ANTI-SEMITISM ISSUE AGAIN CONFRONTS UC REGENTS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2015, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “ANTI-SEMITISM ISSUE AGAIN CONFRONTS UC REGENTS”

          Back in June, the president of the University of California promised on national radio that the UC Board of Regents would vote in its next meeting – in July – on whether to adopt the U.S. State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism.

          It didn’t happen. There was no vote, no discussion, not even an agenda item.

          No regent, including Gov. Jerry Brown, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom or Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, spoke a critical word on the quiet disappearance of that item from the meeting.

          But the question is slated to reappear when regents gather again Sept. 16-17 in Irvine, not as a policy opposing anti-Semitism, but as a general discussion of “tolerance” on campus.

          UC administrators, of course, know all about tolerating anti-Semitism. No suspects have yet been found in several episodes of Nazi-like swastikas daubed onto university buildings and there have been no penalties for student government members who publicly questioned whether Jewish students can make fair and objective decisions or judgments on campus issues.

          That’s consistent with the lack of action against  students who set up mock roadblocks on the Berkeley campus where Jewish-looking students – and no others – were accosted by toughs carrying machine-gun mockups. This was some Muslim students’ idea of a legitimate protest against Israel’s anti-terror tactics, which have cut deaths by car- and suicide-bombings to a fraction of their former level.

          Toothless bromides about tolerance were all those events – and multiple others since 2010 – elicited from administrators and faculty apparently reluctant about doing anything to counter their system’s rising reputation for enabling outright anti-Semitism in the guise of a Palestinian-sponsored campaign to boycott Israel, divest from companies doing business there and create international sanctions against the Jewish state.

          No one suggests Israel’s policies should be immune from criticism, protest or debate. They are debated ceaselessly in countless Jewish forums.

          But adopting the State Department’s definition would let UC officials know when protest becomes bigotry. The State Department criteria, recently reaffirmed, are simple: If an action aims to delegitimize Israel, denying its very right to exist because it is a Jewish state, that’s anti-Semitic. If a protest demonizes Israel in ways not employed against any other country, that’s also anti-Semitism. And if a protest employs a double standard judging Israel differently from other countries, that’s anti-Semitic, too.

          Here’s one clear-cut example: When Israeli terrorists firebombed a Palestinian home and killed a child this summer, government officials immediately condemned the act and began a manhunt for the perpetrators. Palestinian officials and police have never tried to capture any countryman who killed Jewish citizens of Israel. Similarly, campus protestors who vilify Israel for the baby killing ignore the many more similar acts against Israelis. That’s as clear as a double standard can get.

          While Napolitano and the regents spent part of the summer backing off a tough stance against anti-Semitism, both the state Senate and Assembly passed a resolution calling on UC campuses to condemn it in all forms, a recognition that this age-old prejudice has morphed into new forms on campus, partly because of the presence of students from countries where anti-Semitism is official policy.

          A formal definition is needed, say groups that battle anti-Semitism, because of confusion over the relationship between Jew-hatred and animosity toward Israel.

         

          Since the Assembly under Atkins’ leadership passed its resolution unanimously, it seems logical she should lead her fellow regents back to specifics, rather than going along with the milquetoast attempt to simply discuss tolerance. The university already has myriad policies encouraging tolerance and excoriating “hate speech.”

          While those policies have not been enforced against anti-Semites, they effectively prevent hate activities directed against African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims and other groups.

          “Action on anti-Israel behavior devolving into anti-Semitism is still on the table,” said a hopeful Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, lecturer at UC Santa Cruz and co-founder of the AMCHA Initiative, which fights on-campus anti-Semitism. “We need a formal definition of what Jewish students are experiencing as anti-Semitism.” Without that, she said, administrators struggle to separate ordinary student protests from acts of hate. This may be one reason many egregious anti-Semitic acts have elicited no punishment.

    It’s high time the Board of Regents realizes that if it lapses into generalities and refuses to adopt specific guidelines like those of the State Department, it will be promoting an age-old hatred.

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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

CALIFORNIA FACES DICEY NEW ROUND OF BASE CLOSINGS

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

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “CALIFORNIA FACES DICEY NEW ROUND OF BASE CLOSINGS”

    

    When Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel asked Congress the other day to authorize a new round of military base closings and consolidations in 2017, alarm bells should have gone off in many parts of California.

          For this state has been victimized more than any other in the last two such rounds, with profound economic effects in many parts of the state.

          Sure, there have been positive new uses of some old bases, from parkland in the Presidio of San Francisco to a college campus on the former site of Ft. Ord near Monterey. But the jobs lost when those bases closed, plus the ones lost from the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, the El Toro Marine Air Station, March Air Force Base and many others, still have not been replaced.

