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The limits on freedom of speech are clear enough: You can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater and you can't reveal the movements of ships and troops at a time of way.

The limits on the access to government information is quite different.

What's so amazing about local government, and every other level as well, is how officials not only kept information secret from the public but themselves as well.

The City Council, for one of a thousand examples, didn't know that when they tripled the trash fee in the name of full cost recovery of services to the public, they exempted thousands of households at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.

For its part, the LAUSD has refused every entreaty for years to examine the data from standardized tests to see what they could learn about the success of classroom teachers in raising the scores of their students over time.

Publication by the LA Times of how 6,000 teachers' students scored on tests and the questions that raised about performance have sent the unions and education lobby into a tizzy.

Their cry is that test score performance is only part of the information needed to evaluate how well a teacher is doing.

That's true of course but the unions have fought vigorously for years any kind of valid method of "stulling" teachers using subjective standards based on observation and objective standards based on tests.

What the Times' data shows is that some teachers consistently at the bottom with the students in the classes scoring worse than others and that some teachers consistently produce students who show improvement on tests.

It could be that in many cases the best performing teachers are simply teaching to test and doing nothing to really educate their children.

It could also be that many at the bottom are saying to hell with the tests, the kids need their minds opened up, their imaginations sparked to life, to learn to think and comprehend. It could be that the children they teach have better outcomes over time than those who score well on tests.

But without the data and rigorous examination about what is going on and what works and doesn't and for whom, it remains an example of how our public officials prefer the blissful state of ignorance -- as long as they can keep us ignorant to.

For years, local agencies have done their best to keep salary information secret -- a wall that has been chipped away at by the media and blogosphere.

It's only now when the scandals in Bell and Vernon have raised the public ire that LA city and county officials have posted searchable databases with positions and salaries.

Of course, they withhold the names as much as possible even though they are public information under the law and the Constitution and are available online elsewhere in many cases.

For all the promises of transparency, our local government agencies do their best to keep as much information secret as possible or to make it as obscure and hard to understand as possible.

Politicians and bureaucrats have armies of people to make sure that even when information is made available, it is spun to delude and confuse the public.

Openness and transparency in all matters of government is one of the four pillars of the LA Clean Sweep movement (lacleansweep.com).

We need volunteers -- lawyers and people with good research skills -- to step forward to help us become a clearinghouse of information City Hall doesn't want us to know.

We intend to vigorously use the California Public Records Act to get the information the public needs to know to understand what is really going on at City Hall.

Knowledge is power and the name of the game in reforming City Hall and creating a balanced and inclusive public culture is power.

The community will never have the kind of responsive and responsible city government it yearns for without better knowledge and better people in office.

 

If knowledge is power and ignorance is bliss, United Teachers Los Angeles union head A.J. Duffy has clearly sided with the know-nothings -- something that goes a long way towards explaining the failure of LAUSD over the last three decades.

The LA Times has broken through LAUSD's own commitment to ignorance and provided parents, teachers, students and the general public into how how thousands of students perform on standardized tests over a seven-year period.

It was a long and complex undertaking -- one that has long been sought by many education reformers and could have been done by LAUSD a long time ago if anyone in the failed school system actually wanted to know which teachers improved student test scores and which made them worse.

With the data in hand, the highly paid administrators could have gone back and analyzed what is working and what isn't, why some teachers who are beloved by parents and students consistently have awful outcomes, whether high scores are achieved by teaching to test or by actually helping kids learn English and math.

It would have been revolutionary and still could be if parents use the Times information -- to be published online in a searchable database in the next two weeks -- to demand that the same analysis be conducted system-wide and followed up with in-depth research.

Of course, knowledge of which teachers are good and which are could lead to accountability. Intelligent programs could be designed to help low-performing teachers get better and could lead to their firing if they failed to improve.

Better skills teachers and improved outcomes for students is anathema to Duffy and other union leaders, always has been, always will.

It's why the union has fought all real reform and protected incompetence. It's why public support for public education has waned.

Teachers are trained professionals and need to act like they are and demand to be treated as such. They are like journalists and other white-collar professionals and not accept the one-size-fits-all leveling mentality that makes sense for assembly line workers.

Excellence should be rewarded with six-figure salaries and failure in the classroom should lead to retraining and other measures up to dismissal.

Quality education should be the goal, not mediocrity and failure.

