Every failing regime needs an apologist and a henchman and Antonio Villaraigosa has found his in Tim Rutten of the Times and his Chief of Staff Jeff Carr.
Rev. Carr may have learned too much from his days hanging around the city’s vast hoodlum class as the mayor’s gang czar.
To many in City Hall, he is a thug, the mayor’s enforcer, the man who conveys the orders to keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told or you’re out. To commissioners and top bureaucrats, he is the obedient servant of a mayor who has lost touch with his roots, his values, his city.
Carr’s excellent service in eliminating the worst violence of the gangs and loyalty to the mayor earned his promotion late last year, a position envied by others in the world of Antonio who thought themselves more deserving.
That his success was in no small part due to participating in the “Baghdad Solution” to LA’s street violence, achieved by having former gangsters on the city payroll give free passes to hoodlums to do what they wanted as long as they reduced their number of Class 1 crimes that show up on LAPD statistic sheets.
Inside City Hall, what is going on is nothing like the live-and-live deal the hoodlums are getting. Carr listens sympathetically to the entreaties of others but he does not hear, Orders are orders.
Rutten is a different case.
He obeys without being ordered unless you believe his bosses had to tell him explicitly that the company line is the city is in good hands and all will be well be as soon as the economy returns to normal.
Clearly not paying attention to what is going on himself, he turns to Carr of all people for understanding how the city can get of the difficult financial situation created by poor leadership and awful management.
What he learns is this: “The problem, Carr says, is that the mayor’s call for shared sacrifice so
far has been met with silence or rejection. But labor’s refusal to
engage could have profound consequences on its members and the city.”
And labor’s refusal to accept pay cuts of 10 or 15 percent is “a tragedy that organized labor one day may come to regret.:
None of that is remotely true. Unions representing 22,000 city workers have twice in last nine months negotiated deals with the mayor for early retirements and no raises, 10,000 cops have given up raises, thousands of other workers have seen their pay cut by up to 10 percent through furloughs.
Only the mayor’s pals in the DWP union have gotten off without giving up
anything, On top of the nearly 6 percent raises in the first two years
of the recession, they got handsome lump-sum payments of 3.25 percent of
their salaries this year and up to 4 percent in each of the next four
years. Many of those DWP workers got retroactive raises going back three
years and managers just were handed $5.5 million in cash payments
Friday by the City Council.
Any question of give-backs from DWP
workers are off the table but the mayor wants rate hikes of nearly 25
percent this year to help pay their salary increases.
In his
slavish belief in the perfection of City Hall’s failures, Rutten
concludes: “Los Angeles and organized labor have been good for one
another. Now
they need to see each other through the bad times, so that when
prosperity returns, the goodwill engendered by shared sacrifice will
ensure that all share in the benefits.”
Just three days earlier, Rutten was taken to task
for his attack
on City Attorney Carmen Trutanich for his crackdown on millionaire
scofflaw Kayvan Setareh who put up a supergraphic on a Hollywood
building to reap profits promoting a movie in defiance of the billboard
ordinance and fire safety laws.
“Elected office can be made a
bully pulpit, we all suffer when it’s
transformed into a pulpit for bullies,” showing his contempt for those
who believe in the rule of law.
A week earlier, he gave the mayor
a forum without a critical question to sell the genius of his
deceit in selling the public on a 30-year sales tax hike to build a
subway to the sea and now trying to borrow against that revenue stream
to build it in just 10 years.
The henchman and the apologist —
only regimes that are failing try to enforce their rule this way.
The
Villaraigosa Administration is a failure by any measure and no amount
of coercion or puffery can save it from its rightful place in history.
The
unions have been at the table, made concessions and cut deal after deal
that were approved by mayor and Council.
They have even talked
about dramatic pay cuts only to be told that the situation is so bad
they may still face massive layoffs — DWP workers and certain other
classes exempt from both.
The mayor can’t pull off a deal because
he has no credibility with the unions or the public. He has lost
everyone’s confidence and could not win an election if it were held
today.
He is trapped in a box and everything he tries will blow
up into controversy and conflict.
He is trying to destroy the
community empowerment movement that has beat him in three straight
elections and seeks nothing more than full transparency, complete
honesty, an end to back room deals and a share of power.
Such
basic democratic goals are as abhorrent to him as to his henchman and
his apologist. The only question is how much harm we will let him and
his allies do before they fall and a new deal is put into place.