Californians should not mistake a widely shared dislike of our political situation with shared agreement on what constitutes the common good.

The former president of the union that represents Los Angeles County government workers has agreed to plead guilty to federal fraud and tax charges in connection with an alleged scheme to collect illicit consulting payments from a labor-related nonprofit, officials said Thursday.

Alejandro Stephens, a longtime leader of the Service Employees International Union local, signed an agreement to plead guilty to one count of filing a false income tax return and two counts of mail fraud, the U.S. attorney's office said.

Stephens lost his union presidency in 2007 when his SEIU chapter, Local 660, merged with several others.

The county later fired him from his job, alleging he had refused to return to work after a lengthy leave.

The governor's proposed legislation, to be considered during a special session that ends by Oct. 5, was met almost immediately by criticism from the powerful state teacher unions, which called Schwarzenegger's plans rushed and unnecessary.

In order to "solve" California's massive budget crisis, the tax-and-spend lobby and left-leaning academics are again suggesting that we revise Proposition 13, which changed the state's tax structure in 1978 by lowering property tax rates and limiting annual increases.

Ironically, these new efforts to change the highly popular initiative are based, not on the argument that Proposition 13 has failed California, but on the grounds that Proposition 13 is working precisely as intended.

California's budget problem is a result of unrestrained overspending coupled with unstable sources of revenue.

While income tax and sales tax revenue are way down by double digit percentages, property tax revenues have simply flattened out, notwithstanding dramatic drops in market value. True, some counties will see slightly larger drops in revenue than others, but some counties will actually see increases in property tax revenue. There are few places in all of America which can make that claim.

Here is the real irony. Our sales tax and income tax system has evolved over many years in ways dictated by our political elite and smartest policy advisors. Thus, the volatility that we now complain about has been brought to us by people who are oh so much smarter than the rest of us. Proposition 13, on the other hand, was sponsored by two relatively simple men, Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, who were seeking, first and foremost, just to protect homeowners.

How would you feel working at Ford, Honda, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and BMW manufacturing plants in the United States, knowing that your government just gave your competitor $50 billion?

Deese will force GM to make smaller cars. How will he get people to buy the cars no one wants? That's easy. Don't fix the energy problem. Oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear resources won't be developed. The government will subsidize ethanol, which drives up food prices.

The trouble with the president buying GM for "us" is that now the company is owned by people who don't want it and who will never profit from it.

A better solution would have been to give these billions to the stockholders to buy the company for the autoworkers union. Let's see the union take on debt and turn a profit while saddled with the exorbitant salaries, pensions and restrictions it imposed upon the industry.

As a former employee of a General Motors subsidiary, I purchased a few General Motors bonds in 2002 to aid my retirement. I paid full price for senior bonds that had first claims on all the assets of GM, should GM go bankrupt. It was a gold-plated investment.

Then the U.S. government decided, senior though my bonds are, that the assets should be given to other people. The union workers were put first in line, then the government, and then me.

Two and a quarter cents on the dollar is what I can expect for my bonds. I wish the government would follow the bankruptcy laws. I hate playing poker with a government that makes my three aces lose to a pair of sevens.

"To solve the budget’s continuing structural deficit, we must reform the way the government spends its money. And to restore the trust of the people, we must reform the way the government operates.
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My colleagues, I say to you, political courage is not political suicide. Ignore the lobbyists. Ignore the politics. Trust the people.
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Do the math. Our revenue increases by more than 5 billion but our spending increases by over 10 billion. We don’t have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem.
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A lot of people say, 'Arnold, why don’t you just raise taxes and be done with it?' Well, as I said earlier, we don’t have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem. We could raise taxes by billions but that would only further drive up spending by billions of dollars.
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I can also announce that we intend to wipe out nearly 100 unnecessary boards and commissions, abolishing over 1000 political appointments in the process.

No one paid by the state should make $100,000 a year for only meeting twice a month.

I know the special interests will oppose all the reforms I have mentioned. Any time you try to remove one dollar from the budget, there are five special interests tugging on the other end. Anytime you try to make something more efficient, there are a half-dozen special interests trying to prevent it.

The result is that nothing changes in Sacramento. This place is in the grip of the special interests.

