NON-CITIZENS WILL START VOTING SOON

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2018, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

          “NON-CITIZENS WILL START VOTING SOON”

          President Trump has griped for years – without any proof – that undocumented immigrants vote in American elections regularly, often enough to change their outcomes. He claimed after losing the popular vote in 2016 that his 3.1 million-vote national deficit was due solely to droves of illegals casting ballots.

          Of course, the commission he appointed in hopes of verifying his rationalization got nowhere, and he was forced to disband it in January.

          But all Trump must do later this year is look at San Francisco if he wants to see non-citizens at the polls, including plenty of the undocumented.

          That’s because San Francisco in 2016 passed the local Proposition N, allowing non-citizens to vote in school board elections regardless of their immigration status. The idea received 54-46 percent backing in that city, which in this century has also pioneered concepts like same-sex marriage and universal health care.

          Non-citizens will vote legally for the first time in November, and can continue participating in school board elections for at least the next four years.

          It turns out this concept isn’t entirely new, even though San Francisco is the only place in America where the practice is currently legal. Until the 1920s, many states, cities and counties allowed non-citizens to vote in all elections. If you live here, went the reasoning of the time, you have a stake in American or local public affairs. Voting was tied to where people lived, not where they were born or which passport they carried.

          That ended even before the Great Depression, in a tide of anti-immigrant feeling that produced this nation’s first immigration quotas, which still limit how many newcomers are allowed to enter from each of the world’s other countries.

          In San Francisco, there will be safeguards preventing non-citizens from doing what Trump strongly opposes: They won’t be allowed to vote legally in elections for anything but school officials. To ensure that doesn’t happen, ballots going to non-citizens will not list any federal, state or other local offices. And yet, there are few safeguards to prevent non-citizens from registering as regular voters.

          Here’s what the California secretary of state’s website says about identification needed to register: “The voter registration application asks for your driver license or California identification card number, or you can use the last four numbers on your Social Security card. If you do not have a driver license, California identification card or Social Security card, you may leave that space blank. Your county elections official will assign a number to you that will be used to identify you as a voter.”

          In short, no one really needs to prove citizenship to vote for any office, in San Francisco or anywhere else in California.

          This may be in keeping with the old idea that everyone here has a stake in the election results, and so ought to be able to vote. Many immigrant advocates may believe – privately, if not publicly – this would be a good thing.

          But it definitely blurs the lines between citizens and non-citizens, especially those who are here legally, with permanent resident status. There’s already almost nothing they can’t do in California.

          Drivers licenses, check. Immigrant children, even the undocumented, eligible for state-paid medical insurance under Medi-Cal, check. In-state college tuition, check that, too. Non-citizens, even if they’re not here legally, can also practice law under a 2015 bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown. And legal immigrants can be poll workers because of a perceived shortage of multi-lingual election officials.

          Until now, about the only thing they couldn’t do was vote legally. But the San Francisco law has begun to chip away at that distinction. Which means non-citizens now can indirectly help decide how taxpayer money will be spent, by the billions of dollars.

          Some politicians in New York City would like to take things even farther. Mayor Bill de Blasio and his city council have several times considered a law allowing legal-resident non-citizens to vote in all local elections.

          The problem, of course, is that giving this ultimate civic right to non-citizens, along with other privileges they’ve already attained, removes much of the motive to do the very basic book-learning needed to become a citizen.

          Which makes this a bad idea, no matter how charitable it may seem.

                  

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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 second edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

WILL ‘NASCAR INITIATIVE’ PRODUCE NAKED LAWMAKERS?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2016, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “WILL ‘NASCAR INITIATIVE’ PRODUCE NAKED LAWMAKERS?”

    Turn on the TV next time a NASCAR stock car race is on and get a good look at the coveralls worn by the drivers. They are covered with patches bearing the logos of many and varied companies that sponsor their automotive efforts, from oil and carmaking companies to breweries.

        Now imagine a normally staid state legislative hearing, where politicians of both major parties today show up in conservative business suits. Those folks could soon look like a stock car racing crew if an initiative now circulating makes the November ballot and passes.

