GOP MISSING SO FAR IN GOVERNOR’S RACE

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“GOP MISSING SO FAR IN GOVERNOR’S RACE”

 

It’s easy to criticize the field now running for California governor, an office now occupied by perhaps the ultimate lame duck – Gavin Newsom.

 

One thing for sure, Newsom will not have much influence over the race to replace him. He’s certainly not positioned to name his successor, the way President Biden did when he quit his reelection run and anointed Vice President Kamala Harris.

 

Instead, the ultra-liberal Democrats who dominate every major office in California and run both houses of the state Legislature will be glad to see him go.

 

After all, Newsom is the man who vetoed state-funded home loans for undocumented immigrants and immediately afterward forced legislators to come back to Sacramento earlier than they wanted for a special session aimed at preventing sudden large gasoline price spikes.

 

No one in the field to succeed him has come close to doing some of the things he’s done: debate a governor from another state who seems to delight in taunting California and doing the opposite of whatever this state does, from allowing almost all abortions to keeping schools and businesses open during the Covid 19 pandemic.

 

Instead, we have the likes of Toni Atkins, longtime legislator who pushed through a lot of laws, very few of which are on the tip of anyone’s tongue. There’s also Betty Yee, the termed out state controller. And Tony Thurmond, two term state school superintendent who can’t point to many ways he’s improved public education during eight years in the office. Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, who has done about has much in her current office as Newsom did while he held it – virtually nothing – is also running. Add in ex-Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, beaten handily by Newsom when he ran in 2018. There will possibly be Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, best known for tough enforcement of state laws mandating huge amounts of dense new housing.

 

And there could be outgoing U.S, Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, defeated in her quest for the Senate last spring. 

 

None but Porter is exactly a household name. Yet. All are Democrats, with nary a Republican in sight. The closest thing to a GOP candidate is Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, now being sued for claiming his deputies prevented an assassination attempt when they arrested a man with guns and ammo in his car outside a Donald Trump presidential rally in Coachella.

 

In that way, the gubernatorial race looks a lot like this year’s run for the U.S. Senate did before former baseball player Steve Garvey got into it.

 

In short, the state GOP’s extreme lack of a bench – to use a baseball term – is painfully obvious.

 

The party not only holds no statewide offices, but it will not for at least another two years, and there’s no clone of Arnold Schwarzenegger waiting to pounce on Democrats as the muscleman actor did to ex-Gov. Gray Davis in a 2003 recall election.

 

Schwarzenegger is proof the Republican label does not have to be poison in California. But where are Republicans with experience in public policy who could govern as a bit of a counterweight to the big majorities held by legislative Democrats?

 

One big reason the state GOP has no significant bench is that so much of the party drank the MAGA Kool-Aid of Trump, who threatened to “primary” any Republican officeholder opposing him on almost anything, and then did so repeatedly.

 

But the “Make America Great Again” tag has been pure anathema in California. When 2018 GOP candidate John Cox adopted it while running against Newsom in 2018, he lost by the widest margin in almost 70 years. Running again in the 2021 attempt to recall Newsom, Cox drew just 4.4 percent of the vote. 

So much for MAGA in California, which Trump has never come close to carrying.

 

The reality is that there are not many differences among the current corps of candidates to take Newsom’s place in the state Capitol’s “horseshoe” executive area in 2027.

 

It’s doubtful that any of them would oppose many ideas the Legislature has been itching to pass, like those home loans for the undocumented.

 

That’s what California gets for having a Republican Party almost fully impotent at the state level.

 

    -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.

 

FALSELY BLAMING THE UNDOCUMENTED WON’T SOLVE HOUSING PRICE CRISIS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

1720 OAK STREET, SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA 90405
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“FALSELY BLAMING THE UNDOCUMENTED WON’T SOLVE HOUSING PRICE CRISIS”

 

No one who has looked at multiple listings of homes for sale anywhere in this country can doubt there’s a price crisis. That’s especially true in California, where the median price of homes sold in the last year topped $900,000.

 

This means almost half the homes sold here went for more than the mystical million-dollar figure. Five years ago, the median price was about $600,000. That is major league price inflation, which began while Donald Trump was president and continued steadily under Joe Biden.

 

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance says we should blame much of this on undocumented immigrants. They are, the Republican vice presidential candidate claimed in his debate with Democratic counterpart Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, “one of the most significant drivers of home prices in this country.”

 

He was taken seriously when claiming with a straight face that illegals, most of whom arrive at the southern border penniless or nearly so, are competing heatedly with American citizens for homes that cost, at a minimum, well above $100,000. It was an absurd claim, but has gone largely unchallenged.

 

“You’ve got housing,” Vance added, “that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”

 

That’s a tad hard to believe if you’ve ever seen undocumented immigrants living eight to a room in low-priced motel rooms in virtually every part of California.

 

Similarly, Vance claims the handling of undocumented children at the border became sloppier after Trump's term, insisting that more than 320,000 illegal immigrant children are now unaccounted for. Many, he claimed, are used as “mules” to carry drugs for Latin-American cartels. He offered no evidence for any of this.

 

In fact, the government says the actual figure is more like 80,000 untracked children. The rise in unauthorized immigration of unaccompanied children began in 2014, with its growth continual ever since. During 2023, more than 113,000 such children were released to sponsors (statistics from the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute include all counties receiving at least 50 children per year), while in the first quarter of this year, the number was about 61,000, suggesting a doubling of undocumented children going to American sponsors in just one year.

