WHO WE ARE-It was the closing days of the dreariest mayoral campaign imaginable and the unions that so heavily backed the indecisive Wendy Greuel flooded the city’s poor neighborhoods with mailings and sound trucks blaring with the good news: $15 an hour minimum wage if she wins.
Eric Garcetti was beside himself, denouncing Greuel for taking the millions of dollars in union money he wished he’d gotten and calling the ploy to nearly double the minimum wage a "cynical attempt to buy votes."
It gives, he told reporters, “false hope to people who are struggling to make ends meet … a $15 minimum wage, that sets up a false expectation."
You can’t call Garcetti a total hypocrite for coming out on Labor Day in support of raising the minimum wage 22 percent every year to bring it to $13.25 an hour by 2017 when he will be seeking re-election.
Maybe he’s only a three-quarters hypocrite though you can bet all you’ve got it will get to $15 an hour soon enough.
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Everybody who wants something from City Hall – business, labor, even the citizenry, especially the citizenry – treats those who hold public office with respect as if they were honorable men and women dedicated to public service.
But everybody knows – especially business and labor – that the nation’s highest paid municipal officials are servants of a political machine that rewards them handsomely now and for the rest of their lives even though they fail miserably at their jobs.
“Infrastructure Cracks as Los Angeles Defers Repairs,” the New York Times reported Monday, noting:
“With each day, it seems, another accident illustrates the cost of deferred maintenance on public works, while offering a frustrating reminder to this cash-strained municipality of the daunting task it faces in dealing with the estimated $8.1 billion it would take to do the necessary repairs. The city’s total annual budget is about $26 billion.”
Actually, the city’s total budget is just about the same as the cost of repairing the infrastructure – not the $26 billion the newspaper’s LA bureau chief and Garcetti pal Adam Nagourney reported, an error which may explain in part why newspapers are beyond repair and redemption.
Clearly, newspapers are not alone.
Take my friend Kevin James, for instance. Here’s a right-wing Republican talk show host who suffered a supercharged smackdown from Chris Mathews on MSNBC’s “Hardball” in 2008 when he was accusing presidential candidate Barack Obama of being guilty of “appeasement” of terrorists. For five humiliating minutes, Mathews mocked him for not knowing the poster child of appeasement, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who gave the Nazis half of Czechoslovakia in the belief it would satiate the Hitler’s appetite for conquest.
Now James is the appeaser of interests and values he has abhorred all his life. He got thousands of conservative voters to switch to Garcetti in the mayoral runoff and was rewarded with the city’s cushiest job: Chairman of the Board of Public Works where he’s paid a handsome $140,000 a year to steer the city’s money and contracting machine to the right players and serve as the mayor’s point man for billions of dollars in new taxes to pay for street and sidewalk repairs the city has neglected to make for 30 years.
Assuming Nagourney got his quote right in Monday’s article, James said:
“A lot of people are going to say they feel overtaxed. I’m not saying we’re not. But it means going to the voters, as I am prepared to do on behalf of Mayor Garcetti, to make the economic argument that $26 a year, which is what you would spend on a half-cent sales tax increase, is a lot better than $830 a year to fix your car.”
Look, I worked in corporate journalism for most of 50 years so I’m not a virgin to the pressures to sell out to the people who pay the bills. But there is a difference between right and wrong whether the city’s leaders still can make the distinction after years of publicly mouthing words that have nothing to do with what is really going on in back rooms.
Clearly, Eric Garcetti has that problem as he demonstrated once again on Labor Day when he ignored his campaign statements on the minimum wage and the reason why so many people live in poverty and misery in the city, namely decades of City Hall policies that drove away middle class jobs and people and allowed the infrastructure to deteriorate to this point.
No doubt the working poor need a break and a higher minimum wage can help as long as it doesn’t lead to job eliminations as the living wage has. At $15.84 an hour – more than twice the federal minimum wage and nearly $6 more than the newly increased state minimum – employers with city contracts or subsidies of one sort or another often find they can get by with fewer workers who have more skills and motivation.
Taxpayers bear the brunt of costs of the living wage just as ratepayers bear the brunt of soaring utility charges and just as consumers will bear the brunt of the costs of massive hikes in the living wage.
The people most affected are pretty much the same: people just getting by in a town where the cost of living is among the nation’s highest.
Short of a total transformation of America from a materialistic greed-based society to a happiness-based society where people work less and enjoy life more, the only real answer to the problem of poverty is better education and more good jobs. But that takes leadership which is now and has been lacking for so long.
That lack of leadership was on full display at Garcetti’s Labor Day extravaganza where he boasted he is an independent man and was not giving in to labor’s demands for a citywide minimum wage of $15.37 an hour.
No way, Garcetti said, not one cent more than $13.25 an hour. See he’s not the hypocrite and a coward so many see him as.
“This is fair, this is common sense,” Garcetti said. “This is good for business, this is good for the community … without doing any damage in terms of the job losses, that we wouldn't want to see, if it were too high … poverty wages hold back our economic recovery.”
The business community isn’t so sure about Garcetti’s plan – not the apparel industry sweatshops, the hotel and entertainment industry exploitative operations, not the Chamber of Commerce downtown or VICA in the Valley.
"This a huge increase on labor costs, especially for small businesses and nonprofits, who have no ability to just raise their prices or absorb increased costs," VICA’s Stuart Waldman said.
Added County Chamber of Commerce head Gary Toebben: Garcetti could do more to create jobs by "making City Hall more helpful to those businesses who are interested in investing in Los Angeles."
But be clear, if combined with higher sales taxes on consumers, continued elimination of business taxes and even richer subsidies, they would suck it up and swallow deep and get in line as usual.
All that matters in this town is power and money as long as the populace behaves like herds of sheep and tribes of zombies.
The City Council’s boss Herb Wesson noted that seven of the 15 councilmembers stood by Garcetti on Labor Day – one more would have been an illegal quorum – with the mindless City Attorney Mike Feuer behind him on one side and the soulless Eli Broad on the other.
“That sends a message,” Wesson said.
The fabulously wealthy billionaire Broad … who has created his urban fantasy of a New York City in LA at taxpayer expense not his own … opined: "I truly believe that raising the minimum wage is good for business,” adding that billions of additional revenue would circulate through the economy as workers spend more.
Eli Broad, the faux socialist – it’s not hard to love that for pure hypocrisy.
The real voice that matters, the voice that brings them all to their knees in obedience, is the voice of Maria Elena Durazo, the ultimate labor boss whose pronouncements in public and private carry the weight of true authority.
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"We are going to craft the best possible policy to raise that minimum wage and get to $15 an hour and lift workers out of poverty," Durazo said.
You can take her word for it because she’s the real boss of the failed political machine. She owns them all from the billionaires and business community to virtually every political figure in the city and much of the county.
LA is at the point of no return and all of us who are not inside the bubble of power are nothing but bystanders to its destruction, mostly silent, sometimes whining, never courageous enough to stand up for our values and interests.
That’s what makes Los Angeles so great – you have to hate it to really love it.
(Ron Kaye is a lifetime journalist, writer and political observer. He is the former editor of the Daily News and the founder of the Saving LA Project. He writes occasionally for CityWatch and can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 72
Pub: Sep 5, 2014