The Inevitability of the Inevitable: CA Cities Will Go Bankrupt

If you’re the kind of person who looks to government to address the most critical needs of our society, including education, public safety, sanitation and essential services for the needy, then you need to start worrying. Your elected officials’ craven giveaways to public employee unions are about to blow back with hurricane force.

That tax money you happily agreed to entrusted to your elected officials for the greater good is actually going to fund retirement benefits (thanks!!!) that you could never dream of getting from a private employer.  Services intended for children and for your protection will inevitably be cut, drastically, to fund these benefits.  Your taxes will need to be increased (sorry!!!) to pay for them, despite the decline in services.  Or, your city, county or state might have to go this route:

You see, the good Democrats who dominate this blue state of California at the local and state levels are required to raise campaign money from somewhere (we like our jobs!).  With the exception of developers and government contractors, business doesn’t like them enough to send big checks (greedy bastards with no compassion!).

Where are these candidates supposed to find the big checks?  They find them by calling the unions representing the public employees.  Once they get elected, these elected officials owe the unions, big-time (or else!).  So they pay them back, providing an immense return-on-investment, with money intended for kids and the needy (thanks!).  These officials knew it was unsustainable, but, “Hey, we need those big checks!” (And besides, we’re termed-out, so who cares!)

From CNN/Money, an outline of the looming, inevitable crisis:

The jig is up. For years, politicians have been playing what amounts to a multi-trillion-dollar shell game with state and local pensions. They’ve doled out lush retiree benefits to their heavily unionized workforces, knowing that they could shove the cost for those benefits onto future generations of taxpayers.

But a recent financial bombshell dropped by a San Francisco suburb shows why that shell game is now starting to unravel in a nasty way. And it’s a cautionary tale that you can’t afford to ignore.

Here’s the skinny: In late May, Vallejo, Calif., became the largest city in California history to declare bankruptcy. Its financial demise was brought about partly by the real estate crash, which decimated home prices in the area and put a major dent in the city’s tax revenues.

But the real nail in Vallejo’s coffin was the city’s labor costs. Under the current labor agreement, the average police officer walking the beat in Vallejo will be paid $122,000 this year before overtime, according to city documents. An average sergeant will make $151,000; a captain, $231,000. The average firefighter, meanwhile, will bring in $130,000 before overtime.

That’s just the salaries, though. The final budget-crusher was the city’s pension plan. Thanks to retroactive benefit enhancements approved by the city council in 2000, police officers and firefighters can now retire at age 50 and receive an annual pension equal to 90% of their final pay (assuming 30 years on the job), an amount that gets increased every year to help keep pace with inflation. The old plan had given the workers a pension equal to 60% of their final pay at age 50.

So a Vallejo police sergeant making $150,000 a year can now retire at age 50 and receive an annual pension of $135,000, increased each year for inflation. To put that amount in context, you would need to amass a retirement nest egg equal to about $3.5 million to produce a similar retirement income on your own.

According to the Pew Center on the States, there is a $360 billion unfunded pension liability among the 50 states alone, not counting cities like Vallejo (or LA or SF).

Voters need to get involved in this arcane aspect of government, the article’s writer, Janice Revell, says.  Employees should receive the pensions they were promised when they were hired, but taxpayers should pressure elected officials not to give the public employees unjustified and unsustainable upward bumps.  Voter vigilance is necessary because the elected officials simply can’t help themselves (we need those big checks!).

This is an election year. As such, many states and municipalities are under heavy pressure to sweeten the pension plans for their workers – Massachusetts, South Carolina and Pennsylvania are but three high-profile examples. And ironically, just a few hours south of Vallejo, the city of Rialto, Calif., recently approved a similar retroactive pension increase that will give police officers a pension equal to 90% of their salaries at age 50.

The bottom line: If similar changes are being considered in your city or state, the Vallejo disaster tells you that it’s well worth your while to get the facts.

Maybe you’ll discover that your local pension fund is flush with money and that elected officials in your area have out laid out a sound, fiscally responsible plan for funding any pension improvements. But I wouldn’t bank on it.

I’ve been feeling sick about this issue for some time.  As Revell points out, the notion that public employees deserved higher benefits because they are making a sacrifice in accepting lower pay is an out-of-date myth.

What really burns me up, and should burn you up, is the way in which public-employee funded campaigns for increased government spending make illicit use of the neediest in our society — children, the elderly, victims of crime and fire — to pimp voters to part with money that will never reach the intended beneficiaries.  I want to be a liberal, vote like a liberal.  But I’m not willing to be tricked anymore into having my compassion exploited so cynically and so destructively.

Here’s What “John From Cincinnati” Means

I get it.  The fact that I get it doesn’t make “John From Cincinnati” a good show, but if you’re wondering what it’s all about, it’s simple.

“John From Cincinnati” tried to answer the question of what would happen if the most potent figures from the New Testament, akin to John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Joseph and Mary and of course, Jesus Christ, were to emerge in a contemporary setting.  What would the people around them do? 

The show asks:  Do you believe the New Testament?  Do you take it as a matter of not just faith but fact that Jesus performed miracles like raising the dead and walking on water?  Was the purpose of these miraculous feats to persuade the people of his times to believe he was divine, and that his words were prophecies? 

If you do believe these things, why would you find “John From Cincinnati” implausible? Isn’t there supposed to be a return?  Well, then, it could happen like it does on the show, couldn’t it?

