Continuing a longstanding bipartisan tradition, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra came

Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach, is sponsoring a measure to repeal the fuel tax and vehicle fee hikes approved this spring. The description given to Allen’s proposal by Becerra’s office didn’t mention taxes or fees. Instead, it said the measure “eliminates recently enacted road repair and transportation funding by repealing revenues dedicated for those purposes.”

Allen’s lawyers said the description was fundamentally deceptive. Last week, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Timothy M. Frawley agreed: “The Attorney General’s title and summary … must be changed to avoid misleading the voters and creating prejudice against the measure,” he wrote.

The revision Frawley ordered: “Repeals recently enacted gas and diesel taxes and vehicle registration fees. Eliminates road repair and transportation programs funded by these taxes and fees.”

The perception of attorneys general using ballot language to manipulate voters has been common for decades.

When Becerra’s predecessor, fellow Democrat Kamala Harris, was attorney general before her election in November to the U.S. Senate, Republicans alleged she was particularly ready to put her thumb on the scale. The ballot description for 2016’s successful Proposition 58 made it seem as if it reinforced English-learning standards in state public schools when its primary intent was to repeal mandatory English-only immersion programs required by 1998’s Proposition 227. In 2015, Harris was trashed by the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board for effectively killing pension reform measures with what the board called ballot descriptions that sounded like “union talking points.”

When Gov. Jerry Brown was attorney general before Harris, his office also courted controversy. Two of his ballot descriptions were castigated by state judges in the same week in August 2010.

One was for Proposition 23, an unsuccessful measure which would have suspended implementation of state climate-change pollution rules. The initial ballot language was condemned as prejudicial and misleading by Frawley, the same judge who recently ruled against Becerra.

Two days after Frawley’s ruling, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Patrick Marlette rejected ballot language for Proposition 25. The successful ballot measure’s key change was to allow the state Legislature to approve a state budget on a simple majority vote. The ballot language Brown approved made it appear as if the measure’s main intent was to reinforce the requirement that the Legislature could only approve tax increases on a two-thirds vote of both the Assembly and the Senate.

Republican attorneys general also accused of voter manipulation

But in the 20th century, when it wasn’t unusual to have Republicans holding statewide office in California, GOP attorneys general drew fire as well for their perceived ballot language machinations.

The most famous example was in 1978, when California voters approved Proposition 13 to put sharp limits on how much property taxes could increase annually. Neither the ballot title or summary approved by GOP Attorney General Evelle Younger mentioned that it also would raise the threshold for raising taxes in the Legislature to a two-thirds vote.

In 1996, Republican Attorney General Dan Lungren also drew fire over the ballot language he approved for Proposition 209, a successful measure limiting the use of racial preferences by state government. In 2012, Chronicle editorial page editor John Diaz revisited criticism first made in 1996, arguing that Lungren used “loaded words” to sell opposition to affirmative action.

But this rapid growth is slowing as Hawaiian Electric Co., Hawaii’s sole power utility, increasingly objects to policies that require it to buy excess power from these homes at rates it sees as overly generous. This report is from last month:

In a filing with the state Public Utilities Commission last month, HECO argued that solar system owners can end up paying nothing to the utility, yet still rely on its grid daily, drawing electricity at night and when clouds pass. That means grid operation and maintenance costs are “increasingly being shifted from those who have solar to those who don’t,” wrote HECO in the filing.

This foreshadows a big battle that lies ahead in California: whether and/or how much residential solar installations should be encouraged with de facto or direct subsidies. So far, according to the utilitydive.com website tracking utility news around the U.S., California’s regulators appear wary of a commitment to any subsidies, not just long-term ones.

‘Costs should be borne by participants’

Last week, the website took an in-depth look at the latest version of the California Public Utilities Commission’s community solar rule, which has been crafted in response to a state law committing California to establishing 600 megawatts of community solar power generation. The first principle of the regulations is sure to spur criticism from politicians and advocacy groups who want California to shift even more quickly than it is away from fossil fuels:

Careful rate design and procurement can create ratepayer indifference and prevent program costs from being shifted to non-participating utility customers. …

The first finding was central for the IOUs [investor-owned utilities]. “Our program adheres to a principle that program costs should be borne by participants,” noted PG&E Community Solar Program Manager Molly Hoyt. “There is no cross-subsidy paid by non-participating customers.”

