Fire Near the Getty Center.
July 8, 2009
Brush Fire in the Sepulveda Pass
A burning brush fire, in the Sepulveda Pass, near the Getty Center, began today around 1pm.
Photo was taken in Westwood by Andy Hurvitz
Van Nuys Con Artists Prey on Economic Fears.
July 2, 2009
Consumer fraud charges filed against five Van Nuys companies
The cases are part of a federal crackdown dubbed Operation Short Change. The FTC says the firms allegedly made $300 million by selling fraudulent programs related to real estate or online businesses.
By Jim Puzzanghera
July 2, 2009
Reporting from Washington — The recession has killed jobs by the millions, but it’s been a boon to one sector of the population: con artists.
They’ve been offering consumers help in repairing bad credit, landing new jobs, starting lucrative work-at-home businesses and obtaining government money to pay off bills. These scams — which are surging along with the jobless rate — are touted on websites and infomercials, and have bilked consumers out of hundreds of millions of dollars, said David C. Vladeck, director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
Federal officials, working with authorities in California and other states, struck back Wednesday. They announced a series of civil and criminal charges against alleged con artists who have preyed on economic anxiety to lure consumers into making upfront payments for services that either fall far short of the promises or never materialize.
“Rising unemployment, shrinking credit, record-setting foreclosures and disappearing retirement accounts are causing consumers tremendous anxiety about making ends meet,” Vladeck said Wednesday at a news conference at the FTC. “But to con artists, today’s challenging economy presents an opportunity to exploit consumers’ fears and bilk them out of money.”
Vladeck said that more than 100 cases have been filed nationwide this year as part of Operation Short Change, a task force consisting of the FTC, the Department of Justice and officials in 13 states and the District of Columbia. The cases included eight filed Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission.
One of the FTC’s new cases alleged that five Van Nuys companies had bilked consumers out of about $300 million by selling fraudulent programs related to real estate or online businesses.
The companies — John Beck Amazing Profits, John Alexander, Jeff Paul, Mentoring of America and Family Products — and five people who had founded or run those companies were accused of violating federal laws related to telemarketing and consumer fraud.
The FTC accuses the companies of making “false and unsubstantiated claims about potential earnings” that customers could make by following their advice in books, CDs and DVDs titled “John Beck’s Free & Clear Real Estate System,” “John Alexander’s Real Estate Riches in 14 Days” and “Jeff Paul’s Shortcuts to Internet Millions,” which were sold for $39.95 each.
People who purchased the programs, advertised through infomercials, unknowingly were signed up for additional monthly charges of $39.95 and offered “personal coaching services” that cost several thousand dollars.
Messages left at the companies’ offices were not returned Wednesday.
In another case, Beverly Steward, a single, unemployed mother of two from the Washington, D.C., area, answered a newspaper advertisement in January for a cleaning position. She was referred to another company, Job Safety USA, and paid $98 for a certification allowing her to handle hazardous materials.
The documents never came, and Steward soon realized she had been taken, she said.
“The website looked great. Anybody would have fallen for it,” said Steward, who pursued complaints with several government agencies. “I don’t want anybody else . . . to be taken for even 5 cents.”
The FTC sought a court injunction last week against Job Safety USA, its owner, Walter Ramos Borges, and five other Maryland-based companies linked to him for unfair and deceptive practices as well as restitution for customers. Borges and the companies could not be located for comment.
The California Department of Corporations, which oversees investment advisors and other financial services businesses, has filed 13 cease-and-desist orders related to Operation Short Change, mostly against people operating payday loan businesses without licenses. North Carolina has brought the most cases, 19.
“For a con artist, a bad economy is like a gold rush,” North Carolina Atty. Gen. Roy Cooper said at Wednesday’s news conference. Consumer complaints in his state have surged 27% this year, he said.
Complaints to the FTC about business opportunities, such as work-at-home offers, nearly doubled in 2008 over the previous year to 20,286 and are continuing to rise in 2009. In the first six months of this year, the credit counseling and debt management category accounted for 3,600 complaints filed with the FTC, nearly triple the 1,300 complaints filed in the first half of 2008.
California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown’s office has seen the monthly average number of consumer complaints jump from 1,900 in 2008 to 3,000 so far this year, said spokeswoman Christine Gasparac. In June, the office set a record with 3,622 complaints.
Cooper said consumers should not pay money upfront for any such services. But he said that con artists have found fruitful territory in the recession.
“Families in desperate need of cash often let their guard down, a gold mine for scammers,” he said.
The FTC advises consumers to visit its Money Matters website, which offers tips and videos about avoiding scams fueled by the economic downturn.
A New Day for POSOville.
June 26, 2009
Photo by Vista Vision.
