MAKE ONE THING EASIER THIS YEAR: REPEAL AB 5

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE:  FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2020, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

   “MAKE ONE THING EASIER THIS YEAR: REPEAL AB 5”

From local newspaper columnists to court reporters, from musicians and sound mixers to seamstresses, it’s difficult to find a skilled field where the most destructive law California has adopted in the last few years does not hurt substantial numbers of people.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic threw unprecedented millions of workers onto unemployment and wrecked myriad businesses, the measure known as Assembly Bill 5 was destroying careers willy-nilly.

          It’s become extremely obvious just how amateur and clumsy an effort this bill was from the moment of its conception. In a California economy that thrived for years on gig workers (who themselves often thrived as they moved from company to company, taking the best offers available), this law, signed last September by Gov. Gavin Newsom, became sawdust in the gears of business and employment.

          Freelancers in many fields were dumped by the hundreds, adding up to many thousands in the months between the bill signing and its Jan. 1 effective date.

          The bill’s inept author, Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez of San Diego, soon admitted it needed revisions and submitted a few for legislative consideration. These were quickly placed on the back burner as lawmakers, like other Californians, sheltered at home most of the spring. On their return to Sacramento, where they essentially sanctioned months of one-man rule by Newsom, they were justifiably consumed with budget issues, a preoccupation brought on by vast tax losses from the state’s long lockdown.

          It’s plain why AB 5 passed in the first place: Labor unions badly wanted to organize the many thousands of drivers working freelance for rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft, folks who worked when they pleased, as long as they pleased. What befell others in a wide variety of freelance occupations was collateral damage in the war between unions and the big rideshare outfits.

          But the virus lockdown reduced traffic in California’s urban centers anywhere from 35 percent to 65 percent. This did more than merely allow remaining drivers to feel like they could set land speed records every time they ventured onto a freeway. It also took vast numbers of rideshare drivers off the road.

          With businesses shuttered and the majority of Californians sheltering at home and/or working from home, there has also been little need for Uber or Lyft. Where are folks sheltering at home going to go?

          Meanwhile, insecurities some women had about encountering attempted rapists or gropers when drivers showed up during the heyday of ridesharing quickly evolved into worries about getting exposed to COVID-19 if they ventured into a stranger’s car. A stranger whose medical history and past exposure to contagion were of necessity unknown to riders.

          So why keep a law intended to instigate the unionization of a workforce that’s greatly reduced? There really is little or no reason. Even the unions wouldn’t get much in the way of dues if they managed to organize every driver still working.

          If Gonzalez admits she erred in writing a blunderbuss law that inadvertently – she says – damaged the prospects of people she didn’t know she was involving, why not just get rid of the whole thing?

          Why should make-up artists have lost their jobs en masse just because unions wanted to gain new members among rideshare drivers?

          Even worse, why should newspapers, which were already in precarious financial shape before the pandemic but then lost most of their local advertising income, still be forced to hire anyone who writes more than 35 stories per year (the limit set in AB 5) as a regular employee when they’ve had to lay off even more reporters and editors and ad takers than before? For that matter, why the specific limit on articles for freelance writers, when there are no analogous limits for any other gig workers? That limit alone suggests Gonzalez deliberately targeted newspapers and some of their writers.

         

          The bottom line: This was a bad law when it passed. Now the coronavirus lockdown has exposed it as even worse than it first seemed. That means lawmakers should scrap the entire amateurish mistake, not merely tinker with it.

         

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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

DESPITE WHINERS, TOP TWO AGAIN WORKS AS PLANNED

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 26, 2018, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “DESPITE WHINERS, TOP TWO AGAIN WORKS AS PLANNED”

          It happens every two years during the spring primary election season: One major party or the other feels wronged by the Top Two primary system Californians adopted in 2010 and whines for months about its plight.

          In 2016, the griping came from Republicans whose vote splintered in the primary run for the U.S. Senate and left the eventual November runoff field to two Democrats, Kamala Harris winning the seat previously held by three-termer Barbara Boxer.

          This year Democrats did the complaining. Their rush of candidates seeking to knock off seemingly vulnerable Republican members of Congress created the possibility of extremely fragmented Democratic votes, especially in three Orange County-based districts carried two years ago by the party’s presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

          As Republicans did two years earlier, Democrats made much of the Top Two system’s “jungle primary” nickname.

          But as it turned out, counts in the first post-election week indicated Democrats will likely make the runoffs in all those districts, the chief remaining doubt coming in the 48^th District, represented for decades by Republican Dana Rohrabacher.