But in accepting the utilities’ proposals for rates and contract terms, said VoteSolar Western Region Director Susannah Churchill, it is possible the commission compromised affordability.

“I am worried that affordability is going to be a problem and the limitation that customers can only subscribe to the program for a maximum of one year means that they can’t lock in their credits and charges long term,” Churchill explained. “That is going to create uncertainty and may be a big barrier for program uptake.”

While mid-size solar projects remain more expensive than conventional generation, a small premium for renewables makes sense, she said. Many customers will be willing to pay more for 50 percent or 100 percent renewables-generated electricity.

Friendly to solar homeowners — or to state economy?

As state lawmakers gear up for successor laws to 2006’s landmark AB32 energy-regulation law, and as solar panels come down in price, this debate will grow ever more heated. It can be framed as whether alternative-energy policies and laws should be friendly to homeowners doing the right thing for the environment or whether they should be assessed in a cold, bottom-line fashion about their overall impact on energy costs and the economy.

Germany’s experience with its national Energiewende policy, adopted in 2011, holds lessons for California regulators and politicians. This is from a 2013 Reuters story:

Angela Merkel’s “green revolution” risks becoming a victim of its own success.

Seduced by generous subsidies, Germans are embracing the ambitious project with such fervor — installing solar panels on church roofs and converting sewage into heat — that instead of benefiting from a rise in green energy, they are straining under the subsidies’ cost and from surcharges. …

“Germany’s dilemma is how to keep industry’s energy prices low enough to remain competitive and meet ambitious (green) targets while also maintaining a balanced budget,” said Will Pearson, head of global energy at the Eurasia Group in London. “Addressing these will pose a political challenge.”

So attractive are the incentives, or feed-in tariffs, that the rapid expansion of renewable power has driven up the surcharges which fund them and are paid for by consumers. The charge rose by 47 percent this year alone.

Both households and industry are feeling the pain and exporters complain that the energy shift has driven up power prices so much that their competitiveness is being eroded.

This may portend what awaits California in coming years as environmentalists ramp up their push for renewable energy. If the effort leads to broadly higher prices, a reprise of 2010’s Proposition 23 fight is likely. That ballot measure attempted to suspend AB32 until state unemployment was at 5.5 percent of below for 12 consecutive months. It lost 61.5 percent to 38.5 percent after being depicted as an attack on air pollution laws.

The odds of a successor measure passing would seem likely to be much higher if California residents and businesses faced a Germany-sized green-energy price shock. Supporters of the 2010 initiative didn’t only include oil companies and voters who thought California shouldn’t go it alone in trying to reduce the emissions believed to cause global warming. The State Building & Construction Trades Council backed Prop. 23 on the grounds that AB32 would be harmful to the state’s economy.

But a new San Francisco Chronicle account suggests that rather than these being isolated cases, a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours approach was Peevey’s modus operandi when dealing with the giant Northern California utility. He sought to prop up a project by the Hydrogen Energy California (HECA) firm by constantly reminding PG&E how much he had done for it.

A Pacific Gas and Electric Co. executive exploited former state Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey’s intense interest in a Kern County alternative-energy project in making a backroom deal to win favorable treatment for the company, newly released e-mails show.

Among the 65,000 e-mails that the company made public last month was a string of contacts between Peevey and since-ousted PG&E Vice President Brian Cherry that could prove pivotal to state and federal prosecutors probing possible wrongdoing at the agency.

A Chronicle review of the e-mails shows that in late 2013, Cherry went so far as to tell Peevey that “you owe” another PG&E executive for keeping alive the struggling $4 billion project near Bakersfield. A month later, Cherry called on Peevey’s top aide to repay the debt by intervening to appoint an administrative law judge he wanted to oversee a $1.3 billion rate case.

