So, there are fires again in California and it turns out the largest fire was caused by a downed PG&E power wire–despite the fact that PG&E cut power from vast swathes of the state to try and make sure that didn’t happen.
What’s hilarious about this is that PG&E has, ummm, a record:
As early as 1990, years before worsening drought and higher temperatures began pushing wildfire season into apocalyptic overdrive, PG&E was facing criminal charges for failing to trim the trees growing alongside its power lines as required by state law. In 1997, the utility was convicted of no fewer than 739 counts of criminal negligence for a fire that burned 500 acres and leveled 12 homes in the High Sierra town of Rough and Ready. State regulators later charged PG&E with more than 500,000instances, between 1994 and 1998, of failing to trim trees near their electric lines. (my emphasis)
This is mind-boggling. The sheer fucking incompetence, venality, and stupidity of both the government and PG&E. Half a million times they were fined, so obviously the fines weren’t working; PG& simply viewed them as part of the cost of doing business. This was going on in the 90s and the government DID NOTHING.
You have two acceptable choices in this case: You either nationalize the utility, or you change the law from requiring the imposition of fines to require criminal sentences for executives and board members (and probably anyone earning more than X dollars, so they don’t try and silo people from criminal penalties).
As with bankers, where the fines for widespread fraud (including stealing people’s houses by falsely signing documents), were far less than the gain, PG&E had no reason to stop.
This was especially exacerbated by an ideological choice: The decision that the only responsibility corporations had was to their shareholders, and not to anyone else. (This choice also wound up enriching executives far more than shareholders.)
Corporations are bundles of vastly valuable rights, the most important of which is that shareholders and executives are largely insulated from both bankruptcy and the law. In every case, it should be necessary for a corporation to make clear what the public gets in return for granting these rights.
But in the case of PG&E, only a moron would think that the proper solution is anything other than nationalization. Utilities are, in fact, natural monopolies.
But more to the point, they are critical infrastructure. How can California, the home of Silicon Valley, be so fucking incompetent as to have power outs because they aren’t doing basic maintenance? This is third world shit. This is Nigeria. This is pathetic.
In any actually functional society, this shit would get sorted out ASAP and heads would roll, metaphorically or literally.
Instead, we have California governor Gavin Newsom whining about how he’d like Warren Buffet to buy PG&E. Pathetic doesn’t cut it. He’s the governor of a state with an economy larger than most countries. Take it over and sort it out.
Frankly, this is the sort of incompetence that ought to have him thrown out of office, if he isn’t lynched–along with PG&E’s executives. But Americans have become the sort of people who just take abuse by their “betters” lying down, so I’m sure everyone involved will stay rich and important and live in a house with backup generators.
Pathetic.
(Note that this is categorized under “class warfare.” And yes, I know some rich people are getting hit too. Maybe they should realize they aren’t /that/ rich.)
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A1
No
Not even close. The problems are are solvable. I do not know if there is a will to solve any of the problems, but California is rich and has all kinds of resources to mobilise if desired.
Joe
My guess is they are afraid that a ballot vote would come up a ban pg&e from being nationalized through marketing and tie legislators hands, or there is a federal law that prevents states from nationalizing corporations.
Mark Pontin
“The problems are solvable.”
But not by those currently holding governance roles in California. Newsom, like the relatively more competent Kamala Harris, belongs to the most recent (and probably last) generation of DNC-created neoliberal Clintonite Democrats and thanks to being a made man from birth within that hierarchy — which has also produced Pelosi and Feinstein, remember — has failed upwards in each placeholder role that he’s been granted.
Made man? Gavin’s late sister was married to Ron Pelosi, Nancy’s brother-in-law. Gavin Newsom’s father, William Newsom, administrated the San Francisco mayor’s oath of office to his son when the latter assumed the position in 2004. Dad William Newsom also happened to be the financial advisor for the Getty family businesses, directly managing the Gordon P. Getty Family Trust, which is heavily orientated towards RE and RE development. That’s only the beginning —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Newsom
It’s a big club, as George Carlin told us, and we ain’t in it. Are there no guillotines?
