This week, Phil is joined by guest co-host Randy Wang of KABC Radio for three stories out of Sacramento and LA that all come down to the same question: who's actually accountable when the numbers don't add up?
First, the documented timeline behind the FBI's investigation into Gavin Newsom's former chief of staff, Dana Williamson — including new reporting that an informant was recording conversations inside Newsom's political circle a full year before Trump returned to office, and how the case reaches back to a dormant campaign account belonging to Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee for governor.
Then, California Attorney General Rob Bonta's lawsuit to block the $110 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger — filed a month after the U.S. Department of Justice cleared the same deal. Phil and Randy dig into the split between LA County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath's push to protect entertainment jobs from the merger and new reporting that Paramount's own advisers are now discussing whether to move the company out of California entirely.
Finally, LA County's decision to strip $300 million in homeless services funding from LAHSA after an independent audit found the agency couldn't verify how $2.3 billion was actually spent — and whether handing the same money to a brand-new department solves the problem or just renames it.
Three stories, one hour, no political team — just the documents.
California Underground airs live every Tuesday at 8PM PST on YouTube, with the full episode available here on your podcast app afterward.
Read The Gilded State, Phil's book on California's political dysfunction: www.thegildedstate.com
More from California Underground:Substack: caunderground.substack.comInstagram & TikTok: @californiaundergroundX: @ca_underground
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An FBI informant wearing a wiretap was inside Gavin
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Newsom's inner circle, and it was going on since 2024.
00:00:10
She's a up and coming Democratic powerhouse, and she was very
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close to Gavin. So what do we know about this
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DOJ investigation? It keeps getting weirder and
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weirder and more profound and we're going to keep going over
00:00:21
it. Also, we're going to talk about
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how California is now suing to block the merger of Paramount
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and Warner Brothers and how this can end up costing California
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one of its most coveted industries in Hollywood.
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Also, we're going to talk about how the LA County has taken over
00:00:36
homelessness spending and homelessness administration.
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Is it going to work? We'll talk about it.
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I got my special guest, Co host tonight, Randy Wang from KABC
00:00:44
Radio. We're going to get into that
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right now on the California underground.
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What's going on everybody? Thanks for tuning in to another
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episode of California Underground.
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I am your host, Phil. We have a lot to get to tonight.
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And as always, thank you for everyone for tuning in live.
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Make sure you let us know where you are tuning in from.
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Without further ado, since we do have so much to get to before
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ESR, make sure you like share, subscribe, review, all that
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stuff helps with the algorithm, helps us be found more by other
00:01:26
people. And I want to welcome in my
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special guest Co host tonight filling in for Camille, who's on
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sabbatical, Randy Wang of KABC Radio.
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Randy, welcome to the show. Phil, I'm so happy to be here on
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the Underground podcast. Yeah, it's, it's great because
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as we were saying before, you've had me on your show plenty of
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time, so it's nice to return the favor and have you on the show.
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So we got a lot to get to tonight.
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We're going to start off with our first big story, Gavin
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Newsom. It started a while back with one
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of his former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, went a little
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bit further into other people, Alexis Podesta, who we're going
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to get into. And now it is turning into there
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is a wiretap inside Newsome's inner circle for past two years.
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Randy, have you been following this story?
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I'm sure you have been following this story about how FBI and DOJ
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has been investigating the Newsome inner circle.
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Well, I found out about it the same way that you found about it
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when Gavin Newsom holds an impromptu press conference
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telling everybody, hey, I'm under investigation, what's all
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this about? Nobody had leaked that this was
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happening. He's the one that put this out
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there. I don't know if he was desperate
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for attention because no one was paying attention to him for
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quite some time. But it's not exactly the kind of
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attention you want brought to yourself.
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And even though he is trying to maybe get out in front of the
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story and paint this as a purely partisan political
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investigation, the timeline is important because a lot of these
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allegations, which were whistle blower allegations from inside
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Sacramento, came out during the Biden administration.
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And this investigation started over two years ago, when it was
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Biden in the White House, not the current president.
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Yeah, that's the craziest thing is that he came out almost
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immediately and was talking about how this is a Trump
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vendetta. That's what he called it.
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It's a Trump vendetta. He's after me because I want to
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run for president or considering running for president in 2028.
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We all know he wants to run for president in 2028.
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So this came out from New York Post.
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This was the reporting on it. Let me pull it up right now.
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FBI infiltrate Gavin Newsom's inner circle by convincing OOP
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that's not the story we're looking for.
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Apologies, everybody. That's that's a shot of what it
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looks like behind the scenes when we're doing a live show.
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So if you want to go check us out on Rumble, we're also over
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there on Rumble. All right.
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It says the FBI had a mole inside Governor Gavin Newsom's
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political orbit before the agency's corruption pro to
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expand into the governor and his wife, The Post had learned.
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Now, for all those who need to go in the Wayback Machine, when
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we first talked about this, this was just about Dana Williamson
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and her funneling and stealing funds from Xavier Becerra, his
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dormant campaign accounts. So she was funneling funds.
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I'll give you a little bit of background.
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If you remember, she was the one who was taking funds, paying
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herself lavish business expenses from all these dormant campaign
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accounts of Xavier Becerra. When he went to DC.
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She was using it to pay one of his chief of staff or something
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because he said he wasn't making enough in Washington, DC.
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Well, she was helping out the friend.
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She was helping out her friend because he had to take a pay cut
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going to work for the federal government.
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He was Becerra's guy. And you were making a lot more
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at the state level than you're making working for HHS.
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And so to help him make sure that he can pay his bills, they
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organized this scheme where they were charging themselves $12
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a month to manage a dormant campaign account.
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And as we know, that money went to fancy trips to Mexico.
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That money went to two fancy handbags and it was the center
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of this massive investigation where every single party that
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was indicted has pled guilty, including Dana Williamson, who
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the trial had to be delayed for a while because she had to get a
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new liver. And now she just pled guilty, so
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we're going to find out about her sentencing.
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I think her sentencing just happened recently, so we're
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going to get more information about that.
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But then it expanded. Then there was more news that
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broke that now Gavin Newsom and his wife were under
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investigation. And then this news broke that
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Alexis Podesta, who is secretly recorded conversations during
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the criminal probe into Newsom's then chief of staff, Dana
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Williamson, who pleaded guilty. As we just said, the revelation
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she was wearing a wire as far back as June 2024 explains why a
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swath of Sacramento political insiders and lobbyists we're
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stunned to receive FBI letters last fall informing them that
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their phone calls have been intercepted during the
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investigation, despite many having little or no connection
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to Williamson. So this is a wide-ranging
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investigation. And I thought it was just
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interesting when it first came out because I was like, oh, OK.
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It's Newsome's former chief of staff, just close to Newsome.
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We all start to speculate like, OK, so is there any connection
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then? It didn't really seem like
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anything. It just seems like it was Dana
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Williamson and Xavier Becerra and that whole issue.
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We don't even know if Xavier Becerra might be investigated or
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maybe he's under investigation and that's sort of the end of
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it. And I didn't think it was going
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to make this left-handed turn directly into Gavin Newsom and
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his wife. For those who don't know,
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Jennifer Sabiel Newsom runs a nonprofit that gets money from
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the state. So there is a huge conflict of
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interest there, Randy. Did you expect it to turn
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directly at Gavin Newsom and his wife, or did you just expect it
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to stay kind of his inner circle or people in his orbit?
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Well, I think there is a lot of stuff that doesn't smell right
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going on within the Newsom administration.
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And this goes back for years and years and years.
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And there's been all kinds of local reporting on this, like
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you mentioned with Jennifer Newsom's nonprofit, the behested
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payments, the getting paid to show her documentaries in
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California schools. But you also have very recently
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just look at get one, another one of Gavin Newsom's bizarre
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impromptu press conferences where he announces, even though
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I don't know who was asking for this, a massive contract to buy
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40 million diapers for a brand new California parents.
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And he holds this big press conference talking about what a
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huge deal that a game changer this is that we're going to get
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400 diapers for every new parent.
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And this is going to save them so much money, even though
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experts say, you know, the the kids change in diaper size
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pretty quickly. So 400 doesn't really make a
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whole lot of sense. But you look at reporters like
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Julie Watts from CBS News Investigates who tried to simply
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ask the question, OK, why is the organization that you picked for
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this something where the person in charge of the nonprofit, the
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NGO Baby to Baby, just happens to sit on the board of one of
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Jennifer Sebold Newsome's nonprofits?
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Can we see the bidding process? Can we see the contract?
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That was two months ago, and they have dodged every single
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possibility and delayed and delayed and delayed to do the
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most simple thing. Even if there's nothing to see
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here, show us the contract as to why we are paying millions and
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millions and millions of dollars to a nonprofit that has
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connections to the Newsoms to buy a bunch of diapers.
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It's stuff like that that sticks with politicians and their
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wives. We all know that Gavin Newsom is
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going to run in 2028. It's absolutely no secret.
