This 'Green Brotha' Going to Chicago

The Los Angeles Times published a timely editorial this week on the disgraceful handling of the mess at Martin Luther King/Harbor Hospital in Watts.

From the Los Angeles Times, Monday, July 7, 2008.
Editorial: Learning From a Death in Brooklyn

On June 19, surveillance cameras in a Brooklyn, N.Y., mental ward captured shocking images of a woman collapsing on the floor and lying there, untended by hospital workers, for an hour. She soon died.

The tape, released last week, touched a nerve in Los Angeles because the incident was reminiscent of the death of Edith Isabel Rodriguez at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital in May 2007. Rodriguez lay on the emergency-room floor as a janitor mopped around her. The description of her suffering, and of the indifference of hospital workers, silenced all but the most recalcitrant defenders of the mismanaged medical center...

I've made copies of the article (along with some others) to distribute when this "Green Brotha" goes to Chicago this weekend.

On Super Tuesday, when Mayor Villaraigosa, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Laura Richardson, and my Congresswoman Diane Watson were all busy campaigning for Hillary, I was elected a Cynthia McKinney delegate to the 2008 Green Party National Convention. When I get there, if anybody shoves an Obama poster in my face babbling about "change" I'll shove this in his face speaking truth about the status-quo in One-Party Democratic Los Angeles.




The Democratic Convention will have rousing speeches by hypocrites bloviating on health care. Michael Moore will be the toast of Denver for his "Sicko" documentary. But L.A. bosses (and their "Amen corner" among liberal intellectuals) won't talk about Edith Rodriguez at King-Harbor in Watts, Linda Brown at Brotman Medical Center in Culver City, or "Transplants-for-Crooks" at UCLA. They won't talk about patients dumped on skid row, or Dawnelle Keys' daughter dying while bean counters at King and Kaiser Permanente haggled over money, though those stories were featured in Moore's film.

Times investigators have discrovered that even since the sad closing of King/Harbor last summer, almost nothing has been done to discipline the perpetrators of this tragedy.

. . . It is also striking that action against employees in New York was swift. The director of psychiatry, the director of security and the doctor on duty were all fired within 24 hours of Green's death. No one was fired over the Rodriguez incident, and, in fact, a Times review of personnel data shows that hundreds of problem employees who were supposed to be swept out of the county health system remain on the job. Times staff writers Garrett Therolf and Jack Leonard reported that at least 22 workers with significant discipline histories at King still work at the clinics that remain open on the site of the hospital or at other county health facilities. County supervisors claim they had no idea. . .

Cynthia McKinney, all the other Green candidates, and Ralph Nader are speaking truth about the Democrats in Washington - and in Sacramento -- and right here in my town and yours.

Alex Walker
Los Angeles Greens
July 8, 2008