UPDATE: TRUMP THREATS END; CALIFORNIANS MUST GET COUNTED

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 26, 2019, OR THEREAFTER

EDITORS: TO ENSURE TIMELINESS, DISREGARD EMBARGO DATE

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “TRUMP THREATS END; CALIFORNIANS MUST GET COUNTED”

          The Census ball is now very much in California’s court. It turns out, President Trump’s bald effort to punish California for providing Hillary Clinton with her 2016 popular vote majority has been ended by a narrow 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision in June tossing the issue of a citizenship question back to a lower court that previously nixed it.

          Trump at first insisted he would defy the court and insert the question anyhow, but pulled back this week, saying he will get all the citizenship information he wants from other government sources. That, of course, is what Census Bureau officials about one year ago advised him to do.

          For weeks after the Supreme Court ruled, Trump fostered doubt about what he would do. But there’s no guesswork about what could happen if that query is included. Since 1949, Census officials have said using the question widely would cause vast undercounts of undocumented immigrants who don’t trust Census assurances of confidentiality and fear deportation as a consequence of participating.

Trump’s minions lied consistently throughout their legal appeals about why they wanted the question in. They said it was to help the Justice Department enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has never been enforced under Trump. New evidence emerging since the lower court decision ruled the question out, in the form of previously secret emails, plainly showed the motive for the question was entirely political.

          The Supreme Court’s decision hinged on the obvious disgust of Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee of ex-President George W. Bush, over lies told by Trump’s secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross. Roberts wrote that those falsehoods demanded he cast a rare vote with the high court’s four-member liberal minority, possibly deep-sixing the question.

          Meanwhile, the Constitution requires every human being in the country be counted, citizen or not.

Ross insisted he sought to insert the citizenship query used before 1950 because of the Justice Department’s desire. The prior lack of Voting Rights Act enforcement made that statement enough of a lie to offend Roberts.

          There was immediate speculation that Trump backed down on the question because defying a Supreme Court order would almost automatically bring impeachment, and might even be offensive enough for Senate Republicans to convict him. For sure, it would have been a threat to constitutional government.

Trump had also speculated about delaying the Census, contrary to law and precedent, but backed off that, too.

          All this leaves any Census-driven parts of California’s future up to Californians. If a citizenship question spurs millions of the undocumented to refuse participation, this state could lose at least one seat in Congress, one or two electoral votes in presidential elections and many billions of federal dollars earmarked for housing, highways, sewers, public schools and much more.

          But now an undercount will only happen if Californians let it, as they did ten years ago. Most Census experts believe low participation rates caused at least one million to two million Californians not to be counted in the 2010 Census. A repeat would make life more difficult and less consequential for many Californians.

          So Californians, whether citizens or not, must step up now and protect their own interests. Anticipating something like today’s scene, ex-Gov. Jerry Brown and state legislators last year allocated $90.3 million for Census information and outreach.

          That’s about $3 for every California resident, which the state will spend encouraging participation and discouraging anyone who’s thinking of hiding from federal Census takers. Brown and his allies considered spending $90-plus million on TV and newspaper ads, social media and community meetings a prudent investment that promises to produce far more in new money than it costs.

          The effort is needed because, even without the decrements brought by a Census undercount, Trump already allots an average of about 6 billion less federal dollars each year to California than it got under ex-President Barack Obama.

          The one way to change this kind of steady mistreatment, minimization and denigration of California while Trump holds office is to maximize the state’s Census count. That will only happen if virtually all Californians participate.

         

 
-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WHY CALIFORNIANS MUST GET COUNTED, TRUMP MACHINATIONS OR NO

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 26, 2019, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “WHY CALIFORNIANS MUST GET COUNTED, TRUMP MACHINATIONS OR NOT”

          The Census ball is now very much in California’s court. President Trump’s bald effort to punish California for providing Hillary Clinton with her 2016 popular vote majority has been at least blunted by a narrow 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision in June tossing the issue of a citizenship question back to the lower court that previously nixed it.