 

By comparison, when Trump held office during 2019, more than 320,000 cases involving unaccompanied undocumented children were referred for resolution hearings. That number oddly coincides with the quantity of kids whose whereabouts Vance claimed are now unknown.

 

The figures are clearly rising, even though this phenomenon has received little publicity, and Vance gave no indication where his number originated. Regardless, unaccompanied immigrant children are not bidding on many homes.

 

The Vance claims were part of a politically motivated drive to make illegal immigration an even more potent issue than it long has been. Linking illegal immigrants to increased housing prices was an attempt to combine two serious issues.

 

But it totally contradicts past Republican claims that any significant presence of the undocumented in a neighborhood will drive housing prices down. Vance did not explain how the same people can simultaneously drive real estate costs both up and down. This is about as plausible as arguing that dirt-poor illegal immigrants can somehow compete to buy homes at current prices.

 

Chris Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, told a reporter that “Immigrants do add to overall housing demand, (but) they cannot be blamed for the…surge in home prices and rents that took off in 2020 and 2021, when (overall) immigration reached its lowest levels in decades due to the pandemic.”

 

Plus, because they lack funds to buy at today’s prices, the undocumented are almost exclusively renters, not buyers.

 

“They are not the people who are buying homes,” Daryl Fairweather, chief economist for the Redfin online real estate service, confirmed to a reporter. He noted that to get a home loan, buyers need documentation, precisely what illegals lack…”They are more likely to seek out family members who already have a home, and double up.”

 

So this was a phony combination of issues from the moment Vance asserted it. One very real question is why almost no one called him out for it.

 

 

    -30-

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

CONFUSION, CONTRADICTION ON GASOLINE PRICE GOUGING

 CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “CONFUSION, CONTRADICTION ON GASOLINE PRICE GOUGING”

 

At every level of government, there are times when it seems the left hand has no clue what the right hand is doing. Nov. 8 might become one of those confounding times.

 

That’s the date – just three days after the presidential election – reserved by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) for a decision on whether to toughen state rules on the carbon intensity of fuels. The fuel of concern here is gasoline.

 

The more carbon oil refineries bake into the gas they produce, the more greenhouse gas emissions most car engines will spew, thus increasing smog. It has been CARB’s fervent mission since the 1960s to reduce smog in California’s air. That function is even enshrined in the federal Clean Air Act of 1970, signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon.

 

The problem is that toughening up California’s low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) will make gasoline more expensive. No one knows just how much more expensive, though, and CARB says it is not equipped to analyze what the effect will be on retail gasoline prices.

 

Most estimates, however, suggest a 65 cent per gallon increase if the LCSF is made a lot stricter, as proposed. That would come on top of California’s already high gas prices, which consistently run about $1.20 above the national average.

 

Nobody wants this, especially as California and the nation recover from a strong bout of general inflation.

 

At the very same time, the special legislative session called by Gov. Gavin Newsom this fall to counter gasoline price gouging by refiners has finished its work.

 

Newsom, not incidentally, appoints all CARB board members, and he can fire them anytime. But as he supposedly seeks to lower prices with one hand at the legislative level, an agency he can absolutely control may adopt a tactic guaranteed to increase prices.

 

If that’s not a confused contradiction, it’s hard to see what might be.

 

Newsom has taken heat from several members of Congress from both parties and from the governors of Nevada and Arizona (one Republican, one Democrat), for his plan – passed by the state Assembly and Senate – forcing refineries to maintain significant new reserves of gasoline for use at times when they shut down for maintenance or occasional emergencies.

 

Nevada and Arizona both get most of their gas from California refineries, and their governors fear creating a large reserve will drive pump prices up in those states, both now featuring a host of California emigres.

 

They’re probably wrong, because the reserve would not appear instantly, but gradually. Gas would be pumped into it at times of surplus, not when supplies are tight.

 

While the other governors’ concern is probably groundless, the new reserves are proving politically useful for some in this era of fearmongering politicos. Meanwhile, there is no doubt whatever that a severely lowered LCFS would raise prices.

 

So it’s high time Newsom tells his appointees to hold off on a stricter LCFS. Since he appoints the board members scheduled to vote on this, he can easily and properly tell them at least to delay their action until they know exactly how much it will cost consumers.

 

It's true that CARB does not usually worry about consumer costs, as it is supposed to deal almost solely with air quality and not what it costs. But for CARB to raise gas prices at the very moment Newsom seeks to steady them legislatively makes no sense at all.

 

Besides, there is no great urgency, no public pressure, to lower the LCFS just now, at least nothing like the urgency of the 1960s and 1970s, when banks of smoggy brown air hung over entire regions like Southern California, the Central Valley and (to a lesser degree) the San Francisco Bay Area. Ambient air is cleaner here now. Electric cars produce no smog, hybrids produce only a little and even gasoline engines spew much less than they once did, causing the browned clouds to become much more rare.

