Wednesday, January 22, 2014

OPENNESS A MUST FOR NEW PACIFIC TRADE PACT

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2014, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “OPENNESS A MUST FOR NEW PACIFIC TRADE PACT”



          Here’s a bit of unsolicited advice to Congress and the President about the newest free trade agreement in the works for America, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which because of its location would affect California more than any other part of this country:



    Go slow, and open up the negotiations to press and public.



    Whenever this country negotiates a new free trade deal with other countries, government officials try desperately to keep their horsetrading as secret as possible and it always leads to trouble.



          The latest dickering over the Trans-Pacific agreement follows the same pattern, with Ron Kirk, the U.S. trade respresentative insisting he must have “some measure of discretion and confidentiality” so he can “preserve negotiating strength and encourage our partners to be willing to put issues on the table they may not otherwise.”



          The Trans-Pacific Partnership, which many call “the newest NAFTA,” would see this country enter a free-trade area already begun by Brunei, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore. Others that would be involved now include Canada, Japan, Mexico, Peru and Vietnam.



          This agreement, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, would have more effects in California than other states because most American trade with the those nations flows through California. Since Barack Obama became President, his administration has held 19 negotiating sessions on this pact, reaching tentative agreements on copyright infringement and the environment, on human rights and on an independent judicial tribunal, among others.



          Yes, a tribunal. These have been dicey from the time NAFTA's took effect more than 10 years ago; they tend to interfere with American sovereignty, sometimes allowing international judicial panels to overrule U.S. law.



          The most famous of these cases came while California in the late 1990s sought to rid gasoline sold here of the additive MTBE and its noxious odors and taste, along with the alleged cancer risks, it gave some drinking water as it leached from rusty storage tanks and the engines of small boats into aquifers and reservoirs.



          The MTBE ban threatened profits of the Canadian Methanex Corp., which filed a $970 million claim for lost sales in a NAFTA tribunal, circumventing the American court system. Methanex eventually lost, but the point was made – in some cases, the U.S. Supreme Court may no longer be supreme, especially when corporations want to bypass the court systems of countries where they do business, including ours.



          That’s a loss of sovereignty, one that would be widened under suspected provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The text of the agreement has not yet been released, but consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen group claims it would off offshore “millions of jobs,” roll back banking reforms, expose Americans to unsafe food and other products, further threats to Internet freedom and attack environmental safeguards.



          Even members of Congress have not yet seen the full text of the pact as it now stands, one reason Democrats there rejected the Obama Administration’s early January effort to get authority for fast-track negotiations. Fast-tracking would forbid any amendments to the treaty when it comes before Congress and prevent full-scale hearings on it.



          Meanwhile, Wikileaks, which delights in publicizing secret documents, has published a draft of the pact’s proposed environment chapter, written in Salt Lake City last November and making many promises about trade of wood products, wildlife protection, climate change and preventing overfishing. But Wilileaks griped in its release that the chapter is “noteworthy for its absence of...meaningful enforcement measures.”


          Kirk responded that “The U.S.….will insist on a robust, fully enforceable environment chapter…”



          One good thing about the refusal to fast track this slippery concoction is that it could eventually lead to wide publication of the full planned treaty. At the very least, every member of Congress should read the entire thing before approving it.



          For going fast could lead not just to reduced American authority over our own affairs but to corporate lobbyists sneaking in self-serving elements. That’s why complete openness should feature any consideration of this agreement before it’s adopted. That way, anyone who cares will know just what America gets if the treaty takes effect, and just what it loses.


         

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     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to
www.californiafocus.net

SOME NEW SCHOOL FUNDING PLANS GO AWRY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
 FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2014, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “SOME NEW SCHOOL FUNDING PLANS GO AWRY”


          Gov. Jerry Brown and a lot of public school officials are just now rediscovering how right the 18th Century Scottish poet Robert Burns was when he observed that “The best laid plans of mice and men oft’ go astray.”


          The latest example in California is the new public school funding formula Brown aggressively pushed last year, one giving a greater portion of new money raised via the 2012 Proposition 30 tax increases to schools with the highest percentages of English-learner students, foster children and pupils from poverty-ridden homes.


