Sunday, January 26, 2025

TRUMP MAKES NICE, BUT ‘WAR ON CALIFORNIA’ PERSISTS

 CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

 


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

 “TRUMP MAKES NICE, BUT ‘WAR ON CALIFORNIA’ PERSISTS”

 

President Trump made nice during a three-hour stopover at the Palisades fire in Los Angeles, possibly the most costly natural disaster in American history, but his longstanding political “War on California” did not abate.

 

 

He declaimed that “We want to get the problems fixed,” and even embraced Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom he usually calls “New-scum.”

 

 

But he did not walk back demands to condition federal crisis aid on California adopting a voter ID system like Republicans have used to cement power in states they control, or his demand that much more Northern California water be moved south – even though there are no shortages anywhere in California today. Trump also talked about water from the Pacific Northwest, from which California gets none.

 

 

Never mind that there is also no mechanism to move much more water south than gets sent today. Newsom has spent years pursuing a putative tunnel to bring more water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, but no shovels will be turned soon. 

 

 

When Trump sees political rivals in the flesh, he plainly has less appetite to insult them. But that didn’t change any policy he set up via executive order within hours of being sworn in for a new White House term.

 

 

Yes, the futures of tens of thousands of fire victims are at stake just now. But a lot more than that is also involved, even if Trump did pause his stream of victim-blaming to express wonder at the scope of damage.

 

 

One key area is agriculture, where Trump threatens disaster for California farms, 41 percent of whose workers are undocumented. He ordered a new set of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, without revealing time and place. Deport those workers and crops from pistachios to peaches, from rice to apricots, could rot on the tree or vine.

 

 

He also threatened to prosecute local officials who don’t aid his planned deportations of undocumented immigrants. Several dared him to try.

 

 

Trump also immediately ordered offshore oil drilling to resume in federal waters. That could produce conflicts between state and federal officials, since California owns all waterfront property from the average mean high tide line out for about three nautical miles. It’s impossible to get offshore oil to trucks, pipelines and refineries without crossing state property, and the state Lands Commission – controlled by Democrats – has long been hostile to offshore drilling. 

 

 

So Trump’s frequent calls to “drill, baby, drill,” may lead to long legal battles before a drop of offshore oil arrives.

 

 

Trump also signaled he will try again to nix California’s authority to lessen automotive and industrial smog production here. That authority derives from the federal Clean Air Act. It has led to far cleaner air in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area and the Central Valley even as population and traffic increased greatly over the law’s 54-plus years. 

 

 

The renewed president also said he wants to end federal price supports and incentives for buying electric vehicles. Newsom responded that the state would likely reinstate its own incentives if federal ones disappear.

 

 

One Trump tactic: He cancelled subsidies for buying zero emission cars, trucks and other equipment under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

 

State Attorney General Rob Bonta, a likely candidate to succeed Newsom when he’s termed out after next year, promised early on to revive the state’s leadership in resisting Trump proposals affecting climate, immigration and other areas. State legislators quickly voted $25 million to help with this.

 

 

Bonta’s first effort was a lawsuit to throw out Trump’s executive order ending “birthright citizenship,” the 14th Amendment guarantee that almost anyone born in this country will be a citizen. The provision has been affirmed by at least two Supreme Court decisions; Bonta maintains it can only be changed via another constitutional amendment. Trump demurs.

 

So far, this is merely a legal war, with Trump issuing orders and California resisting some. But even California Republicans are calling on Trump to forget about conditions on disaster relief. As they noted, the fires did not discriminate between members of the two major parties. 

 

The open question: How long will this “war,” which really began almost eight years ago, drag on and how much will it damage Californians?

 

    -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

WILDFIRE FUND MAY FALL SHORT IF UTILITIES FOUND AT FAULT

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS5
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2025 OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WILDFIRE FUND MAY FALL SHORT IF UTILITIES FOUND AT FAULT”

 

When Gov. Gavin Newsom and his political donor cronies at Pacific Gas & Electric Co. cooked up the $13 billion California Wildfire Fund in 2019, they never conceived of wildfire damages on the scale of either the Palisades or Eaton blazes that together have been the most expensive in state history. The latest credible estimate of total replacement cost came in at $250 billion.

