The Full Disclosure Network’s Leslie Dutton has long tracked the foibles and finagles of the County Board of Supervisors — an institution rarely watched closely by mainstream media — so reports they had banned footballs and Frisbees on LA beaches did not go unnoticed.
She and I delved into the craziness that went viral around the world within minutes and sent county officials into a tizzy of denials and fingerpointing.
What we found was the story behind the (erroneous) story revealed a lot about how the supervisors operate and why so much of what they do remains so obscure to the public.
You can watch the 1-minute preview of our conversation above or go to the Full Disclosure Network to watch our entire conversation.
“The vision is for this to be a city where people feel they can get a good public education and not spend their life on the freeways creating smog. It would be a city where you graduate from college and find a job. I imagine a city that is manageable in terms of quality of life, good recreation, parks, public libraries. My vision of L.A. is one that allows us to say that you can really achieve your dreams.”
That’s the message Wendy Greuel’s campaign for mayor is sending out all over town to convince you, the voters, she is up to the job and not just a nice upper middle class woman who way down deep is very shallow.
Greuel’s campaign calls it the highlight of her interview with LA Magazine, that and whether she “prefers Art’s or Jerry’s Deli” — a critical question that makes no sense since there is no comparison.
“Help us spread the word about her vision for LA … and let us know your pick — Art’s or Jerry’s.”
The emphasis in the Wendy vision quote and the underlining on the deli question comes from the campaign’s senior advisor Rose Kapolczynski, longtime political consultant to the irreplaceable Sen. Barbara Boxer.
Ms. Kapolczynski has captured the essence of why it can be fairly said, “Everybody Loves Wendy.”
Frankly, the hollow phrases that ring so truly from the lips of Wendy Greuel are no worse or better than the empty pieties uttered by the man who is called her No. 1 competitor for mayor, Eric Garcetti, who swears on a stack of Bibles that the nation’s second most corrupt city government in the nation’s second most hated city is a “Temple to Democracy.”
By everyone’s analysis — and not just that of those lost in the fog of despair — Los Angeles is a city in crisis, its future at stake.
The city with the nation’s worst air, worst congestion, worst roads, failing schools, aging infrastructure, Rust Belt poverty and unemployment rates — what more do you need to know to convince you that we need leaders with the courage to speak the truth and the vision to see a way forward, not the invisible civic leadership that has gone along with failure for so long while the apathetic populace foolishly acted like it wasn’t their problem?
Greuel and Garcetti are smart enough and good enough people at heart.
The leadership provided and the decisions that are made by the next mayor and the next City Council are of the utmost importance to all of us in terms of the quality of our lives, our economic opportunity, our safety, the future of our children going to school and coming of age?
But have Greuel and Garcetti ever in their long political careers done anything substantive other than talk in hieroglyphics that deflect attention from the serious issues at hand?
Have they ever stood up in public and taken responsibility for the thousands of votes they cast and actions they took that put city government so deeply into the red that even now after what they claim is $1.5 billion in budget cuts, we still face massive deficits for years — if not decades to come — no matter what happens?
I bring this up because the only people I have heard anything concrete from were outsider attorney/talk show host Kevin James and the half-outsider who has given up the farce, Austin Beutner.
Maybe an angry woman named Jan Perry will find the motivation to stand up to the failure of the City Hall political machine now that AEG and Central City Association — the downtown power interests she pandered to so generously with public money and public policy — showed who they really are by abandoning her in the redistricting fight.
The hardest thing for me to understand about the tepid politics of LA is why in the last 30 years the closest thing to someone who promised to really change things was Dick Riordan and you know what happened to him.
He turned LA around but he couldn’t get it moving because the dark side coalition of developers and labor blocked his reforms. So he turned himself around and accommodated them in the name of “pragmatism” — the amoral justification LA’s rich so often use for surrendering their integrity.
What makes me so frustrated about this farce of national, state and then local elections is I don’t hear a word of truth coming from anyone — except from the candidates who don’t stand much of a chance.
Does it really matter who wins the costliest Democratic Congressional primary in history: A worn-out old political hack like Howard Berman or a not-so-old worn-out political hack like Brad Sherman?
Does it matter that Tony Cardenas — a wannabe worn-out old political hack is being given a free ride in Berman’s Valley seat and will represent the district just the way Berman did 99.99 percent of them?
That’s what troubles me so: I don’t agree with anyone all the time, not even myself. That’s not the problem. I’m not looking for agreements. I’m looking for someone with the courage and ability to lead, to move us forward.
