Tag Archives: National Lawyers Guild

Garcetti Aide Alisa Orduna at the SVBID Part 2, in which she Proposes to “Empower” BIDs (Including the Freaking CCEA?!?!) to Deal with Homelessness and, No Joke, to Pay Homeless People’s Parents to Let them Move Back In

November 15, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Alisa Orduna at the Sunset-Vine BID Board Meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015. Is anyone, anyone at all, listening to what's coming out of this woman's mouth? — Alisa Orduna at the Sunset-Vine BID Board Meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015. Is anyone, anyone at all, listening to what’s coming out of this woman’s mouth?

Yesterday we presented part 1 of our coverage of Garcetti aide Alisa Orduna’s visit to the Sunset-Vine BID meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015, in which, among other nonsense, she announced that part of what the state of emergency means to the BIDs is that Garcetti is going to spend a million bucks on iPads for the BID Patrol. Today we bring you part two, in which she proposes to empower the BID Patrol (as well as the currently-being-sued-in-freaking-federal-court-for-how-they-deal-with-the-homeless Central City East no less) to deal with homelessness since they’re front-line responders, according to her. As if, with their guns, their shackles, their COINTELPRO-style surveillance of their critics, their freaking blessing by the LAPD, their locking up of every harmless heladero that falls into their clutches, their arrests of over 1000 homeless people per year, they weren’t freaking empowered enough. What’s next? Nuclear weapons? DEATH RAYS? Anyway, you can watch the whole thing here (try Chrome if Firefox acts wonky) and, as always, there’s a transcription after the break. Here’s what Alisa said:

… but what’s the role for BIDs? I mean, so many of our BID officers are front line on the street. I met with Central City East BID, this BID, there was another BID, um, I forgot, but, you know, there was another BID that we’ve just been talking to, and the spike in violence, spike in substance abuse, the spike in, um, families, so it’s people with children that are out on the street in these encampments and often are abandoned, sometimes if their parents are active substance abusers, just the spike in the number of people, the spike in, the sense of permanency, I would say, with encampments, when before they’ve been, you know, none of this is [unintelligible], but someone may have been in a sleeping bag at the bus stop, but now, those coming in [unintelligible], they’re out in San Pedro, there was like a block-long encampment, that was pretty sturdy, you wouldn’t just be able to go in and take it down, you know, at some point, there was carpentry skills keeping it up, so it’s, it’s, how do we, how do we, adjust this, and what are, what do you guys see, and what’s, how can we empower BIDs so that, that information that they’re seeing and that experience that they’re having is fed back into us as policy-makers and we can together come [unintelligible] a solution.
Continue reading Garcetti Aide Alisa Orduna at the SVBID Part 2, in which she Proposes to “Empower” BIDs (Including the Freaking CCEA?!?!) to Deal with Homelessness and, No Joke, to Pay Homeless People’s Parents to Let them Move Back In →

Hollywood BID Patrol, Lawsuits

Acting on Behalf of Street Vendors National Lawyers Guild LA Sues City, Fashion District BID Over Illegal Confiscations, Color-of-Law Abuses. PDF of Initial Complaint Available

October 29, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

Another street vendor arrested, shackled, jailed, and abused by the Hollywood BID Patrol

Yesterday, the National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles filed suit in Federal Court against the City of Los Angeles and the Fashion District BID on behalf of the Union Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes. First of all, I set up a page to collect filings. I managed to track down a copy of the initial complaint (OK, I mean I bought it from PACER for $1.70, you’re welcome!), and you can read about it in the LA Times here if you want.

The title of this file claims that it's abandoned property and that it was donated to Blessed Sacrament. It's obvious from the context, though, that it's really stuff that was confiscated from a street vendor by the BID Patrol or else abandoned when the vendor ran away because the BID Patrol was threatening to arrest him. In any case, it did not belong to them and they stole it when they took it to give to the church. — The title of this file claims that it’s abandoned property and that it was donated to Blessed Sacrament. It’s obvious from the context, though, that it’s really stuff that was confiscated from a street vendor by the BID Patrol or else abandoned when the vendor ran away because the BID Patrol was threatening to arrest him. In any case, it did not belong to them and they stole it when they took it to give to the church.

There’s an excerpt from the complaint after the break, but it’s really worth reading the whole thing.

One of the main points is that the LAPD and the BID conspire to not only cite and/or arrest the vendors, but to destroy their stuff. We’ve written before about how the Hollywood BID Patrol does the same thing. They not only arrest the vendors, but without any kind of due process, they ruin all their stuff, or even worse, appropriate it and steal it. You can see an example of this in the photo somewhere near this sentence. I would imagine that, now that the Fashion District BID is being sued, the HPOA is getting a little nervous. Turn the page to hear why!

