LOS ANGELES

NEW GEOGRAPHY--Generation X, the group between the boomers and the millennials, has been largely cast aside in the media and marketing world, victims of their generation’s small size and lack of identity. In contrast to the much-discussed boomers and millennials, few have recognized the critical importance of this group to the future of politics, economics, technology and business.

Gen Xers — defined as aged between 35 and 49 in 2015 — matter because they will be the generation that will run our companies and governments as the boomers, albeit slowly, fade from their long-standing dominance. As millennials struggle to “launch,” the Xers are the group that will be critical to local housing markets, tech development and, perhaps most important, the creation of the next generation of children.

Far more entrepreneurial than their millennial successors, they also will have the money to shape the economy. An analysis by the Deloitte Center for Financial Services finds that they hold 14 percent of the nation’s wealth, compared to just 4 percent for millennials and 50 percent for the boomers. But by 2030, as the boomers finally start to fade from the picture, Xers increasingly will vie with boomers, accounting for 31 percent of the nation’s wealth, twice the percentage for the millennials.

Southern California’s Xer challenge

Southern California needs to focus more on Xers. Unlike the millennials, whose share has been dropping below national norms, our region still retains a higher percentage of Xers than the rest of the country. Yet, their population is being eroded by factors such as high housing prices and weak high-end job creation.

As housing prices move to ever more unsustainable levels, the Xers now are leaving California at a rate faster than any generation, according to the most recent Internal Revenue Service numbers. After all, with households having children and buying houses later, many Xers may be going to more kid-friendly areas with yards like they grew up in. Losing Xers, at least in the short run, may be more dangerous to the state and regional trajectory than millennial migration.

In their preferences, Xers nationally tend to be somewhat like their boomer forebears. An analysis of Xer residences in major metropolitan areas showed that more than 85 percent live in suburban and exurban areas, no doubt driven by such concerns as prices, house size, yards for the kids and recreation, safety and schools. This aspiration does not match with ultrahigh housing prices.

Indeed, in a recent analysis we did for Forbes.com, using U.S. Census Bureau age data of 35-49 as our measurement, Xer shares grew most dramatically in more affordable Sun Belt cities like Austin, Texas; Raleigh, N.C.; Charlotte, N.C.; Las Vegas; Phoenix; Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, which have enjoyed the widest growth in Xer share in the country. Since 2010, emerging tech hubs, notably Denver and Portland, Ore., also did well. In contrast, the Bay Area, despite its torrid economy, has seen its Xer share stagnate, while Los Angeles’ share actually dropped.

Gov. Brown’s war on Xer expectations

Over the past decade, California regulators — citing climate change concerns — have waged a war on the state’s “sprawl,” including recent moves to all but eliminate greenfield development. This policy hits Xers the hardest since they are demonstrably less attracted to living in dense, inner-core neighborhoods and far more likely to prefer suburban locations.

Here in Southern California, Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties all suffered losses in their Xer population share, while the more suburban — and affordable — Inland Empire expanded its proportion significantly, with Riverside up by over 30 percent and San Bernardino up by over 10 percent. Communities that have become more Xer-oriented since 2000 include places like Perris, Indio, Murrieta, Hemet, Victorville, Temecula, Corona and Moreno Valley. The only coastal community to rank among the top 10 for Xer growth was Irvine, with Lake Forest ranked 11th.

In contrast, most coastal cities — from Ventura down to Santa Monica to Newport Beach and San Clemente — did poorly. Similarly, many of the more affluent, high-cost cities in the region also saw large drops in their Xer shares, including Yorba Linda, Alhambra, Mission Viejo and Thousand Oaks.

California’s increasingly rigid approach to peripheral development seems destined to not only reduce the Xer footprint in the region, but also to contribute to an already rapid decrease in the number of children. For example, since 2010, Los Angeles has suffered one of the largest declines in the percentage of people aged 5 to 14 — ranking 45th out of 52 major metropolitan areas, ahead of only five Rust Belt cities, Chicago and Hartford, Conn.

What is happening with Xers could soon also occur among millennials as they enter their 30s. As the growth among twentysomethings slows precipitously, and then starts to decline by 2020, the market for the high-density urban lifestyle so beloved by our planning overloads, already a smallish minority among millennials, seems destined to decline.

Rather than shut off the prospects of young people, sparking continued outmigration and a diminution of our middle-class workforce, California needs to reconsider its current housing and land-use policies. The green-speculator-regulator triad may celebrate the end of “sprawl,” but in doing so they are creating a California that, from a societal perspective, will be fundamentally unsustainable.

Joel Kotkin is the editor of New Geography … where this piece was most recently posted … and is R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, a St. Louis-based public policy firm, and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.)

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ANALYSIS--Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch emerged confirmation hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee relatively unbloodied by relentless grilling from Democrats attempting to probe what they consider his extremist judicial philosophy.

The nominee came to the hearings with an ideological judicial rating well to the right of Antonin Scalia, the late conservative justice whose seat he would be filling, as well as with the blessings of the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. Both organizations have been key in the efforts by libertarian Republican mega-donors such as hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and the Koch Brothers to politically reshape the country along more corporate-friendly, neoliberal and socially conservative lines.

Republicans are determined to seat Gorsuch by April 16, in time to hear arguments during the Supreme Court’s final session of the current term. For their part, Democrats remain outraged over last year’s unprecedented, 10-month refusal by the Senate to grant the same hearings to Obama nominee Merrick Garland, while progressives continue to express alarm over Gorsuch’s 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals track record.

Time and again the nominee has sided with large corporations at the expense of individual rights. Cases have included his concurrence on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores — later affirmed by the Supreme Court — in which he found that businesses could deny their employees contraceptive coverage that conflicts with the owner’s religious beliefs. And in the midst of Wednesday’s hearings, Gorsuch’s ruling in a case involving the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, in which he sided against a public school student with autism, was overturned by the Supreme Court 8-0.

If confirmed, Gorsuch is widely expected to deliver the coup de grace to the high court’s 1977 Abood v. Detroit Board of Education decision, and the right of public-sector unions to collect fair-share agency fees. That landmark labor law narrowly survived last year’s Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association case when the court deadlocked following Scalia’s death in February of 2016.

To understand Gorsuch’s potential impact on California, Capital & Main spoke by phone to constitutional law professor Melissa Murray. She is Interim Dean at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of Law Faculty Director at the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice.

The Golden State, Murray said, should above all be worried by what she and other legal scholars believe is Gorsuch’s most radical and far-reaching judicial prejudice — his extreme skepticism and hostility to the agency authority enshrined in a doctrine called “Chevron deference,” after the 1984 Supreme Court case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

Agency deference is the foundation of the modern administrative state, she explained. It grants policymaking flexibility to agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Communication Commission by giving them the flexibility to adapt often vague and obsolete laws to the changes of a rapidly evolving, technology-based economy. But it has also provided regulatory sinew to fundamental worker protections offered by laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act.

“That’s a big deal, that’s huge” Murray emphasized. “Honestly, if there was anything that I would be most concerned about, it would be deference, because administrative agencies touch every aspect of everyone’s life.”

Though Gorsuch has been tight-lipped during his confirmations hearings, Murray outlined what Californians can expect from the nominee in different areas of the law based on his opinions and other writings.

Labor:

“Everything we’ve heard on the campaign trail would suggest that this administration is more hostile to labor and, as some of Judge Gorsuch’s critics have noted, he has often been more amenable to corporate interests as opposed to the interests of individuals.

Reproductive Rights:

In his book on euthanasia [The Future of Assisted Suicide], he expressed incredible admiration for what he might call a “culture of life.” And his discussion of euthanasia and assisted suicide would lead many to believe that he would be hostile to the idea of abortion rights or he would actually be quite favorable of broad attempts by the state to regulate access to abortion.

Civil Rights:

I don’t know that [he has] a deep hostility to civil rights; rather, it’s perhaps a broader deference to legislative and executive attempts to curtail [civil rights]. Or, as Chief Justice Roberts said in the voting rights case Shelby County v. Holder, maybe we are past the point where we need the kinds of interventions that the Voting Rights Act provided. I think it’s probably more likely that Gorsuch is one of these people who seems to think that we’re in a kind of post-racial society and these kinds of interventions are no longer needed.

Education:

The [neoliberal] rhetoric of school choice has . . . had very deleterious effects on public schools. By the same token, the idea of choice in other contexts — reproductive rights, contraception apropos abortion — has been pretty much overlooked, and there’s a kind of unevenness in that. So while I could certainly see a Judge Gorsuch being quite favorable in his approach to school vouchers as an expression of personal choice, … I imagine that the same kinds of neoliberal principles would not extend [by Gorsuch] to the right to choose in some other expression of individual liberty.

