#pg&e bankruptcy

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Podcasting "Let the Platforms Burn"

This week on my podcast, I read “Let the Platforms Burn,” a recent Medium column making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be:

https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980

The platforms used to be source of online stability, and many argued that by consolidating the wide and wooly web into a few “curated” silos, the platforms were replacing chaos with good stewardship. If we wanted to make the internet hospitable to normies, we were told, we had to accept that Apple and Facebook’s tightly managed “simplicity” were the only way to get there.

But today, all the platforms are on fire, all the time. They are rocked by scandals every bit as awful as the failures of the smaller sites of yesteryear, but while harms of a Geocities or Livejournal moderation failure were confined to a small group of specialized users, failures in the big silos reach hundreds of millions or even billions of people.

What should we do about the rolling crisis of the platforms? The default response — beloved of Big Tech’s boosters and critics alike — is to impose rules on the platforms to make them more hospitable places for the billions they’ve engulfed. But I think that will fail. Instead, I think we should make the platforms less important places by freeing those billions.

That’s the argument of the column.

Think of California’s wildfires. While climate change has increased the intensity and frequency of our fires, climate (and neglect by PG&E) is merely part of the story. The other part of the story is fire-debt.

For millennia, the original people of California practiced controlled burns of the forests they lived, hunted, and played in. These burns cleared out sick and dying trees, scoured the forest floor of tinder, and opened spaces in the canopy that gave rise to new growth. Forests need fire — literally: the California redwood can’t reproduce without it:

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/giant-sequoia-needs-fire-grow/15094/

But this ended centuries ago, when settlers stole the land and declared an end to “cultural burning” by the indigenous people they expropriated, imprisoned, and killed. They established permanent settlements within the fire zone, and embarked on a journey of escalating measures to keep that smouldering fire zone from igniting.

These heroic measures continue today, and they’ve set up a vicious cycle: fire suppression creates the illusion that it’s safe to live at the wildlife urban interface. Taken in by this illusion, more people move to the fire zone — and their presence creates political pressure for even more heroic measures.

The thing is, fire suppression doesn’t mean no fires — it means wildfires. The fire debt mounts and mounts, and without an orderly bankruptcy — controlled burns — we get chaotic defaults, the kind of fire that wipes out whole towns.

Eventually, we will have to change tacks: rather than making it safe to stay in the fire zone, we’re going to have to make it easy to leave, so that we can return to those controlled burns and pay down those fire-debts.

And that’s what we need to do with the platforms.

For most of the history of consumer tech and digital networks, fire was the norm. New platforms — PC companies, operating systems, online services — would spring up and grow with incredible speed, only to collapse, seemingly without warning.

To get to the bottom of this phenomenon, you need to understand two concepts: network effects and switching costs.

Network effects: A service enjoys network effects if it increases in value as more people use it. AOL Instant Messenger grows in usefulness every time someone signs up for it, and so does Facebook. The more users, the more reasons to join. The more people who join, the more people will join.

Switching costs: The things you have to give up when you leave a product or service. When you quit Audible, you have to throw away all your audiobooks (they will only play on Audible-approved players). When you leave Facebook, you have to say goodbye to all the friends, family, communities and customers that brought you there.

Tech has historically enjoyed enormous network effects, which propelled explosive growth. But it also enjoyed low switching costs, which underpinned implosive contraction. Because digital systems are universal (all computers can run all programs; all nodes on the network can connect to one another), it was historically very easy to switch from one service to another.

Someone building a new messenger service or social media platform could import your list of contacts, or even use bots to fetch the messages left for you on the old service and put them in the inbox on the new one, and then push your replies back to the people you left behind. Likewise, when Apple made its iWork office suite, it could reverse-engineer the Microsoft Office file formats so you could take all your data with you if you quit Windows and switched to MacOS:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

This dynamic — network effects growth and low switching costs contraction — is why we think of tech as so dynamic. It’s companies like DEC were able to turn out minicomputers that shattered the dominance of mainframes. But it’s also why DEC was brought so low that a PC company, Compaq — was able to buy it for pennies on the dollar. Compaq — a company that built an empire by making interoperable IBM PC clones — was itself “disrupted” a few years later, and HP bought it for spare change found in the sofa cushions.

