R.I.P. ROGER DIAMOND, HUGE INFLUENCE ON STATE’S POLITICS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“R.I.P. ROGER DIAMOND, HUGE INFLUENCE ON STATE’S POLITICS”

 

If you’ve ever been accosted by an initiative or recall petition carrier outside a grocery, big box store a la Costco or Home Depot or voted for or against any California initiative in the last 50 years, you have been affected by Roger Jon Diamond.

 

Diamond, possibly the least known major contributor to California politics in the last century, died at 81 in February, exactly six weeks after he and his family lost their bluffside home in the early January Palisades fire.

 

The blaze destroyed Diamond’s hacienda-style home of 50 years overlooking the Pacific Ocean and two other homes just blocks away that belonged to his two daughters and their families.

 

Diamond was best known for his 20 years as head of a community organization called No Oil Inc., which successfully fought off several attempts to drill major oil wells below his bluff and in other coastal zones.

 

But his biggest political contribution came first in a shopping mall more than 90 miles east in San Bernardino and then in a series of courtrooms.

 

In 1970, Diamond took on as a nonpaying pro bono client a grassroots group called the People’s Lobby, headed by activists Ed and Joyce Koupal (no relation to Jonathan Coupal, head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.). The Koupals’ group sought to put an omnibus measure called the Environment Initiative onto the 1972 ballot, and began to gather signatures for it.

 

This was long before the days when consultants offered anywhere up to $6 per signature for valid John Hancocks from registered voters.

 

Ed Koupal came up with the then-original idea of seeking out voters at indoor shopping malls, then a fairly new and growing phenomenon. Diamond among them, some Koupal associates began soliciting shoppers at San Bernardino’s Inland Center and were quickly kicked out by county sheriff’s deputies.

 

Diamond, who had been a lawyer just four years at the time, sued. He claimed shopping malls like the Inland Center – which at the time hosted upwards of 25,000 visitors daily – were de facto public places. He put his name on the lawsuit against 28-year Sheriff Frank Bland, referred to in one biography as “a John Wayne lawman.” It was known as Diamond v. Bland.

 

The case was quickly laughed out of San Bernardino County Superior Court, as the mall’s owner Homart Development Co., tightly regulated all activity in its 32-foot-wide corridors and the adjacent parking lots.

 

The bottom line: Diamond took the case to the state Supreme Court and won access. Eventually, a variety of other court cases and settlements reduced petition carriers to operating almost exclusively outdoors, but still allowing them on store and mall properties. Those settlements have been imitated in most states across the nation.

 

Koupal’s Environment Initiative made the ballot and lost, but Diamond’s lawsuit lives on.

 

If you’ve ever walked down a beach accessway between private properties, you were a beneficiary of the 1972 Coastal Initiative, one of the first measures to gather signatures on commercial property.

 

Then-Gov. Ronald Reagan used the same tactic to qualify a tax-cutting ballot initiative in 1973 also taking advantage of Diamond’s lawsuit. Reagan’s measure lost, but morphed into the landmark 1978 Proposition 13, which remains law today and keeps property taxes here well below national averages.

 

The consumer advocates who qualified the 1988 Proposition 103 to regulate insurance prices also circulated petitions at shopping malls. So did sponsors of later initiatives to ban smoking in most indoor spaces and tinkering with the definitions of felonies and misdemeanors.

 

Diamond loved all this. “I wanted California to have open politics and I’m glad I helped with that, even if I don’t always agree with the causes they push.”

 

Diamond was always vocal for the environment, accosting nearby smokers in the stands at countless baseball, football and basketball games. He never left a game early and would castigate friends who sometimes did.

 

Roger Diamond was a unique contributor to California politics, giving outsiders like himself influence they otherwise never could have had.

 

Rest in peace, Roger. May we sometime soon encounter more of your kind in politics.

 

   -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

LIFE AFTER COVID CRISIS WON’T BE JUST THE SAME

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 11, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “LIFE AFTER COVID CRISIS WON’T BE JUST THE SAME”

 

        Life after the Spanish flu pandemic that killed tens of millions in the late teens and early ‘20s of the last century was never quite the same as before.

 

        Some public health measures, like mass vaccinations, became normalized. New health and cleanliness standards were imposed on restaurants and other businesses. So it would be grossly unrealistic to expect no changes as the COVID-19 pandemic that has plagued the last two years shifts gradually to an endemic ailment that we deal with regularly and not with crash programs and emergency tactics.

 

        One change that figures to be permanent is the relocation of millions of workers, in California and elsewhere, away from office buildings and into home offices. That has already opened up billions of square feet of vacant office space that could be turned into housing far more quickly and economically than new construction.

