Mendocino County Today: Monday, Sep. 17, 2018

• PG&E Bailout
• Ed Notes
• Medical Responses
• Help Hooty
• Homeless Problem
• Miata Mystery
• Little Dog
• Willie's Choice
• Yesterday's Catch
• Michael Slaughter
• YesterLadies
• Going Back
• What?!
• Sea Stories
• Trickledown Worsens
• Polystyrene Cladding
• Storm Deal
• Immortal Selves

PG&E BAILOUT, You’re Going To Be Paying For It

– by Jim Shields –

It was almost too easy. The precision-like fleecing of the People of the State of California, that is.

As predicted here late last year, when the Northcoast fires were still smoldering, I said there would be a historically epic showdown between the Big Three (PG&E and the other two electrical monopolies, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric) and Sacramento legislators over a Bankruptcy-Bailout crisis.

I was correct on the Bankruptcy-Bailout scenario, but dead wrong on the epic nature of the battle. In fact, there wasn’t even much of a fight. It was more like an amicable agreement among friendly business partners settling a year-end dispute over profit-sharing.

The state Legislature late at night in the closing hours of the legislative year on Aug. 31, okayed a bill (SB 901) that features a so-called wildfire surcharge on customer bills that amounts to a bailout of PG&E and the other two electrical giants.

It would authorize PG&E to use a type of state-authorized bond to pay off billions of dollars in damages arising from last fall’s wildfires. The bill, if signed by Gov. Jerry Brown — Brown’s already tipped his hand, he’ll approve it — will serve as a template for all future wildfires, including the record-setting ones that are still burning now, where the Big Three are liable for damage from blazes started by their equipment.

PG&E’s customers would be responsible for repaying the special state bonds on their monthly bills, assuming the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) determines that the company acted reasonably in its equipment maintenance prior to the fires. If the PUC finds the Big Three did not comply with reasonable fire safety maintenance, then the electrical companies and their shareholders have to pay for the damages.

Quite a deal. And, I believe you know already who’s going to be paying for the lion’s share of damages from wildfires started by a utility’s equipment.

There was an interesting coalition of organizations and businesses opposed to the bailout.

Mark Toney, of the Utility Reform Network said, “To make matters worse, PG&E and other utilities will get a blank check for anything they attribute to wildfire safety, despite PG&E’s previous failures. Utilities need only to slap a safety label on whatever they want customers to pay for and it will be approved, with no proof of cost-effectiveness required. The haste of the legislative process was unnecessary and led to a poor outcome for consumers. We still don’t know whether PG&E will face any liabilities from the Tubbs fire, or how much those liabilities could cost. Yet legislators rushed to approve a bailout bill on the assumption that PG&E will, once again, be held responsible. And they left room for future bailouts. The bill could leave PG&E’s customers paying for this bailout, and future ones, for decades to come.”

One of the prodigious loopholes in the law is there would be a limit to how much liability the Big Three are faced with. The bill provides for the PUC to conduct a “bankruptcy stress test,” to determine if a utility’s liability crosses the bankruptcy threshold; if so, any costs beyond that theoretical point would be passed on to ratepayers.

According to a Sacramento Bee report, Ratepayer advocates, manufacturers, agricultural groups and the state’s largest oil industry association quickly rallied against the proposal, calling it a “bail-out” for utilities that cause fires out of negligence.

“Our biggest concern is that manufacturers already pay industrial electricity rates that are more than 80% higher than the rest of country,” said Gino DiCaro, a spokesman for the California Manufacturers and Technology Association. “The fact that ratepayers would be on the hook for billions of dollars would be a problem for growth going forward.”

It was all the way back in the early 1900s, known as the Progressive Era, when folks figured out that certain sectors of our economy must be monitored and regulated because the typical forces of the free market could not control the resulting anti-competitive, monopolistic behavior inherent to such economic endeavors. That era established the creation of public commissions with broad regulatory authority over those industries.

Truly great leaders like Teddy Roosevelt, a grand old Republican, was a champion of that era. Markets could not control the resulting anti-competitive, monopolistic behavior inherent to such economic endeavors. Teddy used his big stick to bust the trusts, which is what folks called monopolies back then. He also brought the monopolies under their first public control.

Back then, another Progressive leader, Tom Johnson, Mayor of Cleveland (1901-1909) said this about private electric companies:

“If you do not control them, they will in time own you. They will destroy your politics [and] corrupt your institutions.”

Truer words have not been spoken since then.

Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, and is also the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at 12 noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org

* * *

MS NOTES: The biggest beneficiary of this bailout will be PG&E’s insurance companies whose liability has now been capped and who have announced that they will jack PG&E’s rates way up to recoup their stingy payouts. PG&E will then pass those hiked up rates along to the PUC as a [very large] cost line item in their budget to help justify their next rate hike. You might think that the insurance companies would be pressuring PG&E to take more preventive steps to limit their insurance liability (like they do on everybody else), but you’d be wrong. Why should insurance companies require more safety investment if ratepayers are going to bail everybody out anyway? There are also banks, bondsmen, and lawyers who will make out very nicely in this bailout. After all, banks and insurance companies and stockholders would have a lot more trouble recouping their loans and insurance paybacks if PG&E was forced to declare bankruptcy and go into receivership.

PS. Have you ever noticed that nobody talks about nationalizing or “state-izing” the three big utility companies? Better just to let them do whatever they please and charge the ratepayers for their negligence under the guise of (non-existent) “regulation” than to even suggest government owned and operated utilities which would be denounced as “socialism” or something. (Never mind that roads and fire departments are “socialized” or “nationalized” and nobody complains about mismanagement or excess liability. Even then, “nationalized” utilities would still translate to most of the actual work being contracted out to private companies. But nationalization would mean no stock market involvement, no insurance companies, no banks and high-interest loans, and — OMG! — maybe higher taxes — but with much lower rates — which we just can’t consider.) And yes, I know that doesn’t apply to our under-performing, overpriced schools — which could easily be run a lot better and cheaper but still should not be privatized.

ED NOTES

WHAT SEEMED to be a partisan smear produced by Democrats to derail the Kavanaugh nomination, came in to focus Sunday, when Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who wrote the letter accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, went public with her story, saying she thought he might kill her during an alleged drunken high school attack. "I thought he might inadvertently kill me," said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in Northern California to The Washington Post. "He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing." Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh's classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them and "sent them tumbling."

IF OUR high school years are going into our permanent Rectitude Record, I doubt many male Americans are going to get passing grades. Kavanaugh is your generic Catholic school rich kid trained from birth to salute power, hence his nomination. Reading some of his decisions I don't see anything particularly "brilliant" about them, but "brilliant" like "awesome" long ago wore out its meaning. I can remember rolling around with the girls as a high school kid — in fact we called the girls "rollers" in those pre-consciousness days when we didn't know enough to fake it, but I don't recall me or anybody else being accused of rape. Of course, there were still serious sanctions in 1957 coming at teen doofi from all directions. It wasn't until '67 that the restraints came off. I hope Kavanaugh is knocked out, but I don't think it should be because he had to be pried off a high school girl when he was a carnally tortured young papist, privileged division.

* * *

IN DEFENSE OF McCOWEN: 2nd District Supervisor John McCowen is taking some heavy incoming for his efforts to clean up after the homeless camps fouling the streams and the Russian River in the Ukiah Valley. Some of the slobs fouling the streams and the river resent McCowen's lonely clean-up campaign to which, incidentally, he devotes more hours all by himself than the average self-identified enviro devotes to Mother Earth's welfare in a year. The Supervisor is on a first-name basis with many of the Ukiah area's homeless, and it always has to be said that a large number of them are crippled by drug and alcohol addictions that place them way beyond caring if their feces and general detritus wind up in the Russian River. McCowen cares, and acts on his concern. If he occasionally has to pepper spray a derelict Earth destroyer, I say give him a stun gun, too.

* * *

THE 91st ANNUAL BOONVILLE FAIR, technically the Mendocino County Fair, has come and gone. The crowds seemed larger than ever in all senses including the diabetic, but also more wholesome in a child-oriented way than the drinkin' and fightin' fairs of the sixties into the early seventies when Slim Pickens, then a rodeo caller, declared Boonville "the roughest rodeo town" he'd ever worked, and he'd worked some rough ones. Boonville has been steadily blanded down since those days and hasn't since required the heavy Fair time police presence of yesteryear. Friday afternoon I spent the most time in the flower hall, as lush this year as I remember seeing it, and all credit goes to Robin Harper, the chief organizer, with big assists from Taunia Green, Terry Ryder, and Tara Lance. A slice of apple pie in memory of Grandma Pie Hulbert, this slice delivered by the gracious Grace Espinoza assisted by an expatriate Gowan who said she left the valley in 1972. A quick spin through the art where I was so arrested by an impious rendering of President Reagan that I offered the artist, Bob Sites, $25 for it. At the deserted arena, Judy Nelson and Stephanie Gold were setting up the beer booth. No Apple Bowl Football this year, and no soccer either, small school football having disappeared, the turf too hazardous for futbol apparently. Sunday's parade began promptly at noon with the appearance of a local fire truck and seemed to end with CalFire's Smokey the Bear. In between, there were bucking low rider cars, a flatbed that recommended that perennial hard sell, "Share, Justice, Peace", and splendid horses, Darth Vader, a bunch of little kids on motorized 4-wheelers, the Anderson Valley Theater, plastic fish on sticks, a raucous float featuring the annual Variety Show players, a golf cart festooned with wind chimes, the District Attorney and Sheriff (no supervisors), mounted Mexicans diplomatically flying both flags, a Pardini truck honoring the late Willis Tucker, and cryptically decorated golf carts. It was a fun twenty minutes, but I came away wishing there was at least one band, and surely one or another of the larger high schools in the county still has one?

