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Nov. LB Announces Start of Registration for Citywide Short-Term Rentals Program

Reporters Desk
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Nov. LB Announces Start of Registration for Citywide Short-Term Rentals Program

LONG BEACH — The registration process has now begun for property owners who may be interested in legally operating their residence as a hosted short-term rental or STR in Long Beach.

The STRs Program provides guidelines designed to maintain the city’s long-term housing stock. Registration information and materials are available on the Development Services Department STRs Program webpage. 

Falling in line with the STRs Ordinance, the city will be maintaining a list of residential apartment building property owners and homeowners’ associations or HOAs in Long Beach who want to prohibit anyone from obtaining an STR registration on their property. Landlords and HOAs interested in being included on the list must complete and notarize a self-certification form, which is available on the STRs webpage.

Following the growth of rental platforms such as Airbnb and HomeAway in recent years, the city council took action to adopt an ordinance to permit the rent or lease of privately-owned residential units on a short-term basis.

Details: For assistance with completing an application, property owners or operators may call 562-570-6820; shorttermrentals@longbeach.gov.

Letter from Kenosha: A Community Under Seige

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Letter from Kenosha: A Community Under Seige

By Gabe Fuente & Sean Edwards – October 29, 2020

KENOSHA, WISCONSIN — We sat in a circle of 15 protestors outside the Kenosha County Courthouse, several hours past the 7pm city curfew. Opposite from the group, and across the street, a pair of federal agents strolled casually behind a black iron fence surrounding the concrete courthouse. The protestors passed around a small megaphone, sharing their experiences, in an attempt to heal from the tragedy that stained the preceding days.

Read more at: https://48hills.org/2020/10/letter-from-kenosha-a-community-under-seige

Los Angeles County Assessment Appeals Board Goes Virtual

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Los Angeles County Assessment Appeals Board Goes Virtual

LOS ANGELES —  In an effort to provide Los Angeles County residents a convenient, secure and efficient way to continue to attend assessment appeals hearings during the COVID pandemic, the Los Angeles County Assessment Appeals Board has gone virtual and is now providing services online.

On October 19, the Assessment Appeals Board kicked off its first virtual hearing comprised of a web conferencing platform and an online document management portal where residents were able to electronically submit and upload hearing evidence prior to the hearing date. The new virtual hearing process allows the applicant, the Assessor and Board Members to simultaneously view the hearing evidence presented live.

On August 4, Fourth District Supervisor Janice Hahn presented a motion to the board and asked the executive office to explore how to modernize current systems to augment in-person hearings by implementing virtual Assessment Appeals Board hearings using video conferencing technology.

In addition, the public is now also able to listen in and stay up-to-date through a dial-in phone number and access code, which will be posted before every hearing on the Assessment Appeals Board website.

Residents can now also submit their assessment appeals applications online in addition to mailing them in.

Details: www.Services/Assessment-Appeals

In His “On the Record” Ethnic Media Column, Gov. Newsom Highlights State’s Support for California Renters Amid Pandemic

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In His “On the Record” Ethnic Media Column, Gov. Newsom Highlights State’s Support for California Renters Amid Pandemic

SACRAMENTO—  Governor Gavin Newsom Oct. 28, released his latest “On the Record” column raising awareness of the new resources and protections for renters in California experiencing economic hardship due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the state’s continued advocacy for action from the federal government to support renters and homeowners.

“We have made remarkable progress in helping more Californians keep a roof over their heads during this emergency, but even a state as large and influential as ours cannot tackle a national crisis on our own,” wrote the Governor in his column. “Without federal support for renters and homeowners, anyone out of a job, behind on their housing payments or struggling with medical bills will potentially face the prospect of losing their home. That’s not right, it’s not fair and it’s not good for our economy or communities. Investing in our renters can make a big difference around the country. It would help stabilize the housing market, help America recover from the devastating economic impacts of the pandemic and keep people in their homes.”

The column is part of a media collaboration with California Black Media, Ethnic Media Services, ImpreMedia, Univision and LGBTQ outlets Bay Area Reporter and Los Angeles Blade to contribute original content from the Governor on topics impacting Californians, including the state’s diverse communities.

Details: Click here to read the latest column.

