Benevolent goddess of sunshine and wormspit

Hand spinning, knitting, blogging and machine knitting ADHD genius.

[theconcealedweapon]

"Child trafficking is the real issue. Covid is a distraction. #saveourchildren"

Really? You dipshits never mentioned child trafficking until there was something to compare it to in order to downplay the other issue. Once the lockdowns ended and people stopped promoting the vaccine, you stopped talking about child trafficking.

If anything, covid caused people to talk about human trafficking more.

[animentality]

[animentality]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules

Today (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

It's a breathtaking fraud: SoCal Gas, the largest gas company in America, spent millions secretly paying people to oppose California environmental regulations, then illegally stuck its customers with the bill. We Californians were forced to pay to lobby against our own survival:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article277266828.html

The criminal scheme is spelled out in eye-watering detail in a superb investigative report by Joe Rubin and Ari Plachta for the Sacramento Bee, which names the law firms and individual lawyers involved in the scam.

Here's the situation: SoCal Gas is California's private, regulated gas monopoly. They are allowed to lobby, but are legally required to charge their lobbying activities to their shareholders, and are prohibited from raising customer rates to pay for lobbying.

The company spent years secretly violating this rule, in the sleaziest way possible: working with corporate cartels like the California Restaurant Association and BizFed, the monopoly paid BigLaw white-shoe firms to procure people who posed as concerned citizens in order to oppose climate regulations that are essential to the state's very survival.

The bill topped $36 million – and it was illegally charged to its customers, the Californians whose immediate health and long-term survival these efforts opposed. SoCal Gas refuses to disclose the full extent of the spending, as do its lawyer-procurers, who cite legal confidentiality and a First Amendment right to secretly seek to influence policy in their refusal to disclose their profits from this illegal conduct.

The law firms involved are a who's-who of California's most prominent corporate fixers, including Reichman Jorgensen and Holland & Knight. The partners involved have a long rap sheet for anti-climate dirty tricking, most notably Jennifer Hernandez, notorious in climate justice history for an incident where activists claim she posed as one of them, infiltrating a campaign to force corporate despoilers to clean up their pollution in order to sabotage it, while secretly on a wealthy, prominent landowner's payroll.

Hernandez claims to care about the environment and says that her longstanding, corporate-funded, extensive campaigns and lawsuits against state environmental regulations are motivated by concern over their impact on working people. Her firm, Holland & Knight, denies serving SoCal Gas in opposing gas regulations, but it received $594k in ratepayer dollars, and submitted comments opposing the rules on its own behalf. Those comments were nearly identical to the comments submitted by SoCal Gas.

Hernandez also represents an obscure organization called The Two Hundred for Home Ownership in "a flurry of lawsuits" over California Air Resources Board rules on pollution, seeking to overturn the state's landmark climate change regulations.

Two Hundred for Home Ownership was founded by Robert Apodaca, who told the Bee that Hernandez's work for him is pro bono and not funded by SoCal Gas, but his entry into the fray occurred just as SoCalGas was founding an astroturf group called Californians for Fair and Balanced Energy (C4BES), which pretended to be an independent organization, disguising its relationship with SoCal Gas.

Apodaca is also founder of United Latinos Vote, an organization that had been largely dormant for seven years, not receiving any donations, until 2018, when the California Building Industry Association gave it $99k. The CBIA is a large-dollar recipient of donations from SoCal Gas, and its CEO insists that it was not acting on SoCal Gas's behalf when it made its unpredented donation to Apodaca.

The CBIA donation to United Latinos Vote was forerunner to a flood of corporate donations from the likes of Chevron, Marathon and Phillips 66. Shortly after receiving this cash, United Latinos Vote ran a full page ad in the LA Times, accusing the Sierra Club of pushing for anti-gas appliance rules that would harm working class Latino families.

This ad, in turn, featured prominently in advocacy by the SoCal Gas front group C4BES, funded with $29.1m in ratepayer money, which it then spent seeking to link clean appliance rules with anti-Latino racism. A quarter of California's carbon emissions come from home gas use.

