CONFUSION, CONTRADICTION ON GASOLINE PRICE GOUGING

 CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “CONFUSION, CONTRADICTION ON GASOLINE PRICE GOUGING”

 

At every level of government, there are times when it seems the left hand has no clue what the right hand is doing. Nov. 8 might become one of those confounding times.

 

That’s the date – just three days after the presidential election – reserved by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) for a decision on whether to toughen state rules on the carbon intensity of fuels. The fuel of concern here is gasoline.

 

The more carbon oil refineries bake into the gas they produce, the more greenhouse gas emissions most car engines will spew, thus increasing smog. It has been CARB’s fervent mission since the 1960s to reduce smog in California’s air. That function is even enshrined in the federal Clean Air Act of 1970, signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon.

 

The problem is that toughening up California’s low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) will make gasoline more expensive. No one knows just how much more expensive, though, and CARB says it is not equipped to analyze what the effect will be on retail gasoline prices.

 

Most estimates, however, suggest a 65 cent per gallon increase if the LCSF is made a lot stricter, as proposed. That would come on top of California’s already high gas prices, which consistently run about $1.20 above the national average.

 

Nobody wants this, especially as California and the nation recover from a strong bout of general inflation.

 

At the very same time, the special legislative session called by Gov. Gavin Newsom this fall to counter gasoline price gouging by refiners has finished its work.

 

Newsom, not incidentally, appoints all CARB board members, and he can fire them anytime. But as he supposedly seeks to lower prices with one hand at the legislative level, an agency he can absolutely control may adopt a tactic guaranteed to increase prices.

 

If that’s not a confused contradiction, it’s hard to see what might be.

 

Newsom has taken heat from several members of Congress from both parties and from the governors of Nevada and Arizona (one Republican, one Democrat), for his plan – passed by the state Assembly and Senate – forcing refineries to maintain significant new reserves of gasoline for use at times when they shut down for maintenance or occasional emergencies.

 

Nevada and Arizona both get most of their gas from California refineries, and their governors fear creating a large reserve will drive pump prices up in those states, both now featuring a host of California emigres.

 

They’re probably wrong, because the reserve would not appear instantly, but gradually. Gas would be pumped into it at times of surplus, not when supplies are tight.

 

While the other governors’ concern is probably groundless, the new reserves are proving politically useful for some in this era of fearmongering politicos. Meanwhile, there is no doubt whatever that a severely lowered LCFS would raise prices.

 

So it’s high time Newsom tells his appointees to hold off on a stricter LCFS. Since he appoints the board members scheduled to vote on this, he can easily and properly tell them at least to delay their action until they know exactly how much it will cost consumers.

 

It's true that CARB does not usually worry about consumer costs, as it is supposed to deal almost solely with air quality and not what it costs. But for CARB to raise gas prices at the very moment Newsom seeks to steady them legislatively makes no sense at all.

 

Besides, there is no great urgency, no public pressure, to lower the LCFS just now, at least nothing like the urgency of the 1960s and 1970s, when banks of smoggy brown air hung over entire regions like Southern California, the Central Valley and (to a lesser degree) the San Francisco Bay Area. Ambient air is cleaner here now. Electric cars produce no smog, hybrids produce only a little and even gasoline engines spew much less than they once did, causing the browned clouds to become much more rare.

 

So it’s time Newsom stays his left hand while his right hand works on preventing gasoline price gouging. To proceed as now scheduled borders on insanity.

 e

 

 

 

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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

THE STRONG FACULTY LINK TO PRO-HAMAS DEMONSTRATIONS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

 

“THE STRONG FACULTY LINK TO PRO-HAMAS DEMONSTRATIONS”

 

More than 80 percent of Americans favor Israel over the Palestinian Hamas terror group in their ongoing conflict. Among college-age Americans, more than 57 percent favor Israel.

 

That’s according to a recent Harvard CAPS-Harris poll reported by the Center for American Political Studies.

 

Which raises the question of why pro-Palestinian protestors have dominated the campus scene in California and nationwide, staging far more rallies, setting up all encampments, occupying buildings and threatening and committing far more violent acts than their pro-Israel counterparts.

