Anaheim has had several distractions since July 12, 2022, but we’re not going to forget – that was the night that Councilman Diaz, Councilwoman Ma’ae, and Wannabe Mayor Trevor O’Neil voted repeatedly and stubbornly against ANY kind of Campaign Finance Reform in this scandal-ridden town. There is a lot to say about that vote, and now it shall be said…

What did we, the public, learn from the FBI revelations of last May?

One, we learned of probably illegal (but not yet charged and tried) schemes of Mayor Harry Sidhu related to the Angel Stadium Giveaway – most garishly, his plans to share secret info with the Angels side, his witness-tampering of Todd Ament in his Grand Jury appearance, his boasting of destroying evidence, and his intention to demand $1 million from the Angels for his re-election as soon as the deal went through. Probably all illegal, but at least bad enough to force Harry to resign from office in disgrace.

And two, we learned something we mostly already knew – that our city has been run (for how long?) not by our elected leaders but by a small cabal, answering to the special interests who pay for our elections, and giving orders to our elected leaders. This is why we have always observed the Council majority showing up to meetings with their minds made up, their instructions digested, impervious to and uninterested in any other points of view. “CABAL” – in case you missed it – that’s what they proudly and playfully called THEMSELVES. To us Anaheim voters, that’s just as wrong and disturbing as the illegal things Harry was accused of.

At the May 17 Council meeting, the day after the FBI revelations, the newer members Gloria and Jose Diaz seemed confused and scared, and they looked to the two older (cabal-allied) members for guidance. Trevor (who now wants to be Mayor) confidently modeled the behavior, which eventually caught on, of throwing Harry under the bus, professing to be shocked, shocked, shocked, and then proceeding with business as usual.

But six-year incumbent Steve Faessel, on the other hand, seemed to take the whole thing a lot more seriously, saying more than once, “All of us are under a cloud.” (I just pretend he meant to say “MOST of us are under a cloud” – Dr. Moreno is under no kind of cloud, and neither is Avelino Valencia at least when it comes to the Angel Stadium giveaway.)

And apparently walking the cloud walk, Steve has joined Moreno and Avelino in pushing for reforms including the Clean Up Anaheim Act. What did Steve mean by this “cloud” under which he and most Anaheim Councilmembers past and present slouch and trudge?

Under the Cloud…

He’s right of course. In their report “Big A Lack of Transparency,” the OC Grand Jury wrote, “The City’s lack of transparency and rushed decisions contributed to the public’s distrust of the Council Majority,” and later, “The Council Majority‘s inappropriate handling of the Stadium transaction betrayed its constituents.” Note, they did not write “The Mayor,” and they did not write “the Council,” they wrote “THE COUNCIL MAJORITY.” That included, at that time, Sidhu, Faessel, O’Neil, the disgraced and resigned Jordan Brandman, and the shady, termed-out Lucille Kring.

Consider – Harry KNEW that this deal was so valuable and favorable to Angels owner Arte Moreno, (and conversely unfavorable to Anaheim taxpayers) that he reasonably expected to get a MILLION DOLLAR BRIBE in return for pushing it through. We Anaheim taxpayers did NOT have a Mayor pursuing our interests on the negotiating team – he was instead pursuing the interests of the Angels owner, who had gotten him elected, and from whom he was hoping to get another million dollars.

Okay, we know all that. But the Council majority, including O’Neil and Faessel, were complicit. They were ordered to let Harry be the sole negotiator from the Council, and so they did, unquestioningly, in lockstep. They handed Harry Sidhu the car keys and closed their eyes.

They had no excuse not to know what a bad deal it was for Anaheim. They did know. Most of the public was telling them. Most of the press was telling them. On the Council dais, Dr Moreno and Denise were telling them, and in the opinion pages, Assemblyman Tom Daly, former Mayor Tom Tait, and Congressman Lou Correa were telling them.

• In lockstep, they voted to “encumber the property” at the first, 2018, opportunity, so that Arte Moreno could get his chosen price of $150 million.
• In lockstep they voted to keep the appraisal secret as long as they could.
• In lockstep they voted to shut up Denise and Dr. Moreno every way they could.
• In lockstep they voted to let the team keep the name Los Angeles Angels.
• And in lockstep they rushed through the vote right before Christmas 2019 just because Arte was worried about the Surplus Land Act getting new teeth and complicating things.

