HOW A DEAL COULD BRING FAST REFORM OF PROP. 47

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2023, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
        “HOW A DEAL COULD BRING FAST REFORM OF PROP. 47”

 

        Ask almost any police chief the reasons behind the last year’s rash of well-organized and orchestrated “smash-and-grab” robberies around California and chances are they will say it’s largely because of the 2014 Proposition 47.

 

        Most would cite a need to change or reverse Prop. 47’s raise in the minimum theft value considered a felony to $950, or at least suggest a lower limit.

 

        But that “solution” ignores the reality that police don’t like dealing with the trivial. Set the limit too low and large numbers of shoplifters could get off scot-free, with not even a misdemeanor conviction because many police departments won’t fool around with “minor” crimes.

 

        This could create an even larger cadre of thieves than now plagues California stores of many types.

 

        But at last sound thinking on how to fix Prop. 47’s flaws has arrived. It comes from legislators, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the sponsors of a new initiative that seems sure to qualify for the fall ballot.

 

        So how to speed their useful ideas into law? The answer is for the business and consumer leaders behind the initiative to deal with Newsom and the Legislature soon, then have Sacramento make laws of what they all agree on.

 

This is possible under a little-used decade-old law allowing initiative sponsors to pull their measures from the ballot if they reach agreements with lawmakers.

 

Here’s where things stand: Newsom notes that many other states have far higher felony-theft thresholds than Prop. 47’s $950. But most of them prosecute repeat offenders as felons. Texas, for one, has a $2,500 threshold.

 

        So, proposes Newsom, don’t lower the felony theft standard, set partly to spare police from dealing with mere nuisances, and also to avoid piling criminal records onto desperately poor persons driven to steal for survival.

 

        Newsom wants to let addition solve the problem and cut repeat thievery.

 

        “We can do it without (changing) Prop. 47,” he said in a budget message. “I want people to know the (current level of theft) is unacceptable. Folks need to be held to account.”

 

        His idea: When thieves whose take is below $950 are caught, before releasing them record how much they stole. If they steal again, add the amounts. When they reach a new threshold level, it becomes a felony. Newsom suggests $2,500.

 

        The ballot measure approaches this slightly differently, allowing felony prosecution for low-value theft if the perpetrator has two prior drug or theft convictions. California could use both tactics.

 

Some state legislators also favor restraining orders on low-value thieves, thus increasing penalties for repeaters.

 

        All these tactics make sense, and California can have them all. There’s no need for rivalry among interests wanting to solve the same problem.

 

Almost unbelievably, it’s taken 10 years to come up potential changes like these. Why not aggregate what thieves take, rather than allowing them to shoplift $949 in goods as often as they like without becoming felons? It’s also sensible to target repeat offenders.

 

        Plus, Newsom called for expanded criminal penalties on those profiting from retail theft and auto burglaries.

 

The state has already begun cracking down on Internet sites where stolen goods are fenced, and in 2023 spent more than $250 million to increase arrests for organized smash-and-grab raids. Dozens of thieves have been caught.

 

        Kevin McCarty, a candidate for Sacramento mayor who now chairs the state Assembly’s public safety committee, has said he likes Newsom’s ideas but made no promises about specifics his committee might advance.

 

        It’s up to voters to let their elected officials know this kind of ho-hum, it-can-wait attitude won’t do when myriad stores including prominent brands from Nordstrom to Walgreens to 99 Cents Only have closed partly because of thievery.

 

        The sooner legislators and initiative sponsors meet and consolidate their ideas, the sooner they can become law. Sponsors could then take the proposed measure off the ballot, letting new laws put most of the currently proposed changes into effect sooner. That’s the quickest way to clean up what voters passed in 2014.

 

        One thing for sure: Something serious has to change or the rash of smash-and-grabs will not stop. No merchant or store will feel safe again until it does.

       

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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

FLORIDA OR CALIFORNIA: WHICH HANDLES COVID BETTER?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 7, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “FLORIDA OR CALIFORNIA: WHICH HANDLES COVID BETTER?”

 

        Where would you rather be during the still-ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which earlier saw Americans die by the thousands each day for many months? Florida or California?

 

        If they could choose today, almost 4,000 now-deceased Floridians might pick California.

 

        It’s true those folks would have had to pay state income tax had they lived in California, as opposed to Florida, which has no such levy.

 

        But they’re no longer among the living, thanks to the virus or its consequences.

 

        A comparison is very relevant today as Republican interests that funded and worked to qualify a vote on recalling California Gov. Gavin Newsom continually insist Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis should be a prime candidate for president if Donald Trump does not try for a second term in 2024.

