Wednesday, March 26, 2014

SIX CALIFORNIAS? IT’S JUST A BAD IDEA

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 11, 2014 OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “SIX CALIFORNIAS? IT’S JUST A BAD IDEA”


          Here’s a piece of advice for registered voters: When petition carriers accost you outside supermarkets, big box stores or shopping malls asking you to help advance a plan to carve California into six states, don’t sign.


          For this is one of the dopiest, goofiest ideas ever to come up in California, which has a long history of flirting with – and sometimes adopting – nutty schemes.


          This plan would create the nation’s wealthiest state – to be named Silicon Valley and to include most everything from San Francisco south through Monterey County – and also the poorest – Central California, including the San Joaquin Valley, with per capita income below even Mississippi’s.


          You say you don’t like paying taxes to support two U.S. senators, a governor and a legislature of 120 persons? Well, get ready for 12 senators, six governors, all making well over $150,000 per year, and hundreds more lawmakers at more than $100,000 each, including perks.


          How about the state of Jefferson, including several Northern California counties that have flirted for decades with the notion of leaving California and joining some jurisdictions in southern Oregon? This one would not have a single University of California campus. Are residents there ready to pay out-of-state tuition of more than $36,000 per year for their kids?


          You think it’s tough to get agreements on water policy today with one state and the federal government involved? Just wait until six bureaucracies are floating ideas on how to divvy up scarce resources.


          Think you pay too much income tax now? If your pay comes from various parts of California, under this plan you might have to file income tax returns and payments in multiple states.


          And what if recreational marijuana were legal in, say, Silicon Valley, but not in some of the other new states? Californians could wind up in jail for bringing pot across the new state lines.


    It’s true that venture capitalist Tim Draper, the man behind this initiative, which is now being circulated by his paid workers, has recognized some good ideas in the past. He made much of his money off early investments in things like Skype and PayPal.


          Draper is also a libertarian. So maybe his real agenda here is to set up a situation where Silicon Valley firms like he’s backed can bring in all the cheap Asian labor they want, undercutting wages for qualified Americans.


          By going the initiative route with this idea, Draper circumvents any need to it approved by the current state Legislature, which would nix the idea in a moment. Instead, if this measure passed, only Congressional approval would be needed to make it reality. In a climate where representatives of other states consistently vote to deprive California of its fair share of federal spending, Congress isn’t likely to multiply this state’s Senate seats by six.


          But there remains the possibility that one major party or the other might see at least temporary political advantage in saying yes. There would be a strong possibility that at least three of the projected new states (Central California, Jefferson and South California, including Orange and San Diego counties) might elect two Republican senators each. If it became likely that another two GOP senators might somehow emerge, Republicans in Congress just might take to the idea.


          So it’s up to Californians to stop this ludicrously flawed idea before its goes any farther. The first thing they can do is refuse to sign petitions aiming to put it on the November ballot.


         
-30-
    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

WILL MANSON FAMILY KILLER EVENTUALLY GO FREE?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 2014 OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “WILL MANSON FAMILY KILLER EVENTUALLY GO FREE?”


          If it seemed like déjà vu all over again the other day when the state’s parole board issued a decision that could free a leading disciple of perhaps the most vicious killer California has ever seen, that’s because it was.


    The order marked the third time in the last five years that the Board of Parole Hearings has tried to release convicted Manson Family murderer Bruce Davis. The previous two attempts were reversed, first by ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and then by current Gov. Jerry Brown.


          This being an election year, it’s almost inconceivable Brown would allow Davis to be released this time, either. Going along with the parole board now would open Brown to Republican charges of being soft on crime, something he’s never been.


          It’s been more than 44 years since a cadre of young followers of the racist guru Charles Manson loosed a campaign of terror upon Southern California, their avowed purpose to get a race war raging across the state and nation. He called the scheme “helter skelter,” taking the term from a Beatles song.


          Their most notorious slayings were those of actress Sharon Tate and four others at her home in leafy Benedict Canyon on the northern edge of Beverly Hills and the killings of wholesale grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in their home a few miles away one day later. Manson’s henchmen (and women) covered the walls of the LaBianca residence in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles with racist slogans scrawled in their victims’ blood.


