YouSaid · the spoken record

Eric Garcetti

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80
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2017-12-07
most recent
2017-12-07
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1
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  1. “Quality of life comes down to kind of opportunities and great public spaces. There's a caricature of LA that we live these solitary lives in our cars and never see one another.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Washington can't stop us from buying electric cars or changing our building codes or creating a hundred percent green electricity in the utility that we control. We kind of are building America and local communities, not vice versa. And there might have been a day in the 60s and 70s, I told President Obama this when I was elected mayor. He convened the class of 2013 at the White House. And there in the Roosevelt room for a couple hours, he went city by city through asking us what we needed. And he asked me to start. And I said, in the 60s and 70s, people were leaving and fleeing cities. And they came to Washington so that Washington could help save America's cities. I think it's vice versa right now. It's the cities of America that will help save Washington.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Absolutely She's very patient and loving. But it's an amazing experience because, you know, if you don't fix that thing, you will have to suffer through it. If you don't pave that pothole, you'll drive over it. If there's not a park in your neighborhood to play at, you can't take at your daughter anywhere. But if you do do those things, you actually see the benefit. It's a very immediate and visceral thing. Secondly, I think cities have tremendous levers of power. And when people right now are feeling so disenfranchised because of Washington, I always say, why are you seating all the power that you have? Don't cede the power you have before you try to exercise it. And the port of LA brings in forty three percent of the goods that come into America. That's something under our local control.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “On the accountability side, you're absolutely right. People will find you at the grocery store, they'll talk to you at the diner, while you're taking a walk, they'll say, excuse me, and I know you're with your family, but you're never off the job.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Long before now, and everybody's saying, Oh, now cities are so much more important and mayors are important. With all due respect, I think that's always been the case. I mean, the third largest economy in the world now is Los Angeles. I mean, you can count GDPs, but nations are the accidents of history and war and conquest. States in the United States are kind of arbitrary lines, but cities are organic since the old ancient Athens city-state. That's where people move to because they want to. And by that measure, Tokyo is the biggest economy in the world. New York is second, and LA is now the third largest economy in the world. 18 million souls. It's the number one port in America, airport in America. It's this huge political and economic organism. And to me, that's not brand new. I think that's always been since the beginning of history.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “more than Washington, DC does, and this nation has always been a collection of local communities inward to DC, not vice versa. And so I got a pair of shoes, took them off only at night, walked holes through them, knocked on more doors, and got in a runoff and surprised myself and others and got elected in 2001.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “But I love the experience because when somebody suggested to me, I realized what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she was writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She said, after all, where do human rights begin? I'm paraphrasing, not in distant places, faraway lands, but in places so small they're not found on any human map. The places we work, the places we live, the places we study and worship. And I realize that all the things I wanted to do to make a better world, if I didn't have roots to a single block and a single street and neighborhood, that didn't really matter for much. And I think so many young people come to me wanting to get involved in politics. They're like, should I go to DC and interns on Capitol Hill? I always say no. Find a community that needs you. There's no shortage of applications for internships. But in some community, in your local community or wherever you want to put your roots down, there are people who need you.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, interestingly enough, my dad ran six months or seven months before me for re-election and got tossed out two to one by the voters of LA County. So it wasn't the kind of familiar name. I've heard of that guy. Is that that DA?”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Well, I think you're right. I mean, when somebody said you've done international development, human rights work, and you taught international relations, what are you doing running for city council? My first response was, always, have you looked at LA? It is, you know, the district I was seeking to run for had little Armenia in it. It had historic Filipino town. It had Thai town. You know, it was on the border of Chinatown. It was probably 50% Latino from multiple countries. It really was a United Nations. But secondly, I think when somebody suggested it to me, and I was the underdog, I was running against somebody who had served as the councilman in that seat before and almost become mayor, a sitting state legislator. I mean, it was a stacked field that I probably was. You did have a good police.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “We've never had more of an ability to reach out and to widen our communications, and we've never had more of an ability to tune people out and narrow it. It's kind of one of the ironies of this moment that I can literally be talking to anybody around the world via FaceTime and engage with somebody in a much more immediate way than ever before. And at the same time, if I don't want to listen to anybody but the people who share the exact same opinions as me over and over again, I can close off the world.