 

As it was, the fund was plenty controversial, arriving just after PG&E equipment was officially blamed for starting the Paradise fire, which leveled the Butte County town and its surroundings in 2018, and others. As one result, many consumers advocated breaking up PG&E or having the state take it over while it struggled in bankruptcy.

 

But Newsom pushed a law known as AB 1054 through the Legislature, creating the fund that was supposed to cover liabilities for damage caused by utility equipment starting future wildfires. Electric companies kicked in $7 billion toward this, while every customer of privately owned firms like PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric will be paying $2.50 a month for it until 2036.

 

So far, PG&E is the only utility that’s made use of this pot of cash, drawing out a reported $150 million for some damages from the 2021 Dixie fire, which struck the Plumas County town of Greenville and parts of four other counties.

 

Now lawsuits from homeowners hit by the Eaton fire in and around Altadena, which burned more than 14,000 acres in eastern Los Angeles County during January’s massive suite of firestorms, charges Edison with failure to turn off power to the transmission tower just above the spot where that fire began. The suit claims Edison had ample warning of extremely fire prone conditions, but did not shut down the juice.

 

Said one lawyer involved, “Everything we’ve seen points to Edison’s power lines being the cause.”

 

The Eaton fire covered more than 14,000 acres and burned 1,000-plus homes and businesses.

 

Some also charge Edison equipment caused the much smaller Hurst fire in the Sylmar portion of Los Angeles on the same day, with no definite ruling rendered yet.

 

Final damage figures from the Los Angeles area fires are not certain. If any claims against it stick, Edison may wind up drawing far more from the state Wildfire Fund than PG&E has done so far. It might even exhaust the fund.

 

This again raises a question that dogged the legislation creating the fund: Why should most California electricity customers pay for damages caused by negligence or malfeasance from the state’s monopoly investor-owned utilities?

 

At the same time, because they did not contribute to the fund and their ratepayers don’t pay into it, publicly owned utilities like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) cannot draw from the fund.

 

This means that if DWP equipment is found to have started the even more widespread and damaging Palisades fire, Los Angeles taxpayers could wind up with expanded tax bills. That blaze, said to have begun on or near a remote trail in hills behind the area, destroyed about half the homes in the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles, plus many beachfront homes in Malibu.

 

There were initial reports of fireworks-like noises in the vicinity of the ignition point about the time flames began.

 

The upshot here appears to be that the swiftly and crudely drawn legislation passed at the behest of Newsom and his longtime benefactor PG&E could prove both unfair to most consumers and inadequate to cover damages if one or two of the state’s utilities are found at fault.

 

Meanwhile, insurance companies will complain nonstop for years to come about the gigantic sums they will have to pay out to cover affected policy holders. But much of the money they dispense will likely be refunded by the utilities (or their customers) if the wildfires are officially blamed on those outfits, as happened in several Northern California wildfires where insurance companies still gripe about alleged large losses they never really incurred.

 

It's a confused scene bound to end up unfair to millions of Californians, coming on top of huge damages already suffered by many thousands of burned-out residents.


-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

Sunday, January 19, 2025

STATE AGAIN GIVES FARMERS AN ABSURD WATER ALLOCATION

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2025, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

"STATE AGAIN GIVES FARMERS AN ABSURD WATER ALLOCATION”

 

The thousands of drivers traversing Interstate 5 on any given day this winter can see for themselves: nothing even remotely like a water shortage currently plagues the State Water Project.

 

This is completely obvious from the major viewpoint off the east side of the interstate between Justine and Patterson, from which it’s clear that all major canals of the project just south of the Delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers are full to capacity, or nearly so.

 

It's much the same a few dozen miles to the southwest where the water project’s largest man-made lake, the San Luis Reservoir, is chock full. Sand-colored margins that grew steadily larger during the drought of the 2010-20 decade have long since been inundated, with the artificial lake shining bright blue on crisp, sunny winter days.

 

Water officials also promise San Luis will soon be expanded.