 

So it’s time Newsom stays his left hand while his right hand works on preventing gasoline price gouging. To proceed as now scheduled borders on insanity.

 e

 

 

 

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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

THE STRONG FACULTY LINK TO PRO-HAMAS DEMONSTRATIONS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

 

“THE STRONG FACULTY LINK TO PRO-HAMAS DEMONSTRATIONS”

 

More than 80 percent of Americans favor Israel over the Palestinian Hamas terror group in their ongoing conflict. Among college-age Americans, more than 57 percent favor Israel.

 

That’s according to a recent Harvard CAPS-Harris poll reported by the Center for American Political Studies.

 

Which raises the question of why pro-Palestinian protestors have dominated the campus scene in California and nationwide, staging far more rallies, setting up all encampments, occupying buildings and threatening and committing far more violent acts than their pro-Israel counterparts.

 

Now the AMCHA Initiative, a Santa Cruz-based group that has tracked campus antisemitism since the earliest years of this century, has found at least a partial explanation: It’s the faculty.

 

More specifically, it’s an on-campus group called Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), whose collegiate chapters and membership ballooned just after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas incursion into Israel that massacred more than 1,200 persons and took 251 hostages, many of whom Hamas killed in captivity.

 

FJP exists to further activities of the Hamas-linked college group Students for Justice in Palestine, whose anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrations mushroomed on Oct. 8, 2023, just one day after the massacre and more than one week before any Israeli troops entered Gaza in their current war with Hamas.

In a detailed study of protests at 100 universities, AMCHA found the number of demonstrations, the time encampments lasted and the number of incidents involving death threats and threats of violence against Jewish students was vastly higher on campuses with FJP chapters than those without.

 

This was true nationally and in California, where FJP and its affiliates have UC chapters at the Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz campuses, as well as at Stanford and USC, most of which saw lengthy encampments and building takeovers.

 

The study found incidents involving violet physical assaults of Jews on campuses were 7.3 times more likely at schools with an FJP chapter than those with none, like Santa Clara University and many Cal State campuses.

 

Death threats against Jews labelled “Zionists” were 3.4 times as common at colleges with FJP chapters, whose membership at California schools ranges from seven to 40 professors per campus.

 

FJP formally has two main purposes: to promote the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement designed to isolate Israeli universities and their faculty, and to purge all Zionist expression from their campuses.

 

Here’s some of how that played out at UC Santa Barbara, in a student’s description of one of many campus meetings about the Israel-Hamas war:

 

“For the Jewish students in that room, the betrayal in what a Black speaker said was palpable. (Jews) were framed as oppressors, even though it was their people who had been slaughtered just weeks before, over 1,200 lives, most of them Jewish, lost in the worst massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” they said.

 

“The reality of that horror was ignored. Instead, the speaker, president of (an) organization that…celebrated the Oct. 7 invasion, portrayed Palestinians as the only victims, as though the grief of the Jewish students…was offensive. (His) narrative left Jewish students stunned. They were grieving, heartbroken, and terrified, and now they were being painted as aggressors in a story where they had just buried their dead. This was soul-crushing.”

 

That experience, multiplied many times over, is one reason many Jewish students have transferred away from campuses they attended last year.

 

In a way, their leaving is a victory for FJP, one of whose stated goals is to squelch all disagreement with its views. Another stated goal is to dismantle many schools’ foreign study programs linked to Israeli universities.

 

Administrators at UC, Stanford and other campuses this fall adopted some of AMCHA’s suggested safeguard and enforcement mechanisms aimed at keeping politics out of classrooms, while leaving campuses open to peaceful expression of all views.

 

It's too early to know how this will play out, but an official FJP statement said “the work to educate and organize (students) will grow in new ways.”

 

One big question: How many students will be willing or able to risk their grades and futures by defying the views of some of their professors and how many will go along to get along?

 

    -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”

SOLANO COUNTY PLAN COULD HAVE CHANGED HOW CALIFORNIA DEVELOPS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“SOLANO COUNTY PLAN COULD HAVE CHANGED HOW CALIFORNIA DEVELOPS”

 

A measure allowing voters in Solano County this fall to approve – or not – a vast new development about 45 miles northeast of San Francisco just might have been the most influential local ballot proposition California has seen in decades. If it had gone forward.

 

This measure would have allowed a brand-new full-scale city to be built by a corps of billionaires as a partial solution to the housing shortage that has wracked the state’s lifestyle and politics for years, threatening both the nature of many neighborhoods and the independence of city governments.

 

But the billionaires pulled their proposition from the ballot at midsummer because they thought it might lose.

 

Instead of piecemeal infill developments and replacement of mini-malls and other relatively small buildings with huge high-rises containing hundreds of apartments and a few stores, this plan could have seen an entire new city plopped down on open space and farmland.

 

Land for this already belonged to an outfit called “California Forever,” which quietly spent years buying up pieces of property south and west of Suisun City, Fairfield and Rio Vista, eventually aggregating 50,000 acres. The billionaires, who did this gradually in order not to drive the price of land to forbidding levels, include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist Mark Andreessen, Lauren Powell Jobs, widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek, with Sramek now the project CEO.

 

Their purchases at one point had federal officials suspecting foreign agents might be angling for access to intelligence about the nearby Travis Air Force Base, a key facility for military flights to the Far East.

 

But this was no spy adventure. Rather, it’s a land use gamble, with the investors banking on the 259,000 registered voters of a medium-sized county about midway between San Francisco and Sacramento to okay a gigantic new kind of development. It won't go forward this year; but maybe next time.

