Tonight: Baby Boomers Getting the Once Over on CNBC by Brokaw

...But, Will Boomers be Told the Truth About what They've Done for a Change?

Tom Brokaw's greatest contribution to the American mediascape may not be his role as an anchor on NBC; it may be his coining of the phrase "The Greatest Generation" to describe the once-young Americans who fought and won World War II. However, his treatment of another generation tonight on CNBC via a new documentary called "Boomers" derived from his book of a similar name, heaps another overdose of attention upon the already majorly overexposed Baby Boom generation. This time it's about how they're "facing aging" in these most challenging of economic times in, well, a generation."


A side note to our valued Baby Boomer readers: Forget about aging; you're aged! Well-aged. Old. There. You're old. Sorry; it's just a fact. You've been old for a few years now.

Bland Book

Brokaw's book, Boom! Voices of the Sixties, which was released in 2007, was described that year, by USA Today's Michael Minzesheimer as bland and better at descriptions than analysis. If the same turns out to be true for the documentary, he will have missed an opportunity to hold up a mirror to Boomers and ask them if they can see that what they did in the 1960s has not defined our world; it's what they did after the sixties that gave us the planet we walk today. In the 1980s the sold a nation the idea that greed was good. In the 1990s the fine-tuned that message by turning everything that wasn't bolted down over to corporate America. Rather than the more tangential message "Greed is Good," the mantra of the nineties gave us instructions. It was "Privatize! Outsource! Contract it out!"

Cheaters

A public school teacher recently told me a set of parents, whose daughter had been caught cheating on a final, protested the disciplinary action the school had decided to take by saying, "Come on, everybody cheats a little." The parents were likely Gen-Xers--my demographic--rather than Boomers.

I don't buy it. Not everybody cheats. But, that's the legacy of the Baby Boomer Generation.
Cheating is taking advantage of the trust of others. The others of whom the Boomers have taken advantage are the generations to come.

The Space Program as an Example

Their parents' generation gave Boomers the advantage of a highly accessible higher education system, the crown jewels of whose public university component may have been California's U.C. and CSU systems. But Boomers have decided to begin dismantling is in order to minimize their own pain as they continue aging. It's just too expensive now, they say. And yes, look at the ages of the politicians, administrators, corporate leaders, and even the largest demographic segment of taxpayers driving the deconstruction of nation's largest public university systems. They're boomers. Boomers represent about 25 percent of the U.S. population, weighing in at about 80,000,000 people, according to the U.S. Census.

To be sure, they've done great things. They've vastly improved race relations and increased human communication with technology and openness.

But, they dropped the ball or actually kicked it over the fence and onto the freeway (and in some cases told other generations to go get it), when it came to the economy, infrastructure, the environment, and the family unit.

Boomers have totally gutted U.S. manned space exploration. Think about what their parents did. They went to the moon--multiple times. We couldn't do that today if we wanted to. Think about where we find ourselves today in space: the shuttles are retiring; we're going to have to use the Russians rockets in order to get to the space station until the return to 1960s space-capsule technology is made real. Yes, that is the plan).

Kidding

Unfortunately, there are so many ways to point to the Boomers as being responsible for so much that is wrong with America today. It's sad. So, if Mr. Brokaw (aged 70, and not a Boomer) expects the youth of today to buy another sales pitch of the Baby Boom generation as being anything but a net failure, he's kidding himself and the Boomers too.

Mad as Hell: Los Angeles City Government Could Move Investments out of Large Banks

Chase, Other Bigs Fear Losing City's Multi-billion-dollar Portfolio

Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcón recently ordered the city's legislative analyst to create a points system for grading the social responsibility of financial institutions that want to handle the city’s investment portfolio.


But Councilman Alarcón didn't stop there. He also said the city should, as Arianna Huffington has said both on her online newspaper, "The Huffington Post" and on network television, "Move Your Money." The "Your" in this case means the taxpayers of the City of Angels. The move would, presumably, be from big banks such as BofA and Chase to smaller community banks and perhaps even credit unions.
Alarcón proposed that the city create a “report card” to evaluate the number of small business loans provided, evidence of working with homeowners facing foreclosure, the number and location of branches and ATMs and the use of federal TARP funds.


“During these times of the financial meltdown and the federal bailout of big banks, it is more important than ever that we ensure that our money is being invested in institutions that are investing back in our community—not those that are taking advantage of our residents and ripping off their clients,” said Alarcón, whose district is in the northern part of the San Fernando Valley.


“Creating investment criteria will help us ensure the city is investing taxpayer money responsibly and making the most out of our multi-billion dollar portfolio.”
After a hearing on the city’s investment practices, Alarcón, who is chairman of the Jobs and Business Development Committee, led a contingent of union members, staff, members of the public, and media to the downtown offices of Chase Bank. Inside the bank’s lobby, the group delivered a letter demanding the bank act more responsively to the needs of the community.

Pictured above: L.A. City Councilman Richard Alarcón (second from left) and an unnamed woman ask a bank employee at Chase Bank near City Hall to help get a letter of demands to Chase's Wall Street headquarters.

Below: A draft of the councilman's proposed report card for banks who want to handle L.A.'s investments:

Friday Film & Fold With Mom & Thom

...has been delayed so that we can perfect the feature.
Stay tuned; it will be worth the wait.

-Thom Senzee

Physical Therapists March on Anthem Blue Cross Headquarters

Insurer Threatens to Slash Payments to Therapists by 30 Percent,
While Raising Rates by 40 Percent

But you've got to feel sorry for these poor health insurance companies. The parent company of this one only made $4 billion dollars last year. Times are tough.

