It's a frustrating profession. You're bound by the taste and judgment of the audience, the standards of the profession, the limited vision of your newspaper and most of all during my years in the business, the bean counters whose only interest is to drive profit margins of 20, 30 event 40 percent at some papers.

That isn't why the American revolutionaries wrote the First Amendment with all that stuff about freedom of speech and of the press.

When they made those ideals the cornerstone of our country, there were more than 100 papers in Philadelphia and not a single reporter. Anyone who owned a press could print a newspaper and say whatever they wanted and what they wanted to say was often so scurrilous and defamatory that they would be driven into bankruptcy today by high-priced lawyers even if what they printed was true and defensible.

Today, it's not like that at all. Corporate monopoly journalism denies the basic right of free speech to the reporters and editors who work in the mainstream media. Sure, they sneak in bits and pieces of themselves and the super-talented can actually express themselves but fundamentally newspapers, radio and TV news people are product manufacturers, and never more so than today when news media are dying from the decline in audience and advertising.

Revealed: Antonio's Mistress

GANGS: Terror in the Streets

Does the Valley get its FAIR SHARE?

Anatomy of malpractice

Rodney King: The record against LAPD

Rocketdyne Lab contaminated

Cranston's funny money games

Payola to L.A. Prep Star

Valley woman to the rescue

Those are headlines from just a few of the hundreds of stories Daily News reporter Beth Barrett has done over the last 22 years.

No reporter in L.A. has had a bigger impact on the politics of the city or raised public awareness more about important issues.

Tonight, the Society of Professional Journalists in L.A. is honoring Beth for her achievement along with five other distinguished journalists: Bob Banfield of KABC-TV,  John Rabe of KPCC-FM, Tom Tugend of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and Los Angeles Times reporters Scott Glover and Matt Lait.

I have had the privilege of working with Beth since she came to the Daily News from Alaska in 1986 and nobody ever deserved to be recognized for her achievement more.

The most remarkable thing about Beth is that as tough and relentless as she at nailing down a story, people still talk to her because she is always fair and straightforward about what she is reporting.

Much of the Daily News' reputation for hard-hitting coverage of City Hall is due to Beth. She is one of a kind, a great reporter and a great friend.

.

Scaled down and still unable to arrange financing, Eli Broad's grandiose vision for L.A. is in deep trouble.

The Grand Avenue project was supposed to be the Central Park of L.A., the masterpiece of human ingenuity that was finally to make downtown the true center of the city, the place where all roads led and all people came to celebrate the wonders of urban life in Southern California.

In truth, the project exposes everything wrong with the city.

There is utterly no grassroots support for it, no public demand or interest, only the vision of a philanthropic billionaire who truly believes great monuments and a great downtown make a great city and has the clout to bring politicians to their knees to do his bidding.

Ever since Tom Bradley won election in 1973, the insider power structure has invested the city's wealth into downtown with massive public subsidies that robbed neighborhoods everywhere of services, infrastructure investment and support necessary for community health.

Once upon a time I delighted in giving Mike Feuer a hard time.

He asked for it by always reminding everybody he went to Harvard and acted like that proved he was smarter than them as if being smart was the most important quality in a person, as if going to Harvard meant you were better than getting an AA degree from Pierce College.

Maybe losing the election for City Attorney to fellow Harvard grad Rocky Delgadillo chastened Mike but I've found myself liking him a lot in my last few encounters and that made his earnestness more appealing.

So I'm not giving Mike a hard time personally over his latest email blast to constituents where he boasts of all the bills he has introduced -- 22 in all. Think about it: 22 bills times 120 members is potentially, 2,640 new laws. God help us!

There's so many laws on the books already that nobody knows what's right or wrong anymore. I've long argued there ought to be a law: No new law can be passed without repealing an old law. I don't have a clue as to how many laws there are on the books in L.A., California and  Washington but I'll to bet the number runs into the millions.

Enough already, let's cap the number until all reasonable people can tell what's legal and what's illegal. It makes you wonder how God boiled it down to Ten Commandments, obviously he hadn't created lawyers when He set down His law.

It was nearly 25 years ago that then state Attorney General, John Van de Kamp, told me the politicians had written California's public corruption laws in such a way that only a politician stupid enough to stand up in public -- or get caught on camera _ and admit he took money and did favors could be convicted of a crime.

The politicial culture of L.A. has thrived on that carefully sculpted loophole for years, Our elected officials give access to special interests they don't give the general public, do favors that sometimes are worth tens of millions of dollars and sell out the public interest for contributions to their campaigns and officeholder accounts -- if nothing else.

L.A. is corrupt in a way and on a scale that goes far beyond what goes on in Chicago or New York where politicians often go to jail but the system works to make those cities better -- not worse.

A prime example was back in the news today in the L.A. Times  where Ted Rohrlich followed up on the long-running scandal involving well-connected developer Chris Hammond and the Santa Barbara Plaza project near Baldwin Hills.

The plaza was a rundown center with 20 shops and Hammond -- with the generous help of Mayor James Hahn -- put together a plan for a $123 million redevelopment called Marlton Square. It was to be a housing and retail project with $43 million in public subsidies.

The Daily News exposed the shenanigans in an an article by Harrison Sheppard which discussed Hahn's hope to win votes in South Los Angeles with his no-questions-asked support.