“Good Trouble” Makes a Portrait of a Change Agent

Lyn Jensen
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“Good Trouble” Makes a Portrait of a Change Agent

John Lewis’ life was too complex for any one movie — or book — to encompass it all. Dawn Porter’s 2020 documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble is a worthy but sketchy attempt to summarize the late Georgia representative and civil rights leader in 98 minutes. The structure is loose and non-linear, so those looking for a straight narrative of Lewis’ remarkable life and achievements may be disappointed.

What we do see is worthy, if uneven. Roughly half the screen time consists of footage that follows Lewis around in what proved to be the last year or two of his life, campaigning for Democratic candidates, visiting his family. We see some clues about why his life took the path it did, even in such mundane moments as when he pets some family chickens, but the overall context is lacking.

What context there is comes from a somewhat random shuffle of archival footage, including the very (in)famous confrontation on March 7, 1965, in Selma, Ala., when police violently attacked peaceful civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettis Bridge. Lewis, the man in the trench coat, the one knocked to the ground so violently his backpack flies off, makes one of the 20th century’s most iconic images. He suffered a fractured skull that day.

This was not the only time Lewis risked his life to make “good trouble,” as he often described his work as a non-violent change agent, both inside and outside the system. He was one of the first freedom riders in 1961. He organized one of the first sit-in’s, in Nashville, Tenn., in 1960. He helped organize the March on Washington in 1964 and was one of the day’s featured speakers, sharing the stage with the much more celebrated speech from Martin Luther King Jr.

Later, Lewis moved inside the system he sought to change by running for public office. After starting his political career on the Atlanta City Council — from 1982-1985 — he served in Congress from 1987 until his death shortly after this film was completed in early 2020. In an interview clip, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said he “challenges the conscience of the Congress.”

One of Lewis’ more notable actions as a liberal congress member was to stage a sit-in on the House floor over lack of action on gun control in 2016.

Unfortunately, if you don’t already know this rough sketch of Lewis’ life, you may find this rough sketch of a movie too lacking in form and detail. The movie’s worth a look, though, even considering Lewis’ life has already been well-documented elsewhere, in other documentaries, and in books by himself and others.

CNN has broadcasted the film, and it’s also available from such online sources as YouTube, Amazon, Google, iTunes and on Netflix (this last as DVD-only).

Official website including “watch at home” options: www.johnlewisgoodtrouble.com/

The Roots of Democracy

James Preston Allen
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The Roots of Democracy

Crazy at the polls

I can’t imagine that there’s anybody in this nation except for those too young or who have lost their minds that haven’t decided who they are voting for president on Nov. 3 yet. Even those who can’t vote have an opinion. As does the crazy lady singing  Light my Fire off key outside of Sacred Grounds on 6th Street. On the one side you have a psychopathic narcissist spreading the coronavirus around the country in complete denial of the disease or its consequences and on the other side a reasonably normal guy who keeps getting slandered by the psycho and his minions.

This is probably the most critical election since George McGovern challenged President Richard Nixon in 1972, an election pinned to the decision of whether to end the Vietnam War. We are still having to cope with the consequences of that election and Nixon’s corruption of power. So if you haven’t watched the film  The Trial of the Chicago 7,  you should. It is a great American historical film written and directed by Aaron Sorkin and it is a reminder for those who happened to live through that time, and for those who came of age after it, just how little our country has come as far as justice is concerned.

Remembering is something we don’t do well, yet there’ll be plenty to recall from these last four years and even these last four weeks, that will fill many books, films and documentaries far into the future.  You may just get to read or watch them if the Republicans lose the election big. If they win by some form of trickery via the electoral college and  Supreme Court like in the Gore versus Bush election of 2000 then be prepared for book burnings and civil unrest.

Even though it’s a sure bet that former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris will take California’s 35 electoral votes by an overwhelming margin, perhaps the largest in history, it remains to be seen whether they can win in those “battle ground states.” The polls are guardedly optimistic. Just how it is that Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan, or even North Carolina and Arizona, became the deciding factors in choosing a president, I really don’t know. I keep hearing pollsters and political analysts explain this and the best conclusion I can come to is that in certain parts of America some people only get Fox News on cable.

Fox News and faux news websites help explain the existence of those toss up states and the presence of our own homegrown looney tune rightwingers in the Facebook group All Politics San Pedro. Yes, we have our very own brand of “true believers’’ here. Some of them, ironically, are members of the International Longshore Workers Union, whose motto is “An Injury to One is an Injury to All.” These few have politics that do not jibe with this ethic, as they tend to adhere to the “I’ve got mine, go get yours” attitude. Meanwhile, they scream at people like me as being “commies’’ on their page threads.

