What’s In Caruso’s CAN?

Los Angeles’ Mayor’s Race

Long before Rick Caruso started dumping a million dollars a week into his campaign to run for mayor of Los Angeles, it looked like it was going to be a battle between Mike Feuer and Joe Buscaino. Feuer, the twice elected city attorney and Buscaino the former Los Angeles Police Department officer turned councilman from the 15th district. Clearly this was an opportunity for both to lead this city but with very divergent approaches. One with a well thought out set of policies and programs and the other with his anti-homeless no camping ordinances. Buscaino’s gambit was to lean into the outrage of conservatives and let the more liberal factions battle for the majority of the democratic leftwing voters ostensibly splitting the primary vote to get him into the runoff. Now I’m not so sure.

This was before Congresswoman Karen Bass and then billionaire Rick Caruso entered the race. Now you can’t pick up your cell phone or open your computer without viewing “Caruso Can” ads. He even dropped his first campaign mailer earlier than what some political strategists would consider prudent, but hey, he’s got the money, so why not? The only question that lingers is what Caruso CAN do?

It would seem like this newly minted “Democrat,” who only changed his registration about a month before announcing, has borrowed extensively from policy initiatives that were well formulated by City Attorney Feuer and a growing consensus of liberal democrats on housing, mental health and drug treatment programs. So what makes him so different?

Yet, I have a hard time believing that a guy who just bought an $18.6 million, 7 bedroom, 8.5 bath mansion in Newport Beach, right next door to the one he already owns on Balboa Peninsula has much concern for those living in a tent on skid row or Beacon Street in San Pedro. His massive Brentwood estate could probably house many of our current unsheltered neighbors, but that would really rock the boat up in that tony area. What would the neighbors say if Caruso actually started housing the homeless instead of buying an election or palatial estates for the wealthiest people who will never be homeless? Clearly Los Angeles doesn’t have a shortage of mansions for the wealthy.

You can’t accuse Caruso of not being a real billionaire, unlike the wannabe dictatorgrifter who should be indicted for trying to subvert the 2020 election results. Caruso’s wealth is real and can be calculated by his extensive property holdings, his Fortune 500 listing and his all-American luxury yacht which sold for $100 million. And after four years of corruption both at City Hall and in the White House, is anyone really willing to elect another rich guy who has never been elected to office before?

On the other hand we have Karen Bass, perhaps one of the most overly qualified contenders for mayor in the entire history of this office.

Upon Bass entering the race, the polls immediately showed her approval ratings in the double digits while Buscaino, Feuer and (did I forget to mention Kevin de León?) all with single digits. I have not seen a poll with Caruso listed yet, perhaps he can buy one.

Karen Bass comes with a very long public service resume that includes six terms in the U.S. Congress, many years in the California State Assembly where she became the first Black woman speaker and before that, a social worker and community organizer in South Los Angeles. She grew up in Mid City Los Angeles, which is the same area she represents today in Congress. She is a graduate of Cal State Dominguez Hills, the University of Southern California’s School of Medicine physician assistant program, and the Masters Program in Social Work. She worked as a physician assistant and as a clinical instructor at the USC Keck School of Medicine physician assistant program.

I had the opportunity to do a short interview with her at her recent fundraising event in San Pedro and found her engaging, smart and earnest in her aspiration to come back to LA and fix it. I have no doubt that she, Feuer and de León would make a sincere effort at fixing all that ills Los Angeles. I’m just not convinced that LA, such as it is, can be fixed!

What I mean by this is that the bureaucracies, the overlapping jurisdictions and the top-down management of the city breeds a long established distrust between city departments and the citizens they serve. It operates in both directions — from the city clerk’s office, to the LAPD, to the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (which is a misnomer if I’ve ever heard one). People don’t tend to trust the city, and the city tends not to trust the people, unless you are a “part of the city family.”

And yet, there’s a kind of complacency that is born from this distrust that allows the common people of Los Angeles to abide the benign neglect that blankets their being disempowered up until the day there’s a drive-by shooting in their rather quiet neighborhood, their trash day is missed or the homeless camp expands to Echo Park Lake where they walk their golden retriever. Then watch out!

The only one of the top tier candidates that seems to understand this is Mike Feuer, and he may not make it past the primary. But if he does not get elected, whoever does should hire him to implement his plan to untangle LA’s fundamental dysfunction.

I’m waiting to interview de León to see if he’s the real deal. All I can say at this point, is that we don’t need another billionaire wanting to come in and run the city “like a business.” Such candidates aren’t to be trusted with the keys to the city or the nation.

I don’t even know what Caruso’s CAN might look like but I can only imagine that it’s a gold plated toilet and something the city can’t afford even if he only gets paid a dollar a year.

tending to be so very, very concerned about.

Every one of those Republican senators had two simple goals for the hearings.

The first was to smear the Democratic nominee in a way that will guarantee that — over the next 24-hour news cycle — the name “Judge Jackson” will repeatedly occur in the same headline or sentence as “child porn,” “Critical Race Theory,” or “terrorists from Gitmo.”

The second was to craft a short soundbite of their own performance art that Fox “News” and other hard-right media can play on a loop. White Republicans dressing down a Black woman? Perfect for conservative hate media.

Even if they make fools of themselves, they all know that the first dictum of public relations — taught to them by Donald Trump himself, who candidly and correctly credited it to PT Barnum — is: “There’s no such thing as bad publicity. Just spell my name right.”