Even by that time, Hammond had bundled tens of thousands of dollars into politicians' coffers despite a record of bouncing checks on his own accounts. He had close ties to most of the area's black politicians, including Herb Wesson, Bernard Parks and Mark Ridley-Thomas among others.

Because Hammond had such strong political support, the project got approved even though there was critical news coverage, a critical audit and criticism from the city's watchdog, Controller Laura Chick.

Insiders say Hammond was smooth and made big committments to campaigns and nonprofits, and even his bad checks. never stopped fundraisers from putting him high on their lists of targets for money.

Hammond's story is the story of how City Hall works, or rather doesn't work for the benefit of the city.

Hammond bought influence, the politicians gave him what he wanted, which was public money and Santa Barbara Plaza is just the way it was years ago -- except even more run down, a cancer in the community.

Did Hammond get in trouble wth the law? No.

Did any of the politicians who did him favors for money for their campaigns. No.

Were crimes committed? No.

Is this corruption? Yes.

And it is still going on every day. Follow the money and you will see how and why your elected officials aren't serving you and why they back projects that are bad for your community and why they are constantly taking more money from you and why L.A. keeps getting worse.

Give me some out-and-out quid-pro-quo bribery like they get in Chicago and New York. and I'd give you some politicians in jail and a city that works.

By Ellen Vukovich

Reader and Sherman Oaks activist

Here's my prediction -- a full-scale EIR will be ordered as a compromise. What's another year to Home Depot?

By this time, Wendy Greuel will probably be our next Laura Chick - City Controller. That means the new Council Member will declare that there is nothing he/she can do to "stop" the project because Home Depot has worked with the (Sunland-Tujunga) community and mitigated its impacts to an "insignificant" level as per the EIR.

And, the last thing this City will jeopardize is its working relationship (read that as collecting more sales taxes, etc.) from Home Depot when facing its record bugetary shortfalls coupled with losing a multi-million dollar lawsuit.

My suggestion is that all residents of Council District 2 unite and find a candidate for Wendy's seat that will do their bidding. That's the only solution to all of the "Home Depots."

When you get off the 210 Freeway at Sunland Boulevard, you leave the grit and noise of the rest of L.A. and enter what seems like an old California town of well-kept modest homes and small businesses set between mountains .

It could be 1968 as easily as today.

But the peace and quiet of this community of less than 60,000 has been disrupted by a four-year battle against City Hall and the corporate America Goliath, Home Depot.

On Saturday, that battle came to a turning point with the city sending out a team of mediators to look for an opening that would get Home Depot to drop its lawsuit and get its project greenlighted to transform a closed Kmart store into another home improvement megastore .

More than 300 residents showed up for the Day of Dialogue, and were quickly split into 30 or so small groups, sort of like when the cops separate a group of suspects so they can't collaborate on their story.

The residents didn't need to collaborate. They knew their story cold after fighting what they see as the beginning of the end of everything they love about their community, a rustic place where people sometimes ride their horses down Foothill Boulevard and neighbors look after each other.

The back story is that the city approved Home Depot's request for permits without informing the community or bringing the people into the process, without even takiing a look at what the store would do to the character of the community or to local merchants. The bureaucrats just took the work of the lobbyists and corporate execs like they do every day as they go about trashing the neighborhoods of L.A. and the quality of life of its residents.

But Sunland-Tujunga organized and fought back while Home Depot played hardball, packing meetings with hirelings, blitzing the mainstream meda which is so dependent on Home Depot for advertising revenue, even accusing the residents of racism for not wanting dozens of day laborers hanging around their neighborhood.

The roar of the community, magnified by Home Depot's arrogant tactics, forced the City Council to nix the development unless the company did an extensive environmental impact report that would take years and in the end would show it was the wrong business in the wrong place anyway.

So the corporate giant sued and the City Attorney's Office, which has such a poor record of defending the public interest in litigation, sought the mediation effort.

I sat at Table 27 with six local residents, a representative of Home Deport and a volunteer facilitator. Oddly, at the outset of the entire event, media representatives were asked to identify themselves but bloggers like myself were accepted on equal footing with my former colleague, Daily News reporter Rick Coca. And the facilitator questioned at length the appropriateness of my joining in at Table 27.

Truth be told, the event came four years too late. If City Hall gave a damn about the neighborhoods, every development project with any significant impact on the quality of life would start with community information meetings and this kind of mediation event if there was much of a controversy. 

Regina Clark set the tone for my group by setting out a long series of problems and making it clear Home Depot could never win even if the store got built.

"Most people in this community would never shop in another Home Depot no matter what happens,'' she said.

The company representative offered no objection to that or any other statements during the next 90 minutes or so, making sure everyone understood listening to the community's concerns was the mission.

The group's list of objections was long: It will destroy the small-town character of the community; small merchants, especially hardware stores and home repair services, would be put out of business; noise; traffic congestion; dozens of 18-wheel trucks on the street; a school less than 500 feet away; day laborers; violation of the community plan; the start of  overdevelopment and high density. Similar lists of issues that came up at every other table.

So what do these people want?

A town center with a Target or other general merchandise store, with a meeting hall, and places to stroll, lots of little shops -- why it sounded like a scaled-down version of every Rick Caruso project like the Grove or Calabasas Commons.

I couldn't help but wonder why the city wasn't working to achieve that for Sunland and every other neigbhorhood in the city. Isn't that why we have a government at all? Shouldn't City Hall be working with every community to create gathering places and economic health? Isn't government supposed to deliver what we the people want, not what's good for the politicians, bureaucrats, developers and influence peddlers?

