LOS ANGELES

URBAN PERSPECTIVE-The day the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died, Appeals Court Judge and Scalia’s nominated replacement, Neil Gorsuch, said he could barely get down a ski run in Colorado because he was so blinded by tears at his death. This was not a private utterance or personal feeling of deep emotion that he shared with friends and family. He told of his profound sorrow in a speech in April 2016 at Case Western University. Gorsuch wanted the world to know that Scalia was more than just a heartfelt friend. He was a man and a judge whose legal and judicial mindset he was in total lockstep with. 

Scalia represented judicially everything that liberal Democrats, civil rights, civil liberties, women rights, and public interest groups regard as wrong with the Supreme Court. His opinions and votes on crucial cases read like a “what’s what” of legal horror stories. Scalia tipped the White House to Bush in Bush versus Gore in 2000, voted to gut voting rights, oppose same sex marriage and gay rights protections, scrap the checks on corporate spending on elections, whittle away at abortion rights and to give free rein to corporations to discriminate by narrowing down who could file class action lawsuits. 

The only reason that Gorsuch hasn’t matched his mentor and idol, Scalia’s, 19^th Century grounded voting record on key cases is because he hasn’t been on the court for the number of decades as Scalia was on the high court. But there’s enough in his thin resume on some cases that pertain to abortion rights, planned parenthood funding, a powerhouse federal judiciary, and most menacingly, the strictest of strict reading of the constitutionalism (branded “originalism”) to serve as fair warning of what’s to come if he gets on the SCOTUS. And, as with Scalia, it won’t be pretty. 

This is one of the few times that Senate Democrats can do exactly what Senate Republicans did with Obama’s pick to replace Scalia, Merrick Garland: use the filibuster to say no. The GOP concocted the blatant lie to justify their obstructionism that Obama was a lame duck president, and lame duck presidents don’t and shouldn’t have the right to put someone on the high court on their way out. They pooh-poohed the fact that the Senate has approved other lame duck president’s nominations to the courts, including Reagan’s pick of Anthony Kennedy in 1988, Reagan’s last year in office. 

They blocked Garland not because of protocol, propriety, or tradition, but because of raw, naked and brutal partisan politics. The GOP understands that the Supreme Court is not just a neutral arbiter to settle legal disputes. It is a lethal weapon to skirt congressional gridlock and serve a dual role as a judicial and legislative body. This has meant scrapping the long-standing tradition on the court in which justices based their legal decisions solely on the merits of the law, constitutional principles and the public good, and not on ideology. Trump and his hard-right conservative backers are fully aware that the court’s power to be de facto legislators could last for decades. After all, presidents and congresspersons come and go, but justices can sit there until death if they choose. Scalia was proof of that. He sat on the bench for 30 plus years. 

Gorsuch is young, fit, and conceivably could duplicate Scalia’s tenure on the high court. He would sit there long after Trump is gone, and long after other future Democratic presidents that might sit in the Oval Office depart. During those years, he will be a key vote, if not the key vote, on many cases involving labor protections, civil rights, civil liberties, gay and abortion rights, corporate power, environmental issues, education, the death penalty, criminal justice system reforms, voting rights, and many other issues that will alter and shape law and public policy for years, perhaps decades to come. 

Gorsuch was carefully vetted by the Heritage Foundation when it submitted its list to Trump of reliable ultra-conservative judges who would rigidly toe the ultra-conservative line. They took no chance of recommending any judge who might in any way be a high court turncoat, and experience a judicial conversion in philosophy as a few judges thought to be reliably conservative have done in the past. The stakes are simply too high to risk that in the relentless drive by ultra-conservatives to roll back the gains in civil, women’s and labor rights of the past half century. 

The pressure will be enormous on conservative Democratic senators in the Red states to cave quickly and support Gorsuch, by rejecting a filibuster. They’ll be hit with everything from the stock argument that presidents have the right to pick their SCOTUS justices to outright threats that they’ll be top targets when election time rolls around. It will take much for them to do what the GOP did with Garland, and that is to say no and back a filibuster. If they cave, they’ll be terribly sorry.

(Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author, political analyst and a CityWatch contributor. He is the author of In Scalia’s Shadow: The Trump Supreme Court (Amazon Kindle). He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

NEW GEOGRAPHY--With the first billionaire in the White House, Wall Street booming and, for the first time in almost a decade, very solid and broad based job growth, one would think America’s business elite would be beaming. But that’s not so because the country’s moguls are more divided than at any time in recent history.

This conflict stems largely from divergent interests among rival factions of the putative ruling class. Trump’s backers tend to have links with the “real” economy, that is, those people who make things, such as energy producers, domestic manufacturers, agribusiness, suburban home-builders, and aerospace firms. These interests are increasingly concentrated in parts of America Trump painted “red”—the South, the Midwest, the Great Plains, and Appalachia.

On the other side lies the “ascendant” ephemeral economy, based in such industries as media, entertainment, software, and social media, as well as their financial backers. These industries are less affected by environmental regulations than those in more tangible lines of business. They are also concentrated in the deep blue slivers along the coasts and in college towns, the very places where the progressive social and environmental agenda is most deeply entrenched.

Obama’s Legacy: A New Post-industrial ruling class

Barack Obama’s most “transformative” achievement was the consolidation of this potentially hegemonic, post-industrial ruling class. They reaped high returns from the Obama era embrace of ultra-low interest rates, nudging billions into risky tech ventures and speculative urban real estate. These increasingly oligopolistic interests  also benefited  from a Justice Department that eschewed anti-trust inquiries in such areas as smartphone operating systems, search, and social media, where the main players often control  80 and even 90 percent share globally. IT, telecommunications, and media now compose America’s most concentrated sector and is consolidating somewhat faster than older industries, such as manufacturing, property. and wholesale trade.

In the past, Democrats received some support from business, but the GOP ruled the corporate mainstream. As William Domhoff  illustrated in his classic study Fat Cats and Democrats, Democrats drew support from outsiders, some of them less than savory, in industries from energy,  real estate, and gambling (Trump himself was a long-time Democrat). They also drew on diverse industries. As recently as the Bill Clinton years, Bill White, a savvy oil and gas attorney from Houston, served as chairman of the Democratic Party. It is doubtful now that someone with that background, even with White’s prodigious skills, will again be allowed into the party’s inner sanctum.

Obama’s post-industrial corporate elite emerged in his first 2008 election, with Google, Microsoft, Time Warner, IBM, and General Electric (NBC) ranking among the largest business donors. During his time in office, companies like Google enjoyed unprecedented access to the White House: More than 250 people moved between jobs at Google or related firms, the federal government, and Democratic political campaigns.

In the process,  the technology and media oligarchies became core funders of the  Democratic Party. This could prove more important in the future, as six of the ten and eight of the top 15 richest people on the planet, according to Forbes, derive their fortunes from these businesses. And this could just be the beginning: All of the 12 richest entrepreneurs under 40 come from the tech industry.

Even Hillary Clinton, a far less appealing figure than Obama, garnered most of the big money from tech oligarchs and their employees. Open Secrets notes that among private firms the largest business donors to her campaign included tech media establishments, including Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Microsoft, Apple, Time Warner, and Comcast.

Trump’s victory shocked this cozy alliance, and placed them in opposition. Silicon Valley, along with its idiot aunt, Hollywood, are now the most likely business constituencies to go into hysterics over the most recent inane Trump tweet, with some CEOs active participants in the anti-Trump “resistance.” Those few in Silicon Valley who backed Trump, like Peter Thiel, are now subject to campaigns to drive them from prominent boards. Uber’s Travis Kalanick, himself a rather unpleasant character, has been forced by such pressure to remove himself from any association with the current White House.

Ideology here mixes with self-interest. Mark Zuckerberg, whose $50 billion net worth makes him easily the wealthiest American under 40, recently issued a pronunciamiento that places his company’s objective as far from Trumpian nationalism as possible. He wants to create “a global community” even though his industry has helped foster the most social isolation since people discovered caves. His vision of the future, notes Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky, offers something of a “social dystopia” run by Facebook’s management, with terms of discussion powered by computer algorithms.  

It’s clear what won’t make the cut in Zuckerberg’s “community”: Facebook is  increasingly hostile to any dissenting opinions from the right. The traditional media now wholly or partially  owned by the “ephemeral” economy oligarchs—Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, Microsoft’s MSNBC and Carlos Slim’s New York Times—have also joined the anti-Trump “resistance,” having just previously served as claques for Obama and Hillary Clinton. Newsrooms may always have tilted somewhat to the left, but today they seem about as objective as those in Putin’s Russia or, for that matter, Fox News.

Immigration may be the biggest hot button issue separating the oligarchs from a   White House that has fanned nativist flames. But for them, embracing immigration—most notably the odious HIB visa program—does not mean adhering to legal norms or American traditions. Instead, their immigration vision fits that of companies seeking indentured tech servants as well as a cheap and inexhaustible supply of undocumented cheap dog-walkers, toenail painters, and nannies.

For this constituency, neither Trump’s proposed infrastructure program nor his moves to deregulate the economy have much appeal. After all, the Bay Area oligarchs seem perfectly fine with California’s regulatory insanity, and the piteously poor condition of the state’s infrastructure. Who needs roads and bridges when you have the cloud?

Of course, not all the new ruling class can dismiss Trump so haughtily. Elon Musk, a Hillary supporter who still sits on the new president’s economic council, needs skilled tradespeople and reasonable regulation to build electric cars and rockets. He yearns to play a role in Trump’s “lunar gold rush.” Caught in the middle, Musk is trying to make nice even in the face of assaults sent to him from the “resistance.”

Trump’s Oligarchs: Old School and Middle Class Friendly

The Obama oligarchs, like establishmentarians everywhere, clearly missed what the Chicago sociologist Richard Longworth predicted two decades ago: that rapid globalization,   now known as Davos capitalism,  would cause a full scale “social crisis.” The middle and working classes, as the Guardian has correctly noted, have little reason to love “superstar” oligarchs who employ few of them and, according to a recent paper by the Bureau of Economic Research, are a primary reason for the growth of inequality.

Trump’s oligarchs, for their part, reflect interests that jibe more closely with those of many middle and working class families. Trump’s so called  “cabinet of billionaires”—their  net worth is estimated at $14 billion—rightly has elicited criticism from   the Guardian and Mother Jones, which predictably also labeled them a bit too pro-Russian. And to be sure, Wall Street’s hoary hand, notably the ubiquitous Goldman Sachs, has secured  top posts at both the Treasury and the head of the National Economic Council.

Nonetheless, these billionaires have embraced a president who trolls corporations sending jobs overseas and bullies foreign firms, like Softbank, into committing themselves to major employment in the states. Obama and his academic coterie might dismiss such behavior as unseemly, darkly nationalistic and even ahistorical, but there may well be political gold there.

Of course, self-interest is a guiding factor, something particularly evident in the energy industry. The Trump cabinet features Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon Mobil, as its secretary of State,   Rick Perry, former governor of Texas, as Energy secretary, and Oklahoma’s former attorney general, Scott Pruitt, as director of the EPA. David Wolff, one of the Houston’s largest land owners, notes  the change of administration has sparked renewed optimism across the energy belt. “It is nice to have a president who doesn’t hate your major industry,” Wolff quips.    

Many manufacturers—at least those who build products  here—also have reason to celebrate the Trump ascension. A lot of firms felt threatened by the Democrats’ regulatory regime, which threatened to boost their energy and other costs. They also were the primary victims of globalist trading polices embraced by the grandees of both parties. The 79-year-old billionaire Wilbur Ross, the new Commerce secretary, made his fortune by buying and selling companies in such trade-impacted sectors as steel, textiles, and coal. Trade advisor Peter Navarro is well-known for pushing neo-protectionist and nationalist policies abhorred by the new oligarchs but popular in large parts of the country.

Interregnum or Change of Direction?

To the increasingly disconnected and increasingly concentrated blue state media, Ross and his ilk may epitomize an unhealthy attraction to “backward” sectors that need to be “disrupted” by the geniuses of Silicon Valley. Given their sense of historical inevitably, the tech oligarchs may feel that this shift is just a temporary halt in their drive, as notes Newsweek’s Michael Wolff,  to create “a more careful, regulated, and corrected world.”