But HP didn’t fall to Compaq’s fate. It survived — as did IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook. Somehow, the cycle of “good fire” that kept any company from growing too powerful was interrupted.

Today’s tech giants run “walled gardens” that are actually walled prisons that entrap their billions of users by imposing high switching costs on them. How did that happen? How did tech become “five giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four?”

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

The answer lies in the fact that tech was born as antitrust was dying. Reagan hit the campaign trail the same year the Apple ][+ hit shelves. With every presidency since, tech has grown more powerful and antitrust has grown weaker (the Biden administration has halted this decay, but it must repair 40 years’ worth of sabotage).

This allowed tech to “merge to monopoly.” Google built a single successful product — a search engine — and then conquered the web by buying other peoples’ companies, even as their own internal product development process produced a nearly unbroken string of flops. Apple buys 90 companies a year — Tim Cook brings home a new company more often than you bring home a bag of groceries:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18531570/apple-company-purchases-startups-tim-cook-buy-rate

When Facebook was threatened by an upstart called Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg sent a middle-of-the-night email to his CFO defending his plan to pay $1b for the then-tiny company, insisting that the only way to secure eternal dominance was to eliminate competitors — by buying them out, not by being better than them. As Zuckerberg says, “It is better to buy than compete”:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

As tech consolidated into a cozy oligopoly whose execs hopped from one company to another, they rigged the game. They colluded on a criminal “no-poach” deal to suppress their workers’ wages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

And they colluded to illegally rig the ad-market:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

This collusion is the inevitable result of market concentration. 100 squabbling tech companies will be at each others’ throats, unable to agree on catering for their annual meeting much less a common lobbying agenda. But boil those companies down to a bare handful and they’ll quickly converge on a single hymn and twine their voices in eerie harmony:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/16/compulsive-cheaters/#rigged

Eliminating antitrust enforcement — letting companies buy and merge with competitors, permitting predatory pricing and other exclusionary tactics — was the first step towards unsustainable fire suppression. But, as on the California wildland-urban interface, this measure quickly gave way to ever-more-extreme ones as the fire debt mounted.

The tech’s oligarchs have spent decades both suppressing laws that would limit their extractive profits (there’s a reason there’s no US federal privacy law!), and, crucially, getting new law made to limit anyone from “disrupting” them as they disrupted their forebears.

Today, a thicket of laws and rules — patent, copyright, anti-circumvention, tortious interference, trade secrecy, noncompete, etc — have been fashioned into a legal superweapon that tech companies can use to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers, and prevent them from making or using interoperable tools to reduce their switching costs and leave their walled gardens:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Today, these laws are being bolstered with new ones that make it even more difficult for users to leave the platforms. These new laws purport to protect users from each other, but they leave them even more at the platforms’ mercy.

So we get rules requiring platforms to spy on their users in the name of preventing harassment, rather than laws requiring platforms to stand up APIs that let users leave the platform and seek out a new online home that values their wellbeing:

https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/publication/lawful-awful-control-over-legal-speech-platforms-governments-and-internet-users

We get laws requiring platforms to “balance” the ideology of their content moderation:

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/16/texas-social-media-law/

But not laws that require platforms to make it easy to seek out a new server whose moderation policies are more hospitable to your ideas:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship

The platforms insist — with some justification — that we can’t ask them to both control their users and give their users more freedom. If we want a platform to detect and block “bad content,” we can’t also require the platform to let third party interoperators plug into the system and exchange messages with it.

They’re right — but that doesn’t mean we should defend them. The problem with the platforms isn’t merely that they’re bad at defending their users’ interests. The problem is that they can’t defend those interests. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t merely monumentally, personally unsuited to serving as the unelected, unaacountable social media czar for billions of people in hundreds of countries, speaking thousands of languages. No one should have that job.