The people of California demand reform. That is what the recall election was all about."

A study released Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center has documented a change in trend: After years of rapid growth, illegal [alien invasion] is slowing down in California, with the state's share of the nation's estimated 11.9 million [illegal aliens] dropping to 22% from 42% in 1990, the study showed.

The state still has the largest concentration of illegal [aliens] in the nation, with 2.7 million -- a figure that has nearly doubled since 1990.

But, in a trend that began with California's recession in the 1990s, more migrants are bypassing the state for other areas of the country. The number of illegal [aliens] outside the nation's six traditional "first stop" states of California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and New York has increased sevenfold, to nearly 5 million in 2008 from 700,000 in 1990, according to Jeffrey S. Passel, the study's coauthor and a Pew Center senior demographer.

Nearly half of the households headed by [illegal aliens] have young children, twice the rate of native-born households. And nearly three-fourths of their children were U.S.-born citizens.

The children of [illegal aliens] make up about 10% of California students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

The study, co-written by D'Vera Cohn, a Pew Research Center senior writer, found that three-quarters of illegal immigrants are Latino, mostly from Mexico. On average, they tend to work in low-skilled jobs such as farming and construction, earn markedly less than the median national income and have lower educational levels than U.S.-born residents.

For instance, 47% of illegal immigrant adults ages 25-64 have less than a high school education compared with 8% for U.S.-born residents. The immigrants' 2007 median household income was $36,000, compared with $50,000 for the U.S.-born, and they did not attain markedly higher incomes the longer they lived in the United States, unlike legal immigrants, the study found.

The nation's top two labor federations announced a framework Tuesday for comprehensive immigration reform, setting aside differences with the hope of pushing legislation through this year.

The agreement, supported by the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win federation, supports the legalization of the nation's 12 million [illegal aliens] and the formation of an independent commission to analyze the labor market's needs and assess shortages for the admission of future foreign workers. The unions oppose any new guest worker programs that would allow employers to bring foreigners in on a temporary basis.

[Illegal alien advocate] groups also plan to hold news conferences, town hall meetings and hearings across the nation to mobilize support for reform and to highlight what they say is the harm caused by a lack of legislation.

In addition, the unions included border security as a tenant of their plan but wrote in the agreement that enforcement should not be the responsibility of local law enforcement and should focus on "criminal elements."

In the civil complaint, brought in Los Angeles County Superior Court, the United Long-Term Care Workers accuses Freeman of misappropriating funds in a broad scheme to enrich himself and his relatives. Named as co-defendants are his wife, Pilar Planells; his mother-in-law, Carmen Planells; and the video and day-care companies they operated out of their homes.

Freeman, a onetime protege of SEIU President Andy Stern, had been a rising star in labor and political circles because of his stewardship of the local, California's largest.

Meanwhile, Freeman required employees of the training-center charity to work on partisan political campaigns, despite laws barring such activities, and then denied doing so to an Internal Revenue Service examiner, sources told The Times.

This change would correctly take away from management the power to pick employees' method of voting on whether to organize. But instead of returning that decision to the people who ought to have it -- the employees -- it would award it to a labor union, an outside third party that has the potential to become the employees' representative in bargaining but isn't yet, and shouldn't be before the vote.

First, a little background: By March 15, school districts in California were required to send out reduction-in-force notices (RIFs) to any employee whose job might be in jeopardy come fall.

The unions are referring to these notices as "pink slips." Now, everyone knows that a pink slip means "You're fired." But it is very clear that these RIFs are nothing more than an alert to a possible layoff -- sort of the difference between a bullet to the head and a warning shot.

Our state is in dire financial straits -- why should teachers be a protected class? This is especially true in light of the following inconvenient fact: In 2003-04, the LAUSD had 747,009 students in its system, and those students were taught by 36,180 teachers. By 2007-08, the student population had shrunk 7%, to 693,680, but the teaching force had decreased only about 1%, to 35,785. In 2003-04, the student/teacher ratio was 20.64 students per teacher. In 2007-08, it was 19.38 students per teacher. If we went back to the 20.64 ratio of 2003-04, we would need only 33,597 teachers -- 2,000 fewer teachers than we have now.

