CAPITAL & MAIN SPECIAL REPORT-Fernando E. Hurtado scrolled through photos on his mobile phone in a pristine new examination room of South Los Angeles’ federally funded St. John’s Well Child and Family Center. Nearby, his wife, Amy Areli, waited with two of their four children as the younger boy fidgeted nervously. 

“He’s getting his immunization shots today,” Hurtado grinned at the 3-year-old before pausing at a close-up of a woman’s forearm and what looked like a mosquito-bite-sized bump surrounded by a patch of ruddy inflammation. The next image revealed a gaping, half-dollar-sized crater where the bump had been.

“My wife got a tiny cut on her arm that became infected,” Hurtado explained. “It was [Methicillin-resistant] staphylococcus. She spent nine days in the hospital. They told me that if we hadn’t had Medi-Cal, the bill would have been more than $100,000. If this would have happened without medical coverage, there would have been no way for us to afford to pay that kind of expense.” 

On the same day that congressional Republicans set the stage to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the 35-year-old father, who installs artificial lawns, grimly reflected on the shadow that his family and the majority of St. John’s patients have been living under since the election of Donald Trump signaled the coming end of the law that has dramatically transformed California’s health-care landscape. “Before my wife got the infection,” Hurtado said, “our 2-month-old baby was also in the hospital, with an infection for [chicken pox], when he got an infection in his head and he was hospitalized for four days for the same [staph] bacteria. I imagine them not having medical coverage. Yes. Of course I’m worried.” 

Though the form that Trumpcare will take remains vague, for Hurtado and his family -- and the more than 50 percent of their newly insured South LA neighbors, who now rely on the state’s ACA Medi-Cal expansion for their health coverage -- the future remains frighteningly uncertain. They are not alone. 

Over five million Californians have received coverage under Obamacare -- 3.7 million through Medi-Cal and 1.4 million through Covered California -- and the state has logged the largest percentage-point decline in its uninsured rate of any state, dropping from nearly 17.2 percent in 2013 to 8.6 percent in 2015. 

St. John’s alone has enrolled over 18,000 previously uninsured Angelinos, nearly all of them black or Latino, and more than doubled its insured-patient base. The health center has aggressively embraced the new ACA population to dramatically expand preventative and primary care throughout the region, which before the law had been ground zero of California’s uninsured crisis. 

“We provide free medical, dental, mental health and support services, and case management in about 300,000 patient visits a year at 14 sites and two mobile [clinics],” St. John’s Well Child and Family CEO Jim Mangia told Capital & Main.  “We provide health-care services to the homeless. We serve thousands of homeless folks through two mobiles that go into the riverbeds and to help buy homeless shelters. And we’re the largest health provider in South L.A., which is the largest area of contiguous poverty in the United States.” 

But with Trump now in the White House, those gains are in the crosshairs of the new president and the Republican congress. At stake for Californians is $20.5 billion a year in federal ACA subsidies. The murkiness surrounding what will happen next has left the state’s political and public health leadership with little choice but to brace for the worst and hope for the best. 

“It is almost impossible to develop a contingency without knowing exactly what we are dealing with,” state Senate Health Committee Chair Dr. Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina) told Capital & Main in an email. “A loss of federal funding would be devastating for low-income and middle-class Californians who rely on the ACA for their health insurance. We plan to do everything we can to protect the people of our state and ensure stability in the health insurance market and Medi-Cal program.” 

St. John’s spotlights a lesser-known aspect of the Affordable Care Act — namely, its role as a conduit for $12 billion in construction infrastructure spending and operational funding for the expansion of private nonprofit health centers, which are known as Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC). These provide low-income and immigrant communities with quality health care, regardless of a patient’s ability to pay. That makes the center both an exemplar of how much California stands to lose, as well as an unexpected harbinger of what resistance to the abolition of the ACA might look like. 

“I started that literally the day after the election,” Mangia said about planning for the Trump era, “and now I’ve got all of these players. There’s a lot of special interests that benefited from the Affordable Care Act. … We’re talking about, ‘Okay. What’s our advocacy need to look like? Who do we need to be talking to? Who do we need to bring to the table to craft a solution in the state?’” 

Forty-five percent of St. John’s patients are ineligible for insurance under ACA because of their immigration status. According to Mangia, who was part of President Obama’s health policy committee when the Affordable Care Act was first being drawn up, addressing the plight of those ineligible for Obamacare because of immigration status was always part of the plan. Care for the undocumented is partially paid by My Health LA, a no-cost health-care program run by L.A. County. Private fundraising makes up the rest. 

The FQHCs have been instrumental in braking the country’s decades-long expansion of America’s health-care inequality gap, which continues to be one of Obamacare’s most significant achievements. 