 

Now the AMCHA Initiative, a Santa Cruz-based group that has tracked campus antisemitism since the earliest years of this century, has found at least a partial explanation: It’s the faculty.

 

More specifically, it’s an on-campus group called Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), whose collegiate chapters and membership ballooned just after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas incursion into Israel that massacred more than 1,200 persons and took 251 hostages, many of whom Hamas killed in captivity.

 

FJP exists to further activities of the Hamas-linked college group Students for Justice in Palestine, whose anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrations mushroomed on Oct. 8, 2023, just one day after the massacre and more than one week before any Israeli troops entered Gaza in their current war with Hamas.

In a detailed study of protests at 100 universities, AMCHA found the number of demonstrations, the time encampments lasted and the number of incidents involving death threats and threats of violence against Jewish students was vastly higher on campuses with FJP chapters than those without.

 

This was true nationally and in California, where FJP and its affiliates have UC chapters at the Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz campuses, as well as at Stanford and USC, most of which saw lengthy encampments and building takeovers.

 

The study found incidents involving violet physical assaults of Jews on campuses were 7.3 times more likely at schools with an FJP chapter than those with none, like Santa Clara University and many Cal State campuses.

 

Death threats against Jews labelled “Zionists” were 3.4 times as common at colleges with FJP chapters, whose membership at California schools ranges from seven to 40 professors per campus.

 

FJP formally has two main purposes: to promote the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement designed to isolate Israeli universities and their faculty, and to purge all Zionist expression from their campuses.

 

Here’s some of how that played out at UC Santa Barbara, in a student’s description of one of many campus meetings about the Israel-Hamas war:

 

“For the Jewish students in that room, the betrayal in what a Black speaker said was palpable. (Jews) were framed as oppressors, even though it was their people who had been slaughtered just weeks before, over 1,200 lives, most of them Jewish, lost in the worst massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” they said.

 

“The reality of that horror was ignored. Instead, the speaker, president of (an) organization that…celebrated the Oct. 7 invasion, portrayed Palestinians as the only victims, as though the grief of the Jewish students…was offensive. (His) narrative left Jewish students stunned. They were grieving, heartbroken, and terrified, and now they were being painted as aggressors in a story where they had just buried their dead. This was soul-crushing.”

 

That experience, multiplied many times over, is one reason many Jewish students have transferred away from campuses they attended last year.

 

In a way, their leaving is a victory for FJP, one of whose stated goals is to squelch all disagreement with its views. Another stated goal is to dismantle many schools’ foreign study programs linked to Israeli universities.

 

Administrators at UC, Stanford and other campuses this fall adopted some of AMCHA’s suggested safeguard and enforcement mechanisms aimed at keeping politics out of classrooms, while leaving campuses open to peaceful expression of all views.

 

It's too early to know how this will play out, but an official FJP statement said “the work to educate and organize (students) will grow in new ways.”

 

One big question: How many students will be willing or able to risk their grades and futures by defying the views of some of their professors and how many will go along to get along?

 

    -30-

    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”

SOLANO COUNTY PLAN COULD HAVE CHANGED HOW CALIFORNIA DEVELOPS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“SOLANO COUNTY PLAN COULD HAVE CHANGED HOW CALIFORNIA DEVELOPS”

 

A measure allowing voters in Solano County this fall to approve – or not – a vast new development about 45 miles northeast of San Francisco just might have been the most influential local ballot proposition California has seen in decades. If it had gone forward.

 

This measure would have allowed a brand-new full-scale city to be built by a corps of billionaires as a partial solution to the housing shortage that has wracked the state’s lifestyle and politics for years, threatening both the nature of many neighborhoods and the independence of city governments.

 

But the billionaires pulled their proposition from the ballot at midsummer because they thought it might lose.

 

Instead of piecemeal infill developments and replacement of mini-malls and other relatively small buildings with huge high-rises containing hundreds of apartments and a few stores, this plan could have seen an entire new city plopped down on open space and farmland.