          Essentially, Brown wants to finish the job begun in 1971 by the Serrano v. Priest decision of the state Supreme Court, which directs most funds from newly-approved property tax levies to the poorest districts.


          “Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice,” Brown said as he proposed giving districts with high concentrations of needy children as much as $5,000 per year more than wealthier districts for each such student they have. The grants would start lower and escalate over several years, the money added to the state’s base grant of $6,800 per year per child.


          Officials of many better-heeled districts protested, suggesting the Brown proposal left out students from poverty-level homes who attend their schools. They provided numbers showing that districts in some generally well-to-do areas educate many disadvantaged students, even if their numbers don’t come up to the levels required to get the extra state money.


          Those districts pushed for giving schools money based on the actual number of disadvantaged students they serve, rather than creating a threshold percentage schools must pass before getting extra money.


          Their objections resulted in some change in the plan, with the extra money now being passed to districts on the basis of numbers at individual schools, rather than district-wide enrollments, an alteration made by the Legislature in June.


          “Our disadvantaged students deserve more resources to overcome the extra obstacles they face, and this formula does just that,” said state Senate President Darrell Steinberg, a Sacramento Democrat, after the changes were okayed. Known as the Local Control Funding Formula, the new rules also give districts more control over how they spend state money they receive.


          That's the plan. But it’s not working out quite as Brown and the school administrators hoped, the same phenomenon Bobby Burns sagely noted more than 200 years ago.


          Yes, districts are getting extra money for low-income pupils, English-learners and foster children. The initial boost comes to about $2,800 per student.


          But many districts are not getting all the money they expected because hundreds, perhaps thousands of families have still not turned in verification forms attesting to their income. So far, the state isn't handing over money for students whose forms are not yet in, reasoning that without the forms, it can’t be sure the students actually exist or are really needy.


    Districts, meanwhile, complain they already verify students’ family income every four years to get federal funds for subsidized lunches, while the state demands new forms and will want them every year. Doing it again costs them time and money, they gripe.


          For some of California’s largest districts, this paperwork problem amounts to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. The Los Angeles Unified district, for example, had only about 40 percent of the required forms returned as of mid-December, with about $200 million at stake in the missing paperwork.  In Fresno, hundreds of families were refusing to fill out forms, possibly worried about immigration problems.


          In San Diego, only a small fraction of affected schools had turned in the forms by the same time.


          If this problem continues and the state is left with an undistributed pot of cash, it should be divided among all schools on the basis of their federal lunch-money reports. Do that and poor kids who go to school with the children of the wealthy will benefit far more than they can under the current formula.


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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

DON’T EXPECT MUCH ON IMMIGRATION THIS YEAR

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014 OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “DON’T EXPECT MUCH ON IMMIGRATION THIS YEAR”


          There’s one big reason why, no matter how much happy talk you hear about “comprehensive immigration reform” from President Obama and members of Congress, it’s unrealistic to expect much action this year: This is an election year.


          All 435 members of the House of Representatives face reelection this year, as they regularly do every other year. Until recently, once someone was elected to the House, he or she could expect never again to have much intra-party opposition during primary elections.


          But that went out the window with the advent of the highly ideological Tea Party organizations, which have not hesitated to challenge and oust even the longest-term incumbents, including Republican senators like Richard Lugar of Indiana and Robert Bennett of Utah.


          This has a direct impact on the potential fate of changes to America’s highly flawed immigration system this year. For almost two-thirds of the current Republican majority in the House comes from heavily gerrymandered districts where election of a Democrat is highly unlikely.


          The majority of GOP voters in those so-called “red” districts tend to lean rightward, and the Tea Party is strongest in those places. That means even if they are inclined to vote for a limited pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants who have been law-abiding residents after arriving here, doing so could amount to political suicide. Republicans generally call any such plan “amnesty.”


          Things are different, of course, for Republicans like Jeff Denham and David Valadao, two Central California congressmen with heavily Latino districts. The same for Republican Gary Miller of San Bernardino County.