Immigration/Muslim Travel Ban:

He has made some statements in his confirmation hearings about being independent and the importance of an independent judiciary, especially in standing up to the executive, and I think those are exactly the right things to say in a moment like this one. But he has a very long record of being a government lawyer, and he was a high-ranking official in the Department of Justice under George W. Bush. In that capacity he had a very deferential posture to exercises of executive authority, and I can’t imagine that philosophy will be jettisoned now.

The Environment:

Deference is a big one. The idea that Judge Gorsuch has expressed is that agencies are not equipped to interpret the laws that govern their particular doctrinal areas. He would not be in favor of allowing the EPA to administer and to interpret the Clean Air Act. Instead he would say that was a legislative decision, or rather an executive function.

Gun Control:

He is a purported originalist, so I think he would be very protective of Second Amendment rights.

Should Democrats Filibuster Gorsuch’s Nomination?

Elections have consequences, and one is that the President has the authority to nominate someone to the Supreme Court, and the Senate has the duty to, through their advise and consent function, to appoint that person to the court. Judge Gorsuch is eminently qualified and is, I think, quite an appropriate pick for a more conservative-leaning president. That said, I would have to say that in March, 2016 when Merrick Garland’s name was put before the Senate, President Obama was the president, and it was his right to nominate someone and it was the Senate’s right to use their advise and consent function to give Judge Garland a hearing, and because Judge Garland was an unobjectionable candidate, he should have been appointed.

(Bill Raden is a freelance Los Angeles writer. This analysis was posted first at Capital and Main)

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EMOTION PICTURE CAPITAL--Pema Gyaltsen, a 24-year-old Tibetan man, reportedly set himself alight late last week — one of many such protests in recent years against what rights activists call brutal and repressive policies in China’s far West. Gyaltsen, who lived through his self-immolation, was promptly arrested by authorities; his whereabouts remain unknown.

The international advocacy group Free Tibet first reported Gyaltsen’s self-immolation Sunday on its website, basing the news on information obtained by research partners in northern India, says John Jones, an organizer with Free Tibet.

“The reasons for the self-immolation protests are the occupation and the accompanying human rights abuses,” Jones says. “Tibetans often leave notes or shout slogans during their self-immolation protests, calling for Tibet to be free, for an end to China’s repressive policies, for an end to the attacks on their culture and religion.” The incident was not widely reported in most Western outlets.

Meanwhile, on Monday, Chinese officials expressed outrage to their counterparts in India, after the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso — the Tibetan religious leader living in exile in Dharamsala, India — participated in an Indian state-sponsored Buddhism conference there.

New Delhi typically refrains from indicating any official support for the Dalai Lama, whom Beijing accuses of inciting Tibetan separatism from China. But it appeared this week the Dalai Lama was becoming involved in a long-standing deadlock between the two competing regional and world superpowers, entrenched in territorial disputes more than a half-century after the Sino-Indian War. Like Gyaltsen’s self-immolation, the news development received little attention in the Western media.

This trend is nothing new: With the exception of United States government-funded outlet Voice of America — which routinely reports on human rights violations in hard-to-reach parts of China and other deeply censored media environments — Americans and the international community have largely turned their attention away from Tibet. 

And that worries some ethnic Tibetans.

“Not only does the New York Times mention Tibet less, and not only does the American public … not talk about the issue, and not only is it Hollywood sidestepping this issue,” says a Tibetan activist who asked not to be named out of fear of reprisal from authorities. “The whole world is doing this. It’s because the Chinese government’s influence is growing.”

“But I also believe that as in everything in this life, there is karma,” the activist adds. “So I don’t believe that the Chinese government can always have good luck.”

It wasn’t always this way. In the 1990s, Tibet was Hollywood’s cause célèbre. As a result, for about a decade, Americans often heard of human rights violations in Tibet.

“Tibet has to compete for news coverage with the frequently shocking news from Syria, Ukraine, Sub-Saharan Africa, and other areas where there are wars and natural disasters.”

In 1993, the Academy Awards imposed a ban on actor Richard Gere (he’s since been rehabilitated) in response to a speech he gave advocating for Tibetan rights while presenting the Oscar for Art Direction. In his speech, Gere expressed his wishes that “we could all kind of send love and truth and a kind of sanity to Deng Xiaoping right now in Beijing, that he will take his troops and take the Chinese away from Tibet and allow people to live as free independent people again.”

Four years after Gere’s controversy, two big-budget films set in Tibet were released: In October, there was Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt, and, in December, there was Martin Scorsese’s Kundun. Both films featured appearances by the Dalai Lama. One year later, the Dalai Lama himself released his book of philosophy, The Art of Happiness. A favorite at the time, it has sold well over a million copies.

Taking Hollywood’s lead, Free Tibet student groups proliferated in high schools and colleges across the nation.

But these days, the website for the Gere Foundation, dedicated to Tibet and the fight against HIV/AIDS, appears not to have been updated in years. An attempt to reach the organization was not successful, and Gere’s agent did not respond to a request for comment on his recent work for Tibetan rights. 

Gere is, however, still sticking up for Tibetans, even if his activism isn’t as loud or widely publicized as it once was. In February, he met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel amid the Berlin release of his forthcoming film The Dinner. At the meeting, the two reportedly discussed Tibet, among other international affairs. 

“For several years recently [Gere] was more engaged with his work on HIV/AIDS than on Tibet, so his return to the Tibet issue, let alone as a strategic player, is a new development,” says Robert Barnett, a Columbia University professor and preeminent scholar on Tibet. “Perhaps media coverage has finally become seen as of secondary importance?”

“As for the Dalai Lama’s popularity, there is a slight shift in his role in the West from being an advocate on the Tibet-China issues to being a leading figure on ethics and religious tolerance in general,” Barnett adds. “The latter position continues to give him a huge audience in universities and other sectors around the world. That’s a shift in the type of media focus he’s interested in, rather than a decline in his profile.”

“It is up to Tibet groups and Tibet’s supporters, both celebrities and regular people, to keep reporting on Tibet.”

Some activists for the Tibetan cause blame a more turbulent world for the decline in international awareness of Tibetan affairs.

“There are many conflicts taking place around the world and Tibet has to compete for news coverage with the frequently shocking news from Syria, Ukraine, Sub-Saharan Africa, and other areas where there are wars and natural disasters,” Jones says. “Tibet retains many of its supporters from the 1990s, but, given the suffocating level of control that China is imposing, it is hard for news to get out of Tibet and for people around the world to get a true sense of how repressive China’s rule there is.”

Many advocates for human rights in China have observed that, with the country’s rise in political and economic power, Washington has been less willing to comment on Beijing’s repression of civil liberties.

Moving forward, Jones says, “it is up to Tibetan groups and Tibet’s supporters, both celebrities and regular people, to keep reporting on Tibet, so that it remains in the public consciousness.”

As for China’s comments to India: Last week, the Dalai Lama was present at an Indian-government sponsored Buddhism conference in India’s eastern district of Nalanda.

“It does look as if Delhi is signaling a somewhat tougher stance to Beijing for the moment, and that’s something the Dalai Lama has long called for,” says Barnett, the Columbia professor.

But don’t expect to find the Dalai Lama at the center of any major conflagrations between New Delhi and Beijing in the near future, Barnett predicts. “Neither [the Dalai Lama] nor Delhi will want to push this too aggressively,” he says. “For both of them, it is an element within their larger negotiating strategies rather than a prelude to confrontation.”

(Massoud Hayoun is an multilingual, investigative, award-winning journalist currently based in Los Angeles. He was most recently a reporter and part-time editor for Al Jazeera America’s website. This perspective was posted originally at Pacific Standard Magazine.) 

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BELL VIEW--I moved to Los Angeles from Chicago in the late-90s. Chicago – or most of it – is much more traditionally “urban” than LA. In fact, when I first came here, LA’s tree-lined streets and single family homes so confused me that I decided to move downtown. At least that part of town felt like a “city.” And I’ve always been a city kid.

At the time, about the only places to walk to in my new neighborhood were Bloom’s General Store and Al’s Bar. Bloom’s sold cigarettes and cereal – pretty much my steady diet at the time – and Al’s was a crazy cave covered in graffiti where you could grab a beer, shoot a game of pool, and maybe watch The Imperial Butt Wizards set fire to the place.