          In that coastline district, Rohrabacher had tallied just over 30 percent of the vote, with the possibility of going higher when all provisional and late absentee ballots are counted. Former Orange County Republican chairman Scott Baugh trailed a bit behind two Democrats for the district’s second November ballot slot under Top Two, which allows only two candidates to appear on runoff ballots for each position: the two highest primary election vote-getters regardless of party.

          If Baugh eventually makes the runoff (and chances are he will not, as he was more than 1,400 votes behind Democrats Hans Kierstead, an M.D. and a stem cell researcher, and businessman Harley Rouda – separated by just 87 votes), Democrats should blame it on their own disorganization, not on the system. Kierstead was supported by the state Democratic Party, while Rouda was funded in large part by the national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

          Their circumstance evokes a 1930s-era remark by philosopher/comic Will Rogers, who famously observed that “I don’t belong to any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

          Meanwhile, in the 49^th District just to the south, former Orange County Democratic Party executive director Mike Levin, a lawyer, pulled 17.1 percent of the vote, beating out two other significant Democrats for the right to take on Republican political veteran Diane Harkey for a seat long occupied by the GOP’s Darrell Issa.

          And in the 39^th district, represented more than a decade by retiring Republican Ed Royce, Democrat Gil Cisneros – winner of a $266 million Powerball lottery prize in 2011 – easily beat back several other Democrats and will take on Republican Assemblywoman and former Royce aide Young Kim in November.

          Further north, late counts indicated Democrat Josh Harder had emerged from yet another crowded Democratic field to take on veteran Republican Jeff Denham this fall.

          It began to dawn on Democrats only in late April that their surfeit of eager hopefuls could produce two GOP runoff candidates in districts that seemed ripe for turning from red to blue. This happened once before, in 2012, when Republicans placed two candidates into the runoff in a San Bernardino County district with a large Democratic voter registration edge.

          But most likely not this time, because the party put significant money into all these districts to assure that voters knew there could be such distortion.

  

          In the end, the more moderate Democratic candidate won out in all districts where the outcome has been determined, precisely the intent of Top Two when it passed as a ballot initiative.

          If a party was actually wronged this year, it was probably the GOP, which for the second straight November will apparently have no candidate for the U.S. Senate, longtime Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein to be opposed by fellow Democrat Kevin de Leon, who barely beat out a field of almost completely unknown and unfunded Republicans.

          The fault here lies not with the system, but with the GOP for failing to recruit and support a significant candidate. Now Republican voters may decide the race between the moderate Feinstein and the far more leftist de Leon.

          All of which means Top Two worked just as designed, no matter what the whiners said before Election Day.

        

         
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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

 

BIT BY BIT, ‘DISCLOSE ACT’ BECOMES MORE REAL

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2015, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “BIT BY BIT, ‘DISCLOSE ACT’ BECOMES MORE REAL”

          If there’s one main reason for the distrust many Californians feel for government and elected officials at all levels, it may be the way special interests from corporations to labor unions to individual billionaires pour millions of dollars into elections campaigns while hiding their identities.

          Almost five years ago, Julia Brownley, then an obscure assemblywoman and now a Democratic congresswoman from Ventura County, began trying to get state legislators to fix a bit of that.

          Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision, it’s impossible to stop these groups from pouring as much money as they like into campaigns, both for individuals and initiatives. But there are ways to force disclosure of their identities even when they’d like to remain anonymous.

          So Brownley sponsored something backers called the “Disclose Act,” aiming to force disclosure of the sources for all significant campaign donations. The reasoning was that if voters knew, for instance, that Chevron Corp. was the leading donor to the “no” side of an initiative campaign about putting a tax on oil drilling, they might be a bit more skeptical of whatever arguments are made in TV commercials.

          As it stands, companies like Chevron, Exxon, Tesoro and Valero can create and donate to campaign committees with benign names like Californians Against New Taxes without much muss or fuss.

          The Disclose Act would require such committees to reveal the three leading donors behind each political newspaper, TV or radio ad, lifting the fig leaf that has long obscured who’s doing what. It would also compel nonprofits funneling money into campaigns from anonymous donors to reveal their identities.

     But it failed in 2011, and Brownley went on to Congress, where she’s in her second term. That left backers to find new sponsors for the Disclose Act and they’ve done so each year since.

          Meanwhile, bit by bit, the ideas in the Disclose Act are moving toward reality. The first movement came with a 2014 state Senate bill known as SB27, which passed in part because of outrage over an out-of-state non-profit dumping $11 million into California campaigns at the last moment before the November 2012 election. Even though the state Fair Political Practices Commission fined that Arizona-based outfit $1 million, it wasn’t forced to disclose names, even after the election.

