The
value of a life = $40,000
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| Photo: KTLA.com |
The CEO, Bill Johnson,
was not personally pleading guilty to the crimes. He was appearing as a
representative of the corporation, which was charged with the offenses and
which agreed to pay the statutory
maximum monetary penalty of $3.48 million—or around $40,000 per victim.
Since no executive of
the company was charged and since a corporation cannot be put behind bars, no
one is paying a real penalty in this case. That, unfortunately, is the norm for
almost all matters of corporate misconduct.
Usually, however, a
hefty monetary penalty takes the place of imprisonment. PG&E is not even
facing that limited form of punishment to a meaningful degree in the immediate
case, though it was separately pressured to create a $13 billion fund to
compensate victims of the Camp Fire.
It is difficult to see the PG&E case as anything more than a symbolic gesture. It leaves open the question of what would be an appropriate way to deal with egregious corporate misconduct.
For a while it
appeared that the utility might face serious consequences after Gov. Gavin
Newsom raised the possibility of a state takeover. It now appears Newsom was
simply using that threat as leverage to get PG&E to make some changes to
its operations. Those changes are unlikely to be adequate for a company with
such a poor track record.
Converting PG&E
from an investor-owned utility into a customer-owned cooperative, as some
California officials suggested, would accomplish much more. Skimping on
maintenance to bolster quarterly profits would likely become a thing of the
past under such an arrangement.
Such a conversion
would in effect be a “death penalty” sentence for the existing PG&E. But
instead of putting the company out of business, it would resurrect it in a new,
more accountable form.
This is actually not a
very radical idea. There are already many community-owned utilities across the
United States. They even have their own trade association, the American Public
Power Association. There are also many cooperative utilities. Even the federal
government is involved through entities such as the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Yet these forms of
public power have never represented more than a slice of the industry, which
instead has been dominated by large investor-owned utilities whose clout was
supposed to be kept in check by strict regulatory oversight, especially at the
state level.
PG&E is a prime
example of the failure of that oversight. Perhaps it is now time to return to
the idea of regarding access to energy, like healthcare, as a right rather than
a product.
