PG&E, Jesse Jackson, and Ward Connerly

OF PG&E, JESSE JACKSON, AND WARD CONNERLY

by Alex Walker


San Jose, CA -- Thursday afternoon, April 11, 2001, was one of those days when you can see all the games played by America\'s plutocracy operating at once. I attended a congressional hearing chaired by Republican Congressman Dan Burton on the California energy \"crisis\" in a room packed with more dark suits than can normally finds in Silicon Valley in a month of Sundays.

I personally witnessed Stephen E. Picket, Vice President and General Counsel of Southern California Edison, admit that California\'s infamous rolling blackouts in January and March were not, I repeat NOT due to a supply and demand problem.

Mr. Picket admitted that the real problem, in his words, was that \"the market is dysfunction.\" He even said it more than once.

While all the other congressmen, including San Jose\'s \"liberal\" Democrat Zoe Lofgren, indulged their gourmet taste for corporate boot polish, Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland (perhaps not coincidentally a protege of the great progressive Ron Dellums), hammered Dede Hapner, Vice President of Pacific Gas & Electric about PG&E\'s bankruptcy filing. Hapner lamely replied: \"I am not a bankruptcy lawyer, so I can\'t answer that question.\" The hapless Hapner also had no answer to why PG&E was unable to secure contracts for affordable power last spring or to Rep. Lee\'s straightforward question \"What happened to the money?\" that PG&E raked in during 1998 and 1999.

Today\'s online editions of the San Jose Mercury News, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times did not report these juicy nuggets, even though nowadays it is truly a \"man bites dog\" story to hear the words \"market\" and \"dysfunctional\" in the same sentence.

The Mercury News did report, however, that none other than John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, one of Silicon Valley\'s highest flying coporations, and a big contributor and personal pal of George W. Bush was a scheduled keynote speaker at an event organized by Rev. Jesse Jackson at San Jose\'s posh Fairmont Hotel.

This is supposed to mark a new push for \"diversity\" in Silicon Valley. However, it needs to be said out loud, and especially by African-American progressives like me, that under current conditions in Silicon Valley this is a meaningless exercise. Tens of thousands of layoffs have already been announced due to the current high tech downturn, including thousands at Cisco Systems and another 400 at Yahoo yesterday. If any good was going to come from the \"Silicon Valley Initiative\" started two years ago by Mr. Jackson, the window of opportunity has opened ... and closed. Therefore, the informed observer can only fear these moves will result in nothing more than window-dressing and divisiveness.

Meanwhile, by an amazing coincidence, on the very same day, Ward Connerly, California\'s infamous scourge of affirmative action announced a new crusade: a ballot initiative to block California from even gathering racial statistics. Connerly and his \"conservatives\" cannot refute the mountain of prima facia evidence of discrimination, so their \"solution\" is to make it impossible to gather the evidence. They called California\'s 1996 anti-affirmative action initiative the \"Civil Rights Initiative.\" Their latest crusade has been dubbed the \"Racial Privacy Initiative.\"

To bad George Orwell didn\'t live to see this.

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Throw in two weeks of screaming headlines on the \"crisis\" in China and the \"game plan\" of the plutocrats is clear:

Blackouts are the fault of \"Big Government.\"

Corporate executives are innocent.

And so, by the end of the summer all of y\'all suburban suckers are supposed to sit in the dark waving your little flags and grousing about \"Big Government,\" the \"Yellow peril\" over there, and \"The Coloreds\" over here.

It is going to be a challenge for African-American progressives like me not to get suckered into yet another futile \"debate\" over affirmative action on terms defined by Ward Connerly and his cynical, rich, white, Republican backers. California\'s \"deregulation\" of electric power is the most dramatic example yet of the failure of the bipartisan \"market\" consensus and we should keep our eye on the ball. After all, in the dark we are all the same color.


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Alex Walker is a software engineer, freelance writer and an active member of the California Green Party.