Mark Pontin
I live in the effected region in California, by the way. My electricity went out and one day I went with my laptop to the local library in Danville, adjacent to Mount Diablo, to work because they still had power there. I found myself next to a 73-year-old fart doing the same and consoling himself with the idea that all the locals driving Teslas were now more stuck than he was.
When I commented that PG&E had done stock buybacks and paid out dividends of $1.6 billion to shareholders last year, he assured me with lordly assurance that: firstly, he was a Harvard MBA and I should take it from him that investing in utilities was something for little old ladies and there was no greed involved on PG&E’s part and, secondly, PG&E’s failure to invest in basic upkeep was all the fault of the lefties on the California Public Utilities Commission who forced the company to waste money by stipulating that 20 percent of electricity retail sales must be served by renewables. Global climate change and atmospheric carbon release, he was convinced, was a hoax.
So that’s the line you’re going to hear: it was all the fault of the California PUC for stipulating that PG&E introduce renewables.
Dan
Besides the rampant you-can’t-call-it-corruption-because-we-made-it-legal in the US being an enormous problem, there is the problem that states lack any real power in exactly the sort of way that the wealthy elite and large corporations love.
They have no real control over their own monetary and trade policies, no control over their borders, and most of them have legal “balanced budget” requirements (including California) that make deficit-spending on crises nearly impossible. Even what pitiful forms of state autonomy, like California passing more stringent emissions requirements, are increasingly being challenged at the federal level. The only weird exception is state-level marijuana legalization, which is dead-to-rights unconstitutional…but it doesn’t really threaten any powerful interests, so neither Obama nor Trump administrations have decided to enforce the law (full disclosure: marijuana needs to be federally legalized, or at the very least taken off the scheduled substances list and devolved to the states for them to decide at their own level).
Republicans love to cry “states’ rights”, but that’s just a cudgel they use to evade federal regulations and taxes, re-legalize segregation, or otherwise serve their masters in the 1% donor class.
ponderer
I sympathize with your rant, but you are wrong. Nationalizing or what ever this would be (state-izing) will not fix the issue. The same government that does nothing now can do nothing then and they have shown they will do exactly that. California, one of the strongholds of Democrats, epitomizes the neoLiberal class sabotage strategy to keep the rank and file under thumb. They could easily fix this if they wanted to. There is a reason the tree’s around my home are trimmed by the power company (private) while California’s are not and it’s not economic.
I reiterate, this is a down stream problem from the root cause of a lack of accountability and partisan politics. This wouldn’t happen in other states or under other local governments. You have to hate ‘the other’ pretty hard to keep in power a group of people that steal from you and shut off your power while they burn down the country side. That’s apparently not too difficult in a state that specializes in propaganda and organized crime. Even Ian doesn’t suggest that perhaps the environment where these people live is unsustainable as wild fire is hardly new to the area. Nor is the build up of flammable brush to blame or the local governance who refuse to apply pressure to the utility, the only blame lies with where the spark comes from. That ignores the problem that there will always be a spark, sometimes the source is immaterial in developing a compensating strategy.
On the flip side its a chance for the suburbs to find something in common with fly over country.
edmondo
“Republicans love to cry “states’ rights”, but that’s just a cudgel they use to evade federal regulations and taxes, re-legalize segregation, or otherwise serve their masters in the 1% donor class.”
Yeah, we need more Democrat leaders like Diane Feinstein, Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi to fight those horrible billionaires who own California, like Feinstein, Schiff and Pelosi.
anon y'mouse
vast parts of it are. and have been for some time.
signed, former ghetto dweller native
Hugh
Schiff’s net worth is about $2 mil; Pelosi’s $120 mil; and Feinstein’s $58.5 mil. However, Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, a quintessential American robber baron profiting off his wife’s connections, is probably worth a billion. Supposedly, most of Pelosi’s wealth is attributable to her husband Paul, a venture capitalist (the Silicon connection) who is also into real estate and “consulting.” While Schiff is certainly not hurting, he really isn’t anywhere near the same level as Nancy and Dianne, financially or grift-wise. He is Stanford, Harvard Law, and a former federal prosecutor.
Just out of curiosity, has anyone ever been associated with or worked for a business or institution that was well run? I never have. If they functioned at all, it was because A) they were mostly on auto-pilot or B) they hadn’t quite gone splat, despite the best efforts of their managers to run them into the ground.
