What's Next, Los Angeles? with Mike Bonin
Los Angeles is at a turning point. We are living in a defining moment. What happens next is up to us. Over the past few years, problems and challenges have shaken this city -- and tremendous opportunities for change have presented themselves. How do we rise to this moment and emerge a better place to live? What will it take to create a more just and a more equitable community? Working together, how are we going to create a stronger, forward-thinking Los Angeles? Mike Bonin, writer, teacher, progressive activist and former City Councilmember, looks at the issues and problems facing Los Angeles, examines ideas, and talks with the people who will lead us to a brighter future.
Produced in partnership with LA Forward.
What's Next, Los Angeles? with Mike Bonin
Re-Air: Laura Friedman for Congress - Candidate Spotlight
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NOTE: This interview first aired last summer, before the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas.
With Adam Schiff running for U.S. Senate, his Los Angeles area 30th district congressional seat – which stretches from Burbank and Glendale and Sunland Tujunga down to Hancock Park and West Hollywood – is up for grabs for the first time in twenty years. There is a wide field of candidates running for the seat in next year's election, and we are going to talk with the major candidates, one on one and in-depth, on What's Next, Los Angeles.
In this episode, Mike talks with Laura Friedman, who has represented the Burbank/Glendale area in the State Assembly since 2016. In the assembly, she is chair of the Transportation Committee, and policy chair of the Progressive Caucus. Prior to her election to the assembly, she was a councilmember and mayor of the city of Glendale.
What's Next, Los Angeles? is produced and hosted by Mike Bonin, in partnership with LA Forward.
In the next election, voters in a large chunk of Los Angeles get to pick a new congressperson, and we are talking with the candidates who want to represent you on Capitol Hill. Our special guest is Assemblywoman Laura Friedman. On this episode of What's Next, Los Angeles. Three members of Congress are running to succeed Diane Einstein in the United States Senate. Barbara Lee, Katie Porter, and Adam Schiff. Schiff's decision to run for Senate means his Los Angeles area congressional seat, which stretches from Burbank and Glendale and Sunland to Hunga all the way down to Hancock Park in West Hollywood, is up for grabs. The primary is not until next March, but there is already a big field of candidates running to fill the position. Who are they and what do they stand for? We are meeting and talking with a lot of them here on What's Next, Los Angeles. Today we're joined by Laura Friedman, who's represented the Burbank Glendale area in the state assembly since 2016. Prior to that, she served on the Glendale City Council and as mayor of Glendale. In the state legislature, she is chair of the Assembly Transportation Committee and is policy chair of the Progressive Caucus. I had a chance to work with Laura a lot when she was in office, and she's a great partner, and it's great to have her here on What's Next Los Angeles. Hey, how are you doing?
SPEAKER_00Hey Mike, it's great to see you. Thanks for having me on.
SPEAKER_01Eager for voters to hear more about you and your candidacy. So the way I start these is the same with uh every candidate. Uh talk to the voters out there and tell them who you are and why you should be their congressperson.
SPEAKER_00Great, thank you. So my name's Laura Friedman, and I've been now in the state assembly for seven years. And I could stay another four years in the assembly, and I love it. I love my job. But while I feel like California does a lot of things well, of course, we're not perfect and we have a lot of challenges, but I love California's goals about clean energy, about equality and equity, our goals to have preservation of our open space and a good environment. I look around this country and I see a steady attack on our basic civil rights. I see voters being disenfranchised intentionally around the country. I have a nine-year-old daughter who right now is going to be growing up with less rights than I enjoyed at her age. I see polluters still polluting, and I see divisions growing wider, and I feel compelled to go to Washington to try to be a part of solving a lot of this. I've never been shy or afraid to jump into the middle of a controversy if it's an important issue. But I've also been very effective. And it's taken me years sometimes, but I've been able to do legislation that moves the needle on issues like water efficiency and water conservation, on the way that we do transportation in the state of California, on climate change, on caring about hospital patients and foster youth and people who are vulnerable. And I really believe that we need people in Washington who are in it for the long haul, who are passionate about it, not just there because it's a place to go after they've turned out or to kind of fade into the sunset, but people who are going to be warriors for Los Angeles and who have a track record of being affected. And I believe that I've proven that I'm that person.
SPEAKER_01What was your background before you got into politics and why did you get into politics?
SPEAKER_00I, like many people, came to Los Angeles to work in the film industry. I had been working in New York City, and in 1992, I got a job at Paramount Pictures, and I moved into this district, and I have lived in the this current 30th Congressional District since 1992, continuously. So I know this district really well. I first moved into Hollywood and lived there, and um uh I came out to work in film, and I always thought that you know my dream was one day to be running a film studio or producing films. I never thought I would be in politics, and yet here I am.
SPEAKER_01And what prompted you to run for your first office?
SPEAKER_00Well, I bought a house in Glendale in 2000 and got on a city commission. I was very interested in being involved in my community and the shape of my community and how it develops and all of that. And so I went on a city commission and I didn't think I would run for kids city council for many years. I thought maybe in the future I would run. But then I was diagnosed with breast cancer in my 30s and went through a lot of the corny things that you hear about, um, thinking about what I had accomplished in my life, uh, realizing that I was young, but you didn't know how much time you were going to have left. And if you wanted to do something and make a difference, you can't wait. So even though there were three incumbents running for re-election and three seats, and even though there had only been that 100 years of Glendale's history, five women on their city council. And even though I didn't have nearly as much money as my opponents, I ran. And the morning after the election, I woke up to the headlines that I had been the top vote getter, beating all three incumbents. Wow. And by the way, the other reason I ran was we had started to see the uptick in what I thought was the peak of gun violence in this country with school shootings.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And Glendale still had a gun show operating on city property at the Glendale Civic Center. It's called the Glendale Gun Show.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00And the council had thought about trying to get rid of it, but they were a majority Republican council and they were conservative. So when I come on to came on to council just a few months later, we reopened the issue and we were able to ban what was the longest-running gun show in LA County's history, the Glendale gun show from ever happening again on city property. And at the same time, forbidding anybody to carry any weapons, whether they have a concealed carrier or not, in school, in playgrounds and in schools or any public place in Glendale, any publicly civically owned space in Glendale.