Socializing — and swapping favors?

The latest piece also adds to the already-established picture of Peevey regularly socializing with top utility executives while discussing major issues.

HECA was still languishing on Jan. 1, 2013, when Cherry wrote a memo to his boss, Tom Bottorf, about a New Year’s Eve he had spent with Peevey at Sea Ranch in Sonoma County, where both men had vacation homes.

“Mike will be reaching out to you in a few weeks over HECA. He strongly believes in this project and its importance to the state of California,” Cherry told Bottorff. …

Peevey then reminded Cherry that PG&E had had “a great day” at the utilities commission’s most recent meeting, when Peevey had pushed through a regulatory decision in the company’s favor. The decision — opposed by customer advocates — awarded $29 million to utilities to encourage them to get customers to reduce energy use, even though the companies had failed to meet conservation targets.After stressing how much PG&E had benefited, thanks to his efforts, Peevey said that “HECA was important to him,” Cherry wrote. “I told him I got the message and would forward it on.

“We ended the conversation with a dram or two of Johnny Walker Blue Label.”

There is still no publicly revealed evidence of bribery or overt corruption. But legal experts say even without such evidence, Peevey is legally vulnerable under anti-corruption statutes dealing with improperly influencing government decisions that are supposed to be  ministerial — based on set standards — not transactional — based on unrelated favors or actions done by regulated utilities.

After more than a century in California’s political spotlight, the state’s initiative process will be getting a major revise next year. Even more surprising, both Democrats and Republicans in the famously partisan Legislature are happy to see it happen.

While Republicans made up most of the limited opposition when SB1253 made its way through the Legislature, the two GOP leaders, state Sen. Bob Huff of Diamond Bar (Los Angeles County) and Assembly member Kristin Olsen of Modesto, both voted “aye.”

“It was a bipartisan effort,” said former state Sen. Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento, the Democrat who authored the bill. “People like the initiative process but believe it can be improved.”

The measure opens the way for increased collaboration between lawmakers and backers of initiatives by requiring the Legislature to hold a joint public hearing on a proposed initiative as soon as 25 percent of the required signatures are collected. It also calls for the attorney general to open a 30-day public review before approving an initiative for circulation and lets supporters amend the initiative during that time.

A much-bigger problem: Slanted ballot language

These reforms make sense and should lean to cleaner ballot measures.  But if one looks back over the past 15 years, all of the biggest outrages in the initiative process involved another problem that the Legislature declined to try to fix: the extraordinary way that the last three attorneys general — Bill Lockyer, Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris — have slanted ballot language to achieve the outcome that Democratic special interests prefer.

Gov. Schwarzenegger’s bid to use a 2005 special election to force through major reforms was hurt badly by Lockyer’s ballot titles and language. Proposition 76 would have created a rainy-day fund and a less chaotic budget process. Lockyer made it sound like an attempt to hurt school kids, titling it “State Spending and School Funding Limits. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.”

In one week alone in 2010, then-Attorney General Jerry Brown had his ballot language thrown out by judges who agreed that Brown wasn’t playing fair on a ballot measure challenging AB 32 and one making it easier to pass a state budget without Republican votes. (He tried to sabotage the first one, Prop. 23, and promote the second one, Prop. 25.)

Kamala Harris has continued this unfortunate tradition. This CalWatchdog post looks at her attempt to help trial lawyers with their misleading 2014 ballot measure.

Lockyer, Brown and Harris all say they don’t draft the language; instead, they depict it as a chore that they leave to their “professional staffs.” But if that were the case, then why have all three AGs opposed reforms transferring ballot-language responsibilities to the FPPC, the LAO or a panel of retired judges?

Because they know being able to compose ballot language on measures digging with the biggest issues of the day gives the California attorney general extraordinary power.

