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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.

The threads of the story have become so entangled it's like a crazy dream that is so vivid you think it's reality.

How dumb do they think we are?

That's the question that has come to mind thousands of times over the years as I've observed the insanity that passes for our local government.

Today, what came to mind for the first time is "How dumb are we?"

The evidence is mounting everywhere that it's us who are out of our minds, not them. They are just selfish little people who will do and say anything to protect and serve themselves. We are the fools who keep on paying the bills and electing them to office.

They conned us into paying billions, nearly $20 billion, to build mammoth monuments to miseducation that cost as much as $400 million each but now can't pay the salaries of teachers to staff them so they want another tax for that.

It was all for the "sake of the children," they said, so we taxed ourselves to build parks and libraries that will soon be shuttered.

But they've got money lying around to build yet another park to connect City Hall with the DWP, presumably so city and county workers will have a place to nap in the daytime and the homeless to sleep at night since they've been rousted from Skid Row so developers given huge subsidies can build luxury apartments that no one can afford.

How dumb are we?

I'll tell you how dumb we are, we borrow a fortune to build a new Convention Center because the old one is a bust and subsidize it to the tune of $40 million a year and then when it starts making money, we are going to sell it to the billionaire who is getting even richer on Staples Center and LA Live that were built with our generosity to provide playgrounds for the rich.

We give slick operators like the CIM Group everything they want and when their deals flop, like Hollywood and Highland, we bail them out.

We cut secret sweetheart deals with the emirs of Dubai and New York billionaires for the Grandiose Avenue Project and we forgive them millions in penalties when they don't deliver.

We watch our elected officials beating their breasts because their incompetence and cowardice puts the future of our city in jeopardy and sit silent as they piously talk about firing contractors and their workers to save the jobs of city workers they no longer can afford to pay. It would be wrong, they say, to make our horrifying unemployment numbers worse even as they make them worse.

Oh, the horror, the horror...

But instead of storming their palace of self-service, we come as peasants begging for a crumb from their lavish marble and gold table.

We are fools. We are dumb. We are slaves and they are masters. We have gotten what we deserve.

Nothing will change until we -- business, labor and the community -- get up off our knees and stand up like free men and women and show them who's boss, show them we will not be fooled  any longer.

When I first came to town, the big issue was forced busing under court order intended to integrate the schools.

Roberta Weintraub and Bobbi Fiedler on one side hollering about preserving neighborhood schools. Jackie Goldberg and Rita Walters on the other yelling about racial equity.

It was the start of "white flight" from the schools -- and the city -- that now, 30 years later, has become "middle class flight from the schools and the city.

We've spent billions and billions of our money to build new schools and fix old ones. We've ended forced busing and brought back neighborhood schools and pretty much ended year-round calendars.

Yet, most schools are racially impacted and outcomes in terms of test scores and dropout rates are abysmal and many parents are choosing to transport their kids to schools outside their neighborhoods in hopes of getting them a better education and keeping them safe.

We've gone through close to a dozen superintendents. We've tried school-based management and LEARN and gone back to top-down management. We've created mini-districts and dissolved them. We resisted independent charter schools and then embraced them as a means of breaking up the mammoth and dysfunctional district school by school.

And now we're giving parents the rights to close down failing schools and rebuild them the way the want and opening the door to teachers, non-profits and everywhere else with an educational theory to start their own public schools.

Maybe the problem isn't governance, as a friend of mine who's closely followed the devolution of LAUSD has long argued. Maybe it's a teaching and learning problem and somethiing more.

The something more was visible in Howard Blume's story in the Times today about how LAUSD laid off thousands of teachers and other employees and still overspent its budget for salaries by an astonishing $200 million.

What's even more incredible is that the army of bureaucrats in LAUSD don't know how they did that and apparently didn't want us to know since the internal audit was completed a month ago and probably wouldn't have come out at all without the efforts of a good reporter.

Superintendent Ramon.Cortines offers little insight beyond "we're cleaning it up."

Inspector General Jerry Thornton is somewhat more helpful.

"The system is broken," he said. "We really don't have adequate position control and we don't know where our funding comes from for all these positions.

"There's no suggestion of impropriety or fraud. We didn't see people being paid who aren't working or who aren't there."

There it is, the smoking gun. Incompetence is the problem and all the experiments, all the money haven't fixed it.

