Forum… Or Against ’em

By Count Friedrich von Olsen
Here’s a couple of things readers of this column may wish to ponder…
According to the Santa Monica-based public interest group Consumer Watchdog, 26 companies doing business in California and therefore being subject to state regulators donated $9.8 million to Governor Jerry Brown and the California Democratic Party over the last eight years. What’s more, many of those donations were made within days or weeks of those companies being granted favorable rulings by regulatory agencies or obtaining other favors from the state…
Consumer Watchdog is not exactly a right wing mouthpiece. It is based in Santa Monica and is manned by many of the same idealistic hippie-like reformers cut from the same cloth as Jerry Brown’s supporters during his first eight-year tenure as governor a generation ago. That Consumer Watchdog would excoriate our governor with a report issued on Wednesday and titled Brown’s Dirty Hands is very significant…
The 26 companies are a virtual who’s who of California’s utility and energy companies and consortia. Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electiric, San Diego Gas & Electric, Occidental, Chevron, and NRG among them…
The upshot of the report is scathing. Indeed, what it describes might qualify as indictable offenses if there was a truly independent prosecutor engaged on the case…
Consumer Watchdog’s extensive review of campaign records, publicly released emails and other documents filed through the California Public Utilities Commission, court filings and media reports show that Brown intervened or interfered in regulatory decisions on a consistent basis, in nearly every case leading to outcomes favoring companies in the energy industry…
The report lays out how Brown and his operatives utilized the state Democratic Party as “a political slush fund” to receive contributions from energy companies in amounts over and above what he would have been permitted to receive through or into his candidate committee…
Between 2011 and 2014, $4.4 million originating with energy companies was donated to the Democratic Party. In roughly the same time period, according to Consumer Watchdog, the Democratic Party infused Brown’s reelection campaign fund with $4.7 million…
An egregious example of this pay-to-skate formula is that of Southern California Edison, which donated $130,000 to the California Democratic Party on March 26, 2013, the very day that Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey was in the swanky Bristol Hotel in Warsaw, Poland cutting a deal with Edison Executive Vice President Stephen Pickett to have Edison’s ratepayers — not Edison shareholders — cover 70 percent of the $4.7 billion cost to close the San Onofre nuclear plant, which had to be closed prematurely because of Southern California Edison’s grievous errors in operating that plant…
Peavey was the former president of Edison, having served as in that capacity before he was appointed to the California Public Utilities Commission originally by Governor Gray Davis. He is married to California State Senator Carol Liu, a Democrat. He is a major mover and shaker in the Democratic Party’s California fundraising machine. He is now under criminal investigation for conspiring to obstruct justice by illegally engaging in and concealing ex-parte communications, while he was chairman of the California Public Utilities Commission, with Edison officials and inappropriately interfering with the San Onofre settlement process.
Three days prior to Southern California Edison’s announced San Onofre closure, the company donated $25,000 to the California Democratic Party, according to Consumer Watchdog. All members of the California Public Utility Commission are appointed by the governor and serve on that august panel at his pleasure…
Also according to Consumer Watchdog, Chevron donated $135,000 to the California Democratic Party the same day lawmakers exempted a common method of well stimulation from fracking regulation legislation…
The report underscores that NRG, a megafirm involved in power plant, had not donated anything to Governor Brown until the company engineered a “sweetheart deal” with the California Public Utilities Commission settling the state’s case over an electricity price manipulation scam NRG was involved in that was first revealed in 2001. The governor’s office was right in the middle of this. That deal allowed the company to skip out on $100 million of its $120 million fine by instead investing $100 million in the effort to build electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Two months later, NRG made the first in a series of donations to Brown, his causes, and his party that would total $105,000, according to Consumer Watchdog’s Brown’s Dirty Hands report. One of NRG’s electric charging station competitors, Ecotality, filed a lawsuit against the California Public Utilities Commission, stating the deal was an illegal monopoly that had been awarded to an out-of-state company…
The day before the report was released, a federal jury found Pacific Gas & Electric Company, which supplies power to most of central and northern California and is the largest utility company in the state, guilty of violating pipeline safety regulations before a deadly natural gas pipeline explosion in the Bay Area community of San Bruno and then misleading investigators about its efforts to identify high-risk pipelines. It took seven days of deliberations, but a jury at last convicted Pacific Gas & Electric Company on Tuesday of obstruction and five of 11 counts of pipeline safety violations, including failure to act in investigating and getting to the bottom of gas line threats and deliberately not classifying a faulty gas line as a high risk…