Yet many more Americans—particularly blue collar Americans—may prefer the Trump approach. Manufacturing employs some 11 million workers compared to 2.7 million in information. Both have seen their share of jobs go down since 2004, but, suggests the Bureau of Labor Statistics, industrial jobs are likely to remain six times as numerous by 2024. Throw in the mining sector, which includes energy, and the difference is expected to be roughly 9.4 million jobs compared to 2.4 million in the information sector.

Ironically, the workforce in these industries is far more diverse than in those businesses run by the Obama oligarchs, who loudly champion the rainbow ideal but rarely in practice.   Silicon Valley  employs very few African-Americans or Hispanics; they make up barely 6 percent, for example, of Facebook’s workforce while overall leading tech firms employ barely 5 percent. In contrast,  according to 2015 data, 16.2 percent of manufacturing workers are Latinos and 9.7 percent are African-Americans. In mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction, Latinos make up 16.9 percent of the workforce and African-Americans 4.8 percent, while in agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, nearly a quarter of the workforce—23.0 percent—is Latino and 2.7 percent African-American.

If Trump policies can unleash a boom in these industries, he may have more staying power than many in the chattering classes admit. At least the Trumpians offer the prospect of upward mobility, greater independence, and the pride of work. In contrast, Silicon Valley’s vision, notes Greg Ferenstein, who has researched the views of the post-industrial elite, suggests a world where a “greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people”—that is, the denizens of Silicon Valley. “Everyone else,” he continues, “will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ‘gig work’ and government aid. “

One has to wonder whether the prospect of widespread downward mobility for all but the “best and brightest” will prove very attractive to the majority of Americans. In contrast, Trump’s outsized promises, however unrealistic, may retain surprisingly long-term appeal. 

Trump’s business cronies may be grizzled, and even reactionary. They still may well end up as anachronisms, the last devotes of a dying industrial, largely white, America. But the Trump interregnum could become a new dominant paradigm if the Obama oligarchs fail to develop a vision that allows a better future than the jobless, socially stagnant and politically correct one now on offer.

(Joel Kotkin is executive editor of New Geography … where this analysis was first posted. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. He lives in Orange County, CA.)

-cw

EDUCATION POLITICS--If you know Shakespeare's play “Julius Caesar,” the Ides of March -- or March 15 – it is the date in 44 BC when Julius Caesar was assassinated. In California, the Ides of March in 2017 might in the future be looked upon as the date the new California School Dashboard (CSD) student performance evaluation system signaled the purposeful assassination of anything remotely resembling real accountability for the public education system. 

On that date state officials unveiled the CSD public education accountability system that, in reality, is the most comprehensive way yet devised to further obfuscate how students are actually not doing well in public schools. Under CSD it is virtually impossible to address the subjective needs of students, since the CSD assessment never allows for an objective standard to measure even minimally their actual education levels. 

Anything that remotely approximates an objective standard for measuring how students and specific schools are doing -- in comparison to all other students and schools in the state -- has been eliminated in favor of a new color-coded system offering feel good assessments that give contrived acceptable rankings based on “improvement” without any notion of holding students to the mastery of grade-level standards they will ultimately be required to have when they leave school and try (unsuccessfully) to be gainfully employed. 

In a March 16 article, the LA Times acknowledged that this new CSD assessment framework replacing the prior objective standard of the Academic Performance Index (API), "paints a far rosier picture of academic achievement than past measurements." If the patient/student is running a high fever and is very sick, you can either treat the patient/student or break the thermometer. CSD breaks the thermometer. 

So now, under CSD "80% of schools serving grades three through eight are ranked medium to high performing...when last year the majority of the [same] students failed to reach English and math standards." The fact that "those schools whose average math scores fell below proficiency [now] receive the dashboard's highest rating for math" is never addressed. 

There is clearly an effort by the CSD to obfuscate the continuing failure of too many schools and students. The API objective standard let you know that, if you were in an 800 or 900 API school, things were okay; but if you were in a 400 or 500 API school, you couldn't learn even if you wanted to. The CSD makes this kind of assessment or accountability impossible. 

Given the pressure on teachers to pass students whether or not they have been able to do the work, how can passing or rates of graduation be used in CSD assessment when they do not reflect an objective, independently verifiable level of academic achievement? 

CSD even takes into account suspension rates at a school without ever asking the threshold question as to whether teachers still have the power to suspend students from a class where they are making it impossible for their fellow students to learn. 

As reported in the LA Times, Carrie Hahnel of Education Trust West in Oakland said: [the CSD is] "terribly misleading -- communicating things are just fine even if they're not." More telling is what Jenny Singh of the California Department of Education said in opting for having blue or green positive ranked schools: “You don’t want to have an accountability system come out and say there’s not going to be any blue or green schools.” Does she believe this is true, even if you have to engage in hiding the true level of too many schools in order to do so? 

It is not surprising that LAUSD officials have called the new CSD system "useful," since its lack of clear objectively verifiable standards of academic excellence will now allow them to continue putting their careers ahead of the needs of their failing students. For them, it’s a "fairer way of looking at schools," because it continues to not hold them accountable for predictable student failure that could be easily addressed -- if these students were assessed and educated in a timely manner.

(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EDUCATION POLITICS--California’s school districts expect to issue close to 1,750 teacher layoff notices despite a statewide teacher shortage.

Wednesday was the deadline for districts statewide to issue pink slips, or reduction in force notices, to teachers, counselors, administrators and other credentialed employees who could be laid off at the end of the school year because of potential budget shortfalls.

The 1750-layoff figure is an estimate issued by the California Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union, based on a survey of key districts.

Educators and union leaders estimate that few if any of the pink-slipped teachers come from the most in-demand jobs, including special education, math, science and bilingual education. (State law requires layoffs be based on seniority, but also allows for districts to protect teachers with limited experience if they’re credentialed in jobs that would be difficult to fill otherwise.)

The teacher layoffs are part of an annual ritual as districts “prepare for the worst” when they start crafting spending plans for next school year that are based on conservative early state budget estimates.

Typically, many of these notices are rescinded before the end of the school year as districts receive better funding estimates from lawmakers before the final budget is approved in June.

But these notices also come during a time when many education leaders, lawmakers, and researchers say California is experiencing the worst teacher shortage  in more than a decade. So it raises the question as to why these teachers face the threat of job loss when so many districts are desperate to hire and retain them.

The answer lies with the set of conflicting state laws for state budget projections and requirements for giving teachers advance warning regarding possible job loss.

By law, public school districts in California had until March 15 to send notices to teachers and other credentialed staff who might be laid off at the end of the school year. This amounts to about a 90-day notice.

Districts make these projections based on the governor’s preliminary budget proposal released two months prior, in January.

This year, Gov. Jerry Brown proposed a minimal 2.1 percent increase for K-12 education in January, which educators said would not be enough to cover districts’ increasing salaries, benefits and costs.

“It’s already a struggle to find qualified teachers, especially in hard to fill jobs,” said Eric Heins, president of the California Teachers Association. “Districts and the state should instead be working on finding better incentives to keep their teachers.”

The California Teachers Association says that has led to about three dozen districts sending a combined 1,750 pink slips. These figures represent a small fraction of the more than 325,000 teachers statewide. And the number of notices is far below the 25,000 that were sent out in the peak of the recession in 2010.

San Diego Unified, the state’s second-largest district, sent out 850 notices, the most of any district. Santa Ana Unified sent out 287 notices. Montebello Unified sent out 333 notices. About 30 other districts sent out 50 or fewer, according to the teachers union.

Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest district, sent out 1,300 notices to administrators, but none to classroom teachers. So these figures were not included in the union estimate despite the fact that many of those administrators could bump back to a teaching position if they have a credential.

Los Angeles Unified spokeswoman Barbara Jones said the district hopes to rescind most, if not all of these notices. And even if some administrators return to the classroom, no current teachers would lose their job, she said.

Analysts and educators expect the governor’s updated version of the budget released in May to be more generous to K-12 education, especially as the state’s economy has continued to grow, meaning most of these jobs will be saved.

Teri Burns, legislative analyst for the California School Boards Association, said that even if most of the teachers receiving notices end up keeping their jobs, this yearly cycle exacerbates the state’s teacher shortage.

“These notices disrupt peoples’ lives unnecessarily,” she said. “If you’re a teacher and you receive one of these notices, then you start looking or another job, or even look to leave the profession.”

Burns said for students considering careers as teachers, reading reports of pink slips given each spring to teachers might signal that it’s a very volatile career.

The California School Boards Association has recommended that the state eliminate the March 15 warning deadline, and instead use the June 15 date for informing teachers that they’re actually being laid off.

Other groups have also proposed that move, but it’s been opposed by the California Teachers Association, with union leaders saying teachers need as much warning as possible to look for other jobs or make other preparations just in case they face unemployment.

Joshua Pechthalt, president of the California Federation of Teachers, the state’s second-largest teachers union, said the number of spring layoff notices is also not a valid measurement of how the state is being affected by the teacher shortage.

“You have to look at whether a district giving out layoff notices is experiencing declining enrollment, or if they have their own unique budget problems. Not every district is the same,” he said.

Districts facing the most severe teacher shortages are reporting no layoff notices including San Francisco Unified, San Jose Unified, Oakland Unified, and Fresno Unified.

This story originally appeared on EdSource

(Fermin Leal is EdSource’s career and college readiness reporter, based in Southern California. Fermin previously worked for 13 years as an education reporter at The Orange County Register. He covered k-12 education and the California State and University of California systems. This piece originated at EdSource and was posted most recently at Huff Post.) 

-cw

EDITING INFORMATION-Only a fool would accuse the mainstream LA press of dabbling in fake news. But what to call a political endorsement, then, that omits mention of a raging and worsening fiscal crisis caused in large part by the endorsee? 

In their endorsements of Mayor Garcetti, every one of the mainstream news outlets, while chastising him for seemingly serious failings, omitted any mention of a fact which was well-known at the time --and in many cases even reported by those outlets on January 9, 2017 -- that since November 2016, the reserve fund has stood at about $295 million, a number the CAO reported was “only precariously above” the minimum amount required under city policy -- 5% of the General Fund budget. They also neglected to report that the LA City Council had just been forced to change the law in order to borrow up to $70 million through judgement obligation bonds, a form of borrowing not used since 2010.  

Why does this matter? Why omit a fact that readers would no doubt consider important in choosing how to vote, or just as important, in choosing whether to vote? 

Maybe readers wouldn’t have changed their vote. And it’s unlikely that the outcome would have been changed. But discussion of the issue might have produced pressure to expand coverage of the race, and in any case would have given the public a chance to ask tougher questions of the Mayor -- to make him earn his reelection – and to commit to meaningful reforms. Maybe even hold his feet to the fire.  

By offering seemingly “tough” criticisms of the Mayor yet excluding genuinely tough topics, the media misrepresents "by omission" and so denies readers their right to think for themselves.  

The motive for engaging in such whitewashing? You’ll have to ask the press outlets. Incumbents often set up “velvet rope” systems whereby reporters who criticize them too harshly are denied access. This can hurt business, and so they avoid stories that are too hard-hitting, especially in an election where the outcome seems certain. Why stick out their necks by reporting things unfavorable to the incumbent when they know it will be he who has the power after the election?  

The problem with this attitude is that it misleads the audience, and we believe it hurts the bottom line. Readers want hard-hitting truth. And incumbents respect organizations that don’t kowtow because they think they have to. The best way to deal with the velvet rope is to blow right past it.

(Eric Preven and Joshua Preven are public advocates for better transparency in local government. Eric is a Studio City based writer-producer and Joshua is a teacher.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CORRUPTION WATCH--People do not operate on the basis of reality. Rather, they function on their beliefs. If their beliefs are close to reality, then their actions are more likely to be beneficial to them. Thus, logic tells us that people want information which reflects reality as much as possible. Then, their actions would benefit them as much as possible. 

Logic is incorrect because the belief that people operate on logic is false. Experience shows that people accept as true information which pleases them. The more the news pleases them, the more likely that they will believe it. 

