Category Archives: Street Vending

Hollywood BID Patrol, Hypocrisy, Street Vending

Don’t Incarcerate the Ice Cream Man

March 23, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

We have written before about the BIDs’ hysterical, dishonest opposition to City Councilman José Huizar‘s proposal to legalize street vending. We’ve discussed the fact that many of the BID board members who oppose this law are themselves criminals, although not the kind who get prosecuted for their dirty deeds. We’ve written about how their froth-mouth rage at this relatively small move in the direction of sanity puts them in opposition to democracy itself. But we haven’t yet written about the very human cost of continuing to outlaw street vending in Los Angeles.
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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy, Street Vending

Why Does Hollywood McDonald’s Queen Carol Massie Hate America, Mom, Apple Pie, Bacon Dogs, and the Residents of Hollywood?

March 22, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Why does jittery little psychopath Carol Massie hate America and the residents of Hollywood so much? Only God and her pyschoanalyst know for sure... — Why does jittery little psychopath Carol Massie hate America and the residents of Hollywood so much? Only God and her pyschoanalyst know for sure…

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.

Rodriguez Strategies PR flackie Jessica Borek at the March 17, 2015 meeting of the SVBID board of directors, calmy contemplating methods to utterly destroy the living culture of Los Angeles and plow salt into the fields where it once grew

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]
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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Street Vending

Kerry Morrison: Hollywood Businesses too Feeble to Survive Free Market Without Municipally Enforced Draconian Anticompetitive Pinko Racist Regulatory Capture

January 1, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Street vendor in Manhattan destroying the prosperity of the city, laying waste to the comfort and privilege of rich white people, and generally ruining EVERYTHING!! — Street vendor in Manhattan destroying the prosperity of the city, laying waste to the comfort and privilege of rich white people, and generally ruining EVERYTHING! And now the city of Los Angeles intends to forcibly convert Hollywood into a cultural and economic wasteland like New York City by allowing such miscreants to operate with impunity on our streets. “Not on our watch,” say BIDs.

Street food is one of the signature pleasures of the great cosmopolitan cities of the world. Practically alone amongst its peers, though, Los Angeles forbids vending on its public rights of way. This is because there are really no bounds to the willingness of the economic elites of this city to prohibit anything that normal human beings enjoy if by doing so they can stick a dagger in the neck of the poor. They will certainly destroy the village in order to save it.

Hollywood BIDs destroying the city of Los Angeles in order to save it from its own misguided sense of sanity — Representative of the Hollywood BIDs metaphorically destroying the city of Los Angeles in order to save it from perceived (albeit delusionally) unintended consequences of an all-too-rare outburst of sanity with regard to its street-vending policy.

Case in point: the City Council recently began to discuss legalizing street vending in Los Angeles. Sane people everywhere rejoice at this attempt to allow civilization to flourish and also bring an estimated half-billion dollars worth of economic activity out of the shadows and onto the bottom line. There’s a hot dog in the public manger, though.

The BIDs and their minions have leapt into coordinated action! They are in a cyclonic tizzy, explaining fast and loud how the unintended consequences of the sane and harmless choice to legalize street vending will ruin everything. It will e.g. impoverish small businesses, encourage crime, cause the unauthorized commercial use of public trash cans, cause the unauthorized non-use of public trash cans, provide increased funding to criminal street gangs, encourage armed robbery, cause diseases, and even more stuff too weird to list here. Think we’re exaggerating? Read on!
Continue reading Kerry Morrison: Hollywood Businesses too Feeble to Survive Free Market Without Municipally Enforced Draconian Anticompetitive Pinko Racist Regulatory Capture →