janbtucker.com Blog

Rocky Delgadillo….hmmmm…..

Some people think that Governor Rod of Illinois is bad.

City Attorney Rocky is worse.  His “pay to play” schemes are publicly recorded…and nobody cares.

On March 8, 2006, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office sued a bunch of downtown businesses under eminent domain laws, including the NAACP and Grant Parking.  The NAACP doesn’t make campaign contributions to City Officials, but Grant Parking’s owners do.On March 15, 2006, “Californians for Rocky” received $5,600 from one Grant Parking owner and another $5,600 from another Grant Parking owner on March 16.  On March 16, 2006, the case was dismissed solely as to Grant Parking.  Surprise, surprise!Rocky Delgadillo’s wife got into an accident in a Los Angeles City owned vehicle while her drivers license was suspended and got the City to foot the insurance bill on the vehicle that her husband was supposed to be using.  She did business with the City utilizing a corporation that was suspended by the Franchise Tax Board and which didn’t have a City business license or pay city taxes.  Nobody bothered to prosecute her when it was publicly exposed.

This is typical municipal behavior in Los Angeles.

Some years ago, the City allowed four suspended corporations all owned by the same Caucasian ex-police officer to have Police Commission permits to run dance hostess clubs.  In aggregate, between federal, state, and local tax liens on the corporations and the owner personally, he owed around $13 million in back taxes.

The City didn’t bother him about that, but it did prosecute his Asian competitors’ business after vice-cops went in and offered Latino dance-hostesses $50 for a blow job and claimed that some said “yes.”  When you’re a young single mom trying to get through community college on minimum wage, $50 might be the difference between the next meal for your children, the toys you can’t buy them for Christmas, or the school books that could mean the difference between passing and failing.  If his competitors had learned the “Pay to Play” game in L.A., i.e., grease politicians with campaign cash, maybe they wouldn’t have been singled out.

More recently, Iranian immigrants in the parking business have been singled out for shake downs by the City government.  Many of them get jacked up with repeated audits conducted by an out of state business the City hired while it was a suspended corporation in its home state and had never qualified to do business in California.  Most of the Iranians put up with it, but when one stood up for his rights and refused to put up with the so-called auditors (who were in essence conducting illegal unlicensed investigations) repeatedly harassed his customers, employees, impersonated city officials in pretext calls, the City criminally charged him with failing to pay city business taxes and filed two civil suits against him for the same thing.

PS…remember that Rocky’s wife did not get prosecuted for failing to pay City business taxes.

PPS….the guy who’s getting prosecuted by the City has paid millions of dollars in taxes and when the city’s computers crashed, erasing the old account numbers, the city refused to accept payments from his employees since there were no account numbers to apply the payments to.  Not to mention that the City is trying to dun him for parking taxes on vacant lots, parking lots owned and operated by his competitors, vacant boarded up buildings, businesses he doesn’t operate which have nothing to do with parking, and even non-existent addresses.

The State Bar Rules preclude attorneys from advancing their cause by means not consistent with the truth, but apparently prosecuting somebody criminally and civilly for failing to pay parking taxes on a print shop or a gas station is okay when you work for the City Attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

It’s better to Pay to Play in L.A.

L to R:  Linda Pruett, Hilda Solis, and Jan Tucker
On December 19, 2008, President Elect Obama nominated Hilda Solis to be Secretary of Labor.

In 2000, I was a delegate to the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, representing Local 69 of The Newspaper Guild.  In order for a candidate to be endorsed by the Federation, it requires a 2/3 vote of the Committee on Political Education (COPE), 2/3 of the Executive Committee (consisting of the officers and vice presidents), and 2/3 of the delegates.  In her quest to unseat incumbent 32nd District Representative Matthew G. “Matty” Martinez, Hilda got the COPE and Executive Committee votes, but the endorsement initially stalled amongst the delegates.

The first vote was to adopt the COPE report, which only received 55% of the vote.  A motion was made to divide the question to sever the 32nd District out of the report and then it passed unanimously.

Mike Nye representing the California Federation of Teachers moved to endorse Martinez, noting that AFL-CIO rules required endorsement of any incumbent with a 95% COPE voting record or higher.  That motion was defeated 55-45%.

Then, a brother delegate from the UAW moved to endorse Hilda Solis.  Nye tried to have that ruled out of order.  Speaking as delegate of the Guild, and local parliamentarian, I opposed the point of order because no motion had been made to endorse Hilda, just to approve the COPE report.  It was technically a different motion.  Miguel Contreras overruled Nye’s point of order.

Three people spoke in favor of Hilda and three spoke in favor of Martinez.  Finally I got the floor.  The main issue had been over Martinez’s vote for NAFTA.  I began by asking the assemblage whether anybody remembered how Martinez justified his vote for NAFTA.  Nobody raised their hands, so I explained that he’d come back to L.A. and claimed to have gotten a commitment from President Clinton to set up an Inter American Development Bank (IADB) with billions of dollars of funding to clean up the environment in Mexico and to improve labor conditions.

Then I asked the delegates, “has anybody heard of an IADB being set up?”  “Has anybody here heard of one dime…no…one penny appropriated to clean up the environment and improve labor conditions in Mexico?”  Dead silence.  “I didn’t think so, and if that is the way Matty Martinez delivers on his promises, that’s why we need Hilda Solis in Washington!”

I sat down and the brother from the UAW immediately moved to cut off debate.  Hilda won the endorsement with 77% of the vote!

William Alan “Bill” Callison, a perennial wack-job candidate associated with the Peace and Freedom Party’s “Berkeley Bolsheviks” (maybe that should Bullsheviks) has become the most recent victim of the FCOA’s curse on the unworthy and useless.  Callison, a descendant of Virginia slaveowners, graduated from Central Kitsap High School in a wealthy Seattle suburb (some might wonder if his later patronage from John Thomas Condit had anything to do with a potential relationship being Big Boeing Phil Condit???).

A self-published “author” of an insane tract he called “The Coming Revolution,” Callison holds the distinction of being the only person ever expelled from the California Peace & Freedom Party State Central Committee on charges of sexual harassment.  He was accused of battering and sexually attacking then-state party chairperson Kayren Hudiburgh mid-70′s.   In spite of his unabashed and perverse attack on Hudiburgh, Callison was welcomed back into the party by the insanely sectarian Akin-Feinland-Condit alliance who welcomed his utterly sectarian analysis of the world in his book.

The FCOA recently included Callison on its standing curse list.  As a result, he was subjected to the usual cocktail of Roma (Gypsy) black magic, Black Path Wiccan magic, and Voodoo during an FCOA ritual.