Tag: Mayor Garbageciti

The Trump Re-Election Campaign in Los Angeles.

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On foot to LA Fitness on Sepulveda this morning, I passed Wendy’s near Erwin. 

It was about 7:30 AM, and the restaurant wasn’t opened yet. There were no cars in the takeout lane. 

But there, in the alley, sitting along the curb, across from the takeout window, was an old woman squatting and peeing. Her urine came out and ran down towards the sidewalk. I just kept walking.

Later on, after the gym, she was asleep on the bus bench.

A temporary home.

There are no adequate words to describe the degradation and humiliation that public defecation brings to both the perpetrator and the witness.

Her normal biological action did not rank up there with the tens of thousands who live in group tents, in trash camps, along sidewalks, under bridges, within public parks in the City of Angels on Hiatus.

Just one of many living in the filth and neglect of our city.

But this is reality in LA and in so many other cities like Seattle, Portland and San Francisco that once thought such acts unthinkable. All these cities hate Trump. And all these cities call themselves sanctuaries.

A sanctuary to me is a holy place, a reverent place, a place kept scrupulously clean because people worship there and respect the ideals that make a place a sanctuary from all the evils of life, all the injustices. Inside a sanctuary there is quiet, and calm and peace and you go there to pray and find solace. There are churches, there are mosques, there are synagogues, there are temples, there are parks and courtyards that are sanctuaries all over the world.

What kind of sanctuary is present day Los Angeles?

We don’t have a single public park un-desecrated by trash, shopping baskets, sleeping drunks, tents. Perhaps 30% of the bus stops are makeshift homeless homes, pushing out legitimate bus riders who wait on their feet in the blistering sun.

Woodley Park, 2018.
  • Bus Bench: Sepulveda at Victory.

We have a hapless and synthetic mayor, Mr. Garbageciti, whose public pronouncements are so ineffective that they carry the weight of a meme.

In every car and in every kitchen across Los Angeles people of every political persuasion are asking: how can this be happening?

As hated as Trump is in this state, with every illegality and breakdown of law and order, ordinary liberal minded and tolerant people in California are moving away from the Democratic Party ideals of understanding, empathy, government regulation or government program, and hankering for a strong man or woman who will take drastic, emergency and militant steps to stop the disease of allowing people to live and do everything publicly they should be doing privately. 

The surprise that awaits liberals in 2020 is that anyone should be surprised when Trump is re-elected. .

Some Upcoming Ballot Initiatives

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Here is a rundown of some upcoming ballot initiatives Los Angeles voters will decide in 2020.

Red Light Running: Inconvenient but let’s not shame red light runners.

MEASURE RLR

In recent years there has been an epidemic of red light running in Los Angeles. 

To understand the problem, which is not solvable by law enforcement or red light shaming, a $6 million study was conducted by the California Therapists Union (CTU) to try and understand the emotional reasons behind running red lights.

A shocking 88% of red light running drivers were found by CTU to have personal worries. Some were stressed at work, others were unemployed, many were anxious about historical events and current debt. Family problems including abandonment by parents and helicopter parenting were also cited.

A new ballot measure, which will tax red citrus fruits with a 1% per pound fee, will help pay for a new 100 person therapy unit of the LAPD to meet with drivers who found, through no fault of their own, that they drove through red lights. $40 million is expected to be raised by the tax.

Mayor Garcetti and the CTU both strongly support this.

A Treeless Pacoima Home, through no fault of its owners.

MEASURE TREE EE

It is no secret that there is a great inequality between citizens in the amount of trees on private property. In one area of Sherman Oaks, wealthy homeowners have, on average, 18 trees, even with only one or two residents on a property. In a more just and fair nation this arboreal injustice would be intolerable!

In Pacoima, many homes have one or two trees and their front lawns are covered in asphalt. And one tree sometimes must often work overtime, day and night, to shade 8-16 people living in a house. It is unfair, that simply because of wealth, some homes are more shaded than others.

Measure TREE EE will tax each tree $100 on properties over $1,200,000 in value, to go into a general fund that will finance whatever the city needs from social services to street art.

Silent Meow No More!

MEASURE LGBTPET

Queer pets, including dogs, cats, and goldfish have been widely ignored until now, after a $10 million dollar Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation study found high rates of depression and early death in pets whose sexuality was unacknowledged by humans and other animals.

