mayoral candidate mike feuer drops campaign video trying to prove that he's a human
but here's what his elevator pitch to LA voters left out
Mike Feuer is back, again. Yesterday he dropped a new website and campaign video for his LA mayoral run. Feuer declared running over a year ago—a week before the world ended—and we still have a year and a half until the election. I guess as a serious professional, he wants to be really prepared for the job. In the video he has rebranded himself as the cool mustache guy who got hit by a car, and therefore developed the correct moral compass to be the leader of one of the largest cities in the world. A Hollywood actor did the voice over from the perspective of Feuer’s mustache. And it’s soundtracked by a gross Who song. The LA Daily News loved it. It’s all very funny for all the wrong reasons. You have a deeply serious man, who is a dead ringer for Borat, working in politics. And over and over again through a series of mundane tasks he tries to verify that he exists. Is he real?
We see Mike Feuer moving around in a stoned cadence, kissing goodbye his wife, and driving his Prius. From behind a mask, he’s giving people elbows and probably whisper-yelling competitive American buzzwords like “let’s go!” or “game changer.” We understand from the video Feuer is a moralizing person, who has bodied up to evil entities such as Wells Fargo and the NRA. He got a trophy for environmentalism. He introduced a bill that Kamala Harris liked. His mom taught him about diversity. Absolutely adorable!
But of course, there is no mention about that time in 2019 when the federal government raided his office as part of the wide-ranging DWP corruption probe. In short, attorneys working for Feuer, who as city attorney defended a DWP billing lawsuit, worked a ‘lil too closely with attorneys representing the DWP billing customers (there have been no indictments so far). There is no mention a judge hit the city with $2.5 million in sanctions over the handling of the matter. There is no mention that Feuer’s the subject of at least two federal lawsuits either. How about the price tag to taxpayers? Forty, fifty million? Not mentioned.
And there is no mention that when Feuer was questioned about his knowledge as to the DWP mess, he effectively pleaded the 5th. Feuer said “I do not recall” more than 60 times when answering questions regarding the timeline of the case, which is odd because Feuer has described himself as an “engaged manager” who oversaw a large team of attorneys handling some 2,000 cases.
What I can’t get passed: Feuer was shown emails during his depo from high-ranking attorneys working under him saying Feuer okayed the original legal strategy in settling the DWP billing mess. The attorneys talked about how they got the attorneys representing water customers suing the city to drop their lawsuits. The plan was to all team up and file two lawsuits—one on behalf of a DWP customer and one by the city—against PricewaterhouseCoopers, which consulted the city on the rollout of the new billing system that spit out wrong bills.
The email said “Mike” was “on board” with that plan. But that plan fell through due to conflicts, which led to plan B. This is where it became sketchy. One of the private attorneys Feuer’s office, hired Paul Paradis, suggested repurposing the lawsuit it was going to file on behalf of the DWP customer, Antwon Jones, and hand it off to opposing attorneys to file against the city. This is what came out in court. That way, the city could control the outcome. A fake lawsuit, really.
Soo the city sued itself. That’s what happened, and it’s hard to believe that Feuer had no knowledge of plan B, since emails show that he okayed Plan A. Did he just not care about what happened after? Either he is responsible for manufacturing a weird lawsuit, or he’s a bad manager who doesn’t know what his employees are doing. Which is it?
There is a quote by H.L. Mencken, who today would have definitely been cancelled in a second, that has stayed in my brain:
“Explanations; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”