The show was rife with Christian mystical symbolism, but I don’t think the point of the show was to bring us all to Jesus.  It was, instead, a what-if, a fantasy, a film noir Second Coming. And yet, within the universe of the show, we are to believe that this particular Second Coming is a very good thing — for the characters in the show, and for humanity in general.  The crisis precipitated by 9/11 is “huge,” as John says.  Bigger than what we believe it to be already.  An existential threat that will require divine force to save us mere, frail humans from turning it into an apocalypse.

Minneapolis Bridge Collapse Gives Antonio Villaraigosa Another Chance

I haven’t yet heard or seen Mayor Villaraigosa go on TV to talk about all the things he is going to do to check the status of all the bridges and other elevated structures on which Los Angeles drivers depend, many of which are older than the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis yesterday.

That’s okay.  They are still pulling people out of the Mississippi River.  It might be unseemly to move too quickly. But this tragic disaster presents the mayor with an unearned but vital opportunity to make the last two years of his term meaningful, and possibly recoup his political momentum.

As Stephen Flynn’s column in Popular Mechanics points out, every city and state leader in America should look up on the dead and injured in the Mississippi River and realize it could have just as easily been our neighbors, and it might be us next time.

According to a report card released in 2005 by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 160,570 bridges, or just over one-quarter of the nation’s 590,750-bridge inventory, were rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. The nation’s bridges are being called upon to serve a population that has grown from 200 million to over 300 million since the time the first vehicles rolled across the I-35W bridge. Predictably that has translated into lots more cars. American commuters now spend 3.5 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, at a cost to the economy of $63.2 billion a year.

It is not just roads and bridges that are being stressed to the breaking point. Two weeks ago New Yorkers were scrambling for cover after a giant plume of 200-plus-degree steam and debris shot out of the street and into the air. The mayhem was caused by the explosion of a steam pipe, installed underground in 1924 to heat office buildings near Grand Central station. In January 2007, Kentuckians and Tennesseans woke up to the news that the water level of the largest man-made reservoir east of the Mississippi would have to be dropped by 10 ft. as an emergency measure. The Army Corps of Engineers feared that if it didn’t immediately reduce the pressure on the 57-year-old Wolf Creek Dam, it might fail, sending a wall of water downstream that would inundate communities all along the Cumberland River, including downtown Nashville.

The fact is that Americans have been squandering the infrastructure legacy bequeathed to us by earlier generations. Like the spoiled offspring of well-off parents, we behave as though we have no idea what is required to sustain the quality of our daily lives. Our electricity comes to us via a decades-old system of power generators, transformers and transmission lines—a system that has utility executives holding their collective breath on every hot day in July and August. We once had a transportation system that was the envy of the world. Now we are better known for our congested highways, second-rate ports, third-rate passenger trains and a primitive air traffic control system. Many of the great public works projects of the 20th century—dams and canal locks, bridges and tunnels, aquifers and aqueducts, and even the Eisenhower interstate highway system—are at or beyond their designed life span. 

Politicians like Villaraigosa get advice from seasoned campaign operatives that talking about “infrastructure” is a losing political strategy.   Elections are won on emotion — elevating the candidate to mythic stature, and denigrating opponents as corrupt scum — not on the candidates’ plans to address the prosaic priorities of the government he or she wants to lead.  This dynamic has led to a critical underinvestment in the physical structure of our cities and states, especially in California.

It’s easier to tell people they need tax cuts, or to shovel more money to public employees.  Bridges, power plants and ports are not only unsexy, they become oddly controversial.  For an example, take LAX.  If you’re running for mayor or council, the quickest way to win applause in Westchester, El Segundo or Inglewood is to take the most irresponsible position possible with regard to upgrading that critical facility.  Safety? Security? Trade? Tourism?  Who cares!? The people around LAX don’t like it, and apparently figure that if nothing is done to fix it, it might go away.

The tragedy in Minnesota potentially could change the politics of infrastructure.   The desperate search for 20 or 30 missing people is anything but boring or unemotional.  The crumbling bridge puts the most important issue facing most cities and states at the top of the news — with a warning that it could happen here.  Villaraigosa, fighting to look like a serious leader again, could do himself and Los Angeles a lot of good by seizing this urgent moment to get the needed repairs on track.

David Halberstam, R.I.P.*

Two of David Halberstam’s books made a huge impact on me: The Best and the Brightest, and The Powers that Be. I don’t think a writer has captured the way bad governmental decisions can metastasize from good intentions into political manipulation better than Halberstam did in Best…. The Powers That Be, an intertwined narrative history of four big news organizations (CBS, Time, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times), contains a superb introductory history of Los Angeles.

Then, Halberstam started to mix books about sports into his public affairs writing career, focusing on particular moments in sports that allowed him to talk about social change in America, without departing too far from the drama of the games and personalities. I particularly recommend October 1964, which happens to be about the first World Series I was really able to follow, pitting the “establishment” New York Yankees against a St. Louis Cardinal team that was dominated by three of the greatest black players of that era: Bob Gibson, Curt Flood and Lou Brock. The morality play isn’t always so neat and tidy, but it gives him a theme to ride as he tells stories about so many baseball legends and follows the Series’ intensely competitive course.

Sadly, David Halberstam was killed an automobile accident Monday morning in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco. He was being driven to an interview with another sports hero, former New York Giant quarterback Y.A. Tittle, a participant in the NFL’s “greatest game,” the Giants’ 1958 championship game against the Baltimore Colts. Halberstam was the only person who died from the accident — he was dead at the scene. A UC Berkeley graduate student in journalism was driving the car, which was broadsided while making a left turn.

