SCHWARZENEGGER LEAVES A SHAMEFUL LEGACY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 28, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“SCHWARZENEGGER LEAVES A SHAMEFUL LEGACY”

No California governor serving his last few days in office has ever been more concerned about his legacy than was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Perhaps this was because unlike Ronald Reagan or Pat Brown or Pete Wilson in their last days, he has few possibilities for future elected office.

Yes, he could conceivably run for the U.S. Senate against Dianne Feinstein next year, but she’s a far more formidable candidate than the state’s other senator, Barbara Boxer, so if Schwarzenegger saw the Senate in his future, he would have gone after Boxer last year.

Right up until his last day, Schwarzenegger’s bloated press operation was sending out long encomiums to his achievements in office, principally on the environmental front, where he first watered down the landmark 2006 AB32 climate change bill and then trumpeted what was left of it as his signal achievement.

But the former governor’s last few days in office did not reinforce any environmental achievements he may have had. Rather, they called new attention to his consistent pattern of favoring the biggest contributors to his campaign accounts.

That pattern began on his first day in office, when he rolled back a previous increase in the vehicle license tax, an action that greatly pleased the car dealers who helped bankroll his 2003 recall election candidacy, but has cost the state more than $4 billion per year since – an amount that by now totals the same as the entire projected state deficit of about $28 billion.

Other actions favored developers, casino Indian tribes, oil and chemical companies and many other big-money contributors. Sure, Schwarzenegger spent some of his own money on his causes, but others plunked down far more and they were well rewarded.

It was just the kind of behavior that led to the recall of ex-Gov. Gray Davis, but Schwarzenegger did it with far more panache, so he never paid a price for it.

But the pure hypocrisy of Schwarzenegger’s actions in his last few days stood out in bas relief because of its timing and volume.

Most roundly condemned has been the commutation of the prison sentence of Esteban Nunez, convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the stabbing death of a San Diego State University student in 2008 and sentenced to 16 years. Nunez, the son of former Democratic Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, who often seemed like Schwarzenegger’s lapdog as they hobnobbed around the state, bragged to friends and co-criminals that his daddy would get them off. The younger Nunez had already caught a break when he was charged with manslaughter and not murder.

But Schwarzenegger went the generous prosecutors responsible for that charge one better on his final day as governor, reducing the sentence for the son of his sycophant to seven years. Seven years for helping snuff out the life of a fellow college student. They may be angry about this, but the family of the victim and the prosecutors can do nothing about it.

It was an act of cronyism and hypocrisy from a man who blasted political favoritism when he ran for office and constantly tried to portray himself as a supporter of tough law enforcement.

Equally hypocritical and reeking of cronyism were some of his last-minute appointments. Remember, this was a governor who promised to “blow up boxes” and tried to get rid of numerous boards and commissions he thought redundant and wasteful.

He failed to eliminate most, and among his final acts as a “public servant” were a score of appointments of friends and aides to high-paying jobs on those same boards. His longtime chief of staff, Susan Kennedy, was appointed to a new commission that will negotiate health insurance rates. Her “wife,” Vicki Marti, received two plum appointments with salaries totaling $168,000. The interior decorator wife of another ex-aide, Kari Miner, will get $128,109 per year as a member of the Public Employee Relations Board, a board with little useful purpose.

Schwarzenegger also handed out political rewards to lawmakers who did his bidding and then were either termed-out or simply gave up in the face of determined opposition. Former Republican state Sens. Dennis Hollingsworth and Roy Ashburn will join the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board at $128,000 per year, and ex-Republican Assemblyman Anthony Adams will get $111,000 as a member of the state parole board. Previously, the ex-governor placed ex-Democratic state Sen. Carole Migden in a $132,000 post on the Integrated Waste Management Board.

All provided key votes for Schwarzenegger at times when he badly needed them.

Some of the appointments were nothing unusual. Democrats who run the Legislature have often appointed departed colleagues to state sinecures. So has every past governor.

