Once again, the California Legislature has shown it slavishly follows the Golden Rule: He’s who’s got the gold, makes the rules. And there aren’t many

The Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce has consistently rallied our members and legislators to support regulatory reform in California — a cause made all

We
know that SB 202 was a gut-and-amend bill that was introduced the last day of
the legislative session to move initiatives from the June ballot to November
largely at the behest of the public employee unions who believe they have a
better chance of defeating the Stop Special Interest Money Initiative.

We also
know that SB 202 included a provision to move from the 2012 ballot to 2014 the
rainy day fund measure (ACA 4) agreed to by the legislature during the 2009
budget deal. The reason was to stall the measure opposed by the unions who
don’t want spending capped. Whether the stall is for one election cycle or if
it becomes an annual vote by the majority to put off the measure remains to be
seen.

Another
possibility is that the Democrats, if they secure a two-thirds vote in the
legislature, would simply vote the measure out of existence before the people
get a chance to vote on it at an election.

Western HiWays trucking company
headquarters sits among the oil derricks and citrus groves just off Highway 65
in Bakersfield, CA.  Its 13 drivers haul
everything from fresh produce to new cars, giving life to the industry adage,
"If you bought it, a truck brought it." 
The health of American trucking, which itself supports
about 7 million jobs, is closely tied to the health of our national
economy.  In fact, roughly 70 percent
of all goods in the United States move by truck. As part of the
AmericanJobCreators.com initiative to expose the true scope and costs of
federal regulations, we visited Western HiWays Safety & Human Resources Director
Doug Grove and Operations Manager Kelly Grove.

The federal government regulates
commercial motor vehicles (CMVs) to ensure the safety of both the truck driver
and the general public sharing the road.  Almost everything on or in a typical long-haul
truck – which runs about $120,000 each – has a
corresponding federal regulation administered by the Department of
Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, including special licensing, training, and equipping
rules to account for the unique safety challenges of trucking.

The election season has begun and the political posturing is under way. The battle for political power is in full swing. With new districts and an open primary, it is a whole new ballgame and business as usual is just not going to cut it.

Candidates: while I do not claim to be a campaign consultant, I have worked for a few politicians and I think I have a good issue for you to run on – legal reform.

Voters want legal reform. Our economic times demand that we have legal reform. Lawsuits affect every issue I can throw at you. Healthcare, education, police and fire protection, business, and the list goes on. The impact of litigation is huge and it costs our economy hundreds of millions of dollars.

When people are being laid off they might want to think about the impact litigation has on businesses’ (and public entities’) bottom line. It is huge. If a business has to settle a wage and hour class action for hundreds of thousands of dollars, that is money the business cannot spend to grow or hire new workers.

Some of the most important decisions affecting consumers in California are made with surprisingly little input from consumers themselves.

That’s certainly the case with California’s Green Chemistry Initiative. Three years after the Legislature passed groundbreaking laws to create a system for making consumer products safer, regulators in Sacramento are still about the business of writing the rules that will put the laws into action. But after three years of public hearings, written comments, sub-committee meetings and reports, it remains unclear whether consumers are being heard from in a meaningful way.

To be sure, there is no shortage of participants claiming to represent the interests of consumers. At times in these hearings, everyone who testifies claims to be interested only in what ordinary consumers want and need.

Every year for the last two-and-a-half decades a lobbyist friend and I
break down the recently-departed legislative session. Our exchange usually goes
something like this:

Me: I can’t believe that crowd, they can’t possibly sink any lower than
this.

Her: Loren, they can always go lower.

In point of fact, the special talent of the Legislature is to find new
and different ways to astonish and disappoint even the most gimlet-eyed
observer.

Tim Leiweke, president & CEO of the sports and
entertainment companies known as AEG, and the point man on the Los Angeles
football stadium, pulled off the political trick of the year last week.

He not only
won a special exemption from state environmental laws for his plan to build a
stadium in a downtown LA. He helped open up a major new hole in the law itself
– a hole that will ease other big projects and change the political balance of
power in the state.

The law’s
big winner, in fact, may not be football. Leiweke still has to convince a team
to come to LA, and that won’t be easy.

No, the big winner was the
governorship, and its powers.