Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (59520)	11/27/2012 10:45:58 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	3 Recommendations Respond to of 71588

It's A Sad Day For L.A. As Riordan's Reform Drive Ends Pension Reform: A former mayor took on the unions, and the unions won. If this is the best that America's second-largest city can do, it's already well on the way to bankruptcy. Los Angeles watched a train leave the station when ex-Mayor Richard Riordan this week ended his drive to put a pension reform measure on the city ballot. Riordan was giving L.A. a chance, maybe its last, to save its future by changing its politics. So much for that. The city is now set on a course of rising payroll costs, higher taxes and economic decline. Riordan who was mayor from 1993 to 2001, spent a reported $500,000 of his own money promoting a plan that would have shifted all new city workers — including police and firefighters — to 401(k)-style defined contribution plans. Future benefits for current workers also would have been trimmed. This was no harebrained scheme. Voters in San Diego and San Jose had approved similarly serious proposals, and Riordan's effort was well timed. His reform plan would have been on the same ballot next spring with the election to choose the city's next mayor. Mayoral hopefuls would have had to take a stand on the measure. If it was popular, they might have felt compelled to back it. The unions made sure this nightmare didn't happen. They attacked Riordan personally and badgered voters who had just signed his petitions. The Police Protective League was especially nasty, terming Riordan and his backers as a "billionaire boys club." That term has special meaning for L.A. crime aficionados; it refers to a Ponzi scheme in the 1980s, run by former students at an exclusive prep school, that eventually turned to homicide and kidnapping. So the cops weren't being the least bit subtle. Anyone who messes with their pensions, in their view, is morally equivalent to a murderer. Riordan got another taste of the city's degraded political discourse when he appeared before the City Council last week. There, as the Los Angeles Times reports: "He was dressed down by Council President Herb Wesson, who smiled and asked him why he didn't fix the city's budget problems when he was mayor. Riordan started to respond, but Wesson shut off his microphone. 'There's no back and forth. I get the last word,' said Wesson, adding: 'This is our house.'" What the 82-year-old former two-term chief executive of America's second-largest city thought about such rudeness is not recorded. If he gave up on L.A. right then and there, we wouldn't blame him.