I’m troubled when people like Wendy Greuel say things like they want to live a in a city “where you graduate from college and find a job … a city that is manageable in terms of quality of life, good recreation, parks, public libraries.”
Damn it, what about the fact that a third to half the kids never graduate high school? Is she out of her mind, so indifferent to the realities of a city where half the people live in fear every month where the rent is going to come from?
Did she not notice we closed the libraries two days a week and even though voters gave the libraries millions of dollars in more money, they ripped 90 percent of it off so there was only enough to hire back six fired librarians and reopen half a day on Fridays?
Life, recreation, parks — all gutted because we need a city of flashy subways and trains linked to a state with a bullet train so the rich can get to San Francisco.
There are two LAs: the rich and the poor. And just about everything you are hearing and all that you are likely to hear is lies covering up the truth.
Dance with the devils if you want. But we will never reach the light at the end of this dark tunnel unless we fight, fight what we want, what we believe in.
Here’s a fabulously wealthy guy with a proven track record of success at everything he tried, a man who retired after he broke his neck in a cycling accident and decided at age 50 to dedicate himself to philanthropy and public service.
When Antonio Villaraigosa was lost in the doldrums of near total failure of his administration, he handed over control of just about everything at City Hall except the budget, police and fire to Beutner to straighten out.
It was a natural assignment for a man who made his fortune turning around distressed companies and Beutner assembled an economic development and jobs creation team of skilled people — many like him working for a dollar a year — and began to cut deals that achieved some of those goals.
What he saw inside City Hall appalled him: Lethargy, waste, inefficiency, incompetence and worst of all meddling by small-time politicians who derailed solutions to long-standing problems unless they or their friends could profit from them in one way or another.
When the Department of Water and Power was thrown into chaos by the bumbling leadership of David Freeman and his cohort Raman Raj (a twice fired top executive who is still drawing disability pay despite working as a consultant for a DWP contractor), it was Beutner who was called upon to clean up the mess and stabilize the situation.
His experiences as a deputy mayor for 18 months whetted his appetite for more and Beutner decided to run for mayor, believing that as difficult as the city’s problems are, a lot could be done to strengthen the economy and make the quality of our lives better.
It only took a few months for him to realize it was an impossible dream no matter how many millions of his personal fortune he poured into his campaign, no matter how much his wealthy friends could add to the kitty.
He called it quits on Tuesday, citing family obligations that he couldn’t fulfill if he was going to be running around the city day and night building support and overcoming the name recognition advantages of the insiders — Greuel, Garcetti and Perry.
It is easy to blame each of those insiders, as I have done so often, for their roles in running the city into the ground.
Yet the polls show you the people love them: The three city officials and county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky who is not yet a candidate each get support from roughly 20 percent of registered voters and the other outsider, attorney and radio talk show host Kevin James, is at 7 percent.
Beutner ranked last at 2 percent!
Think about it: If guys like Kevin James and Austin Beutner who have records of real achievement in the private sector and in public service get support from less than one in 10 voters combined and the people in public office who have failed time and again get support from everybody else, whose fault is it for the way things are — the pols or the people?
It’s the same in every other race up for grabs in the March 2013 city election.
Traffic cop Dennis Zine who has done everything he could to loot the city treasury as a police union official and Council member is the odds-on favorite to win the City Controller’s race against two highly qualified citizen activists, Cary Brazeman and Ron Galperin.
Legislators who deserve opprobrium for wrecking the state are heavily favored to win the City Attorney’s race (Mike Feuer) and most of the open Council seats (Gil Cedillo, Mike Davis, Felipe Fuentes and Bob Blumenfield, who is so contemptuous of voters he is running simultaneously for re-election to the Assembly where he is in charge of the budget and the City Council).
The fault lies not in our stars but ourselves.
Is there a single elected official in Los Angeles at any level of city, state or federal government who can demonstrate that they have courageously stood up against the policies that have failed the people?
Some better than others certainly. But it always comes down to at best the lesser of two evils with the outsiders, honorable citizens who have achieved success in the private sector, not standing a chance with voters who insist on preserving their ignorance and apathy, putting a smiley face on failure or being grateful for a few crumbs from the table of power.
Even on those rarest of occasions when an outsider like Carmen Trutanich beats a consummate insider like Jack Weiss, it doesn’t take long before he reveals himself to be a blatant liar and betrayer of his promises to the community.
The problem isn’t the people like Greuel and Garcetti and their colleagues set out to be crooks anymore than poor kids in our ghettos and barrios set out to be violent criminals.
