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For the past two years, I have been documenting from every direction that Los Angeles is "Crossing of the Rubicon," its point of no return at which we have become an old dying city divided between the rich and the poor with a diminishing middle class.

I use the phrase crossing the Rubicon advisedly because it refers to Caesar's 49 BC crossing of the river on his way to conquering Rome and ending its democratic traditions. The writer-philosopher Cicero, a senator who fled Rome for his life, spoke truth to power as few have ever done.

"Freedom," he said, "is the participation in power... a possession of inestimable value."

In endless articles on my blog, at my citizen journalism/community networking site OurLA.org, on radio and TV and at many community meetings, I have tried to convey the vision I developed of our city as a newspaperman for 30 years in Los Angeles.

It is a struggle for democracy against a narrow network of powerbrokers and special interests that served themselves even as they sharply raises taxes, rates and fees, chased away good jobs and let the streets, sidewalks, water and power systems deteriorate.  

Along the way, they resisted every effort at reform, only embracing the most modest progressive changes in the face of the most overwhelming evidence of police brutality against the poor and minorities and the threat of secession by the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood and San Pedro.

What we learned from that secession debate is that the City of Los Angeles is a corporation under the law. It owns everything: Streets, lights, every part of the DWP, all the parks, libraries and city buildings.

The city is no more owned by the residents and businesses, the taxpayers, than the customers of General Motors or any other corporation is owned by its customers who supply the money that feeds their executives, staffs and shareholders.

This isn't just Chinatown, Jake, it's becoming like China itself.

There's no other way to see what the leftist mayor is doing in finding a roundabout way to pull his quotes from the Reason Foundation and embrace free enterprise capitalism.

No other way to understand what he is doing with the city's golf courses by setting them up as a semi-independent entity with its own enterprise fund and the goal to become profitable as in making money and being run as a business for profit and the benefit of its customers and employees.

Isn't that how the commies in China found a way around their doctrinaire past to become a global economic giant? That way they didn't have to admit communism had failed.

Showing his own political flexibility, Antonio Villaraigosa is using the same strategy to avoid admitting LA's experiment in municipal socialism is a dismal failure.

He is ready to turn over valuable assets like the Convention Center and the Pershing Square parking structure to private companies, undoubtedly friends and contributors, right when they are starting to turn a profit.

This didn't just happen overnight.

The mayor made such a mess of the city's finances with expanded social welfare programs, massive hiring, subsidized developments and sweetheart union contracts that the city seeing is running in the red and can't pay its bills.

So what else can he do but sell off assets and fire workers?

As luck would have it, there is something else he can do and he took the bait Monday by agreeing to keep the "for sale" sign off the city's nine golf courses and instead turn them into a business enterprise, the kind the makes money instead of losing it by being burdened with wasteful, and in to a great extent, fictitious costs.

So when his henchman, Chief of Staff Jeff Carr, hauled Recreation and Parks General Manager Jon Kirk Mukri on the carpet Monday the conversation took an unexpected turn. Instead of eliminating huge chunks of his staff, Mukri cut a deal to spin off the nine golf courses into a separate "enterprise fund" rather than seek bids from private companies to run the golf program as the county does profitably despite significantly lower fees than the city.

"Organized labor and organized golf have been working together on this for a long while," Craig Kessler, executive director of the Public Links Golf Association.

"The budget crisis is an opportunity for a team effort to make the golf enterprise fund succeed. We need to recognize the need for consensus, push for transparency and see what is working and not working."

There is no guarantee that the mayor or the rest of City Hall actually intends to do anything beyond getting the 165 golf jobs out of the general fund and into a special fund so that a similar numbers of jobs in the Parks Department is saved.

Power sharing is a more threatening concept to City Hall than capitalism is to the commies these days.

But there is real opportunity, as with Neighborhoods Councils and other agencies that are being gutted, for citizen activists, workers and bureaucrats to work collaboratively together and make city government work better at lower costs.

Like the Chinese, the mayor finds the idea of sharing sacrifice and costs more palatable than sharing power. But that's the heart of the question that ought to inspire those committed to specific areas of city government to work harder and work together for real change.