Isn’t it odd that a union founded by Harry Bridges, a man hounded by the FBI and Joe McCarthy for being a communist, ends up being inherited by a few libertarians? Luckily this isn’t the majority opinion among the ILWU rank and file workers or the vast majority of other labor unions in the rest of Los Angeles. From what I hear, these guys are barely tolerated.

Still, you’d think that in the towns surrounding this industrial port complex of Los Angeles and Long Beach that it just might be mandatory for the public high schools to teach labor history or maybe bring back Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana as essential reading for middle schools. This, however, is not the case and hence we have workers, some with college educations, that don’t even know their own history. Perhaps a brief history should be mandatory reading for every casual longshore worker before they get accepted into the union?

I digress though. What might be applicable from the history of the ILWU is how it was founded with a general coast-wide strike in 1934. It’s certainly the kind of event that grabs national attention. And if the Supreme Court, with its newly minted 6-3 Republican majority were to rule against the popular vote in this election, a legitimate response just might be for all workers to just not show up for a few days. We’ve seen the impact of what shutting down the economy can do to protect against a viral enemy. What would the average worker do to protect the republic against an infectious dictator?

As of last week, the LAPD has already begun making plans for containing the “civil unrest” if this election goes sideways. As of this writing, I received a press release from the Justice Department saying that they were dispatching the FBI to monitor elections in the seven counties of Southern California. I am sure it is the contingency plan all across this fine country. One might read many things into these “contingency” plans, but “Law and Order” would seem to be at the top of the list. The priority, however, should be to protect the vote, protect the polls and to defend justice – as this is the root of our democracy.

Castellanos Fighting the Good Fight

Terelle Jerricks
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Castellanos Fighting the Good Fight

Running against the big money opponents

This year’s election for the Los Angeles Unified School Board has set another record for campaign spending with $15.6 million being spent by outside groups on the Los Angeles Unified School Board race, shattering the previous record set in 2017. The most competitive races are District 3 and 7 with the charter school backed candidates, Marilyn Koziatek and Tanya Franklin-Ortiz, versus Scott Schmerelson and Patricia Castellanos who are supported by United Teachers of Los Angeles and SEIU Local 99.

The 2017 school board campaign holds the previous spending record, with outside groups reporting more than $14.8 million in “independent expenditures” during that cycle. If the pace of spending in this year’s races continues, it will either match or exceed the 2017 record.

Tanya Ortiz Franklin spent $94,251 from her own campaign. If the election would have taken place Oct. 23, and assuming Franklin-Ortiz gets at least the same number of votes she got during the primaries, she will have paid $2.36 per vote.

The outside expenditure group supporting Ortiz Franklin, Kids First, spent $2,328,837. If the election would have taken place Oct. 23, Kids First would have spent $58.35 per vote. Kids First is a political action committee put together by Netflix CEO and founder, Reed Hastings and Bill Bloomfield, the former head of commercial laundry equipment company.

Bill Bloomfield contributed $1,369,344 in support of Franklin. If the election would have taken place Oct. 23, Bloomfield would have paid $34.31.

Bloomfield’s contributions represented more than a third of the money spent on the District 7 race. When combined with the contributions of Kids First, the expenditures by pro-charter forces represent more than half all expenditures in the District 7 race.

Patricia Castellanos spent $187,355.98 from funds raised from her own campaign. If the election would have taken place Oct. 23, Castellanos would have paid $4.11 per vote.

Students, parents and educators in support of Castellanos and Scott Schmerelson for School Board 2020, and sponsored teacher unions, including United Teachers Los Angeles, spent $171,758.

Imagine Justice, a political action committee sponsored by Service Employees International, spent $88,316.

Total independent expenditures on behalf of Castellanos totaled $260,074, or $5.70 per vote.

Kids First poured $2,166,694.63 into mailers, nearly half of that was in the form of negative ads at $935,334.92.

Noblesse Oblige

It misses the point to characterize this race as simply a polarized debate between pro- and anti-charter school advocates. Sure, this school board race is a balance-of-power struggle between the two sides and whether charters will face more scrutiny than not going forward. But the challenges the Los Angeles Unified School District faced during the coronavirus pandemic and the coming crisis created by declining enrollment portends more chaos and funding uncertainty than ever before.

