REPARATIONS EFFORT WON’T PRODUCE MUCH THIS YEAR

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

      “REPARATIONS EFFORT WON’T PRODUCE MUCH THIS YEAR”

 

        Try taking an apology to the bank and see what the teller says, or even the bank president.

 

        One thing for sure: No apology will directly produce a bank deposit.

 

        Thousands of Black Californians knew this as they attended hearings across the state last year aiming to develop an aid package for descendants of slaves who still suffer after-effects of bondage. So they responded far more enthusiastically to the possibility of cash reparations than anything else mentioned.

 

        Not preferential college admissions or affirmative action in hiring, nothing else drew crowd approval crowds like cash.

 

        But there is no cash in any proposal for reparations now being floated in the state Legislature, even the 14-bill package announced earlier this year by the legislative Black caucus.

 

 

        That’s partly because there’s no cash to be had in this year of huge budget deficits amounting to somewhere between $38 billion and $73 billion. It’s also due to a seemingly definitive poll which found last fall that California voters by more than a 2-to-1 margin oppose paying descendants of the enslaved cash reparations for atrocities against their forebears.

 

        That survey by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found 59 percent of voters against and just 28 percent in favor, with a relatively paltry 13 percent undecided or neutral.

 

        Cash reparations, said poll director Mark DiCamillo, have “a steep uphill climb, at least from the public’s point of view.”

 

        It’s no surpise, then, that the key piece of reparations legislation this year involves no money, or even affirmative action, which many Californians have long opposed. Rather, it would require the governor to apologize quickly to descendants of human chattel. That costs nothing, but from the viewpoint of Black lawmakers may seem as if it would leave them a big foot in the door for future actions on other types of reparations when times grow fiscally looser.

 

        Even last year, with much smaller deficits than now, Gov. Gavin Newsom made it clear he would veto cash reparations. Not wanting to embarrass him by forcing an actual decision, majority Democratic legislators won’t yet try to pass out money.

 

        One reason most Californians look askance at cash reparations is that this state was never a center of slavery. Under pre-Emancipation federal law, slaveowners could bring their human property into free states and see them remain enslaved. Similarly, escaped slaves could be tracked down in so-called free states and forced back to their previous owners.

 

        California was part of this, but not a ringleader, essentially no more culpable than New York, Massachusetts and Illinois, all hotbeds of abolition.

 

        California voters looking at those historical realities were not last year inclined to pay the great-great grandchildren of slaves victimized by a Supreme Court that upheld slavery even in free states. That court included five justices from slave states.

 

        If only because of California’s peripheral involvement with slavery, it would make no political sense to back monetary reparations. Plus, the concept may be illegal on its face.

 

        That’s because government favoritism of one group over others is not permitted under the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment, which guarantees all who live in America “equal protection of the laws.”

 

        So if one person whose forebears suffered legally sanctioned injustice could get six-figure cash reparations from the government, so could any other persons whose ancestors also suffered government-imposed injustice.

 

        That would include Native Americans enslaved by Californians including John Sutter, whose Sacramento fort is often recognized as a key starting point for the Gold Rush, and possibly also Chinese and Jewish Americans precluded from owning some properties by legally approved property covenants.

 

        Start giving big chunks of cash to members of all these groups and soon money itself might become meaningless.

 

        The bottom line: The legislative Black caucus is wise to limit its demands in this early phase of recognition that some kind of compensation is in order for those who continue to be victimized by the aftermath of slavery.

 

        It’s possible that looser financial times will make more measures possible, but certainly not yet.

       

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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

 

ETHNIC STUDIES BATTLE MOVES TO LOCAL SCHOOL DISTRICTS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 23, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “ETHNIC STUDIES BATTLE MOVES TO LOCAL     SCHOOL DISTRICTS”

 

        After a two-year battle, California now has a model ethnic studies curriculum for its elementary and high schools.

 

        But no one knows how many schools will actually use the 700-plus page study plan, as there is no state mandate forcing anyone graduating from high school to pass such a course.

 

        That’s because Gov. Gavin Newsom unexpectedly vetoed AB 331 last fall, killing a bill to impose just such a requirement even though he okayed a similar condition for graduation from California State University campuses.

 

        Newsom explained that he didn’t sign the bill because conflicts over the K-12 ethnic studies program were still playing out. But the plan was okayed unanimously last month by the state Board of Education. Yet, the controversies it spurred remain strong.

 

 

        All this means the battle now shifts from the state level to local school boards, which will decide what parts of the model curriculum to use, what to ignore and what to leave up to individual teachers.

 

        This is not a new fight. Even as the curriculum underwent revisions over the last year, school boards in places like Albany and Alhambra, San Francisco, Oakland and Hayward endorsed it sight unseen. They did this at the urging of advocates of a school of academic thought known as “critical ethnic studies” and the organization that pushes it, the Critical Ethnic Studies (CES) Association.