00:09:09
This is stuff that slowly but surely he's building up his
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portfolio for his opponents who are going to run against him in
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2028, even Democrats. I mean, there's going to be
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Democrats who use this stuff against Gavin Newsom in 2028.
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And it just reeks of absolute corruption.
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It just reeks of Gavin Newsom and his wife have enrich
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themselves at the public through where they're getting themselves
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funneling themselves millions of dollars through these nonprofits
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so that Jennifer Sabiel Newsom gets it.
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They're living in multi $1 mansions being a
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public servant and he always hides behind, oh, I'm a business
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owner. That's how I afford it.
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You don't buy a $9 million Marin mansion being a public servant.
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I mean, this is just stuff that reeks of hypocrisy and
00:09:57
corruption. So maybe and, and to your point,
00:10:01
this was started under the Biden administration.
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So this is not Trump going after Gavin Newsom because he's scared
00:10:07
of him running for 2028. I wonder what was the impetus to
00:10:12
start this under Biden's administration, Not under
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Trump's administration. Maybe it was just kind of the US
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attorney in that area, the the DOJ in that area just said we
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need to look into this because there's so many reports of
00:10:25
what's going on with Jennifer Sabiel Newsom and that that
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might be the sticking thing. She might be the center of a lot
00:10:30
of this investigation between the two of them, not necessarily
00:10:33
Gavin, but she might be the center of all of it because of
00:10:37
what's going on with her nonprofits and how much she's
00:10:39
been making the diapers, the films.
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What was the representation project is one nonprofit where
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they make films for schools and the California education pays
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for these films. It's just a whole web of lies
00:10:57
and and obviously Gavin Newsom's a little upset about it.
00:11:01
I have a clip of that. Let me pull that up real quick.
00:11:04
I have too many windows open right now.
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This is the problem. I always joke.
00:11:08
I feel your pain. I joke about this every show.
00:11:10
If there's a producer out there who'd like to help the
00:11:12
California Underground podcast, so I can just say go to clip
00:11:16
three, that would be great. But here's a clip of Newsome
00:11:19
lashing out about all of this. I I already have.
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Have you had 20 years of my taxes?
00:11:25
Yes. Let's make sure we got the sound
00:11:28
on. I know you love taxes, Donald
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Trump. When's he releasing him?
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What? Are you saying so different?
00:11:36
From Trump. Well, I am, because that's why
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I've released all my taxes for decades.
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And you will have all those new tax returns because I have no
00:11:43
reason why you haven't gotten them already.
00:11:45
So I have no problem can. You provide on the FBI federal
00:11:48
investigations and you. Not much more than that has
00:11:52
already been provided. I mean, this is purely political
00:11:57
and you've seen some of the porting.
00:11:59
I'm not sure, maybe you guys have reported it as well.
00:12:02
People have stated pretty clearly they were directed to
00:12:05
find something, have more. People been contacted in your.
00:12:10
Circle to find something just directed Find something.
00:12:16
It says everything you need to know about the United States of
00:12:18
America in under Donald Trump. And so we continue to, you know,
00:12:26
maintain vigilance as it relates to the just weaponization by the
00:12:33
Department of Justice and other power ministries under the Trump
00:12:37
administration. And, and a lot has been
00:12:40
reported. And I don't have much more to
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add except it's, it's pretty disgraceful.
00:12:48
OK, what is this the saying the lady doth protest too much?
00:12:54
Again, it's not political retribution if they're doing
00:12:58
investigation, if there's reports, and again, if they're
00:13:02
wiretapping people close to Gavin Newsom in a circle to,
00:13:07
that's part of investigations. That's how criminal
00:13:09
investigations happen as they start with a lead, they start
00:13:12
with a clue or a tip, and then if it's worth investigating,
00:13:17
then they deploy all of their mechanisms for investigation and
00:13:21
one of those is wiretapping. Now, again, this is kind of
00:13:25
where it gets confusing. Is the Dana Williamson connected
00:13:28
to the investigation of the new Sims?
00:13:31
That's where it's getting tricky.
00:13:33
Is it just the like the orbit is being expanded from just Dana
00:13:38
Williamson and what she did and then Gavin Newsom and his wife?
00:13:43
Are those two separate investigations?
00:13:46
I don't know. But even let's just put it this
00:13:50
way, let's just put it real bluntly.
00:13:52
It's not good if you're planning on running for president in two
00:13:55
years and you're the governor of the largest economy in the
00:13:59
country that you're already under federal investigation for
00:14:04
maybe misappropriating funds or fraud or something like that.
00:14:07
I don't know. Just I'm not a political expert,
00:14:09
Randy. But what do you think?
00:14:11
Do you think it's a good idea to run for president two years
00:14:14
after being under federal investigation?
00:14:17
Well, it's not a good idea to run for president when you don't
00:14:20
have a record to run on. That's the first of his
00:14:22
problems. I mean, we've got 7 years of
00:14:24
Gavin Newsom. Gavin Newsom is the king of big
00:14:27
bold proclamation with no follow through.
00:14:30
Things are not noticeably better than they were when he took over
00:14:33
7 years ago. But yes, this stinks to high
00:14:36
heaven. But it is emblem automatic of
00:14:38
California politicians that maybe one of the reasons that
00:14:41
Gavin is so indignant is because so many California politicians
00:14:45
for so many years think that this it is business as usual.
00:14:49
The practice of behested payments may not be necessarily
00:14:53
against the law. It sure doesn't seem ethical,
00:14:55
but it's something that happens all the time.
00:14:58
You know, you look at what everyone thought was going to be
00:15:01
Gavin Newsom's heir apparent, Rob Bonta, the attorney general
00:15:04
who decided not to run for governor and said it said run
00:15:07
again for attorney general. There was a huge story that
00:15:10
dropped on him right before COVID, so nobody paid attention
00:15:14
to it. About years and years and years
00:15:17
when he was an assemblyman, he would direct funds towards a
00:15:20
nonprofit. That nonprofit would put his
00:15:22
wife in charge. And then he moved to another
00:15:24
nonprofit. And he did this over and over
00:15:27
and over again. You look at the FBI
00:15:29
investigation into someone related to Rob Bonta through his
00:15:34
big benefactors, the Dong family of California Waste Solutions in
00:15:37
Oakland and the mayor Shang, how she was indignant too when she
00:15:41
was indicted because she said the corruption, the pay to play
00:15:45
was nothing that wasn't already be done by everybody.
00:15:49
So it is commonplace for this kind of stuff to happen in
00:15:52
Sacramento every single day. And the reason that politicians
00:15:56
up there get so indignant is they don't understand what's the
00:15:59
big deal. Everybody's doing this all the
00:16:02
time. This is how Sacramento works.
00:16:06
Yeah. I mean, that's another
00:16:08
investigation I'm interested in seeing is Rob Banta and the
00:16:11
whole Duong family. We covered that year or so ago,
00:16:14
year and a half ago, I feel like.
00:16:15
And that's still ongoing because that started with Shang Tao and
00:16:18
then it ended up being the Duongs and Rob Banta.
00:16:22
All these investigations take time and they kind of unfold
00:16:27
slowly. A little plug.
00:16:28
That's why you always have to make sure you tune into this
00:16:30
podcast because we cover it as it updates for you.
00:16:34
Just want to give a shout out to everybody in the chat.
00:16:36
Thank you for joining live. Camille.
00:16:38
What's up, Camille? Good to see you in the chat.
00:16:41
Some people checking in from Palm Desert, Placer County,
00:16:45
someone coming in from Reno, NV. Must be hot in Reno.
00:16:49
It's hot here in Southern California.
00:16:50
I can't imagine what Reno, NV is.
00:16:52
And I'm sure people in Palm Desert are like, you're
00:16:54
complaining about 78° in San Diego.
00:16:57
I don't know what to tell you, man.
00:16:59
We're, we're soft here in San Diego. 78° is really bad.
00:17:04
All right, I wanted to talk about who before we finish this
00:17:07
story because I think it's also important to know like who is
00:17:11
actually, let me pull this up. Who is the girl who actually had
00:17:17
all of this? So this is Alexis Podesta.
00:17:20
She's been one of Sacramento's most influential behind the
00:17:23
scenes power brokers for years. The kind of political insider
00:17:26
whose name rarely makes headlines despite her
00:17:28
fingerprints being all over California politics.
00:17:31
This is her Alexis Podesta. She's part of the probe of Dana
00:17:35
Williamson. And then that he was OK.
00:17:39
Here's the announcement. She's 45, spent years climbing
00:17:41
the Democratic political ladder before cashing in as a lobbyist.
00:17:46
So be careful in Sacramento who you make friends with because
00:17:49
they may be your chief of staff one day, a lobbyist the next,
00:17:52
and then an FBI informant the following.
