In the wake of a turbulent election season and a disturbing new study on the credulity of many political news consumers, a handful of California legislators have put forward new bills designed to ensure the state’s public schools make students aware that not everything purporting to be factual reportage is as true or unbiased as it seems. Although “fake news” has swiftly become a recognized problem, it has also become a political football — a label with which to swiftly discredit opponents or undermine criticism. 

Wave of worry

“A bill from Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-San Rafael, will ask the state to adopt high school history curricula based on a recent national intelligence assessment that Russia tried to influence the election by producing fake news and hacking into Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. “Another bill, introduced last week by Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, would require schools to teach children ‘media literacy’ — including how to tell the difference between ‘fake news’ and real news.”

“During the final, critical months of the 2016 presidential campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax websites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions and comments on social media,” SB135 read, according to the paper. 

Additionally, lawmakers will consider a companion “fake news” bill, AB155, introduced by Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, D-Los Angeles, which “would require the state to establish curriculum standards and frameworks to teach ‘civic online reasoning’ to middle- and high-schoolers,” as the Washington Post reported.

“Ordinary people once relied on publishers, editors and subject matter experts to vet the information they consumed, but information shared on the internet is disseminated rapidly and often without editorial oversight, making it easier for fake news to reach a large audience,” his bill suggested. “When fake news is repeated, it becomes difficult for the public to discern what’s real,” Gomez said in a statement, according to the paper. “These attempts to mislead readers,” he warned, “pose a direct threat to our democracy.”

From bias to ignorance

The line has blurred in recent years between factual reporting and deliberately misleading or partial content, with partisans on opposite ends of the ideological divide hurling contending accusations. In addition to fears that outside propaganda could impact voting patterns at home, the credibility of both mainstream and alternative outlets — online and off — has come under question.

So too has the responsiveness of American schools and universities to the problem and its sources, which reach deeper than partisan preferences or agendas. “In November, a Stanford University study found that 82 percent of high school students surveyed could not distinguish between a reported news story and an advertisement,” the Guardian observed. “During last year’s election, rumors and false reports spread widely, and in the aftermath of the vote partisans began to accuse each other of propagating ‘fake news.'” In introducing his legislation, Gomez invoked the Stanford report as reason for action:

“President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump have both denounced ‘fake news’ in recent weeks, to different purposes. In November, Obama warned that democracies would be threatened by the spread of misinformation and false reports, and by the discrediting of once trusted news sources. This week, Trump seized on the phrase ‘fake news’ to characterize unsubstantiated allegations about him, blaming BuzzFeed and CNN in particular.”

The debate over what counts as fake news, and who gets to decide, has helped ensure that California’s new bills won’t sail through the Legislature without at least some criticism. State Sen. John Moorlach, R-Costa Mesa, for instance, called Levine’s bill “petty” and “showmanship.”

“I’d just be happy if we taught kids how to read and write and do arithmetic,” he told the Mercury News. 

The lawsuit, filed in Boston federal court, was prompted by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2013 in a case involving the University of Texas’ admissions practices. The court didn’t invalidate the Texas system, but it sent the case back to lower courts with an admonition that race had to truly be only one of several factors in weighing close calls in admission decisions — not the crucial factor.

The Harvard lawsuit, launched by the Project on Fair Representation and the Students for Fair Admissions, targets the same practice that has drawn fire at UCLA and UC Berkeley: a “holistic” evaluation of applicants’ merits that considers how much they have had to overcome and their personal qualities, among other factors.

In his recent book, “Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA,” UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose found black students were three times as likely as white students and twice as likely as Asian students to gain admission under “holistic” grounds. Proposition 209 sponsor Ward Connerly, a former UC regent, has long charged that UCLA, UC Berkeley and other UC campuses manipulate admissions to get around the race-neutral requirement of his 1996 law.

The numbers in the Harvard case seem to suggest that an Asian student quota exists. Over the past 20 years, Asian-Americans have comprised 20 percent of the freshman class with little variation.  As the Project on Fair Admissions — sponsor of the Harvard suit  — notes, over the past 20 years, the number of high-performing Asian-American high school students has doubled.

