Imagine the scenes at the Pacific Dining Car and in the back rooms of City Hall in the next few days as the nation’s highest paid municipal officials and their armies of staffers, each with their taxpayer-supplied Priuses, back slap and praise each other for all their hard work above and beyond the
Job well done.
High fives all around. They have been in combat these last few weeks. They have seen the enemy and it is us, the taxpayers, the businesses, the people. And they have survived through daily sessions, and the pitfalls of posturing and hypocrisy as if they had braved incoming shells and snipers and improvised explosive devices.
No, it hasn’t been easy but they have gotten through and have lived to destroy again another day.
You can understand their need to fly off to the nation’s capital to wine and dine with the men and women at the pinnacle of the political machinery of public deceit, or to spend a few days on the beaches of Maui far from the maddening crowd of ordinary folks begging for crumbs from their table of power.
Such is the burdens of self-importance in an age of transformation when the rules no longer apply, when the center of inertia no longer holds, when the abnormal has become the norm.
These are the people we have anointed to lead us through these times of troubles and they are delighted to have danced and preened, to have shown their heartfelt concerns, to have made it through pretending to have faced the demon of their massive deficits without having done anything at all.
And they are still in place in their high stations to enjoy the privileges and perks they have come to expect as a birthright for their virtue and goodness.
Oh, what a happy day it is, what a well deserved vacation they have coming next week for their public service.
They have confused and fragmented the populace and shown their superiority and put the grumbling rabble in their place, worried about themselves and their parks and libraries and their petty concerns as they try to preserve the quality of their little lives.
It was brilliant and worth all the sweat of donning their fancy clothes every day though they will have to call in chits from their wealthy friends to cover the inflated dry cleaning bills they have from having to show up at work every day.
Of course, they never all show up at the same time.
That’s one of the wonders of the Council. They arrange their schedules so that they have just enough members — a dirty dozen — to enact everything they and their puppet masters want on unanimous votes on first reading.
By so doing, they reduce the time for the public to figure out what they
are up to and limit the opportunity for public input. And since they
can put their votes on automatic dial for “aye,” they don’t even have to
be in the Council Chamber or even in City Hall for that matter.
It
should be obvious why 99 percent of the public comments come from the
regular gadfly crowd. They really don’t want to waste their time and
don’t care what the public has to say. They do not listen, they do not
hear.
The more I watch what passes for this deliberative body
called the City Council, the more I think maybe we don’t need them at
all.
Right off the top we’d save $25 million or so in salaries
and perks. Then, we’d save tens of millions more that they squander from
their slush funds and hundreds of millions even beyond that from
eliminating all the money that goes into political pandering to keep
them in high office.
Without a Council to muck things up, the
lobbyists, developers, contractors, consultants and union leaders could
come out of the back rooms and gather around the horseshoe and take care
of city business in public and on camera.
We’d at least know
what was really going on that way, and how so much of what city
government does is for the good of the few and harms the interests of
the many.
And as for the office of mayor with its 200 staffers,
We could live better without all of them. It’s little more than a
ceremonial office these days so why not have a mayor for a day, a person
chosen from some kind of reality show by public vote.
The
audience would be huge and the advertising revenues would clean up the
structural deficit. There could be contests for who could cadge the most
money in the area that was supposed to be the Grand Avenue Project or
who could run the fastest around a circuit of massive subsidized
developments or who could sell the most dope out of a street vendor’s
cart.
The possibilities are endless. Think about it, would we
really be any worse off?
You have just about summed it up. I think most of the readers here have seen all this developing for years and some of it is not new. Only the players have changed and they are playing more recklessly.
I think that they are so deeply self-absorbed that they now believe their own press releases, and that’s been Antonio’s script from the beginning when he had not yet tipped his hand in bringing us the worst kind of administration ever. And that style was something like the absentee landlord who is not seen to handle property maintenance but surely expects all of the rent and on time. Actually Tony was more like a slumlord, taking and not caring at all about what he’s responsible for, but ever ready for that next photo opp. The only thing missing is the set of strings that all the other marionettes come with.