 

So why does California’s Department of Water resources persist in providing preliminary farm water allocations that can only be described as pikerish?

 

It may be due to insecurity, a sense that the Pacific Ocean is due for a long-running “La Nina” condition that could produce a new drought and lower water levels of the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project to the dangerously dry levels of seven and eight years ago. Or it may simply be bureaucrats reminding farmers that they control the lifeblood of America’s most productive agricultural region, also one of the five largest industries in California.

 

But the reality – especially after heavy “atmospheric river” rains in mid-November and December drenched Northern California – is that farms will receive far more water than the 5 percent of requested amounts promised them in late December, when state officials behaved as if the November downpours would be the water year’s last precipitation.

 

Yes, it is the duty of water officials to husband California’s water supplies to make sure neither cities nor farms ever run completely dry. But 5 percent made no real sense.

 

It’s as if the bureaucrats who work for Gov. Gavin Newsom wanted to put the lie to his post-election pledges to pay more heed to the Central Valley and its interests, whose sense of being disrespected was one reason that region was the only major part of California carried by President Trump in last fall’s election.

 

This adds up to a need to change some practices, including a few outlined by Karla Nemeth, director of the Department of Water Resources. “We need to prepare for any scenario, and this early in the season we need to take a conservative approach to managing our water supply,” she said.

 

But that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for farmers to plan crops unless they depend greatly on ground water, a resource becoming increasingly depleted while ground levels above aquifers subside. And they have subsided, as anyone can deduce from seeing onetime irrigation pipes that now rise several feet above current ground levels.

 

Better to compromise a bit in years following a few seasons of heavy rain, today’s situation. Another way to put this might be to ask why state bureaucrats push a number and then essentially wink at farmers to tell them what they’re hearing is nowhere near what will eventually govern. That’s what happened last year, too, when the initial estimate of what farmers would get was 10 percent of requests and the ultimate amount was 40 percent – still using conservative allocations to make sure – unnecessarily – that reservoirs and canals remained full all year round, rather than just partially full.

 

Even now, after a 2024 that was much drier than 2023 and an early winter with virtually no rain in Southern California, drinking water reservoirs remain nearly full. Diamond Valley Lake, near Hemet, the largest such potable water storage facility in Southern California, was at 97 percent of capacity shortly after Christmas.

 

All this makes it high time for California water bureaucrats to cut out their act and provide farmers and other citizens realistic supply estimates, rather than constantly reserving the right to leave water districts and their people and industries high and dry, even when supplies are copious.

 

 -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

 

DECISION TIMES BEGIN SOON FOR NEWLY HOMELESS FIRE VICTIMS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“DECISION TIMES BEGIN SOON FOR NEWLY HOMELESS FIRE VICTIMS”

 

As the flames of California history’s most damaging winter began to cool, decision times were about to arrive for tens of thousands of the state’s newest homeless.

 

Some evacuees had homes to return to; some did not. This was almost like a random lottery. But those whose homes fell to the mid-January firestorms suddenly face decisions they never wanted to think about.

 

The questions are no different from those that confronted victims of many fires over the last few years, but are made different and maybe more difficult because of scale. Never before have more than 10,000-plus fire victim households faced these issues simultaneously.

 

Do they rebuild, or do they sell the land long occupied by their ravaged homes? Do they settle for what insurance companies are willing to pass out, or hire a lawyer? With insurance companies bringing claims adjusters from around the nation, many of them unfamiliar with California conditions, do they hire a public adjuster to fight lowball damage evaluations?

 

Amid a housing shortage, do they seek a temporary rental or try to buy something in what is fast becoming a seller’s market? Do they want to keep living in what proved to be a hazardous environment, no matter how benign it seemed for previous decades?

 

The paths many will choose were eased only a little by an executive order issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom while flames were still spreading. He took the California Environmental Quality Act off the table, so environmental impact reports will no longer be a necessity for anyone rebuilding anything even similar to a previous abode or commercial building. CEQA never applied to individual homes, so this will aid only developers doing multiple rebuilds. For those who lost homes at or near the beach, Newsom's order means the state Coastal Commission won’t have a voice in how or what they can build.