But Harvard’s freshman admissions suggest quotas for all races. In recent years, blacks have made up around 12 percent of freshmen, Latinos around 13 percent and whites and decline to state students a little more than half.

The numbers for UC’s top schools also suggest a de facto quota system. At UCLA, Asian-Americans consistently make up one-third of freshmen; whites about 27 percent; Latinos about 20 percent; and blacks about 4 percent. At Berkeley, Asian-Americans consistently make up about 40 percent of freshmen; whites about 30 percent; Latinos about 12 percent; and blacks about 3 percent. (The UC numbers don’t add up to 100 percent because they don’t have racial breakdowns for international student admissions.)

Asian-American state lawmakers seem satisfied with this status quo and strongly opposed Latino and African-American lawmakers’ interest in weakening Proposition 209 last year. But Groseclose’s research found an interesting fact that could someday become a hot potato in California politics. “Holistic” admissions policies are supposed to weigh to a big degree on the disadvantages facing potential enrollees. Yet …

… race outweighs socioeconomic status, according to Groseclose. For instance, black applicants whose families had incomes exceeding $100,000 were about twice as likely to be accepted in round two [after holistic reviews] as Asian and white kids whose families make just $30,000 and had similar test scores, grades and essays.

While Harvard is a private institution, it receives tens of millions of dollars in federal funding with strings attached, making it vulnerable to lawsuits over admissions. Thus, virtually all U.S. universities are at risk of being sued over practices that appear discriminatory.

The Project on Fair Representation intends to sue other universities over what it sees as rigid racial quotas.

It’s interesting to note that incoming freshmen at Yale are also 20 percent Asian-American, as are those at Princeton.

In the most recent numbers from Stanford, Asian-Americans made up 23 percent of the undergraduate student body.

The first case in which the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on affirmative action in college admissions was the 1978 Bakke case, involving the University of California. More information on Bakke is here. The court found affirmative action to be constitutional — but not the use of racial quotas.

For the fourth year running, San Diego had the lowest murder rate among the country’s ten largest cities.

The department investigated 32 homicides, down from 39, giving San Diego, the eighth largest city in the nation, a murder rate of 2.4 killings per 100,000 residents, according to data compiled by U-T San Diego.

By comparison, Phoenix, which has a slightly larger population than San Diego, had a murder rate of 7.7 per 100,000, while San Antonio, another city of similar size, had a rate of 7.3. Philadelphia had the highest rate of the nation’s ten top cities, with 16 killings for every 100,000 residents.

But this good news has an unusual subtext: If San Diego is so safe, why is there bipartisan agreement that more must be done to widely boost compensation for current San Diego police officers and to make the force bigger? This story is from Feb. 6:

San Diego and its police officers labor union announced on Friday a tentative agreement for compensation increases that aim to help reverse recent struggles with recruiting new officers and retaining existing staff.

The five-year pact doesn’t include salary hikes until July 2018, but most officers would see large jumps in their take-home pay starting this July because the $92 million deal includes sharp increases in benefits for veteran employees.

Those include thousands in higher stipends for uniforms, additional holiday pay and lower health insurance contributions.

“We’ve had a real crisis when it comes to recruiting and retaining some of our best and brightest police officers,” Mayor Kevin Faulconer said at a Friday morning press conference in City Heights announcing the deal. “That ends today.”

The recruitment and retention issues are backed by the numbers. The San Diego Police Department has about 180 budgeted, unfilled positions, and the agency says 249 officers left the force from July 2013 through last month. An independent survey shows the city has low police pay relative to other jurisdictions.

But if the city is enjoying such a safe run, why would its leaders consider the status quo unacceptable?

We’re in a strange new era when it comes to the social sciences and crime, which has gone down for three decades for reasons that researchers cannot agree on. Old theories about declining exposure to lead in childhood, increased incarceration because of tougher sentencing laws and the increase in abortions of unwanted children after the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling are still around, but there are plenty of new ideas. Vox last month cited 16 different explanations offered by researchers with varied backgrounds and different levels of hard evidence.

