CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 2014 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“DEMO CONVENTION SHOWS RESTRAINT BROWN PROVIDES”
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 2014 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“DEMO CONVENTION SHOWS RESTRAINT BROWN PROVIDES”
One well-worn thought that has not
been heard since Jerry Brown in 2010 won his third term as governor is the
notion that California’s state Capitol needs some adult supervision.
That suggestion became commonplace
among pundits and voters during the Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger years
of massive budget deficits and, for just one example, bond issues in which
more bonded debt was sold as the best way to pay off old debt.
For some clues as to what California
government might be like with Democratic legislative supermajorities and a
governor unlike Brown, it can be instructive to look at the actions of the
state Democratic Party convention staged on a March weekend in Los Angeles.
There, the party with virtually no
dissent adopted a platform endorsing complete legalization and then taxation of
marijuana, also taking a firm stance against any immediate hydraulic
fracturing (fracking) of the state’s immense shale oil and gas deposits, which
some studies claim could produce more than 100,000 new jobs.
Because state legislators are both
convention delegates and also pretty representative of delegates as a whole,
those actions give a decent idea of what state government might be like without
Brown.
A party that officially adopts stances
like those is one that does in fact need adult supervision. It’s one that without
a bit of restraint might push through not just those two policies, but also
other notions currently popular among Democrats.
For example, legislative leaders want
not only to restore all the deficit-induced cuts to human services made both by
Brown or kept on after Schwarzenegger’s departure, but they’d also like to add
state-funded pre-kindergarten, a positive idea yet the kind of thing likely to
put state budgets back into the red the moment a new glitch affects the
economy.
State Senate leader Darrell Steinberg
of Sacramento also wants to eliminate special elections for legislative
vacancies, allowing the governor to make appointments effective until the next
general election.
Steinberg
apparently presumes that’s the best way to keep his party’s on-again, off-again
two-thirds supermajorities intact in both the state Senate and Assembly, not
recognizing the possibility that voters might one day elect a Republican
governor, something they did as recently as 2006.
So far, Brown has shown little
interest in either idea, or some more radical ones also put forward by other
Democrats.
But it’s their actual platform planks
that show how much of a curb Brown has been on overly exuberant Democrats.
Yes, Colorado has completely legalized
pot for people over 21, while Washington state has granted some licenses to
grow cannabis for non-medical purposes. Brown says he’s happy to let them
experiment with it. “I’d really like those two states to show us how it’s going
to work,” he said.
Brown worries about “how many people
can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation?”
His thought more or less echoes those
of Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal, founder of the noted Phoenix House drug
rehabilitation program. Rosenthal warned in a recent essay that pot “damages
the heart and lungs, increases the incidence of anxiety, depression and
schizophrenia and can trigger psychotic episodes. Many adults appear able to
use marijuana with relatively little harm, but the same cannot be said of
adolescents, who are about twice as likely as adults to become addicted.”
Which suggests Brown is prudent to let
other states be test cases, something that will happen now if only because the
several proposed initiatives to legalize the weed in this state appear unlikely
to make this fall’s ballot.
Meanwhile, Brown okayed a go-slow
approach to fracking, which has not yet been proven to have harmed water
supplies desite many years of use on older oil wells in California, while it
has created boom towns in once-desolate states.
That makes it seem premature to ban
the process here, now the official party position and one that legislators
would most likely adopt if they didn’t believe Brown would veto any such bill.
One thing to think about for the
future: Even assuming Brown is reelected this fall, who’s going to provide his
style of non-confrontational adult supervision and restraint once he’s termed
out in 2018?
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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
Mr. Elias has quite obviously done very little if any research on the two important issues of this piece.
ReplyDeleteThere are two interesting facts on each subject he has conveniently ignored as he tries feebly to justify his opposition to the two issues.
On the issue of legalizing marijuana for recreational use it is only good common sense to do this not only in California but nationally. Worrying about keeping pot from people under 21 by not legalizing marijuana is a classic ostrich reaction since we are talking about a substance that can be procured at any middle school in California and certainly any high school throughout the country. Teenagers going back 50 years have figured out that stupidity a long time ago as well as the giant myth that pot leads to drug addiction. If you want to control a substance, you legalize it to the extent you take away the incentive to provide and buy it illegally.
Evidence America's grand stupid experiment with alcohol "Prohibition".
As far as "fracking" is concerned there is tons of evidence that the process of extracting the oil and the oil itself pose tremendous environmental dangers, not the least of which is the more highly volatile nature of the oil. But the most important consideration, to California especially, is the huge amount of water needed in the extraction process. When all one hears on every side of the political spectrum in this state is drought, drought, drought, it only makes sense to the greedy such as Mr. Elias, unfortunately, a very sizable population in California, to commit millions of gallons of water to this ridiculous process. Water that is mixed with highly toxic chemicals that would certainly eliminate it's post process use for human consumption. It is time for Mr. Elias to come into the 21st century.