"Beyond confounding the budget, the referendum system also often falls prey to exactly the oligarchic interests its Progressive creators were trying to counter. Rather than vehicles for grassroots rage, many of the initiatives that make it to the ballot are the pet projects of a handful of wealthy donors or interest groups. In 2006, for example, Los Angeles real-estate heir and environmentalist Steve Bing single-handedly dumped nearly $50 million into Proposition 87, an initiative to levy $4 billion in taxes on California oil producers. That same year, actor / director Rob Reiner plowed nearly $3 million of his own money into a measure that would have raised state income taxes to fund universal pre-school. And in 2008, Orange County tech billionaire Henry Nicholas spent nearly $5 million bankrolling Proposition 9, a measure that expanded victims' rights under California criminal law. In the end, both Bing's and Reiner's initiatives went down to defeat, while Nicholas's passed with nearly 54% of the vote. But regardless of their outcomes, these endeavors bear witness to the fact that the referendum system is just as often a means for the powerful to circumvent the system as it is for the people to have their voices heard."

For shits sake! Taxing Big Oil who are BILKING EVERYONE even while the BushCo cuts every green incentive is wrong?! But, because these tax measures were defeated and no energy standards are enforced it's the consumers fault! What a fuckload of malarkey. This piece doesn't even cover the purposefully rolled blackouts which took out thousands of businesses. Every other day a rolling brownout would take down server power, gas generators backup would kick in, but the equipment invariably was damaged time and again costing us millions. Enron weren't fully investigated even with the taped EVIDENCE, the grid is the SAME TODAY and blackouts WILL PURPOSEFULLY HAPPEN AGAIN.

Stupid, stupid, stupid programmable Republicans!