The 2010 natural gas pipeline explosion killed eight people, injured dozens of others and destroyed 38 homes in San Bruno. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco, “PG&E [Pacific Gas & Electric] management chose willfully not to follow certain regulations” which led to the mass fatalities. Though no Pacific Gas & Electric employees were charged and no prison time is riding on this, a judge’s decision on the monetary fine against the utility giant is pending, although it is not expected to exceed $6 million. Investigators determined and testified to the effect that the San Francisco-based utility purposefully lied to federal officials about the standard it was using to identify high-risk pipelines. Pacific Gas & Electric went through the charade of pleading not guilty and sought to argue that the regulations were ambiguous…
A surprising thing happened more than a week ago when the prosecution announced several days into jury deliberations they would not pursue a potential $562 million fine if PG&E was found guilty of any of the pipeline safety counts. The judge agreed to go along with reducing the company’s liability to a maximum $6 million. That development has resulted in suggestions that federal prosecutors have shrunken from holding PG&E accountable…
That is reminiscent of charges already likewise leveled at the California Public Utilities Commission…
San Bruno officials, understandably alarmed about eight of their citizens being killed in the pipeline blast, filed a lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric. Along the way San Bruno officials came across some irregularities with regard to the way the California Public Utilities Commission addressed the issue. They accumulated a cache of internal PG&E emails as well as exchanges with commissioners and commission staff that indicate there was something less than an arm’s length relationship between the commission and PG&E. San Bruno officials are particularly incensed with the action of Mike Florio, appointed to the commission by Governor Brown. They want him to resign from the commission or be prevented from having any say over matters involving PG&E. Some of the documents in San Bruno’s possession show that Governor Brown was clearly aware of Florio’s conflict-fraught involvement. Another, one authored by a senior PG&E executive, shows that Governor Brown was not merely entrusting decisions to the commissioners but had pressured a commissioner to change his vote. Other communications show that Governor Brown is told in advance – well in advance – of actions to be taken by the commission. This raises questions about the independence of the commission and the commissioners, their adherence to the Ralph M. Brown Act, which is California’s open public meeting law, and the integrity of the process in general…
Before I forget, please note that Pacific Gas & Electric is a major – supermajor – Jerry Brown campaign donor.
Governor Brown’s office has steadfastly refused to release his emails, even when they bear directly on issues of public policy such as those involving the California Public Utility Commission. But some of these emails have been obtained indirectly from some of those to whom they have been mailed and communications between others have surfaced, the contents of which raise serious questions about the degree of the governor’s complicity in some shady dealing and his inability or unwillingness to hold commissioners and others who have violated the public trust to account. One example of this is an email Edison International Chairman Ted Craver wrote to his board of directors telling them he had phoned Brown on June 6, 2013, the day before the utility announced it would not seek to restart San Onofre. According to the email, Craver said he reached Brown in Rancho Mirage, where the governor was meeting with President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping. In the midst of that meeting, according to Craver, Governor Brown took his call and was supportive of Edison’s plan to close the plant. During the call, Craver provided Brown with talking points, to the effect that Edison was “taking the high road” and “insuring system reliability for our customers.” The next day Brown put out a news release in which he was quoted as saying, “Since the San Onofre nuclear power plant went offline last year, energy utilities and the state have worked to provide Southern California with reliable electric power year round.”
During the closing arguments of the more than month-long trial of Pacific Gas & Electric, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Schenk said, “The motive was profits over safety.”
PG&E attorney Steven Bauer countered with “Nobody at PG&E is a criminal.” It appears the jury disagreed with that…
But what of the politicians and their hacks, such as Mr. Florio? Are they criminals, too?
What General George Patton once said keeps coming back to me. “Politicians,” the general said, “are the lowest form of human life. Democrats are the lowest form of politician.”

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