        The measure, formally called the “Name All Sponsors California Accountability Reform (or NASCAR. Get it?) Initiative,” would require all state legislators to wear the emblems or names of their 10 top donors every time they attend an official function.

        The measure’s sponsor, Rancho Santa Fe businessman John Cox, takes delight in the idea and has already done some touring around California with 120 life-size photographic cutouts of politicians dressed up as they might have to under his plan.

        This idea has some similarity to part of the defeated 2006 Proposition 89, an attempt to set up a publicly financed election system that would also have required every privately-financed political ad, whether on television or in newspapers or mailed flyers, to list its three biggest financiers in type as large as the biggest print anywhere else in the ad.

        That proposition lost, but not because of the donor exposure provision. It went down by a 76-24 percent margin because voters didn’t want to be taxed for the sake of politicians.

        There’s no tax associated with the NASCAR initiative, which Cox, a former chairman of the Cook County (Chicago) Republican committee, is willing to finance to the tune of $1 million.

        “The whole idea is to hold the entire corrupt, stupid system up to ridicule,” said Cox, who ran unsuccessfully in Illinois for both Congress and the U.S. Senate before moving to California in 2008.

        One who appreciates the sentiment behind this is Jamie Court, head of the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group, which sponsored Proposition 89. “This could definitely make politics more racy,” he said. “If this passes, it could turn the statehouse into a nudist colony because no one would want to pin their real owners onto their clothes. We might even discover that the emperors really don’t have any clothes.”

        There is, you might guess, some question over whether forcing lawmakers to wear signage is constitutional, or might be a violation of their First Amendment free speech rights. Of course, no one forces them to be legislators, any more than stock car race drivers are dragooned into that calling.

        Cox, for one, would welcome a court challenge on the constitutionality of dictating dress in the state Capitol. “That would be wonderful,” he said. “The real point here isn’t to force anyone to wear anything, but to fix our broken, ridiculous system. It’s a system where people who want things from government pay for and staff the campaigns of the folks who will run that government. Any objective person would call that corrupt.”

        Cox, however, stops short of calling California more corrupt than his old Chicago stomping ground. “I haven’t lived here long enough to make that comparison,” he said.

        He’ll need 365,880 valid voter signatures to qualify this idea for the ballot, and Cox is convinced his $1 million commitment will be more than enough to pay for getting it on the ballot.

        “The petition drive outfit we’ve hired says this is the biggest slam dunk they’ve ever seen,” he said. “They’re having the petition carriers use it as a lead item to make it easier for them to get signatures for other initiatives.”

        He’s also trying to do much of the petition drive online, the measure providing printable sheets with room for only three signatures, thus making it easier for backers to get a full sheet to send it in.

        The bottom line: For anyone who wants to afflict the powerful and make lawmakers feel anxious and perhaps a bit threatened, this could be a strong – also amusing – vehicle.

         
     -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

MOVIE CREDITS: A TAX BREAK THAT ACTUALLY WORKS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 13, 2014, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “MOVIE CREDITS: A TAX BREAK THAT ACTUALLY WORKS”

          Businesses are moving out of California – or at least building new plants in other states – in droves because this is such a high-tax state. That’s the frequent claim of Republican politicians who have tried to bludgeon Democrats for years with the issue.

    The idea has been repeated so often it is widely accepted as truth, even though here’s no proof any company relocates outside California except when a move puts it closer to existing plants and assets, as when Occidental Petroleum announced an impending move from Los Angeles to Houston this spring, saying that would put management much closer to the oil wells it manages. Or Toyota moving many jobs from Torrance to Dallas, much closer to its factories.

    But the tax motive in corporate moves is often overrated, with the real reasons frequently factors like land costs and lower housing expenses that ease recruiting of young employees.

    Similarly, Republicans have argued for decades – without proof – that lower taxes actually lead to higher government revenues because they encourage employers to add jobs. But it’s never been proven that when corporations get tax benefits, they put the money saved into employees rather than seeing it pocketed by top management and investors.

    That’s why it behooves California politicians to pay heed when a substantial study shows lower taxes in other states actually do have an impact on a particular industry and that lower taxes do add both jobs and government revenues.