SPEAKER_01What would you say, uh, whether it's city council or state legislature, what would you consider to be your most significant accomplishment?
SPEAKER_00I would say in the state legislature, it's my body of work relating to climate and the environment. Some of these are some of it is legislation that I co-authored with other people because when it's done well, politics is a team sport. I worked with Senator Ben Allen for a number of years on a circular economy for single-use plastic to try to get plastics out of our environment, out of our ocean, out of our landfills. That was very significant. I worked on legislation to have the California Energy Commission start moving towards bringing us to low emission or zero emission buildings, which is a big part of the fossil fuel use in California, being gas, heat, and cooking and buildings. I worked on landmark water efficiency legislation with Governor Brown when I first came into the legislature, and that radically changed how we do water resources in California. And then I think a lot of people in Los Angeles are familiar with my bill that would ban parking minimums within a half mile of major transit stops. This was a bill that I worked had to work on for a couple of years, and it's a bill that I love talking about because it brings together and desilos issues that are very intricately linked, but that people think of as being different issues. And that's climate change, active transportation, being walking and biking, housing, our housing crisis and what we pay for housing, equity in terms of being able to move better around your community, and transit and be and supporting transit. It brought all of those together into one policy piece. And I'm really proud to have seen that Congressman Robert Garcia just introduced the same legislation nationwide.
SPEAKER_01Yes, he did.
SPEAKER_00Looking forward to taking a lot of these same accomplishments to the federal level to work alongside him and so many other great progressives.
SPEAKER_01So in Congress, you have to vote on a million different things, big and small. What would you say are the three top issues that you want to uh put your shoulder into and focus on?
SPEAKER_00One is the decline of the middle class and the potential rise of oligarchies and just the increase in corporate power. We see people's purchasing power slipping, we see stagnant wages. In California, we have a fairly high minimum wage compared to the rest of the country. In much of this country, the minimum wage is under $8 an hour. And yet the cost of living is going up in so many places. People can't pay for health care. Many states haven't expanded the ACA. And I think that a lot of what's happening in terms of people turning on each other is related to the anxiety that people feel over their economic situation. And uh we see the decline of the middle class tracking exactly with the decline of the power of unions in this country. You know, the more people are represented by organized labor, the better their economics tend to be. So that's one big issue, is because you would call it economic insecurity.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00Um, or the gap between rich and poor. Another is absolutely the environment and climate change. You know, I've done bills successfully to get PFOS, you know, which is a carcinogenic forever chemical, out of personal care products like lipstick and skin cream and shampoo. I'm doing a bill now that would, in the same personal care products, ban the most toxic chemicals that have already been banned in the EU. And I have another bill that I'm working on getting fiberglass out of mattresses. Fiberglass that leeches through the outside of mattresses, gets into people's lungs, into their skin. It's a terrible health toxin. But I shouldn't have to do any of that, and neither should any state. Because the Environmental Protection Agency, they need to have enough teeth to be real regulators, to protect Americans from polluting companies and from toxic chemicals that companies don't think anything about putting into our bodies, into the air, into the waste stream. And then, of course, climate change is an existential threat. So that's another huge area is environmental protections. And I could talk all day. I know we have whatever amount of time we have, but I've done work on conservation, on wildlife crossings for cougars and mountain, you know, mountain lions and bobcats and um tortoises. You know, that's all the environmental work is very centered to who I am and what my values are and what I want to leave behind for my nine-year-old, you know, and for your son. And then lastly, I would say, you know, basic consumer protection. I'm doing legislation now to push back against Ticketmaster and Live Nation and their monopolistic practices. So just making sure that people aren't price gouged by their banks, by stores, by credit cards, you know, it goes back a little bit to giving power back to people and away from large corporations. But that's something that really the federal government needs to act on because whether it's being forced into teeny seats on an airplane and not being able to be compensated if you miss a day of work because they cancel a flight for some reason, to your banks gouging you or uh mortgage lenders repossessing people's homes against the spirit of the law. Uh there's so many times when people are just ripped off. And I love the work that Elizabeth Warren does and Katie Porter does. And I think we need more people who are championing just ordinary consumers and ordinary citizens.
SPEAKER_01Uh a couple questions I got from people who live in in the district. Uh the 30th district is is really pretty diverse. There's a big difference politically from say Burbank and and Pasadena on one end, Echo Park and Fairfax on the other. How do you um balance and represent, say, Glendale homeowners and West Hollywood Progressives?
SPEAKER_00Well, I do think you have to be on you have to have an understanding of the district and what different communities need. And it's not always the case that people who are the loudest are representing the biggest needs in the community, number one. Now I've represented about 60% of this congressional district between my assembly district now and the assembly district I've had for the past six years before redistricting. So I am intimately familiar with the issues in Sunland Lakeview Terrace, in Hancock Park, in West Hollywood, in Silver Lake in Los Felos and Outwater, in Glendale and in Burbank. I know those communities and I understand the issues, and I understand where there's commonality and I understand where there's big differences, and there are differences. So you have to be willing to really work alongside your community to deal with whatever challenges are unique to different parts of the district. And you also have to think about issues that are huge challenges across the district. Housing prices and housing shortages is it is an issue that's a crisis every single part of our district, whether people acknowledge it or not. Homelessness is an issue in every part of the district. It's larger in some than in others, but it's it's there and everybody thinks about it and talks about it. Climate change affects all of us. And I will say one thing about all parts of this district. This is a very high information district in terms of voters. People across the district, and I would say almost regardless of economic status, pay attention to politics. They understand the link between the people that they vote for and what they do or don't do for their community. And I really like that about this district. I've always had the privilege of running in districts with high voting voter turnout. And I love that because I truly believe that the only way we're going to solve our huge problems is as a community together. And if people don't participate, it makes it that much harder to address real needs.
