BROWN LEADERSHIP MUST KEY CALIFORNIA REVIVAL

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“BROWN LEADERSHIP MUST KEY CALIFORNIA REVIVAL”

It’s a question commonly asked by schoolchildren: What is the President’s most important job? The answer plainly is not being commander-in-chief of the military or appointing a cabinet or negotiating a budget.

Rather, the answer is that any President has the paramount task of making other Americans feel confident and optimistic about the nation, in effect to be psychologist-in-chief.

America’s decline in world regard since the presidency of Bill Clinton is probably largely because George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been singularly inept at this most important task. Each in his own way has managed to make Americans feel pessimistic about their country and its future place in the world. That phenomenon has been measured in myriad polls.

So it has also been in California, where a succession of governors from the1940s through the ‘70s conveyed optimism and a sense of never-ending expansion of the state’s human horizons.

That sense lasted through the tenures of Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight, Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan and, to some extent, the first incarnation of Jerry Brown, who acquired the sobriquet Gov. Moonbeam because he wanted California’s vision and dreams to extend into outer space – a mind-bending concept at the time.

Now it’s up to Brown to try to restore that positivity, not an easy matter when he’s presided over major cuts in vital public programs and services, with more to come.

His task looks even tougher when you consider how poorly it was done by the four governors who served between his terms, George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson and Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. None conveyed a sense of vision for the future while they watched California’s once-exemplary infrastructure of roads, bridges, aqueducts, reservoirs, pipelines and public buildings begin to decay without doing much about it.

The crowning achievement of Deukmejian’s tenure was “workfare,” the program requiring welfare recipients to perform some work when they didn’t have child care obligations. This might have been constructive, but was hardly inspirational.

Wilson is best remembered for two things: His anti-illegal immigrant “They Keep Coming” campaign commercials and his support for electricity deregulation, whose consequences still reverberate in power rates among the highest anywhere.

Davis gave public employee unions almost carte blanche, okaying pay and pension increases that are a key factor in today’s state and local budget problems. Under him, there was also a culture of corruption; Davis often seemed to make public policy decisions as a direct consequence of campaign donations.

And Schwarzenegger put the state more deeply in debt than ever, backing or running bond issues that accomplished little or nothing in the long term other than to guarantee that fully 8 percent of future budgets would have to go toward paying back debts.

Little of that was going to further the California Dream of endless possibilities in exchange for good new ideas and hard work.

Now it’s up to Brown to reverse the tide of skepticism and pessimism about California’s future. It doesn’t really matter that many problems which afflicted this state first, from excessive public employee pensions to massive numbers of home foreclosures, now trouble most other states, too.

Brown has made a start in the right direction by trying to push new types of industrial development compatible with California’s justifiably high environmental standards and by making tough budget decisions.

But it now seems inevitable that next year will bring deeper budget cuts than even those which have already decimated health care for the poor, caused cancellation or closure of school amenities from buses to nurses and libraries, closed dozens of state parks and raised tuition at public colleges and universities by about 20 percent in just one year.

Yet, Brown’s obligation – the task he willingly took on when he opted to become governor again – is to revive the optimism of both Californians and outsiders about this state and its future.

Making a few unpleasant choices aimed at ending perpetual budget deficits may be a start in that direction, but it’s plainly not enough. Brown’s job in the second and third years of his return to office will be to inspire, not to instill dread of the near future.

His televised state of the state speech early next month would be a good place to start. He might also do a series of radio and television “fireside chats” a la Franklin D. Roosevelt. But he’s got to do something positive, and soon, or risk joining the list of recent governors whom history has already judged failures.

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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

U.S. CHAMBER CONTINUES ATTACK ON STATE’S RULES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2011 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“U.S. CHAMBER CONTINUES ATTACK ON STATE’S RULES”

When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a 116-page report last spring that ranked California dead last among all states in the way state laws affect both hiring by private businesses and creation of new businesses, it was good for a belly-laugh.

Now the Chamber is out with another lengthy study purporting to show that California has lost at least 104,000 steady jobs because of its legal climate, which allows wronged parties to sue both companies and individuals.

The newest study doesn’t specifically compare California to Mississippi, as the spring report did. Back then, the business group claimed California’s rules that limit pollution of air and water made it inferior to poverty-ridden Mississippi when it came to new business. And yet…only 139 new businesses opened in Mississippi in 2009 (the most recent year the Chamber examined), compared with 10,087 in California. California, then, accounted for 19.5 percent of all new businesses in America, but had only 12 percent of the nation’s population. Mississippi accounted for a miniscule .00026 percent, but the Chamber liked it better.

The new report on legal climates can best be understood as part of an effort by the Chamber and its state affiliates to free businesses from as many obligations and liabilities as possible. It’s all done while chanting a “new jobs” mantra, even though there is scant evidence that loosening regulations or lowering business taxes causes businesses to increase hiring.