 

        So the solution to both homelessness and the shortage of affordable housing is upon us and beginning to happen, even if Gov. Gavin Newsom and a California Legislature largely funded by developers studiously ignores it.

 

        Another likely permanent change: Even though it won’t be compulsory in many places, count on grocery stores, gyms, theaters and other privately owned public places to require or recommend that the unvaccinated populace (at least) wear masks for the indefinite future, with the most health-conscious among us gladly going along.

 

        State, county and city masking requirements have already been eliminated or eased considerably, partly the indirect consequence of Newsom and Mayors Eric Garcetti and London Breed of Los Angeles and San Francisco getting videotaped maskless in a skybox during a January professional football playoff game in Inglewood.

 

        Expect masking in schools to disappear gradually, and figure on vaccinations remaining a major political issue. They already were before Covid appeared;  the virus accentuated the conflict as millions claimed enforced vaccinations infringe on basic freedoms.

 

        Those who make those claims, of course, are essentially saying they have the right to infect everyone around them for the sake of their own momentary comfort, as Covid can be passed on even by persons who exhibit no symptoms of the disease. If anyone dies as a consequence of their refusals – and many already have – that makes some refusers little more than premeditated murderers, as by now most know the possible consequences of their failure to mask or vaxx.

 

        All this has led to a vast expansion of the anti-vaccination movement which opposed compulsory inoculations of schoolchildren long before anyone heard of the coronavirus or its Greek-lettered variants like Delta and Omicron.

 

        So it’s highly likely California will for the foreseeable future be a vaccine battleground even more intense than it was before the pandemic.

 

        At that time, all the way back in 2019, anti-vaccine protesters were being arrested regularly for various forms of disorderly conduct and some even assaulted a state legislator.

 

        That was Democratic state Sen. Richard Pan of Sacramento, who authored two state laws that make it far more difficult for anti-vaxxers to claim religious-belief exemptions to shoehorn their children into schools, public and private, without getting shots protecting against threats like smallpox, rubella and whooping cough.

 

        Pan was beaten up while walking on a sidewalk in his own district, not far from the state Capitol.

 

        Undeterred, Pan – also a pediatrician – now is sponsoring a bill to add Covid immunizations to the list required before kids can attend school.

 

        “The vaccination requirement is a cornerstone to keeping schools open and safe,” Pan told a reporter. “This vaccine has proven to be safe and effective.”

 

        Pan also authored a bill clamping down on doctors who made a cottage industry of providing medical excuses for children of anti-vaxxers, often without actually seeing the kids involved. It’s likely only a matter of time before he or others promote and pass a bill tightening up on Internet clergy who now sell religious-exemption statements against Covid inoculations to ani-vaxx parents and public employees they’ve never met.

 

        All of which means some of the pandemic’s changes, including several that have not yet completely played out, will become permanent, while others will remain matters of fiery dispute for years to come.

 

-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

PROGRESSIVE REGION HEADING FOR ULTRA-REGRESSIVE TAX

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

 FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 11, 2016, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

   “PROGRESSIVE REGION HEADING FOR ULTRA-REGRESSIVE TAX”

    If all goes according to the plans of a relatively new environmental agency, the most progressive part of California will soon inflict the most regressive tax known to America upon all its residents.

    Because the wetlands around San Francisco Bay are fast drying up, with many thousands of acres developed and wildlife habitats threatened and shrinking, the seven-year-old Bay Restoration Agency wants to add $12 a year to the tax bill for each parcel of land in nine counties surrounding the Bay.

          That’s right, the owner of a one-room shack deep in the Hamilton Range of Alameda and Santa Clara counties would pay the same $12 assessed against the billion-dollar complexes of companies like Google and Apple Computer in the heart of Silicon Valley. Yes, they are each built on several parcels, so their parcel tax levies each might total $120 or so, still as unfair as it gets.

          But parcel taxes have gradually become the rage in California over the last 40 or so years. This happened largely because of the 1971 Serrano v. Priest decision of the California Supreme Court, which sees more than half of most new property tax assessments by school districts sent to Sacramento for dispersion among the poorest districts in the state. Parcel taxes are the only kind whose take stays completely at home, to be used for local purposes where it is raised.

          In some cities, this sees factories and luxury hotels paying the same amount as owners of small houses or one-bedroom condominiums. Renters see all or most of such levies passed through to them.

          Even backers of many parcel tax plans often admit the levy is inherently unfair, taxing the poor the same amount as wealthy corporations. That’s one reason some parcel taxes exempt property owned by senior citizens.

          As with schools, which use the money for everything from construction to curriculum, the cause for the proposed new 20-year Bay area parcel tax is admirable. The levy will be up for a vote in the June primary election in all nine counties involved, with a two-thirds vote for approval needed for passage.

          It would raise about $500 million over two decades, funding clean water projects, pollution prevention and restoration of about 35,000 wetlands acres along the shores of the Bay. That would just about double the land area now available to the approximately 1 million shore birds in the area, which contained about 200,000 wetland acres at the time of the Gold Rush. It would also improve commercial fishing for herring and other species.

          Much of the land to be restored can easily be seen from airplanes landing at San Francisco International Airport – the salt flats once owned by the Leslie and Cargill companies, which are now available for restoration with no funds available for the work.

          Another aim of the project would be to protect the wetlands and nearby cities from rising sea levels predicted by most climate scientists. The Restoration Authority operates on the belief that rising oceans could push water levels in the Bay up by more than three feet before the end of this century, with shoreline areas in Marin County and the East Bay most vulnerable to the flooding. Schools, airports, seaports, freeways, electricity generation and much more would at peril under that scenario, which the new money is supposed to mitigate.

          “This parcel tax will bring in more money…and could be used as a leverage for federal matching funds,” said a scientist for the environmental group, San Francisco Baykeeper. He complained that other wetland areas like the Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound and the Everglades now get far more in federal conservation funds than the Bay area, which gets only about $5 million a year in federal water quality improvement funds.

          The money would also build new hiking trails and improve availability of swimming and boating.

          That’s all admirable, as are the improvements to public schools now largely paid for by parcel taxes. But it doesn’t make parcel taxes equitable.

          While the Bay area parcel tax proposal is supported by the likes of the Save the Bay, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Ducks Unlimited, there is no significant opposition, largely because the amounts at stake seem insignificant to wealthy interests.

          But it remains to be seen if a two-thirds majority of voters even in the ultra-liberal, environmentally-friendly Bay area will vote to tax themselves unfairly for decades to come.

     -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, go to www.californiafocus.net

APPEAL COURT COMMENTS ENCOURAGE BIRTHERS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “APPEAL COURT COMMENTS ENCOURAGE BIRTHERS”

          For years, those who claim President Barack Obama was born in Kenya or someplace other than the Hawaii hospital indicated on the birth certificate issued by that state’s officials have claimed their effort is neither political nor racist, but merely purist.

          But now the woman who has carried the birther torch in more devoted fashion than anyone has revealed a political motive: She says she hopes a case now before the federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will “influence the fall election and get more Republicans elected.”

    Of course, the case now avidly pursued by Orly Taitz, the Orange County lawyer, dentist and real estate agent often called the “Birther Queen,” does not involve Obama directly. But Taitz, planning a run for state attorney general, believes a wisecrack by one of three judges hearing it might cause other jurists to take her claims more seriously.

          This case involves Peta Lindsay, the 2012 candidate of the national Party for Socialism and Liberation, who tried two years ago to get onto the California ballot as the candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen refused Lindsay a ballot slot because she was under – far under – the Constitutional minimum age for a president, 35. Lindsay was born in 1984.

          Taitz told the judges that because Bowen scrutinized Lindsay’s candidacy enough to determine her age made her ineligible, Bowen should also have investigated whether Obama’s birth certificate, Social Security and draft cards were forgeries, as she and other birthers have claimed for more than five years.

          Taitz argued that it was a violation of the 14^th Amendment’s equal protection provisions for Bowen to investigate Lindsay and not the birther claims about Obama. Bowen’s lawyers responded that Obama’s qualification was covered by the “political question doctrine,” because he was the nominee of a major party, rendering it unnecessary for her to check those claims.

          Responded Alex Kozinski, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the appeals court and a noted judicial eccentric, “What if your party were to run a dog for president of the United States? Would the secretary of state be obligated to put a dog on the ballot, too?”

          The three-judge panel, which also included Diarmuid O’Scannlain, another Reagan appointee and one of the Ninth Circuit’s most consistent conservatives, inquired of lawyers on the case what might have happened if the secretary of state were a birther.

          Those comments encourage Taitz to believe her claims, previously tossed out of several federal courtrooms, may at last be taken seriously. She hopes the Ninth Circuit panel will remand the Lindsay case to a lower court with an instruction for a legal discovery process investigating the forgery claims. The timing of any ruling in the Lindsay case is uncertain.

          Taitz does not believe such an investigation would cause Obama to be impeached or disqualified. But she claimed “It will influence the fall election and it will discredit all the critics of us birthers.”

          Of course, if the appeals panel were to make such a ruling, a request for a rehearing before an 11-member panel of Ninth Circuit judges sitting en banc would quickly ensue and be granted. Any such panel of the famously liberal court would be highly likely to reverse a pro-birther ruling.