And Jose Diaz and Gloria Ma’ae can’t sit there with dumb looks on their faces, pretending they’re innocent of this Swindle Cloud. Last April, after the state’s Housing Authority forced the City to go through a housing “Shell Game,” those two joined right in, IN LOCKSTEP, re-affirming the shitty deal, right before the FBI boom fell. (It should be mentioned as well that Planning Commissioner Natalie Meeks, who wants to rise to Council now, also voted for the Swindle every time it came before her Commission, ignoring the jeremiads of Steve White.)

BUT…

…it’s not just the Stadium Giveaway…

Without even getting into the decades of pay-to-play corruption before the 2016 election, Dr. Moreno focused on the shady acts of Council since Sidhu took power at the end of 2018 – all of them affirmed in LOCKSTEP by the Council majority. Disney itself, our elections’ largest funder through SOAR, didn’t seem to want much those three and a half years, besides premature relaxation of pandemic restrictions, making sure there’s never a Gate Tax, and instead urging us to take out a $210 million bond to avoid bankruptcy. (Remember, Disney flack Carrie Nocella, a longtime Cabal member, helped write Harry’s poorly-read speech hawking that bond.) Maybe Disney had an interest in making sure the shitty Stadium deal went through, but nobody has figured that out yet.

Todd Ament’s Chamber of Commerce on the other hand, itself a major funder of Sidhu and his majority, was INSATIABLE those years:

• Dec. 2018 “emergency” temporary (6-week) homeless shelter awarded no-bid to Chamber Board President Ross McCune for $175,000
• 2019 no-bid Chamber contract for $400,000, just to do things that Chambers are supposed to do using their members’ dues (promote business etc.)
• $6.5 million of federal Covid money, March 2020, sterered to tourist agency “Visit Anaheim” while resort district was closed down and would stay that way for over another yea. (Trevor was an especially loud cheerleader for that bizarre boondoggle.)
• $250,000, ALSO in the midst of Covid, to Chamber-created (and now disbanded) astroturf group Anaheim First, to check out what’s needed in neighborhoods or something.

What else? What else did the paid-off Council Majority approve IN LOCKSTEP?

• In 2019 the Council majority voted repeatedly and stubbornly to NOT protect Rancho La Paz mobile home seniors from draconian rent hikes, after each of them received tens of thousands from MHET, the mobile home park owners’ group, as well as rent-gouger John Saunders himself.

• Also in 2020-21, they voted NOT to protect Anaheim apartment renters from extreme rent hikes and no-cause evictions, because that is what the big-pocketed Apartment Associations demanded.

• And look (above) how much the Police Union (and their little bros the Fire Union) gave – well, in Feb. 2020 the Council Majority approved a fabulously, unaffordably generous contract with those public safety unions – $60 million six-year contract including a 14% raise, which is making us dig into our reserves by about $90 million. $400,000 a year goes to the lucky police union chief Edgar Hampton – in every other town the guy would be paid by member dues. TREVOR O’NEIL, the fake conservative who wants to be the next Mayor, excused this by saying, Sure we’ll have to “dip into our reserves,” but hopefully our revenue will go up soon. We were already in debt by about $6200 per taxpayer. And a few weeks later, Covid hit Anaheim. THIS is what keeping Anaheim dirty costs us – our debt is now at $1.6 BILLION.

********************

What the Clean Up Anaheim Act would’ve done

Not purporting to be perfect or a cure-all, Dr. Moreno’s campaign finance bill (which he had originally tried to pass a few years ago) aimed both at reducing corruption and restoring some of the badly-damaged trust the public has in their Council. The ordinance had a few elements, the most basic of which is based on the Levine Act (which applies only to non-elected boards) – you can’t vote on a matter affecting a person or entity who has given you $250 or more in the past year.

That is just the basic. minimum reform, applying to direct contributions to candidates which are already limited to like $2000. But the vast majority of money pumped into campaigns in Anaheim and everywhere in the country is “Independent Expenditures”(I.E.’s) given thru or to PAC’s (Political Action Committees.) That DWARFS old-fashioned direct contributions, it’s the real problem, and Moreno wrote his ordinance to ALSO apply to money received from a PAC. Check out just HOW PAC money dwarfs direct money:

[Note how you can ALMOST NOT SEE the 32K of Disney’s direct contributions in the bar graph above,
compared to Disney’s PAC donations – mostly thru SOAR?]

