Los Angeles Primary Voters Need To Beware Of Imposters Laura Friedman, Elan Carr And Steve Napolitano

An actual endorsement

Fake endorsement by L.A.'s most dishonest politician

The other day I got a piece of mail disguised as a Democratic Party slate card with prominent pictures of President Obama, who isn't running for anything and Kamala Harris who is running for U.S. Senate. The "Democratic Voter Guide" is not put out by the Democratic Party at all and there's no indication of who paid for the mailing, which tries to imply that dishonest conservative candidates like Republicans Elan Carr and Steve Napolitano and the Walmart anti-public school candidate Laura Friedman are running on a Bernie Sanders slate.

A shady outfit called Voter Guide Slate Cards puts this garbage together mails these out to whomever pays them-- and circumvents the law by not reporting who their clients are. There are pull-out quotes from Supervisorial candidates Steve Napolitano, who says "I running for Supervisor for the 4th district to rethink, reinvent, and re-engage L.A. County" and Elan Carr referring to himself as "a criminal gang prosecutor and Iraq War veteran who will put gangs behind bars." Neither mentions he is a partisan right-wing Republican, since each is running in a district with far more Democrats than Republicans and each understands he can only win by stealth and by implying he is a Democrat or even a "Berniecrat." Both are vile Trumpists.

As I was driving home, I was listening to a Supervisorial debate on KPCC between the 6 top candidates. The Democratic Party is united behind Darrell Park for the ostensibly non-partisan office. The 5 right-wing Republicans running are state Sen. Robert Huff, Kathryn Barger, Elan Carr, Glendale Councilman Ara Najarian, L.A. City Councilman Mitchell Englander. The debate moderator asked the whole panel of candidates if any of them have publicly opposed Trump. Najarian mumbled some disjointed nonsense about not being happy with some of Trump's positions but made it clear that he would be voting for him. The other 4 Republicans in the race sat mum, hoping no one would notice. Carr's mailers presenting him as a Democrat speak to his lack of honesty and make it clear how unsuited he is for public office. (last year, running for the open congressional seat on the west side and South Bay-- not remotely near where he's running now-- he had his head handed to him by progressive Ted Lieu, who beat him 108,331 (59%) to 74,700 (41%), despite spending $1,575,540 and despite a barrage of expenditures on his behalf by a huge SuperPAC paid for by Mob-controlled Las Vegas gambling boss Sheldon Adelson ($506,407) and another financed by far right crackpot and wine seller John Jordan and the Koch brothers ($256,485).

Most voters are unaware about the deceptive practices used to trick them into voting for candidates whose agendas they oppose. The most dishonest campaign in Los Angeles is the Laura Friedman For Assembly campaign in Glendale, Burbank, the Hollywood Hills, Los Feliz, East Hollywood, Silver Lake and La Crescenta (assembly District 43). Friedman, the corrupt conservative in the race, is being backed by gigantic expenditures from the Walton family (Walmart), which seeks to destroy teachers unions and end public education, replacing it with charter schools. The endless stream of mailers from Friedman and her charter school superPAC smear the progressive in the race, Ardy Kassakhian. Friedman, best known for her tendency to lie whenever she opens her mouth, implies in her campaign communications that she's been endorsed by Mayor Garcetti (who very forcefully endorsed Kassakhian and has made it clear what a disaster Friedman would be for Los Angeles). She also implies on all her posters and literature than she's been endorsed by the Democratic Party, which is another lie, the state and county Democratic Party (as well as the Democratic Party of the San Fernando Valley and all the Democratic clubs in the district from the Stonewall Democratic Club and the Korean American Democratic Committee to the Glendale Democratic Club and the Hubert H. Humphrey Democratic Club) have all endorsed Kassakhian, as have the AFL-CIO, the California Labor Federation, AFSCME, SEIU and virtually every other labor union in the L.A. area. Since one of Friedman's big lies that all her literature and campaign signs spout is that she's supported by "teachers," it's worth mentioning that the California Federation of Teachers, California Teachers Association, the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, and the California School Employees Association have all endorsed Kassakhian and have been urgently warning their members that Friedman is the anti-education/anti-teacher conservative imposter in the race.

Yet the gigantic sums being spent by billionaires Eli Broad and the Waltons on her behalf are drowning out debate and deceiving voters into thinking Friedman is a progressive of some kind. And, it turns out, that it was her sleazy campaign that helped the Republicans-masquerading-as-Democrats pay for the Voter Guide Slate Cards mailing I mentioned up top. No, nothing will make Elan Carr and Steve Napolitano Democrats and nothing will separate them from Trump and Trumpism and nothing will ever make Laura Friedman a Berniecrat, no matter how much dark money she spends trying to persuade voters she is.

Another California Election, Another Power Grab By Eli Broad And The Rest Of The Anti-Public Schools Billionaires

I live in the Los Feliz neighborhood of L.A. Our state Assemblyman, Mike Gatto, is termed out and we have a hot election here in the 43rd district. The favored candidate is Glendale City Clerk Ardy Kassakhian, a values-driven, long-time progressive, but he's coming under all the withering fire a secret SuperPAC can provide, this one from the charter school billionaires and their puppet candidate, Laura Friedman. This week I've gotten an average of one mailer per day from a completely fake parents-teachers astroturf outfit paid for by L.A.'s grand arch-villain Eli Broad and the Walton (Walmart) family, each mailer blatantly smearing Kassakhian. Kassakhian is running a positive, issues-oriented campaign and he's been strongly endorsed by the California Teachers Association, the California Federation of Teachers, and United Teachers of Los Angeles-- as well as by the California Labor Federation, the police, firefighters, the nurses, SEIU, Mayor Garcetti and virtually every good government organization in Los Angeles. Friedman is backed by the charter school billionaires who want to destroy public education.

