(1) Starting around noon Pacific Time today (Wednesday 10/9), I won't be on social media for a few days because I'll be one of the many Californians without electricity. Here's a thread about that...
(2) Our power company, PG&E, is a private corporation with an illegal monopoly (which they get away with maintaining because they're rich).
(3) Over the course of the past couple of decades, their top-level executives took most of the money that was supposed to be earmarked for safety upgrades, and gave it to themselves in the form of raises and bonuses.
(4) As a result, PG&E power lines became increasingly unsafe, and eventually, combined with the increasing heat, dryness, and winds caused by the growing climate catastrophe, this caused a massive wildfire last summer that destroyed entire towns.
(5) PG&E got in some financial trouble over causing that wildfire, but of course the rich executives who were responsible kept their jobs and their own ill-gotten wealth.
(6) In the year or so since then, those same executives have continued to put PG&E funds into paying themselves bigger bonuses, instead of into safety improvements.
(7) So now there's another spell of hot, dry, windy weather upon us, and the safety conditions of PG&E power lines still haven't been improved, even though they knew this was coming and had the funds to deal with it.
(8) So now they're shutting off power to thousands of California residents, in order to prevent being held responsible for another fire.
(9) Thousands of lives will be disrupted and endangered by this shutdown. Particularly vulnerable people -- the poor, the elderly, the disabled, small children of non-affluent parents -- will be hit the hardest, will suffer, and in some cases will die.
(10) All because a private corporation has been allowed to maintain a monopoly on an essential service, and because PG&E executives decided to go with the option that allows them to escape legal liability without having to give up any of their multi-million-dollar bonus checks.
(11) This is going to keep happening as long as we allow it to, and it's going to keep getting worse. Because now that PG&E executives have figured out they can maximize profits by turning the power off every time the weather gets bad instead of spending money on safety upgrades.
(12) So these power shutdowns are going to be PG&E's go-to strategy from here on out, and they have no motivation to ever spend money on safety upgrades again.
(13) I hope all my fellow Californians are thinking about what we're going to do, in the coming year, to make sure this doesn't happen again next year.
(14) And I hope you're all savvy enough to understand that the only solutions that actually stand any chance of working are solutions that involve wresting control of the power from the corporate executives.
(15) The problems created by capitalism can never be solved by working within the structures, norms, and laws of capitalism.
[End of thread]
[End of thread]
