PG&E’s Profit Culture Is Key Element In San Bruno Explosion Trial
by George Avalos, San Jose Mercury News
PG&E faces a fine of up to $1.13 billion if convicted on the federal criminal charges. The case includes 27 allegations that PG&E violated pipeline safety regulations and one charge that it obstructed a follow-up investigation into the explosion. … The state Public Utilities Commission in April levied a record-setting penalty of $1.6 billion against PG&E for causing the explosion. … Federal investigators believe a combination of PG&E’s shoddy maintenance and flawed record keeping, nurtured by lazy oversight by the state PUC, were the three primary factors that led to the explosion. Read More ›
CPUC Reform Veto Vexes Brown Backers
by Jeff McDonald, San Diego Union-Tribune
Richard Holober, executive director of the Consumer Federation of California, has praised Brown in the past for action on privacy, food safety, credit reports and residential care facilities for the elderly. Holober is not happy with the vetoes of CPUC bills. “Until we saw the vetoes, we were keeping our fingers crossed that he would make the Governor’s Office part of the solution,” Holober said. “Now we are really scratching our heads. The loss of public trust, the scandalous collusion is troubling.” Read More ›
Beware The Fine Print: Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking The Deck Of Justice
by Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Robert Gebeloff, The New York Times
The move to block class actions was engineered by a Wall Street-led coalition of credit card companies and retailers, according to interviews with coalition members and court records. Strategizing from law offices on Park Avenue and in Washington, members of the group came up with a plan to insulate themselves from the costly lawsuits. Their work culminated in two Supreme Court rulings, in 2011 and 2013, that enshrined the use of class-action bans in contracts. The decisions … upended decades of jurisprudence. Read More ›
Call Kurtis Investigates: Some Jeep & Dodge SUVs Are Catching Fire After Recall Repairs
The Hanson family brought their 2012 Jeep Grand Cherokee into the dealer for a recall repair expecting to take away the danger. Instead, the family is just one of at least nine that have had fires after the recall repairs. … Stacie Hanson says she and her two kids were just sitting down to eat at Taco Bell, when her daughter yelled, “mom your car has smoke coming out of the whole inside of it,” said Stacie. Eric points out his family was sitting in the SUV just minutes earlier. Read More ›
Utilities Spend Lots Of Public’s Money To Influence State Politics
by Teri Sforza, The Orange County Register
“Your No. 1 example, PG&E, is textbook!” [said Chapman University political science professor Mark Chapin Johnson.] “They answer to the state through the PUC, not their shareholders. … Whenever PG&E wishes to contribute vast sums of ratepayers’ monthly payments to the political process, all PG&E needs do is gain permission to raise rates with the PUC to cover such contributions. Public shareholders or ratepayers have no say in the process. Is this a great system or what? Talk about incestuous!” Read More ›
FBI Hits Nursing Home With Search Warrants
by Marjie Lundstrom, The Sacramento Bee
California’s largest nursing home owner is facing a new round of government scrutiny as the FBI served search warrants last week at his Riverside facility. … The latest investigations shine the spotlight again on [Shlomo] Rechnitz, a 44-year-old Los Angeles entrepreneur whose facilities have been the focus of multiple local, state and federal probes, along with stepped-up scrutiny by health officials. The Bee found that homes he owned for all of last year were tagged with nearly triple as many serious deficiencies per 1,000 beds as the statewide average in 2014. Read More ›
Corinthian College Students Sort Through Confusion, Bureaucracy After Company’s Fall
by Katy Murphy, Contra Costa Times
The Department of Education created a special claim form for students who as far back as 2010 attended Heald programs it found to have inflated job-placement numbers – about 80 percent of all of the chain’s offerings. Roughly 6,100 such claims had been filed as of mid-October compared with only a handful in the past. … The department has estimated that roughly 40,000 former Heald students alone were defrauded because of their programs’ phony job placement rates and are eligible for the relief. Read More ›
A Fiat Chrysler Discount Will Cost You Your Right To Sue
by David Lazarus, Los Angeles Times
Until now, experts say, no major car manufacturer has sought to encourage customers to forgo their right to sue. … Many large businesses prefer arbitration because settlements are limited and because professional arbitrators often favor the corporate side. Arbitrators’ fees are typically paid by the company in a dispute. A 2007 report by Public Citizen found that over a four-year period, arbitrators ruled in favor of banks and credit card companies 94 percent of the time in disputes with California consumers. Read More ›
More Trouble For ITT Education Services: Agency Restricts For-Profit’s Use Of Federal Student Aid
by Ashlee Kieler, Consumerist
The new restrictions from the Dept. of Education are just the latest regulatory and legal issue for ITT Educational Services. Last month, the company revealed that the Department of Justice was looking into whether the company defrauded the federal government. … Back in May, the SEC filed fraud charges against current and former executives with the company for their part in concealing problems with company-run student loan programs. … The company has faced actions from several states, including the suspension of GI Bill Eligibility in the state of California in May of this year. Read More ›
Judge Consulted Edison On San Onofre Deal
by Jeff McDonald, San Diego Union-Tribune
The utilities commission is unique among state agencies in that it employs judges who serve as arbiters, even when people have a beef with the agency itself. Members of the public cannot take action in Superior Court to challenge a utilities commission decision, but must appear before a commission employee. … The commission tasked an outside attorney to review its record on such private dealings, and the firm in June reported that violations are common and tilt the process in favor of utility companies. Legislators passed a slate of reform bills, which were vetoed earlier this month by Gov. Jerry Brown, who said they contained conflicting provisions that made them unworkable. Read More ›
Rise Of The Business Democrat
by Laurel Rosenhall, CalMatters
Since 2013, the group’s political action committee has taken in more than $4 million, with nearly one-third of that coming from Chevron, PG&E and other oil and gas companies. Other major donors include Wal-Mart, a hospital association and a realtors group. … Overall, the moderate Democrat committee has spent $2.3 million on campaign efforts since 2013 – more than half of it focused on five legislative races in the Central Valley, Orange County and Los Angeles. Voters elected three of the five candidates on which the committee spent the most in the last election. Read More ›
San Diego U-T Editorial: Gov. Brown And The PUC: What, Me Worry?
by The Editorial Board, San Diego Union-Tribune
This is maddening. At any point over the past year, Brown could have given guidance to lawmakers on how to structure PUC fixes that he thought appropriate. Instead, apparently discerning a world in which it’s cool for regulators and utilities to have a buddy-buddy relationship, the governor ended up blocking all reforms. … Despite [scandalous] revelations, the PUC has shrugged off calls to reopen negotiations on San Onofre and has done little to cooperate with investigators… [and] pretends that $850 million in already-planned PG&E infrastructure improvements are a penalty. This is the corrupt, petty culture that Jerry Brown thinks is worth preserving. Read More ›
San Jose Mercury News Editorial: Brown’s Veto Damages PUC Reform Effort
by The Editorial Board, San Jose Mercury News
Gov. Jerry Brown’s rejection of crucial reforms of the scandal-plagued California Public Utilities Commission is appalling. … The six bills Brown vetoed would have tightened the rules on communications between utility executives and PUC members to try to halt the pattern of wink-and-nod backroom deals. The most egregious example was helping PG&E get the judge it wanted for a rate-setting hearing. The legislation also outlined simple standards for when a commissioner should be disqualified from a case and added requirements for public meetings. Read More ›