SPEAKER_01So not only is the district distinctive by being such a high information district, high voter district, it's also one of the most important Armenian districts in the country. It includes the first um city that was basically created to be an LGBTQ plus city, West Hollywood, large Russian immigrant community, an increasing Latino population. How do those unique demographics of the district affect the issues that that you will focus on or represent?
SPEAKER_00And let's not forget Thai Town, a large Filipino community, a large Korean community. So there are large communities, and having represented those communities, not West Hollywood, but a lot of the rest of the areas you're talking about, uh it's what makes the district exciting. It's why I chose to live there and stay there and build my family in that area because of that diversity. And it is a challenge because you have many languages spoken, you have communities that are very tight-knit. Sometimes it's hard to sort of find your way in when you're an elected official. But there are also communities that are definitely worth reaching out to. And because I've represented those communities in the legislature, we've been able to make those connections to community leaders, to religious institutions, cultural institutions across the district. And in some ways, a lot of the issues are similar. Everybody wants a quality education for their children. Everybody wants a safe community. And there's no district that would say to you, I don't want to see less people that are homeless. I don't want to see housing affordability addressed. It's just that you have to find different ways of communicating. And you also have to have more of a cultural understanding of where people have come from and what their experiences have been and how that shapes their viewpoint. Because if you come from a, let's say you're an immigrant who comes from a former the former Soviet Union, you're going to have a very different relationship with elected officials or different expectation than someone who's grown up in Los Angeles their whole life. And so you have to understand what different communities' histories are so that you can communicate well with them.
SPEAKER_01Another thing that's really unique or special about the 30th district is it really is one of the sort of entertainment capitals of the world, right? You've got you've got Disney, you've got Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal, just to name a few, uh, and big cultural institutions as well. So with all the the jobs and economic activity that the entertainment sector provides, uh I assume the rep for this area generally feels a special obligation to look out for that sector of the economy. Um but there's big strikes underway right now, like those places I just named, Monday through Friday, you've got uh WGA out there, they're picketing. Um how do you see your role as uh representing the entertainment industry, given that it's pretty clear that what the the corporate entities say is important is not always aligned with what the actual workers are interested in?
SPEAKER_00So I do believe that having the very long career in entertainment that I've had, and I've produced five feature films and been involved in lots of features and television production. My husband was a film editor before he went back to school and became got a degree and became a landscape architect. You know, and my friends and neighbors are mostly in entertainment. That's that's what this area is about. So I have a real understanding of the economics of the industry, and I do think that that has served me well with my work in the assembly, and I've had I'm on the arts committee and I've had a very uh integral role on a lot of the discussions around the entertainment industry. And it puts me in the unique position of being able to both speak to the MPAA and the studios and the different as well as to the different guilds, the writers' guild, directors' guild, IATSI, and the rest, and also understand the challenges that just ordinary people working in the industry have. And I'm not sure that there's anybody else in this race who has that breadth of experience that I do. Um, I support the writers. I was on the strike line myself on Friday with them for a period of time. Uh, I hope that they're able to bring this to a close um, you know, sooner rather than later. Um but the industry, you know, of course, the economics are changing, but at the same time, film and television projects aren't like other kinds of art forms. They're hugely collaborative, very large productions. And it's really important that, you know, as the studios figure out their model for making money, that they also include everybody who had a hand in creating the content that they all rely on. You know, they can't leave people behind just because they think they can. Uh, they need to make sure that everybody shares in their success. And I truly believe that, and I believe that that will make for better content as well. Um, you know, you we need to attract good people into this field and keep them working. And what a lot of people on the outside don't realize is that yes, these projects can be really lucrative. And you see those paydays that people get and they're they can be very large, but it's also an industry where you can go years without working. You can go years between selling a show or being on a show.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00So it's a really difficult business. I mean, I left it at a certain point because it was hard. And even as an executive, I was a development executive, you know, you'd you'd have a contract for a few years, and then the whole studio kind of turns over and everyone loses their job, and everyone's shuffling around trying to find their next gig. It's it's a very stressful environment that tends to chew people up and spit them out.
SPEAKER_01Uh unlike politics.
unknownVery much like politics.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Want to get a sense of sort of what you you see your your your style uh as being in in Congress. We have a very diverse uh congressional district, you know, Brad Sherman, Maxine Waters, Sidney Kamlogger, Judy Chu, all very different in in temperament and style. Um I was talking to my former colleague Paul Krakorian, and he described Adam Schiff as sober, cerebral, and moderate, and very popular in the district. How would you compare or contrast yourself to uh Schiff in terms of uh style and philosophy?