Police union supported by both parties

In San Diego, however, this esoteric debate never came up. Instead, the police union’s strong ties with Republican Mayor Kevin Faulconer, the Democrats who make up the majority of the City Council and the city’s downtown establishment resulted in a consensus that more, better-paid officers are needed.

Faulconer also needs a less polarized environment at City Hall if he hopes to achieve an agenda that includes funding an expanded convention center, possibly helping build an NFL stadium and bringing coastal prosperity to minority neighborhoods south of Interstate 8. Having a good relationship with by far the city’s most powerful union can only help this agenda.

Outside of San Diego, there is a presumption that Faulconer wants to run someday for statewide office as a moderate, can-do mayor with plenty of Democratic allies. The pay deal with the police union fits this narrative.

But inside the city, Faulconer fits a familar mayoral archetype, not necessarily that of a man with big statewide ambitions. Affable Republican moderates have led the city for most of the last 40  years, from Pete Wilson to (then moderate) Roger Hedgecock to Dick Murphy to Jerry Sanders.

And though currently popular, Faulconer could face a tough re-election fight in 2016. While initial media reports depicted the GOP councilman winning election easily in a February 2014 special election against Democratic Councilman David Alvarez, his final margin of victory was only 5 percent, in an election with poor Democratic turnout.

]]> https://calwatchdog.com/2015/03/09/is-san-diego-safest-big-city-or-having-a-police-crisis/feed/ 8 74874 https://calwatchdog.com/2015/03/08/rocky-chavez-can-a-latino-colonel-beat-kamala-harris/ https://calwatchdog.com/2015/03/08/rocky-chavez-can-a-latino-colonel-beat-kamala-harris/#comments Sun, 08 Mar 2015 17:29:25 +0000 http://calwatchdog.com/?p=74789 The decision of moderate-conservative Assemblyman Rocky Chavez, R-Oceanside, to explore a run for U.S. Senate in 2016 surprised quite a few people in San Diego County. Chavez appeared poised for a long stretch as an unbeatable, influential GOP state lawmaker defending his district’s interests and likely taking a leadership role in the party caucus.

This surprise wasn’t just prompted by Chavez having an unexpectedly ambitious sense of what his electoral possibilities were. It was also the skepticism that a Republican could win statewide office against a glamorous Democratic figure like state Attorney General Kamala Harris. Over the last 16 years, the only GOP statewide candidates to win were mega-celebrity Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 2003 gubernatorial recall, Schwarzenegger in his 2006 re-election bid, and Steve Poizner in his 2006 run for insurance commissioner against widely disliked Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante.

But Chavez, 63, has an ace in hand that most politicians would die to have. He’s a former colonel in the Marine Corps — a much-decorated 28-year veteran. The hope is that this part of his resume peels away Latino, independent and moderate votes from Democrats. It’s why his press releases now routinely refer to him as “Col. Chavez.”

The last well-credentialed Latino Republican candidate for statewide office was Abel Maldonado, a Santa Maria rancher-turned-politician whom Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plucked from the state Senate to serve as lieutenant governor after Democrat John Garamendi was elected to the House of Representatives. In November 2010, seven months after the governor finally managed to face down a contentious Assembly and win Maldonado’s confirmation, the moderate GOPer lost his bid for a full four-year term as lieutenant governor to Gavin Newsom.

Newsom trounced Maldonado 50 percent to 39 percent — by 1.1 million votes — in balloting that saw libertarian candidate Pamela J. Brown gather nearly 6 percent support.

Maldonado had a difficult relationship with the state GOP establishment because of his votes for budget deals and his successful push for a “top-two” primary system that reduces the power of both parties. He also doesn’t have big-money backers, which led him to abandon a 2014 bid for governor.

Chavez will need deep-pockets backers

Chavez has much better party relations and a stronger image. It’s easy to see him wooing — or at least making a plausible case to — deep-pockets backers for a campaign against Harris. Without such backers, he will be a huge underdog.