[PAC contributions to the six current Councilmembers.
Note that Gloria was anointed, so hasn’t needed campaign money yet.
And Jose Moreno’s not a PAC man.]

So that was the second, most important element of the ordinance – that it applies to PAC’s / IE’s. The third element was based on the fact that a lotta candidates lend their campaigns money, and then after being elected, hold big “campaign debt retirement parties” where special interests expecting favors write their campaigns a big check, which leads to a big check from the campaign going into that politician’s pocket. As Moreno says, “One check away from a bribe.”

Sidhu was a particularly outrageous example of this, not only coming into office with $166,400 in debt from his 2018 Mayoral race, but still in debt for a 2014 assembly race AND a 2008 state senate race! But don’t worry – over the course of his three and a half years as Mayor, special interests who wanted things from him paid off ALL HIS DEBTS AND MORE! Moreno’s ordinance aimed to limit this practice to 1) six months after the election, and 2) no more than the actual debt, nothing extra.

There were a couple more elements to Moreno’s ordinance. It woulda limited fundraising to the year of the election. And it woulda deputized us citizens to enforce the ordinance (a precedent being the Brown Act, which can be brought by members of the public within 30 days.) I was all, “Hey cool, we can be like Texas Abortion Vigilantes, except for goodness,” but none of my friends appreciated my analogy.

Anyway. This ordinance got the support of Avelino and Steve in June, but it was defeated by the Dirty Troika of Trevor, Gloria and Diaz. Then Steve surprised us all by moving to bring it back July 12. Then he surprised everybody again on July 12 by having everything stripped out of the ordinance except for the basic Levine Act $250 recusal thing – it didn’t even apply to PAC’s anymore. We were stunned – “Steve gutted it!” But Steve did have a reasonable plan, he wanted to start with the basics, and, one at a time, add each of the other elements to see if they would get any votes. Well, all righty then…

The Dirty Troika says HELL NO!

But one by one, each extra element was voted down by the Dirty Three. They voted down including PAC’s / IE’s in the ordinance. They voted down anything about campaign debt retirement. They voted down limiting fundraising to a year. They voted down deputizing the public. They even voted down a disclosure amendment that Trevor him-fucking-self had suggested earlier. It was like those three councilmembers were one huge turd that WOULD JUST NOT COME DISLODGED.

And we were left with just the bare bones, Levine-Act-based, “you gotta recuse if you got $250 in direct contributions within a year” clause. Avelino and Steve both agreed, “THAT ain’t any reform worthy of the word.” Would the Dirty Three have voted for THAT and then pranced around saying “We voted for campaign finance reform?” Well, the other three didn’t want to give them that chance, so pulled the whole thing.

(A good sign that they WOULD have is the comical sight, recently, of Gloria and Trevor giving back a couple thousand in contributions from Disney and the Chamber… yeah… because they know the hundreds of thousands will be coming from the PAC’s / IE’s, duh.).

Why did the Dirty Three say no to any reform? Well, they each gave reasons, half-assed as they were. And they were not exactly the same, just as these three kleptocrats are not exactly the same. That is one of the joys of this blog, to see exactly in what ways these fools and knaves are different yet similar! Gary Larson illustrated our philosophy well in this classic Far Side:

We’ll look at Gloria and Jose Diaz first because, added together, the two West Anaheim councilmembers have the combined intelligence of one average person. And Trevor, running for Mayor and quite articulate, needs to be taken more seriously.

1. Dirty Diaz

[“Facedance” by Donna Acevedo-Nelson.]

I have become adept at deciphering Councilman Diaz’ mystifying, rapid-fire, staccato series of wordbursts, and could offer my services as translator for those less adept. One thing he distrusts about the ordinance is that it’ll take away his campaign money. Well, that’s not exactly right. It would prevent him from VOTING on an issue affecting anyone who’d given him more than $250 in the past year. But maybe that’s a distinction without a difference to him.