Even more transformative, perhaps, is the quality of the medical care and the innovations that ACA has delivered. The law reorganized payment methodology and radically re-prioritized the health-care system with pay-for-performance measures that shifted the focus of providers from end-of-life and sick care to prevention and primary care. It encouraged innovations like the patient-centered “medical home”  -- a holistic delivery model designed to improve quality of care through team-based coordination of care, for the “whole” patient. Tying Medicare payments to the quality, rather than the quantity, of care that characterized the pricey, pre-Obamacare fee-for-service model, created efficiencies and surpluses for health centers like St. John’s that could then be used to serve California’s estimated 3.3 million uninsured, along with its undocumented population. 

“These relatively modest reforms actually ended up being revolutionary in all sorts of different ways,” recalled Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy coalition Health Access California. “There was all this really exciting work to provide people medical homes, and have early intervention to keep people healthy before they got sick in the first place. There was exciting work about how to treat issues around substance abuse and behavioral health medically, rather than criminally, which was starting to have profound benefits to not just our health system but to our criminal justice and corrections systems. If we undo the Medicaid expansion, we undo all that progress in one swoop.” 

Preserving that expansion has been the focus of California resistors, including consumer groups, labor unions and Democratic lawmakers, since election day, both in the current campaign by patient advocates, to bring public pressure on Trump and Republicans, and in anticipating the full extent of the damage to California’s Medi-Cal expansion that will need to be controlled. 

Nevertheless, it’s difficult to resist what is still unknown. And the extent of that damage won’t be clear until the plan is unveiled sometime after Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Georgia Representative Tom Price, is approved by the Senate. 

Recent promises by Trump for a speedy and concurrent repeal and replacement of ACA with “insurance for everybody” that is “much less expensive and much better” have only further muddled the picture. The broad strokes remain at odds with what has been outlined in separate ACA alternatives by Price, who opposed ACA’s fundamental reforms, and by House Speaker Paul Ryan. And Price’s Tea Party antipathy to federal entitlements makes future attempts to cut Medicare and Medicaid likely. 

“Both of [the plans] would repeal most of the regulations under the ACA, but they would restore some aspects of the law, including subsidies for people to buy health insurance,” explained Gerald Kominski, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and director of the University of California, Los Angeles Center for Health Policy Research. “But their subsidies would be substantially lower than those currently available under the ACA, and would [go] back to a market that’s largely regulated at the state level rather than [have] the layer of federal regulations [that has standardized] the individual insurance market. So it’d be a little bit of a free-for-all.” 

California resistors are divided as to whether the state would have the political will or financial wherewithal to make up the federal government’s $20 billion share of the Medi-Cal expansion and Covered California, should it be cut, or to even go it alone with a version of single-payer. 

“I have always believed that health care is a right for everyone in California and the country,” state senator Ed Hernandez said. “The dilemma arises on how to finance it and whether the public supports it. … The state would be unable to backfill the loss of $20 billion in federal funds without massive tax increases or major program reductions.” 

Wright illustrated California’s difficulty in translating a moral imperative into a health-care entitlement by pointing out that the recent passage of Proposition 56, the two-dollar cigarette tax that, beginning in April, will generate a billion dollars annually for Medi-Cal, had faced three ballot fights — and $200 million in opposition spending by tobacco companies — to become law. 

“Before we get to what California does,” he cautioned, “we all need to be focused on the federal fight. The framework and financing that they provide is going to be very determinative about what is possible for California to do, whether it is an Obamacare lookalike or single-payer or anything else.”

Mangia expressed what might be the ultimate vision of California resistance. “I think it would make a very, very strong political statement across the country if the Republicans repeal [Obamacare] and California says, ‘Okay. Well, we’re going to keep it.’ Democrats control two thirds of the legislature. There’s a Democratic governor. I think we have a real opportunity.”

(Bill Raden is a freelance Los Angeles writer. This article was first posted at Capital & Main.)  Illustration by Lalo Alcaraz. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EDUCATION POLITICS--Why a vote for Steve Zimmer in the LAUSD Fourth Board District is like bringing to life an avatar for RESISTANCE. 

Apply to the County Registrar before the close of February for your ballot to be counted here!

Point of order:

‘Resisting’ means here: Refusing to be manipulated deviously by plutocrats. (Plutocrats are those whose power derives from their wealth.)

Resisting signifies here: Refusing to abdicate your vote, which is your portkey to democracy.

Several “Independent Expenditure’s (IEs) have been made by Political Action Committees (PACs), and unlike forcing notrump in the game of Bridge, these are no paeans to subtlety or finesse.

Everyone should be aware that former-mayor Richard Riordan just plunked down $1m to establish a PAC brazenly titled “LA…Opposing Steve Zimmer for Schoolboard”.

