The urgency of new energy - Changing Santa Monica from the inside

"This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy."

— The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.


These two sentences from the middle of Dr. King's incredible "I Have A Dream" speech could easily get lost in the soaring rhetoric of its conclusion. But for the activist freedom fighter who truly understands what our country looked like in the summer of 1963 and the mortal danger Dr. King placed himself in by leaving his house every day, the "fierce urgency of now" referred to in that address is a call to action. Among the many lessons Dr. King's life and legacy teaches is that none of us are promised tomorrow and once we're gone, our lives will be judged by the impact we made on the world around us.

Those of us who live in Santa Monica rightly count ourselves among the most intelligent people in America because we are smart enough to live in Santa Monica, which is the best place on Earth. Don't get me wrong, we pay through the nose when it comes to the cost of living. But the quality of life for everyone — whether you're a 20-something college student, a 30-something working professional, a family with children, a showbiz professional, or an unemployed skate bum — is better here in Santa Monica than it is anywhere else.

But that quality of life and reasonable access to it for all of Santa Monica's current residents is at an important crossroads. The Land Use and Circulation Element (LUCE) that will serve as the blueprint for Santa Monica's future growth and development is in the final stages of completion by our city government and that work is being done with precious little input from our fellow Santa Monicans. In fact, there is only one road from where our city is now to where we all want it to be in the next decade or two — and that road runs through Santa Monicans For Renters' Rights straight to our City Council.

In this space last week I asked you to join me in bringing a new energy to SMRR in time for this November's City Council elections. I was surprised at how many of you were ready to get on board with this idea before the New Energy Caucus even stood for anything and I want to thank you all. I recently found out that time is of the essence. Every two years, SMRR meets to update its platform — and that meeting is taking place on April 25. In order to vote on the platform, a prospective member's application must be received by April 4. So anyone who wants to have a say in the direction of the organization that controls five of the seven seats on the City Council needs to get his or her act together by next Friday and no later.

Because I know that some of the people who valet park their Bentleys and Ferraris at the new Santa Monica Place will "discover" Santa Monica for the first time and may or may not respect those of us who call it home, I'll be there. Because I know that the commercial interests who are salivating at the thought of exploiting our quiet beach community will be there, I'll be there. Even if the New Energy Caucus is reduced to just me and my energy, I'll be there.

Growing up in Boston, I was an avid reader of The Boston Globe and its most popular columnist, Mike Barnicle. Mike is no saint, but he gets credit for doing the legwork and he's a pretty good example of how to hold a conversation with readers. As I spent months studying the development agreement between City Hall and Saint John's, I kept telling myself that this is what Mike would do if he was in my shoes.

When I finally got a chance to ask the powers that be in Santa Monica about the nuisance that hospital has become, I got responses that I'll never forget. I asked Planning Director Eileen Fogarty if the City Council had been reviewing the development agreement at least every 12 months as required by law. Her response (and that of her senior staff) was exactly the same as the response I got from City Councilmembers Kevin McKeown and Gleam Davis when I asked them who, exactly, they dealt with when negotiating with Saint John's: a silent, blank stare.

I don't know about you, dear reader, but I pay way too much money in rent and taxes to not be able to hold someone accountable when the quality of my life is compromised by developers who don't live here and don't care about the noise, pollution, and traffic problems they generate. So I'm joining SMRR as a member of the New Energy Caucus. The deadline for you to be able to have a say in how your city is governed is next Friday, April 2.

Are you in?

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em - The only political game in town

Until recently, I was ambivalent about becoming active within Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights, the city's leading political party. On the one hand, it's highly unlikely that I, as one of 4,000 members, would be able to have much of an impact on the vision and direction of the organization from the inside. On the other hand, there is no other option if I, as a Santa Monican, want to have a say in how my city is governed because SMRR is the only political game in town, controlling the City Council, Rent Control Board, school district and Santa Monica College.

But the arrival of the 2010 Census (the "$14 billion form" as my friend Nina Sinclaire calls it) got me thinking about this situation a little differently. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 50,000 out of the roughly 55,000 adults over the age of 34 living in Santa Monica either stayed in our homes last year or didn't move very far away. So out of the 50,000 adults in this town who could be called "permanent locals," only 8 percent of us are SMRR members. And if 8 percent of the permanent local adults in Santa Monica can decide what's best for the other 92 percent, then that same math should apply within SMRR.

Even though Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights has been around for decades and has become the establishment in local politics, it's important to remember the organization's insurgent history. It was founded in the 1978 during the Los Angeles real estate boom to protect the interests of Santa Monicans who rent their homes (around 70 percent of us) from developers who saw the potential in the 90-plus percent occupancy rate of the city's 40,000-plus rental units. SMRR's Web site states that those developers were held off with some of the strongest rent control laws in the country and a 1981 moratorium on commercial development followed by another in 1989. The site also demonstrates a striking shortage of black or brown faces within SMRR's elected leadership and, as best I can tell, hasn't been updated in quite some time.