SPEAKER_00Well, despite what my mother always wanted for me, I did not go to law school. So I don't think my role is going to be taking on Donald Trump, as wonderful as I I I don't I don't think anyone could fill his shoes when it comes to that role. What Adam Schiff did for saving democracy, I would like to do for saving the planet in terms of climate and environmental work. I see that as being more of my reputation, more of my experience. Uh I am very, very wonky. And if you talk to anybody in Sacramento, they will say that I am somebody who knows my bills intimately, loves Talk about policy before before I meet with any voters. My team always says, reminder, don't talk about policy. Because I will start talking land use and zoning and transportation and emissions and vehicle miles traveled. And next thing you know, I'm VMTing it and you know, I'm I'm I know it becomes acronym Soup. And I I love really getting into the weeds on how public policy shapes everything, shapes our experience, shapes the way that we experience our cities, uh, shapes the way we move around our cities. Um, you know, talking about the link between transportation options and equity and the people that we see in service and the people that we don't. I love all of those conversations. It makes me a good legislator, it makes me be able to write bills that are impactful. It sometimes maybe for some people makes for dry conversation. So that's much more of what I'm known for. Um, and then in terms of leadership style, I will say that I've been thinking a lot about leadership style lately as I've been in this race, talking to people about it. And I would be the first woman to represent this district. And people have sometimes said, well, why is that important? Why does that representation really matter at the end of the day? And yes, we're losing women, Congress people in California, but why does it matter? And I would say, well, first of all, when you've got abortion rights under serious threat and being taken away, as much as I love my male allies, you know, I think it's gonna be up to women to fight that fight. But beyond that, I've been thinking about what I've been thinking of as feminist leadership style. And men can do that too. This is something men can practice and women can practice. But there's a type of male leadership style that's very much about I'm gonna be the hero and I'm gonna go to Washington and I'm gonna lead this charge and I'm gonna reform things and me, me, me, and my name's gonna be on the door. And then there's a kind of leadership style that I think of as being a little bit more feminine, maybe, about working in hand in hand with other people to support each other and say it's not gonna be about me. I have a role to play in this, but it's going to be my role to also work with a whole bunch of other activists and other electeds so that we can work together on big issues. And I believe that that's the kind of style that I tend to practice. And maybe that's the reason why I work so well with so many of our other elected officials. I with you, but with Nithya Raman and Katie Orzlovski, other people, you know, folks that have endorsed me, I think, right off the bat, because, you know, I'll give Nithya for example. She and I have calls every few weeks to talk about issues in the district. And it's never about, hey, let's do this thing so I can get up on Twitter and take credit for something. It's always, you know, people never even see that collaboration because it's about what do we need to do for the district? How can I get you resources? Where do you need me to help? Do I need to call Caltrans about a homeless encampment under a bridge? What do we need to do? And we just work together to get shit done. And it's not about trying to prove something or going out and bragging on it. It's just about delivering for the community. And I believe we work so well together because we engage in this kind of leader, you know, feminist leadership style when we're working together. So my style, you asked about this diverse district and how do you represent it well? I think you represent it well by recognizing that yes, you have a role to play as a congressperson, but a part of your big part of your role is empowering the people that are doing the work on the ground, the activists, the community leaders, the neighborhood council people, the local electeds, they all need to be supported by your office. And so it's not about I'm gonna go to Washington, I'm gonna solve climate change. It's how do we build a movement in our community where we're all rowing in the same direction to halt climate change together? Or how do we come up with a consensus about how we deal with homelessness in a way that we have enough buy-in across the district to allow the solutions to actually be deployed on the ground? And that's the kind of leadership style that I've demonstrated, and that's what I'd like to bring to this office.
SPEAKER_01So here in LA, uh collaboration with people from different perspectives, I think is a lot easier than certainly than it looks in in Washington, D.C. And Congress is really divided. Uh uh there there are some, it's a shrinking number of people who sort of preach the gospel of bipartisanship. Um Robert Garcia recently you mentioned him. I saw him a few weeks ago, and he spoke at the Stonewall event, and then he posted something on social media uh about how there's there there's no one left in the Republican Party in Congress who isn't far right. And he talked about how he came from Long Beach, where you know he was a local mayor and you work with everybody and you try to put things together. And he said in Washington for him it's been different. And he said, if we spend our time compromising with the extreme right, we won't have a democracy in 10 years. I know you haven't gotten there yet, but do you think bipartisanship in Congress is possible anymore?
SPEAKER_00Well, I haven't gotten there, you're right. And there's a certain point where your values are so different that it's hard to find real common ground. I would hope that the Democratic Party would maybe stop focusing so much on extremists like Marjorie Taylor Green and others and instead start speaking directly to the people that she represents and not talk down to people, but to talk about why their self-interest is not being served. You know, I've got to think that if you're in some of these districts, that you must wonder why people in California have access to better medical care through the Affordable Care Act than you do. And if you don't, it's because no one's explaining that to you in a way you can understand. To explain that the reason your wages are stagnant is not because of immigration, it's not because of our trans community members. It's because we've allowed in a lot of these areas corporations to have so much power that people aren't being compensated fairly for the labor that they do. So I believe that that again, it's about that movement building, and that belongs that begins with trying to communicate it as it as best you can with every single voter everywhere across the country. And then making sure that we hold enough power to get judges elected who will give people the right to vote and make sure that that's real, that people aren't continuing this trend of people being disenfranchised, being discouraged from voting, to stop allowing the kind of gerrymandering that cuts wide swaths of people away from having effective representation, and that keeps extremists in power when they're not winning the popular vote.
SPEAKER_01You know, it people are so frustrated at the lack of action in DC on these on issues that they see every single day that are just painful. The the the the uh destruction of reproductive rights for women, the the horrible uh targeting and abuse of of the trans community, uh, and just the the daily gun violence in this country. It I I was struggling to think about what to ask candidates about these three issues in particular, because at the moment you go to Washington, there's nothing you can do. But there's a chance you take office that you're part of the majority. If the Democrats take office or take take the majority, and you're in the majority when you get there, what actions do you think should be the party's priority to take on guns and LGBT rights uh and on reproductive freedom?