It’s the culture they operate in that makes their behavior seem like a sane adaptation to an insane environment.
There is at least some evidence that the gang culture is changing but none at all that the political culture is. In fact, it is more corrupt than ever with just about everything up for sale to the highest bidder.
Even now with the miracle of 20/20 vision restored to my tired old eyes, the future of LA still looks dark to me, although as Beutner said in his farewell email about giving up the dream of becoming mayor, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Los Angeles will only realize its potential if city leaders face up to the challenges and make the right choices. We need to fix our schools because good public education is a civil right and the foundation of our future. We need to create solutions to the problems of traffic, broken streets and sidewalks and the lack of adequate public transportation. We need a city which can live within its means and can effectively provide core services like police and fire. And we need once again to make Los Angeles a city where private sector employers can prosper – creating good paying jobs and providing the tax base to pay for the services the city has to provide.
I intend to keep working to make a difference in our community. We can’t settle for the same old promises only to find nothing gets done. We face tough choices ahead and we’ll need elected leadership who will make the right ones.
Real change in Los Angeles is only going to happen if you stay engaged. In the words of the great philosopher, the Lorax, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
I agree with every word in those sentences.
The corruption and cynicism in government would fade away in a minute if the people rose up and threw the rascals out, refused to vote for any elected official who couldn’t show beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have been true public servants and not servants of themselves and special interests.
Before Beutner and his friends get in bed with Wendy Greuel or any of the other elected officials who want to be mayor, city attorney, controller, council member, legislator or Congress member, they need to consider whether any of those insiders can bring out the change they know is needed.
The vision in my right eye since cataract surgery last Thursday has changed dramatically to the point I haven’t needed my glasses today, a day before I have surgery on my left eye.
The first thing that was clear immediately was that my right eye now looked out at a world brilliantly lit with a white light even though I couldn’t make out anything in the blur.
But when I covered my right eye I saw the world through the shrouded gaze of my left eye — the vision I have been seeing for years with both cloudy eyes — and what I saw was a yellowed, sepia world, dark and foreboding.
I was looking through an eye darkly. And as the days passed and my right eye healed, I was looking through another eye brightly. It seemed like the perfect schizo kind of experience I was so good at sorting out.
But I was confused.
Given the darkness I see inside, my vision of where things are going, for LA, for California, for America, for just about everything except my wife and I, I couldn’t help but wonder whether how I feel about things is determined by my eyes and not my mind, my knowledge, my analytical skills.
Is it possible that the eyes have it, and the rest is just so much chatter?
In a few days when my left eye heals and the corrective lenses are both in place and the world that I see is so rich in color and detail, near and far and with a light so bright the only glasses I will need are shades to reduce the glare, will I then see only the beauty all around me and the good fortune that has been mine in LA and not the corruption that I have ranted and raved about?
I have longed for so long to declare I unconditionally surrender to the power of the rich and powerful, the coalition of big government, big business and big labor that I despise as nothing but a benign form of fascism whether Democrats or Republicans or the politically correct hypocrites who have ruined my dreams for a great LA, for a great America!
What can they do me? I am the luckiest man in LA, the city where I fell to pieces like Humpty Dumpty — my favorite childhood rhyme — and yet put it together and found love and happiness and success.
And now I can see more clearly now, a world richer, brighter and more beautiful. Will it change how I feel about the future?
I hope so. The first great realization I had back in 1980 when I came to town as part of a Indian swami’s traveling circus was I didn’t understand why people in LA seemed so angry about the injustices all around them, the inequalities, the smiley-face cruelties, the greed, the narcissism.
I understand too well today now that I have seen the horror of what we have made of paradise. We could all come together in love and respect and do so much better for everyone.
But I don’t see that happening without a calamity. Those who got a lot have shown they only want more. Those who got something have shown they only want to protect what’s theirs. And those with little or nothing will take anything they can get.
So I don’t see how anything changes until there is a calamity that hurts a lot of people unnecessarily and causes a lot of destruction that will make it so much harder to set right someday.
Maybe things will look different in a few weeks when the wonder of seeing what a beautiful world it is sinks it.
But for now what I feel is this: F— ‘em all. I believe in love and peace and oneness of all and that’s where I’m making my stand. I want to see it set right with some kind of balance of competing interests, values and rights now while I can see it and enjoy it.
I have always followed the light at the end of the tunnel. I just never seen a tunnel so long and dark as this one.
Maybe it will look better when I’ve got two bright eyes.