 

But what about folks in their 70s and 80s? One 85-year-old Pacific Palisades resident whose longtime home burned down said he would rebuild. Noting he would be about 90 when that project ends, he said, “So I’ll be 90? So what?”

 

Others in that age cohort will no doubt opt to take insurance settlements and sell their land for others to rebuild upon, while moving to condominiums in untouched areas or to independent and assisted living facilities.

 

Younger homeowners will for the most part rebuild, as has happened with most residents of other fire-ravaged areas from Santa Rosa and Napa to San Diego and Malibu.

 

Whether in Northern California or Southern California, in a forest or along the ocean, reporters visiting the blackened scenes of fires a week or two after blazes end often are told by determined residents, “This is the price of living in paradise. We knew the risk and we’re coming back.”

 

To obtain fire insurance when they do that, they will have to use fire-resistant materials not commonly employed in earlier eras when most of the destroyed homes were built. Stone and Spanish tile roofs will be more common. So will fireproof siding. Finer screens will be deployed over vents where flying embers sometimes enter homes and ignite attics. Landscaping will employ more fire-resistant vegetation and fewer trees that can fall or spread flames. Nothing on the exterior will be placed even near to most walls.

 

Homes and buildings thus will more resemble small forts than ever before in California. There will be more brickwork, too, even if that can be an earthquake hazard.

 

The entire process, replete with permitting delays and contractor cost overruns in the coming boom construction market, will take more than five years, during which whole sections of cities will be grossly underpopulated.

 

There will be scams and gouging galore, even though some hotels and merchants now are offering deep discounts to fire evacuees. Some lawyers will demand unethically large percentages of insurance settlements. Imposter contractors will collect deposits, only to disappear.

 

So one watchword for the rebuilding will be “caveat emptor” – let the buyer beware.

 

But California will also see displays of fortitude, courage, generosity and family closeness. In short, the wide panoply of human behavior and emotions will operate closer to the surface than usual, with survivors needing to be as watchful now as they were while evacuating.

 

 -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.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

'EXPERTS’ MISS THE POINT ON MOVING WELLS FARGO’S HQ

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 31, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“'EXPERTS’ MISS THE POINT ON MOVING WELLS FARGO’S HQ”

 

Every published analysis of Well Fargo’s Christmas-week decision to sell its longtime headquarters high-rise deep in San Francisco’s financial district has missed the entire point.

 

Speculation has been rife that the huge California-centered bank plans to move its corporate headquarters out of San Francisco, where it been since Gold Rush days and the Pony Express era. Guesses for a new headquarters have included Minneapolis, Dallas, Charlotte and New York City, where Wells Fargo’s president now keeps his main office.

 

That came about because Charles Scharf joined Wells Fargo from Bank of New York Mellon and didn’t want to move. At the time, Wells Fargo had just completed a new “branch hub” complex along the Hudson River and Scharf moved into it.

 

So talk of Wells Fargo shifting its headquarters is old stuff, since the company already has a very diffuse headquarters structure, with yet another major complex in Minnesota.

 

The “experts” bemoaned Wells Fargo’s shift in San
Francisco and the upcoming sale of its 420 Montgomery Street building as a sign that California will soon be a has-been as a financial center. That’s hokum.

 

So long as this state retains anything near its current stature as the world’s fifth largest economy, it will need to have a significant banking structure even if bank leaders keep offices in other cities, too. Big banks like Wells and Bank of America, another California native whose nominal headquarters are now out of state (in Charlotte), will need big employee bases here.

 

But like other white collar industries including insurance companies, law firms and stock brokerages, they saw many of their workers – even at executive levels – switch to working at home during the Covid 19 pandemic. So the businesses no longer need as many employees in their offices as often as before. It translates to billions of square feet of vacant offices, even if Tesla, Space X and Twitter/X owner Elon Musk disapproves and wants to call his own workers back to their old cubicles.

 

That’s not happening even at his companies, which have seen large-scale employee departures since Musk began making those demands. Example: Tesla last year saw a 44 percent departure rate among its executives, about five times the normal turnover rate for large corporations.

