Enter Goliath

Open Letter to Jerry Brown: Were you too busy campaigning to notice Nancy McFadden’s $50-million marketing move at PG&E last June? According to CEO Peter Darbee’s own statements to investors, McFadden researched the “problem” of communities’ trying to innovate outside of PG&E’s monopoly and came up with Proposition 16, a straight-out ballot buy that brought a new level of cynicism to California’s democracy. I watched my own daughter give up months of her non-corporate-backed life to light up [figuratively] room-after-room as she explained the sham of McFadden’s Prop. 16. Eighty local-government agencies and a massive number of newspapers in California got the picture and came out solidly against this trickery.

McFadden and PG&E tried to persuade us to further paralyze ourselves with another two-thirds vote requirement, where the minority has all power. You’ve just inherited the mire of our other version of the ol’ two-thirds majority vote in Sacramento.

While you were out promising local clean energy and community power, your first appointee, Senior Vice President of PG&E Nancy McFadden, was busy trying to bury community and hang on to old models of centralized generation and heavy fossil fuel use with her big gold purse.

What is with this appointment? What is it you think we aren’t noticing? I voted for you with all the hope of getting, among other things, big money out of our electoral process. The tiny, truthful, ordinary smart voices were able to inform us and triumph over the big-money power play of Prop. 16, and then you bring Goliath right in the front door. Please reconsider, walk her out the back door, and make good with all of your other appointments. We are looking to you to be with the people, not with the big-money politic.