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And have resonance with people. Our challenge is to get back to what America has always been striving for, which is a more inclusive version of that. But we had a presidential candidate who literally started his first speech telling us who the enemy was in ethnic terms, Mexicans who are rapists and murderers. Some of them might be okay, he said. And that's literally the seed that he planted. At the beginning his first speech as a Mexican American like I couldn't believe myself. I mean, it was, I know, you know, the judges and district attorneys and mayors and doctors and business people and living in Los Angeles, like it was something so foreign to me, my family's experience. But he wasn't wrong that people need identity. They need belonging. We need each other. But how we define our family is going to be critical in these insecure times. People not just here but around the world will reach for that.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “No, and I think history shows that this happens usually when things are very unsettled. Sometimes that's economically. You look between the two wars in Germany or something and when there was inflation and a great depression. But even now in times of economic plenty, it's still an unsettling time. Technology is changing. The nature of jobs, the insecurity about those things that used to root us. And so that's the moment when ethnic ideas.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “To be an opponent at that time of the war instead of saying, I don't believe in America, it was the opposite. We believe so deeply in America, let's heal it. And I think that that's missing from our conversation. How will we heal our identity and belonging in this nation?”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, we see, I think, at the national level, one thing that our president gets, which is universals, people do yearn for identity. They want an emotional connection. I think what we're sold, though, is a very perverse identity that is an exclusionary one. But we can't just talk to people simply about economics and jobs and policies. We actually have to create a sense of belonging again and a sense of Americanism. There's an exhibition at the Whitney Museum right now, and I saw somebody on Instagram had an anti-war poster from the 60s that had a torn American flag, and then it had a thread stitching it back together saying, heal America.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Bosnian Muslims and Serbs had intermarried, but for years, but there are leaders, some of them who wanted to create these sanitized histories, said, no, we've always hated each other and we have to kill everybody who's Muslim or kill everybody who's Croat or kill everybody who served. And it taught me the lesson that we think ethnicities can be linked to very ancient things, but they're more often than not manipulated by political leaders. And I never imagined the times we're living through now how resonant that would be. But true history is much more complicated. We as a human family have always innerbred, traveled the world, mixed with one another. We don't have these purified races of human beings or even ethnic groups. And here in America, we know that most because we don't have an ethnic nation. We have a civic nation that is encompassed white and black and Latino and native and Asian folks for hundreds of years. And I think it's important for us to”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Exactly. And the thing that probably convinced me most to do this is I was in Oxford in nineteen ninety three, President Clinton had just been sworn in. He came to visit us in Oxford and I remember he greeted us. I was lucky enough to be a Rhodes scholar like he was and at a place called Rhodes House he came to introduce himself to all of us. And I knew I wouldn't have half a second to say hi. So I wrote him a letter the night before saying, please intervene in the Balkans and help the Bosnians out who are being victims of genocide at the time. Wrote on this long letter, the reasons why. It's kind of naive looking back on it. I said, you know, stop Serbia, help us do something for these people. And I realized that ethnicity is usually this thing that is used by political leaders to oftentimes turn us against one another. That if you look at the history of the Balkans, Croats and”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Well, you know, I was in England. I had spent time in high school in Ethiopia, in the northern part of Ethiopia between the two famines in a medical relief mission trying to help women and children who had been left behind. And I planted a seed in my head that I wanted to go back to Northeast Africa at the time in Burma working with these ethnic minorities, some of who had been promised their own countries by the British in colonial times and had been fighting 50 years for independence or for autonomy really I think led me that pathway as well as my own background where I've, like I said, kind of navigated culture very fluidly since I was born. It's part of living in LA. It's part of being an American I think and part of just my own back family.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I think I've learned through life never make too much of a hero of anybody. Everybody's full of flaws, and I think that Aung San Suu Kyi, unfortunately, for the Burmans, who are the ethnic majority, there's always a tortured history with some of the folks who are ethnic minorities. The Burmans themselves lay claim to plenty of oppression over the years and to British rule and under the Japanese, but unfortunately there's sometimes been a lot of overreach where these ethnic minorities are completely forgotten or even worse atrocities with rape, with murder, with burning down of villages, is not unique to the Rohingya. And it does sadden me that somebody who won the Nobel Peace Prize and somebody who we had as such a hero hasn't been able to stop that.