Duffy's answer to the Times' revelations is to call on unionists everywhere to boycott the newspaper.

When Larry Mantle asked him on KPCC today over and over to say what was wrong with knowing how teachers' students performed on standardized tests, Duffy dissembled and evaded, unable to offer a straight answer.

He blamed everyone in the world, attacked the tests and, as usual, defended failure. It's time teachers -- the vast majority of whom are dedicated and capable -- to take control of their union and stand up for what's right for the kids and for themselves.

This School Tax Is A Bargain

For just $8.33 per household a month, voters could save hundreds of L.A. Unified teachers' jobs and help preserve arts education in elementary schools.

Those are the headlines over the LA Times highly-paid columnist Steve Lopez's column today in which he reveals that unlike his newspaper's editorial board, he supports LAUSD's $100 per parcel tax to avoid some teachers from being laid off.

"I say yes, and maybe it's because I have something no member of our editorial board has: A child who attends an L.A. Unified school," writes Lopez.

It says a lot about LAUSD that the 10 or so well-paid editorialists at the Times don't have kids in the city's public schools, something that puts them in step with thousands of other affluent LA residents.

Like Lopez, I'm a firm believer in public schools and my son is a graduate of Taft High and Berkeley and now is a post-graduate student at UC San Diego. The parents of the 650,000 LAUSD students, nearly 90 percent of them poor, immigrant or minorities, also believe in public schools or can't afford to buy the education their kids need.

Quite simply, the district is overwhelmed by students with great needs and has failed to make significant strides for three decades in carrying out the reforms needed to meet them or win the confidence of those who can afford private schools.

Writes Lopez: "Times are tough, and people don't want to dig into their pockets right now, especially since there's no citizen oversight written into the measure. On top of that, the teachers union has stubbornly resisted needed reforms, the district bureaucracy can be awful and the school board is no great shakes, either. So do we really want to send these people more money?"

No, we don't and the reasons are many.

It's not because we don't want to "save the jobs of 350 teachers, along with 400 custodians and campus aides. Seventy-five nurses, counselors and psychologists will be spared. High school class sizes, already in the 40s, won't swell any further. And arts programs in the elementary grades could be preserved," as Lopez enumerates what the $100 million a year that Measure E would generate.

It's not even because a parcel tax is the most regressive tax there is. It's the same $8.33 a month for a tiny cottage in Watts as it is for a Bel Air mansion or an office building worth hundred million dollars.

Voters have backed school bond issue after bond issue -- taxes based on the value of property -- only to see their money go to build schools that cost up to $500 million, only to see the latest bond issue not even needed for seven years from now.

We've seen superintendents and reform plans come and go but we've still not seen major improvement in dropout rates or achievement. We've seen the mayor take over the schools, at least indirectly, and still not seen the changes we were promised. We've recently seen the mayor and district officials collude with the ACLU to stop layoffs of teachers at three impacted schools, two of them directly under the mayor's control.

We're seeing the mayor, Superintendent Ramon Cortines and even teacher union leader A.J. Duffy duck the parcel tax campaign, presumably because their standing in the community is so low they would generate more "no" votes than "yes" votes. Instead, the campaign for Measure E is "hoping that if the turnout is low, only the most passionate voters will take to the polls and support the schools."

There's good reason for running an underground campaign just as events that occurred Tuesday showed.

One of the most important reforms enacted to protect the squandering of taxpayer money at LAUSD was the creation of the Inspector General's office and the appointment of former FBI agent Don Mullinax to the position.

Mullinax proved so tough and thorough that after a few years, they cut his funding and drove him out of office.

On Tuesday, Jerry Thornton, the current Inspector General, met the same fate. According to word leaking out from the school board's closed-door session, Thornton -- who was largely frozen out by the board and top officials for most of a year -- was terminated because his audits of spending and programs had a "gotcha" tone.

A review of recent audits showed Thornton found P-card abuses like someone at an early childhood education center racking up "$1,100 in dating services" on the card of someone else who was on leave and the "potential for abuse and misuse" of P-cards for millions of dollars in district and federal stimulus funds.

Of even greater significance is what happened at Verdugo Hills High on Tuesday and how the district is trying to make this scandal go away.

Community activists have long campaigned to get an investigation into LAUSD practices of marking truants present in class for the purpose of collecting the $25 daily attendance payment from the state.