After four years of consciousness-raising experience, the people in my group had a good grasp on what's wrong with L.A.

Kathy Kennedy said, "We're not getting heard, all we get is lip service."

"We don't trust the city," said Dan Smith. "No matter what we do somehow or another this thing is going to go through.

Added Jeff Buzard: "Democracy is just a buzzword anymore. All they're saying is, 'Let's give them a voice so we can say we did before we get our way,'"

Almost in unison the group in the end asked the same question: "Why are we even doing this?"

A good question. Nothing came up that wasn't well known to them, to Home Depot and to their elected representative, Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, who will receive the full report of what each of the group found important. Killing the project outright  or requiring a full EIR were at the top of the list.

Greuel supports the community in this fight, the same way every council member in the city will support the community if they face large numbers of people organized, informed and ready to fight for themselves.

It's unthinkable that Home Depot won't see the light and back down on this project before people everywhere start questioning whether supersized stores and corporate America aren't causing more harm than good.

And it's unthinkable that Greuel and her colleagues will back down because the people in this community have shown that people power works. Similar struggles to theirs are going on all over the city as the mayor and council do their best to remove all community input and give developers the go-ahead to do whatever they want, wherever they want.

And that's why the battle of Sunland-Tujunga is so important. The community won. It won because it empowered itself by banding together and raising the stakes for the politicians..

So if you want to save your community and the character of your neighborhood, look, listen and learn from the people of Sunland-Tujunga. Perhaps someday this will be seen as an historic event, the moment when City Hall first learned that the government belongs to the people and exists to serve them.

 

 

 

 

THE HOME DEPOT PARTICIPATES IN PUBLIC DIALOGUE IN SUNLAND-TUJUNGA

Company Officials Listen to Community Opinions About Proposed New Store

 

LOS ANGELES, CA (April 26, 2008) - The Home Depot^® today issued the following statement regarding the company's participation in the Los Angeles City Attorney's Mediation Group voluntary public dialogue at Mt. Gleason Middle School in the Sunland-Tujunga area of Los Angeles.

 

"Today we were able to listen to and interact directly with members of the Sunland-Tujunga community," said Jeff Nichols, Director of Real Estate, Western Division for The Home Depot.  "We believe it is important that all parties involved in this neighborhood hear from differing perspectives and opinions and today's meeting was an important step toward accomplishing this goal.  On behalf of The Home Depot, I would like to thank the City Attorney's Mediation Group for facilitating this forum for community dialogue.  I would additionally like to thank the committed residents of Sunland-Tujunga for the frank and helpful opinions expressed here today."

 

As background, The Home Depot acquired the site at 8040 Foothill Blvd. from Kmart in 2004 as part of a multi-store transaction.  The Home Depot applied for and received remodeling permits in July of 2006, which were later revoked by the Los Angeles City Council.  The Home Depot sued the City of Los Angeles on November 9, 2007, asking the California Superior Court (Court of Los Angeles, Central District) to reinstate the incorrectly revoked permits.  On March 4, 2008 a stipulation to a stay of litigation was agreed to by The Home Depot and the Los Angeles City Attorney, allowing the two parties to work toward finding solutions other than litigation.  On April 22, 2008, The Home Depot submitted a new project permit compliance review application to the City of Los Angeles as part of the stipulation to the stay of litigation.

 

As a separate component of the stipulation, the Los Angeles City Attorney's Mediation Group was charged with facilitating discussions between The Home Depot and Sunland-Tujunga community stakeholders. 

 

###

In college, I majored in anthropology, the study of humankind and how it evolved genetically, culturally and socially -- which m

The idea is that some crazy monkey stood upright and found he could run faster and see farther than his pals. Upright, he could wield a club so he survived longer, ate better, had more kids who as soon as they learned to walk, stood upright and  turned out to be even faster and stronger than their father.

A lot of monkeys pooh-poohed what was going on, and accused the upright monkeys of betraying their heritage and warned that if they didn't watch out, they'd be thrown out of the monkey world. But a few smart monkeys started imitating their upright brethren, and then a few more until one day there were 100 of them and at that moment a threshold was passed and all the monkeys started standing straight up...well almost all, some were so resistant they slinked off into the jungle and continued monkeying around forever.

Anyway, that's a theory of how Homo Sapiens started to evolve from monkeys.

I apply that theory to the political evolution of L.A. We've come a long way from six families ruling the town and tolerating no dissent to the Committee of 25 and today's insider culture of big shots, developers, contractors, unions and the politicians who front for them.

The roots of democracy have been growing. Neighborhood councils, resident groups, volunteer organizations and a host of others that are mostly preoccupied with their own agendas have steadily grown stronger and more vocal. It's my view that the efforts to make L.A. a more democratic city is nearing the threshold where all these groups can look past their narrow interests and see the big picture.

It just takes that 100th monkey to trigger a movement that brings all those people who want the power to affect the decisions that affects their lives. That's all democracy is about and I don't see how anyone can object to the empowerment of all sections, all communities, all individuals in L.A..

I've believed in that for the nearly 30 years I've lived here. I believe in it now more than ever. I believe it's possible for democracy to flourish here, and I believe that if it does, Los Angeles would become a truly great city, a city that shines like a beacon of hope to a world that so often seems on the brink of catastrophe.

Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. But it's what I've worked to achieve and what I'm doing now that I've retired from the Daily News and expanded my horizons beyond journalism and am now just like everybody else an ordinary citizen exercising his rights to speak his mind and work for what he believes in.

I know there are a lot upright monkeys out there and I know we are near a threshhold where standing up for what you believe in and working with others to find common ground to make things better for all, inch by inch, day by day, is more possible today than ever.

The only questions are when will it happen and, of course, who will be that 100th monkey.

Here's why my mantra for so long has been: I love L.A., phonetically that comes out I luuuuuv L.A.

This is a city of light and dark, yin and yang, Hellywood where the lost souls of the world come to work out their karma, a city of temptations where there's no middle ground. You either get well, get dead or get out.

Which brings me to L.A. City Hall which has done none of those things. It continues to operate much like the Kremlin undemocratically and indifferent to the needs of the people.

Perhaps that's why the sidewalks have been left to crumble for decades without City Hall even being able to decide on a policy of whether the city or property owners are liable for repairs and for injuries that occur because of broken cement. The result is the city has paid out tens of millions of dollars in damage claims and there's an 83 year backlog of needed sidewalk fixes, even worse than the 75 year backlog for street paving. Some 4,600 miles of sidwalks need repairs, nearly half of the city's sidewalks.

Enter the do-littles of the City Council with a brilliant scheme to shift the responsibility to property owners who would have to pay for sidewalk repairs to be able to sell their homes or businesses. Homeowners could be hit with as much as a $7,000 repair bill which could wipe out a lot of people's equity given the 25 percent drop in home prices which is certainly going to get worse before it gets better.

With its typical cynicism the council named its most conservative, pro-business member, Greig Smith, to be the point man for this trick, a man with nothing to lose since he's leaving office next year after two terms and 25 years or so serving the whims of his illustrious predecessor, the unforgettable Hal Bernson.

Trouble is Smith has run into a firestorm of opposition from the Realtors and the newly-formed 80,000 member Los Angeles County Business Federation. They think the proposal won't fix the sidewalks, will hurt a lot of people and slow down property sales. They want the current 50/50 split program between the city and property owners to be expanded instead of elminated.

None of that matters to the council, having given away the treasury to city unions, developers and contractors -- not to mention all the money they put into their own pockets as the nation's highest paid elected city officials. The council now faces a monumental budget deficit that they want to solve by taking more money away from the people's pockets and providing less services to them.

The sidewalks point-of-sale policy fits in perfectly. It achieves nothing to make the city better and it saves the $9 million the city now pays annually for repairs plus it makes property owners the liable party, saving millions more in damage claims. That will go a long way toward keeping them and their vast staffs with all those city cars and blackberrys and other perks happy and keep the unions supportiing them.

The last point is the most telling. The pressure to adopt this policy comes from the SEIU, the largest city union whose members are the lowest paid -- which isn't saying much since city workers salaries and benefits far exceed those available in the private sectors or in big cities across the country for that matter.

The union wants to make sure its members get the 5 percent a year raises they were just promised and keep their jobs until they can retire at any early age with 75 percent of their salary and health benefits for life.

Who can blame them.

All that's standing in the way of this deal going through is the entire business community of Los Angeles which has harbored long-standing feelings that City Hall's brand of municipal socialism is somehow anti-business.

So they've mounted a letter-writing and lobbying campaign to derail the plan, much to the chagrin of Councilman Smith.

He is mad as hell about their resistance and in an email now circulating throughout the business community made it perfectly clear he's not going to take it anymore.

Smith asserts he is the "lone voice' that even wanted the business community to have be involved in the process. He accuses Realtors in particular of the "lie" that city wants to "shift" the responsibility for sidewalks to property owners, noting a 1911 state law making property owners responsible.

"The fact that the city began fixing sidewalks under Mayor Riordan has given the false imprression, and promulgated by the representatives of the Board of Realtors and the Daily News, that it is a city responsibility. IT IS NOT."

Then Smith throws his best punch, he'll turn against the business community if they persist.

"So, if the Board continues to tell its members and the public, as your spokesman did on television not long ago, that the "City is trying to shift its responsibility onto the taxpayer, and they have plenty of money to fix it themselves (the city), then I shall cease being your major supporter.''

I know Greig is hard to read and understand and there's various grammatical issues but i'm just repeating what he wrote.

But you get the gist: He's not going to be their friend anymore unless they play nice the way he likes it.

Far be it for me to throw around accusations about lying but Smith either is deliberately obscuring the truth or he doesn't know his L.A. history despite more than three decades in city government.

The facts are these: One of the first things that the Tom Bradley revolution did in 1973 was to formally take responsibility to get the crumbling sidewalks fixed across the city. And Bradley did that for a decade or so until federal money ran out and the economy softened and the city stopped making the repairs.

And there the issue has sat for more than 20 years except for a brief period when Richard Riordan was trying to fix city government to actually fulfill its mission of serving the people.

Can you imagine how a city government can even pretend to be a government when it can't even decide who has to fix the sidewalks. 

Is it any wonder that they can't fix the public transportation system, or get rid of gangs, or attract companies with good-paying jobs, or create healthy neighborhoods?

When the secession movement in the Valley was in full sway, the Daily News did stories with photographs showing how the streets and sidewalks in L.A were broken and crumbled and how across the street in Burbank, San Fernando and other cities they were in good repair.