Halberstam was a more traditional reporter than some of his 1960s-era counterparts like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, but he had just as big an impact on the era’s journalism. He was critical of the leaders whose misrule resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers in Vietnam, but he built his case not with invective, but with thorough reporting and engrossing storytelling. His passing should prompt interest in his entire catalogue, which will only make him more of an inspiration to non-fiction writers of any era.

*UPDATE, 4/24/07:  Sheesh. Shouldn’t Slate’s Jack Shafer wait til Halberstam’s grave is dug before throwing dirt on him? 

Yeah, okay, he wasn’t a great stylist.  But his sports books were good, less prey to his windy tendencies.  It was interesting to look at a list of Halberstam’s works.  I was under the misimpression that all his books after about 1985 were sports-related.  Just all his best books, I guess.  The sports books, his NY Times Vietnam war reporting and especially The Best and The Brightest will be his legacy.   

**UPDATE, 4/25/07:  This is better.  The Washington Post’s Henry Allen writes affectionally about Halberstam’s unique style, notes that he had detractors, but shows how the style was a reflection of the man, his values and, yes, his ego:

He started working in the mid-’50s, before journalism was hip. He covered big stories: civil rights in the South, war in Africa, and Vietnam when John Kennedy was getting us into it with the help of “The Best and the Brightest,” as Halberstam called the elite and arrogant aides whose folly brought on our failure there.

He was not cool. He spewed sentences whose dependent clauses piled up into midden heaps of outrage or joy.

As part of an interview at lunch in 1979, he gave me this reaction to a bad review of his 1979 media book, “The Powers That Be.”

“Naturally, you want a book to live and be liked, it’s like children, but there’s a law of averages — you want the book to live. Some people aren’t going to like the book. Some people aren’t going to like you. Some are not going to like the success which — your anticipated success. And, after all, I’m not Tolstoy. It’s a very unusual book, unusual in its conception, unusual in its execution, unusual in its organization.”

All of this erupted from a fierce scrim of incantatory facial gestures, eyebrows divebombing his big nose, his lower lip jutting to show lower teeth but never upper ones while he oraculated to a reporter.

This was in The Summerhouse, a discreetly upscale restaurant just down the street from his townhouse on the Upper East Side. (“This is a wonderful neighborhood, I love living here, a truly remarkable place, one of the last strongholds of the middle class in Manhattan.” I wondered: Middle class? On 91st between Park and Madison?)

His schoolboy earnestness seemed preposterous in a man this famous, sophisticated and well connected, but it was the preposterousness that made him likable rather than insufferable. It even made him lovable unless you were on his enemies list, which was not short.

How he could roar on, gaining sincerity with every word. The New Republic satirized the same book: “David Halberstam. Halberstam, that was what everybody called him (after all, it was his name). They always said that what Halberstam needed was a good editor, his sentences ran on and on, he piled phrase upon phrase and clause upon clause, he used commas the way other men used periods.”

He was only following the writing teacher’s advice by writing the way he talked. He talked that way enough that his friends called him Rolling Thunder, Jehovah and Ahab.

It’s hard to stop quoting.  Just read the whole thing.

Bob Hattoy, R.I.P.

Bob Hattoy was a grand human being.  

He is one of the handful of people who educated me about the environment when Mayor Bradley appointed me as his deputy for environmental issues despite my minimal experience with the issue.  This was in 1987, at the cusp of a period of environmental progress that I was fortunate enough to participate in.  He helped me, even though he was allied with Bradley’s rival at the time, then-Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky. He was naturally generous.

Bob was sort of the Robin Williams of the environmental movement — outrageous, lightening-quick, hilarious.  As with any activist movement, some environmentalists are irony-challenged.  Not Bob.  He knew what the other side would say, and he was already making fun of it, simultaneously making fun of himself and all of us.  He came out of politics, and he was a good exponent of the “don’t believe your own press releases” maxim.  He worked hard and passionately, but wore his burdens lightly.  His humor was never cutting, cheap or mean.  It was always apparent he cared about people. Not people in the abstract.  People in the room. People in his life.

In the LA Times obituary, Elaine Woo describes how Bob’s irreverence got him in trouble with President Clinton on the issue of gays in the military:

He told that newspaper in March 1993 that he “almost started to cry” when he heard Clinton say at a news conference that he would consider limiting the assignments of gay soldiers. Such a move, Hattoy said, would be akin to “restricting gays and lesbians to jobs as florists and hairdressers” in civilian life.

By the next year, he was reassigned to the post of White House liaison on environmental matters at the Interior Department, where administration officials thought he would be less likely to be consulted about issues affecting gays and lesbians.

Of course, it was Bill Clinton who made Bob famous when he invited him to address the 1992 Democratic Convention about AIDS.  After mischeviously thanking ”Aretha and God” in that order, Bob mesmerized the crowd and the TV audience, delivering this speech, proving he could be intensely serious when the occasion called for it.  Here is a piece of it, but the whole thing is at the link and deserves your time.