SPEAKER_00So, in terms of guns, we need an assault rifle ban, which had been, by the way, a bipartisan action when it was done during the Clinton era.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00It was the most effective uh drop in gun violence deaths. And as soon as that ban expired, we saw the deaths increase over 40% within a number of years. So we need a national assault uh weapon ban in this country. We need national red flag laws so that guns can be taken away from people. If a judge rules that they're mentally ill or violent or otherwise unable to safely handle guns, we need national safe storage laws. It should be legal to have a gun and not have it locked up or have a trigger lock on it. You know, we leave lose thousands of children every year in this country to accidental shootings in the home or to suicides for that matter. Um we need uh comprehensive background checks for every single person who's gonna buy a weapon. You know, we make people take a driver's test to drive. Um, there's a lot of things we do in this country that are based on ability, and there's nothing that says we can't do that when it comes to guns. The Second Amendment itself mentions a well the term well-regulated. Well-regulated is in the Second Amendment.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00So those are the those are what I would start with when it comes to gun violence. Um, we also need to stop scaring the heck out of people. You know, we've got people in this country that drive around with guns and walk around with guns because they've been told that there are people that are going to kill them every step of the way. You know, we have a media that stokes the fear people have against each other and against their neighbors, and we need to hold them more accountable for stoking that kind of fear. And then in terms of abortion, we need a constitutional amendment to enshrine Roe v. Wade. Full stop. We need to make sure that reproductive choices is seen as base basic health care for women, and that it's a decision, these are decisions that people can make on their own without interference from the gov from big government, from overreaching government. With LGBT and trans rights, same thing. We need to recognize that those are basic civil rights, and we need to treat them with the same force of law as we do other types of civil rights. In terms of the right to adopt children, to marry, to live under whatever gender you choose to live under, that is your true identity, all of those things. And we need to make sure that people understand and discuss those issues as basic civil rights.
SPEAKER_01Uh you mentioned the environment and climate change a few times in our conversation. Uh I think it was in in March when one of the most definitive reports ever published about climate change came out, and it said the world is likely to pass a dangerous temperature threshold within the next 10 years, pushing the planet past the point of catastrophic warming unless nations drastically transform their economies and immediately transition away from fossil fuels. It also said somewhat pessimistically public officials, private investors, and other powerful groups have repeatedly failed to heed those warnings. I know you're very passionate about this issue. You've got a lot of track record on this issue, but a lot of grim forecasts and the trends don't seem to be changing fast enough. What do you think our best case scenario is at this point?
SPEAKER_00Well, just because we're hitting tipping points doesn't mean that we can't slow things down. And you know, one of the biggest fears I have is that people become so cynical and so overwhelmed by news like that that they just don't think it's worth acting. You can get to a point where you're so depressed that you become paralyzed. And I believe that a lot of people are moving into that phase. Giving people a roadmap that they can do individually is something that we all need to start doing. And there's actions that people can take on the individual level, and then there's actions that we need to take at a larger level. But honestly, I'd say that we need all of our electives to take this as the crisis that it is and to move a lot more rapidly. And yeah, we have to think about jobs and we have to think about other kinds of impacts and economic impacts. We have to make sure we don't pass costs along to people who can't afford it, because that's going to be something that will stop us on our tracks faster than anything else. So we have to act very deliberately and we have to act in concert. Um, Joe Biden's Build Back Better program and his Federal Infrastructure Act is a huge step towards putting investments into clean energy nationwide. And by the way, I talk to energy companies all the time. I talk to Berkshire Hathaway, I talk to even the oil industry, um, you know, to some of those companies. And they see the writing on the wall because when it comes to market forces, a lot of the market forces are just moving to clean energy. But they do need that nudge to move a lot faster. I'm proud of what Gavin Newsom's been doing in California. I we are setting the stage for the rest of the nation, but we need to get all of the states on board, not just because it's the right thing for the dude to do for the climate, ultimately it's going to be a lot cheaper for their own ratepayers because renewables, once you install them and once you do your build-out, are much cheaper to operate than fossil fuels. As we all know from what's happened to gas prices in the last couple of years, fossil fuel prices are um they are unreliable, they spike, uh, they are um they're not nearly as steady and uh as inexpensive as uh renewables. And certainly the econom the ecological damage, even beyond climate change, is is you know, can be very expensive. You know, oil, offshore oil spills, for instance, in California cost billions of dollars. And it's not all paid by the polluters. There are times when companies go bankrupt, they leave taxpayers on the hook. Where we as taxpayers are left to clean up messes all the time from the oil industry and from legacy oil companies. So there's huge costs in terms of asthma rates, in terms of pollution that we don't always figure in. So I do think that making those federal investments in clean energy, along with um uh giving tax incentives like the Biden administration is doing, is pushing the market rapidly. But we just kind of need to get everyone on the on the same program, everyone moving in the same direction.
SPEAKER_01Should the federal government be mandating a faster transition off of fossil fuels entirely?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. What Gavin Newsom did here a couple of years ago in saying that we're not going to sell internal combustion engines after 2035 had ripples around the world. And the auto industry is pivoting and they are making more zero emission vehicles. Uh, but if we did that, imagine if we did that in the entire United States, there would be a sea change almost overnight in this country uh and and in the whole world. So, you know, of course, there's a lot we have to do in terms of charging infrastructure and other things, but we can do it. And we have to. We have no choice. We see what's happening now to the to California with wildfires, with with uh drought, with extreme weather. So the cost of inaction in terms of actual dollar cost is multitudes greater if we don't act than if we do.
SPEAKER_01Uh you've also talked about uh the economy, you've talked about um the way people are struggling with the economy, you've you've talked about corporate power. Um people like Bernie Sanders would say that the that the U.S. economy is rigged in favor of the wealthy. Do you agree with that characterization?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it often is. Um, you know, people that are low income or middle, I'd say middle income people pay a much greater share of taxes than people who are very wealthy. Um we allow for general generational wealth to accumulate, and it's very difficult for people who don't come from generational wealth to generate it, which isn't to say it's impossible. And certainly there are people who are entrepreneurial, who are able to succeed. Um, so I don't want to take that away from anyone, but it's really hard, and people who are working hard are struggling. You know, I I had some SCIU workers, some home health care workers in my office on Thursday. These are people who take care of our seniors, take care of people who are in hospice and very, very ill. And they really are doing the Lord's work. And they get paid minimum wage. Some of them are telling me they're working two jobs, they're taking care of dying people, you know, when their families can't or won't.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00At their hardest, most vulnerable part of their life, really hard work, really hard work. And then they go and they work another job. There's something wrong with that.