          It’s anyone’s guess whether the Census Bureau now controlled by Trump lied when it said it has started printing Census forms without the question: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”

          But there’s no guesswork about what could happen if that query is included. Since 1949, Census officials have said using the question widely would cause vast undercounts of undocumented immigrants who don’t trust Census assurances of confidentiality and fear deportation as a consequence of participating. Census confidentiality promises have been honored in the past.

Trump’s minions lied consistently about why they want the question in. They said it was to help the Justice Department enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has never been enforced under Trump. New evidence emerging since that federal court in Maryland ruled the question out, in the form of previously secret emails, plainly shows the motive for the question is entirely political.

          The Supreme Court decision hinged on the obvious disgust of Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee of ex-President George W. Bush, over lies told by Trump’s secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross. Roberts wrote that those falsehoods demanded he cast a rare vote with the high court’s four-member liberal minority, possibly deep-sixing the question.

          Meanwhile, the Constitution requires every human being in the country be counted, citizen or not.

Ross has insisted he sought to insert the citizenship query used before 1950 because of the Justice Department’s desire.

         

          The prior lack of Voting Rights Act enforcement made that statement enough of a lie to offend Roberts. Did Ross also lie when he said the Census Bureau, which he supervises, had to start printing forms by July 1 for them to be ready for the March 1 beginning of the count?

          Meanwhile, Trump proposes to ignore the Supreme Court and include the question by executive order. If Ross and the Census Bureau are not lying about the print timetable, of course, Trump would have to be content with including the query only on some forms or as an addendum.

Trump also has speculated about delaying the Census, contrary to law and precedent.

          All this leaves any Census-driven parts of California’s future up to Californians. If a citizenship question spurs millions of the undocumented to refuse participation, this state could lose at least one seat in Congress, one or two electoral votes in presidential elections and many billions of federal dollars earmarked for housing, highways, sewers, public schools and much more.

          Question or none, an undercount will only happen if Californians let it. Most Census experts believe low participation rates caused at least one million to two million Californians not to be counted in the 2010 Census. A repeat would make life more difficult and less consequential for many Californians.

          So Californians, whether citizens or not, must step up now and protect their own interests. Anticipating something like today’s scene, ex-Gov. Jerry Brown and state legislators last year allocated $90.3 million for Census information and outreach.

          That’s about $3 for every California resident, which the state will spend encouraging participation and discouraging anyone who’s thinking of hiding from federal Census takers. Brown and his allies considered spending $90-plus million on TV and newspaper ads, social media and community meetings a prudent investment that promises to produce far more in new money than it costs.

          The effort is needed because, even without the decrements brought by a Census undercount, Trump already allots an average of about 6 billion less federal dollars each year to California than it got under ex-President Barack Obama.

          The one way to change this kind of steady mistreatment, minimization and denigration of California while Trump holds office is to maximize the state’s Census count. That will only happen if virtually all Californians participate.

         

 
-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

AMENDED WILDFIRE FUND PLAN STILL HAS HUGE FLAWS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 23, 2019, OR THEREAFTER

EDITORS: TO ENSURE TIMELINESS, DISREGARD EMBARGO DATE


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “AMENDED WILDFIRE FUND PLAN STILL HAS HUGE FLAWS”

          Hurried, slapdash amendments to a proposed state Wildfire Fund plan pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom improve it a little, eliminating secret meetings by a now-discarded new commission and forcing utilities to pay a full $5 billion for fire safety measures. But the plan still does not answer two key questions ignored by Newsom and the state Legislature:

          Why should consumers pay for the negligent conduct of utility companies like Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric? And do these companies deserve to survive, considering how the largest two of them admit they’ve behaved?

          Other huge problems also lurk in both the amended measure, known as AB 1054, and in Newsom’s original plan:

          While the putative new Wildlife Fund Commission is gone, replaced by a fire advisory board with no real powers, vital decisions on whether utilities act responsibly remain with the state Public Utilities Commission despite its long history of corrupt favoritism of those same utilities.

The latest plan would let the PUC decide when utilities can issue bonds to pay for wildfire liabilities, with electric customers obliged to pay them off via increased rates. That’s on top of a mostly customer-paid fire claims fund that could exceed $30 billion.