What happened at Verdugo is that Principal Diane Klewitz sent home forms for parents of graduating seniors authorizing their children to go on three-day field trips to get them out of the way while other students were taking standardized tests and still collect the $25 payment..

The trouble was the field trips were for the students to stay at home, something that would not allow for the $25 daily attendance payment -- costing $5,000 a day in revenue for the 200 seniors given "stay-cations."

Klewitz told Howard Blume of the Times she inherited the tradition from her predecessors. In other words, it's common practice to scam the system and let 17-year-olds party for three days.

"Parents signed a slip saying they'd rather have their children stay home than sit in an auditorium," Klewitz said. "There are issues in terms of safety [when you] ask kids to sit in an auditorium all day. They tend to want to go out and roam the campus or jump the fence and disappear and roam the streets."

So being in school is dangerous but being off campus and doing whatever graduating seniors do is safe?

Some parents disagreed and complained and the Times called for comment so the district ordered the kids back to school today and promised to check whether Verdugo cheated in the past.

Don't expect them to end the practice everywhere else and clean up the truancy issue they have ignored for so long.

These current examples are just small elements in the grand rubric of LAUSD's failures.

Board member Tamar Galatzan, the only board member to vote against putting the parcel tax on the June ballot, explained her opposition in these terms:

"Now is the time to look at every single program, how it's funded, who benefits from it, get rid of the ones that don't work and change the ones where the funding mechanism isn't benefiting our students."

That's exactly what LAUSD needs to do to restore the public trust and get the money it needs to do a better job.

It's what the district has needed to do for 30 years but the district's leadership and the union prefer to go on protecting policies that have failed the students and the city as a whole.

The court fight over layoffs of teachers at three schools exposes the contradictions of liberal dogma, especially the mayor's own roles over the years as a teacher union organizer, ACLU official, state legislator and wannabe master of the LAUSD.

The heart of the matter raised in the ACLU's lawsuit is that UTLA-won job protection provisions in teacher contracts with LAUSD and enshrined in state law by Democrats beholden to the California Teachers Association is that the district doesn't assign teachers to where they are needed. Instead, teachers are hired by principals who naturally choose the best and brightest with the most experience.

The result is that schools in safer and more affluent neighborhoods get the cream of the crop and the most impacted schools in the most dangerous neighborhoods get the dregs and the inexperienced and often poorly trained teachers.

And when it comes to layoffs, it's last-in, first out so schools with the greatest need get even worse faculties as they lose young teachers and wind up substitutes and dumps from better schools.

This has gone on for years without a peep from the ACLU or the mayor.

Beth Barrett in the LA Weekly digs into what has happened in a story headlined "On the Backs of Children -- How UTLA's teacher-layoff rules are devastating inner-city L.A. schools."

This isn't a new phenomena. It was true before LAUSD ran up a $650 million deficit and needed to layoff junior teachers. It's worse now.

"The dual rules protect employees, not students, " Barrett reports. "The dirty secret is that many veteran teachers prefer to work in nicer areas with less crime and more attractive surroundings, where students are better-behaved and better-educated. They choose West L.A., for example, or Woodland Hills, not Watts. When teacher layoffs come, L.A.'s middle-class schools are protected."

Superintendent Ramon Cortines, the mayor's appointee, seems to be of two minds on the issue. He supports job protections but adds that "there also needs to be some flexibility, where principals can hire and retain the people they think are the most qualified."

He is not alone in being timid about how to fix the problem that has led to as many as 72 percent of the teachers facing layoffs at the three schools designated in the ACLU lawsuit -- Liechty, Gompers and Markham, the latter two under the control of the Mayor's Partnership for Schools.

UTLA head A.J. Duffy is all for negotiating a solution that is "good for students and fair for teachers."

"We must continue to work together to challenge this system and prevent disproportionate layoffs from happening year after year at the highest needs schools," the mayor said after a judge issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday to stop the layoffs temporarily. "We must continue to work together to protect our schools' greatest assets - their teachers."

The solution Duffy articulates and the mayor and Cortines would like to see isn't changes in the work rules but more money from taxpayers so they can keep on negotiating unaffordable contracts and protect poor teachers.

