STATE DEMS NOT HEEDING LESSONS FROM 2020, ‘22

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “STATE DEMS NOT HEEDING LESSONS FROM  2020, ‘22”

         

          California voters administered a few lessons to this state’s dominant Democratic Party in 2020 and 2022, but they appear to be forgotten or were never completely heeded.

 

          The essence of those lessons, as seen in election returns on initiative measures and congressional races: This state’s voters are not as inveterately leftist as believed by the folks now running the state Democratic Party and the Legislature.

 

          Rebukes to those Democrats actually began in the March 2020 presidential primary election, “won” by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders with about 36 percent of the Democratic vote. This was the same number drawn by the ultra-liberal former state Senate president Kevin de Leon (now a disgraced Los Angeles city councilman) from Democratic voters in his 2018 primary attempt to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

 

          These two results ought to tell Democratic leaders they might find their control of California public affairs threatened if they lean too far to the left. A combination of moderate Democrats – clearly, about 65 percent of those registered in the party – with traditional Republicans and other moderates among the no party preference voter cohort has the potential to install very different leaders from those operating today.

 

          One consequence of the fact that far left Berniecrat voters regularly pack the local Democratic caucuses that pick state party convention delegates and, thus, statewide party leaders, has been the strong emergence of what is euphemistically called “identity politics.”

 

          That’s a political school which essentially holds that every ethnic group is homogeneous and should be represented in state and national leadership in direct proportion to its percentage of the populace. Another way of saying it goes like this: “We want our government to look like the state (or nation).”

 

          This allows little space for qualifications, achievement or even consideration of who might do the best job for California and America.

 

          Identity politics now controls much of what the state’s Democratic Party does. It’s was very visible here in the public pressures exerted upon Gov. Gavin Newsom when he mulled possible replacements for Vice President Kamala Harris after she gave up her U.S. Senate seat following the 2020 election.

 

          “The next senator should be an Asian/Pacific Islander,” said one leader of an Asian political group early in Newsom’s search. That’s because one of Harris’ multiple ethnicities is Indian-American, and the Asian-American interest group wanted her seat go to someone much like her.

 

          This gave absolutely no consideration to who might do the best job pursuing California’s interests, who might have the strongest chance to win election on their own, who was best qualified or myriad other factors that go into choosing political leaders.

 

          Black groups made similar demands, insisting the seat must go to a Black woman, just because that’s also a Harris identity.

 

          What happened to merit?

 

          This was one question voters asked four years ago, when by a 57-43 percent vote they nixed Proposition 16, which aimed to restore affirmative action in hiring and college admissions. By a margin of about 2 million votes, Californians rejected the idea of a system with quotas on those areas, one where group identity matters more than merit.

 

          Because some ethnic groups stress education more than others, they’ve gotten ahead economically and academically in higher proportions than their actual numbers. The voters essentially ruled these groups should not be penalized for their hard work and achievements.

 

          These are lessons for Democratic leaders to contemplate as they face a third election featuring Donald Trump.

 

          California Republicans blew their chance to take serious advantage of these things in 2022. For governor, they ran no one credibly distanced from Trump and lost the race to Newsom by about the same margin as in 2018. Potentially credible candidates like businessman and 2018 GOP nominee John Cox and former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer both blew their wads in the failed 2021 recall of Newsom, neither even entering the 2022 race.

 

          In short, Democrats could have had significant opposition in 2022 if the GOP figures involved had been patient. And Democrats actually might see some serious competition in 2026, if they continue ignoring the lessons of 2020 and 2022 by tilting too far to the left.

 

         

         

         

       

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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

MASS SHOOTINGS HORRENDOUS, BUT GUNS IN HOMES KILL MORE

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “MASS SHOOTINGS HORRENDOUS, BUT GUNS IN HOMES KILL MORE”

 

        Pronouncements from politicians and others came almost instantly after six persons died and 12 more were wounded by gunfire as patrons poured out of downtown Sacramento bars and clubs at the 2 a.m. closing time April 3.

 

        “Enough is enough,” said Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who got her biggest career boost when she inherited the San Francisco mayor’s office after then-Supervisor Dan White murdered both Mayor George Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978. “We can no longer ignore gun violence in our communities. Congress knows what steps must be taken.”

 

        Appointed state Attorney General Rob Bonta, frantically running for election in his own right, said his office “continues our work to get illegal guns off the street.”