This is happening because the Republican Party is no longer interested in governing. They’ve become the mouthpiece for a faction of business and great wealth, and beyond that have no commitment to rebuilding or improving this country in any meaningful way.

There’s a reason the GOP refuses to publish a party platform or legislative agenda: they don’t have one, beyond doing anything they can to increase corporate profits (regardless of the harm to consumers, competition, or the planet) and to keep taxes low on their morbidly rich donors. And to winning the so-called “culture wars.” Hell, they’ve been telling us that for years. “Deregulation, cut taxes, small government” is the GOP mantra. Meanwhile, the culture war keeps their base in a constant state of frothingat-the mouth.

Deregulation and cutting taxes is all they have, and it doesn’t sell today like it did back in the 1980s when they waved it around as a “new idea.” So they’ve stopped even pretending that they care about actually doing the people’s business.

Of course, there’s all the Sturm und Drang about race, porn, drugs, religion, and gender identity. But that’s just to keep the rubes showing up at the ballot box.

These multimillionaire Republican senators, funded by their billionaire pals, don’t have a second thought for any of those “issues.” As the Republican Study Committee pointed out, “winning” the “culture wars” is the real agenda to get angry white racists to turn out for GOP candidates so they can stay in power and continue to do the bidding of the wealthy.

And in that, they don’t care how many gay or trans kids commit suicide because of their demagoguery;

they don’t care how many red-state teenage girls get pregnant because they never learned about human reproduction or lack access to birth control; they don’t care how many kids will die by gunshot today.

Species going extinct? Wilding weather destroying another thousand homes? Childhood cancers exploding? People crushed by medical bills and losing their homes?

They don’t want to hear about it.

The struggles of average working people are meaningless to them, as are the crises of people struggling with medical or educational debt that literally doesn’t exist in any other developed nation.

Those are all just numbers to them, and they don’t pay much attention to numbers. It doesn’t even matter to them that the fear-laden and hateful version of authoritarian “Christianity” they preach would be rejected by Jesus.

They’re happy to ignore the fact that the United States — apparently on advice from “Beerbong” Brett Kavanaugh when he was working for George W. Bush (the Trump administration refused to release the papers) — tortured and murdered numerous innocent people at Gitmo, some still there.

Their absurd “concern” that white children will be “scarred for life” by discovering that a small minority of white people were once brutal slaveholders is pure theater. As is their proclaimed worry that kids reading about the holocaust or a novel that describes the Black or LGBTQ+ experience in America will twist young minds.

It’s all theater to distract us from their real work of increasing the poisons in our air and water to jack up the profits of their obscene overlords. The more hate they can create among Americans the better: it boosts their social media presence because of algorithms designed to keep us in a state of perpetual outrage.

Seriously. They have no real interest in governing or making America a better place for anybody to live, other than the morbidly rich.

Proof: Name one single piece of legislation since 1980 that has been proposed by Republicans, passed a Republican-controlled Congress, and been signed into law by a Republican President that primarily helps working or poor Americans more than it does fat-cats on Wall Street, polluting industries, or billionaire industrialists.

You can’t do it. I’ve been asking this question for 19 years on my radio/TV show and I can tell you right now: you can’t name a single one.

Sure, they’ll wrap a tiny carrot for average folks inside a big box with a pony for the billionaires, like they did with the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts.

But primarily benefit America’s working people or the poor, or strengthen our democracy? Forgetaboutit. never effective and San Pedro resumed is a generalized standard practice of failing to provide rental property to Afro-Americans.

The big question now is how do we solve the problem? Realtors are between a rock and a very hard place. Some apartment owners’ perceptions of Afro-Americans are that of the 1970s television series, Starsky and Hutch (Thus persona non grata). That all AfroAmericans as drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes. All in all, will there only be a compromise of what is codified law? Does equality and respect matter anymore? Is one to accept Critical San Pedro Theory that de facto segregation is acceptable in a town that glorifies its good race relations.

We know that San Pedro’s politicians shake in fear at the words, “de facto segregation” kind of like E=MC^2 as too hot to handle. Will the new 15th district councilperson address the issue? We will be waiting.

John Gray Wilmington

Dear Mr. Gray,

You might find this history enlightening.

The California Fair Housing Act of 1963, better known as the Rumford Act (AB 1240) because of its sponsor, Assemblyman William Byron Rumford, was one of the most significant and sweeping laws protecting the rights of blacks and other people of color to purchase housing without being subjected to discrimination during the postWorld War II period.

The Rumford Act called for an end to racial discrimination in all public and private housing in the state and immediately met opposition in the California legislature. Republican legislators exempted most forms of private and single family housing before the bill was finally passed on September 20, 1963. The new law made illegal discrimination in public housing and in all residential properties with more than five units.

Despite the exclusion of the vast majority of the homes occupied by Californians, the California Real Estate Association (CREA) immediately launched a repeal campaign. Exploiting the growing hostility toward all liberal social programs and promoting the call for “property owner rights,” the CREA-led effort resulted in the Proposition 14 referendum on Nov. 3, 1964, which saw a 2-to-1 vote in favor of repeal of the Rumford Act.

Despite the vote, the Rumford Act was restored in 1966 when the California Supreme Court ruled that Prop. 14 was illegal. A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court strengthened this ruling stating that Prop. 14 violated the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which “prohibits all racial discrimination in the sale or rental of property.”

This by no means explains how some landlords still get away with discriminating against people of color.

James Preston Allen, Publisher