SoCal Gas is regulated by the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC), which tolerated this mounting illegal conduct for many years, even as the company circulated internal memos as early as 2015 discussing its plans to oppose electrification in the state on the basis that it constituted "a significant risk to our business."

But last year, CPUC fined SoCal Gas $10m. Now, CPUC's Public Advocate office has filed a damning, extensive report on SoCal Gas's unlawful conduct, seeking $80m in rate cuts to compensate Californians for the funds misappropriated to protect the company's shareholder interests:

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M517/K407/517407314.PDF

Additionally, the Public Advocate is demanding $233m in fines for the company's refusal to allow investigators to audit its books and discover the full extent of the fraud.

SoCal Gas is the nation's largest utility, but (incredibly), it's not the dirtiest. That prize goes to Ohio's FirstEnergy, which handed $60m in ratepayer dollars to state politicians in illegal bribes in exchange for coal and nuclear subsidies and cancellation of state climate rules. That scandal led to GOP speaker of the Ohio House Larry Householder being sentenced to 20 years in prison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

There is something extraordinarily sleazy about using ratepayers' own money to lobby against their interests. SoCal Gas and its Big Law enablers have funneled millions in Californian's money into campaigns to poison us and boil us alive, and they did it while using workers and racialized people as human shields.

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/19/cooking-the-books-with-gas/#reichman-jorgensen

Image: Maryland GovPics (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mdgovpics/6635539089/

Jackie (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/79874304@N00/197532792

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

Precious man (not in black!) sighted ❤ (x,x)

Neil Gaiman: Hi, I'm Neil Gaiman. I'm wearing the first red T-shirt I've worn since 1987. Because I'm a member of the WGA. I'm on strike. I care so much for the things that I've written but I'm out here right now not working and here until we get a good contract because I care about the future of the WGA, the future of young writers. I want a world in which no AI writes scripts or attempts to. I want a world in which young writers get to learn how to make television. And I want a world in which we are fairly compensated for the things that we put up on streaming.

[nicostiel]

#more twitter drama

[soberscientistlife]

[threadmaiden]

I bought the weave-it rug loom on eBay a few years ago. It wasn’t in perfect condition, if you look closely you’ll see I’ve had to replace some of the pegs. It takes about 12 feet of cord to make a single square.

[threadmaiden]

This is the best picture of me in my old work room.

[neil-gaiman]

As a fellow lover of libraries (and as a librarian) feel I must share the heart breaking story of the loss of my rural university's library system.

I live in Vermont, a beautiful state full of many wonderful libraries (Story walks were actually invented in our state capital, at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montepelier!)

Unfortunately, Our State University system (VSU) wants to permanently close down our University Libraries state-wide. There will be no more physical libraries for students to utilize, no librarians to help us or to connect with. Students and members of our communities will be losing a precious resource and public space. Our library system will be digitalized, online only. This will have devastating effects not only for the students and our campuses but our rural communities too.

If you'd like to learn more, here's an informative post from a fellow student!

https://www.tumblr.com/0liver-hope/709438313729245184/if-you-love-books-save-a-library

I don't know if there's much we can do at this point, but if you can, please help us raise awareness. We love our libraries and don't want to lose them. Thank you, Neil Gaiman.

That's sad, and wrong. Happy to help publicise it.

if you love books, save a library!

I hear people on Tumblr talk a lot about the importance of libraries; now’s your chance to help save one! At Vermont State University is a

[threadmaiden]

I made these

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[threadmaiden]

Handmade stretch velvet headbands | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Handmade stretch velvet headbands at the best online prices at eBay! Free ship

I use left over and dead stock yarns and fabric to make beautiful things and keep them out of landfills. This means that I’m usually designing the final product around the materials instead of looking for the right material to fit my design. These headbands are so natural in this material, I’m really pleased with how they look feel and function.

[threadmaiden]

It's my 9 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