LAUSD has put a $100 a property parcel tax on the June ballot -- the most regressive tax imaginable since a 50-story office building downtown pays the same amount as the owner of a cottage in Watts. For his part, Duffy doesn't understand why the state facing continuing massive budget deficits doesn't just raise taxes to provide more money for schools.

Yet, when it comes to real reforms that would allow LAUSD to assign skilled teachers to where they are needed to create balance, the education lobby is nowhere to be found.

When it comes to limiting tenure protections or developing an evaluation system that would allow bad teachers to be fired or rewarding outstanding teachers with merit pay, they are nowhere to be found.

The "dance of the lemons" and the near impossibility of firing incompetents and even child molesters is well documented.

It is an inescapable fact that for all their rhetoric about how much they care about kids, the mayor and the education lobby have resisted all real reforms. They are protecting the very system that has failed for decades now because their solution is always more money, not reform.

For instance, SB 955, backed by the governor, would give districts more flexibility to deviate from seniority laws and allow assignment of teachers based on performance and the needs of schools.

It actually passed out of committee last month on a 5-4 vote but state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg derailed it in the face of opposition from the CTA, one of the biggest spending lobbies in Sacramento. A watered-down version might come back to save political face.

Democrats have the power to fix the system rather than asking taxpayers for more money but that would take the courage to stand up for what is right and necessary.

Instead, the mayor and ACLU have gone to court arguing the disparity in our schools is unconstitutional, and asking the judge to find a solution.

What ought to be unconstitutional is contracts and laws that protect the incompetent and perpetuate the failure of our schools to educate our children.

The mayor has a lot of nerve blaming "people at the highest levels" of DWP management of being "the biggest defenders of the status quo," of failing to respond to the policy direction," of being engaged in "an absolute war" against his leadership.

Year after year, this mayor and previous mayors, this City Council and previous ones have used the DWP as a cash cow of cover up their gross mismanagement of the city and its finances.

They politicized every policy decision, appointed nine general managers in 10 years who lacked the experience or ability to run the largest municipal utility in America, demanded they carry out political agendas without regard to the interests of the residents and businesses, without regard to the need to modernize the infrastructure.

They have failed to carry out comprehensive strategies to reduce reliance on fossil fuels or to achieve moderation in consumption of water and power.

They have turned the citizen watchdogs who are supposed to serve as an independent buffer between politicians and bureaucrats into stooge commissions, corrupting the intent the City Charter.

At every juncture, they have given into blackmail, rewarding IBEW union bully Brian D'Arcy with spectacular contracts, featherbedding and law work rules. They have taken millions of dollars of his union's money for their campaigns and quaked at his threats

D'Arcy takes umbrage at the mayor suggesting his union is "part of the problem and part of the solution, saying he is "shocked and disappointed" at the mayor's "failing to take responsibility for his own actions" in running the DWP.

But so what?

The mayor and his latest unqualified DWP general manager Austin Beutner already have taken any question of wage concessions from D'Arcy off the table even as they develop phony plans for green energy and fake their commitment to transparency when all they want is billions of dollars more in higher rates from the public to add thousands of new jobs to the IBEW rolls and enrich green-washer environmentalists and green investors with insider connections.

The only statement with even an ounce of truth in it that has come out of the mayor's circle was fired GM David Nahai's retort to D'Arcy's pointing the finger of blame at the succession of DWP bosses:

"If Mr. D'Arcy truly wants to uncover the cause of the present problems at the DWP, a good, long look in the mirror might help," Nahai said.

The whole truth is they all need to look in the mirror.

Everyone in power over the last decade or long kept rates low by relying on dirty coal for half the city's power so they could afford the soaring IBEW salaries and benefits and declare as surplus electricity revenue 5, 6, 7, now 8 percent of it to keep the city general solvent.

Understand, the city already gets $300 million from the 10 percent utility tax on power and now Antonio is counting on more than $250 million extra from the "power surplus" next year, $37 million more than the DWP is supposed to supply this year if it turns over the $73.5 million that is being held hostage to force the Council to approve a rate hike.

The general fund gets 12.5 percent of all its revenue from your electricity payments to DWP, money that is used to pay the salaries and benefits of other city workers who account for 80 percent of the basic costs of city government.

