BIDEN MAKES A DIFFERENCE: STATE NO LONGER A TARGET

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “BIDEN MAKES A DIFFERENCE: STATE NO LONGER A TARGET”

 

        California spent most of the last four years as a target, the object of continual presidential resentment from Donald Trump because he lost here in 2016 by almost a 62-38 margin, the state’s differential providing all 3 million votes by which Hillary Clinton defeated him in the popular vote that fall.

 

        But with the end of successor Joseph Biden’s first 100 days in office drawing near, things look very different for California today.

 

First, a look back at California’s background with Trump.

 

The popular vote numbers against Trump were somewhat higher last fall than in 2016, but the percentage was virtually the same, this time slightly more than 64-34 percent, suggesting few minds changed over four years.

 

        Trump took out his resentment in myriad ways, refusing to come here for almost anything but visits to his vaunted border wall and a couple of fund raising dinners. More substantially, his presidency meant less money for California schools than before, and less funding for police, highways, parks and almost anything else the federal government helps pay for.

 

        When it came to new federal projects and climate change measures, forget about it. As for top appointments, almost no one from California except big donors to Trump campaigns got any. The big exception was Stephen Miller, the only close advisor who was not family that lasted the length of Trump’s term.

 

        Miller, a Santa Monica High School graduate whose family suffered financial losses during his youth that forced a move from the most affluent part of his hometown to a lesser area, became the ideologue behind Trump’s extreme hard line policies on immigration.

 

        With Biden’s accession – something Trump fought to stop right up to inauguration day – things quickly turned around for California.

 

        Start with the vaccination program against the COVID-19 plague. Under Trump, there was virtually no program. Some health care workers managed to get inoculated before Biden took over, but there were no mass vaccination sites, small supplies for hospitals and health systems and tiny numbers of people getting the shots.

 

        Within less than a month after Biden’s arrival, California had dozens of large-scale vaccine centers, and six weeks into his term, about one-third of Californians (13.5 million) had been jabbed. There was some confusion, but except for weather-caused shipping problems, there have been no supply shortages or vaccination stoppages. With the advent of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson version of the vaccine, the rollout gained speed and hurtled toward herd immunity, slowed only by a chemical mixup in one J&J plant in Baltimore.

 

        Biden aimed for 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days, but the campaign far exceeded what at first seemed an impossible goal.

 

        California also ceased to be the center of resistance to federal policy, that role shifting to states like Texas and Arizona, run by conservative Republicans.

 

        Instead, Californians – none part of the Biden family – moved into one top policy-making role after another. UC Berkeley Prof. Janet Yellen became Treasury secretary, state Attorney General Xavier Becerra became head of Health and Human Services, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm – a Berkeley professor most of the time since she left office in 2011 – is Energy secretary. Many more Californians got sub-cabinet jobs.

 

        For California, this means treatment as a most-favored state rather than the least favored. It means California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s new bill to permanently ban offshore oil drilling along the West Coast – a direct descendant of the anti-drilling movement that began with the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1968 – stands a good chance.

 

        Plus, Biden ordered a moratorium for new oil drilling from federal land and waters within less than a week of taking office.

 

        Biden’s arrival also means the million or so Dreamers whose status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program established by ex-President Barack Obama and targeted by Trump, now breathe easier. Immigration raids and deportations of the undocumented, some of whom have lived and worked here for decades, are much reduced and targeted more to known criminals than others.

 

        It leaves California’s universal mail balloting unmolested by federal interference.

 

        For California, then, Biden has meant the last election had consequences that figure to increase every day.

 

 

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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

ONE CENSUS QUESTION COULD DO LONG-LASTING DAMAGE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2018, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
   “ONE CENSUS QUESTION COULD DO LONG-LASTING DAMAGE”

          President Trump may just have struck his most effective and longest-lasting blow of a seemingly constant conflict with California, the state that cost him a popular vote victory in 2016 and continues to resist his policies most.

          As with many of Trump’s anti-California moves, like his abortive attempt to defund the ongoing construction of an earthquake early warning system, he allowed one of his cabinet members to announce the latest tactic: adding a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S. Census questionnaire.

          California politicians and immigrant rights groups instantly recognized the move for what it is, “an attempt to suppress the political influence of people of color,” in the words of the Los Angeles-based Latino Victory Project.

          State Attorney General Xavier Becerra and the state’s top election official, Secretary of State Alex Padilla, instantly filed a lawsuit to strike the question from the Census, denouncing it as unconstitutional. Twelve other states quickly followed.

          But the states will likely lose that legal battle. For the Constitution says nothing about what questions the Census Bureau can ask, nor even about whether the answers are confidential.

          All it says, in Section 2 of Article 1, is that every 10 years the government must count “the whole number of free persons…excluding Indians not taxed.” The information, it says, is then to be used for setting the number of representatives for each state in the lower house of Congress.Co

          But census information now goes far beyond that. It also determines for the next decade how much money each state gets for education, highways, homeland security, health care, welfare, natural disaster preparation, sewers and much more.