          Nor have the ripple effects stopped, as many surviving businesses near those bases now are far less profitable than before, employing many thousands fewer than they once did.

          This new potential round of closures comes at a particularly dicey time for California, which has lost or is about to lose some of the veteran members of Congress who might have fought for a fair deal for their state.

          Of course, there’s little evidence that the likes of Democrats Henry Waxman and George Miller, or Republicans Gary Miller and Buck McKeon (current chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, no less) ever did much to spare California pain.

          The base closures are one reason California ranks 43^rd among all states in federal per capita spending, getting back just 78 cents for every dollar its taxpayers put into the U.S. treasury.

          Those veteran congressmen and the rest of the state’s 53-member largest-in-the-nation House contingent couldn’t even get a single Californian onto the Base Realignment and Closure Commission in the early 2000s. In the previous closure rounds, that commission each time presented Congress with one complete package of cuts, with the lawmakers committed to a yes-or-no vote on the entire thing, no amendments allowed.

          Just as it was almost inconceivable at one time to imagine the Army’s huge training facility at Ft. Ord disappearing, so it now seems impossible that the Marine Corps’ giant Camp Pendleton just north of San Diego could be closed.

          But the real estate on which that base sits is so prime that a federal commission might decide to take the money and let it be built over, as seems the likely fate for the mostly vacant former El Toro base in Orange County, now that park proposals for that land have been thwarted.

          With U.S. policy leaning against new desert wars, will Ft. Irwin and its desert warfare training facility be scrapped, some of the land perhaps to be used for trendy solar thermal electricity projects?

          The last two times around, Californians in Congress overwhelmingly backed both the creation of BRAC and its plans. It’s no coincidence that once the closures in those plans occurred, California dropped 20 places in its rank among the states in federal spending. Meanwhile, the last U.S. Census showed Texas, site of the Army’s troubled Ft. Hood, now home to much of the training that once took place in California, got $19.7 billion in military salaries in 2010 compared with just $10.3 billion for California.

          Does anyone doubt that an extra $9 billion in personal income being spent and re-spent in California might have some effect on the state’s chronic unemployment? Similarly, is there any doubt all that extra income had something to do with Texas weathering the Great Recession better than many other places?

          The upshot of all this is that Californians in Congress must make sure any new round of cuts does not again make this state its prime victim. One way to do this would be to insist that the House and Senate get some control over who serves on the next BRAC commission and that any new plan not be presented on an all-or-nothing basis.

          But Californians in Congress have rarely shown much appetite for working together for the welfare of the whole state. This has to change, or we could see a California with no Seabee base in Ventura County, no Travis Air Force Base in the East Bay and no Lemoore Naval Air Station in the Central Valley. And as many as 120,000 more related jobs gone, as happened in the last round.

                       
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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

WILL GAS PRICES STUNT THE CALIFORNIA RECOVERY?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 4, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

          “WILL GAS PRICES STUNT THE CALIFORNIA RECOVERY?”

          The ripple effects of high gasoline prices have been clear for decades, ever since the Arab oil boycott of the mid-1970s temporarily forced a form of gas rationing on California.

          These effects include more riders on public transit, less car vacations, fewer people visiting state and national parks and other outlying attractions, more sales of hybrid and electric cars and much more.

          But now comes a UC Berkeley study supplying reasons why this spring’s dramatic spike in gasoline prices could slow or even reverse the very tenuous California economic recovery that has been ongoing for the last seven months or so.

          Not that the economists who wrote the study, financed in part by the university’s Center for Energy and Environmental Economics, are making any predictions. Rather, their study covers the housing collapse of 2007 and the subsequent, ongoing wave of foreclosures, laying a large part of the blame on the doubling of gas prices between 2005 and 2008, when they peaked at $4.15 per gallon, with then-President George W. Bush unable or unwilling to do much about it.

          The study’s authors, Berkeley’s Steven Sexton and David Zilberman and JunJie Wu of Oregon State University, contend that “low energy prices during the housing boom…made suburban houses affordable to a new class of homeowners characterized by low incomes, high leverage, low credit worthiness and long work commutes.”

          That description is a close fit for many thousands of homeowners who bought during the housing boom in the Inland Empire portions of Southern California and in Central Valley counties like Merced, Madera, Stanislaus and San Joaquin, where many new homeowners of that period commuted regularly to jobs in the East Bay and Silicon Valley suburbs of San Francisco.

