Working Class

'Working Class' Where: CMT When: 8 p.m. Friday Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

In a city still reeling from a shooting rampage that killed six and severely injured a congresswoman, contrasting giveaways are being proposed for a handful of its working-class neighborhoods. One would dole out free shotguns to poor adults. Another would hand out free school supplies to needy children. Talk of the gun giveaway has divided residents in the Tucson neighborhoods of Midvale Park, Pueblo Gardens and the Grant-Campbell area. These communities now find themselves thrust in the middle of a nationwide conversation about gun ownership after they were singled out by a fellow Tucson resident as high-crime neighborhoods that he believed could benefit from free firearms.

When President Reagan fired the air controllers early in his first term he sent a message loud and clear to the greedy corporate world that the time was ripe to come down hard and heavy on the working class. The policies of the Reagan Administration are fast proving that all the old cliches about the Republican Party are true. Growing numbers of people believe that the Republican Party is the enemy of the working class and seeks power to protect the wealth of the greedy. The issue of national defense will not carry another Republican to the White House.

The mixed verdicts on the six former Bell City Council members might not have offered the clean sweep many residents had hoped for, but they nevertheless served as a welcome confirmation of what everyone already believed to be true: Appalling wrongs were done to the people of Bell. Officials who were supposed to be public servants in the working-class community took too much of the taxpayers' hard-earned money for themselves and nearly ruined the city in the process. It's true that the defendants were acquitted on some charges, and there is still a possibility that all six might be able to avoid prison.

When I read "Dividend Tax Cut Effect Mixed" (Dec. 29), it struck me that the Republicans have really done it. If you have to work for a living, you may see a small increase in the size of your paycheck. But if you don't have to work for your income, such as receiving dividends, the Republicans make sure that your tax rate is greatly reduced. Masse Bloomfield Canoga Park Business welcomes your letters. Write to Letters to the Business Editor, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012; e-mail: bizletters@latimes .com.

What Scott Howard-Cooper failed to point out in his article on soccer was that youth soccer in America is a suburban movement, whereas elsewhere in the world the players are from the working class. I believe that American soccer players will never be able to compete with Europeans and Latin Americans until soccer in America becomes a working-class movement, and Americans forsake the college draft in favor of the apprentice system common in Europe and Latin America. STEVEN KARLIN Los Angeles

Iam outraged at the few meager inches you give to the working class and unions. And Harry Bernstein's Labor column has now been cut back to every other week. I was told that you did it to cut costs. This is where you have to cut costs--in the paltry few inches devoted to what is the major part of your reading public? The only source where we can learn about the union's side in a strike? Furthermore, why is news about working-class problems in the Business section to begin with?

"Bouncers" was his baby. "Shakers" is theirs. The former was John Godber's electric, award-winning paean to working-class machismo in an English nightclub. (It ran for months at the Tiffany Theater in 1986 and 1987.) The latter, by Godber and Jane Thornton, both from Britain, is a cheeky, fast-paced romp with four waitresses in a London pub. It opened at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in March and runs through Sunday.

What residents of Los Angeles face is a local expression of an economic crisis that is engulfing economies from Germany to Japan, from Mexico to Zaire--it is the crisis of the capitalist system worldwide. It is only in a world framework that we can begin to understand the causes of the problems we face and forge a way forward. There are no local solutions to the ravages of an international system in decline.

Nothing so astonishes us--the professional middle class--as a visible working class. To the media (both news and entertainment), to most urban and suburban professionals, workers are like wallpaper: always around us, seldom noticed. When they do emerge from the background, we are amazed: Where did they come from? Were they there all along?

It's amazing, and depressing, when political compromise functions only to throw obstacles in the way of ideas that bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people. Today's example: the long, tortuous road to bringing more retirement security to working-class Californians. In September, the state launched a plan to enable these workers to put aside about 3% of their wages a year for retirement. As enacted by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, the program's goals would be modest indeed.

