Hot Topics: May 2008 Archives

By Doug Dowie

Correspondent

It's a small world isn't it, small and funny and fine -- at least for people in the tight little circles of influence where opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies abounds.

Take the case of Northeast San Fernando Valley Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes who, while nobody was watching largely because he has been so invisible, took steps to strip the City of L.A. and its citizens of their basic right to decide land use issues by letting developers do almost anything they want like tear down houses and put up apartments.

It should be noted that his skullduggery was aided and abetted by the fact the Daily News no longer has anyone in Sacramento and the Times still doesn't care about such mundane matters as the well-being of the city.

But word does get around and on Friday Rick Orlov reported Fuente's deceit and a brushfire of outrage quickly spread across the city.

(Strike up the appropriate music by clicking here to get in the right mood for what follows)

With a little help from his friends, Fuentes has concocted a measure, AB212, that  "would limit the ability of the city to make zone changes in areas where the community plan is not consistent with the general plan," according to Orlov.

That lack of consistency is everywhere since the general plan is a fraud and the community plans outdated.

Fuentes' goal is affordable housing -- a code word for taxpayer subsidized housing for the poor and densification of neighborhoods all across L.A.

Now I don't know at this point who would get rich from Fuentes' effort to strip the people of L.A. and their government of control of land use but an examination of how he came to be an elected official and how this legislation came to be might be instructive.

For starters, you need to know Fuentes is a tool of City Councilman Richard Alarcon and former City Council President Alex Padilla, who is now a state senator.

You got to feel for Russ Stanton. He comes from nowhere to land one of the plum jobs in American journalism as editor of the Los Angeles Times just as the bottom falls out of the industry.

So he's facing round after round of staff cuts and worsening morale and the challenge of reinventing the newspaper in the Internet age and then BANG -- the Times' shoddy journalistic practices blow up in his face.

First, there was the Chuck Philips fiasco. Philips is a reporter who has been repeatedly accused of carrying the water for the such questionable characters as Suge Knight in the rap music scene wars that led to the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls among others,

Yet, the Times apparently did nothing to investigate allegations Philips breached industry ethical standards. I say apparently because when Philips earlier this year wrote a story accusing Sean "Puffy" Combs of complicity in a criminal attack on Shakur, only one senior editor vetted it for content and it went up online and ultimately into the paper.

It didn't take long before the blogosphere exposed several fatal problems: The story was based on falsified documents and anonymous sources, and was so badly reported that the Times had to run a front-page retraction. It now faces enormous costs to settle the matter.

And now accusations that are potentially even more serious have surfaced that grow out of the Anthony Pellicano case, the Hollywood private eye who ran roughshod over the law and common decency in numerous cases involving celebrity clients.

The probe of Pellicano began after then Times reporter Anita Busch was threatened to scare her off a story. With Pellicano's conviction last week, Busch went public with her experiences in an interview with blogger Patrick Frey at Patterico.com. She called for an investigation into Pellicano's relationships with Philips, Editorial Page Editor Jim Newton, Newton's wife Karlene Goller who is the Times' in-house lawyer and other journalists.

In a series of posts in recent days at Patterico.com, Frey, a Los Angeles County prosecutor, has questioned Philips' relationship with Pellicano and why he wrote stories challenging the government's case against him; why after Pellicano was indicted for the threat against Busch, Goller suggested the private eye be hired to investigate the threat against Busch, and why Newton kept a gift of a paperweight from Pellicano on his desk long after he was suspected in the Busch threat.

Journalism is a noble calling -- or at least that's what so many of us believed throughout our careers.

We were society's watchdogs, democracy's infantry, doing the dirty work of ferreting out the truth about what was really going on in our government, our society. We took no prisoners, threw our verbal bricks at windows on both sides of street.

Or so we thought.

Of course, that wasn't my experience for the most part. The watchdogs were our bosses, making sure  we didn't go too far. Only the truly talented had the right to exercise the First Amendment to any real degree. The rest of us sneaked in the truth, if we could, between the lines the same way good journalists at Pravda did.