Don't kid yourself, the mayor and Council talked about 4,000 layoffs and sweetened pensions for 2,400 other city workers but in the end only 103 employees have even received pink slips and a total of 750 are targeted in the mayor's 2010-11 budget for layoff or transfer.  incentivized early retirement

All that talk was phony because all they have ever been concerned about is protecting city workers' jobs, not public services. Every one of the hundreds of workers transferred already to special funds, the harbor, airport and DWP already are providing services to the public -- not police or fire or library or parks or planning or code enforcement or any other core services.

City Hall has become a jobs program, not a services provider.

If there was any doubt just look at how the mayor has ceded so much of his authority to "jobs czar" Austin Beutner whose stated mission -- when you translate his slick pronouncements lacking in specificity -- is to protect and create city jobs and buy whatever jobs he can in the private sector whether they are in sweatshops or the low-wage service industry.

In case you haven't been paying attention, here are some of Beutner's recent pronouncements:

"What people don't realize is that at the DWP, labor is only 25 percent of its cost. And, they do a good job in their work. What I want to do is look at the other three-quarters of the agency and make sure costs are in line. People have made labor the issue and I don't think it's the top issue facing the agency."

"What I want to do is make sure the mayor, the commission and the City council area all sharing the same information and make sure we avoid falling in to the same sort of trap.
What I have started to do and hope to do is look at all the information we have about the DWP and see what we can do to restore trust."

He admits they can't hire a professional utility manager because they have made such a mess of the DWP, yet he wants to get rid of or demote the best professionals the DWP has, create more DWP jobs, be just transparent enough to get the Council to go along, as they just did deceitfully in approving a 5 percent rate hike permanently, with one rate hike after another.

The problem is bigger than just cutting deals with business, labor and the Council to shove rate hikes down people's throats and make them subsidize the bills of hundreds of thousands of other customers.

The DWP must come clean about everything.

The year-old and almost totally ignored study by PA Consulting, the same firm that just sabotaged the mayor's 20 to 30 percent rate hike, is a blueprint for all that's wrong with the DWP.

Wages and benefit costs must be brought in line with that of private utilities and the same efficiency must be achieved. Costs and rates need to be made clear. We need to know who's really paying the bills and who is not.

When the DWP is totally transparent and property oversight put in place, when plans for fixing the infrastructure and investing in green technology are thoroughly and publicly analyzed, when providing of water and power services and not jobs and subsidized economic development are the strategic goals, then we can talk about how much and how fast we can spend our money to fix what they have broken.

Anything less is just another ripoff of the public by a rogue agency.

UPDATE: Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller shot down the mayor's plan to close most city government agencies two days a week starting Monday, saying he does not have the "unilateral" authority to carry out his threat. Council members said they would "never" approve such a plan.

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There are enough laughs and tears, pathos and bathos, fear and loathing for every taste -- Channel 35's hot new soap opera, City Hall.

Tuesday's episode was one of the best with the apostle of clean energy left muttering in his cowboy hat he must have "misspoke" after being exposed as a liar with even the see-no-evil Janice Hahn calling out, "I think we need some honest answers here."

The mayor, with the mysterious Austin Beutner as his side, perhaps pulling his strings, declared the government would shut down completely for two days except for the cops and others but it was unclear whether that was to protect him or the public from growing unrest and lawlessness in the streets.

The obedient DWP Board then provided a ray of hope in the gloom by pulling back millions of dollars in new spending that could keep LA from going broke until late May.

But the unions put a damper on that slim hope by saying the mayor was playing games with fire and was going to get burned.

By day's end, they all looked like kids playing in a lockbox filled with dynamite.. The mayor accused the Council of using "the politics of 'no'...the kind of demagoguery you see in the Congress...the kind of scare tactics you saw around the healthcare debate."

Paul Koretz responded that the mayor's behavior was "bizarre" and worried that "a crazier and crazier game of chicken" would lead to somebody actually getting hurt, maybe everybody.

The overnight reviews were devastating -- for the mayor.

LA Times Editorial: L.A.'s financial quagmire: The city is in deep trouble, and the mayor and the Department of Water and Power are to blame

Daily News Editorial: Independent eyes: DWP oversight post needs to be as far removed from politics as possible

What heartache and heartbreak will unfold today as the Council goes back to its snail-like efforts to micro-manage the budget crisis.

Will they finally make some decisions? Will they denounce the mayor or cuddle up to him? Will the unions make love or war? Tune in at 10 a.m. for today's episode of City Hall, the LA soap opera.