We should point out that many people love to feel outraged. People who feel cheated, want their abusers to be trounced. Some people love to feel angry and news which allows them to vent rage is a narcotic for them. 

When the Politics of Revenge hooked up with Alt-Right news, a powerful force was created. The Politics of Revenge, as the name implied, was not based on positive affirmations of becoming better in every way every day, but instead it zeroed in on making the SOBs pay. 

The path for Alt-Right news had been paved by the mainstream media which had perfected Alt-News to an art form. While some newspapers followed the Who, What, When, Where, Why, How format, many newspapers such as the Hearst Publications and Los Angeles Times did not. From its start, a main purpose of the LA Times was to promote the agenda of whoever was in power – be it the railroads, oil tycoons, or real estate developers. 

Objectivity did not rate high in the LA Times’ pantheon of values. Today’s historians know that during the so-called Zoot Suit Riots in 1943, the Mexican-American youth were primarily the target of the violence by the servicemen whose anger was fueled by LA Times Alt-News machine. 

“The mobs may have operated with the tacit support of local law enforcement, but they earned the explicit praise of the Los Angeles press. On June 7, the Los Angeles Times ran a story with a lead paragraph that read: "Those gamin dandies, the zoot suiters, having learned a great moral lesson from servicemen, mostly sailors, who took over their instruction three days ago, are staying home nights." August 29, 2012, KCET, Los Angeles' 1943 War on the Zoot Suit by Nathan Masters, http://bit.ly/2mK7sjI In reality, the Zoot Suiters were primarily the victims and not the perps, but that news would not make Anglos feel good. 

Because the LA Times is one of the Rembrandts of Alt-News, it realized that many stories had to be factual. Thus, any item which did not impact the financial interests of the rich and powerful could be faithfully reported. When time for dissembling arrives, the art of omission is employed. Since Garcetti’s election in 2001 as councilmember for Hollywood’s council district 13, the LA Times has accepted almost every piece of BS in support of his Manhattanization of Los Angeles. People are lead to believe that the increase in housing prices is due to a high demand for housing despite facts to the contrary. It was only in 2004-2007 that the LA Times attributed the nationwide increase in housing prices to high demand and ignored the trillion dollar mortgage frauds which were deceiving people into believing that there were millions of home buyers all across the nation. 

Since LA is owned by real estate developers, the LA Times comes out with the same Alt-News now that it pushed upon people before the Crash of 2008.   According to the LA Time’s Alt-Fact, LA’s housing problem is lack of supply. In a rather typical Alt-News article in July 2016, the LA Times wrote: 

“Yes. Like most things, it’s a supply/demand situation. The number of [housing] starts hasn’t been able to take care of that pent-up demand. The pricing has gone up accordingly, and that has been accommodated by low [mortgage] interest rates. Continued low interest rates have in essence subsidized a rapid ascent in pricing.” 

In reality, the cause of Los Angeles’ escalating housing prices is not supply and demand. As the LA Times knew or certainly should have known, LA had glut of higher end apartments constructed in the last decade. 

Here’s an HCIDLA Report from Nov, 2015: “The average rent in Los Angeles is $2,031 while new apartments built in the preceding ten years rent for $2,609 and have a 12 percent vacancy rate; a 5 percent vacancy rate indicates that supply and demand are in balance. At these rental rates, families must earn $81,240 to afford the average rent and $104,360 to afford a newly built apartment. In reality, the Los Angeles median income is only $50,543 and the current living wage of $15 per hour translates to $26,254 in annual wages; both wages leave a tremendous wage gap for workers seeking to rent in Los Angeles. The high vacancy rate for newer, more expensive housing exemplifies the disparity in the type of housing being built demonstrating that new, higher cost housing, is out of reach for many Angelenos.” 

Thus, the LA Times would appear to have been intentionally publishing Alt-Facts that there was a shortage of housing and that shortage was pushing up housing prices. Omitted from the LA Times article was the fact that the City had demolished over 21,000 rent controlled houses since 2001 and that in 2013, the City was constructing only 37% of the housing needed for low income people. Those figures were verboten because people would be able to see that the only housing shortage was for the very poor and that was due to the City’s destroying their homes: 

Then, we see the entrance of Donald Trump, who is his own 24 hr Alt-News Service via Twitter. I suspect that during his stay in LA as editor of Breitbart, Steve Bannon saw the extreme gullibility of readers of the LA Times. Although I’ve never spoken with Bannon, I fantasize that he was green with envy that the LA Times could publish Alt-Facts with impunity. 

Under Trump-Bannon, however, Alt-News is no longer like your Grandfather’s Buick. His variant of Alt-News is more aggressive -- like a souped up Dodger Challenger without a muffler. His Alt-News is obviously fake. Maybe it was part the Revenge of the Nerds Syndrome. Sick and tired of the Alt-News of BS publications like the LA Times, he was going to use Right Wing Alt-News to destroy “News” itself. 

This is a dramatic change. Bannon is not old man Hannity ranting stuff like the senile uncle one has to invite to Thanksgiving. Trump is not only Twittering Alt-Facts at us, but Bannon even has Missy Kellyanne Conway tell the entire world that they are Alternative Facts. Then, he sends out Herman Goebbles look-a-like Herr Stephen Miller commanding us not to question. Did Herr Miller start with “Actung, ich befehle Sie” or is that just my imagination? 

Bannon has launched a war on Americans’ consensus of reality. Building upon over a 100 years of sophisticated Alt-News distorting reality so that the public would vote for it own demise, Bannon-Trump have made America unsafe for reality. Herr Miller is correct – Truth is what Trump says it is – do not question. 

In what may be the most brilliant display of the destruction of reality came with Rachel Maddow’s March 14, 2017 release of Donald Trump’s 2005 Tax Returns. Had Maddow adhered to Honest Journalism 101, she would never have mentioned these phony documents. When one thinks of Ben Bradley, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and their extreme efforts for confirmation, the rash stupidity with which Maddow hyped her having “Trump’s Tax Returns,” one feels sick. One never brings forth a document unless one has proof that the document is what it purports to be? There are accepted modes of confirmation. Step number one is to read, step number two is think. Standing alone, these two pages reeked of “set up.” 

To aggravate this deplorable breach in journalism, David Cay Johnson tells Rachel that he has no way to authentic the documents since they “came over the transom.” In journalism, that ends the matter. Woodward and Bernstein did not print what Deep Throat said without confirmation. 

One needs to emphasize the enormity of Maddow’s malfeasance. Even if it should later turn out that these two pages are genuine, that is not the real point which is: Maddow did not abide by the tiniest bit of journalistic ethics before standing before the entire world proclaiming these two pages to be genuine copies of Trump’s 2005 federal income taxes. In light of the favorable light in which the 2005 tax returns cast Trump, they are more likely Alt-Tax Return leaked by Donald Trump.   

This sad episode shows how little regard people have for truth. We live in a world of Alt-Facts where honesty plays no significant role. 

The use of Alt-Facts is ingrained in American life. The Trump-Bannon regime is forcing us to confront reality by its incessant and unrepentant use of falsehoods.

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch)

PERSPECTIVE-Deportations of illegal immigrants has been in the news quite a bit since Donald Trump took office. Possession of stolen Social Security numbers by those detained or deported have played a role in some of the cases. A recent, well-publicized, deportation involved Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos. She was arrested in Arizona and returned to Mexico for a 2009 felony conviction stemming from a stolen SSA number she used. Her case was reviewed by ICE seven times after the conviction. A removal order was issued in 2013. 

One source reported the actual owner of the number was a young man in Tucson. While I cannot confirm that, even if Garcia de Rayos had created one from randomly selected digits there would have been at least a 50% chance of it belonging to a citizen, living or deceased. As of 2014, approximately 450 million numbers had been issued out of one billion possible numeric combinations. 

The remaining 50% will be issued over the next several decades. The current rate is 5.5 million per year (there are blocks of numbers which are unavailable.) Eventually, all illicitly used random numbers will, in effect, be stolen. 

That begs the question: if you are aware that an action you have taken has a 50% chance of amounting to theft, are you guilty of a felony? There is no easy answer, but it at least can be considered some form of fraud or misrepresentation. It would be enough for me to lose my CPA license (or worse) if I filed a tax return for a client who I knew was using a W2 with an unauthorized SSA number. 

SSA numbers are stolen for two purposes: financial gain, as in taking out a fraudulent loan in the name of the person to whom it is legally assigned, or for purposes of obtaining employment. The former can create significant harm to a person’s credit and reputation; the latter can create other problems, such as impeding a background check or delaying the payment of a federal entitlement. The most vulnerable victims in either case are children. Until they are old enough to enter the job market or apply for certain federal benefits, they will not be aware of the theft. 

Thefts for financial gains will always be a problem. Nothing short of persistent, proactive measures by the government and other institutions who possess SSA numbers will make a dent in this form of criminal activity. Even then, sophisticated hacking will occasionally breach any firewall. It is ultimately up to individuals to prevent or limit damage by practicing relentless vigilance. Take any seemingly legitimate communication you receive from a financial institution with a grain of salt. Carefully scrutinize all requests for information appearing to originate from a government body. 

Preventing the use of SSA numbers for employment purposes is difficult to stop, too, maybe even more so because theft can be accomplished using low tech resources. Illegal immigrants normally use their own names for the stolen numbers. Creating authentic-looking documents is fairly easy. However, they will not accrue benefits if the number is fictitious or has already been assigned. The Social Security Administration screens employer W2 filings for mismatches or no evidence of issuance. Employee contributions will be held in the Earnings Suspense File.  

In 2010, it was estimated that these suspense dollars provided around $12 billion to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.  While that is a windfall, it is a pittance compared to the funding needs of the two programs. The contributions are likely more than offset by the uncompensated services provided by emergency rooms across the nation to those who are not authorized to be here. That’s according to the American College of Emergency Physicians.   

I would not rule out future benefit claims against previously unmatched contributions by those who may one day attain legal status, or through a class action. If that occurs, the windfall effect could be greatly diminished. The United States could be facing a growing contingent liability that could bite a large chunk from the Retirement and Medicare trust funds when we least expect it, and when less prepared to deal with the fallout. The Suspense File has accumulated $1.2 trillion through 2012 from 333 million unmatched W2s. Claims against a fraction of that could easily exceed $100 Billion. 

Except through a small pilot program, neither the IRS nor SSA will notify you if your Social Security number pops up as a mismatch. It is important for you to compare your earnings against those shown on your annual Social Security Statement. Do not depend on the SSA to catch all fraudulent W2s and assign them to the Suspense File. 

The most sensible line of defense against illicit use of SSA numbers for employment purposes would be to increase the use of the E-Verify system. There must be penalties for employers who do not perform reasonable due diligence in screening hires.

There are concerns about mandatory use and the cost of the system to businesses. My suggestion would be to use it as an audit tool – not everyone would be required to use it. Employers submitting too many W2s with mismatched SSA numbers would have to as long as the problem persists…and suffer consequences for their carelessness if it did not cease. In time, it may be practical to require widespread use as efficiency is improved through experience. 

Ultimately, we need to come to grips with the primary cause of employment-purposed SSA number theft. There are some jobs Americans will not do at current levels of compensation, in some cases kept artificially low by the availability of cheap labor. Rooting out unauthorized SSA number use could open up some labor segments to American citizens. Then there are those jobs most citizens will shun at almost any rate of pay. Do not expect to find more than a few Americans picking crops or working in a poultry processing plant. That was not the case in days gone by, but that train left the station many decades ago, and it is not returning. 

There should be regulated guest worker programs, subject to the protection of labor laws, for certain industries and jobs when needs are proven. Employees will not get rich, but could earn a path to citizenship and all the opportunities that has to offer. Costs of certain products would rise, but the use of unauthorized SSA numbers could significantly diminish. 

If the integrity of the SSA database is compromised by a steady inflow of bogus information, the ramifications will be painful to the economy and greatly diminish trust in the institutions responsible for our financial and physical well being. That pain will be far worse than what would be felt by taking steps to deal with the problem now.