A shorter form of Ian’s thesis is: There need to be consequences. Instead the more wealth or power one has, the more impunity he/she has. There have to be consequences. Now there are none.
nihil obstet
Yes, but I think it demonstrated the rest of your paragraph. When Reagan’s federalism policies devolved programs to the states, our state was run by people who had finished college in the fifties; that is, they had grown up and been educated in the post WWII time when the New Deal was still the ruling framework. They set up some well thought through and very well run programs. I was lucky enough to start the government phase of my work life with them.
Their successors came in under the Reagan era politicians. They had no particular interest in governing. They recited the one-liners and cliches quite well, but they couldn’t shape the agency and its policies to accomplish anything beyond simplifying and commanding no mistakes in what it was already doing. There was a lot of reorganization since that’s how managers prove how smart they are. Basically, the work kept getting done by auto-pilot. And then after about ten more years, it all went splat, and the program was shut down.
DMC
Why has PG&E not been “class-actioned” into oblivion? Or is that in the immediate future? Word is that it’s about to become impossible to get fire insurance in California, as in “not at any price”. That’s going to have some HUGE knock-on effects that can’t be readily fathomed, in state and out. As was noted, California by itself is the 7th largest economy in the world. Just the Pacific Rim implications are staggering. The problem with kicking the can down the road is that you eventually run out of road.
Mark Pontin
“Why has PG&E not been “class-actioned” into oblivion? Or is that in the immediate future?”
More likely, I suspect, it’ll be more of this sort of thing ….
“State senator Bill Dodd, D, authored SB 901 back in April, 2018 that passes PG&E fire liability on to customers and authorizes PG&E to use a type of state-authorized bond to pay off the more than 200 lawsuits filed against the company over the fires and hundreds of deaths. However, no reverse condemnation of PG&E for damages is possible. Signed into law Sept 21, 2018 by Governor Jerry Brown.”
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/09/24/brown-wildfire-protection-bill-passes-costs.html
Also, to clarify Gavin Newsom’s stance re. PG&E a little more fully, the utility was the 13th largest contributor to his campaign in 2018 —
https://votesmart.org/candidate/campaign-finance/70386/gavin-newsom
And more generally,’Governor Newsom, most state lawmakers took money from convicted felon PG&E:PG&E donated millions to California politicians after it was convicted of 6 federal felonies connected to the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion that killed 8 people.’
Author: Brandon Rittiman, Eric Escalante, Chelsea Shannon
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/investigations/governor-newsom-most-state-lawmakers-took-money-from-convicted-felon-pge/103-2414790f-3a19-4411-92c2-fe23b519d646
Published: 6:04 PM PDT July 1, 2019
Updated: 10:26 AM PDT July 11, 2019
I ask again: are there no guillotines?
Eric Anderson
On this note, Thom Hartmann penned a must read in Salon recently:
https://www.salon.com/2019/01/10/its-time-to-bring-back-the-corporate-death-penalty_partner/
Now add Boeing.
Isn’t financial capitalism fun?
Mark Pontin
@ Eric Anderson –
Huh. Thanks for that — good piece by Hartmann.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
“Are there no guillotines?”
Uh, you have read what became of their staunch advocate, M. Robespierre, have you not?
I don't like giving my email either
There’s absolutely no way that something this complex boils down to only two options. Full stop.
Nationalization, when the government has discretionary control over something like 10% of its budget, feels a pathological need to get into the weeds so deeply that it posts notices on air bridges to the effect that inhaling air where jet engines have burned aviation kerosene causes cancer (while simultaneously also paving a significant fraction of the state for cars), is a recipe for disaster. Similarly, fixing generational scale messes like PG&E in a capital intensive, thin margin business (let alone one where patterns of capital distribution are shifting significantly) require top drawer talent – talent that’s not going to dedicate itself to the task when folks are obviously sharpening pitchforks and looking for someone to hold the bag.
SDG&E would appear to provide a good model for unscrewing this particular jam jar. Clearly it’s going to take a lot of will, money, time and talent to do that. Anything that interferes with the ability to access all of those is counter-productive.
Ian Welsh
Funnily enough, some generational problems are actually not that hard to fix IF you have the will to do it. Full stop.