We don’t need a better Mark Zuckerberg. We need no Mark Zuckerbergs. We don’t need to perfect Zuck — we need to abolish Zuck.

Rather than pouring our resources into making life in the smoldering wildlife-urban interface safe, we should help people leave that combustible zone, with policies that make migration easy.

This month, we got an example of how just easy that migration could be. Meta launched Threads, a social media platform that used your list of Instagram followers and followees to get you set up. Those low switching costs made it easy for Instagram users to become Threads users — and the network effects meant it happened fast, with 30m signups in the first morning:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/06/meta-launches-threads-and-its-important-for-reasons-that-most-people-wont-care-about/

Meta says it was able to do this because it owns both Insta and Threads. But Meta doesn’t own the list of accounts that you trust and value enough to follow, or the people who feel the same way about you. That’s yours. We could and should force Meta to let you have it.

But that’s not enough. Meta claims that it will someday integrate Threads into the Fediverse, the collection of services based on the ActivityPub standard, whose most popular app is Mastodon. On Mastodon, you not only get to export your list of followers and followees with one click, but you can import those followers and followees to a new server with one click.

Threads looks incredibly stupid, a “Twitter alternative you would order from Brookstone,” but there are already tens of millions of people establishing relationships with each other there:

https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing

When they get tired of “brand-safe vaporposting,” they’ll have to either give up those relationships, or resign themselves to being trapped inside another walled-garden-cum-prison operated by a mediocre tech warlord:

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-algorithmic-anti-culture-of-scale

But what if, instead of trying to force Zuck to be a better emperor-for-life, we passed rules requiring him to let his subjects flee his tyrannical reign? We could require Threads to stand up a Fediverse gateway that let users leave the service and set up on any other Fediverse servers (we could apply this rule to all Fediverse servers, preventing petty dictators from tormenting their users, too):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

Zuck founded an empire of oily rags, and so of course it’s always on fire. We can’t make it safe to stay, but we can make it easy to leave:

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

This is the thing platforms fear the most. Network effects work in both directions: if your service grows quickly because people value one another, then it will shrink quickly when the people your users care about leave. As @zephoria-blog​ recounts, this is what happened when Myspace imploded:

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html

When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.

Platforms collapse “slowly, then all at once.” The only way to prevent sudden platform collapse syndrome is to block interoperability so users can’t escape the harms of your walled garden without giving up the benefits they give to each other.

We should stop trying to make the platforms good. We should make them gone. We should restore the “good fire” that ended with the growth of financialized Big Tech empires. We should aim for soft landings for users, and stop pretending that there’s any safe way to life in the fire zone.

We should let the platforms burn.

Here’s the podcast:

https://craphound.com/news/2023/07/16/let-the-platforms-burn-the-opposite-of-good-fires-is-wildfires/

And here’s a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @internetarchive​; they’ll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_446/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_446_-_Let_the_Platforms_Burn.mp3

And here’s my podcast feed:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Tonight (July 18), I’m hosting the first Clarion Summer Write-In Series, an hour-long, free drop-in group writing and discussion session. It’s in support of the Clarion SF/F writing workshop’s fundraiser to offer tuition support to students:

https://mailchi.mp/theclarionfoundation/clarion-write-ins

[Image ID: A forest wildfire. Peeking through the darks in the stark image are hints of the green Matrix "waterfall" effect.]

Image: Cameron Strandberg (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fire-Forest.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #mp3s #saving the news from big tech #platform decay #enshittification #fire debt #good fire #big tech #lawful but awful #content moderation #content moderation at scale #antitrust #trustbusting #podcasts

[notbeingnoticed]

California’s residents have taken a beating from investor-owned utility companies and the CPUC over the past year. Major utility PG&E passed a 13% hike to electricity rates, adding on to what are already among the highest in the nation.

The state passed NEM 3.0, a cut to solar export compensation which sunk the state’s once-thriving rooftop solar market, leading to nearly 20,000 jobs lost and numerous solar installer bankruptcies.

