic and pussy-footing around the mayor like the farm leadership has wasted so much time doing. He's NOT our "honorable friend"---he's a damn politician, and if that isn't obvious to you by now with all that has happened with the farm, then you are either not paying attention, or you are so blinded by your own identification with the interests of the rich that you might as well start up and drive the bulldozers yourself.

grimace:

any of the following may help:

st. john's wort (yep.. oppressive name. deal.)
sam-e
5-htp

good luck with your dysthymia.

(please contact your primary care provider before implementing the above - it is an opinion, not a medical assessment or treatment plan. i try to be of use to the affectively impaired whenever possible, so i hope this is of service to you - or those who have to endure you in daily life.)

Relax, Grimace. My point obviously (or at least I thought it was obvious) was that if public attention can be brought to the issue and public opinion affected, particularly by framing the issue in a catchy way like the original poster did, Antonio will be goosed into action out of sheer fear of losing some ratings points.

We all know that politicians, no matter how "of the people" they claim to be, are all about being reelected so they don't have to go to work for a living. This is true no matter how corrupt they are. If they sense a large mass of people demanding something, quite often they'll deliver it just to make the issue go away. Ralph Horowitz isn't the only developer in town. If Antonio has to burn him just to keep public opinion off his back, he'll do it. But you have to get that public opinion first, and two hundred people shouting and being all rad and shit in the streets generally doesn't accomplish that.

(That's not to say that I'm trivializing the effort to defend the farm physically from eviction. That kind of thing can and does change the course of events. Nor am I criticizing the pressure campaign of drumming and holding vigils at Tony's house and wherever he speaks; that does serve the purpose of making his adoring fans question his commitment to social justice. I'm talking about Grimace's tired-ass exhortation to "take things to the streets," as though that somehow precluded using tactics aimed at persuading mainstream consumers of mass media--most of whom currently don't know about the SCF eviction--of the rightness of our cause.)

The Coliseum isn't too far from the Farm. They're both along MLK, more or less. One's on Alameda, the other is on Figueroa. (The two streets are around 2.5 miles apart down there, but they cross up in Chinatown, north of Downtown.)