TRUMP GOES AFTER UCLA FIRST AND HARDEST BECAUSE IT’S A FAT TARGET

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2025 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“TRUMP GOES AFTER UCLA FIRST AND HARDEST BECAUSE IT’S A FAT TARGET”

 

Go almost anywhere in the multiple medical centers of slogan-obsessed UCLA and you’ll see signs reading “It Begins With U” and “Innovating Patient Care since 1926,” bromides urging every employee from nurses to heart surgeons toward ever-better performances and ratings.

 

So far, the slogans have helped place UCLA’s medical centers first among Western hospitals in the U.S. News & World Report ratings, topping even famed institutions like Stanford University’s hospital, the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and UCLA’s sister medical centers in San Francisco, Sacramento and Irvine.

 

But UCLA now also places first in a far less desirable category: It is the university which President Trump seeks to dun the most in federal research and fine money, going after a total of $1.7 billion. That’s in keeping with Trump’s practice of attacking prominent targets, rarely secondary ones.

 

The $1.7 billion represents virtually all annual federal research money UCLA gets, sixth most in the country behind places like UC San Francisco, Michigan and Johns Hopkins, schools which had far less anti-Semitic activity during the 2023-24 school year. By contrast, UCLA sprouted anti-Israel encampments like mushrooms. So in many ways, UCLA was the largest target Trump could find, and his psychology suggests that’s why he singled it out.

 

Fully $500 million of the federal research money was to be taken from UCLA’s medical facilities and research before a judge the other day stopped the process at least temporarily on grounds the demands were made via form letters not listing any transgressions by researchers. The other $1.2 billion is a “fine” for allowing anti-Semitic camps and other anti-Jewish activities on the campus for weeks.

 

Totally ignored were petitions signed by hundreds of Jewish UCLA faculty noting the campus has seen no medically-linked anti-Semitism.

 

Trump’s administration more than any other appears struck with the central injustice of Gaza: Over 1,000 Israelis were murdered and kidnapped, but Israel somehow has been blamed for the entire conflict.

 

UCLA has been widely blasted ever since for its long tolerance of the campus encampments and concurrent interference with other students’ freedom of movement.

 

The overall University of California system says it will resist any federal penalties, a big commitment from this huge institution. Overall, UC campuses get about $17 billion per year from the federal government, including more than $9 billion for the care of Medicare and Medicaid patients and almost $9 billion in research funding.

 

It’s no wonder UCLA doctors show signs of insecurity from the standoff between school and government. “What’s going to happen to my family?” wondered one cardiologist while examining a patient. “Will I and my colleagues have to go somewhere else?” If they do, what happens to all those “Best in the West” awards and slogans?

 

What does America get for its research money? Early on, it got CT (computerized tomography) scans. More recently, there have been a wireless implantable brain device that partially restores vision in some of the blind; drug delivery systems that cross the blood/brain barrier to reach cancers in the central nervous system, and gene therapies for babies born without immune systems.

 

Should advances like these be lost to Donald Trump’s “war on California,” of which the attempted UCLA extortion is one part? 

 

So far, UCLA and the larger UC system appear to be resisting via a mix of lawsuits and compromise. The campus last month announced new protest rules at least partly matching federal demands. UCLA will allow pre-approved overnight events, but not in the campus center. It stopped far short of cutting off admissions of students with pro-Palestinian or anti-American views, as Trump demanded. The rules make clear that campus disruptions and blocking of building access will not be allowed.

   

All this meets many Trump demands.

 

Similar rules have not yet been applied to other UC campuses, including those in urban settings like UCSF and the UC San Francisco school of law.

 

Settlement talks reportedly involve 10 of the 24 members of UC’s Board of Regents, along with President James Milliken.

 

It’s an open question whether Trump appointees will make more demands. Further pressures figure to spur an increase in UC’s emphasis on lawsuits to uphold its rights.

 

Meanwhile, it’s all made the slogan “It starts with U” as good as obsolete, for no campus employee from nurse to specialized researcher did anything to provoke the crisis.

 

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WILDFIRE FUND LEADS INEVITABLY TO SMUG UTILITIES

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WILDFIRE FUND LEADS INEVITABLY TO SMUG UTILITIES”

 

The tone has bordered on smug among executives of the Southern California Edison Co. ever since the Eaton Fire last January destroyed most of Altadena and some of neighboring Pasadena, consuming a total of about 9,400 structures and doing at least $27 billion worth of damage.

 

Edison has all but admitted some of its equipment sparked that fire, but somehow has acted as if it needs never even to worry about bankruptcy, the procedure its sister utility Pacific Gas & Electric Co. went through after its equipment sparked the fire that destroyed virtually all of Paradise in Butte County seven years ago.

 

Edison has even offered settlements to Eaton fire victims who lost homes: $900,000 in rebuilding money to owners of burnt typical 1,500-square-foot homes, plus a $200,000 reward for settling directly with the utility and more for pain and suffering. 