 

        Those words came before police captured several suspects, including one seen with a home-modified automatic pistol at the scene barely a month after he won early parole over the objections of Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert. One of her deputies predicted to state parole officials that if released early, current suspect Smiley Allen Martin would do more violence. Martin, apparently a pimp before he went to prison, had been serving a 10-year sentence for beating and whipping a prostitute, the offense euphemistically labeled “domestic violence.”

 

      Meanwhile, at this writing no one had been caught in the shootings of two men on a San Francisco playground less than 14 hours after the Sacramento massacre.

 

        As futile as the politicians’ words appeared, they were matched by those of Sam Paredes, head of the group Gun Owners of California, who said officials' “knee jerk reaction is to go after guns,” when the real issues driving mass shootings may be mental, economic or medical.

 

        The talk obscured a key fact made clearly in a brand-new study from Stanford University researchers published in the peer-reviewed journal Annals of Internal Medicine the day after all the unjustifiable deaths:

 

As bad as mass shootings are, far more innocents are killed by home-based weapons, legal or not. Mass shootings account for only 1 percent of all gun-related deaths in America.

 

The Stanford study establishes that Californians living with handgun owners, whether the weapons are legal or not, are more than twice as likely to die by homicide than if they lived in gun-free homes.

 

Said the lead researcher, “Despite widespread perceptions that a gun in the home provides security…people who live in homes with guns are at higher – not lower – risk of dying by homicide.”

 

Related here: The Feb. 28 shootings, also in Sacramento, where a father killed himself and his three daughters in a church, despite a restraining order prohibiting him from possessing any firearm.

 

Plus, mass killings often involve guns taken from homes by residents there who did not own the weapons.

 

While the Stanford study focused on victims rather than perpetrators, events have long suggested guns in homes increase the chance of persons becoming mass shooters.

 

        This knowledge should impel authorities toward more thorough enforcement of existing gun controls, both involving legal purchases and self-built “ghost guns” that lack identifying serial numbers.

 

        The Stanford study also implies authorities should be able to check whether legally-owned guns are stored securely, unloaded and away from unauthorized users. A way to enable this might be for gun shop buyers to sign waivers allowing police to check how guns are stored in their homes and make unsafely stored weapons subject to confiscation.

 

        For sure, law enforcement lacks time and manpower to check on every gun owner, especially not those with ghost guns, but even spot checks could inspire many owners to keep their firearms safe and away from anyone likely to hurt themselves or someone else.

 

This would not totally prevent massacres like the downtown Sacramento massacre, apparently done with illegal guns. But it would help prevent disturbed teenagers who sometimes become mass shooters from gaining easy access to guns and ammunition.

 

        This is just one compromise idea that would allow continued gun ownership, but also make life safer for those who live in homes with guns and the many who can become victims of people who live with gun owners.

 

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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, go to www.californiafocus.net

UTILITY TROUBLES COULD BE A CONSUMER OPPORTUNITY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2019, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
   “UTILITY TROUBLES COULD BE A CONSUMER OPPORTUNITY”

          Jog your memory back just nine years to 2010 and you’ll find California’s Big Three privately-owned electric utilities spending more than $70 million – $46 million from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. alone – trying to pass a ballot proposition making it almost impossible to create new publicly-owned utilities.

          Imagine the outcry today if PG&E and its allies at Southern California Edison Co. and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. spent that kind of money on a measure designed to keep their monopolies intact.

          All three have been implicated in the ignition of several of the largest wildfires in California history, causing tens of billions of dollars in damage to their customers. So the outcry against any repeat of the big-money utility company effort to pass the 2010 Proposition 16 – it failed – would come not only from consumers, but also from victims of fires admittedly started by the electric firms’ equipment, who see any utility spending for political donations or lobbying as essentially theft. It would take money away from the cash reservoir available to compensate victims.

          The utility company effort of nine years ago aimed to require a two-thirds public vote before any new Community Choice Aggregations could be started. Such a huge margin would be virtually unattainable, the utilities knew.

          If that measure had passed, it’s doubtful places as diverse as Marin County and Manhattan Beach, San Francisco and Simi Valley would have the CCAs now serving them. These publicly-owned electricity suppliers buy power where they want, then transmit it back to their customers on power lines owned by the utilities.

          The results include far greater use of renewable energy in California than before, lower prices in many places, and lower utility company revenues.

          It’s that last item that the big regional power companies fearfully anticipated. Because they are publicly-owned, CCAs don’t pay or pass through the same taxes as other utilities. So even if the juice they use costs them a tad more, it ends up costing most consumers a bit less, besides being better for the environment and the planet.

          What’s more, the utilities will never be bankrupted by this, as PG&E has declared it will be by its own negligence in power line maintenance and wildfire prevention.

          The biggest of the CCAs resulting from Proposition 16’s failure is the Clean Power Alliance of Ventura and Los Angeles counties, which serves their unincorporated areas, plus 31 cities. More can join if they wish.

          The first invoices from that brand new CCA went to customers within the last few weeks. These invoices include power transmission charges from Southern California Edison, with all the funds collected via Edison’s existing billing system.

          A typical invoice shows the majority of the money charged still goes to Edison, even under the CCA’s most expensive option, which uses power drawn exclusively from renewable sources like solar, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric dams.

          But the debut of the Clean Power Alliance and other CCAs was delayed by onerous rules set up two years ago by the state Public Utilities Commission, which has long done what it could to aid the companies it’s supposed to regulate. One rule passed in 2017 set up new, higher levies on CCA customers as a way to compensate utilities for their expenses in building power plants – which customers already fund via their rates.

          But neither the PUC nor the utilities are now now focused on CCAs, obsessed instead with lawsuits both filed and anticipated in the wake of the massive Camp, Thomas, Woolsey and other hugely damaging fires of the last two years.

          Especially with a new top management and board of directors coming to the largest of the utilities, PG&E, this change in their concerns creates an opening for new CCAs like the one now desired by San Diego and its Republican mayor, Kevin Faulconer.

          It’s small consolation, especially to burned out homeowners, but this could mean there will eventually be some long-term consumer benefit after all from California’s vast firestorms.

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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.

HIGH TIME FOR VOTERS TO MAKE PUC ACCOUNTABLE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2016, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “HIGH TIME FOR VOTERS TO MAKE PUC ACCOUNTABLE”

          Travel back in time to the mid-1980s, when California’s insurance rates for both cars and property were nearly the highest in America and climbing fast. Back then, the state insurance commissioner, who could have stopped much of the price acceleration, was appointed by the governor.

          Then, in 1988, a consumer group called the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights and its leader, attorney Harvey Rosenfield, changed all that. The group ran the Proposition 103 ballot initiative and turned the insurance commissioner into an elected official. Bingo! Since then, California insurance rates have risen slower than those in any other state, but coverage remains as good as anywhere.

          The corruption and safety scandals of the last few years demonstrate that it’s high time to regulate utility companies in this state as firmly as insurance companies, and to make utility regulators responsible to the public and the voters just like the elected insurance commissioner.

          For today, with California’s electric and gas utility prices eighth highest in the nation, trailing only the inaccessible likes of Alaska and Hawaii, plus a few northeastern states like New York and Connecticut, utility rates are climbing as fast as insurance premiums once did.

          No one can doubt anymore that Californians are beset by flawed utility regulation which even now favors big energy distributors over their customers. Corruption scandals come thick and fast for the state’s Public Utilities Commission, with power over both electric and gas rates and the safety of pipelines and power plants.

          So this commission has failed abysmally, especially in recent years when lax regulation allowed disasters like the recent months-long methane gas leak at Porter Ranch in Los Angeles, the 2012 failure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station and the fatal 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno. In each case decided so far, consumers have had to foot most of the bills for the shortcomings and blunders of their energy suppliers.

          But Gov. Jerry Brown, who appointed all five present utility commissioners, says not a negative word about his appointees past for present, nor has he tried to rein them in, even after some admitted conflicts of interest. In the last two years, about the only thing he’s had to say about the PUC came when former commission President Michael Peevey left office in disgrace at the end of  2014, just after his collusion with Southern California Edison Co. on who would pay for the San Onofre closure was proven. “At least he got things done,” Brown observed.

          Yes, and Benito Mussolini made the trains run on time.

          The PUC’s most recent pro-utility move: It refused even to read a request from the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group for a public investigation into the Porter Ranch gas leak, which forced a months-long evacuation of about 4,000 families. This was a blatant violation of the California constitution, which guarantees the right to petition public officials.

          In a sane world, all this would lead to taking the PUC down a peg or three from its exalted position, where members cannot be dismissed even by the governor who appointed them and their decisions can’t be questioned in ordinary courts.

          “This is as bad or worse than things were with insurance rates,” says Rosenfield, who still often represents Consumer Watchdog (new name of the outfit he started). “We need to make the PUC accountable to the public and not a puppet of the governor. Commissioners need to understand they work for consumers, not the utilities.”

          Added Jamie Court, now head of Consumer Watchdog, “I would like to recall the current commissioners, but that can’t be done. There’s no doubt the corruption at the PUC would not exist if commissioners were elected, or if there were just one elected commissioner.”

          So Court says he would support a 2018 initiative making the state’s utility regulator(s) elected, and would run the campaign for it “if we can raise enough money.” He says any such measure, like Proposition 103, would also need to impose other rules to open all records to the public and to make rate-case hearings more accessible.

          With a governor unwilling to say, let alone do, anything about the corrupt commissioners he’s appointed, the time has arrived for voters to take things into their own hands.

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     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. 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. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net.

WILL FARM LABOR SHORTAGE DRIVE IMMIGRATION CHANGES?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “WILL FARM LABOR SHORTAGE DRIVE IMMIGRATION CHANGES?”

          There has been some dispute over whether the labor shortages California farmers reported over the last few years are real. It turns out they are very real, but that doesn’t quiet the skeptics.

          “We are told that unless we allow criminals, illegal aliens, freedom to take American jobs, our agriculture will be destroyed,” wrote the conservative blogger Steve Frank, a former president of the California Republican Assembly, last year. “Like most other statements of the lamestream media, that is a downright lie.”

          He used the fact that this state’s farm profits were up in 2011 – from $11.1 billion the previous year to $16.1 billion – to call the reported shortage “phony.” Those profit numbers came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

          But the USDA also reports on crop production (http://usda01.library.cornell.edu/usda/current/NoncFruiNu/NoncFruiNu-01-25-2013.txt), and some of those numbers tell a different story, while also implying that the added profits may have been a result of smaller supplies.

          For example, California growers produced 1.5 million tons of raisin grapes last year, compared with 1.8 million in 2011, causing prices to increase while grape-harvesting expenses dropped.

          Prices were also up for table grapes, from $306 per ton to $358, while the price of canned apricots went from $330 to $419 per ton, while production was down. So there’s more to the farm profit picture than just the bottom line. The price per pound or ton also counts for a lot. And both wholesale prices and profits rose last year, making it an outstanding one for agriculture.

          With 2011-12 a relatively wet winter, there was only one reason for production of anything to be down last year, with prices at or near peaks for almost all crops: A shortage of labor. This was caused in part by stricter enforcement of immigration laws, with the Obama administration already having deported more illegal immigrants than the George W. Bush administration did in its full eight years.

Farm labor problems persisted in 2012, although they’ve sometimes been hard to quantify. The Western Growers Association said last fall that its members were reporting 20 percent fewer laborers available than the year before. At the same time, the California Farm Bureau Federation put the shortage between 30 per cent and 40 percent of the workforce needed. Those numbers are not official, but the group said American workers were not taking the vacant jobs.

That was consistent with the results of an experiment conducted several years ago by Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who had every Employment Development Department office in the state list farm jobs as available. Fewer than 10 unemployed U.S. citizens applied for that work, even though it paid well over the state’s hourly minimum wage.

One Santa Barbara County farmer with crops as varied as lemons and strawberries reported that he had to leave some of his produce to rot in the field last summer and fall. Similar waste occurred in locales like Kern, Butte and Riverside counties, among others.

          One reason: A large percentage of California fruit and vegetable pickers are illegal immigrants. Farm bureau organizations in other states report similar labor shortages. So farmers want any immigration changes coming from Washington, D.C. this year to include a guest worker program.

          Agriculture organizations that usually support Republican politicians have pushed several years for a system allowing temporary hiring of foreign workers if employers cannot find U.S. citizens or legal residents to take the jobs they offer.

          Organized labor has long opposed such a revival of the old Bracero program that allowed American employers to bring in unskilled foreign workers during and after World War II, the unions claiming it could deprive U.S. citizens of work.

          But the nation’s largest labor group, the AFL-CIO, has now worked out a deal with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business interests that would allow workers to be imported as needed to fill jobs that otherwise go unfilled. The proposed new visa would not specify a single employer for each worker, so that employers could no longer discipline migrant workers by threatening to have them deported if they’re not docile. It would also include wages above the federal minimum and require decent working conditions.

          The Chamber also agreed to the unions’ idea of setting up a new government bureau to curtail work visas when unemployment rises to as-yet unspecified levels.

          Two things are clear from all this: It’s highly likely that any major immigration change legislation passing Congress this year will have a guest worker component. And that this is happening mainly because of the labor shortages here and in other big farm states.

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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

KEEP FRENCH OFF HSR PROJECT UNTIL THEY PAY REPARATIONS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2011 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“KEEP FRENCH OFF HSR PROJECT UNTIL THEY PAY REPARATIONS”

Expect foreign companies galore to bid on major contracts for building components of California’s planned high speed rail system, the largest such project now planned anywhere in the world.

They will come from Germany and Japan and China, among others, because no American-based company now can of provide all the elements needed to build the required locomotives and cars. Some, like the German-based Siemens AG (largely owned by American pension and mutual funds) already have plants in California.

One bidder will almost certainly be Alstom Group, a huge French-owned firm that built all the engines and coaches for France’s smooth-as-silk TGV (Train a Grand Vittesse – or high speed train) network. The current chief executive of California’s High Speed Rail Authority, Roelof van Ark, previously was president of one wing of that company, Alstom Transportation Inc.

This outfit has built rail cars for the government-owned French SCNF national rail system since 1928 and is itself about 20 percent government owned after receiving a recession-related bailout.

But as good as Alstom’s machinery is, and as strongly as Van Ark may be associated with the firm, it should not be getting a nickel’s worth of work from California or any other American state until the SCNF – its corporate sister and biggest customer – begins paying reparations for its role in the Holocaust.

The link between the SCNF and the slaughter of most French Jews during World War II? SCNF trains carried more than 76,000 deported French Jews to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. More than 97 percent were murdered.

This was acknowledged in a sideways manner last winter, when SCNF president Guillaume Pepy told an audience in an old train yard near Paris that “In the name of the SCNF, I bow down before the victims, the survivors, the children of those deported and before the suffering that still lives.”

Oddly, Pepy never mentioned Jews, who made up more than 90 percent of those sent to their deaths, strictly because of their very birth. His “apology” reminded some of a memorial plaque placed a few years ago near the entrance of the Gare du Nord (North Station) in Paris, which acknowledges that “From here, thousands of loyal Frenchmen were deported to their deaths.” No specific apology to Jews, neither there nor in Pepy’s words. That's in keeping with the longstanding French government reluctance to acknowledge the country's well-documented role in furthering the Holocaust.

Also,nary a word about reparations payments, the sincere form of apology Germany has been paying Holocaust survivors for many decades.

Instead, Pepy pretended SCNF was a victim. “The SCNF…was forced and requisitioned as a cog in the Nazi extermination machine,” he said. “We will never forget it.” What he did apparently forget was the fact that the SCNF was paid both by the person and by the kilometer for each deportee it hauled.

“That was blood money and they’ve never paid a penny of it back,” New York lawyer Harriet Taumen charges. She has filed a lawsuit seeking reparation payments for 600 Holocaust survivors who were forced onto SCNF trains at gunpoint.

It’s undeniably true that some SCNF employees were resistance fighters and tried to sabotage the deportations, among other efforts. These included 1,647 SCNF personnel who were executed. But the rail firm’s management cooperated fully.

There are many in California who believe the state’s high speed rail plan is ill-designed and bound to be extremely inefficient. It has major flaws, not least of which are parts of its planned route.

But the chances are that high speed rail will become reality, in part because of intense interest from top levels of the federal government. Vice President Joe Biden voiced that enthusiasm the other day, comparing current plans to the original blueprint for the Interstate highway system. “We expect 80 percent of Americans to have access to high speed rail within 25 years,” Biden said.

President Obama has put cash where Biden’s mouth is, earmarking about $4 billion for the earliest work in California, to be done in the Central Valley, with $2.4 billion more possible soon. Another $9 billion in state bonds is available.

It would be a moral mistake to let any tainted company, domestic or foreign, have part of that largesse before it acts to rectify past misdeeds.

Alstom’s longstanding tight links to SCNF make it such a company. No bid should be accepted from French rail firms until and unless they move to divest themselves of any profits from their ferrying innocents to their deaths by the scores of thousands.

That divestment should take the form of reparation payments to those whose lives were taken or scarred, or their heirs, in a manner much like what has done since the 1950s by the German government and by companies which – like SCNF – profited from Nazi policies. Demanding anything less of Alstom and SCNF would simply be immoral.

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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