* * *

NOSTALGICS will want to know that we've got more than a handful of archive articles up. If you haven't noticed, you can take a walk down memory lane right here: www.theava.com/archives/category/features/from-the-archives

MEDICAL RESPONSE FOR UNCONSCIOUS MALE AT BOONVILLE FAIRGROUNDS

The scanner said the Anderson Valley ambulance was dispatched to the area near the animal pens at the Mendocino Fairgrounds in Boonville for an "unconscious adult subject by the animal pens." An air ambulance (CalStar 4) was also dispatched to the Boonville Airport for the patient. It sounded as if this may be a heart attack patient. The patient was transported to the airport was awaiting the air ambulance.

A SECOND CALL TO FAIRGROUNDS at 12:58 pm. AV Ambulance was dispatched to another incident at the Boonville Fairgrounds — an adult with a head injury located near the grandstand.

(MendocinoSportsPlus)

HOOTY NEEDS A LIFT

Owl Needs A Ride To Sonoma

Woodlands Wildlife has a barred owl that needs a ride to Sonoma Wildlife on Monday or Tuesday of this week. Must arrive between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., and be delivered directly (no stops along the way).

Will come in a secure box about 2-feet square, must ride inside an air conditioned car, no dogs on board, no loud music or voices. Sonoma Wildlife is located about 25 minutes off Highway 101 at the south end of Santa Rosa. A map will be provided. (Good opportunity to visit the new Costco on the way home.) Please email WoodlandsWildlife@mcn.org

—Ronnie James

HANDOUTS DON’T HELP, he said. What we need is a central facility where people can obtain services and become productive citizens once again. To do it requires coordinated programs addressing common issues the Ukiah homeless population faces. Don’t give money to people who will use it to make more bad choices.

Bad point. John’s mostly wrong, even if I’m not sure I’m right. We’ve been shoveling money into all these programs and service providers for 30 or more years and what do we have to show for it? What have all these groups providing all these magical solutions done with Ukiah’s homeless population?

ANSWER: They’ve made it much, much worse. What the program administrators knew, and the rest of the citizens didn’t, was that there is a lot of money to be made running these programs. Looking down the road they knew solving the homeless problem would end the funding stream. Instead they found ways to generate more income by bringing more homeless people to town for more services.

We’ve given the “helping hand” nonprofits a lot of years and a ton of money, and they’ve all gotten rich and the problems have all gotten worse. Giving more money to the same organizations and expecting a different result is insane, especially when their goals are not the same as yours and mine. They’ve proven to us through the decades that they either don’t know what they’re doing, or that they know exactly what they’re doing and want to keep doing it because they haven’t yet paid off that second home in Palm Springs.

And the other answer to the question about handing 10 or 20 bucks to a poor bloke standing in the hot sun outside Safeway is that he needs the money. Everybody needs money. You need money, I need money and so does the guy pushing a shopping cart. So what if he gets some bonus dollars? This next bottle of vodka isn’t going to be the one that turns him into an alcoholic, makes him quit his job and stop supporting his family. And if he doesn’t get a bottle of vodka he’s not going to wake up sober and cured in the morning and decide to go back to school and earn that degree in aeronautical engineering.

(Tommy Wayne Kramer, Ukiah Daily Journal)

WHERE'S THE DRIVER?

White Mazda Miata 1 mile up Comptche-Ukiah Road —abandoned or …?

There is a white Mazda Miata license # 6WON721 about 1 mile from Highway 1 on Comptche Ukiah Road (just before the straight-away) that has been parked on the shoulder for about three days. I am hoping that the owner is not lost or injured in the woods in the Mendocino Headlands Big River Marine Estuary State Park.