CPUC then moved to shut down the emergent community solar market, which offered a pathway for renters and those with unsuitable rooftops for solar to save on electricity bills. Proponents of community solar legislation say it would enable bill savings of about $300 per year, with total ratepayer savings reaching $9 billion.

[leanpick]

Opinion | Climate Risks of Investments Should Be Disclosed

Opinion | Climate Risks of Investments Should Be Disclosed

In 2018, Pacific Gas and Electric estimated that the rise in wildfires, partly driven by climate change, could cost the company $2.5 billion in payouts for recent fires started by its electricity transmission lines and other operations north of San Francisco, and as much as $15 billion in the future. The company was wrong. The next year, PG&E filed for bankruptcy protection as it faced an…

View On WordPress

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Scott Scheffer

Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the largest investor-owned utility in the U.S., has acknowledged the high likelihood that its poorly maintained electrical transmission equipment caused the deadly Camp Fire in 2018, the worst wildfire in California history. PG&E declared bankruptcy on Jan. 29, claiming that it won’t have the money for the lawsuits and damages that it will be facing.

#PG&E #pg&e bankruptcy #capitalism #Camp Fire #climate change #profit system #California #Paradise #courts #Struggle La Lucha

[stoweboyd]

The Struggle to Control PG&E | Peter Eavis and Ivan Penn report on the bankruptcy of PG&E, the California utility company.

Legal experts say it could take years to resolve PG&E’s bankruptcy because it involves so many players with disparate interests seeking different outcomes.

“This is the most complicated and difficult decision environment I’ve ever seen for a bankruptcy case,” said Jared A. Ellias, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. “I can’t think of a bankruptcy that had this many powerful parties with unclear bargaining power.”

It's fairly obvious that the state of California cannot let PG&E disappear. People need power. But the company is now bankrupt because it's being sued for starting massive wildfires. However, no matter what the law says, the size of the wildfires is to a great extent caused by climate change and not malfeasance by the company.

The state will have to make it a government-owned utility. I predict this won't be easy or cheap, but that's where it will end up.

#daybook #pg&e #pg&e bankruptcy #california #climate change

[rjzimmerman]

Many of the older solar farms were constructed when solar panels cost a lot more than they do today. As a consequence, these older farms require higher contract rates from the utilities in order to stay afloat. PG&E has power purchase agreements with these older solar farms that may be voided in bankruptcy, or may be modified, creating a risk to these older farms. So, the ones that were bold enough to jump into solar power generation years ago may be the ones that will be hurt by a PG&E bankruptcy.

Excerpt from this New York Times article:

Pacific Gas and Electric promises that its customers’ lights will stay on if it follows through on plans to file for bankruptcy this month. But companies that supply the California utility’s electricity may have more to worry about.

PG&E said Monday that it would use bankruptcy to resolve huge liabilities arising from two years of deadly wildfires. Such a move would allow the company to try to revoke or renegotiate contracts it signed with suppliers when power prices were higher than they are now. That, analysts said, could hurt companies that borrowed based on the higher prices — especially those whose power comes from renewable resources.

That prospect was underscored this week when credit-rating agencies downgraded the debt of Topaz Solar Farms, which is owned by a unit of Warren E. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and whose sole customer is PG&E, and Genesis Solar Farm, a large project in the Mojave Desert developed by NextEra Energy. Both companies said they were operating normally, but were monitoring PG&E’s problems closely.

For power producers, especially those in renewable resources, a bankruptcy filing by PG&E could be wrenching.

In bankruptcy, companies can reject contracts with suppliers, forcing them to join other creditors in asserting claims. PG&E could threaten to walk away from older contracts, particularly those with developers of renewable energy that were negotiated several years ago when prices for solar panels were higher than they are now. (Most of the renewable energy the utility uses is solar power.)

If PG&E succeeded in renegotiating the contracts, it could use the money it saved to pay fire-related damages. That could help shield ratepayers from sizable increases in their electric bills.