00:17:55
She currently owns a Podesta Company, a Sacramento lobbying
00:17:57
and government affairs firm launched in 2020 after leaving
00:18:01
state government. She previously served as
00:18:03
secretary of the California Business, Consumer Services and
00:18:06
Housing Agency under then Governor Jerry Brown from 2017
00:18:09
to 2020. And then she worked in Brown's
00:18:11
office. So that's Alexis Podesta.
00:18:14
She is the informant. She was the one wearing the
00:18:18
wiretap. And I wonder what they got on
00:18:20
her that they got her to wear wiretap.
00:18:25
Well, it probably wasn't something nearly as big as Dana
00:18:28
Williamson, but you know, there were a lot of big fish to be
00:18:31
looking at. And you look at someone that
00:18:34
was, you know, Dana Williamson wasn't just the chief of staff.
00:18:36
She was the big power broker. She was the person that Gavin
00:18:41
Newsom would use as his attack dog to call politicians to get
00:18:45
them to back down. When you had certain politicians
00:18:48
going on the road campaigning for Prop 36 like San Jose Mayor
00:18:51
Matt Mahen, it was Dana Williamson that would call and
00:18:54
scream at them if they were doing anything that was opposing
00:18:58
Gavin Newsom. She was so powerful.
00:19:01
The California DNC headquarters this is true has a statue of her
00:19:06
daughter that she commissioned at the entrance of the building.
00:19:10
This was a huge power broker in the state of California and to
00:19:15
uncover all of her corruption, I'm sure with earth shattering
00:19:19
for all kinds of long time Sacramento politicians because
00:19:24
you can see comments for years and years and years of everyone
00:19:27
talking about how influential Dana Williamson was until we all
00:19:31
realized she was a crook. Yeah, Well, that it's nice to
00:19:37
see something done about it, that's for sure.
00:19:41
At least some of them are being kind of swooped up.
00:19:44
I don't know how far the Fed can go in cracking down a lot of
00:19:47
this campaign finance fraud is a big issue.
00:19:49
But we'll just we'll just keep an eye on it because this is a
00:19:53
big turn. And this is probably the
00:19:54
juiciest turn in this entire investigation is where does it
00:19:58
go from here? And if I were Gavin Newsom and
00:20:01
Jennifer Sabile Newsom right now, I might be sweating a
00:20:03
little bit to be like, what was she wearing a wire for of these
00:20:07
past two years? And what conversations did she
00:20:10
record? So who knows?
00:20:13
Kind of like Rob Bonta, I'm sure that's why he didn't run for
00:20:15
governor is because of the Duong investigation.
00:20:18
So. Who knows where we go from here.
00:20:21
But anyway, let us know in the chat what you think about where
00:20:24
do you think this goes? Do you think it in actually in
00:20:26
ends up in anything or do you think it just kind of fizzles
00:20:30
out? But and Gavin Newsom being the
00:20:33
slippery politician that he is, he gets away with it.
00:20:36
All right. Checking in again with the chat
00:20:38
74 in Los Angeles. Oh, that's not bad in Los
00:20:40
Angeles. Was it nice up there in Los
00:20:42
Angeles today, Randy? It's a little more humid than
00:20:45
I'm OK with, but it's been pretty nice.
00:20:48
I was able to walk the dogs at six O clock instead of 730 so
00:20:51
it's not too bad out this week. 110 in Palm Desert.
00:20:56
Let's see some people checking in Sacramento.
00:20:59
Well, I mean, that's normal from Palm Desert.
00:21:01
Sacramento's at one O 4 Ontario Inland Empire checking in.
00:21:04
What's up, everybody? Thanks for tuning in live.
00:21:07
All right, next story. Randy.
00:21:13
Are you ever surprised when California steps in it and ends
00:21:17
up thinking they're doing something righteous and then
00:21:19
ends up kind of putting their foot in their mouth?
00:21:22
Are you surprised when California politicians do that?
00:21:25
Or is that just? I'm not surprised at all that is
00:21:28
the California story. OK, Well, if this is a little
00:21:32
bit of economic news as well, it, it turned into California
00:21:35
news recently. Rob Bonta and several other AG,
00:21:40
I think it's 11 AG's from across the country are suing to stop.
00:21:44
If you don't know this already, Paramount is working to buy out
00:21:48
Warner Brothers and it's going to be a huge merger.
00:21:50
It's been talked about in the economic news for a while.
00:21:54
But Rob Bonta being the activist AG that he is, steps in and
00:21:59
goes, we're going to sue because we believe this violates
00:22:02
antitrust law. So let's take a gander at his
00:22:06
clip about him explaining what's going on there.
00:22:09
We're here. I'm here to announce a lawsuit
00:22:12
that I've filed and that a coalition of 12 states have
00:22:17
filed challenging the proposed merger of Paramount, Skydance
00:22:21
and Warner Brothers Discovery and asking the court to block
00:22:26
the merger from moving forward. This $110 billion proposed
00:22:33
merger, the largest merger in Hollywood history, would
00:22:38
extinguish competition. It would result in higher
00:22:42
prices, lower content quality, and fewer movies and TV shows.
00:22:49
As our complaint makes clear, this deal is illegal under the
00:22:54
Clayton Act. That is a law that has been on
00:22:58
the books for over 100 years. It prevents mergers that may
00:23:01
substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly.
00:23:07
OK, so Rob Bonta had a little press conference saying that
00:23:11
they're going to sue to stop this.
00:23:12
Here's the story from Fox Business.
00:23:14
California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Monday LED a group of
00:23:17
12 attorneys, attorney generals in filing a lawsuit challenge in
00:23:20
the merger, claiming it would lead to higher prices.
00:23:22
As he just said audience on every sofa and movie theater
00:23:26
seat in the US So basically, and this is the kicker here.
00:23:33
It's that the Department of Justice and Friday announced it
00:23:38
closed its antitrust investigation is a paramount
00:23:40
Skydance proposed acquisition of Warner Brothers concluding the
00:23:44
transactions not likely to harm competition or American
00:23:47
consumers. The Antitrust division says 8
00:23:50
month review examined more than two million documents and found
00:23:53
the deal could strengthen competition across the media and
00:23:57
entertainment industry, including and streaming video,
00:24:00
traditional television and theatrical film distribution.
00:24:04
So the feds have already looked into this and said we don't see
00:24:08
an issue with this. Looks fine to us.
00:24:11
Like we've examined millions of documents on this, nothing to
00:24:15
see here. We're fine with it.
00:24:16
So they closed their investigation on Friday and then
00:24:20
not to miss a political point, Rob Bonta on Monday and 11
00:24:25
attorney generals now all of a sudden announce A lawsuit to
00:24:28
stop this. And here's where they this is
00:24:32
where California puts its foot in its mouth.
00:24:35
Ellison, who is the CEO. He's also the son of Larry
00:24:39
Ellison of Oracle. Allison's confidants have pushed
00:24:43
him to consider moving its corporate headquarters and
00:24:45
reallocating much of its $30 billion in planned spending
00:24:50
outside the state if California attorney Rob Bonta were to sue
00:24:54
to stop the merger, citing people familiar with the
00:24:58
discussions. No decisions have been made,
00:25:01
those people said, and the considerations may just be a
00:25:04
show of brinksmanship given so much of the industry's
00:25:07
production takes place outside of Hollywood.
00:25:09
Already, under the current deal, Paramount has committed to
00:25:12
keeping both company lots operational if it remains in
00:25:15
California. So why is this them putting
00:25:20
their foot in their mouth? Because I don't know.
00:25:24
When you think of California, if you're not from California, what
00:25:27
are some things that conjure up in your mind when you think of
00:25:30
California, You think of the beaches, palm trees, surfing,
00:25:34
the Golden Gate Bridge and Hollywood.
00:25:38
Hollywood is a big part of California's identity now.
00:25:41
They've been doing a great job of killing Hollywood themselves
00:25:45
with taxes and regulations. They can't keep up with taxes
00:25:48
and tax breaks in better states like Georgia and New Jersey.
00:25:53
And now you have Rob Bonta, who is suing because we know it's
00:25:57
all political. This is him just doing it
00:25:59
because it's a political point for him against Donald Trump and
00:26:03
this current administration. Excuse me, but now he might be
00:26:09
pushing one of the oldest operational movie studios out of
00:26:16
California. What are your thoughts, Randy?
00:26:20
Well, it's typical California. In order to save some jobs,
00:26:24
we're going to end up losing as many jobs as we said we're going
00:26:27
to save. But this is a very narrow
00:26:30
lawsuit that he and the other attorney generals are bringing
00:26:33
it. Actually, they're trying to only
00:26:36
say that there's an antitrust when it comes to the film
00:26:39
distribution part of this merger.
00:26:42
Because if you look at this just from face value there, it's
00:26:45
definitely no antitrust or monopoly forming if you're
00:26:48
talking about the big business, which is the streaming.