(Coast ListServe)

LITTLE DOG SAYS, “O yea. Watched the parade in Boonville today, and what a spectacle it was. Lottsa dawgs, both two and four-footed, and nobody threw anything at the Sheriff’s car! In fact, I was very happy to see my old pal the Sheriff. And the DA too —I think he was driving.”

OH WILLIE, WHERE ART THOU!

by Franklin Graham

To think that in this America a man like Willie Nelson has the right, yes, the right, to choose who he supports in an election! How dare he assert his right as an American to choose who he backs as a candidate and then to appear on stage with him. Beto O’Rourke is Willie’s choice to run against that paragon of “Repuglican” virtues—you know what those are, right?

Once Willie made his choice, the twitter and Facebook phalanx of haters flew into full press court denunciations. How dare Willie support a, well you know the word, Democrat! In Texas it is not supposed to be that way. If some Texans had it their way, they would run every Democrat out of the state. To them, that’s patriotism at its best. Forget the American way, that pesky ethic that says every person has a right to choose and support the candidate of their choice. There are Texans who seem to believe that the OWNED Willie. Now that he’s shown his true colors, Commie-Socialist-Anti-Klan person that he is, I suppose they are going to haul out their stack of Willie Nelson hit songs and burn them, like the Nazis burned books. Oh well, who needs their sort sitting around on Klan night spitting out their stuff?

That our political discourse has come to this (I use the term discourse loosely, given the circumstance) is another sign that that creature in the White House simply must go. Oh, it probably won’t happen. After all, it is probably true that less than half of the electorate has the stomach for it. We know that the Congress under Ryan and McConnel does not. But what they hey! Get Willie to fire up the troops, except in Texas, and who knows what could happen.

Meanwhile, we live in hope as Deep Enders that Dave at the Navarro Store will somehow, someway, put a loop around Willie and have him on stage. What a night that would be. In the meantime, let’s hope the good citizens of Texas, those who can’t stand the idea of every person making their choice without rancor, turn blue. Blue is a nice color, right? Let the Republican stay red in the face from apoplexy just thinking of Traitor Nelson. Pop a blood vessel or two. And, so it goes.

CATCH OF THE DAY, September 16, 2018

RANSOME ANDERSON JR., Covelo. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun, evasion, resisting.

JAMES ANSON, Willits. Second degree robbery, battery, domestic abuse.

PARIS BEACHAM-VANDERPOOL, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

DYLAN BECK, Ukiah. Battery, false ID, failue to appear.

ANTHONY BILLY, Hopland. DUI, suspended license (for reckless driving).

ANTHONY BUDAR-MORALES, Ukiah. DUI.

MARSHALL COLLINS III, Albion. Failure to appear.

HAZEL FILLION, Lakeport/Ukiah. Community supervision violation.

THOMAS HANOVER JR., Ukiah. Probation revocation.

JODI HODGES, Ukiah. Under influence, probation revocation.

CHRISTOPHER KEYSER, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

TYLAR MOREHEAD, Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse, probation revocation.

MIRANDA MULLINS, Willits. Vehicle registration forgery, paraphernalia, failure to appear, probation revocation.

JONAH OTWELL, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

ELMER VICHI, Fort Bragg. Controlled substance, probation revocation.

MICHAEL SLAUGHTER has died, just as he said he was going to do in his final message to us.

dissentment.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/improv-memories-on-the-passing-of-a-friend/

(PREVIOUSLY — Sep 12, 2018)

A DISTRESSING DEVELOPMENT here at the mighty ava. A long-time subscriber all the way back to the 1980s sent us an email that said, "Today I die. Thank you for the decades together. Michael Slaughter.”

I TOOK HIM LITERALLY. Gave me a fright, it did. Then I thought Michael Slaughter of Pacifica, was kidding, but who's kidding who sends a message like that?

THEN CAME this clarification: "For years I have been saying that when my mother dies, I'm going to change my name. For me ‘Slaughter’ has been a surname only slightly less nasty than ‘Murder.’ (And ‘Michael Murder’ was at least alliterative.) My mother is now gone. And ‘Michael Allan Slaughter" is now ‘Michael Allan’ — at least informally. I'm not well enough to go to court to get it formally changed. I would like to change my Mighty AVA login to ‘Michael Allan’."

DONE, Michael Allan. RIP Michael Slaughter. Long live Michael Allan!