Reprinted from CityWatchLA:
Goodbye Van Nuys, Hello Sherman Oaks
Jill’s Cliff Notes
By Jill Banks Barad
Well, it happened. The Education &Neighborhoods Committee (Councilmembers Alarcon and Hahn, Zine was not present) voted Tuesday to approve the name change … for a portion of Van Nuys to become Sherman Oaks … and send it on to the full City Council. The room was Standing Room Only and there were many speakers signed up to speak in favor of the proposal. Lydia Mather (President Van Nuys NC) and I were the only two speaking against, so E & N Chair Richard Alarcon gave us extra time.
Here are the “cliff notes” from the meeting (LATimes report here ):
● Janice Hahn said it is “compelling” that Councilmember Wendy Greuel is for this. She said it reminds her of the secession movement when people wanted self-determination and to own their own destiny. “It helps to LOVE where you live,” she said and she was tempted to support it.
● In response, Alarcon wondered “why do we have this process?” (i.e. have the NCs weigh in) . “We should let the Councilmember decide,” he said. While he said that he didn’t “buy a lot of the arguments by the proponents”, he was swayed by the “overwhelming support” in the area. Over 1,000 people had phoned and emailed Greuel. Note to self: should we have done that? We shouldn’t HAVE to put on a phone campaign, we as a NCs took ACTION by our vote.
● I had said in my testimony that both Sherman Oaks NC and Van Nuys NC voted against this proposal after much discussion and deliberation and that it would be a slap in the face for the City Council to ignore the active opposition by the two neighborhood councils. Alarcon said this approval of the name change was not “disrespectful” to neighborhood councils.
● The bottom line is they (City Council) want it to be business as usual (i.e. politics as usual) and let the councilmember decide. .So maybe it didn’t matter what arguments that Lydia and I made, it was a done deal when Greuel gave it a thumbs up.
● It became clear that is irrelevant what the neighborhood councils decide because ultimately it’s the councilmember who will make the decision. And every other councilmember will defer to that councilmember. If only we had known this, it would have saved us the time, effort and emotion of those vitriolic public hearings!
Lydia and I are disappointed and depressed, but as Scarlett said, tomorrow is another day! (Jill Banks Barad is President of the Sherman Oaks Neighborhood Council and the Valley Alliance of Neighborhood Councils.
The Most Beautiful Woman on Earth.
June 25, 2009
She was once the most beautiful woman on Earth, if there can be such a grossly simple categorization.
If you were a teen guy in the middle 1970s, you had her poster hanging in your room. She was the American ideal. She was fresh, athletic, tanned, and you dreamed of her just-washed hair lying on your pillow next to you.
She had the most stunning smile, the most electrifying eyes, and a sweet, vulnerable naturalness. She was the essence of a herbal Aryan, a Texas beauty who danced across our television stage and then slowly descended into the human tragic zone of Tabloidland. Her public life was then so often dramatized by drugs, drinking, and cruel abuse by men and the media. Cancer stalked and sickened her.
Aaron Spelling had made her star, but she propelled herself into a trajectory of show business legend. She had talent, she could act, and she possessed that essential quality of stardom: the ability to mesmerize millions.
The frantic, famous, money and fame hungry world looked upon her with envy. She had it all for one brief moment in time. An angel of grace and feminine fortune.
And now she is dead.
Postcards from Posoville.
June 25, 2009
Various scenes from a Van Nuys neighborhood “Posoville” that will soon join Sherman Oaks.
A Done Deal.
June 23, 2009
There never was any doubt in my mind that the annexation of the Posoville neighborhood of Van Nuys would eventually be approved by Wendy Gruel.
There is no bloc of voters OPPOSING it, so if enough homeowners want it, they will surely get it. Why would any politician want to anger an organized constituency?
This area certainly looks more like tony Sherman Oaks, than neglected Van Nuys, so the move is quite logical.
Big and Baked in the Sun.
June 12, 2009
Living in Los Angeles, one is constantly in search of a place to find that is cool, shaded, intimate, and walkable.
So why are architects and developers still producing sun-baked, tree-deficient, anti-urban statements in our city?
In all the applause over the “new downtown”, where the architectural stars include Staples Center, Caltrans Building Disney Center, Our Lady of Angels Cathedral and the new Coop-Himmelblau designed Central Los Angeles Area High School, one thing unites all these projects: a lack of trees and shade. They revel in their arrogant egregiousness and preoccupation with shape over substance.
These oddly shaped structures seem more intent on drawing attention to themselves than enhancing the city around them.
They might be noticed, but what are they not contributing to the city around them?
Tears for GM?
June 4, 2009
Somehow I am sad, but not too sad, about the demise of GM.
It has been a long time coming. I’m old enough to remember that GM seemed old fashioned after the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, when all those monster sized Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles and Pontiacs seemed disgracefully wasterful, consuming gas at 57 cents a gallon.
Our family history was lived inside GMs. We had the 1966 Pontiac Catalina, a car so superbly engineered, that it would die every cold winter day in Chicago and need to be restarted constantly.