What is missed in today’s debate over charter schools versus traditional schools is that today’s robber barons-turned- philanthropists (think Eli Broad, Bill and Melinda Gates or the Waltons) are using their wealth not simply to improve the lot of their fellow man but to engage in a kind of social engineering without the restrictions of democratic processes and regulatory oversight. Bloomfield and Hastings are just two more operating with a sense of noblesse oblige, or the inferred responsibility of privileged people to act with generosity and nobility toward those less privileged.

In 2012, Bloomfield funneled $7.5 million into his own race against the venerable Rep. Henry Waxman, who prevailed despite the spending spree. In 2014 and 2015, Bloomfield bankrolled the campaigns of two state Senate candidates, contributing more than $2 million to help propel them to victory.

Bloomfield has been putting his considerable financial resources behind the charter school movement for more than a decade. He has contributed more than $3.5 million to former charter school executive Marshall Tuck’s failed 2014 campaign to become California’s superintendent of public instruction and has also donated large sums to other pro-charter candidates.

Bloomfield spent big in the 2018 midterm election cycle, giving $5.3 million to the independent expenditure committee EdVoice, which backed Tuck’s second run for superintendent of public instruction. Bloomfield contributed an additional $1.3 million directly to Tuck’s campaign in what became the most expensive race for state superintendent of education in United States history. Tuck’s supporters have built a fundraising advantage of more than two to one over his opponent, Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, whose largest source of support is teacher unions.

 Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has given millions of dollars to start charter schools. He’s put millions more into developing education software to personalize learning. But he doesn’t just give money. He makes things change. Hastings, reportedly, is not a fan of school boards.

The high-tech billionaire led and financed a 1998 campaign that forced the California legislature to liberalize its restrictive charter law. He served on the California Board of Education for four years. Hastings provided start-up funding for the Aspire Public Schools charter network and helped start and fund EdVoice, a lobbying group, and the NewSchools Venture Fund, which supports education entrepreneurs.

He’s given money to Sal Khan of Khan Academy to develop teaching videos — and a dashboard to track student progress — technology that’s used across the country. Hastings also supports Rocketship Education, which blends adaptive learning on computers with teacher-led instruction. He’s on the board of the California Charter Schools Association; the KIPP Foundation; DreamBox Learning, an education technology company; and the Pahara Institute, which provides fellowships to education leaders. On the business side, he served on Microsoft’s board until 2012 and is now on Facebook’s board.

Like Gates, Reed Hastings is always looking to launch disruptive innovations. When Hastings does it, he goes big. When he succeeds, he pushes the envelope further. When he fails, he retreats until another opportunity to advance forward presents itself.

The Fight for Balance

Patricia Castellanos admitted that her campaign was operating with a bit of a handicap due to the coronavirus pandemic. She said she and her labor allies are communicating with voters the old-fashioned way, which by the way, didn’t include going door-to-door, at least during the stretch from the primaries to the General Election. This old-fashioned way basically meant phone banking, mass text messages and mailers. Lots and lots of mailers.

The biggest lie Castellanos has had to bat down if not endure is that she has no experience. Castellanos argues that she has had more than 20 years of experience in advocacy work and organizing. She argues that she has been able to execute and create policy as a leader and organizer on the outside and see through the implementation of those policies on the inside as a member of various boards.

“Voters are talking but we’re getting a lot of positive responses and a lot of voters are seeing through a lot of the B.S.,” Castellanos said. “And, they are most turned off by it.”

Another thing Castellanos has going for her is name recognition, such as being a member of the Harbor Commissioners at the Port of Los Angeles and her work for Supervisor Sheila Kuehl.

“Our schools are not profit centers and they are not companies,” Castellanos explained. “Transparency and accountability are what’s missing from charter schools although it’s better now than before through recent legislation.”

Indeed, with traditional schools there are several vehicles through which to demand transparency and accountability. Castellanos admits that it’s not easy, either for a parent or an organizer, to hold our institutions accountable. But there are vehicles to do just that.

Education is more than just about the charter versus non-charter divide. Castellanos knows well that despite how much of a problem the explosion in the number of charter schools has become, it will be very difficult to put that genie back in the bottle.