For years, golf enthusiasts and union leaders have been pushing a plan to run the network of city golf courses into a profit-making business instead of the loser it has become because it's saddled with millions of dollars in costs that have nothing to do with the facilities.

The city's budget crisis has created the opportunity to finally implement their proposal and preserve some youth and other programs and avoid closure of many parks because of layoffs.

The challenge is to demonstrate that the golf courses can be run in a business-like manner by scaling their real costs to revenue, reinvesting profits into improvements and even generate income for other parks programs.

That will take real participation from the Golf Advisory Council that too often have been ignored in the past and cooperation from the unions that too often have been inflexible in the past.

"The wolf is at the door. The status quo is not sustainable," said Kessler. "The Parks Department is a little bit of a fortress and that has to change."

Whether the mayor and meddling City Council will stand in the way of change, of power sharing, remains to be seen but this is one case where community activists and labor unions are on the same side and have worked together for several years to make it happen.

While much of what the city does fails because of poor political leadership, bad management and work rules that encourage inefficiency, there are examples like the General Services printing shop as fully competitive with private companies on price and quality.

The golf program is not in that category.

The city's response to the recession-caused decline in the number of rounds played is to sharply raise green fees under the same doctrine of revenue neutrality the mayor has used in running the Department of Water and Power. The less we use of water or power in the name of conservation the higher the rates go. The higher the salaries go the higher the rates go.

Such policies go a long to way towards explaining why the golf courses are in worse condition, why the water and power systems are falling apart, why the streets and sidewalks are crumbling and just about everything provided by the city is getting worse, and the worst is yet to come.

Neighborhood Councils, environmentalists, the disabled and many other segments of the community have tried to step forward as full participants in running the city.

But like the unions who have been promised a full partnership, they mostly get lip service instead of respect.

It would be ironic if it was golfers who teed up the model for a new Los Angeles.

Every failing regime needs an apologist and a henchman and Antonio Villaraigosa has found his in Tim Rutten of the Times and his Chief of Staff Jeff Carr.

Rev. Carr may have learned too much from his days hanging around the city's vast hoodlum class as the mayor's gang czar.

To many in City Hall, he is a thug, the mayor's enforcer, the man who conveys the orders to keep your mouth shut and do what you're told or you're out. To commissioners and top bureaucrats, he is the obedient servant of a mayor who has lost touch with his roots, his values, his city.

Carr's excellent service in eliminating the worst violence of the gangs and loyalty to the mayor earned his promotion late last year, a position envied by others in the world of Antonio who thought themselves more deserving.

That his success was in no small part due to participating in the "Baghdad Solution" to LA's street violence, achieved by having former gangsters on the city payroll give free passes to hoodlums to do what they wanted as long as they reduced their number of Class 1 crimes that show up on LAPD statistic sheets.

Inside City Hall, what is going on is nothing like the live-and-live deal the hoodlums are getting. Carr listens sympathetically to the entreaties of others but he does not hear, Orders are orders.

Rutten is a different case.

He obeys without being ordered unless you believe his bosses had to tell him explicitly that the company line is the city is in good hands and all will be well be as soon as the economy returns to normal.

Clearly not paying attention to what is going on himself, he turns to Carr of all people for understanding how the city can get of the difficult financial situation created by poor leadership and awful management.

What he learns is this: "The problem, Carr says, is that the mayor's call for shared sacrifice so far has been met with silence or rejection. But labor's refusal to engage could have profound consequences on its members and the city."

And labor's refusal to accept pay cuts of 10 or 15 percent is "a tragedy that organized labor one day may come to regret.:

None of that is remotely true. Unions representing 22,000 city workers have twice in last nine months negotiated deals with the mayor for early retirements and no raises, 10,000 cops have given up raises, thousands of other workers have seen their pay cut by up to 10 percent through furloughs.

The Department of Water and Power is at the heart of the story of Los Angeles' transformation into the city it is today, the light and the dark of it, the play of good and evil.

