This sad story really got me upset today.
Saturday March 19 Costa Mesa City Council members ended a highly charged news conference Friday about the suicide of city maintenance worker Huy Pham by refusing to answer reporters' questions and racing from the City Hall meeting room.
"Is there no one that will speak to the people of Costa Mesa?" yelled one television reporter. "This is a sham," added another.
It was a dramatic climax to a day in which city workers remembered their dead colleague and city officials tried to repair a damaged public image.
The 29-year-old Pham leaped to his death from the roof of City Hall Thursday, the same day he and 213 other city employees were issued layoff notices.
This was an entirely avoidable situation. Our federal government chose to end aid to states, instead giving hefty tax breaks to the top 2%. We made the choice to cut healthcare, pensions, jobs and heating oil assistance for all kinds of people like Huy Pham. Men like him that had nothing to do with creating the economic recession, nothing to do with unbalancing the budget. Yet they are the ones who our representatives chose to pay for the mistakes. And the top 2% who actually did cause the recession, and got richer for it, get richer still.
Republicans are to blame, none of them were interested in aid to states. ALL of them were into tax cuts for billionaires. Budgets are choices and Republicans demanded we make average workers suffer for the Wall Street recession.
City Manager Tom Hatch, in a brief statement, told the news conference the city's focus now is on Pham's family and city employees. The city is setting up a fund with the Costa Mesa Community Foundation to assist Pham's family, Hatch said.
Why did it take his death to realize that we valued him and his family more than money, and more than ideology?
Crossposted to The Progressive Electorate