TRAMPLED RIGHTS, LOST RESPECT: WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“TRAMPLED RIGHTS, LOST RESPECT: WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE?”

 

America is now a country where lawful residents can be grabbed from streets and sidewalks by black-masked operatives for government agencies acting without warrants and sent to prisons in foreign countries.

 

It’s also where the voter-established California Coastal Commission, despised by the current president, can tell an oil company to cease making changes on ocean-bottom pipelines – and then see the order ignored. This is still playing out near Gaviota in Santa Barbara County, but for sure at least some respect for legal authority has been lost.

 

It’s a country whose president sought impeachment for judges whose decisions he does not like, while his appointees sometimes pick and choose which legal rulings to heed.

 

It’s also where a non-elected “official” heading a quasi-government agency called the Department of Government Efficiency could fire hundreds of workers from the Social Security Administration, making citizen dealings virtually impossible with an agency serving more than 70 million Americans until someone said “Oops” and a partial emergency fix followed.

 

At the same time, decades of formal assurances that tax filings will be confidential were reversed with no notice, to make deportations easier. Never mind that no one will ever trust the IRS in the same way again.

 

Any of these actions might normally draw equally or similarly forceful reactions of some kind under Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion. That law, long fundamental in both physics and politics, says “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

 

California saw this in a big way during the Vietnam War, when for every draftee sent off to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia, at least one and often more persons took to the streets in myriad protests fueled by outrage.

 

There has been no similarly organized anger today, not even when millions of Americans lost trillions of dollars in value from their 401Ks and other investment accounts due to an on-again, off-again tariff war started by a president using powers many lawyers say he does not possess.

 

Several pundits postulate that when 3.5 percent or more of this nation’s citizens protest government actions, members of Congress from both major parties feel sufficiently threatened to begin opposing or at least questioning the policies drawing public ire.

 

That has not come near happening this year. Major cities saw large rallies in both early and late April, including one that stretched 20 blocks through lower Manhattan and another where Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders drew more than 36,000 in Los Angeles.

 

But overall crowds numbered fewer than 2 million each day, according to most unofficial estimates. That was exponentially short of the approximately 13 million that would make up 3.5 percent of Americans.

 

Any rage voiced fell far short of what it took to drive ex-President Lyndon Johnson from office over Vietnam, for one example of impactful public outrage.

 

Some of the most angry now advocate a literal interpretation of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, saying that whenever masked agents capture legal residents on city streets, beefy young men should physically accost those agents.

 

But answering violence with violence never works in this nation; even the wild demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago produced no policy change until years of nonviolent protests followed in myriad other locations.

 

To be effective this time, popular protests could be staged outside IRS offices, health clinics and research laboratories shut down by fiat even though their funding was supposedly guaranteed via acts of Congress signed by previous presidents.

 

Even these would not accomplish much unless they were constant and very large, perhaps closing down major streets for days or weeks at a time.

 

President Trump has loudly justified some of his most questionable moves this year as mandated by a significant national majority in the last presidential election. Yet, Trump won election by fewer than 1.6 percent of the total vote, falling short of an overall majority popular vote.

 

Which means that even if there were a mandate, it was given by fewer than half of American voters, scarce justification for the scale of changes now seen in the character of American life and public affairs.

 

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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

NEW HOUSING LAWS VS. RENEWABLE ENERGY MANDATES

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 16, 2023, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “NEW HOUSING LAWS VS. RENEWABLE ENERGY MANDATES”

 

  California has a bunch of new housing laws, several taking effect in each of the last few years.

 

They eliminate most single-family R-1 zoning to allow more housing and permit more floors in any new apartment building or condominium structure if it contains a decent percentage of “affordable” or low-income units. One measure also allows more living units by mandating less or no parking spaces in buildings near mass transit stops, on the flawed presumption that no one living there will ever want to own a vehicle.

 

At times, it seems they’ve forgotten these new buildings are

in California and not New York or some other Eastern state where many people neither want to drive nor enjoy driving.

 

But the most important reality ignored by the housing density enthusiasts who now populate the Legislature and governor’s office may be this: Some of what they’re enabling can conflict directly with other state mandates, notably one that insists California run almost exclusively on carbon-free renewable energy by 2045, just 22 years from now.

 

The main reason for this conflict? Shade.

 

        Measures like the density bonus given by one California law to developers who put more affordable units than absolutely required into their new buildings allow them to add floors to those structures. That same factor affects the “builders remedy” that allows developers almost a completely free hand on new projects within cities that are late getting state approval for their housing plans.