Remember Dick Riordan? He’s LA’s octogenarian, thrice-divorced, Irish-American, Republican, self-styled “tough-guy”, the 39^th Mayor, who reigned from 1993-2001. He has been agitating to emasculate Los Angeles’ popularly elected schoolboard for decades. He’s not the only major contributor to IEs opposing Zimmer, and there are more such crocks of gold. Riordan contributed $15,000 to an IE for Nick Melvoin and donated $22,000 (total), the maximum allowable personally to each of Steve Zimmer’s other two LAUSD4 opponents. Like this race, his political machinations are nonpartisan.

And unbounded by moral compunction either; just last summer Riordan was fined $11,250 by LA’s Ethics Commission for shenanigans of incomplete disclosure during the previous LAUSD elections.

Dick Riordan’s net worth is estimated at a mere $100 million, which sadly doesn’t put him anywhere near Forbes’ Fortune 400 list, home to so many of today’s other Education “advocates”.

But nevertheless he is a card-carrying member of the über-rich, a constituent of the immensely wealthy upper echelon, where a wide swathe among the 1% have lately become preturnaturally obsessed with Education Opportunities for the rest-of-us. In particular, this national cabal of multi-millionaires and billionaires is inordinately interested in throwing the outcome of a local populist candidate, to a populist post, in a populist election: Steve Zimmer.

So every single last one of us recently-Berned, Left Without, and rendered outraged electorate should be asking ourselves: Why? Why are the super-wealthy so intensely interested in Public Education? And why are they *particularly* eager to see Steve Zimmer unseated? What does it mean to vote for the plutocrats’ pick?

We should be excruciatingly vigilant against unwittingly empowering yet another pivotal sycophant.

But more to the point, we should be acutely sensitized to beholden money and the consequences of empowering a politically compromised leader.

Ironically, simply having the most money does not immunize against indebtedness; operating through firm moral grounding with an ideology derived internally – not externally – matters.

Independent expenditures may be employed properly to support a candidate but the donors ought never to shape, own or direct the elected’s ideology.

That external rogue influence is what characterizes our Trump crisis, and resisting its furtherance is what understanding the power working to undermine Zimmer’s candidacy will inoculate us against, protecting us from the jeopardy we now face nationally.

So that is why voting for Zimmer is an act of resistance: it protects us from stealth, undisclosed and pernicious, gratuitous agendas.

What clues signal threat from among the supporters of Zimmer’s opponents?

The funders of the PACs supporting Zimmer’s two opponents are constitutionally ambiguous; the same organization chips in $20,000 for one, $25,000 for the other (1/1/16-1/26/17), seemingly without care or ideological conviction regarding which paired endorsee exhibits stronger ideological compatability. From this funder’s dispassionate point-of-view the goal is not to recognize or identify merit but to draw votes from Zimmer thereby forcing an expensive, inefficient electoral run-off less likely to advantage the incumbant than in a primary. This outfit seeks to elevate any non-Zimmer, the better to secure that board seat for their staff. The actual corporeal realization of Zimmer’s loss is irrelevant to them; their indebtedness is not.

And the group running this ambivalent opposition? It is the California Charter School Association (CCSA), equivalently and disingenuously – if not illegally through copyright infringement – conferring advantage through a front group aka “Parent Teacher Alliance”.

Do not imagine for a moment this is the iconic “PTA”, the national Parent-Teacher Association in whose shadow your parents raised you. This copycat Parent Teacher “Alliance” is a Gorgon of a wholly different composition and end-game. It should be enough to note the unapologetic and deliberate replication of the CA State PTA’s moniker, (“CAPTA”, as it’s known here in this state). Observe the palpable difference between this CCSA-“sponsored” and funded, professional web-presence and PTA‘s – a genuine grassroots parent-organization powered by volunteers, who give freely of their time (from many into the thousands of hours sometimes) in service of “children, families and education”.

In contrast CCSA’s “PTA” is a group supported by IEs, dedicated to CCSA’s special interest in seating LAUSD board members. This disclosure anchors the homepage in small print but the implied association clearly piggybacks on the 120 year strong reputation of PTA – and that connection is simply not valid.

So far CCSA has invested $94K toward this special interest of theirs in the LAUSD election. Half this devotion supports the ‘lets-see-who-sticks’ candidate-pair opposing Steve Zimmer. Despite authorizing more charters than anyone anywhere, even in the face of defiance and deception, CCSA deems it intolerable that LAUSD should exercise the oversight of charter schools which it is mandated by election and law to conduct.

And in addition to this “PTA” wannabe group, CCSA funds a network of associated but shrouded special-interest support groups. SpeakUp.com is a parent-branded ‘alternative-news’ website that evades PAC rules for transparency because they are nominally informational and not political. The personnel among these and previous iterations of the same ineffective Edu®eform tropes are abidingly static. But the connection with Trumpism remains: who funds CCSA and why do their initiatives betray common cause with destructive billionaires like Bill Gates, the Walton family and Trump’s nominee for the Department of Education, Betsy DeVos?

