DUMPED HOSPITALS: TIME TO REEVALUATE ARNOLD, BROWN

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2020, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“DUMPED HOSPITALS: TIME TO REEVALUATE ARNOLD, BROWN”

          Ancient Egyptians first observed that only when we eliminate traditions do we discover why they first became traditions.

          That’s a warning state officials must heed this spring, as they shape a sharply reduced state budget where many programs will likely be slashed or eliminated. To rephrase the Egyptians: Eliminate a state program and you eventually learn why it was set up. This can be a very hard lesson.

          So it’s been this spring, as California coped with the many consequences of ex-Gov. Jerry Brown axing a $200 million program featuring sophisticated mobile stand-by hospitals complete with sleeping quarters for staff and a stockpile of ventilators during the budget-cutting festival he presided over after assuming office for the second time in 2011.

          The process of eliminating the program – which received virtually no notice while it existed a decade and more ago – came to light via a joint investigation by the Los Angeles Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

          This emergency ready-response program included three 200-bed tent hospitals that could be brought to disaster scenes anywhere in California on flatbed trucks and set up to provide care within 72 hours of receiving notice. Each covering an entire football field, they included X-ray machines and intensive care units.

          The program and its elimination as an economizing measure puts the governorships of Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a new light.

          Schwarzenegger, sullied by a long-ago affair with his housekeeper that was revealed right about the time he left office and Brown took over, is often remembered as a lightweight. But during the national avian flu outbreak of 2006, Schwarzenegger spurred his then cash-strapped state to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for the portable hospitals.

          “In light of the pandemic flu risk,” the once and future movie muscleman said then, “it is absolutely a critical investment. I am not willing to gamble with the people’s safety.” How right he was.

          But Brown took precisely that gamble. Now it’s clear we all lost. In a classic penny wise and pound foolish move, he abandoned the program, seeing its most valuable equipment distributed to hospitals around the state, while its tens of millions of N95 facemasks and more than 2,000 life-preserving ventilators seem to have virtually dissolved.

          Brown refused comment to the reporters who revealed this travesty. No wonder.

          For he was a governor who reveled in a reputation for foresight, sagacity and parsimony. He traveled the world as the foremost American spokesman for fighting climate change once Donald Trump became president. He accepted full credit for solving the state’s budget crisis and producing repeated multi-billion-dollar surpluses after sponsoring a successful 2012 budget-balancing ballot proposition.

          His refusal to discuss gutting the emergency hospital program is consistent with his repeated refusal to reveal private conversations and emails with utility executives while he and his appointees steadily favored them over customers in crises like the shutdown of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

He never acknowledged his obvious conflict of interest in dealing with utility issues while his sister earned hundreds of thousands of dollars as a board member of Sempra Energy, parent company of both the San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and the Southern California Gas Co.

          Brown somehow evaded most criticism for this.

          But the worldwide coronavirus crisis now affecting every Californian has put the consequences of his action on the mobile hospitals – far from his biggest budget-cutting move – into bas relief.

          With those hospitals up and running, perhaps Gov. Gavin Newsom would not have had to beg Trump to send the USNS Mercy hospital ship to Los Angeles. If the gear in the hospital program had been kept up, perhaps hospital nurses wouldn’t have had to use the same masks for entire days, rather than dumping and replacing them after visiting each of their patients.

          So Brown lacked the foresight Schwarzenegger showed in setting up the program. Which means the ancient Egyptian warning is correct again: Years after this program was eliminated, we now know exactly why we needed it. That may make it high time to reevaluate the gubernatorial tenures of both Brown and Schwarzenegger.

          Which ought to caution Newsom as the virus forces him to start slashing the state budget this spring.

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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

‘RESISTANCE’ DOOMED? SECESSION MOVE COULD RESULT

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2018 OR THEREAFTER

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BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “‘RESISTANCE’ DOOMED? SECESSION MOVE COULD RESULT”

          Since the Civil War, no state has resisted the policies of a single President more than California today as it fights to fend off many measures President Trump and his cabinet have ordered.

          From smog control to sales of federal lands, immigration policy to oil drilling, health care, census questions and much more, California is doing all it can to avoid going along with Trump, the second President of the last three to have been elected with a minority popular vote and only the fourth ever to reach office in that dicey manner.

          As of mid-April, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra had filed 32 lawsuits trying to stave off major policy changes by Trump. Then came the announcements of a coming federal attempt to take away California’s unique authority for setting air pollution standards and a move toward selling government-owned land in the state’s deserts and mountains.

          Becerra announced immediately he’s ready to file still more lawsuits over those issues.

          But it’s far from certain the Trump agenda can be drowned by a flood of legal briefs. That’s because the Constitution’s supremacy clause gives priority to national laws and regulations over state ones when they conflict.

          Legally, resistance to a Trump attempt at removing California’s anti-smog powers appears the one case with the best chance of ultimate success, because federal Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt would have to prove California applied for its authority on flawed grounds. This requirement is part of the 1970s-era Clean Air Act signed by then-President Richard Nixon. California has no other powers different from other states.

          This makes it seem that the real hope behind many Becerra lawsuits is to delay matters until voters can oust Trump in 2020 – if they do. Should these cases reach the Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court earlier than that (or if Trump is reelected), the resistance movement might hit a wall.

