It’s time to rebuild our communities and burn down the LA28 Olympics
As Los Angeles continues to smolder and local communities scramble to perform triage, LA officials are showing their incompetence and true inability to meet the moment.
Like the proposed LA 2028 Olympics, these fires are intersectional catastrophes that will affect us all — tenants, workers, the unhoused, students, every institution and public entity in the region.
Let’s flash back to 2017, when former mayor Eric Garcetti and LA City Council rubber-stamped the 2028 Olympic bid:
Los Angeles’ decision to lock in an Olympic Games to far-off 2028 was praised by city leaders Monday as a deal that offers hundreds of millions of dollars in future benefits. But the longest wait time for any Olympics in the U.S. also comes with the risks of the unknown.
“It’s a big chunk of time,” noted Jules Boykoff, a Pacific University professor who has written widely on the Olympics. “You just don’t know what’s going to come. The world presents surprises.”
History teaches that the economy swings up and down, sometimes with disastrous results. Political scientists foresee an era of continuing upheaval and unrest. Geologists say an inevitable big earthquake in quake-prone Southern California could damage venues envisioned as part of the Games.
Mayor Eric Garcetti shrugged off a question about the uncertainty.
“Los Angeles is resilient,” said the youthful-looking mayor, who will be granddad age, chasing 60, by the time of the Games.
“If the entire earth falls apart, probably the Olympics aren’t happening in Los Angeles. But short of that, we are going to have a great Games here in LA,” the mayor told reporters.
Think about that now, as we’re deep in the cut of a natural disaster.
In 2025, Olympic boosters like disgraced sex pest Casey Wasserman are still trying to claim LA is “Los Angeles is defined by its resilience and determination.” But consider that the LA28 Olympics — which by all we can glean — is still uninsured.
After all, who would bond such a mess, especially now? It was already an absurd financial liability. Meanwhile, LA is becoming an increasingly uninsurable place to live, before and definitely after the smoke clears.
We shouldn’t need an actual disaster to gain the clarity to prevent another one, but here we are.
Let’s take a quick look at how LA’s chief elected is managing the current crises.
The fires started two weeks ago, as 71year-old Karen Bass was in Ghana — specifically, when she was at a cocktail party. LA, of course, has a vibrant history of mayors spending a great deal of time (our time) on other continents while theoretically holding office in an American city.
During Bass’s trek back to LA, she was confronted by a reporter in a clip that has since been viewed a few million times.
Reporter: “Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning?”
Bass: [no reply]
“Do you regret cutting the fire department budget by millions of dollars, Madame Mayor?”
Bass: [no reply]
“Have you nothing to say today?”
Bass: [no reply]
This is clearly a mayor who is frozen in the headlights of cascading disasters. Speechless. Clueless. Completely cooked.
Since her short-circuiting, Bass has decided to actually speak publicly. Still, she’s done little to imbue any public confidence.
There’s a dead-eyed void that has since roiled all sides of the political and class spectrum. Perhaps there is no perfect response to any disaster, but her performances smack of someone who just did their homework five minutes before class started.
Compare these appearances with Mayor Bass’s 2024 State of the City Address, where she acknowledges how unprepared she and municipal agencies are for hosting the 2028 Olympics.
On paper, she may look credentialed at first glance. So can anyone. She’s also positioned herself as a progressive of some sort. Again, so can anyone. But if you dig into what she has done (or not done) as a legislator and as a mayor, the wins are pretty marginal.You could argue she’s achieved more in upholding a broken, punitive system than in advancing the needs of working class people.
In the wake of the 1992 uprising, Bass came to prominence via her work with Community Coalition (“CoCo”), a 501(c)(3) in South LA of debatable influence. Coco and Bass’s priorities were, above all, to going after liquor licenses and working-class Angelenos as the city rebuilt and redeveloped.
Instead of challenging or trying to reform LA police, Bass partnered with them to crackdown on drinking and visible poverty:
“Bass herself explicitly championed punitive efforts by the LAPD, praising, for example, what was described as a “police crackdown” on loitering and public drinking in late 1992. Such an alliance was not merely a fleeting tactic in the immediate aftermath of the riots: in 1996, she participated in a press conference with the LAPD to celebrate another “liquor crackdown” that had resulted in the arrests of nearly two hundred people in South Central in its first six months.”
In reality, this septuagenarian decision maker has no experience running organizations of any real size or scope. She’s led 30 people, at best. And she demonstrates little understanding of how the city works.
Bass’s flagship project, Inside Safe, has proven to be a data-juking rebooting of previous failed attempts to clear street homelessness, while doing little to house people.
With a total absence of leadership, plan and insurance — not to mention the current and impending disasters – it’s clear the LA Olympics must be canceled. This is a region that was already enduring a host of crises: resources, housing, environmental, policing.
The fires just help underscore the improbability and inherent dangers of hosting mega events, while forging a new front for resource battles.
Last Friday, Bass installed Steve Soboroff as LA’s new “Chief Recovery Officer.”
This is the same Steve Soboroff who was LA Police Commissioner. The same Steve Soboroff who was the architect of gentrifying downtown, which led to $1B in public subsidies for hotel developers. The same Steve Soboroff who has given plentifully to the LA Police Foundation.
None of these communications or political decisions inspire any confidence in Bass’s political instincts, or LA’s chances of rebuilding in any sort of equitable fashion.
What LA needs above all is to
- Cancel the Olympics
- Build public housing and cut out the rest of this bullshit
- Support good union jobs to rebuild LA
Any resources diverted to other planned disasters like the Olympics will only result in the compounding of what we’re feeling now.
While we witness the erasure of much of LA’s past and present, let’s also not erase our future.