SPEAKER_01It's happening a lot. Uh so what sort of legislation, there's all sorts of legislation dealing with this in Congress. What sorts of legislation would would you support?
SPEAKER_00Uh we should be we have been raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation for years.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00For one thing. Uh I would support um making sure that we allow for unions around the country, that we don't have right to work states, that we don't uh have union busting happening. Because I do think that organized labor is the best way of putting power back into individual people's hands. Um, you know, which isn't to say that you don't often you don't sometimes have disagreements with labor, but they should be there to fight for their members. Um we need to make sure that everybody gets a quality education that's equitable. It's really distressing to see you know vouchers being introduced around this country, which only allows for wealthy people to not pay into school systems and leaves poor people at the mercy of underfunded school systems. Because one of the great equalizers is education. And one of the best ways to get people out of poverty is to provide them with an excellent education. I support Joe Biden's um proposal to have uh to retire college debt. You know, these are people mostly low-income communities of color, by the way, are the people that have a lot of the debt in this country. People that are wealthy tend to not have much college debt, actually. They tend to pay for college. And these are folks who have gone through sometimes, you know, dealt with poverty and have shown that they excel, who they're exactly the models of what everybody says they want, right? People who are willing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, go and get an advanced degree. And really, they're people who would go back into their own communities and start businesses, set up law practices, be the doctors in those same communities, but we are handicapping them by saddling them with sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans. At the same time that we don't think anything of bailing out banks, struggling businesses, and giving tax credits to all manner of big business. We seem unwilling to help college students.
SPEAKER_01Elizabeth Warren has uh a bunch of pieces of legislation to better regulate banks, uh, to put in uh more controls and regulation of uh of Wall Street. You on board with that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm totally on board with that. And I've seen I've I've been on board with every effort in California to do exactly that. Look, I'm the only person in this race who's been an all-star with courage campaign every single year for doing exactly that. Not just talking the talk, but walking the walk and taking those hard votes against large entrenched corporate interests. I do it all the time. It's not to say to say that I want to burn the house down and not have employers, but we also have to make sure we hold them accountable and to make sure that they are fair. You know, I've gone up to Canada on a couple of trips, for instance, to look at their recycling system.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You know, in Canada, they have they have capitalism, they have the same companies that we have, a lot of the same corporations, but in Canada, those corporations take care of the trash that they put into the environment. Canada doesn't allow them to just dump single-use plastic in their environment and not pay for the impacts. They make them pay for that. And they do because they're held accountable. And they still do business there, they still employ people, they're still able to sell their products. So we we often allow for an unregulated, uh, unfettered uh environment for polluters, for companies to not act responsibly. And and when other countries show that you can hold them accountable and you can make them be fairer to their employees, you can make them take better care of the environment, and you can still have a good economy. I think California's proven that. We're now the fourth largest economy in the world, and we have some of the strongest environmental protections of any state.
SPEAKER_01Should uh Congress uh repeal the Trump cuts in corporate taxes uh andor look at uh increasing taxes on the uber wealthy?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. You know, those Trump taxes were done at a time when those corporations weren't even asking for them. They weren't even asking for them.
SPEAKER_01So we should absolutely uh paid family leave uh mandated I've always supported it, I've always voted for it in California. Uh federally mandated uh paid sick days?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, same thing, you know. And I will say as a consumer, you know, I go to restaurants. Yep, I want to go to a restaurant, knowing that someone felt that they had to come to work when they were very sick and they're sneezing in my food because they weren't given a day off that was paid when they were sick.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Uh Medicare for All?
SPEAKER_00Medicare for all if we fix Medicare, which I think we need to fix it. And um I am I have been an author of California's single payer bills every single time they've they've you know been introduced. And I also asked to be and was put on a select committee on single payer and healthcare delivery systems. And honestly, I would take almost any other country's healthcare system over what we have, which is not really a system, it's kind of like a free-for-all.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00Uh with the ACA, which has helped a lot. I mean, it really helped a lot. Um, but whether it's a German multipayer system, which is like a single payer, but you get to choose from a few different plans, that's very American to me. And you can, you know, that you have some competition between these nonprofit, highly regulated plans, and but it doesn't cost you any more to pick one or the other, you just get a pick. I think Americans like that. Or whether it's England, you know, with their system or the Canadian system, which people think of as being single payer, but it's actually not because the different provinces each have their own system. I would take any of those over what we have.
SPEAKER_01Your answer to that is just such perfect evidence of how much of a policy wonky.
SPEAKER_00I know, I can't help it. I'm sorry. No, that was a good answer.
SPEAKER_01That showed so much knowledge about the issue. I was I was impressed. Um I wanted to ask a question about renters. You know, that was an issue I worked on a lot here in Los Angeles. The pandemic apparently is now over. Um and as a result, so are uh the federal uh protections that were in place to protect renters and to help tenants. Um do you support reinstating any of those? And if so, which ones?
SPEAKER_00You're asking at a state level or a federal level?
SPEAKER_01No, federal level.
SPEAKER_00Um, I I can't speak to what's happening everywhere in the country. I can only speak to what I see in California, which is that we have a lot of people who are become homeless all the time because of just frankly inability to pay rent because rents go up so much. Yep. Uh before the pandemic, before we before, and I voted for the caps that we put statewide on rents uh during the pandemic. Before that, I had people in my community here in Glendale who were calling my office saying that their rents had been increased 100%.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yep.