The worst ballot-language abuser of all

But the twist to all this is that the single worst abuser of the privilege of writing ballot descriptions was the Legislature itself. In 2008, Democrats in the Assembly and Senate directly wrote the highly misleading title and summary for Proposition 1A, the measure which provided $9.95 billion in bond seed money for the bullet-train project. Here’s the summary:

SAFE, RELIABLE HIGH-SPEED PASSENGER TRAIN BOND ACT. To provide Californians a safe, convenient, affordable, and reliable alternative to driving and high gas prices; to provide good-paying jobs and improve California’s economy while reducing air pollution, global warming greenhouse gases, and our dependence on foreign oil, shall $9.95 billion in bonds be issued to establish a clean, efficient high-speed train service linking Southern California, the Sacramento/San Joaquin Valley, and the San Francisco Bay Area, with at least 90 percent of bond funds spent for specific projects, with federal and private matching funds required, and all bond funds subject to independent audits?'”

This prompted a Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association lawsuit. That suit led a state appellate court to issue a jaw-dropping decision that forever banned the Legislature from writing ballot language.

By John Seiler

AB 32 officially is the “Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.” It coerces sharp cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in California to 1990 levels by 2020.

Now that the latest evidence keeps showing there is no global warming, do you think Gov. Jerry Brown will suspend it, as the law allows? Or that the Legislature might repeal it?

Of course not. AB 32 now is part of the political landscape in California, with vast constituencies depending on its maintenance. “Green” industries get a push from it. And environmentalist special interests get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside when they contemplate destroying “dirty” industries and the jobs that go with them.

I’m not kidding. Remember back in 2010 the “Dirty Energy” epithet thrown at the Texas oil companies that bankrolled Proposition 23, which would have suspended AB 32 until unemployment dropped?

To keep the money rolling to the special interests, “global warming” even has been stuffed down the Orwellian Memory Hole, to be replaced with “climate change.” So every time it rains becomes an excuse for increasing government, taxes and subsidies to favored groups and “green” businesses.

Here’s the latest from Reuters:

“Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.

“Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.”

The “cause” wasn’t due to the climate, but to their crummy computer “models.” It’s the old story of computer programming: garbage in, garbage out.

A “science” that still can’t predict tomorrow’s weather advertised that it could predict the weather decades in the future.

Future ‘warming’?

Reuters:

“Getting this right is essential for the short and long-term planning of governments and businesses ranging from energy to construction, from agriculture to insurance. Many scientists say they expect a revival of warming in coming years.”

But they’ve been so wrong in the past, why should we believe them now?

“Some experts say their trust in climate science has declined because of the many uncertainties. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to correct a 2007 report that exaggerated the pace of melt of the Himalayan glaciers and wrongly said they could all vanish by 2035.”

This is another reason to revive the old conservative slogan: Get the U.S. out of the U.N., and the U.N. out of the U.S.

Did you know that U.N. bureaucrats don’t have to pay any income taxes? That knowledge should hurt after yesterday’s painful reckoning with our own IRS/Stasi tax gougers.

The U.N. freeloaders are a major element in the “global warming” scare, a good scam for them to enjoy lucullan lifestyles tax-free.

It’s time to uncover the sham. There’s no “global warming.” The government bureaucrats promoting it to their own profit all should be fired.

Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, finally knows what it feels like to be the victim of his own policies. For years, he and other legislators have assaulted California businesses and jobs with absurdly high taxes and regulations. The worst is AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which is killing 1 million jobs.

Perez wasn’t in office when AB 32 was passed, then signed into law by then Gov. Arnold-Schwarzenegger (R-Sleazebag) to give Arnold something to do between womanizing sessions. But Perez has done nothing to repeal AB 32. And he opposed Proposition 23, the ballot initiative last November that would have suspended AB 32.

Perez cares nothing that AB 32 is killing a million jobs. He doesn’t care that California has the fourth-worst business climate in America. He just doesn’t care that we have the second-worst unemployment rate of the states, behind only Nevada.

So I don’t have any sympathy for Perez’s protests that Controller John Chiang, a fellow Democrat, docked all legislators’ pay for failing to pass a balanced budget by the June 15 constitutional deadline. Perez griped, “I continue to maintain that the Legislature met our constitutional duties in passing the budget last week.”