That’s not just because of Democrats’ basic advantage in statewide elections. Harris also seems a much more formidable candidate then she did in her first run for attorney general as San Francisco DA in 2010, when she beat Los Angeles County DA Steve Cooley by 80,000 votes — less than 1 percent. She became a national figure, and not just because of President Obama’s unusual comments about her attractiveness. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for one example, is a big fan. In 2014, Harris won re-election as attorney general by 1.1 million votes over little-known GOP challenger Ronald Gold.

And she is certain to draw huge funding from big-money interests, only starting with those in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Hollywood/West Los Angeles. The half African-American, half Indian-American attorney is seen as a potential future vice-presidential nominee for Democrats, at the least.

Another California story —  politicians declaring the need for much more spending to repair infrastructure, starting with roads covered with potholes — is now akin to a weekly ritual. Gov. Jerry Brown, Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer are among the many state politicians who have made this case.

But what’s not noted much is that the gas tax shuffle story is directly related to the infrastructure blues story. The reason the rates were adjusted in 2010 was to increase the amount of money raised by gas excise taxes, which can be used in the operating budget, and to reduce the amount of money raised by gas sales taxes. Because of Prop 42 and Prop 1A — two ballot measures that won easy victories from California voters in 2002 and 2006, respectively — gas sales taxes can only be used for road repairs, local transportation projects and a narrow range of needs.

The gas tax swap shifted $1.8 billion from infrastructure and transportation to the general fund. It passed the Legislature on March 4, 2010, on the strength of Democratic votes and with the support of Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Five years later, Atkins is proposing a $52 a year road-user “fee” to raise $2 billion to pay for infrastructure. Her proposal has drawn a mixed to positive reaction from Democrats, some of whom have their own ideas about how to attack infrastructure needs.

But it has also won praise from those who say it’s about time the state government is taking the lead on infrastructure. The context that is rarely included, however, is that the $2 billion annual infrastructure shortfall was essentially created by the state government in 2010 — specifically, by Schwarzenegger and Democrats.

2010 was a brutal year on the budget front; the state’s spending plan for fiscal 2010-11 didn’t past until the 100th day of fiscal 2010-11. But the gas tax diversion would have been much more defensible if it had a sunset provision. Instead, the way the Legislature and Schwarzenegger handled the maneuver created a permanent new source of revenue for general government operations — despite the wishes of California voters who wanted the money spent on roads and transportation projects.

They presume Brown is nervous about the capital-gains revenue rollercoaster as well as the revenue lost when Proposition 30’s temporary sales tax hike expires at the end of 2016 and when its temporary income tax hike expires at the end of 2018. Their solution is to seek to extend the tax hikes, which generated $6.2 billion in fiscal 2013-14.

But another jolt is on the horizon: the cost of the CalSTRS bailout enacted last year, which will ramp up contributions annually for the next six years. The full phase-in is far off. But with 90 percent of the eventual $5 billion annual cost borne by state taxpayers — 20 percent directly and 70 percent indirectly, paid by state-funded local school districts — the bailout tab had Moody’s investor service worried last summer, before it even took effect:

Managing rising pension costs will prove challenging over time because CalSTRS rate increases are back-loaded. School districts face future budgetary stress not only from rising pension costs but from salary and benefit expenditures and programmatic priorities. Further, school districts have minimal revenue flexibility. … Rising pension costs will pressure financial operations and may cause a deterioration in credit quality for some school districts.

LAUSD faces $1.1 billion in new costs in 2020-21

And the California Department of Education’s warnings to local school districts to prepare for a difficult era as the CalSTRS bailout is phased in show that issue is very much on the radar of the Brown administration.

Los Angeles Unified could be near a teachers strike because UTLA rejects the district’s offer of a 5 percent raise as inadequate in a time of healthier revenue. But L.A. Unified leaders emphasize that they face a $1.1 billion bigger pension bill in 2020-21 than the district now pays and have been surprisingly resolute, given the UTLA’s ability to target and defeat board incumbents who are independent.