Continue reading Acting on Behalf of Street Vendors National Lawyers Guild LA Sues City, Fashion District BID Over Illegal Confiscations, Color-of-Law Abuses. PDF of Initial Complaint Available →

Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Street Vending

The True Facts About the May 28, 2015, Community Sidewalk Vending Meeting at Boyle Heights City Hall Revealed Here (With Audio) for All to Hear and Judge and Opinionate Upon! Part 3: the Good Guys

August 3, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Previous installments of this series appear here: Part 1 and Part 2

Placeholder caption — 1990 picture of Cynthia Anderson-Barker, badass civil rights lawyer and board member of the badass civil rights organization the National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles. Their motto proclaims them to be ***“Dedicated to the Belief That Human Rights Are More Sacred Than Property Interests”***

We originally planned to write a full post making fun of Nicole Shahenian’s speech at the May 28, 2015 meeting at Boyle Heights City Hall on the subject of legalized street vending in Los Angeles. On listening to it again, though, we realized that it’s nothing more than the same old nonsense, probably ghost-written by Kerry Morrison, and that writing on it would be a waste of time, space, and electricity. So today we’re concluding our reportage on the May 28 meeting with a brief discussion of the good guys, the white hats, the rays of sunshine, the breaths of fresh air, the actual humans in the room, the supporters of legalized street vending in lovely Los Angeles. In particular we hear from an actual street vendor who supports his family and from badass civil rights lawyer Cynthia Anderson-Barker, who explains why it’s essential to repeal LAMC 42.00(b) because, not only is it not being enforced equitably, it is not actually possible to enforce it equitably.

Man arrested, shackled, and humiliated by BID Patrol for selling hot dogs on the streets of Hollywood.

First up we have a man, whose name we didn’t catch on the audio, who’s one of the street vendors that Kerry Morrison recently mocked in public for claiming that he practices street vending in order to support his family. Listen here or read a transcription after the break. She has complained vociferously in the past and will no doubt complain vociferously in the future about the tone and incivility of those who oppose her iron will, never taking into account that her minions, who are paid to go to these meetings to speak words that, even if she didn’t actually write them, are certainly consistent with every public statement she’s ever made on the issue, are directly attacking people like this speaker, who are trying in the face of massive harassment to feed their families.

She and her minions rank this man’s life and well-being below the putative, delusionally construed rights of their employers not only to own property in Hollywood, to make untold amounts of money in exchange for very little productive labor, and not only that, but to have an extraordinarily immoral amount of control over the social conditions of life in places and neighborhoods where they don’t even live. In the face of this, Kerry Morrison has the audacity to complain about the audience being “uncivil” to her minions? Quel chutzpah, n’est ce pas? Anyway, in his speech, this man makes it clear that he knows that they’re his enemy. And he’s not wrong. They are his enemy. They are our enemies.

Man arrested, shackled, and humiliated for selling ice cream on the streets of Hollywood — Man arrested, shackled, and humiliated by BID Patrol for selling ice cream on the streets of Hollywood

He says, plausibly directly in response to BID flacks Alyssa Van Breene and/or Devin Strecker:

By example, for myself, I make ninety dollars a day. And I support my family with that money. … Our life … is very different than yours. Our day is starting at 4 a.m., and we’ll finish at around 9 p.m. for just a few dollars, but it’s OK.

42.00(b)- LAMC- SALES OF GOODS W/OUT A LICENSE — Man arrested, shackled, and humiliated by BID Patrol for selling water on the streets of Hollywood

This is the kind of story Kerry Morrison dismisses as an example of speakers “being bused in” in order to all have “the same, the same, um, tune, like ‘I need to be able to sell on the street to support my family.'” We’re impressed in a theoretical way that she can live with herself thinking like that in the face of such testimony, although maybe we could live with ourselves too. Never having thought like that, how would we know? Does she think the guy’s lying? Making up stories to win the right to work 17 hours for 90 dollars? What is she thinking, if anything?
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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Street Vending

The True Facts About the May 28, 2015, Community Sidewalk Vending Meeting at Boyle Heights City Hall Revealed Here (With Audio) for All to Hear and Judge and Opinionate Upon! Part 1: Alyssa Van Breene

July 31, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

The Boyle Hotel at 101 N. Boyle Avenue, appearing here because we don't have a picture of the Boyle Heights City Hall, which is about half a mile west on First Street from the corner of First and Boyle. — The Boyle Hotel at 101 N. Boyle Avenue, appearing here because we don’t have a picture of the Boyle Heights City Hall, which is about half a mile west on First Street from the corner of First and Boyle, that being the location of this building.

We recently wrote about Kerry Morrison’s description of the series of public meetings sponsored by the Chief Legislative Analyst of the city of Los Angeles regarding the framework for legalizing street vending that’s being studied by the City Council. Well, interestingly enough, it turns out that the Council’s Economic Development committee has a website set up devoted to the issue and found thereupon are audio recordings of three of the four meetings held to-date.¹ Astute readers will no doubt recall Kerry’s description of these meetings:
there were a series of four hearings that the chief administrative office staff held on the… the sidewalk vending ordinance. … It’s just this kind of amorphous set of hearings, which were completely dysfunctional, disrespectful, and almost, um, resembled a circus.

Wanna know what "frabjous" means? You gotta ask Mr. Humpty Dumpty, or look it up in the Dictionary, for God's sake. — Wanna know what “frabjous” means? You gotta ask Mr. Humpty Dumpty, or look it up in the Dictionary, for God’s sake.

Well, frabjous day, friends! We have listened to the first of these, held at the Boyle Heights City Hall on May 28, 2015, and clipped out some representative bits for your audiosthetic pleasure and we’re sharing them with you here. First listen to HPOA Board Member Alyssa Van Breene (transcriptions after the break if, like us, you’d rather read than hear):

Listened up? Good! Let’s take this nonsense one lie at a time, shall we?
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