Schools, not investigations - The felonious minute & the newsless news conference

I've seen my share of schoolyard fights in my years as a student and working with young people. After watching the video, I didn't think the scrap that took place in the alley between Lincoln Boulevard and Seventh Street near Santa Monica High School on March 16 was anything special — and certainly not anything a city that lost $7 million in school funding should spend time and money investigating.

Nobody seems to have thought this thing all the way through before rushing headlong into a course of action that put the Santa Monica Police Department in direct conflict with the city-funded Pico Youth & Family Center, where School Board member Oscar de la Torre is executive director and behind which the fight took place. Because of that, both sides come out looking foolish. And the real losers are the amazing young people the SMPD and the PYFC are supposed to be protecting and serving.

Somehow, footage of this minute-long, one round bout motivated the Santa Monica Police Department to conduct an investigation into the actions of de la Torre, who eventually broke up the fight and got the student-antagonists to shake hands. Based on the findings of that investigation, the SMPD chose to refer the case to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office for felony child endangerment charges against de la Torre for "fail(ing) [in] his duty to take some action, verbal or otherwise, to prevent the physical endangerment." With that, our local police department decreed that there is no such thing as an "innocent" bystander while pioneering the mind-numbing legal concept of the felonious minute of inaction.

I thought nothing would match the rank stupidity and pointlessness of that investigation until I attended de la Torre's "news conference" last Friday. Knowing that the DA was not going to bring charges against him, de la Torre and his attorney, Wilfredo Perez, told a gathering of reporters and supporters that the investigation was a giant waste of city resources — and immediately called for another investigation into the original investigation in order to determine the motives of the investigators. Also, they'd like an apology from the city. I could have sworn I saw a giant Chicano chip resting on their shoulders as they spoke.

The investigation itself makes our police look petty. The report presented to the DA describes de la Torre as a suspect and attempts to portray one of the two kids trying to hurt each other as a victim — of de la Torre. His supposed offense was that for about one minute, he "merely observes the fight without intervention, and watches the fight develop, continue, and escalate in its injury risk potential." Video footage of the fight shows any of a number of people who would also fit that description, yet de la Torre was singled out. Our police department's official position is that de la Torre (the man who actually mediated and made peace) should have stepped in one minute sooner. The argument is that de la Torre, who left his office when he heard a fight was going on outside, somehow had "de facto care/custody" of one of the young brawlers (for whom he is a mentor) and should have stopped the fight immediately in order to protect that kid from harm. Because he didn't, his minute of inaction constitutes a felony offense. Perhaps if he had stepped in after 30 seconds, it would only be a misdemeanor. We'll never know where that line is drawn.

The video and "news conference" made de la Torre look vindictive. He was totally vindicated, his name was about to be cleared, and he was in possession of a moral high ground that a freedom fighting community activist almost never gets to occupy. Yet he used the Pico Youth & Family Center as a set and the young people who use the center as props as he defended himself against charges that aren't being brought, bemoaned political conspiracy that doesn't exist, and aired grievances and grudges that can't be considered "news." And, of course, he wants another investigation.

It's clear from reading the report that lead investigator, Sgt. Dave Thomas, takes issue with some of de la Torre's stated views on conflict resolution and de la Torre takes issue with the role police sometimes play in criminalizing typical teenage rebellion in black and brown kids. It's also clear that a schism existed between these two long before March 16. It's a shame that neither of them was man enough to use this incident as an opportunity to teach our young people how to de-escalate (as opposed to escalate) tension.

My favorite family-friendly metaphor for this kind of thing is wrestling with pigs. They say you shouldn't wrestle with a pig because: 1) you get all dirty and 2) the pig loves it. Apparently these guys have been going at it for a decade and neither one seems to recognize that he needs the other. But with a multi-million-dollar shortfall to make up for the sake of Santa Monica's schoolchildren, our city can't afford to pay for these two pigs to play in the mud.