          Not that Taitz believes any of this could lead to a reversal of the Electoral College vote, even though she has named that group, which only exists for a day or so every four years, as a defendant in some of her lawsuits.

          “But I am sure that if we ever have discovery and are able to prove that his Social Security card, for example, is false, it would be bigger than Watergate and he would be forced to resign,” Taitz said. “Yes, (Vice President) Joe Biden would then become president and immediately pardon Obama, like Gerald Ford did for Richard Nixon. But that would also guarantee the next president would be a Republican.”

          All of which means a few possibly idle remarks by a couple of appellate judges have exposed birthers as purely political and partisan, while also raising their hopes to new highs.

         

   -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, go to www.californiafocus.net.

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 11, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“DEFICIT-RIDDEN TEXAS NO LONGER LAUGHING AT CALIFORNIA”

That sound you hear coming from Texas officials when the subject of California comes up is no longer chortling. It’s more like choking.

For no one has been more gleeful about California’s plight as it sank deeper and deeper into deficit than the leading officials of Texas. They even used tax dollars to pay for studies on how to take business away from California. Not from other states, just California.

Leading Texans starting with Republican Gov. Rick Perry made frequent forays into California over the last few years trying to convince California business owners to move operations and headquarters to the Lone Star state, and even convinced a few to go. Some California politicians, mostly notably Republican Meg Whitman while she ran for governor last year, called for emulating the low-taxes and weak regulations of Texas and even brought Perry in for advice. But hardly anyone seeks his counsel any more.

For the buccaneer-like approach used by Texas government and Texas businesses in their relations with California have been muted. Some of the Texas companies that tried to exploit Californians illegally during the energy crisis of the early 2000s are extinct, starting with the biggest pirate of them all, Enron. And after hiding the truth for more than a year, Texas state government now admits to a two-year budget deficit of $25.5 billion, similar to California’s shortfall on a per capita basis.

The Texas budget gap comes to about 30 percent of the state budget; California’s to less than one-fourth of recent yearly spending. Things are so tough that ever-lax Texas has begun cracking down on Internet retailers, demanding they pay sales tax if they have a physical presence in the state. This caused Amazon.com to close its lone Texas warehouse, the retail giant griping about an “unfavorable business climate” – the same words Texans use while trying to lure California businesses.

The Texas troubles are largely driven by the “supply side” economic beliefs of Perry and other Republican leaders in that solidly “red” state, who have long been convinced their government could survive and thrive with the third-lowest tax rates in the nation, when levies on income, sales and property are combined. Lower taxes, they’ve argued, would lead to more business growth and more jobs, producing more actual tax dollars for the state budget than would higher rates.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. Yes, unemployment in Texas is lower than in California just now, about 8.3 percent and rising in January, while California unemployment has held steady about four percentage points higher for a year. But Texas, with real estate values far below California’s, had virtually no price bubble to burst and was therefore not afflicted with as great a foreclosure crisis or as much of a dropoff in housing construction jobs. Take away housing factors and Texas unemployment is about the same as California’s.

Meanwhile, Texas business growth has been slowing since mid-2010, reported an Austin business newspaper.

While California Gov. Jerry Brown is trying to exempt public education from most upcoming deficit-driven budget cuts, top Texas officials appear to have no compunctions about slashing public schools and colleges.

“A lot of things we (state government) are doing arguably aren’t priorities for the people of Texas,” Republican Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst told a reporter. “People could stake me and Gov. Perry on the ground and torture us, and we still would not raise taxes.”

Those “low-priority” items include Medicaid, about to be cut by about one-third in Texas, far more than California's looming reductions. Only time will tell if that leads to epidemics or higher health care costs when poor Texans switch from doctors’ offices to emergency rooms for many problems. Per-student public school spending – already about $1,000 a year below California’s – figures to be cut about $1,200 yearly to about $7,800, while California’s level will not sink below $9,000 even if Brown fails to secure the tax extensions he says are needed. Caps on class sizes in Texas will also disappear.

At the same time, one in every three Texas families that include at least one wage-earner remains below the federal poverty level of $22,300 per year income for a family of four. This more than doubles California’s 15.3 percent 2010 rate.

The difference in poverty numbers indicates that Texas features many more low-paying jobs than California, another factor depleting meaning from the difference in unemployment rates.

So Texas has very little to chortle about these days and the upcoming education cuts will harm its prospects for future growth, since businesses tend to like places with well-educated work forces.

There’s certainly no cause for Californians to gloat over the newly-acknowledged woes of Texas the way leading Texans did while California appeared worse off. But there’s also no longer any way to claim, as many have over the last two years, that lower taxes and fewer government regulations assure economic success for Texas while dooming California to decline.

-30-
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