WOULD PART-TIME POLS END SACRAMENTO GRIDLOCK?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 20, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“WOULD PART-TIME POLS END SACRAMENTO GRIDLOCK?”

There’s a one-word cause for the gridlock that so often afflicts California government, where compromise is almost non-existent and very little is accomplished. That word: fear.

This implies if the political class had less to fear, its members might be more dedicated to getting things done and less preoccupied with protecting their self-interested hides.

Today's chief political fear of legislators from both major parties is that if they deviate from the party line, they will draw major opposition in the next primary election and quickly be ousted from cushy jobs which pay well into the six figures when per diem allowances and other perquisites are figured in.

That happened several times in recent years, especially to Republicans who voted for the temporary tax increases and budget compromises featured in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last few years as governor. It’s also happened on the national level, where several U.S. senators have been ousted by primary opponents for casting the occasional compromise vote.

Because there is no such thing as direct democracy on the national level, nothing is likely soon to change the current reality in Congress. But the initiative system does allow changes in Sacramento.

The first major effort to alter what politicians fear came in June 2010, when voters passed Proposition 14 and created the top-two system of primary elections which will see large-scale use for the first time this spring. Because all candidates will be listed together on the primary ballot regardless of party, with the two leading vote-getters advancing to the November general election, the theory is that moderates who have been outvoted for decades in both parties’ primaries might influence election outcomes far more than before.

The reasoning behind this theory is that neither Democrats nor Republicans need fear the extreme wings of their party anymore, since extremists on either side would be unlikely to make up a majority in many districts. The jury is still out on that theory.

But underlying all the concerns about drawing substantial primary opposition is the real worry: loss of the job itself, and the need to venture into the job market just like most other citizens.

Which leads to another theory: Remove the high stakes, the good pay and the many perks legislators now enjoy and maybe they will think as much about what’s good for California as what’s good for them.

This is the idea behind two pending proposed initiatives aiming to reduce the Legislature to the part-time status it had as recently as the 1950s.

Maybe, goes this thought, if lawmakers were paid no more than about $30,000 a year and were in session barely three months annually, getting reelected would no longer be their top concern.

One of the proposed measures is the so-called “Neighborhood Legislature Reform Act,” which would reduce state Assembly district populations to about 50,000 from today’s average of 483,000, producing thousands of so-called legislators whose main function would be to elect a “working committee” of 80 (same size as today’s Assembly) that would do the actual work.

That’s unwieldy enough to be completely impractical, so it probably won’t get very far.

But the other proposed initiative, this one put forward by longtime populist activist Ted Costa (he filed the original recall papers against ex-Gov. Gray Davis) makes more sense.

This one would also see lawmakers meet only three months a year, with lowered salaries part of the deal. There would be special sessions when called by the governor, but these could only deal with specific issues. And legislators could not hold state government employment or become paid lobbyists in Sacramento for five years after leaving office.

The main point, though, is that reelection might not matter as much if legislators got lower pay, less per diem money and had few prospects of staying on the government payroll after their terms are up. Their legislative duties also might interfere with the “real” jobs most would have to hold in order to make ends meet.

Says Costa, “California needs and deserves a Legislature that is closer to the people…and is only interested in conducting the people’s business.” Of course, nothing in his plan would prevent ambitious politicians from trying to use part-time legislative offices as stepping stones to something more.

And the idea that fewer rewards would lead to more compromise is completely untested. Balanced against it, too, is the fact that many state issues have become so complex that part-timers could easily be bamboozled by special interest lobbyists.

Still, a valid argument can be made for the idea that the full-time Legislature has failed and that the time has come to return to citizen legislators. At the very least, this is an idea that deserves substantial public airing. For something must be done to get things moving again in California government.

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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

BIG SAVINGS IN RETURN TO ORIGINAL THREE STRIKES INTENT

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 17, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“BIG SAVINGS IN RETURN TO ORIGINAL THREE STRIKES INTENT”

When California voters begin thinking seriously next fall about the propositions they’ll vote up or down, one that's currently circulating might stand out as eminently sensible: Return the state’s three-strikes-and-you’re-out law to its original intent.

