Utilities: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

I love how corporations are “people” when it comes to voting rights (illegal campaign financing) but when it comes to responsibility for horrific actions… “we’re just a company. We’re not criminally liable.”

Slowly I realize why John Oliver moved to the US - that country is so throughly fucked up that he has material for his show worth dozens of lifetimes

I love how John's obituary describes him as "aspiring comedian"

I googled the name of my utility company and “scandal” and I found quite a bit of scandals. Then I googled the name of my favorite high school teacher and “January 6” and thankfully, found nothing bad.

Here in Finland the utility companies are required to pay their customers compensation for every minute spent without power due to faults. Let's just say it has really motivated them. And of course there are regulation on what they are required to do to ensure safety. I haven't had an outage in 6 years.

Nothings screams “I’m the villain” like “Oh this poor black rural church community is looking for a publicity stunt by having their own electricity because it’s more affordable than us, the big electric corporation that has no other competitor because we monopolised all of electricity in the entire state of North Carolina.”

"PG&E is a fire company that occasionally delivers power" cracked me up :D

Perhaps the one Texas law I can get behind is basically an application of the death penalty for corporations. It's called "involuntary dissolution" and it absolutely needs to be applied at the national level.

This show is personal for me. I lost everything in a fire that PG and E was held liable for and luckily I have had help rebuilding my life due to a settlement fund from a class action lawsuit.

I've said it before, but it bears mentioning again: I'll believe that corporations are people, deserving of protections by our constitutional amendments, when Texas executes one.

I took an elective for my engineering degree that was almost entirely spent covering Alabama Power and how to figure out their rates (It was at The University of Alabama). The professor said that if we could understand Alabama Power's unnecessarily complicated rate structures, we could figure the rates out for any other state/country with ease. It was a difficult class.

John, don’t forget about PG&E’s earlier handiwork - the 2010 San Bruno Pipeline Explosion. I still remember seeing the smoke from the freeway after work. Funds which were supposed to be used for safety operations got diverted into bonuses and such. It is a truly vile company.

"The shareholders are their customers, and your bill is their product" - What an AMAZING quote!! Applies to many companies beyond just utilities.

Twinkle Cavanaugh, Chip Beaker, and Larry Householder sound like names you’d expect to find on a fake ID a teenager made to get into cheap bars

"just the way it's been" is good enough reason to me to change something.

This is the reason I chose to make a career in solar energy 5 years ago. Every home I put solar on takes a lifelong customer away from them, and it's a beautiful thing. Utilities should never have been allowed to be publicly traded companies.

"It seems they treat their shareholders as customers and use the bills they send to the actual clients as the product." US capitalism personified in where it goes wrong.

The more l watch this show, the more l appreciate my ancestors being sent to Australia instead of America

Commenting on the show in general, it's fascinating to watch as a Canadian. There's so many issues this show tackles that are also big problems in Canada, and then there's stuff like this where the issues are completely different, and, at least in this case, dramatically less horrifying. In Canada, a number of systems are run by the government through something called a crown corporation - that is to say, it's a corporation that's owned by "the crown" (meaning the government). While most corporations have the built in assumption that their owners - the shareholders - desire profit above all else and strive toward that presumed demand, crown corporations know exactly who runs them, and their corporate boards are made up of people appointed by the government that handles what they do. (Generally that's the provincial government.) So they know exactly what their owner wants from them, and in most (all?) cases it legally is not and cannot be profit. Power generation and distribution is one of these here in BC, falling under BCHydro (yes, we have so much hydro power that it's the hydro company, not the electric company - even saying "the electric company" sounds weird to me) And while there are certainly problems, basic maintenance of their network is not among them. It's not uncommon to go more than a year without a blackout, and when they do happen it's almost always because someone was driving like an idiot and managed to knock down the local power distribution lines. They can usually manage a quick patch job (enough to get the lights back on) in less than an hour and have a new pole up by the end of the week. We get bigger issues when we have big storms, of course - sometimes we get a big pacific storm that knocks down a bunch of trees and gives them a hundred or more things like that to fix at once. But since it's happening during a very wet windstorm, there's no fire issue. The biggest issue we have to worry about is government shenanigans. ICBC - the automotive insurance crown corporation here in BC - had its financial reserves (which insurance companies save up in substantial quantities so they have money to pay out when some big storm comes in and causes several big pileup collisions, for instance) gutted by the previous ruling party, who was quietly directing it to general revenue (while not even telling the minister of transport, who is on the board for ICBC) so that they could say they were running on a balanced budget. (Running a balanced budget is a big political prize in Canada, particularly on the more conservative side of politics. It's difficult to manage, and requires a lot of trimming costs and such, but it's not so bad that it's not seen as possible.) So the Liberals (the more conservative of BC's 2 major political parties) ran ICBC's reserve into the ground, basically didn't campaign in an election, and then let the NDP walk into power and announce that ICBC rates had to go up because of the reserve needing to be rebuilt. I avoided using the term "corruption" because the funds that were diverted were being diverted into government revenue rather than into someone's pocket, but it's so very close that you'd honestly have to ask a lawyer if it counts. But this kind of thing is really rare, and unlike PG&E's unmaintained power lines, doesn't actually kill people. (Or if it did, the method of assessing that blame is a hell of a lot more complicated than "people died in a fire started by PG&E's failing infrastructure.")

"They're an African American church and we're a big utility company.... we're an easy target" He thinks HE'S the victim in this? Disgusting