 

The Wells Fargo move has to be seen in its overall context, not merely as a banking move. (In fact, Wells officials said of San Francisco that “The city remains vital to us. It is very important to the bank.)

 

What’s happening is the same kind of real estate turnover that’s affected other office-centric businesses. Wells Fargo in 2023 sold one of its major San Francisco buildings, at 550 California Street, for $45 million, taking a loss of more than $200 million from what it paid for that structure in 2019, just before the pandemic.

 

Wells Fargo’s experience is similar to what’s happened to other office tower owners, with real estate investment trusts having lost billions of dollars when hundreds of tenant businesses left their old leases in the pandemic’s dust, exiting as fast as they could.

 

Now Wells is doing the same. Its workers will still come to an office sometimes. One common practice is to hold meetings and make plans at company headquarters, with workers carrying out those decisions largely from home offices.

 

Recognizing this reality, state legislators last spring passed a new law making building conversions into apartments and condominiums far easier than before, almost automatic.

 

This is the best way yet devised to solve much of California’s housing shortage, with new living units created in existing structures without altering the physical character of cities or neighborhoods.

 

So the Wells Fargo building sale and move actually is part of a trend, just not the trend many financial and real estate analysts think they’ve spotted of yet another big corporation moving headquarters out of California.

 

Sure, Wells Fargo will have significant offices elsewhere; it has had many of them for a long time. But the trend that’s really at work in this move is the switch from office-centric work environments to home offices, which has been underway now for almost five years.

 

-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

POLITICAL VULTURES MOVE IN WHILE FIRES BURN

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“POLITICAL VULTURES MOVE IN WHILE FIRES BURN”

 

Like vultures sensing fresh carrion, some politicians began moving in with false information and nonsensical claims even as the flames of California’s most damaging fire ever still burned strongly in early January.

 

Yet, there were some legitimate questions among the rhetorical flares.

 

The actual flames were so forceful and fast-moving that not even his famous light saber could have helped save the Malibu home of Luke Skywalker (aka “Star Wars” actor Mark Hamill) during the hurricane-strength winds driving the mega-firestorm that began in the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles.

 

As multiple blazes erupted and spread over an always fire-prone fifty-mile stretch of mountains and foothills from Malibu to Altadena, burns also took the homes of celebrities like actress Paris Hilton, actor-director Billy Crystal, actors James Woods, Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins, plus Los Angeles Lakers Coach JJ Redick.

 

To hear President-elect Donald Trump, this was all the fault of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and outgoing President Biden.

 

“NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA,” Trump vastly exaggerated on his Truth Social service while fires raged and evacuees struggled to find housing.

 

Trump also blamed a supposed state policy document he called the “water resources declaration” for depleting water supplies to Pacific Palisades, causing low water pressure that hampered firefighters’ efforts.

 

But there never was such a document. Water mains supplying the Palisades fire area were already deemed too small decades ago, long before Newsom or Biden’s time. Pressure in some hillside fire hydrants fed by those mains dropped precipitously during the firestorm, because so many hydrants were tapped at once. Los Angeles officials sent water in by truck.

 

Yet, critics correctly noted a 117-million-gallon reservoir in the area was shut down for maintenance. If filled, that facility might have kept pressure up for a few more hours than it lasted in affected hydrants. One retired water engineer noted that “it is a guessing game when to take metal reservoirs out of service for maintenance.”

 

Larger mains were never installed in the area because until now, there were no serious water pressure problems. Generations of local politicians deemed such a project unnecessary.

 

Victims could find a logical candidate for some blame in Sam Yorty, the late congressman and conservative mayor of Los Angeles from 1961 to 1973. His appointees okayed the Palisades Highlands development where the fires started Jan. 7. The obviously fire-prone Highlands were designed and approved with only one road leading in and out.

 

The route became so jammed while wind-driven flames chased escaping residents that many abandoned their cars to flee on foot. Major delays followed as firefighters tried to deploy equipment.

 

Past generations of politicians and other officials – not Newsom or Biden – created these conditions. Still, Newsom ordered an “unbiased” investigation of the reservoir closure, also inviting Trump to visit disaster zones.