Al’s is gone, and Bloom’s is now a gourmet pie place where a slice of rhubarb and arugula crumble will set you back seven bucks. Clean, bright, happy-looking, beautiful, young urban elites now stroll the same streets where the homeless once pushed shopping carts and urban tumble weeds once rolled. Hipsters nibble on rattlesnake sausages and browse numbingly-precious displays of Japanese origami greeting cards. 

Is it better than it was? Sure. I suppose. Don’t get me wrong, I like line-caught yellowfin tuna carpaccio with locally-harvested micro greens and lemon sea foam as much as the next guy. But Al’s is gone. Gone forever. And with it a little bit of what made LA different from anyplace else in the world. 

After a year downtown, I dumped my lease and moved to a one bedroom apartment in Los Feliz. Rent set me back $630 a month – which sometimes I could barely scrape out of the couch cushions – and it was in this place I first fell in love with Los Angeles. 

And I think I need to make something clear at this point: I don’t love LA; I’m in love with LA. There’s a difference. I love New Orleans, New York City, and the Hollywood Bowl. Whenever I go to these places, I have a swell time. I don’t have any issues, no complaints. But LA drives me crazy most of the time. LA’s like a bi-polar girlfriend with a gambling problem. You never know whether she’s going to scare the crap out of you or take your breath away; and she’ll push your mother down the stairs for a dollar. But don’t anybody else talk smack about her, and don’t tell me she’s not the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. That’s what being in love feels like. 

When I moved to Los Feliz for the first time, the people in the neighborhood used to think of the place as a “village,” and it fit the bill. The heart of Los Feliz Village in the late 90s was the Onyx Café, where they dealt in bitter coffee, stale muffins, surly cashiers, and real conversation. They stayed open as long as people wanted to keep talking, and they didn’t care if you ever actually bought a cup of coffee. The homeless sat across from film students and talked about Kurosawa. Artists, actors, busboys, novelists, and nurses sat alone or in groups, talked to each other, met each other, had coffee, listened to music, and wandered home together or alone in the blue LA night. 

It was a beautiful, real place – a place like no other anywhere – and it’s gone. Gone forever.

Oh the kids these days! They don’t know what they missed. Los Feliz doesn’t feel so much like a village any more. The Onyx is a snooty French café and down the street, ex-frat boys from Michigan with their hats turned backwards chug expensive beer and scream at big-screen TVs. The kids today want housing. In particular, they want density in close proximity to transit. It’s practically a mantra. There’s no denying the law of supply and demand will have a downward pressure on sky-high rents – but will the addition of new housing bring back the days of the $630 one bedroom apartment in Los Feliz? 

No. Those deals are as dead and gone as the Hollywood Star Lanes, where the Coen Brothers shot the Big Lebowski, and which was torn down in 2002 to make way for an elementary school.

Is there room in this new Los Angeles for the likes of Al’s Bar, the Onyx, or the Hollywood Star Lanes? Nah. The new LA is slick, and shiny, and looks a lot like a corporate office park without the parking. The old LA – at least this is what we always told ourselves – was arguably the most diverse city in the world. Will the new LA be as diverse? Don’t count on it. The immigrant families who’ve managed to educate their children in rent-controlled apartments in neighborhoods like Echo Park and East Hollywood know the “affordable housing” coming to their neighborhoods has no room for them. Generational stakeholders in Boyle Heights are fighting against the intrusion of art galleries – which they rightly see as the thin edge of the wedge of gentrification. Wait till they get a load of what CIM Group has in store for them. 

It’s odd to watch the very young stand up for the rights of billionaires and bankers in their own backyards. I never thought I’d say this, but what is wrong with the kids these days?

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

CULTURAL DISCONNECT?--No industry is more identified with Southern California than entertainment. Yet, in the past, the industry’s appeal has lain in identifying with the always-changing values and mythos of American society. But, today, that connection is being undermined, not just by technology, but also by a seemingly self-conscious decision to sever the industry’s links with roughly half of the population. 

This was painfully obvious during the Oscars — the penultimate event of the seemingly endless award season — when speaker after speaker decided to spend their moments of fame denouncing President Donald Trump. For all his personal failings, and often misguided policies, most Republicans and independents disapprove of the relentless Trump bashing in the media. 

Hollywood’s decision to make itself part of the anti-Trump resistance would make for wonderful satire, if you could get it on film. Imagine feminist icon Emma Watson fighting for “women’s empowerment” while baring her breasts in Vanity Fair. Or a host of social justice warriors, like Meryl Streep, demanding justice for the dispossessed, then returning to their estates where these victims of Trumpism are not likely to be found outside the servants’ quarters. 

The results also have a hard side: dismal ratings, down from a traditional viewership of 40 million to a mere 32 million, following a pattern that has seen it slide badly the last three years. Most Trump voters turned off the political speeches, notes one survey. But the Academy had other ways to show its contempt for its customers: None of the 10 largest grossing movies, notes USA Today’s Mitch Albom, got nominated for best picture, best actor or actress, or for supporting roles. 

The everyman era 

The preference of sophisticated opinion may be quintessential to Europe’s boutique film industry, but the blending of popular tastes with art has long propelled Hollywood’s historical success. This separation between audience and the Academy was not always the case. Films like “Gone with the Wind” (1939), “Around the World in 80 Days” (1956), “Ben-Hur” (1959), “The Sound of Music” (1965), “The Godfather” (1972), “Forest Gump” (1994) and “Titanic” (1997) all managed to be both blockbusters and best picture winners. 

Hollywood, wrote author Leo Rosten in 1940, was “the very embodiment” of “magic success,” allowing a truck driver to dream of being a hero, or a small-town waitress “to compare herself to a movie queen.” Hollywood was Middle American to the core, which appealed not just to our own audiences, but also to those around the world. 

In a political sense, Hollywood connected with Americans across the ideological spectrum. During the contentious 1930s, Hollywood could accommodate both the conservative myth of the loner — Gary Cooper and John Wayne — and also produce powerful dramas that touched on issues of class and inequality, such as “Our Daily Bread” (1934), “How Green Was My Valley” (1941) and “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940). 

Some progressive-leaning films were written by people who were later “blacklisted” during the McCarthy era, a tragedy that deprived the industry of some of its greatest talents. The industry instead favored biblical epochs like “Quo Vadis” (1951) as well as innocuous comedies starring the likes of Doris Day. 

“It was boy meets girl, lives happily ever after,” recalled former Los Angeles and Orange County Republican Congressman Bob Dornan, who grew up during this time. “There were clear-cut heroes and villains. Nazis torturing little old ladies, John Wayne landing on the beaches. … America was the bearer, the hope of the world.” 

New closets and old 

In the early 1980s, when Dornan was wistfully reminiscing, things were already changing. As his uncle, Jack Haley Sr., best known for playing the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), grumbled, “The gays have come out of the closet and the conservatives have gotten in.” 

Like the blacklist, the closeting of gays was shameful. But now, particularly after Trump’s election, there’s a new kind of exclusion that marginalizes all but progressive thinking, with conservatives, as one put it, threatened with being “excommunicated from the church of tolerance.” 

Few, even most conservatives, don’t want a return to the self-censorship of the 1950s. It’s simply time to call a moratorium on ceaseless hectoring. Shows with edgy themes packaged in comedy and irony, like “Modern Family,” can still do well with a mass market, but there’s a limited audience for openly activist-driven programs like ABC’s miniseries “When We Rise.” 

A critical economic issue 

This is occurring as overall ticket sales are down to a century low and employment is, for the most part, stagnant. The television industry has also declined in the face of internet-based services, cord-cutting millennials and social media. There is also more competition, both from abroad and within the United States. In 1980, Hollywood employed three-quarters of all movie personnel. Now, as much as 80 percent of film starts take place elsewhere, taking many jobs along with them. 

How the creative industries — responsible for upwards of 700,000 jobs statewide, most of them in Southern California — addresses these issues is critical at a time when we have lost ground to other areas in fields from high-tech to manufacturing and business services. But, to revive fully, the Southern California cultural industry needs to once again speak to the aspirations of most Americans, not just the enlightened sophistos on the coasts. To leave people in Middle America, particularly in their 50s and above, watching reruns of old programs is not exactly a great business strategy for future growth.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org). Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

ECONOMIES OF PLACE-This time of year, the swallows return to Capistrano, and I return to my birthplace, San Francisco, for the city’s annual pre-budget finance conference. For the last few years I have kicked things off with an economic outlook for the coming year, replete with a discussion of risks. This being San Francisco, naturally, I had to talk about the high costs of housing as one of the risks to continued economic growth. 

On my way home, I thought of an SAT exam-like question. One of these things is not like the others: San Francisco, Cleveland, Hong Kong, Sydney, and Vancouver. I am going to take a wild guess and say that you, the reader, have chosen Cleveland. 

