First a little background. Council District 14 representative José Huizar recently proposed a law to legalize street vending in Los Angeles. Predictably, the BIDs are horrified by the thought that this might pass.

In fact, they’re so horrified that the icky-poo Central City Association hired thuggish PR flacks Rodriguez Strategies to help defeat it. We’ll be writing much more on this presently, but for now you just need to know that one of the subterfuges that the BIDs and Rodriguez Strategies are proposing is to get the law modified to allow neighborhoods to opt in rather than the city-wide legalization that’s now on the table.

This is bad enough, of course, since everyone knows that opt-in regulations kill participation, but even this mild, skewed-in-her-favor form of democracy is too much for jittery little psychopath and big kahunette of the Sunset-Vine BID, Carol Massie. She doesn’t believe in the holy principle of one-person-one-vote. WHAT IF PEOPLE VOTE THE WRONG WAY??!? After hearing a couple of flacks from Rodriguez explain the strategy at the March 17, 2015 meeting of the SVBID board of directors, Carol Massie ranted thusly:

Um…you know, Kerry, uh, one of the things that I think we should consider…and this was something that you mentioned, Marie, was the idea of having a certain percentage of the residents and the businesses. The problem with the residents is that they don’t deal with the things that the businesses do, so they might say “WHOAH! A bunch of great, cheap food and cheap CDs, and they could vote it in, and then all the businesses are outvoted, because there’s a lot fewer businesses than there are residents, and so having the residents in on the opt-ins [unintelligible]

Never fear, says Central City Association minion Marie Rumsey, nobody’s gonna want vending (watch the clip if you care, we’re too lazy to transcribe this nonsense). For some reason she singles out La Mirada Avenue as a place where no one will want street vendors. Weird, and it shows how badly out of touch she is with the city she’s ruining. La Mirada Avenue west of Vine Street is not in any BID, and consequently is crawling with now-illegal street vendors. There are heladeros five or six times a day, eloteros at least three times a week, fruit and produce vendors, all between Vine Street and Seward Street right there on La Mirada.

Sheesh, one expects that before they set out to sell the city they live in to the pharisees for 30 pieces of silver, they’d at least take a minute to learn what the hell they’re ruining. They don’t even have time for that, though. So, to summarize: Carol Massie hates democracy and thinks the residents of Hollywood are too stupid to make decisions for their own neighborhood, and Marie Rumsey doesn’t have the first idea about the neighborhood she used to represent when she was with CD13 and now is paid to ruin. And so it goes.

Image of Marie Rumsey is not hosted here, but is instead displayed through a deep link under the theory that the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit knew what the heck they were talking about when they decided Perfect 10 v. Google 508 F.3d 1146 (2007). If you don’t agree, take it up with them, eh? Images of PR flackette Jessica Borek and SVBID kahunette-in-chief Carol Massie are ©2015 MichaelKohlhaas.org.