In the bigger picture, the U-T San Diego reported some districts see the budget problems posed by bailout costs as impossible to address:

Officials in districts throughout California are talking about forming a coalition to explore ways to fix the teacher retirement system without cutting into their own school programs.

As the pension contributions grow, “the things you want and need for educational purposes will take a second seat to funding this retirement system, or paying for utility bills,” said Gary Hamels, assistant superintendent in charge of business services with San Marcos Unified School District.

“It’s going to hit the fan because you’ll have to make a decision — I have to pay this so you can’t buy that,” Hamels said. “We’ll have a situation where there’s demand for some academic improvement but this is where the money is going first.”

CTA and CFT officials have touted renewing the temporary sales and income tax hikes for months. So far, the unions have been quiet about doing anything to address the fiscal turmoil looming in local school districts because of the cost of the pension bailout.

The reaction was harsh in San Diego. Sports columnist and veteran Chargers watcher Kevin Acee likened the announcement to the Chargers being “in bed with a silver and black whore,” a reference to the team’s long and at times ugly rivalry with the Raiders. That characterization was soon toned down, but Acee’s bitterness — and San Diego’s mayor’s bitterness — was still plain:

“It’s now abundantly clear,” San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said in a statement Thursday night, “that while we have been working here in San Diego to create a plan for a new stadium, the Chargers have for some time been making their own plans for moving to Los Angeles. This would amount to abandoning generations of loyal Chargers fans.”

Yeah. That’s right.

No matter how much we try to understand why the Chargers have to do what they’re doing to protect their business interests – and the team is a business – this stinks.

It feels like we’re in the midst of being cheated on.

Sounds ‘like a fabulous pipe dream’

In the Bay Area, the Raiders’ threat to leave was treated skeptically — quite a change from San Diego journalists, many of whom sound as if they believe the team is gone. This is from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Al Saracevic:

Both the Raiders and Chargers are desperately trying to find public or private money to build stadiums in their existing communities. With no legitimate plans forthcoming, it seems like the two NFL franchises are throwing a hail-mary pass to the deep reaches of L.A. County, hoping their professed desire to move will unlock local riches.

Or maybe they really do want to move to Los Angeles. Carson certainly seems to want them.

“If you can’t work it out with your cities, we’ll welcome you here in Carson,” said Congresswoman Janice Hahn (D-Los Angeles). “ We’ll give you a new stadium. We’ll give you fans like you’ve never seen before. This is not going to be at the public expense. This is not going to be taxpayer dollars. Chargers and Raiders, come on down.”

Sounds fabulous. Like a fabulous pipe dream. While the two teams announced they have actually bought land in Carson to help facilitate the plan, concrete financing is a long way away. And the absence of team executives at Friday’s press conference was downright mind-boggling.

The difference may be that San Diego journalists have considered the chance of the team leaving to be credible for several years. In the Bay Area, the Raiders are considered dysfunctional even years after the death of controversial, irascible owner Al Davis.

This L.A. Times excerpt addresses the initial developments:

Frustrated by the prospect of another do-nothing stadium task force, the Chargers on Monday warned San Diego to either step up or step aside in the pursuit of a new NFL venue, and again raised the specter of a relocation to Los Angeles. …

Fabiani wrote any stadium proposals should pass a series of “real world tests,” such as it needs to have a strong chance of being approved by the required two-thirds of votes, needs to have the support of the mayor and a majority of the city council, and should “recognize the economic realities of our local marketplace and of the NFL.”

Among those realities, Fabiani wrote, the Chargers cannot be expected to generate the robust preferred-seat-license revenues the San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys did when building their stadiums.

Members of the task force offered mild reactions to the Chargers’ bluntness. But Fabiani’s response was to raise new questions about the competence and integrity of the city task force.