“Giving local boards more authority over charter schools is critical,” Castellanos said. “My hope is that the board uses that authority aggressively to be able to hold charters accountable with a more scrutinous eye of new charters that are trying to apply.”

Hastings once spoke admiringly of how the New Orleans school district became entirely all-charter after Hurricane Katrina. With the combination of the coronavirus pandemic and already exacerbated declining enrollments, this particular moment has the potential of becoming LAUSD’s Hurricane Katrina and the sharks are circling.

“It’s difficult to break through the noise, especially during this time of COVID,” Castellanos said. “There’s so much more at stake.”

Castellanos notes that distance learning works for no one; not for students, not for teachers, not for families.

“We need to put in place measures that make distance learning as effective as possible,” the long timer organizer and activist said. “There are conversations that need to be had about how to reopen safely. What resources do we need?”

Castellanos noted that Congress and the president are playing politics over COVID relief funding for education.

“My focus would be to manage and regulate the charters,” Castellanos said. “It has to be done and bring some stability to that. Then begin leveling the playing field in our higher needs communities.”

She didn’t want to speak just yet on the direction the district should take next year when COVID-related enrollment declines exacerbate ongoing declines in enrollment.

“We hope that Prop. 15 passes, that the federal government comes through with funding, but these are uncertainties and unknowns,” she said.

Castellanos also noted that it is not known what the enrollment numbers are going to be or what the state’s allocation of resources is going to be based on enrollment. 

“The state chose to continue funding school districts at the same level as pre-pandemic, holding school districts harmless,” Castellanos said. “At best we’re going to be back with some hybrid model. “

Rather than thinking about budget cuts, Castellanos prefers to get the state and the federal government to keep funding schools at pre-COVID levels.

“Pre-COVID, we need to look at where we are investing our resources,” Castellanos said. “If we don’t have the funds to invest in our schools then we are not going to be able to make them attractive choices for parents.”

Imperial Avalon Residents Fight Displacement

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Imperial Avalon Residents Fight Displacement
By Joseph Baroud, Reporter

The intersection of Carson and Avalon was surrounded with the deafening sounds of
honking cars on Oct. 20 in support of more than 30 demonstrators protesting the
attempted displacement of residents from the Imperial Avalon Mobile Home Park.
As the City of Carson moves forward with redevelopment projects they believe will add more quality retail options and market rate housing, mobile home residents believe these improvements are happening at the expense of their housing security.
Residents have decided to take to the streets because the phone calls and the letters aren’t yielding results. This is the second week of protests. Residents are joined by supporters and representatives of their homeowner’s association in order to reverse the momentum with public support.
During a July 7 council meeting in which representatives from Faring Capital joined the council to discuss this situation, Darren Embry, a representative of Faring, which is part of the relocation project team that has been tasked with Imperial Avalon and handles community development, said that residents have until January 2022 to find a new home.
The relocation project team that will handle the move presented a chart to the City
Council’s planning commission. Embry said that each resident will be provided this chart and given the chance to make a selection of which buyback rate they would like to use to complete this transaction.
Jeff Steiman, 55, a resident and representative of the mobile home homeowners’
association said that as of Oct. 26 residents haven’t been given a choice about the rate at which they want to sell their house. Steiman also says the resident’s first right of refusal wasn’t respected.
Homeowners say that they’re being offered a significantly low value for their homes.
Glenn White, 66, who has been living there for 21 years, said he was being offered
$10,000 for his home valued at $80,000.
“The residents have been offered on site market value,” Marcela Steiman, 62, said. “We want fair market value because we have to go out to search the housing market with less money. Why in the hell would we move into another mobile home park when they are all being bought up by all the investors?”
The entity who conducted the appraisals for the homes was Faring Capital, which also
bought the property. White says that the council is helping Faring Capital obtain mobile home parks, because Faring makes hefty contributions to the council.
“The main voting bloc allowing Faring Capital to buy up all the mobile home parks are
led by city council members Lula Davis-Holmes, Jawane Hilton and Cedric Hicks,” White said.
Carla Zanotti, 48, who has lived at Imperial Avalon for 40 years, said she received a
change of ownership notice in August and a promise from the new proprietors, Faring
Capital, that they would find everybody a residence in Carson and they would take care of all of the moving fees. That didn’t happen, so she took the matter up with an attorney and is scheduled to meet Nov. 4 to discuss her options.
The City Council has scheduled a meeting on Oct. 28 at Dignity Park to hold an open
discussion with affected residents. Steiman said that the City Council wants residents of the various affected mobile home parks to attend this meeting. They requested that representatives from Faring Capital attend as well.
“When the mobile home lots were built, they were intended to be an affordable way instead of living on the street,” Steiman said.

