Twenty years ago, I produced a story at the Daily News headlined "City of Lmits" that spelled out how a century of growth at any price must come to an end -- the nation's dirtiest air, worst traffic congestion, sprawl over five counties, soaring poverty, loss of good-paying jobs, gang-infested neighborhoods -- imperiled the Southern California dream.
I still think that story by reporter Karen West was the truest and most important story I was ever involved in.
Not much has changed in the last two decades. In fact, the problems have gotten worse. And the city, county and state have done little or nothing to develop strategies to deal with these issues.
Growth at any price is still at the heart of public policy despite the lip service occasionally paid to the environmental and quality of life issues.
And to me that's a crime. It's why I so passionately believe that only a grassroots movement, a people's revolution, can turn things around. It's why I'm hoping we'll get a large crowd to City Hall on July 14 to launch a concerned citizens coalition that can snowball into a region-wide movement that will seize control of the political system and turn things around.
I know a lot of people believe that's a pipedream. So be it. A lot of people also believe it's the only strategy that will create a balance of interests and power between labor, business and the communities.
At the heart of the problem is the belief that we always have to have more and newer instead of enough and better.
I still think that story by reporter Karen West was the truest and most important story I was ever involved in.
Not much has changed in the last two decades. In fact, the problems have gotten worse. And the city, county and state have done little or nothing to develop strategies to deal with these issues.
Growth at any price is still at the heart of public policy despite the lip service occasionally paid to the environmental and quality of life issues.
And to me that's a crime. It's why I so passionately believe that only a grassroots movement, a people's revolution, can turn things around. It's why I'm hoping we'll get a large crowd to City Hall on July 14 to launch a concerned citizens coalition that can snowball into a region-wide movement that will seize control of the political system and turn things around.
I know a lot of people believe that's a pipedream. So be it. A lot of people also believe it's the only strategy that will create a balance of interests and power between labor, business and the communities.
At the heart of the problem is the belief that we always have to have more and newer instead of enough and better.
More is the central idea that has driven the American labor movement
since Samuel Gompers. It's the central idea that has made America a
consumer society. It's the basis of our whole economy, our vision of
the ideal life.
Enough already. Everybody doesn't need a 60-inch plasma screen on the wall of their 4,000 square foot house. Everybody doesn't need an SUV. Few people really need blackberries, IPhones or jawbones. Nobody needs blu-ray DVDs.
I don't know how to break this to you but we can't all be millionaires. But we all could be happier. We are over-regulated and under-served. The planet is suffocating in our exhaust fumes. Like primitive savages, we are in perpetual war over water and basic resources.
Denmark, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Iceland and Ireland are the happiest countries on the face of the earth, America is 16th, just ahead of Guatemala and Mexico. Money does not make you happy.
Peace, love, friendship, work that's fulfilling, safety -- those are the things that make you happy. Everyone knows that in their heart, of course. We are clinging desperately to a runaway culture and it's incessant beep-beep-beep of electronic messages and demands.
We don't give ourselves time to think and reflect, to put our lives in perspective.
OK, I'm a senior citizen now and live modestly but well now but I've been down to my last dollar several times in my adult life and I've spent a lot of time talking with bums in the park, men and women broken by a society that demands too much of all of us all the time. I've backpacked around the world and seen there is no other aspiration of the poor than to be middle class, safe in their homes, certain there will be food on the table tomorrow and hopeful that their children will have more opportunity than they had.
It's why I believe my parents and their generation were truly the greatest generation. They took us from poverty and ghettos to the middle class and gave us the chance to become better educated and freer.
It's why I believe my own generation is the worst. We have indulged ourselves in materialism and narcissism. We have achieved nothing beyond learning to take our pants off.
It's time we grew up. It's time we started fixing what we have broken. It's time we change our minds about who we are and what's important and get to work at making our neighborhoods, our city and the world beyond a better place for ourselves and others.
I don't pretend to know the solutions and I'm wrong about a whole lot of things but I do know that nothing good happens unless you take the first step in the right direction.
Enough already. Everybody doesn't need a 60-inch plasma screen on the wall of their 4,000 square foot house. Everybody doesn't need an SUV. Few people really need blackberries, IPhones or jawbones. Nobody needs blu-ray DVDs.
I don't know how to break this to you but we can't all be millionaires. But we all could be happier. We are over-regulated and under-served. The planet is suffocating in our exhaust fumes. Like primitive savages, we are in perpetual war over water and basic resources.
