[ilbegone]

I don't know much about Bloomberg except that he is of far left political political persuasion. My thought of the man is that he is a hypocrite, that being wealthy he would hurl ananthamas against the wealthy; while avoiding taxes himself he would seek to tax others; championing the "disenfranchised" he insulates himself from the rabble; that he would stifle local capitalism while turning a blind eye to where his own wealth came from. But this is mostly conjecture.

Villaracista, while I haven't thought of him in some time, is another matter.

The productive and self sustaining Los Angeles of his Mechista youth is now his personal Aztlan ready to implode when "other people's money" runs out.

My thought is that Villaracista is now in a comfortable personal situation without having a grasp on the fact that Los Angeles could become the next San Bernardino when denial ceases to be an option. I saw that he was frantic for a while that revenue from the state was drying up, but he is still preoccupied with social services and "green" pipe dreams that his city can't afford.

On top of that, he is very ignorant that the decaying Department of Water and Power's rat's nest is eventually going to fail in a big way on a widespread scale without massive belated maintenance needed to correct the problem, and no money to fix it. It's almost the same idea as being the owner of a used car who never changes the oil (and rarely checks fluid levels) or does any other maintenance minor or major until something fails - sooner rather than later the car is going to die and won't be worth fixing. LA's politicians, Villaracista prominently included, don't have a clue that the overhead is ready to come crashing down around them and the underground lead circuits are soon destined to blow up under their feet.

Utilities are a capital intensive business. About a year and a half ago there was the scrap between DWP and City Hall about money which was to be forked over to city hall but DWP determined to hang onto until some of it's demands were met. This resulted in the media chasing around employees and contractors and publishing stories about individuals and crews they caught screwing off. However, while the media was concerned about the money these people were being paid, the fact is that wages and benefits aren't even a drop in the bucket compared to plant costs. When something as extensive and necessary to the public as the electrical infrastructure begins to fail in a massive manner due to neglect and stone age civil servant / elected official thought process, the costs are going to be truly astronomical.

LA doesn't even begin to have the money, and a too late wake up call is on the way.