Supreme Court rules cities can sue big banks over discriminatory lending practices, why truck accidents are on the rise in SoCal, new music on Tuesday Reviewsday.
Cities can sue banks for predatory mortgage lending: Here's what that means for you
The housing market collapsed in back in 2008, and many families here in Southern California saw their own homes collapse with it.
They were drowning because of risky mortgages peddled to them by some banks.
But just yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities like L.A. can go ahead and sue banks for the damage they did.
"They have to show that there was some sort of fraud," says Richard Green, director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate. "And they need to show that neighborhoods were hurt because of the prevalence these practices."
There's a high bar to prove that connection, but if a city succeeds then the settlement could help with the public coffers, debt relief for people who took out the loans or more.
Listen to the full interview by clicking the blue audio player above.
Wrongful convictions: new report shows numbers continue to grow
It's been a good run for a special project at L.A.'s Loyola Law School.
Their Project for the Innocent Program has successful secured the freedom for three wrongfully convicted men over the past few months. For more on that story, click here.
But there are a number of groups doing similar work across the country and they're convinced there are lots of people sitting behind bars who shouldn't be there.
Now, there's some new data about the number of inmates who may have been wrongfully convicted. It’s a new report from a group called The National Registry of Exonerations.
Once again, KPCC’s Frank Stoltze has been reviewing it and he's joined A Martinez for more.
Exonerations vs. wrongfully convicted?
"We hear both terms a lot in this discussion of innocence, they're essentially the same. They refer to someone who didn't get a fair trial and should not have been convicted. Bad evidence, bad lawyers. They're not always found factually innocent by a judge. They usually are if the local prosecutor supports that if they find for instance the real perpetrator. But sometimes, they're not found innocent, they've just gotten a bad trial and ordered released from prison."
How many exonerations were there last year?
"Well, 2016 set another record for exonerations in the U.S., 166. There were 160 the year before. In total, the registry has recorded 1,994 known exonerations since 1989, so almost 2000 people. But the rates have been rapidly increasing since 2011, the annual number of exonerations has more than doubled. On average each week, three people are exonerated of crimes they spent time for. Geographically, Texas has the most: 58. Illinois: 16, New York: 14, California: nine."
How do wrongful convictions even happen?
"What folks at Loyola tell me and prosecutors when they say that there are any number of them, tell me. It's a lot of times eyewitness identification. People either get the ID wrong, we know that cross racial identifications are difficult often. But sometimes they're sort of nudged to pick someone during the line up process. Police, detectives will say, 'what about that guy over there? That guy A Martinez looks like he's probably the one that did it.' They won't be quite so obvious, and there's a lot less of that nowadays, but that does happen..."
To listen to the full segment, click the blue play button above.
Big rigs, big risks: As SoCal economy improves, truck traffic is rising and so are crashes
No bones about it: Bray-Ali's uncloseted skeletons unlikely to help his campaign
The 2016 election taught us a lot about how voters think.
For example, there were several times during the Trump campaign when analysts said that he'd gone too far — that things he'd said or did would turn voters off.
But today, much to the surprise of those analysts, we call him "President Trump."
Keeping that in mind, behold the curious case of Joe Bray-Ali, an LA City Council candidate who seemed to have the wind at his back until last week when his internet history came back to haunt him.
But Bray-Ali was quick to respond to the controversy, flinging open his closet doors, and proceeding to toss his skeletons pell-mell in front of voters.
Bray-Ali is set to face off against incumbent Gil Cedillo for his spot at the helm of District 1, which includes cities like Highland Park, Echo Park, and Mt. Washington.
Cedillo is widely seen as the establishment politician, making Bray-Ali's venture into the race intriguing for many. The LA Times even endorsed him. But Bray-Ali would go on to lose that endorsement late last week. He now faces calls to drop out of the race.
But the candidate's late decision to go public with his shortcomings raises an important question:
In the age of the "outsider" candidate, will voters look past Bray-Ali's faults?
The short answer is probably not, says USC associate professor of political science Christian Grose.
"I doubt it. It has raised his profile. It may raise his profile for other things beyond the City Council race, but for this specific City Council race I think it hurts him and helps Cedillo," Grose says.
Press the blue play button above to hear the full interview.
UC Berkeley students create class to combat terrorism
Last July, two UC Berkeley students were killed while traveling overseas. One in the terrorist attack in Nice, France and another in an attack in Bangladesh.