While excoriating Zimmer’s acceptance of PAC money from legitimate interests that never were “special” or tangential to teaching and education – that is: Teachers (via their collective association, UTLA), meanwhile “special interests” that truly are dark, obscure and undisclosed actually do underlie Zimmer’s opposition. Ten times that scraped together by his fellow education-professionals – an entire order of magnitude more money – has been spent (so far) by America’s wealthiest-of-the-wealthy to occlude Steve Zimmer, via money funneled through private contributions and the aggregated-money PACs of CCSA and others.

Refusing to accept the cherry-picked candidates of the 1% is precisely the resistance to Trumpism we must engage.

Zimmer’s opposition are all candidates hand-picked by the billionaires. We must resist the temptation to empower them no matter how slick the astroturfed literature that champions support from the faux- or misled grassroots

(Sara Roos is a politically active resident of Mar Vista, a biostatistician, the parent of two teenaged LAUSD students and a CityWatch contributor, who blogs at redqueeninla.com)

I certainly appreciate the resourcefulness of the real estate moguls opposing Measure S, the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. It is easy to appreciate their dilemma. They can’t exactly go to the public and state the truth. “We have a successful business model, and we want to keep it. Paying off elected officials so we can build our lucrative real estate projects where we want them is working out just fine for us, so why upset the apple cart?” 

Instead, they have to pay big bucks to PR firms to create AstroTurf organizations that then claim their unplanned and therefore illegal projects are actually creating a tidy, well planned city. As for the supporters of Measure S, they are then tarnished with the claim they are clandestine advocates of urban sprawl hiding behind support for a strong General Plan for Los Angeles. Creative and convincing to some low information voters? Yes. Correct? Absolutely not. It is just more of the fake news and “alternative facts” we have recently heard so much about. 

So, what is a wrong with their roundabout claim that LA’s General Plan, both existing and presumably when Measure S accelerates its update, is really a blueprint for urban sprawl? And what is wrong with their parallel argument that left to it momentum, land use decisions based on developers maximizing profit for individual parcels will somehow produce a Los Angeles that turns its back on sprawl in favor of a planned and sustainable city? 

The answer is plenty! 

The claim that supporters of the General Plan and its update – the essence of Measure S -- are supposedly opposed to density and instead really want sprawl is absolute nonsense. 

Measure S supporters, such as myself, have clearly laid out what we want, directly and by implication: 

• A well planned city, including areas for high density, through an updated and unwavering General Plan.
• Planned alternative transportation modes, including those funded through Measure M, which LA County voters adopted in November 2016.
• Adherence to the City Charter’s provisions regarding General Plan amendments: “conformity with public necessity, convenience, general welfare and good zoning practice.”
• Systematic updates of the General Plan, including its Community Plans, based on extensive outreach to all Los Angeles neighborhoods.
• Orderly implementation of the General Plan through planned density and planned alternative transportation modes, per Measure M.
• Careful, annual monitoring of the city’s General Plan, including its implementation programs.
• Regular mid-course General Plan corrections when annual monitoring reveals that adopted plans are not achieving their objectives. 

Measure S supporters have also clearly stated what we do not want: 

• Unplanned development based on market whims.
• Weak EIRs and Statements of Overriding Considerations that allow unmitigatable levels of Green House Gases.
• Pay-to-play pat-a-cake between developers and elected officials so illegal projects can get spot-zones and spot-General Plan amendments.
• Auto-centric shopping and luxury towers that obtain their spot-zones and spot-plan ordinances through phony, unmonitored claims of being transit-oriented. 

None of this remotely translates into support for urban sprawl, and, in fact, LA’s adopted plans have been distinctly anti-sprawl since the 1970s Concept Plan. This early plan evolved into the General Plan Framework, and its Transportation Chapter is also anti-sprawl, and is the new Mobility Element that the City Council recently adopted. 

Furthermore, there is not the slightest chance that the update of the existing General Plan triggered by Measure S will somehow promote a decentralized, sprawl-prone city. That era is long gone, and this allegation is just the contrivance of worried beneficiaries of the status quo, those who are funding the opposition to Measure S.

While I see no evidence that this information about the actual anti-sprawl content of the prior, current, anticipated General Plan will have much impact on the true believers who imagine that unrestrained market forces beneficially shape LA’s land use patterns, I hope this information will sink in among those who sensed but could not quite identify the deceptive arguments from the anti-S groups.

 (Dick Platkin regularly reports on planning issues for CityWatch. Please send any comments or corrections to [email protected].)

CORRUPTION WATCH-President Donald J. Trump and his adviser Kellyanne Conway use “Alternative Facts,” which Meet the Press host Chuck Todd correctly identified as “Falsehoods.” In 2014, our own Judge Allan Goodman made the same observation about Eric Garcetti and his use of Alternative Facts when His Honor rejected Garcetti’s update to the Hollywood Community Plan. As judges often do, Judge Goodman used polite legalese, saying that Garcetti used “fatally flawed data” and “wishful thinking” -- which we know mean Lies and Myths. 