But none of them appointed staffers and their relatives. And none of them inveighed loudly, as Schwarzenegger often did, against that practice and the very boards and commissions to which he later appointed his pals.

It adds up to a legacy of shame and hypocrisy, which comes as no surprise to anyone who ever noted the ex-governor’s long record of false promises and favoritism.

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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

BROWN’S NEXT INCARNATION: SALESMAN

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 25, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“BROWN’S NEXT INCARNATION: SALESMAN”

California has seen Jerry Brown the Roman Catholic seminarian and Jerry Brown the experimenter with Zen Buddhism and Jerry Brown the visionary (remember “small is beautiful” and the “era of limits?”). There have also been Jerry Brown the tough lawman and Jerry Brown the skilled political mechanic.

Now it’s time for Jerry Brown, salesman. If he’s not effective in that new role, millions of Californians will likely feel strong and unpleasant effects, even if they don’t believe it now. Before June, the governor must convince millions that a threat is both real and imminent, or else he’ll have to scrub his plan for pulling the state out of its seemingly perpetual budget morass.

That plan involves bunches of serious cuts to programs Californians love to use, from state parks to road building, home care to public health and education.

It also includes keeping active about $8.3 billion worth of “temporary” taxes passed by legislators two years ago. Keeping those taxes would slice the projected budget deficit from $28 billion over the next 18 months to less than $20 billion. The lower figure would still require major cuts to almost everything the state does.

It’s not an attractive product for anyone to sell, especially to voters who two years ago nixed extending these and other temporary tax hikes. They said no then because they didn’t really believe ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pitch, which was essentially the same as Brown’s is today: tax yourselves or you’ll lose things that are precious to you.

Voters figured other ways would turn up for solving the state’s deficit, and they did, for awhile. Things like taking money from local redevelopment agencies and pushing some payments into future years. But those gimmicks are no longer available, causing Brown to remark that “We’ve been living in fantasy land. It is much worse than I thought.”

Those remarks came as Brown began selling his plan last fall in two budget “summits” and his somber inaugural speech, where he described the scope of the mess he’s inherited without spelling out his solution. Now he’s done that, and the real sales job begins.

Partly because of his long experience and the fact that voters have been skeptical of him before, Brown knows a lot of Californians think the entire deficit is caused by a combination of illegal immigration and government waste and excess. These suspicions were no doubt furthered in late December, when 36 of the University of California’s highest-paid officials threatened to sue unless UC agrees to increase retirement benefits for them and other employees earning more than $245,000 per year.

(Question: How can these folks, including vice chancellors and deans of UC campuses, business, medical and law schools, plus department chairs and medical center CEOs, be smart enough to run the state’s elite public university when they’re so tone-deaf they can’t understand their move will alienate millions of ordinary Californians?)

There’s also the “free lunch” ethos prevalent in California for decades, in which voters believe that no matter how much they cut taxes, no matter how many new taxes they reject, state government will always somehow find enough money to continue all services.

That, of course, is fantasy, and Brown says he’s determined to substitute honesty for fantasy. “At this stage of my life, I did not come here to engage in delay and denial,” he said both immediately after his election and in his inaugural speech.

Brown concedes there’s waste, and pledged in his inaugural to “get after it” right away. But he said in one of his budget meetings that “it’s nowhere near on (the needed) scale.” And there are studies indicating illegal immigrants are a break-even proposition, paying enough sales, gasoline and other taxes to cover costs they generate. So going after those two areas won’t solve the problem. Not even close.

Which means Brown must change the beliefs and tendencies of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of voters if he’s to stave off defeat for whatever special election tax proposition he runs.

Can he do it?

Schwarzenegger failed abjectly when he tried the same thing two years ago, and he had been a masterful pitchman for years previous. But Schwarzenegger – after promising to “blow up boxes” and eliminate waste – proved to be a master of hypocrisy and budgetary gimmickry, most of his threats turning out to be mere bluster.