You are right. But why? After all, Cleveland rocks, but just not in the same way as the other cities. One of the many ways it is different is in the cost of living. Demographia’s just-released 2017 affordability study has Cleveland as one of the most affordable cities for housing, and each of the other cities in my SAT question as among the least affordable. 

This suggests something important about the affordability crisis that has not, but really should, enter the discussion of housing affordability: The cities that we find most attractive are cities where housing is “unaffordable.” In other words, the affordable housing crisis is not just about a lack of housing supply. 

In my current city, Los Angeles, one hears over and over again that everyone is leaving because no one can afford to live here. This talk reminds me of the Yogi Berra homily, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Of course, exactly the opposite is true, and that truth is what should guide us in our housing policy. 

The oft-made mistake is to suggest that housing is expensive because, as Demographia incorrectly puts it in their report, “Studies do not leave the slightest doubt that unaffordable housing is almost everywhere and every time caused by the same factor: housing supply restrictions.” Well, these “studies,” some of which are by very thoughtful people, leave plenty of doubt, and some of their authors ought to go back to Econ 101. Prices are not just a supply phenomenon but are rather an interaction between supply, what is available for sale, and demand, what people want to buy. 

Clearly the people who live in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities on Demographia’s list of cities with an affordability crisis could afford to live there. They just paid a larger portion of their income to do so. They could have moved to a more affordable place to live -- Cleveland, for example. So those who say that housing prices are unaffordable are saying that, at lower prices, there would be more demand than supply. Let’s explore the implications of this. 

Cleveland is so affordable because many people find it less desirable (think “lake effect” blizzards.) Indeed, half the population of Cleveland left over the past 50 years. The housing stock is more than ample for the people who want to live there. Which reminds me of the time I interviewed for a job in Buffalo, New York, right after graduation. Part of the pitch was, “Buffalo is a great place. It is so depressed that you can afford a really good house.” Somehow this did not seem like an endorsement of a community I wanted to move to. 

In my current city, Los Angeles, one hears over and over again that everyone is leaving because no one can afford to live here. This talk reminds me of the Yogi Berra homily, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”  Of course, exactly the opposite is true … 

The reason San Francisco is different is that it is a wonderful place to live. The scenery is spectacular, the climate mild, cultural amenities are abundant, and in a very short time one can be in the Sierra for some incredible winter sports or at Mavericks for world-class surfing. 

Edward Glaeser, in his towering work on urban economies, The Triumph of the City, said “vitality makes people willing to pay for space.” Glaeser, like many other urban economists, argues for more building, but the point repeatedly made by those who study urban migration is that exciting innovation (documented by UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti), natural amenities such as beaches, mountains, and lakes (documented in the “superstar cities” study of Goyurko, Sinai, Mayer), and cultural amenities (as oft described by economist Richard Florida) attract people from declining to successful cities. 

To be sure, San Francisco is not to everyone’s taste; some prefer the charm of a Louisiana bayou, and others the silence of a Minnesota winter. But given the housing stock, many more people want to live in San Francisco than can. An estimate in a 2015 paper by Moretti and the University of Chicago’s Chang-Tai Hsieh found that more affordable housing could increase San Francisco’s population by 100 percent or more. So there exists significant demand for San Francisco housing that a moderate change in zoning and building standards will not correct. 

The population growth Hsieh and Moretti found means that today’s locals in places where people want to live are going to have to write a check for the infrastructure to support them. This is an old story in a place like California. In 1967, one of Ronald Reagan’s first acts as governor was to increase taxes dramatically, giving us Californians the highly progressive income tax system we enjoy today, and that Republicans everywhere rail against. The reason? Large-scale migration to the state had caused his predecessor, Pat Brown, to build infrastructure to support a burgeoning population, and as a result the state was running a structural deficit. 

So what’s happening in San Francisco -- or Seattle or Austin, or any number of popular places where the cost of living is rising -- is the market system doing its thing. The market increases prices to ration the available land through the cost of housing. And people economize on their consumption of housing by living in smaller quarters, sharing with roommates, or stacking up generations. And for some, the price is not worth the value they would receive, and they leave. That is how any market rationalizes differences between supply and demand. 

What about those who are squeezed out of California (such as my kids, who moved to Colorado)? The Dad in me says, “That’s horrible, I want them down the block from me.” But the economist in me says, “They do not value what Los Angeles has, relative to their life in a small town in Colorado, enough to sacrifice other things for it.” Resources, when scarce, are appropriately allocated according to their value to those consuming them. 

And what about our schoolteachers, firemen, police, and city officials who struggle to live in the high-priced cities where they work? Here is the rub. When a place is really attractive and therefore really expensive -- take Santa Barbara -- many who perform valuable services live elsewhere, like in Ventura, 90 minutes away during rush hour. 

Instead of wringing our hands about affordability in high-demand places, and trying to build enough to meet a worldwide demand that is difficult to satiate, we should be saying, “Great, we have a really successful city, but we also want to have a city with certain professional, service, and demographic characteristics,” and design housing policy targeted to that. For example, Santa Clara County built high-quality affordable housing that it rents to schoolteachers. It is a small program, but it is a good start. What doesn’t work are overly broad measures, such as directing developers to make 20 percent of their units affordable in exchange for building permits. Such policies generate homes for only a very few San Franciscans (while attracting ever-more newcomers who want to live there.) 

That is not to say we should ignore affordability. We definitely must pay attention to affordability, as we plan the cities we want to live in. But in doing so, we must pay attention not only to whether we have enough housing supply but also to the nature of the demand in places where people want to live. If we ignore demand, we risk creating urban nightmares -- of crowding, traffic, long commutes, and ill health -- in pursuit of a successful and affordable city.

(Jerry Nickelsburg, an economist at UCLA Anderson School of Management, writes the Pacific Economist column. He would love to hear from you at [email protected] or via Twitter @jnickelsburg. This piece originally appeared in Zocalo Public Square.) prepped for City Watch by Linda Abrams.

TRUMP’S AMERICA-Latinos in Los Angeles are making dramatically fewer reports of rape and domestic violence amid a climate of fear over increased immigration enforcement, according to the city’s Police Chief Charlie Beck. 

Since the beginning of 2017, reports of rape among the city’s Latino population have declined by 25 percent, compared to the same period last year. Domestic violence reports have dropped nearly 10 percent. According to statistics provided by the Los Angeles Police Department, no other ethnic group experienced a comparable decrease.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Beck (photo right) said there was a “strong correlation” between the Trump administration’s new immigration rules, which empower federal agents to more aggressively deport those without documentation regardless of whether they’ve committed a serious crime, and the deflated numbers.

“Imagine a young woman—imagine your daughter, sister, mother, your friend—not reporting a sexual assault because they are afraid that their family will be torn apart,” he said during an appearance with Mayor Eric Garcetti. 

The Pew Research Center estimates that the Los Angeles metro area has one million undocumented immigrants, more than any other area in the country except New York. In a press release, the LAPD cautioned that while “there is no direct evidence that the decline is related to concerns within the Hispanic community regarding immigration, the department believes deportation fears may be preventing Hispanic members of the community from reporting when they are victimized.” 

The statement echoes what advocates and criminal justice experts have long been warning ― that Trump’s immigration crackdown may erode trust between immigrants and law enforcement, with devastating consequences.  

“We have entire communities of people feeling like it’s no longer safe or feasible for them to report crime,” said Jacquie Marroquin, director of programs for the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence.  

She said local domestic violence organizations in Los Angeles have been flooded with calls and emails since Trump’s immigration policies were announced, spiking after an undocumented woman was arrested while seeking a domestic violence protective order. The woman now faces up to 10 years in prison. 

Victims who are undocumented may not feel like they can go to police or appear in court without running the risk of deportation, she said. That means that traditional routes to safety ― filing for a protection order, pursuing criminal charges ― are now out of reach. 

“We have heard of cases of survivors dropping cases all together,” Marroquin said. “Survivors are more concerned about their safety from ICE and law enforcement than their safety from the person who is hurting them.” 

She gave an example of an undocumented domestic violence victim in LA who has a protective order against her abuser, but is now too afraid to report violations to police, putting her in extreme danger. Another victim expressed fear at having to go to the police department to pick up her toddler as part as her child custody agreement. 

“They are reading about ICE hanging out in courthouses,” she said. “That sends a chilling effect to survivors who are thinking about going to the courts to seek relief.” 