GOP Losing the Popular Vote

Paul Rosenberg
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The media ignores the warnings

Republicans have lost the popular vote for president in every election but one in the past 30 years and they appear headed to lose once again, by well more than the 2.9 million votes they lost by last time.  

“Where are all of the arrests?” Trump tweeted on Oct. 7, followed later with the all-caps demand:

“DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN – GOT CAUGHT!!!”

Trump never spelled out the alleged scandal/plot or the person being asked to act. But that very lack of specificity, together with the sweeping, grandiose claim of unprecedented evil, are hallmarks of how autocratic leaders seek to grab absolute power for themselves — justifying the elimination of all rivals. His outburst should have set off alarm bells across the political spectrum. Instead, it barely caused a ripple.

Beyond being inattentive, the media is routinely pernicious: It amplifies Trump’s efforts to undermine our democracy. A recent report from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society found that Trump was the primary driver of disinformation about alleged “voter fraud,” via elite media coverage. The methodology was “an elite-driven, mass-media led process,” the report noted, driven by Trump’s tweets, press briefings and interviews amplified via media coverage.

“Social media played only a secondary and supportive role,” the report stated.

In all, the study analyzed more than 55,000 online stories, 5 million tweets, and 75,000 public Facebook posts. The only peak in activity not personally driven by Trump came in response to the exposure of his administration’s interference with the U.S. Postal Service. Three media practices helped to spread the misinformation, according to the report: “elite institutional focus (if the president says it, it’s news); headline seeking (if it bleeds, it leads); and balance, neutrality, or the avoidance of the appearance of taking a side.”

More precisely, the report explained:

[Trump] uses the first two in combination to summon coverage at will, and has used them continuously to set the agenda surrounding mail-in voting through a combination of tweets, press conferences, and television interviews on Fox News. He relies on the latter professional practice [balance] to keep audiences that are not politically pre-committed and have relatively low political knowledge confused, because it limits the degree to which professional journalists in mass media organizations are willing or able to directly call the voter fraud frame disinformation.

Thus, the media have played a key role in helping to spread Trump’s disinformation, attacking the legitimacy of our elections — and doing so in the specific form that Trump himself has chosen to maximally hurt his opposition. If enough mail-in votes can be suppressed — particularly in Pennsylvania — Trump will have a path to re-“election,” especially with the help of the courts that he’s been stacking with his appointees.

There are some who recognize the depths of what’s at stake, which is why three giants of science publishing — Nature, Scientific American and the New England Journal of Medicine — have made the first presidential endorsements of their histories, stretching back to the 19th century. And, while other institutions have wobbled, specific individuals have nonetheless stood out. Thus, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent noted that Trump’s recent attacks on infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci and 60 Minutes interviewer Leslie Stahl made perfect sense:

They are the figures he perceives to be standing in the way of his effort to conduct this campaign in an entirely invented universe that he’d hoped to manufacture for this very purpose.

But other institutions are flailing badly in defense of reality, despite the clarity of evidence of what’s going on, and the potential dangers that loom.

“The producers of news aren’t capable of dealing with Trump within their present rules and formulas,” NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen told Vox recently. “There’s no emergency switch. … You would have to, for example, tear apart the Sunday shows and start again with different premises. And, there’s no appetite for that.”

Most in the media have long been reluctant to call Trump a liar, which amounts to complicity with him, in helping to obscure the truth of what’s going on in our country. This obscures both what he’s lying about, and why he’s doing it, as well as what should guide us in responding to him.

Ignoring Psychologists’ Warnings

Psychologists and psychiatrists have long warned about Trump — his pathological lying, and a host of other troubling traits reflecting narcissism, sadism, psychopathy and more — but the media have never taken their warnings to heart, never stopped treating him as if their observations and analyses were irrelevant.

Yet, their input can be invaluable. For example, Ian Hughes, author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities Are Destroying Democracy, shed light on the dynamics Sargent touched on above.

