As you’re boiling water for coffee, you turn on the morning news – recurring loops of crime, traffic and weather bracketed by ads you’ve heard thousands of times. In Northern California the company providing the stations with the most revenue is Pacific Gas & Electric. Their ads feature actors playing the role Spike Lee calls “the Magic Negro.” Dressed as PG&E workers, they remind us, “If you smell gas, you’re too close…” The subtext, of course, is that PG&E is deeply concerned about our safety. (There has not been an epidemic of gas leaks.)
Funneling ad money to the media discourages critical reporting and buys favorable coverage, which PG&E is perpetually in need of. Our electricity bills have doubled in the past five years. The average consumer pays $200/month (not counting gas) and the Public Utilities Commission has just approved another rate hike.
PG&E’s CEO as of 2021 is Patricia Poppe, a handsome, middle-aged woman who hasn’t had plastic surgery and comes across as a straight talker. She has become the face of the company (along with the Magic Negroes). Last week she was interviewed by NBC’s Raj Mathai. He asked one or two seemingly tough questions on behalf of “viewers at home.” Poppe had her answers and he didn’t follow up.
Mathai: “PG&E made more than $2 billion in profits last year. Where is that money going?”
Poppe (Emphatically pointing down with her right hand): Right back into the system! Right back into the system! And I would like to think that ‘profits’ is not a bad word for a utility. So a financially healthy PG&E actually enables lower costs for consumers.”
At this point an interviewer speaking for us ratepayers would have asked for specifics. How much was paid out to PG&E stockholders? How many years till costs get lower? Instead, NBC News cut to footage of power lines and narration implying that PG&E under Poppe is a different company: “Reinvesting profits in infrastructure is something critics and watchdogs say PG&E didn’t do for years...Poppe says she’s now leading the charge to improve reliability and reduce fire risk.”
Mathai lobs her a softball: “Critics say that insulating the power lines would save people money.” Patti hits it into the left-field bleachers. Research shows, she says, that in the “high-vegetation areas,” insulating the lines would still leave a 35% risk of them triggering a wildfire. “I don’t know about you,” she says, “but I don’t want to live in an area where there’s a 35 percent risk.”
The woman is all about safety. “Our most current increases are based on some catch-up cost recoveries. That was necessary work to make our system safe. We also know that bills can come down and that’s what we’re working on.”
But she won’t say when.
* * *
Another multi-millionaire effectively shilling for her company these days is Tiffany Devitt of CannaCraft. The Santa Rosa outfit has been one of the few big winners in the Legal Cannabis Industry, but not big enough for ambitious Tiffany. The title of her recent piece on the Project CBD website – “Industry-Promoted Misinformation About Intoxicating Hemp”– had me momentarily confused because Tiffany has long been a leader of “The Industry.”
Turns out she (perhaps with help from her husband, Martin Lee) was attacking the Sketchy Hemp Industry.
As explained by Forbes, “Marijuana remains illegal federally, but its cannabis cousin, hemp, has exploded into a $28 billion industry with products that can legally get you high. In 2018, the federal government legalized hemp and all its derivatives, isomers and extracts through what’s known as the Farm Bill. And since hemp and marijuana are different varieties of the same plant, they contain the same compounds and hemp can be used to make products of similar potencies, or even stronger, than those found in state-regulated marijuana dispensaries around the country.
“Armed with the Farm Bill, companies like Indiana-based 3Chi and its competitors sell these hemp-derived products online, across state lines, at gas stations, convenience stores and other places where marijuana is still outlawed. As a result, hemp is becoming a bigger industry than state-regulated marijuana. In 2022, hemp product sales reached $28 billion while legal marijuana products generated $26 billion in sales during that same period, according to cannabis data firm Whitney Economics.
“Cannabis companies and lobbyists are urging lawmakers to outlaw hemp products on the state and federal level, especially since hemp companies are subject to far less onerous regulations. ‘It is, to an extent, a civil war,’ says Justin Journay, founder of 3Chi. But, ironically, some of those same marijuana companies that want to see hemp products removed from the market are also dabbling in them.” (And in California, many respectable, state-sanctioned companies are dealing large quantities of product to their ostensible rivals.)
The chemical processes by which low-THC hemp plants are made to yield intoxicating cannabinoids might also yield compounds that sensible people should not ingest. Her warning to consumers is almost certainly correct in that sense. But the context –the Project CBD website– is profoundly dishonest.
The “About” page includes a big graphic of Martin A. Lee captioned “How This Activist Launched the CBD Revolution.” In reality, Project CBD was an offshoot of O’Shaughnessy’s, the journal of sorts that I produced for a pro-cannabis doctors’ group founded by Tod Mikuriyua. I broke the CBD story in our first issue and covered it in every issue thereafter. Forgive my immodesty, but having my work ripped off has finally become unacceptable.
In 2008-09, thanks to urgent calls from the buyers at Harborside Health Center, I would race over to Oakland to inform disappointed growers that the pounds they’d brought in, although low in THC, were rich in another cannabinoids that had great medical potential, CBD. I arbitrarily defined “CBD-rich” as herb containing at least 4% cannabidiol. The growers had held several meetings at the Oakland apartment of a woman named Karen Byars before I introduced the crew to M.A.L. I listed him and Sarah Russo as co-authors of articles I’d written myself. What was I thinking? Maybe I was trying to make our little cohort look bigger than it was. I put Martin in charge of developing a Project CBD website. Unbeknownst to me, he trademarked the name and turned it into a stealth PR operation for the company in which he had an ownership stake. California being a community-property state, I assume this fake lefty has been a multimillionaire for years. And he’s still asking for donations!
Why didn’t I sue? Because I was a chump. I didn’t want to bring disgrace to a movement for which I still had hope.
Scoundrel Time
BTW, there’s a shirt-tail connection between PG&E and CannaCraft, a Sonoma-based wheeler dealer who in 2016 convinced a group of Press Democrat executives to invest a few million in Cannacraft and installed his brother Kirk as CEO of their in-house lab.
* * *
We’ll have to stop meeting like this
to share news or reminisce.
Writing on paper feels realer than vapor
but like the kids say, “It is what it is.”
You can still get an AVA fix, the website awaits your clicks.
Mendocino Today might convince you to stay
(Ed Notes is part of the mix).
There’s still Scaramella, still Mike Geniella
Yearsley should keep on playing.
Chris Hedges, Taibbi come as a freebie
(while Substack insists on you paying).
The paper in print appeared till it didn’t,
dear reader, but moving online
is not obsolescence so maintain a presence
and I’ll try to maintain mine.
Be First to Comment