Like sands through the hourglass, so are the daily swindles of L.A. residents and taxpayers — but there’s still a few hours to protest, maybe even delay, your city, county and state officials giving away one of LA’s most prized and historic facilities to USC, the region’s wealthiest private university.
At 2:30 p.m. today, the Memorial Coliseum Commission meets to discuss and possibly vote on — an important question left deliberately unclear depending on how strong the protests are — to approve this amazingly generous gift of the Coliseum, Sports Arena and related properties to USC under a 42-year lease that Gov. Jerry Brown will soon extend to 99 years.
The terms of the deal give nothing back to the public. USC takes over the Coliseum Commission’s $1 million annual rent payments to the state and gets to keep all revenue, including naming rights, tickets sales, concessions, advertising — although sufficient signs of public disgust might squeeze some community benefits out of the deal just as they got the commissioners to surrender the benefits they wanted to take for themselves.
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With all the transparency of an armed robber in the dead of a moonless night, the commission posted a terse statement on its website, yesterday apparently, saying that on April 24 the nine commissioners — city and county electeds and the governor’s appointees — had decided to drop the requirement that USC give each them 10 tickets to every event forever as if that makes the stench of this dirty deal any less nauseating.
It’s not like they are going to pay for all the free tickets and free trips to Super Bowls they have been taking all these years.
Proposed Restated Lease Agreement between Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission and The University of Southern California
(c) Ninety (90) complimentary tickets and associated parking to each USC Home Football Game during the Term in seating locations substantially similar to the seating and parking locations for the Complimentary Tickets provided to Landlord under the Prior Agreement for the 2010 football season, along with access for USC games to a hospitality area at the Coliseum to be designated by Tenant for use by Landlord and its invitees, but not for sale by Landlord to any Person. Access to the sidelines during each USC Home Football Games shall comply with USC Athletic Department and Office of Athletic Compliance policies and procedures for noninstitutional and institutional personnel. Tenant also agrees to use good faith efforts to negotiate a reasonable allocation of complimentary tickets and associated parking for Landlord’s use to any NFL football games held in the Coliseum in the event Tenant negotiates a sublease or occupancy agreement with an NFL team.
Nothing like the crooks who chased away two professional football teams, failed to deliver on endless promises to modernize the Coliseum — only stadium in the world to host two Olympics, two Super Bowls and a World Series — and allowed the management to steal them blind, cutting a deal that benefits themselves while robbing the public once again.
They will wade through how they have been losing money, respond to devastating audits and then provide the “USC Lease Update” before slamming the door on the public and going into closed session with officials from USC, California Science Center, Pac 12 Conference, Mahlmann Media and “Other Potential Tenants/Licensees” to finalize “Both Price and Terms of Payment” for the various properties under the commission’s control.
They also will discuss the various lawsuits their disgraceful failure to fulfill their responsibilities have led to — not to mention the criminal charges against the people they were supposed to be supervising and approving contracts with.
Then, they might seal the deal without even considering alternatives like a proposal from U.S. Capital, a sports and entertainment company, that has been trying unsuccessful to meet with Coliseum officials for a long time, without even responding to the company’s demand for public records or heeding its warnings that it was acting illegally. (D-Israel_LAC-Commission_LTR_4-30-12)
It’s hard not to see how this whole sports stadium game is playing out in so many fronts in a connected way — all part of the feeding frenzy going on among those who have feasted so long on City Hall and now see officials will to give away everything to buy another year or two:
Angels owner Arte Moreno talking with AEG’s Tim Leiweke about relocating to LA.
Leiweke ready to build an NFL stadium next to his Staples Center and LA Live.
Leiweke’s close pal and sometime partner Magic Johnson taking a stake in the Dodgers with the possibility of turning Chavez Ravine into a residential-entertainment-shopping enclave and the team potentially moving to a downtown site.
It’s such a small greedy world and the people supposedly protecting your interests are the same people who turned the Coliseum into a perpetual scandal and have sold out your interests time and again to Tim Leiweke and the greed merchants like him.
Just for record, here are the names of the Coliseum Commission members, take note that Bernard Parks has fought this deal, the alternate member from the state is the wife of Council President Herb Wesson and the mayor’s appointee, Barry Sanders, is the president of Rec & Parks Commission who wants to commercialize the parks with advertising and father of the mayor’s press deputy Peter Sanders:
From the State of California: David Israel (President), Glenn Sonnenberg, William J. Chadwick, Fabian Wesson (alternate)
From the County of Los Angeles: Zev Yaroslavsky, Mark Ridley-Thomas, Don Knabe (Vice President), Mike Antonovich (alternate)
From the City of Los Angeles: Barry A. Sanders, Bernard C. Parks, Johnathan Williams, Tom LaBonge (alternate), Jill Werner (alternate)
Why is Wal-Mart — a spectacularly successful non-union company that buys schlock merchandise from Third World companies that pay workers a pittance and sells those products at ridiculously cheap prices to poor and working class people — a villain that is unwelcome in cool, liberal LA?
