Looking for the year’s most deceptive initiative campaign claim?
There are plenty of contestants for this dubious honor: There’s the
claim by opponents that Proposition 72 mandates government-run
health insurance by seeking to uphold a year-old state law that
aims to require businesses with 20 or more fulltime employees to
provide health insurance for their workers.
Looking for the year’s most deceptive initiative campaign claim? There are plenty of contestants for this dubious honor: There’s the claim by opponents that Proposition 72 mandates government-run health insurance by seeking to uphold a year-old state law that aims to require businesses with 20 or more fulltime employees to provide health insurance for their workers.
Not so. In fact, it would force employers to buy a health plan of their choice, or pay the government an equivalent amount if they refuse. The state would only step in and pick a plan if companies refuse to act on their own. Plus, aside from Medi-Cal, there are no government-run general health plans.
Then there’s the claim by opponents of Proposition 71, which would okay a bond issue to pay for stem cell research, that this kind of science kills babies and/or fetuses. Not so, again. The work almost exclusively involves existing lines of laboratory cells.
But nowhere are claims about a ballot measure more egregiously false or more self-serving than in the campaign for Proposition 64, accurately titled “Limitations on Enforcement of Unfair Business Competition Laws.”
This proposition, written by the state Chamber of Commerce for the benefit of many of its members, seized on the unscrupulous practice of a few lawyers who filed unjustified lawsuits and extorted cash settlements from blameless businesses that found it cheaper to settle than pay exorbitant legal fees.
Once the practice was exposed by a few newspapers, the State Bar acted against the offending attorneys and the problem has all but disappeared.
Nevertheless, the chamber’s pro-64 committee calls itself Californians to Stop Shakedown Lawsuits.
One thing this measure really does is free large corporations to establish fraudulent business practices and pollute without fear of the consumer watchdog groups that have previously stopped many such practices in their nascent stages.
In short, Proposition 64 allows only public prosecutors or people who have suffered actual damages to sue a company for its practices. That sounds fine, but in real life, not many people can sue the moment they are harmed, which means if this proposition passes, unfair, fraudulent or filthy practices could persist for months or even years before anyone even tries to act.
“The opposition’s claims that Proposition 64 will eviscerate environmental (and consumer) protection are completely false,” insists Allan Zaremberg, chamber president and co-chair of the pro-64 group. “California has some of the strongest environmental protection laws in the national and Proposition 64 does nothing to change that.”
Nope, it does not. But it does forbid anyone but the state attorney general and county district attorneys from using many of those laws. The sad political reality is that district attorneys historically don’t worry much about corporate lawbreakers, instead going after accused felons.
And attorneys general often enforce the laws they like, while ignoring those they don’t. Under former Republican Attorney General Dan Lungren, for example, the number of lawyers in the state Justice Department’s environmental law section – which prosecutes polluters – dropped more than two-thirds from its size under Lungren’s predecessor, Democrat John Van de Kamp.
Which means that while Zaremberg’s statement isn’t flatly untrue, it distorts reality.
Then there’s the fact that many large donors to the yes-on-64 campaign have been losers in environmental and consumer fraud lawsuits – and want to make sure they’re not hit again.
The list of donors includes Safeway, Bank of America, Pacificare, Blue Cross of California, Citigroup, Pfizer, Kaiser, ExxonMobil, Intel, General Motors, Nike, Microsoft, Cingular, eBay, Target stores and a host of car dealers. More than 30 corporate backers of Proposition 64 are also donors to the various campaign committees run by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, so it was no surprise when he endorsed the measure as a “fantastic” idea.
Meanwhile, Proposition 64 is opposed by the American Lung Association, the Sierra Club, Consumers Union, the California Nurses Assn. and the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR). Through the years, these groups have succeeded in lowering California car insurance rates, forced oil companies to pay for cleaning up and replacing drinking water when their additive MTBE fouled it, and successfully lobbied for homeowners to have the right to reopen earthquake insurance claims after discovering their insurers have underpaid them.
On MTBE, for example, if no one could have sued until after harm occurred, chances are many drinkers of tap water would have suffered cancers by now.
“The law Proposition 64 would gut was the only tool community groups has to fight against Big Oil’s contamination of our drinking water supply,” said Carmen Balber of the FTCR. “If Proposition 64 had passed a few years ago, Californians would probably still be fighting to get MTBE out of our water now.”
That’s a far cry from what the chamber and its pro-64 cohorts claim, but it’s probably a lot closer to the truth.
Which is why yes-on-64 takes the prize as this year’s most deceptive campaign.