This not only makes sense, but it would save at least $100 million yearly that could then be spent on schools, police and fire protection, parks and day care for the infirm elderly.

Right now, more than 8,000 third-offense criminals sit in California prisons, each costing taxpayers more than $47,000 per year. They won’t be going anywhere in the current “re-alignment” that will eventually see 33,000 prisoners transferred to county jails or probation departments. The offenses that put about half of the three-strikes inmates into their cells were not violent.

Non-violent offenses have ranged from drug possession, thefts and check-kiting to the famous case of a shoplifter caught with cookies getting a 25-years-to-life sentence. One man with two prior non-violent felony offenses got the maximum three-strikes term for trying to break into a soup kitchen when he was broke and hungry.

It would be hard to quarrel with the original intent of the three-strikes law, which was spurred by the October 1993 murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas by an ex-convict who entered her Petaluma home with a knife as she enjoyed a slumber party with friends.

The idea was sold as a way to keep repeat violent offenders off California streets, and it has done that. Crime rates today are significantly lower than before three-strikes.

But the law was never intended to put shoplifters and white collar criminals away for good. It would be hard for anyone even now, with the state constantly running in the red, to quarrel with the parts of the law that deal specifically with serious criminals. Three-strikes was first passed by the Legislature in March 1994 and then passed again by voters the following November.

Serious felons (including murderers, rapists, arsonists and those who use guns while committing any crime, among others) see the sentence for their second offense doubled and get 25-to-life for their third.

They account for about 4,000 of the just over 8,000 three-strikers now in prison.

It’s the other half that’s wasting a lot of tax dollars. District attorneys in each county have the power under the law to elevate any misdemeanor offense to a felony if a defendant has two prior felonies on his or her record. Some do this routinely, while others – most notably Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley – are reluctant to enhance the level of relatively minor offenses.

The annual expense for the 4,000-plus relatively minor offenders now doing elongated terms covers guards, housing, food and medical care.

These inmates are now held on the presumption held by many prosecutors that misdemeanors are often the precursors of major offenses committed later by the same perpetrators. But no credible academic study has ever supported this contention. Stanford University Prof. Michael Romano, founder of the Three Strikes Project that helps appeal cases of nonviolent offenders, claims only 4 percent of persons serving life terms for nonviolent third offenses are likely to commit violent crimes if released. That’s about one-fifth the rate of violent crimes committed by prisoners released from the general prison population.

In the meantime, California’s prison system has become what former Democratic state Sen. Tom Hayden warned in 1994 that it might eventually be: “The world’s largest system of geriatric treatment centers.”

That’s because there is no current provision for releasing prisoners when they become either too disabled or too old to commit violent crimes. (True, no one is ever too old to order or pay someone else to commit a violent crime. This reality also applies to other prison inmates, who sometimes control street gangs from within their cells.)

Only a very small portion of violent crime is committed or instigated by persons over 50.

All of which means the current often-indiscriminate handing down of 25-to-life sentences is both unnecessary to hold crime levels down and a waste of big money in many cases.

That’s why it makes sense to change the law and make only serious offenders liable to receive three-strikes sentences. This is what most voters originally thought they were backing and there’s little evidence that keeping matters as they are accomplishes much for anyone.

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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 EFFORT TO IMPROVE CARS DRAWS THE USUAL MISGUIDED OPPOSITION

CALIFORNIA FOCUS=
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 13, 2012 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“NEW EFFORT TO IMPROVE CARS DRAWS THE USUAL MISGUIDED OPPOSITION”

If California highways and parking lots of 2025 look considerably different from today’s, it will probably be because they'll contain almost 1.5 million more hybrid cars and trucks, hydrogen-driven vehicles and plug-in hybrids that run mostly on electricity except on long trips.

That’s the vision behind the latest set of proposed rules rolled out by the California Air Resources Board even as the Republican chairman of the main investigative committee in the House of Representatives seeks to drag it into hearings about whether it is exceeding its mission.

