3-5-10 by dugan
I guess its’s fitting that it took a New York newspaper to inform Californians that a couple of giant Texas oil refining companies are bankrolling a ballot initiative to kill the state’s popular climate change/green energy law. The whole saga is much like Oklahoma oilman T. Boone Pickens’ failed effort in 2008 to make California taxpayers subsidize his natural gas fuel business. Except that Pickens was honest about paying for his own ballot initiative.
Until a couple of weeks ago, a proposed ballot initiative to kill California’s landmark clean air law, AB32, was just three fringe conservatives with a bad website. They were trying to bill it as a jobs initiative–except that as opponents pointed out, the intitiative would actually kill investment and thousands of new jobs in green power and emission control. As of Feb. 11, the sponsors been turned down for funding by all three of California’s big power companies, perhaps because the clean air law has solid public support, and Gov. Schwarzenegger was its chief backer.
Now, says the New York Times, Texas-based Tesoro Corp. and Valero Energy–which each own two major and heavily polluting refineries in California, are the apparently sole funders. The Sacramento Bee now reports that the two companies have forked over $1.6 million–which is about enough to keep the anti-AB32 effort going until it gets the required 434,000 signatures to get on the November ballot, but not much more.
If you’re a Californian, and one of those annoying paid signature-gatherers shoves a clipboard in hour face and claims that if you sign up it will protect jobs in the state, walk away. And when you come to a Valero gas station, you can just keep driving. Why pay a Texas company to meddle in California politics?
We already have at least two initiatives on the June primary ballot that are sponsored by corporations for their personal financial good:
—Proposition 17, whose sole funder is Mercury Insurance and whose aim is to undercut the state’s pro-consumer insurance laws; and
–Proposition 16, which is an effort by power company Pacific Cas and Electric Co. to make it impossible for cities to form municipal power companies and give consumers a "public option" to the power company.
The measure being funded by Valero and Tesoro is just another corporate takeover of the deeply corrupted voter initiative process.
Enough, already. As columnist Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angelels Times warned in 2005, we face "the specter of a California governed by laws and constitutional amendments written by bozos and billionaires."