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Saturday, January 11, 2025

LA Mayor let rich city contracts, forcing big cuts to fire dept months before deadly fires: records

 Los Angeles was forced to slash funding for the fire department after Mayor Karen Bass awarded gilded contracts to city workers, a review of public records shows.

The trouble began early last year after Bass settled contract negotiations with public sector unions. In dozens of agreements, the city’s civilian employees pocketed 20 to 25 percent wage hikes over five years and other goodies that cost the city $4.5 billion over the life of the contracts, according to an analysis by the city’s administrative officer, the City Journal reported.

A series of unintended payouts stemming from judgments against the city in personal injury lawsuits brought Los Angeles to the brink.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom received a briefing about the area damaged by the Palisades wildfire, with others present in a parking lot.ALLISON DINNER/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass scrimped on the Fire Department to give city workers generous pay increases.MediaNews Group via Getty Images
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“Los Angeles is teetering on the edge of a fiscal emergency, with its finances in “dire” condition and no money to cover unplanned expenses after a series of lawsuit payouts blew a hole in the city’s already-tight budget,” the Los Angeles Times wrote in an editorial in October 2024, blasting Bass for the “self-inflicted” wound.

The paper warned that the city’s rainy day expense fund— required to be 10% the $8-billion general fund budget was at danger of dipping below 2.75% — which would trigger a fiscal emergency.

The financial picture forced Bass and the city council to cut the city’s 2024-25 budget to $12.9 billion, down from $13.1 billion the previous year.


That decision resulted in budget trimming across 20 different areas — including a $17.6 million cut to the fire department.

“Predictions that city services will be impossible to deliver … are simply false,” Zach Seidl, the mayor’s deputy mayor of communications boasted last year, brushing aside the issue with a claim that has not aged well.

The Los Angeles Fire Department was swiftly overwhelmed by the scale of the blazes this week.AP

The scaled-down Los Angeles fire department proved no match this week for the deadly fires which have ripped through the Palisades and several other LA neighborhoods — leaving upwards of $100 billion in damages so far and at least five dead.

“Mayor Bass’s tenure is another unfortunate example of the failure of progressive governance in California. Bass has spent much of her mayoral energy negotiating more generous salary contracts for municipal employees rather than focusing on core city needs such as firefighting,” Judge Glock, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute told The Post.

“Although fires can and do start anywhere, the obvious failures of LA’s fire response are in part the result of Mayor Bass’s focus on supporting municipal unions and progressive causes rather than the needs of the city’s citizens.”

https://nypost.com/2025/01/11/us-news/la-mayor-karen-bass-handed-out-rich-city-contracts-forcing-drastic-cuts-to-fire-department-months-before-deadly-wildfires-records/

Small-Town America "Fights Back" In Court Against Globalists Who Flooded Their Town With Haitians

 A resident of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, who was among the first to draw national attention to the massive influx of Haitian migrants into his small town, is now locked in a legal battle with a local food packaging plant that employs primarily migrants from the third world. Eyes on Charleroi first appeared when President-elect Donald Trump highlighted the town's staggering 2,000% surge in its migrant population before the presidential elections. The resident is also planning a class-action lawsuit on behalf of hundreds of residents, demanding accountability from those responsible for the migrant invasion. 

Local media outlet Pennsylvania Record reports the lawyer of Andrew Armbruster, a resident of Charleroi, filed Pennsylvania's new anti-SLAPP law, a measure that gives defendants, in some instances, the opportunity to evade litigation. This is regarding a defamation lawsuit filed against Armbruster by the Charleroi business Fourth Street Foods

"SLAPP stands for strategic lawsuits against public participation, and anti-SLAPP laws give defendants a First Amendment argument," Pennsylvania Record's John O'Brien wrote.

The motion stated that Fourth Street Foods owner David Barbe filed the lawsuit against Armbruster primarily to suppress protected public expression.

"Armbruster's rights to speak to public issues, community members, and prevailing wages without ever being accused of mentioning 'Dave Barbe' are an incredible encroachment on everyone in Charleroi's right to free expression on public matters," the motion said. 

The motion continued, "Not only are they chilled from speaking about Mr. Barbe, by this lawsuit they are chilled from mentioning the hiring practices of a local employer."

Readers might recall in September. We had the first boots on the ground in the small town outside Pittsburgh - down the street from Nemacolin, investigating staffing companies that were feeding Haitians like cattle into local factories.

Wow. 

Libs of TikTok covered our on-the-ground reporting.

And this.

Pennsylvania Record noted, "After Barbe sued Armbruster, Armbruster reiterated his claims in the Charleroi Rambler and said he was organizing a class action lawsuit on behalf of the citizens and workers of the town.

Armbruster posted on Facebook

I have taken it upon myself to say enough and to fight back.  I am organizing a Class Action Lawsuit against Fourth Street Foods and its ownership on behalf of the citizens and workers of Charleroi.  I wrote a draft of the lawsuit and printed petitions for residents to register as claimants.  I have collected several hundred participants in a few short days, and the reception to the lawsuit has been exceedingly positive. My goal is to make Americans aware that we don't have to accept being Displaced & Replaced by the open border policy of the current federal administration.  We can and will FIGHT BACK! DM me for additional details or to join the Class Action Lawsuit.

Charleroi residents are furious... 

Armbruster's planned class-action lawsuit could be one of the first instances in which small towns across America fight back in the court system against those responsible for globalist open-border policies that flooded their towns with migrants and led to the 'Great Job Replacement' of blue-collar workers. 

