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12-3-2018 Proposal ensuring financial relief for any utility whose equipment was involved in a wildfire during the current year.
Chris Holden (D-Pasadena), chairman of the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee, said the proposal could assuage investor fears that one or more of California’s utilities will be bankrupted by billions of dollars in new fire-related costs....
Combined, the utility companies spent $17.3 million on lobbying legislators in the two-year session that ended in September. PG&E spent almost $10 million of that amount. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-wildfire-legislature-utilities-cost-20181203-story.html
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12-3-18 LOS ANGELES – Consumer Watchdog today warned that an ongoing revolving door between top government auto safety officials and the manufacturers of autonomous vehicles undercuts the public’s faith in robot car regulations and government policies.
The nonprofit, nonpartisan public interest group’s warning came after Uber announced it had hired Nat Beuse, a senior National Highway Traffic Safety Administration official. Beuse, NHTSA Associate Administrator, Vehicle Safety Research, is at least the sixth senior safety official to leave a government position to work for robot car manufacturers.
“You can’t trust regulations to protect our safety when the people writing them land high paying jobs with the very companies the rules are supposed to cover,” said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy and Technology Project director. https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/privacy-technology/consumer-watchdog-warns-continuing-revolving-door-senior-government-auto-safety
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9-2015 Charles Langley is a former public advocate at the Utility Consumers’ Action Network who was terminated for being a whistleblower reporting off-the-books investments he likened to money-laundering.
“My chief concern is the corruption and lax regulatory enforcement at CPUC (California Public Utilties Commission) which has resulted in failure at San Onofre, the unnecessary construction of the Sunrise PowerLink, unnecessary deaths at San Bruno (where a PG&E pipeline exploded) and some of the highest electric rates in the nation,” he told East County Magazine.
Langley adds “I am extremely troubled by the corrupting influence of intervenor compensation at CPUC, which in my opinion, has been used as a form of payola to reward consumer groups that endorse and support unconscionable rate increases. I believe that the secretly-negotiated settlement with Edison at San Onofre by TURN, The Utility Reform Network, is perhaps the most egregious example of corruption through intevernor compensation. “
Due to secrecy shrouding the San Onofre high nuclear readings that kept an NRC inspector from entering the building and led to covering the roof in lead sheeting after employees were exposed to radiation levels, Langley observes, “We still don’t know how high those radiation levels were. And if Edison gets its way, we will never know.” https://www.eastcountymagazine.org/nbc-tv-investigation-finds-evidence-radioactive-debris-beac-san-onofre-“sloppy”-handling-nuclear
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Presidential candidate 
Hillary Clinton’s ties with Monsanto run so deep that she is being called “The Bride of Frankenfood, ” says Washington Times...In 2014 Hillary Clinton spoke at the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Communicating partly in political code lest someone suspect where her real sympathies lie, she said:
“I stand in favor of using seeds and products that have a proven track record… [There is no proven track record, but why bother with the facts when you are speaking to your paymasters?] And to continue to try to make the case for those who are skeptical that they may not know what they’re eating already. The question of genetically modified food or hybrids has gone on for many many years. And there is again a big gap between what the facts are and what perceptions are.”
In this speech Ms. Clinton essentially tells her biotech base that all anti-GMO citizens are anti-science fools who don’t know “the facts”--Monsanto’s “facts,” of course, not any real facts backed by real science not paid for by Monsanto or its minions. Monsanto has, to the detriment of all but their own bottom line, financed a deep network of financial influence to sway scientists, universities and mainstream media. Organic and small farmers don’t have the financial clout to compete with Monsanto in the public information arena. Hillary Clinton meanwhile concludes with the non sequitur that since we ignorant, unscientific masses don’t know we’ve already been eating GMOs, it’s perfectly safe to continue. https://www.dmlawfirm.com/clintons-troubling-ties-monsanto/
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