Conspiring to extend Bush's tax cuts - Forsaking recovery for "certainty"

There are two kinds of people in this country today: those who can earn money overseas and everybody else. While some of us are able to capitalize on the opportunities presented in other markets, hundreds of millions of our fellow Americans make all their money here, where they live. Those of us whose income is based exclusively in these United States now count ourselves as lucky if we have a job, a house, and a health insurance policy. If we have the same position, same address, and same coverage we had two years ago, we're practically lottery winners. That's because the Great Recession of 2008 has taught any American who actually works for a living to narrow his or her focus from prosperity to just plain survival.

Not so much for corporate America, which, partly due to its ability to make money in other places, is doing better than ever. After trillions of taxpayer dollars in bailouts and loan guarantees, Wall Street is back earning billions in quarterly profits and pushing the Dow above 10,000. Non-financial companies are also doing very well now that the extreme cost-cutting measures of the past year-and-a-half are paying off (remember hundreds of thousands of people being laid off every month?). Those firms are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash, which is some $500 billion more than they had when the Great Recession began. Not bad, right?

So why aren't banks lending and why aren't businesses hiring? Why are the "wealth creators" withholding investment capital and why are the "job creators" so slow to put people back to work? The answer lies in a thick gumbo of polls, statistics, think tank rhetoric, and hard-core lobbying all cooked up to do one thing: protect the expiring Bush tax cuts.

In this drama, where marginal tax rates for the top 2 percent of income earners are more important than the lives and livelihoods of millions of American workers, the players include many of the usual suspects. The American Enterprise Institute supplies the intellectually dishonest policy papers, The Wall Street Journal runs articles citing those papers, right-wing radio and FOX News regurgitate the talking points from those articles all day and all night, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), and the Business Roundtable provide the cash to lobby members of Congress to keep those tax cuts from expiring on schedule.

So far, it has worked like a charm. House Republicans are bought and paid for — something they proved early last year when not one of them would vote for the Recovery Act, designed to stop the Great Recession in its tracks. In the Senate, the Republican caucus has shown through their unprecedented use of the filibuster threat on every major piece of legislation that it is basically leased with an option to buy. Because threatening a filibuster is considered to be actually doing it, Senate Republicans have put a 60-vote threshold on the Democratic agenda for no other reason than to make it more difficult for the Democrats to govern. The combination of House obstreperousness and Senate intransigence has conspired to prevent economic recovery from happening more quickly and undermined consumer confidence, providing the opening for what has to be the Frank Lutz-generated talking point of the fall campaign: uncertainty.

The Chamber, the Roundtable, and the NFIB are certain that they want "entitlement programs" reformed, their "regulatory burden" eased, and the Bush tax cuts extended "at least temporarily." They're claiming the lack of certainty about whether or not these things will get done is the reason the businesses they represent won't do their part for our country's recovery and put the American worker back on the job.

In practical terms, that means these business interests want Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security (now large enough to basically eat up all federal receipts) reformed immediately. And they want President Obama and the Democrats in Congress — who ran and won in 2008 on a platform that included stricter regulations — to go back on the promises they made to voters. And they really want the federal government to run up a 10-year deficit of between $675 billion and $3 trillion so the Bush tax cuts can become permanent and their tax rate can be 35 percent, not 39 percent. Then, and only then, will these people consider sharing the $2 trillion they're hoarding.

But they can be certain entitlement reform isn't happening between now and January because it's never happened before. They can be certain that the BP spill in the Gulf means the era of sacrificing health and safety regulations for increased profits is over forever. And they've been certain President Bush's tax cuts were going to expire in January of 2011 since he signed them into law in May of 2003 — or at least since Election Day 2008. The only thing they're not certain about is whether or not the voters will be gullible enough to blame Democrats for the stalling tactics that slowed the recovery and stupid enough to let the same Republicans who killed our economy try to revive it with the same ideas (like tax cuts for the outrageously wealthy) that didn't work the first time.

I'm certain we have more sense than that.