 

The proposed new city was to be completely walkable and bikeable and might eventually house as many as 400,000 persons. So large a development by itself could put a sizeable dent in the state’s housing shortage, promoters say. They said they had arranged with a dozen potential employers to provide at least 15,000 jobs for residents in fields from retail sales to robotics.

 

Instead of parks and schools going in gradually while new residents filter into a raw development, all 17,500 acres in this one were to be ready almost simultaneously – stores, homes, apartments, parks, schools and offices all opening about the same time.

 

The billionaires also promised a $500 million fund to help new residents make down payments on homes. They planned a new sports stadium (are you listening, former Oakland A’s, now that Las Vegas shows signs of stadium hesitation?). Public transit would exist from the get-go.

 

It all would be a huge contrast with the way other cities – even master-planned ones like Irvine in Orange County – arose, with their sometimes haphazard placement of buildings, homes, parks, schools and other services.

 

The notion of using currently open land contrasts sharply with the trend of the last 10 years, stressing ever-greater urban density and the remaking of cities under threats of state legal action or funding cutoffs for services like police and sewers.

 

If the Solano County plan eventually happens, some of the vast desert spaces north and east of Los Angeles might also eventually find themselves hosting large new developments.

 

That’s the way much of California was built, long before politicians like Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco successfully campaigned to make urban sprawl political anathema.

 

But voters in Solano County apparently were set to say no to all this. Now no one is quite sure what happens next in a high-stakes story that could eventually affect not only Solano County but the entire state, whose development priorities could stand some major changes.

-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

A SUPREME COURT-ENABLED ATTACK ON CALIFORNIA’S HOMELESS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“A SUPREME COURT-ENABLED ATTACK ON CALIFORNIA’S HOMELESS”

 

It’s been largely obscured by the mainstream media’s justifiable and almost continuous focus on the ongoing presidential election. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s  summertime decision allowing cities and counties to take down and remove encampments erected by homeless persons has expanded into a growing campaign to virtually ban them from public spaces.

 

If the misery index of the homeless, 186,000 strong in California’s last semi-official count, was already nearing intolerable levels, new tactics authorized by local governments around the state seem about to turn the homeless into the hopeless.

 

This applies even in some cities once well known for their steadfast kindness toward and tolerance of the unhoused, including Berkeley and Santa Monica.

 

Just last month, on the same Tuesday evening Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debated in distant Philadelphia, Santa Monica’s city council voted 4-3 to eliminate a section of its anti-camping ordinance that has allowed homeless individuals to use pillows, blankets and bedrolls while sleeping outdoors. This includes sleeping bags, which church and charity volunteers have often distributed free at seasonal homeless shelters.

 

So the ultra-poor homeless populace – once able to get regular meals served on the lawn of the Santa Monica City Hall – now may be compelled to rest their heads on curbs while sleeping uncovered except by cardboard boxes in driving, near freezing January rains. Unless they are simply forced to keep moving along.

 

Local police say the revised law won’t change how they enforce the anti-camping measure, claiming they mostly use it to regulate encampments in public spaces.

 

But no one will likely know the full impact of the change until winter, when rains in recent years have flooded many of the homeless out of what little shelter their tents and tarps could provide.

 

Remember, this is a populace composed in large measure of the mentally ill, drug and alcohol addicts, persons suffering from PTSD and women driven from their homes by domestic violence, few of whom would be involved if they had enough money to avoid the situation.

 

Santa Monica is far from alone. In just over three months since the Supreme Court ruling, at least 17 other California locales -- and counting -- have taken similar actions. The new laws allow police to arrest homeless individuals apparently violating anti-camping laws, which vary only slightly from place to place.

 

They raise major questions: If the unhoused can’t camp on sidewalks or in parks, where are these virtually penniless folks to go? How long can they survive?

 

“Our residents are demanding a solution,” said the mayor of Vista, in northern San Diego County. His city has reactivated a 1968 ordinance banning encampments in the city.

 

In Berkeley, some local merchants don’t care where the homeless go, so long as it’s away from them.

 

A group of businesses filed suit this fall against the city government over homeless encampments near them. They claim financial harm from encampments due to unsanitary conditions, safety issues and “increased criminal activity,” as some encampment denizens threaten or intimidate potential customers.

 

Berkeley officials did not comment on the litigation, but its city council adopted a new policy allowing city officials to take down tent cities even when all indoor shelter beds are occupied if an encampment is a fire or health hazard.

 

No one knows where the tent residents might go if this should be enforced. Businesses and courts offer no solution.

 

Neither does anyone else. The city of Los Angeles this fall issued a report saying it would take ten years and $20 billion to solve its homeless problem. That would involve building 36,000 permanent housing units for homeless persons with chronic health conditions and 25,000 more apartments for very low-income residents.

 

The plan, not yet adopted by city council vote, assumes the city would continue operating shelters with 17,000 beds for several more years while all that is built. No one knows where funding might come from, especially now, with a major homeless housing operator having recently gone broke without accounting for millions of public dollars it received.

 

It’s an almost intractable problem, with few proven villains in sight, but plenty of very visible victims about to see their situation become much more difficult.