If victims and witnesses are too scared to cooperate in criminal investigations, it can make it hard for prosecutors to hold perpetrators accountable ― placing entire communities at risk. In Denver, City Attorney Kristin Bronson said that four cases involving domestic violence were dropped as victims were afraid of being arrested if they testified. 

“Domestic violence, sexual violence, abuse exist in the shadows,” Marroquin said. “When folks don’t feel like they can come forward and bring these issues into the light, it forces them to remain in harmful situations.”  

(Melissa Jeltsen covers domestic violence and issues related to women’s health, safety and security at Huff Post …where this piece was first posted.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

ALPERN AT LARGE--The City and County of Los Angeles are moving away from liberalism, and even beyond progressivism, to the extent that a social engineering project is being rammed down the throats of even the most open-minded of civic leaders.  And woe be unto those who dare speak truth to power, or to at least point out the sky is blue, and that the late George Orwell had a few good points. (Photo above: Couple fighting over parking space.) 

Speaking as one of the "useful idiots" guilty of wanting more mobility for Angelenos to improve their quality of life, we now have a culture where we just don't need any conservatives, moderates and/or Republicans telling us how to live our lives when we've got such a wonderful group of mega-lefties that are more than happy to tell us how to live our lives, instead: 

Myth #1: The Expo Line, the Gold Lines, and all the other lines were meant to megadensify LA. 

Urban infill is good.  Elegant density is good.  Transit-oriented housing is good.  Affordable housing is good.  Neighborhood preservation--and even betterment--is very good. 

But the Expo Line is a cute little trolley meant to offer an alternative to the I-10 freeway, and effectively added a lane or two each way on that horrible gridlocked highway.  Ditto for the Green Line and the I-105 freeway, and for all the freeway alternatives that the Orange and Gold Lines had to offer. 

Encouraging a capacity of overdevelopment--and anything BUT affordable housing and transit-oriented development--is now the name of the game. 

We could easily define affordable and transit-oriented development.  There's Senior Affordable, Student Affordable, and Workforce Affordable housing that all are great for the middle and lower socioeconomic classes and can reduce traffic and enhance our lives.  We could also define what differentiates "transit-oriented" versus "transit-adjacent" development. 

But we don't--because our pols and Planning gurus coddle developers who build market-level, car-oriented, and gentrifying developments that make a mockery of all they say, and what we demand. 

Myth #2--Car commuters are ruthless monsters bent on destroying us all! 

You know who uses their cars?  Most if not virtually all of our political leaders, the leadership of Metro and other transit agencies, and virtually all transit advocates (and kudos to those few mensches who practice what they preach!). 

As for me, I use my car because I live in West LA and work in underserved middle/lower-economic class neighborhoods in Orange and Riverside County. 

My wife uses her car for our children's needs and for groceries--they need transportation to schools too far to walk to, and we need food and household items too small to carry on a bus or train. 

And very, very few (I'm a big exception) transit advocates have children who are still minors, if they have any children at all!  The needs of children (parks, bus/train safety) and women with small children (or even women without children) are ignored by the transit world dominated by childless males ... although a few of us have children who we see will gladly use the train/Uber/Lyft over the car. 

There's no reason to not do anything in our power to allow other options to the car...for all of us.  But to demonize and arm-twist and belittle and besmirch ALL car drivers is rather obtuse, arrogant, and just downright unfair.   

And, in the same vein, demeaning homeowners who "have it so easy" in single-family neighborhoods isn't very kind, either.  But then again, the social engineers think that God (if they believe in God) is on their side, and they won't be disabused from their monopoly as the Wizards of Truth. 

Myth #3--Parking is BAD...very BAD...and always leads to BAD THINGS! 

Don't worry about ISIS and Donald Trump folks it's that neighbor's parking that'll getcha! 

You know, that parking in front of his/her house that YOU feel YOU deserve as a renter who makes less than him/her, and because he/she MUST have had it easier to buy that home because of Proposition 13...even they're in their 30's or 40's? 

You know, that parking next to the supermarkets and restaurants that are always full and in such short supply, and which forces you to hunt for parking in adjacent single-family neighborhoods, and which forces those neighborhoods to be "the mean streets" by establishing preferred parking districts, and which leads to a host of City parking tickets coming to a windshield near you? 

I could count time after time after countless time we've demanded that parking not be free, but the theology of "Parking is the Domain of the Prince of Darkness" and "the Car is the Anti-Christ" would be much easier to believe if:

 a) We could find a way to ensure that unbundled parking and apartments would ensure that apartment renters not purchasing a parking space would NOT be allowed to purchase a car that would, inevitably, be parked on someone else's hard-earned property.

 b) We could find a way to allow families with small or other minor children and/or seniors to actually survive without a car.

 c) We could create senior and student housing developments that would make it silly to purchase a car.

 d) We could find a way for families to buy family-sized grocery purchases without a car.

 e) We could find an economic model for suburban businesses to thrive without parking.

 f) We could get developers to pay for the same amount of transit amenities that they would have to pay for parking, so that they don't weasel out of their legal infrastructure/mitigation requirements in the name of being "environmentally sensitive". 

So we can all continue to be "useful idiots" and help those presiding over a gentrified LA City and County that leads to a further widening of the income gap between rich and poor, and which destroys the lives and dreams of the vanishing middle class, or we could consider treating urban planning and transportation planning like a science ... 

... and not a faith-based theology.

(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties. He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.)

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CALBUZZ--President Donald Trump’s approval rating, just 39% nationwide, is an anemic 31% in California, according to the latest survey from the Public Policy Institute of California. At the same time, Gov. Jerry Brown, who has sharply criticized Trump on immigration, health care and the environment, enjoys a 58% approval rating at home.

And while Trump has tightened restrictions on travel from majority-Muslim countries and amped up immigration controls at the U.S. border, 58% of Californians disapprove of the president’s travel ban and a whopping 68% of California adults say undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. should be allowed to stay and apply for citizenship.

To say California is another country is an understatement.

California Exceptionalism. Trump’s low approval ratings in California, about the same as they were in January, are held up only by the 82% of Republicans who approve of his performance: a staggering 91% of Democrats and 57% of independents disapprove. And while whites (45%) and men (39%) are more likely than women (24%) to approve of Trump, the president does even worse among Latinos (17%) and blacks (16%).

It’s a pathetic showing for the Narcissist in Chief in California where just 26% of voters are registered as Republicans (compared to 45% as Democrats and 24% as independents) and where Democrat Hillary Clinton won the November 2016 popular vote by nearly 3.7 million votes – 8,720,417 to 5,048,398.

Compared to the nearly seven in 10 Californians who say undocumented immigrants should have a legal path to citizenship, just 15% say they should be required to leave. A strong majority of Californians (68%) say that undocumented immigrants living in the US should be allowed to stay and eventually apply for citizenship. An overwhelming majority of Democrats (82%) and a solid majority of independents (62%) want a pathway to citizenship. But so too does a plurality of Republicans – 46%

If the Trump administration intends to round up undocumented immigrants and deport them, it will be against the wishes of the people of California, An even larger statewide majority (72%) is opposed to Trump’s plan to build a wall along the southern U.S. border, an idea supported by just 25% of California adults.

With his 58% approval rating and with 55% of Californians saying the state is headed in the right direction, Gov. Brown is well positioned to rebuke Trump’s attempts to build his border wall in California or – if he should try it — to use California National Guard troops for border security or immigration control.

(Jerry Roberts is a California journalist who writes, blogs and hosts a TV talk show about politics, policy and media. Phil Trounstine is the former political editor of the San Jose Mercury News, former communications director for California Gov. Gray Davis and was the founder and director of the Survey and Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University. This piece appeared originally in CalBuzz.)

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EASTSIDER-The resignation of Xavier Becerra (photo above) to become California’s Attorney General has opened up a rare opportunity for some lucky Democrat. The prize is a lifetime sinecure as the Congress member for Congressional District 34. I say Democrat because the 34^th district is overwhelmingly a Democratic, carved out district. 

As proof, of the 23 -- that’s right -- 23 candidates for the Special Election on April 4, 19 of them are Democrats, with one Libertarian, one No Party Preference, and one Green Party hopeful. Just a single Republican. Need I say more? 

And speaking of opportunities, here in Northeast LA we now have two Democratic clubs -- the been- around-forever NEDC (Northeast Democratic Club), and the new EAPD (East Area Progressive Democrats.) The NEDC has something like 100 members, while the new group advertises around 600 members. Quite a feat for a new Democratic club. You can probably guess where the Bernie people tend to hang out.

