Sacramento Bee Fights Back?
The Sacramento Bee seems unhappy with apparent corruption among Southern CA city governments: "Eye-popping inflated public salaries. Personal loans to employees from the city budget. Illegal tax increases. Shakedowns of local businesses. A car-towing scheme to generate revenue. Seven politicians and city administrators convicted."
I can't help but wonder if this is brought up because SoCal is relatively conservative? Would they make this fuss if it was in an area run by Democrats? I doubt it. I don't think they have before.
posted by Fred Mangels @ 6:44 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
That 215 is working pretty good Freddie. Hope your feeling well.
I'm sorry to say the corruption has been going on longer, much longer one way or another.
Cast your memory back to the film "Chinatown"....
Now see if you remember "True Confessions" (look for it if you haven't...Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro (1981) about two brothers in LA during the Black Dahlia murder case. Top book & script...I remember seeing it as part of a double bill at the more modern of the two theatres in Arcata then. The book was well-researched and there's a telling scene where a young negro policeman 'does as he was told' and was told, just keep following orders and you'll get someplace. His name was Tom Bradley.
LA County was gerrymandered into small, convenient 'cities' where businesses could run things the way they want to. The population was kept low (until more money could be made with cheap housing) so the electorate stayed small.
This happened mainly along the major freeways. In the case of the cities you're discussing there were various north-south roads/highways from LA toward San Diego but it was after WWII that the plans were made to build what we now know as the Santa Ana Freeway (the south part of I-5) and construction started in the late 40s, and completed mid-50s.
This freeway opened up the southern areas to more business construction and those business interests not wanting to answer to a County Board of Supervisors (est in 1850s) with only five members. It still has only five members with both executive & administrative functions who represent over ten million people. You can understand why, even early on, business interests would want to run their own show.
So of course elected officials were bought and sold and as long as business had what they wanted, no one complained. Of course scandals came and went but local newspapers didn't cover such things and the mighty LA Times was too busy being big to cover small town problems.
When the Pomona Freeway went through (also known as 'the 60') out came the knives to cut up the land. The City of Industry (legal name) was one such. It was incorporated in the 50s to keep cities around it from annexing the land for their own tax base. It has at least 2,500 business, over 75,000 jobs and less than a thousand actual residents.
About 12 square miles, much of it south of the freeway and along the rail line, it's very narrow, in some cases only a couple blocks wide. I worked there and learned about it: Flat, hot and no one complains about anything.
So the real story is more interesting than that told by the Sacramento paper. The story makes me think that particular politician is trying to get broad name recognition for a run for another office as he will 'term out' in two years. He can run for CA Senate or some other public office. I doubt he'll go back to teaching.
There are going to be a LOT of offices to be competed for in 2018: Governor on down...and there are already some candidates declared, many also termed out come 2018.
So when you read some politician's name in the paper and they're talking big...find out when their term expires and consider what they say accordingly.
A long reply but situations like this need explaining, esp. when newspapers take a limited view of a situation.
It's silly the justifications people make to feel better about very bad things.
Fred:
This is off topic but, might cheer you up. You won $90 bucks in the News Channel 3, three degree contest. But, we need a mailing address to get it to you. Call me at the Station 443-3123.
J W. Hockaday
southern calif. is 95% liberal and article says they been taken over by latinos which are very liberal .
conservatives in this state are out numbered 100 - 1 . thats why us in the north want southern cal to separate the state so we can get away from those liberals in the southern 2/3 of the state .
All the city officials convicted in the scam were Democrats.
Had you simply read the comments in the article you linked you would have know that.
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