Their deaths shocked students across the campus, including two friends of the victims, who were in Nice as well when the incident happened.
"We didn't know exactly what happened until a couple hours later when we saw it on news reports," said UC Berkeley student, Anjali Banerjee. She didn't know that her friend, Nicolas Leslie was killed in the attack until three days had gone by. Getting details on what had happened was not easy.
"We felt just like our hands were tied and we didn't have any agency in the situation. There was just nowhere we could go for help. It was scary to see what happens to a city and how everything shuts down after an attack like that."
After Nice, Tyler Heintz became more interested in creating more tools to keep track of terrorists. He partnered with Banerjee and fellow student Alice Ma to create a class that would help him do that. It's made up of mostly engineering Heintz and Banerjee's fellow engineering students. The class is split up into teams to work on specific areas.
"The theme for this semester is that help analysts in DC gather information and solve problems in the illicit finance space," Heintz said.
"For example, one team ... built a tool that allowed analysts to see networks of charity as sort of charities are often used as a front for disguising funding for illicit organizations."
The team also built online tools that help track flight histories to determine where terrorists might be traveling. Heintz says that they are conscious of the risks that come with making that sort of information public
"We made a very intentional effort to make these tools open source," Heintz said. "So we're not going to be deciding who is going to be using them and for what cause. We want to stay out of that argument. But we want to create tools that make information more freely available."
To hear the full conversation, click the blue player above.
Tuesday Reviewsday: Oumou Sangaré, Aldous Harding and more
It's time for Tuesday Reviewsday, our weekly new music segment. This week music journalist Steve Hochman joins A Martinez with a list of new songs.
Here are his picks:
Oumou Sangaré
Album: “Mogoya”
“Look at me,” sings Oumou Sangaré in her native Malian language Wassoulou. “I did not kill myself over pain.”
It’s not a survivor’s boast, or a cry for pity, or even a confessional. The song, “Yere Faga (Suicide),” is a deeply heartfelt plea to her fellow Malians, suffering greatly under oppression and strife, to persevere, if not for themselves then for their families and communities. “Your children love you, don’t kill yourself over any kind of pain,” she sings, addressing her many appeals to various people by name. “Why would you kill yourself and leave us in deep sorrow?”
She takes the role both of example and leader, recounting the gossip and lies that have followed her throughout a long, notable career as one of Mali’s music stars, accusations of drug use, of pornography, of other allegations of transgressions she says were false. “But Oumou did not take her own life.”
It’s a powerful statement from a respected icon (she has her own model of SUVs sold in Mali and serves as an ambassador for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization), an artist known for the power marking her music since a landmark 1990 debut album. “Mogoya” is only her sixth studio album in that span and her first in eight years, a time which has brought much change to her life and dramatic changes in her homeland. As the title, meaning “people today,” indicates, she takes in all that is happening now, with a stern, loving eye befitting her position as something of a maternal figure to many there. “Bena Bena (Ingratitude)” opens the album encouraging people to stay strong in the face of negativity and “Kamelemba (Womaniser)” takes cads to task. But it’s not all negative: several songs honor people of virtue and “Mali Niale (Beautiful Mali)” explores the nation’s attributes as she calls for those who have left to return and renew the land.
But where the lyrics speak directly to Mali’s people, women in particular, there’s also a global reach in the music. The album was made partly in Stockholm with producer Andreas Unge and partly in Paris with the French trio A.l.b.e.r.t., known for work with Air and Beck among others. Tony Allen, the Nigerian drummer who helped shape modern Afrobeat working with Fela Kuti, lends his combo of force and grace on “Yere Faga.” Throughout there is a very effective, distinctive, complementary mix of traditional and modern sounds. “Bena Bena” leans more to the former. “FaDJamou (Family Name)” goes more modern for one of the album’s most dynamic, frenetic songs, but with ancient modes and sounds woven in. And on the yearning title song which closes the album, she addresses what she sees as the insincerities of modern relationships, her powerful voice backed only by ancient, plucked n’goni. Ultimately it’s that, the traditions of many generations, that give the album its depth and strength, in the music and profoundly in her messages.