Not even a Dec. 30 ruling by U.S. District Judge Lawrence O’Neill of Fresno, an appointee of ex-President George W. Bush, is likely to derail the new rules for long. While conservative judges have occasionally ruled against rules set by CARB, they have almost always been overruled by higher courts. That’s also likely for this decision, which found the new regulations unfair to some farmers and ethanol producers.

There is no doubt about the mission of the ARB: Clean up California air at least enough to meet the not-so-extreme standards of the federal Clean Air Act. That law specifically gives the state board authority to do what’s necessary to reach its goals in some of America’s smoggiest areas, even if that means taking tougher actions than those of national agencies including Congress itself.

The latest CARB initiative is called the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. It seeks to change cars by changing their fuels. It would demand cutting 10 percent of the carbon from current automotive gasoline and diesel by 2020, thus reducing greenhouse gases and encouraging much more development of alternative fuels from waste-based biofuel to electricity and hydrogen.

In the process, it would drive average gas mileage up from today’s 27.3 miles per gallon to about 55 by 2025. That upsets some carmakers, oil companies like those whose lawsuit produced the Dec. 30 court ruling and Republican Congressman Darrell Issa of north San Diego County, who heads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Issa is getting a new round of questions ready for CARB chief Mary Nichols. It upsets him that CARB may have had great influence on federal gas mileage standards, which largely parallel the effects of the California rules and are forecast to drive up the cost of new cars by about $1,900 when they’re fully in effect.

He and the oil companies which hailed the Fresno court decision as a money-saver for drivers ignore the fact that those same forecasts say the standards will save car buyers an average of $6,000 each in fuel costs over the lifetime of the new cars.

Meanwhile, carmakers led by Ford are saying they wouldn’t be able to sell all those fuel-efficient cars even if they could somehow build them. The rules would essentially mandate that about one-third of new cars 13 years from now be electric- or hydrogen-powered, with plug-in hybrids similar to today’s Chevrolet Volt taking a much larger market share than today.

Preposterous? That’s what Ford and other companies said when CARB almost 15 years ago adopted a “zero-emission” standard for about one-third of California cars to be sold by 2012. Things haven't turned out precisely that way, but the rule hasn’t been preposterous, either, with the near-zero emission Toyota Prius a tremendous commercial success and scores of other hybrid models from Honda Civics to Lexus and Ford sport utilities. Not to mention all the Ford Fusions, Nissan Altimas and others that fall in between.

The same oil companies that say there simply won’t be enough alternate fuels available by 2025 to support the new standards also claimed in the 1990s that they couldn’t formulate the cleaner gasoline commonly used today. They also said they couldn’t clean up diesel, but did it when they had to. Car companies said in the 1970s that having to put catalytic converters on cars and trucks would kill their business. Consistently, the companies that embraced the newly-mandated technologies soonest are the ones that have done best commercially.

So it’s best to take manufacturer complaints with a substantial grain of salt.

In fact, without CARB, there would be no hybrids today. Air in California would be about twice as polluted. Gas mileage would be far lower. Improvements like that make a pretty good track record for any agency, so it’s hard to understand why a politician like Issa would go after CARB unless it’s just to score rhetorical points. Plus, there’s the board’s record of compromise when improvements in technology don’t quite keep pace with the rules. Just such an adjustment to the zero-emission standard is the reason hybrid cars appeared in big numbers before all-electric ones arrived.

Yes, when the air board reduces pollution, it also increases fuel efficiency and cuts America’s oil imports. And when other states and the federal Environmental Protection Agency adopt the California rules as their own, the usual practice, that has so far helped just about everybody except oil sheikhs and the authoritarian government of petro-rich Venezuela.

So when CARB issues rules like its new Low Carbon Fuel Standard, it’s often best to visualize the resulting new cars rather than focusing on opposition that has usually proven wrong. Yes, the board had serious credibility problems last year and in 2010 with its diesel regulations and the staffer who helped produce them, but on the whole this is one government regulator that has produced innovation and improvement. There’s every reason to believe the new rule will uphold that 52-year tradition once it clears its legal hurdles.