          Davis didn’t go on either of those expeditions, remaining at the (now built over) Spahn Movie Ranch in the Chatsworth area of the suburban San Fernando Valley on those humid August nights.


          But he did participate in the murders of movie stuntman Donald (Shorty) Shea, whose body was carved up and buried piecemeal around the ranch in the summer of 1969, and aspiring musician Gary Hinman, also cut to pieces with knives and a sword by Manson and friends.


          It’s difficult for those not involved in investigating, prosecuting or covering the Manson Family crimes to comprehend their gruesome nature. Trial testimony by one former Manson minion revealed that Davis held a gun on Hinman while Manson slashed his face with a sword, trying to extort money from him. Shea was killed allegedly because Manson feared he was a police informant.


          When Brown last year refused to allow Davis to be paroled, his six-page decision included this salient point: “In rare circumstances, a murder is so heinous that it provides evidence of current dangerousness by itself.”


          In short, Brown, who at that point had signed off on 81 percent of the parole board’s recommendations for releasing murderers serving life sentences, remembered the crimes well.


          To Brown and to most who still recall the Manson spree, the fact that Davis has claimed for more than 40 years he had little to do with Shea’s death, saying he inflicted only a “token” stab wound on the stuntman’s shoulder, matters little. The same for the fact he has been well-behaved in prison and has earned a Ph.D. while incarcerated.


          All of which raises the question of what might happen when California gets a governor who not only doesn’t remember the Manson Family, but has little heard about it. If Brown is reelected this fall, that question will be delayed. But the leading candidates to succeed him in 2018 might include Democrats like Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, two years old at the time the Mansons ran amok, and state Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris, five at the time. Brown’s current Republican opponents, Assemblyman Tim Donnelly and former financier Neel Kashkari, were respectively three years old and not born until about four years afterward.


          Might their lack of sentience at the time lead one of them to let Davis go? If so, that would be just plain wrong, for some crimes are just too horrible ever to be forgiven, no matter how old or intellectual the perpetrators may become.


         
    -30-
    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

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

FAVOR IT OR NOT, DEATH PENALTY CHANGES NEEDED

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 4, 2014, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “FAVOR IT OR NOT, DEATH PENALTY CHANGES NEEDED”


          Few topics divide California as consistently or as evenly as the death penalty. The last time voters had their say on it, they opted by a vote of just over 51-49 percent to keep it around.


          How avidly do supporters of capital punishment maintain their opinions? Two years ago, when the Proposition 34 ballot initiative aimed to dump capital punishment in California and disband the state’s only Death Row, in San Quentin Prison, its supporters raised $7.3 million while those wanting to keep the death penalty had barely $300,000. The no’s prevailed despite that huge financial disadvantage.


          So Death Row persists, with 736 denizens at last count, all convicted of the most vicious crimes, some of them repeat killers. As of March 1, 233 had killed children and 42 were cop killers.


          It takes so long for any of them to exhaust their appeals that the most common causes of death on Death Row are linked to old age.


          “It’s just wrong for these people to live that long after they have deprived others of their lives and taken the victims away from their families,” says former Gov. Pete Wilson.


          While the death penalty is opposed by groups from the California Nurses Assn. to the League of Women Voters and by every Roman Catholic and Episcopal bishop in the state, it is still reality, and the reasons for making it less time consuming include everything from finances to better justice for convicts. No one is talking about a rush to the gas chamber here.


          Little has ever united Wilson and his predecessor and fellow Republican George Deukemjian with Democratic ex-Gov. Gray Davis. But all back a proposed new ballot initiative to clean up the capital punishment process.


          How flawed is that process? It normally takes five years before a person under sentence of death has a lawyer assigned to his (almost all are men) case. It often can take four times that long before death penalty appeals are heard by the state Supreme Court, even longer before they reach the U.S. Supreme Court.