We need a President who will take action, a President strong enough to take on the insurance companies that drop people with the HIV virus, a President courageous enough to take on the drug companies who drive AIDS patients into poverty and deny them lifesaving medicine. And we need a President who isn’t terrified of the word “condom.” (Applause)

Every single person with AIDS is someone worthy of caring for. After all, we are your sons and daughters, fathers and mothers. We are doctors and lawyers, folks in the military, ministers and priests and rabbis. We are Democrats, and yes, Mr. President, Republicans. We are part of the American family and, Mr. President, your family has AIDS and we’re dying and you’re doing nothing about it. (Applause)

Listen. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. But I don’t want to live in an America where the President sees me as the enemy. I can face dying because of a disease, but not because of politics.

I was so fortunate to see Bob for what turned out to be the last time at a beautiful outdoor wedding of a mutual friend last fall.  He was the same guy, funny, sweet, extremely gracious to my wife, hungry for political gossip.  He looked positively vigorous.  But he told me that he veered from good health to bad, and wasn’t always so robust. Things could change quickly.

According to the Times, he moved to Sacramento in January, perhaps to facilitate his service as chairman of the Fish and Game Commission, where he had served since 2002.  He died last weekend from complications of his disease.  I owe Bob a lot, and I’m going to miss him. 

Big and Quiet

A container ship slips quietly through the San Francisco Bay…

The sun streams onto a patio at Nepenthe in Big Sur…

…and the wind swirls around Coit Tower.

San Francisco, Looking at the Pacific from Pt. Lobos, 12/28/06

Clear, cold and windy here, just like in LA.

Let Me Tell You a Story About A Little Town Called Los Angeles…*

Harold Meyerson’s Los Angeles magazine column is not on its website yet, so you’ll just have to believe me that it’s pathetic.   Called “Topsy Turvy,” it is the kickoff to a series of features under the umbrella “The Power Issue.”  I’d call Meyerson’s piece propaganda — and Meyerson more pamphleteer than journalist — except I think he believes every word of it himself.  

In the spirit of Christmas I suppose, the story Meyerson wants to tell is like the Gospel verses that purport to show the birth of Christ and his divinity were foreshadowed by the Old Testament prophets.  In Meyerson’s cathechism, the whole history of Los Angeles has been leading up to this magical moment — the ascension of Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor.  The story’s John the Baptist is the late Miguel Contreras, the man who had the vision of a “labor-Latino-liberal alliance,” and then brought it into the world — dressed I suppose in swaddling clothes.

Do I dispute the fact that Latinos, labor and liberals today dominate City Hall?  Of course not.  But how new is it?  Not very.  The trend lines bringing each of these factions into power weren’t the vision of anyone in particular, and they were clearly visible long before Contreras became head of the LA County Labor Federation in 1996.  And for all the benefits empowerment accrues to these groups, it has not shown itself to be a coalition that’s strong enough to overcome Los Angeles’ profound problems.

Meyerson has to tweak history to make it fit his mythology.  His tale includes, but minimizes and misinterprets the 20-year mayoralty of Tom Bradley, attributing his rise solely to a coalition of Jews, African-Americans and liberals.  As I understand the history, those factions got Bradley into a runoff in 1969, where he was defeated by a racist reactionary assault by incumbent Mayor Sam Yorty.  It took additional help from labor and some of the business community to get Bradley elected in 1973. 

Labor played an enormous role throughout Bradley’s reign — as strong or stronger than it does today.  Bradley’s mightiest achievement, the rebuilding of downtown, came about because of labor leaders like Bill Robertson and Jim Wood, who saw the potential for thousands of good jobs in the construction of office towers and, later, the Metro Rail.

In comparison with Los Angeles’ reputation before World War II as an anti-labor city, Meyerson makes it seem like a phenomenon of the Villaraigosa era that unions play a dominant role in choosing who sits on “more than half the seats” on the City Council.  In fact, that level of influence took hold in the 1970s.  Bill Robertson was about as big a power broker as this city has seen in the past 50 years.  The carpenters, machinists, transportation workers and several others were serious power players that at least half the council and all other elected officials had to take seriously.  The players today are different and the agendas are different, but the labor movement’s decisive strength goes back decades.

It goes almost without saying that liberals have dominated Los Angeles politics at least since Bradley’s emergence in the late 60s — back when liberals didn’t hide their philosophy behind anodyne words like “progressive,” back when liberals were much more left-wing than today’s breed.  Three of the four mayors who have served since 1973 were liberal Democrats, and the fourth, Republican Richard Riordan, was only electable in 1993 because Los Angeles was in both a deep recession and a social malaise in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots. 

Riordan, however, was the embodiment of the RINO, the Republican In Name Only — a liberal in GOP drag, who only adopts a handful of conservative ideas to maintain his party identity.  A former Bradley appointee himself, Riordan’s staff was populated by Democrats. In fact Riordan and Villaraigosa had the same chief of staff.  Riordan posed no threat to the liberal achievements of Bradley’s era.  His conservatism on law enforcement and the economy mirrored the shift in many liberals’ thinking on those subjects at the time of his election.

True, Riordan took on the unions sometimes — but so did Bradley, and so has Villaraigosa.  If you want to see a mayor who was truly obedient to labor, the only example in my lifetime was Villaraigosa’s predecessor, Jim Hahn, whose defeat was celebrated by Meyerson.

Latinos are also not new to political power in Los Angeles.  Meyerson neglects a significant success of the Latino-labor coalition:  The uphill fight to elect Edward Roybal to the City Council in 1949, a seat he held until 1962.  True, after Roybal left City Hall, Latinos couldn’t win another seat on the council until Richard Alatorre in 1985, but that was more due to the devious political genius of a Spanish-speaking Irishman, Art Snyder, whose pork-barrel politics kept him popular in East LA for two decades.  But Latinos were a part of Bradley’s grand coalition. Throughout his tenure, Bradley never had more than two deputy mayors at a time.  One of the two was always a Latino.  

