Either way the customers are getting screwed. Meanwhile PG&E battles Marin County over how many customers each gets to rip off.
WHATEVER YOU SAY PAL
This is really the type of news that need not be presented. It’s no different than two heroin dealers fighting over neighborhood turf. In this case PG&E is the power supplier and the county is their biggest customer. So the county finally says, why should PG&E make all this money off our customers? Let’s cut out the middleman.
The deal reeks of crooks on both sides, corruption and collusion and nothing else. There isn’t an honest or good-intentioned word in the multi-year legal charade carried on by these cry-sack villains seeking to extort more and faster from the taxpayers.
PG&E is headquartered in SF – where endless power shakedowns thrive from administration to administration – and dominates the Nor Cal power delivery scene. Its influence and lobbys are ubiquitous in Sacto and its collusion with Enron in the infamous power scam that bilked California citizens out of billions of dollars is well documented. PG&E was in on price fixing with Enron and shared in the spoils as it bought power from Enron at phony prices and sold it to California citizens at phony prices. Additionally PG&E worked with Enron in fabricating the power ’shortage’ that is the famous smoking gun in all commodity taxpayer scams.
In any just court PG&E would have dissolved along with Enron, but the utility more or less owns the state and it sure as hell owns San Francisco, where the proceedings were held. If it sounds like an insinuation that the deal was rigged, it’s not – it’s just an outright fact.
More recently PG&E installed ‘rip-off meters’ aka ’smart meters’ in Bakersfield. Among the many foul cries this maneuver prompted was the home whose owner was on a two month vacation during the time of the meter switch. Everything in the home was shut down. When he returned his bill was 4 times the amount it was previously. Same with hundreds of other victims of this bullshit scam.
PG&E installs and maintains their own meters. It reads the meters and makes up profitable data results that produce mega profits. The amount of energy used by PG&E’s victims has absolutely zero to do with the amount of money charged to these victims. The billing software simply calculates the profit margin and then spits out a correlating energy usage. This is what constitutes a failsafe business plan that attracts shareholders from galaxies far away.
As for the municipalities and other taxpayer-funded extortion agencies, the deal has been that PG&E basically gives these rigged JPA’s (Joint Power Authorities) free power to run all their muni facilities, like government offices and cop shops, firehouses, admins and jails, etc.
In exchange for this free power the cities and JPA’s turn a blind eye and allow PG&E to rape and pillage the victims – cutomers – with whatever unregulated scam and increased charges at any time it feels like. When customers cry foul, the cities or JPA’s will certainly “look into it.” But this is all for show because they can’t afford to fuck up the sweetheart free power deal PG&E has them on the hook for – just like crack and smack dealers.
So there’s the deal and it is the real deal, that is assured. So then, what’s the problem? Well, there wouldn’t be one except for somebody always has to get greedy. And that’s what all this power play bullshit is about – cutting out the middleman and taking over drug (power) turf and increasing market share and profits. Business.
The whole business is despicable and given the public nature of it all, downright criminal.
Rest assured though, that all empires must fall. And PG&E and JPA’s will not be the exception.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 7:42 pm and is filed under news commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.