SMRR has come to dominate city politics, but it's coming to a critical junction in this November's elections when its City Council majority could be threatened if the organization doesn't come up with a clear, coherent vision for Santa Monica's future. I appreciate what rent control does for those of us lucky enough to live in below-market-rate apartments and I like Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights' formerly-tough stance against development. But about a quarter of our city's population is between 14 and 25 years old, so they don't care about past accomplishments and they (and their parents) have the right to wonder what SMRR has done for them lately.

Personally, I think it's about time to light the candle of openness and democracy as opposed to continuing to curse SMRR's darkness. We have a situation where a political party whose total membership equals about 8 percent of our city's population has a seriously exaggerated influence on the vision, direction, and budget of Santa Monica. Since that's the case, then a caucus within that party whose membership is — let's say 15 percent — should be able to exert at least some influence on the vision, direction, and budget of SMRR.

So I'm looking for 600 Santa Monicans to join with me to create the New Energy Caucus within Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights. We'll put our heads together and come up with a platform or a signature issue around which to organize and campaign, then all 600 of us will join SMRR together at the same time and challenge the organization to tell us why our interests can't or won't be addressed. And if a caucus that represents 15 percent of its membership doesn't move SMRR to action, then we'll try 20 percent, then 25 percent, then 30 percent until we win. That's how progressives fight and that's how progress is made.

I'm no longer ambivalent about getting involved with this organization because I realized that the problem with changing Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights isn't that I, alone, wouldn't be able to do it; it's that I shouldn't try to do it alone.

Hollywood needs to invest in soldiers - Oscar 2010 & The Hurt Locker

I have only one beef with this year's Academy Awards. I'm happy that Kathryn Bigelow, director of "The Hurt Locker," gets an Oscar for her mantel and another to rub in ex-husband James Cameron's face. I'm happy that journalist Mark Boal found a way to mine Oscar gold out of all the time he spent reporting from Iraq. I'm happy that Greg Shapiro (who gave us "Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle") is an Academy Award-winning producer, and I'm especially pleased that truth-teller and former Disneyland Paris janitor Nicolas Chartier (who was banned from the ceremony for encouraging people to vote for his movie and "not a $500M film") will be getting a statue.

The only problem was the best war movie nominated didn't win an award on Sunday night. It was the true story of an American hero who exposed the official government lies that got us into the Vietnam War and brought down the Nixon administration in the process: Judith Ehrlich's and Rick Goldsmith's documentary, "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers." I understand Hollywood doesn't usually heap praise upon real people who do incredible things or make difficult choices (preferring instead to celebrate the genetically fortunate meat puppets who portray them on-screen), so I wasn't surprised that the Documentary Feature Oscar went to a film about dolphins. And while the movie business pats itself on the back for discovering the American soldier and "The Hurt Locker" over a year after it premiered at the same 2008 Venice Film Festival that featured "The Wrestler," let's not forget that the fictional characters in this made-up story are based on real people — and a lot of them need real help.

As hard as this "Great Recession" has been on the rest of the country, the movie business is doing better than ever and made more money at the box office in 2009 than in any other year in history. On the opposite end of the "payback relative to sacrifice" scale are the military personnel who have served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While our national unemployment rate hovers right around 10 percent, the same rate for veterans aged 24 or younger is an incredible 27 percent — 10 percentage points higher than the rate among civilians of the same age. The unemployment rate for Afghanistan and Iraq vets is 20 percent higher than the overall rate; so the fact that there are nearly 200,000 unemployed veterans who have served in those two wars basically means that we, as a country, have decided that there is no future private sector benefit for young people who choose military service.

As nice a gesture as it is to thank our military in acceptance speeches, movie studios could create opportunities for Iraq and Afghanistan war vets by doing something like hiring focus groups composed of young veterans to screen new releases and offer their opinions on how they'd be received on military bases — and that's just off the top of my head.

Much more important than the economic needs of soldiers is their mental health. Our military is about 1 percent of our population, but veterans account for 20 percent of all suicides. The rate for younger vets rose more than 25 percent between 2005 and 2007 and the number of suicides almost doubled among active duty soldiers in the Army, Army Reserve and the Army National Guard between 2004 and 2008. As characters like the ones in "The Hurt Locker" join the troops from "Jarhead," and "In The Valley of Elah," and "Generation Kill" in exposing the issues Afghanistan and Iraq war vets face in dealing with re-integration into civilian life and post-traumatic stress, the producers who get rich by marketing those characters have an increasing moral obligation to re-invest some of that money to help the real people and improve the real lives on which these characters and stories are based.

As our military occupation of Iraq continues to wind down and our footprint in Afghanistan becomes smaller and smaller, the memory of the disastrous neo-conservative Bush foreign policy will begin to fade in the same way that the memory of the completely corrupt Nixon administration has gotten blurry with time. It will become the domain of the documentary filmmaker to tell true stories like Ambassador Joe Wilson's (our generation's Daniel Ellsberg) and the job of feature film directors to do justice to this new film genre of soldiers' stories from western Asia.