How Lies and Myths and Alternative Facts crashed the economy in 2008. 

Lies, Myths and Alternative Facts (LMAFs) resulted in the Crash of 2008 which devastated millions of Americans. The crash grew out of the ethos of Alternative Facts which originated from corrupt business practices right here in the Los Angeles area. Mortgage lenders like Countrywide and Indymac Bank were selling defective mortgages to Wall Street. (A defective mortgage is one in which the lender knows that the homeowner cannot pay off the loan and will default.) Wall Street would then bundle together defective mortgages and sell them to pension funds, foreign countries, etc. (Goldman Sachs executive and Trump’s Secretary of Treasury-designate Steven Mnuchin made his multi-million fortune by buying Indymac Bank after the Crash of 2008.) 

We need to focus on how LMAFs crashed the economy in 2008 because, once again, they are at work both nationally and locally. Unless we stop this massive and near perpetual disinformation, life will become much worse for everyone. 

Normally, a Wall Street investment firm like Goldman Sachs selling junk mortgages would result in investors not buying any more products; but the nature of defective mortgages was covered up by a second corrupt practice: The investment houses would guarantee the buyers that if the income from the bundled mortgages dipped below a certain amount, the investment firm itself would make up the difference. Thus, all those pension funds, foreign countries, etc. felt safe in buying the bundled mortgages. 

However, there was a third level of fraud. The insurance sold by the investment houses to guarantee that the bundled mortgages would pay out the benefits was not insurance. Insurance should require the investment house to set aside insurance premiums to pay off the claims. Goldman Sachs et al were not putting those “premiums” into accounts so they would have the cash to pay future claims. Rather, they counted the premiums as regular income and spent the premium money. If State Farm spent all the premium money it collected, it would have no money to rebuild your home if it burned down. Likewise, when the investment firm spent all the “premiums” from the “insurance” it sold to buyers of the bundled, defective mortgages, it had no stock pile of cash to pay the claims. 

Then, there was the fourth level of fraud. Insurance may only be sold to people with an insurable interest in a house or person. Thus, I cannot take out fire insurance on my neighbor’s house and my neighbor may not take out insurance on my life.   

This is what occurred with bundled defective mortgages. Wall Street executives who created the defective bundles bought the “insurance” that would pay executives when their bundles failed. How long do you think you would be alive if MS-13 owned a $25 million dollar life insurance policy on your life? This is the criminal core of the Crash of 2008. Wall Street executives intentionally created defective bundled mortgages, then bought “insurance” on them. It’s the same as betting against a race horse you just drugged. 

Since the bundles of defective mortgages had been designed to fail in order for the “insurance” to pay off, Wall Street executives started buying worthless mortgages from Countrywide, Indymac Bank and similar mortgage lenders. The faster the bundled defective mortgages failed, the sooner the Wall Street executives would collect on their “insurance.” 

Because so many mortgages were being “sold,” the public erroneously assumed that people were buying all these new homes. Thus, billions of dollars were diverted to housing construction. All the mortgage companies wanted was a signature on a piece of paper, then they’d sell it to Wall Street with no regard as to whether the home “buyer” was employed or even existed. It got to the point that mortgage companies were inventing buyers and selling fake documents to Wall Street. 

Wall Street executives did not care if homeowners could not afford the homes or that these homeowners were non-existent. The worse the mortgages became, the faster the bundles crashed and the faster the executives would put in their insurance claims. They called the insurance “credit default swaps” solely to evade any insurance regulations. 

Because these Wall Street executives sold trillions of dollars of “insurance” on defective bundled mortgages, investment firms were faced bankruptcy unless one of two things happened: 

(1) The U.S. government could immediately insure all mortgages. 

Then no bundled mortgage would fail and no one could make a claim under the “insurance” (credit default swap.) No investment house would face failure as there would be no insurance claims based on defective mortgages. The cost to the government to start up such a program overnight could have been as high as $100 billion. 

(2) The U.S. Government could bail out the Wall Street firms. 

Using this approach, all the bundled mortgages would fail and Wall Street executives could collect their trillions of dollars through “insurance claims.” That is why the Obama-Geithner chose to bail out Wall Street – to make certain Wall Street firms had enough cash to pay off the crooks who had perpetrated the greatest economic crime in world history. Trillions of dollars flowed to Wall Street firms while Main Street went bankrupt. This corruptionism is also the origin of the Politics of Revenge that has brought us President Donald Trump. 

Lies, Myths and Alternative Facts underlie the current LA housing market. 

The current high prices for Los Angeles residential real estate is similarly based on Lies, Myths and Alternative Facts. 