Some of us with an excess of passion also formed an underground. We pushed the rules of corporate journalism to the edges and took our chances. Sometimes we went too far, sometimes we succumbed to alcoholism, or gave up and joined the fraternity of public manipulators in the world of public relations experts, lobbyists and political staff.

The collapse of newspapers in particular and news media in general that's now under way has robbed even the most diehard journalists I know of all illusion. The game is up. At my former paper, four great journalists have quit in just a few weeks -- all for public relations where they will earn a much better living, have more fun and salve their wounds knowing there is life after your dream is over.

Soon, a friend said recently, there will be no journalists left for all the PR types to manipulate.

And that's the point of this: Manipulation of the media is far more sophisticated than the media and that's been true for a long, long time. It's a big reason our government at all levels is doing such a poor job of serving the people and such a good job of serving itself.

Antonio Villaraigosa was his usual charming self last night when he dropped by the latter-day secession group Valley Vote to spend 90 minutes or so auditioning his re-election pitch and addressing concerns from overdevelopment to overpaid city workers.

He even said nice things about me even though we disagree on a lot of issues. I got to chat with a lot of these truly concerned citizens who have worked long and hard for a better city whether it's L.A. or the Valley.

Before the mayor arrived, I got a chance to make my own pitch which is that nothing great will happen unless business, civic, social groups of all types across the city unite around a handful of core issues -- like quality schools, safe streets, healthy neighborhoods and good jobs -- and become the third force in city politics equal to the unions and developers/contractors/lobbyists.

Both Antonio and I were warmly received which tells you a lot about the decency of these people and their eagerness to embrace anyone who offers any hope at all at making L.A. a better city.

What intrigues me about everyone who lives inside the bubble of City Hall -- is how the world they operate in makes such perfect sense to them when it seems so corrupt to me. This is true of every politician and staff member and bureaucrat I know even ones who are cynical about what's going on.

Somehow, they can't see that inflated salaries and benefits, civil service rules that reward and protect low achievement and sloppy contracting practices that give away fortunes are the problem.

The mayor is certainly no exception.

His scheme to raise taxes, fees and rates while cutting services almost seems to make a kind of insane sense when you listen to the innocence with which he says that every new dollar he takes in from the public, he'll reduce services by $1.50. He blithely explains away giving pay raises that far exceed inflation even as the economy was sinking, even blaming the economists for not predicting things would be as bad as they are.

As always, he rests his case on the reduction in crime and makes the city's new plans for massive development without community input sound like smart growth.

I'm not going to belabor the point because I'm putting up video of the event. It's the first time I ever tried to shoot with a video camera or post it online. So it'll be pretty amateurish at best. Click here for his answer to a question on city salaries, the Tennie Pierce case is here and here for the first segment of his talk, Part II is here, Part III is here.

UPDATE: I've spoken with Ben Austin who is now working part-time as an assistant city attorney mainly working on litigation involving health care providers and he's paid somewhat less than the salary in the city database. He also works part-time for the Green Dot charter schools on educational issues, an arrangement approved in advance by the City Ethics Commission officials.

Personally I like Rocky Delgadillo, L.A.'s City Attorney, and Ben Austin, the Democratic political consultant Rocky hired as his "director of communications" when he took office back in 2001.

But when I start going through the city salary database put up by the Daily News  along with hard-hitting stories on the outrageous pay of city workers, I find this entry: 

CITY ATTORNEY     ASST CITY ATTORNEY     AUSTIN,BEN B     $119,031.66  

And that makes me mad as hell.

Throughout city government -- government at all levels really -- there are vast public relations operations paid for by the taxpayers.

For the most part, these aren't people who spend a whole lot of time communicating what is actually going on behind the scenes to the public, or providing the public useful information to better understand what government is actually doing.

They are there for one purpose and one purpose only: To make the politicians look good, to make the bureaucrats look good. In fact, their principal mission is to mislead the public about what's going on.

You got to feel sorry for poor City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo. He's become the living embodiment of the cliché about no good deed goes unpunished.

A year ago, Rocky announced with Councilwoman Janice Hahn and Mother of Watts founder "Sweet" Alice Harris at his side that he was going to make Markham Middle School in Watts the poster child for a new anti-gang school safety initiative

"Mend Markham" involved everything from school uniforms to teacher empowerment to mentoring and adult supervised after school play with nearly $1 million in public and private funds.

