[refurb]

Indeed.

The CA Governor is the one who selects the people on the committee that regulate PG&E.

And the same committee approves PG&E’s budget and rate each year, all the way down to the fine details such as repairing an electrical fence at a substation.

This problem is entirely under the control of Newsom and the CA legislature yet they seem completely uninterested in fixing it.

[amypetrik8]

I think back to every ... overly enthused student council member or student council president or HOA president I've seen in my education, a microcosm of politics. These are people with a fire inside of them to seize these positions. Speaking with them, as they were my representative to the academic leadership, they would often hear my request and provide a explanation as to why that was not feasible. A naive assessment of their explanation - often at face value reasonable in the most simplistic of ways, a slightly deeper reflection would reveal it was a convenient excuse for the truth - they had a completely different motivation, usually self-interest in nature, but hidden behind the lie to hide the ugly truth.

The same is much true of California. So many strict laws and regulation. For the environment? For safety? Why I can't build a house? No, no - they don't want anyone building houses to keep the prices pumped up high. Same for many things. Keep PG&E rich, and PG&E will keep the people in power rich either directly or through the major supporters of said politicians

[mrguyorama]

A politician in the US requires immense resources to run any campaign. That means rich people control who gets to be a politician.

Fixing this would require both public funding of campaigns, and immense limits to campaigns. Certain people, ignorant or malicious, will pitch an insane fit about trying to do that.

It doesn't matter how much certain politicians "suck" because the way the system is built, your choices are a guy who is awful but will implement some of what you want, or a guy who is fucking bonkers and will destroy our country, and this is true regardless of your political affiliation.

Even Bernie sucks the political party money teat. Because being the most popular senator isn't a reliable enough way to get elected!

Our politicians spend more time on the job calling rich people and begging for cash than they do actually voting on or discussing legislation.

This will only continue to get worse because the rich people are fully in control, and it benefits them to keep pushing the cost of a campaign higher, as the richer of the rich benefit from boxing out the "just" very rich.

Any change requires serious moves to unseat the current supreme court.

Currently, populism is much more effective for extremely regressive and outright hateful politicians than extremely progressive ones though, so expect things to get much much worse.

FDR was only elected and provided the actual power to make changes after 30% of the country was jobless, and an entire generation had been raised in horrific fiscal policy, and lived in a world where a hard worker for 50 years died in the ditch because we had no retirement program or way of feeding people who no longer work.

If we do literally everything right and the very angry and stupid people suddenly put aside their hatred of "others" for long enough to actually vote for a good idea, we might see improvements in 30 years.

[thijson]

That's because our political system according to the Greeks is called an oligarchy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

Most Athenians believed sortition, not elections, to be democratic[12][page needed] and used complex procedures with purpose-built allotment machines (kleroteria) to avoid the corrupt practices used by oligarchs to buy their way into office.

[kelnos]

PG&E are big campaign contributors to Newsom; he is expressly interested in not fixing it.

It's amazing that we had a governor recalled 20 years ago in no small part due to utility-related scandals, but these days, being a public servant in their pocket is just business as usual.

[twoodfin]

I’m whatever the opposite is of a devoted fan of Newsom, but I think describing the cause of this aggregate mess as PG&E buying politicians is well off the mark.

The problem is that PG&E is just one player in a system built up over decades. The system is built on the wrong set of premises, continues to evolve based on those premises, and can only be fixed by rejecting those premises.

This is becoming increasingly obvious, and a politician like Newsom is too smart to tie himself to the mast of a sinking ship.

[kyboren]

> This problem is entirely under the control of Newsom and the CA legislature yet they seem completely uninterested in fixing it.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

- Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935)

Ironically that quote came from a book about Sinclair's failed bid to win the CA governorship...