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No more memorials, please
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This is really more drama than I want to see on my daily news. Theaters are struggling to create art and, like schools, are being denied funds and someone OK'd the expense of $1.4 million to this theatrical extravaganza called a Michael Jackson memorial?
This was a party, a wake, that the City of Los Angeles paid for that Los Angeles taxpayers weren't especially invited to go. There was no preference given to city taxpayers. No vote. According to the AP article:
AEG Live, the owner-operator of Staples Center, has not committed any money to the Jackson memorial, which it organized and promoted. Company spokesman Michael Roth did not return messages on Wednesday.
If you or I planned a party and needed to shut down freeway off ramps and have security, then you bet we'd have to file permits and pay the bills for that and clean up. Jackson may go on the records for helping pull the financially troubled Los Angeles under as well as the state of California.
That's something Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, could add to her resolution. Why wave the resolution for Michael Jackson on a stage in California when you represent Texas? You can barely muster support (Rep. Diane Watson, D-California is the only co-sponsor) and the black caucus members aren't interested. I'm with Nancy Pelosi because there's already some fallout and more may come when the monetary reality hits Los Angeles.
Let's have no more memorials unless the people who want the celeb remembered cough up the money first. It doesn't matter what charitable acts that person has done. Charity starts at home and this is a sorry way to teach fiscal responsibility.
To be clear, I'm not blaming Michael Jackson for what the Staples Center did and what city officials allowed to happen. He did not ask the city to spend that money. That was a plan formulated by people who are living, some of them in Los Angeles.
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