Overlooked was checking out the criminal backgrounds of the people in charge of the school, particularly Assistant Principal Steven Rooney  who was transferred from Fremont High to Markham last fall after beating a rap for allegedly having sex with an underage student who refused to testify in court about their two-year fling. The transfer was part of LAUSD's notorious "dance of the lemons" policy to move its losers to one bad school after another, ensuring that the neediest students get the worst education.

Now Rooney is in jail accused of using force and molesting three teenage girls at Markham. So much for student safety. So much for protecting them from fear and violence.

But that didn't stop Rocky from sending out a mass mailing on April 29 boasting that his "Blueprint for Safer Schools, based on our Markham Middle School Safety Initiative...should inspire a dialogue about how we can do things differently with an eye toward ending fear and violence in our schools."

Roosters in Woodland Hills 

Thanks to my wife's indefatigable early morning dog walking, I have discovered there are roosters in my neighborhood and some people are running mini-chicken farms.

That seems really nice to me, a throwback to the idyllic time when the Valley was nearly all ranches and farms.

But the commissars of the city, specifically in this case Councilwoman Janice Hahn and Councilman Tony Cardenas, see something sinister and something obnoxious about the roosters. So they have put on Wednesday's agenda a measure to limit the rooster population to one per household although an exemption would be made for Hollywood film and TV producers.

Better they should have limited gang members or high school dropouts to one per household, but no, they have decided roosters are a priority problem.

But nobody wants to get serious about what to do about it.

We get mad about it. We study it. We politicize it. We see an endless parade of innocent lives lost and vast areas of the city living in terror.

And yet we lack the political will to take the kind of action needed.

Here's some steps that could be taken right now without further debate:

Go through the lists of the thousands of gang members already identified as criminals under the 30 or so gang injunctions and determine with federal immigration authorities which of them is in America illegally and deport them.

     A hummingbird nested in a rose bush in my backyard a while ago and started a nest of spider webs that grew and grew. And then there were two eggs in the nest and the hummingbird nestled down for most of the day, almost invisibile unless you knew where to look. Now there are two little hummingbirds nestlings in my tree and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the world right now.

Say it ain't so Janice, say your posture as an anti-gang crusader who wants yet another tax on the law-abiding people of L.A. isn't the delusion of someone who doesn't have a clue about what she's doing?

Fox News last night tattooed the San Pedro councilwoman with the political pedigree with a devastating report, months in the works, about how Hahn screwed over two tough good cops and made a hero of Betty Day, the mother of a notorious family of members of the Grape Street Crips.

The cops, Ryan Moreno and Chuck Garcia, are suing the city, claiming Hahn in collusion with LAPD brass forced them off the gang beat in Watts because of their aggressive attack on hoodlums and drug dealers.

Fox reporter Chris Blatchford suggested the information that led to pulling Moreno and Garcia off the street came from the gangs in an orchestrated effort to undermine their crackdown on the criminals.

The devastating report adds political pressure for City Hall to stop coddling criminal illegal immigrant gang members.

Passions already are running high over the murder of Jamiel Shaw II and mayoral candidate Walter Moore's campaign for a tough law forcing the cops to turn over all illegal immigrants  identified in state law enforcement records as gang members to federal immigration authorities for deportation  

The debate has locked up over Special Order 40, under which police have a longstanding don't ask, don't tell policy on immigration status, but there's a lot that can be done immediately that I don't see how anyone can question.

I've talked to a lot of cops over the years and most of them question just how effective the city's 30 or so injunctions are against gangs. But they do believe the quickest and surest way to weaken the gangs is to go after the thousands of gang members named in the injunctions who are in this country illegally.

These are not just your everyday gang members. They are specifically identified as criminals by name in the injunctions issued by the courts so it doesn't take a federal task force or any changes in Special Order 40 to get them out of the country.

And it certainly doesn't take the gang tax proposed by the naive Ms. Hahn.

It just takes the political will at City Hall to protect the law-abiding, instead of the criminals.