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When the Disney-dominated SOAR group is in full panic mode, EVERYBODY knows it – everybody who uses Facebook and the internet at least – they advertise their scary “Job Killer Initiative” propaganda everywhere you turn. Doesn’t matter if you’re trying to read the New York Times, shopping for Doc Marten boots, or trying to research a medical condition – the words “NO on the Anaheim Job Killer Initiative!” jump out at you.
And that costs money, and we know that Disney’s too broke to pay their employees a living wage. So I figured – didn’t you? – that these ads would disappear on May 1 when all the signatures were collected, and – assuming there are enough legitimate ones – the public won’t even have to decide on the matter for a few more months. Nothing more anyone can do about it pro or con right now, as the registrar patiently pores through the stacks of John Hancocks.
Pero no. For the first week of May there were even MORE of these Job Killer Ads. It was crazy, you couldn’t get away from them! Close your eyes, you’d STILL see “NO on the Anaheim Job Killer Initiative!” Why were they still wasting SO much money on their propaganda? (I heard 400 grand so far.)
Except NOW there was a slight difference in these ads – Disney and SOAR were now urging you to click and e-mail the Anaheim council to tell them HOW MUCH YOU HATE the Job Killer Initiative. But why? There wasn’t, and still isn’t, anything the Council can do to stop or slow down or speed up the process (except enacting it as an ordinance themselves which seems unlikely.) It turns out that if you read through the prefab e-mail they wanted you to send, what Disney, Wincome, and the O’Connell group were terrified of is the Council conducting a Fiscal Impact Study! From that prefab e-mail:
“…the City Council must take no action to unfairly influence or extend the initiative process. Do not waste taxpayer funds to do a fiscal study when the initiative may not even qualify. If the proponents follow the rules and qualify the measure, that’s the appropriate time to do a robust analysis so Anaheim voters have a clear choice.”
“Do not waste taxpayer funds?” Now first of all, these are the people … okay, now I’m starting to lose my temper and will try not to cuss.
- These are the same kleptocrats who wasted at least $2 million of YOUR taxpayer dollars from 2012-14 trying to make SURE you couldn’t have district elections and vote their puppets out!
- The same ones who also wasted millions of your money “studying” a STREETCAR that would’ve been a taxpayer gift to Disney above anyone else.
- The same ones who managed to finagle getting nearly a billion dollars of their expected TOT taxes back from us taxpayers, and we could go on in that vein – parking garage, gate tax ban…
And here they are bitching that our representatives might want to put out $50,000 to $75,000 to help us citizens decide if the Living Wage Initiative is really a good idea or not? Breathtaking, but … it obviously couldn’t really be the cost that they’re so worried about.
Still. Somehow they are unmistakably terrified that conducting this study – especially sooner rather than later – will “unfairly” help the initiative move forward. How would that work? I asked a union leader and she pretty much agreed, “Yes, we would like that study to take place as soon as possible.”
Then it hit me – duh! It’s because both sides know that, once a serious study is done, all the fearmongering myths will prove to be false and overblown. Lies pulled right out of their ass. And then the Disney/SOAR side will have to find NEW ways to get the public to oppose a living wage for Disney/Wincome workers, which will be a real challenge, even with Cunningham on their payroll.
(I wrap up this little essay perhaps a few days late: The panicky ad campaign has stopped, and the kleptos’ tactic seems to have shifted from resisting an inevitable study to doing their best to influence it in the direction they want.) But some facts remain:
- The measure is only ARGUABLY a job killer for 4,000 jobs that don’t even exist yet;
- and THAT’s the case ONLY if they refuse to build their four subsidized hotels, which has become an overt threat of theirs since I called them on it,
- and that is still not an economically credible threat;
- and then of course someone else will build those hotels if they don’t.
Oh, and…
(hat-tip to Red Lister!)
Looks like it’s gonna be a fun summer and fall fighting this good fight, and it looks like after each Council meeting there’ll be a new Jill Kanzler anecdote, a new anecdote about the SOAR spokeswoman I’ve started to call “Cruella deJill“, who drives her Jaguar up from Balboa for each meeting to recite her klepto talking points, and goes back to her Jaguar with a police escort after cussing people out.
