To the author - I am very gratified by your article referencing my website at powergrab.info. I do indeed regard PG&E's initiative (like the Tesoro Valero initiative against California's Carbon law AB32 - now a robocorp trend that PG&E has initiated) as a corporate attack on fundamental local control over infrastructure - basic authority that local governments have not just since the American Revolution but since the Middle Ages. This massive change is written and funded with $35M in ratepayer dollars as a constitutional amendment, meaning the legislature cannot change it without very extraordinary political effort.

It is as though Globalization has made corporations treasonous towards the very governments whose franchise agreements and local rights of way made and continue to make their monopoly legally and factually possible. Instead of wishing to please these clients following what was then the largest bankruptcy bailout in the nation's history, PG&E is acting like it is operating in a foreign country whose government it can and should manipulate - to internally treat as one would treat an enemy rather than a client or friend. California lost $100B from the Energy Crisis - the largest loss of wealth in state history. Today we have a $20B deficit and California drops to fourth world credit ratings. Prop 16 is not the beginning but the end of a multi-decade attack on the state and local governments by energy corporations including PG&E.

A week ago I debated PG&E before the California Association of Counties on Prop 16 in Sacramento, where 58 California counties each sent a supervisor to vote as a body to Oppose Proposition 16. In its speech, PG&E had said "whatever happens June 8 PG&E will continue to cooperate with county government - your constituents are our customers."

Cooperate? I called Prop 16 an attack on government that is inconsistent with cooperation - to threaten a state preemption of traditional local control over energy - the core of the modern economy - by corporate plebiscite, and particularly in the middle of a terrible economic crisis that PG&E has in large part precipitated - its $11B Bankruptcy bailout in 2003, its $15B "stranded costs" bailout approved in 1996 and paid up to the state's takeover of power; PG&E's bailout take alone of the past ten years adds to the entire amount of today's California budget deficit $20B! - as an intellectual historian I cannot help but be reminded of the knightly raids on the newly emerged merchant cities of the Middle Ages. In 2003 PG&E's book value was $23B - meaning the customers have bought PG&E in bailouts. Not only do they still own themselves, they are building a massive new gas-fired power plant infrastructure and asking for $5B in new rate increases before state regulators - a 30% rate increase, the largest in in its history.

There are so many hyperboles to PG&E's recent history because it is being run like Scarface's coke business, except the drug of choice is natural gas. Considering that PG&E is trying to eliminate the only competitive alternative to itself (and already sold its monopoly to its ratepayers for the 1996 bailout) amounts to extremely hubristic revisionism of the grossest order. That PG&E can maintain itself as the green darling of mainstream media (Vanity Fair's EcoWarrior, Business Week's Greenest Utility in America, etc) while not once even complying with state green power laws since 2002 and aggressively blocking actual large green power efforts of Marin and San Francisco (in which I am very involved) strikes me as shockingly exotic on virtually any time scale. It is extraordinary, and people need to understand the possibilities of corporations as immediate threats to basic democracy and local control in California today. Considering the stakes involved (particularly the urgent need for government action on climate change) Prop 16 is indeed terrifying.

Finally, the greenwashing of Peter Darbee has provided him with the needed cache to rebrand nuclear power as carbon free power across the nation. Indeed, PG&E is the nation's leading nuclear revivalist, and its role in pushing Cape and Trade and nuclear power alongside vague, never executed commitments to green power is in very large part responsible for selling President Obama on the first major new nuclear plant initiative in America in a quarter century. If people don't wake up to this extremely alarming political situation, whole new nightmares will soon become possible. It means no less than a fundamental, potentially permanent crippling of democracy itself. That is why Prop 16 is so important to stop on June 8. We have great video on these wonderful subjects at powergrab.info/video.html if readers are interested.

Thanks again, I really appreciate your interest. Votes: +0