(Updated) 'Portland IMC' Poster Exposes Fake Pro-PGE Citizens Campaign
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
A poster to the Portland Independent Media Center named N. Tesla revealed yesterday the true nature of an organization calling itself Citizens Against the Government Takeover, whose website says:
A proposal to condemn and takeover the electrical system in Multnomah County is headed for the ballot. The proposal would replace the reliable service of Portland General Electric and Pacific Power with a startup people's utility district (PUD).
Oregonians are uniting against the proposal because a forced government takeover would be costly, risky, bad for the economy and bad for the community.
And their Background page says:
Citizens Against the Government Takeover is a committee of individuals, businesses and organizations who oppose the condemnation and takeover of Pacific Power's and Portland General Electric's service areas in Multnomah County.
As of this writing, the Committee and Endorsement pages present no information regarding either the committee or their endorsements, so the identities of these "individuals, businesses and organization" are anyone's guess.
After learning of the "Citizens" campaign ("Let's just say," Tesla explained, "a little birdie told me about it.") Tesla used the whois tool to determine the owner of the organization's domain, discovering that the domain was registered to Gard & Gerber, a Portland-based advertising agency.
As Tesla points out, taking a glance at their client list shows that the agency handles advertising work for... Portland General Electric.
Which naturally raises the rather obvious suspicion that the Citizens organization is little more than a PR front group for PGE -- regardless of the legitimacy of any of the individual citizens they may put forward or organize. How closely this suspicion reflects reality is difficult to determine without futher information about the Citizens.
Originally, I was awaiting responses both from Gard & Gerber and the "Citizens" campaign (asking them each to clarify the relationship between and amongst Gerber, Citizens, and PGE) before posting about this. But at this point, I see no particular reason not to relate what Tesla determined thus far.
Update
There is now a list of committee members on the Citizens website:
Hank Ashforth
Nik Blosser
Gun Denhart
Neil Goldschmidt
Phil Keisling
Tom Kelly
Ellen Lowe
George J. Passadore
John W. Russell
Fred Sanchez
Ed Washington
Mara Woloshin
In addition, the site's list of endorsements is up, presenting "a rapidly growing list of organizations, businesses and others who have taken a stand formally opposing the costly and risky formation of a People's Utility District in Multnomah County."
Nothing on the site yet reflects the group's connection to Gard & Gerber, from whom I am still awaiting a response.
Update
For those not up on using WHOIS (or who have an older version which only returns the name of the domain registry through which a domain was purchased, but doesn't go the next step into the actual ownership) click here to see the ownership record for the Citizens domain.
June 12, 2003 at 02:00 PM
Not a particularly surprising development... amusing though.
However, in all fairness, "Tesla" needs to be honest with us about his/her indetity as well. Unless it's just coincidence that a major electricity pioneer -- Nikola Tesla -- has a namesake playing bloodhound with an electric utility?
June 12, 2003 at 03:28 PM
Well, judging by Tesla's comments elsewhere at Portland IMC, they do appear to be a backer of the public utility district, against which PGE's advertising agency has organized a "citizens" groups.