LMAF #1: There is no high demand for housing in Los Angeles. 

Just as people incorrectly believed there was a huge demand for housing between 2002-2007 because it appeared that so many homes were being purchased, the high price of Los Angeles houses does not mean there is a demand for housing. As we learned in 2008 and forgot by 2009, crooks can manipulate markets thereby deceiving millions of people into believing there is a demand for housing. But there is always a crash. 

LMAF #2:   There is no single LA Housing market. 

In reality, Los Angeles has several markets for homes and what happens in one housing market does not always affect another market. Each situation requires analysis based on real facts. 

Families who want to buy a home in Echo Park are not driving up the cost for mansions in Bel Air. There is a stratification by price range for Los Angeles housing, but there is bleed over between nearby prices ranges. For example, after the City had 22,000 rent-controlled units destroyed and allowed judges to improperly eject poor people from their rent-controlled homes, four things resulted: 

• Those people who could afford places in the next higher housing bracket bid up the rents for apartments which were just above the rent-control level. 

• Those who could not afford to pay more than the low rent-controlled prices, e.g. the elderly and disabled on fixed income, became homeless. We do not add their rent of Zero Dollars to the cost of housing.   

• Rental agencies reported that average rents had increased and used that biased data to raise rents. 

• People believed that higher rents reflected an increased demand when in reality it reflected the fact that the Garcetti Administration reduced the supply of apartments for poor people by destroying rent-controlled housing. 

The forces threatening Middle Class neighborhoods are more deceptively insidious. 

As written in previous CityWatch articles, the worse threat to Los Angeles Middle Class is that homes are no longer valued by their value as Living Space but rather by their value as Speculative Investments. Because developers know that they can re-zone any property to anything that they want, they buy homes in lower priced residential areas where they plan to build two to eight houses on a single family lot. 

The lot where the developer plans to put a Granny Flat is worth more to him as Speculation than it is worth to a family as Living Space. Because the developer knows that he can bribe his way to a Small Lot Subdivision, the price of the “family home” zooms into the stratosphere. A small parcel with 8 homes, each separated by 6 inches, is worth far more money to a developer than the family can afford. 

A middle class family does not have to be in direct competition with a developer to be faced with a detached home’s Speculative Value. The realtor who sets the listing price researches recent sales prices for comparable homes. If two streets over, a home which was worth $300,000 for Living Space sold for $1.2 million on its Speculation Value, then the new home is priced at around $1 million even if the Living Space value is less than one third as much. 

The evils which flow from residential properties’ prices being based on Speculative Value. 

People, who pay attention to facts and the laws of economics, as opposed to Lies, Myths and Alternative Facts, know that certain evils always follow the “market dislocations” caused by LMAFs. 

(1)   The Middle Class moves away. 

It’s a form of osmosis where upwardly-mobile middle class families move away from the High Cost, Low Opportunity cities like Los Angeles to Low Cost, High Opportunity cities like Nashville, Denver, or Austin, Texas. Los Angeles is already experiencing a significant net loss of its Family Millennials too this trend. 

(2)   The reduced demand for housing does not lower housing prices. 

Prior to the Crash of 2008, there was virtually no demand for housing, yet the prices continued to increase. Mathematically, all financial frauds collapse; but until they do, prices show little or no indication of the bust that is a few months or weeks away. Prices remain high because they are based on the public believing the LMAFs. Eventually, however, people see reality and the crash arrives. 

(3)   Millions of homeowners who bought high are stranded in homes worth far less than the equity they have in those homes. 

This drop in prices often wipes out families’ “nest eggs” since they have dumped all their cash into mortgages for homes which were inflated by two, three or four times of their true value by the Garcetti Administration’s disinformation. They can neither sell nor renegotiate these mortgages. 

People who purchased homes based on inflated Speculative Values live in finance hell. They must continue paying these mortgages based on old values that are much higher than the new lower values. Since they dumped all their extra cash into their homes, they do not have adequate insurance or stocks, pensions or other investments. They are often “house poor” – with every cent tied up in the house. They just have to pray they can hold on until a better economy returns. 

When the economy turns down, people are laid off. If a lay-off happens to a family that is “under water” with its mortgage, it may be headed for the streets. There will always be a kind and loving Steven Mnuchin ready to foreclose on that family, even if it was only 27 cents short in a payment. 

The need for Residential Mortgage Insurance. 

Since Obama-Geithner refused to institute Residential Mortgage Insurance (RMI,) once people are laid off, they needlessly lose their homes. Sure, they may find decent jobs – a year after their homes’ foreclosure -- but that’s of no help to them or the economy. Residential Mortgage Insurance is like fire insurance where the insurer makes up the short fall in the mortgage payment due to a financial disaster. 

