Why is the state government so adverse to nationalizing them vs allowing them to leach off of their collective customer base? $2B in profits after a rate hike? Outrageous. Who cares what it costs to nationalize at this point, y’all are already getting raked over the coals with no end in sight.
I think in part this is bc PG&E donates to a bunch of political organizations, office holders and candidates. They don't even spend all that much ... But since there's not a "nationalize the utilities" PAC making comparable donations, PG&E will stick around.
A few years ago there were stories about how PG&E had continued to make political contributions while their victims/victims families settlement fund was partly in stock bc supposedly PG&E didn't have enough cash.
It’s already nationalized, just in a much more clever way. Now pols can dump backpocket money to their friends, yet still point the finger at evil corporations.
Nationalizing them is likely to have far worse outcomes and the entire company would turn into a leech that neither produces electricity nor makes profit.
Honestly I have no idea. They are a D-tier company in really any metric, it’s amazing they’re still in business after how many people they’ve killed. If I had to guess it’s because Newsom is eyeballing 2028 and it could be a bad look. If not for centrist voters, then for larger corporate donors.
The problem becomes when growth of profits is the only driving metric. At some point the company will look at ways to screw over any entity outside of the company to ensure profits and growth. Sure they erect barriers but this issue is prevalent among all big companies in the US.
There are plenty of monopolies, duopolies, etc in the "free" market that have nothing to do with governments. Example: How broadband companies share the map and don't intrude into each other's "territories".
Largely in part due to regulatory capture; it is not necessarily innate of a government to cause this. Maybe restrictions on how corporations are able to influence governments to act against their constituency might solve this problem, rather than giving corporations carte blanche to do anything...
When the capital investment to compete with large players in the ISP/electricity market is enormous you will, eventually, end up with a monopoly either way.
Laying cables for internet/electricity is expensive, I cannot comprehend why the USA hasn't understood this particularity and hasn't attempted to create a publicly-owned national grid and fibre infrastructure where providers can plug into and offer internet connectivity and electricity production over it.
You do not want multiple competing companies laying down their own electricity cables, nor internet cables, it's wasteful and just creates a huge barrier for any competition to appear...
Other countries have tackled this issue by regulating that the company that owns the cable and the company that provides the service over the cables are separate entities, frequently with the cable owner being the state.
BigCos using government to erect barriers to entry isn't a distortion of free markets. It’s an inherent outcome of capitalism's maturity, where monopolies and oligopolies emerge naturally.
Power grid operators are basically a textbook example of a natural monopoly. In other words, it wouldn’t make sense to have multiple companies running power lines to houses. This isn’t like a coffee shop where it makes sense for there to be multiple in the same neighborhood competing on price.
It would make sense to have public wires built the same way as roads, and private power companies that I pay to put power into the grid, that compensate for the power I draw out. If the natural monopoly is the wires, so be it, but there's no natural monopoly on solar farms.
If we’re going to have a public road system I don’t see why the grid should be privatized. Why should the grid be run at a profit but roads be run at cost? Is PG&E really doing a much better job as a private company?
The government can require that the lines must be available for rent to other power providers. Such that consumers can pick provider independently of whom builds or maintain the lines.
I’m not sure whether you will agree wholly or partly with this, your comment can be read more than one way. But several child commenters seem to be reading it as “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem”. So I’m going to address the ever more psychotic Reaganomics that still haven’t “trickled down” 40 years later and how that ties into the energy situation in California. He won his second term the year I was born, in California, so I watched all of this since like, 1989 and was hearing about it in the womb.
Enron is arguably the nastiest collapse of any large company due to sanctioned crime, there’s just not another word, a bunch of people went to jail.
They lobbied to get energy business de-regulated, and it was so extreme that they had the pull to get something like half the base load generation turned off, spiking the price per kilowatt hour over 4k USD at one point, fire departments were rescuing people from elevators in blackouts.
Capitalism sounds awesome: I hope I live to see it. But it’s not practiced in the United States in any credible way: you’re always hearing “it not what you know, it’s who you know”, “you get jobs through your network”, “the value of an Ivy university degree is the people you meet”. “The YC network is an advantage no startup should turn down”.
That’s not capitalism, that’s how to get a decent pair of shoes in East Berlin in the 1970s. Or so I’ve been told.
Our system is a capture kleptocracy with a core economic engine built around “indentured” labor, and has been since Jonestown Virginia in the 17th century. For a time people from Africa got by far the worst of it to date, that’s substantially (though by no means completely) addressed now, and now you see headline after headline (like this one) about staggering corporate profits, or stagnant wages, or both pricing traditionally solidly middle class people out of an existence in which they have any real choice about whether to work, for who, and for how much. If you’ve got a diabetic kid, and the insulin (that’s basically too cheap to meter anywhere else in the “developed” world), you don’t get to “negotiate the value of you labor on a fair, free, transparent, and competitive marketplace. That’s just one example of one friend who got popped with a pay decrease recently and has no real option but to take it.
Dumbass children(-in-law) will be hanging around the White House, doing crime no matter who wins the next Presidental Election. You see the occasional wealthy or successful person who friggin ground it out from nothing, those people exist, everyone knows a few examples, but it’s not a defensible claim that this is typical.
Jon Stewart (who for some reason is not regarded as patriotic by many in spite of choosing better treatment of 9/11 first responders and their families as his “wedge” issue, laboring tirelessly and often shaming corrupt Congresspeople by standing on their steps personally), recently interviewed Larry Summers (who brought you hits like crippling the CFTC in a no minutes hatchet job on Brooksley Born, who called the 2008 financial collapse and regulated the derivatives and would have personally prevented the collapse):
Judge for yourself, but Summers sounds pretty full of it I think, and I think there’s a grudging consensus around that.
The topic being a planned increase in unemployment (openly declared by the FOMC) to reduce wages (this is for real) to combat inflation (as defined by the CPI and a dartboard).
Stewart’s assertion, and I think, that of any humane person, is that corporate profits can’t be shattering record after record while wages are suppressed in broad daylight.
Good analysis, but one point: you say that's not capitalism, but something else.
I'd say that is capitalism working as intended.
There is really no other end-state to capitalism than a winner-takes-all race to the bottom, where everyone but the big owners of capital get completely screwed.