(Paul Hatfield is a CPA and serves as President of the Valley Village Homeowners Association. He blogs at Village to Village and contributes to CityWatch. The views presented are those of Mr. Hatfield and his alone and do not represent the opinions of Valley Village Homeowners Association or CityWatch. He can be reached at: [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

MY TURN--I really thought this time would be different.   Especially after all the toxic political atmosphere had spurred thousands into marches; phone calls to numerous members of Congress; noisy town halls; increased sales in tranquilizers; campaign events; lots of the "sky is falling" on social media; and huge viewership increases in cable news shows; the Los Angeles voting electorate didn't manage to reach even a 12% turnout.   Our previous election turnout in 2013 was 21% and that was nothing to brag about. 

The largest turnout for a Mayoral election was when Tom Bradley challenged Sam Yorty for Mayor. Yorty won that election with a 76% turnout. There is no doubt that racial prejudice played a big part in his victory.   Tom Bradley won the next election against Yorty with a 64 % turnout. Richard Riordan received the biggest turnout for Mayor in recent years at 45%. That was after the riots and Rodney King. 

Does this mean we must have a crisis in order to go to the polls? Maybe our Federal crisis has taken so much energy that Angelenos don't realize the local elections affect their everyday lives. Since we will not garner a lot of sympathy or care from President Trump (after all he lost by double digits in CA) it is even more important to have strong, smart, ethical, elected leaders to make sure we can survive whatever comes our way from Washington DC. 

The Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State University did a study on "Who Votes in Los Angeles Local Elections". They analyzed the 2013 election at that time was one of the lowest turnouts. They found that in reality the voter turnout was not a very good representation of the City's population. Voters were predominately white, older home owners. The lowest turnout group was Latinos, which is unfortunate, since statistics point out that 90% of Latinos reaching the voting age of 18 were born in the U.S. 

The report is really interesting. It concludes with both structural and civic reform. The structural reform suggestion to move the elections to even years has already been voted on and passed.   

The other structural change was to increase the City Council currently covering two million registered voters to twenty one.   There are currently five LA County Supervisors for more than five million registered voters. Both legislative branches should increase their elected representatives. Having smaller geographic areas would allow the City Council Member to be closer to his/her constituents thereby being more inclusive. It is even more relevant for the County. 

District 5, as an example, has both parts of the City and the Valley. Some of the other districts have different ethnic, economic and social challenges within the district. It makes more sense for each District to be more homogeneous. 

The last time enlarging the City Council was on the ballot was 1999 and there have been huge demographic changes since then. 

Maybe someone should take the bull by the horns and start a petition to have an increase in both areas. It is almost impossible to do a good job with so many constituents. Since CALEXIT is such a slight possibility; having smaller geographic areas would give the City and County electorate a much better look at local government and what their "electeds" are doing ... or NOT doing. 

The PBI Report also had suggestions for Civic Reform commenting that local issues for working class people, young people and minorities do not have as much interest in local as they do in federal elections. In addition, people who are active and knowledgeable about City and County challenges ... vote. Those who are not knowledgeable don't vote because of either lack of interest or lack of knowledge.   The candidates also can and should do more to show their prospective voters why the issues are relevant to them. 

So what else can we add to Civic Reform? 

Better and more civic involvement for High School students. Get them excited about the possibilities of making a difference. When I went to High school in Los Angeles we had something called a "student congress" at City Hall. Civics’ classes would discuss the challenges of the day. Kids can get their parents motivated to vote. Elected and appointed officials can have Department speaker bureaus, where they send an enthusiastic and knowledgeable people to talk about what they are doing and how it affects each student’s life. 

Adapt the target marketing, instead of sending out thousands of the same expensive print pieces. After the initial mailer, most people I know sent the mailers straight into the recycle bin. Utilize Social Media. Do the research showing what each group of constituents really wants or fears. Internet messaging has brought down costs in printing and postage but one size does not fit all groups.  

Neighborhood Councils (NC's) attract only 15% participation of our City's populace. Some have seen the light and are having youth projects and activities. Most Boards of Directors are made up of older adults, set in their ways and who want the status quo. There were quite a few younger generation attendees at the last Neighborhood Congress but as far as I know, nothing has been done to follow up. Yes, there is a so called leadership program, but again theory instead of practical and no follow up. 

Perhaps DONE should hire a young millennial to do nothing but motivate and organize an effective program to distribute to the various neighborhood councils. Why not ask each Board member to bring a new person to each Board meeting? 

Local NC Boards should be able to send out to the High School s in their area energetic and interesting speakers to talk about involvement and WHY it is important. 

Most of the Neighborhood Council Board meetings are as exciting as watching paint dry! Perhaps DONE could come up with program ideas. I don't recommend the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners (BONC) be asked to do anything since they are not effective. In fact, in my opinion the entire Neighborhood Council System needs an upgrade. For something that has so much promise to bring people together and participate in making this City better ... they (again in my opinion,) get a ‘C-' in performance, vision and creativity. and an ‘A’ in bureaucratic gobbledygook. 

As always comments are welcome as well as suggestions or ideas to make our City better.

(Denyse Selesnick is a CityWatch columnist. She is a former publisher/journalist/international event organizer. Denyse can be reached at: [email protected])

-cw

WEST COAST CITY OF LIGHTS-Imagine stepping into a time machine and traveling 100 years into the future. You find out that the city of Fargo, North Dakota, once barely a speck on the map, has become the country’s second-largest metropolis and the place to be for cosmopolitans and immigrants of every stripe – an internationally renowned commercial and cultural hub. 

That’s exactly what Los Angeles is today. Over a century, the city has risen meteorically from a sleepy farming town in the middle of nowhere to a world-famous center of entertainment, business and pretty much anything else you can name. As of 2015, the Greater Los Angeles area was home to over 15 million people, making it the second largest urban area in the country and 19th largest in the world. Los Angeles’ gross domestic product is closing in on $1 trillion, placing it in the top tier of urban economies globally. 

But for all its people and businesses, the city faces equally legendary problems: Its housing shortages, traffic jams, homelessness, inequality and issues of racial injustice have all become as well known as any movie studio in this city. And with it, the city is going through a bit of an identity crisis. 

Make no mistake, Los Angeles’ era as a boomtown is over. The city – built on natural assets and sustained by the offer of a unique lifestyle centered around the automobile – now needs to reinvent itself as a true urban center if it wants to remain important in the coming years. 

City leaders are emphasizing density, transit and social justice more than ever. But in order to find a way forward, the city must establish its civic identity once and for all – in other words, what it means to be an Angeleno in the 21st Century. 

The Western frontier 

Americans didn’t really pay attention to Los Angeles for most of its early history. 

When Felipe De Neve – then-governor of the Spanish province of Alta California and namesake of our beloved dorms and dining hall – commissioned the establishment of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de Porciuncula in the Los Angeles Basin in 1777, the site was a chaparral-covered prairie home to dozens of native Tongva tribes. 

A hundred years later, the pueblo had become a ranching community of about 6,000 people built on the backs of native laborers. Spanish and Mexican rule, the California Gold Rush and the cattle rancheros had come and gone, but Los Angeles was still just a Wild West town – rowdy and lawless, with most of the violence squared on its Mexican population. 

All that quickly changed when the railroads came to town. In the process, Los Angeles found a civic identity as a booming farm town on the western frontier supported by good weather, cheap land and wealth eventually provided by the oil and movie industries. 

When the Southern Pacific Railroad was completed in 1881, it provided Southern California’s first direct link to the eastern United States. That same year, the California State Normal School opened a southern branch – one that would eventually become UCLA. Los Angeles was clearly moving up in the world. 

Local farmers soon found that the area’s temperate Mediterranean climate was perfect for growing big, juicy oranges. With the advent of refrigerated boxcars, agriculture replaced cattle ranching as a mainstay of the Southern California economy. The orange industry left an impression on the growing town that can still be felt to this day. 

By 1890, over 50,000 people called Los Angeles home. 

It’s tough to pin down a single explanation for the city’s sudden explosive growth. In an 1890 edition of the “Historical Society of Southern California,” historian J.M. Guinn laid out various reasons for the city’s stunning success. First, railroads from the U.S.’s eastern population centers eliminated the six-month transcontinental trek to even reach the place. Second was the orange business, which attracted thousands of migrants looking for work. Third, the area’s world-famous sunny and warm climate proved an obvious draw for frostbitten easterners. 

There were other factors too: easily available land through the Homestead Act of 1862 promised newcomers a healthy chunk of Southern California real estate, and the discovery of oil in 1892 attracted speculators – and their money – in droves. 

Looking back, it’s easy to see similar factors and growth patterns in other Sunbelt cities like Houston, San Diego and later Phoenix. But Los Angeles was the only city with a potent enough combination of cheap and open land, a strong economy and good weather in the prime time of Western settlement to sustain a population boom that lasted decades. 

Land was cheap when Los Angeles was still booming. This advertisement for lots at Pacific Palisades ran in a February 1929 issue of the Daily Bruin. (Daily Bruin archives)

If Los Angeles’ early growth was fueled by its natural assets, it was quickly becoming a major city in its own right – complete with electric trolleys, the newly opened University of Southern California and a 280-mile aqueduct carrying water from the Owens River in the Sierra Nevada area to the Southland. The city even had its first skyscraper, the Braly Block, open in 1904. 

The population would continue to boom over the next 20 years as the petroleum and silent film industry attracted more residents and business to the Southland. 

But this was just LA’s warmup. A particular invention that was becoming popular at the time would cement the city’s place as the boomtown of the 20th century: the automobile. 

Eventually, the orange groves would give way to palm trees and housing subdivisions as Los Angeles discovered its next identity. 

Paradise on the freeway 

Fun fact: Only one species of palm tree is actually native to Southern California. Of the countless different types of palms throughout LA, every one that isn’t the tall Washingtonia filifera – better known as the California fan palm – came from elsewhere. 

Yet palms of every shape and size have come to define the city’s urban landscape, and they provide an important clue to discerning why Los Angeles continued to grow and thrive while other cities across the country lost population and relevance. 

Los Angeles’ second identity was, simply put, a 20th-century paradise. It promised its citizens what its eastern counterparts could not: a mild climate, affordable housing and – most importantly – an entire city built around the allure of a freewheeling auto-centered lifestyle. 

And it delivered – at least for a while. 

The city had plenty of room to grow into this model from its perch in 1920: its population of almost 600,000 was largely confined to the city center and got around with one of the most extensive streetcar systems in the country. Most of the surrounding land was still farmland or wilderness – including a pocket of land out west where a new UCLA campus opened in 1929. Los Angeles also began aggressively annexing surrounding communities. City Hall opened in 1928 as a towering celebration of the city’s newfound prominence. The 408-foot structure would remain the tallest building in the city for 40 years. 

By 1930, the population of Los Angeles had ballooned to over a million people, cementing its place as one of America’s great cities. No one was ignoring LA anymore. 

The population only continued to grow during the Great Depression and World War II, when the Southland set itself up as the West Coast’s economic center and primary magnet for wartime manufacturing.

All those people had to live somewhere, so housing tracts began to spread in all directions from the city center, aided by a growing street grid and an intricate Red Car streetcar system – the largest in the world at its peak. 

And traffic isn’t just a modern LA gripe: riders often complained of slow streetcar speeds along its busiest lines, prompting civic leaders to look into an alternative route of transportation. They found it in the freeway. When the national freeway frenzy began in earnest during the 1950s, the megaroads were considered saviors that would be cheaper, faster and more versatile than the streetcars. The Red Car system began dismantling at the same time.

By the 1950s, LA’s trajectory was clear. The city was still growing at a breakneck pace in every direction. Every direction, that is, except up. The city passed an ordinance way back in 1911 restricting the height of any new building to 150 feet, with the sole exception of City Hall.

But that played perfectly into LA’s allure. People – wealthy white people, to be specific – were fleeing America’s crowded, polluted and oftentimes snowy inner cities en masse for suburbs in the phenomenon known as “white flight.” And LA marketed itself as one giant suburb. 

Even the buildings were built around the car. The line of skyscrapers down Wilshire Boulevard’s “Miracle Mile” were envisioned as the nation’s first “linear downtown,” where every building was easily accessible just by driving down the street. 

A large, single-family home on a generous lot, with a lawn artificially irrigated by water from the Colorado and Owens rivers – the American dream offered itself in full gear. And lest residents ever feel that they weren’t living in paradise, the palm trees were always there to emphasize the tropical vibe. 