    About the only area that’s been proven is in movie and television production, where California has steadily lost location filming to places as varied as Pennsylvania and Georgia, New Jersey and Louisiana over the last 20 years. The majority of feature filming now takes place outside this state, even though most pre- and post-production work – everything from casting and film editing to sound dubbing and musical scoring – still is centered here.

          Altogether, states gave movie and TV studios and TV commercial production houses more than $1.5 billion in tax credits and rebates last year. States actively pursue location shoots because of the revenue they bring via catering, vehicle rentals, house rentals, hotel rentals, restaurant meals and much more. Pennysylvania ponied up a $1 million tax credit to get the Denzel Washington film “Unstoppable” filmed there, as just one example.

          “You just follow the money,” actor-director Ben Affleck told a reporter last year, when asked why he planned to film his upcoming “Live by Night” in Georgia. Tax credits and incentives sometimes cover as much as one-third of production costs in an industry where profit margins can be thin. For the states, this can lead to new jobs (most of them temporary) and more government revenue without the kinds of environmental problems new factories often bring. Movie makers almost always guarantee host states they will leave conditions exactly as they were before, or better.

          California now offers about $100 million a year in credits, not enough to keep a lot of filming from going elsewhere, even when it means producers must pay lodging and transportation bills for actors who mostly live in California.

          This state’s tax credits produced at least $1.11 in state and local tax revenues for every dollar of tax benefits deployed, concludes a study performed this spring by the usually-accurate Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. With 35 other states now giving tax incentives for location work, California's current credits are not enough to retain most of the production that was traditionally centered here.

          Relatively small as the California film location credits have been (less than one-fifteenth of national credits from a state with about one-ninth of the national population), the study concluded the spending they helped produce came to $1.9 billion for 109 projects over the last three fiscal years, with 22,300 jobs supported. Total economic activity from those projects was $4.3 billion.

          The movie tax credit, opponents say, is a giveaway to the wealthy, while the poor languish as programs helping them are steadily cut back. But if the film credits actually produce more government money (via income taxes, sales taxes and more) than they cost, that means they’re really helping keep programs for the indigent alive, even as they benefit wealthy actors and producers.

          The bottom line: This is a tax credit that works for California and could work even better. That’s why it should be increased, as called for in a bill now working its way through the Legislature.

    -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 

THERE'S HOPE FOR ‘DISCLOSE ACT’ IN 2014

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “THERE'S HOPE FOR ‘DISCLOSE ACT’ IN 2014”

          If there’s one main reason behind the distrust many Californians feel for government and elected officials at all levels, it may be the way special interests regularly pour millions of dollars into election campaigns while managing to hide their identities.

          There was hope last year for an end to the sense of political impotence and frustration this often produces among voters. With two-thirds majorities for Democrats in both houses of the state Legislature and a governor who helped write this state’s original clean elections law, the Political Reform Act of 1975, the expectation was that a major disclosure bill would pass.

          But those two-thirds majorities turned out to be ephemeral and sporadic, coming and going irregularly as politicians played musical chairs when vacancies occurred in congressional, state Senate and Assembly seats.

          So the single legislative bill that could have done the most to restore trust in time for next year’s election languished. It’s not dead, having been turned into a two-year bill after it passed the Senate by an easy 28-11margin, with most Republicans voting no.

          But no Assembly Republican voted for the bill, known informally as the DISCLOSE Act and officially as SB 52, originally sponsored by Sens. Mark Leno of San Francisco and Jerry Hill of San Mateo.

          So when it was due for an August hearing in an Assembly elections committee, it was converted into a two-year bill instead, with that house due to take it up again in 2014.

          There is no way this or any other proposal can hope to keep big money, both from within California and outside, from playing a major role in the state’s politics, electoral and initiative. But this measure is intended at least to let voters know who is paying for what.

          The need for a law like this became urgent after the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious 2010 Citizens United decision declared corporations the equivalent of human beings, giving them the right to donate limitless amounts to political campaigns not formally controlled by candidates.

          This led to independent expenditure committees, which run ads at the very least dovetailing with those of the candidates. So we get subterfuge, as with the last-minute 2012 dumping of millions of dollars into California proposition campaigns by out-of-state groups with vague names and anonymous donors, many still secret.