 

Land for this already belonged to an outfit called “California Forever,” which quietly spent years buying up pieces of property south and west of Suisun City, Fairfield and Rio Vista, eventually aggregating 50,000 acres. The billionaires, who did this gradually in order not to drive the price of land to forbidding levels, include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist Mark Andreessen, Lauren Powell Jobs, widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek, with Sramek now the project CEO.

 

Their purchases at one point had federal officials suspecting foreign agents might be angling for access to intelligence about the nearby Travis Air Force Base, a key facility for military flights to the Far East.

 

But this was no spy adventure. Rather, it’s a land use gamble, with the investors banking on the 259,000 registered voters of a medium-sized county about midway between San Francisco and Sacramento to okay a gigantic new kind of development. It won't go forward this year; but maybe next time.

 

The proposed new city was to be completely walkable and bikeable and might eventually house as many as 400,000 persons. So large a development by itself could put a sizeable dent in the state’s housing shortage, promoters say. They said they had arranged with a dozen potential employers to provide at least 15,000 jobs for residents in fields from retail sales to robotics.

 

Instead of parks and schools going in gradually while new residents filter into a raw development, all 17,500 acres in this one were to be ready almost simultaneously – stores, homes, apartments, parks, schools and offices all opening about the same time.

 

The billionaires also promised a $500 million fund to help new residents make down payments on homes. They planned a new sports stadium (are you listening, former Oakland A’s, now that Las Vegas shows signs of stadium hesitation?). Public transit would exist from the get-go.

 

It all would be a huge contrast with the way other cities – even master-planned ones like Irvine in Orange County – arose, with their sometimes haphazard placement of buildings, homes, parks, schools and other services.

 

The notion of using currently open land contrasts sharply with the trend of the last 10 years, stressing ever-greater urban density and the remaking of cities under threats of state legal action or funding cutoffs for services like police and sewers.

 

If the Solano County plan eventually happens, some of the vast desert spaces north and east of Los Angeles might also eventually find themselves hosting large new developments.

 

That’s the way much of California was built, long before politicians like Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco successfully campaigned to make urban sprawl political anathema.

 

But voters in Solano County apparently were set to say no to all this. Now no one is quite sure what happens next in a high-stakes story that could eventually affect not only Solano County but the entire state, whose development priorities could stand some major changes.

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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

A SUPREME COURT-ENABLED ATTACK ON CALIFORNIA’S HOMELESS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“A SUPREME COURT-ENABLED ATTACK ON CALIFORNIA’S HOMELESS”

 

It’s been largely obscured by the mainstream media’s justifiable and almost continuous focus on the ongoing presidential election. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s  summertime decision allowing cities and counties to take down and remove encampments erected by homeless persons has expanded into a growing campaign to virtually ban them from public spaces.

 

If the misery index of the homeless, 186,000 strong in California’s last semi-official count, was already nearing intolerable levels, new tactics authorized by local governments around the state seem about to turn the homeless into the hopeless.

 

This applies even in some cities once well known for their steadfast kindness toward and tolerance of the unhoused, including Berkeley and Santa Monica.

 

Just last month, on the same Tuesday evening Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debated in distant Philadelphia, Santa Monica’s city council voted 4-3 to eliminate a section of its anti-camping ordinance that has allowed homeless individuals to use pillows, blankets and bedrolls while sleeping outdoors. This includes sleeping bags, which church and charity volunteers have often distributed free at seasonal homeless shelters.

 

So the ultra-poor homeless populace – once able to get regular meals served on the lawn of the Santa Monica City Hall – now may be compelled to rest their heads on curbs while sleeping uncovered except by cardboard boxes in driving, near freezing January rains. Unless they are simply forced to keep moving along.

 

Local police say the revised law won’t change how they enforce the anti-camping measure, claiming they mostly use it to regulate encampments in public spaces.

 

But no one will likely know the full impact of the change until winter, when rains in recent years have flooded many of the homeless out of what little shelter their tents and tarps could provide.

 

Remember, this is a populace composed in large measure of the mentally ill, drug and alcohol addicts, persons suffering from PTSD and women driven from their homes by domestic violence, few of whom would be involved if they had enough money to avoid the situation.

