CALIFORNIA CRIMINAL DEFENSE

We are living a historical moment, an unprecedented case in our recent democracy. Thanks to the massive support provided by all the citizens, we have been able to transform our anger into hope, and this hope will help us change all the things that upset us. To fulfill this object, we shall not lag behind strength or courage, nor behind the energy need to make true this common project.



We must not allow the strength already gained by this civil movement to be belittled by foreign and spurious elements. To prevent this from happening, we propose the following twelve concrete measures; they shall lead us –while we make them happen— to the plural and just democracy that we have set our hearts to obtain. Such democracy should fulfill the following aims:



To guarantee that the principles of justice, freedom, equality and pluralism are truly and effectively respected.

To make sure that the revenues and economic privileges enjoyed by those who hold a public office are significantly diminished, and that permanent banning from such offices (and the impossibility of their being reelected) is applied to those who have been found guilty by justice.

To put forward a thorough reform of the election law, whereby proportional representation shall be guaranteed; whereby no political force nor social demand shall be discriminated; whereby the effective inclusion of minority parties shall put an end to the dictatorship of two parties; whereby, finally, the 5% barrier impeding numerous groups representation shall be pull down.

To insist and improve the mechanisms (such as holding a referendum) allowing the people to exert direct democracy in relation to decisions involving important socio-economic concerns. Likewise, devices enabling legislation through popular initiative must be simplified.

To hold, on a compulsory basis, state, regional and local budgets to popular consultation.

To supervise the separation of powers through a system of checks and balances (or through its revision whenever such system is already functioning), in order to guarantee the total independence of the judiciary.

To ensure that services such as the management of energy resources, communication networks, food supplies, transport and the banking system (all of which satisfy needs of vital importance for the well-being of the people) are granted the status of “goods of public usefulness”. In accordance, private monopolies and oligarchies in the provision of such goods shall be precluded.

To grant the right to labor, to holding a worthy and stable employment. No labor force adjustment plans shall be applied whenever a firm ears benefits. Every member of society has the right to enjoy the social and public services that are vital to make a life worth living.

To implement the civil mechanisms whereby corruption in public office can be prevented and punished adequately. Conditions should be provided for, so that an effective civil control of the economic activities carried out by public officials can be exercised, as well as for the implementation of a set of incompatibilities to disable such officials to exercise simultaneously public and private activities, and benefit from both.

To enforce a progressive tax regulation, and to impose on an international scale a single tax on immense fortunes, as well as on finance transactions. Obviously, tax havens must be dissolved worldwide.

To provide for the people’s strict control and supervision of banking entities and their practices, especially of the latter’s abusive conditions imposed on credit concessions and house mortgages.

For these measures to become true and transform reality accordingly, we press for the calling of a Constituent Assembly, as the only proper means to assure that these measures acquire force of law.



The latter are no set of definitive measures, however, hence they are subject to revision. They are but the prompt response delivered from someone who had never made proposals, but have been challenged to do so.

Those who have systematically ignored their own commitments even while the ink still lay fresh in their political programs, now are challenging us to present our own political programs, and stand by them. So be it.

Those who never shared their power or their influence with us, nor helped us intervene in the taking of decisions, now demand from us transparency in our debates, and open participation.

Those who owe millions and millions, and keep them in their credit accounts, demand ideas from us who live in the open, under plastic tents and cardboard boxes, among deprivation and unemployment, under a mountain of debts and mortgages.

The reason why they need our ideas and proposals is because they are no longer in power, because the power is now among us. It is being held between all of us.

They need ideas as vampires, blood.?They need certainties and need them fast, for their time is coming to an end while it is starting for us. Time is on our side

Million Dollar Theater (Los Angeles)
Historical Background
1918, Joseph Mora. 307 S. Broadway
The Million Dollar Theater stands at the southwest corner of Fourth and Broadway as a living monument to the economic and social changes that have occurred in downtown since 1918. A marquee, extending out from the building over the sidewalk, announces that the ground floor was designed as a movie theater. Rising above the theater are twelve stories of what originally were office suites. When viewing the building from the west, you can see "Metropolitan Water District" painted in a soft brown band just below the roof line. This sign proclaims not what is here, but memorializes what was here. Instead of offices of the Metropolitan Water District, the visitor will now find apartments, and instead of a movie theater, the visitor will find an auditorium that was previously used as a church.
Homer Laughlin formed the Stability Company to construct the complex, and invited Sid Grauman to develop and operate the theater. The theater was initially called the "Grauman's Theater"(1) but it opened as the Million Dollar Theater with the premiere of "The Silent Man" on February 1, 1918. The new name epitomized the glamour and romance of Hollywood and the extravagant ostentatious wealth that had already become associated with the movie industry. A year after opening the theater, Grauman introduced "prologues" to the bill, which were live stage presentations "designed to enhance the film that would follow."(2) These nationally acclaimed productions continued until sound movies came in during the late 1920s. Grauman later acquired other theaters on Broadway before opening his two best known theaters, the Egyptian and Chinese, in Hollywood. Grauman began a tradition at the landmark Chinese Theater and left a world-famous attraction by preserving for posterity the footprints and handprints of Hollywood's greatest stars in cement.

By the 1960s, the Million Dollar Theater reflected the changing ethnic composition of Broadway shoppers by including Spanish language movies and showcasing live Mexican performers in the program. This period of the theater's rich history is preserved in the sidewalk, where plaques identifying Mexican entertainers who performed during the 1960s through the 1980s are embedded. Large movie theaters have always been expensive to operate and the Million Dollar was no exception. After struggling to keep the theater open, the owner, Bruce Crown, finally closed it in the 1990s. The auditorium was used by the Universal Church until 1998.(3)

The office building's history is separate from the theater. Originally, it housed offices of the Edison Company and the municipal water department (the predecessor of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power) and its head, William Mulholland, whose office was located on the top floor. With the departure of banks and law firms from Broadway and Spring Street, the suites in the office tower were abandoned, except for an occasional use as a setting for a movie. In the 1990s, as part of the redevelopment of the entire building, the vacant offices were converted into apartments. Though movies came to Broadway in 1910 when Clune's Broadway (528 S. Broadway) opened as a nickelodeon, it was the opening of the Pantages and the Orpheum (later renamed the Palace) as the region's premiere vaudeville houses, that anchored the city's theater district on the street. Vaudeville matinees and family oriented programs appealed to women who arrived by trolley to shop in the large department stores and specialty clothing shops that lined Broadway from Fourth to Eighth.(4) The Million Dollar Theater, as the first movie palace in Los Angeles, symbolized the respectability movies had acquired in the middle class.(5) Beginning in New York with the Roxy in 1915, movie palaces were richly decorated theaters that quickly became an important part of the movie going experience as seeing the movie itself. When the nation-wide construction boom of movie palaces ended with the Great Depression and changing consumer tastes, Broadway had the largest concentration of movie palaces in the world. The two buildings making up the Million Dollar Theater--the 2345 seat theater designed by William L. Woollett and the twelve story tower designed by Albert C. Martin--are wrapped in a lush Churriqeuresque facade expressing faith, hope and fantasy. Integrated into this architecture is a band of eight statues framed by niches in the third story. These statues (six facing Broadway and two overlooking Third Street) capture the sensuality and exoticism associated with the film industry. Dancers, writers, actors, musicians, technicians and artists are portrayed in Egyptian, South Sea, Renaissance and medieval costumes as symbols of the talents, technology and specialization that had evolved by 1917 in the movie industry. A Wild West theme, perhaps expressing the interest in