00:26:52
Because even if you add up all of the viewers and subscribers
00:26:55
of Paramount Plus and H Bo Max, it doesn't hold a candle to
00:26:59
Netflix or YouTube, which is the most dominant streamer that is
00:27:02
out there. So but when it comes to the
00:27:05
actual film distribution, they're saying, well, now
00:27:08
instead of seven hands, it's down to four or five hands.
00:27:11
But even that doesn't really hold water because as we have
00:27:14
seen in this massive box office year, two of the biggest box
00:27:17
office wind stories were from small independent productions
00:27:21
from small studios on 0 budgets that made hundreds of millions
00:27:25
of dollars. So I don't know if necessarily
00:27:27
the competition is really going to be harmed by this whatsoever.
00:27:31
Now, will jobs be lost if this merger goes through?
00:27:33
As we seen with all these mergers, you look at the merger
00:27:36
that we're talking about where it's Paramount, Skydance, that
00:27:40
merger just happened, and Warner Brothers Discovery, that merger
00:27:43
just happened a couple of years ago.
00:27:44
There will be redundancy. There will be jobs lost.
00:27:47
That is always going to happen. But in this move by Bond and the
00:27:51
other attorney generals to try to almost do a shakedown,
00:27:54
because one of the catches in this deal is that if it's not
00:27:59
closed by September, the shareholders are entitled to a
00:28:03
big payout from Paramount every month that this thing drags on.
00:28:08
It's almost like whatever concessions that Banta is trying
00:28:11
to get from them, he has put them in a position where now
00:28:14
they have to negotiate not just with the federal government and
00:28:16
the FTC and also the EU. They've got to negotiate with
00:28:20
Banta, so he got his head all over the place yesterday with
00:28:23
this one. Even though it's 12 other
00:28:25
states, California is the big dog in this.
00:28:29
Rob Bonds is looking a little white in the hair.
00:28:31
Must be that Duong investigation we were just talking about.
00:28:34
Looking a little. Maybe the stress is causing him
00:28:36
a problem. Well, if I had to spend $500
00:28:40
on attorneys to assist in an investigation that I had nothing
00:28:43
to do with, I'd probably be turning white myself.
00:28:46
Yeah, it's a lot of money for a guy who's says he's definitely
00:28:50
not in trouble with the feds. It's it's so it this is one of
00:28:56
the most baffling things about California politics.
00:28:59
And we say it all the time. It seems like they try to do
00:29:03
this because they want to score political points, but at the end
00:29:07
of the day, they end up shooting themselves in the foot.
00:29:10
And I always felt like if there's one industry in
00:29:13
California that you want to protect and that you want to try
00:29:18
and help, whether it's your tax credits or whatever, it's gotta
00:29:22
be Hollywood like. And California is getting its
00:29:26
lunch eaten by other states. I mean, I think Georgia is now
00:29:31
outpacing California for how much in revenue it takes in from
00:29:35
the movie studios. I mean, all the big
00:29:38
blockbusters, Marvel, stuff like that are all being filmed in
00:29:40
Georgia. And now New Jersey is going to
00:29:43
be home of Netflix. They're doing a lot better with
00:29:47
streaming and filming there. So it, it's almost insane that
00:29:50
California took advantage of the fact that Hollywood was here.
00:29:53
And they, they seem to think like, well, Hollywood's here.
00:29:57
So Hollywood will never go anywhere.
00:29:59
Like who's going to compete with us for Hollywood?
00:30:01
This is where Hollywood is, you know, and sadly, it's, it's now
00:30:07
become, it's not really Hollywood anymore.
00:30:10
I mean, you're an LA guy. Like I, I just don't see the
00:30:13
glamour in, in Hollywood anymore.
00:30:16
It seems like it's, it's losing jobs, it's losing prestige and
00:30:20
companies are moving out. Is that something you're seeing
00:30:22
up there in LA? Well, production has become
00:30:25
mobile. You can shoot things on small
00:30:28
budgets. You can send crews all over the
00:30:30
place. The tax structure is definitely
00:30:32
one aspect of it. And I will say California made a
00:30:35
big deal about increasing the tax credit last year, and it did
00:30:39
increase some productions, including some big productions
00:30:42
that ended up shooting in the state.
00:30:44
But you know what they did in this budget, the state of
00:30:46
California, through their budget, through what they're
00:30:49
calling a misstep, put in a clause with that tax credit that
00:30:54
no company could get more than $5 million from it in a year,
00:30:58
which pretty much says to all the big studios, OK, you're not
00:31:01
going to be able to shoot anything in here.
00:31:03
And now they've got a few weeks until everything is settled in
00:31:07
stone to reverse this. Meanwhile, it doesn't look like
00:31:11
Gavin wants to move it all from it.
00:31:13
And you've got the assemblyman from the Hollywood area, Rick
00:31:16
Chavez, Burr, freaking out that everything they said they were
00:31:18
going to do to help the studios just hasn't helped.
00:31:21
We've have like everything else with Gavin and the California
00:31:24
legislature, it's big bold proclamations, little follow
00:31:28
through. But that's only one aspect of
00:31:29
it. We're also in a situation where
00:31:33
and you're going to see this, where production even that move
00:31:36
to Georgia, production that even move to New Jersey is all going
00:31:40
to be going to the UK into Canada.
00:31:42
Because if our regulations and our policies aren't chasing them
00:31:45
away, the union rules are chasing them away.
00:31:49
And the strict levels of, you know, where you've got to have
00:31:53
these minimum levels for salary, you have to have these minimum
00:31:55
even if even if you don't have the budget, the companies are
00:31:59
now finding that it is. And this is what makes no sense.
00:32:02
It is cheaper to fly everyone to another country, deal with
00:32:05
immigration, then have to pay the wages that we have here.
00:32:09
And that's not a problem that anybody in elected office is
00:32:12
talking about, let alone wanting to do anything about.
00:32:15
Because even when you have the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen
00:32:19
Bass, say, OK, here's a whole bunch of things we're going to
00:32:21
do to revitalize the film industry.
00:32:23
Those are in concurrence with what the unions want.
00:32:26
And usually what the unions want is good for the unions and of
00:32:29
course, good for them. Hey, I'm a sag after guy.
00:32:31
I, I, you know, I, I want my union to do well.
00:32:35
But if you are so powerful and your rules are so onerous that
00:32:39
is actually preventing production from being shot, then
00:32:42
you have people who are walking around, especially in post out
00:32:46
here, who cannot find work, who would love to take a lower rate
00:32:51
just so they could work, just so they could get their healthcare
00:32:53
going. And it's not happening.
00:32:56
And they then this is a huge problem that's affecting the
00:32:59
entire state and eventually it will be affecting the entire
00:33:02
country. Another thing that an angle that
00:33:07
goes that that it's hard for leftists or status to understand
00:33:14
is it's business. This is business.
00:33:17
Warner Brothers needed to be bought out.
00:33:19
They were struggling. They needed someone to buy them
00:33:22
out. There was a bunch of proposals
00:33:23
of people who are going to make bids, and Warner Brothers
00:33:27
selected Paramount as a bid. This happens in business all the
00:33:32
time, where companies get bought out because they're struggling.
00:33:34
They need to stay afloat. They'd rather get bought out and
00:33:40
merge and keep their intellectual property, at least
00:33:43
work it out the way they want it to work out.
00:33:46
This is just how it goes. And for some reason California
00:33:49
politicians, I think either they just don't care, they don't want
00:33:53
to know, or it's just this, this anti business sentiment in
00:33:57
California that anything businesses do and, and Rob Bonta
00:34:00
goes, well, there's $110 billion merger.
00:34:03
Who cares? Who cares what it's worth?
00:34:05
It's, it's a merger, it's part of business.
00:34:07
This is how it happens. Businesses buy out little
00:34:11
businesses and then they streamline those businesses,
00:34:14
right? They, they usually take those
00:34:17
businesses. Maybe they make them better,
00:34:19
maybe they deliver a better product because the other
00:34:21
business is failing. And they just can't wrap their
00:34:24
heads around the fact that this is the free market in action.
00:34:27
When businesses are struggling, other businesses will come in
00:34:30
and want to buy you out. And when you're Warner Brothers
00:34:32
and you have an enormous amount of intellectual property, when
00:34:35
you have the DC Universe, that's one thing that I can think off
00:34:38
the top of my head. I don't know how valuable Looney
00:34:40
Tunes is anymore. I mean, the LeBron Space Jam
00:34:43
didn't do as well as the original Space Jam might be a
00:34:46
different whole story why it didn't do well, but it's it's
00:34:50
what happens in business. So for them to throw a freak out
00:34:53
over what is happening here, when Paramount wasn't
00:34:58
threatening to leave California, they weren't saying we're going
00:35:00
to buy out Warner Brothers and then move them out of
00:35:03
California. It sounds like Paramount very
00:35:05
much wants to stay in California.
00:35:07
And that's the crazy thing. Paramount wants to stay here and
00:35:10
be operational here in California and buy out Warner
00:35:13
Brothers and continue to put out quality or content or anything
00:35:17
like that. And they just can't wrap their
00:35:20
heads around it. It's just anything business
00:35:23
does. They just view it as an evil.