Testimony in the corruption trial of six former Bell leaders came to a bickering end Friday with a former councilman defending the city's huge salaries as a way to attract Latinos and a prosecutor sarcastically asking him whether he also felt a need for a chauffeur to get around the small, working-class town. Since the trial opened - nearly three years after the city began imploding under the weight of a corruption scandal - the defendants justified their nearly six-figure salaries as fair pay for long hours or as a payday forced upon them by a fearsome administrator.

Yesenia Rojas, vibrant in her purple shawl, sang with a voice so powerful it rose above the rest of the procession as they shuffled down the damp Anaheim sidewalk. " Era mexicana. Era mexicana, " they sang with a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe hoisted high, candlelight and street lamps illuminating their way. " Madrecita de los mexicanos. " The singsong serenade lauds the patroness, the mother of all Mexicans. On this drizzly evening, Rojas led the group down Anna Drive, where she and her family have made their home.

The sign at the northeast corner of 1st and San Pedro streets in downtown Los Angeles is deceiving. The pink and blue neon advertises a real estate agency, but swing open the glass door and you'll encounter a tribute to a bygone era. "Heirloom" is a fitting title for the year-old shop at the edge of L.A.'s Little Tokyo. The boutique deals in vintage Americana (so rare it's displayed on the walls like museum pieces), as well as retro re-creations. There are 80-year-old Stetson hats, complete with original boxes, and a university sweater from Princeton; vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycle boots and modern reproductions of military-issue flak jackets.

If Los Angeles City Council members vote Tuesday to place a sales tax hike on next year's ballot, they will have delivered a major victory to the real estate industry. The city's top budget official spent six months laying the groundwork for a March ballot measure that would have increased the tax on real estate sales, saying it would provide much needed revenue to a city in crisis. But two weeks ago, City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana abruptly changed course, working with council President Herb Wesson to abandon the real estate measure and push instead for a tax on retail sales, one that would generate twice as much money but also hit working-class Angelenos harder.

The sleepy Boston suburb that Mitt Romney has called home for much of his adult life has much to offer a family. It features excellent schools, big homes, and so little excitement that a local newspaper once called it the most boring town in the region. But there's a division in Belmont too, that may, or may not, have been present as far back as when the painter Winslow Homer built a summer home here in the 1850s. It's a divide between the rich and everyone else. Before he sold his house and moved into a condo, Romney and his family lived on Belmont Hill, where the residences are large and the yards spacious.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, saying he and other Communists are "guilty before the working class" for their errors in leadership, vowed immediate efforts Thursday to alleviate the country's worsening food crisis. In a wide-ranging speech to a citywide conference of Moscow Communists, Gorbachev, who is also the party's general secretary, said his country, as in World War II, is again in a life-or-death situation.

Three new books provide disturbing insights into how American workers have fared at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. They go far in explaining why, during a long period of American economic hegemony, the real income of the average worker has remained essentially stagnant, while the share of the rich in national wealth has increased to a point at which it can provide satisfaction only for believers in the economic benefits of greed.

BEIJING - Forced evictions of poor and working-class people from their homes and property are accelerating in China, leading to violent disturbances and deaths, a report released Thursday by Amnesty International asserts. The human rights group said it had collected reports on more than 40 cases from January 2009 to January 2012 in which people resisting relocation by local governments had set themselves on fire, a sharp rise from previous years. Forced evictions are a well-documented issue in China.

They're one of the most sought-after voting blocs, prevalent in swing states such as Ohio, but if today's job numbers are any indication, working-class voters could still be very much up for grabs in this election. That's because as the country's economy slowly improves, more people who traditionally work in manufacturing, logistics, or other professions that don't require a college degree are increasingly dropping out of the labor force and giving up looking for work. There were 11.7 million workers with less than a high school diploma in the labor force last September - now there are just 11.2 million, indicating that 500,000 people with less than a high school diploma have given up looking for jobs in a tough economy.