That's why parents rights, charters, anything that frees parents, teachers and principals from the reign of incompetence seems like a step in the right direction.

I spoke with a principal recently whose grade school test performance has soared from the mid-400s to over 800 in the last 10 years and heard how creating a shared vision and empowering teachers and supporting them was responsible for the improvement.

That's the heart of the matter as far as I'm concerned. It's what makes any enterprise successful: Shared beliefs, individual empowerment, strong leadership.

I call it democracy and I don't see why those with power in LA are so afraid of it, so resistant to embrace what makes America what it is -- or at least what it was.

My last political engagement of 2009 came on the second last day of year, breakfast with state Sen. Gloria Romero. The subject was educating our children by mandating that parents - all parents everywhere in California - have the power under the law to play a direct role in how schools are run.

It was a far cry from how the year began with Jack Humphreville and his Solar 8 defending themselves in court against the lawsuit the mayor engineered to get the ballot argument we signed against the Measure B solar energy fraud removed from the voter pamphlet.

The underlying issue in both education and energy policy is the same, the same one that comes up over the 1,000 pot shops, the 4,000 illegal billboards, the disastrous city planning policies and the multitude of other issues that trouble the lives of the populace.

What is the role of ordinary citizens in determining public policy in Los Angeles and across California? Is it nothing more than the occasional right to choose among meaningless choices in elections controlled by big moneyed special interests?

Gloria Romero offered her answer in the closing weeks of the year when she put her political career on the line and pulled off a dramatic victory by getting the state Senate to approve by a single vote a proposed state law that gives parents unprecedented power over the schools. The prize for California taking the lead in education reform could be as much as $1 billion for our troubled public school system from the pot of money in President Obama's "Right to the Top" stimulus program...

She acted in defiance of one of the most powerful lobbies in Sacramento, the California Teachers Association, the umbrella organization for teacher unions that has dictated educational policies for most of this generation.

For a Democrat and Senate Majority Leader to twist arms and give courage to members of her party to back parental empowerment was an act of heroism we don't often see from our politicians anymore.

The issue was the "parent trigger" - a measure backed by the Parent Revolution led by Ben Austin. It would allow for the takeover and even closure of failing schools when a majority of parents come together and support real change. The teacher union lobby is now throwing all its weight and money behind efforts to kill the "parent trigger" provision in the Assembly where intense negotiations have been under way for days.

Why Romero took her stand has a lot to do with where she came from and where she's going.

She grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Barstow where her father worked for the railroads and instilled in her the passion to do what she thinks is right. She has a nearly perfect pro-union voting record and a lifelong commitment to social justice yet she stood for the rights of parents against the power of teacher unions.

Now she is running for state Superintendent of Public Instruction and is certain to face intense opposition from the teacher union leadership fighting to preserve the status quo that has so badly served our children for so long.

She is one of my leaders of the year.

There are many others in so many walks of life, prominent people and ordinary citizens, who like Gloria Romero, have found the courage to stand up publicly for what they believe in.

I could name hundreds of people I know personally or from their work who have emerged as true leaders of this community. There are thousands of others like them unknown to me.

2009 marked a turning point in our history, I believe, the year when the people crossed over from the indignity of powerless negativity to pride in their power to get the kind of changes they want and believe will make their lives and the lives others better.

When you read through my month-by-month year in review you will see how community activists scored victories at the polls and forced our elected officials to back down on numerous issues and begin to obey the will of the people and respect the rule of law.

The collapse of the nation's economy exposed for one and all to see just how mismanaged the affairs of our city and state and nation have been for too long because the politicians on both sides of the aisle have sold out to special interests while voters stood by passively.

It's unbelievable that the Golden State and the city of unlimited dreams should be in such dire financial straits that dangerous criminals are being freed early from our prisons, teachers laid off and basic services slashed.

Real change rarely occurs without such catastrophes.

How we respond in such critical times determines the future and what I'm seeing is the birth of a truly democratic movement that is gaining momentum so fast that the thousand little cells of community organizations are coming together into a cohesive force that can end the cycle of failed pubic policies that have diminished our lives.

It hangs in the balance. The challenges are great. But we are entering the second decade of the 21st century and if we are not ready to create a more democratic society in which all of us are empowered and our interests and values respected, we never will be.

