"Friendly Fire: 'LA politics, it's all relative(s)'"A lot of the Mayor's relatives and friends (and their relatives) are moving up in the political goings-on, locally. The Mayor works to support them and I imagine it is expected to work both ways. Villaraigosa just saw his cousin John Perez elected to the state Assembly in June, as reported in the L.A. WEEKLY article,
Lilia Esther Garcia was appointed to the East Area Planning Commission today. The board is responsible for planning decisions in Silver Lake, Echo Park, Boyle Heights and northeast Los Angeles.
The appointment means nothing to many until you realize she's the the sister of Monica Garcia, the rather unremarkable president of the LAUSD board of education and one of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's special hand-picked board members. She was also the former aide to Councilman Jose Huizar when he was the president of the LAUSD school board, who was the anointed replacement when Villaraigosa left the 14th council district for the mayor job. It's just like a big happy family here in Los Angeles politics. http://www.insidesocal.com/friendlyfire/2008/03/la-politics-its-all-relatives.html
"Villaraigosa's Mini-Me, John Perez" by LA Weekly , June 4, 2008 10:41 AM
"Who needs voters? The fix was in on the Eastside last night" By Max Taves. For the uninitiated, this is just the way politics works, friends and relatives added into the picture as you might see from another paragraph in this same article:
This is just a sample of the idea that "There are no coincidences," when it comes to politics. We could make a family tree if you laid out all the friends and relations, especially prevalent with Latinos, when applied to political offices.This isn’t the first time the mayor has made certain his family got into
power positions. For the past two years, Perez has been Villaraigosa's appointee
to the city's Community Redevelopment Agency. More recently, Villaraigosa’s
sister, Mary Lou Villar, was tapped to be a Superior Court judge in L.A. County
by the mayor’s sometime-political friend Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
There was a triva game, "The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" that showed how this was a small world and that any actor could be linked to Kevin Bacon in no more than six links; like "he worked with (somebody) who was in a movie directed by (director) who was a director of Kevin Bacon in (a movie)." This is even more pronounced in Latino circles. And just think, there was a time when only Ed Roybal was the Mexican-Americans' singular political representative in city and then higher level politics. Have we come a long way or what (at least in terms of representation, because ethics and forthrightness are in a league of their own for the modern day politicians)?
It's like the old charts of bands that traced artists as they moved from one band to another in their rise to fame, seeing their origins, like Eric Clapton playing with Cream, and then on to Derek and the Dominoes and solo. A lot of other rising stars could be traced who moved up after working together with other artists, also moving up. But here, its all politicians, and they really are not at all entertaining or pleasing. Maybe just "tolerable" is the best that we can expect.
Monica Garcia will be celebrating a victory early. It would be nice if the LAUSD had something to celebrate.
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