*I* didn’t know she lived in Balboa, and wouldn’t really have cared much, but she was sitting right behind me and Donna last night, and our friend Mike Robbins spoke a little after her, beginning, “To start with, I’m getting a little tired of people who drive up from Balboa to tell us about…”
“MOTHERFUCKER!” the high-strung woman immediately hissed, loud enough for half the room to hear. Donna and I laughed and laughed, and then something strange happened:
The bearded guy right behind me, two seats down from Jill, leaned forward to me and said, “Hey Vern, do YOU live in Balboa?” Donna turned around and said, “No he doesn’t, he lives on Anna Drive with his wife and we’re happy there.”
I don’t know what that guy meant, if it was supposed to be a putdown or an innocent joke, but I found out later that was
MITCH CALDWELL*, who’s running as the SOAR candidate in district 3 against Jose Moreno and Robert Nelson. Hmmm. That was our first interaction.*Update Friday: Apparently it was not Mitch, but some Evil Mitchelgänger.
Not very suave for a lobbyist.
Does
CaldwellEvil Mitchelgänger think living in Balboa is some sort of honorific thing?In all the years I knew Jill Kanzler I cannot recall her ever using profanity, even in a private conversation. The pressure of that job has to be soul-crushing.
Vern, you never met Mitch? Your wife picketed in front of his million-dollar mansion (AMAZING house, seriously, be nice to him long enough to get an invite.) He can be enormously charming, which will not be comforting to Jose Moreno. It’s going to be a tough road to November on both sides of these battles, and when it gets this ugly, NOBODY wins.
I’d heard a lot about him, I knew about that protest; but I couldn’t a picked him out of a crowd of middle-aged bearded white guys. I still don’t know what he meant by asking if I lived in Balboa.
Yes, Jill has cursed loudly at two meetings in a row.
The soulless have no soul to crush. Those buying the stair way to heaven will find out some day that there is a short time of life on earth and an eternity of hell.
YEAH you guys.
The ugliness of a SOAR battle is in their court and only in their court they play only one way on one grass-less weed infested one sided court, while sipping 50 year old scotch from a poor immigrant child’s skull. Sure a higher authority was watching those mean flyers on every door step every day!
I imagine SOAR’s backers committed a limited pool of funding: once SOAR failed to stop the ballot initiative, they needed to show some results before they could expect a new tranche of funding might be allocated to them.
The results the backers would be interested in at this stage could be far less about blocking/delaying the study, than about simply assessing signs of changes in voter behavior: they want to know whether to commit $500k, $5m, or something in between – and they want to know whether to continue with SOAR, or bring in other guns they have available.
As an aside for Disney fans in Anaheim…I am guessing everyone would prefer to forget Mickey’s debut in ‘Plane Crazy,’ and instead skip to the successful debut of ‘Steamboat Willie’ – and not merely because of the failure of the former and the success of the latter.
‘Plane Crazy’ features an ingenious, plucky mouse who converts a car into an airplane – but then uses his achievement as a tool to get fresh with a lady mouse against her will – such that she’d rather leap out of a flying airplane than tolerate a kiss from an errant suitor; she is saved from her death by her parachute-worthy underwear. Not a theme suitable for children…
[Edited Friday]
So!… I sat next to Evil Mitchelgänger at last night’s council meeting..I over heard the exchange between Evil Mitchelgänger and Vern then Donna…also another pricless moment with Evil Mitchelgänger and.. who comes along looking for a seat…None other then Todd Ament…so Evil Mitchelgänger ..as if the seat between Evil Mitchelgänger and myself “was anyone sitting there”…I said.”yes I am holding the seat for my mother”!…Evil Mitchelgänger just gave me a look…
Now “Colony Insider” on the Liberal OC is claiming that wasn’t Mitch. I don’t know if it was, Donna thought it was. No big deal anyway, I just don’t know why Mitch or some Mitch lookalike would be asking me (by name) if I live in Balboa. Maybe they had it confused with Huntington Beach.
Yeah… another friend who was sitting behind THAT guy and had an argument with him says it wasn’t Mitch, it was some angry SOAR dude with a beard who looks a little like him. So sorry, Mitch, I’m sure we’ll meet some day, and I don’t live in Balboa, but I used to play at a restaurant there for a while!
This is Mitch’s website. Is this the same guy?
https://www.mitchcaldwell.com
Donna and Mark thought it was him, but Wesley Jones knows Mitch a lot better, was sitting behind this Evil Mitchelgänger , THEY had some harsh words back and forth themselves, and Wesley says “No, that was not Mitch.”