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

WE HAVE SEEN THE PENSION FUTURE AND IT IS – L.A.

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 14, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WE HAVE SEEN THE PENSION FUTURE AND IT IS – L.A.”

As he campaigned last fall, new Gov. Jerry Brown made it clear that one key element in fixing California’s huge financial problems would have to be big changes in public employee pensions.

Outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger already achieved a little of that on the statewide level by negotiating several new contracts with public employee unions that will set up a two-tier system where new hires get somewhat fewer benefits than long-term employees hired under different conditions and promises.

Still, the majority of public employees work not for the state, but for cities, counties, school districts and other local agencies. One of them – the city of Vallejo – declared bankruptcy two years ago as a way to force unions to renegotiate both pensions and salaries. Then came scandals in cities like Bell and Vernon, where public employees and local elected officials exploited their constituents to an apparently illegal degree, both in terms of salaries and pensions.

It’s clear, then, that any wide-ranging changes in public employee pensions will have to involve the locals.

That’s why it’s striking that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has stepped up in a surprising way. It’s unexpected for Villaraigosa, a former speaker of the state Assembly and a onetime teachers union organizer, to be helping Brown in part because the mayor once thought he would be standing by now in Brown’s spot.

But Villaraigosa’s putative campaign for governor reached a sudden and early demise when he couldn’t keep his pants zipped up and his once-celebrated close marriage collapsed under revelations of an affair with a Latina television reporter. Now he’s divorced, with only one or two major offices potentially available to him after his second mayoral term expires in 2013.

Rather than just feel sorry for himself, Villaraigosa decided his best course was to attempt leaving a legacy, even if it offends some of his friends in the labor movement.

Some results of that decision are now before L.A.’s city council and others will be on the local ballot on March 8, in the form of a proposition that would make enormous changes to the city’s pension plan for police and firefighters. Those changes can apply only to new hires because, short of bankruptcy, federal laws prevent changes to pension benefits offered workers when they were hired.

The need for the changes is clear, best stated by Los Angeles City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana, who warned that unless something is done, civilian (non-police and non-firefighter) pension costs will amount to one-third of the city’s budget by 2030. L.A. now pays about $300 million a year in such pensions, from an annual budget of about $7 billion. By 2015, the pension cost will be $769 million and it will keep growing as about 400 civilian employees retire each year at age 55, expecting to collect pensions for life based on their last year’s pay.

Changing civilian pensions can be done by city council members, with a sign-off from Villaraigosa. Among the revisions: Local civil servants would for the first time have to start contributing to their health-care costs to the tune of about 2 percent of pay. Their pensions would be capped at 75 percent of workers’ average salary over their last three years in harness and cost-of-living adjustments would be cut from 3 percent yearly to 2 percent.

Plus, the retirement age would rise from 55 to 62, graying the city work force considerably.

“The fact is that Los Angeles cannot continue down an unsustainable path,” Villaraigosa said. His March ballot measure would impose similar changes on new police and fire employees.

There’s a lot here for Brown to chew on as he begins to negotiate with the very public employees to whom his 1970s-era signature gave bargaining rights. He has an innate advantage over Schwarzenegger or any Republican who might possibly have won the governor’s office if he had not run: Because the unions know his role in the rise of their members’ benefits, they also know he’s not their enemy. That should make them more likely to work out compromises with him than they might with others.

Yes, public employee unions funded a good part of Brown’s campaign. But at least publicly, he never promised them anything but a place at the table as he tries to work out the budget solutions of which their contracts will have to be a part.

Villaraigosa has now has given Brown a big leg up. Because he’s a former labor leader, unionists cannot see his actions as deliberate hostility, but rather will be forced to consider them pragmatic necessity. And if they view the changes Villaraigosa is pushing that way, it’s bound to make budget-easing deals far easier for Brown to craft.

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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

CALIFORNIA CENSUS RESULTS DON’T MEAN WHAT YOU’VE HEARD

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 11, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“CALIFORNIA CENSUS RESULTS DON’T MEAN WHAT YOU’VE HEARD”

Gnashing of teeth and expressions of chagrin were highly audible around California the other day, when the U.S. Census Bureau reported the state will not get an additional seat in Congress for the next 10 years.

Geez, there would sure be a lot more clout from 54 seats in the House than from today’s 53, wouldn’t there? Well, probably not. When California got one new seat in 2000, its influence increased exactly zero.

But at the same time, the increase of about 4 million residents between 1990 and 2000 assured that California got somewhat larger amounts of federal education support, superfund cleanup dollars, welfare and education money, highway funding, water cleanup dollars, anti-gang funding and more. Those kinds of grants are usually handed out on the basis of population.

So the state’s officially-figured growth of 3.8 million persons (slightly more than the population of Oregon, but about 1.5 million less than the state Department of Finance believes was the real figure) between 2000 and 2010 should also make certain that California keeps getting the largest share of any state when it comes to the $400 billion yearly in per-person federal spending.

There will also be no substantial loss to the state from not getting one more seat in the Electoral College. If there’s any deficit in any of this, it will be in the ego department.

Until now,California had always received more seats in Congress after every Census since it joined the Union in the mid-19^th Century. Not getting any new slots is a first. Worriers quickly drew the inference that California somehow stopped growing, easy enough with anti-California negativity now commonplace in the national media.

But it’s not so. Even if the growth was “only” the official 3.8 million persons, the rise was consistent with the state’s population increases of approximately 4 million in each of the last four Censuses.