Cops talk about the broken window theory of crime, how broken windows are a symbol of the breakdown in law and order. Well, broken sidewalks belong in the same category, a symbol of the failure of government to do its fundamental job of making life better for the people. 

"The easiest thing would be to have the unions work with us to reduce salary increases." 

That's what Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told the Daily News Tuesday in trying to explain why he wanted to take $90 million out of our pockets and reduce various services to us.

Unfortunately, the mayor didn't do "the easiest thing" -- in fact it's the only thing -- which is to confront the problem that the city pays its workers too much and gives them benefits that are too costly.

L.A. has arguably the nation's costliest municipal workforce and the most coddled with civil service rules that make it almost impossible to fire people or even lay them off. The result is mediocrity, and lackluster performance is rewarded while creativity and energy are punished.

This isn't an anti-union screed. I've been a union leader. I believe unions are vital to balance out the power of corporations and create healthy work environments. This is about how L.A.''s public employee unions -- with help from big money special interests like developers, contractors and lobbyists -- own our elected officials.

Instead of confronting the real problem, the mayor took the same old route that City Hall has taken for too long when there's financial problems: Screw the public! Raise taxes! Cut services!

Antonio knows better, he knows what has to be done. He knows that he and the City Council just approved whopping pay raises to city employees in the face of a weakening economy. And he knows that the people aren't organized enough to give him the political room needed to confront the problem without gambling with his own ambitions.

That's our fault. But it's his and the rest of the city's leadership that they don't have the courage to stand up for what's right, to privatize functions that can be done cheaper and better outside of government, to bring the unions and other special interests in line.

For example, private companies could fix the broken streets and sidewalks faster and cheaper than the city does, and actually reduce the 75-year backlog that leaves taxpayer liable for millions of dollars in lawsuits every year. Rather than breaking the social contract and charging the public the full cost of home garbage collection as a subterfuge for paying for more cops, the city could let residents contract with the many private firms at lower cost, even organizing whole neighborhoods to bargain for discounts.

We need City Hall to focus on reducing crime, getting rid of the gang menace, improving the public transportation system using jitneys, bus lanes and other low-cost measures.

I've told Antonio more than once that many voters liked the idea of a punk from East L.A. who wanted to be somebody in the mayor's office because they believed he'd stand up for the people. But as much as I like Antonio personally and believe that he would respond if there was a groundswell of public support for radical changes to make the city better, I'm sad to say what we've got for the most part is Jimmy Hahn with a smile and a charming personality.

The community is waking up over new development rules that will destroy their neighborhoods and disenfranchise them, to the failure to come down hard on gangsters and criminal illegal immigrants, over the worsening congestion on streets and freeways, over political rhetoric without an action line.

I still hold out hope that Antonio will seize this moment of crisis and be the one who finds the guts to do the right thing for the city and its people. But the clock is ticking and things are going from bad to worse. 

Besieged by nearly 1,000 complaints from the public, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has backed away from buck-a-book plan proposed by the Board of Library Commissioners.

The proposal -- subject of an item here last week -- would have required borrowers to pay $1 for every book moved to their local library for pickup from another library. That was the keystone to the whole effort to rebuild L.A. public library system around small, neighborhood facilities.

The mayor, according to David Zahniser at the Lost Angeles Times, reportedly distanced himself from the idiotic proposal and the Library Commission is ready to pretend the whole thing never happened.

Take heart Angelenos, the system will run for cover at the slightest indication that the community is aroused. So get aroused and stop taking crap from City Hall. It's your town, your taxes, organize and empower yourselves and see what a difference it makes.

A teacher's comment worth reading:

I was listening to a radio show while flipping channels and the DJ asked people to call in and tell what they did for a living and how much they made.

A guy who drives a street cleaning truck for LA called in, gleeful, and said he makes $65,000 a year as a street sweeper.

I immediately thought to myself, "I could do that for a living. I could run a street sweeper."

Ah, but I am only a lowly teacher/real estate agent/single mom of 3/and amateur writer. None of my four jobs has ever paid me that much in my life.

Can someone PLEASE tell me why the guys who scrub our streets are thought to be more valuable human beings (if value is based on salary) than people like me who teach and watch over our kids?

It's easy to blame the unions, and believe me, I know many of them are poorly managed, but the problem truly lies in the deep and massive need for a paradigm shift in attitudes.

The street sweeper must admit that maybe, just maybe, he can survive on $65K for the next 2 or3 years and doesn't really need that raise.

The parents need to decide their kids' teachers are worth more than $45K a year and be willing to pay slightly higher taxes to care for their kids.

And the mayor needs to stop worrying about what rung on the ladder he wants to climb next and actually govern and run this city just as he promised he would do. Less smiling, more work.

Maybe he's just going to leave the mess for someone else to take care of? That's not what he said he was going to do, but people change their minds, don't they?

You're right about the attitudes among a lot of unionized employees. They are sometimes concerned only about themselves. They don't care about other workers coming in and they don't care about the big picture. However, I still believe in unions.

-- Spiffy

Walter Moore vs. Jim Newton

This email exchange between mayoral candidate Walter Moore and Los Angeles Times Editorial Page Editor Jim Newton may not be the fight of the century but it is amusing and a window into the mindsets of each.

That's a non-judgmental statement, I'm leaving it to you all to score the match as you see fit, in comments: 

Round One: Moore attacks

Sun 4/20/2008 9:18 PM

To: jim.newton@latimes.com

Why is the L.A. Times coverage of Jamiel's Law biased? In a word, 

"money."