Los Angeles and the California lifestyle made its mark on the national psyche through pop culture: James Dean raced cars in “Rebel Without a Cause” and The Mamas and The Papas had some “California Dreamin’,” singing “I’d be safe and warm, if I was in LA.”

Which was all well and good – if you were white. But discriminatory housing covenants meant that the Angeleno take on the American dream was virtually off-limits to the city’s sizeable Latino and black populations. The covenants were banned by the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963 but reinstated when California voters approved Proposition 14, which nullified the Rumford Act, in 1964. The California Supreme Court declared the proposition unconstitutional in 1966, but racial minorities were still forced into the eastern and southern parts of the city. These neighborhoods suffered from decades of divestment and neglect, which can still be felt to this day. 

Los Angeles continued to grow throughout the postwar era – in sharp contrast to its already-developed counterparts in the East and Midwest, which saw their populations decimated in a one-two punch from economic malaise caused by deindustrialization and suburbanization at the expense of the inner city. Notably, of the U.S.’s 10 largest cities in 1950, only New York and Los Angeles have a larger population today.

 But all this growth led to a whole host of new problems, forcing the city to question its comfortable suburban identity and once again transform – this time into the densifying urban colossus we see today.

City of lights 

The year was 1984, and cheers flooded the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Athletes from around the world gathered to show their physical prowess in the XXIII Summer Olympics. And Los Angeles was the center of the world’s attention. 

A mere 100 years after it was a rough-and-tumble farm town newly connected to the outside world, Los Angeles had become a behemoth megapolis that was hosting the Olympics for the second time and had just overtaken Chicago to become the second-largest city in the country. The age of modern LA was just beginning. 

But as the saying goes, not everything that glitters in this city of lights is gold. The modern city is defined by dichotomy: old and new, rich and poor, low and high-rise. Many of the current issues Los Angeles faces like homelessness, traffic, pollution and housing shortages stem from its status as a boomtown metropolis for most of the 20th century. 

In 1957, city voters repealed the ordinance restricting building heights. The Union Bank Plaza opened downtown 11 years later as LA’s first modern skyscraper and part of a controversial redevelopment of the Bunker Hill neighborhood. The neighborhood’s stately old Victorian homes were quickly razed and replaced by gleaming glass and steel skyscrapers. 

Some people liked those Victorians, though. There has always been a tension between pro- and anti-development visions for the city, reflected in the fact that control over development has been the one of the most contentious issues in local politics as of late – the high rise-restricting Measure S on this year’s ballot is just the most recent example. 

This tension underscores yet another one of Los Angeles’ civic identities. But this time, the city is torn between visions of its suburban, exclusionary past and diverse urban future, and Angelenos are living in a moment of civic rediscovery. 

The facade of a car-based utopia was already beginning to crack by the 1970s, as it turned out that building an entire city around the automobile had some unintended consequences. Jammed freeways and an internationally notorious smog problem prompted swift and aggressive action by the city. Now, most of Los Angeles’ transportation initiatives are aimed at getting people out of their cars – not into them. 

Moreover, the still-rising population introduced a problem new to Angelenos: Housing was becoming too expensive. Some people couldn’t even pay their property taxes anymore. In the “taxpayer revolt” of 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13, which caps property taxes and provided respite from crushing tax burdens – at the expense of state coffers. 

A bigger backlash to the city’s rapid development took place in 1986, when city voters passed Proposition U. The measure imposed significant reductions on the size and height of buildings in many areas of the city. 

And the suburban legacy of racial injustice has continued into the 21st century. Today’s majority-minority neighborhoods are still struggling with basic environmental justice issues like having enough grocery stores and handling toxic waste. The issue has slipped under the city’s radar for years, but thanks to increased activism and focus on social justice, it may finally be getting the attention it deserves. 

It hasn’t been all doom and gloom for Los Angeles, though. The city is still growing, albeit not as quickly as before. It’s made significant investments in mass transit, most recently via Measure M, a sales tax passed last November that will finance major expansions in the city’s transportation infrastructure. And in the era of President Donald Trump, Los Angeles’ leaders have positioned themselves as advocates of social justice – how well they can carry out that promise and address the city’s infamous inequality and racial tensions remains to be seen. 

The legacies of the city’s previous identities have manifested in the attractions and problems of the LA we see today. But housing tracts are a lot harder to bulldoze than orange groves, and unlike before, Los Angeles isn’t going to be able to organically grow its way out of its problems. 

The decisions city leaders make over the next few years can determine whether LA sinks or swims – if it becomes a thriving metropolis influenced by its suburban roots, or just another overcrowded city that can’t meet its residents’ needs.

Changing tides

Every now and then, when I get a break from my responsibilities at the Daily Bruin, I take the Expo rail line downtown. It helps me escape the Westwood bubble for a bit, and I like watching the city whiz by as the train barrels down the tracks – or crawls, as it gets closer to downtown. 

From my window, there’s a pretty stark difference in the layout and development between Westwood and Palms – and Crenshaw, and West Adams, and Exposition Park and Downtown, for that matter. 

But there’s one thing all these places, along with the countless other neighborhoods throughout the city, have in common: They’re developed, yet still growing. 

Los Angeles is a megapolis. The chaparral-covered wilderness and orange groves are long gone, replaced by houses, apartments, skyscrapers and strip malls. The City of Angels’ days as a frontier boomtown and America’s suburb are over. 

And yes, the city faces challenges of Angeleno proportions: homelessness, crime, inequality, fights over development, gridlock and gentrification. Unaddressed, these issues threaten to buckle the city under the weight of its own problems. 

But tackling these issues can put Los Angeles on the brink of a major urban transformation. Like it has in the past, it will grow and change yet again. It must adapt to changing cultural and demographic tides to cultivate a bustling but sustainable and livable environment for all its citizens.

If it’s done right, the city can find a new identity as true urban center. The assets are there: an economic, entertainment and cultural hub of international prestige, a wide array of lifestyle options and one of the most diverse places in the world to boot. 

Now, it needs to do what it hasn’t before and provide the Angeleno dream to all its citizens. It’s a future the city must embrace – after all, it’s already grown out. Both literally and metaphorically, the only way to go now is up.

(Chris Campbell is the current Daily Bruin Opinion editor. He previously served as Radio Director and as a Radio contributor. He writes about everything, but focuses on Westwood and city issues. This column appeared originally in the Daily Bruin.)  Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

RUN-OFF?-Last week, I had a brief sit down with Joe Bray-Ali – the upstart, independent candidate for the City Council seat in Council District 1. As of this writing, Bray-Ali looks poised to head into a runoff with Gil Cedillo. It would be hard to create a more polished, poised, committed, and competent candidate than Bray-Ali. If Mr. Smith rode his bike to Washington, he’d look and sound a lot like Joe Bray-Ali. (Photo above: Joe Bray-Ali on left, Gil Cedillo.) 

Contrasted with the mumbly, creepy-uncle vibe of Cedillo, it’s hard to believe we even need a runoff. But this is LA, where voter turnout inching above 18% is considered pretty darn good, and the population completely tunes out local politics until it spills into their backyard. In a city full of faux-progressives screaming at their iPhones over the latest outrage in Washington, Los Angeles had a collective yawn on Election Day and sent a crop of bought-and-paid-for incumbents back to City Hall to kick business as usual into overdrive.

I can’t say I’ve been paying much attention to CD1 – most of my time is spent in my own neighborhood. But I’ve known Joe for a while, seen him in action in the community, and know he’s paid his dues. We disagreed over Measure S, but – as I’ve said all along – we don’t need Measure S if we have elected officials committed to doing what’s right in our neighborhoods rather than the bidding of bankers and developers. Joe Bray-Ali is that kind of guy. 

But even a surface understanding of the race in CD1 leads overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the time has come to elect a true independent to City Council. 

Word on the street is that Cedillo can’t really be bothered to get to know his true constituents. Even his supporters note his "somewhat aloof governing style."  If you want the opposite of aloof, vote for Joe Bray-Ali. He’s literally on the streets of his neighborhood every day, riding his bike, working for his neighbors, and talking to people. You don’t need to be a VIP to talk to Joe. Just look for him in the neighborhood. 

But the most important reason to vote for Joe is because he’s not beholden to the big money interests who look at our neighborhoods the way Donald Trump looks at a cheap steak. Cedillo – like every one of the incumbents on his (and I do mean “his”) way back to the halls of power – is in deep with the money men, including local do-gooders Chevron Corporation.  

During our conversation last week, Joe made an interesting point. He said, although he could compete with the incumbent on a 19th Century playing field – shaking hands, going door-to-door, meeting people in the neighborhood – as well as on a variety of 21st Century platforms – Internet, social media – the 20th Century was killing him. Big media – newspapers, radio, television – where blood and money are the only things that break through the gate, and old-fashioned mailers – where name recognition is forged in the minds of many low-information voters – all came down to one element: money. In order to break through the strangle-hold that money and apathy have on City Hall, we’ve got to find a way to get up off the couch and vote.

It can’t be that hard.

(David Bell is a writer, attorney, former president of the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council and writes for CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

HEALTHCARE WATCH--The GOP's healthcare plan narrowly passed out of the House Budget Committee on Thursday, while "stakeouts" began in Congressional home districts aimed at pressuring lawmakers to vote against the widely unpopular legislation. (Graphic above: A sign at the stakeout targeting Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas)

Three right-wing Republicans on the committee, Reps. Dave Brat (Va.), Mark Sanford (S.C.), and Gary Palmer (Ala.), voted against advancing the American Healthcare Act (AHCA) —but their opposition was not enough to stymie the plan. Now, the bill heads to the House Rules Committee, "where leadership might make amendments to appease conservatives and moderates unhappy with the current legislation," The Hill reported. A full House vote could come as early as next week. 

And so the resistance must act fast, hence this week's "Congressional Stakeouts to Save Healthcare," organized by MoveOn.org and taking place outside the district offices of nine Republican senators and more than two dozen Republican representatives who "hold the decisive votes" on AHCA.

"By holding vigil outside the offices of key Republicans who hold the decisive votes on 'TrumpCare,' MoveOn members will ensure that anyone coming in or out of the office—staff, visitors, and the members of Congress themselves—will face their constituents and hear our health care stories, our songs, our hopes, our anger, and our cheer," said Victoria Kaplan, organizing director for MoveOn.org.

"Passing this repeal bill is the GOP's top legislative priority—but because of strong opposition from constituents recently, including at intense and packed town hall meetings, GOP leaders are in a bind," she continued. "If millions of MoveOn members and activists nationwide mobilize—by showing up at Congressional offices, making phone calls, and sharing our healthcare stories—we can prevent this bill from ever becoming law."

The targeted lawmakers are:

Senators:

• Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)
• Tom Cotton (Ark.)
• Jeff Flake (Ariz.)
• Cory Gardner (Colo.)
• Bill Cassidy (La.)
• Susan Collins (Maine)
• Dean Heller (Nev.)
• Rob Portman (Ohio)
• Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.)

Representatives:

• Martha McSally (Ariz.)
• David Valdao (Calif.)
• Ed Royce (Calif.)
• Darrell Issa (Calif.)
• Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.)
• Mimi Walters (Calif.)
• Jeff Denham (Calif.)
• Steve Knight (Calif.)
• Carlos Curbelo (Fla.)
• Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.)
• Peter Roskam (Ill.)
• Kevin Yoder (Kan.)
• Erik Paulsen (Minn.)
• Leonard Lance (N.J.)
• John Katko (N.Y.)
• Elise Stefanik (N.Y.)
• Patrick Meehan (Pa.)
• Ryan Costello (Pa.)
• Pete Sessions (Texas)
• Will Hurd (Texas)
• John Culberson (Texas)
• Barbara Comstock (Va.)
• Dave Reichert (Wash.)

The stakeouts had begun as of Thursday afternoon.

And with additional town hall meetings planned for this weekend, legislators are likely to get an earful over the next few days—much like Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price did during a CNN town hall on Wednesday night.