          One argument against the death penalty is that California has the nation’s highest rate of wrongful convictions, running as high as 7 percent in some categories. But that’s also an argument against the current inefficient administration of capital punishment cases. For the longer the appeals process drags on, the longer a victim of a mistaken or manipulated conviction is penalized. Appointing appeals lawyers right after death sentences are dispensed would likely cut that time.


          “The 30 years it can now take for the entire process to be resolved is also far too long for the families of victims,” said Davis. “They need resolution, too.”


          Phyllis Loya’s son Larry Lasater, an ex-Marine and a policeman in the East San Francisco Bay suburb of Pittsburg who was slain in 2005, is an example of the delayed process. “My son’s killer was sentenced in Aug. 2007, but didn’t get an appeals lawyer appointed until late in 2011, almost 4 ½ years,” the bereaved mother said. “Then the lawyer got nine extensions of the deadline for filing his opening brief over the next two years. That’s ludicrous, it’s nonsense.”


          Kermit Alexander, a former UCLA football player who was a pro-bowl defensive back for the San Francisco 49ers, shares her frustration. His mother, sister and two nephews were murdered in 1984 – 30 years ago – when gang members seeking someone else mistakenly invaded their home.


          “These vultures are still alive,” Alexander said. “I have not slept well since my mother was murdered.” He also wants the process speeded.


          Then there’s the issue of how to house Death Row inmates, each of whom now gets an individual cell, usually outfitted with radio and TV. Backers of the death penalty efficiency initiative, led by San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael Ramos, want them housed two to a cell, a change the state’s non-partisan legislative analyst says could save $10 million yearly.


          “Why should the worst criminals live more comfortably than the general prison population?” Ramos asks.


          While death penalty opponents say this is all strictly about retribution and note that killing criminals can’t reverse their crimes, most Californians still want capital punishment. And if California is going to have it, what sense is there in dragging cases out decade after decade because of bureaucratic delays, thus frustrating everyone from victims’ families to the wrongly convicted?

         

    -30-
     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

DEMO CONVENTION SHOWS RESTRAINT BROWN PROVIDES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
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?


          -30-

     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

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

UNPRECEDENTED CONSERVATIVE BACKING FOR MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 28, 2014, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “UNPRECEDENTED CONSERVATIVE BACKING FOR MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE”


          From the moment Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed America’s first minimum wage law in 1938 (25 cents per hour, or $11 a week), conservatives have fought increases every time and everywhere they’ve been proposed.


          It would cost millions of jobs, industrialists and business interests argue every time anyone tries to boost the minimum. Meanwhile, executive salaries have skyrocketed, leaving many millions of workers far behind in a phenomenon now called “income inequality.”


          But now comes Ron Unz, former publisher of the American Conservative magazine and once a Republican candidate for governor, backing a new minimum wage for California two bucks an hour above the $10 minimum now set to take effect two years from now. Unz is not to be taken lightly; he authored and largely funded the 1998 Proposition 227 ban on most bilingual education programs.


          Far from the Republican bugaboo it long has been, software entrepreneur Unz claims a higher minimum wage will solve many pet GOP peeves and could restore his party’s faded fortunes in the state. He is once again pushing an initiative, this time aiming to raise the minimum to $12 an hour immediately.


          But Unz doesn’t plan to fund the campaign for this one alone, and contributions from others have been slow coming. So it might not reach the ballot until 2016.


          If you’re a conservative and you don’t like illegal immigration, Medicaid, food stamps and other welfare programs, you might be disappointed by that kind of wait. For Unz makes a good case for his claim that the best way to cut back on all those longtime GOP targets is to eliminate the need for them by paying workers more.


          “I first got involved with this when I realized that a higher minimum wage solves the illegal immigration problem. The vast majority of illegals are in this country for jobs, jobs Americans won’t do,” Unz says. He claims it’s not the nature of work in car washes, hotels, restaurant kitchens and vegetable fields that turns off American workers – it’s the lousy pay for that work.


          “Americans won’t do those jobs because the wages are so low you can’t survive,” he says. “Now Los Angeles is talking about raising the minimum for hotel workers there to $15. When you raise the wages to a level like that, a lot of people are suddenly happy in jobs they wouldn’t touch before.”