"They'd never think of doing this to doctors; guess they think we're easy targets." --Demonstrator
Click the Play Button (arrow) Below to Watch RoLA's On-the-spot Coverage

Funday-Monday: Random Scenes from the Mean (and sometimes, just plain crazy) Streets of Los Angeles

An SUV Driver Took a Sharp Right--Right into an Edible Arrangements Store on Fountain Avenue & La Brea Boulevard in West Hollywood Recently

And guess who just happened to be driving by--with my camera?
(I swear I don't stage this stuff.)

Scientology Protest

A local photographer who was allegedly intimidated by Scientology officials at his home after shooting pics at a previous demonstration, recently joined protesters as they marched up and down Hollywood Blvd. The motley crew of demonstrators stopped at each of the controversial church's many buildings along that storied thoroughfare.

Here's what RoLA caught via our Droid cam.

Young Designer, Alexander McQueen's Biggest Fan Shares a Poignant Moment Before Midnight Outside Fallen Designer's Melrose Store (Low Light)

             Valentine's Night Vigil:  

               Fashion Designer, K. Aguirre

          

Let's Call it a Comeback...

Republic of L.A. will be back online Tuesday, January 26. And RoLA has some new stuff coming that will be exciting to those we love and those who love us.

Obama, McCaine: More F22s Unneeded (Cuts to Thousands of Jobs in California)

Say Goodbye, L.A., to a Big Jobs Program...and a Really Bad-Ass Airplane

Sorry, I guess even a gay leftie still has an inner ten-year-old who loves cool jet fighters. Just look at it! I want one. Well, between the Air Force and the Navy, the U.S. military is getting 187 of them anyway. Truth be told, many experts believe the F-22 Raptor is a weapon in search of a mission, as it was designed to combat a never-built, advanced Soviet fighter.

The local angle is jobs. In California, contractors--the lead of which is Lockheed-Martin--claim 19,500 jobs will be lost as a result of the recent vote to ix-nay the ane-play. About 6,500 of those are workers working directly on the contract to supply the military with the ultra-fast, ultra-stealthy war birds. Another 13,000 in supporting jobs will be lost, they say. The job losses will begin to materialize this year, as the program winds down, with the bulk of pink slips to be issued next year when it ends altogether.


Award-winning blogger and former L.A. Times columnist Robert Scheer calls Obama and McCaine brave for not supporting the military-industrial complex's biggest pet project, noting that while some in congress were ready to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars to keep the F-22 Raptor contract flying, there was no one on earth who could find $50 million to keep L.A.'s summer school sessions alive.

Yay! Everyone's Favorite ROLA Topic: Parking in WeHo!

Typical? An electrical sign flashes a warning about construction, while taking up a precious parking stall in West Hollywood one recent weekend. At the same time, there was ample space near a driveway a few feet away that was neither parking, nor firelane. Wah-wah.

Republic of L.A. has waited two weeks for the City of West Hollywood to respond to our questions about the elimination of a few dozen parking spaces in an alley off of Melrose Avenue, and more than 100 others inside of West Hollywood park for construction and "safety reasons," and their replacement with $10 valet-only spots. The old spots were free between 6-10 p.m. Well, it turns out that Jake Stevens has gone to Washington for a new job. We wish him well.

Stevens was deputy for Councilmember Jeffrey Prang. He had been getting answers about the parking problems at West Hollywood park--an area that served as the only parking solution for many restaurant, bar, coffee house and 12-step meeting goers in the heart of the nation's most creative city--for Republic of L.A. since the issue first arised. His replacement, Mike Haibach is now looking into the issue. But, instead of making you wait any longer for the information Republic of L.A. has been promising to bring you, we've decided to keep you in the loop as we investigate. That said; here is the text of an email we sent to Haibach today. We'll let you know what the response is as soon as it comes:

Hi Mike,

It was nice speaking to you this afternoon. BTW, do you have contact information for Jake Stevens? I'd like to congratulate him on his new job.

Below are emails between Jake and I. As you can see, Jake addressed the concerns about lost parking and the dubious manner in which the changes had been executed, even offering to review the citations that may have been erroneously issued during the transition. However, he did not mention--and regrettably, I did not ask about costs--that the free (between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.) spaces had been replaced by $10 valet-only spots.

That's a big deal. I have interviewed people for an upcoming piece who have given up on going to their A.A., Crystal Meth Anonymous and other 12-step meetings because they were so frustrated by the lack of parking that has resulted from the recent changes. Of course the truly dedicated recovering alcoholics and addicts are going to get to some meeting, somewhere, some how. But, it's probably the ones for whom just being able find or not find parking may be the difference between relapsing and not relapsing.

Additionally, I have spoken to one business owner who said business dropped by about 10 percent as soon as as the new parking regime was initiated; and it's stayed down. I have spoken to patrons of restaurants, coffee houses and bars who are also upset by the elimination of spaces they had relied upon for years. Here is a quote:


"I know ten bucks is nothing for people coming over from next door in Beverly HIlls, but there are a lot of people who live right here in WeHo, who are out of work like my boyfriend, and maybe me next week. We live east of Fairfax, and so we drive to go out for dinner at our Bossa Nova on Friday nights. It's where we met five years ago. I can't take him out for dinner and drinks and then pay ten dollars for parking. I just can't afford it."

Tim Cahill, patron at Bossa Nova on Robertson Friday, July 3 2009.



Mike, I would like to know what the city council's response is to this situation. If it's simply been an oversight and work will be done to find a solution, I'd like a timeline of how the issue will be addressed. Or, if it's going to be more complicated than than, I'd like to interview your boss. I've interviewed Jeff before, and I know the councilmember's heart is always in the right place, so I'm eager to receive a response.

Best,

Thom