In fact, California’s officially-listed growth over the last 10 years was second only to Texas’ 4.3 million, and a pretty close second, at that. The big growth in Texas, the Census found, came primarily among Hispanics, just like the recent growth here. But Texas had far fewer Latinos in 2000 than it does now, having become much more of a magnet for illegal immigration from Mexico over the last decade than before. Why? The Border Patrol in the early 2000s concentrated more on closing off its San Ysidro sector in Southern California than any other part of the border. Many illegal immigrants shifted to places like Texas and Arizona.

Both will get additional seats in Congress because of it.

Nevada, which grew by just 520,000 persons over the last decade, also gets one more seat, for a total of two. Why would half a million new residents give Nevada a new slot, while almost eight times as much growth gets none for California?

The answer lies in the percentages. With its new official populace of 37.2 million, California accounts for just over 12 percent of all United States residents. The current 53 seats make up just over 12 percent of the House. Nevada’s growth, like that of Texas and Florida, increased its percentage of the total American population, while California’s growth did not.

That’s what comes of being the biggest state to start with. You can grow substantially and almost no one notices, while those who started out much smaller might grow about the same or even much less, but look far larger than before.

There are, of course, benefits from not having had the official growth of 5 million or so it would have taken to net a new seat in Congress. That extra 1.2 million persons would have put further demands on a water system that’s already overtaxed. They would have added to traffic problems, school crowding and urban sprawl, committed crimes and further overfilled prisons and hospitals. And more.

It may also be that California is nearing physical maturity, with its metropolitan areas pretty much built out. Much new construction today comes in the form of tear-downs and build-ups. Unless and until the real estate market revives considerably, that will continue.

All of which means that, yes, California is still growing even in recessionary times. But unlike Nevada, it is not undergoing out-of-control expansion.

If California is indeed reaching a sort of maturity, maybe it’s also time the state’s politicians did the same. This state will again have by far the largest delegation in Congress for the next 10 years, by a margin of 15 seats over No. 2 Texas. But that won’t matter unless California’s representatives start working together for the first time ever, putting the state’s interests over narrow ideology and down-the-line party loyalty.

They’ve never done that, with the result that new jobs and industries that could and maybe should have come here ended up elsewhere instead.

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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

BUDGET MESS LETTING CRIMINALS GO FREE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 7, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“BUDGET MESS LETTING CRIMINALS GO FREE”

It’s easy enough to say the mess that is this state’s budget has little impact on ordinary Californians other than furloughed state employees or many of the elderly and infirm who have lost government-paid in-home care.

But after seven years of steady deficits under the administrations of outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and ex-Gov. Gray Davis, things are getting more serious than that. One sign of how bad it’s gotten: criminals who would almost certainly be doing time in any other circumstance are going scot free, not penalized in the least for their misdeeds.

One clear illustration may be the case of Tony Wagner, which was to have been heard in Riverside County Superior Court in September 2009. There is little doubt about the facts of this case, which saw Wagner and a friend enter the Hemet home of Jerry Jackson with Jackson’s ex-girlfriend Celeste Trzepacz (cq), who sought to recover her dog from Jackson.

Fisticuffs followed between Wagner’s friend and Jackson outside the house, while Trzepacz went inside. While there, she heard three gunshots, went back outside and found that Jackson had been wounded in both knees. Wagner eventually admitted to police that he shot Jackson, but said it was in self-defense.

Two weeks later, Riverside County prosecutors charged Wagner with assault with a semiautomatic firearm and inflicting great bodily injury. The felony case wound its way through the court system and was finally set for trial the day before Wagner’s constitutional right to a speedy trial would be violated.

But no trial ever occurred because no courtroom and no judge was available on the set date, and the case was dismissed the following day.

The dismissal, thus, was solely the result of a shortage of judges, the same shortage outgoing state Chief Justice Ronald George decried in 2004, when he asked Schwarzenegger and the Legislature to create 350 new judicial posts around the state. Only 100 new judges have been seated since then.

The shortage is most severe in fast-growing Riverside County, where more than 250 cases have been dismissed for lack of judges and courtrooms. Those dismissals – mostly in misdemeanor cases – were upheld in a unanimous late-autumn decision by the state’s highest court, which rejected an appeal from the county’s district attorney, Rod Pacheco. Pacheco argued that when the speedy trial time limit is almost up, criminal cases should get priority over all others, and should thus be heard by judges who normally deal with juvenile offenders, child custody, divorces, probate matters and other civil trials.

But the high court, in one of George’s last pre-retirement decisions, ruled that doing this could impair the courts’ duty to “provide for fair administration of justice…and thus would be unconstitutional.”

While Riverside County in mid-2009 stopped “last day” dismissals with a new court-management system, the entire state is now on notice that without hundreds of new judges, dismissals of criminal cases will surely become commonplace over the next few years.

Failure to find adequate financing for state government, then, means both Schwarzenegger and recent legislatures failed in their basic responsibilities, if protecting public safety is one of the prime functions of government, an assertion Gov.-elect Jerry Brown often made during the fall election season.

Health care for persons who can’t afford insurance is also a form of protecting public safety. Not caring for them can cause epidemics. Building safe highways and hiring enough police and firefighters are other forms of protecting public safety. So is assuring clean drinking water and getting rid of smog. Plus, voters via the 1988 Proposition 98 decided that public education should be the highest priority for state government.

In lean times, some of these major functions have been cut back, one reason why police forces are operating with fewer officers than they’d like and roads are far more potholed than drivers would prefer.

But when courts release criminals for lack of judges and those decisions stand up on appeal, more alarm bells than ever should be ringing in Sacramento and in the ears of every Californian.

Which means it may be time for voters to pay attention when they’re asked to approve new taxes of some kind in a special election that’s almost certain to come this spring.

The bottom line: This is an entirely new kind of problem for California, and the state will become an unsafe place to live if the voters opt to let it go on either in Riverside County or anywhere else.

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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