00:35:27
Anything big business does, it's automatically evil.
00:35:30
I mean, I don't know. What are your thoughts?
00:35:32
Am I just rambling on about like free market capitalism?
00:35:34
But that's, that's what it seems like these politicians just
00:35:36
don't, they can't grapple with business.
00:35:39
It's like none of them took an economics class or anything.
00:35:42
Well, this is, this is how California works.
00:35:44
We do so many things to push so many different industries out of
00:35:48
the state, whether it was the defense industry many, many,
00:35:50
many years ago, you know, we were doing so many things to
00:35:54
push out. I mean, look how literally one
00:35:57
tweet from then Assemblywoman, your favorite Lorena Gonzalez,
00:36:02
one tweet directed at Elon Musk had him move his entire company
00:36:07
to Austin. It was specifically out of spite
00:36:10
because she tweeted out bleep Elon Musk that cost the state
00:36:15
billions and billions and billions of dollars every single
00:36:19
year. He still has a lot of businesses
00:36:21
here. Obviously a lot of money and
00:36:23
jobs are still generated from Musk, but his headquarters are
00:36:26
in Austin specifically because we chased him out.
00:36:30
I remember it's funny, you know, Antonio Villaraigosa was one of
00:36:33
the candidates running for governor and he was running as a
00:36:35
very middle of the road probusiness.
00:36:38
We need an and all of the above energy approach.
00:36:41
We need to make sure we don't chase all the refiners out of
00:36:43
the state. But when he was mayor of Los
00:36:46
Angeles, he was literally quoted at a press conference saying,
00:36:50
Valerho, get out of here. We don't want you in our state.
00:36:55
Yeah, they, they, they keep demonizing business and sooner
00:36:59
or later there's not going to be business left.
00:37:01
And all these billionaires that they want to tax.
00:37:04
That's a whole another issue is the billionaire tax, which we
00:37:07
don't we we don't need to get into, but that's a perfect
00:37:11
example of you keep going after big businesses.
00:37:14
Elon Musk goes, great, you don't want me in this state, I'm out.
00:37:17
Paramount goes, you're going to assume me to stop this merger.
00:37:20
Maybe we'll leave all these billionaires who are leaving
00:37:24
because they're like, you want to tax me 5% of all my net
00:37:27
worth? OK, then I'm just going to
00:37:29
leave. Like at a certain point it's
00:37:32
just, I'd like to think either they're, they might be just too
00:37:36
stupid to figure out that you can't keep punishing business
00:37:39
and make business the bad guy. Because sooner or later there's,
00:37:43
there's 49 other States and they can move.
00:37:45
And guess what? Those other 49 states, they will
00:37:48
kill to have a lot of these businesses bring their jobs and
00:37:52
revenue and tax revenue to their state.
00:37:55
And Georgia is a big beneficiary.
00:37:56
You know, I keep mentioning Georgia because they're the
00:37:58
biggest one, but there's a lot of states that are benefiting
00:38:00
from California businesses leaving.
00:38:03
Texas, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, they're all leaving.
00:38:07
And California just doesn't seem to figure out that if you keep
00:38:11
pushing them out and punishing them, they're going to leave.
00:38:15
They can leave, which is why Gavin Newsom supports a national
00:38:18
billionaires tax because he doesn't want people to be able
00:38:21
to escape anywhere. He wants every, every
00:38:23
billionaire to be taxed just like this proposal.
00:38:26
And if you do it just in California, he knows that it's
00:38:30
going to scare away all the billionaires, which it already
00:38:32
is doing. Just for some context because I,
00:38:36
I was mentioning how this is such an institution in
00:38:39
California and Paramount has been here.
00:38:42
It's the longest operating only remaining major studio in
00:38:45
Hollywood. It's been on the ground floor of
00:38:47
every major development film. They have been in motion
00:38:49
pictures. The emergence of television, 100
00:38:52
year history. It grew from 26 acres to 4
00:38:57
stages and 65 acres and 29 stages.
00:39:00
So to give you a little history of Paramount, of how impactful
00:39:05
they are, they started in 1912 by this family right here, the
00:39:10
Lasky family, and then the golden age of Hollywood.
00:39:13
We all remember there's such great movies as To Catch a
00:39:17
Thief, The 10 Commandments, Top Hat, King Kong, Citizen Kane.
00:39:23
I mean, those are like iconic movies.
00:39:25
You think of like the history of movies.
00:39:27
Those are iconic movies. Probably my favorite that has to
00:39:33
be talked about is The Godfather Saga.
00:39:35
All Paramount, amazing saga. Then you had, sorry, Night
00:39:39
Fever, Chinatown, Greece. I mean, these are all like
00:39:44
stand, these are like pinnacles of American cinema.
00:39:48
We're talking about Titanic. If you're a big fan of Titanic,
00:39:51
Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Indiana Jones, Beverly Hills
00:39:54
Cop, Terms of Endearment, Top Gun.
00:39:58
I mean, it's just the list goes on and on and on of what
00:40:00
Paramount has been involved in and they're pushing them out.
00:40:04
They were doing this stuff. They want to stay in California
00:40:07
and keep making movies and keep producing stuff, but they just
00:40:10
keep putting their foot in it. And another politician, your
00:40:15
supervisor up there, Lindsay Horvath.
00:40:18
Horvath. Is that how you say it, Horvath?
00:40:19
Horvath. Lindsay Horvath.
00:40:22
She was formerly on the West Hollywood City Council, and she
00:40:26
was notable back then for in 2021, defunding the Sheriff's
00:40:31
Department in exchange for block by block safety ambassadors.
00:40:35
And anyone in West Hollywood will tell you it did not make
00:40:38
the streets any safer. She moved from that to getting a
00:40:42
job at $300 a year to be one of five, five LA County
00:40:46
supervisors, the most powerful politicians in the state of
00:40:50
California. Each one of them represents 2
00:40:53
million people. And she hasn't been great.
00:40:57
But don't you worry, she won her election outright in the
00:41:01
primary. So we're getting four more years
00:41:02
of Horvath. Yeah, just looking at the
00:41:06
comments with people saying Top Gun yet let us know in the chat
00:41:10
which one of those Paramount movies was your favorite.
00:41:12
I'm going to go Godfather Saga. Godfather 2 particularly is my
00:41:15
favorite. Not 3/3 is weird.
00:41:17
I tried watching it a while back and I was like, what is this
00:41:20
movie? It's so weird.
00:41:23
Someone brought up the billionaire taxes a use tax.
00:41:25
It taxes everyone. Quick story about this.
00:41:29
I'm I must be a masochist because I go on Reddit and argue
00:41:32
with people in the California politics subreddit.
00:41:35
Oh no. I don't know why I it.
00:41:38
I guess it tries to sharpen my argument skills.
00:41:40
There was a whole list of people under the billionaire tax post
00:41:44
that was recent. They're all saying the same
00:41:47
thing. They're all parroting the same
00:41:48
talking point. Well, it's just a one time tax.
00:41:51
It's just a one time tax. Why is everyone so scared of a
00:41:53
one time tax? And I went in there such thing
00:41:58
as a one time tax, especially in California.
00:42:00
And I went in there and I quoted, I literally pulled it
00:42:03
from the actual proposition text and I said no, no, it's actually
00:42:07
forever. The legislature can change it
00:42:09
whenever they want. This is not a one time tax.
00:42:11
Here's the language and I put it in there and I kid you not, the
00:42:17
response was yeesh, conspiracy theory theorist much?
00:42:21
And I'm like, that's a conspiracy theory.
00:42:24
I, I pulled the text from you and showed you that this
00:42:28
actually will be for. But anyway, that's what we're
00:42:31
dealing with out there. And what's interesting about the
00:42:34
billionaire tax is that the people who support it don't even
00:42:38
care where the money goes. If you actually read the
00:42:41
proposition, most of the money goes toward the SEIU healthcare
00:42:45
union that got it on the pallet. It is a California direct
00:42:49
democracy cash grab. But that doesn't matter.
00:42:51
There is so much rage out there against the billionaire class
00:42:54
that people just want to take away their money.
00:42:56
They don't care where it goes. And I have one person that I
00:42:59
blame for all of this, Tom Steyer.
00:43:02
People saw Tom Steyer ads on their TV non-stop for eight
00:43:06
months and all of a sudden they have an opportunity to take some
00:43:10
of his money away and they don't care where it goes.
00:43:13
They want to take his money away so he can't run for anything
00:43:15
else because they're sick of them.
00:43:18
That's a that's a good point. Yeah.
00:43:20
I saw enough of Tom Steyer ads and we we haven't even really
00:43:23
gotten into the heat of election season with the proposition.
00:43:26
So get ready, buckle up. There's going to be plenty of
00:43:28
those. Somebody said.