       

     -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

STATE BALLOT PROVIDES PLENTY OF INCENTIVE TO VOTE

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“STATE BALLOT PROVIDES PLENTY OF INCENTIVE TO VOTE”

 

There are occasional elections where voters are not asked to decide very much – as in last March’s primary where the presidential votes were not close and it was hard to find other significant issues.

 

Things are very different this fall.

 

Not only does the California ballot feature a unique presidential choice with a former prosecutor facing off against a convicted felon who's also a former President, but control of the House of Representatives may hinge on several congressional races here and the list of ballot propositions contains some that could create big changes for many people.

 

Voting begins soon, as mail-in ballots will start hitting mailboxes around California within the next two weeks.

 

Plenty has been written here and elsewhere about the congressional choices, where some races involve Republicans who have won repeatedly in districts where Democrats hold registration advantages. This means efforts by both parties to get their voters to actually vote could decide who will control policymaking in Congress for at least the next two years.

 

Polls indicate California’s Senate race between Democrat Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey is no real contest, with Schiff holding leads that average about 20 percent in virtually every poll.

 

But the statewide questions posed by 10 propositions provide fodder aplenty for voters to consider while marking their ballots.

 

For some, the most controversial of these is Proposition 5, placed on the ballot by state legislators who want to make it easier for cities and counties to raise money for affordable housing projects and infrastructure like sewers and bridges.

 

Since 1978, it has taken a two-thirds majority vote of local voters to pass bonds for such projects, other than schools, which for more than 10 years have needed only a 55 percent majority to raise money for buildings and other causes.

 

Prop. 5 would lower the passage threshold to that same 55 percent for many non-school projects, marking a fundamental change in 1978’s tax-limiting Proposition 13. This one is strongly opposed by the tax-fighting Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.

 

There’s also Proposition 6, another issue placed on the ballot by legislators. It would end forced labor by convicts in prisons and jails. If it passes, prisons could no longer compel inmates – no matter what crimes they’ve committed – to work. Prisoners could not be penalized for refusing assignments.

 

Of course, inmates could still get credit toward earlier-than-normal release for things like serving on fire-fighting crews, but they would have to be paid much more than the current pennies per hour.

 

That would mark a major change in prison life, giving convicts more choices and the chance at having even more empty time to while away than now.

 

Rent control is also back on the ballot, after voters twice earlier voted down statewide controls. Under Proposition 33, local governments would not need approval from their own voters to enact controls on residential property, not even on relatively new units built since 1995 that are now exempt from most rent control. The concept of vacancy decontrol of rents, allowing them to rise to market rates when tenants move out, would also disappear; local officials could keep controls in effect even when units are vacated.

 

Meanwhile, Proposition 34 goes after the tax-exempt status of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, aiming to strip its non-profit status. It would also allow Medi-Cal to negotiate many drug prescription prices for its clients, just as the federal Medicare system recently did with several drugs used nationwide, including insulin.

 

And Proposition 32 would raise minimum wages statewide to $18 per hour starting Jan. 1, less than two months after Election Day.

 

There’s also the ballyhooed Proposition 36, which aims to make felony prosecutions easier to conduct against repeat shoplifters and thieves even if their take from any one episode does not exceed the $950 bottom limit on the value of stolen goods needed for felony processing.

 

At the very least, this all presents a ballot that should be fascinating enough to hold voter interest for the few minutes it takes to mark choices that might affect millions of lives for many years to come.

       

    -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.

 

Suggested pullout quote: “The ballyhooed Proposition 36, aims to make felony prosecutions easier to conduct against repeat shoplifters and thieves.”

POLITICIZING CENSUS: THWARTED TRUMP AIM REAPPEARS IN PROJECT 2025

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“POLITICIZING CENSUS: THWARTED TRUMP AIM REAPPEARS IN PROJECT 2025”

 

There is no 2024 election phenomenon from which former President Donald Trump has tried harder to distance himself than Project 2025, an inch-plus thick manifesto from the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation written largely by former officials in Trump’s 2017-21 administration.

 

“I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposefully. I’m not going to read it,” he said during his Sept. 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

 

But days later, he said of the Heritage Foundation: “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do…when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

 

Every poll shows that when voters hear what’s in Project 2025, the vast majority recoil, reason enough for Trump to deny any link to it.

 

Among other things, the manifesto advocates criminalizing abortion nationwide, increasing some taxes and reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits.

 

But another provision, a direct call to politicize the U.S. Census, will ring bells with many Californians who remember Trump’s effort to do that in 2019, a move that could have cost California many millions of dollars in federal funds.

 

The Constitution says that every 10 years, the Census is to “enumerate” every person in this country, not property owners or voters or citizens or any other category. Just live bodies. The information is then used to divvy up seats in Congress and federal spending in many categories, from grants to police to funding new sewers.

 

Trump was determined during his administration to include a question on citizenship in the Census. Doing that, said opponents, would likely cause many undocumented immigrants who fear deportation to avoid being counted, even if it meant heading out the back door while Census takers knocked on the front one. This threatened to cause a drastic undercount of the undocumented, translating into significantly lower federal support for many programs, from Medi-Cal to assistance for teaching English learners in public schools. It also could have cost California a seat in Congress, because this state hosts more undocumented immigrants than any other, by far, and a severe undercount would show California population as far lower than it is.

 

That would be fine with Project 2025’s authors at the Heritage Foundation. One passage says, “A new (Trump) administration should work to actively engage with conservative groups…to promote response to the decennial Census.”

