"City Hall's Past Abuses Of Public Are Centerstage During Current Crisis" by Daniel Guss
@TheGussReport - Anyone who has ever been censored by an abusive politician at LA City Hall is loving its City Council meetings these days.
The same politicians who dropped the ball in the hours immediately after the Nury Martinez - Gil Cedillo - Kevin de León racism scandal erupted two weeks ago have suddenly been rendered impotent by boisterous protesting groups, including The People’s City Council.
They are unable to run their own meetings or enforce rules of decorum, including but not limited to ordering the mob to sit quietly like school children and wait for a pathetically reduced 60 seconds to speak.
The justifiably angry mob doesn’t care if they are called up to the podium to speak or not. They have commandeered the meetings until further notice and speak, chant and jeer as they see fit.
And this is what they thought Wednesday of City Council’s no signs or banners rule:
On Wednesday, even gadfly legend, David “Zuma Dogg” Saltsburg called in, satisfyingly mocking the officials (and their predecessors) for mistreating him daily - hourly really - when he correctly foreshadowed in this 2006 clip, and many others, “a wave of homelessness, y’all, that’s going to hit the streets of LA like a tsunami,” and corrupt land development scandals that are now near-daily headlines.
Zuma Dogg, it turns out, was a genuine canary in the coal mine.
But somehow, the LA Times’ David Zahniser the other day expressed shock - shock, I tell you - that the current and continuous meeting disruptions make it impossible for the Councilmembers to hear what people wishing to offer public comment are saying.
What’s delusional is that Zahniser, who has covered City Council for years, genuinely thinks that the officials give a rat’s rump about what members of the public have to say.
Did he not see these same officials and their predecessors eating, chatting, snoozing and turning their backs on the public when they regularly expressed their heartfelt concerns day-in and day-out in less turbulent times?
Yes, Zahniser saw it every day.
But he’s a chum of politicians just like his Times colleague Dakota Smith, among others. They withhold from readers that these politicians (and previous officeholders) often feed them stories for a softer write-up than they deserve. The Times is a collective spokes-person in the wheel of corruption, pun intended. Disingenuously making these detached, condescending and failed politicians seem sympathetic is utterly pathetic.
My Take: Not-a-one of these city officials possesses even a single original idea, so what’s really being lost with these protests? Nothing. Censuring its offending colleagues, which it is trying to discuss this morning, ain’t gonna cut it. Neither is threatening to put its meetings in recess until the crowd simmers down. It will take a long time to get them out of the meetings, and they’ll be back for innumerable tomorrows, so to speak.
And stunningly thanking Nury Martinez for resigning, as Councilmember Monica Rodriguez bizarrely did, perfectly illustrates the politicians’ misunderstanding of how the rules of the game have suddenly changed.
Since City Council has zero thoughtful, groundbreaking and important agenda items to advance, these meetings are just like before the scandal, except that the protests make for vividly more entertaining viewing on the City’s streaming channel on YouTube.
Sorry, not sorry.
At this point, Councilmember Kevin de León might as well hang around and collect the $450,000 in salary he has coming over the next two years because he isn’t City Council’s primary problem these days: it’s the mob and everyone else it has abused as far back as this column, if not David Zahniser, can remember.
There was only one way for City Council to have handled this crisis from its outbreak two weeks ago. The idea is still valid, but they haven’t figured it out yet.
In fact, there is even a way for de León to leverage this chaos on a road to redemption, of sorts, should he employ a shift in his personal strategy. But he doesn’t seem to have figured it out yet, either.
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(Daniel Guss, MBA, was nominated for three 2022 LA Press Club awards and was a runner-up in 2021 and 2020. He has contributed to Mayor Sam, CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)