 There is no limit on how much in bonds the PUC could authorize, money consumers would have to repay as certainly and as regularly as they pay taxes. But no company could issue bonds if the PUC finds it was irresponsible.

          Lawmakers giving the PUC these powers apparently don’t remember that this commission in secret and illegal meetings with SoCal Edison officials agreed to force consumers to pay two-thirds of the cost of decommissioning the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, closed in 2012 because of an Edison blunder. The PUC years later conceded this was wrong, changing its earlier decision to charge consumers about one-third less than before, a difference exceeding $1 billion.

          Then there was a federal investigation that found PUC negligence as much at fault as PG&E’s criminal behavior for the 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion which killed eight persons and destroyed much of that San Francisco suburb.

          All this came before the huge wildfires of 2017-18 drove PG&E into bankruptcy because of expected fire claims in the tens of billions of dollars.

          Now, the only limit on the PUC’s bond-authorizing ability in the Wildfire Fund plan, original or amended, is that it expires after 2035.

          So the commission’s long history of favoring utilities and getting investigated for criminal collusion with Edison is ignored. AB 1054 would give the PUC a new way to help the utilities it consistently favors.

          One other problem: While the current Wildfire Fund proposal forces customers to pay many billions, it does not name a single fire prevention move the utilities must take, even though their lines started multiple billion-dollar-plus blazes. Instead, the companies would bring safety plans to the PUC only once every three years, the aim to “harden” power lines, whatever that means.

          “This entire plan does not focus on fires, but on ways to let the utilities keep making billions,” says former San Diego City Attorney Michael Aguirre, whose legal work caused the reduction in consumer payments for San Onofre. He threatens a lawsuit to cancel the new plan, if it becomes law. “It’s as if no one really wants to stop the fires.”

          Meanwhile, Newsom keeps urging quick passage of AB 1054, with its current amendments and others likely to come. He says it must pass before the lawmakers’ impending summer recess or Wall Street will degrade utility bond ratings.

          This rush to poor judgment again places utility interests ahead of consumers’, with no explanation why the present companies should be allowed to survive and keep their monopolies intact.

          For despite a Newsom suggestion to the contrary, power would not disappear if the companies do: state law allows a government takeover of their systems if those firms fail, with employees guaranteed their jobs.

          It all means slowing down this bill is a must to allow measured consideration of alternatives to the current system that frequently foments criminality and negligence.

         

          -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

NEW VACCINATION BILL IMPROVES ON ORIGINAL PLAN

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 19, 2019, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “NEW VACCINATION BILL IMPROVES ON ORIGINAL PLAN”

          Only rarely does a legislative compromise that waters down an originally tough proposed law end up creating something better. That appears to be what Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Sen. Richard Pan have now accomplished.

          This compromise came about because of an off-the-cuff remark Newsom made in early June while talking to reporters in a hallway at the state Democratic Party’s annual convention.

          Newsom, whose own four children have met all public school vaccination requirements, shocked the medical world in the midst of the worst national measles outbreak in decades when he said he might not sign a bill by Pan, a Sacramento Democrat and the Legislature’s only pediatrician.

          Pan sought to crack down on some parents and the doctors they depend on for medical exemptions from requirements for vaccinations against diseases like polio, whooping cough, rubella and measles. Children need to have had these shots to register for schools at various grade levels, but increasing numbers have gotten the waivers.

          Parents who are skeptical of vaccinations because of firmly debunked pseudo-information contending there’s a connection between inoculations and autism lost their ability to claim a religious exemption when ex-Gov. Jerry Brown signed a previous Pan bill in 2015, after vetoing it the previous year. A brief measles outbreak changed Brown’s mind.

          Anti-vaxx parents immediately began seeking medical exemptions instead. No pro-vaccination bill can ban medical waivers altogether because some individuals, notably those with organ transplants, organ failure or certain allergies, cannot safely be vaccinated.

          Soon, a cadre of physicians willing to sign off on exemptions for fees of about $300 per child developed, and anti-vaxx parents began seeking them out. The Voice of San Diego news website reported last year that one doctor was responsible for about one-third of all medical exemptions in the 130,000-student San Diego Unified school district.