“Imposing their pathological worldview onto the world is what individuals with dangerous disorders do,” Hughes told Random Lengths News. “Doing so is not a conscious choice; it is a consequence of the fact that individuals with these disorders live in an internal ‘reality’ that is shaped by their disorder.”

“He reacts with anger at anyone who dares challenge his superiority — whether that is female journalists or scientific experts,” said Hughes about Trump’s sense of superiority. “He lives in a world of his own making in which he must control others or take them down before they harm him.”

Trump’s refusal to take the coronavirus seriously has resulted in more than a hundred thousand excess deaths. That’s typical of the dynamic Hughes went on to describe:

By acting out this worldview in their minute-by-minute relationships with everyone around them, pathological individuals make this internal world an external reality. People either agree with them, stick around and reinforce their pathological views, or disagree with them, refuse to associate with them and become enemies to be destroyed.

This is exactly what has happened with COVID-19.

The media has generally failed to realize how experts like Hughes can help make sense of Trump’s actions for their audiences. But that’s as foolish, in its own way, as Trump’s refusal to listen to and learn from Dr. Fauci. Like Fauci, they can help us grasp things we already experience, but don’t know how to make sense of.

A paper published in spring showed that ordinary Americans — Trump supporters and conservatives as well as liberals — perceive the same sets of Trump’s psychologically dangerous traits that experts have been warning against.

“We found that, on average, those who voted for Trump and those who voted for Clinton did not have wildly different views of Trump’s personality,” the lead author Jacob Fiala told PsyPost. “Both groups saw him as particularly sadistic and narcissistic, and even though the two groups disagreed about how prominently he displayed these traits, his own supporters still judged him to be more sadistic and narcissistic than 90% of people.”

This didn’t surprise Hughes.

“In the context of an extremely divided society, even majorities can believe that choosing leaders with traits that correspond to the clinical diagnosis of psychopath or malignant narcissist is the smart thing to do,” he said.

But if that’s what they’re choosing, it should be a central matter of debate.

Attacks On Democracy Also Ignored

Similarly — though not so completely — the media has also done a poor job of describing Trump’s multifaceted attacks on American democracy. In September, the Washington Post ran a story, The United States is backsliding into autocracy under Trump, scholars warn. And, while it wasn’t the first such story, there’s no spillover into changing day-to-day reporting on what Trump is doing, despite widespread agreement amongst political scientists, such as the V-Dem project, involving 2,800 national experts around the world.

We’re now in a “third wave” of autocratization, they tell us. The first two waves, from 1926 to 1942 and from 1961 to 1977, were characterized by sudden events, such as military coups, but the third wave, starting in 1994, is characterized by gradual erosion (at least initially) most often driven by elected leaders like Trump, who undermine democratic norms and institutions to remain in power.

“Once in power, the ambitious autocrats work to change constitutions, undermine independent electoral authority (domestic and international), weaken the opposition, besiege civil society and persecute critical media,” Armando Chaguaceda, a V-Dem national expert, explained in 2019. And V-Dem’s 2020 report noted that “The United States of America is the only country in Western Europe and North America suffering from substantial autocratization.”

This is where America stands today, less than a week from Election Day, with a very real chance of significant democratic erosion, depending on what kinds of results come in where, and how, and when — and how other actors respond to Trump’s continued efforts to undermine our democracy.

Trump’s tax cut is his sole piece of major legislation, vastly overshadowed by the volume of judges he’s appointed, aided by Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s practice of sabotaging almost all of Barack Obama’s nominations in the last two years of his term. While intended most broadly to win support from the GOP establishment as well as the base, Trump has also made it clear he expects “his” judges to protect him — up to and including the Supreme Court, where his latest nominee  was confirmed at record speed. And so far, that’s exactly what they’ve done.

On Oct. 19, the Supreme Court declined to overturn a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling to allow late-arriving ballots to be counted up to three days after election day. But with Amy Coney Barrett on the court, that could easily be reversed, and one theory being argued could allow the GOP-controlled state legislature to simply ignore the popular vote and send their own slate of electors to the Electoral College.

