FIRST ELECTED INSURANCE COMMISH WANTS INCUMBENT OUT

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS5
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 15, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“FIRST ELECTED INSURANCE COMMISH WANTS INCUMBENT OUT”

 

Think back: When was the last time you heard the former occupant of an important political office, state or national, declaim publicly that a successor of the same political party wasn’t doing the job well and ought to be ousted?

 

If your answer is never, that would be correct. Jerry Brown has never criticized Gavin Newman. During Donald Trump’s first term as president, neither George W. Bush nor his father George H.W. Bush said much about his performance.

 

But John Garamendi has changed that script. An eight-term Democratic congressman from a Central Valley district and the original elected insurance commissioner (he served from 1991 to 1995), Garamendi is sickened by what he’s seeing from Ricardo Lara, the fellow Democrat who now holds the office.

 

He looked on silently for six years as Lara first took political contributions from the insurance companies he regulated, then was forced to return them. He also said nothing when Lara began kowtowing to those same companies by okaying extra-high premium increases. 

 

But he’s now had it. He’s told a San Francisco Bay Area television station that Lara “should go” if he’s unwilling to battle those same insurance companies. 

 

And Lara is demonstrably not willing to fight the hand that fed him, the hand he’s not supposed to hold in any affectionate way so long as he’s in the office he now holds. 

 

For example, when the insurance rates on a building directly next to a fire station in the hilly town of Portola Valley were raised 50 percent this year, Lara said nothing, did nothing to prevent it, even though its very location makes that structure about as fire-safe and risk-free as anyplace could be. 

 

Garamendi pointed out that Lara, when a candidate in 2018, pronounced himself “leery” of insurance rate hikes unless customers were getting something in return, like more extensive coverage or guarantees of renewal. 

 

But that’s all gone by the wayside. Lara has finalized a plan to allow insurance companies to assess massive rate increases even in areas with no significant fire danger without making the concessions he had promised to require.

 

For example, he promised earlier this year that insurance companies would have to cover 85 percent of homes in wildfire areas (where policy cancellations have lately been rampant) in exchange for significantly higher rates. But the regulation he issued said that companies can instead opt to cover only 5 percent more homeowners than they do now.

 

“The commissioner lied,” said the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group. “And companies don’t even have to meet that 5 percent threshold; they can opt out…if they want,” added the group’s president, Jamie Court.

 

Lara’s response was to say new rates will “reflect the risks of where we’re living.” But that’s not true, either, since all homeowners will be paying more, even if they don’t live in fire areas. Said one Santa Monica policy holder who has never filed a fire claim in more than 45 years of home ownership, “Any fire would have to cross an awful lot of city before it got to me, but my rates are going up anyway.”

 

She is not alone. Meanwhile, some owners of city properties in sections of San Francisco with many older homes that have been remodeled in recent years (like Noe Valley and the Mission District) have seen their policies cancelled even though few claims have been made in those districts.

 

That led Garamendi to say, “Over the last three years, I have observed that this commissioner is not willing to take the hard task and the necessary task to stand up to the insurance industry. If the commissioner is not willing to do that…then he’s not doing his job and he should leave.”

 

In short, the pioneering insurance regulator Garamendi is saying “Lara must go.”

 

But there’s no sign of that. As a candidate, Lara said that he was running because “California needs a strong defender, one who will stand up to bullies.” But his predecessor finds he hasn’t come close to doing that.

 

Which leads to an almost unprecedented political scene, with one Democratic party stalwart telling another to depart.

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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

 

17 TRUMPIST STATES TRY TO PENALIZE CALIFORNIANS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2022 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “17 TRUMPIST STATES TRY TO PENALIZE CALIFORNIANS"

 

        While president, Donald Trump tried to punish Californians whenever he could for voting against him by the huge margins that meant he never won the legitimacy of a popular vote victory.

 

There were delays in federal grant money to cities and the state, there were slow responses to wildfires on federal lands, there was his hamstringing the Census to assure California would lose at least one seat in Congress.

 

But he imposed no more direct and pernicious punishment on individual Californians than his single-handed revocation of this state’s right – granted under the federal Clean Air Act of 1970 – to set tailpipe smog emission standards for cars and trucks sold here.

 

        From the start, opponents claimed this law would make cars more expensive, cut sales and cost jobs. That did not happen, as a look at any urban California freeway will make obvious.

  

        Even when population plateaued or declined slightly, traffic increased.

 

        But air pollution did not. The state has seen ever fewer smog alerts and warnings for children and seniors to stay inside on hot summer days since Republican President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act. Rates of emphysema and lung cancer have been down for decades in Southern California, the San Joaquin Valley and the San Francisco Bay area, the state’s three smoggiest regions.