00:43:30
Let's not forget American Me Friday, Boys in the Hood, Menace
00:43:36
to Society, South Central Colours, just to name a few.
00:43:40
Yeah, that's a lot of good movies.
00:43:41
Somebody said. That subreddit is bonkers.
00:43:43
I go to that subreddit because it's also research for the show.
00:43:46
Sometimes you don't want to get in an echo Chamber of like what
00:43:49
you read. So I go to that subreddit and
00:43:51
see what what the lefties are talking about.
00:43:54
And then sometimes I make the dumb decision to, I don't know,
00:43:58
make an argument and then I get bombarded with down votes.
00:44:00
Anyway, let's see what your supervisor, Lindsay Horvath had
00:44:03
to say about Paramount. Today, our California attorney
00:44:07
general, along with other attorneys general throughout the
00:44:11
United States, came together to file a lawsuit to block the
00:44:14
merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers.
00:44:17
Previously, Los Angeles County took action because we know this
00:44:20
impacts us right here at home. We have to fight to protect this
00:44:23
industry and every worker in it. That's exactly why we brought
00:44:27
forward a motion to not only only study the impacts, but also
00:44:29
give authority to County Council to take action on our behalf,
00:44:32
and we intend to do just that. OK.
00:44:38
Did you really need the soccer ball at the end there, Lindsay?
00:44:41
Yeah, she's trying to tap into the World Cup fever.
00:44:44
I don't know if you have an opinion on on France losing
00:44:47
today. I thought France was going to go
00:44:48
all the way, but France and Spain, I don't know.
00:44:52
All right, This was a statement that she released.
00:44:54
Hollywood and our entertainment industry is too important for
00:44:57
Los Angeles County to simply hope someone else will save it,
00:45:00
said Supervisor Lindsay Horvath. Quote, local leaders have an
00:45:03
obligation, responsibility, ensuring that we remain the
00:45:06
creative capital of the world. That means partnering with labor
00:45:12
parentheses. That means unions and studios
00:45:14
pushing for smarter incentives, modernizing how productions work
00:45:17
with government, and fighting for the hundreds of thousands of
00:45:20
workers, small businesses who livelihoods depend on a thriving
00:45:23
entertainment economy. Los Angeles is in Los Angeles
00:45:26
County is an active partner in making sure this happens.
00:45:29
Also prior to it, it says the round table was led by Teamsters
00:45:34
at Large vice president. That's always good when it's led
00:45:37
by the unions. We saw what happened when Lorena
00:45:39
got saw this big union person got involved with trying to save
00:45:43
any sort of industry. And she quotes that there's
00:45:47
going to be, I think about 2000 jobs that would be lost by this.
00:45:52
And again, I come back to this point of, OK, but how many jobs
00:45:57
would be lost if Paramount left? Can we see that number?
00:46:03
Maybe a little more than 2000. Might be a little bit more than
00:46:06
2000. I mean, I feel bad for the
00:46:09
people who lose their jobs part of business.
00:46:11
It's what happens. But you keep focusing on like
00:46:14
2000 jobs that you're trying to save, but you may end up costing
00:46:18
the state way more in LA county, way more in jobs and revenue.
00:46:23
I don't know it, it's just another example of how
00:46:27
California has no idea how to fix Hollywood because doing so
00:46:31
would do would mean they would have to do something that they
00:46:34
they can't fathom, which is they'd have to make it more
00:46:37
affordable to do work here. They'd have to increase tax
00:46:40
credits. They'd have to cut down on
00:46:43
regulation. They'd have to be way more
00:46:46
business friendly and more free market.
00:46:47
And I just don't think a lot of these California Democrats know
00:46:51
how to do that. And I think that probably makes
00:46:53
their skin crawl to think that they actually have to do stuff
00:46:56
like that. So you.
00:46:58
Remember a few months ago when we had the reboot of Baywatch,
00:47:02
coming back to Los Angeles, coming back to Venice, and they
00:47:05
almost moved the entire production?
00:47:07
Because you could talk all you want about tax credits and you
00:47:10
can talk all you want about all the things that we're trying to
00:47:13
do to make the businesses come back here and shoot here.
00:47:17
Especially for a show that should be in California like
00:47:19
that. And you have so many insane
00:47:23
regulations as the amount of city staffers you have to pay,
00:47:26
the amount you have to pay for parking closures, the amount you
00:47:28
have to pay for permits. And every single time these
00:47:32
politicians, you look at Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles,
00:47:35
who claims that she really cares about this issue, she holds a
00:47:38
press conference with a game changer.
00:47:41
We're going to lower the permit fees by 30%.
00:47:43
If you want to shoot at the Griffith Observatory, that's
00:47:46
going to do it. How about just get rid of the
00:47:49
permit fee? Like just, or make it nominal,
00:47:51
like it's, you have to take bold action if you want these studios
00:47:55
to stay. And we had a guest on Jim Agnew
00:47:59
several months back. He's a, a screenwriter, been
00:48:02
working at Hollywood for 2530 years, very enlightening show
00:48:06
talking about what's going on inside the, the industry.
00:48:10
And he put it bluntly, he's like, look, you just, you can't
00:48:12
compete with these other states unless you're willing to go toe
00:48:16
to toe or beat them with the tax credits, you're not going to
00:48:19
beat them. It's just pure economics.
00:48:21
Sorry, unless you're willing to do what Georgia does, which is
00:48:25
allow like unlimited write offs for production costs, you're
00:48:29
never going to beat him. And California can't do that.
00:48:32
So all right, final story of the night.
00:48:35
We do it. We're featuring a lot because
00:48:38
Randy is an LA resident. He is on KABC up there in Los
00:48:42
Angeles. So we're featuring a lot of Los
00:48:45
Angeles stories tonight just so Randy feels like he's at home.
00:48:51
By the way, Randy, tell everybody.
00:48:53
Yeah, tell everybody you're on KABC.
00:48:57
Tell us where people can listen to you and TuneIn to you.
00:49:01
So I Co host the John Phillips show with my buddy John
00:49:04
Phillips. We are on every single day from
00:49:06
noon to three statewide. We're on 790 KABC in Los
00:49:09
Angeles. We're also on 810 KSFO in the
00:49:12
Bay Area and we just started live streaming on YouTube.
00:49:15
So you can watch our show every single day by going to
00:49:18
youtube.com slash at Randy Wang Radio.
00:49:21
We also do a podcast called the Accountability podcast.
00:49:25
We have a new episode dropping tomorrow which covers Karen Bass
00:49:29
and the fake doctor Barbara Ferreira getting custody out by
00:49:31
the residents of Boyle Heights for telling the residents when
00:49:34
that fire started that the toxic smoke from the solar panels
00:49:38
wasn't dangerous. That's at youtube.com/account at
00:49:42
Accountability Podcast. And I host my own show breaking
00:49:46
down the news of the day from up and down the state of
00:49:48
California. It's called the News Blitz.
00:49:50
Phil has been a guest on it many times and that airs at 5:00 on
00:49:54
790 KABC. Awesome.
00:49:58
So everyone go check it out. Go listen to Randy, especially
00:50:02
if you're in the LA area. Final story of the night.
00:50:07
LA County takes control of homeless.
00:50:10
That's not what I want to do. Too many buttons, too many
00:50:13
screens. All right, LA County takes
00:50:14
control of its homeless spending from LAHSA.
00:50:18
Lhasa is what we call it down here.
00:50:20
Lhasa, I have always been struggling with saying the
00:50:23
entire acronym out loud. Camille knows this.
00:50:26
I took me a long time to get get the hang of that Randy, I'm
00:50:32
going to let you take it away while I check the chat.
00:50:35
Give us a little background of what happened with Lhasa and why
00:50:40
the county is taking over the funding and in operation of
00:50:45
homelessness spending in in LA County.
00:50:48
Well, that's a good thing. We're on a podcast, so we have
00:50:50
plenty of time to talk about this so.
00:50:52
We don't, yeah, we don't have any ad breaks we got to.
00:50:55
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority was
00:50:58
established many years ago as a compromise because of a lawsuit,
00:51:02
because the city of LA and the county of LA, we're just blaming
00:51:06
each other and not working together when it came to dealing
00:51:09
with the homeless. So they came up with this joint
00:51:12
rules authority where the county would be in charge of the
00:51:15
services of mental health care, what have you, and the city
00:51:18
would be in charge of the infrastructure.
00:51:20
It has been a bloated bureaucracy since day one and
00:51:24
but it was pretty much a small thing where they would work on a
00:51:27
few things here or there until 2016 when at the county they
00:51:31
passed measure H and at the city they passed measure triple HA
00:51:34
sales tax hike that was going to end homelessness in 10 years.
00:51:38
And spoiler alert, 10 years later in 2026, they have not
00:51:42
ended homelessness. The bureaucracy just got bigger.
00:51:46
There have been several audits over the years where nobody
00:51:49
knows where a lot of this money has gone.
00:51:51
And over the last few years, it's a gotten a whole lot worse.