          The DISCLOSE Act, first sponsored in the Legislature by former Democratic Assemblywoman Julia Brownley of Ventura County, now a congresswoman, would force every political TV commercial in California to disclose its three largest funders prominently for six seconds at the start of the ads, rather than using small print at the end. Similar rules would apply to print and radio ads, mass mailers, billboards and websites.

          So voters would know before they heard a message who is behind it.

          This bill passed the Assembly in 2012, but time ran out before the Senate considered it.

          Its passage in the new year has the backing of Assembly Speaker John Perez of Los Angeles, giving it a strong shot of getting the two-thirds backing it needs to become law so long as the Democrats’ current two-thirds majority proves a bit more stable than it was through most of 2013.

          The need for transparency allowing voters to peel away the veil of anonymity many campaign donors now hide behind is more pressing today than ever, thanks to the unlimited quantities of cash corporations can deploy.

          That’s what made the DISCLOSE Act the most important bill the Legislature considered in the past year, more so than fracking regulations, prison changes, drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants or anything else. It will be again in 2014.

          Other open-government bills will also be on the docket in this session, but if this one passes, California voters could become the best informed in the nation. And if it happens here, count on it being imitated elsewhere, like many other California-first laws covering everything from medical marijuana to property tax limits.

          But that happens only if this measure gets a two-thirds vote in the Assembly, which the vagaries of 2013 proved is no sure thing.

    -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

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ANTI-SEMITISM IS WHITEWASHED

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ANTI-SEMITISM IS WHITEWASHED”

          Less than two years ago, Palestinian students and sympathizers on the University of California’s flagship Berkeley campus dressed up in combat fatigues, “armed” themselves with genuine-looking mock firearms and set up “checkpoints” where they demanded that students attempting to pass tell them if they were Jewish.

    There was no immediate outcry on campus, nor any response from administrators or campus police, as there surely would have been if students set up similar “checkpoints” to determine whether students with tan complexions are really African-Americans or whether students conversing in Spanish are undocumented immigrants.

          When Jewish groups later sought a court order against similar demonstrations in the future, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco said any attempt to ban them would “raise serious First Amendment issues.”

          So, he implied, campuses can ban “hate speech” like the N-word and anti-gay smears, but outright physical intimidation of Jewish students and impinging on their walking space are OK.

          In August of this year, both the U.S. Department of Education and the Berkeley administration exonerated the demonstrators of anti-Semitism charges, and found that two other incidents to which Jewish students objected on the UC campuses at Irvine and Santa Cruz also were just fine.

          At the time, the Amcha (Hebrew for “your people”) Initiative against campus anti-Semitism and other Jewish groups warned these decisions might lead to an escalation. The whitewashings may not have condoned campus anti-Semitism, but they certainly promised to enable it.

          This appeared to come true in November at San Francisco State University, where a student group called the General Union of Palestinian Students set up tables in Malcolm X Plaza featuring messages like this: “My heroes have always killed colonizers.”

          Later, Amcha uncovered a since-removed picture on the Tumblr website allegedly posted by the president of the Palestinian student group, showing him brandishing a knife, with the caption saying “I seriously can not get over how much I love this blade. It is the sharpest thing I own and cuts through everything like butter and just holding it makes me want to stab an Israeli soldier…”

          Palestinian student groups say they differentiate between Israelis and Jews, but most Jews are skeptical of that claim. Key Palestinian groups like Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and won the last major Palestinian election, make no such distinction. Says that group’s covenant, “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” And the mufti of the Palestinian Authority has issued a fatwa forbidding sale of land to Jews (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Palestinian_territories). So it's no wonder many Jewish students feel targeted when Palestinians refer to killing “colonizers” or knifing Israelis.

          University officials who may believe Jews have little reason to feel this way and that such references are constitutionally protected free speech might want to look at some once-popular Nazi German anthems that also referred to knifing Jews.

          “Sharpen the long knives on the pavement, let the knives slip into the Jew’s body,” goes the lead verse of “Blood Must Flow,” theme song of the S.A. (full name in German: Sturmabteilung, or Assault Division), Adolf Hitler’s notorious “Brownshirts.” “When Jewish blood spurts off the knife, things will be twice as good,” says the “Fighting Song of the S.A.,” another Brownshirt anthem.

