Comments@THE GUSS REPORT-What started last week in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) is a voluntary abdication of the local government’s responsibility to maintain law and order,
as a group of marauders annexed a multi-block area of Seattle and declared it to be free of government, setting up border walls with some of its members brandishing weapons and allegedly extorting money from people and businesses within the zone. And these folks remain an occupying force there because Seattle’s Mayor Jenny Durkan and the Seattle City Council have declared that they are okay with this.
Wait, aren’t border walls and guns supposed to be bad?
But don’t laugh LA. The same thing could easily surface in LA because it already did in late 2011 with the similarly vague Occupy LA movement.
The key ingredient in Seattle in 2020, and LA back in 2011, is this: a spineless, ingratiating mayor without a hint of voice resonance or sense of responsibility to the rest of us. That description nimbly fits Durkan, current LA Mayor Eric Garcetti and Antonio Villaraigosa, who was LA’s Mayor during Occupy LA in 2011.
Last week Durkan and the Seattle City Council stunningly embraced CHAZ by delusionally suggesting it is more like a granola bar-laden block party akin to the “summer of love.” But what is happening in Seattle is a notably different summer of love than the social phenomenon of mid-1967; Seattleites who live or work within CHAZ are trapped. And the taxpayer-funded Seattle Police Department is of zero value to the community because that agency vacated its police station located within CHAZ, believed to have been done with the blessing, if not the direct order, of Durkan.
At any rate, let’s shout out a hearty Congratulations Seattle! This is the leadership you elected, and these are the results you get. LA looks forward to seeing how things look in a month or two because we had a preview of it a decade ago and it was neither pretty nor cheap.
In late 2011, Los Angeles city officials, always desperate to appear down with the cool crowd, similarly embraced hundreds of Occupy LA protestors camping out on the LA City Hall lawn.
Strike that. LA officials didn’t just embrace Occupy LA; they invited them in. Everything was fine at first because it got our politicians the media attention they crave. Pied pipers Villaraigosa and Garcetti made the situation worse by enabling members of that LA City Council to pass a resolution further encouraging the protest.
But like house guests and fish, Occupy LA’s fecal miasma became, how shall we say, inconvenient.
A month into Occupy LA, an LA Times editorial entitled “Occupy L.A.: Ending the occupation,” called out then-LA Mayor Villaraigosa and then-LA City Council president Garcetti:
“Right about now, we suspect City Council President Eric Garcetti is regretting telling protesters with the Occupy Los Angeles movement camping outside City Hall that they were welcome to ‘stay as long as you need to.’ And Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa might be rethinking his decision to hand out ponchos when the weather turned wet.” -- LA Times Opinion, Oct 28, 2011
At the two-month mark, LA officials, inundated with demands by locals to end the toxic stew brewing on City Hall’s lawn, switched gears and used the decidedly violent muscle of 1,400 LAPD officers to force them off of the property and arrest hundreds who refused to leave.
In the immediate wake, LA had 30 tons of its trash to haul away by workers in hazmat suits. The property surrounding LA City Hall was subsequently fenced up, requiring millions of dollars and many months to sanitize and restore.
Neither Villaraigosa, Garcetti nor any other LA official (here’s looking at you, 2011 Councilmembers Richard Alarcón and the late Bill Rosendahl) apologized for encouraging the Occupy LA disaster, including squandering $2.45 million in 2015 lawsuit settlements that taxpayers had to pay to the protestors for the LAPD’s violent eviction.
And just imagine how much overtime those 1,400 LAPD officers got. . .
Last week, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who spent part of 2019 running for president, claimed he was unaware of what was going on in Seattle’s nation of CHAZ. In 2011, then-California Governor Jerry Brown chose to protect the First and Fourth Amendment rights of the Occupy LA movement without regard for protecting and preserving the safety of the communities which elected him.
But if LA thinks that a CHAZ equivalent can’t re-surface in LA in 2020, just look at who’s still in charge here: Eric Garcetti. That’s the same guy who recently took an emasculating knee with George Floyd protestors and rioters and then unilaterally decided to re-allocate between $100 and $150 milion from the LAPD budget to other programs, which is a big, beaming welcome signal for a CHAZ-like takeover in LA.
That’s also an invitation for CHAZ-minded folks to camp out in front of Garcetti’s home and those of other City officials, especially Nury Martinez, LA City Council president who with breathtaking speed last week sheepishly ended the LAPD’s costly protection of her home after publicly supporting those severe LAPD budget cuts without a shred of public input.
That’s who in charge in LA.
But this time the LAPD may have a bone to pick with Garcetti and Martinez and may not be so quick to tear gas protestors and crack them over the heads with their batons. And is there a doubt in anyone’s mind that Garcetti, the nerdy white suburban kid educated in ritzy private schools, secretly craves the national spotlight of hosting vague, funkified protests? Does anyone doubt that Garcetti wishes that he could be the mayor kumbaya’ing, my lord, with CHAZ in LA?
CHAZ is now trying to rebrand itself as CHOP, the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, though its purpose remains vague. Perhaps Garcetti could help them out with that since he sure doesn’t stand up for the rest of us.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star News, Los Angeles Downtown News, and the Los Angeles Times in its Sports, Opinion and Entertainment sections and Sunday Magazine, among other publishers. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