Why is Apple — an even more spectacularly non-union company that ships most of its jobs overseas to China where where suppliers pay workers so little and push the so hard they are suicidal — the darling of cool, liberal LA where so many are willing to pay a huge premium for its products and become captive consumers to even more Apple products?
Maybe it’s because Apple is such a creative, cool, liberal company it has written the book on how the world’s richest company and others like Google and Amazon that rank in the upper 1 percent of profitability worldwide — avoid billions of dollars in local, state and federal taxes, according to a massive New York Times investigation published Sunday. (How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes)
It’s called the “Double Irish with a Dutch Twist” — basically a scheme to drive profits to low tax states and countries like Ireland where Apple’s patents are located so the company can put $110 billion in the bank, make billionaires of its and millionaires of its shareholders at the expense of everyone else, including Apple’s adoring followers.
With a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states.
Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.
California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.
Setting up an office in Reno is just one of many legal methods Apple uses to reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars each year. As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.
So how lucrative is Apple’s tax avoidance scheme?
Apple’s federal income tax bill last year would have been $2.4 billion higher if it paid its fair share. Instead, it paid a total of $3.3 billion in cash on profits of $34.2 billion — a 9.8 percent tax rate. And that’s not what it pay the U.S. government; it’s what they paid to all the governments in the world in income tax.
“By comparison, Wal-Mart last year paid worldwide cash taxes of $5.9 billion on its booked profits of $24.4 billion, a tax rate of 24 percent, which is about average for non-tech companies,” the NY Times reported.
It isn’t just the government that provides the military-diplomatic support for companies that Apple and other high-tech California companies screw.
In 2009, they bought the California Legislature — presumably for a penny on the dollar with 10 free I-Pads thrown in — and got tax breaks that save Apple alone $1.5 billion a year in state taxes.
That’s a lot money in a state with a perpetual budget crisis that has led to massive cuts in public services, let the poor to live or die on their own and jacked up taxes, rates, fees and penalties with far more to come.
What’s happened to De Anza Community College, barely a mile from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, is the face on this story.
It’s the school Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak attended but now it has cut more than a thousand courses and 8 percent of its faculty and faces a budget gap so large, it is in a “death spiral,” according to the school’s president, Brian Murphy.
“I just don’t understand it,” he saidl “I’ll bet every person at Apple has a connection to De Anza. Their kids swim in our pool. Their cousins take classes here. They drive past it every day, for Pete’s sake. But then they do everything they can to pay as few taxes as possible.”
Steve Jobs, hero to so many, personally went before the Cupertino City Council shortly before his death last year, to demand approval for a new corporate headquarters building.
Only one Council member had the courage to even suggestion that Apple might doing something nice and generous for the city like providing free wireless Internet for everyone.
“That’s why we pay taxes. Now, if we can get out of paying taxes, I’ll be glad to put up Wi-Fi,” Jobs responded.
That remark clearly is the tone Apple likes to take toward anyone who dares to question how the company behaves. Apple issued a statement to the NY Times, counting among the company’s good works the taxes paid by its employees which make “us among the top payers of U.S. income tax …Our focus has been on doing the right thing, not getting credit for it.” (Apple-NYT statement)
So I ask you what is so cool and liberal about Apple?
What is so rotten about Wal-Mart that the City Council, kowtowing to union demands, has kept them out of the city as much as possible, even trying to stop them from setting up a badly-needed grocery store in Chinatown in a building built with public money and left empty for 20 years?
And if the company wasn’t providing something of value, why would residents of the predominantly Latino community of Panorama City be welcoming a Wal-Mart grocery story in an abandoned eyesore shopping area?
Maybe it’s because the real people value jobs and taxes and fresh food more than the City Council that is more concerned with who gets the jobs and who they give the tax breaks too while posturing about the food deserts of LA they created with their destructive policies.
Do you ever wonder why the subway ends in North Hollywood instead of turning east to Burbank and Glendale? Or why the Gold Line turns right when it gets to Pasadena? Or why the Westside is getting light rail and a subway extension while you get nothing?
