L.A. Bomba

The call is coming from inside the Hall. Plus, election takes (not about the presidential race), an update on LA's sanctuary ordinance, and the podcast of the year.

One week before Christmas, Mayor Karen Bass issued a press release with the subject: “Statement Regarding City Hall Bomb Threat.” The Mayor’s Office excluded the release from its website’s “Press Room” page, but reporter Meghann Cuniff posted a screengrab of the email.

"The Mayor's Office was notified that the FBI searched the home of Deputy Mayor Brian Williams yesterday as part of an investigation into a bomb threat he allegedly made against City Hall earlier this year.” The Mayor’s Office went on to assure that Williams “was immediately placed on [paid] administrative leave” and that “the Mayor takes this matter very seriously.”

It gets even better. Williams is the Deputy Mayor of Public Safety and oversees the LAPD for Mayor Bass.

People’s City Council organizer Jason Reedy shared a video of Williams at the December 3 swearing-in ceremony of LA’s new “tough-on-crime” District Attorney Nathan Hochman. Williams opened his speech by lauding the historical significance and inspiration he draws from the same building he allegedly threatened to blow up months earlier. (During the ceremony, cops detained Reedy and separated him from his child.)

Why would the Deputy Mayor of Public Safety call in a bomb threat to his workplace? The FBI declined to release information about a potential motive. Maybe Williams was jealous his LAPD buddies got to blow up a neighborhood. Perhaps he just wanted the day off. It looks like he’ll have quite a few of those going forward.

Then again, this is LA City Hall, one of America’s most prolific sources of corruption scandals, and Mayor Bass hasn’t exactly been shy about “locking arms” with corrupt allies. During this year’s primary, Bass endorsed right-wing City Councilmember John Lee for re-election despite Lee actively facing ten charges from the Ethics Commission—not to mention the FBI investigation into Lee, which landed his former boss and predecessor in federal prison. In June, Bass made a public appearance alongside disgraced former LA City Councilmember Mark-Ridley Thomas and Tavis Smiley, who was suspended from PBS for sexual misconduct allegations. With this track record, Williams could be back at work in no time.

Ballot Measure Bust

Elections are about money. Thanks to the hard work of anti-corruption activists, LA City has implemented some measures to balance the campaign finance scales. But if you’re running for office or trying to pass a ballot initiative above the municipal level, you need money. Lots and lots of money.

The criteria to qualify a statewide proposition for the ballot can vary, but the current minimum is 546,651 valid signatures in a six-month window. That’s an extremely difficult feat for anyone who isn’t super rich or a corporate giant. But even if grassroots movements manage to get something decent on the ballot, monied interests pretty much always swoop in with propaganda campaigns and unlimited amounts of cash to kill it. Corporations and PACs spent nearly $400 million on this election’s ten statewide ballot measures. The results are pretty disastrous for renters, people with disabilities, incarcerated people, low-wage workers, and poor people generally.

Get a refresher on these props.

By Election Day, almost every California proposition had amassed an eight-figure spending differential. The largest resulted from the California Apartment Association (the landlord lobby) shelling out well over $100 million to tank rent control expansion.

When the votes were tallied, the biggest spenders were victorious with only two exceptions: Prop 6, which would have codified the abolition of slavery in state prisons, and Prop 32, which would have increased the minimum wage.

It’s easy to explain how greedy industry bought sour outcomes for most of these measures. Frequently, ballot measures are nefariously designed to confuse. Most people don’t know where to read their full text or access critical context about what they’re voting on. Confusing the masses is relatively easy when you have a mountain of cash to burn. It’s next to impossible to overcome a $125 million spend on a ballot measure as was the case with Prop 33.

But money can’t explain the outcomes for Prop 6 or 32, both of which lacked any significant opposition and should have easily passed in bright blue California. Unless of course the Democratic Party has shifted rightward and dragged its base along for the ride.

How California voted vs how LA County voted.