For example, if the Mom is laid off and the family lacks $1,500 on the $4,000 mortgage, the insurance pays the $1,500. This government insured program is good for the general welfare of the nation because it will stop a crash in the housing market like what happened in 2008. But Obama-Geithner thought a complete crash was preferable, and thus, they refused to institute RMI on even an emergency basis. Now, the nation is again vulnerable. 

The Big Lie on which the LA residential housing market rests. 

It is fraudulent to insist that there is demand for dense housing, that people want to live in mixed-use projects next to freeways, that people want Granny Flats or that people want to pay $850,000 to live in a house six inches away from another with no yard, no garden, no place for a dog, and no room for the kids to pitch a tent. Thus, we are paying taxes on billions of dollars of city bonds to construct the very type of dense housing which is emblematic of the fraud eating away at our economy. 

We know that Garcetti is still feeding us a diet of Lies and Myths, just as we know that Family Millennials are moving away from LA to places where they can afford to buy a detached home with a nice yard with fruit trees and plenty of space. Worse yet, the decent employers are following the Family Millennials out of town.

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

BUTCHER ON LA-On Saturday, January 21, 2017, an estimated 750,000 people took to the streets of downtown Los Angeles in support of the Women’s March on Washington organized as a day of action, celebration, and protest in cities across the country and world. A local announcement billed it as an event for: “Everyone who stands for human rights, workers’ rights, civil rights, and compassion for our shared humanity.”

It was wonderfully festive, totally unorganized, peaceful as could be. About half of the participants, by my observation, were young (mostly) women who'd never marched before; the rest were all the rest of us. It was joyous and magical! 

Said one participant, echoed by many, backed by so much pink: “There was an incredible politeness from the majority of the protesters. People were so close and I had never had so many boobs bump into me but everyone was saying ‘sorry’ and ‘excuse me.’ It was amazing!  There was a variety of people there from old to young and of all races. The women who spoke were amazing. Janet Hahn was great and I think made us proud to be Angelenos.” 

There was no appreciable parade route. My adult son Steven, his friend Raj and I walked from City Hall to Pershing Square, got as close as we could, and along with a mass of other people, turned around where we were to march back to City Hall. I saw bunches of LA City traffic officers but no police. Of course there was no need as it was peaceful, safe for babies and children and dogs, and so many women. Everywhere you looked, in every direction. I’ve been in large marches and rallies and this was by far among the largest of LA gatherings. 

For me, it felt historic. To march with my son – on the weekend just before my 60^th birthday – felt glorious and so very hopeful!

(Julie Butcher writes for CityWatch, is a retired union leader and is now enjoying her new La Crescenta home and her first grandchild. She can be reached at [email protected] or on her new blog ‘The Butcher Shop - No Bones about It.’) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

MUSING WITH MIRISCH--In a city in which an election was won four years ago by seven votes, every vote should count. But only the votes that should count should count. And that’s a problem in Beverly Hills.

Voter fraud is real. It’s alive. It’s happening. And we have to stop it. Whether or not it happens at the federal level, we know it happens at the local level. We have seen it ourselves and our own investigations have proven it happens.

Last night at a marathon City Council meeting, the Beverly Hills City Council at my request unanimously agreed to launch an Anti-Voter Fraud Initiative. The initiative will attempt to use every tool at the Council and City’s disposal to protect the integrity of our local election, the next of which is March 7 (and in which I and the vice mayor are up for re-election). 

We will attempt to inform our own voters to help report suspected instances of unauthorized voters (“If you see something, say something”), as well as continue to lobby the Secretary of State, our DA and other officials to take the matter of suspected voter fraud seriously and to take action. The decision to launch the Anti-Voter Fraud Initiative follows a Monday meeting of the City’s Sunshine Task Force which we created to make our city a model of transparency and good government.

Yes, we are frustrated.

Our frustration and the decision to educate, lobby and take whatever local action we can to deal with voter fraud is preceded by two Council study sessions in which we discussed the matter with representatives from the local registrar-recorder and the Secretary of State, one meeting more exasperating than the other. We shouldn’t have to self-police and we are extremely limited as to what we can do locally to put an end to voter fraud.

Some background information is in order, particularly for those who aren’t familiar with Beverly Hills, beyond the stereotype, or suggest that voter fraud doesn’t exist.

In 2008 a local developer won a referendum by 129 votes which granted a controversial building entitlement. The developer spent millions of dollars prior to the election with all manner of expensive propaganda. The grass-roots group opposing the developer’s plans suspected that many voters who had voted in Beverly Hills were not bona fide or legal residents of the City, but nonetheless voted in the election.

In a Herculean effort, volunteers canvassed the city, going door-to-door to investigate the claims of voter fraud. They uncovered 569 documented cases of voters who were not entitled to vote in our local election. The group of phony voters included random people registered at unsuspecting residents’ addresses, non-U.S. citizens, Beverly Hills residents’ adult children who themselves were domiciled elsewhere, etc. That’s right: there were 569 documented cases of illegal voters in an election which had been won by 129 votes. The math is pretty simple.