YOU CAN’T GO BACK HOME to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

— Thomas Wolfe

THERE ARE SEA STORIES and sea stories, millions of them. Every week an output of at least 750. If you look closely, however, at those interesting sea stories, you notice that they tell of sailors who are opera singers in disguise, who manicure their fingernails, and who have no other worries than their god-damned silly love affairs. Even that heavenly, that's highly praised, that greatest sea story writer of all time knew how to write well only about brave skippers, dishonored lords, unearthly gentlemen of the sea, and of the ports, the islands, and the seacoasts; but the crew was always cowardly, always near mutiny, lazy, rotten, stinking, without any higher ideals or fine ambitions. Of course the crew is that way. Why? What ambition shall the crew have? For whom? The skipper has ambition, because higher wages and promotion and orders await him. His name flares over the front pages of the papers and is set perhaps in golden letters on tablets on the walls of the Board of Trade. The crew have nothing in the world but their wages, their food, their health, their lives. They have no promotion in sight and no share in the dividends of the company. So what earthly reason have they to be ambitious about anything? To save the lives of passengers in a shipwreck no crew have ever failed in their duty as human beings; but skippers have, to save the company's money. Sailors know that, and therefore they are the only people who know how to read a sea story the right way, and how to read about the bravery of skippers in newspaper reports. Not the skipper, but the sailor is the one who is the first to risk his life, because he is always nearest the real danger, while the skipper on his bridge, like the General at headquarters, is farthest away from where he could lose something. Yes sir.

—B. Traven, ‘Death Ship’ (1934)

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I learned how to build houses (and now live in one that I built myself) by copying the old school Victorian era designs down here. I sort of figured they lasted at least a century – often with poor maintenance – so the builders must have known something. And I have first hand experience at repairing their faults so I have a good idea where they went wrong.

Nowadays, I see houses with polystyrene cladding. WTF! It is nice that render is applied over the polystyrene, but I really do wonder about the longevity of the materials used given that impacts may damage the render. And I really hope a fire never gets into the timber walls that the polystyrene cladding is attached too. I dunno…

And then I’ve also seen some newer houses where some walls used timber stud spacings of about two foot, when the old timers religiously stuck to a foot and a half (450mm in proper language).

Maybe I’m just guilty of over engineering things, but I have heard anecdotal reports of the lifespan of some newer buildings and the numbers don’t make me feel comfortable at all.

I paid my house insurance policy the other day. A 21% increase in one year. And they tell me that inflation is low.

THE OLD MIND-BODY QUESTION

Reality in Postmodern America.

Just sitting here in my room in Honolulu, not identifying with the body nor the mind. Immortal Self I am! And so are you. So tell me, what is the way forward amidst the confusion of global postmodern society? I would like to leave here and be associating with others who are spiritually directed. Note that I say "spiritually", and not specifically "religious", although it could be. Spiritually means not identifying with one's thoughts. It means identifying with the witness of thoughts. Insofar as many of us not receiving anything tangible from groups engaged in peace & justice and radical environmental campaigns in the past, nor from organized religious groups, it is important to understand why. The reason is that these individuals and groups are not spiritually identified, and therefore are operating solely from ego. This is the problem. There is no reason at all why those of us who are spiritually identified have to live without money resources, housing, or anything tangible, as we participate in peace & justice/radical environmental efforts as organizers and/or activists. Surely you will agree with me, that the time for graciousness is over. It is beyond stupid to cooperate with the ignorance that does not appreciate legitimate spiritual attainment. After all, we do not need them. They need us to bring off their protest carnivals, absurd feel-good liberal campaigns, raise money for their agendas, fill the seats, and otherwise make their spectacles happen. The real absurdity of all of this, is that we hold the higher cards, and only for divine reasons, have been willing to cooperate with every ignorant, crazy experiment in the name of God, or social liberation, or enlightenment, or saving the earth, etcetera. I wish to work with others who are identified with the Immortal Self. I do not wish to work with those who are identified with the body and the mind. That takes care of my entire problem in America, of receiving nothing and yet being asked to give all. In the future, I am not interested in being associated with that which isn't spiritually realized; particularly in the name of God/Goddess, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, general enlightenment, social justice, and of course world peace. If you want to work with me, then you are identified with the Immortal Self, and not the body and not the mind. You witness thoughts. You do not unconsciously act them out. I am able to leave where I am staying in Hawaii at any time. I am waiting for replies, and seriously, what are we waiting for?

Craig Louis Stehr, Email: craiglouisstehr@protonmail.com