          Pan’s effort this year was to foreclose that avenue for unjustified waivers by subjecting each of them to a review by state health officials. Newsom, in his unscripted comments, called this draconian because, he said, it would put government bureaucrats between doctors and patients.

          Subsequently, the pair met and hashed out a compromise that actually improved on the original Pan plan. Instead of subjecting all medical waivers to state review, the new version covers only exemption forms from doctors who sign off on more than five waivers a year. Schools where vaccination rates fall below the 95 percent saturation level many experts say is needed for the protection of “herd immunity” will also be looked at.

          This should pretty much put medical offices that had become de facto waiver mills out of that business, while also relieving state medical officers of most burdens imposed under the original plan. If the Legislature passes this plan over the vocal objections of anti-vaxx protestors, doctors who write significant numbers of exemptions will now have to demonstrate via medical records that all of them were justified.

          Whenever state health officials believe a doctor’s waiver decisions create a wide risk to public health, they would now have to refer those physicians to the state medical board for potential discipline. This also improves the original plan, which could have allowed non-medical board members to punish offending doctors.

          It still leaves exemptions open for children who really need them, while placing major obstacles in the path of waiver mills.

          This satisfies just about everyone except hard-line anti-vaxxers, who want to enable all parents to choose whether to inoculate their children.

          State officials can now “focus on the two biggest (vaccination) problems – doctors who sell exemptions and schools that lack community immunity,” said an official of the Health Officers Association of California. (About 100 schools now have vaccination levels under 90 percent.)

          The bottom line: This bill is less intrusive than it originally was, while still accomplishing all its major aims. It’s a clear-cut case of compromise causing improvement.

     -30-       
     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WILDFIRE FUND PLAN: CONSUMERS WILL BAIL OUT UTILITIES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 16, 2019, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “WILDFIRE FUND PLAN: CONSUMERS WILL BAIL OUT UTILITIES”

          There’s one word Gov. Gavin Newsom has assiduously avoided in the days since he proposed a new $30.5 billion Wildfire Fund that would help the state’s big privately-owned utilities pay off damage claims from forest and brush fires their lines have sparked or helped to cause: Bailout.

          This fund would shore up utility finances as they face tens of billions of dollars in potential judgments from lawsuits that followed fires they admittedly helped cause via negligence during 2017 and 2018.

          Under pressure from Wall Street investment firms, Newsom proposed that utility customers (often euphemistically called “ratepayers”) and utility shareholders share the costs. The legislative form of Newsom’s plan makes it clear customers would be stuck with at least half the costs of utility negligence.

          This bill, AB 1054, co-sponsored by Democratic Assembly members Chris Holden of Pasadena, Autumn Burke of Inglewood and Republican Chad Mayes of Yucca Valley, places the burden of proving utilities acted prudently on the consumers, reversing many decades of precedent.

          There’s an unasked, unanswered question here, ignored largely because of the sheer power of the utility lobby and its financial allies, all of whom could lose big bucks if other utilities follow Pacific Gas & Electric Co. into bankruptcy: Why should customers/ratepayers foot any bills when they did nothing to cause these fires?

          It’s a fact that customers’ monthly bills for decades included money earmarked for utility maintenance. That tab came to more than $6 billion over almost 50 years before the latest spate of big blazes.

State and federal regulators never tracked what the companies did with most of that money. As a result, California saw the fatal San Bruno natural gas line explosion in 2010 and huge amounts of vegetation sitting on or near power lines before the start of the state’s largest and most costly fires ever during 2017-18.

          If much of the maintenance money went to executive bonuses and other optional items, another question arises: Do these irresponsible monopoly companies deserve to survive?

          For sure, there are other ways PG&E, for one example, could raise whatever money it needs to pay off upcoming negligence judgments. Here’s one: sell off its natural gas division and some of its electric assets.

          This could produce many billions of dollars, exact amounts depending on how many assets are sold.

          AB 1054 contemplates none of that. It would keep the same companies that damaged thousands of lives in business. And Newsom asked that his Wildfire Fund plan be rushed through in a matter of a few weeks, urging passage by July 12.

