Today I was only going to cover redevelopment and displacement in Echo park and Tijuana, but in the middle of prepping these segments I got a call from my mother who lives in Riverside CA. She told me the city of Riverside, CA was planning to take her house and give it to a developer. So I rushed out there with my camera to capture this story. Across the southland thousands of people are loosing their access to affordable housing. Please get involved in the economic justice movements of our time. If you don't know were to start check out our website at lapoverty.net.

When most people look at homelessness they begin their examination at the final stages of someone's life. Just before that person slips into the street. So the most important structural factors that begin the process of homelessness are lost to all but academia.

Our society is based on competition. So there is always a downward pressure on the housing market. When homeowners loose their homes to redevlepment for example, some of those homeowners will not be able to afford to buy another house. These former homeowners enter the rental market with advantages, like the equity from their last home or a better credit rating, etc. So they push the least competetive renters into the precarously housed, people who pay as high as 60% of their income for housing, or multiple families living in single family homes, converted garages etc. As more people are packed into unstable living situations, someone is eventually forced into the streets.

So I have compiled todays segments in order of this chain of events. First we focus on redevelopment and evictions for homeowners, then renters, and finally a community of last resort. The only problem this show has in highlighting this process, is that most of the folks we follow are fighting back, and sometimes winning.

In the sound byte format of American media, it's impossible to get the true story behind complex political and economic mechanism. And this time limited format advantages political actors who either can't support their rhetoric with analysis, or simply want to avoid debate. Unfortunately, debate is necessarily one sidded, becuase governor swarzenneger doesn't grant many media interviews, and rarely speaks in public for any extended time. Jackie Goldberg on the other hand holds two and three hour forums, open to the public, and she ussually presents more data than one can stand in a sitting.

Organized labor is about to battle itself for the hearts and minds of the American Working class. SEIU the teamsters and the UFCW split off from the AFL-CIO last week. Seven unions have formed the Change to win Coalition. What does the split mean for working families.

Organized labor created the largest section of the US middle class, but now only 1 in 10 workers belong to union. As American labor has declined so has the paycheck for the average worker. Several Unions say they have the answer, and they’re so sure, they’re willing to split the labor movement in half, during the most conservative era since the gilded age.

Over the next hour will wind our way through documentaries, my interviews, excerpts from the AFL-CIO convention recorded by Pacifica and the Workers Independent News Service. I don't know what the split means, I don't know if it will be good or bad, but hopefully over the next hour we can cut away some rhetoric from reality in this seven section look at labor.