 

        Trump sought to reverse that via an executive order. And if he’d been reelected, it would have happened, with the effects due to be felt starting about a year or two from now.

 

        But Trump did not win in 2020, despite his plaintive and lying claims to the contrary. Instead, Joe Biden became president and reinstated California’s tailpipe authority.

 

        Now come the attorneys general of 17 states, seeking to get California’s authority revoked again, this time by a federal appeals court. The list includes Missouri, Ohio, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Texas, Utah and West Virginia, all led by Republicans who supported Trump. Only one appealing state did not go for Trump two years ago.

 

        Their claim is essentially the same as what critics of the Clean Air Act argued more than 50 years ago: Giving California authority other states do not will make cars more expensive everywhere and cost jobs.

 

        Of course, there are plenty of states that disagree. The 13-state Northeast Consortium, composed of the New England and Atlantic Seaboard states north of Virginia, opted years ago to adopt California standards automatically four years after they take effect here.

 

        The California rules essentially forced auto makers to build hybrid and electric cars, design catalytic converters and increase gasoline mileage greatly.

 

        All that probably validates one claim of the states seeking to end California’s authority for good. As voiced by West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, it goes like this: Giving California the authority to set its own standards essentially forces the rest of the country to live by this state’s standards. That’s pretty much assured, because when you add up the car sales in California and the states that use its rules, you account for well over half the vehicle sales in America – and carmakers don’t want to make two types of vehicles, so the California rules set the pattern.

 

        “That leaves California with a slice of sovereign authority that Congress withdraws from every other state,” gripes Morrisey.

 

        Is he perhaps a tad envious?

 

        In any case, Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta had no trouble after the anti-California case was filed in rounding up 20 states and three big cities to oppose the suit by all those GOP-dominated states.

 

        Said Bonta, “The existing (policy) has been a massive success, driving down air pollution and growing the electric vehicle market…we’ve defended our clean car standards from these roadblocks before, and we can’t let this latest challenge take us the wrong way on clean cars.”

 

        Even if that means cars cost more today than a few years ago, it also means they last longer and kill fewer residents of areas once plagued by smog-related illnesses. And it means that in trying to impose a Trump-inspired punishment on California, the Republican attorneys general could be causing plenty of deaths not only here but also in their own states.

 

    -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 

BULLET TRAIN WILL MAKE ‘BROWNEST CUT’ BITE HARDER

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2016, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “BULLET TRAIN WILL MAKE ‘BROWNEST CUT’ BITE HARDER”

          Back in 2007, when then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger desperately cast about for ways to cut the deficit-ridden state budget, he suddenly slashed $27.8 million from the a program that preserved agricultural lands, leaving a mere token $1,000 for it in a $90 billion general fund spending plan.

          Now that cut in so-called Williamson Act contracts, dubbed the “brownest cut of all” at the time since it came from a governor with very green pretensions, seems about to do more environmental damage than ever, in large part because of a new business plan adopted by the state High Speed Rail Authority.

Schwarzenegger’s cut left 16.4 million acres of farmland exposed to potential development, land formerly protected by contracts between counties and landowners previously committed to keep farming their acreage in exchange for a property tax break funded by the state.

          The cut has already had a measurable impact, but the bullet train authority’s latest action figures to accelerate things.

          Here’s a bit of what’s already happened, based on figures developed by Conservation Science Partners, a non-profit in the Sierra Nevada mountain town of Truckee:

During the decade from 2001 to 2011, only partially covered by Schwarzenegger’s Williamson Act cut, which has been continued by current Gov. Jerry Brown, California lost 785 square miles of farmland to development, equal to 502,000 acres at 640 acres per square mile. That was a higher percentage than in any other Western state, and no one knows how much more has been eaten by urban sprawl since 2011.

          By the end of that year, fully 19.5 percent of California’s total land mass was developed, the highest percentage of any Western state.

          The springtime plan for a bullet train construction U-turn can do nothing but exacerbate this trend, the brownest item in California’s modern budget history.

          Just how brown? One 2003 study from Purdue University showed that  every acre of farmland in Purdue’s home state of Indiana pulled an estimated 0.107 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air each year. That’s for all types of farmland, including pastures, vineyards, rice and cotton fields, orchards and more.

          This is a lowball figure based on Indiana lands, which unlike California open spaces, sprout nothing green during the winter to take carbon from the air. Even under those less-than-ideal conditions, the math works out to a total of 1.754 million tons of carbon absorbed yearly by the 16.4 million present and former Williamson Act acres. That’s more than is saved by any man-made tactic, including expensive cap-and-trade programs. The act was named for 1960s-era Republican legislator John Williamson, who dreamed it up.