"Medicaid expansion saved my life and saved me from medical bankruptcy," colon cancer survivor Brian Kline of Pennsylvania said to Price during the televised session. "Now, I earn $11.66 an hour at my retail job. And obviously, I cannot afford to pay for my cancer care out of pocket. My life really depends on having access to my doctors and medical care. Getting a cancer diagnosis is bad enough. But Medicaid expansion gives me the economic security in knowing that funding is always going to be there for my cancer care. So my question for you, Secretary Price, is pretty straightforward: Why do you want to take away my Medicaid expansion?"

Price responded: "The fact of the matter is, we don't. We don't want to take care away from anybody. What we want to make certain, though, is that every single American has access to the kind of coverage and care that they want for themselves."

Kline said later that he didn't think the secretary had answered his question.

Watch the exchange:

Another attendee zeroed in on the plan's attempt to defund Planned Parenthood. 

(Deirdre Fulton writes for Common Dreams … where this report was first posted.)

-cw

RANTZ & RAVEZ--A RantZ is something negative while a RaveZ is something positive. I will begin with some RaveZ this week. 

Hats off and Congratulations to Mayor Eric Garcetti for a huge victory in the election for Mayor of Los Angeles. With 10 opponents in the race, Mayor Garcetti was able to generate a huge victory with over 80% of the votes. That is an incredible victory for our Mayor who will have a firm position to continue his vision for Los Angeles over the next 5 and one half years. 

While the usual term for the Mayor and the other elected city officials is 4 years, a change in the election cycle is providing the leaders of our city with an extra year and a half to adjust the election cycle to align with state and federal elections. The intended purpose is to encourage more voters out to vote in local elections. 

Time will tell if this tactic works. It has not worked in the past and that is why the city elections pulled away from the state and federal election cycle to stand alone a few years ago. It was part of the Charter Reform. If there is a magic formula to motivate large numbers of voters to vote, Los Angeles needs it. 

It is interesting to note that while thousands of eligible voters can gather to protest an issue or situation they refuse to vote where real change can be made. While many of the protests are peaceful, a quicker way to make change in America is by voting. A simple and highly successful process in our form of Government in America. 

For the record, the County of Los Angeles spent around $19 Million Dollars of our tax money on the March 7 election.    

####

The vision of the Mayor includes an urban city with denser development along transit lines. That means the continuation of more apartment and condo construction throughout the city and an expansion of the public transit lines. With the passage of Measure M in a previous election, the funds will be there to push forward with more public transit projects. It is all part of the vision to build up with more density. More residential units in the form of condos and apartments. 

With rents of newly constructed one bedroom apartments going for over $2,000 in many communities of the San Fernando Valley, and much higher in other parts of the city, rents will never be brought down to a more reasonable cost. No matter how many residential units are being built in Los Angeles, the rents will remain out of the reach of many families. In order to purchase a single -family home in the Los Angeles area, a person needs to make an annual income in the Hundred Thousand Dollar range to simply qualify for a loan. With interest rates increasing, fewer people will have the funds to purchase a single -family home with a yard for the children to play and a dog to run around. 

The only option is to pay rent for an apartment or hope to possibly purchase a condo that one can qualify for and afford.

####

My son recently showed interest in a condo in Culver City. The condo had 3 bedrooms and had been upgraded. The asking price was over ONE Million Dollars. To say the least, he did not purchase the unit. 

Congratulations again to Mayor Garcetti for his victory in leading Los Angeles forward for the next possibly 5 1/2 years. The door is open for the Mayor to run for United State Senator if Diane Feinstein decides to retire or California Governor when Governor Brown terms out of office. Either way the future for Mayor Garcetti is clear to follow his dreams for leadership in our region of America.

####

Congratulations are also extended to the other Elected City Officials that won their race with no opposition in the race, City Attorney Mike Feuer, Controller Ron Galperin and District 3 Councilman Bob Blumenfield all won. The odd numbered seats of the council will all be returning and there will be a runoff for the North East San Fernando Valley Council seat in the 7^th District. 

Congratulations to District 1. Councilman Gil Cedillo, District 5 Paul Koretz, District 9 Current Price, District 11 Mike Bonin, District 13 Mitch O’Farrell, District 15 Joe Buscaino.

###

How about Measures S and H? 

It turned out that the majority of the voters were opposed to measure “S” and supportive of measure “H”. 

What this means is that massive development will continue in Los Angeles and the gridlock transportation and congestion will not be improved in our region of California in the immediate future. More apartments and condos and traffic on our roadways. When it comes to rents in the new units, it is all about Market Rate that means what the market will bear. Little is any will be affordable for people making $10.15 or even $15.00 an hour.   

Being a native of Los Angeles all my life, I can remember the public transit system that once transported people around Los Angeles in a smooth and efficient manner. Once very efficient and effective all scraped for the comfort and convenience of a personal car. Now we all live in gridlock 7 days a week on our freeways and local roads. The people have voted on Measure S and we will all live with it into the future. 

Measure “H” won in the election. The measure will increase the sales tax in Los Angeles County, not just the City of LA, ¼ cent for the next 10 years. Time will tell if the 10 years turn into permanent as others have in the past. The money will be used to assist with the homeless situation in Los Angeles County. 

Serving as a Board member for Hope of the Valley, a Homeless Service Center in the Valley, I have seen firsthand the sadness of the Homeless in our region. Will the funds honestly be applied to those organizations dealing with the Homeless or just chewed up with administrative and other operational costs? 

The homeless situation is not improving and if the funds are not properly used to address and help eliminate the homeless on the streets with supportive services, we can point the finer and blame ourselves for not holding our elected officials responsible for improving the quality of life for all in our county.   

I welcome your observations and comments.

(Dennis P. Zine is a 33-year member of the Los Angeles Police Department and former Vice-Chairman of the Elected Los Angeles City Charter Reform Commission, a 12-year member of the Los Angeles City Council and a current LAPD Reserve Officer who serves as a member of the Fugitive Warrant Detail assigned out of Gang and Narcotics Division. Zine was a candidate for City Controller last city election. He writes RantZ & RaveZ for CityWatch. You can contact him at [email protected]. Mr. Zine’s views are his own and do not reflect the views of CityWatch.)  

-cw 

CYBER CRIME FOR SALE-Last March, Bloomberg Business ran an article called “How to Hack an Election” in which Andrés Sepúlveda, a computer hacker now serving time in a federal prison in Colombia, describes his career rigging elections throughout Latin America. Usually, Sepúlveda explains, he was working for Juan José Rendón, a Miami-based political consultant who’s been called the Karl Rove of Latin America. 

For $12,000 a month, according to the article, a customer could hire Sepúlveda and a crew of 5-10 to hack smart phones, spoof and clone Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The premium package, at $20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital interception, attack, decryption, and defense. 

“My job was to do actions of dirty war and psychological operations, black propaganda, rumors,” Sepúlveda is quoted as saying, “the whole dark side of politics that nobody knows exists but everyone can see.”  

Pretty shocking stuff, but get together a group of government watchdogs these days, and you might be surprised what you hear. The truth is that a fair number in that community have experienced first-hand some of the dirty tricks just described. And not in ways that are subtle or open to “gee that’s paranoid” dismissals.  

Recent examples include a “black hat SEO [Search Engine Optimization] technique called cloaking. ‘Black hat’ SEO is defined as the use of unethical methods to manipulate search engine results. The technique, called ‘cloaking,’ refers to any of several means to serve a page to the search-engine spider that is different from that seen by human users. It can be an attempt to mislead search engines regarding the content on a particular website.”  

Watchdogs’ computers have been hacked, some through a specific technique called “rootkit,” which is a malicious software that takes full control over a system, while overriding anti-virus software.

And then, outside of computers, there’s a recent example of “this kind of thing doesn’t happen in the United States, does it?” dirty business. And it involves an author of this piece, LA City Council critic Eric Preven who, seated quietly at a meeting, caught on audio a police officer threatening to arrest him if he was “ruled out of order” by the Council President. Arrest was not a sane option given the situation. 

During the recent Presidential election, it was rumored that Juan José Rendón had been working for Donald Trump (Rendón denies the rumor.) What’s not a rumor is Andrés Sepúlveda’s view of whether the recent Presidential election was rigged: 100% yes. He should know.

(Eric Preven and Joshua Preven are public advocates for better transparency in local government. Eric is a Studio City based writer-producer and a candidate for Los Angeles mayor. Joshua is a teacher.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-LA’s March 7 election appeared to be decisive. Measure S, the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, was soundly defeated. As a result there is no legal mandate to stop the steady flow of pay-to-play mega-projects that the City Council approves through spot-zoning and spot-General Plan Amendments. Likewise, there are no clarifications to the City Charter’s prohibition on these legislative actions. Likewise, there is no mandate to quickly update the General Plan or to produce a finding that every ministerial (by-right) land use decision is consistent with the General Plan. 

Nevertheless, such prominent opponents of Measure S as Mayor Eric Garcetti and the Los Angeles Times immediately sounded like they made an about-face. Within a day they repeated many Yes on S’s campaign points. They cautioned that the election results should not be over-interpreted. They both stated that the defeat of Measure S should not justify City Hall maintaining the status quo of pay-to-play spot-zoning substituting for a legally required professional planning process. 

More specifically, on March 9 Mayor Garcetti issued Directive 19. It is a comprehensive executive order that, if actually followed, could make a significant difference in the way Los Angeles is planned. Its 18 specific sub-directives almost sound like the points I have repeatedly offered in many CityWatch columns. For example, the Mayor wrote, “The Director of Planning shall develop a schedule for the immediate systematic public review and update of all elements of the General Plan, with a periodic review process to occur every five years thereafter. This program should include the review and possible updating of the thirty-five Community Plans.” 

But, let’s not count our chickens before they hatch. This is what I read between the lines, and why I fully expect that little will change at City Hall. Appearance should never be confused with substance, especially when it comes to our esteemed elected officials. The City Hall leopard is not about to permanently change its spots. 

Why the appearance of reconciliation by the Mayor and the LA Times? 

The no on S campaign had a strong victory on paper, but it was only a superficial ballot box victory. In the words of the LA Times, “Measure S tapped into the angst that many Angelenos feel about how growth and development are changing their communities, and in some cases displacing their inhabitants. The concerns over density, traffic and gentrification are not going away because the forces behind them are not abating.” 

To paraphrase the LA Times in straightforward English, about six percent of the voting public was persuaded by duplicitous arguments. The no on S victory depended on farfetched claims that Los Angeles could address its housing crisis through new luxury housing and trickle down deals from real estate speculators. Meanwhile, as the public waits for these miracles, they do not like what endless real estate speculation produces in Los Angeles: unplanned density, with its predictable consequences of displacement, gentrification, and traffic congestion. The LA Times and the Mayor recognize this will be the real outcome of the no on S victory. They also know that goose laying its wonderful golden eggs could be sent to the slaughterhouse in the next voter initiative. 

And they also know their victory came with another serious cost. It was based on explicit promises to the Democratic Party’s liberal base in Los Angeles, and there is little chance that City Hall can deliver significant housing for the homeless, even through Measure HHH and inclusionary housing via linkage fees and Measure JJJ. 

The bottom line is that Angelenos will not see continued arbitrary loosey-goosey land use decisions decrease rents, reduce economic and racial inequality, improve LA’s public infrastructure and services, facilitate bicycling and walking, generate alternative energy, plant one million trees, and combat climate change. 

What other flies are in the no on S ointment? 

This following list is only a beginning: 

1) The urban growth machine’s tactic of turning to the California State legislature to override local land use planning will run its course. In fact, many activists already are targeting the errand boys of the real estate industry, like Santa Monica Democrat Richard Bloom. A few defeats of these surrogates will quickly realign local planning politics. 

2) Many major projects are in the pipeline. Measure S might have stopped them, but its defeat means they will soon appear in many Los Angeles neighborhoods. They will generate displacement, traffic snarls, and demolitions. They will also result in many more project-specific movements and lawsuits. In fact, the defeat of Measure S is a full employment act for land use attorneys and the experts they hire to pursue their cases. 

3) Real estate investors will still engage in soft-corruption at City Hall by making a variety of payments to elected officials. 