          To his credit, when San Francisco State’s president, Les Wong, heard of the Palestinian group’s words, he issued a statement saying “The university is a place where dialogue, debate and the marketplace of ideas are cherished. We must also maintain a safe environment. Engaging in expressions that threaten and intimidate are counter to these goals…”

          If Berkeley officials had reacted similarly to the Palestinian mock checkpoints, the San Francisco State incidents might never have occurred. But unless Wong follows through, preventing a repeat, and officials of other campuses react as strongly, there will be more intimidating demonstrations and Web postings.

          And soon they may not merely target Jewish students. Example: An investigation is now underway of an alleged anti-black hate crime at San Jose State. For Jews have long been like a canary in a coal mine: They are often the first targets in waves of discrimination and hate, but those waves almost always wind up washing over plenty of others.

          -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

FRACKING RULES MUST HAVE MERIT; NO ONE COMPLETELY HAPPY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2013 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “FRACKING RULES MUST HAVE MERIT; NO ONE COMPLETELY HAPPY”

          There is little doubt an economic bonanza awaits California beneath the surface of the Monterey Shale, a geologic formation stretching from San Benito County south along the west side of the San Joaquin Valley right into parts of Southern California.

          One study put the possible job-creating potential of this oil and gas trove at more than 20,000. For sure, it would spread oil industry jobs far beyond their current centers in Kern County and some coastal areas of the state. Oil reserves said to lurk within rock formations are said to amount to at least 15 billion barrels. Not to mention many millions of therms of natural gas.

          So far, not much has been done with this resource, and there’s plenty of dispute over whether anything should be. The potential is obvious: Hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, has brought enough oil and gas from similar but smaller formations in Wyoming, the Dakotas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere to turn this country from a big oil importer to a net exporter of petroleum products.

          But environmentalists in California worry large-scale fracking of the Monterey Shale and other oilfields previously considered depleted will pollute ground water, foul the air and maybe even cause earthquakes.

          That’s why the state Department of Conservation issued a set of proposed new rules the other day aiming, it said, to protect those other resources at the same time it keeps California “productive and competitive.”

          The rules, mandated by a compromise law passed last summer, won’t take effect for months and are now open to public comment, with revisions possible.

          Once they are in force, two things will be true: California will have America’s toughest set of fracking rules, while both frackers and their opponents will be unhappy. In journalism, there’s an old principle: If folks on all sides of an issue are unhappy with a story, it was probably a pretty good job. That’s because most stories are complicated, filled with gray areas and not all black and white.

          That’s also true of fracking.

          The practice has made a boom state of North Dakota, once a depressed area. But there have been reports of water pollution from several places and a several earthquakes have occurred in far from usual quake country since the technique became common.

          Here are a few things California’s proposed new rules would do:

--  Force oil companies to apply for permits before fracking and disclose where it will occur, how much water it will use, what chemicals are involved and where waste will eventually be dumped.

--  Nearby property owners will be able to have their water wells tested before and after fracking.

--  An independent panel of scientists will study risks and make a public report by Jan. 1, 2015.

--   And state water officials will monitor all ground water basins to make sure drinking water is not harmed by fracking.

     The Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading fracking

critic, says it has mixed feelings about those rules. They’re not a complete 

moratorium, but they do assure the most thorough study of fracking ever, which 

ought to lead to sound permitting laws and regulations.

      The oil industry has known for at least a year regulations were coming, but didn’t want an outright moratorium. “We’ve been doing it (fracking to get extra oil from wells previously considered depleted) for 60 years and there hasn’t been an incident anywhere in the state,” a spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Assn. said. “To have a moratorium would make it even more difficult for California to supply the crude oil it needs.

           

          “But we’ve known regulation was coming. We don’t like it, but we can live with this.”

          The bottom line is that neither of these principals is happy with the planned new rules, which aren’t permanent anyway. The real key to this dispute will be the findings of the scientific panel and how all sides interpret them. Until that report arrives about a year from now, everyone involved can only hang onto their positions and hope they are proven right.

          

          -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.