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Old Posted Sep 11, 2017, 5:03 AM
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Bikemike Bikemike is offline
ride or die
 
Join Date: Feb 2015
Posts: 395
Quote:
Originally Posted by Car(e)-Free LA View Post
Pretty much what you just said. Put stuff in about upzoning and making development easier to appease developers, and the equivalent for unions.
This would render the initiative dead on arrival. Angeleno voters aren't educated enough to be sold on "good" upzoning/development. In order to get votes, you'd have to sell it on its own merits: an intra-city bond measure to get your community out of its auto-dependent morass. And it would still be iffy, because Angelenos bitch and moan about traffic, but neglect to read up on its causes or its solutions.

It's like the prop 13 quagmire - why vote to increase your own taxes in exchange for societal benefits that, due to your lifestyle-induced ignorance of the public realm, won't even allow yourself to comprehend? And why vote to abolish it when you already selfishly benefit from it. The prop 13 quagmire is the suburban quagmire - a distillation of the entire American culture-war into a single legislative initiative. Why hope that someone with the attention-span of a house-fly would find interest in the wider social benefits of self-taxation to begin with, when he's too busy lusting about a bigger yard to bbq in? Goes to my complaint of the vapid consumerist LA lifestyle (every city's got it, but LA is torch-bearer) - if you want to live in a city, live like you mean it. Don't ask for more parking for yourself, and then complain about regional traffic. Don't ask for lower taxes, and then complain about piss-poor education and dumb kids who don't vote. Don't build a half-assed city because then you create the ignorant electorate that can't save itself from itself (people who've become too stupid for their own good - trump voter phenomenon). I am a firm believer in being products our environment. Have you heard, Texans love laissez faire capitalism, dereg, privatization, SUVs, big homes, and cheap oil? Environment = culture = environment.

The failures of democracy are the failures of the public realm to factor into the daily lives of its people - to be aware of a greater common good (the public realm). And Angelenos' appreciation of this realm is the worst of any major global city. Self-taxation for benefit that are self-explanatory to other city-folk is an extremely tough sell here, and the problem is deep-rooted in our lifestyle and culture. Here more than most places, things must get much worse before people wake from the self induced coma of suburban culture. LA's electorate is NOT an enlightened crowd. Starting a local initiative is an admirable cause, but our intellectually-passive electorate votes solely on the basis of self-observed hardship, and that alone. Change will happen o its own time, as it always has.

Last edited by Bikemike; Sep 11, 2017 at 5:56 AM.
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