Also top drawer talent is rarely actually needed, and rarely actually recognized. Look at all the assholes on Wall Street calling themselves top tier. Running utilities is a solved problem. It was solved by the 50s and 60s. We have gone out of our way to run utilities badly because we had idiotic ideological commitments to running natural monopolies privately, when they should either be public or extraordinarily heavily regulated.
Utilities do not have to be razor margin, you simply decide what the margin will be, because people must have utilities. But obviously the State is going to have to pump money in, in this case, under any reasonable scenario.
ponderer
@mail
No, the only thing needed is will. Blowing the problem out of proportion only serves to prevent it from being solved. The country is literally full of utility companies who don’t kill their customers. It’s a boring business like finance is supposed to be. Ian is right that there are 3rd world countries who do better providing electricity. The problem is the corrupt ties between PG&E and the state government. A decent person would measure the effectiveness of their government by how well it serves all of its people. A partisan measures by how well their tribe is helped and how harmed their ‘enemies’ are. The CA government is full of unethical partisans who benefit from PG&E so they do nothing.
Again, private companies only have one purpose, that is to make money. They should be expected to push the limits to accomplish that. Governments job is to serve the people. Clearly, here the issue is with the Government. The focus on PG&E, nationalization, and other side minutia are only to distract the people with grievances from the real issues that plague the entire Republic.
Watt4Bob
A lot of what needs to be done to solve California’s PG&E problem could be done WPA style, lots of boots on the ground trimming trees, and clearing brush, all the stuff PG&E neglected due to ‘cost’.
The work needs to be done, the people need the jobs, and a public take over from irresponsible private ownership makes sense every way you look at it except from the perspective of adherents to the neo-liberal religion.
I’d be willing to bet that 5-10 years of public investment in infrastructure, and that WPA style assault on neglected clean-up backlog would do the trick, but hey, where’s the profit for investors in that?
Stirling S Newberry
The difference between California and the third world is CA has money.
But they both have dumb voters.
John E Zimmerman
Its happening in California, and we deserve blame, but would it really be any better in other states?
As a side note as one who just lived through 5 power shutoffs (PSPS: Public Safety Power Shutoff), PG&E has been pulling a CYA by putting the responsibility for call for a shutoff on the weather service. In only one of the 5 shutoffs did we experience high winds. PG&E could have field personnel monitor actual conditions and call for the shutdown if and when the winds get high. Instead they basically say that the Weather Service made them do it. Then, when they get the \”all clear\” from the weather service, they spend hours inspecting the lines for damage even if the winds have been calm. This week we did have very high winds on Saturday, then they inspected and turned us back on Monday. There was another wind event predicted here so they shut us down on Tuesday. The winds remained calm all Tuesday and Wednesday. Still, they spent hours inspecting line on Wednesday that they had inspected on Monday. CYA big time.
Mike Barry
https://www.theatlantic.com has done some excellent recent reporting on recent events in California. Some post titles from the last three weeks:
Mike Barry
A Google News search on
will bring up these posts (and a few others).
Chipper
@Hugh
I’ve worked at several different companies and I’ve been surprised and appalled at how stupidly they’ve been run. When I started my first “real” job I honestly couldn’t believe that this was how adults ran things, and it’s only gotten worse since then as I moved on to bigger companies. I still can’t believe it when I think about it, but I’ve gotten used to it.
I think that the public schools that I went to were well run, and I worked at a franchise where the individual franchise was well run, but every other place has been a mess and some have been complete clusters. It seems that as humans we should be able to do better than this.
anon y'mouse
third world has money. not as much, but similar dynamic. wealthier people have the high ground and have arranged things to insulate themselves. everyone else toils in the dog-eat-dog below.
enter the wealthier parts of Mexico City and you will see their walled, guarded and camera-surveilled compounds. i bet every third world country has the same.
full of people who don’t care about the rest of those in their country, and say “that’s the way it is” while people scavenge garbage dumps, suffer brownouts and drink contaminated water.
wait, what country am i discussing again? i’ve forgotten…
I don’t like giving my email either
It’s a generational problem in the sense that it’s taken somewhat more than a generation to create it. Mitigating it would take a good deal less time though a real fix, given the state of repair, would take quite a while. PG&E’s problem is something like 20 times the scale of SDG&E’s just to mitigate easier risks – and that has taken them about a dozen years and $1.5 billion. And yeah – fixing all that while keeping it running, without burning down the state and while the rest of the populace shits on everyone from file clerk to lineman, talking about how easy would be to fix it (everything’s easy from behind the keyboard), is going to take rather a lot of talent.