          If U.S. citizens take those jobs once they pay significantly better than welfare, a lot of the illegal immigration problem will go away. The same for programs like food stamps and Medi-Cal, Unz claims.


          President Obama’s effort to up the federal minimum to $10.10 gets firm resistance from Republicans in Congress voicing the same old arguments. Fighting Obama’s plan, Republicans pounced on a February report from the Congressional Budget Office saying it could cost about 500,000 jobs nationally.


          Unz argues that number is misleading. Initial job losses, he claims, would be followed by job increases stemming from the roughly $150 billion a year the higher minimum would put into the economy. California Assembly Speaker John Perez, a Democrat, made the same argument last year while backing the scheduled 2016 increase. “Putting that kind of money into the economy will create far more jobs than it might cost,” Perez said.


          And, Unz said in an interview, the report to Congress found that 27 million people – about 98 percent of those affected – would benefit, while just 2 percent might not. “If a policy helps 98 percent of the people affected, it usually looks pretty good,” Unz deadpanned.


          Plus, he figures, when minimum wage earners get more money of their own and need less welfare spending, the government will save as much as $250 billion a year which could be used for anything and might beef up the economy.


          So far, Unz has won backing from prominent conservatives like Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly and talk show host Bill O’Reilly. But elected politicians on the right are staying away from his putative proposition and those on the left are silent, perhaps because Unz would considerably outdo the plan they passed last year.


          Whenever this plan reaches the ballot, Democrats will be in the odd position of either backing a Republican’s plan that makes them look like pikers, or opposing their own ideas.


          -30-

     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

PROBLEMS KEEPING THE HYDROGEN HIGHWAY CLEAN

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 25, 2014, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “PROBLEMS KEEPING THE HYDROGEN HIGHWAY CLEAN”


          Cleaner air, that’s the aim of about $30 million in “hydrogen highway” grants given each year by the California Energy Commission to companies that will build refueling stations for the hydrogen fuel cell cars due to hit the road between now and 2017.


          But the commission has had great difficulty keeping its own grant-giving process clean. And trouble may be cropping up again, as the commission gets set to pass out a new batch of grants.


    This time, the problem could be a conflict of interest involving a former University of California scientist who said in an online resume that (while consulting for the commission) he  “led the..effort…to develop the …hydrogen station roadmap.” A new company co-founded by that scientist, Dr. Tim Brown, apparently now seeks millions of grant dollars, possibly using information he saw when working for the commission.


          The recent history of this program clearly implies that no one should be surprised at any ethical problems the commission might blunder into.


    Less than two weeks after this column in 2012 exposed a pattern of favoritism and cronyism in grant giving, the commission pulled back $28 million in awards it had announced.


    That year, the tentative grants had gone only to station-builders approved by at least one auto manufacturer and virtually all were earmarked for members of the $87,000-per-year-dues California Fuel Cell Partnership, of which the commission was also a paying member. As planned, millions of state dollars were to go almost exclusively to billion-dollar corporations approved by other billion-dollar companies. Non-partners could also apply, but with little chance of success.


          Energy commissioners changed their rules, but much of the money – from vehicle license fees – ended up with the same companies previously due to get it.


          Then, last May, this column exposed the fact that at least one grant handed out in 2013 went to a company proposing to install hydrogen systems in a Beverly Hills gas station – even though the station owner had not agreed to permit the installation.


          Now there's Brown, until January a senior scientist in the Advanced Power and Energy Program at the University of California, Irvine. He left UCI to start and become president of a hydrogen energy firm called First Element Fuel.


          Reliable sources say First Element has applied for well over $10 million in hydrogen station grants. The owner of one service station near Marina del Rey confirms First Element contacted him recently, trying to induce him to defect from a letter of intent he previously signed as part of another company’s grant application. Sources say First Element has also contacted other station owners already signed up by others.