Jamiel's Law would apply only to illegal aliens in gangs. However, 

the L.A. Times has confused its readers by publishing a raft of 

articles about the supposed disadvantages of ending "sanctuary 

city" protection for all illegal aliens (e.g., day laborers), 

rather than focusing on those in gangs.

Want to know why? The company that owns the L.A. Times also owns a 

Spanish-language newspaper called "Hoy." Sales at Hoy would plummet 

if L.A.'s "sanctuary city" status ended.

During the past four years, the L.A. Times has lost 20% of its 

daily circulation. Hoy, by contrast, is bullish about the growth of 

"Spanish Speaking Hispanics" in Los Angeles: the publisher expects 

a 42% increase by the year 2525, for a total of 7.3 million.

"Hoy publications," the company recently reported, "have a gross 

weekly distribution of more than 1,375,000 copies nationwide."

So when you wonder why the L.A. Times hires reporters and editors 

who never seem to "get it," just remember: the newspaper is a 

business. Unfortunately, it's a business that puts its own profits 

ahead of the lives of the people of L.A.

The publishers are not going to entrust their English-language 

subsidiary to managers who might cut sales at their Spanish-

language subsidiary. Instead, the publishers hire reporters and 

editors willing to adhere to the "party line," namely, "there are 

no illegal people."

The L.A. Times should, at a minimum, disclose its conflict of 

interest. After all, whenever ABC news reports on the Disney 

company, the newscasters always disclose that Disney is ABC's 

parent company. Shouldn't the Times disclose, when it reports on 

illegal immigration, that it is owned by the same company that owns 

a Spanish-language newspaper?

ROUND TWO: Newton brushes off the punches, hits back

Apr 21, 2008, at 6:14 AM

Dear Walter,

This is absurd, and I think you know it.

Jim Newton

Editor of the Editorial Pages

Los Angeles Times

ROUND THREE: Moore counterpunches

Mon Apr 21 07:09:05 2008

Your "coverage" of this issue is absurd.

You go out of your way to attack straw men, distort the facts, 

mislead the public about the provisions of Jamiel's Law.

You're not running a newspaper; you're running a propaganda machine.

ROUND FOUR:  Newton goes for the jugular

Apr 21, 2008, at 7:18 AM:

First, I run our opinion coverage, not our news coverage. And we can have whatever opinion we want on this. If you're concerned with our news coverage, take it up with those editors.

Second, however: whatever you think of the coverage, to blame it on Tribune's ownership of Hoy is ridiculous. I don't give a damn about the effect of this issue on Hoy. I have no idea whether they've taken a position. I don't even know who runs Hoy or how it's doing -- any more than I do about Newsday or the Baltimore Sun.

Criticize all you want. But this argument is just nuts.

ROUND FIVE: Moore moves in for the kill

April 21, 2008 7:30:05 AM

Why do you think YOU have the job?

Why do you think the Tribune hired and keeps you instead of someone able to acknowledge that importing gang members from abroad might not be the greatest idea in the world?

And why don't you let readers decide whether it's "nuts" by disclosing your conflict of interest?  ABC discloses its financial relationship when it reports on Disney.  You should likewise disclose your paper's stake in illegal immigration. Your paper has a vested financial interest in maximizing the number of Spanish-speaking people in America.

Your editorials, moreover, ARE slanted.  The argument that Jamiel's Law wouldn't have saved Jamiel Shaw, II is -- to use your word -- absurd.  You claim that because Espinoza's most recent arrest was by Culver City, the policy would not have saved his life.  How about the preceding five years?  He was a known gang member.  What if he had been deported for violating our immigration laws five years earlier?

You're not a journalist.  You're part of big business's propaganda program to boost profits.  Maybe you don't realize it.  I don't really care if you do or not. But for you to claim that the Tribune's multi-million dollar conflict of interest isn't relevant, well, good luck with that one!

So I'm out of work and my nest egg for retirement is cracking with my home worth 25 percent less than a year ago, my Social Security check doesn't go very far and I'm being hit with a lot of extra bills as I try to start a new life.

And now I find out the city, county and state want a lot more money from me.

Don't cry for me L.A. I've lived modestly within my means and i've got a little put away to tide me through these rainy days.

But that's not true for a lot of people and it's certainly not what the city, county or state did during the recent years of soaring revenue. They spent their money -- I mean our money -- even faster than it came in. The result is they are facing huge deficits, mostly caused by giveaways to contractors, developers and public employees.

I got nothing against those classes of people personally. They've just been acting out of the force of a habit that developed during decades in which their inordinate power allowed them to feast on the public treasury without regard to the public interest.

No, the problem isn't them. It's the politicians who have gotten away with violating their oaths of office, their vows to serve the public for too long, who squandered all our money and worst of all, didn't solve any of our problems.

And now as thousands of people are losing their jobs and gas is nearing $4 a gallon, the politicians are telling us their only answer is for us, the taxpayers, to pay more and get less in public services.

The mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, has put it most nakedly: For every dollar he raises in new revenue from taxpayers, he wants to cut $1.50 in services to the public.

It's a really quite ingenious scheme. He only needs to raises taxes, fees and rates high enough to generate $200 million and then he can justify $300 million in service cuts to cover the $500 million deficit created under his leadership.