 

        They may not have looked at the latest contrasts between wide-open Florida and still somewhat closed California, set to reopen substantially more on June 15. Numbers from the week between April 1 and April 8 can be instructive here. Florida, with about half California’s population, had 37,293 new Covid cases during that week to California’s 17,366. Its death rate also topped California’s, at 157 per 100,000 persons to 148 per 100,000. On one day during the following week, Florida recorded more than 6,400 new cases to California’s 1,200-plus. So who is managing the pandemic better, Newsom or DeSantis?

 

        Meanwhile, if Newsom beats the recall and then is reelected next year, he will surely be touted as a prime prospect for the Democratic nomination the next time that slot opens up – perhaps in 2024 or 2028.

 

        For both men, handling of the pandemic’s onslaught has become a prime issue determining their ultimate potential to lead the nation.

 

        Newsom was the first governor to shut down his state, ordering a lockdown in mid-March 2020 soon copied in myriad other places. DeSantis never issued a full stay-home order. Similarly, while California has required masking to stem Covid almost from the start, Florida requirements have been spotty, the only actual masking orders issued by city and county officials in a few places.

 

        To understand any comparison, it’s important to note that California has almost twice as many people as Florida, 39.985 million compared with 21.48 million Floridians at last count.

 

        California stood at about 59,500 Covid deaths in mid-April, while Florida had just above 34,000.

 

        California has seen a somewhat lower percentage of its populace perish during the pandemic, especially lately. In actual numbers, figuring for the states’ population differences, the figures amount to almost 4,000 more Florida deaths than would have occurred if that state performed just like California.

 

        This was despite natural advantages Florida’s far more humid climate provides: Several studies suggest that aerosol droplets emitted when humans breath, talk or sing fall to the ground much faster in humid air than in a drier climate.

 

        DeSantis celebrates that he kept schools open through the pandemic, while most were closed in California. But the 1.5 million more elderly persons here could have fared far worse had California stayed as open as Florida.

 

        The question: Were the lives saved here by using Newsom’s tactics rather than those of DeSantis worth extra sacrifices by other age groups?

 

        That’s essentially being debated right now in the recall drive, where Newsom is roundly criticized for keeping businesses and schools shuttered longer than many found comfortable, even though teachers and school districts often have the last word on reopening.

 

        The bottom line on all this is that both governors operated from basic instincts and principles: Newsom placed lives saved above all else while DeSantis wanted to save lives, too, but not if his state’s economy suffered beyond his supporters’ comfort level.

 

        In both cases, the governors accomplished their goals. Newsom kept California in 29th position among the states when it came to death rates, even while its climate and senior populace could have pushed fatalities much higher without the strategies he employed. DeSantis kept his state at 25th, fatalities never mounting to levels threatening to his political future.

 

        Their contrasts in philosophy and the results will be remembered, especially if these two eventually oppose one another for the presidency.

       

       

     -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

WHERE, WHEN WILL FIRE DISASTER BUCK-PASSING STOP?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2019 OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “WHERE, WHEN WILL FIRE DISASTER BUCK-PASSING STOP?”

          One unspoken concept was conspicuously missing the other day, when Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a wildfire mitigation plan he had loudly touted: responsibility. Instead, there were multiple forms of passing the buck.

          The Newsom-spurred plan has at least three prongs. Even though he didn’t quite endorse them, the governor wants the proposals acted on long before the next potentially massive wildfire season arrives in summer and early fall.

One plan element would see some mitigation of liability for utility companies when their electric lines start fires, especially if the companies are not found at fault. Another envisions a new state wildfire fund created with state money and funds from utility customers statewide, with needy fire victims somehow able to benefit. A third would let insurance companies refuse to sell policies in fire areas or charge more there.

It’s fair to sum up these three plan portions as two bailouts and a license to gouge.

          Incentives are also recommended for utilities switching to renewable energy sources faster than now required, hopefully reducing the climate change that helped the swift spread of disastrously huge fires in 2017 and 2018.

          One group that could benefit from all this: The victims, even though most knew or should have known just what they were getting into. The biggest blazes of the last two years occurred in or near areas that have burned before. People living there had every reason to know the dangers they faced.

          Wrote one local columnist in a fire area: “I told (my wife), ‘This neighborhood is going to burn to the ground someday.’ We bought the house anyway.”

          But the proposed plan would have taxpayers and utility customers who deliberately refuse to live in fire-prone areas share the cost when homes there burn. Already, prices for everyone’s property insurance tend to climb when insurers make multi-billion-dollar payoffs on existing policies.

          That’s just one feature of the Newsom task force plan for a wildfire disaster fund. But why should taxpayers in historically safe areas pay into this?