No, it didn’t.

In the private sector, if you don’t perform, you don’t get paid. Proposition 25, which voters passed last year and Perez supported, mandates that legislators’ pay is docked if they don’t pass an on-time budget. They didn’t do the job. So they shouldn’t get paid.

Let’s see how the tormenters like it when they’re tormented by their own policies.

June 22, 2011

As I’m sure you heard, California’s new official name is AB32ifornia. The whole state, from the economy to the very centers of our families, is to be remade by AB32, the Global Warming Jobs Killing Schwarzenführer Act of 2006. It stipulates, “Every job in AB32ifornia must be destroyed so people stop hurting the environment and survive by eating tree bark, at least until we ban that, too.”

After an indecisive period reminiscent of Gray “the Panicker” Davis, Meg finally opposed Prop. 23, which would repeal AB 32. It probably cost her $40 million in focus group polling to make up her mind. Her reasoning, “What do I care if jobs are destroyed? I’m a billionairess. I’ll be able to cut my maid’s pay.”

Her opponent, Jerry “Men are from Mars, I’m from the Moon” Brown also opposes Prop. 23. So, on the most important issue of the day — repealing AB 32 and saving our jobs — the candidates take the same position.

There’s no choice. There’s no democracy. And soon, there’s no jobs in AB32ifornia.

Sept. 24, 2010

By JOHN SEILER

Welcome to the desert of California jobs.

Officially, California’s unemployment rate was 12.3 percent for July, the latest month calculated. That’s bad enough. But the real number is twice as much: at least 25 percent, a Great Depression level.

The reason for the discrepancy lies in the way the government counts “unemployment” at the state and federal levels. Different — and I would contend more accurate — numbers can be found at Shadowstats.com, in San Francisco, a site that is a gold-mine of information on what’s really going not just with employment, but inflation and economic growth. The site notes, “The problem lies in biased and often-manipulated government reporting.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Labor, gets us part-way to what are the real unemployment numbers. It puts up a Web page with the ungainly title, Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization for States, Third Quarter of 2009 through Second Quarter of 2010 Averages.

The BLS tabulates six measures of unemployment, U-1 through U-6, which are defined there. We need concern ourselves with only two of these: U-3 and U-6. I’ll discuss each, then take a step beyond with additional analysis from John Williams of Shadowstats.com.

All the numbers here are for the year-long period from the third quarter of 2009 through the second quarter of 2010. For this year-long period, the U-3 numbers are 12 percent for California and 9.7 percent for the U.S., slightly different from the monthly numbers cited above. I’ll use these yearly numbers for the rest of this article.

The U-3 unemployment number is the one most cited, and which is cited at the top of this article. The BLS defines it as “total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force.”

“There is a definition problem,” Esmael Adibi told me; he’s director of the A. Gary Anderson Center for Economic Research and Anderson Chair of Economic Analysis and maintains a close watch on the California economy for Chapman’s biannual Economic Forecast. He said the unemployment numbers are made based on surveys of the population. The U-3 number uses “a definition of being ’employed’ that you worked one hour per week for pay. That 9.7 percent number includes a whole bunch of people who are working part-time. Always we have this definition problem. True unemployment is much higher.”

He added that California has suffered worse than almost all the states, with only Nevada (13.5) and Michigan (13.2) suffering higher unemployment rates, as measured by U-3. Whereas Nevada’s problem is the collapse of the tourism and gambling business during the Great Recession, and Michigan’s is the crash of the auto industry, California’s centers on the dilapidation of the related construction and mortgage industries.

“These two fields have very unique skills not applicable to any other industry,” he said. “Even if those who lost their jobs in those industries have jobs now, it’s not in that sector. Being in escrow is a good skill, but you can’t transfer it.” Further, a lot of escrow workers are still struggling in that field, working only a couple of hours a week part time, yet are considered “unemployed” under the U-3 number.