A lot more is at stake in LA these days than just electricity rate hikes and closed parks and libraries.

Our system of government itself has been corrupted to the point of dysfunction. That's why the city is running massive deficits and facing the threat of bankruptcy, why workers facing layoffs are being transferred and getting huge pay raises, why City Hall costs too much and delivers too little from crumbling streets and sidewalks to green energy.

It didn't just happen overnight. The cancer of corruption has been eating away at City Hall a long time with unions, developers, contractors, consultants and their campaign cash holding almost all the power, and the people almost none.

The administration of Antonio Villaraigosa has accelerated this trend by using slogans as symbols in place of real policies -- a million trees, mayoral takeover of the schools, the carbon surcharge to close coal power plants to name a few examples -- and intimidation in place of persuasion to coerce commissioners and bureaucrats into docile obedience to his self-serving political agenda.

Commissioners are supposed to be citizen watchdogs on the operations of all city departments but they have become mere lapdogs with rare exceptions like Jane Usher and Nick Patsaouras who resigned as heads of Planning and DWP rather than do the mayor's bidding when they knew what they were ordered to do was wrong.

None of the four DWP Commission members had such qualms last Thursday when they approved massive rate hikes without even considering the Council-ordered report by PA Consulting which called for major changes in policy to achieve transparency, effective management and coherent green energy policies.

They didn't even have copies of the report on their desks when they rubber-stamped the mayor's ill-conceived "carbon surcharge" policy. They didn't even consider the recommendations of the DWP citizens committees when they proposed gutting efforts to create an independent Rate Payer Advocate by putting it under Controller Wendy Greuel, who owes her political career to the IBEW as much as to her personal charm.

As they did when the commission approved a 2,000 percent increase in the Energy Cost Adjustment Factor surcharge six months ago, the City Council on Tuesday repudiated the DWP Commission's approval of an 800 percent increase, and did so unanimously.

In the space of eight days, the mayor had gone from proclaiming a 20 to 30 percent rate increase -- which he falsely claimed was just a $2.50 a month increase -- as necessary to raise nearly $700 million extra annually to replace DWP's coal-burning plants with solar and wind energy.

He ignored the fact that the DWP's five-year plan contains no provision to reduce the utility's reliance on coal for 45 percent of its energy, the only reason its rates are 16 percent lower than other utilities.

By Thursday, the commission changed the story. It based its action not on replacing coal but on avoiding a credit rating downgrade due to the "under-collection" of $130 million in revenue when natural gas prices soared three years ago -- a fraction of the revenue it had declared surplus and turned over to the general fund during that time.

By Tuesday, the mayor was resorting to the desperate argument that the city will go bankrupt if rates aren't raised high enough to keep paying $220 million a year -- 8 percent of all electricity revenue -- to the general fund.

The shifting argument, the dishonesty of DWP officials, the lack of transparency cost him dearly politically and in terms of credibility.

City Hall is now in chaos.

Early retirement with sweetened pensions for 2,400 workers, threatened layoffs of 4,000 others have left nearly every department outside the DWP, Harbor, Airport and LAPD into confusion with gaps in skills and experiences and uncertainty about which services to protect and how to provide them.

We are nine months into the fiscal and still have a budget deficit of more than $200 million with much bigger deficits looming in the years ahead.

It's clear nobody at City Hall has a clue about what to do. They are only making matters worse.

The commitment the Council made Tuesday in defying the mayor's bullying tactics and promising to bring the shadowy policies of the DWP into the light of day is the first step on the long road to cleaning up the corruption at City Hall.

Citizen commissioners should take heed, starting with the DWP Commission.

In their acquiescence to the mayor's coercion, they have failed to fulfill their duty to provide oversight on the DWP. They have been called out by the public and the Council, their actions denounced.

The honorable thing would be to resign immediately. And so should every other commissioner who has succumbed to pressure from the mayor or others to put special interests ahead of public interests.

It's my belief that few would still be serving if they put honor ahead of position.

Department managers and other high-ranking bureaucrats have the same moral obligation to stand up in public and private for what is right for the city even in the face of threats to fire them.

It's asking a lot of people to put themselves at risk for the common good of the city and its people. But if those in high positions don't make a stand for what's best for the city, what do the think the rabble, of which I'm proud to be part of, to do?

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.