Most notably he has protested a few times that, “Without all this campaign money, I COULD NOT HAVE WON – I could never have GOTTEN OUT MY MESSAGE to all the voters in my district.” This provokes a few retorts:

• To start with, does Jose D even know what his “message” WAS when he (barely) beat incumbent Denise Barnes in 2018? The vast majority of the mailers sent out by I.E.’s on his behalf were vicious and false attacks on Denise. I can document that. That was his “message?”
• Two, you want to get a “message” out, go knock on doors, call people, assemble volunteers, just like anyone else!
• Three, Mr. Faessel looked at his two campaigns, looked at the ordinance, and concluded that he could have won anyway with the ordinance in effect. Why doesn’t Jose D have that kind of faith in himself? Commie.

He unveiled a couple other mystifying claims on July 12. Like, this ordinance somehow empowers faraway election meddlers like George Soros, who donated to the recently-recalled San Francisco DA. And it somehow empowers candidates who are supported by their local Party (Jose D is a proud independent.) His example is Sunny Park’s coming in ahead of Supervisor Doug Chaffee (for whom he has a soft spot) in the June primary. I don’t really see that either.

But voting against the Clean Up Anaheim Act has unforeseen consequences. For example the last, August 9 Council meeting included a public hearing on a development in Jose D’s district, and a lot of his constituents were there to oppose or criticize the development. And I was able to tell them,

“We have no way of knowing if your Councilman Mr. Diaz received money from this HB-based developer in the past year, or even this morning, or if that developer donated to a PAC that supported Mr. Diaz, because Mr. Diaz defeated a campaign reform ordinance on July 12 that would have prevented him from voting on this. Mr. Diaz thinks it’s fine to get any amount of money from a developer, and then turn right around and approve their project. District 1, this is your Councilman.”

Things like that will come up a lot for the Dirty Troika. Mr. Diaz has two more years in office, but it might not be a bad project, when the weather’s better early next year, for District 1 to recall him. A special election next year on a Gate Tax, a voter-approved Clean Up Anaheim Act, and a recall of Diaz would not be a waste of public funds.

2. Dirty Gloria

[“Facedance” by Donna Acevedo-Nelson.]

Gloria hasn’t been through an election yet, and this Fall she will be trying to get elected to her appointed District 2 seat. She still considers it disarming to admit “I don’t know anything about this particular issue,” and then still go ahead and vote on it. (As ordered, apparently.) Campaign finance reform is no exception. All three times the ordinance came up, she smiled, “I don’t know ANYTHING about Campaign Finance.” One of those times, Rosalinda Viveros, the evicted Sunkist Plaza beauty salon owner, yelled out, “Well then RECUSE YOURSELF!” But of course Gloria didn’t.

Every time, she went directly from “I don’t know anything about this” to “but I have a long list of concerns,” and sure enough she’d pull out pages of sophisticated but bogus quibbles – things that could CONVEIVABLY go wrong under the ordinance – which she would read aloud, for all the world like Harry Sidhu reciting, badly, the writings of Jeff Flint. Who wrote these quibbles for Gloria? That’d be Arianna Barrios (right) of Communications Lab, former aide to Kris Murray, currently an Orange Councilwoman, and a consultant who has her fingers all over Anaheim MORE THAN YOU MIGHT KNOW after the disgrace of Jeff Flint, and whom we’ll have to be writing about soon.

Gloria also has a comically thin skin and takes everything personally, even attempts at citywide campaign finance reform.

But there’s something particularly grotesque and circular about Gloria Ma’ae killing campaign finance reform in Anaheim.

CONSIDER: She helped FOUND the Disney front group SOAR 15 years ago with the original purpose of keeping residential projects out of the resort district, and stayed active in it over the years as it morphed into a money funnel through which Disney launders millions of dollars to its favored politicians. After years of loyally fighting against District Elections and a Living Wage for Disney workers, she was rewarded with a seat on Council. Now she finds herself facing election, could really use those hundreds of thousands of SOAR dollars, and finds herself able to make the choice of whether she can get them or not. And of course she wants them.

It is like a GLORIA HOUSE OF MIRRORS.

3. Dirty Trevor

[“Facedance” by Donna Acevedo-Nelson.]

Trevor seems to get a lot of his lines from the “Wordsmith” Matt Cunningham, who runs the Chamber-funded Anaheim Observer, and has a lot of experience crafting disingenuous lies that seem plausible – a staple of propaganda! One of those lies is that the Clean Up Anaheim Act is designed purposely to exclude regulation of public employee unions, just because Moreno and the Act’s other supporters favor unions over corporations. So what pretends to be an honest if imperfect effort at reform is really a sneaky power grab, right?

