{"id":522660,"date":"2010-04-08T22:13:50","date_gmt":"2010-04-09T02:13:50","guid":{"rendered":"tag:ronkayela.com,2010:\/\/1.1032"},"modified":"2010-04-09T15:03:03","modified_gmt":"2010-04-09T19:03:03","slug":"bumbling-boobs-and-bobblehead-bums-bankrupt-would-you-give-them-more-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/522660","title":{"rendered":"Bumbling Boobs and Bobblehead Bums = Bankrupt: Would You Give Them More Money?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the universal signs of businesses going bankrupt is that they don’t know how much money is coming in or going out and their future projections miss the mark by double-digit percentages.
\"AntonioBobbleHead1.jpg\"<\/a><\/span>
The reason is obvious: Bumbling boobs are in charge, or in the case of LA, bobblehead bums.<\/p>\n

During four straight quarters, city financial analysts missed their revenue estimates by more than 10 percent. <\/p>\n

Even so, they warned over and over that this year was going to be bad and the next year worse and far worse in the years following.<\/p>\n

But the man who likes to see himself as courageous and a bubbling brook of brand-new ideas went against their advice — and his own public and private statements — to reject the folly of a sweetened early retirement package that is only now nearly complete in sending 2,400 senior employees off on pensions averaging $55,000 while mostly still in their 50s.<\/p>\n

The City Council was no better so nine months later we are mistreated to last week’s theatrical war over DWP rates — a spectacular tragi-comedy that seemed impossible to top — but somehow the magical world of Main Street did it this week.<\/p>\n

On Monday, Out-of-Controller Wendy Greuel issued a proclamation so dark and dire it caused panic in the city and credit rating agencies to downgrade LA once again: “This is the most urgent fiscal crisis that the City has faced in recent
\n history, and it is imperative that you act now.”  <\/b><\/p>\n

The mayor acted quickly and pulled the strings on the windbag David Freeman to send the city reeling with his declaration that the DWP with a billion dollars in cash lying around in desks and drawers would not deliver the $73.5 million it promised: “We have deficits, not surplus…There is no surplus money to transfer at this time.”<\/b><\/p>\n

That was Tuesday. The next day the mayor came out fighting and announced he was shutting down city government unless he got the massive DWP rate hikes he wants for purposes that are far from clear: “There are no easy decisions or simple ways to solve this budget
\ncrisis. But as the CEO of this great city, it is
\nmy responsibility to make these difficult but necessary decisions to
\nsteer the city out of this crisis and onto solid financial ground.”
<\/b>
Of course, he was just blowing hot air like his order to lay off 1,000 city workers or was it 2,000 or 4,000 — only 33 have actually been axed two months later. It took only one minute Wednesday for the Council to show the mayor once again was trying to be an autocrat without authority when he ordered two-day-a-week furloughs for most of the workers who actually provide services directly to the public.<\/p>\n

The only power he does have to act unilaterally is to bludgeon commissioners and bureaucrats into submission to his will, compromising their integrity and soiling their reputations — a power he and his minions are using mercilessly, which goes a long way toward explaining why the city is falling apart. <\/p>\n

So Thursday morning, a slightly chastened mayor deigned to meet behind closed doors with Council leaders. It took two hours to find a fig leaf to cover his naked posturing — a $30 million windfall that arrived overnight we can only presume in a brown paper bag.<\/b><\/p>\n

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“To all of our surprise, we’ve gotten an increase in revenues of $30
\nmillion more from property tax than we expected…We might not be out of
\n cash after all,”<\/b> Villaraigosa said Thursday, conditionally
\nsurrendering to the will of the now renegade Council just two days after
\n announcing his government closure plan to keep the city from running
\nout of money.<\/p>\n

With alarm bells still ringing across the city and attracting
\nnational attention for the mayor’s campaign of self-promotion, Greuel
\nunashamedly backtracked insisting she was pleased that she was so
\nhelpful in finding a solution to the crisis even if it meant reducing
\nthe emergency reserve fund of 5 percent of revenue to next to nothing.

“It
\n is never good to have to use that money,”<\/b> Greuel said submissively
\nas she got in line in support of the mayor’s latest flip-flop position
\nas usual.<\/p>\n

For his part, Council President Eric Garcetti was
\nebullient as if he had just achieved his ambition to be mayor or
\nCongressman or who knows what.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

“There’s
\n no scenario, unless something catastrophic happens, where we
\nare going to be in the red,” <\/b>he said.<\/p>\n

Not in the red? How else
\n do you explain the $200 million, or $300 million or whatever it is,
\ndeficit 10 months into the fiscal year? Or the $500 million or whatever
\nit is next year or the $800 million or $1 billion deficits looming in
\nthe years ahead?<\/p>\n

<\/span>Not to worry. Today, we are supposed to get
\nan update on the latest financial data but how useful can that be if
\ntheir numbers are always wrong. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the universal signs of businesses going bankrupt is that they don’t know how much money is coming in or going out and their future projections miss the mark by double-digit percentages.The reason is obvious: Bumbling boobs are in charge, or in the case of LA, bobblehead bums. During four straight quarters, city financial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-522660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=522660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=522660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}