What really boosted Latino political fortunes in LA was the U.S. Justice Department. In the early 90s, the department sued to force the city to redraw its council district boundaries to maximize the potential for Latinos to win two more seats, for a total of three.  There are still three Latino council members today.  There probably should be four, but for the consensus desire to avoid conflict between the fast-growing Latino population and the shrinking black population.  The 2010 census will likely cost one African-American seat, and perhaps bring about two more Latino seats.  But this is demographic destiny combined with federal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act — not anyone’s grand strategy. 

In Meyerson’s mythology, Los Angeles was dominated by business leaders for most of its history until very recently.  In fact, at least since I was old enough to vote, business has had to form or join coalitions in order to have much political influence at all.   Even developers have to adopt the protective coloration of others’ agendas to win votes for their projects.  During Bradley’s era, business joined with labor and with the African-American and Latino communities on pro-growth policies that eventually led to a backlash among affluent suburbanites pining for preservation of Brady Bunch-style neighborhoods.  The homeowner groups — who Meyerson pretty much ignores in his fable — continue to exert strong influence on councilmembers representing parts of the San Fernando Valley and the Westside.

Meyerson is correct in observing that, beginning in the 1980s, “slowly but inexorably, all of the city’s signature big businesses–its banks, oil companies, aerospace conglomerates and department stores…were sold to or enveloped by new owners who moved their headquarters out of town.”  But why did things move in that direction — out of town?  Why weren’t LA-based corporations strong enough to be the nucleus of many corporate mergers?  

That saga is where the real story is, but it’s not one Meyerson wants to tell.  The fact is, Los Angeles has an extremely hostile business climate.  It’s heavily regulated, it’s expensive, and its public services are in tatters.  The young, eager and talented coming out of the nation’s colleges don’t think of LA as a cool place to start their careers.  Married employees with kids don’t want to deal with the bad schools, the traffic or the smog. Los Angeles is also afflicted with California’s poor business climate — a double whammy. 

I was just talking to someone in Phoenix today — the growth there is phenomenal.  Las Vegas, Reno, Portland, and other cities from Boise to Dallas are growing at LA’s expense, because they offer business lower costs, lower taxes, better services and a better lifestyle for the workforce.  Businesses want to ship their good through LAX and the Ports of LA and Long Beach.  They want to sell to the region’s huge population.  But they don’t want to have their headquarters here, and they want as little of their operations here as they can get away with. It’s just too costly and too much of a hassle.

Much of the blame for LA’s anti-business image, and California’s, falls at the feet of the portion of organized labor representing public employees.  To whatever extent labor’s political clout grew in the 90s and 00s, it was due to public sector workers taking over the labor movement.  The labor leaders in Bradley’s time, like Bill Robertson, were pro-business, because business meant jobs.  The labor leaders of the Contreras era are pro-high taxes, because high taxes pay for public sector jobs and perks.

Far from being the fulfillment of an historic evolution, the current political dynamic is in fact quite volatile and unsustainable.  Eventually, high taxes depress business activity so much that raising them brings in little additional funds.  Public services suffer as more and more of the public revenues go toward salaries and extremely generous pensions — and eventually, even the most liberal voters who give government the most benefit of the doubt will notice that despite massive resources going into the government, services aren’t improving.  Those who can afford to leave, leave.  Those who can’t leave are also those who don’t have much to give the taxman — or who can hire accountants to keep the taxman at bay. 

If there is any manifest destiny in Villaraigosa’s emergence, I think it comes from qualities unique to the man himself — his energy and enthusiasm, his charisma.  He obviously makes some people feel hopeful about Los Angeles.  He also has a great network; and better relationships with the state government, the governor and the legislature, than Bradley, Riordan or Hahn had.  That helps.

But the diminishing presence of business in Los Angeles is not a good sign, and it is not good news for liberals, labor leaders or Latinos.  In the first half of the 20th century, as Meyerson points out, business had too much power, and they abused that power to suppress organized labor and minorities.  After Bradley was elected, there was a balancing of influence between business and labor, leading to a period of growth from which all communities and factions saw benefit through working together.  The equilibrium was lost in the early 1990s, and since then, Los Angeles has been in decline.  Meyerson’s pseudo-socialist ideology blinds him to the fact that his beloved labor-liberal-Latino coalition is primarily in charge of handing out ever-smaller pieces of a shrinking pie.  It’s not clear if they know how to grow it. It’s not clear whether anyone does.

*Edited 12/2/06

The Wandering Tsunami

We don’t really have a firm grasp yet on what happens on this planet, do we?

TOKYO — A powerful undersea earthquake prompted tsunami warnings Wednesday for Japan, Russia and Alaska, but the danger passed after a series of tiny waves hit the northern Japanese coast.

Still, the event served as a useful test of Japan’s sophisticated early-warning system and of its civil-defense emergency procedures designed to speedily remove people from low-lying coastal areas.

Japan issued a major tsunami alert for the northern coast of Hokkaido and some parts of northern Honshu on Wednesday evening local time, sparking the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people in some of the most remote and inaccessible parts of the nation.