The citizens’ group turned over their voluminous documentation over to the local DA’s office, which complimented them on their meticulousness and then proceeded to do... absolutely nothing. No indictments. No prosecution. No convictions. Nothing.

Fast forward to the months preceding the Nov. 2016 election: the same developer who had won the tainted 2008 election was now attempting to pass an initiative to build a 375-foot skyscraper in Beverly Hills. As in 2008, the developer spent millions of dollars in campaign propaganda (it turns out that the developer ended up spending more than $1000 per vote in a losing effort), and reports of potential illegal voters arose once again. The City received a list of over 500 voters registered at a few business addresses. As a Council colleague remarked, the limited number of business addresses makes this seem like an organized effort. We turned the list over to the Los Angeles County Registrar Recorder, who sent letters out to these 500 registered voters, informing them that their voting status would be placed on hold pending their verifying that they actually lived in Beverly Hills and were entitled to vote here.

It turns out that only two of the over 500 registered voters ended up verifying that they actually live in Beverly Hills.

If we had not been provided with a list of unauthorized registered voters, which we forwarded to the registrar with the request to invalidate the registrations pending further confirmation, we could have had 500 illegal voters in the November election. This is in a City in which, as mentioned, a councilmember won election in 2013 by a mere seven votes.

At our Council study session earlier this month in which we asked for representation from the local registrar, the Secretary of State’s office and the DA, only the registrar seemed to take the problem of voter fraud seriously. The Secretary of State’s representative gave answers which actually decreased our confidence in its ability to protect the integrity of our voting process and raised the frustration levels of the entire Council. After having refused to prosecute the widespread 2008 voter fraud, the DA’s office refused to even send a representative to our Council meeting, even after I followed up the initial refusal with a letter to County DA Jackie Lacey, personally asking her to send a representative to discuss this serious issue. Their job is not just to prosecute voter fraud (something they evidently refuse to do, as was the case in 2008) but also to help us avert such crimes which undermine our electoral system. This nonchalance was both shocking and stupefying.

At that meeting, as confirmed by our City Clerk, we pointed out various ways in which voter fraud could occur and evidently had occurred: people could simply register at houses where they did not live, either with or without the bona fide residents’ knowledge or they could register at business addresses, as they had done in the past. At the polls, they could comb through the voter rolls and see who had not voted and simply get replacements to vote in their stead. There is effectively no way under our current system to avoid or deal with most of these situations, particularly if the local DA’s office is unwilling to take action.

According to today’s Washington Post: “Multiple investigations of the extent of in-person voter fraud — someone showing up to vote fraudulently — have found that it’s not a significant problem.” Well, if these “investigations” are anything like our own experience, this is a prime example of a self-fulfilling conclusion. Our Secretary of State’s office and our own DA seem unwilling to investigate or even acknowledge the problem. Small wonder that ostrich “investigators” - in opposition to grass-roots residents - are finding that voter fraud is “not a significant problem.” See no evil. Hear no evil... You get the picture.

Our situation is different from President Trump’s claims of voter fraud in that many (though not all) of the phony voters in Beverly Hills are US citizens who simply don’t live in Beverly Hills and therefore are not entitled to vote in municipal elections. But the problem remains a serious one at any level of government and we deserve to have faith in the integrity of our electoral system at all levels of government.

On Tuesday, the National Association of Secretaries of State issued the following statement: “We are not aware of any evidence that supports the voter fraud claims made by President Trump, but we are open to learning more about the administration’s concerns.”

How about also being open to learning about the concerns of cities in which elections are won and lost by seven votes? How about taking action in instances in which voter fraud clearly has taken place and in which there are ongoing attempts to rig our elections?

Whatever the situation at the national level, we in Beverly Hills are committed to doing whatever we can to protect the integrity of our local elections, even if we do not receive the support from the authorities who are tasked with doing so. Because if the integrity of our electoral system is not protected, if bad actors know that they can literally get away with voter fraud without any consequences, then we can expect to see this phenomenon spread and grow, further undermining our democracy.

Local government, when done right, is the best form of democracy because it is closest to home. For it to mean anything, though, the elections in which the residents choose their local leaders and decide on local issues must be on the up and up. Sacramento, we have a problem.

And so the Beverly Hills Anti-Voter Fraud Initiative is born. Let’s hope other cities and municipalities join us to create a coalition against voter fraud. Our democracy is too precious to allow its very fundament, our elections, to be subverted.

(John Mirisch is the Mayor of Beverly Hills. He has, among other things, created the Sunshine Task Force to increase transparency, ethics and public participation in local government. Mayor Mirisch is a CityWatch contributor.)

-cw