          In response, almost two years later, Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB27, forcing non-profits to disclose the sources of their so-called “Dark Money” on the secretary of state’s website.

          That’s a help, but it’s not enough. Most voters will never take the trouble to look on that website for the information. A more direct approach is needed.

          Enter this year’s version of the Disclose Act, known as AB700 and sponsored by Democratic Assemblymen Marc Levine of San Rafael and Jimmy Gomez of northeast Los Angeles. This bill would compel political ads to disclose their top three funders clearly and unambiguously in the ads. The funders disclosed must be the original ones, not dummy committees like those used in the past to mask their activity by interests from labor unions to tobacco, chemical and oil companies, not to mention wealthy individuals.

          The disclosure would have to come in large letters at the beginning of TV ads, not in fine print at the close, where no one is likely to notice. That way, voters would know who is behind a message while they're seeing and hearing it.

          This isn’t quite as radical an idea as one that surfaced in a 1990s-era initiative that would have required similar disclosure in type matching the largest and most colorful contained in any ad or commercial.

          Maybe that’s why the Assembly Election Committee passed it last month on a 4-2 vote.

          That vote meant the idea of disclosing top donors prominently has already gotten farther toward becoming law than ever before. It’s a tactic vitally needed in an era of unfettered spending by wealthy interests on all sides of the political spectrum. If spending can’t be limited, at least voters should know who’s doing it.

          So bit by bit, key elements of the original Disclose Act may well become reality. And the more the better, hopefully in plenty of time for next year’s initiative-loaded elections.

           

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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    

ROMNEY ALL BUT THROWS IN CALIFORNIA TOWEL

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 26, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

          “ROMNEY ALL BUT THROWS IN CALIFORNIA TOWEL”

          The assumption of almost anyone interested in politics has all along been that Republican Mitt Romney stands virtually no chance of carrying California in his bid to unseat President Obama.

          The candidate himself made that assessment all but official the other day at the end of a fund-raising swing through the state’s big cities, when he named a “leadership” team to head his campaign in this, the nation’s largest state, with the biggest pot of electoral votes.

          The Romney choices were almost automatic, representing nothing at all new or original politically, and some of them amount to a virtual kiss of death when it comes to winning elections in California. They assure that Californians who don't donate thousands of campaign dollars will see almost nothing of the national candidates this fall, not even via television commercials.

          Start with the fact that no Republican can win a statewide vote in California with anything less than about 40 percent of the steadily-larger Latino vote. Then note that Romney’s new honorary statewide co-chairman is former Gov. Pete Wilson, who almost singlehandedly turned California from a highly competitive state into one that’s considered solidly Democratic blue on every electoral map.

          Wilson did this with his unstinting support of the anti-illegal immigrant 1994 Proposition 187, which passed handily and but for a federal court order would now ban children of the undocumented from public schools, while denying all other government benefits to them and their parents, including hospital emergency care.

         

Wilson, trailing Democrat Kathleen Brown by 20 points in early polls on his reelection that year, promised to require all state and local government employees to report suspected illegal immigrants to the state attorney general’s office if Proposition 187 passed. Then-Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, now a suburban Sacramento congressman but also running for re-election in ‘94, quickly agreed to set up emergency regulations to enforce the law immediately after the election, even before its effective date.

          This all achieved two political results: It got both Republicans reelected, and it set off a massive wave of citizenship applications, with more than 2.5 million previously legal residents who were not yet citizens becoming naturalized in the next two years. Many of them said they believed further new anti-immigrant laws might be imminent, and the only way to assure their ability to remain in America was to become citizens.

          Almost all of them immediately registered Democratic, ending any hopes the GOP might have harbored for achieving voter registration parity for decades to come.

          Wilson further alienated Hispanics with a drumbeat of TV commercials featuring video of illegals running across the Mexican border at San Ysidro, with an announcer solemnly intoning “they keep coming.”

          Wilson soon was Latinos’ biggest political bugaboo everywhere in the Southwest; polls even showed he was widely detested in Mexico.

          So, in a state where Latino votes have been decisive for many years, that’s who Romney takes as the symbolic chief of his campaign. Throw in his statewide co-chair Meg Whitman, an old Romney chum who was the 2010 Republican candidate for governor and now heads Hewlett-Packard Corp. Whitman’s poll standing two years ago plummeted suddenly when it was revealed that she had employed an undocumented immigrant housekeeper for years, knew the employee was here illegally and dumped the housekeeper summarily just as she announced she was running for governor. Not exactly a move calculated to win popularity among Hispanic voters, once it became widely known.

