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THE VIEW FROM HERE - Historians will no doubt have tons of theories about Los Angeles’ demise. Of course, then it will be too late. In fact, now it is too late to avert the evil decree. As with most significant events, the wretched state of Los Angeles has multiple substantial factors. One of the most important is its form of government.
Los Angeles’s government is a feudal society divided into fifteen fiefdoms where the lord or lady (councilmember) is total ruler. While Europe in the middle ages had inherited rulers with their overthrows and decapitations only to be followed by subsequent overthrows, etc., Los Angeles has peaceful changes in the fifteen lords and ladies. Nonetheless, succession is controlled by behind-the-scenes power mongers; LA’s elite and Wall Street. Jan 6th showed that we are not that immune from violence determining who shall govern.
Any councilmember such as Huizar, Englander, and before them Richard Alarcon, will be prosecuted on bogus charges in order to protect the grandiose corruptionism of the LA City Council. The political sin of all three was the same: interfering with the corrupt Los Angeles city council’s One And Done Rule. Alarcon’s first error was rejecting developer bribes for his Valley District 7. Under Los Angeles City Council operating rules, each councilmember will have any project which he places on the city council agenda unanimously approved. A councilmember who refuses to accept bribes halts this developer corruption at its inception. Worse yet, councilmember Alarcon publicly questioned the corruption at the City’s Planning Department. At the June 19, 2012, city council hearing on Garcetti’s Update to the Hollywood Community Plan, he asked the representatives of the Planning Department, “Couldn’t the city redo the Hollywood Community and the 30 community plans which will use it as a model based on accurate data?” When the department’s representative said “Yes, they could all be done based on accurate data,” the assistant city attorneys swarmed Alarcon, telling him to be quiet. Then, Councilmember Eric Garcetti (CD 13) demanded that his Hollywood Community Plan be unanimously approved forthwith with false data and all its other defects. The entire council voted yes.
Two years later in January 2014, Judge Goodman threw out the entire Hollywood plan since it had been knowingly based on fatally flawed data. By this time, the corrupt courts had prosecuted Alarcon because he lived in the wrong house in the Valley, while his main residence was being renovated. Hence, he resided short distance outside CD 7. (His replacement Herb Wesson did not even live in the Valley!) The irony is that had Alarcon been taking developer bribes, his home in CD 7 could have been fully renovated. Finally, the bogus charges against Alarcon were thrown out, but LA’s corrupt elite had achieved its objective. Alarcon was out of office, and everyone was on notice not to interfere with the One and Done Rule.
As explained in CityWatch, the entire Englander - Huizar criminal charges had one purpose – to protect the corrupt One and Done Rule. See FBI Seeks But Will Not Find.
The Short Story about Englander and Huizar
They did take bribes, which is expected in Los Angeles, but their unique corruption harmed the One of Done Rule. Rather than limiting their bribe taking to their own district, they used their control of the PLUM committee to force developers to may many more bribes to Englander and Huizar and their political allies in order to get the PLUM hearing approval. The amount of money which Englander and Huizar were demanding was exemplified in the LA Times Janice Hahn got $203,500, Jose Buscaino got $94,700, Martinez got $7,700, Huizar got $30,400, Englander got $65,800. When developers could be hit up for hundreds of thousands of dollars in more bribes in order to get through the PLUM Committee before reaching the City Council, where the developer was guaranteed unanimous approval, the One and Done Rule was becoming worthless. Englander and Huizar threatened the entire structure of city council corruption which rested on each councilmember being able to guarantee unanimous approval of a developer’s project. Since some districts like CD 14 had tons more construction, those districts could rake in bribes galore. Districts with little construction wanted in on the action and PLUM was the place to make their stand. The One and Done Rule only applied to the final city council vote. Thus, Englander’s and Huizar’s demands for more bribe to other councilmembers posed a lethal financial threat to the City Council’s vote trading requirement which mandated a yes vote on every project.
The corrupt US Attorney for Los Angeles carefully crafted his complaint against Huizar and Englander to excluded the One and Done Rule, which was the glue which held together the city council’s criminal vote trading rule. If Los Angeles’ City Council had not operated according to the One and Done Rule, which Penal Code § 86 had criminalized, Los Angeles would not have been awash in developer bribery. With 15 council members, it is financially prohibitive for developers to bribe a majority of the city council. Without the vote trading requirement, which Penal Code, § 86 had outlawed but LA and the corrupt courts ignored, bribing the one councilmember for the district where the developer wanted to build could not guarantee city council unanimous approval. Thus, the US Attorney made certain that he never allowed any mentioned the lynchpin of LA corruption in the Englander and Huizar trials least the rogue Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals should expose LA’s habitual violation of Penal Code §86. Instead, the US Attorney focused on Englander’s, Huizar’s, and the developers’ shenanigans in Los Vegas and other common misdeeds, but the US Attorney stopped the case well before unanimous city council approval would become an issue. The US Attorney’s truncating the criminal case before mentioning the One and Done Rule, left the logical question: why would the developers pay so such money for only one councilmember when it needed 11 for passage?
Thus, the core of Los Angeles’ damnation derives from its feudal form of government and the One and Done Rule. There is no group to counter the corruption. The State judiciary has been fatally corrupt since the 1986 state supreme court judicial retention elections and the federal courts have been corrupt far before that. If one has a case of no significance to a judge, one may get a fair trial, but increasingly judges and attorneys have found a multitude of ways to obtain personal benefit. The most notorious attorney was Thomas Girardi who had been paying off judges for years in order to get high jury verdicts. The bribes to the judges as well as the avaricious demands of his wife, Real Housewife of Beverly Hills star, Erika Jayne, led to Girardi’s taking his client’s funds to pay off the judges as well as to support the lavish life style of Erika Jane. Despite a rumored 200 complaints to the State Bar about Girardi’s theft of client funds, the State Supreme Court Chief Justices, who control the State Bar discipline, absolved Girardi in every single case!