          All joined the limited-amnesty camp during the latter half of 2013, knowing it would make some of their conservative constituents unhappy. But since the vast bulk of the GOP House majority refused even to hold a vote on whether to allow the issue to come to a vote on the House floor, where Democrats could have joined with a few Republicans to pass significant changes, these men’s stances were never tested by the need to cast an actual vote.


    Chances are the same will be true this year, unless Republican Speaker John Boehner is willing to risk defying the right wing of his membership, as he at times hinted he might while complaining about the Tea Party in late fall.


    Despite his complaints about what the far right of his party is doing to the overall GOP, Boehner still shows no sign of allowing a vote on any comprehensive changes. In late December, for example, he said “We have no intention of going to conference on the Senate bill,” a reference to the bi-partisan compromise passed by senators last June, which allows for a very arduous path to citizenship. That means the speaker will not allow the House to vote on any bill similar enough to the Senate’s version that it might merit an effort to hash out House/Senate differences.


          Instead, Boehner and other House Republicans have spoken in oxymorons like this one: “We’re committed to moving forward on step-by-step comprehensive reforms.” That’s an oxymoron because nothing done step-by-step will ever be comprehensive.


          But Boehner’s remark and some subsequent statements may mean his House majority will accept some changes that stop short of wide amnesty. He’s also hinted he might do something substantial after the springtime filing deadlines for potential primary election candidates have passed. After that, hard-line anti-immigration forces can’t mount as many primary election challenges to incumbents.


          Filing deadlines, of course, fall within the next month or two in many states.


          If those deadlines leave much of his majority without opposition from even farther right than where they stand, there could be some immigration action.


          The most likely prospect is a guest-worker bill to create a neo-Bracero program benefiting big businesses and big farms which like to hire cheap immigrant labor, but don’t much care if their workers ever become citizens.


          All of which means that while the need for immigration changes grows stronger by the day, it will never be the top priority for individual Congress members. Most important to them will always be their own survival, and that means the only changes that will pass will be ones they see as no threat to them.



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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

DOES FEINSTEIN REMARK IMPLY BIG SENATE RACES AHEAD?



CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2014, OR THEREAFTER



BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “DOES FEINSTEIN REMARK IMPLY BIG SENATE RACES AHEAD?”


          No doubt the California Republican Party is down, but anyone who counts it out of big statewide races is a fool who disregards the ego-satisfying appeal prominent public office can hold for the very rich and very famous.


          Arnold Schwarzenegger is Example A of a fabulously wealthy celebrity who seized an opportunity to run for high office – governor – and then had more fun while holding the office than he appears to have had as a muscleman movie star before or since.


          This is relevant today not because there appear to be few or no immediate high-visibility opportunities today for celebrities or business people with big bucks. California offers no U.S. Senate races this year and Gov. Jerry Brown looks pretty secure as he piles up campaign cash while delaying any direct mention of reelection.


    But one remark last month by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein suggests there may be plenty of chances ahead. Explaining her vote to end the U.S. Senate’s tradition of allowing minority parties to use filibusters to stymie presidential appointments, she said she did it because she wants “the remainder of my five-plus years to get something done.” As of now, she has just four-plus years left in her latest term.


          The reality is that Feinstein will turn 80 on June 22 and would be 84 in June of 2018, the next year she might run for reelection, 85 just six months into what would be her fifth full six-year term, plus. (First elected in 1992 to fill out the unexpired term of then-Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, she then had to run again in 1994 for a full term). That’s not terribly ancient for the Senate, but it would make her the oldest top-of-ticket candidate in California history.


          Did her remark mean she thinks about leaving office when her current term expires, even if she remains in good health? There is, of course, nothing political wonks love more than finding meaning in officials’ words, even where there may be little.


          Longtime Feinstein campaign manager Bill Carrick says his friend and client was talking only about her current term. “She hasn’t made any decisions about 2018 yet,” Carrick said. “So I wouldn’t read too much into a casual remark.”


          He noted that even now, four years before her campaign could begin in earnest, Feinstein has more than $1 million in her political kitty, while still pursuing a lawsuit against a bank she contends allowed a former campaign treasurer to embezzle another $4 million or so from her in 2012. The theft didn’t matter much: Feinstein won handily that year over a virtual unknown, taking more than 7.75 million votes, the most ever for any senator.