 

The idea, says Project 2025, would be to ensure that every conservative gets counted. It says nothing about Native Americans, immigrants or low-income communities, groups that reportedly often go undercounted.

 

So Trump’s supporters want to use the next Census to promote their interests, and his. They call themselves conservatives, while seeking to control what young women do with their bodies and the most private of their decisions, the opposite of the small government American conservatism has usually promoted.

 

For California, a positive in all this is that the next Census will not be conducted until 2030, with new congressional district lines effective in 2032. If Trump were elected next month and leaves office as scheduled in January 2029, that would leave plenty of time for a reversal of whatever changes he might attempt in the Census.

 

So this front in Trump’s long campaign to punish Californians for voting against him heavily in 2016, 2020 and maybe in 2024, could at least be delayed and might be avoided altogether despite what the Project 2025 blueprint says.

 

That would not stop him from acting against California on other fronts, like attempting to eliminate the state’s authority to regulate its smog levels and threatening (as recently as this month) to cut emergency services after fires and floods.

 

Should Trump get elected this fall and if his previously attempted plans to change the Census endure until 2030, California could be a big loser, given that the funds at stake cover government nutrition programs, public schools, highways, anti-pollution assistance and much more.

 

That’s just some of what’s at stake in the election that begins very soon.

 

 

    -30-

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

 

Suggested pullout quote: “This is one front in Trump’s long campaign to punish Californians for voting against him heavily in 2016, 2020 and maybe in 2024.”

LARA, NEWSOM APPEAR BENT ON ENRICHING INSURANCE COMPANIES

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

      “LARA, NEWSOM APPEAR BENT ON ENRICHING INSURANCE COMPANIES”

 

        From the way they’re acting, it’s clear Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara believe they have no choice other than caving in to insurance industry blackmail.

 

        Or maybe it’s extortion. Either way, these two supposedly strong and independent officials have been working steadily this year to enrich insurance companies.

 

        When State Farm announced a 30 percent hike in property insurance rates, neither elected official blinked. The same when Allstate and others announced even larger rate increases.

 

        Newsom, at least, has the grace to gripe about inflation at the same time he’s helping cause it. Lara doesn’t even mention the fact that astronomically higher homeowner and business property insurance premiums create burdens on individual citizens just as much as seemingly unending increases in grocery prices.

 

        Here’s the nature of the blackmail/extortion these men face: Insurance companies are steadily canceling more and more property insurance policies in known wildfire areas because, they say, the risks of writing or continuing that kind of coverage in those places are simply too high.

 

        Never mind that they have always in the past written such policies, making strictly local price increases when risks and replacement costs rose. If they now won’t write insurance, homeowners are forced to turn to the state Fair Plan, California’s insurer of last resort, where rates are much higher than even the companies charge.

 

        Newsom, who pushed unsuccessfully over the summer for a new law to greatly speed up processing rate increases, lost out when his plan went nowhere in the state Assembly and Senate.

 

        But…not to worry, Gavin. No sooner had that proposal died than Lara proposed virtually the same thing, but as a regulation, not a law. The essence is the same. The consequences for homeowners and businesses would be the same.

 

        Neither Newsom nor Lara needed to react to insurance company blackmail (“We’ll stop writing any policies in California if we don’t get our way.) by simply caving in. They could have told the companies something like this: If you don’t sell property insurance here, then you won’t be selling any car insurance or life insurance or coverage on luxury items, either.

 

        That’s called linkage, and California had it for earthquake insurance until the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. Until then, companies that did not sell quake insurance couldn’t sell other coverage in this state.

 

     But then-Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush set a precedent for caving in to the companies. Rather than fighting back, he lobbied the Legislature to create the California Earthquake Authority, which has had the good fortune to see its reserves pile up over 30 years in which the state saw no urban quakes of magnitude above 6.0 on the Richter Scale.

 

        The latest in Lara’s series of moves aiming to placate and bring more profit to insurance companies is his attempt to bring Newsom’s rate-hike speedup plan to reality via the back door.

 

        Primarily because of public hearings aimed at letting consumer groups shed light on rate increase requests, it usually takes some months to get a premium increase through. When rate hikes have been forced through faster, with only sketchy hearings, the companies have usually gotten about 97 percent of what they ask. But with full hearings, according to the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group, that percentage has been cut by about 25 percent.

 

        Even though the rate-making process takes about the same time with or without full hearings, Consumer Watchdog claims hearings have cut the prices paid by customers just over $6 billion over the last few years.

 

        The group says the 1988 Proposition 103 – which also made the insurance commissioner an elected post – requires full-scale hearings. Consumer Watchdog’s founder, Harvey Rosenfield, wrote that initiative.

 

        The bottom line: While Lara says “We do not have the luxury of time” in processing rate increases, reality suggests following the full procedures its author says are required by Prop. 103. This saves consumers money while not damaging the companies. Why, then, would Lara be trying to squelch that process if he’s really acting for consumers and not for the companies whose excesses he’s supposed to rein in?

       

 

-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

TRUMP’S ANTI-CALIFORNIA RIFF IGNORES POSITIVES

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “TRUMP’S ANTI-CALIFORNIA RIFF IGNORES POSITIVES”

 

        A bright sun, blue sky and equally blue Pacific Ocean formed the backdrop the other day when ex-President Donald Trump came to his golf course on the Palos Verdes Peninsula near Los Angeles essentially to run down California and blame everything he listed on Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he trailed by slim margins in most polls of that moment.

