Impervious as ever to the impact of centrally planned greenie socialism on the reliability of electricity in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom is running scared.
He's threatening the Hugo Chavez solution to the new-normal of blackouts in his state, which is to say, nationalizing Pacific Gas & Electric. Nationalization? Boy is that a cop-out.
Yet look at how he couches the language so soothingly, according to the Sacramento Bee:
California Gov. Gavin Newsom designated a top aide as his “energy czar” in the wake of Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s prolonged power outages and on Friday suggested the state could take charge of the bankrupt utility.
“The entire system needs to be reimagined,” Newsom said at a press conference.
Ana Matosantos will continue to serve as Newsom’s cabinet secretary while also working as the state’s energy czar, where she will be charged with helping fix the state’s utility problems.
He also sounds like his governor's office is in turmoil. Get a load of this:
During the news conference, Newsom initially indicated Matosantos would step down as cabinet secretary — the second-highest-ranking cabinet member — to take the position, but his office later said he misspoke.
Obviously, he feels he needs this person, who did such a bang-up job on Puerto Rico's finances during its bankruptcy, the impressiveness of that visible in the wake of Hurricane Maria, /sarc.
It sounds like she got mad when he said she would step down from her more secure or prestigious position as cabinet secretary for the lousy czar position, which is rather signals she thinks this bid is going to fail. She probably knows she can't command economics and the whole thing is going to fail. (She'll keep her fancy position and lifetime bennies, though).
And of course it will fail. PG&E has no money to put its electrical wires under the ground after all the "green mandates" the socialists in the California state assembly have foisted on them, forcing them to convert to pricey, unreliable and wire-transmitted solar and wind power instead of efficient, reliable, cheap fossil fuels. That's a money pit right there.
Now PG&E has even less money to make even that happen and still supply reliable electricity what with all the billions in lawsuit payouts it must make to residents who have lost their homes in past wildfires based on this lack of investment. Why did that happen? Not just the greenie mandates for wind and solar power from the state central planners, the company also was forbidden to clear brush from its electrical lines. Another greenie diktat from the top that didn't end well.
Combine it with the highest state taxes in the nation to bankroll the plethora of freebies for illegal aliens, greenie boondoggles, and bloated salaries for public employee unions, and the company hasn't got a snowball's chance in a wildfire chance of succeeding in its basic function of providing electricity. But it's green as heck...
Now that the results of those priorities are clear, Newsom would have you think he's more competent to run the electrical company and make its decisions for it than the electrical company itself. He'll deliver the electricity, he'll command it so, mandates and all. He's not talking scrapping the hellish greenie mandates, cutting taxes, giving it legal relief to the company, or putting consumers first. His idea is to command the economics killing this company ... to go away. He's going to be Moses commanding the Greenie Sea. We all know how well that worked out when Hugo Chavez did it. Now with prettyboy Newsom's hands on the electrical levers, what could go wrong?
His talk is wild talk, desperate talk, and this being a one-party blue state, he may actually get his way.
But it's also the sort of desperation we saw - if you read, say, history of the Castro era in Cuba, that Castro undertook in the mid-1960s after the failure of his socialist central planning -- he used that as an excuse to collectivize further. It's also redolent of what went on in the Soviet Union in the 1920s when Vladimir Lenin was threatened with his loss of power after the disastrous early failures of socialism led to famine (electrical shortages, food shortages, socialism is always all about shortages), and then announced his New Economic Plan. As that threatened the communist grip on power, Josef Stalin's collectivization of farms followed. Nasty, nasty precedents there, and Newsom, ignorant as hell about it, yet fully socialist, is pretty well following in their footsteps -- lemmings-like, off the cliff.
He's refusing to put the blame for the blackouts on himself, where it belongs, and now trying to crack the whip even harder on the already abused PG&E.
Why he's worried is strange stuff, given his stranglehold on power in his one-party state, what with ballot-harvesting, the ease with which illegals can now vote in the state, and gerrymandering. Yet he's clearly running scared, so he's going Stalin.
Let me handle it, he says. This won't end well.
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