(L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gave his State of the City Speech this week. Ron Kaye satirizes the speech on www.ronkayela.com)
My Fellow Angelenos:
Let me tell you about my Grampa Hymen who worked as a tailor in sweatshops so my mother could get a high school education and I could grow up to be a spoiled brat with a degree from a great university.
I’ve lived my whole life believing everyone deserves the same opportunities to enjoy decent wines from BevMo during the 5 cents for the second bottle sales and to dine occasionally at Pocket Pita and Fab Dogs whether or not they are actually willing to go to school, get jobs and obey the laws.
In recent years, I have done everything humanly possible to hire more city workers and raise taxes, fees and rates to balance the city budget but it has become obvious that Goldman Sachs and those other Wall Street thieves have brought our nation and our city to its financial knees despite my best efforts.
I have given bonuses to city workers to retire, singled out one union for furloughs even as I was giving big raises to my friends at the DWP, threatened to fire every worker I came scross at City Hall who wasn’t on my staff. But economic forces beyond my control have convinced me that even my best intentions have not been enough.
So let me be for the first to tell you what this budget does not do: this budget does not reflect why I ran for office.
I ran for office to enrich my friends whether they were in business or labor, to be able to be governor of this great state, maybe even President of this even greater nation.
A lot of things haven’t worked out quite the way I had planned because of forces beyond my control, but I still intend to make our great city the global center of green energy, green technology, green billionaires — let all those others be green with envy
And I am going to take the $40 billion you gave me to spend over the next 30 years and do a little bait-and-switch and spend it all in 10 years to build half the transportation projects you were promised. I can give you numerical projections based on stochastic analyses that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt I am a genius and political spinning the likes of which this poor town has never seen.
I know that the naysayers and troublemakers out there have made a big deal about how I botched the budget and pushed the city to bankruptcy.
They whine and complain about how tried to use back room deals and lies to raise your DWP rates to the point it would throw thousands of you out on the streets like all those other people who have lost just and homes and businesses under my leadership.
But who are these people and who cares what they think? Do they dine nightly on the finest foods and wines available anywhere in this city, do they have girlfriends as beautiful as mine?
I am the only one who would dare to stand in front of you and tell you the truth about the future of our city.
I guarantee you with all the integrity in my being that no matter what happens, no matter what blundering greed and stupidity we at City Hall do in the coming year, the brilliant sun will always shine 300 days a year on Los Angeles.
Trust me, that is one promise I will keep.
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