          The study does not dismiss financial chicanery, loan fraud and easy money as other causes of the Great Recession. “Lax lending practices and new mortgage products” are two major factors cited by the authors and many others.

          But no one else has fingered gasoline prices, which remained at a fairly constant $1.50 per gallon in 1976 dollars from the late 1970s into the mid-2000s.

          When gasoline spiked, the study contends, “the calculus of suburban living changed. High commute costs made typical homes less valuable and mortgages less affordable for homeowners with …(low) average incomes. Some households could no longer meet mortgage obligations and others walked away from mortgage debt.” In short, high gas prices became the last straw for many.

          No one knows the precise number of “under water” homeowners – their houses worth less than what they owed on their home loans – who were finally moved to action by high gasoline prices. What is known is that there was an increase in apartment rentals in urban centers as the foreclosure trend rose. This suggests many who walked away from under-water homes deliberately sought shorter commutes.

          There’s good news and bad news in all this for today’s California. Ironically, the fact that the housing market has not recovered much from the depths of 2008-10 makes the state relatively immune to some effects of this spring’s gas price spike, which has gone even higher than the damaging increases of 2008. So while all the other ripple effects seen in previous gas price spikes are likely to be repeated, at least there’s not likely to be much of a housing effect.

          Except for one aspect: The higher the price of gasoline goes, the more real estate prices near urban job centers could rise. For the trend when gasoline rises is for more and more people to seek short commutes.

          This, the study authors contend, “explains the disproportionate decline in suburban housing markets” during times like these.

          And for sure, as the authors note, “Those who reside in communities characterized by relatively high gas consumption (read faraway suburbs and ex-urban developments) suffer most” when gas prices rise. They also found that “as gas prices double, (housing) density also doubles.”

          All of which means this spring’s fast upward movement in gas prices will hurt, but should still not produce times as disastrous as those that accompanied the last previous upward move.

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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

'OCCUPY' IS WRONG; ELECTION STAKES ARE ENORMOUS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“'OCCUPY' IS WRONG; ELECTION STAKES ARE ENORMOUS"

It’s fashionable to say -- and the "Occupy" movement has made this a basic tenet -- that Republicans and Democrats are really alike beneath their skin, any apparent differences amounting to no more than a contrast between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

But Occupy and it adherents are dead wrong about that, even though it's a central part of the rationale that's let the populist movement spread from New York to several California cities and then around the world this fall.

The demonstrators in tents and sleeping bags had some things right, of course, including the fact that campaign finance is the root of many American political evils, and both Republicans and Democrats often dance to the tunes of their big donors.

But with the primary/caucus season starting in earnest, you'd have to be blind and deaf not to see huge differences between the two major parties. So the results of this year’s presidential and congressional races will decide huge policy issues.

The two biggest areas of difference just now are health care and the environment.

Republicans in the House of Representatives havesteadily attacked environmental protections of clean air and water since the moment they took control there last year. In this relatively short time, 161 votes have occurred on bills aiming to roll back those protections.

Environmental purists may have been grossly offended, even completely turned off, by President Obama’s nixing some new restrictions on smokestack emissions proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, but that doesn’t change the fact that Democrats have stymied myriad Republican attempts to roll back anti-smog, anti-acid rain regulations and restrictions on industrial waste running into rivers, lakes and oceans.

Had all those passed, America – and smog-prone California in particular – might soon come to look something like Communist-era Eastern Europe, where a pall of heavy pollution hung over almost every sizeable city and rivers reeked of oil and other pollutants.

One still-current Republican proposal would set overseers over the EPA and require cost considerations to trump health and science concerns whenever new rules are considered. When contemplating that one, it behooves voters to remember that every new California smog regulation has been fought by car companies claiming their sales would evaporate if the rule took effect. Constant freeway traffic jams are a pretty good demonstration of how wrong those claims have been.

If not for Obama and the Democratic majority in the Senate, some analysts say, America would be returned to lax levels of environmental regulation not seen since the 1880s.

Give the GOP and its extremist Tea Party component the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress, and such a turning back of the clock is possible. That’s because most Republicans today buy into “trickle down” economic theories that contend less regulation equals more jobs. This claim, and its companion contention that lower taxes mean more jobs, have never been proven in the 31 years since they became conservative dogma in 1980.

Then there’s health care, where every Republican candidate for President and virtually all the party’s congressional candidates swear they will immediately get rid of the health care policies they call “Obamacare.”

“The window for action comes and goes, so we need to be ready,” pronounced one analyst at the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute looking forward to the election aftermath.