SPEAKER_00People who are saying that they were seeing 30% rent increases month after month, but their landlords were refusing to give them year-long leases, that they would only allow them to go month to month and were constantly raising the rent. Nobody can live under that. Nobody, especially people who are not, you know, uber wealthy. Now we've got tens of thousands of people on the streets in Los Angeles and across the nation. And once people are homeless and once they have been living for a while on the streets, and the longer they're on the streets, the harder it is to service those people, the more expensive it becomes. It's cheaper, it's more cost-effective for the state and for municipalities to find ways to keep people housed where they are than to try to find them and rehouse them once they're homeless. So policies that are meant to keep people indoors are very important. Section 8 is a federal program that's been closed for many years, and there's tens of thousands of people in Los Angeles on the waiting list for Section 8 housing. That's a program that the federal government could increase and put more money into that's non-controversial. I have supported the bills in California that make it against the law to not take Section 8 housing, to discriminate based on having rental subsidies. So helping people with more subsidies is important. I also believe it's very important to create more housing. We have increased our population by hundreds of thousands of people in the past 30 years, and yet we have not kept up with supply. And that's why we have people living in overcrowded conditions, where more and more people are being pushed further and further away from where they work and live. Bringing it back again to the environment, that takes a huge environmental toll when people are living in San Bernardino and working in Burbank or living in San Santa Clarita and working in Santa Monica. When we don't have good public transportation to get people around, whilst around California and we're making them drive, that has congestion impacts. It has huge quality of life impacts for those folks. And let's not forget that those people that are doing those commutes tend to be our essential workers at the bottom of the pay scale.
unknownAbsolutely.
SPEAKER_00So people who are driving the oldest, most polluting cars, who have the least amount of time to spare, and who don't have access often to public transportation because we just haven't built it to those locations. So there's a lot of work we have to do, but but allowing for that housing to be built closer to job centers is vitally important.
SPEAKER_01Couple last quick questions. Immigration reform. President Biden's been making some news uh over the past couple weeks uh with immigration policy changes. Uh do you support or oppose uh the Biden administration's immigration efforts?
SPEAKER_00Well, I absolutely support comprehensive immigration reform. You know, we we still have people who are coming to this country. First of all, I am first generation on my father's side. My father came after World War II. My husband is an immigrant who's not a U.S. citizen yet. I have a very mixed household. You know, we are recent to this country actually. And it's not fair that my grandfather and my father came to this country at a time when they were able to basically just arrive and establish residency. And people now are not. You know, there's something that's that's racist about our policies in terms of who we give a carte blanc to and who we don't. And we certainly have people who are coming here and fleeing, you know, real problems in where they come from. And I'm not I'm not saying that we need open borders, but I do think we need a path for citizenship to people. If because we don't, we have tens of thousands of people in Los Angeles living in the underground economy. People who are ripe for exploitation, who are often exploited, who are paying into the system through various taxes like sales tax and are not receiving the benefit of that money that they're paying, who are unprotected, you know, in terms of health care, who end up in our hospitals, by the way, costing more money because we don't offer them insurance through ACA in a lot of cases. And who are working. If these people were here legally, working legally, we'd not only be capturing more taxes from them, but we'd have people who now are much more a part of our system, who are not, you know, often in companies where they're uh in the underground economy and paying substandard wages and competing against companies that are acting legally and undercutting them. And that happens all the time in contracting and landscaping in lots of areas. So we're allowing for American companies that are following the laws to be undercut by unscrupulous employers who are hiring people who are not documented and then not paying them fairly. So there's there's all kinds of ripple effects across our economy, and they're they're all bad. But allowing those same people the chance to work here at a time when we have record low unemployment, and we've got uh four higher signs everywhere. You know, you can't go to a coffee shop and not see we're hiring, you know, every single place you go, people are desperate for employees. And we've got this whole class of people who want to work that those same businesses can't hire because they're not documented.
SPEAKER_01Um police brutality. Uh, it remains a persistent problem in this country. Um and uh there is clearly a racial bias in how it is meted out. What role does Congress have in dealing with it?
SPEAKER_00So um this is uh something that's very personal in my household. You know, my daughter's African-American, so it's something I think about quite a bit. Um I do believe that a lot of what we need is a culture change where people understand what racism looks like, what anti-Semitism looks like, what all of that kind of discrimination looks like and how it manifests itself. From the obvious to the not so obvious. Things like housing discrimination, mortgage discrimination, job discrimination, sometimes is not visible to people, and yet we know that it exists. So we need to make sure that we build equity into everything that we do, into all of our policies. We need to make sure that we center people who are low income, people with disabilities. Uh, you know, often policies that I've been working on, like transportation, you know, a lot of what I've been doing is trying to have those people be better serviced by our transportation infrastructure dollars. When most of our dollars go to servicing single occupancy cars, there's a whole lot of people that get left behind. So with police brutality, and you asked specifically about that, um, you know, this is something that is a national embarrassment. It's something that is heartbreaking. No parent should wonder about the safety of their child from the people that are supposed to be protecting them. So we need to demand much better from law enforcement. We need to make sure that we have quality people and that they're given the training that they need. And that's anti-biased training. That is um uh hidden bias training, that you know, that we make sure that we have policing that reflects communities and that is done in conjunction with communities, so that we have that open dialogue and we have not a siege mentality, you know, against communities, but law enforcement that works hand in hand with communities and that police is on their terms. We also have to recognize that what makes communities safer is investments. You know, we've got communities that are low-income communities that are that are, you know, high crime communities, you know, often because we haven't made the investments that gives people hope and that gives people pathways out of poverty. I went down to a prison a few months ago in San Diego and I spent the whole day with people who are doing life in prison or very, very long prison terms for really heinous crimes. And it was a really heartbreaking day and a really hard day. But it gives me, it gave me a greater understanding of how people come to where they come to, you know, talking to them about the trauma that they had, about the crimes that they committed, and you know, how they are now different people who themselves are horrified by what they had done. And, you know, talk about the kind of environments they grew up in and, you know, kind of what led to the kind of people that they were at the time, you know, not saying that they shouldn't have uh uh you know have to pay a price for having done, you know, what done the crimes that they did. You know, that wasn't the message. The message was let's be soft on these people. It was what do we need to keep these crimes from happening for in the first place? And how do we have real accountability for victims and really give victims the support and what they need? And how do we take people's lived experiences and use their experiences to help guide us in terms of our law enforcement policies and our investment policies? Um, we certainly have cycles of trauma and cycles of crime that we need to find ways of breaking. And that means going into communities that have often been disenfranchised and underinvested in, and really spending the time and the resources in those communities to uplift very vulnerable people so that you know their children have a better future. We talk about that a lot, but we don't always do it. And you can tell by driving into those communities. You can see the lack of investment. Yes, you can. You can see the lack of community spaces, the lack of green space, the lack of investment in schools. It's starting to change, but you know, it's a long time in coming.