That’s especially true today, when a many of the Chamber’s member businesses have outsourced millions of jobs once held by Americans to Third World countries where they can pay wages that would dump American workers into poverty.

The newest Chamber effort assails what it calls a “tort tax” on California businesses, claiming lawsuit settlements and judgments in this state in 2009 amounted to just over $32 billion.

Putting that into perspective, it amounts to about one-third of the cost of the proposed California High Speed Rail System going to legal costs each year. The Chamber claims that businesses pay $4.47 in legal insurance premiums for every $1,000 of revenue, which it says amounts to a .45 percent tax on every dollar taken in by California businesses.

Of course, the Chamber’s own study indicates that less than half the cost of lawsuits in California involves anything at all commercial. “Personal tort costs” – one person suing another, divorce settlements and the like – amount to almost as much as commercial torts, while medical malpractice suits account for 12 percent of all legal settlements and judgments.

The Chamber hastens to say that its newest study “does not provide a guide for specific legal reforms,” but it has often pushed to limit punitive judgments against companies that build faulty cars or sell rotten food or pollute drinking water. Both the national and state chambers have also tried repeatedly to limit class action lawsuits and make most consumers ineligible to sue when they believe they’ve been wronged.

Doing these kinds of things, the Chamber report says “could add hundreds of thousands of jobs in California.”

But as with all things in this kind of trickle-down economic theory, there is no proof that giving breaks to the rich or the corporate brass causes them to hire more ordinary folks.

At least the newest Chamber effort does not make the mistake of again comparing California to Mississippi. If the new report had done that, its own statistics would have found that lawsuits in the Magnolia State do even more to impede employment than in California, with the Chamber claiming its wished-for changes in the legal climate there could potentially produce at least 1.07 percent more jobs, compared to a minimum of just .65 percent more employment here.

The bottom line is that nothing in the new Chamber report establishes that California’s legal climate – with state legal rules often more generous to consumers and ordinary citizens than federal rules – is a major cause of the state’s economic malaise.

Here’s a suggestion for the Chamber’s corps of analysts, who seem to enjoy tackling big problems with voluminous studies: Figure out a way to solve the home foreclosure crisis that plagues much of California and the rest of America and you’ll go a long way toward fixing the entire economic crisis, which has created about half today’s rampant unemployment.

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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.

STATE’S BIG WATER DEALS LOOKING SHAKY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“STATE’S BIG WATER DEALS LOOKING SHAKY”

"In California, whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over." Often attributed to Mark Twain, circa 1870.

Regardless of whether America’s greatest author and wit of the 19^th Century actually made that pithy comment, and some Mark Twain scholars question whether he did, the remark is at least as true today as it was when Twain allegedly said it.

Just look what’s happening now between San Diego County and one of its two leading water suppliers, El Centro’s Imperial Irrigation District. Then check out the confusion and possible deception surrounding the perpetually troubled Delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers.

These are two of the state’s prime water sources, and their futures are both in considerable doubt, with legal and political wrangling over them rampant.

The more surprising of these quarrels is over Imperial Valley water – actually not water rising in that parched yet fertile area along the Colorado River just north of the Mexican border, but water from Imperial’s allocation that’s now being taken out of the river considerably north of any valley farms, then shipped to the San Diego area. To make this possible, more than 5,000 agricultural acres in the Imperial Valley have already been fallowed, their owners receiving payments for water they no longer use.

That water now flows through the Colorado River aqueduct operated by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) and is relayed to the San Diego County Water Authority, a flow slated to increase over the next few decades under a 75-year agreement signed in 2003.

Even though the water now flows – while San Diego County money flows in the other direction, to the Imperial district -- so do the lawsuits. At issue are things like fish die-offs, possible dust storms and the salinity of the Salton Sea – a man-made lake southeast of Indio that’s a major stopping point for migratory birds.

There’s also the not-so-small matter of the state having committed in 2003 to fund work to save the Salton Sea, something it no longer can afford.

Meanwhile, nothing much has visibly changed in the Delta, from which flows much of the water used by cities in Southern and Central California, as well as farms in the Central Valley. Several cities in the East Bay and Peninsula suburbs of San Francisco also get supplies from the state Water Project, whose fluid originates in the Delta.

But there’s still plenty of action. An environmental impact report paid for by water suppliers like the MWD and the Westlands Water District was labeled suspect even before its writing begins, with five Northern California Democratic members of Congress claiming the funding arrangement gives the big water agencies “unprecedented influence over the process.”

The report will evaluate effects of a current plan to move water south via a tunnel under the Delta or a canal (some call this a “big ditch”) around it. That’s a concept roundly voted down in a 1982 referendum overturning a law passed early that year which would have built a large, concrete-lined waterway around the Delta, called the Peripheral Canal.

The vote against that canal was based on Northern California fears of a big “water grab” where farms and cities south of the Delta would dam or otherwise tap the few remaining wild rivers to the north.