Depressed gay cats, for example, are often seen alone, on window sills, sleeping on sofas, hiding from their owners, and exhibiting symptoms of repressed anger, hissing and clawing. Yet socializing these cats, with other cats of their declawed gender, showed promising improvements.

Gay or bi-sexual goldfish, shockingly, suffer most from sexuality issues, and many live less than five years in an environment of drowning purposelessness and tabletop ennui.

A Life With Purpose Thanks to LGBTPET.

A $2.00 a gallon tax on orange soda will help pay for 100, on call psychiatric veterinarians to visit homes of distressed animals. LGBTPET will raise some $75 million and help support all mental health programs for non-human Angelenos.

A Once Neat City.

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Looking from Wall Street between 8th and 9th Streets. “Japanese and Negro District”

The California Historical Society has a fine website with old photographs of Los Angeles. The Anton Wagner Collection is especially notable for its images of our city in the 1930s.

The Great Depression was in full swing and Los Angeles was a place where people also struggled to make a living, even though photographs show new buildings, apartments, public works, farms and industries. It seems everyone was working and the city was thriving despite hard times.

One thing that stands out is the spectacularly tidy streets with swept sidewalks, clean curbs, and not one sign of shopping carts filled with garbage or mountains of trash.

  • Mouth of Santa Monica Canyon, looking northeast, early 1930s.
  • Looking north from Palmer Drive
  • E 11th and Crocker

This was during the most severe economic downturn in American history, yet Los Angeles functioned as a functioning city, where the presentation of tidiness, order, and cleanliness was foremost.

There were many poor, destitute people in the 1930s. But Los Angeles did not create a dystopian city where people shit in the streets, or lived along the road, or slept on bus benches, or roamed mentally ill in parking lots, or set up tents on residential streets for outdoor trash camping.

There were not two-story high trash piles that authorities promised to remove in three months time.

Cheap structures on Eagle Rock Boulevard, looking east from north of York Boulevard

There was a crisis and it was called the Great Depression, but government and people, here in this city, were not seized in panic and unable to respond or knocked over by circumstances.

They ran the city well, with pride, and these photographs of ordinary life in the City of Angels, 85 years ago, should fill our modern, jaded hearts with shame for what we have allowed Los Angeles to become under Mayor Garbageciti.

  • Wilshire Bl.
  • Drive-in market, northeast corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Hamilton Drive

I Don’t Care About Your Identity….

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Woodley Park.

May 13, 2019

Someone recently was very excited because there is a new slate of young, female, diverse people who are running for the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council. She is one of the contestants and wanted some input on what I thought about the VNNC.

I rolled my eyes. Nothing good has ever, ever come out of the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council, and if you don’t believe me, take a walk up Van Nuys Boulevard today and see the boarded up shops, the homeless, the filth and the neglect.

Maybe I should expand that to the office of Nury Martinez, a city councilwoman who has been in that job for some five years and has presided over the further decline and frightening expansion of homelessness that plagues our city and our district in particular.

Often young aspirants seeking election will roll out first, those labels which they think matter. You are queer, you are a woman, you came from Honduras. And you are under 30. That last designation is the most important because you have “fresh ideas”, ideas which only those people born after 1989 have thought of.  And you care, you really care about this community because you are queer, you are woman and you came from Honduras.

And you are also against: exploitation, triggering, cruelty, bigotry, and policies that discriminate against homelessness, against the undocumented, and against those who have been convicted of crimes and are unjustly punished.

Fine. All fine. All open for debate, though you may not ever agree to debate these issues because you are right and I should know you are right.

But I have one thing to say to you, candidate for political office: I don’t care about your identity.

I know you are angry because growing up you wanted role models and when you looked on TV or in the movies you were given maids and gang-bangers instead of entrepreneurs and philosophers. Pity. You didn’t model yourself after Marsha Brady or Samantha Stephens so you went into a tailspin.

Your identity is your fortress, your crowing achievement, because, after all, you’ve worked hard to acquire that DNA.

But running on a platform of DNA, gender, or preference labels doesn’t stop crime, bad schools, illegal dumping, trash camping, random violence.

Woodley Park.
3/5/18 Bessemer at Cedros.
3/5/18 Bessemer at Cedros.