Los Angeles wasn’t immune to this shift. LA County voted within seven points of the statewide results on all ten state props. If just LA County voters decided the outcomes for these ballot measures, the abolition of prison slavery, raising the minimum wage, and lowering the threshold to pass bonds for affordable housing all would have only squeaked out single-digit victories. Expansion of rent control still would have failed by ten points.

LA County Results

The county-wide election most thematically linked to (some of) the state props was the District Attorney’s race. Longtime Republican Nathan Hochman ran on an explicitly pro-criminalization campaign and outraised the fuck out of the incumbent, reformist George Gascón. Hochman’s conservative positions were bolstered by the The National Retail Federation spending tens of millions on lobbying and propaganda campaigns in the years preceding the election. Unfortunately, Gascón essentially decided not to campaign, allowing Hochman to seize a commanding 20-point victory. Without significant resistance, we can expect DA Hochman (emboldened by Prop 36’s landslide victory) to send incarceration rates skyrocketing.

Nearly two million Angelenos voted for Hochman compared to just 1.2 million for Trump. The DA’s race is non-partisan and doesn’t list political affiliation on the ballot, but this means ~800,000 Harris voters in LA (roughly one-third of her supporters) voted for Hochman, a longtime Republican prosecutor. I guess that’s what Democrats trumpeting “tough-on-crime” rhetoric gets us.

Some good news? Public defenders George Turner and Ericka Wiley won their races for Superior Court Judge, a position that’s primarily made up of former prosecutors with a conservative bias.

Measure G, which will expand the LA County Board of Supervisors (the County equivalent of City Council) and create an elected CEO position (the County equivalent of Mayor), claimed a narrow win with nearly 52% of the vote. Measure A, which renews (and doubles) the sales tax that funds homelessness services and housing, passed with 56% of the vote—down double digits from the 69% its predecessor Measure H tallied in 2017.

The week after the election, LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia issued a press release, revealing that LA City only spent half of its $1.3 billion homelessness budget this year. (Measure A is an LA County measure, but a significant portion of its revenue will flow into LA City’s homeless budget.) A large portion of this year’s unspent homelessness budget will “revert back to the Reserve Fund at year-end,” meaning those earmarked funds will likely never be used to help poor people.

LA City Results

LA City had the least bleak—albeit mixed—election results. Ysabel Jurado unseated disgraced racist Kevin de León in CD14. Some self-described progressives celebrated Heather Hutt’s re-election, defeating challenger Grace Yoo in CD10, despite the incumbent’s shit voting record. In CD2, Jillian Burgos over-performed, clearing 46% against establishment opponent Adrin Nazarian despite more than $1 million in PAC money backing him.

Not a single member of City Council’s progressive bloc endorsed Burgos even though their support certainly would have boosted her numbers and potentially pushed her to victory. Controller Kenneth Mejia was the sole City official to endorse and rally support for Burgos against her right-of-center, landlord opponent.

Burgos is a member of and was endrosed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Despite this, City Council’s three DSA members—Nithya Raman, Hugo Soto-Martinez, and Eunisses Hernadez—declined to endorse her. This wasn’t due to policy differences. At best, their icing-out of Burgos was rooted in fear of political retaliation. At worst, it was political cowardice.

In LA, anyone on the left who believes electoral politics is an important avenue for change will tell you the goal is to build the progressive bloc until it reaches at least a simple majority: eight seats. Raman, Soto-Martinez, and Hernandez know that a Burgos win (paired with Ysabel Jurado’s victory) would have boosted their numbers to five or 1/3 of the Council. So why didn’t they back her?

For Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez, the answer is simple enough. Leadership at the LA Federation of Labor endorsed Adrin Nazarian, the establishment candidate. Soto-Martinez has become a lapdog to the LA Fed, whose leadership directly conspired with racist Councilmembers in the LA Fed Tape scandal just two years ago. While Soto-Martinez declined to endorse Nazarian, he certainly would not cross his handlers at the LA Fed and endorse another candidate—even when he knows it would be for the betterment of Los Angeles.