Failing to learn from the past - SMRR, the LUCE, and the future

"History, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page" — Lord Byron, 1812

By the time you read this, the damage will already be done and our City Council will have approved Santa Monica's plan for real estate development, the Land Use and Circulation Element.

Urgent pleas from young people at the Pico Youth & Family Center and seniors at the Village Trailer Park will be ignored and they will be left at the mercy of any real estate developer with enough cash to hire Harding, Larmore, Kutcher & Kozal to do some lobbying/jawboning.

Before the 1979 founding of Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights (SMRR), the council had a history of laying down for developers who "use land" as a money making commodity instead of standing up for those of us who use it to live our lives, raise our families, and support our community. The SMRR-dominated council leaving the most vulnerable Santa Monicans to be sacrificed on the altar of the profit motive shows that in the 30 years since SMRR's founding, the tenant's advocacy group has become the establishment in Santa Monica and forgotten its progressive past.

Words like "land use" and "development" can lose their meaning when repeated as often as they have been through this process. In commercial real estate, land is used for profit, and development is basically how one use is changed to another use to generate more profit. On a small scale, corporations like Starbucks can take X number of square feet (like at a freeway rest area) and turn them into Y number of dollars per year. On a larger scale, corporations like Westfield can turn a fallow city block into a shopping mall that generates millions. But big or small, real estate development is all about using land, the scarcest of all commodities, to make profit.

From the beginning, the city of Santa Monica has done battle with the land users and their lust for money using while preserving the quality of life for everyone who lives within our 8 square miles. When the railroad connected us to the rest of Los Angeles in the late 1890s via the Big Red Cars, we were kind of a West Coast Miami Beach; a city of seniors living in inexpensive little beach bungalows. Black and Mexican railroad workers became as much a part of Santa Monica as the elderly Jews and well-to-do suburbanites who lived here; and like those older residents, weren't well represented in city government. Over the next three decades or so, the land users, including the Chamber of Commerce, blocked a group of black investors from buying the Crystal Plunge (now the Casa Del Mar), promoted a city ordinance to vastly increase apartment construction to replace those bungalows, and basically transformed a retirement community into a full-on bedroom suburb of Los Angeles.

The land users cemented their control of Santa Monica in the 1960s when they got City Hall to designate a community of mostly elderly Jewish residents in Ocean Park (1,400 residential units on 25 acres) and a community of mostly black families in the Pico Neighborhood as "blighted" in order to justify destroying them … excuse me, in order to justify developing them into those giant cement boxes on the beach known as The Shores and the construction of the I-10 freeway.

That was about when rents started to skyrocket and the housing crisis which gave rise to SMRR began. An unlikely progressive coalition that included the Committee for Fair Rents, the Santa Monica Democratic Club, the Santa Monica Fair Housing Alliance, the Santa Monica Tenants' Union, and the local chapter of the Campaign for Economic Democracy banded together to fight City Hall — and won. Fast forward 30 years to today and SMRR is City Hall. Yet, unless I miss my guess, the SMRR-dominated council has thrown its lot in with the money-lusting land users, not the seniors and young people whose families make this city the best place in the world to live.

At last week's LUCE hearing, I realized what the real problem is when I was asked by land-use attorney Chris Harding how long I've lived in Santa Monica. He made it clear that he believes his 50 years as a resident trumps my four, therefore his vision for the future of our city has more merit than mine. As I get to know them as individuals, it seems to me that much of Santa Monica's old guard thinks this city belongs to them — and they, in their magnanimity, tolerate those of us who haven't already lived our lives and raised our families here. They know best, and we should shut up and go along like good little children.

I would remind those former freedom fighters who enjoyed positions of esteem in Sunday's Main Street parade and who may have discovered the comfort of a north of Montana address not to forget about the rent control wars fought out of garages and church basements in Pico and Ocean Park 30 years ago. I hate to imagine what this city would be like if you hadn't stood up then like those young revolutionaries from PYFC stood up to the City Council last week. Santa Monica needs your help to keep from becoming a soulless Beverly Hills West.