Politically speaking, size matters, so smaller cities don’t — unless they act like the 31 cities in the San Gabriel Valley. In 1994 they formed the San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments to end their self-destructive squabbling and allow their voices to be heard despite the deafening roar of the 800-pound gorilla to the west, the city of Los Angeles.
It took a long time to get the cities and their three county supervisors to begin to collaborate for the good of the region, but working together has gotten results.
“We spent a lot of time building consensus and developing a common vision,” said Nick Conway, executive director of the SGVCOG for the last 16 years.
“Now we have two light rails, the most progress in light rail of anywhere in the county, freeway improvements, open space and conservancy. Had it not been for the COG, we could not have been able to band together and get those projects and become the overarching organization that respects local control, encourages cooperation and advocates for the common good.”
So who speaks for you? Who is advocating for your fair share of the billions of mass-transit dollars you are contributing to?
Formed last year, the San Fernando Valley Council of Governments could become the vehicle for improving the quality of life for the two million people who live in the L.A. portion of the valley and in the cities of San Fernando, Burbank and Glendale and Santa Clarita.
Four years ago this month, I was fired from my job at the Daily News where I had worked for 23 years and started blogging.
“Free at last!” — those were the first words I wrote in my first post after more than four decades of dancing with the devil of corporate journalism.
I said I wanted to write from “my heart” about “the things I believe in, and the vision that drives me to fight for a better, a greater Los Angeles … to engage in a public conversation about who we are and what we could become if we pull together and work together for the common good.”
We’ll never know what that is or how to achieve it unless we talk about our experiences, our values, our needs and our aspirations. I believe with all my heart that that kind of public conversation will cut through the fog of political, media and corporate double talk and lead us to the common ground where we can start solving the problems of our community and make life better for us all.
I certainly don’t pretend to know the answers; I only know what I see and I’m probably wrong about most of all of it. My newsroom knew that, and had a saying, “You can’t spell wrong without R-O-N.”
So let’s tell the truth as we see it and learn from each other. Let the games begin
That was how I ended that first post — and now 1,702 published posts, 123 stillborn posts and 22,585 comments later — I’m at a crossroads, struggling against the futility of it all, the failure of so much of what I tried to achieve and engaged in a months-long meditation asking myself, “What if I am wrong?”
What if the greedy bastards are right? What if you might as well take as much as you can and enjoy yourself: To hell with everybody else, just be like so many others and cover the nakedness of your selfishness with politically correct nonsense and the armor of ideology?
Exploring that idea, I bought the website no-change.com where I thought about satirizing the way things are today by declaring, “I got mine.”
I thought about writing under various pseudonyms boasting about how airlines, hotels, expensive shops, credit card companies were bestowing such generous freebies to make life more luxurious for the affluent and how the government is doing the right thing by providing tax shelters to the super-rich and giving them a lower tax rate than the masses.
Surely, many people would contribute their own let-them-eat-cake stories to no-change.com because they actually believe things like that and in the grand illusion that they somehow will go from being an ordinary working slob and became one of those rich people someday.
I’ve thought long and hard about what I’ve written, what I’ve said in interviews, what I did in starting the Bastille Day 2008 Saving LA Protest at City Hall and how it became the Saving LA Project (SLAP), and how so many people from across the city came together to defeat Measure B, the $4 billion solar energy boondoggle and elect Carmen Trutanich as City Attorney in 2009, and how SLAP morphed into LA Clean Sweep for the 2011 city elections to support candidates who were not part of the insider City Hall political machine.
Along the way, I brought to life my idea for the citizen journalism project, OurLA.org that I worked long and hard to try make it a place where we could talk about the issues we care about in our neighborhoods and in our organizations.
But what came of any of it? Even the successes have turned sour and most of what I tried ended in failure — not that failure itself has any sting for me.
I can’t deny it makes a difference that I’ve gotten older. I’ll be 71 next month and I’m having cataract surgery on my eyes in the next 10 days.
So my dilemma today is the same one that has haunted me my whole adult life: What to do?
I can no longer see what the point is to exposing the extraordinary corruption and incompetence of our city government or any of the levels of government above LA.
If you don’t know how they steal your money and give you so little in return, you haven’t been paying any attention and never will. You don’t matter at all except for your usefulness as a mindless casual voter who can be easily manipulated by ads and mailers designed to plug in to the programs embedded in your brains by an out of control materialist culture.
Personally, I’m tired of beating this dead horse. Like so many citizen activists and mainstream journalists, I’ve exposed many of their swindles of a docile and defeated populace. I’ve insulted their integrity, and mocked their daily deceits.