 

        It was like listening to the ultimate “declinist” diatribe, to borrow a term for this state’s critics coined by former Gov. Jerry Brown.

 

        Yet, for every claim Trump mentioned (true, false or partially correct), another observer might have named a positive, based on several recent independent studies.

 

        For one example, Trump said California has “the highest inflation” in America. Incorrect. This state has seen significant inflation, but nevertheless had only the seventh largest price increases in the nation over most of this year.

 

        Trump didn’t mention the WalletHub.com study indicating Californians had among the highest confidence in their own financial futures, based on personal spending and plans for it. Another sign of optimism: Californians ranked first in the nation, increasing their credit card debt by $4.5 billion in the second quarter of this year. Of course, California has by far the largest population among the states and therefore the most active credit card accounts.

 

        Trump claimed, too, that California has the highest taxes in America. Not true. Yes, this state has the highest sales tax, 7.5 percent. But overall, the tax burden here ranks eighth among the states, largely because of the 1978 Proposition 13, which puts California property taxes in the bottom half nationally despite the state’s ultra-high real estate prices. The Trump golf course benefits directly from this.

 

        But Trump neglected to mention that California ties Washington State as the best in the West for finding jobs, according to CommercialCafe.com rankings. San Francisco ranks in that study as America’s best city for starting a post-college career. Six other California cities ranked in the top ten of that category, including Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, San Bernardino, Victorville and Menifee. And it had four cities ranked in the top 10 best places for working parents: San Francisco, Fremont, Irvine and Oakland.

 

        Plus, California tops all states in the number of major corporations headquartered here, at 57, outstripping the 52 in New York and 50 in Texas.

 

        The ex-President blasted this state for its homeless problems, saying that “After Kamala Harris and Gavin Newscum (sic) took charge of San Francisco, homelessness increased by 200 percent.” Yes, homelessness has risen in California, standing at 186,000 unhoused statewide in the most recent surveys, but in San Francisco, it was at its lowest level since 2015 when surveyed early this year.

 

        At the same time, Trump never mentioned that California ranks in the top ten states for teachers' wellbeing, according to another new analysis, this from the WalletHub website. California has the seventh highest teacher salaries, when adjusted for the cost of living. It ranks first in digital learning for schoolchildren, and fifth in the pace of teacher pay increases. 

 

        For Trump to have cited any of California’s many positives (none cited here are related to the state’s best-in-the-nation weather), would not have benefited him politically.

 

        Instead, he compared California’s forest maintenance with Finland, ignoring that country’s location in far more northerly Scandinavia, where forest fires are scarce. Thickly wooded forests with dense underbrush that Trump believes should be cleaned out also are uncommon in the far north. Trump, aware he has no more chance than ever of winning California’s 54 electoral votes this year, also threatened to withhold federal firefighting assistance if the state sticks with recently adopted clean water standards.

 

        Trump’s anti-California riff was plainly designed for use in campaign commercials airing in other states where the positives of California life get short shrift on newscasts that often feature lurid video of wildfires and the mudslides that often follow. Not to mention car chases.

 

        But Californians would be wise to remember that news coverage generally features negatives more than positives, which means that declinist visions of California will always get more exposure than the positives, no matter what or when.

       

   -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

WHY WE NEED NEWSOM’S SPECIAL SESSION ON GAS PROFITS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “WHY WE NEED NEWSOM’S SPECIAL SESSION ON GAS PROFITS”

 

        The gasoline price gouging that has plagued Californians sporadically for decades appears no longer to be merely occasional. Rather, it’s become pretty steady.

 

        Oil companies and refiners have so conditioned millions of California drivers that today’s prices, still well above national averages, now draw few complaints because they are about a buck lower than a few months ago.

 

        But the facts remain: Every time refiners allow their stocks to dwindle while blaming either in-plant accidents or routine maintenance, pump prices skyrocket and profits of the oil companies that own California’s Big 5 refineries rise to record or near-record levels.

 

        This means any slight disruption in supplies, intentional or not, resulting from collusion between the companies or not, produces huge margins for the companies. They include Chevron, Marathon, PBF, Phillips 66 and Valero, which together produce the vast bulk of gasoline consumed here.

 

        They also supply neighboring states like Nevada and Arizona, but consistently refuse to cut back out-of-state shipments when those shortages occur, putting virtually all the high-price burden on Californians.

 

        When state legislators refused to confront these realities during their regular session ending as September began, Gov. Gavin Newsom called them back into special session.

 

        The session was to start immediately, but the state Senate leadership refused to heed Newsom’s order and its members headed home for what was scheduled as a three-month break.

 

        Senators later relented, saying they would return to work if the state Assembly passes a steady-supply bill. Most senators are Democrats who campaigned in part as consumer advocates. Did Newsom get them to partially relent by hinting he might cut back some of their perks and staffing funds, or maybe some of their expense accounts, at next summer’s budget time?

 

        Said Newsom in calling the session, “It should be common sense for gas refineries to plan ahead and backfill supplies before they go down for maintenance, in order to avoid price spikes. But the price spikes are actually profit spikes for Big Oil, and they’re using the same old scare tactics to maintain the status quo.”