Whether it's big budget military hardware porn made with the cooperation of the Pentagon like "Transformers" or a small independent film that initially opens on only four screens like "The Hurt Locker," the most important message Hollywood can send is the same one my friend Mike Woods' dad taught us after taking us to see "Platoon" in the mid-1980s. In a conversation that stuck with me for literally the rest of my life, he made sure we knew that no matter what it looks like in a movie, war is pain, war is death, and war is not cool.

It's time to take back control - The Santa Monica City Council

I appreciated the political symmetry of last week’s meetings. The two groups that control the federal government (the Democratic and Republican parties) met to try to work out a deal on health care reform and the two groups that control our city government (the Chamber of Commerce and Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights) met to try to work out a deal on democracy and development. In both cases, the issues on the table weren’t as important as the larger question at hand. Fundamentally, it’s a question that sums up our current political divide and the way you, as a voter, answer it determines which candidates you support. The question is: do you and your family want the protection of your government or do you and your family want protection from your government?

Since the health care summit in Washington, D.C. has been analyzed to death and since the Republican negotiating strategy (we’ll support the bill only if you agree to scrap the bill) was a joke, let’s focus on last Tuesday’s City Council meeting. When we look back, that session will prove to be a turning point in Santa Monica history because it was on that day the dominant political force in our city, SMRR, made it known that they’re no longer focused on the needs of the people and have decided this is a pro-development town. The way they showed us their vision for Santa Monica’s future was to finally put to rest any illusions of representative democracy by appointing Terry O’Day, not Ted Winterer, to the vacant City Council seat. Then they put the pedal to the metal on the growth express by having a SMRR majority vote down Councilman Kevin McKeown’s proposal to postpone hearings on large-scale developments until the city completes its long-term plan for managing growth. Machiavelli would have been proud.

The eight rounds of voting it took to get O’Day on the Council were eight separate referenda on Ted Winterer, a man who finished fifth in an election to fill four seats in 2008, yet was passed over for a SMRR member (who didn’t even run in that election) when an appointment was made to fill Herb Katz’s seat. By any objective standard, he was the right choice to take Ken Genser’s place, but SMRR needed that seat for it’s pro-growth agenda – and Winterer isn’t a reliable pro-growth vote. Despite his support from voters, Ted was neither the first or second choice of SMRR’s Gleam Davis, Richard Bloom, or Pam O’Connor. So he was never a serious contender for the seat because SMRR doesn’t want him on the Council – a fact that became clear to Winterer supporter McKeown in the early rounds and to Winterer supporter Bobby Shriver in the last two. In the end, it came down to a choice between one of two SMRR-backed candidates to occupy the fifth SMRR-controlled seat on our seven-member City Council.

It was later in the meeting when the “development time-out” was being considered that SMRR’s true motivation for appointing O’Day was revealed. Knowing that he worked to defeat the Residents Initiative to Fight Traffic (which would have capped development in Santa Monica), there was no question that he would join fellow SMRR-backed Council members Bloom and O’Connor and pro-business Councilman Robert Holbrook in voting “no.” With those four votes in place, Davis was free to vote however she wanted (a reward for nominating and sticking with Kennedy, perhaps?) and Shriver’s vote became irrelevant.

The most ominous part of the meeting was when some Council members became convinced that the Planning Division could handle completing the draft Land Use and Circulation Element and conducting hearings on development projects based on the word of Planning Director Eileen Fogarty. In a meeting last year, Ms. Fogarty assured Editor in Chief Kevin Herrera and myself that all current development agreements with the city of Santa Monica were up to date and in compliance. Yet the most problematic, Saint John’s Health Center, was quickly shown to be violating many key provisions of its development agreement – a fact that was news to Ms. Fogarty, Planning Manager Amanda Schachter, and Principal Planner Brad Misner. Their incompetence in overseeing the disaster that is Saint John’s doesn’t inspire confidence in their ability to metaphorically walk and chew gum at the same time; yet the Council voted to increase, not decrease, their workload. An overwhelmed oversight agency might be good for business, but it’s not good for the people who have to live with the traffic, noise, and pollution that inevitably come with growth.

I like clean water, healthy food, and medication that won’t kill me, so I typically want the protection of my government. When it comes to my SMRR-majority City Council, however, I’m either going to need protection from my government or I’m going to have to change my government. Luckily, five of the seven City Council seats are being contested this year – with four of those currently occupied by SMRR.

In November, we should support candidates that don’t see the people of Santa Monica as consumers in a marketplace whose profit potential should be maximized, but as residents of a community whose quality of life should be preserved and protected. And if a former tenants organization that has mysteriously morphed into a pro-growth business circle won’t listen to us, we have the power to throw the bums out.