Analysts at Credit Suisse estimate that PG&E could save $2.2 billion a year by renegotiating renewable power contracts down to current market prices. Those savings could offset the utility’s annual cost of paying off wildfire claims from the last two years, the analysts wrote in a research note.

#PG&E #California wildfires #PG&E bankruptcy #bankruptcy #solar power

[mercurialturnip]

Fuck PG&E

Looks like PG&E is facing into bankruptcy for starting the most apocalyptic of the recent wildfires in California. Couldn’t happen to a nicer company. PG&E is shit. Anyone remember the CA energy crisis back in 2001, the one that led to ousting the governor? (who was replaced by Arnold Shwartzenegger, because electoral politics is 85% tear and madness) That was all caused by PG&E playing shell games, taking energy produced in CA and selling to out of state subsidiaries, then buying it back at inflated prices. Paradise is far from the first place screwed over by their disregard for safety standards. Plus, I recently learned they’ve been cheating the city of San Francisco for just ages. See, SF gets power from the Hetch Hetchy dam. By contract that energy belongs to the city, it was part of the bargaining around damming the valley in the first place (which was fucked up, but that’s a whole different thing.) But PG&E has always charged for it. They do it by buying the power when it hits their lines, and then selling it back at vastly inflated prices. They do it with full complicity of city officials. Every once in a while they get taken to court and are found to be in breach of contract. No actual consequences, a new contract is drawn up, rinse lather repeat. More evidence that big corporations operate above the law.

#pg&e bankruptcy #energy #california #corruption #politics #public buy out!

[furryalligator]

Source: http://twitter.com/theindicator/status/1091103777422278656

What does PG&E’s bankruptcy filing means for the utility business? 🧐 https://t.co/r7Ws9BqKri

— The Indicator (@theindicator) January 31, 2019

Utilities in the U.S. are generally private companies regulated by government commissions. With a dedicated customer base - everyone needs water and power, right? - and government protection and oversight, utilities seemed like a safe bet for most investors.

So many people were shocked this week, when California's largest public utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Company — or PG&E — filed for bankruptcy. Perhaps people shouldn't have been so surprised: it's not the first time PG&E has sought protection from its creditors, after all. The utility filed under Chapter 11 in 2001 in the wake of a power meltdown in California.

But this is the largest bankruptcy filing since the financial crisis, and the largest bankruptcy filing of a utility ever. PG&E says it was forced to take this step because of the damages it may have to pay after wildfires devastated parts of California, wildfires that some people claim were caused by the utility.

Today on The Indicator, how PG&E's woes show how the utility business is changing.

#theindicator #IFTTT #PG&E #pg&e bankruptcy #public utility #California wildfires #@theindicator #monopoly

[elleesttrois]

#pg&e #pg&e bankruptcy #California fires #paradise

[kp777]

#pg&e #bankruptcy #california #gavin newsom #wildfire

[newsierising]

#PG&E #California wildfires #bankruptcy

[cdsix]

“PG&E Corp. equip­ment started more than one fire a day in Cal­i­for­nia on av­er­age in re­cent years”

#pg&e #forest fires #utility #california #bankruptcy

[stoweboyd]

2019-01-05 Daybook

Record Numbers of Americans Want to Leave the U.S. | I've discussed it with my family. Seriously.

40% of women younger than 30 would like to leave the U.S.

22% who disapprove of Trump would like to move vs. 7% who approve

Canada is top desired destination for would-be migrant Americans

:::

Nouns of Assemblage | Quartz obsession of the day includes 'venereal terms', like a gaggle of geese:

An incomplete list of animal gatherings according to the United States Geological Survey:

A shrewdness of apes

A wake of buzzards

A clowder of cats

An intrusion of cockroaches

A bask of crocodiles

A business of ferrets

A cackle of hyenas

A smack of jellyfish

A troop of kangaroos

A romp of otters

A company of parrots

A shiver of sharks

A scurry of squirrels

A murmuration of starlings

A knot of toads

A rafter of turkeys

A pod of seals or whales

:::

Why People Go to Instagram for the Comments Section | Instgram is photo-centric, so it may be counterintuitive that a lot of users visit to find like-mined people through the comments. Increasingly, Taylor Lorenz writes, many of the photos are simply sugar to attract people to chat.