It is the soul of LA, the shimmering lights and hopes of the city and the dark side of its "Chinatown" past -- and present.

Writer Yasha Levine in an article on Alternet.org today and excerpted on OurLA.org captures the origins of this story from the theft of the water in Owens Valley a century ago that turned the spectacular beauty of the area into a dust bowl to the DWP's plan now to cover the lake bed with 80 square miles of solar panels, the largest such installation in the world.

"L.A.'s New Scheme to Plunder Owens Valley Water, This Time with Solar Panels" reads the headline. "L.A. has sold the idea of enriching the residents of the Owens river valley before, while ripping them off in the dark. Will the residents buy into it."

The story links back to an article at SierraWave.net about the visit to Owens Valley in January of David Freeman, interim general manager of the DWP, a post assigned him after he served as Harbor Commission president and deputy mayor for energy and the environment.

Freeman is the darling of environmentalists, the apostle of solar energy -- and a profiteer in clean energy like the mayor's behind-the-scenes political operative Ari Swiller and others who have found Antonio Villaraigosa an easy mark for their hustles.

With his cowboy hat and sweet-talking good old boy southern malarkey, Freeman was resurrected by the mayor with the help of his business partner, Swiller.

It's dirty little power games these clean energy advocates and investors play.

Apart from his connections, Freeman has the credibility to get away with lying through his teeth, telling whoppers so big and so smoothly that he is one of the greatest con men in a city filled with con artists. It's that quality that got him fired by Mayor Richard Riordan a decade ago as DWP general manager. It's that quality that allowed him to preserve his reputation despite wasting tens of millions of dollars on green energy without actually generating any.

Back in January, Freeman brought his act to what he regarded as easy marks in the Owens Valley.

About 200 people came to a Methodist Church to hear his pitch to pave the dust bowl with solar panels and make them all rich, according to SierraWave.net

"He made them laugh and he made some mad," reported Bennett Kessler, describing Freeman as being "viewed as a man with the personal power to push projects through and manipulate people in the way."

The next day before the County Board of supervisors, Freeman used "the same country charm ... found mostly a  positive response until Supervisor Susan Cash laid out the colonial failures of DWP to treat the Owens Valley as an equal, to treat people and the land with respect," Kessler reported..

Cash seized on a comment by Freeman regarding his refusal to release DWP land around Inyo that strangles its economic development, saying, "You closed that door. More conversations need to be had. This is not pristine land here."

She challenged him on DWP's failure to live up to its 20-year-old agreement to restore the area to its "pristine" past and other issues,  "I feel like you're bringing me flowers and won't show up for the rest of the dates."

Finally, she threw in Freeman's face that he had told KABC that DWP owns Inyo lock, stock and barrel. "Don't you see that's offensive?" said Cash. Freeman denied saying it. Cash called his hand on the lie. "I saw you say it on television," she said.

Freeman reached for an excuse. "I was making a joke." That didn't fly with Cash. "The internet words 'epic fail' come to mind," she said. "Some people don't like our style," Freeman said.

Freeman is a liar who will say anything to get his way and with the bottomless pit of DWP ratepayer money and the political clout of LA, he will undoubtedly be able to pay off the folks in Inyo to let the DWP plunder them again. It's why he fits in so well as part of the mayor's team.

There never was a doubt about what the mayor and the City Council were going to do to bail themselves out of the crisis they created.

The DWP was always the answer.

Where else could they turn in their desperate need for big bucks than the most wasteful and politicized agency in city government, the cash cow that keeps the public in the dark and can raise rates spectacularly without even needing approval of anyone but the Board of Commissioners, a rubber-stamp group accountable to no one except the mayor who has made it clear that obedience to his orders is mandatory or you're out.

The  true crime of Antonio Villaraigosa and his current henchman Chief of Staff Jeff Carr is that they have put every department head in City Hall and every commissioner on notice that they will be fired if they get the least bit out of line, dare to tell the truth instead of lie, actually try to fix things instead of sweeping them under the carpet.