         

          “It’s a massive hijacking of the state of California,” says Michael Aguirre, former city attorney of San Diego.

          Newsom’s rationale: “Financially unstable electrical utilities will put wildfire victims in jeopardy and cause California families to see their electrical bills skyrocket,” he said, parroting the utility line. No wonder PG&E stock rose sharply after release of his plan.

          But would there be so much as a glitch if Warren Buffett’s Oregon-based Portland General Electric took over gas operations in Northern California? Even the company initials would be the same. And what if the state’s publicly-owned Community Choice Aggregation electric outfits bought up PG&E dams and power lines? Why would that cause service problems?

          Meanwhile, Newsom cleverly devised his plan so customers rescuing the undeserving utilities would barely notice their new payments. He would continue a current $30 per year fee that was about to expire. Bills wouldn’t change until after the next huge fire piles on even more claims. Business as usual would continue at companies that spent many years mismanaging safety operations.

The governor also wants utilities to develop safety plans to be OK’ed by the state Public Utilities Commission. Never mind the PUC’s long history of kowtowing to utilities, favoring them over their customers/ratepayers.

          How could consumers be sure the new safety plans would be worth the paper they’re printed on? This is the same PUC that has long ducked its own safety responsibilities by hiring far too few inspectors to check all power and gas lines.

          So Newsom’s fund can only be described with the one word he badly wants to avoid: bailout.

                  

-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WHEN OJ SAYS ‘I GOT A LITTLE GETTING EVEN TO DO, LISTEN

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE:  FRIDAY, JULY 12, 2019, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“WHEN OJ SAYS ‘I GOT A LITTLE GETTING EVEN TO DO, LISTEN”

          The video seemed ordinary enough, until you saw who was talking in mid-June: O.J. Simpson, the last century’s most prominent might-have-been-murderer.

          “Hey,” Simpson said. “This is yours truly.” It was indeed he, now 71 and looking far more than 25 years older than when he led police on a slow-speed chase along major Southern California freeways almost precisely a quarter century earlier.

          His video appeared on a new Twitter account two days after the anniversary of the stabbing deaths of his estranged wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. In it, a smiling Simpson says he plans to speak on “just about everything. I got a little getting even to do. So God bless, take care.”

          After which just about anyone connected to Simpson and his 1995 “Trial of the 20^th Century” began taking care.

          It has never paid for those around him to ignore threats or potential threats from the onetime football hero, released from a Nevada prison in 2017 after doing nine years for armed robbery and kidnapping in a case unrelated to events of 1994 and 1995. Mrs. Simpson told a domestic violence hotline several times about earlier threats to her, the tapes of those calls never heard by the jury that acquitted Simpson because his wife could not be cross-examined about her frantic, panicky statements. They were played in open court outside the presence of the jury. Of course, there was a reason she could not be questioned: she was dead.

          Simpson also reacted rashly against at least one driver after he moved to Florida following his acquittal on the murder charges, a man who honked loudly at him after being cut off in traffic by Simpson.

          But, as in the video, Simpson often puts up a genial demeanor. During one courtroom break at his murder trial, the former Heisman Trophy winner cracked a joke while grinning broadly. A reporter observed that in the moment, he just didn’t look like a killer. “Even murderers can laugh,” rejoined Joseph Bosco, who went on to write a book on the trial.

          (Full disclosure: Columnist Elias covered the Simpson murder trial for the now-defunct Scripps Howard News Service. He later co-authored the best-selling book “The Simpson Trial in Black and White.”)

          Just about a year before he tried to steal back some of his football memorabilia in a Las Vegas hotel room in the incident that led to his Nevada conviction, Simpson co-wrote the never-distributed book “If I Did It.” In that tome, of which 400,000 copies were printed before the publisher pulled it back, Simpson allegedly detailed how he would have pulled off the Brown Simpson-Goldman killings. He has always since insisted this was strictly a hypothetical exercise, but some who saw the book said it seemed authentic.

          And a civil court jury in Santa Monica found him liable in both murders during the year after his criminal trial ended, awarding most of his earnings and assets to Goldman’s family. This prompted Simpson to leave California, where he had lived for many years in a Brentwood neighborhood among neighbors including former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, current Boston Red Sox co-owner Tom Werner and former Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti, whose son Eric is the current Los Angeles mayor.