Brown so far appears the very opposite. Maybe good salesmanship this year will have to involve his kind of simplicity. If Brown can’t pull it off, all Californians will find out just how draconian the cuts will be in the budgetary Plan B he’s vowed to carry out if voters refuse to extend the temporary taxes. For he knows there really is no free lunch.

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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

SHOULD STATE AIR BOARD IMPOSE ‘TRUTH RULE?’

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 21, 2011 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“SHOULD STATE AIR BOARD IMPOSE ‘TRUTH RULE?’”

As California’s smog-fighting Air Resources Board gets set to impose America’s first cap-and-trade rules for fighting the greenhouse gases most scientists believe are helping cause global warming and climate change, it is also considering imposing a “truth” rule on everyone who testifies in its hearings or submits reports to it.

For some, that appears a bit ironic right now, as the board has just scaled back diesel particulate pollution regulations that were based on a report whose lead author turned out to have falsified his academic credentials. Before the changes, those regulations had already cost truckers and operators of industrial machinery big money as they struggled to clean up their engines.

Did the Air Board fire the resume-inflating scientist, Hien T. Tran, whose “doctorate” turned out to come from an outfit based in a New York City post office box? Nope, he was merely demoted, and still works on matters that can lead to new emissions restrictions. So the smog board opted to keep a documented liar on its staff and now it’s concerned with getting the truth from others.

In fact, the “truth” rule is only in its workshop phase, meaning it will be some time before the ARB could possibly impose it. But as proposed, it would forbid dishonest statements to the board or its staff. This would also apply to the reports many companies – including car makers and electric utilities – routinely make to the agency. No one has yet spelled out the penalties for lying.

Several federal boards and the state Public Utilities Commission already have “truth” rules with varying penalties for violators.

For sure, lying has long been commonplace in testimony before the ARB, from carmakers that denied they were developing electric or plug-in hybrid cars but rolled out prototypes two months later to gasoline refiners encouraging the smog board to adopt rules without disclosing they held the patents that anyone complying with the rule would need to infringe or license in order to comply.

The case cited most often by ARB officials involved Unocal, the oil company since subsumed by Conoco-Phillips, and a rule it proposed for making reformulated gasoline.

“When the ARB adopted the recommended path and other oil companies started dispensing the reformulated gas, Unocal then sued the other oil companies for patent infringement,” says an ARB background statement. “This sparked lots of litigation, including a Federal Trade Commission proceeding against Unocal.” For sure, Unocal deliberately set up a situation where it planned to profit from suing other oil companies, but was eventually stymied. The ARB says it was fooled because it doesn’t have sufficient staff to track every patent held by every company it regulates.

“People take advantage of the openings they get,” says Ellen Peter, the board’s chief counsel. “If they didn’t, we wouldn’t need a Securities and Exchange Commission or laws against perjury.”

She says carmakers and others “often omit key facts. They’ll tell us ‘This car gets a certain gas mileage,’ but they won’t mention its other flaws.”

But others say the proposed rule represents a double standard for an agency that essentially tolerated deception by one of its own officials when it declined to fire Tran, but only demoted him.

Then there are problems with the age-old question of what is truth? Some of these were outlined in a letter to the ARB from Michael Lewis, senior vice president of the statewide Construction Industry Air Quality Coalition, which includes builders, truckers and a variety of contractors.

“If a person makes a statement to the agency that they believe to be true, based on their experience, and that information cannot be proven to be true or it only becomes obviously true at a later date, are they subject to enforcement under this rule?” he asked. “Who determines the accuracy of a statement?”

All that is unclear, the ARB insists, saying the proposed rule is being floated merely because the board is taking on new responsibilities but not getting more staff, and thus will depend even more on the accuracy of the testimony and reports it gets.

“The real question is whether we should get a rule now that protects consumers and businesses,” said Peter. “We’ve gotten so many misstatements of fact that we felt we ought to explore this.”

The bottom line: The ARB can avoid the “double standard” accusations it is now hearing if it waits to adopt this rule until it has reestablished the reputation for complete veracity and integrity it enjoyed before the Tran affair and the flawed diesel rule linked to it. How long that might take is anyone’s guess.