          Now consider the latest high speed rail plan, which sees the first bullet trains running between Bakersfield and San Jose, and not between Merced and Los Angeles, as previously planned.

          The change means early bullet trains will likely carry more commuters than other passengers. With estimated travel times of an hour or less between Fresno and San Jose, Silicon Valley workers who can’t afford sky-high real estate prices in cities like Los Gatos and Palo Alto could get to work fairly quickly via the bullet train and connecting Caltrain routes or corporate buses.

          This solves problems for a lot of people, while potentially creating enormous urban sprawl on current farmland. For the High Speed Rail Authority, it could assure a full passenger load, something that’s been very uncertain from the original conception of this massive project. That could help the authority lure private investors who so far have not put up a nickel.

          For high-tech companies, it resolves the problem of finding affordable housing for employees, because land is exponentially cheaper in Central Valley locales like Merced, Chowchilla and Madera, all hard by the bullet train route. It would let them expand near their headquarters, rather than putting new plants in cheap-land states like Texas and Arizona.

          For farmers whose Williamson Act contracts have either expired or are about to, it could mean big money when developers move in even before all the tracks are laid.

          But ill effects are obvious, too. There will be far less sequestration of greenhouse gases when housing tracts eat up farmland. Urban sprawl could spread as never before.

          All because of two governors who have billed themselves the greenest ever, anywhere, and their hand-picked appointees.

         

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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

EARLY PRISON RELEASES A POLITICAL HAZARD, TOO

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 15, 2014, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

  “EARLY PRISON RELEASES A POLITICAL HAZARD, TOO”

          From early in his career, Gov. Jerry Brown has had a proclivity for dismissing problems with wisecracks or aphorisms. As early as 1975, in the first term of his first go-‘round as California’s top official, he mocked university professors’ pleas for pay raises by saying they didn’t need more money, but could make do with “psychic rewards.”

          He’s done the same thing lately as companies like Toyota and Occidental Petroleum announced they were moving headquarters and thousands of jobs out of state, noting that those firms and their jobs are just a tiny fraction of the California economy. True, but the moves are very consequential for the employees involved and everyone they do business with.

          Now, with the state beginning to release some non-violent prisoners to comply with a federal court order demanding that prison crowding be reduced, Brown told a reporter that “The U.S. Supreme Court ordered us to release thousands of prisoners.” The releases, he said, “are a creative solution.”

          But as soon as Brown’s Republican reelection opponent Neel Kashkari finishes hammering him for allowing Toyota and Occidental to leave (the companies say no official persuasion or tax concession could have prevented their shifts), the GOP will start in on prison releases.

          Again, Brown will plead that he did all he could to resist the releases and the accompanying realignment program that sees many felons who would previously have done time in state prisons serving shorter terms in county jails. And he did, coming close to a historic confrontation with the judges involved.

          But it’s also true that legislative Democrats, with no resistance from Brown, killed a Republican proposal to put all prisoners sentenced to more than 10 years in state prisons and not county jails.

          The GOP cited the case of Randall Murray Allison, arrested on Interstate 5 with more than 200 pounds of cocaine worth about $2.3 million in the largest drug bust in Kings County history. Because of realignment and the non-violent nature of Allison’s crime, he was sentenced to 28 years in county jail, but space issues there mean he will probably serve only about 30 months in jail, less than 10 percent of his sentence.

          Allison is not alone. State corrections officials say hundreds of prisoners will be paroled “slightly earlier” than normal before the end of this year. Plus, some second-time offenders who have done half their enhanced time under the “three-strikes” law may become eligible for parole.

          If Brown’s job approval rating (now well above 50 percent) were not so high, this could pose a serious political problem for him. And it still might if Kashkari begins to catch fire.

          For the reality of realignment so far is that while violent crime is down in most areas since the program began, property crime is up. This means car burglaries, thefts from garages where doors are inadvertently left open and the like, with stolen goods frequently fenced to pay for drugs.

          Even though no one has yet been able to show a direct link between those new crimes and realignment, many victims would likely blame Brown if his opponent could make any connection.

          And yet, with the prod from the court order, California is now doing exactly what a new report from the National Academy of Sciences says all states should: cutting the rate of incarceration.

          “The United States is past the point where the number of people in prison can be justified by social benefits,” said Jeremy Travis, president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. The problem, says the study he headed, is that few criminals reform while in prison, so “When ex-inmates return to their communities, their lives often continue to be characterized by violence, joblessness…” and other problems.

          It’s true that fear of long prison terms has never been proven to reduce overall crime. But when someone like Randall Murray Allison balances the potential gain from trying to sell more than $2 million worth of cocaine against little more than two years in county jail, there will surely be more crime.