All three progressive Councilmembers were faced with an even stronger deterrent. Nazarian was the former chief of staff and protégé to termed-out Council President Paul Krekorian, whose seat Burgos and Nazarian were vying for. The Council President is a powerful position that can kill legislation or remove Councilmembers from powerful committee assignments. Progressives are incentivized to protect the establishment just like everyone else.

All LA City ballot measures passed with Measure FF (paying millions to transfer cop pensions) performing the most poorly. That means we’ll get some watered-down ethics reforms and more independent redistricting processes for LA City Council and LAUSD. It also means City political appointees are now required to file financial disclosures that help screen for conflicts of interest before they’re confirmed. Or…at least it’s supposed to. The City Attorney has already failed to abide by that particular amendment to the City Charter, which is apparently totally fine due to bureaucratic delays.

On a related note, City Council passed its sanctuary ordinance…with a major asterisk. City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto slipped a report into the council file, stating “the draft ordinance recognizes that, by terms of the Charter, not all City departments would be bound by its prohibitions.” Translation: the City’s top lawyer says the LAPD doesn’t have to adhere to LA’s new sanctuary protections. This is after Feldstein-Soto kept City Council from voting on sanctuary legislation for a year and a half while she just sat on it. Doesn’t seem great that one politician can just block legislation on a whim, but it happens all the time.

Even when organizers manage to work within the system and pass ballot initiatives like Measure HLA, the 2024 primary’s Safe Streets ballot initiative, public officials find a way to sabotage it. Instead of implementing voter-mandated safety enhancements, City officials drastically defunded the street services department, slashing its budget more than any other City department and effectively neutering HLA. 2020’s Measure J, which requires 10% of LA County’s unrestricted budget be invested in social services and alternatives to incarceration, was bastardized in even worse ways.

Even if, years from now, progressives win eight seats on LA City Council, the Mayor could (and likely would) veto any legislation that significantly disrupts the violent status quo. We’ve already seen how Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez abandoned the No New Cop Money Pledge, gutted anti-corruption measures, broke his campaign promise to end encampment sweeps, and betrayed fellow progressives when he voted against an amendment to remove discriminatory zoning that would have allowed expansion of affordable housing. He’s not the only progressive on Council to have betrayed his values, and he won’t be the last.

The bureaucratic system is designed to block progress, and even the “good” politicians readily betray their values. This probably seems real doom and gloom, and I concede that it is—if you believe electoral politics is the primary avenue to solve systemic problems. I do not.

In the fallout of the election, I’m sure you saw plenty of chatter about organizing. If your idea of organizing is limited to volunteering on political campaigns and attending polite protests, let me direct you to this bell hooks quote:

“We’ve not just been colonized in our minds, we’ve been colonized in our imaginations.”

Imagine more for yourself and your neighbors. We do not have to live in a world where tenants pay the majority of their income to landlords. Where we cannot afford decent health care or public education. Where trillions of dollars from our budget fund police, prisons, militarism, and the mass murder of brown people.

I can tell you with great certainty that we will never transform this world by asking permission or pressuring politicians. The alternative is organizing. That can look like mutual aid. It can look like unionizing your workplace or apartment building. It can look like rapid response networks that defend against evictions or ICE raids. These alternatives aren’t new. Organizers are well acquainted with the strategies that work—and those that don’t.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of organizations in LA—I urge you to get involved.

The Hits

The above list provides leads, but you might still be wondering what organizing looks like in practice. How is it structured? What kind of tactics do organizers use? Fortunately, my favorite new podcast takes a deep dive into one of them and paints a pretty vivid picture. I hope you’ll check out The Tenant Association from LA Public Press and share it with your friends.

Solidarity and wishing you a happy new year. -K