00:51:54
When Karen Cass took over as mayor of Los Angeles, she
00:51:58
appointed Velicia Adams Kellum, excuse me, Doctor Velicia Adams
00:52:03
Kellum as the head of Lhasa. She came from a crooked
00:52:07
nonprofit called the Saint Joseph Center.
00:52:09
She was paid $435 a year to run that agency and was caught,
00:52:14
thanks to a whistleblower complaint to be writing checks
00:52:18
from Lhasa to her husband's nonprofit, amongst a whole bunch
00:52:22
of other unethical behavior. They actually used lots of money
00:52:26
to settle a whistleblower complaint for $800.
00:52:31
There has been no track record whatsoever of this money.
00:52:34
So there's been talk for many years about disbanding Lhasa.
00:52:38
The county in 2024, despite the massive failures from all the
00:52:42
money we've spent on homelessness, actually doubled
00:52:45
down and the residents passed a doubling of sales tax and now
00:52:48
it's in perpetua, something called Measure A.
00:52:51
And now that the county had all this money coming in, they
00:52:54
figured out, you know what, we can use this to cut the city out
00:52:57
of this. We control all of the money by
00:52:59
saying that Lhasa is a failure, which is true, but in the county
00:53:03
creating their own agency for Lhasa has decided to just move
00:53:07
all of those people over to a different ship.
00:53:09
But it's still the same exact operation, it's still the same
00:53:13
ideology and we've still seen 0 results with all the money that
00:53:17
has been spent in the county, in the in the city.
00:53:20
It has been a complete disaster and I don't see that changing
00:53:23
anytime soon. It's been fascinating to follow
00:53:28
the saga of homelessness up in Los Angeles.
00:53:32
We followed it for a while now. LAist, who I have up on the
00:53:35
screen now, and Nick Gerda, who has been doing an amazing job
00:53:39
following all this. He's been the one breaking all
00:53:40
the news, especially with Valesia Kellum's Adam Doctor.
00:53:45
Sorry, Doctor. Valesia Adams, Callum and all of
00:53:51
that. Because that's another issue
00:53:52
that kind of unfolded over time. And you saw, OK, she's writing
00:53:56
checks in the amount of $2 to her husband's
00:54:00
nonprofit. And she said it was a mistake,
00:54:03
it was a clerical mistake. I don't know how you make a
00:54:05
clerical mistake three times to your husband's nonprofit.
00:54:10
So finally they took all this away from Lhasa.
00:54:16
Instead of move, you kind of went over all this.
00:54:18
So I don't really want to rehash all this.
00:54:20
It says the transition of funds follows a series of harsh odds
00:54:23
and the judges rebuke. So there's a fed judge who
00:54:26
basically was like, look, either you guys have to figure this out
00:54:31
or I'm taking over. I'm putting a receiver in charge
00:54:34
because this is billions of dollars we're talking about.
00:54:38
In total, HSH now has a budget of $843 in public funds
00:54:45
this fiscal year. A billion.
00:54:49
You almost have a billion dollars that LA spending on
00:54:53
homelessness per year. That's mind boggling and.
00:55:00
I'll give you a crazier number than that.
00:55:02
I'll give you here's here's how you want to know how insane our
00:55:05
homeless spending is. So Karen Bass, who is now up for
00:55:08
re election against Nithya Ramen and Karen Bass may actually lose
00:55:12
to a democratic socialist. When she got elected over Rick
00:55:15
Caruso, she campaigned on ending homelessness by 2026.
00:55:19
That did not happen. And her chief program was
00:55:22
something called Project Inside Safe where we were going to
00:55:25
clear out the encampments and put put them into motels.
00:55:28
There are 48 homeless people in the city of Los Angeles.
00:55:31
Over the last four years, she has moved maybe about 2003
00:55:36
thousand into these motel rooms. And we have had for because we
00:55:40
are under a state of emergency, no way to audit how this money
00:55:43
was being spent for the last couple of years until only
00:55:46
recently. And there is one member of the
00:55:48
City Council who has pushed back forcefully on how much of A
00:55:52
waste this is because with our Housing First policies, we're
00:55:55
not doing anything with these people.
00:55:57
They were supposed to be in these motels for a couple of
00:55:59
months before they moved on to something else, and they've been
00:56:01
in there for multiple years. Here's the number we spend in
00:56:05
the city of Los Angeles, $17 per motel bed per month, per
00:56:14
person. That is a staggering amount of
00:56:18
money for a motel bed. And these people are not getting
00:56:21
services. They are sitting there.
00:56:23
A lot of them are suffering from mental illness.
00:56:25
Some of them are addicted to drugs and they're allowed to
00:56:28
bring their drugs into the motels, $17 per bed per
00:56:34
month. And it has not solved the
00:56:36
problem. And if you drive around Los
00:56:38
Angeles City or Los Angeles County, it does not look any
00:56:42
better than it did four years ago.
00:56:45
That's for sure. I mean, the last time I was
00:56:47
there, it's we went up, we went and visited.
00:56:51
What were we doing? We went to go see a hoop concert
00:56:54
up at the Hollywood Bowl. And again, going back to the
00:56:57
last story about Hollywood, Hollywood is not some place you
00:57:01
want to walk around. Let's just put it that way.
00:57:04
Drive off any of the the off ramps in downtown LA, you're
00:57:08
going to see it. It's definitely not getting any
00:57:11
better. And I think wasn't Karen Bass
00:57:14
also the one who pushed back on there being this, The LA city
00:57:20
controller wanted to review where the money was going in her
00:57:23
program. And then they pushed back and
00:57:27
said, no, you don't need to know where the money's going.
00:57:30
And this is the city controller, basically the person who's
00:57:34
supposed to look at the finances and go, OK, where's all the
00:57:36
money going and keep an eye on all of this?
00:57:40
And the mayor of LA said to the city controller's office, if I'm
00:57:44
getting this correct # sand like, you don't get to see where
00:57:47
this is going. And then it went through like a
00:57:49
whole court process of, do I get to see, do do the citizens in
00:57:54
the city of controller get to see where this money's going?
00:57:56
And it's crazy that you're, why would you not want people to see
00:58:01
where the money's going? If the money's going to
00:58:03
homelessness, who cares? Show them.
00:58:04
Be like, hey, this is where we're spending it.
00:58:06
This is we're we're literally showing you the receipts of this
00:58:10
is what we're spending money on. But she fought back ardently to
00:58:14
like, keep that away from the public and keep it away from the
00:58:17
city controller. Am I getting that right?
00:58:19
Is that the right story? Oh, it's so much worse than
00:58:22
that. And there has been so much
00:58:23
retaliation against the city controllers office.
00:58:26
The city controller, by the way, Kenneth Mejia, who ran as ADSA
00:58:29
candidate now is a a independent because of all the things that
00:58:33
he has seen. He unveiled a couple of years
00:58:36
ago that the city of LA, they had $500 allocated towards
00:58:41
the homeless that they just hadn't.
00:58:43
And there was just sitting in an account.
00:58:44
And that is a staggering amount of money that should be spent
00:58:47
that is not spent. Excuse me, did I say $500?
00:58:50
I meant $500 million, Excuse me. And when he put out that he
00:58:57
wanted to audit where the money was going with Inside Safe, the
00:59:00
money going to Lhasa, there was so much pushback because, and
00:59:03
this is what we've seen with state audits, with the lawsuit,
00:59:06
with the judge and the Homeless Alliance.
00:59:09
They don't know where the money is.
00:59:10
They don't have the receipts and they don't have any any
00:59:14
noticeable improvements to show you.
00:59:15
So we know this has been a gigantic NGO money laundering
00:59:19
operation where we are spending money on organizations like
00:59:23
Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles, a nonprofit that gets paid to go
00:59:28
around Skid Row and golf carts and pass out meth pipes.
00:59:32
And some of their employees also deal drugs on the side.
00:59:35
That is straight up fact. This is the kind of stuff that
00:59:38
we're paying for and it's why we don't want any kind of audit.
00:59:41
So not only did the mayor fight tooth and nail to make sure that
00:59:45
investigation, that audit did not happen in the city's recent
00:59:49
charter reform, they have tried to defang the city controller's
00:59:54
office and make it so they cannot audit any city department
00:59:58
because they're worried that somebody, an independent body
01:00:01
and they spent a lot of money to try to knock out the incumbent
01:00:04
And again, who was supposed to be on their party because.
01:00:07
They don't want anybody shining a light on the straight up
01:00:10
corruption that is happening in Los Angeles every single day.
01:00:15
Wow. It is mind boggling.
01:00:19
I mean, there could be a whole book written on LA homelessness
01:00:23
and the homeless industrial complex that's going on there.
01:00:26
And, and again, if you don't have anything to hide, why are
01:00:31
you so worried about pushing back on audits?
01:00:34
So these are some of the things that they said about the county.
01:00:38
This is, of course, from the county themselves.