After one case before a federal judge in Chicago, however, the judge reported Girardi to that federal circuit for his taking client funds. That did not curtail Girardi in California until interest in the scandal involved his infamous wife. Then, California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye was forced to resign in 2022. No one bothered to ask why Chief Justices had turned a blind eye to all the complaints about Girardi’s stealing millions of dollars of clients’ funds to pay off judges. Girardi was hastily declared incompetent so that he could not be questioned about which judges he had bribed, his pattern to pay mortgages for judges, his use of off short bank accounts including in Mexico, and his Nevada retreat Yellowstone where he allegedly hosted (and filmed ?) judges’ sexual predilections.
The reason that the corruption which controls the California judiciary from the Chief Justice to the lowest clerk is relevant to LA’s being doomed is that the judicial system is supposed to be a primary check and balance against the executive and legislative branches. Rather than protect the public, the judges protect only the corrupt. This corruption was epidemic back when Kamala Harris was State Attorney General, which is how she earned the nickname “Queen of the Jailhouse Informants.” Judges who objected to Kamala Harris’ untoward behavior were forced off the bench.
Do not expect the Trump Administration to take any effective action. Trump wants courts to rubber stamp his every whim; he uses the judicial system to exact political revenge.
From Whence Will LA Reform Come?
Nowhere! There will be no savior! Angelenos have been told for over 15 years, that there is no housing shortage, but they refuse to believe their own eyes. They foolishly believe that homelessness is due to the moral depravity of the homeless and from the failure to build enough new apartments. The sole and only cause of Los Angeles’ Homeless Crisis is the mass destruction of poor peoples homes, where developers threw the poor onto the streets, knowing that large percentage would remain homeless since all the vacant housing in Los Angeles was above their ability to pay. If the corrupt city council had not accepted bribes to destroy tens of thousands of rent controlled apartments, LA would have no Homeless Crisis today.
Because so many of the poor who were evicted to make way for projects were the mentally ill, those with criminal records, and the very low skilled, those segments of the Homeless grew larger each year. For obvious reasons, they had a much harder time finding new shelter. If they have a Section 8 voucher, a landlord does not have to rent to a crazy person. The landlord has a legal duty not to rent to individuals who will destroy the “quiet enjoyment” of other tenants. Landlords seldom want to take a chance on renting to someone with a criminal record. As the years rolled by, the mentally ill, etc. became a significantly portion of the homeless population so that LA had the criminally insane roaming the streets murdering people. Fraudsters like the city council and the Pravda West (LA Times) then turned reality upside down and blamed the homeless for their own plight since the were drug addicted, criminals and mentally ill.
Currently, homelessness costs the city council over $1.3 billion per year, but do not expect any truth to emerge from city hall. Mayor Karen Bass and everyone else in the power structure have made clear that they will tolerate no more “Truth Sayers” like former LAFD Fire Chief Kristin Crowley. Knowing that Kristin Crowley had spoken 100% the truth in saying that the lack of preparedness of the LAFD played a role in not adequately fighting the Pacific Palisades disaster, Mayor Bass fired her. Let’s be very clear about this fact. Mayor Karen Bass knew for an undeniable fact that Chief Kristin Crowley had spoken only the truth, but that did not stop Mayor Bass from setting forth a series of Trumpian type lies. When Chief Kristin Crowley appealed to the city council, every member of the council knew that Kristin Crowley had done nothing wrong, but due to their cowardly fear of retaliation by Mayor Bass and Los Angeles’s hidden elite, all but two voted against Chief Crowley and in favor of Lies and Myths as the basis for Los Angeles’ governance.
The Woke Developer Alliance
Both the Woke and the Developers want the same thing: POWER. Neither gives two cents for the general welfare; both are organized to suck as much wealth out of the middle and lower classes as possible. The Woke do have one advantage – unlike the MAGA, the Woke do not want to destroy the medical system along with balance of all Keynesian programs such as Social Security. (MAGA grew up to answer Pelosi’s Identity Politics which became Wokeism. Without Pelosi, there would have been no tea baggers, Trump would not have won in 2016 and he would not have won again in 2024. No matter what disaster Pelosi, Obama, and other Wokers bring upon America, they are convinced that only more anti-white anti-Jewish Wokeism can save America.)
Wokers and Developers are united in the desire to destroy homeownership in Los Angeles and they are very successful. The exodus of Millennials and others who want to have a detached home with a yard for their family are fleeing Los Angeles. Due to vast corruption in the overall housing market, LA Housing is about 2 to 3 times above fair market values so that anyone who purchased a home in last 15 years is paying millions of dollars in extra mortgage payments. Homes which should cost no more than $450,000 are selling for $2 Million. When the family, however, shuns LA and relocates to the suburbs or exurbs outside LA and California, they can afford a decent single family home for a reasonable price.
Employers have already fled Los Angeles since they know that ultimately they will have to bear the burden of LA fraudulently hyper high home prices. The only place most young homeowners will find enough cash to buy a home is from their employers. As a result, LA employers are at a competitive disadvantage. The main reason the film industry is leaving LA is that producers do not want to pay exorbitant housing costs for their employees. No amount of tax incentives can compensate for the billions of dollars in absurdly high housing costs.
There is No Salvation
The developers will exact every penny until the federal government will no longer pay for housing. . Other than the federal government, there is no other place to bail out LA. The Wokers will take over and with LA’s crashing property taxes, today’s $1 billion deficit will look small.
(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])