SPEAKER_01I I love that this has been such a wonky, uh, serious, substantive conversation. I wanted to ask one sort of campaign-related question. And I I suspect you may be able to tie it into a wonky policy answer, but uh during this campaign, are there any uh groups uh or sources of uh donations that you are refusing?
SPEAKER_00I'm not taking any corporate pack money, and I'm not sure if I'm the only one in my race or not, but I know that there is at least one other candidate that has corporate pack money, you know, in their in their um war chest uh and you know, casino money and all that kind of stuff. And I just want to show that we're going into this campaign powered by people and voters. I think that I am by far the candidate that's gotten the most individual contributions, you know, low dollar, under $200 contributions. Um I don't know if that's the case. I haven't you know studied everybody, yeah, but I'm proud. I'm proud every time I get a $5 contribution, every time I get a $10 contribution, every time I get a $50 contribution. Because I know that for the people who gave those contributions, that's super meaningful.
SPEAKER_01Yes, it is.
SPEAKER_00Uh so um we are not taking corporate PAC money at all.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Final question. Um it is uh I I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that democracy's under siege. We've got false claims of rigged elections, we had a literal insurrection in the place where you want to go work. Um all sorts of civil rights are being stripped away. In state legislatures, elected representatives are being expelled or denied the right to speak. Political violence is happening, capital is sort of a hot mess, the chance uh Donald Trump could get be the nominee and may get elected again. Um it's getting harder for a lot of folks, even someone like me, to have hope that we're gonna be able to salvage things and turn things around. Um whether you're talking to a frustrated voter or you're talking to your nine-year-old daughter and her friends, uh, where do you see and find hope that we can salvage this country and move it in the right direction?
SPEAKER_00It is a very troubling time. I do think that our institutions are strong, but of course they're only as strong as those who enforce our laws like the Supreme Court. That's the that's the piece that has me the most worried is I see an activist court that's not enforcing and interpreting our constitution and our laws the way that I believe they should be. And not just that, we have a Supreme Court where clearly we have corrupt individuals. Uh and you know, there's no excuse for that. None. Those people should be held to the absolute highest standards. Um, I believe that we need to really find a way to comprehensively push back on the misinformation and conspiracy theories that we see rampant across the country. I think that that's a much bigger threat than people are acknowledging. Um, the threat of deep fakes, of misinformation, it's made people not trust anything, and it makes also allows for just out and out conspiracy theories, many of which have anti-Semitic and racist roots to take hold. We need to treat people with empathy, and I'll I'll give this now. I'm gonna criticize my own party. I think it's really easy to talk down to people that are in the throes even of misinformation. As much as it's tempting, because you say, how could you possibly believe that? Uh, you know, you must be stupid, you must be uneducated. It's not gonna get us anywhere. Because when you dismiss people like that, you just push them further to the other side and further into extremism. We have to understand that there are people who live in parts of the country where they're not fed anything except a steady diet of MAGA. That's what they're given them through Fox News, through their own electeds, through every single mouthpiece that they have access to. And we know that Twitter also will self-select and only give people more and more extreme versions of what they think they want. So if we can, we need to find a way to counter that and bring people back to talking to each other in a real way and not in a way that is meant to undermine each other. And I think that you know, some of this is being done deliberately, and some of it is just the media loves to just get people mad. So if we can find a way to tone things down, maybe we can have conversations again.
SPEAKER_01So we can still can we still leave uh the country a better place for our kids than the way we've got it.
SPEAKER_00Well, I think we have to. It's not a question of can we? We have to try. Otherwise, there's no point in any of this. And that's why I'm giving up my seat. Yep. I'm the only one in the race who's given who's got skin in the game. You know, anyone else in the everyone else in this race is either in the middle of a term where they just keep serving, or they're turned out and kind of looking to have a have a landing somewhere. I'm willing to walk away from you know years left in the legislature because I'm that determined to go and try to turn this around. I lie awake at night thinking about this stuff, like I think you do, Mike.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00I worry about this country and I worry about my daughter all the time. And I'll I'll be damned if I'm just gonna sit on the sidelines and let somebody else try to solve it.
SPEAKER_01Amen. Uh that's a great ending. Is there anything else you want to say?
SPEAKER_00Well, I really appreciate you and doing this podcast and inviting me here. I've always uh admired your work and you've been a great partner. So thanks for inviting me, and it's great to see you.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much. This has been great. This has been a fantastic discussion. I really appreciate you joining me. Assembly Woman Laura Friedman, thank you for joining me on What's Next Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.
SPEAKER_01And that does it for this episode of What's Next Los Angeles. My thanks to Laura Friedman for joining me. My thanks to you for listening, and my thanks to Brian Holmes for editing and producing this podcast. Please don't forget, follow or subscribe to this podcast on whatever service you listen to podcasts on. And if you have ideas or suggestions or feedback, just shoot me an email at what's nextlosangeless at gmail.com. That is all for this episode. Until next time, peace and take good care.