What makes political life interesting here in Northeast LA, is that the Eastside Progressives have recently turned the Party on its head. They did it with a huge turnout for the January Delegate race (for the State Democratic Party Central Committee) in the 51^st AD. Something like 900 votes, a number more than triple the usual turnout for this event, and the EAPD candidates won all 14 seats!  

Anyhow, this special election offers up an amazing prize in a race where only a handful of voters are likely to pay attention and vote. Special elections tend to have even lower turnouts than City Council elections, if you can believe that. And a congressional seat has no term limits! 

It is also a wonderful opportunity to introduce the next group of Democratic politicians, that next generation of leaders that are looking for a way into the political system outside of the same old same ‘kiss the ring’ old party process. 

So What Did We Get? 

At the end of the day what we saw at the few candidate forums was mostly the same small group of insiders. Since the East Area Progressive Democrats did not endorse anyone, let me concentrate on the Northeast Democrats, who did. 

Three insiders (folks with a track record and some money) and a couple of unknowns were invited, ignoring the other 13 democratic hopefuls. The three I would characterize as insider favorites were Jimmy Gomez, Sara Hernandez, and Yolie Flores. We were at least spared former Assembly Speaker John Perez, who had announced that he was running early on, only to magically withdraw based on “health issues.”

For those who don’t follow politics, Jimmy Gomez is currently the Assembly Member from our 51^st AD in Northeast LA, and just won re-election in last November’s General Election with over 86% of the vote. He is also one of those carefully nurtured soon-to-be lifetime professional Democratic politicians the party loves so much. 

UCLA, Harvard MA, worked for Hilda Solis in D.C., came out of AFSCME, and then returned to California as the political director for UNAC (United Nurses of California) while awaiting his opportunity to run for office. Jimmy Gomez is personable and smooth. He also won the NEDC endorsement with 84% of the 58 ballots cast. 

Our other well nurtured Dem insider, “God’s Gift to the Eastside” Jose Huizar, evidently decided that he likes the City Council better than taking a chance on losing to Jimmy Gomez, so he dithered around, finally deciding not to run for Congress. He is another of the carefully created professional Democratic Party lifers. Backed by the establishment, he was handed a seat in the LAUSD before coming to City Hall. The LAUSD gig let him spend our school bond money as head of the District’s Public Works Committee, and even become President of the Board, all while getting tight with developers. 

Huizar’s presence is still on the ballot, however, in the person of a surrogate -- Sara Hernandez. She was Huizar’s Area Director for Downtown Los Angeles, getting to know the rich and powerful just as Huizar did with the LAUSD. She quietly rebranded herself with a little distance from Huizar, by leaving the Council office to become Executive Director of Southern California Coro in mid-2016, prior to announcing her run to replace Becerra this year. Less advertised is her stint with the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA). 

Sara Hernandez must have known that the Northeast Dems are death on Charter Schools, because she was a no show at their Endorsement meeting. On the other hand, she is well-funded and has hit the campaign trail with a whole series of TV ads, mailbox stuffers and phone banking. 

Speaking of Charter Schools, the third mainstream candidate was Yolie Flores, registered as a Democrat but really IMHO Monica Garcia “lite” when she was on the LAUSD School Board. She and Monica are deep pocket CCSA backed Charter School advocates, and for my money, they are Democrats in name only. The reason I know she has money behind her this time out is because I’ve had four calls from her campaign people, as well as a number of mailbox pitches. 

All top-down Democrats. 

And What Did We Miss? 

When I asked the President of the NELA Dems who decided who was going to be showcased at the Endorsement meeting, I was informed that the Executive Committee had met, looked at candidate resumes, and then determined a cut off for applying. Cut off indeed. How about a deliberate curtailment of small “d” democracy. 

Personally, I wanted to hear from at least two other candidates that could well be in that top tier for a runoff -- Arturo Carmona and Wendy Carrillo. It seemed to me that these two in particular represent the next generation of grassroots Democrats as opposed to top-down Democrats. 

Arturo Carmona represents the best of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, working tirelessly for the Senator’s vision of a small “d” Democratic Party. My kind of real deal working from the ground up small donor kind of leader we need in the party. You can read more about him here.  

Wendy is young, hails from the Boyle Heights/El Sereno chunk of Northeast Los Angeles, became a citizen by age 21, and went on to get a Masters at USC. Not too shabby. She is another real deal small “d” Democrat. You can check out the LA Times article about her here. 

The Takeaway 

Out of the 19 Democratic candidates for Congress in the 34^th CD, only a handful really got heard by anyone in this election. I think that potential voters were cheated by not being able to widely hear from Arturo Carmona and Wendy Carrillo, and that’s sad. It also raises a broader question. 

What about the other 13 candidates? Buried in there somewhere could be the next Xavier Becerra, but we’ll never know. I think a disservice was done to all of these candidates who did not get a chance to appear before a broader audience. They had the guts to go out and run for office, expose themselves to public scrutiny, and devote a huge amount of their time (and probably finances) to actually run for political office. 

If we are going to rebuild and rebrand our Democratic party into something more than a top down vehicle for the limousine liberals like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, we need to get going on actually building a grassroots party. Otherwise, it will be back to the ho-hum maybe 15% voter turnout that allows lobbyists, big developers, and other special interests to own our City, not to mention the Federal government. 

Bottom line, no matter what your political persuasion, get out and vote in the April 4 Special Election! Turnout is likely to be small, and your vote could make the difference in who gets to a runoff, if there is even going to be one. A large turnout could send a message to the Democratic establishment and our politically turned off Angelenos. 

Indifference has a cost. Just look at our current Council, Congress and President.

(Tony Butka is an Eastside community activist, who has served on a neighborhood council, has a background in government and is a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CONNECTING CALIFORNIA--The Ralph M. Brown Act, first approved in 1953, is celebrated for its supposed guarantees that we citizens have a voice in the decisions of all our local governments. (Photo above: Carmen Bella, 76, a resident of Bell, Calif. yells at city council members.)

But today, it is little more than a gag rule.

Over the past six decades, the Brown Act—famous for its guarantee of a 72-hour notice for public meetings—has become a civic Frankenstein, threatening the very public participation it was intended to protect.

The act’s requirements of advance notice before local officials hold a meeting has mutated into strict limitations on the ability of local officials to have any kind of frank conversation with one another, even over email. Brown Act requirements that we, the public, be allowed to weigh in at meetings have been turned against us, by way of a standardized three-minute-per-speaker limit at the microphone that encourages rapid rants and discourages real conversation between local officials and the citizens they represent.

And by effectively prohibiting deeper exchanges among officials and citizens, the Brown Act has empowered professionals outside the civic space—lawyers, labor unions, and especially developers—to fill the conversation void.

At a recent UC Irvine conference on the Brown Act in which I participated, speakers discussed how local elected officials and their staff members, wary of talking to or even emailing each other and violating the Brown Act rules against unannounced meetings, often communicate with each other through developers, who are much freer to meet and talk.

This is one reason why allegations that developers have too much power are routine in California communities. But it is also why proposed reforms to limit the influence of developers—Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti just announced a ban on meetings between city planning commissioners and developers—never last. Under California’s Brown Act, developers are often the most practical conduit for local officials to get information to their colleagues.

“The Brown Act gives developers superior access, because it cuts [local government] staff off from talking to the decision makers in the same way,” said one California local official, quoted in a conference paper.

The problem with the Brown Act is not that the law has changed. It’s that the law has stayed too much the same, while California governance has changed radically.

Back in the 1950s, when the Brown Act was passed, local governments largely ruled via broadly applied laws, policies, and plans. But in subsequent decades, a combination of court decisions, state laws, and ballot initiatives like Prop 13 have limited the power of governments to control their own revenues, and to make and enforce laws.

So to retain some self-determination, local governments have worked around the law, ignoring plans and policies they once followed, and instead embracing ad-hoc decision-making, considering proposals on a case-by-case basis. The most important tool for today’s local governments is not the ordinance or the general plan but rather the closed-door negotiations that produce labor contracts and developer agreements. In the latter, developers typically receive exemptions from present and future rules in exchange for benefits they give to the city.

The problem with the Brown Act is not that the law has changed. It’s that the law has stayed too much the same, while California governance has changed radically.

In this era of government by negotiation, the Brown Act is unhelpful when it’s not beside the point. First, the act’s limits on meetings end up restricting the ability of elected officials to participate fully in such negotiations; such talks end up being conducted by staff or outsider lawyers.

Second, the Brown Act covers public meetings, and doesn’t get the public into closed negotiations. All too often the public hears about negotiations only once deals are done, and brought to a council or a board for approval.