This is Antonio's City Hall, everyone in it is complicit. The daily City Council meetings are nothing but a charade, a pretense of debate when they will all go along with the plan to borrow billions, sell off the assets, pack the DWP and other special funds with unneeded workers and stick the public with the bills.

Inside the bubble of false consciousness of City Hall, there is no awareness everyone in LA is hurting. More than a quarter of the people are jobless or underemployed, homes are worth 60 percent of their value, foreclosures are at record levels and so are business bankruptcies.

But all they can see is themselves. The City Hall "family" is all that matters, the people are nothing.

They drool at the prospect of bleeding the public dry for water and power. Every two months that DWP bill comes to every house and every business. That's where the money is, money for the taking to pay the ridiculously inflated salaries of the DWP, to pay for their featherbedding of the one agency that keeps on hiring even when others are losing their jobs.

While the heads of the Harbor and Airport have cautiously opened a few jobs despite the sharp declines in their revenue, the jaded David Freeman has publicly promised to create hundreds, maybe even thousands of jobs to create room for civilian city workers who will get giant pay raises to join the DWP even as he mercilessly pushes for giant rate increases.

On Friday, OurLA.org revealed the DWP consultant's report that calls for an 800 percent increase on April 1 of the pass-through Energy Cost Adjustment Factor which is now limited to 1 percent a quarter.

It's the first step toward more than a 20 percent increase in power rates in the next 12 months. Next year, the rate hikes will be even worse and they will double and triple in the years ahead.

It's the mayor's doing. He talks a green game but he hasn't done anything to create green energy or even develop a plan to do so.

It is a sign of the times that the mayor has actually been forced to engage the public in discussions, preliminary as they might be, about how LA is going to survive as a city even as it brings spending into balance with revenue for the first time in years.

A sign of his own weakness and the failure of the city's leadership, to be sure, but a positive step toward actually coming to respect the public and share power with the civic, business, labor and community leaders.

Deputy Mayor Larry Frank, assigned to co-opt and calm the anger of Neighborhood Council members, was assigned the unenviable task of meeting Saturday with Budget LA, the group that has been brought dozens of community activists together every Saturday for weeks to try to develop a strategy for saving the Charter-created civic empowerment movement from destruction.

The mayor has fired the head of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment and plans to eliminate the department entirely with the full support of the City Council to reduce this year's $212 million deficit by $2 million.

It is Frank's job to make it look like this is being done in the name of efficiency and cost saving, to hide the truth that it is being done because they fear the growing influence and organization of community groups across the city.

Frank, in a lengthy and detailed explanation, laid out the mayor's plan such as it is to fix the massive budget deficit as if he were talking to fourth graders.

But it's nonetheless instructive because it's the first time anyone from the mayor's office has actually tried to explain why nearly 7,000 jobs of people who run the parks and libraries, do the community planning and building code enforcement, and provide dozens of other basic services to the general public are proposed for elimination.These are more than half the jobs in those positions.

I know most of you will not actually watch these videos and see for yourselves what a fairy tale Frank spun for the Neighborhood Council people on Saturday, a fairy tale that does not have a happy ending.

So here's the takeaway: Setting aside the obfuscations and outright false statements, the mayor's plan is to slash basic services, sell off valuable assets like parking structures and the Convention Center to his pals, and borrow billions of dollars just to get through this year and next.

He has no plan to deal with the $775 million deficit the year after or the more than $1 billion deficit equal to more than 25 percent of the city's operating budget the year after.

If you believe in miracles, economic miracles in this case, everyone will live happily ever after. If you don't, maybe you better watch these videos and know for yourself what is going on.

Once upon a time, there were mice  who lived in a house and were terrified of the cat who lived there too.

So one day, the mice all got together to figure out how to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. Some said this, and some said that; but at last a young mouse got up and said he had a proposal to make, which he thought would meet the case.

"You will all agree," said he, "that our chief danger consists in the sly and treacherous manner in which the enemy approaches us.

"Now, if we could receive some signal of her approach, we could easily escape from her. I venture, therefore, to propose that a small bell be procured, and attached by a ribbon round the neck of the Cat. By this means we should always know when she was about, and could easily retire while she was in the neighborhood."