          Still…her remark might stir the cadre of ambitious Democratic politicians now waiting patiently for a big chance while holding lesser statewide offices – people like Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Attorney General Kamala Harris and Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones. For there’s the possibility of a plum job appearing on the horizon.

          There’s also the Senate seat of Democrat Barbara Boxer, 73. The former Marin County supervisor and congresswoman spurred talk of impending retirement when she moved to Rancho Mirage in Riverside County’s Coachella Valley even before she sought reelection in 2010.

          Unlike Feinstein, who has had a series of weak opponents, Boxer is perpetually deemed among the Senate’s more vulnerable Democrats and has drawn significant opponents like Bill Jones, then the California Secretary of State, and the partially self-funded former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.

          Since first winning her Senate seat in 1992, Boxer has used long series of coffee parties in individual homes as a key part of her campaigns, which have usually seemed far more arduous than Feinstein’s. Boxer will be 75 if she runs two years from now, and should she choose to bow out, that’s a possible big opening for the wealthy and ambitious.


          But Boxer in 2010 foiled those who thought she might step down and has been more visible than ever in her current term.


          All of which means there may be two big political openings forming on the California horizon – or there may not. We’ll all have to stay tuned as two redoubtable women decide how long they want to continue fighting for women’s rights, abortion rights and on other key issues they’ve made their own.


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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

STATE GOP’S LOWERED ELECTION YEAR EXPECTATIONS



CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2014, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “STATE GOP’S LOWERED ELECTION YEAR EXPECTATIONS”


          As the California Republican Party enters the 2014 election year, its tone is considerably more restrained than we've heard in quite awhile. With good reason.


          Generally, at year’s beginning, the GOP touts the large gains it plans to make in both legislative and congressional races, while also feeling optimistic about its statewide candidates.


    That’s natural when candidates have millions of their own dollars to throw into campaigns, as Meg Whitman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Simon, Carly Fiorina and others have done. In that group, only Schwarzenegger got anywhere, though, and many Republicans came away from his seven years in office completely dissatisfied, his environmental interests leaving them convinced he is a “RINO,” Republican in name only.


          No one with a bankroll like theirs is vying for anything this year. Nor does the GOP say it has great expectations of cutting into big Democratic margins among Latinos, fastest growing voter bloc in both the state and nation.


          “I’ve never overstated our case,” says state party chairman Jim Brulte. “We have a shot at picking up some competitive congressional seats in California, but we also have to defend some.” It’s the same in the Legislature.


          Republicans, then, are no longer whistling past the graveyard. This time they’re barely whistling at all.


          Part of the reason is ideological. Conservative activists have lost some enthusiasm for the GOP because several of its relatively few California members of Congress have taken moderate stances on whether illegal immigrants deserve a pathway to citizenship, however arduous. Those politicians are acting on their survival instincts, realizing their districts are steadily becoming more filled with Latinos. Prime examples are Jeff Denham, whose district centers around Merced, and David Valadao, with a Visalia-based district.


          “Would you join a political party that proclaims itself to be the party of law and order…that has Congress members willing to give citizenship to criminals from foreign countries, illegal aliens?” wrote Stephen Frank, former president of the California Republican Assembly and an ultra-conservative blogger.


          Frank implies this kind of ideological impurity is why registered Republicans are a fast-diminishing species in California. But a mid-2013 report from the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California suggests the reverse as the reason for the GOP’s steep slide.


          Once near parity with Democrats, the state GOP late last year was down to 28.9 percent of registered voters, compared with 43.9 percent for Democrats. Ten years ago, Democrats were at right about the same level as today, while the GOP had more than 35 percent of state voters. In fact, there are about 100,000 fewer registered Republicans today than 10 years ago, even though the overall registered voter roll is up about 2.9 million.


          While Democratic Party registration efforts have held its percentage steady, the GOP has lost ground. The non-party that’s grown spectacularly is “decline to state” or “no party preference.” Those voters are up from 15.3 percent 10 years ago to 20.9 percent – which means almost all recent ex-Republicans have migrated to the ranks of the noncommitted.