That way he can afford to deliver on the pay raises of 5 to 7 percent a year recently given to city employees in the face of a collapsing economy, avoid cleaning up the city's sloppy contracting practices and  keep on subsidizing massive development projects by Arab oil sheiks and American billionaires -- projects the public doesn't want like Grandiose Avenue.

 And still have enough change left over to to hire a few hundred more cops and keep his campaign pledge to add 1,000 cops to the LAPD's ranks -- something that is an absolute necessity for him to get re-elected next year since he hasn't done much else to distinguish his administration from the lackluster Hahn administration that preceded him.

Higher water rates, higher power rates, higher garbage fees already are in place and today Mayor Villaraigosa will announce new ways to gouge the public when he releases his budget plan for the next fiscal year.

Don't expect what's announced to be clear and transparent. It will take weeks if not months for the press and concerned citizens to actually wade through the morass of obscuring rhetoric and vaguely worded footnotes to actually see the true impact.

The only certainty is that the rich and the poor will be least affected while hard-working people struggling to keep their middle class status or reach the middle class will take the brunt of this assault.

So wake up alll you little people out there. You can either throw up your hands and take it in the chops again or get mad as hell an do something about it.

What is to be done?

You could call, write or email your City Council member or the mayor. But how much good has that ever done.

 If you really want to make a difference, here's a few suggestions:

1. Talk to your friends and neighbors about how mad you are about what's going on and get them fired up.

2. Get involved with them in your neighborhood councils and other community and civic groups in your area and work hard to reach out to everyone you can to join together to take action.

3. Put aside irrelevant ideological differences that don't mean a thing in local politics and band together with other community groups to form a broad coalition to demand City Hall pay attention to what's important to you.

I guarantee that if enough people start participating in our civic life, the insider culture of City Hall will collapse into rubble as if hit by an earthquake. Nothing but greed holds the self-servng political culture of Los Angeles together.

People power will bring it down faster than the Berlin Wall.

In the meantime, sound off about how you feel in the comments box at the top of this item. The time is right. People care about what's going on. It's time to stop grumbling and do something about it.

Inside was a beautiful four-color picture Lloyd took himself at the Sea of Galilee in 2006, according to the caption. And facing it, the lovely sentiment: "Peace and best wishes to you and yours on Passover"...Below that it said: Assembly Lloyd Levine/Candidate for State Senate. The cover states in the postmark Lloyd Levine for Senate and at the bottom is the proper identifier: Paid for by Friends of Lloyd Levine ID #1278106.

I guess Lloyd, as I had suspected previously, is Jewish. And I guess he or his friends have possession of a mailing list that presumes I too am Jewish.

So my question is what does being Jewish have to do with whether I vote in the Democratic primary for the 23rd Senate District for Levine or for his opponent, Assemblywoman Fran Pavley.

I don't know whether Pavley is Jewish or not (I think not) or whether either candidate will be participating in seders tonight when the holiday begins. I honestly don't care but I do have strong feelings about race, gender, religion politics. They offend me.

What I care about is the character and integrity of the candidate and whether they are open and honest about what they believe in and are willing to bend their beliefs in the face of political realities to support policies that make life better for society as a whole.

I haven't decided yet which candidate I'll vote for. Both are very liberal and very much party-line voters in the Assembly. Neither boasts of being endorsed by any Jewish organizations, although Pavley seems to have more personal endorsements of Jewish politicians, if people's religion can be identified by their names, the same presumption that has me on Levine's Jewish mailing list.

Instead of wishing me Happy Passover, I wish Lloyd would have sent me a mailer saying he would stop voting for higher taxes and more spending, that he would support legislation to create competitive districts that brought more moderates of both parties into office and that he would put the common good ahead of ideology, partisanship and personal advancement.

I must be dreaming. Perhaps it's the good feeling that comes with these holy days celebrating the Jewish struggle for freedom that has me hoping for politicians who work first and foremost to create healthy economic climates for hard-working people, good schools that serve the children, safer streets,  better public transportation systems and all the other basic needs of a modern community.

In any case, Happy Passover to you too, Lloyd, and to everyone who celebrates this holiday.

How dumb does City Hall think all us little people are? And why do they want to keep us dumb?

Those questions are rumbling through my mind today over City Hall's latest scheme to pick the pockets of taxpayers: Charging to use the public libraries.

Could anything be more un-American?

Half a century before the country was founded Benjamin Franklin came up with the radical idea of a free public library with the rich putting in some money to buy books and putting them in a public place where anyone could check them out, take them home and read them.

Franklin was quoted as saying "these Libraries have improved the general Conversation of Americans, made the common Tradesman and Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries, and perhaps have contributed in some Degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defence of their Privileges."

In other words, free access to books let everyone become educated and capable of looking after themselves, even if it meant revolting against the inequitous taxes imposed by a tyrannical ruler.

Clearly, an educated populace is against the interests of those who run this city or they would not have let the LAUSD become the Los Angeles Uneducating School District.

So they have come up with a novel scheme, the same one now being applied to garbage collection and other services to the public: Tax people to provide these public services and then start charging them for these same services. In effect, it's double taxation and undoubtedly goes hand in hand with reducing the services the public has paid twice for.

The specific proposal that comes from the mayor's appointees to the Library Commission is that library users pay a $25 annual fee for their library, initially applying only to non-residents but we all know how that works. It will soon be expanded to residents, the children, the elderly, the poor, everyone.

What's most outrageous is the plan to charge $1 a book when a library user orders a book out of the catalogue and has it brought from another facility to their local branch.

