Comments
THE VIEW FROM HERE - Not only does power corrupt, but corruption destroys. The conflagrations consuming Los Angeles are not the result of climate change, but were caused by the decades long corruptionism at Los Angeles City Council. After Mayor Karen Bass took office in 2022, her behavior did nothing to rectify the situation, but LA City had already passed the point of no return. If Mayor Bass had $5 Billion to fix all that was wrong with Los Angeles due to the massive decades’ of corruption, she could not have made a dent. Karen Bass, however, did not even try, but instead her Woke DEI administration turned a nightmare into a living Hell.
LAFD Chief Crowley had been warning Bass ab initio of the malign cancers which needed immediate attention. However, Mayor Bass chose not to alert Angelenos to the unmitigable disasters which were looming over Los Angeles. Rather, her Woke DEI agenda took priority. Supposed the $1.3 Billion wasted in one year on worthless attempts to thwart homelessness had been spent on fixing infrastructure and providing the LAFD the personnel and equipment it needs – as Fire Chief Crowley had been telling Bass.
For those who think, this nightmare was not foreseeable, we will present a few documents from the past. There is more to this story which goes back decades as the May 2005 USA Today article alludes. There are a plethora more documents, but CityWatch has only so much room.
1) May 20, 2005 USA Today article that the LAFD is understaffed as proven by response times. A major source was Marc Ecstein, LAFD Medical Director. Paramedic and firefighter response times are roughly the same as they come from the same fire stations and are dispatched by the same system. See FN #1
2) August 19, 2012, memo from Richard Lee Abrams to Hollywood Neighborhood Council (HUNC) town hall, explaining the basis for HUNC to call for a federal grand jury. At the August 2012 HUNC Town Hall, firefighters and paramedics testified despite Garcetti’s and the top brass’ threats of retaliation against the rank and file. (HUNC is now essentially defunct under the control of developer shills.) See FN #2
3) LA County’s June 28, 2013 Civil Grand Jury after Garcetti had downsized the LAFD by $200 million ($280 Million in 2024 dollars) and the LAFD money should be forthwith restored. It was not. Instead billions of dollars were funneled to developers and Wall Street by the use of a variety of frauds. See FN #3
In January 2014, Judge Allan Cooperman threw out Garcetti’s Update to the Hollywood Community Plan on the grounds that it had been “intentionally based on fatally flawed data and wishful thinking to the extent it subverted the law.” Judge Goodman was ignored; the Manhattanization of Hollywood continued and its population continued to drop, while homeless increased. After Garcetti became mayor, everything got worse while developers and Wall Street got wealthier by hundreds of billions of dollars.
One Should Not Think That Garcetti’s Corruption Only Impacted the Fire Department
The entire city and the courts are filthy with corruption. For example, the City Attorney Mike Feuer participated on both sides the lawsuit against the fraudulent rate scams at Department of Water and Power (DWP). By being on both the Plaintiff’s and the Defendant DWP’s side, Feuer was able to derail the lawsuit to save hundreds of millions of dollars for the DWP. The city itself gets an 18% override on DWP revenue. Any other attorney, who was secretly on the side of the Plaintiffs who were suing his client so that he could sabotage Plaintiff’s case, would be disbarred. The California chief judges similarly dismissed over 200 complaints against Thomas Girardi for stealing clients’ funds! The federal judge in Chicago caught Girardi on his first case. “Filthy with corruption” is too mild to describe our judiciary, but it explains why corruptionism still reigns at LA City Council.
Do not think that political corruption in any area is over. Mayor Karen Bass has obviously interfered with the arrest and prosecution of her buddies at Black Lives Matter (BLM). Has there been a single arrest of the mob who stormed the city council and tried to break into city hall to stop the city council from meeting? No! Not under her Woke DEI administration! BLM’s member Jason Reedy was never arrested despite the fact he was videotaped assaulting and battering Councilmember Kevin DeLeon due to the totally false lie that DeLeon was an anti-Black racist. Knowing that the racist defamation was 100% false, Mayor Bass protected the criminals. Did the LAPD protect former city council president Nury Martinez when the mobs threatened her son? No. Instead, she and her family had to flee and she resigned to protect her son. BLM members are above the law. Wasn’t it Mayor Bass who also interfered with the LAPD’s helping UCLA stop the anti-Jewish pro-Hamas encampment despite knowing that Jewish students were physically assaulted? The protectionism of LA corruption extends to the City Council itself as Judge David Fruin ruled in December 2016; the city council’s actions are “non-justiciable.” That means the city council does not have to follow the law – not Penal Code § 86 or even its own Council rules.
How will Chief Crowley Fare?
The powers-that-be hate nothing more than someone who tells the truth. See Chief Cowley telling the truth Experience shows that she will pay heavily for speaking the truth. The attorney, Yours Truly, who used facts to show that the City had duty to study downsizing and downzoning rather than use falsified data to justify upzoning, was disbarred. The federal judge, who objected to prosecutorial and judicial corruption including Kamala Harris, was forced off the bench – despite life-time tenure. Will Chief Crowley be forced to resign? BTW, why did LAPD Chief Michel Moore resign so abruptly in the wake of the Woke DEI Sandal defaming three innocent council members as anti-Black racists? (“Moore is the son of a Spanish father, and his original last name is Sanchotena. "Michel" is the Basque and French form of "Michael," and Moore pronounces his first name "Michael")
As CityWatch has previously pointed out, there are still hundreds of billions of dollars to be looted from Los Angeles by developers and Wall Street through endless frauds and scams. One would like to think the present disasters would be a wake up call to stop the vast corruptionism, but that would be naive. As a harbinger of things to come, let’s see if the LA Times (Pravda West) turns against its billionaire cohorts to expose LA’s ruinous corruptionism or whether it advises that “This is not the time to point fingers.”
(Richard Lee Abrams has been an attorney, a Realtor and community relations consultant as well as a CityWatch contributor. You may email him at [email protected])