          Which means that if he doesn’t want political trouble either this fall or in a future term as governor, Brown needs to come up with a more creative solution to the overcrowding issue. Or else he will get at least some of the blame for any new crime increase that might come.

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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.

ECHOES OF ANCIENT ANTI-SEMITISM IN CIRCUMCISION MOVE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2011 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“ECHOES OF ANCIENT ANTI-SEMITISM IN CIRCUMCISION MOVE”

By now, most Americans have heard the story of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah many times, with its tale of a Greek king in ancient Syria (which included modern Israel) trying to eradicate the Jewish religion. He was thwarted by the guerrilla warfare of the Maccabees, who liberated the ancient Temple in Jerusalem in the second century B.C.

The story says they found enough oil to fuel the Temple’s ever-burning lamp just one night, but the small vial burned continuously for eight days until more was found, the reason Hanukkah lasts eight days and nights.

As usually told, this tale does not include some of the items King Antiochus decreed in his effort to put an end to the Judaism.

Here’s what a document called “Megillas Antiochus,” (the Scroll of Antiochus) written shortly after the events, records as the words of the monarch: “We will annul the covenants which (the Jews) have established with their God, that of the Sabbath and…circumcision.”

Not even Adolf Hitler or the Spanish monarchs and priests who conducted the Inquisition attempted to ban circumcision, which Jews regard as a key mark of their relationship with God, ordained in Genesis:17:10, which specifies that “Every man child among you shall be circumcised…and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you.” The passage further says “the uncircumcised man…shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my convenant.”

Moslems also practice circumcision, but it is not nearly so central a feature of their religion or their identification with Islam.

Now comes a San Diego-based group called MGMbill.org (MGM stands for Male Genital Mutilation), which seeks to ban the practice of snipping off the tiny foreskins of small children, usually done on the eighth day of a Jewish boy’s life. Hospital circumcision of baby boys has also spread far beyond the Jewish and Moslem faiths, reaching 95 percent of all American boys in the 1960s, but now down to just over 50 percent.

The anti-circumcision group’s Web site claims affiliates in 17 states, with 11 of those sub-groups headed by women.

It has qualified a local initiative for San Francisco’s November ballot aiming to ban circumcisions of any male under age 18 except where medical conditions demand it. A similar measure was proposed in Santa Monica, but quickly withdrawn by its proponent, who wanted to include a religious exemption, but was told by the movement’s lawyers that would not be constitutional. The supporters’ main claim is that circumcision before a boy is truly sentient deprives him of control of his own body parts.

The San Francisco proponent, Lloyd Schofield, claims circumcision is the equivalent of female genital mutilation, banned in this country but still practiced in certain Third World precincts with the intention of depriving women of sexual pleasure. No one has ever claimed circumcision prevents male sexual pleasure.

MGMbill.org also denies there are any medical benefits to circumcision, despite studies showing circumcision somewhat lessens male vulnerability to sexually transmitted diseases and urinary tract infections. There are no recorded medical detriments.

Schofield claims many Jews support his initiative, but named none in an interview. “Scripture says a lot of things – for instance, that we should stone to death anyone who works on the Sabbath,” he said. “I say if someone wants to adhere to this, that’s their choice, but it should be their choice.” He did not mention that the operation, which typically heals in 10 days or less for infants, is far more painful and dangerous for adults.

MGMbill.org also has published a campaign comic book called “Foreskin Man,” featuring a muscular blonde hero wearing Superman-style tights and evil-looking Jewish figures, drawn in the style of Nazi-era anti-Semitic tracts, standing over a baby boy and holding back his mother as she fights to prevent the circumcision (see comic book cover at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=149564035091485&set=a.128374157210473.20063.117501288297760&type=1&theater)

Pro-foreskin advocates are unfazed by the similarity of their efforts to those of a bigot whose name is still reviled about 2,200 years after his demise.

They claim a desire to protect young boys, and not anti-Semitism, motivates their effort to force Jews to ignore a Biblical mandate set forth almost 4,000 years ago, just after Abraham left his home in the country now called Iraq. Moslems would also be compelled to refrain from their religion’s tradition, the reason why Jewish and Islamic groups are in a rare coalition trying to get courts to knock this measure off the local ballot. At the same time, Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman of Los Angeles has proposed a bill that would no allow prohibitions of circumcision.

The bottom line is that there is at least some similarity between the current effort and what Antiochus attempted unsuccessfully.

Combine this with the proponents' comic book, and they should not be the least bit surprised if and when their effort is labeled flatly anti-Semitic, no matter how many Jews they may claim are among their best friends.

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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.