Several thousand people fled to higher ground on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. The waves, however, did not swell higher than 16 inches and rapidly diminished in size.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, right?  After the horrific December 2004 tsunami that wiped out 200,000 lives of people who mostly had no warning, now we issue warnings on evidence of a possible disaster, and then breathe a sigh of relief when the disaster doesn’t strike.  Warnings were issued not just in Japan, but also Alaska, British Columbia and Washington state.  No warning was issued for the Philippines, but coastal villages on the northeastern end were evacuated in a panic anyway, and the villagers stayed away despite government pleadings that they return.

No warning was issued for Crescent City, California.  But that’s where the tsunami hit.

Although tsunami warnings and watches for parts of Japan and the Pacific Basin were lifted Wednesday, hours after an 8.3-magnitude underwater earthquake struck the region, large waves were reported in Hawaii and on the western coast of the United States.

A 6-foot wave struck Crescent City Harbor in Crescent City, California, and caused “extensive damage” Wednesday afternoon, according to a National Weather Service advisory. In addition, the weather service said tide gauges along the coast of northern and central California have measured surge waves of 1 to 3 feet.

Crescent City’s local newspaper, The Daily Triplicate, described two surges, one at noon, and another more than a hour later:

Fisherman Victor Reneau said the first surge measured about 8 inches, an estimation he recorded because “we were all standing around curious.”

Harbormaster Richard Young said he thought the harbor was in the clear after the initial surge, which he’d been warned of earlier in the day.

But some time after 1 p.m. he noticed the water quickly running in and out of the harbor from his harbor office.

“We thought, ‘Gee, look at that, it’s the tidal wave,’” Young said jokingly.

Shortly thereafter, he saw that H dock had broken in half, so he jumped up and helped secure a floating boat.

Young said H and G docks were completely destroyed and F dock was “severely damaged.”

Though it’s still too early to give an exact figure, Young said replacement costs of the docks could range from $400,000 to $600,000 range.

(snip)The rate and speed that the waters rushed did more damage than the size of the surges, Young said.

“It didn’t even look like a wave — the water was just raising and falling rapidly,” he said. “It was the rate of change rather than the magnitude of change.”

Fisherman John Hale said the surge came in quietly, without warning. “It was just a little wave, then all of a sudden (stuff) started falling apart,” he said.

Lori Dengler, chairwoman of the Humboldt State University geology department, said the largest surge measured five feet.

“And it occurred at low tide, which was nice — very polite of it so far,” she said. “The Crescent City Harbor is just the right size and shape to get excited when tsunamis come.”

Los Angeles County Lite?

Probably I’m one of only about 238 people who think this is a big deal, but trust me, it’s a big deal! From Rick Orlov’s Daily News column today:

Prodded by City Councilwoman Jan Perry, a review has been quietly started to look at what it would take to have the city become its own county — similar to San Francisco — in an effort to get more federal and state funding.

Perry said she asked for a preliminary review by the Chief Legislative Analyst s Office because of the homelessness situation and the belief that Los Angeles County may dole out money to address the crisis based on politics rather than need.

It will take months before anything really surfaces, and it would be a complicated breakup. Remember how long it took to get the San Fernando Valley secession process vetted and on the ballot?

The difference is, the special interests who would favor a breakup probably have equal or greater ability to make this happen than the San Fernando Valley interests did.   Combined with Mayor Villaraigosa’s successful effort to obtain partial control of the previously independent LA Unified School District, this has the looks of a trend — the City of Los Angeles wanting to be accountable for all major governmental services within its boundaries. 

Who does what is a major source of confusion for many LA residents.  Right now, the City of LA is responsible for: law enforcement, firefighting, sanitation (trash from single-family homes and all sewage), libraries, street maintenance, street lighting, animal regulation, zoning, some parks, regulating cable TV and pipelines, and other less-visible services.  In addition, the city owns a public utility that sells water and electricity, and a port and several airports that very profitably lease space to shipping-related companies and airlines. 

The County is responsible for health services, welfare, children’s services, management of the criminal and civil courts and other criminal justice services like public defenders and probation, and flood control for the entire county, including all the cities.  It also provides law enforcement, firefighting; and other municipal services in the unincorporated areas, and, on a contract basis, to some cities.  For example, Beverly Hills has its own police department, but neighboring West Hollywood contracts with the County Sheriffs.   The county also has control over a number of cultural institutions: the Music Center, the Hollywood Bowl, LACMA.  The city has a cultural affairs department too, but its assets aren’t quite as notable.  Don’t even get me started on who does mosquito abatement.

Obviously, what’s at play here are the big-ticket items — health and welfare, both of which administer huge programs that receive huge allocations from the state and federal governments.  Undoubtedly the County would keep running the courts and continue to be responsible for dams and flood channels. I doubt the City Council wants to set up a new coroner’s office.  

This is not about decentralization.  It’s also not about “respect,” which was the driving force in the Valley secession movement.  A power struggle?  Yes.   But it’s also about the relationship between the government and the governed, and the mediating role of elected officials at the different levels.   There are only five county supervisors.  Their districts are bigger than most cities and some states.  They tend to be invisible.  There are not enough of them to go around, to cover the needs of 10 million people.  In the city, there are fifteen council members, which means the ratio of constituents to elected officials is somewhat smaller. 

One of the first things that will happen if the city effects this secession will be a reality check on the way the city governs itself.  The question of how much power the mayor should have relative to the council members, and how many council members there should be — all that will be reopened.  Which is fine.  Even without this expansion of its role, I believe the city needs more councilmembers.