I’ve reach out to people who care in every part of the city, people of every race and class and met thousands of amazing people, caring and committed to right the wrongs they perceive, people who work countless hours to try to get City Hall to respect their values and interests and address their needs.
Clearly, I’m not very good in that role, never thought I was. I’ve always hoped a true leader would emerge and become the catalyst to bring the city together, believed it was inevitable that the opportunity to do something great was obvious that someone would step forward with the transcendent vision and the charisma to revolutionize LA into the city it could be, the city where dreams come true for all like it has been for me in so many ways.
What I have determined, right or wrong, is the issue is not poverty and the abuses of bankers; it is not over-development and the CRA; it is not the outrageous costs of salaries, pensions and benefits for public employees; it is not bike paths or green energy or even public safety.
The only issue is power. The people have none and are reduced to begging for crumbs from the table of power while developers, unions, business, political operatives divvy up the spoils of public money.
Nothing that I have seen or learned in the last four years gives me even the slightest hope that those who want a better city, a great city, are ready to put aside the narrow issues issue that motivate or rise above the biases that inhibit them to come together as a single unstoppable force.
The truth is the City Hall political machine is weak, held together by the greed of the special interests who control what is a motley crew of elected officials, few of whom have ever achieved anything of distinction in their whole lives.
The entire corrupt system would fall in a second if all those who agree on nothing but the need for dramatic change stood together in silence in front of City Hall where the Occupy LA movement camped out for so long and refused to leave until all our separate and collective demands were met.
That’s what I’ve always believed but I’m older if not wiser now. The only thing I’m sure about is that it is not going to happen without terrible pain that will only accentuate the horrible disparity between rich and poor and further send the middle class fleeing.
It is going to take a calamity to bring about change. I hope I’m wrong but the system is in a feeding frenzy and feels it is immunized against the consequences of the looming disaster.
This is 20 years after the LA riots that some call an uprising. The police have learned how to control without the incessant use of abusive force but the rage among the poor is so much deeper, the injustices so much deeper, a spiritual infection that has spread to many who like me could look the other way and say, “I got mine.”
I could learn to live with that like a lot of people but it would break my heart.
Your elected officials are bought and paid for — put into the highest paid and most outrageously overstaffed — municipal offices in America by money, lots and lots of money, from people who expect and usually get a healthy return on their money.
In the last two elections, Eastside Councilman Jose Huizar has put the touch on 201 people who actually live in his 14th District and more than 1,000 who live elsewhere while raising nearly $900,000 so he could trounce his underfunded challengers. Shamelessly, he even took the maximum $100,000 in public matching funds just to be safe because challenger Rudy Martinez put $213,000 of his own money into his campaign while raising only $88,000 from other people.
Last year, running for an open seat in District 12, the candidate anointed by the City Hall political machine, Mitch Englander, raised $568,000 from his far-flung friends to gain a 57 percent majority over his closest challenger Brad Smith, described in the press as the “contender with any press or money” — if $23,000 counts as money.
For his part, Antonio Villaraigosa garnered 54 percent of the vote in winning re-election in 2009 with a campaign warchest of more than $3 million — 14 times what his closest rival Walter Moore was able to raise.
There are typical examples of why city elections are almost always a fraud, why only 13 % of registered voters cast ballots last year, why City Hall has become a front for developers, unions and other special interests that feed at the public trough.
The rarest of exceptions is Carmen Trutanich, an outsider who raised $2 million from contributors to match insider Jack Weiss in the City Attorney’s race in 2009 and then got $1 million more — twice what Weiss got — from independent expenditure committees, the vast majority from the police union.
Money matters. It matters about 99 % of the time.
It means special interests get the politicians they pay for and the public gets the bills for the government they own.
We can do something to level the playing field — oops the U.S. Supreme Court says we can’t do that — but we can pressure City Hall to change the formula for public matching funds for candidates so that ordinary citizens could mount a credible campaign, get people talking about the real issues and maybe even win a few offices.
For the past year, Kathay Feng of Common Cause of California and her team have worked out a plan that would increase city matching funds in Council races from $1 for every dollar raised to $4 for every dollar raised up to the same maximum of $100,000.
Other proposed changes would give candidates the full $100,000 when the raise $25,000 as long as they have gotten contributions from at 200 residents of their districts.
Sitting Council members don’t like that idea, requiring them to actually spend time with the little people they were elected to represent. It’s beneath them.
These proposals are set to come before the Ethics Commission in June (the May meeting was cancelled because the commission is pleading its case not to be further debilitated by cuts in their staff).