Wrong-o. Look at all the charts of big contributors above, and you’ll see that among the biggest are the police and fire unions, who ALWAYS fund the same candidates as Disney and the Chamber. In LOCKSTEP, again. You don’t think Jose and the rest of us would love to regulate them just like Disney? Jose was told that wasn’t legally possible because of some state law regarding public employee negotiations. Then on July 12 City Attorney Fabela (whose advice frequently changes) told Jose it MIGHT be possible, and Jose was eager to amend the Act accordingly. But by that point it was already flatlining.

Forget about all that, beware of Swindlers who come babbling about “Transparency.” Trevor has got the “Transparency” fetish. Even Jose Diaz, after rehearsing the word three times on mike, fell in love with it. I can’t use that word any more without scare quotes. It is a word commandeered by People of Bad Will, like “bigot,” “entitlements,” and “ACCESS” to health care – words the rest of us should avoid.

“Transparency” won’t solve Anaheim’s corruption problem, we already WERE pretty transparent. All the word means is there are places you can look up on line, if you have the time, interest and knowhow, to find out who contributes to whom. It doesn’t limit contributions, it doesn’t limit votes for contributors, it doesn’t explain why it’s a bad idea to vote for a certain person, and most voters do NOT have the time or interest to look that shit up.

Anaheim is uniquely corrupt and corruptible, between the huge amounts of money flowing through it, and its culture and habits of corruption – it needs a lot more than “transparency.” Did I mention – it’s not even about businesses looking to bribe politicians. What you see more in Anaheim is politicians themselves, and their representatives, their fundraisers and consultants, going out to businesses and telling them if you wanna get anything done, you really should come to this event with your checkbook. Anaheim needs the Clean Up Anaheim Act, we need an honest Mayor and Council, and much more.

Eschatology.

Eschatology is the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind. Example: “Christian hope is concerned with eschatology, or the science of last things.” In the context of this blog piece, it signifies, “What’s the FBI gonna do next, and who else is gonna be in trouble, and will they go to jail?” Cuz smart money says it ain’t over!

But what metaphor do we use, without falling into woeful cliché? Are we waiting for “the next shoe to drop?” No, because more than two already have, so that doesn’t work unless this is the fabled centipede that John McCain helpfully suggested. What we’ve seen revealed already is certainly “the tip of the iceberg,” but that’s such a cliché it doesn’t even register any more. We could describe what we’ve seen so far as a “turtlehead,” as Anaheim groans and strains to expel the remainder of the painful load… but we have already utilized constipation as an analogy and it’s starting to smell up the place.

Rather, in the spirit of how the FBI came down on Mar-a-Lago last month, let us quote 1 Thessalonians:

“Now, brothers and sisters, about times and dates we do not need to tell you, for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While some people are saying, ‘Peace and safety,’ destruction will come upon them suddenly, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.”

*************

APPENDIX 1:

Your November Election Guide – Clean vs. Dirty.

We are blest this Fall to NOT have too many candidates running for Council and Mayor – no splitting of votes, this time, of NON-Cabal contenders. One useful way to distinguish the candidates from each other is: Which ones support or oppose Campaign Finance Reform (The Clean Up Anaheim Act?) For your convenience I will list supporters as “clean” and opponents as “dirty.”

MAYOR

• Ashleigh Aitken – CLEAN.
• Trevor O’Neil – DIRTY.
• Lorri Galloway – DIRTY.
• Dick Lopez – CLEAN. (But, perhaps, not a contender.)

DISTRICT 2

• Gloria Ma’ae – DIRTY.
• Carlos Leon – CLEAN.

DISTRICT 3

• Al Jabbar – CLEAN.
• Natalie Rubalcava – DIRTY.

DISTRICT 6

• Hari Lal – CLEAN.
• Natalie Meeks – DIRTY.

And there you have it. Vote your values, Anaheim!

APPENDIX 2:

Trevor-Palooza August 30

You busy Tuesday the 30th, at 5:30 pm? A lot of us will be here… out front.

“Are You Ready for SIDHU PART TWO?”

“CABAL MEETING HERE, 5:30”

“End rent control with Mayor Trevor!”

What else?

***********

APPENDIX 3:

Just for fun – Donna’s Anaheim Council Face-Dances!