This proposal met with general applause, until an old mouse got up and said: "That is all very well, but who is to bell the Cat?"

The mice looked at one another and nobody spoke. Then the old mouse said: "It is easy to propose impossible remedies."   

I share this fable that a reader sent to me because of all the talk about firing 4,000 city workers in a manner that will force parks and libraries to close and many of the services we all pay for to be sharply reduced even more than they have been, from tree trimming to street repair.

It is easy for the Mayor and City Council to toy with such an impossible remedy because once elected, they think they have cushy jobs for life and don't have to care about what the people say anymore.

They all know, or at least most of them do, that they massive elimination of all those jobs and all the early retirements affect only the 20 percent of the city workforce that provide direct services to the public for the most part

Police and Fire, revenue producing jobs, jobs that support the system itself are exempt from this remedy and the shutting down of public services will make LA even less attractive to business and lead to even more unemployment and decay.

So they look for ways to avoid the 4,000 layoffs by padding the payrolls of the Harbor, Airport, DWP and special funds.

But that too is an impossible remedy. It might save many of those jobs but the services they now provide will still be lost and the financial burdens those transfers impose will simply be passed on to business and the public, particularly in DWP rate increases.

The mice who are our leaders keeping trying to bell the cat of the budget deficit created by their mismanagement of the city's business.

The system itself has failed. We cannot any longer afford the nation's highest paid elected officials or the sweetheart contract that have cut with unions, developers, contractors and consultants who have put them in office and kept them there.

The remedy that is possible, that is within their ability, is to share power with labor, business and the community, to bring us all to table. It is only way that faith in government can be restored, the only way we can work out the only solution to the problems that threaten the future of our city.

Firing or transferring thousands of workers doesn't solve anything.

Only by city workers, particularly in those drawing exorbitant salaries in elected office, top positions and the DWP, must take a step backward financially -- pay cuts and pension reforms.

Workers would be fools to accept such a deal after getting the runaround for the last year unless it was part of deal the provided long-term job security.

It's my belief that, despite the skepticism about the public's willingness to accept new taxes, taxpayers would step forward and agree to share the sacrifices if power were really shared.

The mice can't bell the cat because mice can't work cooperatively for the common good. We the people aren't mice. We are capable of cooperation. Working together as equals, we can do the impossible. We can bell the cat and remedy the city's financial crisis.

What's going on in LA is a calamity of historica proportions -- not the kind that causes catastrophic destruction like the day the levees broke in New Orleans. But the kind that just as surely damages a city physically and spiritually like a slow water torture.

Maybe that's why I've spent the day watching City Council members prattle mindlessly and ignorantly about the city's finances, posturing and preening as if they were both blameless for what has happened and had any answers on how to fix what they have broken.

The dark side of my soul took over and all I could see was the bleak outlook for the city I love if left in the hands of these foolish and selfish people.

And then I listened to the good and decent people, who unlike the nation's highest paid and most pampered city officials, give their time and energy out of love, not money, to make their neighborhoods and their city better, appeal for a small measure of sanity.

They came before the Board of Neighborhood Councils for a special meeting just 24 hours after the Mayor had exercised powers he does not have to abolish their department -- the central reform enacted 10 years ago to empower the community.

If it were me I'd have tried to get the more than 1,600 members of 90 Neighborhood Councils to resign in mass and tell City Hall to take their lousy money and shove it. Like homeowners and other community groups, they don't need to be under the thumb of people who treat them with contempt even as they fear them.

But that isn't how these people handled this crisis.

They have been meeting every Saturday for weeks and emailing all day long to generate ideas on how the movement they are part of can gain strength no matter how many obstacles are thrown in their way.

They were polite and constructive and persuasive and the BONC commissioners agreed with them in every regard to push forward even in the face of the treatment they are receiving.

Then, they took their message to Paul Krekorian and Dennis Zine on the Elections and Neighborhood Committee and spoke sincerely from their hearts about what they believed, even when they didn't always agree.