At those late stages, public comments—especially public comments that are limited to just a few minutes—don’t matter very much. And the elected officials to whom they are complaining may have been left out of the talks. So California citizens typically and understandably respond either by checking out of the process entirely or by opposing their local politicians fervently and uncompromisingly. In this way, the Brown Act encourages the worst sort of NIMBYism.

The good news: There are many methods for encouraging earlier and deeper public participation in the deal-making that governs our local communities. Proven approaches to dialogue and idea-gathering should be tried. I personally like participatory budgeting—by which residents of some California cities decide directly how some municipal money is spent—and believe the same model could be applied to planning decisions. Regular citizens could be brought into negotiations and allowed to help decide the particulars of exemptions and community benefits in developer agreements.

The bad news is that such ideas require conversation between elected officials and citizens that would run afoul of the inflexible Brown Act. Indeed, some of the more innovative local government experiments in California—notably the neighborhood councils in the city of Los Angeles—have found their influence and ability to communicate limited by the meetings restrictions of the Brown Act. 

At the UC Irvine conference, many ideas were raised for amending the Brown Act. The state’s Little Hoover Commission has also suggested several changes in the law.  But the act has created a regime so antithetical to the goal of public participation that it might be better to scrap it and start over—with a new framework providing local governments with more flexibility as long as they pursue policies that enhance public participation in decisions.

The National Civic League has a model participation ordinance that suggests what such a law could look like. Such an ordinance might work even without repealing the Brown Act. Instead, the ordinance could be allowed to supersede the Brown Act rules, exempting from the act’s edicts any process that enhances public participation and civic conversation.

Who could oppose such sensible changes? Answer: Some civic and media organizations are suspicious that reform would limit access. And they claim local officials and lawyers are being overly cautious in limiting conversations because of fear of Brown Act violations. But local governments maintain the caution is well-advised, given how easy it is to sue for violations of the act, and thus block important projects.

While the debate over the Brown Act continues, the everyday reality of California public meetings grows ever more absurd. On a recent Saturday at my local school board, our city’s mayor—one of only a handful of people in attendance—rose to ask questions about the board’s management of a newly passed school bond, the largest in our small district’s history.

The mayor is a public works lawyer with long experience with bonds, and her questions were fair and straightforward. But the board members wouldn’t answer them. Instead, they tried to cut her off after just three minutes, noting that’s the limit on public comment. When one board member sought to answer the mayor’s questions, the school superintendent interrupted to say that any exchange could be a violation of the Brown Act.

Any law that won’t let a mayor and a school board talk about their city’s most important construction project—and at a public meeting—is a bad law. Until our local governments move past the Brown Act, Californians will find it hard to have the kinds of conversations that local democracy requires.

(Joe Mathews is Connecting California Columnist and Editor at Zócalo Public Square … where this column first appeared. Mathews is a Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010). Photo credit: Chris Pizzello/Associated Press.

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PLATKIN ON PLANNING-It is distressing, but hardly surprising, that the Los Angeles Times would use a lead editorial to preach about planning the future of Los Angeles without cracking open the city’s adopted General Plan or mentioning climate change and its own articles on City Hall corruption and new earthquake threats. Apparently, their view of Los Angeles is not 600 amazing complex and vulnerable square miles, but a checkerboard of private lots waiting for real estate investors to swoop in from around the world for short-term profits. 

I will post my full critique of this lead editorial on my blog, Plan-it Los Angeles, but here are some of the paper’s more far-fetched claims, followed by my debunking: 

LAT: “For what may be a brief moment in Los Angeles, planning is hot. Measure S, the slow-growth, anti-development initiative, failed at the ballot box but succeeded in one very big way: It drew attention to the city’s broken land-use process and the need for a new comprehensive vision for how Los Angeles should grow.”  

LAT: “Every new project is a political negotiation and a fight over height, density and community impact, making housing construction a high-stakes gamble and turning residents reflexively into NIMBYs.” 

Debunking: Less than one percent of real estate projects in Los Angeles involve the City Council legislative actions that Measure S addressed. And only a small percentage of these cases involve any negotiations, appeals, or legal challenges. In these cases local communities want the City to follow its own planning laws and regulations, as well as the California Environmental Quality Act. 

This means local communities are in no way reflexive in challenging projects. To the contrary, they are highly selective in opposing illegal projects that adversely impact their neighborhoods and depend on City Council spot-zoning to become legal. 

LAT: “Can Los Angeles finally fix this broken system that doesn’t produce enough housing, erodes public trust in government and doesn’t result in well-planned communities?” 

Debunking: Public distrust in local government results from City Hall’s rampant pay-to-play land use decisions. The LAT’s own reporters carefully exposed these practices until several months ago. This is when the newspaper’s editorial page became LA’s highest profile voice championing the city planning status quo -- by leading the charge against Measure S. Furthermore, LA’s plans and zones are not the cause of insufficient housing production and poorly planned communities. The cause is the business model of real estate developers. They do not build affordable housing because it is unprofitable, and they do not follow adopted plans and zones to create well-planned communities because these laws interfere with their bottom line. 

LAT: “Los Angeles runs the very real risk of repeating what it has done time and again: The city develops a plan for growth, homeowner groups oppose it, and then elected officials ignore it.”  

LAT: “Los Angeles as a whole needs to be far more walkable, bikeable and transit-oriented, with most communities within easy reach of frequent bus or rail service and amenities such as parks, libraries and grocery stores.” 

Debunking: The Framework and all other General Plan elements, such as the new Mobility Element, are fully consistent with all alternative transportation modes, including walking, biking, and transit. The adopted plans already address these issues in great detail. Likewise, even though the City Council adopted the General Plan Framework in the 1990s, it is still a visionary document that addresses parks, libraries, and the location of retail stores. Furthermore, the Framework mandated (but never pursued) careful monitoring of its goals and policies to ensure the adequate construction of transportation facilities and other infrastructure categories, such as parks and libraries. 

To cite one of many examples that the Los Angeles Times is apparently unaware of, this is what the Framework proposed regarding parks: 

P14: Formulate/update a Recreation Master Plan (a Recreation and Parks Department document) to provide sufficient capacity to correct existing deficiencies as well as meet the needs of future population. Consider the following actions when developing/updating this Element: 

a.  Identify improvements to the recreation and park system including additional parklands and recreational programs. Priority should be placed on the identification of improvements for the underserved areas of the City. Both traditional and non-traditional solutions to the expansion of facilities should be considered, including the following: 

(1) Revise standards that permit the acquisition of parks smaller than five acres, particularly in those communities with the most severe neighborhood park deficiencies; 

(2) Acquire use, and maintain of properties for recreation and public open space, that are as small as 5,000 square feet in area; 

(3) Develop community gardens on small lots in residential neighborhoods and commercial areas; 

(4) Develop active and passive greenways along fixed rail transit lines and utility corridors, as well as for the development of open space along rivers and principal drainages (as depicted on the Citywide Greenways Network Map); 

(5) Adopt joint use strategies for recreational facilities, wherever appropriate; 

(6) Require for the inclusion of recreational facilities in multi-family residential and mixed-use development projects. 

Will the Los Angeles Times accept this scolding about its need to undertake basic research about LA’s plans and planning process before blathering on about a new planning vision? 

There is always hope, but there is no reason to think that the paper has or will ever give up its fundamental role in what I previously dubbed the Urban Infill Growth Machine. For over a century, even with its founding families departed, the paper has considered real estate speculation to be LA’s economic development machine. Even though conditions have dramatically changed since the 1970s, the paper’s unwavering support for real estate speculation has never faltered. But, the paper will eventually have its come-uppance when thoughtful planning cannot be reconciled with a welcome wagon for every global speculator targeting Los Angeles for its sand castles and Lego buildings.

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

TRANSIT WATCH--So here we are in spring of 2017--we've just had two elections that were both bruising and decisive, either in victory or in failure. The city and county of Los Angeles has a new president they overall do NOT like, but can legally drown their disappointment in a haze of legalized marijuana. Public spending on transportation and the homeless is up, and developers are encouraged to build affordable housing ASAP. 

Among other issues on voters/taxpayers minds: trains and mobility, and overall ridership.  We want to get from here to there.  Despite the knee-jerk tendency to complain about everything, Metro has a lot to crow about, and so do we--but we've got a lot to focus on with respect to improving and preventing operations at Metro and other transportation-related services. 

First, THE GOOD: 

1) Ridership is up on the Expo, Gold, and other light rail lines, in ways we kind of predicted but did so a decade ago with our fingers crossed. Ridership on the buses is NOT what we expected, but there's a confounding variable that NOBODY saw coming a decade ago: Uber/Lyft. 