          The rest of Romney’s California cast is purely GOP boilerplate, but completely ignores the one Republican who has lately cut into Democratic majorities among Hispanics in this state: ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. True, Schwarzenegger is not particularly popular these days, but if Romney really intended to challenge for California votes, he would include a moderate like Schwarzenegger, rather than sticking exclusively with conservatives.

          What’s more, Romney left it to Wilson to respond for the slate of chairs, co-chairs and steering committee members – none of whom will actually be expected to do much. “The members of (Romney’s) California leadership team have already been hard at work spreading his …message and working to ensure that President Obama is defeated in November,” Wilson said.

          Not exactly fiery rhetoric, but about what you’d expect from a half-hearted campaign that’s throwing in the towel in the nation’s largest state long before the political season gets intense.

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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

L.A. MAYOR'S HOPE: NOR CAL VOTE SPLIT

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2009, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
"L.A. MAYOR'S HOPE: NOR CAL VOTE SPLIT"

To understand at least part of the scenario Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will need if he decides to run for governor next year, it helps to go back to 1974.

Villaraigosa, the only major Southern California figure now considering a try to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor, might need a re-run of what happened that year in one down-the-ticket race if he's to have any real chance at the governor's office he covets.

Here's what happened then in the contest to succeed Jerry Brown (today's attorney general) as secretary of state, conducted while he ran successfully for governor: An eccentric assemblywoman from Oakland ran against well-known Democratic activist Cathy O'Neil of Pacific Palisades and eight-year San Gabriel Valley Assemblyman Walter Karabian for the Democratic nomination.

Prior to that election, former dental hygienist March Fong Eu was best known for smashing a toilet on the state Capitol steps as part of her successful campaign to get pay toilets outlawed in this state. She also sought to become the first Chinese-American elected to statewide office in California.

She won that nomination with less than 40 percent of the Democratic vote because her two prominent Southern California rivals essentially split that region's votes while tallying very few in Northern California, where Eu dominated. Eu went on to defeat Republican Brian Van Camp that November by a margin of more than 20 percent. She served almost five full terms before becoming President Bill Clinton's ambassador to Micronesia in the 1990s. But if another major Northern California figure had entered that 1974 race, she likely would have lost, and her son Matt would never have become state treasurer years later, nor would he have had a shot at getting the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in 1998.

Now Villaraigosa, weakened by drawing just 55 percent of the vote against a less-than-stellar field of underfunded unknowns when reelected last March, faces a nothing but Northern Californians in the run for governor. He's also handicapped by the recent revelation of yet another affair with a female television reporter. This time, though, he's separated from his wife, so the matter won't be quite as damaging as his first affair.

Other prospective Democratic candidates include Attorney General Brown, the former Oakland mayor, and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, not to mention U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the longtime San Francisco mayor who would probably force most other candidates in her party to reconsider if she decides to run. She says she probably won't.

Another wild card is state Schools Supt. Jack O'Connell, with less money than the other significant Democrats. With his base in Santa Barbara and small likelihood of running a large-scale advertising campaign, he doesn't figure as a major factor in this race.

Villaraigosa would have three fervent hopes if he runs in this field: One would be to sweep Latino voters while coaxing them into a large turnout. Another is that the northern candidates split the vote there as Karabian and O'Neil did Southern California in 1974 in a dramatic example of regional bloc voting. And a third (shared with Newsom) is that voters forget about sexual peccadilloes or deem them irrelevant. Newsom has also been involved in a sex scandal while in office.

There are no geographic splits among Republicans: all three major GOP candidates have strong roots in roughly the same Silicon Valley area. Republican contenders include Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, who can finance as many campaigns as he cares to run after selling off his software business for hundreds of millions of dollars; former eBay chief Meg Whitman, who was not involved in public life before becoming an adviser to defeated Republican presidential candidate John McCain last year, and former Congressman Tom Campbell, previously an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate and a former academic at both UC Berkeley and Stanford University.

Perhaps Campbell had something geographic in mind when he became a visiting professor this year at Orange County's Chapman College and started writing op-ed pieces for the Los Angeles Times and others. But he's still not well known in Southern California and would have no legitimate claim to regional loyalty.

Were Villaraigosa to win the Democratic nod, he would then hope for both a strong Latino vote and strong regional loyalty in the November 2010 contest against one of those current and former Silicon Valley denizens.

But that is by no means assured.

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