For the politicians and companies that still can't read the room after the presidential election: "America First." Let's remind you that a majority of Americans gave Trump a mandate to prioritize taxpaying citizens first—not third-world migrants.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/small-town-america-fights-back-court-against-globalists-who-flooded-their-town-haitians

The Left’s Ignoble Motives

 Having read his January 7th piece in American Greatness, “We Can Handle the Truth,” clearly Christopher Roach did a splendid job of employing a cinematic reference to tie together the U.S. and U.K. establishments’ mutual fear of telling their public the truth about terrorism and other criminal acts when the perpetrators are from a preferred intersectional group.

Specifically, Mr. Roach deftly stated the case how the refusal by the authorities and the corporate media in the United States to call the murders in New Orleans a terrorist attack constitutes a refusal akin to that exhibited by the United Kingdom regarding the Pakistani rape gangs. Per Mr. Roach:

There has been an even more aggressive media blackout in response to the horrifying rape gangs in the United Kingdom. For years, not only the media, but police, politicians, social workers, and other authorities downplayed the reality of these attacks, blamed victims, and did little to stop the rape of young, native British females by Pakistani immigrant gangs.

Regarding such obfuscations and denials by the two nations’ leftist elites, Mr. Roach noted the role allegedly played by their fear of being accused of “racism”: “[I]n the modern West, whether in the United States or the United Kingdom, authorities are more afraid of being accused of racism than stopping terrorism and child rape.”

To bolster this point, Mr. Roach cites British writer Tom Holland, a clear front-runner for the 2025 Walter Duranty Fake News Award:

The true nightmare of #Rotherham is that the motives of those who turned a blind eye, however monstrous the consequences, were indeed noble.

“It wasn’t the indifference that was noble, but the concern not to demonise a minority. Caring for the weak. The Christian thing . . . I think they genuinely didn’t want to give succour to racism against a minority—which was a noble principle.

Yet, as is so often the case in dealing with the left, reality dictates otherwise. The left has ignoble motives—ones rooted in preserving and imposing their power over others and over their own deluded sense of superiority.

As a rational matter, it is far more plausible to believe that the left is politically more concerned with keeping core minority voting blocs intact. Often, their paranoia and patronizing racism involve pushing policies that are detrimental to society, including minorities. Not surprisingly, such policies are unpopular to a great number of voters (such as the increasing number of Hispanic and other American minorities who oppose open borders, illegal immigration, and the politicians behind them).

Consequently, when a member(s) of one of the left’s core minority voting blocs commits a terrorist and/or other criminal act, the governing elite will downplay it, often by obfuscating the perpetrator and their motives and/or covering it with a cloak of muted statements—except, of course, when they are blaming victims and attacking those who demand a more honest and effective response.

Such despicable political tactics are aimed at insulating the governing elite’s solicitous, patronizing, and injurious policies purportedly offered to benefit said group from becoming publicly exposed, debated, and even more disfavored. For, if they are brought to light in the public square, it will doubtless cost them the votes and, ergo, elections. Thus, the governing elites do this not to protect the minority group from “racism.” The governing elites do this to protect themselves from voters. As Mr. Roach trenchantly avers: “This self-serving justification obscures that officials engaged in narrative control are often more concerned with avoiding embarrassment and accountability than any broader social goal.”

Still, for the leftist political elites in both countries, there exists an even more powerful irrational motive for twisting reality to suit their aims. The left must perpetuate their self-delusion of moral and intellectual superiority at all costs—including if it requires obfuscating and minimizing the protection of children who are being raped or pedestrians who are being run down. For the left, there seems to be no price too high to pay for their inflated self-esteem—especially when they’re not the ones paying the tab. Indeed, such evasion of accountability is the genesis of the leftist governing elites’ myth of the “noble lie,” one that has attempted to sanitize recent weaponized deceits ranging from rape gangs to Russia-gate, ad nauseam.

Ultimately, the left is not content with avoiding accountability for the consequences of their harmful policies and injurious ideological follies. They seek to be seen as the virtuous victims of those people demanding accountability. It is but a small step for them to take, considering how little regard the leftist governing elite in both nations have for the great mass of their populations.

Unconscionably, both nations’ leftist governing elites fear the response of their own populations more than the terrorist and/or criminal actors. By projecting its own paranoiac contempt upon the rest of society, the left is perpetuating its self-deceit of superiority by victim-blaming and shaming.

And that victim is you.

In turn, this raises the question above all else that the leftist governing elites fear answering honestly: “Do you believe an oppressed minority is justified in committing a violent act against the racist, misogynistic, imperialist, inequitable, oppressive majority?” If you think the question far outré, remember what is being asked of people who knowingly refused to employ every means at their disposal—starting with the full truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—to stop children from being raped or people from being murdered.

After all, this is not what Mr. Holland offered but an irrational, ludicrous justification for an almost unimaginable ideological and moral failure, one along the lines that Walter Duranty scrawled when excusing Stalin’s crimes: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” The toxic imbecility is staggering, and the verdict is damning. As Mr. Roach concludes:

The leadership class has no respect for the West, its history, or its people. This is evidenced by their consistent desire to hide the truth and subject our most vulnerable citizens to horrific violence, lest we all “get the wrong idea.” They have forfeited their authority to rule because of their repeated refusal to treat us with candor and protect our most vulnerable citizens.

Contrary to their prejudices, we can handle the truth.

It is the leftist governing elites that cannot.

An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional District from 2003-2012, and served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars and a Monday co-host of the “John Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media appearances.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/11/the-lefts-ignoble-motives/