 

        Several websites describe the central question guiding CES as “How do the histories of colonialism and conquest, racial chattel slavery and white supremacist patriarchies…affect, inspire and unsettle scholarship...”

 

        In brief, CES believes African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Asian American/Pacific Islander Americans have always been downtrodden in America.

 

        Its advocates contend – and got this view enshrined in the new curriculum – that pale-skinned immigrant groups gave up all or most of their prior identities when they arrived in America, eagerly assuming a position of “white privilege.”

 

        This contention persists even though the new curriculum has sections on the difficulties encountered by immigrant Irish, Sikhs and Jews, among others.

 

        It’s also a bunch of hooey, say leaders of some of those groups.

 

        One is Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of the AMCHA Initiative that tracks campus anti-Semitism. “The curriculum…has a politically- and activist-driven mission that will incite hate and division and is dangerous for all high school students,” she said. “Profoundly disturbing is the portrayal of Jews…as white and privileged at a time when anti-Jewish sentiment, hostility and violence has reached alarming levels. Indoctrinating students to view Jews (that way puts) an even larger target on the back of every Jewish student.”

 

        It’s the same for Irish and Armenians, who are declared privileged despite decades of discrimination extending to property codicils that until recently often forbade sales to them and some other groups.

 

        While scores of university scholars, religious leaders and other nationally recognized experts opposed much of the new curriculum, no one knows who might get involved in the local battles now that this plan is official state policy.

 

        When CES activists began approaching school boards last spring, they met little or no organized opposition. So several districts endorsed and a few actually began teaching units from the then-draft curriculum about figures like self-described “lifetime Communist” Angela Davis, former Black Panther leader Bobby Seale and other violent, divisive figures.

 

        In one of the few places that saw substantial expert opposition to this campaign, the Vallejo school board rejected the curriculum after Robert Lawson, a school board member and former history teacher, said “People shouldn’t be fooled that ethnic studies are mainly to instill pride in one’s heritage. It’s a means of getting even.”

 

        The bottom line is that the curriculum is little better than what was roundly rejected as hate-inducing in 2019. But it did attain the level of accuracy and balance needed to get the state school board’s support.

 

        That means this material ought to be viewed as merely a bunch of suggestions, not a blueprint, when local schools plan approaches to ethnic studies. It also means Newsom – or his recall-induced successor, if there is one – would be wise to veto any new bill establishing a high school ethnic studies mandate if one should reach his desk later this year.

       
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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

BAIL BOND PRESERVATION LOOKS LIKE A WINNER

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2019 OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“BAIL BOND PRESERVATION LOOKS LIKE A WINNER”

It’s never easy to convince Californians they should reverse decisions made by the legislators they elect, as Republicans led by the failed gubernatorial candidate John Cox discovered last fall.

          Cox made his pet proposition, a referendum to repeal a 12-cent gasoline tax increase passed in 2017, the centerpiece of his run for governor, but saw it lose by a 57-43 percent margin, not even close.

          But California referenda – the term for propositions aiming to overturn laws passed by the Legislature – can win, as sponsors of a 1982 measure proved when they overwhelmingly killed a plan called the Peripheral Canal, designed to move Northern California river water south around the Delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers.

          And now, anyone looking for a nearly guaranteed winning proposition in next year’s election should check out an already-qualified measure to repeal last year’s law eliminating the centuries-old cash bail system from California criminal courts.

          This law, quickly signed by ex-Gov. Jerry Brown after it passed last summer, appears doomed by the new referendum sponsored by the state’s more than 3,000 bail bondsmen. They, of course, have a vested interest in keeping the present system: If cash bail goes, they would lose established businesses, jobs and income amounting to about $2 billion per year.

          Ending cash bail looks like a loser not for legal reasons, but because it draws opposition from both the left and the right. Republicans like Cox and the GOP’s defeated candidate for state attorney general, Steven Bailey, instantly condemned the new law, passed as SB 10, claiming it was both soft on criminals and unconstitutional.

          Their claim won’t be tested unless the bail bond industry’s proposition fails in late 2020. That’s because the no-cash-bail system SB 10 set up is now in abeyance even though Gov. Gavin Newsom tentatively budgeted $75 million to get it going.

          So strong is the support for cash bail that this referendum qualified for the ballot in near-record time. Sponsors had 90 days to gather the 365,888 valid voter signatures needed to put their proposition on the ballot. They took just 70 days and collected more than 576,000.

          Support for keeping cash bail, at least for now, comes from both liberals and conservatives. The American Civil Liberties Union and others on the left initially supported SB 10, but were turned off by the system that would replace cash bail if the law ever takes effect. This plan was added into the bill in the last hours before it passed, and criminal justice critics fear it might result in keeping more pre-trial defendants in custody than cash bail ever has.