“Latest salvo in a string of concerns”

This is from the U-T San Diego account posted Tuesday afternoon:

Public subsidies are unlikely

For 14 years, the team — owned by billionaire entrepreneur Alex Spanos and run by son Dean Spanos since his father was afflicted with dementia — has been seeking a new stadium. Qualcomm Stadium in Mission Valley was built in the mid-1960s and is considered one of the NFL’s dowdiest stadiums even after some costly overhauls; only Lambeau Stadium in Green Bay is older. Team officials, at least, believe it can’t be remodeled to include the luxury suites that have become a gold mine for many NFL teams.

A new stadium integrated into a larger mixed retail-housing zone on the Qualcomm site was the early focus, but the 2004 election of Chargers’ foe Mike Aguirre as San Diego city attorney followed by the collapse of the housing market killed that plan. In more recent years, interest centered on a new $800 million to $1 billion stadium in the city’s downtown, near the taxpayer-subsidized Petco Park baseball stadium — either a standalone football stadium or one integrated with the bigger Convention Center the city needs to build downtown to continue to attract Comic-Con and other lucrative gatherings.

But the team has always made plain that it expects public subsidies, something that elected leaders promised would only happen if voters supported them in a referendum. Few observers think the Chargers could win half the vote, much less the legally required two-thirds of the vote, in such an election in a city scarred by years of fiscal problems and reduced services.

In recent months, while being somewhat optimistic on the record, team officials have made particularly clear in not-for-attribution interviews that they needed some sign of progress.

Conventional wisdom vs. the view of insiders

But Faulconer’s turn to another task force infuriated the Chargers — at least if the conventional wisdom is to be believed.

That conventional wisdom has been mocked for years — off the record — by many prominent San Diegans. Their view was that as soon as it seemed likely an NFL-blessed and possibly subsidized stadium could be built in Los Angeles, the Chargers would be on their way — either as the lead team or the secondary team sharing the facility. The huge financial success of the New York Giants and New York Jets sharing a stadium in north New Jersey is a key factor in the league’s eagerness for an L.A. dual-team facility.

If this more cynical view is accepted, then Fabiani’s actions of the past two days look to be calculated to make him be the villain of both contemporary and historical accounts of why the Chargers left San Diego — not the Spanos family that has paid the former Clinton White House spin doctor lavishly for more than a dozen years.

But there’s another twist that makes the Spanoses’ eagnerness to move to L.A. even more plausible. The Los Angeles Rams and Raiders may not have enjoyed consistently good attendance before fleeing in 1994 for St. Louis and Oakland, respectively, but the value of having a professional sports franchise in the nation’s second-largest metropolitan area looks more immense then ever after the recent sales of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Clippers.

The Dodgers fetched $2.15 billion and the Clippers — which don’t even own the arena in which they play — cost $2 billion. No MLB or NBA team has ever been sold for even half that much money.

Given that the NFL is much more popular than the NBA or baseball, the incentives for Fabiani to offer himself up as a distracting villain for a team completely committed to leaving San Diego are plain. The Chargers could be worth $1 billion more in Los Angeles than the city 110 miles south on I-5.

Now, a decade after Schwarzenegger began his strong emphasis on green jobs, we have another powerful state leader on the bandwagon.

With Senate President Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, declaring his determination to bring a huge infusion of green jobs to California, it’s time to look at the most comprehensive assessment of green job claims in the Golden State.

It wasn’t from The Los Angeles Times or Sacramento Bee. It was from The New York Times in August 2011, and it’s fairly described as harshly dismissive of such claims.

In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned. President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream. …

A study released in July by the non-partisan Brookings Institution found clean-technology jobs accounted for just 2 percent of employment nationwide and only slightly more — 2.2 percent — in Silicon Valley. Rather than adding jobs, the study found, the sector actually lost 492 positions from 2003 to 2010 in the South Bay, where the unemployment rate in June was 10.5 percent.

Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show. Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes, California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter, according to the State Department of Community Services and Development.

The weatherization program was initially delayed for seven months while the federal Department of Labor determined prevailing wage standards for the industry. Even after that issue was resolved, the program never really caught on.