Worst unemployment in the nation

The next number is U-6, which the BLS defines as:

total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.

The U-6 number for California, for the latest year covered, was 21.9 percent. So, it’s 9.9 percentage points higher that the U-3 number — nearly double the official rate.

“The difference here is that they include a variety of things in the U-6 number,” Williams told me, such as those that are marginal workers. These folks want to work full-time, but can’t.

“In California, if state workers are put on furlough, they’re considered to be working part-time for economic reasons,” and so are not included in the U-3 number. But, of course, they’re not really working. So that’s why they are included in the U-6 number.

Of the 50 states, for the U-6 number, California’s 21.9 percent unemployed actually is the worst, even higher than the U-6 rates for Michigan (21.6 percent) and Nevada (21.5 percent).

The best state with the higher, U-6 number, by the way, was North Dakota at 7.8 percent, about a third of the California number. Maybe it’s the snow.

The Shadowstats number: more than 25%

But Williams goes beyond even the U-6 number to calculate unemployment. He said that, before 1994, the official numbers used to included discouraged workers, “those who had given up looking for a job. Today, if you can’t find a job in more than 12 months, you’re taken off the rolls completely. I try to estimate the discouraged worker.”

He said that, at the national level, including discouraged workers — as was done before 1994 — would add about 5 percentage points to the unemployment rate. “I don’t have a separate survey for California,” he said. “There’s no way to directly measure it.”

But if the BLS’s U-6 number for California is 21.9 percent, then adding 5 percentage points would put the actual unemployment rate at 26.9 percent. To be cautious, we can say it would be 25 percent.

“California’s unemployment rate could be 25 percent,” Williams calculated. “During the Great Depression, unemployment nationally was 25 percent at its worst in 1933. We’re about as bad as we’ve seen in the post-World War II era.

Even though I like to use statistics in my articles, as a check I also try to use what my late father called “good old common horse sense.” I did a tally of my friends and acquaintances in California. About a quarter of them are completely unemployed or working only part time, but would like to work full time. Several were in the once robust, not bust, escrow industry. One friend was making about $150,000 a year as a mortgage broker, but now makes a fraction of that cleaning houses and doing odd jobs — when possible. So the 25 percent unemployment number meets Pop’s “horse sense test.”

From under the rubble

Why is California, in reality, mired not just in a bad recession, but a slump of Great Depression proportions? And how can we get out of it?

“The state of California probably is one of the most difficult in which to run a business,” Williams said. “There are health-insurance issues. State regulations generally are more severe than federal regulations. A business looking to locate between New Hampshire and California, might look at California, then look at a state that is generally less expensive — where there’s not as much paperwork. There are many disincentives for a business to stay in this state.”

Adibi agreed. “We have to stimulate job creation,” he urged. “The only way to do that is private job creation. The president is backing a middle-class tax cut. But he’s vague on business taxes, such as long-term capital gains and dividends.” Obama also is favoring increasing taxes on the wealthy. But, Adibi said, “This is not the time to raise taxes on any group. The Bush tax cuts should be extended.” It is the wealthy who are most likely to invest in new business and jobs creation. Raising their taxes leaves less money available for that.

As to California, he said, “Most problems are coming from the public sector. AB32 is a problem.” AB32 is the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. It mandates that greenhouse gas emissions be reduced by 25 percent by 2020. Opponents contend that AB32 is a major jobs killer; while proponents say it would give California the lead in creating “green” jobs.

Part of the uncertainty is whether AB32 will be effectively be repealed by Proposition 23, on the November 2 ballot.

“And there’s no budget,” Adibi concluded, even though the state constitution requires one to be passed by June 15. “Republicans insist on no tax increases in the budget, but eventually will cave in. Who will get hit with higher taxes? It’s not clear, but probably sales taxes, gas taxes and the vehicle license fee will increase.”

John Seiler, an editorial writer with The Orange County Register for 19 years, is a reporter and analyst for CalWatchDog.com. His email: writejohnseiler@gmail.com.