Those who have taken the step forward in their communities will have to redouble their efforts. Those who have watched from the sidelines will have to leap into the arena. Those in authority will have to change their minds about where their winds of power are blowing.

But it can happen. I believe that or I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing any more than all of you doing what you are to make LA a better city.

Here's the highlights of 2009 as I have lived and written about it:

In his desperation to save himself politically, the mayor has reluctantly reached out to the civic elite -- people like former Mayor Richard Riordan, billionaire Eli Broad, LAEDC head Bill Allen -- to create jobs, hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs.

The mayor's own efforts have been a dismal failure with the official unemployment rate among the highest in the nation at 14 percent and another 14 percent so devoid of hope they have given up the search for work.

He loves to talk about creating a "green corridor" but couldn't bring home the cornerstone of his promise, an Italian rail car assembly (not manufacturing) plant, despite promises of subsidies and didn't lift a finger to capture even a fraction of the billions in state funding for stem cell research.

He throws his muscle behind huge subsidies for luxury hotels and expensive entertainment venues with obnoxious digital billboards and gets nothing in return except guarantees of living wage jobs while corporations reap huge profits that end up in bank accounts far away.

He talks endlessly about streamlining the wearyingly complex permit processes for major developments but fails to follow through even as he arranges for massive public subsidies and does his best to exclude the public from any influence.

He gives tax breaks and other advantages to the entertainment industry but runaway production continues unabated.

He touts a $5 billion program to build affordable housing that hardly gets off the ground and never spells out just what affordable means. Affordable for who?

Huge increases in taxes, fees and rates are imposed for public works projects that keep the local economy from collapsing entirely but make no dent in the long-term problems of soaring poverty and the flight of the middle class.

And now he turns to the civic elite he shunned for four years to bail him out of the catastrophe his policies have created.

The business community assuredly will line up behind them as they use the tools at hand: More public works spending, hasty approval of development projects that will give us bigger malls and more high-rises along with more traffic congestion and greater demand for water and power that will require huge rate hikes.

The plain truth is these efforts haven't worked for 30 years and they won't work now.

Large corporations and high-tech industries don't set up shop in cities with vast numbers of people who lack the disposable incomes to consume their goods and services and lack the skills to do their jobs.

If they want to do business in the region, they go to Santa Monica and Glendale and Pasadena and Thousand Oaks and most of the other cities that encircle LA, or the areas of LA like the Westside and the 101 corridor in the Valley where there is still affluence.

We have talked for three decades now about the failure of our schools, our gang-infested neighborhoods and the vanishing middle class and keep on using the same tools to reverse the trends.

It's time we faced the truth head-on.You aren't going to create sustainable jobs in a jobless recovery from the worst recession in a generation. 

Hard as it is to believe, LA is a city following the path of dying old industrial towns like Detroit and Cleveland -- not the path of vibrant cities that endlessly regenerate like Chicago and New York.

Our governance system is hopelessly broken. City Hall for too long has been a jobs program, not a service provider. City government simply costs too much and does too little. The bills for that have now come due and we are slashing even those services in an effort to reduce massive deficits and avoid bankruptcy.

The real problem isn't structural -- it is leadership.

The civic, political and business leaders keep on supporting band-aid approaches to what is wrong and settling for crumbs that mask the severity of the problem for a little while.

Great cities require the belief of the people who feel their interests are being served today and will be in the future. That's why they stay and invest in them.

If anything should be obvious it's that LA long ago became a city of limits where "thinking big" no longer works. There isn't enough land or other resources to support more and more development and more people.

We need to think small, to put the quality of our lives at the top of the agenda, to devolve power from City Hall to the neighborhoods, to empower our residents to bring to life a new city out of our extraordinary diversity and the shared belief in personal freedom that is the essence of what LA is all about.

Antonio Villaraigosa once held the promise of being the leader who could bring us to this promised land.

Maybe he still can but not as long as keeps on looking to enrich his friends and allies at the expense of others, not as long as keeps looking for his next job, not as long as travels the world rather than attending to his duties, not as long as he keeps thinking the people are fools who will fall for hollow promises.

I dream of a city where every individual feels empowered to affect the course of public events, where people feel an ownership stake in their city's public life, not categorized as stakeholders to be manipulated.