          That might not seem such horrible news for the GOP – at least its
former adherents have not become Democrats. Except in many
cases, their voting habits have become pretty Democratic, the PPIC
found. Four out of 10 decline-to-state voters in the poll viewed
themselves as more likely to vote Democratic, while 30 percent lean
Republican and the rest admit to no particular leaning.


          So as they lose voters to the no-party-preference column,
Republicans will be lucky if as many as 35 percent of decline-to-
states vote GOP.


          This is not merely because of Latinos. There’s also an enormous
gender gap, with 57 percent of registered Democrats being female
compared with 48 percent of Republicans.


          The PPIC report shows one common GOP lament is mostly
correct: Democrats tend to dominate in the coastal counties from
Los Angeles northward, with the GOP doing best inland. About 56
percent of all Democrats live either in Los Angeles County or the
San Francisco Bay area, while the GOP dominates in Orange and
San Diego counties and the Central Valley. Those findings pretty
much square with election results.


          They explain why Republicans are making no grandiose
predictions these days, a sharp contrast to their fancy rhetoric in
many past election years.

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     Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated fourth edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

BEST BUDGET IDEA? LETTING SICK, ELDERLY CONVICTS GO



CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2014, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “BEST BUDGET IDEA? LETTING SICK, ELDERLY CONVICTS GO”


          Sometimes it can take more than a decade for a completely sensible idea to catch on. So it is with what may be the single best money-saving idea in the inventive preliminary budget proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown in early January.


          That idea, part of a Brown plan to appease a panel of federal judges, calls for the possible parole of several thousand convicts who are sick or mentally impaired, plus a new parole program for elderly prisoners. This is spurred by the judges’ demand for even more releases of state prison inmates than the 22,000-plus already returned to their counties.


          But it’s an idea first proposed to this column in 2002 by reader Ray Procunier, then a Grass Valley resident. Procunier, who died two years ago at age 86, was director of corrections in California under Gov. Ronald Reagan and during part of Brown’s first term in the 1970s. He also headed the prison systems of Texas and Utah.


          “When Reagan was governor, we cut the prison population by one-third and there was no increase in crime, not even a blip,” he said 11 years ago, responding to a column. “I guarantee I could cut down today’s prison population by 100,000 or more and not hurt a soul in the process.”


          Among his chief suggestions was the wholesale parole of prisoners over age 55, regardless of the Three-Strikes-and-You’re-Out law or their specific sentences. He would have kept murderers, rapists and other serious sex offenders behind bars unless they had serious chronic illnesses. These tactics alone, Procunier said, would cut prison costs by more than $4 billion – equivalent to at least $5 billion in today’s dollars.


          Now that Brown has made almost exactly the same idea a central point of his plan to comply with the court ruling on prison crowding, one big question is why it took so long for this idea to percolate to the surface. The most likely answer is inertia, along with a fear component, as no politician ever wants to appear soft on crime. That proclivity also helped produce Three-Strikes and to increase the state’s prison population from about 25,000 in 1980 to 170,000-plus in 2008. It took the court order to cut that down a bit.


          So far, as Procunier predicted, there has been no significant statewide crime increase as a result of the early paroles. Releasing the sick and elderly would likely have a similar negligible impact.


          That’s because national criminal statistics show most violent crimes are committed by persons in their teens, 20s and 30s, and very few by persons aged 55 or over. At the same time, the cost of maintaining hospitalized inmates ranges between $68,000 and $125,000 per year, depending on where they are treated. That’s significantly more than the average annual cost of about $47,000 for the typical healthy convict.


          So far, 15 other states acting on this kind of information have begun expediting release of elderly prisoners, who can use pensions, savings, Social Security, welfare or the resources of relatives to cover expenses outside custody. Most ill inmates released early can be covered almost immediately by Medi-Cal under Obamacare, while the state gains not only prison space, but also can stop posting guards in each of their hospital rooms around the clock, required for prisoners hospitalized outside the prison system.


          That’s why the new Brown plan makes so much sense, both as a means of helping comply with the court order and saving many millions, perhaps billions, of prison dollars. Too bad other California governors didn’t have the good sense to do this many years ago, when Procunier first suggested it.


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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net