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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

GOP WHISTLES PAST LATINO GRAVEYARD AGAIN

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“GOP WHISTLES PAST LATINO GRAVEYARD AGAIN”

As the California Republican Party heads into a much-needed rebuilding year, still reeling from the huge losses it endured while other Republicans were winning big in most parts of America, it is once again whistling past a graveyard.

Last year’s GOP losses leave Democrats occupying all six statewide offices and both of California’s U.S. Senate seats.

But the party still won’t seriously consider moving into what has obviously become the mainstream of California political thought; it has no notion of attempting to win back women voters by moderating its Tea Party-like anti-abortion stance or its hard-line anti-amnesty position on illegal immigration.

Those positions worked fine in many other places during a mid-term election that, as usual, saw the President’s political party take big losses. But they alienated a lot of California voters.

Most offended of all were Latinos, who voted more than 4-1 for new Gov. Jerry Brown over the Republican candidate, former eBay executive Meg Whitman. Whitman spent more than $15 million on television advertising and slick Spanish-language mailers aimed solely at Latino voters, yet some exit polls showed Hispanics nixing her by an 87-13 percent margin.

Despite this, Republicans persist in thinking they can win over Latino voters with hard-line conservative rhetoric. True, in summer and fall, Whitman tried tacking back somewhat from her tough anti-illegal immigrant stances of the spring primary election. But it didn’t wash, as Latinos turned out to have a memory.

Whitman also trotted out former Gov. Pete Wilson as her campaign chairman, a largely honorary post that carried no real clout but gave Wilson a podium from which to speak. Every time he did, many Latinos flashed back to 1994, when Wilson used grainy scenes of illegals running across the Mexican border at San Ysidro in commercials during his reelection campaign. Those commercials promoted the draconian Proposition 187, which would have deprived illegals of virtually all government services had courts not struck it down. It remains the single law Latinos detest most, in part because it sparked a year-long spate of hate crimes against them.

As long as Republicans continue to honor the man behind 187, they will never again win the substantial percentages of Hispanic votes that Arnold Schwarzenegger did in his two campaigns. Polls during those campaigns showed Schwarzenegger’s appeal to Latinos did not result from any positions he took, but stemmed from his movie star status. Enough younger Latinos thought it would be “cool” to have him as governor to net him about 37 percent of the Hispanic vote, about what any Republican would need to win.

Schwarzenegger didn’t give Wilson a prominent role and he didn’t talk much about immigration, either.

But when the GOP ran moderate former state Sen. Abel Maldonado for lieutenant governor, even though he’s of Latino ancestry, Hispanic voters nixed him after he took a hard-line stance on immigration amnesty, just like the rest of the statewide Republican ticket.

All this does not mean the GOP has no hope to win Latino votes, even though Whitman and Maldonado didn’t get many last fall. All it has to do is go softer on immigration and stress moral values that appeal to both the huge Catholic majority among California Hispanics and the increasing number of fundamentalist Protestants among them.

And it must choose candidates who can avoid alienating Latinos when their full backgrounds become known, people who have not fired longtime Hispanic employees the moment their immigration status might turn problematic, as Whitman did her nine-year housekeeper.

Plus, it has to move a bit toward the center on budget issues that affect Latinos strongly, things like school funding, after-school programs and in-home care for the disabled elderly.

Essentially, Republicans need to convince Latinos they are not hopelessly prejudiced against them. This may prove difficult so long as ultra-conservatives dominate the party. Maybe the new open primary system will cause the GOP to nominate some candidates not guaranteed to alienate the bulk of Latinos.

If so, California Republicans could make a big comeback over the next three or four years. But there are no signs they realize this. They’re still looking for ways around the open primary. No voices have risen in the party to advocate for immigrant rights.

All of which makes Republican talk of winning over substantial numbers of Hispanic voters – a tune they’ve sung soon after every election of the last 17 years – nothing more than denial of reality, a form of whistling past the graveyard.

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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