Ellen Lubic, DWT's public education expert and the Director, Joining Forces for Education connects the dots that illustrate the danger posed by the Eli Broad crowd and his corrupted candidates like Friedman to the existential dangers posed to American democracy.

Nobel Prize winning Economist, Paul Krugman wrote about Donald Trump recently, expressing the view of most educated people from the Right, Left, or Middle of the political spectrum. Paul Krugman puts the matter directly: "Donald Trump is an ignoramus."

University educator Arthur Camins' November 17 article at HuffPo-- U.S. Schools Don’t Fail at Test Performance, They Fail at Citizenship Development-- indicates that perhaps the Trump candidacy has come about due to the fact that schools fail at teaching citizenship development. As an educator of public policy and an educational researcher of many decades, I agree. A great failure of public education is the sparse teaching and learning about citizenship and what it means to live in a nation of laws.

The operant question seems to be, why are there so many Americans who are willing to support Trump, who seems to be a distorted and uninformed clown, a showman and greed merchant, and who seems proud of his ignorance and is so egocentric that he does not even want to learn?

This group of voters presents a frightening prospect for our society. For example, on Thursday, Mother Jones magazine’s David Corn reported Anthony Senecal, who served as Trump’s butler for 17 years before becoming the real estate mogul’s in-house "historian" at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, has been taking to Facebook to rant about how the current president should be hanged.  "Looks like that sleezey bastard zero (O) is trying to out maneuver Congress again, if the truth be known this prick needs to be hung for treason!!!" Senecal declared on his Facebook page on April 21, 2015.

The work of William. Shirer from the early 1960s, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, rings alarms that resonate today when fellow citizens are rushing to the arms of this potential despot who could possibly create a nuclear holocaust with his hand on the red phone. This theme is the core message of Ionesco's remarkable play, Rhinoceros, depicting those who rush to join the Anschluss in Germany and throughout Europe before World War II.  Many people today feel safe to express their hate for others of different nationality, different religion, different skin color and Trump offers this permission to divide Americans and to incite violence.

 

Are all these American voters, virulent bigots against immigrants, Jews, Muslims, the educated, teachers, and virtually most of those in the mainstream in the U.S.?  Will they be rushing to turn in their neighbors who may be hauled away to 21st century gas chambers, and then steal all their land and all their worldly goods as happened under the Nazis?

Are they striving to somehow be seen as billionaire wannabe's?  Or are they poor and uneducated and easily taken in by a snake oil salesman who wants to "Make America Great Again?"

Do these 'know-nothings' follow the lead of The Turner Diaries and want to only have a White Christian country, and be able to string up all other people of color and of other religions, from the light poles, as depicted in this hate-filled book?

This is the moment to figure out who is a Trump voter, and why.  And what can we do as a community to fix it.

Is John Dewey  somehow responsible for this frightening turn of events? Is it what has been taught, or not taught, in our public schools for the past 60 years that has created a society that is no longer a marketplace of ideas, but which has devolved into the march of the marionettes who will follow Trump to national, and possibly planetary, destruction?

Or is it more reasonable to look at the economics and culture of American society since the end of World War II?

The stream of recent history, from the era of Bundles for Britain and Rosie the Riveter, to today, is strewn with an upsurge of the contemporary robber barons and their idolizing and idealizing Wall Street and the Free Market. The confluence of universal education and the union movement built the strongest Middle Class after World War II that history has ever known. And then there was a 180 degree turnabout with the rise of the Reagan Revolution.This eventually led to 2008 and the worldwide bank scams, bundling of credit default swaps and collateral debt obligations which destroyed economies and broke the Middle Class.

From the banks that are 'too big to fail' (and can now take endless risks 'on the public dole,' as with using the public's cash in the form of the FDIC guaranteeing the banksters risks for their own rewards)... and all the redistribution of wealth going upward to the few in the 1%, to the rise of the entertainment industry with faux (Fox) News, this seems to be the downfall of the Middle Class. Add on the endless murder scenarios shown in films, cartoons, and television.

How mind bending and inculcating is it when tiny children sit and watch on iPads and TV screens and see and hear this devolution of an orderly respectful society of laws, and in its place, the heroes are tattooed and pierced gangster-types who beat and kill others for unleashed super powers? 

And now in the 21st Century, the Billionaire Class led by Eli Broad, the Waltons, Rupert Murdoch, Pete Peterson, Michael Milken, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and all their ilk, is fighting to do away with public education and to privatize all public schools for profit and to undermine universal free education and critical thinking, and instead create unquestioning cogs to fit their corporate needs, as they concurrently attempt to kill off the entire union movement. Keep 'em poor and dumb and manageable, seems to the goal.

This marriage of oligarchic profiteering, and keeping the populace ignorant by a managed media, is leading America into arms of Donald Trump and David Duke, and straight to fascism.

This rush to make big bucks by devaluing a society of laws and universal free education, and glorifying of infotainment news, owned mainly by Murdoch, that skims facts with a quick rush to judgement about how the world works, has led too many to demand and to buy, keep, and use their guns, their automatic mass killing weapons, and to want easy answers to complex situations, to want only what pleases them, to a selfishness that shows up as freeway rage, as gang wars, as racist clashes, as mass murder, and finally, as voting for a Know Nothing like Donald Trump.

Is America finished as a democratic republic? Are we now to become a nation of roaming mobs intent on killing, beating, stealing from others who do not agree with us?

I see little connection to public school education, but rather a strong correlation to the overarching greed of the billionaire class which keeps insulated from it all as they instigate internecine warfare in America.

Ellen is worried about Trump and Broad. I am too-- and Laura Friedman... and any of the other candidates in the pockets of the Billionaire Class, on any level at all.