 

        Among the scare tactics: Some refiners threaten to reduce operations or even shut down parts of their facilities if the state imposes new rules requiring consistent on-hand reserves.

 

        For sure, special legislative sessions focused on just one subject can generate powerful momentum for change.

 

        It took a special session in early 2023 to get the Legislature to create a new Oversight Division in the state Energy Commission and force refiners to file monthly supply and profit margin information with it. The division has the power to set price limits, but has never exercised it.

 

        This may be one sign of the clout Big Oil still has in California politics, even though all the state’s big refineries are owned by out-of-state companies, now that Chevron is moving its head office to Texas.

 

        Newsom ordered this fall’s supposed special session, the first in modern history to be rejected by any part of the Legislature, after lawmakers refused to act on his proposal to require that refiners maintain stable gasoline inventories at all times. This is opposed by the governors of Arizona and Nevada, which get their gasoline from California and worry a high inventory here will make their supplies less certain.

 

        But it would be one step toward preventing sudden spikes like the $2 per gallon hike that hit California consumers suddenly in February 2023, but barely touched Nevada and Arizona.

 

        Another step could be having the new Energy Commission division use its authority to set a limit on profits. Some consumer advocates suggested a limit of 70 cents margin per gallon of gas, far below their take when price spikes occur.

 

        No one knows how long Newsom’s special session order will stay in effect; it might thrust legislators into a special session running concurrently with regular business once the lawmakers return to Sacramento in December.

 

        But the bottom line is clear: If California ever is to stop the constant cycle of sudden gasoline price spikes followed by record profits and then by a gradual lowering of prices – but never down to prior levels – there has to be action sometime. As the old saying goes, if not now, when? 

-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 DEBATING SKILLS KEY ANOTHER HARRIS WIN?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

        “WILL DEBATING SKILLS KEY ANOTHER HARRIS WIN?”

 

        All through Kamala Harris’ political career, success in debates has keyed her victories in very tight elections. Her tactic of letting opponents beat themselves may have provided winning margins in two of her four major triumphs, including the one that propelled her into major league politics.

 

        That was her 2010 exchange in a so-far unique contest for what is California’s de facto No. 2 elective job, attorney general. It was the only time in state history that the state’s two most prominent district attorneys, the chief prosecutors of San Francisco and Los Angeles counties, have faced off.

 

        Befitting a once-time-only contest, that campaign was exceptionally close, pitting San Francisco Democrat Harris against Republican Steve Cooley of Los Angeles in a race decided by a margin of less than 1 percent, or 74,000 votes out of 9.7 million cast.

 

        There was only one debate in that contest, staged on Oct. 10, 2010 in a mock courtroom at the UC Davis School of Law.

       

        That’s where Harris first showed her ability to calmly let an opponent self-destruct. The significant moment came when a moderator asked Cooley, faced with being paid less as attorney general than he was as district attorney, whether he would use his county pension to make up the salary difference.

 

        Responded Cooley, “I definitely earned whatever pension rights I have, and I will certainly use that to supplement the very low, incredibly low salary that’s paid to the attorney general.” At the time, that official was paid $150,000 per year, while the average household income in California was $54,280.

 

        Harris, meanwhile, stood by silently, much as she merely chuckled over some of the falsehoods ex-President Donald Trump told in their Sept. 10 debate, including his calling her a Marxist and contending that illegal immigrants from Haiti are eating the pets of Americans.

 

        Cooley later conceded he erred in being so frank, but not before the Harris campaign featured his admission in campaign fliers. No one knows for sure, but there’s a strong likelihood his admission cost Cooley enough votes to win an election not decided until the very last day of vote-counting.

 

        Harris performed similarly in her other squeaker election victory, the one she shared with President Biden in narrowly beating Trump and then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2020, an outcome Trump still refuses to concede.

 

The closest he’s come to that was his offhand remark during the Sept. 10 debate, when he said “I’m not President right now.”

 

        In the Pence-Harris encounter, Pence tried to ape Trump’s often-used debating style of interrupting his opponents, who usually have been overwhelmed by Trump’s energy and not protested. But Harris broke in, reminding Pence that “I’m speaking!” Pence stopped talking.

 

        Polls showed that moment gained Harris and Biden significant support among undecided women voters.

 

        Which demonstrates that Harris has a gift for not beating herself while letting her opponents do just that to themselves.

 

        The key question all this raises, in light of many polls indicating a large majority of voters – including many Trump supporters who said their votes would not change – thought Harris won their debate:

 

        Will that debate be a new difference-maker for Harris in what figures to be another ultra-close election?

 

        Another key question: Should Trump agree to a second debate on another television network, as Harris now suggests, in an effort to reverse the apparent outcome of the September encounter? Trump says he won’t, but candidates often change their minds about debating or not.

 

        If he does that, Trump will figure he is capable of restraint when Harris tries to bait him into wandering far off his intended themes, as she did by questioning the Trump campaign’s tally of crowd sizes and reactions at Trump rallies.

 

        He has yet to demonstrate that capability, while Harris has, possibly thanks to her experience in courtroom exchanges that come about as close as real life gets to an election debate.

 

        It’s a key strategic decision for Trump, who has been reluctant to admit there’s anything he cannot do.

       

    -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.