“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Now that we’ve all had a chance to recover from this incredibly strange election—to be certified by the County Registrar imminently—I’d like to take this opportunity to speak to everyone who supported this campaign.
First of all, as you probably know, we didn’t make it this time. That is a tragedy, not for me personally but for this city. It was not surprising in the least, but still unfortunate, that the City Machine—which controls so much of city politics—was so utterly determined to circle the wagons around itself. It’s goal was to prevent an untamable truth-teller from entering the inner sanctuary and shining a light on everything sloppy, spendthrift, callous, cavalier, cozy, dishonest, and sometimes even downright corrupt that occurs in City Hall.
For the 2nd District, the City Machine created and protected a candidate who was well-known to it and trusted by it, due to her longstanding transactional relationships with City Hall. The fact that she has now become perhaps the most corrupt individual ever elected to City Council is seen as both a manageable burden and an asset to the City Machine, because her troubles guarantee her continued dependency.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but this is the reality in Long Beach government today: Quid pro quo still rules the day.
We did the best we could to expose this corruption in general, as well as Ms. Allen’s in particular, but corruption is a lot more complicated to explain to busy voters, focused on a presidential election, than lies. And lying is something that Ms. Allen engaged in freely.
If you wonder about my tone here, with the election being after all, over, well there are different kinds of elections. The election we just had in the 2nd District was very different than “normal”, and in very disturbing ways. It wasn’t what we are used to. We are used to elections where exhausted opponents come together afterward for the good of the community, put aside their differences, one congratulates the other as if it’s the end of a well-played tennis match, and they pledge to work together in the common interest.
In fact, I offered to do precisely that for my opponent during this campaign. I said words almost to that exact effect during an informal debate held by a political club. Regardless of the outcome, Cindy, I said, we need to come together afterward. She responded by quite literally screaming at me, screaming accusations which she knew to be false and personally defamatory.
At that point, we knew that we were not up against a legitimate opponent, in any traditional sense, we were up against something more akin to a cornered animal. This was someone whose corruption and moral ugliness had already been exposed to the world, mostly by her own doing. This is someone who needed to win this election not for the people, but for herself. Purely for herself. Purely to salvage what shreds of her reputation she could, at least to whatever degree winning a council race can put the genie of disrepute back in its bottle. At a certain point, she decided she was willing to win the election by whatever means necessary, saying and doing anything, and she did.
So that is why I say that this election is different. This election, apparently according to Ms. Allen herself, is not one of those elections where foes come together after the results are final. I truly wish that it was.
Anyone who knows me, knows that I wish it was. Anyone who talked to me during the campaign knows how distasteful Ms. Allen’s conduct and tactics were to me. Frankly, even the word tactics lends too much credibility to the campaign she engaged in. The reality is that she just lied. She did not just exaggerate or ‘play the game’. She pushed the envelope beyond the limits of basic human decency.
She lied her way into office, largely by making the most outlandish personal accusations imaginable about me, a 36-year active resident of this district. She did so after ingratiating her way into city contracts by lining the pockets of those in power. Quite simply, she represents the absolute worst in corrupt local government abuse.
Soon, she will enter into office bearing a greater burden of scandal than any other officeholder in the City of Long Beach in living memory, from a potential felony fraudulent voter registration investigation by our new D.A. to a lawsuit for fraud and breach of trust for the sale of her corrupt city contracts business ETA. Let’s hope that brings a little humility to the way she conducts herself in office, for however long she manages to stay in office.
Of course the great irony of her ETA lawsuit is that ETA was both the goose that laid the golden egg for her—as the recipient of the largesse she received, apparently in return for her relationship with Robert Garcia, greased with money she put in his pocket, both by buying LB Post and hiring him at ETA—and it was also the undoing of her own reputation.
She began her campaign just over a year ago pretending to divest this glaring conflict of interest, pretending to sell ETA to another company which quite simply didn’t exist, or at least which existed only as a front web site, with “executives” who were stock images anyone could purchase online. Then, without explanation, she again sold the company she had already pretended to sell.
By that point she was already known among the political class as an embarrassingly bad con artist. But this time she, apparently, really did sell the company. But she did so failing to disclose its debts and other liabilities, and the new owners immediately slapped her with a 600+ page lawsuit. That suit is ongoing.
This is the person we’ve just added to the Long Beach City Council. Has she gotten away with everything? No, no she hasn’t. Elections are not magical cleansers of collective memory. It doesn’t work that way.
It’s interesting to think about how politics does work, how elections work, indeed how someone like myself could labor so many years in the community and still fail to persuade a majority of the record turnoutnumber of voters. Well, that’s probably the key right there. Turnout was such in this election that we garnered nearly as many votes as the total number of votes cast in the 2nd District runoff four years ago (which was on a June ballot, separate from national politics). We won nearly ten thousand votes despite the pandemic largely obliterating the grassroots, volunteer field campaign we had envisioned for the runoff period.
It’s awfully difficult to start from scratch with voters who have not been involved with local issues. Some might even say that that’s why Sacramento changed the law to eliminate our local elections, not just in Long Beach but throughout the state. I’ll leave the political science aside for others.
It’s not for me to be a political analyst. My job in this community, as I’ve seen it, has always been just to work as hard as I possibly could, to tell the truth (whether convenient or not), and to make the city better. To me, that has meant holding those in power accountable for stupid decisions, like poor planning, the Broadway road diet, the homeless facility in a cannabis-leased warehouse nearly in Compton rather than downtown Long Beach, the list goes on and on. Accountability is the core issue in City Hall today, it’s why I helped found the Long Beach Reform Coalition, and it’s the main reason I decided to run.
We did the best we could during this campaign to expose City Hall’s most egregious mistakes, whether politically motivated, the result of incompetence, or just outright corrupt. There have been so many bad decisions which we the residents have endured. Perhaps most noteworthy, they have included spending a billion dollars to build a whole new city hall and civic center, rather than simply doing a seismic retrofit, leaving residents of Long Beach as renters in a developer-owned monstrosity.
I could go on and on, you know that. The bottom line is this: This time, we didn’t win the election. But what we did win was each other. I will never forget the many relationships enhanced by this experience and the new relationships it brought me. I truly appreciate everyone who contributed to this campaign, whether financially or in all the other ways people help to make a campaign as successful as it can be. I can only say that I am sorry we were not able to deliver a win.
That does nothing, however, to diminish my profound thanks for you, and for your dedication to our cause.
Not everyone cares about local government. It’s the kind of thing that many are satisfied just to leave alone, just to utilize passively, until it becomes so awful, so catastrophically derailed from its purpose, that folks have no choice but to take an interest. Even then, rather than becoming involved in local politics, just as often the solution people choose is to pick up and move.
You all made the brave decision actually to get involved. You decided to take a measure of personal responsibility for something you didn’t have to take responsibility for. That’s why you’re different, that’s why you’re special. That’s why you mean so much to me!
To all of you who rolled up your sleeves or who took out your pocket book and who followed along and cared, from the bottom of my heart thank you. Not a day will go by during which I’ll fail to appreciate you all—the quiet, and sometimes not so quiet, doers of the world.
Have a wonderful holiday season. Never lose hope. Never give up. Never give in. Because we must remain ever vigilant. I know I will.