It will take a miracle to get this through the Commission and adopted by the City Council in time for the 2013 election.
The miracle isn’t whether they will enact these reforms. The Commission and the Council will do that if the miracle occurs and the community – the ordinary people in every part of the city — rise up and demand this step toward fairer elections and better government.
If you don’t join this campaign with nearly half the Council seats open in 2013 and failed state legislators ready to take them all, with the mayor, controller and city attorney offices open, than you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Click here for a list of the money raised by elected officials in 2007, 2009 and 2011 and below is a chart of the campaign finance rules today and the reforms that are proposed:
EDITOR’S NOTE: Read the letter the LA Times described as “scathing” from the Federal Transit Administration to LA’s MTA over its contempt for civil rights laws. Then, read the MTA’s response as reported by Steve Hymon, the former LA Times transportation reporter who wrote the tepid analysis of Measure R a week before the 2008 election and a year before he joined the MTA as blogger for the transit agency’s self-promoting website The Source. MTA characterizes the FTA’s complaints as old news, says 2 of the 5 failings have been “resolved” and promises total obedience to all demands so that funds are not withheld.
Hell-bent on building the subway-far-short-of-the-sea and ready to open the long-delayed and over-budget Expo Line far short of its planned Culver City destination, the MTA is facing scrutiny from the same Federal Transit officials it hopes will lend it billions against 30 years of future local sales tax revenue.
The problem called “disturbing” by he Feds is that MTA slashed bus services by 650,000 hours to fund rail projects, a problem under civil rights laws since bus riders are mostly minorities and the rail lines that are planned will mostly serve the remnants of the region’s white communities.
Despite the political hot air you hear all the time about how much they care, the actual policies have long been to punish the poor as federal officials noted — a problem that surely puts the nail in the coffin of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s ingenious 30-10 plan for rail construction.
It explains why he now wants to extend the MTA tax indefinitely so he can borrow against 100 years of revenue, not just 30. What else can he show as his legacy — that Jimmy Hahn hired the right guy in Bill Bratton to fix the LAPD so his own Charlie Beck can ruin it?
It also explains why he became so hysterical at last week’s MTA meeting when County Supervisor Mike Antonovich compared how the mayor steamrolled over all opposition to Measure R’s half-cent sales tax hike to “gang rape” — a crude but not inapt choice of words. (Listen here gangrape)
Clearly, Antonovich is not going to let that the mayor’s Measure R II get through with the virtual lack of scrutiny it got four years ago.
The real problem with LA County’s transit system — ridership has been virtually stagnant for years — is that it isn’t a system at all.
It doesn’t go to the places people go like LAX, Dodger Stadium or hundreds of other popular destinations and the connections between lines is poor and getting worse because bus frequency has been reduced over and over along with elimination of many lines.
Connectivity and frequency — no mystery those are what make a successful transit system.
It’s why the lousy Orange Line Busway is dollar for dollar the most successful MTA line even though it only saves seven minutes crossing between North Hollywood and Warner Center. Buses run frequently and for many transit-dependent people, it means one less transfer to get to work.
If you listened to the gangrape audio from the last MTA meeting, you heard board member, transit expert and lobbyist-consultant Richard Katz, the former Democratic Assembly member, take charge and break up the fight between Antonio and Antonovich before it got really interesting.
At one point in recent years, Katz was on the board of the MTA, Metrolink and the High-Speed Rail Authority — something that eventually became a controversy over the obvious conflict of interest.
In a recent Round Table with Dave Bryan on the city propaganda station, Channel 35, Katz was defending the idiotic $100 billion high-speed rail boondoggle against criticism from the Reason Foundation’s Adrian Moore and came to admit just what a mess the transit system is.
You can take Katz’s word for it. He got the public to buy a state gas tax 20 years ago with the now oft-broken promise that it would always go for transportation and has been the mayor’s key adviser and strategist on all things transit-related.
What he can never concede as a principal architect of Measure R II — if projects are delivered on time and on budget would connect LAX and more importantly the various lines that don’t even meet now in downtown — is that it still won’t be a transit system 10 or 20 or 30 years from now.
There still won’t be a system with buses running with the frequency needed for connectivity and it still won’t take people to where they want to go quickly and efficiently.
Measure R — whether it’s 30-10 or 100-10 or whatever — isn’t about gang rape.
It’s about MTA’s fraud against the public in building costly rail projects while bus services are being cut, fares are being raised and maintenance of the system being put off to the point that there is a $1.3 billion backlog and breakdowns are becoming dangerously frequent.
