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    21 Machetes
    21 Machetes
    21 Machetes
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    21 Machetes

    By John Geesman

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    About this ebook

    Take one of America's largest utilities...a delusional, error-prone CEO...a $46.5 million war chest filched from customers...California's squalid, pay-to-play ballot initiative process...what results? Hubris, overreach and venality upended by truthiness. Over-torqued battlefield dispatches create a fast-paced nonfiction novella -- a bugle call to that silent army of citizen optimists everywhere.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Geesman
    Release dateAug 3, 2010
    ISBN9781452390253
    21 Machetes
    Author

    John Geesman

    From the "ABOUT JOHN GEESMAN" page at www.greenenergywar.com:Ten Time-Weighted Footprints in the Soft Sand of My Public Psyche:1) 19 years (from 1983 to 2002) as an investment banker in the American bond markets, an unavoidably conservatizing experience regarding financial matters. Rule of law, sanctity of contract, ability and willingness to pay debt service as scheduled — these are the underpinnings of civilization, in my view.2) 18 years (from 1951 to 1969) growing up in Lakewood, California, one of the original blue collar insta-suburbs built after World War II on the Levittown assembly line model. Civic equality was presumed with every fourth house a carbon copy.3) 11 years (from 1978 to 1983 and from 2002 to 2008) of government service at the California Energy Commission, most recently as a Commissioner and earlier as Executive Director. Both experiences centered on the efficiency/renewables recipe which has become California’s signature energy policy cuisine.4) 8 years (from 1990 to 1998) on the Board of Directors, including 6 (from 1992 to 1998) as President, of TURN (The Utility Reform Network), California’s largest and most vociferous ratepayer advocacy organization.5) 5 years (from 1997 to 2002) on the Board of Governors, including 4 (from 1998 to 2002) as Chairman, of the California Power Exchange, the first domino to fall in the electricity “deregulation” fiasco. Flawed design, institutional inertia, nonexistent police presence, and ham handed political response — the marketplace equivalent of Hurricane Katrina.6) 5 years (from 1973 to 1978) as a political activist, including work on the campaign staffs of successful candidates for Mayor of Los Angeles and Mayor of San Francisco and unsuccessful candidates for President and State Senate; co-authorship of a book on the sorry performance of the state Consumer Affairs department; lobbying on behalf of the Nader-inspired California Citizen Action Group; and helping to found one of the first solar water heating businesses.7) 4 years (from 1969 to 1973) at Yale when it was described — by the snarkily envious Harvard Crimson — as “the bell-bottoms in the Ivy League family”, originally planning to be a journalist and finding a degree of encouragement as a Managing Editor of the Yale Daily News and stringer for the New York Times, only to succumb to the virulent disease of applying to law school instead.8) 3 years (from 1973 to 1976) of alienation at the UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law, immaturely put off by the trade-school-for-shysters aspects (e.g., assigned reading razor-bladed from library books) and prone to the diversions described in #6 above.9) 3 years (from 1999 to 2002) as Chairman of the California Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board, growing enrollment in the State Children Health Insurance Program from 50,000 to 632,000 and creating real benefit for real people.10) 2 years (from 2006 to present) as Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), carrying a California torch to light (zero emission) bonfires across the planet.February 9, 2008, Sacramento, California

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      Book preview

      21 Machetes - John Geesman

      21 Machetes

      The rollicking internet backstory to the California civic uprising that squelched PG&E's Proposition 16 power grab.

      By John Geesman

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2010 John Geesman

      License Notes:

      This free ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, and the reader is not charged to access it.

      …Big money isn't leaving political campaigns anytime soon. That doesn't mean voters can't machete their way through the thicket of competing messages to reach informed conclusions. But they'll have to work at it…

      Triumphant post-election editorial in the Bakersfield Californian

      Campaign Money Was Tuesday's Biggest Player

      June 9, 2010

      Contents

      Preface

      Introduction

      Machete 1: What Does the PG&E Ballot Initiative Claim to Do?

      Machete 2: PG&E Defies Steinberg 8 and Puts Another $3 Million Into the Pot – What’s Darbee Thinking?

      Machete 3: Landmine Buried Within Vague Wording: Vote Required Before New Residents Can Hook Up!

      Machete 4: Prop. 16’s Sloppy Drafting May Slow Home Sales in LA, Anaheim, Riverside, and 45 Other Locales

      Machete 5: What Do the California Realtors Know About Prop. 16 that the State Chamber of Commerce Doesn’t?

      Machete 6: PG&E’s Threat to Halt Marin Electric Deliveries – Does Peter Darbee Think He’s CEO of Gazprom?

      Machete 7: Peter Darbee’s Dog of an Initiative: 3 Tapeworms Eating Away at the Internal Logic of Prop. 16

      Machete 8: Does PG&E Fully Understand the Recklessness of Peter Darbee’s Proposition 16 Gamble?