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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.

CRYBABY GOP WON’T FACE UP TO ITS REAL PROBLEMS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 10, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“CRYBABY GOP WON’T FACE UP TO ITS REAL PROBLEMS”

It’s now all but official: The crybaby-of-the-year award for 2011 has to go to the California Republican Party for its sustained gripes about redistricting.

The GOP’s latest weeping jag began when the investigative-reporting service ProPublica, mostly published on the Internet, sent out a lengthy story titled “How Democrats Fooled California’s Redistricting Commission.”

What this report didn’t note was the fact that some Republicans also tried to bamboozle the independent, bipartisan panel made up of an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, with a few independents tossed in for good measure.

While ProPublica documents the fact that Democrats held a meeting in Washington, D.C. to figure out ways to manipulate the commission and the eventual district lines, it doesn’t mention that Republicans tried similar tactics. Maybe the GOP wasn’t as effective, but both parties were well within their rights. Nothing barred anyone from speaking out at commission hearings.

The idea was for Democrats to have some of their activists testify at commission hearings as representatives of interests other than the party. Their shills would identify themselves as part of certain ethnic communities without mentioning they were also lobbyists or otherwise interested in keeping Democrats in office. That's disingenuous, but far from illegal.

SomeRepublicans did much the same, including paid staffers of officeholders testifying without mentioning who employed them.

Can anyone really be surprised that either party would resort to this stuff? Naturally, both parties did whatever they could to influence the redistricting outcome. Which made the ProPublica story a classical ho-hummer, something that should make readers yawn rather than shocking them awake. Maybe that’s why almost all newspapers in California gave the story minimal play.

Meanwhile, Republicans like state party Chairman Tom Del Becarro were in full whine from the moment it appeared. “No fair-minded person can now say the process or the result was fair,” he moaned. “I am calling for an immediate and thorough investigation.

ProPublica made precious little effort to examine Republican efforts to sway the commission, settling for a comment from a college professor saying “Republicans really didn’t do anything.” There also was precious little effort to assess what real effect testimony at public hearings may have had.

“As a commission, we ran a very transparent process, so some of the allegations made in the story are easily disproved by a look at our website and the criteria we used,” Connie Galambos-Malloy, one of four “decline-to-state” voters on the 14-member commission, told a reporter. “If the voters investigate, it’s clear that most of the allegations are dead wrong.”

And Commissioner Stanley Forbes told ProPublica he and his colleagues knew that “When you’ve got so many people…making comments, some of them are going to be political shills. We just had to do the best we could in determining what was for real and what wasn’t.”

Other commissioners said they were presented so much information that no one submission held any particular sway over them.

But the real reason the Republican outcry following the ProPublica report amounts to little more than loud whining is the numbers: While the largest growth among voters over the last few years came in the “decline-to-state” category, the biggest drops have afflicted the GOP.

The latest voter registration numbers put Republican registration barely over 30 percent of all registered voters. Democrats have about 42 percent more registrants. So why would the GOP figure it could hold onto all the congressional and legislative seats it was handed in the gerrymander deal of 2001, the last time California’s district lines changed?

Given the raw numbers, even if courts eventually supervise drawing of different district lines, they are bound to look much like the commission's. Yes, a few incumbents tossed into the same districts as current colleagues might benefit from a re-do, but the party couldn’t gain much overall. Especially when you factor in legal requirements like keeping communities of interest (read: ethnic groups) together and making sure minorities get an opportunity for a fair share of the total seats, plus the redistricting law's preference for keeping cities intact within districts.

Yes, the GOP surely must feel chagrined, considering its fervent support of the ballot proposition that created the redistricting commission. But that’s little more than buyer’s remorse, as Republicans didn’t exactly get what they hoped for when voters took redistricting away from the Democratic-controlled Legislature.

But it hardly constitutes wrongdoing for either party to try for as good a deal as possible. So the Republican whining really means the GOP knows it was outdone in redistricting, just as it’s been outworked and outperformed at every step of the political process in California for 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