4) Without Measure S cleaning up the City Charter, many new real estate projects will apply for and obtain spot-zones, spot-Height District changes, and spot-General Plan Amendments. The Charter’s unclear findings for General Plan Amendments will continue, despite a lack of evidence of good zoning practices and public benefits. 

5) Even though the City Charter bars individuals from initiating General Plan Amendments, the Department of City Planning will still do this on behalf of large real estate investors, in conflict with spirit of the City Charter. 

6) Real estate investors will continue to select their EIR consultants, and all EIR findings of significant environmental impacts will be cast aside through the City Council’s Statements of Overriding Considerations. Boilerplate about mega-projects generating jobs and transit ridership will be approved with perpetual 15-0 City Council votes. Once adopted, these claims will never be monitored or verified. 

7) The updates of the General Plan’s citywide elements and its Community Plans will continue to rely on chronically inflated demographic data from the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG). 

8) Once updated, the General Plan will not be regularly and reliably monitored to determine if its demographic assumptions are correct. Likewise, City Hall decision makers will never know if the updated plans’ implementation programs appeared and if they meet the General Plan’s goals. 

9) The General Plan will still be prepared and adopted in reverse order, beginning with re:codeLA, then Community Plan updates, and finally the citywide General Plan elements, such as the General Plan Framework element. 

10) Code enforcement will continue to be the weakest part of the land use process. Zoning and building code violations will still be rampant, with contractors regularly gaming the system since they know that Building and Safety cannot or will not stop their dirty tricks. 

11) Finally, it is unimaginable that the Mayor will fire any General Managers who slow walk his 18-point planning-related directive. Mayoral precedents of showing three recent Directors of Planning the door for not processing zoning applications quickly enough will not repeat with Directive 19. 

Can the City Hall Leopard Change its Spots? 

CityWatch readers, please join me in a City Hall Watch, to see what unfolds at City Hall after the March 7 election. Will it be the pieties of the Mayor and the Los Angeles Times? Or will pay-to-play return to City Hall after a short vacation? Will the leopard’s spots quickly return?

(Dick Platkin is a former LA city planner who reports on local planning issues in Los Angeles for CityWatch LA. Please send your comments and corrections to [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CALWATCHDOG--President Trump on Wednesday launched the first salvo in what seems likely to end up a war with the state of California and many liberal states over vehicle mileage rules that Gov. Jerry Brown and environmentalists depict as crucial to control pollution and to reduce the emission of gases believed to contribute to global warming.

At a ceremony at a Detroit-area auto facility after meeting with auto executives, Trump declared his intention to pursue “fair” regulations that “protect and defend” jobs.

Before his remarks, Trump staffers gave background briefings to reporters on his plans to scrap mileage rules approved by President Obama’s EPA in his final weeks on the job. The new rules would require cars and small trucks to average 54.5 miles per gallon in 2025, up from the present 36 miles per gallon.

Automakers were unhappy with the Obama administration’s speedy decision-making – new rules weren’t required until 2018. They believe the rules will require them to sell vehicles Americans don’t want to buy in an era in which gasoline prices are low and relatively stable because of a heavy increase in domestic oil production. Warning that the new rules would put more than 1 million jobs at risk, automakers have been lobbying Trump since they were enacted.

Brown administration officials have already filed a challenge to Trump’s directive, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Any weakening or delay of the national standards will result in increased harms to our natural resources, our economy, and our people,” the brief asserted.

13 states use California’s tougher standards

But while the president rattled state officials with his actions, he didn’t go as far as some environmentalists feared.

Under the federal Clean Air Act of 1970, California was given the right to waive federal vehicle mileage rules in favor of stricter standards because of the state’s severe problems with smog and ozone pollution in Southern California. The waiver allows other states to follow California’s tougher standards. Thirteen do, and as a result about 40 percent of the nation’s residents who buy about 40 percent of vehicles do so under California’s stricter rules, irking automakers who don’t like to have to deal with what are essentially two national standards.

The Trump administration could have tried to end California’s waiver entirely or prevent other states from using the Golden State’s rules. Instead, Reuters reported the administration hopes to work with the state on a compromise.

But that is close to certain to be a nonstarter, given Brown’s and the California Legislature’s approval of a law requiring the state to have greenhouse-gas emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Achieving that goal appears close to impossible without sharply cutting emissions from the state’s transportation sector, which generates 36 percent of California’s carbon emissions, according to the most recent statistics.

Vehicle emissions rule a potent weapon for state regulators

Stanford environmental law professor Michael Wara said tough vehicle mileage standards have been the state’s strongest tool in combating greenhouse gas emissions.

“California is going to fight, to deploy every resource it has, to keep this stuff, because this is big,” Wara told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Wednesday’s developments were foreshadowed by the January confirmation hearing of Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, like Trump a climate change skeptic and longtime EPA critic. Under questioning by Sen. Kamala Harris, D-San Francisco, Pruitt refused to say whether the Trump administration supported allowing California to continue to waive federal air pollution rules in favor of tougher standards.

Given that California’s waiver is written into federal law, it is unclear whether the Trump administration could force the state to follow federal rules. In 2008, George W. Bush’s administration challenged new state rules, prompting a lawsuit from then-Attorney General Jerry Brown that was joined by 15 other states. But no court decision was forthcoming before Barack Obama succeeded Bush the following year. The Obama administration quickly dropped the challenge

(Chris Reed is an editorial writer for U-T San Diego and a contributor to CalWatchdog … where this perspective was first posted.)

-cw

EDUCATION POLITICS--Last month a seven-member panel met in the state Capitol to discuss the calamitous funding situation of the California State University system, as well as the prospects for creating free public higher education in the state. The latter idea of nationally establishing cost- and debt-free learning at the college and university levels had been popularized by Bernie Sanders during his presidential campaign last year. Yet in California, the legacy of the revenue-slashing Proposition 13, which California voters approved in 1978 to cut property taxes, remains a formidable stumbling block. (Photo above: Cal State University professor Melina Abdullah.)

At the heart of the February colloquium in Sacramento was a new report released by the California Faculty Association called Equity, Interrupted: How California is Cheating Its Future. (Disclosure: CFA is a financial supporter of Capital and Main.) Among the report’s findings is that the CSU student body rose 64 percent from 1985 to 2015, yet state funding for the system as a percent of the total general fund fell from 4.4 percent to 2.4 percent.

Panelist and Assemblymember Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) stressed the practical politics of raising taxes and spending them on public higher education. Ting, who chairs the Assembly Budget Committee, pointed to November’s approval by San Francisco voters of Proposition W, which will establish free City College of San Francisco tuition for students who are city residents. It will be funded by a real estate tax on properties that sell for over $5 million.

A similar proposal is on the radar in New York state, where Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed in January that residents with annual household incomes of $125,000 or less attend state colleges without paying tuition. New York’s 2011-2015 median household income—the point at which one-half is below and the other half is above— was $59,269, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Such large-scale public investment in free education is not new. In 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill of Rights. That federal policy allowed mainly white ex-soldiers to attend colleges and universities, free of fees and tuition. (Jim Crow segregation kept nonwhite veterans from attending many public higher education institutions.)

The economic impact of the GI Bill investment, which also funded apprenticeships and job-training, in California and across the U.S., was huge. Upward mobility accelerated, according to panelist and Assemblymember Jose Medina, (D-Riverside), a retired classroom teacher who today chairs the Assembly Committee on Higher Education. “The support and the lower cost was there,” he said.

Government intervention on behalf of higher education through targeted taxation and spending worked then and later, with the California Master Plan. The CMP provided free higher education to state residents at public universities, along with state and community colleges, beginning in 1960, although a decade later Governor Ronald Reagan would cut higher education spending and set the stage for tuition-based funding.

“I think we have to revisit that vision of raising taxes to spend them on public higher education for the CSU,” Medina said, while Ting added that California voters are “aspirational,” and care enough about their kids’ futures to vote for taxes to hike investment in higher education.

Ting believes that a battle to win the hearts and minds of voters must be waged to convince them that the local and state taxes they approve for higher education will actually get to students and teachers. He pointed to such voter-approved initiatives as Proposition 30, which increased personal-income and sales taxes to fund public education and thereby avoid deep spending cuts. (The law was extended in November with the passage of Proposition 55.)

Another panelist, Robert Shireman, who is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, spoke of another fraction of voters to sway in the battle over public opinion, albeit a tiny one: elite opinion makers on editorial boards of news media. Paradoxically, he said, many of these same elites attended well-resourced institutions of higher education, e.g., Ivy League universities, where ample private funding stands in sharp contrast to CSU’s continual disinvestment.

Improving access and success in higher education does require more money, according to Shireman. For instance, he emphasized the importance of CSU libraries receiving adequate funding to keep their doors open and shelves stocked. These libraries, Shireman said, provide alternatives to cash-strapped students coping with the high cost of textbooks.

Economics have intersected with demographics in startling ways for the state university system. From 1985 to 2015, the enrollment of CSU’s white students declined from 63.2 percent to 25.7 percent. At the same time, nonwhite CSU enrollment, which was 26.8 percent in 1985, rose to 62 percent 30 years later. The population of Latino/a CSU students spiked from 13.1 percent in 1985 to 37.6 in 2015, nearly tripling. Meanwhile, the African-American CSU student body has plunged significantly.

“We have seen a plummeting of Black student enrollment in the CSU, with the Black student population cut in half,” said panelist Professor Melina Abdullah, chair of Pan-African Studies at CSU Los Angeles wrote in an email. Abdullah is a founding member of Black Lives Matter in L.A. “That is almost identical to the percentage cut in state funding to the CSU over the last 30 years.”

One recurring theme during the CFA panel discussion was that state spending reflects policymakers’ priorities – which are revealing.

California’s budget for 2016–2017 provides $14.5 billion of general fund revenue to the University of California, CSU and community college systems versus $10.6 billion to operate the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, according to the Public Policy Institute.

Alma Hernández (photo above), executive director of the 700,000-strong Service Employees International Union California, said her members have deep concerns about being able to fund their kids’ higher education — no small stressor in the households of working families. (Disclosure: Some California SEIU locals are financial supporters of this website.)

“I had a conversation with an eligibility worker,” Hernández said, “and in order to fund half of her kids’ education under the ScholarShare program, she needed to be putting away $552 a month. She said to me, ‘That’s what my paycheck is.’ So you can image the fear and the concern. Our members are also fighting for their children to have a pathway to the middle class.”

Margarita Ines Berta-Ávila, a professor in the College of Education at CSU, Sacramento, laid out the impacts of nonwhite CSU students receiving less state resources than what white CSU students got 30 years ago. For example, she shed light on why first-generation CSU Chicana/o and Latina/o students, whose family members’ lack higher education experience, seek out her and other nonwhite faculty for help to navigate the system. Too often, however, CSU minority faculty are absent on campuses because CSU disinvestment has increased class sizes, with fewer professors teaching more students, she said.

In a question-and-answer period that ended the CFA panel briefing, Berta-Ávila stressed the importance of engaging with first-generation minority students’ parents to harvest progressive policies for the CSU.

“When parents realize that their child is working so hard to go through those four or five or six years to graduate, or they see how much their son or daughter struggles, they will make those phone calls and write those letters and make sure that they advocate for their child,” she said. “So we cannot forgo the power of our communities in making these changes.”

(Seth Sandronsky is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. He can be contacted at [email protected].) 

-cw

TENANTS RIGHTS--Los Angeles, Homeless Capital of the Nation, is a city in which 64% of its residents are renters and a majority of those renters are paying unaffordable rents. That’s why I support the passage of Assembly Member Richard Bloom's AB 1506 repealing the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act: it will address the problem of Vacancy Decontrol on rent-controlled housing in California. 

LA is the most unaffordable city in the nation for renters with tenants paying the highest percentage of their income to rent in the nation. We have the highest poverty rate in the country at 26%, meaning one out of every four households lives in poverty. 

We have the most over-crowded conditions; seven out of the top ten zip codes with the most over-crowded housing conditions are here in LA. 

We are the homeless capital of the nation. How can this be if we have rent control? Two answers: the Costa-Hawkins Housing Act and the Ellis Act, which provide landlords the ability to leave the rental market and evict tenants. 

