DO STATE CAMPUSES CONDONE ANTI-SEMITISM?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“DO STATE CAMPUSES CONDONE ANTI-SEMITISM?”

Imagine the outcry if students on a university campus in California set up “checkpoints” to find out whether students with tan complexions are really African-Americans, or whether students heard conversing in Spanish are citizens or illegal immigrants. Screams of protest would rise if students set up similar barriers to check whether olive-complected schoolmates are outfitted with suicide bombs, or if anyone stopped students of any type demanding to know their sexual orientation.

Cries of bigotry would be deafening – and accurate.

But when Muslim student groups at UC Berkeley in 2010 dressed in combat fatigues and carrying fake but genuine-looking weapons manned such checkpoints and demanded that passing students tell them if they were Jewish? No outcry, no protest.

Nothing at all. Not a peep from the large corps of university administrators. Not a move by campus police, even when a counter-demonstrator was whacked with a shopping cart. No demonstrations anywhere.

The only action came from two students who filed a lawsuit charging that Berkeley administrators disregard intimidation by Arab students and foster a climate of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, the checkpoints have continued sporadically on campus.

Now a federal court says any attempt to stop them would “raise serious First Amendment issues.” So, implied U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco last month, campuses can ban use of “hate speech” like the N-word and anti-gay smears, but outright physical attempts to intimidate Jewish students and impinge on their walking space are OK.

This, of course, all comes in the guise of protest against policies of the Israeli government. But no one stops students to see if they are Arab citizens of Israel. No one asks whether Jewish students are Israelis. For those who dislike or hate Israel, all Jews are fair game. That’s also true around the world, where synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses from Argentina to France and New York to Los Angeles have been victims of pro-Palestinian bombings and other vandalism, regardless of whether they had any link to the government of Israel.

Which takes this phenomenon beyond the realm of political protest and into anti-Semitism.

Then there’s Cal State Northridge, where mathematics Prof. David Klein maintains a page on the college web server devoted to calumnies against Israel (http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/boycott.html). It’s laughable to believe that taxpayers who fund that server intend it to be a platform for one-sided political rhetoric from a faculty member specializing in mathematical physics, teacher education and standardized testing.

As an aside, if it’s true, as Klein says on his publicly-funded page, that “Israel is the most racist state in the world at this time,” why does Israel offer unlimited sanctuary to black African refugees trekking on foot from Darfur in the south Sudan who defy Egyptian threats to shoot them if they continue trying to reach Israel by crossing the Sinai desert?

But Cal State Northridge lets Klein keep using its server even when he makes no sense at all, with the campus’ retiring president, Jolene Koester, giving it an official OK.

There is also Cal State Long Beach, which does nothing to restrain psychology Prof. Kevin McDonald, labeled for years as an anti-Semite by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other civil rights groups. McDonald, says Wikipedia, claims that Jews, “conspire to out-compete non-Jews for resources while undermining the power and self-confidence of the (non-Jewish) majorities in Europe and America whom he insists Jews seek to dispossess.”

McDonald told this column last year his work isn’t anti-Semitism, but “science.” In fact, it resembles the pseudo-science Nazis used to justify the Holocaust. But McDonald uses the cover of academic freedom to stay on the public payroll with a six-figure salary. Does anyone think this could happen if he had spent his career vilifying blacks or Latinos or gays or women?

The only significant recent exception to the pattern of essentially condoning on-campus anti-Semitism came last year at UC Irvine, where 11 members of the school’s Muslim Student Union repeatedly interrupted and heckled Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren during a 2010 speech, orchestrating their outbursts to make sure they continued even when some of shouters were forcibly ejected from the auditorium.

The 11 faced university discipline and ten later were convicted of misdemeanor offenses despite claiming they were simply exercising their right to free speech.

The UC Irvine outcome was far from typical in a state where public universities host and help fund dozens of conferences that nominally look only at ways to eliminate Israel as a nation. Hardly anyone denies those events, on UC campuses from Berkeley and UCLA to Davis and San Diego, along with Cal State campuses like San Diego State and Northridge, leave many Jewish students feeling threatened.