01:00:40
So take it with a grain of salt that the new approach is faster
01:00:44
and more accountable, says the department's leader.
01:00:46
People are staying permanent housing at higher rates.
01:00:48
Many workers slayed to be laid off by loss or being hired by
01:00:51
the county. They're concerned about federal
01:00:54
funding halting. Supervisor says she wants the
01:00:57
new county approach to succeed. There's our friend.
01:00:59
Supervisor Lindsay Horvath praised Mayim for assembling a
01:01:02
very, very strong, dedicated team.
01:01:04
And now they're doing the work to change how the county
01:01:06
operates. So those are some of the things
01:01:08
they're they're doing. But it is interesting that this
01:01:11
is the next saga of them taking over and will it improve?
01:01:17
And OK, I was going to, I was going to give you the the your
01:01:21
comment right away. I was going to say and you
01:01:23
submit you, you summarized it pretty well, which is it won't
01:01:28
why, why do you think it won't change anything to switch it
01:01:32
from the city to the county? Because still the same people
01:01:37
that are because because it's so expensive to, you know, actually
01:01:40
hire any employees. We don't have any direct
01:01:43
employees that are responsible for any of this.
01:01:45
So the system is take the money that we're given, funnel it out
01:01:49
to politically connected nonprofits, non governmental
01:01:52
organizations. We've talked about several of
01:01:54
them today and they don't have to be held accountable for for
01:01:58
anything that they're doing. So why would anything change now
01:02:02
that it's the county writing the check instead of the county and
01:02:04
the city writing the check? It is going to be business as
01:02:07
usual. If the county was any better at
01:02:10
this than the city. All you have to do is look at
01:02:12
unincorporated parts of LA County where your boards of
01:02:15
supervisors, you're Lindy Horvaths, they are the de facto
01:02:21
mayor for that part of town. And there are so many examples,
01:02:25
including the outer edges of the San Fernando Valley.
01:02:28
There aren't really the city of Los Angeles.
01:02:30
That's Lindsay Horbeck country. There's plenty of encampments
01:02:32
there. She doesn't know what she's
01:02:34
doing. Holly Mitchell in unincorporated
01:02:36
S LA, it's the same situation over and over and over again.
01:02:40
We've got the same buffoons. It doesn't matter if it's being
01:02:44
spent from the county or the city.
01:02:46
The ideology which actually goes all the way back to LA County
01:02:49
Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who was in the state Senate, she's
01:02:52
the one that authored California's housing first
01:02:55
policy. She was the one that authored
01:02:58
this ideology that went way further than the Atlanta
01:03:01
administration actually said it needed to go in, that we need to
01:03:05
put people inside shelter, Inside Housing, whether they're
01:03:08
clean or not, whether they're stable or not.
01:03:11
And it has been an unmitigated disaster.
01:03:13
You look at places like San Francisco that are starting to
01:03:16
round the corner on this, where they are now talking about
01:03:19
treatment focused just housing because they've seen the
01:03:21
disaster that was the housing first SORSROS and harm reduction
01:03:26
and LA continues to double down on stupid.
01:03:33
Just checking the chat here for some comments right now.
01:03:38
Somebody say Lhasa is lousy. Yeah, that's why they're they're
01:03:44
gone. It's pretty bad when even LA has
01:03:47
to admit defeat and kind of move it over somewhere else.
01:03:51
Checking in from San Diego, Oakland was one of the first to
01:03:55
be caught sending millions to a contractor that was donating
01:03:57
back to the mayor's nonprofit organization.
01:04:00
I mean, that's just just normal business as usual here in
01:04:04
California. Someone said I agree with
01:04:07
Spencer Pratt's proposal for how to deal with homeless, make
01:04:09
arrests for illegal campaign than mandatory drug treatment.
01:04:12
Comment for you Randy. Someone said hello, hello from
01:04:14
Whittier and they said Randy exclamation point.
01:04:18
Oh, love. Whittier, where the girls are
01:04:20
prettier. I never heard that chat that
01:04:23
rhyme, but I'm also not from LA County.
01:04:27
So yeah, thank you to everyone for tuning it.
01:04:31
Everyone in the chat. Yeah, it's until there is a top
01:04:37
down complete teardown of what is going on with the homeless
01:04:40
industrial complex, it's never going to be solved.
01:04:43
They're going to throw more and more money at, they're going to
01:04:45
throw billions of dollars more at homelessness.
01:04:48
And again, there's no incentive to solve homelessness because if
01:04:51
you're the CEO of a non profit who's making $500 a year,
01:04:55
why would you ever, ever solve homelessness?
01:04:57
I've said that so many times, but that's the incentive.
01:04:59
Like there's no incentive to solve homelessness.
01:05:02
Why would you want to put yourself out of business?
01:05:04
And to your point, it doesn't matter if LA County's writing
01:05:08
the check or LA City's writing the check, they're probably
01:05:12
going back to the same exact people that they were using in
01:05:16
LA City. And they're bragging that, oh,
01:05:19
well, now we're just paying them at a 97% clip.
01:05:24
OK, but what are they spending it on?
01:05:25
That was wasn't that the original problem?
01:05:28
Why the judge got so frustrated 'cause they did all these audits
01:05:31
and they couldn't find where the money was going.
01:05:34
Like they didn't know if even the services were be completed.
01:05:37
So now they're bragging, well, we're just paying them faster.
01:05:41
I'm sure the nonprofits love being paid a lot faster, but
01:05:44
doesn't change how things are actually being done so.
01:05:48
They're promising accountability with Measure A, but I'm not
01:05:51
going to believe it until I see it because there is no incentive
01:05:55
at the local level in the county and the city of Los Angeles to
01:05:58
be accountable for any of this. Because guess what?
01:06:01
The voters will keep voting more tax increases.
01:06:04
For this. We doubled down on Measure H And
01:06:07
here's the funniest thing about Measure A, the doubling of the
01:06:10
homeless sales tax. Measure H was temporary.
01:06:13
It was only supposed to be for 10 years.
01:06:16
Measure A is permanent, so now you have a permanent funding
01:06:19
source which tells you the signal is.
01:06:22
We're never going to solve this problem.
01:06:27
Well, that's always their promise.
01:06:28
We just need if we just have a little bit more tax money, if we
01:06:31
just have a little bit of your money, we'll be able to solve
01:06:33
all of California's issues. That's really it.
01:06:37
Again, we like to say on this show, if, you know, progressive
01:06:41
policies work, California would be a utopia.
01:06:44
But that's not the case. I should say status policies
01:06:47
work, then California would be a utopia.
01:06:50
So, all right, any final words, Randy, on the show tonight?
01:06:55
And again, remind people where they can go find you and listen
01:06:57
to you even more. Well, I want to thank you so
01:07:01
much Phil for having me on the California Underground podcast.
01:07:04
Phil has been on my show The News Blitz many times.
01:07:06
I consider him my resident expert of everything going on in
01:07:09
San Diego and all the citizens uproar that happened earlier
01:07:13
this year with going after them for trying to implement paid
01:07:16
parking at Balboa Park. But if you want to give me a
01:07:19
listen, I Co host a statewide show that talks nothing but
01:07:23
statewide political issues in California, Southern California,
01:07:27
San Francisco, San Diego, the Central Valley.
01:07:29
We cover at all. It's called the John Phillips
01:07:32
show. My Co host and I talk this stuff
01:07:34
every single day and you can watch us on YouTube every single
01:07:38
day from noon to three on youtube.com slash at Randy Wang
01:07:43
radio, youtube.com slash at Randy Wang radio.
01:07:46
We're live every single day. We've got our own chat room
01:07:49
going on and is a heck of a lot of fun.
01:07:51
So check us out on there. And then I also do my news
01:07:54
recap, show, the News Blitz with Randy Wang every day at 5:00 on
01:07:58
790 KABC. And if you're out of the
01:08:00
Southern California listening area, you can stream it at
01:08:03
kabc.com. Awesome.
01:08:06
Well, Randy, thank you for coming on.
01:08:07
Like I said, I've been I've been very lucky and very grateful
01:08:10
that you've had me on your show. So it's nice to have you on my
01:08:12
show for once. All right, everyone who has been
01:08:16
tuning in, thank you very much for the chat, which was wild
01:08:19
tonight. Love seeing an active chat and a
01:08:21
lot of people on here. That's why we do this show live.
01:08:23
So everyone who tuned in live for the chat, if you listen
01:08:26
later, make sure you do TuneIn live at 8:00 PM on Tuesday so
01:08:30
you can actually see the show live and engage with the chat,
01:08:32
which is very active. Make sure you like, share,
01:08:35
subscribe, review, all of that stuff helps with the algorithm.
01:08:39
Leave a comment after the show. That also helps people.
01:08:42
It helps the YouTube algorithm. More people find us.
01:08:44
And the best thing you can do that support this show that is
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01:08:49
will enjoy it. So with that, we'll see you on
01:08:52
the next one later, everybody.