A travestry is about to take place. This Tuesday California voters will go to the polls and vote yes or no on Proposition 16. Proposition 16 asks voters to vote yes to demand a two thirds majority vote to approve any effort by a California municipality to have a non profit utility provide energy. Prop 16 is solely funded by Pacific Gas and Energy (PG&E), a corporation that wants to be the sole provider of energy in California. Today throughout the US about 50% of energy use is provided by non profit utilities. Prop 16 is PG&E's bid to be the monopoly provider of energy in California by using the political process to essentially forbid any municipality from going into the energy business and providing citizens with lower priced energy.
The proposition aspect of California public life sounds good. Any group of citizens can get together and, if they collect enough signatures, can place a proposition on the ballot which, if it passes, then becomes law without any intervention from California elected officials. Power to the people, right? In practice the proposition process has been taken over by corporations who pay poor people to stand outside super markets and collect signatures. They pay a buck or two per signature. This alone limits who can get a proposition on the ballot. PG&E is the sole sponsor of Prop 16. They successfully engineered the placing of Prop 16 on the ballot. Now they are advertising the hell out of it, telling people to vote yes. Are there any counter ads telling people to vote no? Well, who would they be? The municipalities are broke. They are the ones principally effected, but they have no money to advertise. Should taxpayer's money be used to run ads on TV demanding a No vote to a proposition which, if it passes, will benefit a corporation at the expense of the citizens? This is how ridiculous, pernicious and perverted this aspect of the political process is. This proposition is being used by a corporation to benefit themselves at the expense of California's citizens. And they are trying to fool enough voters to get it passed appealing to their libertarian instincts to get government out of their lives.
This is from the No on Prop 16 website:
Prop 16 is the worst special kind of special interest ballot initiative, paid for by a single corporation to benefit a single corporation. Prop 16 would lock PG&E ‘s high rates into the California Constitution by locking out community choice and public power. Prop 16 replaces the current process that allows communities to choose non-profit utilities with a process that would require a super-majority for any choice other than PG&E.
Without a choice, customers will be forced to accept:
•PG&E’s high rates instead of the lower rates of non-profit utilities
•Even higher rates in the future- PG&E has over $6 billion more in rate hikes currently pending at the California Public Utilities Commission.
•PG&E greenwashing instead of real green energy and real green jobs.
Rather than keep their customers by providing excellent service at reasonable rates, PG&E has already spent millions on misinformation campaigns designed to defeat public power initiatives throughout California. They said they would spend up to $35 million to pass Prop 16. They just dumped another $11 million in last week, bringing the latest tally to $46.1 million.Vote NO on Proposition 16 this Tuesday, June 8, 2010
The issue is very simple. Do you want PG&E to have a monopoly for supplying energy or do you want municipalities to be able to get into the energy provision business? PG&E figues that, if Prop 16 passes, no municipality will ever be able to procure a two thirds majority vote required to go into the energy business especially since PG&E would spend millions on TV ads putting it down like it's doing now to get voters to vote yes. They figure they can always fool one third of the voters. This proposition would place a hurdle in the way of the provision of power by non profit utilities that never could be overcome. An intelligent voter needs to look at who is sponsoring and underwriting this (and every other) proposition in order to figure out how to vote in their own interests.
Voters are being led down the garden path by a corporation, PG&E, who wants to be the monopoly provider of energy in California. They don't want municipalities or individuals to go into the alternative energy business. A municipality could pass an initiative, for instance, giving tax breaks to individuals who put solar panels on their roofs and fed power back into the grid. This would diminish PG&E's profits. Prop 16 would foreclose any opportunities along those lines. They want to be firmly in control of alternative as well as conventional energy provision so they, not citizens or municipalities, can profit from it. They want to be the ones to solely profit from energy provision. They are using the ballot box to get voters to make them a monopoly without the possibility of competition from a public utility. They want to keep municipalities out of the energy business. They want to keep California citizens firmly in their grips as rate payers with no alternatives. They want monopoly control.
This is a blatant and pernicious misuse of the political process. Corporate money has been used to write a law and get citizens to vote for it using TV advertising. Corporate money has poured into TV ads to persuade voters to vote against their own interests. Corporate money is taking over the political process. Instead of paying lobbyists to change the laws in their interests, PG&E is lobbying the public directly.