The Cuban-American dad who lives with his daughter near Burbank and Kester takes his Sunday morning off to ride bikes with his daughter through a trash-filled bike path along the Orange Line. Does he care if the representative who neglects this park is Latina? No, he cares if the park is clean and safe.

The Guatemalan born, American history professor who takes the bus from Van Nuys to teach at CSUN stands at a bus shelter where a homeless person has placed six shopping carts and has made a home there for three months.

The lesbian mom from Mexico who lives on Vanowen with three school age children still has to drive them from her bad school district to a better one five miles away and she helps, unwittingly, to contribute to traffic and school segregation. Would it matter if she were Irish-American, born in Indianapolis and married to a man?  

Illegally parked cars on Victory during rush hour.
Empty, weed-filled parking lot within walking distance of mass transit and downtown VN.
Homeless.

The broadcasting of identities is like a theater of the absurd because it presents a chimera, an illusion of a person who comes into the public realm advertising her external labels instead of presenting her internal ideas.

I’m reminded me of Jussie Smollet’s words after creating his hoax, he used his “gay, black” identities to hide the true nature of his fabrications. By trotting out the ingredients on his label he sought the mantle of believability and righteousness. But the content of his true character remains.

I don’t care about your identity. I care about facts, about telling the truth, about pursuing equal justice under the law. And that applies to aspirants for political office as well.

The two little boys, Diego, 5, and Eddie, 7, who live on Delano, whose grandparents emigrated from El Salvador, cannot ride their bikes down to Bessemer, two blocks away, because 20 homeless people, some drug addicts, some mentally ill, live on the street there. 

If Diego and Eddie were named Diego and Eddie Moskowitz and they couldn’t ride their bikes in their own neighborhood would their ethnic identities matter more?

Bus Bench: Sepulveda at Victory.
Sepulveda Bl.
Along Sepulveda at LA Fitness.

I don’t care about your identity.  Nury Martinez has a great duo of identities: female and Latina and really, truly, what does that matter for the well-being of Van Nuys?

Being a Latina, doesn’t make you a more effective thinker, leader, community organizer any more than being a Canadian from Haiti does.

Your identity won’t bring in new investment, it won’t appeal to developers, it won’t clean up the streets, it won’t lessen traffic, it won’t purify the air, it won’t make food healthier. 

Van Nuys needs a dose of old fashioned law and order and political and police muscle to let the law-abiding citizens of this district know that we will not fall apart and disintegrate into factions of identities who then will be unable to come together to work as a community to fight our common problems. 

Van Nuys 2030?
Van Nuys 2030?
Small Homes, Not Homelessness.
Small Homes, Not Homelessness.
Japan
Japan

Van Nuys: Vigorous Valley Hub 12/13/1959

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It was “230 square miles encircled by mountains and roofed by a blue sky.”

Its 800,000 residents were more populous than Boston or San Francisco and its land size equaled the city of Chicago.

It was famous for “its distinctive way of life” a “perpetual exhibit of Modern Suburbia at its brightest and biggest. Valley people live outdoors with patios, swimming pools and gardens all year through. They wear sports clothes and drive sports cars.”

Vigorous Valley Hub, Page 2

So exclaimed the Los Angeles Times on December 13, 1959 in breathless prose accompanied by an aerial illustration of the Valley Municipal Building surrounded by open parking lots and flat topped office buildings floating in a sea of spaciousness.

And Valley industries were tops, in the forefront of electronic, missile and space age developments. PhDs were hired by the thousands, and the Van Nuys Chamber of Commerce sponsored more than 239 courses for upgrading personnel including 60 UCLA classes taught right here in the San Fernando Valley.

The Air Force and the US Government loved the spaciousness of the valley and its highly educated workforce and spent over 1/3 of ballistic missile budget dollars here.

90% of all filmed television was produced at such studios as Warner Brothers, and Disney in Burbank; Universal in Universal City and Republic Studios in Studio City.

And to make sure the success, the glittering, shining, prosperous times continued, efficient government services were necessary. 

In 1959, a $7 million dollar streamlining of the Valley Administrative Center in Van Nuys, described as “second only to the Civic Center in downtown Los Angeles” began a sweeping, and comprehensive remodeling of the area by bulldozing hundreds of old bungalows and opening up a vast pedestrian mall which would one day be a glorious assemblage of courthouses, government offices, a new library, a new police station, and parking for tens of thousands of cars.