Worry less about making utilities private and more about financialization / trading of power. Long distance transmission infrastructure is being treated as if it were made up of nice predictable point to point pipelines, which it simply isn’t.
different clue
Here is a little newsreel from The Weather Channel about how the management of the Reagan Library had earlier in the year deployed a big herd of goats to eat all the flammable brush from off the grounds, so when this round of fire approached it, the fire died out at the goat-made fire-break.
Perhaps there is a lesson here about ecological landscape management unwinding the risk of huge catastrofires.
Here is the copy-pasted caption:
Goats Help Save Reagan Presidential Library from Flames
A huge herd of goats munched on brush to create a fire break earlier in the year. Firefighters say they were responsible for rescuing the Reagan Presidential Library when the Easy Fire was dangerously close.
Here is the link:
https://weather.com/news/news/2019-11-01-california-wildfires-maria-fire-ventura-county
Gaianne
Ian–
A great summary.
This comment thread has surprised me though. Some real third-world thinking here!
By which I mean: If the people selected to run activities necessary for a society to function fail to do their jobs–whether through greed, laziness, malice, or any other reason–and if the rest of society does not remove them, dispose of them, and replace them with willing and competent people, then that society will decline, disintegrate, and fail. This is precisely what the United States has been doing for three decades.
And California leads the way!
–Gaianne
Eric Anderson
Gaianne:
This is exactly right.
But, as evidenced by anon y’mouse:
“enter the wealthier parts of Mexico City and you will see their walled, guarded and camera-surveilled compounds. i bet every third world country has the same”
It very well may be a feature, not a bug.
Next stage: right wing populism rides in to save the day.
Eric Anderson
And shortly after I posted that last comment, I rolled straight into this:
“ ‘Economics is the method: the object is to change the soul.’ Understanding why Thatcher said this is central to understanding the neoliberal project, and how we might move beyond it. Carys Hughes and Jim Cranshaw’s opening article poses a crucial challenge to the left in this respect. It is too easy to tell ourselves a story about the long reign of neoliberalism that is peopled solely with all-powerful elites imposing their will on the oppressed masses. It is much harder to confront seriously the ways in which neoliberalism has manufactured popular consent for its policies.”
Exactly my point above. Why would anyone think for one second that the goal of corporations like PG&E is not only to strip capital, but also to fundamentally alter people’s “souls” to lay the political groundwork to make it easier to strip more capital.
Ian, there’s a bombshell post to be made on this idea.
different clue
Perhaps the neoliberal soul re-engineers feared and hated the hippies so much because they suspected that the embryonic hippie counter-culture would turn the social soil very hostile to the germination and growth of neoliberal weeds.
The various mind-expanding drugs of that day were indeed considered to be for mind-expansion. The establishment culture-lords and their culture enforcers did not want to have people with expanded minds running around in society, possibly passing their ” mental expanditis” to others. Whence the savagery of their suppression of marijuana and the hallucino-psychedelics. And their determined effort to re-direct the drug-using public away from such and towards the CIA dumm drugs like heroin and cocaine and meth.
If that is part of the cause of the problem, then perhaps part of the cause of the solution might be the development and then the weaponization and dissemination of a leaner tougher meaner form of hippie-ism for today’s leaner tougher meaner times of today.
I periodically read a blog by Ran Prieur, called Ran Prieur, who I think may be an early appearance of the kind of leaner tougher meaner hippie for today which might be called for.
http://www.ranprieur.com/
I think elements of thinking from the Church of the SubGenius might also be useful, so long as one does NOT adopt this as some kind of True Real Religion. Here are their most stripped down basic tenets.
http://www.subgenius.com/pam1/pamphlet.html
Make Love, not Money!