Two key questions emerge for top administrators: Even if hate speech were allowed, why are state funds being used for these activities? And why are blatantly political messages permitted, even encouraged, on publicly-funded Web sites?

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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 BUDGET WOULDN'T LOOK VERY DIFFERENT WITH WHITMAN

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“STATE BUDGET WOULDN'T LOOK VERY DIFFERENT WITH WHITMAN"

Now that Jerry Brown has gone public with the second attempt of his latest turn as governor to deliver a balanced budget, it’s fair to speculate about how different things might be today if he’d lost to Meg Whitman, his billionaire 2010 Republican opponent.

The answer: Not very, mostly because it’s unlikely any governor could make many different choices. Most variations would likely be the consequence of having a Republican governor committed to the standard GOP no-new-taxes pledge pitted against solid Democratic majorities in both houses of the state Legislature.

In brief, it’s doubtful legislative Democrats, beholden as they are to labor union campaign donors and liberal interest groups, would accept some of the very same cuts they’ve agreed to under Brown.

Make no mistake, those lawmakers are unhappy with the budget slashing Brown conducted last year. Some – most notably state Senate President Darryl Steinberg – say they won’t go along with the further social service and education reductions in Brown’s newest financial plan until they see what state government’s cash flow looks like two or three months from now.

But they’re not digging in their heels against Brown, as they might have with Whitman, the former eBay executive now ensconced at the helm of the Hewlett-Packard computer firm in Palo Alto. Yes, Brown’s plan balances the budget mostly at the expense of the poor, the elderly and students. But few come out and call him inhumane, as they would label any Republican doing the same things.

There are, of course, areas where differences would be certain. For one, over his two budget plans, Brown has made either real or proposed cuts of more than half a billion dollars to the University of California and California State University systems. Most of that money will be exacted from students and their parents in the form of jacked-up tuition and fees, as the state’s level of support for higher education ebbs to an all-time low. Plus, Brown threatens to cut another $4 billion-plus from public elementary and high schools unless voters approve a tax increase next fall. Not exactly the “education governor.”

Whitman, by contrast, pledged to “invest $1 billion” in those same public university systems, promising to get the money via “savings from welfare and other budgetary reforms.” Of course, it’s questionable whether she could have made changes of that scale over the objections of the Legislature, so the result might have been a stalemate, with the UC and CSU systems winding up with about their previous levels of support. Either way, they would be better off today had Whitman won. So would elementary and high schools, where Whitman probably would not even have tried to eliminate or delay transitional kindergartens for children born between September and December, something Brown now proposes.

But welfare recipients and in-home health care clients and providers might be even worse off than they've been under Brown. Whitman, for example, vowed to blue-pencil entirely the in-home care program and essentially let helpless and often penniless elderly and paraplegic persons somehow try to fend for themselves. Perhaps she believed, as Republican Congressman Ron Paul of Texas has claimed in several of his party’s presidential debates, that “volunteers would come forward” to do the job. Reality is there might have been some such volunteers, but only a fraction of what it would take to replace the entire program.

In this area,Brown hasn’t behaved very differently from what Whitman outlined. His budgeteers tried to axe the in-home care program last year only to see legislative Democrats revive it, although to a lesser extent and expense than its previous form. Brown also cut the state’s welfare-to-work program substantially and proposes to chop it more. He seeks, for one thing, to end welfare payments for parents who don’t meet work requirements after 24 months, rather than the current four years. Combined with his projected cut to child care subsidies, that would lop more than $1 billion from the next budget, just about what Whitman said she would transfer to the colleges.

All of which means that in his new incarnation, Brown does not exactly fit into the “tax-and-spend” liberal category, as Republicans often claim. Plainly, he is also no slave to the unions that largely paid for his campaign (ask unionized workers at state prisons, where more than 3,000 jobs may be eliminated). And it means that a Whitman administration, had she tried to keep her campaign promises, might not have been all that different for almost everyone except university students and professors.

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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

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