    The Energy Commission stonewalls on all this, refusing to confirm or deny either that Brown ever consulted for it or that First Element applied for grants. Nor will it say whether Brown had access to other companies’ previous grant applications. The commission refuses even to say whether it would be illegal for one of its former consultants to profit from inside information. For sure, that circumstance would at least convey the impression of corruption.


    Tentative new grant awards are to be announced on or before March 28.


          “The Energy Commission does not discuss applications during the screening and scoring process,” the agency said in an emailed statement. “As part of its process, the Commission screens for potential conflicts of interest and takes appropriate action to ensure the integrity of the competitive process.”


          But the commission’s record demonstrates any efforts to ensure integrity have been incomplete at best.


          Meanwhile, Brown did not return email and telephone messages inquiring about his new company and how it came to try to poach stations already signed up by another grant applicant. His resume disappeared from First Element’s website after those attempts to reach him, but printouts remain.


          The overall picture is of an agency which has had trouble administering a clean program, no matter what it says. Maybe it will do better this time, for if it can’t run a clean program, how can it help clean the state’s air?


          -30-

     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

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

PG&E GAS RATE REQUEST: NEW STANDARD FOR CHUTZPAH

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


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “PG&E GAS RATE REQUEST: NEW STANDARD FOR CHUTZPAH”


          At the very moment that California’s largest utility company was being assessed a $14 million fine for failing to report discovery of flawed records on its gas pipelines in the San Francisco Peninsula town of San Carlos, the same company was asking for well over $1 billion in rate increases to pay for repairs to that very same pipeline system.


          That alone would demonstrate remarkable chutzpah, the Yiddish word for sheer audacity and gall in overstepping the bounds of accepted behavior. But at the same time late last year, the company, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., was also asking the state Public Utilities Commission for a 12 percent increase in its ordinary rates.


          If PG&E gets away with much of what it now seeks, you can bet on similar breaks for the other big California gas utilities, Southern California Gas Co. and San Diego Gas & Electric, both owned by Sempra Energy, which has annual revenues of more than $10 billion.


          It’s certainly not the first time PG&E, the San Francisco-based outfit whose pipeline exploded in 2010, killing eight persons and destroying 38 homes in San Bruno, has shown chutzpah, sometimes interpreted as insolence. “Negligent” was the word employed by the National Transportation Safety Board to describe PG&E’s conduct (along with a finding of lax enforcement by the PUC).


          This, after all, is the same company that got away with using obscure rules to declare bankruptcy while sitting on plenty of resources during the energy crunch of 2000-2001, a move that allowed it to restructure itself for greater future profit.


          But bankruptcy did not have a direct adverse effect on the consumers – residential and commercial – who finance PG&E. The requested new rates would.


          For much of the repair and maintenance work PG&E (like the other gas companies) wants customers to pay for now should have been done years ago with billions of dollars in maintenance money consumers have paid via their monthly bills since the 1950s. It’s still unclear just what PG&E and the others did with the cash earmarked for maintenance, but plainly, not all was spent on that.


          All of which means PG&E has not deviated from its long-stated goal of having its customers put up new funds for it to bring its system up to the level of safety it should have had all along.


          The $14 million fine utility commissioners assessed against PG&E for its San Carlos misbehavior may signal some change in the attitude of the PUC, which has long given its obligation to keep the utilities financially sound a higher priority than its other big mission, keeping prices in line for customers.


          “This penalty is to serve as a deterrent against similar future behavior,” said Commissioner Mark Ferron.


          But only time and the PUC’s final decisions on both PG&E rate increase requests will determine whether the commission’s kabuki dance of the last six decades will continue. This dance has long seen utility companies make large rate increase requests only to see the commission cut them down.


          Of course, no one but company executives ever has known how much they really needed to remain solvent – all we know is that no California utility has ever gone under, despite PG&E’s highly questionable 2000s-era venture into bankruptcy, a trip to financial purgatory that somehow did not cause even one of the firm’s top executives to lose his job.


          What we do know is that consumers who paid billions in maintenance money over many, many years would have every reason for righteous indignation if asked to pay for upgrading the pipeline systems of any of the utilities.