Any new Delta plan would have to shore up earthquake-damage-prone dikes that now protect thousands of homes in the Delta area from flooding. Altogether, there are now ten options for simultaneously making Delta water supplies more reliable, fixing dikes and restoring the area's ecosystem by protecting threatened fish populations and assuring high water quality in the face of continual threats of salt water intrusion from the San Francisco and San Pablo bays.

Accomplishing all that is a tall order that has stymied politicians and water experts for decades, especially with funding low and suspicions high in these bad economic times. No one now is quite sure where money for any work would come from, even if work is approved.

Put it all together and you get a picture of water insecurity in many of the most fertile and populous parts of California. No one knows what might happen if an earthquake cut off supplies from the Delta. Even less certain is what might happen if the Imperial-San Diego agreement were called off before such a quake might strike.

All of which makes the current wrangling over both Colorado River and Delta supplies more crucially important than most Californians know, as vital as any issue now confronting the state.

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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

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“QUALIFYING BALLOT MEASURES GETS TOUGHER”

A quick look at this year’s scorecard for ballot initiatives and referenda reveals a surprise result: Qualifying a measure for the California ballot appears to have gotten a lot harder than it used to be.

This means the threat made so often by displeased politicians and other factions -- "Cross me and I'll run an initiative or referendum to change what you’ve done” – has lost a lot of its impact.

For years, these ballot measures – initiatives are new laws, while referenda attempt to repeal bills the Legislature has passed and the governor signed, but which have not yet taken effect – were the easy province of almost anyone with a pet cause and a lot of money.

Initiatives are a lot more common, so much so that many voters simply call every the proposition on the ballot by that name, ignoring the distinction between measures placed there by gathering voter signatures and those proposed by the Legislature.

Almost every interest group conceivable has managed to qualify some sort of measure for the ballot: Tobacco industry companies tried to roll back smoking regulations, insurance companies have repeatedly tried to bamboozle voters into giving them more money, fringe politicians like Lyndon LaRouche have made oddball attempts and others have tried to pass myriad new taxes and regulations.

Most of these efforts fail; the overall passage rate is just under 20 percent for initiatives. Referenda sometimes do better, with the foremost example the overwhelming 1982 repeal of bills aiming to create a Peripheral Canal to bring much more Northern California river water to the Central Valley and Southern California. That result made any talk of doing this into political anathema for decades.

But the failures of initiatives and referenda this year are more striking than ever. For one thing, there have been a record nine referendum drives so far this year, all spurred by Republican legislators, big businesses or other conservatives disgruntled over some laws pushed through by Democrats and signed by a Democratic governor. Those efforts have included a try at repealing a new fire protection fee to be assessed on homeowners in fire-prone brush areas and another targeting a new law requiring schools to teach about the contributions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals, as well as people with disabilities. More recent is an attempt to cancel a new law that would put all initiatives into the November general election, which invariably draws more voters than primaries or special elections held at other times.

Referenda now need 504,760 signatures of registered voters in order to qualify for the next statewide ballot (they are not covered by the new only-in-November law for initiatives). The number changes, depending how many people have voted in the last general election.

Referendum sponsors get only 90 days to gather signatures, while initiatives have 150 days to gather voter names once they’re certified.

It’s also more difficult to get corporate financing for referenda than for some initiatives with more commercial implications. An exception was the Amazon.com drive against a law that will soon require Internet retailers to collect sales tax on purchases by Californians. Amazon plunked $5 million into that effort, but thought better of it and pulled the bulk of its cash back a few days later, instead reaching a deal with Gov. Jerry Brown that lets it hold off tax collections for awhile in exchange for setting up several big distribution facilities in California.

The deal will eventually save Amazon money by bringing its warehouses closer to its biggest market. The company previously stayed out of California physically because prior law would have forced it to collect those taxes if it had an actual footprint here.

There’s been some whining from groups that failed to qualify the repeal measures they sought. Example: “The abbreviated timeline and lack of funding made this attempt extremely difficult,” griped the California Family Council, one of two groups behind the bid to eliminate the gay-education law.

Translation: There wasn’t much support for its cause, something most interest groups are loath to admit.

It was the same for the labor and environmental groups trying to qualify an oil severance tax initiative for next November’s election. When it become clear their first attempt to get that levy onto the ballot would fail, they abandoned it in favor of a new drive for a “revised” measure. But the revisions were small.

Maybe all these failures (and there have been some recent successful signature drives, too, with one measure changing term limits and another creating a new cigarette tax to benefit cancer research already set for votes next year) are due to a growing public cynicism about signing petitions.

A recent Field Poll showed about 60 percent of voters believe most proposition elections turn out “the way organized special interest groups want.”

All of which means the oft-heard threats to make end runs around the Legislature or overturn its votes are less credible today than they’ve been in decades.

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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