          Newsom’s response is that “We’re all in this together…” But he doesn’t explain why that should be true for folks who deliberately avoid fire areas. They don’t live in lovely forests, with scenic streams and gullies and thick woods, sweeping mountain views or ocean vistas.

          Reporters who visit just-burned fire areas often hear residents say something like this in virtually every fire-prone part of California: “We love the lifestyle and the ambience here and we won’t be driven out by any disaster.” Most taxpayers and utility customers get neither those vistas nor their ambiance. Why should they subsidize a lifestyle they don’t have and usually can’t afford? If people voluntarily help homeowning fire victims, that’s admirable, but why use tax dollars?

          Deploying tax money after earthquakes and hurricanes is very different, since they can hit almost anywhere and can’t with any certainty be avoided like fire areas.

          Then there’s the Newsom task force approach to the big privately owned utilities, Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric: A suggested lessening of their liabilities in big fires. All have lately been found at fault or admitted fault in fires.

          Legislators last year refused to let them completely off the hook, and likely also won’t this year. Instead, lawmakers should clear the way for relatively new publicly-owned Community Choice Aggregation electric providers to buy up transmission lines and other equipment, so long as they maintain it safely. Existing utilities could use money from this to pay for damage they caused.

          Newsom said “No single stakeholder created this crisis, and no single stakeholder should bear its full cost.” He called for costs to be shared by, among others, local governments (read: taxpayers) and utility ratepayers in general. But while no single group created the crisis, plenty of taxpayers and utility customers deliberately avoid fire danger. Newsom didn’t adequately or credibly explain why they should pay.

          In a way, this scene stems from today’s societal reluctance to hold individuals and companies responsible for their actions and behavior.

          But passing the buck eventually stops somewhere, sometime, and California might now be at one of those seminal moments.

 -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

COURT’S HIT AT BROWN ACTUALLY HELPS HIM

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
  FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “COURT’S HIT AT BROWN ACTUALLY HELPS HIM”

      Normally, it's uncomfortable at best to hear a federal judge -- let alone a panel of three such jurists -- thunder criticism at one from the bench.

      But as usual, Gov. Jerry Brown is different. For beyond doubt, prison realignment has drawn more criticism than any other single thing he has done in his second incarnation as governor, even more than his devotion to high speed rail. But the judges' tirade now provides Brown a convenient scapegoat, one on which he can pin blame for the entire prisoner-release program, and with complete accuracy.

      That, of course, wasn’t the way the three-man judicial panel intended things to go when making bald threats against the governor if he doesn’t release even more convicts.

“At no point over the past several months have defendants indicated any willingness to comply, or made any attempt to comply, with the orders of this court,” said the panel, referring to Brown and his administration. “In fact, they have blatantly defied (court orders).” 

      The three jurists – district judges Lawrence Karlton and Thelton Henderson and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Steven Reinhardt – gave Brown 21 days to submit a plan for meeting their prison population target by the end of this year. If Brown doesn’t simultaneously begin complying with the court order, the judges said, he risks being cited for contempt. So the governor said he would ready a plan to release 10,000 more prisoners in case his appeals fail.

       Imagine a California governor sitting in the basement lockup of a federal courthouse eating cheese sandwiches. Theoretically, at least, it could happen, if the judges aren’t satisfied with Brown’s response.

      The court’s latest order stems from the fact that even after Brown’s controversial realignment program reduced convict numbers by about 20,000 over the last 18 months, state prisons are remain filled to 149 percent of their designed capacity. The judges say this overcrowding constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, and prior, similar rulings have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

      Meanwhile, Brown looks around the state and sees cities cutting police forces to balance budgets, well-to-do neighborhoods hiring private security to compensate, a 65 percent rise in warrants issued for paroled sex offenders supposedly tracked by GPS devices who have gone missing and a few felons turning violent after being convicted of non-violent offenses and then paroled under realignment.

      Possibly the most significant of the latter type of case was the early April fatal stabbing of a woman in a Fontana park-and-ride lot. California Highway Patrol officers later shot and killed the alleged murderer, David Mulder, a 43-year-old transient with a history of drug offenses released from state prison a few months earlier under realignment.

      Mulder, like many others, had been transferred to the supervision of county probation officers.

      Complained Fontana Police Chief Rod Jones to reporters after that incident and another where a felon released to county supervision alleged raped a woman in a hotel room, “Dangerous prisoners that belong in state prison continue to be released early.”

These and other cases caused Brown’s conservative critics to rip him, even suggesting he be indicted for assisting those crimes.

      But the entire realignment program was a response to federal court orders – upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court – to reduce prison crowding and improve prison medical care. Brown’s first two budgets in his current term provided money for local agencies to supervise the supposedly low-level, non-violent criminals involved.