Krekorian and Zine heard their message and voted to go forward with official elections of NCs that start next Tuesday.

The full Council will take up that issue on Wednesday and other aspects of the attempted assassination of the community empowerment issue in the days ahead.

To be honest, I'm just an old softie and tears came to my eyes at times as I listened to these humble voices of the people and I thought a time long ago when I was young and thousands of us stood together in protest and gave ourselves strength with songs of solidarity.

Once again, I came around and knew deep in my heart that I have never lost and never will lose my faith that the good does prevail over the evil, someday.

They're protesting at the school board, they're storming the City Council, they're mad at the mayor, the teachers hate the charters, the charters hate the bureaucrats, the unions and the people hate everyone in government, the whole world of LA is festering with unhappiness.

With liberties from the Kingston Trio's "They're rioting in Africa," it seems to me just about everyone who is even half aware in LA is mad as hell at someone.

It's about time.

There is no mystery. It's been building a long time through successions of mayors and City Council members and school boards and school superintendents, endless attempts at changing the forms of governance, studies, task forces, restructurings.

It's still the same old, same old. Nothing really changes. We approved bond issues for schools, colleges, libraries, parks, police stations and things only get worse until now the bills have come due. There is not enough money for any of it. Such are the inexorable laws of karma.

When the interests of the few prevail over the interests of the many, it is a certainty that sooner or later things are going to fall apart.

Sweetheart deals and giveaways to developers, contractors and unions; policies that pander to poverty and punish the middle class; leaders that pay lip service to public policy and serve only themselves and the circle of lobbyists, consultants, operatives and PR manipulators who channel cash into their campaign chests -- for too long that has been the nature of LA's political system.

And yet, with the community in an uproar over plans to slash services, fire thousands of city workers, pad the payrolls of the proprietary departments, sell off the city's assets and mortgage the future with massive borrowings, the mayor and City Council still admit to no failure and engage in a charade to protect themselves no matter how many get hurt.

People should be mad, a lot angrier than they are.

They pay the bills. They do the work. They care about each other.

The unions have sat at the table and bargained for the deals they got and suggested hundreds of ways of fixing what is broken.

Community leaders have come forward with reasoned and moderate solutions only to find what passes for a dialogue with officials is nothing but a sham.

What officials have set in motion has blown up in their faces for the last six months and it will keep blowing up because what they are doing only makes matters worse.

More and more people will wake up to this reality when they find parks and libraries closed, when there's no one to respond to neighborhood eyesores or problems because city agencies are in chaos from loss of staff without any coherent strategy.

It's already happening in little ways like the closure of Mulholland Drive because the city can't afford to make the road safe even as they keep on spending on things that flatter their overblown egos.

The future is as clear as day and it's not a pretty sight.

The only question is when -- not whether -- the anger that the school board and Board of Neighborhood Commissioners faces this afternoon and the Council faces in the days ahead boils over.

Hopefully, it will be sooner rather than later because the damage they are doing gets worse every day.

What you are seeing in the LA bankruptcy melodrama is a calculated and deliberate effort of the Mayor and his colleagues on the City Council to silence the voice of the people.

It is a hopeless task.

The silent majority is awakening and beginning to realize that what is at stake in this crisis of confidence is their jobs and property, their businesses, their hopes for a better tomorrow for their families, the future of the city they call home.

Neighborhood Councils whetted the appetite of thousands of people from all walks of life for a say in their government, for policies that improve their lives and communities, for a measure of power.

It was supposed to take 25 years before NCs were able to flex their muscles and provide the margin that defeated the solar energy fraud Measure B and elected Carmen Trutanich and Paul Krekorian to office.

When the threat of secession by San Pedro, Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley loomed leaders in the civic culture of the city proposed a system of boroughs the governed large chunks of the city and send their best to the full City Council.

Unions and other special interests watered that down to elected Neighborhood Councils with first authority over land use issues and then drowned it with powerless Councils self-selected by anyone who chose to call themselves a stakeholder.

And still the good and decent people who for so long had worked for reform accepted that as a place to stand to begin to move City Hall.