          That’s when the almost-forgotten secession movement known as Calexit might suddenly revive. Sentiment to split from the Union ran as high as 32 percent in polls taken soon after Trump assumed office last year. If the high court should trash cherished state policies that embody what U.S. Senate candidate Kevin de Leon calls “California values,” sentiment could grow stronger than that.

          If this feeling develops, voters might be able to express it at the polls this fall. For the pro-secession “Yes California” group, which claims 44,000 members, will start circulating initiative petitions late this month for a measure called “The California Self Determination Act.” It demands a popular referendum on May 4, 2021 asking voters if they want the state to become independent. If a majority then say yes, the Legislature would have to issue a declaration of independence within one week.

          “After Trump was selected,” says Yes California president Marcus Ruiz Evans of Fresno, “there were two reactions. One was Calexit and the other was resistance. The resistance…has more attention than Calexit now. But the movement feels that’s going to shift dramatically within the next three months.”

          Ruiz claims the resistance movement is “based on the idea that protest can compel politicians to stop…Trump through lawsuits.” None of those suits has yet reached the Supreme Court, he notes, predicting that when they do, things will change. “What happens when the court…shoots down all the California lawsuits? It will be laid bare to the public that California politicians…can’t protect their people as long as they’re part of America and have to abide by federal law.”

          Ruiz thinks that could happen this spring, even as secession initiative petitions are circulating. But odds are it will take longer than that for most of Becerra’s lawsuits to reach the nation’s top court.

          Meanwhile, Calexit backers are unlikely to be dissuaded if they fall short of the signatures needed to put their preliminary measure to a November vote. They’d be sure to come back with another effort, perhaps moving the date of their desired secession referendum back a year or two.

          But Ruiz may be correct in seeing potential here for a significant secession movement so long as Californians feel strong antipathy for Trump and the supremacy clause he’s trying to use to roll back many years of California environmental and social policy.

 
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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

COURT FRUSTRATES VOTERS’ WILL ON ‘JESSICA’S LAW'

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2015 OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “COURT FRUSTRATES VOTERS’ WILL ON ‘JESSICA’S LAW’”

          It was no surprise when Proposition 83, the so-called Jessica’s Law, passed in 2006 with better than a 2-1 majority. The issue, as stated in the ballot summary, was where convicted sex offenders should be allowed to live, no matter how long ago their offenses. The plain wish of the vast majority of voters is that these people become pariahs for life, unable to live anywhere near any potential victims.

    Nobody likes sexual predators, especially violent ones, nor should they. But lawyers for some of them argue that once they’ve served their time and once corrections authorities rule they’ve been rehabilitated as well as possible, they’ve got to live somewhere. And the reality is that Proposition 83 allows them almost noplace to live in any city or town.

    That’s what voters wanted, of course. No one wants a predator living nearby, and many parents have felt more comfortable since Proposition 83 passed.

    As written, this law prohibits all registered sex offenders from residing within 2,000 feet of any school or park. The law also mandates far longer prison terms than before and allows the state Department of Mental Health to keep offenders in custody indefinitely after their prison terms are up, if psychiatrists determine they’re still dangerous. After release, the measure puts tracking devices on all of them for life.

    No one is seriously challenging many of these provisions, which expand on the severe restrictions previously placed on violent rapists and child molesters. The challenges have come to the residential limits.

          On its surface, this proposition was a no-brainer, a gut reaction against a few crimes committed by paroled offenders who were not being thoroughly monitored. Pre-existing rules even contained a tougher residential restriction than the initiative’s 2,000-foot limit for some offenders, not allowing predators judged to be high risks to live within 2,640 feet of parks and schools.

          But by voting as they did, Californians said they don’t fully trust the judgment of mental health professionals; they said no one can ever be sure a onetime offender might not again act out an impulse. Previous law took essentially the same point of view, having long required released sex offenders to register with authorities even decades after their crimes.

    The legal problem comes in restricting where long-ago offenders can live, even after they are judged no longer a serious risk to anyone. This spring, the state Supreme Court in a ruling on a San Diego case, written by conservative retired justice Marvin Baxter, said the restrictions are too tough. Those rules raised the rate of homelessness among the state’s 8,000-plus registered sex offenders by a factor of 24, also hindering their access to medical care and drug and alcohol dependency programs.

    While the beatdown of Proposition 83 residency rules applied at first only to San Diego County, it has already been made general by a state order lifting the distance restriction on offenders whose crimes didn’t involve children.

    The state high court’s decision was presaged years earlier by a federal judge in San Francisco, who said the day after the initiative passed that there was “a substantial likelihood” the law is unconstitutional, changing conditions of parole for persons convicted and released long before it passed.

          That ruling came in a case where a former offender, identified only as John Doe, claimed Jessica’s Law would force him to leave a community where he lived peacefully for more than 20 years.

          That’s just what Republican legislator Susan Runner, from the high desert region of Los Angeles County, wanted to do when she sponsored Proposition 83 and it’s what voters wanted, too. They simply don’t trust prior offenders to remain impulse-resistant forever, and so they want even long-ago sex offenders with solid records since their release far from any proximity to children.

          The last time voters felt as strongly about an initiative was in the mid-1990s, when a huge majority passed Proposition 187 in an effort to cut off health, education and all other public services to illegal immigrants. A federal judge struck down most of that one quickly.

    No one seriously expects the surveillance and sentencing aspects of Proposition 83 to suffer a similar fate. But voters can be excused if they feel frustrated by a court waiting almost nine years to strike down a much of a law they passed, one that provided peace of mind to many.

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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