      The problem, of course, is that there’s always a risk of a previously non-violent offender turning to more serious crime. Car thieves occasionally become arsonists, burning vehicles and whatever is near where they’re parked. Some drug addicts become armed robbers, rapists or killers.

     This happens even without realignment, but draws much more focus when prisoners are being released early and some go missing either because local parole officers are overloaded or tracking devices fail or are removed.

      Brown said little about those cases, except that they’ve been rare exceptions under his program, which is correct. 

      Now he won’t have to be very defensive any more. For by resisting the latest court order, even to the point of approaching a constitutional crisis, he can argue that whatever he’s done has not been of his own volition and was designed to minimize risk.

      In a state with a long tradition of voting for tough-sounding law-and-order candidates and ballot propositions, the judges’ threatening language has inoculated Brown against most soft-on-crime charges that might be leveled against him during his anticipated 2014 reelection campaign.

      -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

LEGALIZED POT WOULD BE NO PANACEA”

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 7, 2010, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“LEGALIZED POT WOULD BE NO PANACEA”

There’s a sense among a lot of Californians that legalizing marijuana and then taxing it is some sort of panacea that would solve many law enforcement problems, make it safer to smoke pot and also produce a tax bonanza of $1 billion or more per year.

Voters will see just such a proposal in November.

Much of the pro-legalization thinking is based on analogies to the alcohol experience, which sees various forms of booze putting about $3 billion into the coffers of state and local governments each year and providing more than 300,000 jobs around the state.

But cannabis is not alcohol and the current confusion about marijuana does not constitute a situation anything like Prohibition.

For one thing, major distilling companies had produced whiskey, beer and other alcoholic beverages legally for many decades before Prohibition. By contrast, not a single significant tax-paying company has produced so much as an ounce of pot in this state or nation in the last century, if ever.

Yes, criminal elements did control much of the booze trade during Prohibition and they did foment gang warfare during the 1920s and early ‘30s. But backyard breweries and distilleries were far more rare than pot gardens are today. And when it came to larger-scale production, foreigners were rarely involved. So it was far easier to bring alcohol into the realm of legitimate business than is likely with legalized pot.

Then there’s the matter of federal law. When Prohibition ended, so did most federal alcohol raids. But Californians have their heads in the sand if they believe a state vote to legalize pot will end all federal raids on growers and gardens.

Yes, President Obama indicated while campaigning in 2008 that he most likely would not hassle mom and pop medical marijuana operations, from growers to dispensaries. And raids have eased off considerably since his election, even if they have not completely stopped. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, reserve the option to raid under the constitutional provision giving federal law precedence over state laws.

Obama never said a positive word about recreational marijuana, not covered by the 1996 Proposition 215, which made medipot legal in this state but authorized no other sort of use. Sure, plenty of pot users pay $40 or $50 to shady doctors who hand out the “recommendations” needed to get marijuana at dispensaries that have proliferated in some counties. That’s a subterfuge and an end-run around the law, but falls far short of open defiance of federal law, which full legalization would amount to.

Many precedents suggest such defiance would cause the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to restart serious anti-pot enforcement efforts again if recreational use is “legalized.”

Then there are the matters of price and taxation. The sales and excise levies that would produce the largest share of taxes anticipated by backers of legalization depend directly both on price and the openness of sales.

How likely are pot prices to remain at their present level of $100 per ounce or more? Not very, if every pot user can suddenly grow his or her own in a backyard or a window box. Which means estimates of the tax take from legalization are probably far higher than it would really be – especially if most pot became home grown and not subject to any taxation at all other than what new growers might pay head shops for seeds or small plants.

And how likely are the big commercial pot growers – those who maintain heavily armed cadres of illegal immigrants around their often-boobytrapped gardens in national forests and other woodlands – to allow themselves to be taxed?

With legalization already likely to bring the street price of pot down, the drug cartels behind many of today’s illicit operations won’t want to give a nickel to the tax man.

They may, in fact, engage in some kind of warfare against growers who do pay taxes and let themselves be regulated. They won’t take kindly to competition or to having their street dealers made irrelevant.

Which means legalization could bring to California the kind of drug wars that now plague countries like Mexico and Colombia, where gangs and cartels openly defy police. It’s a Third World horror scene California need not inflict on itself.

None of that even mentions the moral and medical questions often raised both by doctors and police: What is the social benefit of legalizing a mind-altering substance that produces passivity and lethargy? And what about addiction, anxiety and psychosis, three conditions the Harvard Mental Health Letter says (in its April issue) may be associated with regular pot use.

All of which means that life will surely not become simpler if pot is legalized, nor would the benefits be as clear-cut as proponents suggest.

-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