Those who are transit-dependent and find it convenient will use the buses, but for all of us who were fearing doom and gloom because our buses weren't connecting to our trains (myself included!) there is an individual freedom and mobility with Uber/Lyft/Metro Rail that is being achieved by more than we realize... and probably isn't too easily measured. 

2) My teenage son, who I once brought to Friends4Expo Transit meetings in a baby carrier, is now big enough to carry me, and attended a Railroading Merit Badge event with his and other Boy Scout troops.  Interest was high, our trip on the Pasadena Gold Line was standing-room only, and a huge choice of restaurants now exist at Union Station where virtually none existed a decade ago. 

3) Downtown is rapidly becoming a place to go to, rather than a place to avoid.  Interest is almost as high in the Downtown Light Rail Connector as it is the future LAX/Metro Rail Connector. However, the southeast portion of Downtown remains ignored and unloved (more on that later). 

4) As awful as it is that the I-10 and I-110 freeways are, even on the weekend, for those who use them it DOES portend that our economy is coming back big time, in one way, shape or form. Whether it's with decent jobs and/or whether it's due to an underground, cash-only economy are two other questions not to be answered here. 

Next, THE BAD: 

1) It was such a struggle to build the Expo Line that it now goes too slow, and its impacts on traffic actually ARE as horrible--perhaps worse--than many of us had feared. 

Although thoughtful author Ethan Elkind has a lot of good ideas on how to improve our transportation investment after passing Measure M, he too often supports the point of view that gives the "thumbs up" to transit riders to an extreme that throws another, more hostile finger at those who must use their cars to get to work, errands, etc. 

2) Transit advocate Matthew Hetz also opines the need for single-family housing to use mass transit for environmental purposes, and it is hoped that greater awareness of our expanding mass transit system will encourage more to use mass transit. 

And our young Millennials and teenagers, as evidenced by demographic trends, are avoiding the stress of cars and using transit ... and Uber/Lyft ... and walking ... to the benefit of all. 

3) But the lack of elevated grade separations--pursued by too many at Metro, and opposed by too many next-to-the-track neighbors being of visual concerns--is hurting us all.  The trains are too darned slow, and the cars trying to cross the tracks are forced to wait 10-15 minutes or longer during rush hour.  

And ditto for pedestrian grade-separations with our need for pedestrian bridges over major thoroughfares! 

So the next time someone complains of a rail line, or the need for a visually-impacting bridge, either the majority of us (who, when polled, probably do NOT care about the looks of a bridge) and/or Metro should tell the immediate neighbors to "deal with it" or move.   

I'll wager that a bunch of us on the Westside and in Mid-City find the Sepulveda Blvd. bridge to be just beautiful and wish we had a lot more of them to allow our trains and our car traffic to achieve quicker and safer speeds to enhance our mobility, environment, and quality of life. 

Finally, THE STUPID: 

Simply put, using the underutilized Harbor Subdivision rail right of way for walking and bicycle paths instead of completing a direct LAX to Inglewood to the Blue and Silver Lines to southeast Downtown Los Angeles to Union Station is about as stupid an idea as ... 

... not connecting LAX to Metro Rail, or 

... not connecting the Blue, Expo and Gold Lines with an underground Downtown Light Rail Connector. 

Over the next few years, we will realize that our need for a second "light rail connector" is paramount and hideously overdue to serve the southern and eastern portions of LA County with LAX and Union Station. 

And we're blowing it. Big time. 

So there really IS a lot to crow about in the world of transportation.  And then there's a lot we'll be EATING crow about in that same world of transportation.  

Yet the hope for improving mobility in our future is always there ... as the crow flies.

(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties. He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.)

TOO LITTLE DEMOCRACY-Los Angeles is solidly Democratic and has voted so twice in the past five months to prove it. However, it is a sad commentary on both the democratic leadership and our city that an overwhelming majority of voters reelected the mayor and six city councilmen, as well as stopped Measure S in its tracks -- and they did so with one of the lowest voter turnouts in history. It was a landslide, but from a very small hill. 

So what can be taken away from this kind of municipal triumph? Clearly the Berniecrats who were inspired to vote for a social democrat last June were not similarly inspired to vote out the Democratic leadership in a sanctuary city opposing #45notmypresident. This is a dilemma for party leadership here in the desert-city-by-the-sea, a city that likes to see its reflection as Hollywood and LA LA Land, but not Watts or Wilmington. 

The challenge for Mayor Eric Garcetti and Councilman Joe Buscaino, who seem to be connected at the hip, is how to play their roles on the national stage while remaining relevant to the multitude of neighborhoods they represent. After all, Los Angeles is a collection of towns looking to find a city. Every mayor since Tom Bradley has tried to create a Los Angeles epicenter, but this hasn’t made those on the periphery very happy. Just look at the backlash to gentrification in Venice or East Los Angeles or the reactions to continued industrialization at the Port of Los Angeles and the expansion of LAX. There is deep dissatisfaction in the hoods that are distant from City Hall and that harbors an even deeper distrust of the “city family” — a distrust that this election has not resolved. 

However, grassroots democracy is not dead in this city. It’s just waiting for a vacant seat in which to run without the weight of an incumbent blocking the path. Council District 7 is a prime example in which 22 candidates ran for office. All of them learned the hard way about the impediments the city places in the path to running for elected office — not the least of which are the 500 qualified signatures of registered voters needed to get on the ballot. It only takes 50 signatures to qualify for elected offices at the county or state level. But the Los Angeles city clerk’s office can’t even get the petition forms right! 

With the city bureaucracy protecting the superstructure of incumbency and money-in-politics, those who vote with campaign donations often don’t actually reside in the city, but lean heavily on those in power. This was the issue proponents of Measure S made in this past election over spot zoning. While losing 66.72 to 31.28 percent in this election, Garcetti had to realize that nearly 250,000 Angelinos were not happy and he immediately issued an executive order banning ex parte meetings with developers by commissioners. Does that also apply to city councilmembers? 

I seriously doubt that we will ever really eradicate the influence of money in politics, but what we can do is vote for those who are highly resistant to legal bribery. Give us candidates who actually work for the greater good of the city’s citizens, rather than those who aspire to higher office. I sometimes wonder, if Jesus was elected mayor, just how long it would take for the Pharisees of this city to tempt him. All we can hope for is that the people we elect prioritize the greater good over pocketing the money that’s there before them. It’s not inconceivable. It’s just improbable considering that Los Angeles’ current power structure perceives criticism as a threat. 

Just one week after Measure S went down in defeat, Vincent Bertoni, Garcetti’s latest hero in the Department of City Planning came to San Pedro for an early morning chat with the local Chamber of Commerce. He has a great grasp on the challenges of city planning. He even has some profoundly good ideas on how to fix them. Yet, he said something quite peculiar. He said, “LA is a place.” 

Now, the only time that I, as a lifetime citizen of Los Angeles, have self-identified as an Angeleno is when I travel to some place abroad. If you go to Paris, France or Mexico City and someone asks, “Where are you from?” it’s easier to say LA because everyone knows where that is. But it’s relatively meaningless because LA is not A PLACE -- it’s a collection of places each with their own identities, cultural references, landmarks and history. And that is the challenge to citywide planning: one size doesn’t fit all. 

The problem in city planning is the same problem all the other departments have, which is how to have consistent rules and ordinances across the city when there are some reasons, possibly 35 (read community plans) or more, to have exceptions to these rules. This is the raison d’etre for the 95 neighborhood councils; this is among the many reasons for the growing dissatisfaction with City Hall -- too much government and too little democracy. And perhaps this is also the explanation for Donald Trump and the Democrat’s inability to effectively resolve his curious rise to power with their own inadequacies. 

Los Angeles just may be the testing ground for a new form of democratic politics called “Version 20.18.” Clearly, this will not happen if only 10 percent of the citizens continue to turn out to vote in city elections. For, as is said, all politics are local. If you want City Hall to pay attention to your part of this metropolis, you gotta turn up the heat at the ballot box!

(James Preston Allen is the Publisher of Random Lengths News, the Los Angeles Harbor Area's only independent newspaper. He is also a guest columnist for the California Courts Monitor and is the author of "Silence Is Not Democracy - Don't listen to that man with the white cap - he might say something that you agree with!" He has been engaged in the civic affairs of CD 15 for more than 35 years. More of Allen…and other views and news at: randomlengthsnews.com.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump’s Oligarchs: Old School and Middle Class Friendly

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

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

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

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

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

Interregnum or Change of Direction?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-cw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story originally appeared on EdSource

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

-cw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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