I believe LA can reinvent itself as a free city where people come first and freedom and mutual respect flourish in place of greed and selfishness. It seems to me that is the destiny of LA, the logical outcome of all that has come before. The alternative of a city separated by grotesque differences or wealth and poverty is unthinkable.

Maybe I'm wrong and there's another way but I haven't heard anyone propose anything that isn't already a tried and proven failure.
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Antonio Villaraigosa has finally staked out his claim as the leader of Los Angeles; now all he has to do is lead.

He knows good and well what the No. 1 problem is: Public employee unions are out of control. They have gone from their rightful role as bargaining agents for workers to policy makers, successfully throwing their weight around in elections to the point that too many elected officials are little more than stooges for their interests.

As the elected leader of the city, the mayor has the primary responsibility of resolving the financial crisis brought to a head by the economic downturn.

By stepping to the forefront of the movement to reform the school system, he has now fully asserted himself as the man responsible for ending the LAUSD's 30-year record of failure.

The city's financial troubles are far less complicated than the challenge of providing a quality education to nearly 700,000 children.

LA doesn't have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem mainly caused by years of sweetheart contracts with its workers that no longer are affordable.

The mayor knew, and acknowledged knowing, that the sweetened retirement deal that he and the City Council offered the unions threatened the city with bankruptcy. He pulled it off the table last spring but then lost his nerve and gave in.

It has fallen apart now, which has left the Council shivering in its boots, or more likely basking in the sun on some faraway beach where its members have fled to escape their responsibilities.

Quite simply as the city's financial bureaucrats have repeatedly said, albeit timidly, payroll costs must be reduced. Giving a bunch of cash and enhanced pensions to workers who are ready to retire anyway doesn't achieve this. Furloughs and deferral of raises don't achieve the permanent reduction in payroll costs either.

There's no mystery about how to reduce payroll costs: You either lay off workers or you reduce their pay and benefits.

Finally, after 30 years of failure to achieve a record of success and a can-do classroom culture, LAUSD surrendered Tuesday and took the leap toward real reform.

The school board voted 6-1 to open 50 new schools and those that are failing to competition by independent operators, charter organizations and LAUSD staff..

The teacher, administrator and classified unions backed by ACORN, civil rights and community organizations complained about the process being too hasty and warned that charters are not the answer.

They threatened to sue and retaliate against board members who supported Yolie Flores Aguilar's resolution entitled "Public School Choice: A New Way at LAUSD."

Former Assemblywoman and school board many Jackie Goldberg, who many have blamed for turning LAUSD into an ideological battleground, passionately made the case against the plan, accusing the district of giving into the right-wing and abandoning their responsibilities.

Thousands of demonstrators chanting "We want change" gathered at LAUSD headquarters in support of the resolution which has the backing of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the LA Chamber of Commerce, Superintendent Ramon Cortines, the Parent Revolution, MALDEF, United Way and a number of educational, civic and community groups.

Aguilar acknowledged the district is making slow improvements in test scores but noted only a third of third-graders are reading at grade level and it will take as long as 20 years to make substantial progress at the current pace.

"Slow and steady gains are not enough...we need rapid large-scale student-centered reform," she said.

Tamar Galatzan, a candidate for City Council District 2, said she too was "fed up" with the slow pace of progress.

"I'm going to vote for this resolution," she said. "We have a chance to succeed right now beyond the capabilites and limitations of our district...we are expanding our district in order to save it."

Marguerite Lamotte was the only board member who voted against the reform effort but union backer Steve Zimmer eventually came out in support of the reform after stalling the vote for three hours with resolutions that sought to protect existing teacher union contracts and enhance the union's ability to throw roadblocks in the way of independent operators.

Zimmer said he was "hurt and angry" that he had to "shatter the trust" of either the union or many of his constituents with his vote.

He insisted the process was flawed and failed to put the interests of children first but he believes in the role of families involvement in education. "I'm voting yes because I want to make  sure I'm part of the next step of this process."

LaMotte said it was enough to be a board member to be part of the process and cast the lone no vote.

Passage of the change was a foregone conclusion despite the rallying of forces with the city's most powerful labor leader, Maria Elena Durazo, tilting in favor of the plan and agreeing to head the committee which will work out details of a 10-step process designed by Cortines who will ultimately recommend who runs the schools under a four-year implementation program.

The battle lines are drawn for the Council District 2 special election on Sept. 22 and if money talks -- and it usually does in politics -- Chris Essel should be unbeatable.