Job-training programs for nonexistent jobs

The NYT also pointed out that when there are few green jobs, having ambitious green job training programs isn’t likely to turn out well:

Job training programs intended for the clean economy have also failed to generate big numbers. The Economic Development Department in California reports that $59 million in state, federal and private money dedicated to green jobs training and apprenticeship has led to only 719 job placements — the equivalent of an $82,000 subsidy for each one.

“The demand’s just not there to take this to scale,” said Fred Lucero, project manager at Richmond BUILD, which teaches students the basics of carpentry and electrical work in addition to specifically “green” trades like solar installation.

Richmond BUILD has found jobs for 159 of the 221 students who have entered its clean-energy program — but only 35 graduates are employed with solar and energy efficiency companies, with the balance doing more traditional building trades work.

When upbeat green job reports come out, they’re usually driven by ever-expanding definitions of what constitutes green jobs, as I noted recently in the U-T San Diego newspaper:

Thrift-shop clerks, bus drivers, janitors at solar power plants, professors who teach about the environment, cashiers at bicycle-repair shops and trash collectors are all characterized as green jobs by the Obama administration.

This is a fact that rarely seems to appear in California newspapers.

The peer review of the California Air Resources Board’s 2007 report on the economic impact of the law included criticism from a UCLA professor and other academics who faulted the air board for failing to acknowledge the law’s likely eventual impact on manufacturing, in particular. The air board has been more candid about the AB32 economic fallout since then. In 2009, officials warned of what is known as “leakage”:

Producers that face compliance costs may not be able to pass costs through to consumers because their competitors that do not face similar costs do not have to increase prices. … Industries in this category may include non-ferrous metals smelting, iron and steel-making, cement, and other energy and/or emissions intensive activities.

But the typical California coverage of AB32 rarely discusses this prospect. Instead, it often uncritically accepts the idea that green jobs created directly and indirectly by AB32 will be its primary economic effect.

‘Manufacturers are the canaries’

But the national media generally look at the law differently. Bloomberg news service offered the latest example with a Feb. 5 story:

California manufacturers from food processors to apparel makers are warning costs will skyrocket if state regulators proceed with a plan to reduce their allocations of free greenhouse gas emission credits.

Starting in 2018, some companies California considers to be at risk of losing business to competitors outside the state’s landmark emissions cap and trade market will receive up to 50 percent fewer free pollution credits. That means they will either have to buy more allowances at auction or invest in ways to cut carbon pollution even more.

California has the toughest greenhouse gas curbs in the U.S., seeking to cut discharges to 1990 levels by 2020. The pushback from industry comes as Governor Jerry Brown and other state Democratic leaders are looking to advance those climate change policies further even as business leaders warn that lack of a national and global carbon-emission market puts companies in the state at a competitive disadvantage.

“Manufacturers are the canaries,” said Dorothy Rothrock, president of the California Manufacturers & Technology Association. “All of the costs in this system are radiating up and concentrate in manufacturing. It’s cumulative and it’s not happening anywhere else like this. California is doing it to its manufacturers in a way that no other state is contemplating.”

NYT: ‘Risks for CA are enormous’

In 2012, The New York Times offered a similar take about California’s “grand experiment”:

 The outsize goals of California’s new law, known as A.B. 32, are to lower California’s emissions to what they were in 1990 by 2020 — a reduction of roughly 30 percent — and, more broadly, to show that the [cap and trade system of selling emission rights] works and can be replicated.

The risks for California are enormous … the program could hurt the state’s fragile economy by driving out refineries, cement makers, glass factories and other businesses. Some are concerned that companies will find a way to outmaneuver the system, causing the state to fall short of its emission reduction targets.

“The worst possible thing to happen is if it fails,” said Robert N. Stavins, a Harvard economist.

The contrast with California media is pronounced. A Los Angeles Times editorial about AB 32 from last summer, for example, doesn’t even mention the law’s economic risks. Nor does this story from November about how an Indian tribe is taking advantage of one of the law’s provisions.

But the Times did acknowledge concerns that AB 32 would force the cost of gasoline higher for motorists. The effects of higher energy costs on business were not mentioned, however.