 

This move to defuse the myriad lawsuits against the utility is a first, made possible by the work Gov. Gavin Newsom, his legislative minions and his appointees to the state Public Utilities Commission did to protect PG&E and its fellow privately owned utilities from most liability when they cause fires in the future. Now Edison gets that protection.

 

The bailout mechanism invented by Newsom and friends in 2019 while consumer groups were advocating a breakup of PG&E, is known as the California Wildfire Fund. As part of the rescue, almost all customers of the three big private California utilities (San Diego Gas & Electric also benefits), now pay a $3 monthly surcharge on their bills to cover post-2019 fire damages caused by utilities. 

 

Even the $21 billion or so in the Wildfire Fund today might not be enough to cover all Edison’s prospective liabilities from the Eaton fire. So pending Newsom's expected signature, the Legislature this month agreed to extend the $3 monthly customer payments all across the state until 2045 rather than the previously scheduled 2035 expiration date.

 

That will up the Wildfire Fund $18 billion, half paid by Edison shareholders and half by customers.

 

Californians cannot blame President Trump for this, even if his firing thousands of Forest Service workers could help make this year’s fire season the most costly ever. This injustice sits squarely with Newsom, who appears unworried because the $3 fee is buried in most electric bills and rarely noticed by rate payers.

 

Myriad lawsuits from homeowners hit by the Eaton fire now charge Edison with failure to turn off the power to a transmission tower just above that fire’s generally accepted ignition point. The lawsuits claim Edison had ample warning of fire prone conditions, but still left the juice on. Those actions go away in cases where victims opt for Edison’s offers.

 

Final damage figures from the Eaton fire and the simultaneous Palisades fire are not certain and could almost double the current $27 billion estimate. Even if Edison’s payments are widely accepted, insurance companies would likely pay back much of that amount. Edison could also take a big drawdown from the Wildfire Fund, possibly leaving the fund broke.

 

All of which raises the question that dogged the original legislation creating the fund: Why are most California electric customers paying for damages caused by negligence or malfeasance from the state’s monopoly investor-owned utilities?

 

Customers did not cause the fires; in fact many are fire victims still trying to get fair settlements from their own insurance companies.

 

The upshot is that the swiftly and carelessly drawn legislation created solely to keep today’s companies in business despite self-made crises could prove both unfair to most consumers and inadequate to cover damages assessed to Edison and future perpetrators of other fires. 

 

Meanwhile, Edison’s chief executive Pedro Pizarro, when queried during the summer about prospects for an extension of the Wildfire Fund surcharge, correctly responded that “The governor’s office is engaged, as are our legislative leaders.” How smug could he sound?

 

The alternative could have been much simpler and more just: If proven negligent and/or careless, Edison and its utility brethren could have been forced into bankruptcy and then broken up, with cities, counties and the state picking up parts of the current infrastructure.

 

For if privately-owned utilities keep starting fires, why do they deserve their current monopolies, complete with billions yearly in guaranteed profits?

 

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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

 

IF COVID-WRACKED BODIES STACK UP THIS YEAR, BLAME RFK Jr., TRUMP

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“IF COVID-WRACKED BODIES STACK UP THIS YEAR, BLAME RFK Jr., TRUMP”

 

As Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues making vaccines in general and COVID-19 inoculations in particular harder to get, it will become more and more clear that the blame for any resulting deaths lies with him and his boss, President Trump.

 

That also applies to the current outbreak of whooping cough (or pertussis), of which 10,082 cases were reported by the end of May, killing five infants. That led Kennedy’s top U.S. Senate critic, Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy, whose state had three times as many cases as last year, to call on him to encourage mass vaccinations for whooping cough. At this writing, Kennedy had not responded, and the outbreak was unabated.

 

It's important to make clear neither Trump nor Kennedy is responsible for the summertime measles death of a Los Angeles child infected when too young for vaccination and before either RFK Jr. or Trump took office.

 

Yet, there’s little doubt much of the blame in any future stackup of bodies dead from COVID-19 varieties will lie with Kennedy. For years, he was America’s foremost critic of vaccines of most types, from long-established preventives like the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) inoculations required for most schoolchildren to the newer COVID-19 antidotes.

 

We know New York City and parts of New Jersey experienced such high death tolls early in the COVID pandemic that hospitals and morgues used refrigerated trucks to store piled-up bodies. Images of mass burials on Hart Island near the Bronx also circulated widely during 2020 and 2021.

 

In that same year’s winter surge (the deadliest wave yet), hospitals in California, Arizona and Oregon also converted trucks into temporary morgues.

 

Now another round of COVID threatens, and we shall see how responsible the American public that elected Donald Trump president is willing to hold him and his political deal-making.

 

Just now, a new variety of COVID-19 – at least the fourth since the pandemic’s supposed end – proliferates across the nation, while Kennedy makes it continually more difficult for people to get protected by new forms of the vaccine.

 

As secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy names the committees that set the rules for this. He has systematically filled them with anti-vaccine cronies he calls “distinguished scientists.”

 

They’ve set rules making it almost impossible for anyone under 65 to get previously free vaccinations unless they tell a pharmacist they have some kind of underlying condition weakening their health.