She's raised nearly $200,000, which is more than the rest of the nine candidates combined.

Her list of 495 contributors includes such luminaries as Barbara Steisand and Vlade Divac and his wife, studio executives and many others in entertainment industry interests, real estate and development interests, construction company and trade unions, lawyers and consultants of various types and even a wives of lobbyists thrown in.

You can read the full story at OurLA.org.

UPDATED: Excerpts of what Council members said at the bottom.

And they'll say or do anything to get their hands on it.

Here's a 10-minute movie I made from comments made by each of those who spoke in support of a motion that would put the City of Los Angeles on the record as backing any  and all measures that would reduce the threshold needed to approve a state budget from the current two-thirds

The City Council -- policy making body of the City of Los Angeles -- voted unanimously Friday, Democrats and Republicans alike in the non-partisan unity, to support getting rid of Proposition 13 and its taxpayer protections.

And they supported using any means necessary to get their way and repeal Proposition 13.

Missing just a couple of votes in the Legislature, and often just a couple of points at the polls, to raise taxes, your elected officials will be happy to settle for anything less than two-thirds -- 50 percent, 55, 60, why they'd even take 65 percent and still be able to raise taxes and approve a budget locally or at the state level.

All they want is your money.

The billions in dollars of government deficits could be wiped out just like that.

The tens of billions in unfunded pensions to public employees, the sweetheart contracts, the sinecures for former politicians, the patronage, the back room deals, the sellout of the public interest -- just like that your tax dollars let them go on same as always, business as usual.

I know it's asking a lot but I hope you'll watch this 10-minute movie. It might help you to make up your mind about which side you're on:






Just to be helpful for those who didn't watch the video, here's excerpts, with an interpretation, from each Council member who spoke Friday.

Koretz: Blame the Republicans: "It's a disaster of epic proportions. It's purely caused by the two-thirds budget (requirement)."

Huizar: It's not our fault: "Here we are now looking at some dramatic cuts...when we've already passed our own budget and we may have to go back to the table to make some changes because the state has not passed its budget."

Parks: Limited tyranny of majority: "Prior to Prop. 16 there was a caveat of 5 percent ..as long just as we are here today in the council nonpartisan we get to vote on what we choose to vote on. We have no one that's punishing us one way or another."

Garcetti: Selective tyranny of majority: "Californians are angry...the rules that we have passed have to change in order forf California to repair itself...It's ironic in this state as we saw with the vote on Prop. 8 you can take someone's civil rights away with a majority vpte but it takes a two-thirds vote just to pass a budget."

Rosendahl: No term limits, no Prop. 13: "No. 1 we need to restructure the budget and the budget process...this six-year term-limit is insane...the initiative process is totally dysfunctional...we need to do deal with political reform. I'm talking about clean money."

Wesson: Demoracts good, Republicans Bad: "We in Los Angeles i don't think we have a lot in common with the state of Arkansas..or Rhode Island...The entire system needs to be changed. The majority party is the Democratic Party. So you would think the agenda in the state government would be led by the majority party."

Alarcon: Who needs reform? "There's a lot of problems with the state. There's a lot of problems with Los Angeles. Anywhere in between would be better than 66 and two-thirds percent. They say... we have to do all these other radical things to fix state government... To me democracy is about the majority ruling."

LaBonge: Huh? What? Vote Aye! "Whatever is this about?: "What are we recommending?...I ask you for an aye vote."

Zine, as presiding officer: Just trying to help: "12 ayes, that matter passes. Hopefully that will help the state and the budget."

Historically, public employees were paid less than those private sector who did the same work but enjoyed a level of job security unimaginable elsewhere.

Over the last 30 years in LA, and to a less extent California, that balance has gotten out of whack.

Today, LA city workers are paid more than comparable private sector workers and in the case of the DWP 30 percent more than the rest of the city workforce for the same jobs. And they can retire with full lifetime health care and pensions of as much as 75 percent of their highest play, 90 percent for police and firefighters.

Their jobs are just as secure as ever. The cost-cutting measures offered city workers by the Mayor and City Council provide sweetened pensions that will allow 2,400 city workers to retire with full pensions as young as 55 and guaranteed there will be no layoffs, furloughs or pay cuts.

Former San Fernando Valley Assemblyman Keith Richman now heads the California Foundation