Aldous Harding
Album: “Party”
Where Oumou Sangaré pleads with peers to preserve their own lives, young New Zealand singer-songwriter Aldous Harding, on the title song of her second gripping album, takes the role of a girl — willingly, if naively — putting herself in peril, both emotional and potentially physical. The tune is somber and sad, the music muted and spare, the words disturbing and distressing. “I was as happy as I’ll ever ever be,” she sings, describing a situation that, to us, is clearly a toxic obsession-depression-dependence cocktail . “I will never break from you.”
Sung with a a tone of youthful, innocent affection, it’s harrowing. There’s the folk tradition of the murder ballad. This, from a young woman’s point of view, feels like the lead-in to an inevitable murder and as such is even more troubled and troubling. On her 2016 debut, “Aldous Harding,” she showed herself expanding on folk traditions of the faded British Empire from her Kiwi outpost. Ballads of obsession and consequential murder are, of course, a big part of that tradition. This, from a young woman’s point of view, feels like the lead-in to an inevitable murder and as such is even more troubled and troubling.
Not that weakness or victimization are Harding’s mode. To the contrary, the dominant tone of “Party” is one of steely resolve, of pain turned to strength, even if often guardedly from inside a hardened shell. And for this, she has in producer John Parish a perfect partner for bringing that side of her art to the fore. Parish made his name in partnership with P.J. Harvey, who has never gone in for much of the reserve of her English heritage, transforming pain to power. This album, recorded on Parish’s turf of Bristol, England, also sees her on the roster of 4AD Records, the English label known for such masterful marshals of deep, dark emotions as Bahaus, Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins.
Bringing that boldness to the more rural Kiwi orientation of Harding proves magical at various turns, at times brash and raw, at others more subdued and inward. Opening song “Blend” has her wispy, with a light-touch electronic track. On “Imagining My Man,” he voice is huskier, rounder, more somber, matched by her finger-picked acoustic guitar. For “I’m So Sorry” she gets even deeper, huskier in tone with the lone, sparely picked guitar joined by a wistful sax line here, a ghostly chorus there.
And then there’s “Horizon,” in which she fashions folk balladry into something personal and new, the way Adele fashions pop balladry into something personal and new. “Horizon” even sounds like it could almost be an Adele song — if Adele let her hurt, bitter tone tighten her throat so that her singing turned into a raw, pained wail. It’s another voice for Harding, literally and figuratively, but it never seems that she’s putting on masks, or merely doing characters.
All of this sounds like her. Which is a little scary, but also, to use a word associated with her namesake Mr. Huxley, brave.
Anat Cohen & Trio Brasileiro
Albums:“Rosa Dos Ventos”
We’ve had our share of despair here, so how about some hope? “Baião da Esperança” — “the dance of hope” — does the trick. It’s the kick-off song of a new album, “Rosa dos Ventos,” by Israeli-born clarinetist Anat Cohen. And yes, the music is Brazilian. Cohen, who moved to New York as a young adult nearly 20 years ago and established herself as one of the most talented and versatile clarinetists in jazz, developed a serious passion for Brazilian music.
“Rosa dos Ventos,” recorded in Brasilia, has her teamed with the Trio Brasileiro — Dudu Maia on the 10-string bandolim (a relative of the mandolin), Douglas Lora on 7-string guitar and Alexandre Lora on percussion — for some lively originals drawing on a variety of styles and showcasing multiple talents. “Baião da Esperança,” written by Douglas Lora, is suitably spirited, while the same composer’s title song is heavier, the four musicians reaching orchestral power at times. And on a few written by Cohen bring in some of the modes and moods rooted in European Jewish music. And “O Ocidente que se Oriente” has, as the title implies, an east-meets-west turn with Indian sounds and scales for something of a Brazilian raga.
This is actually one of two new albums of Brazilian music by Cohen. The other, “Outra Coisa” (fittingly, “Another Thing”), has Cohen duetting with 7-string guitarist Marcello Gonçalves in a session recorded in Rio de Janeiro spotlighting the work of cherished Brazilian composer Moacir Santos. Here, the two of them evoke the full colors of larger ensembles that have explored this material for a delightful, virtuosic collection and a wonderful complement to the Trio Brasileiro set.
A highlight of all this is another very lively tune from the Trio album, “Choro Pesado,” written by Maia and Douglas Lora. It’s a very happy sound, but if you know even a little Portuguese, you might know that, in keeping with most of the other music we’ve explored in this Reviewsday edition, what it portrays is anything but. The translation? “Heavy tears.”