 

Santa Monica is far from alone. In just over three months since the Supreme Court ruling, at least 17 other California locales -- and counting -- have taken similar actions. The new laws allow police to arrest homeless individuals apparently violating anti-camping laws, which vary only slightly from place to place.

 

They raise major questions: If the unhoused can’t camp on sidewalks or in parks, where are these virtually penniless folks to go? How long can they survive?

 

“Our residents are demanding a solution,” said the mayor of Vista, in northern San Diego County. His city has reactivated a 1968 ordinance banning encampments in the city.

 

In Berkeley, some local merchants don’t care where the homeless go, so long as it’s away from them.

 

A group of businesses filed suit this fall against the city government over homeless encampments near them. They claim financial harm from encampments due to unsanitary conditions, safety issues and “increased criminal activity,” as some encampment denizens threaten or intimidate potential customers.

 

Berkeley officials did not comment on the litigation, but its city council adopted a new policy allowing city officials to take down tent cities even when all indoor shelter beds are occupied if an encampment is a fire or health hazard.

 

No one knows where the tent residents might go if this should be enforced. Businesses and courts offer no solution.

 

Neither does anyone else. The city of Los Angeles this fall issued a report saying it would take ten years and $20 billion to solve its homeless problem. That would involve building 36,000 permanent housing units for homeless persons with chronic health conditions and 25,000 more apartments for very low-income residents.

 

The plan, not yet adopted by city council vote, assumes the city would continue operating shelters with 17,000 beds for several more years while all that is built. No one knows where funding might come from, especially now, with a major homeless housing operator having recently gone broke without accounting for millions of public dollars it received.

 

It’s an almost intractable problem, with few proven villains in sight, but plenty of very visible victims about to see their situation become much more difficult.

       

     -30-       
Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

STATE BALLOT PROVIDES PLENTY OF INCENTIVE TO VOTE

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“STATE BALLOT PROVIDES PLENTY OF INCENTIVE TO VOTE”

 

There are occasional elections where voters are not asked to decide very much – as in last March’s primary where the presidential votes were not close and it was hard to find other significant issues.

 

Things are very different this fall.

 

Not only does the California ballot feature a unique presidential choice with a former prosecutor facing off against a convicted felon who's also a former President, but control of the House of Representatives may hinge on several congressional races here and the list of ballot propositions contains some that could create big changes for many people.

 

Voting begins soon, as mail-in ballots will start hitting mailboxes around California within the next two weeks.

 

Plenty has been written here and elsewhere about the congressional choices, where some races involve Republicans who have won repeatedly in districts where Democrats hold registration advantages. This means efforts by both parties to get their voters to actually vote could decide who will control policymaking in Congress for at least the next two years.

 

Polls indicate California’s Senate race between Democrat Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey is no real contest, with Schiff holding leads that average about 20 percent in virtually every poll.

 

But the statewide questions posed by 10 propositions provide fodder aplenty for voters to consider while marking their ballots.

 

For some, the most controversial of these is Proposition 5, placed on the ballot by state legislators who want to make it easier for cities and counties to raise money for affordable housing projects and infrastructure like sewers and bridges.

 

Since 1978, it has taken a two-thirds majority vote of local voters to pass bonds for such projects, other than schools, which for more than 10 years have needed only a 55 percent majority to raise money for buildings and other causes.

 

Prop. 5 would lower the passage threshold to that same 55 percent for many non-school projects, marking a fundamental change in 1978’s tax-limiting Proposition 13. This one is strongly opposed by the tax-fighting Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.

 

There’s also Proposition 6, another issue placed on the ballot by legislators. It would end forced labor by convicts in prisons and jails. If it passes, prisons could no longer compel inmates – no matter what crimes they’ve committed – to work. Prisoners could not be penalized for refusing assignments.

 

Of course, inmates could still get credit toward earlier-than-normal release for things like serving on fire-fighting crews, but they would have to be paid much more than the current pennies per hour.

 

That would mark a major change in prison life, giving convicts more choices and the chance at having even more empty time to while away than now.