      Machete 9: Peter Darbee’s Weird Prop. 16 Soliloquy: Blame Underlings, Ignore Bad Polls, Diminish Voting

      Machete 10: Bad Timing: Darbee’s $10.559 Million Paypalooza Faces Advisory Shareholder Vote May 12

      Machete 11: Darbee’s Shaky Finger on the Trigger of PG&E’s Rate Design Begins to Terrify the Customers

      Machete 12: PG&E Proxy Filing Reveals Corner-Cutting Effort to Feed Darbee’s Compensation Gluttony

      Machete 13: ‘We Are Appalled,’ Declared CPUC About 2004 PG&E Executive Bonus Scandal – ‘Give It Back’

      Machete 14: PG&E Fleeced for $175,000 by LA Pols – What Was Darbee Trying To Do With All That Money?

      Machete 15: CEO Report Card: How Much of the Goldman Sachs Kool-Aid Did PG&E’s Peter Darbee Drink?

      Machete 16: 10 Years After Erin Brockovich – PG&E Is Aiming Its Propaganda at A Bunch of Dumb Hicks

      Machete 17: San Diego Chamber of Commerce Votes 79-2 to Oppose Prop. 16: Is PG&E’s Whopper Indigestible?

      Machete 18: Prop. 16 Limits On Competition Would Erect a Constitutional Iron Curtain to Lock In Customers

      Machete 19: Prop. 16 Drafting Error Would Spew Pestilence Across 48 Real Estate Markets in California

      Machete 20: LA County Republicans Ain’t Buying – Demise of Prop. 16 Among Conservative, Pro-Market Voters

      Machete 21: Never Underestimate the Voter’s Sense of Smell

      Epilogue

      Afterword

      Postscript

      Preface

      PG&E disclosed August 2, 2010 that it actually contributed $46.5 million to its Prop.16 fiasco, more than $9 for each of its 5.1 million electricity customer accounts – the largest sole-funded * corporate ballot initiative in the history of the world.

      That’s slightly more than the $46 million estimate around Election Day which provoked vitriolic scorn from commentators across the ideological spectrum. And it makes the PG&E Board’s authorization of $25-35 million in January – an amount so excessive that it pushed me into the jihad of a retired regulator – seem quaint by comparison.

      The final report didn’t faze me much. I was more focused on the unheralded 20-th anniversary, ten days earlier, of the first print reference in the New York Times to perhaps the most consequential Richard Nixon comment ever captured on tape.

      In RN’s words: I have often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

      Does anyone dispute that there’s a certain peculiarity about what goes down in California? As this summer’s pop radio anthem enthuses:

      "You could travel the world,

      but nothing comes close to the Golden Coast"

      On the premise that PG&E’s utter humiliation by an atomized, largely spontaneous, loosely coordinated revolt of outraged citizens – outspent by the mindboggling ratio of 337 to 1 – may be of interest to those in another place or time, I have compiled the 21 posts from the now notorious PG&E Ballot Factsheet (http://www.pgandeballotinitiativefactsheet.blogspot.com/) into this free electronic book.

      To provide a few brushstrokes of context, I’ve also added this Preface; a surreal Epilogue crafted by Peter Darbee; an Afterword taken from Michael Hiltzik; and a brief Postscript from me, courtesy of KNBC-TV. And three new links to radio encounters here, here, and here.

      But don’t look to me for any particularly trenchant insights into how we did it. You’ll have to work on that yourselves. The raw material is all here, though.

      My view is that only one thing kept PG&E from buying its way into a permanent, Constitutionally-guaranteed, monopoly advantage: a self-deputized posse of fewer than 100 newspaper reporters, editorial writers and broadcast journalists who just refused to let the company’s deceitful campaign go unchallenged. But that’s not very profound.

      Thomas Jefferson put it better:

      Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

      Who knew he was a PG&E customer?

      According to the final results certified by the California Secretary of State on July 16, 2010, Proposition 16 was beaten 53% – 47%. Of even greater concern to a corporation daring to spend $46.5 million collected from its customers to trick them into self-imprisonment, the counties in which PG&E currently conducts business voted 59% – 41% against Prop. 16. Heckuva job, Darbee!

      Laid end-to-end, these postings inadvertently contain narrative arc; character development; a Shakespearean plotline blending tragedy, history, and comedy; and, of course, eternal verities. For those willing to dig into the hyperlinks: texture and complexity. Make of it what you will. When H.G. Wells complained about the time required to decipher Finnegans Wake, James Joyce replied, The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.

      The only reader of whom I would make that demand is a certain CEO sorely in need of a How-Not-To manual. Well, maybe his board of directors, too. And perhaps any other corporados who think that with a big enough war chest they

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