Maybe this idea will die a quiet death.  But I don’t think so.  Accountability is an idea with the wind at its back.

Don’t NOT Vote…

I’m back in Orange County today while my son attends another play at Cal State Fullerton, which, from hearing him talk, might be what you’d get if Stratford-on-Avon mated with Broadway. Uh, okay. Sitting and waiting in Starbucks, I pick up a discarded OC Register Sunday Commentary Section, and see a friendly face on the front page, Jill Stewart, who I just mentioned the other day. She has a great column today that begins this way:

Have you noticed how, the more money the union and corporate special interests spend to promote their particular candidate, bond measure, or tax, the less interested and less aware of these issues we voters seem to be?

Although record amounts are being spent in California to drag us out away from our plasma TVs and our favorite blogs, we, the electorate, are deeply uninvolved. We are stuck in our comfy chairs.

How true. I’m going to vote Tuesday, but I expect to have to spend a lot of time in the voting booth reading over some of the propositions, because with one or two exceptions (the oil tax and the cigarette tax), I don’t understand what most of them are. Which are the ones that were Gov. Schwarzenegger’s grand deal with the legislature, the infrastructure bonds that are supposed to prepare California for the wave of population that, er, actually started arriving 20 years ago? I have no idea.

The advertising has been more unhelpful than usual. There’s one proposition that has been called a “taxpayer trap.” That’s all they say: Vote no on the “taxpayer trap.” To make sure I get the point, there’s a huge graphic of an old-fashioned mousetrap with what looks like a house from Monopoly being used as bait. So, does that mean if I give into temptation and try to take that nice little house, I’ll be caught in the taxpayer trap? The ad gives no further information. Then there’s another one that, if I recall correctly, implores me not to be fooled: Such-and-such proposition is bad for the environment. Since I had not heard of this proposition, listed only by number, I figure it’s unlikely that I’ve been fooled — but maybe, subliminally, I have.

I vote in every election, so in fact I will do my homework. But, as Jill Stewart suggests, most voters see these ads and figure the safest place to weather the election is from that comfy chair. So many traps out there, so many people trying to fool you! And if you’re just going to vote no, why bother showing up at all?

And that’s the special-interest strategy, Stewart suggests: To keep turnout “horrifically low.”

Little wonder why voters will stay away Nov. 7, and why record monies spent will be inversely related to votes cast. I figure a cost of $52 per vote.

The sharp pollster Mark Baldassare, director of research at Public Policy Institute of California, tells me, “What is going on is that a lot of money is spent on directing relatively few people to vote, and telling the rest of them to stay home. Campaign consultants … buy a list telling them who the voters are, they winnow it down to the 50 percent they need, and they try to get as many of the other people not to vote. And it works. This is no accident, that we are spending more money and getting less voters.”

The special interests get a bonus from this system, too, Stewart says. For an initiative to qualify in the next election, it must collect signatures equaling 5 percent of the total votes cast for governor. With the 2006 gubernatorial race pretty much a wipeout, and an initiative ballot full of obscure traps and tricks, turnout will be low, and so the 5 percent threshold in 2007-10 will be easier to meet, leading to “an onslaught of ballot measures.”

Who benefits from these ballot measures? They aren’t serious attempts to change the law, for the most part, are they? Given the overwhelmingly persuasive influence of the “vote no, it’s a trap!” advertising, I figure that the odds are against almost any ballot measure now–the good, the bad or the ugly. So who benefits? The election industry, that’s who — TV and radio stations who get to sell lots of advertising, the media buyers and other consultants. A full slate of initiatives, no matter how doomed, means full employment in the campaign and elections industry.

Back in my Berkeley days, I used to stop many late nights at Top Dog, which was run by some hard-core libertarians. The inside of Top Dog was decorated with libertarian bumper stickers. One of them was, “Don’t Vote. It Only Encourages Them.” But after reading Jill’s column, I think that slogan is due for an update. Voting is the last thing “they” want you to do. Don’t NOT vote. It Only Empowers Them.

Big Weekend for Yosemite Search-and-Rescue*

Blogged in the desert deals in extremes — earthquakes, severe weather, remote landscapes prone to stark conditions. In this post, he transcribes what the Yosemite Search and Rescue team had to deal with last weekend, as reported by the National Park Service. I hope this weekend goes more smoothly for them!

Zodiac Route, El Capitan, Yosemite Valley – Park dispatch received a 911 transfer call from CHP on Saturday afternoon, reporting a request for the rescue of a climbing team on the Zodiac Route on El Capitan. The Korean climbers on the wall spoke no English, and a Korean climber/interpreter who was assisting SAR personnel spoke only limited English. Clarifying the situation was accordingly difficult, but it was eventually determined that the climbers wanted to be rescued simply because their haul bag rope was tangled and they couldn’t figure out a means to correct the problem. Following a careful evaluation of the situation, SAR staff declined to launch a rescue at that time. Cold, rainy weather engulfed El Capitan the next morning, though, raising the concerns of SAR personnel. Due to the team’s obvious inexperience and the ongoing poor weather, SAR staff continued to monitor the progress of this team until they completed the route three days later.