         

The more people live in your state, the more money it gets for services Congress has decided everyone in America should have. Citizenship doesn’t matter in those distributions.

          That’s why, every 10 years for the last half-century, California has mounted a loud campaign to convince illegal immigrants to let themselves be counted. For neither federal funding nor apportionment of congressional seats is set by the number of citizens in any state, only by the number of people living there.

          In short, the more fear the Trump administration can strike in California’s large undocumented immigrant populace, the less money the state will get for a host of vital functions.

          That’s because illegal immigrants have never completely trusted Census Bureau promises that their information will be confidential and not passed along to immigration authorities. Many fear being counted might lead to deportation, so they avoid census takers.

          They have even less cause for trust today, when Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross controls the Census Bureau and didn’t promise confidentiality when he announced the citizenship question for 2020. (A similar query was used in six censuses before 1960, but obvious undercounts became common, so the question was abandoned for the last five counts.)

          But Ross claimed the federal Voting Rights Act requires the government to tally “citizens of voting age to protect minorities against discrimination.”

          He can likely revive the citizenship question because, as the Census Bureau says on its website, “It is constitutional to include questions…beyond those concerning a simple count…” The bureau then lists several major legal decisions, including a 1999 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Census is “the linchpin of the federal statistical system…collecting data on the characteristics of individuals, households and housing units...”

          It’s hard to see how a citizenship question violates that decision, but Becerra says it does. He adds, probably accurately, that the question is an “attempt by the Trump administration to hijack the 2020 Census for political purposes,” including diminishing both the federal money coming to California and its representation in Congress. This state already gets back far less in federal spending than it puts in the Treasury via taxes, and Republican politicians in some other states are crowing that the citizenship question could cost California as many as three congressional seats, plus three electoral votes.

          This all adds up to a savvy move by Trump to strike lasting harm against his political nemesis California, harm that could far outlast his own time in office.

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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

WHY CONSUMERS WON’T GET MUCH OF DYNEGY’S MILLIONS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“WHY CONSUMERS WON’T GET MUCH OF DYNEGY’S MILLIONS”

           There was applause from environmentalists when Gov. Jerry Brown and the state Public Utilities Commission late last month accepted a $120 million settlement from NRG Energy Inc. for the part it and the bankrupt former electric generator Dynegy Inc. played in the power crisis that afflicted California 11 years ago.

           To be paid over four years, that settlement will see NRG spend 80 percent of the money on a network of electric car charging stations along major highways and in the state’s biggest cities. Only 20 percent will go to consumers in the form of very small rate reductions.

           Few questioned any of the deal, even though electric customers bilked during the crisis will get mere pennies back for this part of the many dollars the cheating Dynegy stole from them. (New Jersey-based NRG six years ago bought out Dynegy’s interest in two California power plants. Dynegy paid consumers $281 million in a previous settlement.)

           Despite numerous attempts to get his explanation, Brown has yet to offer a rationale for spending most of the money on charging stations rather than refunding it to myriad cheated customers. The best his office has offered was this from spokesman Evan Westrup: “$100 million to expand the state’s clean energy infrastructure is good news for all Californians.”

           Altogether, Dynegy caused an estimated 10 percent of the $9 billion in overcharges California electric customers paid during the crunch because of illegal market manipulations by Enron, Dynegy, Reliant Energy, Williams Energy, Mirant and other firms, most of them based in Texas. Including this settlement, it has paid back about $400 million.

           So Brown endorses a deal that gets consumers little, while leaving Dynegy’s successor the owner of 200 full-service charging stations. Another 1,000 smaller charging facilities will go into commercial buildings and apartment or condominium complexes.

           The best explanation of why this money will go to electric car chargers comes from Frank Lindh, the utility commission’s general counsel. In a telephone interview, he said refusing this settlement would risk eight more years of legal wrangling, with the possibility Californians could end up with nothing.

The chargers, he said, are what NRG offered, “and I think it’s the best we can do here.” For sure, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission – which would hear any further case – has never approved a full refund of illegal gains by any electric generating company.

Meanwhile, the new chargers will likely spur more use of electric cars in California. The question is whether the PUC should have pressed its refund demands or accepted this kind of subsidy for a new sort of infrastructure. No one ever subsidized America’s gigantic network of gasoline stations. No similar largesse is yet going to anyone building hydrogen fueling stations for what many believe will be a coming generation of H2-powered cars and trucks.

           It’s certainly possible to see this use of money as a form of theft. In virtually any other settlement for corporate wrongdoing, most of it would go back to those who were cheated. Residential ratepayers saw their monthly electric bills rise by an average of more than $10 per month during and after the crisis of 2000 and 2001, when then-Gov. Gray Davis was essentially blackmailed into accepting electric power supply deals at exorbitant prices rather than risk years of blackouts and brownouts. That was what the crooked generating companies threatened in their heyday, before many of their executives were later convicted for their complex cheating.

           It’s also true that today’s limited number of electric car and plug-in hybrid models sell for many thousands of dollars more than comparable gasoline-powered cars. So cheated ratepayers will now subsidize the wealthy who can afford those cars.