Tune out, slow down, slack off.
ejf
@Chipper
Here I am at a mere 66 years of age and from what I’ve seen is that the bigger the company is, the dumber the adults were. That doesn’t mean that big things like governments are part of the dumb squad. Cuz, hey, the U.S. has a broke casino and hotel hustler who ran a bad family business running it.
The private sector has a lot of ass covering fools who are scared. They express that fear in many a way.
Ché Pasa
California has become unlivable for many of us ex-Californians.
I was really shocked when I went back last year after six years away and saw how things had changed/deteriorated from the essentially unlivable conditions I’d left. Things have only gotten worse since then with the constant fire season, electricity blackouts, failing infrastructure of all kinds, homelessness and worse.
Yet for many of my New Mexico friends, California is still a magnet, still fronted by gloss and
glamour, still exciting and energizing. They don’t see or want to know about the rotten underbelly, or just as mindless, they think it couldn’t be worse than New Mexico, but in many ways it is.
Problems stem from the nature of the California economy: agriculture, hi-tech, finance, real estate, entertainment — all of which are essentially exploitative. They need to feed on willing and coerced resources, labor and customers. State and local governments are the creatures of that exploitative economy, and for the most part, they do as they are told. They’re told to let things go to shit and yet draw ever more people in. The house of cards collapses if population stabilizes or declines, yet realistically, there are already 20-25 million too many people trying to live in California. It passed its realistic carrying capacity decades ago.
Note: this would be and is true regardless of which party of the Duopoly is in nominal control of government.
It’s not so much Third World as it is Other World. As it has been since the world rushed in for gold after 1849.
What you see now is pretty much what it has always been under US control, only bloated and decadent and riddled with dyspepsia.
An image of what’s to come for the rest of us? Probably. That’s certainly what many of the story-tellers in Hollywood see for the future.
Mike Barry
Yeah, but have you seen the latest Cardi B vid? Outtasight! /s
different clue
I visited San Francisco for an extended-family-member wedding sometime in the 1990s. I stayed a few extra days in San Francisco so I could see a tiny little bit of stuff.
My impression was . . . California was such an eco-beautiful state that no wonder so many people wanted to live there and would put up with all kinds of abuse in order to get to live there. And that all the public and private authorities in California knew how much abuse Californians would take to get to be able to live in California. And that the authorities would therefor subject Californians to every bit of abuse the authorities could figure out how to invent and design and apply.
My thinking about “where to retire” if I ever get to retire is this . . . . if California were to collapse so comprehensively and totally utterly that 20 million Californians had to flee for their lives back East over the Sierra . . . what parts of the US would those Californian refugees never ever want to live in? Those are the parts of the US I would consider retiring to so that I would not have to deal with millions of refugees from California.
I am hoping that somewhere in Minnebraska or Tennessota, or maybe Ohiowa . . . will be unfashionable enough that no Californian refugee would ever ever want to live there.
anon y'mouse
different clue: try Georgiabama. and i don’t mean HOtlanta!
Eric Anderson
different clue:
Thanks for the Ran Prieur tip. He’s an interesting man and thinks well for sure. I enjoy that in a human.
different clue
Georgiabama could be interesting, but I am afraid I might live long enough that the Global Warming would get me.
Whereas if I retreat into upper Minnesota or Upper Peninsula, I might avoid the worst of the heat.
different clue
@Eric Anderson,
Thank you for the kind words. I have enjoyed reading Ran Prieur for some years now.
Bern
During one of my several \’careers\’ I managed private properties for land trusts an had occasion to direct PG&E staff and subcontractors on power line alignment maintenance projects. So many more trees on the properties than there were a century ago. So many more people living in the region (tho often not many more in the immediate vicinity). So much on PG&E field staff\’s plate.
My job was to keep the tree crews from mowing (sometimes very old oak) trees right to the ground while assuring the trims would be sufficient for 15-20 years (before the next crew could be expected to return). They were accommodating and efficient. That said, it was difficult to imagine hiring enough people to do that over the entire state.
And before we slag California too hard, remember that a large portion of the state is federal land, not managed by the state. No worries on that score tho – the massive raking crews are on it I\’m sure…
When trees are devalued by Trumps
Even James Watt gets down in the dumps
The butchers of forestry
Cut even the poorest tree
IT\’S THE US DEPARTMENT OF STUMPS!