 

As often, facts did not faze Trump, who previously blasted Newsom and predecessor Jerry Brown for allegedly letting brush and forest areas become more fire prone. He tried to withhold federal aid money as punishment. Yet, most lands he referenced belong to the federal government, raising doubts about where blame should lie.

 

But there was also possibly legitimate criticism. One example: developer Rick Caruso, a potential 2026 candidate for either governor or Los Angeles mayor who lost narrowly to current Mayor Karen Bass in 2022, blasted her for reducing the city’s brush clearance budget. Could more brush cutting have slowed this fire? With winds up to 99 mph, no one knows.

 

Others also blamed Bass. They griped that as high-wind “red flag” fire warnings were issued two days before flames broke out, she flew off to a political event in Ghana. No one has shown events would have differed if she’d been home.

 

The critics’ failure to wait until the fires died down before making their attacks gave them the look of vultures seeking dead meat. Meanwhile, Bass was blasted by her own fire chief for cutting the fire department budget, a move later partially reversed.

 

The big question for Trump, Caruso and other critics: why did they pour all blame on present officials who had to cope with many faulty decisions from decades ago?

 

-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

Sunday, January 5, 2025

NEWSOM ORDER AMOUNTS TO PURE GRANDSTANDING

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRI
DAY, JANUARY 24, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

 “NEWSOM ORDER AMOUNTS TO PURE GRANDSTANDING”

 

If ever there's been a political move that amounted to pure grandstanding, it was Gov. Gavin Newsom’s late 2024 executive order telling a state commission to give millions of California electric customers some rate relief.

 

Normally, when the governor orders a state commission to do something, he can be pretty sure his wishes will be carried out. That’s because the governor appoints virtually all state commission members and they serve at his pleasure. He can bounce them any time.

 

That’s true for the state Energy Commission, the Air Resources Board, the Parole Board and many others. But not the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), which sets natural gas and electric rates for all the private, investor-owned utilities in the state.

 

Yes, the governor does appoint the five utility commissioners. But no governor can fire them. They serve staggered six-year terms, with either one or two appointments expiring every two years. The only appeals from their decisions are to state appellate courts, not ordinary county courts, as with all other agencies.

 

Once a governor anoints a PUC member, they are set for years to come, almost as secure in the job as federal judges, who get lifetime appointments.

 

So when Newsom issued his executive order, it wasn’t really an order. It was a wish. It was for show. He can tell PUC members what to do, but unless they have ambitions for other future appointments, his wishes mean no more than those of any other citizen.

 

When it was designed in the early 1900s, all this was supposed to make the PUC independent. Instead, regardless of whether they’ve been appointed by Democrats or Republicans, PUC members for more than 50 years have tended to kowtow to the utilities they are supposed to keep in check.

 

Newsom’s order told the commissioners to review more closely how companies like Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric spend customer money to stop transmission lines from sparking wildfires. Those expenses have been the supposed basis for several rate increases over the last two years.

 

One result is that California now has the second highest electric rates in the nation, behind only Hawaii, where all fuel burned to create power has to be shipped thousands of miles before it is used.

 

 California electric bills have risen by as much as 110 percent – meaning they’ve more than doubled – over the last 10 years. In just the last three years, charges to customers of the three big privately owned utilities are up by more than 20 percent.

 

Those increases, paid by every consumer either directly or as part of their rents, were all approved by Newsom appointees who received only cursory vetting from the state Legislature before they were rubber-stamped.

 

Newsom may not have power to enforce his current executive order, but if commissioners want reappointments to their cushy jobs – where almost all the tedious scut work is done by clerks or administrative law judges – they might at least try to please him.

 

Newsom’s executive order comes atop his calling a special legislative session last fall with the aim – achieved – of getting lawmakers to force gasoline refiners to keep substantial stocks on hand at all times to avoid price gouging during times of routine maintenance or plant outages.

 

Such gouging has been frequent over the last 40 years, with collusion between the oil companies that run the state’s big refineries becoming obvious. Any outage at any one refinery invariably brings huge price increases at every gas station. In February 2023 alone, this amounted to a $2 per gallon increase in pump prices within a two-day span. 

