SMRR's Desperate Tactics

David Ganezer

Appropriately, the homeless camp outside Santa Monica's City Hall. Why not? Members of the council support the right to trash the city.

Well, this exhausting season is almost over. No matter what the result, I trust that we will muddle on and things will settle down. But I want to comment on last week's City Council meeting, which reached new lows, disrupted by two members of our community: Jon Katz and Jason Mastbaum, who left right before being escorted out by the police. Both are out-of-touch SMRR dead-enders and Santa Monica Democratic Club stooges, and they, like all people defending the indefensible in terms of policy, resorted to shouting scurrilous smears that Oscar de la Torre said something racist many years ago. Unfortunately it runs deeper than these two marginal radicals, because this attack campaign is supported by SMRR itself, and both former and present council members attacking Oscar in mailers. This is something I hope never to see in our City's politics again.

I guess it's a clumsy attempt at an October surprise: scream racism at anybody who disagrees with you politically. Hey SMRR, news flash: it's not 2020-stop resorting to the last refuge of the intellectually bankrupt. I'm not going to dignify this further except to say that EVERYBODY sees through this for what it is, a desperate attempt for the establishment, which has been in power for 40 years, to regain control of the council. Hang in there Oscar. And for the current council members, and their SMRR candidates who have not strongly condemned this odious smear, shame on you.

But there was an actual vote that was much more illustrative of how the current SMRR Council, who are supporting the SMRR Four slate, are out of touch: they voted AGAINST endorsing Prop 36, which is now polling at 72% statewide. Yes, Jesse Zwick, Caroline Torosis, and Gleam Davis, who all hate enforcement and inexplicably don't believe the police can help solve crime, all made the typical mouth noises about racism and cost and some study somewhere that makes it a bad idea. And then all three voted against it! But the voters in the state are wiser than that. The tide has turned and SMRR is on their back foot, resorting to desperate tactics to catch up.

This is all you need to really know in terms of just how out of touch the SMRR Four is. They are:

- Against Prop 36 (72% of Californians voting for it).

- Endorsing George Gascon, who's about to lose in a landslide because of his soft on crime policies.

- Against ending the needle distribution in our parks.

- Trying to catch up by making the laughable claim that Santa Monica is unsafe because of the last 3 years, instead of the last 40 in SMRR control.

- Against police making traffic stops (Snell & Raskin with the honors for this stupidity).

- Making accusations in flyers that imply rent control is at stake. It's not and can't be changed because it's in the city charter. So just take that out of the equation when voting and ask yourself: what's the only real problem we face in restoring our city?

- Endorsing SB10, which would allow developers to put apartments in single family lots, furthering their density agenda of "urbanization. I live in multi-family housing and even I can see the stupidity of that (but a great gimme to developers financing the SMRR campaigns).

In every way possible, they are against what directly could improve or preserve our quality of life. They have lost the thread and are swimming against the tide, voting against something even as moderate as Prop 36, which is simply saying if you repeatedly steal you will eventually go to jail. Caroline Torosis hysterically called this a return to "three strikes." Ha! I guess her policy is to let them steal everything up to $950 a day FOREVER.

I suspect the much of staff, and definitely their handlers Gleam Davis, Caroline Torosis, and Jesse Zwick, do NOT support our police. In fact, they, and their candidates are really anti-police activists. From their safe perches in single family homes in Sunset Park, (it's quite possible to live in pockets of Santa Monica insulated from the degradations my neighborhood suffers) they just don't see a problem. They consider themselves anti-racist, but refuse to hear that poor black and Latino neighborhoods in the country OVERWHELMINGLY want more police because they are suffering the most from crime. SMRR refuses to wake up to the fact that they could lose this election because the tide has turned on crime in the state, (and even in blue, blue places like Portland, San Francisco, and NYC). They are willfully blind, and so the desperate charges against Oscar.

Instead of solving the problem or giving an ounce of empathy to residents, the SMRR Four would rather tacitly support last minute smears of racism. Instead of fighting for Santa Monica residents, they are only focused on "regional" issues, ignoring their constituents desperate pleading for safe and clean streets and parks. And, most discordant, instead of doing what's necessary by supporting Prop 36, they are nearly libertarian in defending the rights of transient addicts to use our city as a drug toilet. Even Ezra Klein in the New York Times is talking about the monopolization of public space by a minority of dysfunctional behavior that leads to crime. Sadly, they could be taking about Santa Monica in this podcast: The Hidden Politics of Disorder (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hidden-politics-of-disorder/id1548604447?i=1000673550695).

Continue the change that was started 4 years ago. Send a message and vote for Phil Brock, Oscar de la Torre, Vivian Roknian, and John Putnam. To put it simply, they all exhibit a return to the common sense the Democratic Party used to be known for, and is returning to. And despite the accusations of them being "MAGA," the Safer Santa Monica Slate all, like myself, have ONLY voted Democratic their entire lives.

And no matter what the outcome on Tuesday, keep calm and carry on.