 

Even some over-65s in California and other states have reported being forced to get COVID-shot prescriptions from physicians.

 

These are far higher barriers to inoculation than Americans faced as recently as last year, before RFK Jr. took over HHS.

 

Why blame Trump, too? For one thing, he put Kennedy where he is, part of a Trump/Kennedy political bargain sealed very publicly in August 2024.

 

That’s when Kennedy – until then a secondary presidential candidate – agreed to throw whatever support he had at the polls (it wasn’t much) behind Trump, often reported as an exchange for any cabinet job he desired.

 

Kennedy sorely wanted HHS. He has used it to the hilt, first lying about the extent of his anti-vaccine sentiments during Senate confirmation hearings and then acting on his true feelings after taking over the only federal job he ever wanted.

 

Trump knew he was suborning this deceit, saying later that “Everyone knows these (vaccines) work,” but still refusing to fire Kennedy even after most of Kennedy’s family begged him to. Who knows what written “pre-nup” may exist between the two men, restraining Trump from taking appropriate action?

 

Even senators who voted to confirm Kennedy as a cabinet member now loudly point out contradictions between his confirmation hearing testimony and his actions in office. “I would say effectively we are denying people vaccines,” said Cassidy, a doctor and the decisive vote to confirm Kennedy.

 

The bottom line: The direct line of responsibility for today’s rising positive results for COVID-19 and other once quiescent ailments like pertussis runs through both Kennedy and Trump. But no one knows if voters will hold either to account.

 

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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

IT’S LESS OVERT, BUT TRUMP’S ‘WAR ON CALIFORNIA’ CARRIES ON

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“IT’S LESS OVERT, BUT TRUMP’S ‘WAR ON CALIFORNIA’ CARRIES ON”

 

It’s not exactly the 100 years war, but Donald Trump’s undeclared ‘War on California’ carries on this fall just as intently as ever before.

 

No, it’s not as obvious as when he defied the governor and several judges to send National Guard and Marine troops by the thousands to quell a riot that wasn’t.

 

It isn’t merely that the count of California lawsuits against him is higher today than at the same point in his first presidential term. In some cases, Trump lets other Republicans carry his water and in others he is harming California more than other states with his nationwide moves, including the tariffs he has (possibly illegally) imposed on California’s largest trade partners.

 

These things will not likely knock California off its pedestal as the world’s No. 4 economy, just ahead of India and just behind Germany. For one thing, the large amount of rebuilding construction that will soon follow last January’s Los Angeles County firestorms will keep the cost of goods created here higher than before, suggesting a potential move up in the worldwide economic rankings.

 

But make no mistake, through a wide series of moves, Trump is doing what he can to make life less pleasant, more expensive and even less truthful for Californians.

 

Start with the Clean Air Act, where Trump coerced every Republican in the House of Representatives to vote last spring for elimination of the California waiver in the Clean Air Act of 1970. That’s the provision that allowed this state to clean up its air (not completely, by far) through measures like catalytic converters and electric vehicles, pioneered here and often resented elsewhere. Such resentment was why 35 Democrats voted with the House GOP.

 

Trump tried for this repeatedly in his first term, but was voted out before he could finish, rendering moot any legal cases surrounding his effort. Now it will be up to Democrats in the Senate to stop this effort to dirty up California air.

 

There is also significant legal debate on this. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has stated that waivers like California’s are not subject to congressional review, suggesting Congress lacks the authority to overturn them. If this measure goes through, with a smirking Trump signing it, that issue would be decided by the courts.

 

But that’s only one move against California. Here are a few others (not the complete list):

 

n Termination of a study on guaranteed income. Trump halted a $9 million UC San Francisco clinical trial providing $500 monthly to 300 low-income Black young adults that aimed to learn whether this tactic can cut crime and homelessness.

 

n An executive order to Attorney General Pam Bondi to halt enforcement of state laws on climate change, explicitly challenging California’s cap-and-trade program that, among other things, produces electric and natural gas bill credits of about $50 per customer twice a year.

 

n Another order opening floodgates in two Central California reservoirs, supposedly aiming to address wildfire issues. But there were no fires near those reservoirs and none of the water reached any fire area, most of it flowing into depleted San Joaquin Valley aquifers.

 

n Trying to eliminate past California atrocities from the Smithsonian Institute and all other government-sponsored exhibits purporting to deal with all aspects of California history.

 

n Ignoring the bragging he voiced while visiting the January fire zones and again in an Oval Office meeting with Gov. Gavin Newsom – to provide quick federal aid to wildfire survivors. Reality is there has been no movement in Congress toward passing California’s request for $40 billion in fire aid.

 

Taken together, these moves compose an attack on California’s ability to control its own environment and fix its problems with tax money paid by this state’s citizens, who annually put far more into the federal treasury than they get back.

 

They would instead put this state on equal or even lesser footing than Republican-controlled states like West Virginia and Alabama, where smog and water safety issues have never been taken seriously, as they are here.

 

 

 

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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

 

Suggested pullout quote: “These moves are major parts of an attack on California’s ability to control its own environment and fix its problems.”