Denmark, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Iceland and Ireland are the happiest countries on the face of the earth, America is 16th, just ahead of Guatemala and Mexico. Money does not make you happy.
Peace, love, friendship, work that's fulfilling, safety -- those are the things that make you happy. Everyone knows that in their heart, of course. We are clinging desperately to a runaway culture and it's incessant beep-beep-beep of electronic messages and demands.
We don't give ourselves time to think and reflect, to put our lives in perspective.
OK, I'm a senior citizen now and live modestly but well now but I've been down to my last dollar several times in my adult life and I've spent a lot of time talking with bums in the park, men and women broken by a society that demands too much of all of us all the time. I've backpacked around the world and seen there is no other aspiration of the poor than to be middle class, safe in their homes, certain there will be food on the table tomorrow and hopeful that their children will have more opportunity than they had.
It's why I believe my parents and their generation were truly the greatest generation. They took us from poverty and ghettos to the middle class and gave us the chance to become better educated and freer.
It's why I believe my own generation is the worst. We have indulged ourselves in materialism and narcissism. We have achieved nothing beyond learning to take our pants off.
It's time we grew up. It's time we started fixing what we have broken. It's time we change our minds about who we are and what's important and get to work at making our neighborhoods, our city and the world beyond a better place for ourselves and others.
I don't pretend to know the solutions and I'm wrong about a whole lot of things but I do know that nothing good happens unless you take the first step in the right direction.
Ron Kaye is the former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News where he spent 23 years helping to make the newspaper the voice of the San Fernando Valley and fighting for a city government that serves the people and not special interests.
Twice in recent years, Los Angeles Magazine listed Kaye among the city’s most influential people, specifically in the area of politics. Kaye has been variously described in the media as the “accidental anarchist,” “the Patrick Henry of the San Fernando Valley” and a “passionate populist.” He is now committed to
carrying on his crusade for a greater Los Angeles as an ordinary citizen. Previously, Ron worked at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
Associated Press, Cleveland Plain Dealer and The Australian as well as papers
in Fairbanks, Alaska and Yakima, Wash. He also wrote for Newsweek magazine, The Guardian in London and the Naitonal Enquirer.
OK, I accept the premise that this is a city (state, nation, planet) of limits. You can only put so many cars on the highway, trash in the landfill, hydrocarbons in the air, spigots on the reservoir etc... Eventually you're going to reach capacity, and if we're not there yet we're awfully close (as anyone who drives in this traffic-choked town can tell you).
I also accept your premise that we're long overdue for leadership in finding real solutions to these problems. We can't just keep jamming more and more people into this finite region without things starting to break. Your old Army buddies will tell you that's what they used to call a blivet: 10 pounds of crap in a 5-pound bag. A real mess.
So I'm with you... we need leadership, at both the grassroots and elected level (are you listening Mayor Villaraigosa? When will we see your comprehensive transportation plan?)to address these problems.
Where you lose me is in the class war rhetoric. What, no TVs in the Kaye house? No cell phones? No computers? No cars in the driveway? No kidney-shaped pool in the backyard? No sprinklers on the lawn? You're an ascetic sleeping on a bare floor somewhere, renouncing all material things?
I'm reminded of the old joke:
Man: "Madam, would you sleep with me for $100 million?"
Woman: "Sir, you don't have $100 million -- but if you did then I would indeed."
Man: "Well, then, would you sleep with me for $100?"
Woman: "What do you think I am, a whore?"
Man: "Madam, we've already established what you are. Now we're just haggling over price."
I understand how much you love wearing the populist suit of clothes. But impying that a 60-inch TV is corrupt while a 32-inch TV is good, or that a Blu-Ray player is a sign of corruption but low-definition DVD or VHS are good, is like arguing that a woman who sells sex for $100 is a whore while the one who does so for $100 million is a businesswoman.
C'mon. We're in this together. I'll give up my TV (an energy efficient 50-inch, by the way) when you give up yours. I'll turn off my air conditioner this summer if you'll turn off yours. I'll stop watering my lawn if you'll stop watering yours. I'll recycle more and trash less, if you'll do the same. I'll park my car and get on the bus when you park yours. And through it all I'll keep paying my property taxes, even if (i) they're higher than yours based on the size of my house and the year I bought it, but (ii) I don't get a dime more in services than you do.
