-By Warner Todd Huston
The California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) is suppose to be a consumer advocate, it’s supposed to be a watchdog agency that keeps California’s public utilities in line so that they don’t rip off rate payers. Unfortunately, as the SF Chronicle’s Katy Grimes says, the regulator is instead responsible for a culture of corruption with the state’s utilities.
It almost seems as if the CPUC is an arm of the rate-hiking utilities instead of their minder!
“The California Public Utility Commission,” Grimes says, “has a history of allowing utility companies to increase utility rates without much proof of need, resulting in some of the highest utility rates in the entire country. Despite gross mismanagement and well-documented negligence, the CPUC has allowed Pacific, Gas & Electric Company to continually increase utility rates, passing tremendous costs on to rate payers.”
Grimes details a lot of the scams and broken promises about rates in California all this quite despite the fact that PG&E is actually responsible for the deaths of at least 8 Californians due to its negligence.
One thing that Grimes didn’t focus on too much is the fact that PG&E has taken billions from ratepayers that it claimed it needed for safety upgrades but never made any of the safety upgrades it claimed it needed.
Even though the CPUC found that PG&E violated the law, the purported watchdog agency continues to act as the utility’s biggest insider advocate helping the company further rip off ratepayers at will. It just makes one wonder for just whose interests the CPUC is working.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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