In Los Angeles, we have some of the highest-paid teachers in the U.S. -- most of whom have a world-class health plan in a state whose economy is falling apart, where the unemployment rate tops 10% and whose citizens are already among the most taxed in the country -- whining about the possibility that a few jobs may be lost.

But Stern's critics point out that a trio of SEIU officers who have faced varying degrees of scrutiny were his appointees. Some say that his administration ignored early reports of trouble with one or more of them, particularly Tyrone Freeman, the sacked president of the largest California local. Freeman is the target of a federal criminal probe that confidential sources say probably will stretch well into 2009.

An SEIU inquiry already has concluded that Freeman misappropriated more than $1 million in union funds for himself and his relatives, an allegation he has denied.

The SEIU's national office has paid millions of dollars to companies, nonprofits and individuals with family ties and other personal connections to the union's leaders. One firm partly owned by an SEIU director received more than $1 million in consulting fees. The union says all the payments were proper.

Others say Stern's push to centralize control over the 2-million-member union created conditions for abuses. They say his consolidation of locals into bigger and bigger chapters has reduced SEIU democracy, and thus limited the ability of rank-and-file members to monitor and challenge officers they suspect of unethical conduct.

The SEIU spent millions of dollars on Obama's behalf, and fielded legions of get-out-the-vote troops in pivotal states.

Among its top priorities is the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to unionize by signing petition cards. Business interests are lobbying hard to defeat the measure, because it permits unions to avoid secret-ballot elections if a majority of workers sign up. Union activists say employers routinely undermine such elections by coercing workers against voting for representation.

Some non-union workers, rather than viewing lower wages as a problem to be remedied by demanding higher wages, attack the wages of union workers, asserting that they should make less.

When working people stop agreeing with attempts to lower their pay rate and their standard of living -- and stop buying into the belief that wages need to come down and be brought in line with reality -- maybe then Americans can retake their rightful place as the most prosperous people on Earth.

By making the auto bailout a fight about unions, Senate Republicans have once again shown their disdain for workers.

Tenure laws keep a teacher from being fired without just cause. What's wrong with that?

Your editorial does acknowledge that there must be protections against vindictive firings, yet it fails to mention how exactly this could be accomplished without granting tenure.

Also, you neglect to mention that public schools are required by law to do what no other government agency, company, private school or charter school is willing to do: accept everyone who walks through their doors.

A nonprofit organization founded by California's largest union local reported spending nothing on its charitable purpose -- to develop housing for low-income workers -- during at least two of the four years it has been operating, federal records show.

The charity, launched by a scandal-ridden Los Angeles chapter of the Service Employees International Union, had total expenses of about $165,000 for 2005 and 2006, and all of the money went to consulting fees, insurance costs and other overhead, according to its Internal Revenue Service filings.

"Of the 5,000-plus charities we've looked at, I don't think we've ever seen one that didn't spend anything on its charitable programs," said Sandra Miniutti, vice president of Charity Navigator, an online rating service.

But SEIU officials declined to discuss the charity, saying it is a separate legal entity from the union, even though its board is dominated by officials from the local. The charity is located at the local's headquarters.

Tyrone Freeman, then president of the 160,000-member United Long-Term Care Workers, helped start the charity in 2004. Freeman and the local are the subjects of a federal criminal probe and a congressional inquiry because of his spending practices. After an internal investigation, the SEIU accused Freeman and another former union officer of receiving improper payments from the nonprofit.

One, Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, is a rancher; at least one, former EBay chief Meg Whitman, is a billionaire; a third, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, is known across the nation as a champion of same-sex marriage.

Several have run and lost for governor before, and one, Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, has been governor already.

The wild card is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, 75, widely considered to be the state's most prominent Democrat, who friends say is debating whether to enter the race or remain an influential figure in Washington.

She would vault to the head of the field, analysts say, but may be reluctant to leave the Senate with her party newly dominant in favor of a campaign to run a deficit-plagued state and deal with a polarized Legislature.

So far, Poizner, Newsom, Garamendi and former Republican congressman Tom Campbell have formed exploratory committees to raise money for the race.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, 55, has not ruled out a run, but he must first win back his current job in March.

Describing himself as "a student" of California, Brown said he had gained new insight from his previous tenure after a quarter-century of thought: