TIME FOR STATE, CITIES TO FOCUS ON OLDER HOMELESS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 12, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “TIME FOR STATE, CITIES TO FOCUS ON OLDER HOMELESS”

 

        The more than 100 housing-related laws passed by legislators and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom since 2019 have done little or nothing to solve any of the three problems they were supposed to stem: availability, affordability and homelessness.

 

        That was the conclusion of the Superior Court judge who last spring ruled unconstitutional one of the most important of those new laws, the 2021 SB 9, which authorized homeowners in single family zoned (R1) neighborhoods to subdivide their lots and create six housing units where previously there was just one.

 

        Fewer than 2,000 such subdivisions have occurred since that law took effect, and even if they had become common, they would have done little about the problems they were supposed to alleviate.

 

        That’s because nothing in that law compels any subdividing homeowner or developer to make units affordable – another word for making them financially accessible to low-income folks (four-person households earning less than $114,000 per year, by one city’s standard). Or those spending more than 30 percent of their monthly income on rent or mortgages, by another definition.

 

        Most of the currently homeless are unhoused because they fall into categories like those, so nothing in SB 9 ever figured to help them.

 

        Now comes a study showing more than half the homeless will soon be aged 50 or older, with the proportion of homeless over 65 due to triple between 2017 and 2030 unless something is done soon.

 

        For the state and its cities and counties, this turns out to be one of the most financially disastrous realities they could ever confront.

 

        Current law prevents emergency rooms from turning away anyone who needs help urgently, even if they have no insurance. The state and its local components end up footing those bills, costing billions of dollars. A single urgent care visit by an uninsured adult costs an average of slightly under $300, with adult homeless generally making multiple emergency visits yearly, the number increasing as they age.

 

        This makes the findings of the newest study of the homeless from the UC San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative critically important for California, where budget constraints have already reduced average annual spending on homelessness.

 

        As the homeless population ages steadily, in part due to increasing rents and unavailability of low-cost homes in all size classes, and with the median home price in the state’s largest county now more than $980,000 – or more than $100,000 higher than one year ago – this problem can only grow worse.

 

        Said Margot Kushel MD, director of the Benioff program, “The dramatic rise in homelessness among older adults has severe consequences for the health and safety of those who experience it and (for) our society at large.”

 

        She urges quick action to prevent even more homelessness among the aging. This would not only be humane, she said, but also financially wise. The Benioff report, for example, says “adults experiencing homelessness in their 50s and 60s are similar in health status to people 20 years older in the general population.”

 

        In short, rapidly increasing older homeless will quickly translate into vastly larger public expenses for their medical care. Those expenses figure to continue longer than they would for younger homeless, because older homeless adults typically experience “prolonged episodes of homelessness,” the median length of their remaining unhoused now standing at 25 months, or just over two years.

 

        The report, based in part on 365 interviews with homeless individuals, showed older adults believe “modest” financial help, including housing choice vouchers and small subsidies like one-time payments that can get them into an apartment by funding security deposits, can help them become permanently housed.

 

        So the Benioff program recommends special attention to prevention efforts targeting at-risk seniors, expanding seniors’ access to health care before they become homeless – even if uninsured – and expanding outreach to homeless seniors well beyond today’s levels.

 

        All these things cost money, but allowing the senior homeless populace to keep expanding will clearly boost legally required spending on medical care even more. It’s a situation dramatically outlined in a slogan from 1990s era TV commercials for automotive oil filters: “You can pay me now (for prevention), or you can pay me later (much more).”

 

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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

WILL ABORTION DECISION REVIVE CALEXIT?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 12, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “WILL ABORTION DECISION REVIVE CALEXIT?”

 

        Calexit, the movement for California secession from the Union, has never gotten off the ground, despite the efforts of the so-called “California Freedom Coalition,” formerly “Yes, California!” which tried running separatist ballot initiative drives in 2017 and 2020, but never really got off the ground.

 

Its reasoning then was that California pays far more into the federal government in taxes than it gets back in federal spending, unlike much smaller states like West Virginia and Mississippi, which get far more back than they pay in. Secessionists also held this state is permanently underrepresented in the Senate and Electoral College compared with places like Alaska, Wyoming and Delaware.

 

If there are ever to be causes that might spur this state and perhaps some of its neighbors to go it alone, the twin U.S. Supreme Court decisions this spring to cancel out laws like California’s restrictions on carrying firearms and the federal right to female bodily privacy and, thus, abortion, might do it.

 

Right now, most voices opposing those decisions are exhorting their cohorts to “resist.” They don’t say how to do that effectively, even as the rulings are often compared to the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision upholding the rights of slaveowners to pursue escaped slaves even in so-called “free” states. That 7-2 ruling, like the 5-4 anti-abortion decision, was voted in by justices with personal interests in the cause at hand, folks who under some standards ought to have recused themselves from voting.

 

In the Dred Scott case, the court majority were slaveowners or former high officials of slave states from Maryland to Georgia. In the new anti-abortion ruling, all five justices voting to end the right are Roman Catholics taught since early childhood in church and/or school to oppose all abortions.

 

Abortion and gun control adherents can resist all they like, but it’s not likely to change a thing. When that sinks in, it’s just possible some people might consider other courses of action.

 

For sure, California often acts like a semi-independent country, and the abortion decision immediately set the state into action.

 

        Within hours, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a compact with two other states, Oregon and Washington, to promote abortions in all three states to women in scores of Republican-controlled places where the procedures are now suddenly illegal or soon will be.

 

        No one now knows whether this will be the first step in a move toward secession by California and its neighbors, with like-minded places like Hawaii and the Canadian province of British Columbia possibly joining in. They might form a powerhouse country, perhaps called Pacifica, that could be a major world economic and military force.

 

        Already, in spring 2020, when ex-President Donald Trump first indicated he might try cheating to hold onto power, the nominal head of the Calexit movement, Marcus Ruiz Evans of Fresno, observed that, “People are saying, ‘Hey, I used to think Calexit is a fanciful idea and I still do, but I’m coming around; we need a government that works and I don’t believe America can anymore.’”

 

        That’s the same feeling a lot of Californians are voicing in the days after the Supreme Court’s two late-June decisions.

 

        Some lately have cited an 1860 editorial from the Dubuque, Iowa, Herald that argued “It does not follow that because a state cannot secede constitutionally, it is obliged under all circumstances to remain in the Union. There is a natural right, which is reserved by all men, and which cannot be given to any government…to form a government for their mutual protection...and for such other purposes as they may deem most conducive to their mutual happiness and prosperity.”

 

        Those would be the very grounds toward which California and two of its neighbors now might be moving. Ironically, rather than resisting, what's left of the Union might just say “good riddance,” since a California departure alone would all but assure indefinite Republican rule of the rest of America.

 

        So far, though, secession is a mere idea that has never had much support. Yet, history shows that borders, policies and governments are never permanent, no matter what any constitution may say.

 

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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

 

WHEN OJ SAYS ‘I GOT A LITTLE GETTING EVEN TO DO, LISTEN

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE:  FRIDAY, JULY 12, 2019, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“WHEN OJ SAYS ‘I GOT A LITTLE GETTING EVEN TO DO, LISTEN”

          The video seemed ordinary enough, until you saw who was talking in mid-June: O.J. Simpson, the last century’s most prominent might-have-been-murderer.

          “Hey,” Simpson said. “This is yours truly.” It was indeed he, now 71 and looking far more than 25 years older than when he led police on a slow-speed chase along major Southern California freeways almost precisely a quarter century earlier.

          His video appeared on a new Twitter account two days after the anniversary of the stabbing deaths of his estranged wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. In it, a smiling Simpson says he plans to speak on “just about everything. I got a little getting even to do. So God bless, take care.”

          After which just about anyone connected to Simpson and his 1995 “Trial of the 20^th Century” began taking care.

          It has never paid for those around him to ignore threats or potential threats from the onetime football hero, released from a Nevada prison in 2017 after doing nine years for armed robbery and kidnapping in a case unrelated to events of 1994 and 1995. Mrs. Simpson told a domestic violence hotline several times about earlier threats to her, the tapes of those calls never heard by the jury that acquitted Simpson because his wife could not be cross-examined about her frantic, panicky statements. They were played in open court outside the presence of the jury. Of course, there was a reason she could not be questioned: she was dead.

          Simpson also reacted rashly against at least one driver after he moved to Florida following his acquittal on the murder charges, a man who honked loudly at him after being cut off in traffic by Simpson.

          But, as in the video, Simpson often puts up a genial demeanor. During one courtroom break at his murder trial, the former Heisman Trophy winner cracked a joke while grinning broadly. A reporter observed that in the moment, he just didn’t look like a killer. “Even murderers can laugh,” rejoined Joseph Bosco, who went on to write a book on the trial.

          (Full disclosure: Columnist Elias covered the Simpson murder trial for the now-defunct Scripps Howard News Service. He later co-authored the best-selling book “The Simpson Trial in Black and White.”)

          Just about a year before he tried to steal back some of his football memorabilia in a Las Vegas hotel room in the incident that led to his Nevada conviction, Simpson co-wrote the never-distributed book “If I Did It.” In that tome, of which 400,000 copies were printed before the publisher pulled it back, Simpson allegedly detailed how he would have pulled off the Brown Simpson-Goldman killings. He has always since insisted this was strictly a hypothetical exercise, but some who saw the book said it seemed authentic.

          And a civil court jury in Santa Monica found him liable in both murders during the year after his criminal trial ended, awarding most of his earnings and assets to Goldman’s family. This prompted Simpson to leave California, where he had lived for many years in a Brentwood neighborhood among neighbors including former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, current Boston Red Sox co-owner Tom Werner and former Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti, whose son Eric is the current Los Angeles mayor.

          He headed first for Florida and then to Nevada, two states where local laws make it far easier to shelter income and assets than in California,

          The evidence in the civil trial and the civil court jury’s judgment, along with Simpson’s intermittent behavior before and since the gruesome knifings of Brown Simpson and Goldman, make it difficult for many who shared the criminal courtroom with him to ignore or downplay Simpson’s latest comments.

          Which means no one should be very surprised if America has not yet seen the last of O.J. Simpson, criminal defendant.

                  

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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

WAS THIS ENDORSEMENT AS ROUTINE AS IT LOOKED?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 12, 2016, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “WAS THIS ENDORSEMENT AS ROUTINE AS IT LOOKED?”

          No political endorsement ever seemed more innocuous and expected than Gov. Jerry Brown’s backing of state Attorney General Kamala Harris for the U.S. Senate seat now held by the retiring Barbara Boxer.

          Like Boxer, both are Democrats. Harris was Brown’s successor as head of the state’s Justice Department. Each is part of the Northern California Democratic group that now controls most major statewide offices, including both California seats in the Senate, plus the governor’s office, the lieutenant governor’s slot and the attorney general’s seat. Rarely has one region held so much power so firmly in California.

          But there may have been more to the Brown endorsement than met the eye.

          Harris’ department is currently conducting a criminal investigation of the state Public Utilities Commission’s conduct of major cases stemming from the failure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station and the multi-fatal 2010 explosion of a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. natural gas pipeline in San Bruno. Not only are PUC commissioners the most powerful of Brown’s appointees outside the judiciary, but he cannot remove them once they’ve been sworn in, as he can every other person he appoints, except judges.

          Brown has maintained steady contact with his PUC appointees, mostly via email and telephone.

          Public records requests caused more than 100,000 PUC emails to be disclosed, now available on the website www.PUCpapers.org, created by the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group.

          Conspicuously absent from these now-readable and -searchable documents are more than 60 emails between the PUC and Brown or his office (without seeing them, no one can be certain who said what) exchanged around the time of the PUC’s decision to dun Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. customers for about 70 percent of the $4.7 billion it will eventually cost to close down San Onofre, which failed because of a blunder by Edison, the plant’s operator and 80 percent owner.

          Handwritten notes found in a Justice Department search of the La Canada-Flintridge home of former PUC President Michael Peevey showed the San Onofre settlement closely matched a deal hatched in a secret meeting between Peevey and Edison executives during an industry conference in Poland. (The PUC recently reopened its San Onofre settlement case.)

          Former San Diego City Attorney Michael Aguirre, now a consumer advocate, first demanded the Brown emails in an early April public records request, but Harris stepped in, saying she would rule on whether Brown is entitled to some kind of executive privilege. This simple yes-or-no decision is still in the works.

          So Brown was endorsing the very official who had already waited months to decide whether he needs to make emails public. Until the emails can be widely read, the public cannot know if they demonstrate some sort of untoward conduct.

          Now, Brown loudly and enthusiastically endorses an official who might possibly stand between him and embarrassing revelations. She happily accepted his backing. At the very least, this looked like a conflict of interest.

          Meanwhile, Harris’ office maintains it has set up a hermetic seal between her department’s investigation of the PUC and anyone involved in deciding the email issue.

          “The attorney general…has more than 1,100 attorneys who represent state agencies on a wide array of matters,” said her spokesman David Beltran. “No government agency, and no public utilities company, is above the law, which means all investigations go where the evidence takes us.”

          But by law and common practice, the attorney general represents the governor in any criminal case relating to his official activity. So the official determining whether the public can see whether the governor has done something wrong is also his defense attorney. Does that pass the smell test?

          So far, none of this has become a major issue in the Senate campaign matching Harris and longtime Orange County Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, both Democrats.

          But it would be unwise for Harris to believe that will continue; not with millions of Californians paying billions of dollars as a result of the San Onofre settlement, as it now stands.

          Nor should the so far-Teflon-coated Brown expect to be untouched by all this, if the emails eventually become public and show him favoring utilities over consumers.

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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

NON-CITIZEN JURORS SIMPLY A BAD IDEA

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 12, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “NON-CITIZEN JURORS SIMPLY A BAD IDEA”

          It’s one thing to give undocumented immigrants an opportunity – however limited and lengthy and expensive – to gain American citizenship if they’ve lived and worked in this country for a long time while contributing and without committing any criminal offenses.

          Drivers licenses for the undocumented also make some sense, especially since many law enforcement officials say that could compel those here illegally to obey laws requiring car insurance, thus cutting down the expenses of other drivers who may be involved in accidents with them.

          But one bill that has passed the state Assembly and is now in the Senate simply makes no sense: Called AB 1401, this proposal would allow non-citizens to serve on juries in California’s state courts.

          Never mind the longstanding American tradition of a having a jury of the defendant’s peers determine whether criminal charges are valid. That’s merely a custom, not a constitutional right.

          The Sixth Amendment says only that every American is entitled to an “impartial jury” and that its members should live in the state or district where the crime under consideration took place. Courts have interpreted this to mean jury pools should contain a cross section of the population of the area, in terms of gender, race and national origin.

          No one yet has specified that jurors must be U.S. citizens, perhaps because at the time the Bill of Rights – the Constitution’s first ten amendments – was written in 1789 and finally ratified by the states two years later, it could be difficult to determine who was a U.S. citizen. Birth and immigration record-keeping was far from comprehensive.

          But proving citizenship today is far easier, via birth certificates, passports and naturalization papers. So it’s fair to figure that if the Bill of Rights were being written today, it would specify that all jurors be citizens.

          But the door to non-citizen jurors was left open a crack, and some Democratic state legislators now want to walk through it.

          Juries, Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski of Fremont told a reporter the other day, “should reflect our community and our community is always changing. It’s time for California to be a leader on this.”

          He said jury service for legal residents who are not citizens would also help ensure an adequate pool of jurors and help immigrants integrate into American society.

          But suppose you are suing a used car dealer for selling you a vehicle with faulty brakes that caused an accident. Would you want a juror who’s a citizen of a county where such lawsuits are not possible? If you’ve been raped, would you want your accused assailant judged by a man from a country where women have few rights and are penalized for extramarital sex, even if it was forced on them?

          Wieckowski is correct that immigrants often need time and training to adjust to American life and values. Should the guilt or innocence of any American be determined even in part by persons not completely familiar with this country’s values and customs?

          In fact, customs vary by locale in a state as large as California, and the framers of the Constitution, who also wrote the Bill of Rights, knew that would be inevitable. It’s why they said juries must be local residents, not imports from faraway places.

          There’s also the question of dilution of citizenship. There are already proposals (none has yet become law) to allow non-citizens to vote in some local elections. Non-citizens who have caused no trouble can qualify for easy passage through customs and immigration checkpoints via the federal Trusted Traveler and Global Entry programs.

          If citizenship is no longer required for many of the duties and privileges it once conferred, does it lose some of its value? Is there any advantage to being a citizen over merely carrying a green card?

          And especially, when the fate, freedom and fortune of any American citizen is at stake, why should anyone but another citizen help decide?

          Condemning a person to prison or taking money from either a citizen or a corporation is a serious matter, not something for anyone with limited knowledge of either the English language or American ways to decide.

          The bottom line: Like many other bills proposed in the Legislature and then disposed of, this is a terrible idea and ought to be consigned to the lawmaking trash can, the sooner the better.

         

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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

PAY FREEZE TESTS LAWMAKERS’ VALUES, PRINCIPLES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 12, 2011 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“PAY FREEZE TESTS LAWMAKERS’ VALUES, PRINCIPLES”

If there’s one thing that quickly became clear in the wake of state Controller John Chiang’s decision to withhold the pay of California legislators because of their failure to produce a balanced budget by June 15, it was the shallow feeling those officials really hold for values they consistently proclaim while running for office.

Would Republican state senators and Assembly members hold tight to their “no new taxes” pledges and rhetoric even while losing $403 per day in salary and per diem payments? Many did not, saying they’d allow an election on the tax extensions Gov. Jerry Brown says are needed in return for some other concessions.

In the end, they didn’t get those concessions, so they did not sign off on the handshake deal Brown later reached with legislative Democrats.

Would Democrats continue resisting additional cuts in programs they backed while seeking election? They, too, made compromises including more budget slashing for state university and college systems and deferrals for public schools, whose teachers are among their biggest supporters.

No politician will ever admit to going back on campaign pledges. So it will be up to voters to understand the inferences of their actions.

One very significant barometer of deep belief can be time. When a balanced budget plan – one that does not allow voters to decide whether to re-enact about $9 billion worth of taxes that expire (editors: say expired here if using this column after June 30) Friday, even as it depended on the higher tax revenues of the last two months to continue -- emerged quickly, it became plain that money talked loudly to these politicians. Even amounts that are a pittance next to the billions of taxpayer dollars these same folks normally pass out.

Legislators acted far faster than usual, their agreement with Brown coming less than 10 days after Chiang’s action and just 12 days after Brown’s mid-June veto of a Democratic-sponsored budget he labeled as likely to be found at least partly illegal.

Where legislators in previous years often went days, even weeks, without publicly debating the budget after they missed a constitutional June 15 deadline, suddenly they were meeting on weekends. No backyard barbeques or visits with constituents for these folks, not until they got the job done.

Then there was the bleating that followed Chiang’s action, which he took only after determining that the budget vetoed by Brown would not have been balanced, no matter what legislators claimed.

Because Democrats hold vast majorities in both houses of the Legislature, they did most of the whining. Chiang, said Assemblyman Mike Gatto of the San Fernando Valley portion of Los Angeles, “just wants to sit there and beat up on the unpopular kids.” He added that “I now have to explain to my wife and daughter that we won’t be able to pay the bills because a politician chose to grandstand at our expense. California has officially degenerated into a banana republic…”

What Gatto didn’t say is that the pay stoppage was dictated by a 55 percent majority of voters via last year’s Proposition 25, which Democrats like him strongly backed because it also allows passage of budgets on a simple majority vote. So Chiang, who agonized for days over whether to stop writing paychecks, was merely doing his job.

A possibly more substantial objection came from Democratic state Sen. Noreen Evans of Santa Rosa, who accused the controller of creating “a constitutional crisis, one where the balance of powers in our…government and the separation between the legislative and executive branches of state government has been breached.” Agreed Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento, “The controller’s decision today sets a dangerous precedent.”

They and others apparently didn’t notice any deep constitutional issues in Proposition 25 before their pocketbooks began thinning. If they had, they might have taken up a legal challenge before now.

Essentially, voters said they don’t want lawmakers paid unless and until they perform one of their most elementary tasks, creating a budget. It was unfair for legislators to blast Chiang for doing a job he was elected to do.

But Republicans also did not get paid. Some of them – some Democrats, too – have sufficient personal wealth and other income that $403 per day doesn’t matter much to them. But plenty of folks in both parties began feeling pressure of an unprecedented sort the day their paychecks stopped coming.

How they reacted to that pressure revealed more about them and the lack of depth of their stated beliefs than anything they might ever say.

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Elias is author of the current book "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It," now available in an updated second edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net.