Cables Route, Half Dome, Yosemite Valley – On Sunday, the park received several 911 cell phone transfers regarding a person who’d slipped outside the cables on Half Dome and slid 100 to 150 feet down onto the blank face. He was lying precariously on the face, using only the friction of his body against the rock to stop him from falling more than 800 feet to the ground. A ranger and a SAR climbing team were immediately dispatched to the incident location. The Yosemite rescue/fire helicopter was unavailable, so a primary rescue team was put on standby to await the arrival of another helicopter to fly them to the shoulder of Half Dome. A helicopter from Sequoia/Kings Canyon responded to the request for mutual aid assistance and was the first available for the mission. Unfortunately, due to the time it took to free up a helicopter, more than two hours passed before technical rescuers were on scene. SAR technicians then repelled down to the man and rescued him. Although uninjured, he was treated for hypothermia at Yosemite Medical Center and later released.

There’s more, so if you’re looking for adventure, go visit both the post and his site.

*UPDATE — Somehow I overlooked this huge Yosemite story on “blogged in the desert,” about the accidental death near Bridalveil Falls of pioneering free climber Todd Skinner.  Here is the excellent New York Times obituary for him, and here’s an excerpt from it:

In 1988, using only their hands and feet to move upward, Mr. Skinner and his longtime climbing partner, Paul Piana, completed the first free ascent of the 3,600-foot Salathé Wall on El Capitan in Yosemite, a seminal achievement in American climbing.

“He proved that it was possible to free climb El Capitan,” Mr. Model said. “Now it’s common.”

Perhaps Mr. Skinner’s most renowned feat was his team’s free ascent, in 1995, of the East face of Trango Tower, also known as Nameless Tower, a 4,700-foot rock face in the Karakoram Range of the Himalayas in Pakistan. No one had tried to free climb it before.

Mr. Skinner and three climbing partners from Wyoming — Mr. Model, Jeff Bechtel and Mike Lilygren — spent 60 days at more than 18,000 feet and reached the peak of about 20,500 feet. Mr. Skinner described the expedition in a cover story for National Geographic in 1996.

“We faced serious objective dangers — avalanches, rock falls, we were trapped in hanging tents for days at a time,” Mr. Model said.

Invested in Angelides

So, according to the LA Times and the San Jose Mercury News, the California Democratic Party has figured out recently that this gentleman Democrats nominated for governor, state Treasurer Phil Angelides, is encountering unexpected trouble and might lose the election.

It’s hard to figure out how a campaign that started with such seemingly unstoppable momentum could run into a rocky patch, but in politics, like in life, sometimes the unexpected happens. It’s starting to look like the Republican incumbent, Arnold Schwarzenegger, might just eke out a victory — a development few party activists could have foreseen back in March, when Angelides seized the nomination.

Moreover, if Angelides is somehow defeated, it might have an impact on the fortunes of other Democratic statewide candidates. Imagine!

Worried Democrats said Sunday that Phil Angelides failed to achieve the breakthrough he needed in the sole gubernatorial debate and expressed fear that his campaign’s trajectory threatened others on the statewide ticket.

Fellow Democrat John Garamendi, in a tight race for lieutenant governor against Republican state Sen. Tom McClintock, has started to distance himself from Angelides. He said in a television interview aired Sunday that he disagreed with an Angelides plan to raise taxes on corporations and the well-to-do.

“I don’t think it’s necessary,” Garamendi, now insurance commissioner, said on KNBC’s “News Conference.”

Though few thought Angelides did poorly in the debate, there was wide agreement that Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger benefited the most from Saturday night’s allotted 55-minute session, largely because nothing occurred to change the essential dynamic of the race.

Angelides, the state treasurer, entered the evening desperately needing to redefine a contest that by all measures — polling, fundraising, party morale — was going badly for him. And he needed the lift not just for himself, but for fellow Democratic candidates counting on him to spur a strong turnout Nov. 7.

Okay, with my tongue now excavated from my cheek, I just want to know one thing. Angelides won the nomination from a moderate, pro-business candidate, Steve Westly, because a group of labor leaders and other party regulars organized an independent campaign on Angelides’ behalf. They spent a lot on it, and made a heroic effort. Their hard work paid off.

Why did they do this?

Angelides is the same guy in October 2006 that he’s been his entire public life. The Dems always do opposition research on their own candidates, so they knew he was vulnerable on the issue of tax hikes. The positions the Schwarzenegger campaign is throwing in his face were promulgated over the course of his career.

In fact, that’s Angelides’ defense, essentially to say, “I didn’t support those tax increases all at the same time.” But he’s not making much of a case for what he’d spend that money on. He’s running basically for the status quo — for letting lots of busy government employees keep doing things Democrats have faith are worthwhile. He’s misread the public mood. The public doesn’t think all of what state employees are doing is worthwhile — and hasn’t felt that way since the Gray Davis years.

In this story, the Times says California has “a left-moderate tilt.” I agree. But the left side is mostly about social issues, specific policy issues like the environment, and national issues like the war in Iraq. The moderate side of California’s political persona still leans right on the issues of taxes and government expenditures: Lower taxes, no deficits, keep spending under control, don’t touch Proposition 13. The sky-high cost of living is a factor that dominates most Californians’ daily lives. Few believe they aren’t being taxed enough. Even relatively painless bond issues lately have failed, unless they are for schools.

It is on taxes and spending where Angelides is weakest — and yet, many in the party’s leadership decided he was the candidate they wanted to see at the top of the ticket.

Now, some Democrats talk about a “triage,” not throwing good money after bad, focusing resources on down-ticket Democrats who Angelides is hurting. But when was it good money? When did this candidate look like a worthy challenger to a superstar incumbent, and to whom? Would they care to explain now what they were thinking back then?