           Complained Steve Frank, the former head of the conservative California Republican Assembly and a persistent Brown critic, “(Brown) has stolen $100 million belonging to the people of California to buy a wasteful, unneeded personal toy… Brown has decided to misuse our money for his bad dream policies.”

           Actually, Brown didn’t arrange the NRG/Dynegy settlement, even if he did announce it in the same press release as his executive order demanding that state officials work with private companies to get 1.5 million electric cars on the road by 2025. The PUC did that.

          But Brown appointees, like Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols, hailed the action. “This…will clean our air, lower greenhouse gas emissions and reduce our dependence on imported oil,” she said. Added PUC Commissioner Mike Florio, a former consumer advocate, “This creative deal…propels us down the road to a clean transportation future…”

           But the people who were cheated will not be repaid by this settlement. The bottom line is that no one will ever know if Lindh and the PUC are correct about this being the best that could be done. 

         
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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

JUST HOW VULNERABLE IS BARBARA BOXER?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“JUST HOW VULNERABLE IS BARBARA BOXER?”

All three Republicans now vying to challenge Barbara Boxer this fall call her “vulnerable” – and much worse – at least three or four times daily. So have three major polls, all of which found the three-term Democratic senator running about even with each of her possible opponents.

And yet… while 41 percent of Californians said in one survey last summer that they’d prefer to see Boxer unseated this fall, her approval rating in the Rasmussen poll (which often gives Republicans slightly higher percentages than they actually reap) and others remains at about 49 percent.

That’s right about where it usually is, and only slightly lower than ratings for California’s other Democratic senator, Dianne Feinstein. Oddly enough, almost no one calls Feinstein vulnerable as she looks to a likely 2012 reelection campaign.

What’s going on here? Just the usual, says Boxer.

"It’s tough for me every six years,” she said in an interview, noting that she’s riding a winning streak of 10 straight elections, dating from the 1970s when she first ran for supervisor in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. “A lot of people move in and out of California all the time, so you’re always dealing with a lot of voters who don’t know you. I have to reintroduce myself to the public every six years.”

Each time, her opponents – like current Republican leaders Tom Campbell and Carly Fiorina – have been touted as strong candidates, but lost. When she ran against former state Treasurer Matt Fong, Boxer recalled, “People said it was curtains for me. He was an Asian-American man, a moderate Republican with a mother (longtime former California Secretary of State March Fong Eu) who was a Democratic icon.”

In 2004, against another former Secretary of State, Bill Jones, who had long been the only Republican in statewide office, Boxer was again the early underdog. But she won by a 58-38 margin, topping the 54 percent drawn by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry that year in California and pulling 6,955,728 votes, still the most ever cast for any Senate candidate. Since then, Jones – a longtime state senator who won two statewide elections before losing to Boxer – has frequently been labeled “incompetent.” No one ever called him that before he lost.

Maybe Fong wasn’t weak and Jones was competent. Maybe Boxer knows something many analysts don’t. For sure, she knows her position is tenuous every time she enters an election season.

“All my races are hard, and this one will be, too,” she said. “It’s California, and despite a lot of people saying it’s a Democratic state, I know it’s very independent. It’s a huge state, so I need a campaign to tell people where I stand and what I’ve done for them.”

One reason her would-be opponents may have closed the early 10-point or larger gap she had over all of them: They’ve been campaigning actively, beating the bushes for votes almost every day, appearing in local newspapers and on local television, while Boxer has been active here only on weekends when she can fly out from Washington, D.C.

That’s a problem for every senator whose state is distant from the capital. Boxer has already raised more than $12 million to counter this factor with an ad campaign that likely won’t open until well after the June primary. Most likely, she’ll raise a total of $30 million, with another $10 million or so in independent expenditure ads on her behalf if labor unions or the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee believe she remains vulnerable as the November vote nears.

One thing she’ll surely hear plenty about this year that she hasn’t in past campaigns: The “call me Senator” encounter she had with a brigadier general during a committee hearing last year. That’s been a common You Tube video for months and will surely show up in Republican campaign ads.

In the exchange, she told Gen. Michael Walsh, testifying about federal aid in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, “Could you say ‘Senator’ instead of ‘ma’am?...It’s just a thing, I worked so hard to get that title, so I’d appreciate it, yes, thank you.”

Republicans leaped on that as a sign of senatorial arrogance. Boxer’s explanation: “The general had no problem with that. I just thought I should call him General and he should call me Senator since those are our titles and it was an official hearing. So, once in 18 years I did ask to be called by my official title. I think it’s so much less important than things like the jobs bills I’ve worked for and passed and many other things.”

Her longtime campaign manager, Rose Kapolczynski, says the continuing play that incident gets is “a sign we’re in a toxic political climate. People are angry. We also know that in off-year elections, the party in power always loses seats.”

But Kapolczynski insists Boxer will beat whatever Republicans runs against her. And if she does, that Republican will likely be called “weak” or “incompetent” for a long time to come.

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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