 

The nub of the problem is simple: The higher and wider a new multi-story building gets, the more shade it casts over existing nearby buildings. And the more hours shade covers a rooftop, the less solar energy can be produced there.

 

     Reality is that California won’t reach its mandated carbon-free energy future, without huge numbers of solar photovoltaic panels installed atop both houses and commercial buildings.

 

Yet, the 2021 law known as SB 10, sponsored by San Francisco’s Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, allows limitless new apartment or condo buildings along all streets classed as “major transit corridors” or within half a mile of a light rail stop. All it takes to create a major transit corridor is for a city or regional bus system to add new routes on any street it wants.

 

If and when that happens on a large scale, not only will residents of nearby R-1 neighborhoods lose privacy, as their once-secluded backyards become visible to new neighbors living a few floors up, but shadows from large new buildings will shade those existing homes for hours every day. So much for the ability to generate much solar energy, still the key to renewable power even in an era that includes wind energy, geothermal, hydroelectric power and more.

 

A lot of this has been spelled out graphically by a group of architects in Santa Monica, an independent enclave surrounded on three sides by Los Angeles. In parts of that city, almost every lot is eligible for new construction dwarfing what was standard in the beachside town for generations.

 

The group, called Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow, notes that an 88-foot-high building on a typical 50 x 150-foot lot would cast shadows over some of its neighbors between 9 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. on most days.

 

So much for the common idea of placing solar panels atop existing nearby two-story commercial structures.

 

But some new laws propounded in Sacramento over the last three years were neither subjected to such analysis nor vetted for conflicts with other state laws. Taking the word of the state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) that millions of new homes are needed, even in a time of falling population, legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom gladly passed an signed these laws.

 

It's an example of lawmakers becoming so preoccupied with one perceived need (even though a 2022 report from the state auditor cast question on documents forming the basis of HCD estimates) that they don't notice effects on other state mandates.

 

Of course, there is a solution: Convert existing vacant office buildings and closed big box stores and mini-malls into housing, and you’d create more units faster and while avoiding interference with any other mandates.

 

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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 YUCCA MOUNTAIN BE THE NUCLEAR WASTE ANSWER?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 16, 2017, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
  “WILL YUCCA MOUNTAIN BE THE NUCLEAR WASTE ANSWER?”

          The longer Donald Trump remains President and Harry Reid remains retired, the greater the chances that canisters bearing more than 3.5 million pounds of nuclear waste from the shut-down San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) will end up beneath a mountain about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

          And the closer this proposed solution to a serious problem comes to reality, the greater the chances it will pit well-meaning Californians against each other, both sides with legitimate environmental concerns that so far appear of little or no interest to Trump’s administration.

          The waste involved, say San Diego-area consumer groups, is extremely deadly and could remain potentially lethal for about 250,000 years – much longer than the known history of the human race. Planned burial of the canisters near the beachfront abutting the SONGS site along Interstate 5 at the San Diego-Orange county line may be delayed as Edison and consumer lawyers try to negotiate another disposition for them. Those negotiations have already postponed a civil trial scheduled to begin April 14.

          Should the canisters stay beneath the beach and leak, they could endanger more than 8.4 million persons living within 50 miles, not to mention freeway drivers and passengers on an adjacent coastal rail route.

          Enter Yucca Mountain. The hollowed-out mountain was considered in the 1990s as a prime candidate for storage of nuclear waste from around the nation, now scattered widely in supposedly temporary sites.

          Then Reid, the recently retired Democratic Nevada senator and longtime Senate Democratic leader, stepped in along with now-retired California Democrat Barbara Boxer. Both expounded a theory that radioactivity from Yucca Mountain could trickle into underground water supplies that eventually flow to the Colorado River upstream from the aqueduct belonging to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides significant supplies to about half of all Californians. They warned that stored waste at Yucca Mountain could pollute much of California’s and Arizona’s water supply for generations to come.

          Any threat to those water supplies can only create pressure to draw  more water from rivers in Northern California.

          Yucca Mountain also became highly unpopular in Nevada, whose citizenry resisted becoming a dumping ground for the most toxic waste in America when there isn’t even a nuclear power plant in that state.

          Now comes the Trump administration, which has seemed to care little about polluting anything, from air to water to the airwaves, where it admits purveying “alternative facts.” That’s another phrase for lies, distortions and exaggerations. Meanwhile, no one has either proved or disproved the potential threat from a Yucca Mountain dump.