 

Rent control is also back on the ballot, after voters twice earlier voted down statewide controls. Under Proposition 33, local governments would not need approval from their own voters to enact controls on residential property, not even on relatively new units built since 1995 that are now exempt from most rent control. The concept of vacancy decontrol of rents, allowing them to rise to market rates when tenants move out, would also disappear; local officials could keep controls in effect even when units are vacated.

 

Meanwhile, Proposition 34 goes after the tax-exempt status of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, aiming to strip its non-profit status. It would also allow Medi-Cal to negotiate many drug prescription prices for its clients, just as the federal Medicare system recently did with several drugs used nationwide, including insulin.

 

And Proposition 32 would raise minimum wages statewide to $18 per hour starting Jan. 1, less than two months after Election Day.

 

There’s also the ballyhooed Proposition 36, which aims to make felony prosecutions easier to conduct against repeat shoplifters and thieves even if their take from any one episode does not exceed the $950 bottom limit on the value of stolen goods needed for felony processing.

 

At the very least, this all presents a ballot that should be fascinating enough to hold voter interest for the few minutes it takes to mark choices that might affect millions of lives for many years to come.

       

    -30-

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.

 

Suggested pullout quote: “The ballyhooed Proposition 36, aims to make felony prosecutions easier to conduct against repeat shoplifters and thieves.”

POLITICIZING CENSUS: THWARTED TRUMP AIM REAPPEARS IN PROJECT 2025

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“POLITICIZING CENSUS: THWARTED TRUMP AIM REAPPEARS IN PROJECT 2025”

 

There is no 2024 election phenomenon from which former President Donald Trump has tried harder to distance himself than Project 2025, an inch-plus thick manifesto from the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation written largely by former officials in Trump’s 2017-21 administration.

 

“I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposefully. I’m not going to read it,” he said during his Sept. 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

 

But days later, he said of the Heritage Foundation: “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do…when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

 

Every poll shows that when voters hear what’s in Project 2025, the vast majority recoil, reason enough for Trump to deny any link to it.

 

Among other things, the manifesto advocates criminalizing abortion nationwide, increasing some taxes and reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits.

 

But another provision, a direct call to politicize the U.S. Census, will ring bells with many Californians who remember Trump’s effort to do that in 2019, a move that could have cost California many millions of dollars in federal funds.

 

The Constitution says that every 10 years, the Census is to “enumerate” every person in this country, not property owners or voters or citizens or any other category. Just live bodies. The information is then used to divvy up seats in Congress and federal spending in many categories, from grants to police to funding new sewers.

 

Trump was determined during his administration to include a question on citizenship in the Census. Doing that, said opponents, would likely cause many undocumented immigrants who fear deportation to avoid being counted, even if it meant heading out the back door while Census takers knocked on the front one. This threatened to cause a drastic undercount of the undocumented, translating into significantly lower federal support for many programs, from Medi-Cal to assistance for teaching English learners in public schools. It also could have cost California a seat in Congress, because this state hosts more undocumented immigrants than any other, by far, and a severe undercount would show California population as far lower than it is.

 

That would be fine with Project 2025’s authors at the Heritage Foundation. One passage says, “A new (Trump) administration should work to actively engage with conservative groups…to promote response to the decennial Census.”

 

The idea, says Project 2025, would be to ensure that every conservative gets counted. It says nothing about Native Americans, immigrants or low-income communities, groups that reportedly often go undercounted.

 

So Trump’s supporters want to use the next Census to promote their interests, and his. They call themselves conservatives, while seeking to control what young women do with their bodies and the most private of their decisions, the opposite of the small government American conservatism has usually promoted.

 

For California, a positive in all this is that the next Census will not be conducted until 2030, with new congressional district lines effective in 2032. If Trump were elected next month and leaves office as scheduled in January 2029, that would leave plenty of time for a reversal of whatever changes he might attempt in the Census.

 

So this front in Trump’s long campaign to punish Californians for voting against him heavily in 2016, 2020 and maybe in 2024, could at least be delayed and might be avoided altogether despite what the Project 2025 blueprint says.

 

That would not stop him from acting against California on other fronts, like attempting to eliminate the state’s authority to regulate its smog levels and threatening (as recently as this month) to cut emergency services after fires and floods.

