Commentary from California
Of Haircuts and Janitors
The energy crisis in California: ever curiouser and more closely cropped
By Edmund Zimmerman

May 15, 2001 -- San Francisco (APJP) -- Out here in the Wild West we know how to talk to Texans. You start out real polite-like until you get them a few feet from the pickup truck (and the gun rack) and then you compliment their hairstyles and ask about the weather. It’s not that the Texans make us Californians nervous; after all, we’ve got Bakersfield out here and you can’t throw a stone from the Capital rotunda in Sacramento without hitting a feedlot, but it’s the way they look at us. It’s the redneck version of the disrespect shown us whenever our state football team the Forty-Niners had to play an important game against some big industrial town…the "brie and chardonnay" thing…Mike Royko in the Chicago Tribune calling San Francisco the “city of soft, groovy shoulders”. It’s tough to be taken seriously when every damn thing you do has the word “new” in front of it (or nouvelle).

So we shouldn’t take it personally when our governor demands a sit-down with the bosses of the power generating companies, many based in Texas, and they respond with the “hook ‘em horns” salute (the redneck Bronx cheer). The meeting Wednesday (May 9) in Sacramento went exactly as we could have predicted…nowhere. Wild-maned State Senate President John Burton (D-San Francisco) set the clippers on hum with a call for a “thirty per-cent haircut” on the debts owed the Texans by the state and our local utilities, poor little PG&E and sweet little Southern California Edison. After the meeting Governor Gray Davis, no stranger to the barber’s chair, repeated the call for the power generators to “take a haircut” and accept 70 cents for every dollar owed them. The representatives of the generating companies, many of them sporting standard-issue Trent Lott "power coifs," seemed unamused by the governor’s dollar trimming proposals. In typical Texan understatement, John Stout (rakish center part, a bit long over the ears), senior vice president of Reliant Energy, drawled, “I would much rather get that 100 cents on the dollar.” The other officers present, including VP’s, Senior VP’s and CEO’s and presidents and chairmen of Enron, Duke, El Paso and even PG&E National Energy Group (name sound familiar?) were mainly silent but the general facial expression was pure "hook ‘em horns."

On Monday, speaking in Los Angeles, Governor Davis sent mixed signals to his adversaries. “My friends, we are in a war with energy companies, mostly from Texas…Our best short-term remedy…is conservation.” (With this attitude, Davey Crockett would’ve wound up his career selling coonskin sombreros at El Alamo.) Serious conservation efforts and funding for renewable energy sources are the main ingredients in any long term solution to California’s problems, but for the moment, generators are charging California hundreds of times what it costs them to produce their energy. And the war metaphor doesn’t seem to scare the Texans. Jan Smutny-Jones, executive director of the Independent Energy Producers, said on Friday, “I don’t think running the California bear flag over a power plant is going to help anything.”

The foot soldiers Davis was addressing in LA were janitors from the Service Employees International Union. These guys have shown they know how to fight; just a year ago 8000 of them let office garbage pile up throughout Los Angeles in a contentious three-week-long but ultimately successful strike. Posing with the Governor in green “lights out!” t-shirts in front of bright TV lights will probably be the closest they get to raising any flags. Not to diminish the PR value of this LA moment for any of the parties involved, but some of the mandate for this modern day Jacquerie ranges from the obvious to the unrealistic; according to the LA Times, ”to switch off lights in unoccupied areas and…other machinery, including computers.” Be sure to hit “save” first, guys.

The federal government, now in the hands of “energy experts” from Texas, is taking a two-pronged approach to California’s problems. At a press conference on Saturday, May 12, George Bush proposed channeling the minuscule tax rebates due the average American directly into the pockets of other Texas energy experts. His second smirk, Dick Cheney, seems to drool as he banters shamelessly about reopening the lead-lined Pandora’s box of nuclear energy. He boldly straddles California’s fault lines firing spent fuel rods at all his critics. There are quite a few spent fuel rods lying around, since they remain deadly for a couple of million years and the energy experts seem content to just move them from one dank, poisonous cave to another.

Still the war goes on and the lights go off and our government gets smaller and the companies get bigger -- and since we certainly have no say in the activities of the corporations, our say in all this gets less significant with each passing day. In a troubling illustration of this point, the SF Chronicle reported that during the Wednesday meeting in Sacramento, the Governor of California actually asked the power boys of Texas to intervene for him in Washington on his energy plan, “asking them to try to win GOP support for it”. This is rather like asking General Dynamics to try and convince the Pentagon to pull out of the Star Wars missile defense boondoggle. Meanwhile the citizenry of California (and everyplace else…Enron knows where you live!) are left to ponder our own pandering to the conductors of these corrupt casino games…how we abdicated our rights to the most basic elements of our lives and allowed ourselves and our loved ones and our communities to become mere commodities.

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