Even more arcane power-grab scenarios are possible — predicated only on the willingness of GOP enablers to carry out Trump’s wishes. In a suddenly tightening re-election race, Texas Sen. John Cornyn has let slip a few modestly Trump-critical comments. The GOP could also lose two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia and one each in South Carolina and Mississippi, which they once assumed were all safe — signs that an epochal power-shift may be underway. Joe Biden could conceivably win Texas and Georgia as well, effectively outflanking Trump’s threatened Pennsylvania shenanigans.

There are too many possibilities to specifically discuss, but there’s a common thread: Trump’s instinct to stay in power no matter what will diverge from the perceived interests of long-term power-players like McConnell to a greater or lesser degree. And here, again, a combination of psychological and political science frameworks can help illuminate what may come.

“Daisy” a Timely Document of the Advertising Shot Heard ‘Round the Political World

Greggory Moore
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“Daisy” a Timely Document of the Advertising Shot Heard ‘Round the Political World

If you don’t know The Beatles, you cannot possibly understand the genesis of rock ‘n’ roll. But in both politics and advertising, the “Daisy” spot is even more seminal, more original. Sean Devine’s Daisy, which makes its California premiere online in International City Theatre’s first COVID-era production, dramatizes the creation of the 60-second spot that revolutionized political campaigning and whose reverberations still move us today.

Aaron, Sid, and Louise (Matthew Floyd Miller, Alex Dabestani, and Erin Anne Williams, respectively) are star ad execs at Doyle Dane Bernbach, which has just been hired by the White House to create an ad campaign for Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 presidential run. Although television may have been a big part of the prior three races, LBJ’s election committee wants something new, something more aggressive — especially once the Republicans nominate extremist Barry Goldwater, who has publicly professed his willingness to use atomic weapons in Vietnam and elsewhere.

Enter Tony Schwartz (David Nevell), an agoraphobic sound designer who’s ahead of his time. He knows that combining the right sonic elements in the right way can “bring to the surface what’s already deep inside,” just as Louise knows a killer ad idea when she hears it — in this case, the juxtaposition of a little girl counting flower petals, followed by an ominous countdown preceding a nuclear explosion. 

Despite never mentioning Goldwater’s name, from the moment of its one and only TV broadcast on September 7, 1964, the “Daisy” spot was considered the first attack ad, and Daisy is a meditation on the Pandora’s box it opened, with characters taking turns questioning and justifying their actions in language that at times is a bit too on-the-nose. “Tell me, where is the ethics in attack ads?” “Tell me that when Cliff [an LBJ adviser played by Phillip J. Lewis] was talking about attack ads that didn’t feel like a slippery slope.” “What we do is going to play on 8 million televisions across the country. Not only is the opportunity unprecedented, but so is the responsibility.”

By design, Daisy is a play without either a moral center or a bad guy. All of the characters are ambitious, but none is amoral. All have blind spots, yet all have some idea what they’re doing. Devine deserves credit for this, just as he does for not trying to provide answers for the unanswerable. “The best we can do,” says Schwartz, “is make choices for an imperfect world.”

As an online production, although Daisy is a decent first stab for ICT— and you definitely feel like you’re watching a real play and not simply a video exercise masquerading as such — it’s a bit puzzling why it isn’t a bit better. Although this is an archived live performance, it contains no less than mid-scene five edits, three or four of which are noticeable glitches. And that doesn’t include a particular line flub so obviously wrong in a nontrivial way that there’s no excuse for leaving it as-is since they’re doing edits, anyway. 

Perhaps a tougher nut to crack is the stasis. Because Devine’s script is innately static, this was going to be a shortcoming even were ICT staging this in their usual Beverly O’Neill Theater digs, and so the problem of having actors isolated from each other in their own rectangular boxes doesn’t hurt as much as it might for a script with more physical action and interaction. Still, it doesn’t seem like director caryn desai has quite yet figured out how to turn the limitations of virtual theatre into inspirations. (I’m not saying I do, either, but I’ll know it when I see it.)

What cannot be denied is that Daisy is a timely choice for our current election season, where the Republican in the race ain’t got nothing on Goldwater, and the cerebral sophistication of the “Daisy” spot is a far cry from today’s political milieu and the attacks that even relatively sober candidates routinely unleash on each other. So if you feel like ruminating on the road that got us here, Daisy is not a bad place to start.

Daisy at International City Theatre (virtually)

Times: On demand
The show runs through Nov. 7
Cost: $20
Details: (562) 436-4610, ICTLongBeach.org

Learn More: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJiYY2-xibU

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