(Fair share, anyone? Maybe for fun sometime we should debate the effect of Proposition 13 on municipal services over the past three decades, and the fair-share imbalance it created among individual taxpayers. Is it fair that my property taxes are 10 times higher than my next door neighbor in the identical house, simply because I bought my home last year and he bought his in 1978? We put out the same amount of trash every Friday. Given the property tax imbalance, which of us is the greater burden on the system in our city of limits?
(Truth is, Proposition 13 is one of the reasons our neighborhoods are crumbling. I understand that it was a revolt against inept pliticians who were tax-and-spending middle class howmeoners into the poorhouse. I understand the power of letting homeowners keep that money to do what they see fit.
(But what most have done with that excess capital is to plow it into consumer goods -- TVs, cars, cellphones and, yes, Blu-Ray players. Meanwhile, our streets crumble, our landfills overflow and our infrastructure decays.
(I'm not saying we should jack up porpoerty taxes and turn the money over to inept and corrupt politicians to squander. I'm just saying we need real vision and a real plan, not sloganeering and phony race or class wars.
(We need leadership to rise from the masses, one or more people truly have the public's interest at heart and had a real plan for building a greater Los Angeles...)
I agree with some of this poster's points, especially the way Ron and some of his supporters (unintentionally, I hope) engage in a class war, as defined by anyone who's ever made in the six figures, actually needs a cell phone or Blueberry for business or personal reasons, and has a plasma tv or kids who demand the latest tech toys. (Partly it's an age thing, unless you're a bike-riding vegan.) That pretty much includes as a class enemy anyone south of Mulholland and west of Laurel Canyon or in the hills, not withstanding that these people as a group pay the most in taxes and get the least back in services. Even the subway "to the sea" and ExpoII are depicted as some sort of Vals subsidizing the westside/rich scheme, when in fact, those of us who live in the BHPO canyons suffer such traffic congestion from the Valley, that "rush hour" lasts several hours morning and afternoon, when it takes a half-hour to crawl up to our own driveways. And we could go on with how WE'RE suffering from the Valley's conviction that they all are entitled to cheap homes with lots of land and big cars that clog the westside and job magnets, while whining about "the city."
BUT you lose me when you get to blaming Prop 13. As you admit, even if we paid more in taxes, our current crop of pols locally and statewise would have blown it anyway -- we've had plenty of money coming in from RE sales in recent years, which could have gone to streets, sidewalks, DWP power lines and other infrastructure, but priorities were to the "entitlement people," including the illegals immigrants and their kids who comprise 3/4 of our schools, county healthcare system patients and live births, deployment of police and gang and youth programs, etc. Nothing is ever enough from us, and yet nothing would benefit those of us on the doubly-maligned westside, however much we paid in taxes.
So we're targeted by both the self-described middle class "common man" and by the left and ethno-centric politicians as greedy "rich people" who deserve to be treated as cash cows and be even more marginalized. (Maybe that's what's bugging you too, 3:07: we're subsidizing both our older neighbors AND "the poor" while getting bashed for not doing enough by both groups -- when if we were in Palos Verdes, San Marino or Beverly Hills, for the same money we'd have great schools, cops, streets, sidewalks and no class envy from those we subsidize. If ANYONE would benefit from secession, it's us: the hills west of La Brea and north of West Hollywood, and all of WLA the other side of Beverly Hills. We'd be instantly maybe the wealthiest city in Calif. BUT because of liberal tendencies, this group doesn't gripe nearly as much as the Valley.
(Incidentally, some of those on the westside who bought before the 80's boom and pay the least, are among those who see their highly taxed neighbors as a class enemy -- while collectively, they pay far less in taxes. These are typically the same people who fight all new development which is needed to bring in tax revenue most vehemently, whether it's Century City or the Beverly Hills redevelopment of Robinsons/May.
The Beverly Hills Courier did an interesting study recently, comparing the combined tax payments of the HOA most actively opposed to that project, and which is suing the city -- an HOA north of Sunset on prime real estate, with payments of those who bought recently. The two dozen or so homeowners in that association collectively paid some $40,000, about what ONE current $4 million sale netted the city of Beverly Hills. We'd see a similar statistic among the westside HOA's who've battled everything most consistently, who are currently suing over Pico-Olympic, and who post here their jurassic views opposing subway and light rail.
Before you target "the rich" as your enemy, Ron, consider where the bulk of tax revenues which prop up this city are coming from. Just who is this war of yours directed against, exactly?