By Charles Andrews
CAREER ADVICE FOR EMERGING STUDENTS
If you have been paying attention to what has been going on for the last 10 years in DC, state capitols, the courts, media, here and around the globe, you will be well positioned and sought after to write the history of these Alice in Blunderland times. And that will be volumes and volumes and volumes. A career! And as an expert, you will be invited to speak at universities, global conferences, and on whatever media the future comes up with. You lived through it! You are a living witness, not just a scholar. Do a little research (which may be tricky, with all the books burned and media meddled with) to fill in the details, and you emerge an expert on our most consequential era of history since the Civil War.
Or, the poor schlub in the darkest, dankest prison cell. Could go either way. We are spending billions of our tax dollars on a sprawling network of concentration camps, all across the US. But I’m betting on the exceptional American people, their laws and Constitution. And their willingness to revolt when their leaders are in the wrong and not responding to reason. It happened once, against all odds. There’s some history that needs to repeat itself.
WHICH BRINGS ME TO THIS WEEK’S PRIMARY ELECTIONS
Trust me, I will get to LA, CA, and especially SM/Santa Monica as soon as I can. There’s just so much, you know? Some might even call it chaos. Chaos as a strategy, for distraction. Intentional chaos is always hiding something, something pretty bad.
When I saw the votes for Pratt, a reality TV clown, were only four points behind Mayor Bass, qualifying him for the runoff in the fall, and eight points ahead of the one I wanted but knew had no chance (genuinely) progressive LA City Council member Nithya Raman, my heart sank. These fools have learned nothing from this horrible Trump decade we have endured? They want another ranting red-faced TV celebrity, who figured out that if he yelled about the fires he might be able to win. But he has no idea how to govern the nation’s second-largest city. It’s like sending in someone who flunked out in 5th grade to teach a university literature class.
OK, honestly, I’m getting to Santa Monica, but do you know where this nonsense started? In the modern era, with George W., a simple man who did not have a passport when he was elected, and had to be told the Pope (a world leader of more than a billion people, and a head of state) is not addressed as “Your Excellency.” A small thing? Not if you are going to play with the big boys, and girls. Bush was a bumpkin with an Ivy League degree, so uninformed that he let those who knew what they were doing get us entangled in Middle East wars that screwed up everything, and we are still paying the price. I always hated hearing a voter say, “he’s the kind of guy I could go down to the corner bar and have a beer with.” Great! Do that! But don’t put him in the White House. Or our governor’s mansion, or wherever the mayor lives. We used to elect people based on their qualifications.
SO IS THAT OUR PROBLEM IN SANTA MONICA?
No. We have volunteer Council members (bad idea) and a mayor they choose, so there is not enough money in that way, or fanfare, to attract the pretty/angry boy/girl types who crave a big screen (like Pratt, and Donald J.). But SM real estate is like gold, and there has been plenty of mining activity for years. Our airport, set to close in a couple years, is a big hunk o’contention. Making it a Great Park would be marvey, but we don’t have the money that would cost. Without letting developers go nuts there. The last estimate I heard of the RE value of that land, by closing time, is close to $4,000,000,000.
For the better part of 40 years, Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR) has called the shots in our city government. Only one candidate, and recently one slate of three, ever got elected to Council without SMRR’s blessing. Their grip has loosened some and now Santa Monica Forward, with bulging bags of developer money available, is a formidable force. Unite Here Local 11, the union of hotel and hospitality workers, 32,000 strong, based in LA, has been key in getting what they want from power brokers because they can offer so much manpower for mailing, telephone calls, door-to-door. And you wonder why we keep getting the elected “leaders” we have in SM?
We residents have never been organized, while “the machine” has people working every day, on salary. We need a People’s PAC here, to elevate candidates who will represent residents’ concerns, not outside money interests. We don’t have that yet, but we do have people in various groups working to organize for the right kind of candidates.
THERE WILL BE MANY ISSUES EMERGE
Between now and election day. It will be confusing, because it is a hallmark of SM politics to do things in back rooms, without letting those pesky residents weigh in. A recent example is when residents found out about a plan to house homeless drug addicts and the mentally unbalanced in two buildings on Ocean Avenue, ostensibly to get them off the streets, but seemingly without sufficient services, or or precautions restricting them from wandering the streets of that neighborhood willy-nilly. Residents became angry again when it was revealed that Mayor Caroline Torosis knew about the plans but said nothing to her constituents.
Here’s one you are bound to hear about, if you haven’t already: AB (Assembly Bill) 1740. This one’s a doozy, an example of corruption getting more bold and open (sound like anyone in the White House to you?). It’s quite hard to follow on the twisted path it has taken, but Dan Jansenson, a Mirror columnist as one of the SM.a.r.t (Santa Monica Architects for A Responsible Tomorrow) group, took it on, and it took him three weeks’ columns to march through it, including his part 3 today that explains the changes that have taken place. (Once people opened the back room door to shed some light.) I have no doubt these changes, radical, would never have happened without public awareness.
Our Assembly member Rick Zbur, up for re-election, seems to have been a prime mover for this bill, as evidenced by some emails back and forth from his staff to city staff, who for their own reasons were fine with pushing it along. City Council member Dan Hall went to Sacramento to lobby for the bill. He did not say he represented Council, but he also did not insist clearly that he was there only as a private citizen. Some of us were pretty stunned at such dramatic public support, for a bill many consider very harmful to Santa Monica, and which did not get public input, by Dan Hall or any of the Council.
So read Jansenson’s three prt on this, and you will understand a lot of what is going on. In a nutshell, 1740 would have removed authority from the Coastal Commission, and it would have been much easier to build high-rise, market-rate (NO affordable housing component) on our beach. And, this bill would apply ONLY to Santa Monica.
Much more to come. Stay tuned. Stay SM.a.r.t.
Charles Andrews has lived in Santa Monica for 40 years and wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world. Really. Send love and/or rebuke to him at therealmrmusic@gmail.com