Today’s bit of council meeting that I heard was the regular playing to the work force and trying for some maximization of everything for everygbody, but now they make a show of it, a little late to try to leverage the financial institutions from a weakened standing. At the moment Richard-there’s a squatter in my house-Alarcon is grilling a female speaker for what seems to me should be his responsibility. She’s holding her own and said she did not come here to ask the council for anything, just to give them the report.
He backed off after his bullying style was resisted. The council members just seem to be so ignorant going into the discussion here and for other issues when they should have done some homework first. Here, that should have begun when they lost pension board appointees. That was the “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” warning that they never acted upon (join the list) to see what they could do BEFORE NOW.
They sound like they are stuck on a procedural merry-go-round where they keep talking and talking but coming back to where they were when the trip’s over. They don’t want to cut people and that’s their own fault that it’s this way. They don’t want to scale down the pension plans as if no one would work for the city with less benefits. Garcetti and family, Alarcon and his demands, and the rest are late in coming and they will still be talking when they have that bankruptcy filing ready to go. Maybe that’s their strategy, but I think there is no strategy other than the regular CYA as they run out the clock, except that they won’t win anything at the sound of the buzzer.
If the County of L.A. has only 5 Supervisors, a CEO and geographically encompasses all of L.A. and is larger than L.A City why do we need 15 Council Members and a Mayor?
The problem with the City Council is SPENDING. Every other Council meeting agenda item is more spending – half a million here, a couple of hundred thousand there, another consultant, another block party, another calligrapher’s product being delivered to somebody who nobdy ever heard of, another gift to a political contributor, another $1-a-year rent agreement, another study, aother contract extension, SPEND, SPEND, SPEND…..
Lay them off – HELL, FIRE THEM for incompetency, dishonesty, lack of integrity, lack of fiduciary responsibility, just general ugliness, whatever, they’ve got to go!
Ask them to justify any of their actions and you’ll receive dead silence – why did they send $500,00 to a book fair in Mexico, why did they give DWP employees (who already make more than similar skill employees in any other City department) a raise, why does the Mayor need 100 employees in his direct staff, why anything – no answer – they just keep passing out our money.
What’s the status of the AEG-Michael Jackson police overtime review? Where’s the final report on why the sewers are exploding? Where is anything – not on the agenda, so there’s no accountability, and since we have no active press presence other than to collect and reprint official press releases, we the citizens will never know.
Just bend over fellow citizens, that way it won’t hurt as much when your pocket is picked again (as soon as the Council lets out another contract for more Vaseline!).
The truth is the mayor and the council are tired, old backward clunkers – as out of date as the SUV’s they parade around in. They are the 70′s Oldsmobiles in a world that has moved on. They are the senior still wearing his polyester leisure suit and a bad toupee, trying to pick young women. “Hey baby, don’t you think I’m sexy??”
The City of Los Angeles will form and change around them, because they are of little consequence, unless you are a property owner – then you’ve put yourself at their mercy. If you make yourself dependent on them in any way, you’re not being wise. If you’re following their every move, you will come to realize that they only prevent you from moving on in life by reacting to them and joing in their sily soap opera. It’s no mistake that Mayor V and Garcetti went on a soap opera. It’s an unconscious confession.
Soap operas are for little old ladies with nothing better to do.
Move on. Find something better to do.
If the County of L.A. has only 5 Supervisors, a CEO and geographically encompasses all of L.A. and is larger than L.A City why do we need 15 Council Members and a Mayor?
If the Federal government has only 1 president and geographically encompasses all 50 states, why do we need 50 governors?
The City works for all of the City Council and their friends, What’s wrong with all of you?
I can’t even believe that somebody asked the question below. We would not want to model ourselves after the County of LA.
If the County of L.A. has only 5 Supervisors, a CEO and geographically encompasses all of L.A. and is larger than L.A City why do we need 15 Council Members and a Mayor?