There is a saturation radio ad campaign going around these days
for a new proposition on our gee-don’t-we-need-another-one June
ballot. It’s called Proposition 16 and the ads start something like
this:
”
Under current law local governments in California can spend
unlimited amounts of public money to go into the electric power
business without the people even getting to vote on it.
There is a saturation radio ad campaign going around these days for a new proposition on our gee-don’t-we-need-another-one June ballot. It’s called Proposition 16 and the ads start something like this: “Under current law local governments in California can spend unlimited amounts of public money to go into the electric power business without the people even getting to vote on it. That’s why we need Proposition 16 because voters deserve the right to have the final say on how our money is spent; after all, it’s our money.”
An earnest appeal to the Mad Hatter in every Tea Partier: evil government spending your money without you getting to vote on it – how dare they try to pull this underhanded scam by using “current law,” which means, incidentally, the way it has always been because everywhere in the world and at all times in history one of the most fundamental functions of any government is to take in money through taxation and then spend it.
What the backers of Proposition 16 want you to believe is that somehow governmental ability to spend your money without you voting on it first is a strange and un-American anomaly as though California were ancient Greece and representative democracy itself was some sort of sinister plot to take away your sacred freedoms. Try running that one past the Founding Fathers.
Actually, I misspoke there when I said “backers”; the word shouldn’t be plural. In fact there is precisely one, count ’em, one backer of Proposition 16, a single proponent with pockets as deep as Meg Whitman’s who as of March 26 has spent a whopping $28.5 million to get this dog to the track: PG&E, your friendly local power monopoly; no one else has spent a cent. Proposition 16 is its personal initiative measure designed to preserve its comfortable residence in Fat City unhindered by any competition in the power biz.
Yes, I know PG&E is a corporation, and yes, I said “personal,” but after the Supreme Court’s ruling that corporations are for purposes of controlling and corrupting the political process the functional equivalent of an actual if highly malevolent person the term is now officially appropriate.
So say hello to Mr. P.G. Andee; Mr. Andee is a billionaire and he wants to make sure that no one will be allowed to poach on his extremely lucrative territory unless not just a simple majority but two-thirds of the voters say it’s OK.
Now we all know that passing a camel, even a really big one, through the eye of a needle is child’s play compared to getting two-thirds of Californians to agree about anything, especially since if such a thing ever actually got on the ballot we can count on Mr. Andee himself to pour more millions into making sure it doesn’t succeed, so if Proposition 16 passes the perpetuity of Mr. Andee’s monopoly is assured.
And where does Mr. Andee get $28.5 million to spend on his own private state law? Hmm, I guess it would be from us, his captive customers; we are the source of all his money. So why does Mr. Andee get to go around creating self-serving laws without us getting to vote on it?
After all, it’s our money, or at least it was before we paid it to him just like our tax money was ours before we paid it to the government. So maybe we need a new proposition to prevent Mr. Andee from spending our money without a vote on ballot measures that eliminate the government’s right to spend our money without a vote. Seems only fair.
Welcome to the originally populist-inspired California initiative process on bad acid: a single huge corporation spending tens of millions on a state law whose only subject is itself and whose only purpose is to strengthen and immortalize its total freedom from competition, cynically surfing a rising wave of unfocused anti-government sentiment all the way to the bank. It’s an old truism that angry people make bad decisions.
There is a seething mass of angry people out there at the moment egged on by the Limbaughs and the Becks and the Paul Revere wannabes just looking for somebody to punch in the face, and some of the decisions they are going to make this year will no doubt be doozies.
There is also a cadre of calculating opportunists who know that by manipulating that nebulous anger to their ends there are glorious profits to be made.
Despite being an award-winning columnist, Robert Mitchell doggedly remains the same eccentric attorney who has practiced general law in Morgan Hill for more than 30 years. Reach him at r.****@*****on.net.