So if your 24-year-old adult child is now covered by your health plan because that young person either can’t get or can’t afford one of his or her own, that could disappear if Republicans take control.

Republicans, led by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, want to scrap the requirement of the Obama program that every individual obtain some kind of health insurance before it takes effect in 2014 – even if it’s upheld by the GOP-dominated Supreme Court. They favor tax credits that consumers could use to shop around for health insurance in a new system not dominated by employer groups. Their approach would be completely different and far more laissez faire than what Democrats passed while they controlled both Congress and the White House.

It all adds up to a huge contrast, with Republicans pushing the concept of smaller government in every respect, from fewer regulations to allowing citizens to go without any health insurance. They believe this would make America a better place with fuller employment, while Democrats hold it could make America filthy and leave millions unprotected from disasters of many types, from earthquake and hurricane damage to health crises.

Which means it’s pure nonsense to say, as the “Occupy…” demonstrators have through the fall and early winter, that the election outcome doesn’t matter because both big parties have the same bottom line. They really don’t.

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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

BIGGEST TAX HIKE OBSTACLE: RESENTMENT OF PUBLIC EMPLOYEES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“BIGGEST TAX HIKE OBSTACLE: RESENTMENT OF PUBLIC EMPLOYEES”

The many negative stories represent aberrations, revealing nothing at all typical about public employees in California. Yet, they have turned public opinion against civil servants so severely that it will be difficult to pass any of the current spate of tax increase proposals, no matter who might back them or bankroll them.

That’s the political reality created when a newspaper digs up information on the fired head of the housing authority in California’s largest city quietly getting $1.2 million after being fired earlier this year.

It get more intense when that news follows on the heels of headlines about University of California regents doling out raises between 6.4 percent and 23 percent to 12 high-ranking administrators and lawyers already paid more than $200,000 per year. The rationale for this move at a time when students are paying about 40 percent more in tuition and fees than five years ago, while class offerings have been cut back substantially? The regents say they must grant raises or they might lose valuable talent to private industry or other colleges.

Voters can put up with frequently seeing road repair crews taking it easy on construction sites during work hours. They quietly endure long lines at the Employment Development Department and other government offices. They shrug at potholed streets and rough highways in a state whose roads were once the smoothest anywhere.

Those are all annoyances, but the ideas of unreasonably high pay and overly generous pensions are now paired and they fuel rising resentment against public employees of all types.

Especially when headlines reveal big bucks going to undeserving figures like that fired housing official or already well-heeled administrators like those the UC Regents granted big pay hikes.

At a time of high unemployment and slow economic recovery, actions like these generate the perception that public employees have it better than those who work for private business, with more job security and better pensions and benefits.

In fact, for more than a year, there’s been a steady barrage of newspaper and blog reports about public employees fattening up on taxpayer dollars. These stories don’t change the fact that public employee pensions actually average well under $30,000 per year in California, with many retired public workers getting no Social Security. The common perception also ignores the fact that laid-off public employees make up a substantial portion of California’s unemployed, right about 10 percent at last report.

Mundane facts like those will never be attention grabbers. Stories about indicted, ousted and sometimes criminally overpaid officials of cities like Bell and Vernon will always get far larger headlines.

The same for the more than 30 prison doctors and mental health professionals who have been paid about $8.7 million over the last five years for essentially doing nothing. All have collected six-figure state salaries while the wheels turn on disciplinary proceedings. One has drawn more than $200,000 a year for acting as an in-house mail courier.

Voters have also read of prison guards already paid high wages drawing overtime to sit in hospital rooms with paraplegic convicts, who by law must be guarded around the clock even if they’re too crippled to get out of bed, let alone run away.

Some voters wonder, also, why UC regents never test their theory about needing to hand big raises to people already getting top dollar. Why not, they wonder, refuse raises to UC and California State University bigwigs and then see how many really do get other offers? It’s a good bet that in these hard times, many won’t. Next time the issue arises, maybe the regents could grant big raises only to employees who actually have another offer or two.

And voters have seen the state Supreme Court ruling in an Orange County case which strictly limited local government’s ability to cut health care benefits for retirees, many of whom don’t have to pay for Medicare or its sometimes-expensive supplement plans. In that case, Orange County officials argued they could reduce benefits because they never explicitly promised to leave them untouched at high levels.

Uh-uh, said the court. You granted the benefits and kept them going for years, so you implied you would keep them up. That, said the justices, is as good as a binding promise.

Put it all together and it’s no wonder many voters believe they are worse off than the public employees they pay

As long as that’s what a large part of the public believes, it will be hard anytime soon for anyone to pass any kind of tax increase beyond the local level.

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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