 

Should Trump get elected this fall and if his previously attempted plans to change the Census endure until 2030, California could be a big loser, given that the funds at stake cover government nutrition programs, public schools, highways, anti-pollution assistance and much more.

 

That’s just some of what’s at stake in the election that begins very soon.

 

 

    -30-

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

 

Suggested pullout quote: “This is one front in Trump’s long campaign to punish Californians for voting against him heavily in 2016, 2020 and maybe in 2024.”

LARA, NEWSOM APPEAR BENT ON ENRICHING INSURANCE COMPANIES

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

      “LARA, NEWSOM APPEAR BENT ON ENRICHING INSURANCE COMPANIES”

 

        From the way they’re acting, it’s clear Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara believe they have no choice other than caving in to insurance industry blackmail.

 

        Or maybe it’s extortion. Either way, these two supposedly strong and independent officials have been working steadily this year to enrich insurance companies.

 

        When State Farm announced a 30 percent hike in property insurance rates, neither elected official blinked. The same when Allstate and others announced even larger rate increases.

 

        Newsom, at least, has the grace to gripe about inflation at the same time he’s helping cause it. Lara doesn’t even mention the fact that astronomically higher homeowner and business property insurance premiums create burdens on individual citizens just as much as seemingly unending increases in grocery prices.

 

        Here’s the nature of the blackmail/extortion these men face: Insurance companies are steadily canceling more and more property insurance policies in known wildfire areas because, they say, the risks of writing or continuing that kind of coverage in those places are simply too high.

 

        Never mind that they have always in the past written such policies, making strictly local price increases when risks and replacement costs rose. If they now won’t write insurance, homeowners are forced to turn to the state Fair Plan, California’s insurer of last resort, where rates are much higher than even the companies charge.

 

        Newsom, who pushed unsuccessfully over the summer for a new law to greatly speed up processing rate increases, lost out when his plan went nowhere in the state Assembly and Senate.

 

        But…not to worry, Gavin. No sooner had that proposal died than Lara proposed virtually the same thing, but as a regulation, not a law. The essence is the same. The consequences for homeowners and businesses would be the same.

 

        Neither Newsom nor Lara needed to react to insurance company blackmail (“We’ll stop writing any policies in California if we don’t get our way.) by simply caving in. They could have told the companies something like this: If you don’t sell property insurance here, then you won’t be selling any car insurance or life insurance or coverage on luxury items, either.

 

        That’s called linkage, and California had it for earthquake insurance until the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. Until then, companies that did not sell quake insurance couldn’t sell other coverage in this state.

 

     But then-Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush set a precedent for caving in to the companies. Rather than fighting back, he lobbied the Legislature to create the California Earthquake Authority, which has had the good fortune to see its reserves pile up over 30 years in which the state saw no urban quakes of magnitude above 6.0 on the Richter Scale.

 

        The latest in Lara’s series of moves aiming to placate and bring more profit to insurance companies is his attempt to bring Newsom’s rate-hike speedup plan to reality via the back door.

 

        Primarily because of public hearings aimed at letting consumer groups shed light on rate increase requests, it usually takes some months to get a premium increase through. When rate hikes have been forced through faster, with only sketchy hearings, the companies have usually gotten about 97 percent of what they ask. But with full hearings, according to the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group, that percentage has been cut by about 25 percent.

 

        Even though the rate-making process takes about the same time with or without full hearings, Consumer Watchdog claims hearings have cut the prices paid by customers just over $6 billion over the last few years.

 

        The group says the 1988 Proposition 103 – which also made the insurance commissioner an elected post – requires full-scale hearings. Consumer Watchdog’s founder, Harvey Rosenfield, wrote that initiative.

 

        The bottom line: While Lara says “We do not have the luxury of time” in processing rate increases, reality suggests following the full procedures its author says are required by Prop. 103. This saves consumers money while not damaging the companies. Why, then, would Lara be trying to squelch that process if he’s really acting for consumers and not for the companies whose excesses he’s supposed to rein in?

       

 

-30-

    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