_________________________________

If the luminaries, the citizens, the people of Van Nuys in 1959, could have only looked 60 years into the future, they would have been stunned by the enormous progress our town has made, truly a model of technological, architectural, social, cultural, and aesthetic achievement.

Today, a walk down Van Nuys Boulevard between Oxnard and Vanowen is fun, safe, entertaining, clean, delightful, a veritable model of city planning with great restaurants, wonderfully restored old buildings, friendly shops, and spotless sidewalks.

Councilwoman Nury “No Human Trafficking” Martinez keeps everyone on their toes, and should the police even hear of one intoxicated person nearby, they are immediately apprehended and taken into custody.

Our schools are wonderful, ranked first in the world, with the highest paid teachers in North America, and schoolchildren getting healthy exercise walking and biking to nearby classrooms. All students in Van Nuys are required to live near school so roads are not jammed with parents driving students to other districts.

Recent statistics show that only 1% of all children are obese; and diabetes, obesity, mental illness, marijuana and drug addictions are almost unknown in this healthiest of districts.

Mayor Airwick Garbageciti is adamant in keeping Van Nuys clean, lawfully prohibiting anyone from sleeping, camping, tenting, RVing on public property. Nobody disagrees because after all the public taxpayer pays for public property and expects it to be kept in tip-top condition.

Laws are faithfully obeyed, and drivers always obey speed limits, stop for red lights.  And illegal dumping, a scourge of the third world, is never seen here. 

A new law proposed by the City Council and supported by Mayor Garbageciti will require RHP (Registered Homeless Person) identity cards which will monitor people to make sure they report to 40 hour a week jobs cleaning parks and mowing lawns and working for $10 an hour to assist elderly residents who need house painting and yard maintenance. 

We, in 2019, are rightly grateful for what our ancestors built here, and we vow to keep it as perfect as it is for many years to come.

Blight Around the Block

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It would be wonderful, as some readers advocate, to report on more happy local events, such as smiling families, freshly painted houses, award winning rose gardens and the best pho in Van Nuys. I could spread joy talking about the opening of a new Hawaiian BBQ on Sepulveda across from LA Fitness. Maybe there is a new car wash to praise.

But the urgent business of blight calls me to blog.

We live in a unique time in Los Angeles, one that features a continuing garbage festival of debris that comes, like an incurable virus, upon our neighborhoods, and stays for weeks and months, maybe even years, a homeless caravan of disorder which our city council, our mayor and other elected officials are powerless to stop.

Reader Wendy Hernandez-Zepeda lives near the Big Lots store on Wynadotte St. and Sepulveda Blvd. and she sent me some photos of the shopping carts, the garbage, and the illegal dumping that blights her neighborhood.

“Hi there! Can you help? We have been dealing with this for more than a year,” she wrote.

She sent me these ugly photographs, ugly not because she is a bad photographer, but ugly for what they contain, and the degree to which they depict how our city has fallen under Mayor Garcetti (“Garbageciti”), a smiling hologram of political correctness, who seems to be visiting another city and another country every month of the year, and regularly trots out his 23 and Me diversity by claiming to be made of the same genetic ingredients as the five top ethnic voting blocks in Los Angeles.

I told Ms. Hernandez-Zepeda to report this to that app, My LA 311, and she explained that she has, but nothing has been done to correct the garbage festival on her community sidewalk.

My take on the homeless issue is that tolerance of it creates more of it.

When you allow, by law, using public sidewalks and public parks and public ways for the unlawful and unsanitary life of vagrancy, you send a message, broadcast around the world, to come to Los Angeles and camp out.

How is it that the lawless make the laws and the law abiding must accept that? There is not one valid or moral or medical excuse for human beings sleeping in alleys, on bus benches, and wandering the streets pushing shopping baskets.

Yes, it’s painfully true that housing is expensive, but it does not explain why the city of Los Angeles and the State of California have not jumped into emergency mode and created sanitary, safe, abundant housing for people who are temporarily displaced.

What we have, instead, is weak and pathetic leadership which panders to disorder, decay and barbarism, and refuses to use all power to end this continuing monstrosity of un-civilization going on all around Los Angeles.

There is nothing I can tell Ms. Hernandez-Zepeda other than voting for someone who is not Eric Garcetti in the next election.