          So far, Trump proposes spending $120 million to restart the licensing process for the site. But Yucca Mountain could end up costing more than 1,000 times that much – a possible $100 billion for things like 300-plus miles of new railroad track to bring waste there, advanced robots to work underground with waste canisters, and building of massive underground titanium shields designed to keep waste from most of the 48 contiguous states contained for hundreds of thousands of years beyond the lifetime of anyone alive today.

          Trump’s aim is to keep nuclear power plants operational as long as possible. They currently supply about 20 percent of America’s power, with more than two dozen now storing radioactive waste on or near their own sites on a longstanding “temporary” basis.

          The renewed controversy would not be happening if Reid were still leading the Senate. The strong push by San Diego County residents to move SONGS waste far away from them will only add pressure to the drive for Yucca Mountain.

          There is no doubt America needs a waste storage site, as all existing ones are at capacity. Yucca Mountain got its newest boost the other day, when Energy Secretary Rick Perry – a determined rival of California during his eight years as Texas governor – quietly visited the area.

          But Nevada officials are united against it, including Democrats like Reid successor Catherine Cortez Masto and Republicans led by Gov. Brian Sandoval. So far, no California official has been involved in the new push for the site.

          More and more, this looks like a political landmine, with legitimate environmental worries on both sides of a decades-old dispute.

         
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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

WHOSE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA WILL IT BE?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2014 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “WHOSE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA WILL IT BE?”

          As springtime admission and rejection letters went out from the nine undergraduate campuses of the University of California, the squeeze on this state’s most promising high graduates became tighter than ever before.

          That made it fair for many of those rejected despite meeting all qualifications to wonder just whose UC this great public university will eventually become.

          Will it continue to be the fundamental goal and reward for the state’s high schoolers, motivating them to achieve and attempt ever more difficult academic challenges? Or will it become another playground for wealthy out-of-state and foreign students who can afford the almost $23,000 extra per year in tuition paid by non-California residents?

          So far, that extra money – the difference between $13,200 in-state tuition this year and $36,078 for all others – has proved no hindrance to foreigners in particular. One reason: Governments of China and some Arab countries pay all tuition and expenses for many of their citizens who study at American universities.

          Altogether, 13 percent of all UC undergraduates next fall will be from out of state, split just about evenly between foreign students and those from the other 49 states. That’s up from 12 percent this year and just 5 percent as recently as 2010.

          There is no doubt a connection between that fast-growing out-of-state student-body element and the fact that state budget support of UC has declined over the last 10 years, though it was bulked up a bit this year with funds from the temporary taxes in the 2012 Proposition 30.

          UC officials maintain the out-of-staters displace no Californians in either the top 9 percent of their high school class or the top 9 percent statewide. Of course, UC used to accept the top 12 percent statewide, so despite that claim of no displacement, there has unquestionably been some. Plus, the out-of-state proportion is higher at the most desired UC campuses – Berkeley and UCLA – compared with lower-demand locations like Merced and Riverside. Which suggests that in academia, money talks, especially the more than $120 million in extra yearly tuition to be paid by new out-of-state students. Add in returning students and those in graduate and professional schools, and UC now gets nearly $1 billion more each year from out-of-staters than if the same slots went to Californians.

          But California taxpayers built those nine campuses principally for the benefit of their children. It’s one thing to argue that a sprinkling of students from other places serves a sound academic purpose, but when do financial motives supplant that academic benefit?

          The demographics of UC are also changing as fast as those of the state itself, where Latinos are now the largest ethnic group and Asian-Americans are a fast-growing minority. For the first time this year, UC took more Latino students than Anglos, 29 percent of incoming frosh being Latino to about 27 percent white. High-achieving Asian-Americans made up the plurality of admits among in-state students, at 36 percent.

          Some of those new Latino students will be so-called “Dreamers” brought to this country as small children by undocumented immigrant parents. Typically, many such UC and California State University admits have been unable to accept their slots because as illegal residents they cannot get low-interest federal loans or grants.

          But a program now proposed by Democratic state Sen. Ricardo Lara of southern Los Angeles County would allow at least some of them to get loans from the state if they can’t access federal ones.

          New UC President Janet Napolitano, responsible for deporting thousands of the undocumented while serving as secretary of Homeland Security, backs that plan as it advances in the Legislature. “These students…should have access to equivalent resources as their campus peers,” she told a legislative hearing.

          It’s one thing, of course, for changes to occur because the state itself is different from before. But for UC to display the obvious financial motives that it has in admissions over the last few years is both unseemly and wrong. Far better to accept at least the top 10 percent of California high schoolers than to take foreign students just for their money, even if that means state government will have to pony up a bit more support.

          Otherwise, UC will increasingly belong to highest bidders, a change in the entire purpose and gestalt of the entire university.

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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