:::

Fed Chairman Powell to Markets: I Hear You | Neil Irwin says we can breath easier now, after the worse December in ages:

The loud-and-clear message is that Mr. Powell and his colleagues aren’t going to put their hands over their ears, ignore these messages from markets, and carry on as planned.

:::

Byers Market | Dianne Feinstein picks Biden, Martin O'Malley picks Beto.

A bit early, isn't it?

:::

A 2015 Tweet about Apple's lack of innovation

:::

Recently re-elected Maine lawmaker quits Republican Party — Politics — Bangor Daily News — BDN Maine | Another elected Republican quits the party while in office, this time Don Marean a Maine state representative. This guy is hitting term limits in 2020 and can't run again.

I am going to watch this because I think the GOP will melt away in the next few years.

:::

Report: PG&E considers bankruptcy filing due to potential wildfire liability | With the desertification of California acceleration, if not this year, then PG&E will go bankrupt next wildfire season, and the state will have to take it over. #2019prediction

:::

Paul Krugman defends Alex Ocasio-Cortez' economics on Twitter:

She's actually saying what top public finance economists have been saying for some time. Not at all outlandish.

:::

#daybook #venereal terms #instagram #apple #2020 elections #federal reserve #americans want to emigrate #aoc #paul krugman #pg&e bankruptcy #dan marean

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this New York Times piece:

Before the catastrophic Camp Fire destroyed Paradise, Calif., the Pacific Gas and Electric Company was worth more than $25 billion. Now its C.E.O. has stepped down and the company, which provides natural gas and electricity to 16 million people in California, has filed for bankruptcyas it confronts billions of dollars in potential liability claims following recent wildfires. It is perhaps not the first bankruptcy in which the changing climate played a role, but it is almost certainly the largest. And no doubt, it won’t be the last.

Of course, it’s not easy to attribute any particular event to climate change, and it will take time to sort out all of the causes of the Camp Fire last November, add up the damages and assess liability. Last week, in a small bit of good news for the company, the state concluded that PG&E was not responsible for the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County that burned nearly 37,000 acres, destroyed more than 5,600 buildings and left 22 dead. But the company says it still faces “extensive litigation, significant potential liabilities and a deteriorating financial situation” following the “devastating and unprecedented wildfires of 2017 and 2018.”

Many fires in recent years have been caused by downed power lines. And even though the company took wildfires seriously and had a broad plan to protect equipment and trim branches — pruning or removing as many as 1.4 million trees a year — it wasn’t enough. The fires pushed the company over the edge.

One message of the bankruptcy is that climate change is already creating calamitous conditions. As PG&E put it recently, “California faces an ever-increasing threat from catastrophic wildfires, extreme weather and higher temperatures.” In a statement, the company noted that the state’s most recent climate assessment “found the average area burned statewide would increase 77 percent if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise” and that “prolonged drought and higher temperatures will triple the frequency of wildfires.”

#california #wildfires #climate change #PG&E #PG&E bankruptcy

[eideard]

Deadliest corporate crime in US history ending with 84 guilty pleas

Deadliest corporate crime in US history ending with 84 guilty pleas

Josh Edelson/AFP

On Tuesday, PG&E Corp. will plead guilty 84 separate times to involuntary manslaughter — the deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history.

That admission in a California courtroom will mark the end of one portion of the power company’s legal travails after its equipment sparked the largest wildfire in state history, consuming the town of Paradise. Many who lost loved ones or homes…

View On WordPress

#84 charges #84 guilty pleas #bankruptcy #California law #manslaughter #PG&E

[phooll123]

By BY IVAN PENN from NYT Business https://ift.tt/2BYpOJL

#News Updates #PG&E Appoints a New Board as It Eyes Its Bankruptcy Exit