          He headed first for Florida and then to Nevada, two states where local laws make it far easier to shelter income and assets than in California,

          The evidence in the civil trial and the civil court jury’s judgment, along with Simpson’s intermittent behavior before and since the gruesome knifings of Brown Simpson and Goldman, make it difficult for many who shared the criminal courtroom with him to ignore or downplay Simpson’s latest comments.

          Which means no one should be very surprised if America has not yet seen the last of O.J. Simpson, criminal defendant.

                  

    -30-       
     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net

FIRES GIVING UTILITIES VAST NEW POWERS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE:  TUESDAY, JULY 9, 2019, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “FIRES GIVING UTILITIES VAST NEW POWERS”

          From the ashes of last year’s huge fires in Butte, Shasta, Lake and Los Angeles counties, this state’s utilities have suddenly acquired vast new powers to control and influence the lives of millions of Californians.

          The new reality is that no one living near a potential fire area – and that includes wide swaths of this state – now can be sure when the lights will go off and come back on.

          It’s all because California’s big utility companies have accepted blame for contributing to the start of several multi-billion-dollar fires and want no part of anything similar in the future. So anytime they deem wind and weather sufficiently threatening, they’re shutting down power to prevent arcing and sparking on their lines, whether or not they’ve been maintained.

          This would be fine if standards existed for what constitutes fire danger from power lines, which helped start and spread fires from San Diego to Paradise, from Simi Valley to the Sierra Nevada in 2017 and 2018. There are no such standards.

          So when Pacific Gas & Electric Co. announced it would undertake the year’s first power shutdown in early June because of possible record-setting temperatures and high winds in Napa, Solano and Yolo counties, anyone without immediate access to newspapers and electronic media had no way to know their lights, TVs and appliances would go dead for an unpredictable time.

          That exercise, also affecting parts of Butte and Yuba counties, affected “only” about 21,000 electricity customers. No one knows how many had electric-powered oxygen supplies, CPAPs for sleep apnea or other medical devices. No one knows how many had independent power supplies, whether solar or from generators. But a lot of people and businesses were suddenly imperiled.

          PG&E figured fire risks outweighed all others. “The safety of our customers and the communities we serve is our most important responsibility,” said one company vice president. Too bad PG&E hadn’t realized that before last year’s Paradise Fire, or before the Wine County fires of 2017, both admittedly at least partly the products of corporate negligence.

          One thing for sure: Before this year’s just-opened fire season is over, PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric (along with several municipal utilities) will be doing the same kind of thing to many, many more people, with the same kind of notice under the same whimsical standard.

          The lack of predictability here is the problem. Certain temperatures, wind directions and speeds must soon be written into firm standards for when deliberate power cutoffs can occur. Given sufficient notice via printed inserts in electricity bills, customers could know what to expect and when. Now they don’t. Which leaves some folks as vulnerable to power company judgments as they are to actual fires.

          It also puts great power in the hands of power companies that have repeatedly proven themselves irresponsible.

          The real question here is why state regulators, principally the Public Utilities Commission – now many months after the last big wave of fires –  still have not yet developed firm guidelines for utilities to live by.

          This leaves many customers vulnerable to chancy, unreliable weather forecasts and the will of utility executives.

          Last fall, when PG&E staged its first modern-era fire-prevention power cutoff, one reader near Nevada City called the move “blatant terrorism,” which was exacerbated when winds in the area turned out never to exceed a paltry 7 mph. He called it a form of blackmail, designed to accustom consumers to accepting the will of the utility.

          The PUC already allows utilities to dun customers steadily for maintenance: they took in more than $6 billion in such funding over the last four decades without accounting for most of it. The new charges are for tree-cutting (often done against the will of tree owners) and other long-neglected fire prevention tactics.

          So far, it’s all random, chancy stuff. Utilities and the public need rules for the companies to live by, giving millions of Californians some ability to predict when their power will be turned off, just in case they can’t or don’t want to read or listen to the news 24 hours a day.  

                  

    -30-       
     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net