          The planned new system, called “risk assessment,” would rate all persons bound over for trial in California for their likelihood of disappearing or committing more crimes if left free while awaiting court appearances. People accused of misdemeanors would have to be freed within 24 hours no matter their background.

          The ACLU, for one, fears the new system could give judges new power to hold felony defendants indefinitely before trial, and might perpetuate racial or religious prejudices, leading to more persons languishing in jail than now do.

          While Republicans opposed the no-cash-bail law, Newsom and other Democrats praised it, saying money should never decide whether a defendant stays in jail, isolated from family and friends.

          Without doubt, money can do that now: If a defendant cannot make bail or afford the 10 percent down payment on bail usually required by a bondsman, that person stays in custody.

          The bail industry also claims the new system would be unsafe. “Where it has been used, (some) violent offenders have been declared “safe,” while others with minor blemishes on their records have been deemed “high risk” and left stuck in jail,” said Jeff Clayton, executive director of the American Bail Coalition.

          Another factor: While California is as solidly “blue” politically as any state in America, it also has a long history of passing tough anti-crime measures like “three-strikes-and-you’re-out,” and by large margins.

          Taken together, all this makes the new referendum almost a sure thing for passage, which would send would-be criminal justice reformers back to their no-cash-bail drawing boards.

    -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.

BEWARE OF EASY MUNICIPAL BANKRUPTCIES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “BEWARE OF EASY MUNICIPAL BANKRUPTCIES”

No one is seriously suggesting that California will soon become another Cyprus, the Greek-speaking Mediterranean island nation whose economic bailout plan includes dunning holders of “large” bank accounts as much as half their holdings and freezing the rest.

          But since a federal bankruptcy judge gave the go-ahead for the city of Stockton to seek shelter from more than $1 billion in debts via Chapter 9 bankruptcy, alarm bells have been ringing loudly in the heads of municipal bond investors.

          They’ve already seen California cities and counties file four of the five largest municipal bankruptcies in U.S. history, beginning with the $4 billion 1994 Orange County debacle, and then Vallejo’s $175 million case in 2008 and the in-progress cases of Stockton and San Bernardino.

          If you’re the chief of municipal bond investing for a big bank, whether on Wall Street or in San Francisco, Los Angeles or Chicago, this gets your attention. You might hesitate to lend hundreds of millions of dollars to other cities and counties if you fear they might go the Stockton route. Even if you proceed, you might insist on higher interest rates to compensate for what now appears to be added risk. That can translate to higher local taxes.

          If you hesitate or insist on high interest, what happens to school remodeling plans, sewer expansions and repairs, park purchases, water facilities and scores of other civic projects that won’t be built without borrowed money?

There’s also the question of who might go to work for cities and counties, some risking their lives at times as police officers or firefighters, if Stockton should be allowed to weasel out of salary and pension obligations the city and its voters agreed to.

          That’s why the hosannas that greeted the early April decision by veteran Judge Christopher Klein allowing Stockton to proceed seem premature and hollow.

          Even Stockton’s city manager, a major player in his city’s bankruptcy filing, was subdued after the Klein ruling went his way. “There’s nothing to celebrate about bankruptcy,” said Bob Deis.

          One who crowed was former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who long has believed his city may need bankruptcy to escape some of its pension obligations. Said Riordan, “If I was a union leader, I would be shaking in my boots. I think the unions should be scared stiff.”

          There are plenty of other cities unhappy with their debts and possibly unable to pay them, just like Stockton. Few, though, owe as much to one creditor as Stockton does to the California Public Employees Retirement System, better known as CalPERS -- $900 million.

          It was that debt, the result of assumptions about property tax revenues and developer fees made in the heyday of the housing bubble during the last decade, which Klein said cinched his decision. The bankruptcy filing had been challenged by big bond holders who claimed the city isn’t really broke, just trying to evade paying all it owes.

          It’s the same kind of debt that saddles San Bernardino, Los Angeles and other cities. Voters in most such places have shown little if any willingness to increase their taxes to help pay down debt, especially if it’s to fund public employee pensions, even for police and firefighters.

          But at least once, they voted for serious changes in city pension obligations as a way out. That came last year in San Jose, where Measure B passed with almost 70 percent of the vote, raising retirement ages for new employees and increasing some employee pension contributions. The San Jose move is believed to have been taken early enough to avoid bankruptcy.

“The city of Stockton could have and should have taken the necessary steps to avoid bankruptcy,” claims Bob Williams, president of the Virginia-based State Budget Solutions, a national non-profit group advocating reduced municipal budgets and lower public employee pensions.