That service is actually one of the few innovations in decades that is actually successful and useful to the public and more importantly was the cornerstone of the whole plan 20 years to squeeze nearly $400 million out of the public's pockets to rebuild every library in the city.

The idea was to build small neighborhood libraries, stock them with only small collections and let people choose from a vast catalogue and have the books delivered to their local branch in a timely manner.

Ingenious, every library didn't need to buy a copy of every new popular book because they could be moved around quickly. Older books could find more borrowers because people would not have to chase around town to get their hands on the books. The book would come to them.

The scheme worked so well the city started spending less and less on new books, only $3 for every person last year and now wants to cut that to $2 a head.

No one should be surprised that City Hall is gearing up to betray its commitment when it went after the two library bond issues, betray the whole idea that free access to books is an integral part of a free society, betray the public trust yet again.

City Hall is broke. Revenue has been soaring for years and the city has spent all that money and a lot more on inflating already inflated employee salaries and benefits, subsidized developments to benefit billionaires and Arab oil sheiks and connived with contractors to loot the public treasury.

So let me offer answers to the questions I raised at the outset:

They know we are dumb because we let them stay in office instead of putting them in jail or at least throwing them out on the streets where they can cadge with the rest of the bums.

 And they want to keep us dumb so they can keep on living high without actually doing anything to make life better for the people who pay the bills, actually pay the bills twice.

Link: http://origin.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_8965415 

So I'm going on two weeks now out of the newspaper business after 44 years in it, from copy boy to editor and I'm so busy I'm not keeping up with my reading, papers stacked under my desk.

Which led to this thought: A day without a newspaper. What if journalists across the nation, writers and editors just picked a day and didn't show up for work and papers couldn't publish because no one was there to produce them and TV and radio had to actually report stories on their own.

Would anybody notice?

Would anybody care?

I don't know but the last time technology -- television broke the business model for newspapers in the '50s, half the papers in the country went out of business and the survivors got fabulously rich and journalists' salaries soared and they started toeing the line of the corporate controllers without a peep.

The situation today is even more dire. Not only can newspaper people no longer walk across the street to another paper but they have nowhere to turn to practice their craft as papers teeter on the brink and layoffs accelerate.

Are journalists capable of making a stand? I doubt it. But I raised the question in an interview with Barbara Osborn and Howard Blume for their Deadline L.A. show that airs Saturday at noon.

In my mind, it's time for people to make a stand for what they believe in, to act like the free people Americans are supposed to be. I've had several opportunities in recent days to talk to and listen to people involved in a lot of different activities, civic groups of various sorts, activists of one sort or another.

Thursday afternoon, I spoke to the Valley chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a group of wonderful women who trace their ancestry back to 1776, who seemed totally responsive and interested in my rant which I guess is no more than this: Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country, or at least the city of Los Angeles.

Love of America, love of freedom was all I heard when I sat in Wednesday on a luncheon meeting of the Canoga Park-West Hills Women's Republican Club where I was invited by a longtime Daily News reader and email correspondent, Teddy Howell, who has as open a mind and as great a commitment to solving real problems as anyone I've met in a long time.

It was much the same at the Warner Center Kiwanis Club where people of good humor and deep commitment to volunteerism and good works for others find common ground with each other.

Is love of America, love of freedom wrong in some way? Are those ideas obsolete? I think not, I think the liberal mind hears something that's loaded and politically repulsive when conservatives speak that way, obscuring the fact that it's unthinkable not to love the soul of this country or hold freedom for all precious.

And that's my point. We need to stop talking Democrat language and Republican language. We need to stop speaking conservative and liberal language. We need to give each other the benefit of the doubt a little and start speaking the common language that brings us together to work for making things better for ourselves and others.

I don't know how anybody can look at a world torn apart by hatred, at the looming environmental catastrophe, and the breakdown of the health care system and all the other tensions of the world and not think it's time, if it's not already too late, to start fixing what we have broken.

Long ago I figured out that I can't do much of anything about all those global issues but I can do something about what's broken in my community. And so can we all. If we the people of Los Angeles can't start fixing what's broken here, if we can't find a way to respect our differences in all our diversity of race, creed and religion, who can?

Free at last!

That's how I feel about starting a new chapter of my life and leaving the Los Angeles Daily News behind after the happiest 23 years in my life personally and professionally.

My last day on the job as editor of the Daily News was April 4 and every day since has been amazing, filled with a lot of love and support from friends, colleagues, acquaintances and even people I didn't know.

The newspaper business has been tough for a long while and getting worse day by day so the stress level has been high and I can't put into words just how good it feels to be free of it, to be free to participate in civic life just as me without a formal role, to speak publicly purely in my own voice and work directly for the things I believe in.

My only regret is the colleagues I've left behind at the Daily News, journalists most especially, since we had a great newsroom and had become a real newspaper with people finding their own voice, having fun telling stories and working hard to reinvent newspapering.

But there are also hundreds of other great people who make up the Daily News I loved so dearly, from telephone sales to the printing plant, from advertising, circulation and all the other business offices -- dedicated people who gave the paper character and identity. I wish them all the best as they struggle to find the keys to keeping alive a nearly 100-year-old tradition of community service to the San Fernando Valley.

I want to talk more about that later, the paper, the Valley, the city, the things I believe in, and the vision that drives me to fight for a better, a greater Los Angeles. I want to write from my heart and I want others to post their stories at ronkayela.com, 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.