          The same, of course, would be true if Southern California Edison and SDG&E customers who have paid for years into a fund for use in the eventual decommissioning of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, were forced to pay extra because now it really is closed. In both cases, the blunders leading to the problems were done by the companies, not their customers. Which means they and their stockholders, not the customers, should be paying the price of failure, whatever it might be.


    -30-
    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 third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net


JERRY BROWN CALLED LAZY, VULNERABLE

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


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “JERRY BROWN CALLED LAZY, VULNERABLE”


          Jerry Brown has been called a lot of things in his 45-year political career, from “Gov. Moonbeam” to “the old man,” but no one ever accused him of being a do-nothing dud of a politician. Until now.


          Changing the state’s school-funding formula, balancing the budget after years of deficit, proposing a massive water transportation plan and spearheading a successful campaign for a tax increase were not enough to make Brown a busy man, says his most likely fall reelection rival.


          “Brown is a caretaker governor,” charges Neel Kashkari, leading Republican in some recent polls. “I’m telling you, he’s a status quo guy. I call him lazy and unwilling to make the major changes we need to bring California back from the Great Recession. All he does is nibble around the edges of problems.”


          This unique criticism of Brown will be a major theme of Kashkari’s campaign against the 75-year-old Democrat. Kashkari, a former executive of the Goldman Sachs banking house, led the federal Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program for several months under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He takes much credit for rescuing the U.S. economy from disaster and is the early favorite over fellow Republicans Tim Donnelly and Andrew Blount in the June primary election.


          For sure, Kashkari is a different sort of Republican candidate, perhaps one California voters will be ready to accept. The Ohio-born son of Indian immigrant parents, he didn’t get here until 1998, then left for more than three years’ work in Washington, D.C. So he’s only lived here about 13 years, less than any serious candidate for governor in modern memory.


          “If time in California were the criterion leading to a great governor, Brown would be great,” the intense, shaven-headed Kashkari said, seated in a San Fernando Valley coffee shop.


          Kashkari is unlike other recent top Republican nominees: He’s not a billionaire, his net worth estimated at “only” about $5 million; he can’t write big checks to his campaign every time the bank account gets thin, a la Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Arnold Schwarzenegger and William Simon.


          “I won’t contribute anything,” he says. That would contrast enormously with Brown’s 2010 opponent, Silicon Valley executive Whitman, who spent more than 140 million of her own dollars without coming close.


          “Brown is vulnerable,” Kashkari declares. “He wants to spend $67 billion on his crazytrain (Kashkari code for high speed rail) and one poll I saw had only about 33 percent of voters wanting to reelect him.” The same survey, however, found 59 percent approve Brown’s job performance, an odd polling combination.


          Kashkari says he’d pursue two main goals if elected: creating jobs and reviving California education. Asked how, he makes a major commitment to exploiting the state’s huge shale oil and gas reserves, without imposing a new drilling tax. He would also make a big push for less regulation of business, something Brown has tried, but not been able to push through the Legislature.


          How would Kashkari operate as a Republican dealing with a large Democratic legislative majorities? He doesn’t explain in detail. But he insists that “I would bring a lot of companies back to California, not have them continue moving out of state,” also a theme of the previous three GOP candidates for governor. But he doesn’t detail how he’d help business cope with high housing costs that prevent many companies from recruiting out-of-state workers here.


          He also insists he’d pursue development of new reservoirs to store water in wet years and prepare for dry ones, but does not say where he’d put them. “We need a large water bond on the fall ballot,” he says. “I blame Brown for lack of preparation for the drought.”


    But in more than an hour discussing what he would do, there were no details on how he’d revive education, where California’s per-student spending is among the lowest in America.


          Kashkari brings obvious energy to the campaign trail. But his big handicap also is obvious – voters don’t know him. Not one person in that coffee shop appeared to recognize him, despite his distinctive appearance.


          Can Kashkari win in a state where Republicans are badly outnumbered and where he’s never run for any office, where he’s voted in barely half the elections during his time here? He says yes.


          Brown doesn’t seem worried.


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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