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Absolutely we had Rohingya who we were working in the jungle four days journey from Bangkok over the border into Burma. It was called the Liberated Areas and there was a shadow capital on a lot of the students and ethnic minorities like the Rohingya and other groups like the Karen and other ethnic groups had fled to the jungle after the government had cracked down and shot and killed so many pro-democracy students and others to see now what's happening inside a new and a newly resurgent Burma against the Rohingya is absolutely heartbreaking. I still have connections back to that country.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Not really. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, which is everybody's seen it on TV. It's literally where the Brady Bunch was filmed in Sino Little League, right in the middle of things. It was very kind of middle class everywhere, anywhere existence. We had the GM car factory that shut down when I was growing up. We had people who had factory jobs and who'd lost them. And I learned kind of growing up in LA this limitless potential because LA is this place where anything's possible. But it was also a place that reflected kind of Middle America on the coast of California. But no, I thought I would do something maybe in music.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “In the state had grown up with violence in the household, and he really wanted to do something about it. And it taught me never miss an opportunity in the midst of even all the chaos that was that case.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I was. I mean, before that, I think a lot of people think I grew up with politics. I didn't. My father had been active in Eugene McCarthy's campaign out here with my mom, but he was just a line deputy district attorney, a prosecutor. I grew up, nobody knew the name Garcetti. My mom worked in philanthropic worlds here, investing in the city. And so it wasn't until I graduated from college that my dad ran and won for district attorney. By then, I was studying abroad in England. And so I was away for a lot of that, but I came back, helped him run his reelection campaign in 1996, and was really proud of seeing the things that he did to highlight domestic violence. I think when he saw the OJ trial and OJ being on trial come up, he said, this is a moment to raise awareness about something. He grew up in a home where there was some domestic violence. He knew that 100% of the people on death row.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Whatever it would take to make the decision or not speak out and keep them. And so he took out a full page ad in The New York Times that said, President Johnson as your tailor, don't run for re-election. Please get out of Vietnam. And my wife and I will contribute, I think, $10,000 to your retirement. And I grew up kind of learning you speak up and speak out for what you believe in.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “And when Jack Valeni was tapped by President Johnson after Kennedy was assassinated to go to D.C., he said, I know a guy out in LA who makes a great suit. And my grandfather became tailored to the present United States, to President Johnson. And that would be a nice story. It would end right there. But it goes further. He was opposed to the Vietnam War, and he had to make a decision when Johnson was considering running again in 68 whether to speak out and lose his most important client.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “There is a piano in here. I try to, it's my escape, but when I have five minutes between a meeting. But he was in the depression, no opportunities to become a pianist, so he became a tailor like his father and named a clothing company after his dad called Lewis Roth Suits. And they made suits right here in LA, a union company, one of the first Jack Valenti was one of his customers, and”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So, in the beginning of 20th century, what's interesting is my great grandfather who was born in Poland was a tailor here in LA on the east side of town. His son then followed him, Harry Roth, who dreamed of being a piano player, something that I think has been passed down to me.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Because see, they grew up in a small mining town called Superior, and she has every brother and sister in the world grew up there and they came when she was in high school to LA. So really that side of the family is Mexican of Italian, Irish, Spanish, and Indian blood. My mom is Jewish, and her grandparents and parents who were born here, they were all of Polish, Russian, Ukrainian descent. So I kind of navigated borders growing up.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Fled Ireland because he didn't want to be a priest, married a nice Mexican American girl in Arizona, Juanita Baines, my great-grandmother, her great-great-grandmother, and yeah, the rest is history. My father's parents both spoke Spanish as a first language. My grandfather was born in Mexico. I guess you'd call him a dreamer, even though they didn't use that term back then. But when he was one-year-old, my great-grandfather died in the Mexican Revolution. Rumor has that he was a judge who was hanged, and his wife, his widow, picked up my grandfather in her arms and crossed the border, as we see echoed today, fearing for her life, wanting to make sure her son survived. They went through Texas and came to LA. He married my grandmother, who was second generation already, Mexican-American, one of 18 children to the same two parents from Mexico. So basically every Latino in Arizona is my cousin.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “You know what's interesting? I actually have some Irish in me, too. I knew Bane. I knew you were going to pull that on. No, no, no. My great-great-grandfather.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I'm kind of an average Angelino in many ways and only in America kind of guy, your average Mexican-American Jewish Italian. Who I think everybody, because of my last name figure, is I'm 100% Italian American. So, my question is.”

    2017-12-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 199 - Eric Garcetti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source