Racist remarks and intimidation attempts from Los Angeles leaders and labor officials. A major Los Angeles labor federation threatened the Los Angeles Times over a story about offensive remarks made by Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez in a conversation with Councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León and Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera.
During the October 2021 conversation—a recording of which was recently leaked—Martinez referred to Councilmember Mike Bonin (who is white) as a “little bitch,” and said his son (who is black) was “parece changuito“—like a monkey—who needs to be beaten. “They’re raising him like a little white kid,” Martinez said. “I was like, this kid needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner and then I’ll bring him back.”
“Later in the conversation, the group talked about how Koreatown — a largely Latino neighborhood — should be handled in redistricting,” noted the Times in an article published Sunday:
The group then questioned whether Shatto Place, a small street, and Lafayette Park are in Koreatown. “I see a lot of little short dark people,” Martinez said of that section of Koreatown, employing stereotypes long used against Oaxacans in Mexico and in the United States. “I was like, I don’t know where these people are from, I don’t know what village they came [from], how they got here,” Martinez said, before adding “Tan feos” — “They’re ugly.”
In the Times article, Martinez, de León, and Herrera each apologized, and Cedillo said he didn’t recall the conversation.
Martinez subsequently resigned from the City Council, and Herrera resigned as president of the labor federation—a group representing 800,000 workers belonging to 300 unions.
“Racism in any form has no place in the House of Labor,” interim federation President Thom Davis said in a statement Tuesday. “It is unconscionable that those elected to fight for our communities of color would engage in repulsive and vile anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Asian and anti-Oaxacan remarks that pit our working communities against each other. These sentiments will not be tolerated by our organization or those who we represent.”
This is a good response. But it wasn’t the federation’s first response. Prior to the Times story coming out, a lawyer for the labor federation tried to bully the Times into not publishing it. In an early Sunday email to Los Angeles Times editors, lawyer Julie Gutman Dickinson described the leaked conversation as “an illegal recording” that was made “in violation of California’s privacy and recording laws.”
“If the LA Times publishes this illegal recording, or information contained in it, it is condoning this illegal conduct and subjecting itself to legal liability,” wrote Dickinson. “It is imperative for this reason, and to avoid harm to innocent people, that the LA Times refrains from publishing anything from the illegal recording.”
The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor should probably get itself new counsel. If the recording was made illegally, any criminality accrues to the person who made the recording; the Los Angeles Times is not breaking any laws by reporting on it. And aside from being a dubious legal strategy, the threat is also a bad PR strategy. The union could have simply condemned Martinez’s remarks and insisted that it does not condone them. Instead, it tried to intimidate a newspaper into burying the story.
In a letter to the union, Los Angeles Times General Counsel Jeff Glasser wrote that its response was “contrary to the United States and California Supreme Court constitutional law, which recognizes that the First Amendment fully protects news reports on illegally intercepted recordings about matters of public concern.”
Citing a number of relevant cases, Glasser concluded that “the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor could not constitutionally hold liable LA Times or its journalists for publishing a recording of three LA City Council members and a county labor official making pejorative references to fellow City Council members.”
FREE MINDS
Copyright versus the internet. Glyn Moody, the author of Walled Culture, recently joined Mike Masnick on the Techdirt podcast. Per Masnick, Walled Culture is a book “that goes through the history of how legacy copyright industries have tried to harm the internet and gain ever greater control over the work of artists and creators.” You can download a free copy of the book here and listen to the podcast about it here.
FREE MARKETS
A licensed Texas roofer helping put roofs on Florida houses damaged by Hurricane Ian was arrested for not having a roofing license in Florida.
OH I AM LOSING IT. HOURS APART. After Duque Roofing worked with police to help with food after the storm, THEN their person was arrested for unlicensed (they ARE licensed in Texas though) roofing by other police. Just SO EGREGIOUS.
A bunch of things to note here
/1 pic.twitter.com/8FYEdtm2bR
— Shoshana Weissmann, Sloth Committee Chair ???? (@senatorshoshana) October 12, 2022
Reason‘s Eric Boehm has more here.
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• “Jurors ordered conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Wednesday to pay nearly $1 billion to Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims’ relatives and an FBI agent,” reports the Associated Press. “The $965 million verdict is the second big judgment against the Infowars host for spreading the myth that the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history never happened, and that the grieving families seen in news coverage were actors hired as part of a plot to take away people’s guns.”
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I’ve been digging into the communities surrounding meme stocks and, like, it’s weird man. Somehow a short squeeze opportunity back in 2020 has mutated into a straight up apocalypse cult trying to trigger the end of the world.
— Dan Olson (@FoldableHuman) October 10, 2022
• What the 1970s can teach us about inflation now.
The post Union Group Tries To Bully <i>L.A. Times</i> Into Burying Racist Remarks appeared first on Reason.com.