The Costa-Hawkins Act ties the hands of local governments to adequately address their housing needs. It is the reason LA cannot pass an inclusionary housing ordinance to obtain more affordable housing units the City so desperately needs. 

The Costa-Hawkings Act puts a bullseye on the back of every long term, low rent tenant in every rent-control jurisdiction in the state. That's because landlords know if they can get those tenants to move, either by legal or illegal means, they can jack up rents without limits due to mandated vacancy decontrol. 

This is the reason why 64% of Angeleno renters are paying unaffordable rents. If we are ever going to adequately address our affordable housing crisis we must let local municipalities have the flexibility to develop policies to address the particular needs of their communities. 

This is why we fully support the repeal of the Costa Hawkins Housing Act and why AB 1506 should be passed by the State Legislature.

(Larry Gross is Executive Director of the Coalition for Economic Survival (CES) and an occasional contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

IN HIS OWN WORDS (VIDEO)—LA’s just reelected Mayor Eric Garcetti answers these questions and more in this special 7 ½ minute interview with one of SoCal’s most important journalists … PBS reporter David Lazar. What’s ahead for LA’s rising crime stats, transportation, community plans, density, his political future? Get the answers straight from the Mayor to you. A CityWatch guest report. 

(David Nazar is a longtime Los Angeles journalist and PBS reporter.)

-cw

GUEST COMMENTARY-In the aftermath of Measure S, it seems everyone is offering their post mortem observations about this giant struggle over land-use and development in Los Angeles. I'd like to add my "two cents.” 

First, the voters made the right choice in sinking Measure S. We can breathe a sigh of relief that a blanket moratorium did not go into effect that would have vaporized thousands of construction jobs and wreaked havoc on our economy. Now we can continue to address the serious shortfall in housing in our region. 

Second, although the voters rejected Measure S, it was not a vote of support for the status quo. Far from it. Both residents and businesses made it clear that the current system is broken and needs to be fixed. 

Third, the Mayor and City Council need to follow through on the reforms that were promised, among which were to update community plans in a timely fashion and to have the Planning Department select the consultants performing environmental impact reports. 

Fourth, once community plans are updated, "spot zoning" (changing land-use rules to accommodate specific projects) should become the exception rather than the rule in approving projects. It would be helpful if criteria could be drawn up that explains when it is appropriate to grant an exception. 

Fifth, greater transparency should occur throughout the entire process, so that trust can be established with the public. One particular area that needs improvement is with community benefits packages. The Planning Department and councilmembers now negotiate these packages, sometimes extracting millions of dollars from developers for projects that will benefit LA. This process needs to be revised so that the public has more of an opportunity to provide suggestions on things that would benefit the impacted neighborhoods. 

And once a package is finalized and the developer hands over to the City mitigation funds, there needs to be accountability so that the public knows to which department the funds went and that they were spent according to the plan. 

An example may help. When the Hollywood & Highland complex was built back in 1988, the City negotiated a contribution from the developer for more than $9 million to be spent on traffic improvements, etc. Years afterward, when I tried to find out if the money had been spent, I could get no answer. Yet, more than 10 years after the project was completed, I saw a motion before the City Council approving the expenditure of some of the mitigation money from that project. I am not implying that anything was done incorrectly. What I am saying is that the system was not set up for transparency with the public. 

With today's technology, there is no reason that a tracking system cannot be set up on a City website that easily allows the public to see what the community benefits packages are for each project and to track the expenditures of those funds as they occur. This is an issue of trust. If the public can see that these funds are truly going to benefit them and are actually being spent on the purposes intended, it will help to instill trust in the system. 

Finally, in my conversations with neighborhood councils, one of their largest concerns is with evictions that are taking place to make way for some new projects. Most of these evictions are occurring with rent-controlled buildings and by-right projects. With the affordable housing crisis, some tenants are losing their homes with no place to go. The city needs to review its current policy to strike a balance between property rights and fairness for those being evicted. It is a complicated issue with no easy answers because of conflicting state and local laws, but the conversation needs to occur. 

The voters have indicated by large margins in the last two elections that they understand the need to "densify" our City rather than to continue expanding outward. That is the proper course of action, but it is not easy to achieve. The Hollywood Community Plan update will be coming back later this year for reconsideration. Stakeholders will have ample opportunity for public input into the process. With all of the development and changes occurring in Hollywood, we really need to have an updated plan rather than operate under one that dates back to 1988. Let's have the discussion necessary to adopt a plan that will move this community forward and which will help to reestablish trust in our land-use process. 

(Leron Gubler has been serving as the President and CEO of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce for the past 24 years. His tenure since 1992 continues to oversee the great comeback story of Hollywood.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

FILM WATCH--The most pernicious aspect of our purposefully failing, corporate-profit-driven public education system (when it comes to students of color and the poor) is that student victims of this system end up thinking something is wrong with them. The truth is, the public education system has let them down from the moment they entered kindergarten. 

The real problem lies in public education's unwillingness to educate all students in a timely age-sensitive manner. Instead they are assigned to often arbitrary, inaccurate grade-level designations determined by age rather than their subjective ability level. The longer this public education system is allowed to do this, the more damage will be done to innocent students, whose lives it continues to destroy. 

Predictably, this leads to more violence and costly damage to all of our society. Ultimately, this continued failure to socially and economically integrate such a large segment of our population costs big bucks. Surprisingly, it would be easier and much less expensive to integrate and educate these students so they can become part of this country's future. At some point one must ask if the real purpose of public education as it is presently constituted is to educate the young or to reinforce class and racial stereotypes to maintain the status quo. 

The movie “The Bad Kids”  is a new feel good documentary that will screen on your local PBS station at 10 p.m. on March 20. It purports to show (in a faux “objective” documentary format) the day-to-day life of "bad kids" – a.k.a., underachieving students. What it never addresses is that although these students are being offered a second chance at getting an education and making something of themselves, they are also victims of fraud. Their second chance ignores the measurable academic deficits these "bad kids" have been allowed to acquire after years of being socially promoted with no mastery of the prior grade-level standards. This has impeded their ability to reach their academic potential. 

Placing these “bad kids” in a continuation school to help them finish high school is an act that is doomed from its inception, because it is based on the false assumption that you can make somebody ready for high school by merely waving a magic wand and declaring it so. This is in being done despite them not having mastery of the prerequisite prior grade-level standards that would actually give them a chance to succeed. Not exactly a formula for building self-esteem. 

Simply stated: How can you do Algebra, when you haven't learned your times tables? Or how are you supposed to read a 12th grade English literature or Government book, when you have a 3rd grade reading ability? But these and other issues are never addressed in “The Bad Kids,” whose sole purpose seems to be the creation of positivity and hope without any substance to back it up. 

In addition, the mystical value of a high school diploma is set as the unquestioned goal for all students at Black Rock High School Continuation School students in Yucca Valley, California. No context or questioning of this goal is ever presented and no subsequent academic success or failure of the students is ever presented. 

The Black Rock website lists statistics touting 38% for English and 50% for math as the numbers of students in the school district that are at grade-level; however, the specific statistics of Black Rock Continuation High School students are noticeably omitted. And when it comes to how many Black Rock students are actually "College Ready," the website says "N/A" for not applicable. Why is that? 

At no time during the after screening discussion I attended, lead by KPPC Reporter Adolfo Guzman Lopez, was the premise of “The Bad Kids” ever questioned critically. That is, not until I raised my hand and mentioned what I thought there were relevant questions that needed to be addressed: 

1. Since 70% of students going to California junior colleges with high school diplomas cannot pass the entrance/placement examination and wind up taking remedial classes until most drop out, why is a high school diploma so important, especially since students could get a GED or high school diploma contemporaneously with doing other community college work? Are all high school diplomas created equal if some are given away irrespective of whether or not a student has mastered the material? 

2. Since the total capacity of all colleges and universities in the United States is only 40% of all high school graduates, why are we closing down industrial arts and other direct occupational training programs that could enable students to find gainful employment, making them self-sustaining, tax paying members of our society with professions and/or the ability to pay for further education without going into debt? 

3. What justifiable rage and antisocial behavior is predictably acted out when the vast majority of students in continuation school programs like Black Rock High School ultimately figure out that they have been scammed by being given high school diplomas that aren't worth the paper they are written on? And how much effort would it take the school district or the state to test students to see if they really earned a high school diploma? 

While schools in the past served as the key societal integration mechanism that levelled the playing field by equalizing academic opportunity for all American socio-economic classes, the difference in opportunity between what the affluent receive and what minorities and the poor receive today has never been greater. Is it any wonder there are over 2.3 million people behind bars? If nothing else, it would seem that the cost of timely education would be far less than the $78,000 a year it costs to incarcerate a juvenile...unless you are the for-profit corporation running the prison. 

The free exchange of ideas and knowledge we need as a putative democratic society to continue making decisions that will allow America to be great – “great again” or maybe for the first time -- requires that we the people be given a marketplace of ideas from which to choose -- something more than mere propaganda. Could that be why the core of these rights are in the First Amendment? 

What I found most reprehensible at the screening of “The Bad Kids” was witnessing an example of the cowardice of the news media (both commercial and public) who seem to care more about keeping their jobs than going to where the facts lead them, irrespective of the corporate or foundation interests that either own or subsidize them. The Reporter Adolfo Guzman Lopez, who emceed the evening, is an extremely intelligent person and excellent writer who knows more than I do with regard to what is really going on in public education. But, as a reporter, he’s doing nothing to question the education system; rather, he gives distorted credibility to it by his mere unquestioning presence. 

When I asked him why he never questioned something as irrational as LAUSD Superintendent Michelle King's recent call for 100% graduation rate, while LAUSD has an audited effective truancy rate of 52%, Guzman Lopez said, "She must have meant she would like to have 100% graduation." Other than President Donald Trump's Press Secretary Sean Spicer, is it the function of a reporter to slant and interpret without input? Or rather, should he proactively ask how such an apparent contradiction could exist? Shame on you Adolfo!

(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TASER TROUBLE-Last chance for Charlie Beck. Back-to-back Taser-stained police shootings last weekend--one by LAPD officers, the other by LA County Sherrif's Deputies--have brought things to a head, and it’s time for Beck to make a choice: will he pull the plug on his aggressive Taser deployment policy, or let it pull the plug on him?

It may be too late. To save his legacy there's two things he can do: 

First, take the lead in the nation in calling out Taser International for what it is  -- a fraud -- and then dump it wholesale, demanding LA’s money back. 

Second, take the $370 million all-overtime contract he just snatched for providing Metro security and use a big portion of it to subcontract a private security force that can field enough personnel to provide each bus a dedicated guard. 

The jury is in: not only do Tasers fail to reduce police shootings, they cause them. The two police shootings last weekend were just two more data points on a graph that everyone in law enforcement across the country knows to be true. 

1) Tasers fail up to fifty percent of the time and thereby not only provoke the subject into aggressive behavior (leading to shootings by police officers) but also leave the officer exposed at close range and so more in need of using deadly force. Taser International advises officers to avoid shooting at the torso of a subject for fear of causing cardiac complications. At which part of the body is an officer supposed to aim? 

2) There is already an effective means of subduing subjects -- pepper spray -- which, however awful and imperfect, is reliable. It’s also sufficiently messy and inconvenient to discourage unwarranted use. The groan of rank and file cops over having to suffer that inconvenience will be like the groan of teenagers being forced to do something that they know is right. 

Charlie Beck let the Wall Street wolf into the chicken coop. By masquerading as pro-cop, the hedge fund managers who own Taser International are laughing all the way to the bank. 

Monday morning the City of Los Angeles Claims Board will grapple with a multi-million dollar Taser-involved police shooting judgment from 2013. What if the shootings last weekend had taken place at a Metro stop under Beck's all-overtime contract? The liability would be off the charts. 

It takes a village to put so many people -- cops, civilians, taxpayers -- in harm's way, but Eric Garcetti is off this weekend at what the Times is calling a “cattle call” for Presidential hopefuls, and he’ll be long gone when all this comes crashing down in flames. 

Will Charlie Beck's legacy come down with it? 

(Eric Preven and Joshua Preven are public advocates for better transparency in local government. Eric is a Studio City based writer-producer and a candidate for Los Angeles mayor. Joshua is a teacher.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.