CommentsONE MAN’S OPINION-Although the modus operandi of Trump and der Wunderkind Garcetti are different on the surface, they are almost indistinguishable underneath their veneers.
Trump is a mentally debilitated histrionic who must always be the center of attention, while Eric is smooth, cool and shuns the spotlight except for well-crafted photo-ops. Trump has trashed his reputation to the point that he is his main enemy, while Garcetti’s demeanor lets him tell outrageous lies unchallenged. It’s a matter of crude vs cool.
Under Trump’s Administration, the overall U.S. economy is doing fantastic for reasons few comprehend, while day by day, in each way, LA grows worse and worse. Under Garcettization, we have gone from the nation’s premier destination city to the city with the greatest exodus of productive Family Millennials and the urban area with the worse GINI Coefficient. Our traffic congestion has gone from bad to the worst in the nation to the worst in the world. LA’s crowning achievement is its homeless crisis.
Trump makes almost everyone mad at him except for thugs like Putin and Un. Garcetti gets a friendly audience with Pope Francis. Trump ships toddlers off to detention camps, while Garcetti has the homes of poor people destroyed, shoving toddlers onto the streets. The number of people that Garcetti’s Manhattanization has killed due to having no shelter is not known because he does not allow such data to be collected. But, no one cares, except maybe Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas. Garcetti, like most despots, is good at falsifying data to conceal his crimes against humanity. See LA County June 2013 Grand Jury about the fraudulent LAPD report which downsized the LAFD-paramedics and ended up killing people.
Trump has no use for the rule of law and he just does whatever he wants. Often, however, the federal courts constrain him, but their actions do not seem based on love of the law but rather are due to the judiciary’s perception that Trump threatens its power. Generally, the law has become whatever the judges want it to be at the moment. All of the sudden, a fictitious person has rights of free speech, and money becomes speech. Thus, the more money you have the more speech you get. Just look at Citizens United v Federal Elections Commission, 588 U.S. 50 (2010). And, here we stumble upon the common element of Trump and Eric – a disregard for the rule of law. While the federal courts restrain Trump’s repeated transgressions, California state courts suffer from an epidemic of misconduct. For the most part, they let Garcetti run wild. Almost all judicial rejection of Garcettism has come from the federal courts. If a state court rules against the city as it did in the Hollywood Community Plan case, the Garcetti administration does not pause in its criminogenic densification.
In his recent CityWatch article, “Solving an LA Housing Mystery … One Clue at a Time,” Dick Platkin explained many of the mechanisms the Garcetti Administration uses to decimate LA. Since Mr. Platkin is a planner by profession, he does not go outside his field of expertise into the legal arena. Angelenos, however, need to understand that the ways in which LA’s rich and powerful behave are criminal. Like Trump, Garcettites have no use for the rule of law -- only for what they desire. Unlike the federal court system which perceives the threat to itself from Trump, the California judiciary is complicit in the illegal behavior which is turning Los Angeles into a third world city.
The Virtue of the Rule of Law
There must be something wrong with a populace that needs to have the benefit of the rule of law explained. Angelenos are great at screaming about Trump’s disregard for American mores and law, but they are silent about the same or worse behavior in LA. Suppose a federal judge ruled that Donald Trump’s behavior was “non-justiciable,” i.e., above the law. Non-justiciable means that President Trump could do anything he wanted. Does anyone think for a nano-second that the national media would not go berserk – and rightly so? When Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Richard Fruin did exactly that in December 2016 for the LA City Council, giving it the green light for more mass destruction of poor people’s homes and for all the illegalities detailed by Dick Platkin, no one cared.
When the bribery of men replaces the rule of law, the rich and powerful take what they want and everyone else pays the price. That is the condition of Los Angeles today. Angelenos pay in the form of exorbitant housing prices and the escalating homeless crisis. They pay with their time sitting in needless freeway traffic which is a direct result of the illegal densification of The Basin and other selected parts of LA. Angelenos pay by having horrible schools and by being the nation’s most park-poor urban area. We have come to accept these things as normal just as serfs accepted living in hovels while the barons and ladies lived in castles.
Without the rule of law, the productivity of each person goes not to that individual, but rather the value of his or her productivity is funneled upwards to the 1%. Who should pay for the commuters’ time in traffic? The employees who played no role in devising this horrid system of super densification or the developers and the multi-millionaire business owners who locate their offices in dense office towers?
Let each employer in a Bunker Hill or Century City office tower pay $100 per employee per day tax for locating his office in a dense part of town. There is no need for all those offices to be in DTLA, Century City, West LA, or Hollywood. Not only do these people virtually never deal with each other, but if they do, it’s via email.
As bad as the national scene may be, NYC and Washington still adhere more to the rule of law than LA does. That is one reason the DOW is up, and LA is down.
When the judiciary abdicates its responsibility, evil men do what they will. Those highfalutin’ Angelenos occupying seats of “non-justiciable” power may be smiling, wearing nice suits and telling genteel lies, but the harm they do to the quality of life of the rest of us is real. People go homeless and needlessly die. When the judiciary does its job even halfway, mentally ill buffoon’s excesses are constrained. When the judiciary itself becomes criminogenic, you have LA.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