 

Newsom tried to seem like a consumer champion by putting the clamps on some energy price hikes, while at the same time allowing his appointees at the Air Resources Board to make changes in gasoline formulae that appear certain to cause price increases.

 

It's a complex scene and one that suggests political motivation by Newsom. Why else would he issue his latest executive order, knowing all the while that no one involved has to pay it any heed?

 

    -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

REDUCED VOTING SHOWS DISILLUSION WITH GOVERNMENT

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 21, 2025, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“REDUCED VOTING SHOWS DISILLUSION WITH GOVERNMENT”

 

When Gov. Gavin Newsom looks out over the state Legislature while giving his still unscheduled state of the state speech sometime in the next few weeks, he will see slightly reduced Democratic majorities in both the Senate and Assembly.

 

He may wonder why. The answer is much the same as it was in years like 2002 and 2012, when Democrats voted in far lower numbers than previous elections because many were disillusioned, maybe even uninterested, by state government.

 

Under Newsom, voters have authorized spending more than $15 billion in state and local taxes to solve the problem of homelessness. But California today has about 10,000 more homeless than a year ago, and possibly as many as 30,000 more than four years ago, when the total stood at about 150,000 and was already a crisis.

 

Under Newsom, the state went from sumptuous budget surpluses to vast deficits, much of it papered over by borrowing from the future.

 

Under Newsom, several major corporations, including Chevron and Toyota USA and Tesla have moved their headquarters out of state, even while leaving much of their California operations intact.

 

All this seeming decline has not toppled the state from its status as the world’s fifth leading economy. But it left ordinary citizens far less than impressed with government.

 

Many reacted just as past voters have. In a fiercely fought 2024 election, onetime voters in unprecedented numbers simply didn’t bother. Back in 2020, more than 17.12 million voters turned out or sent in their choices, giving Joe Biden a record 5 million vote margin in California. Just four years later, with population almost exactly at the same level, only 15.72 million voters cast ballots, 8 percent fewer. Donald Trump’s vote totals in California didn’t change much, steady at just above 6 million. This was far less a Republican surge than a Democratic plunge.

 

Democrat Kamala Harris won California in the presidential vote, but with 9.6 million votes, about 1.6 million fewer than Joe Biden rang up four years earlier.

 

Newsom was not on the ballot this year, so no one could directly express displeasure with his performance. Instead, well over a million Democrats made their point by not voting.

 

Just as California gave Democrats the margin needed to create national popular vote victories over Trump for both Biden and Hillary Clinton, this time their absence allowed Trump his first-ever national popular vote win, which he claims as a mandate for his entire agenda.

 

The last time California saw something similar came in 2002, when then-Gov. Gray Davis drew 1 million fewer votes than four years earlier, but still won. The voters’ clear displeasure set up the 2003 recall election that made muscleman actor Arnold Schwarzenegger governor for the next seven years.

 

Schwarzenegger remains the only California Republican since 1998 to win statewide office. Democratic margins are so strong here that even with 1.6 million of their previous voters staying out, their presidential candidate still carried the state by about 3.5 million votes.

 

Similarly, there has been a lot of talk, and reams of newspaper and Internet coverage, about Latinos supposedly turning more Republican. That’s not exactly what happened. The raw numbers suggest droves of Latinos who voted against Trump in 2000 (no one knows the precise number) did not bother last year, wanting neither candidate.

 

Just as Democrats needed a strong Latino voter turnout to stage their anti-Trump comeback during the 2018 mid-term elections that gave them congressional majorities, they now must draw back the Latino no-shows of 2024.

 

This may not be easy; once voters begin behaving a certain way, it can be difficult to get them to do something different.

 

But by 2026, at least in California, there will be fresh faces and names on the midterm ballot; some of them are bound to be Latinos. It’s highly possible a Latino like former state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a proven California vote-getter who was Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services through four scandal-free years, might be one of the two November finalists for governor. 

 

That may be what it takes for Democrats to draw many 2024 non-voters back to the polls and mailboxes.

  

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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