Bernard Parks is making waves in the City Council by going after SCOPE, and its leader, Anthony Thigpenn. SCOPE has been served an eviction notice. SCOPE is one of 11 organizations renting a property from the city at a $1 or $0 a year, but it is the only one singled out for eviction. (There are supposedly over 100 units that are rented to nonprofits in this manner.)
Thigpenn, in addition to being the leader of SCOPE, also takes leaves of absences and works as a political consultant. In the past, he helped elect Antonio Villaraigosa to the Mayoral seat. For this coming election, Thigpenn is working for the County Federation of Labor, running a campaign that is promoting Mark Ridley-Thomas. Ridley-Thomas is running against Parks for the seat, in a classic labor versus business race, with Ridley-Thomas supporting labor, and Parks siding with business.
SCOPE organizes the South LA and East Hollywood communities to build political support for things like green jobs, media jobs for underrepresented working class people, and a health care job ladder. A job ladder is a way for workers to get promoted within a company or organization -- the trend since the 80s was to hire people from outside or outsource, at all levels, destroying what had been a tradition of internal training in companies.
To top it off, it could have been other friction that caused Parks to act. Thigpenn, along with progressive lawyer Kwaku Duren and former Black Panther and community activist Michael Zinzun, formed Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) to deal with the LAPD violence in the African American communities.
Whatever their office-space situation may become, it's unfair for Parks to single out SCOPE for eviction, when other organizations leases aren't going to be revoked. It's an obvious attempt to exact some political retribution against Thigpenn, and an attempt to disrupt the organization, which seeks to raise wages and create better opportunities for working class people.
If you're in Los Angeles, drop an email to your rep on the City Council, asking them to not support Parks in his singling-out and harassment of his political opponent. Parks has probably got the support of Jan Perry, because, in some ways "they're on the same page". Maybe some progressives can be convinced to stand up to Parks' dirty game playing. (Wesson? Garcetti? Hahn?)
http://calitics.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=7036 http://scopela.org/index.php http://www.dailynews.com/ci_10551744 Wave Newspaper op-ed:
http://tinyurl.com/4yqz26 http://votertechkit.progressivetech.org/assets/video/thigpenn_intro_mission.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Zinzun