          He cites Measure B as a prime example of what Stockton did not attempt. But there are also differences. San Jose has kept up its retirement system payments, for one thing.

          The problem for some cities is that they've waited so long it would take something more radical than Measure B to reduce their debt. And state law prohibits them from reducing public employee pensions now being paid.

          So some have turned to bankruptcy and others may follow, hoping federal law will trump state law and allow them to cut pension obligations, by no means a sure thing and an issue that will almost certainly end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

          In the meantime, bankruptcy risks many aspects of the future of cities that declare it, something they should not forget when tempted to follow Stockton’s sad example.

     -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, go to www.californiafocus.net

ARE REPUBLICANS MOVING TOO FAR RIGHT TO BE ELECTED?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 23, 2010, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“ARE REPUBLICANS MOVING TOO FAR RIGHT TO BE ELECTED?”

How far right can California’s Republican candidates move before they’re too far out of this state’s apparent mainstream to be electable?

That question hangs in the air this spring as the five major GOP candidates for governor and the U.S. Senate practically trip over each other while running to the right.

They do this because they know their party’s primaries are dominated by conservatives who rarely nominate a moderate for anything. Many analysts believe, for instance, that Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – elected in the 2003 recall – never could have won a GOP primary.

This situation will hold unless or until the overall California electorate okays an open primary like what’s proposed this June as Proposition 14.

Only when all voters can vote in all primaries will candidates need to appeal to the broad middle ground, unrepresented in California for decades as the right wing rules the GOP and a far left/organized labor coalition controls the Democratic Party.

For now, anyone who wants to get anywhere in the GOP must cater to the right, even if it means running counter to what all polls show the vast majority of Californians favor.

This conservative dominance is one reason Republican voter registration fell to an all-time low of about 31 percent this spring.

“If we ever go below 30 percent,” Meg Whitman, the current poll leader in the race to become the Republican nominee for governor, warned in one recent speech, “it will be almost impossible for us to win elections.”

Republicans now can win statewide even though they are unlikely soon to win a legislative majority because voting runs much heavier in districts they dominate than in many with strong Democratic majorities.

But if they weave too far right while vying for party nominations, they risk losing the moderates and liberals who together comprise the vast majority of the electorate. And if they recant their primary stances, they become flip-floppers.

The most obvious Republican move right for the primary is by current state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, Whitman’s rival for the nomination for governor.

Poizner has campaigned around the state for two years, often taking different stances from what he espoused while running for the Assembly in 2004. Whitman’s campaign loves noting his switcheroos. She, of course, has no prior record – not even much of a record of having voted.

Whitman notes that Poizner opposed ex-President George W. Bush’s 2004 tax cuts and donated $200,000 to the year-2000 campaign for Proposition 39, which lowered the majority needed for school construction bonds from two-thirds to 55 percent. Whitman estimates that added $40 billion to the state’s tax load.

Meanwhile, she makes improved education a major promise, but doesn’t say where schools would be without Proposition 39 money.

Whitman also charges Poizner backed an immigrant guest worker program in 2004 and praised Bush’s efforts to pass an immigrant amnesty program, but now wants illegal immigration totally cut off and illegals deprived of all public services. Poizner calls Whitman soft on illegal immigration. And so on.

Whitman opposes immigration amnesty and vows to cut 40,000 state workers. She promises to become “Gov. No,” pledging to veto any bill not about job creation, government spending cuts or improved education. No one knows whether her plan would produce a larger spending cut than Poizner’s proposed 10 percent, across-the-board reductions in taxes and spending, especially since schoolteachers are public employees. In both cases, this is campaign blather; neither candidate’s position will become reality while Democrats dominate the Legislature.

One thing for sure: both candidates and the three Republicans vying to take on three-term Sen. Barbara Boxer this fall made certain few Latinos will vote for them this fall, since every poll shows immigration reform with some kind of amnesty is a high priority among that group – the fastest growing voter bloc in California and the nation. Polls also show most other voters have a live-and-let-live attitude toward illegals.

The candidates also seemed to want to alienate pro-choice women, with Whitman blasting Poizner for favoring government-funded abortions a few years ago, but reversing himself now. And, led by Whitman and Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, GOP candidates grow more skeptical of global warming every day in a state where environmental measures usually pass.

The real question is how long these stances will be remembered outside the Republican Party.

For if this year’s crop of candidates is anything like many predecessors, they will become more moderate after the primary, when they must appeal to an electorate not dominated by conservatives and Tea Party activists.

Back when Jerry Brown was governor, top aide Tom Quinn remarked that “We can say almost anything we want before Jan. 1 of an election year; no one will remember.” It’s now well beyond Jan. 1 and Brown will soon start trying to make sure the great mass of voters – non-Republicans – remembers what these people are saying now.

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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