We had the beautiful 1972, $4100 Delta 88 Convertible, purchased in Downers Grove, IL and my parents kept it for 25 years. It ran well, even when it sat in the driveway in Woodcliff Lake, NJ and collected leaves and got rained on when they forgot to lift the top up. This was a pleasure car to take on the parkway, and up to Ringwood Lake and Bear Mountain.
There was the solid prosperity of the 1981 Blue Delta 88 sedan and the later 1986 Brown Delta 88 that my father drove down Kinderkamack Road on his way to Medical Economics. The car smelled of his pipe smoke but it never broke down.
I don’t think my parents bought another GM after 1990, with the exception of that used 1992 Cadillac Sedan de Ville that they also kept around for 15 years.
And GM, what have you done with your magnificent wealth and gigantic colossus that basically gave you the entire world’s admiration, market and respect in 1950? You squandered it with bureaucracy, with greed, with a hatred of public transportation and a stupid belief that people would just buy you because you were American. You became fat, lazy, arrogant, narrow minded, deferential to the rich and powerful, and deaf to the needs of your buyers.
You are based in Detroit, yet you didn’t care enough about the actual city of Detroit,which has become a disgraceful slum, many miles wide, a war torn zone of burned and abandoned homes, empty industries: poor, violent, sick and despondent.
You helped dismantle the streetcars of Los Angeles, tearing up the city to construct a freeway and smog drowned wasteland where people sit inside their cars for hours, wasting gas and hours in a needless and useless way of commuting. You might have worked to construct light rail and trains, which you could have built, in between the lanes of the freeways, thereby making driving easier and more pleasurable.
It took me an hour last night, to drive from Culver City to Hollywood. What a city, what a life, made possible by people like those who ran General Motors.
We live in a land of enormous asphalt parking lots and ugly big box stores and billboards. What a city, what a life, made possible by people like those who ran General Motors.
But you always focused on the bottom line. You never aimed high, you only thought of the lowest common denominator of product. The crappy car has always been king and its needs are more important than any human ones.
And who could forget your billions invested in the mortgage and credit debacle, loaning money to home buyers who have now defaulted on those properties they never could afford to begin with?
In the end, everything about GM was about “image” and your needs.
The city, state and nation that you egregiously ignored, has now turned away and forgotten that you once mattered, deeply.
What is good for GM finally turned out to be bad for America.
Lies We Tell Ourselves.
May 22, 2009
The other day, walking around the block to visit my local Trader Joes near the temp office in Culver City, I joined a march of other workers, pouring out of their cubicles, and onto the sunny streets to pick up something to eat.
Surveying the refrigerated salads, I laid my eyes upon a multitude of plastic containers. There were so many types: goat cheese and red beets; pears, gorgonzola, walnut; Chinese Chicken; Caesar; Spinach with red onions; Feta cheese, Arugala with raspberry Vinagrette. I picked up some sexless and aging bulgar wheat combination with shriveled up tomatoes and dried peas.
I walked with this sad little salad into another aisle. I looked at it and imagined peeling the plastic wrap away and sticking the little plastic fork into the dish. Maybe I would eat it in the homeless people’s park across the street, the one without any benches or garbage cans, where speeding trucks rumble on by on Venice Blvd. Yuck!
And then I turned back and threw the bulgar wheat salad back into the bin.
These salads don’t taste good. They don’t taste fresh. They aren’t filling. They don’t satisfy. And when you are done, you want to eat a box of Oreos or go to In and Out Burger and consume a cheeseburger. Then why do so many lunch losers (myself included) flock to the Trader Joe’s salad? Maybe it’s a character flaw.
Modern life becomes a series of compromises, made livable by continual self-deception. We tell ourselves it’s OK to eat crappy salads because they are cheap and allegedly more healthy. But why eat if we don’t enjoy what we eat?
There are great things to eat at Trader Joes, or so we think, because they are marketed to people like us who want balsamic vinegar or fresh roasted coffee and we don’t want to be ripped off.
Like yoga, iTunes, text messaging, iced low fat milk coffee and masturbation, certain behaviors are indulged in, without thought, by large portions of the population in Los Angeles. Going to Trader Joes is almost habitual and sub-conscious. But are these activities really satisfying, or are they merely substitutes for something we really crave and need?
Yet we march, quite a few days a week, through Trader Joes and we buy the same lackluster produce, pre-packaged salads, and generic potato chips because we don’t have the imagination, energy or initiative to shop elsewhere and prepare truly good tasting food. The lazy and lying part of our character makes possible the big profits at TJ’s and we can pat ourselves on our environmentally correct backs for shopping there.
Gina.
May 22, 2009
This is a friend of mine who is an actor, living in Studio City. Like so many, she is looking for work, any work, right now, to pay the bills. Smart, witty, pretty, articulate, funny.
Dressed up, she looks like she should be in the world of “Mad Men”.
