EDUCATION POLITICS-Every week for the last five years I have been contacted by what seems to be a never ending parade of targeted senior teachers. These are the professionals that are at the top of the salary scale who make up 93% of teachers being charged and subsequently removed from their careers at LAUSD.

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW--A Los Angeles neighborhood grassroots matching funds program may have opened the door to a second candidate landing in hot water. LA City Council Member Nury Martinez is under Federal investigation in connection with her 2015 reelection efforts.

RETIREMENT POLITICS--More than seven million people—over one-fifth of California’s population—work without a path to retirement. They have neither a 401(k) — the so-called “roller-coaster plan” tied to the stock market — nor a traditional pension that was once considered a worker’s right and which is now a rare species outside of government employment or the public education system.

BUSINESS WATCH--Recently, when my firm, Spectrum Location Solutions, completed a study that found about ten thousand companies left California in the last eight years, it hardly surprised leaders in the business community. 

REVITALIZATION POLITICS--In the early 13th century, a wealthy merchant’s son knelt before a crucifix in a small, crumbling chapel near Assisi, a village in Italy, and received a message from the Lord: “Go, Francis, and repair my house, which as you see is falling into ruin.”

INSIDER VIEW--After Target tried to construct a patently illegal store at the corner of Sunset and Western in Hollywood, the courts ordered Target to stop construction. 

Upset that it could not build a 75 foot store in a zone which limited the height to 35 feet, Target decided to continue the legal fight while changing the law so that its illegal building would be legal.