The Face of Evil

When I was a young man, Pacific Gas and Electric Company was a given in my life. Everyone's life, really, in northern and central California. They generated electricity and sent it to us. They charged a certain amount -- nobody had a problem with it.

When the power failed -- so seldom that I actually remember those few times -- PG&E fixed it expeditiously. Their dull green vans and trucks were everywhere. On any drive across town you'd find at least one man in PG&E green at work: trimming tree limbs back from the power lines, stopping at a house to light pilot lights, reading meters, or climbing utility poles with a heavy tool belt.

If you called PG&E, you got a real human and a no-nonsense answer. And soon a Man in Green would come to check things out. If it were their problem, they'd fix it. If it was your problem, they'd at least tell you what to do.

They were PG&E. They were okay. We didn't love them, but we didn't hate them either. We sure liked them better than the phone company. They mailed a homey little newsletter to customers every month with tips for saving power, a few recipes, and even a section of corny jokes. I knew people who waited for those jokes every month.

You could trust PG&E -- because it was a regulated monopoly. It was the only game in town, but it operated under state rules and restrictions. It was guaranteed an income, but not a windfall profit. The way it was all set up, it made sense for PG&E to do a good job, spend money on infrastructure, plan for the future, generate its own power and keep the power flowing smoothly. And so it was run by Men in Green who believed in all those things.

Then things changed. PG&E was deregulated by the state government -- there'd be more efficiency and cheaper power for all if we just got government out of the equation and let PG&E do what it wanted. That's what the politicians said, anyway. And at the top of the company, the Men in Green were replaced by the Men of Green -- money men. All they cared about was the profit. Quarter by quarter.

Maintenance was cut, the workforce was trimmed, service became less reliable. Outages started popping up everywhere because there were no longer enough crews trimming back the trees. "It's going to hell," one of my cousins told me. He was a PG&E lineman, a lifer Man in Green. "Complain to the PUC, write everybody you can think of. Otherwise it'll just get worse."

It did. PG&E spun off some of its power plants to a separate corporation, and now had to buy power on the open market -- often from its own former plants, at a high price. When the corrupt energy trading company Enron gamed the electricity market in 2001 and caused massive power shortages in California, PG&E went bust. And was bailed out by the taxpayers to the tune of $12 billion. We're still paying for that through artificially high utility rates.

In its quest to cut costs and raise profit, PG&E has tried to roll out "smart meters" -- gas and electric meters for your house that report energy consumption directly to PG&E and don't need a meter reader. They rolled them out so fast that they didn't test them -- and people found the smart meters pushing up their power bill by 300 percent. Some California towns have refused to let PG&E install them.

Fed up with all this, some cities have tried to start their own public power utilities. They wouldn't necessarily start their own power plants, but they might buy power wholesale from other suppliers than PG&E and save cash. PG&E has fought every attempt bitterly, even telling Marin County that if they went ahead, PG&E wouldn't sell them power. The state stepped up for a change and told PG&E to back off.

Then the CEO of PG&E got a great idea: it was so expensive to fight all these individual battles against public power. Why not just put one proposition on the statewide ballot? It would require a two-thirds vote of the locals to approve a public power utility. PG&E knew that you can rarely get two-thirds of the people to vote for anything.

So they've spent $46 million of their copious profits to promote Proposition 16, the "Taxpayer Right to Vote" proposition. Who would possibly vote for this? Plenty of people -- if you lie. I get a Yes-on-16 flyer in the mail every day saying "Vote YES on 16 to preserve YOUR RIGHT to vote on TAXES." As if you wouldn't have the right to approve a local utility plan -- you would. Just, it'd need a simple majority.

Nobody in California loves PG&E. Mostly, we hate them. But PG&E is hoping to confuse enough people to get California to vote against its own best interests. And most of the opponents are government agencies, who by law can't spend money in opposition.

So it's come to this -- PG&E is trying to lie its way through an election that will maintain its monopoly in California, over the very people who are still paying to bail it out of bankruptcy. So it can continue to rip us off by providing minimum service at maximum price. They are using their vast wealth -- guaranteed by us, in fact paid to them by us in our monthly power bill -- to oppress us. They are doing evil.

And here it is again: the Face of Evil. Peter Darbee, chairman and CEO of PG&E Corp., the parent company of PG&E.

He's an Ivy League boy, and he made his bones not as an engineer or power company guy but as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. You know, the people who sold billions of dollars of securities based on bad home loans. Securities they knew would explode, and which did, and which helped bring our economy down to the pitiful level it's at now? With further to fall.

Peter knows it's all about the money, and nothing more. And it's his job to wring every dollar out of us he can. And if that means spending $40 million to buy an election with lies -- and this proposition is PG&E's baby alone, nobody else will touch it -- that's just business. Isn't it? Perfectly legal. And evil.

Peter and his PG&E may get away with it; Peter knows people don't pay close attention to those thick voter guides. But in the end, PG&E gets away with nothing. I, and a million like me, will officially cut myself loose from any consideration for PG&E. Peter, you and yours are not Part of the Tribe anymore. If I see somebody destroying PG&E property, I will get around to reporting it -- eventually. I will do everything I can to deprive you of My Money. Rhumba and I will save up and go solar and force you to pay ME, by law, for the power generated by our house panels.

I have to plan ahead, because this is not a just world; you may win. If it were a just world, a gang of husky court bailiffs would already be up in PG&E headquarters to take you into custody, strip you naked, and herd you down Market Street to the Hall of Justice with high-voltage cattle prods. And you would scream why, why? I'm just doing what the market demands....

That's right. And the market demands.... evil. Money and choice taken from the many, for the benefit of the few. And you happily complied.

Vote No on 16, please.

Afterword, 2011: PG&E didn't get away with it. And neither did Peter Darbee. See these follow-up posts:

I Kant Haz Evil?
The Everlasting Henchman