Yves here. To balance our entirely warranted “hating on Kristi Noem” piece yesterday, a harsh look at a Gavin Newsom seemed in order. Oddly, Norman Solomon does not mention that Newsom is a creature of the Gettys with not just personal but family ties. That alone does much to explain why his progressive stance is mere posturing. From Stanford Magazine in 2019:
Bill Newsom once told an interviewer that as a young man he wanted to be a high school English teacher. Instead, he would rise to prominence as a champion of the environment, an appeals court judge for California’s First District—and the person charged with delivering the ransom money when billionaire J. Paul Getty’s grandson was kidnapped.
On December 12, 2018, William Alfred Newsom III, JD ’60, MA ’61, a native San Franciscan and the father of current California Gov. Gavin Newsom, died at his Pacific Heights home. He was 84.
Newsom’s life was forever changed by the friendships he formed with three fellow students at St. Ignatius College Preparatory in San Francisco: Jerry Brown and Gordon and Paul Getty Jr., sons of J. Paul Getty. As California’s governor, Brown appointed Newsom to the bench twice, first to the Placer County Superior Court in 1975 and then to the Court of Appeal in 1978. Newsom also served as a trustee for the Getty family, a position he devoted himself to after retiring from the judiciary in 1995, and he was godfather to Paul Getty III, whose kidnapping was dramatized in All the Money in the World, the 2017 film directed by Ridley Scott.
And from the Los Angeles Times in 2018, in How eight elite San Francisco families funded Gavin Newsom’s political ascent:
Gavin Newsom wasn’t born rich, but he was born connected — and those alliances have paid handsome dividends throughout his career.
A coterie of San Francisco’s wealthiest families has backed him at every step of his political rise, which in November could lead next to his election as governor of California.San Francisco society’s “first families” — whose names grace museum galleries, charity ball invitations and hospital wards — settled on Newsom, 50, as their favored candidate two decades ago, said Willie Brown, former state Assembly speaker and former mayor of the city.
“He came from their world, and that’s why they embraced him without hesitancy and over and above everybody else,” said Brown, who is a mentor to Newsom. “They didn’t need to interview him. They knew what he stood for.”
A Times review of campaign finance records identified eight of San Francisco’s best-known families as being among Newsom’s most loyal and long-term contributors. Among those patrons are the Gettys, the Pritzkers and the Fishers, whose families made their respective fortunes in oil, hotels and fashion. They first backed him when he was a restaurateur and winery owner running for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1998, and have continued their support through the governor’s race.
They are not Newsom’s largest donors: The families in total have given about $2 million of the $61 million that donors have contributed to his campaigns and independent committees backing those bids. But they gave while he was a relative unknown, providing crucial support to a political newcomer in the years before his camp
aign accounts piled high with cash from labor unions, Hollywood honchos, tech billionaires and donors up and down the state.
By Norman Solomon,the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Originally published at Common Dreams
California Governor Gavin Newsom has made headlines this winter by vowing to defeat a proposal for a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires in the state. Many national polls now rank him as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, but aligning with the ultra-wealthy is not auspicious for wooing the party’s voters. Last year, Reuters/Ipsos pollsters reported that a whopping 86 percent of Democrats said “changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority.”
Newsom has drawn widespread praise for waging an aggressive war of words against President Trump. But few people outside of California know much about the governor’s actual record. Many Democratic voters will be turned off to learn that his fervent opposition to a billionaire tax is part of an overall political approach that has trended more and more corporate-friendly.
A year ago, Newsom sent about 100 leaders of California-based companies a prepaid cell phone “programmed with Newsom’s digits and accompanied by notes from the governor himself,” Politico reported. One note to the CEO of a big tech corporation said, “If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away.” While pandering to business elites, Newsom has slashed budgets to assist the poor and near-poor with healthcare, housing and food—in a state where 7 million live under the official poverty line and child poverty rates are the highest in the nation.
The latest Newsom budget, released last month, continues his trajectory away from social compassion. “The governor’s 2026-27 spending plan balances the budget by dodging the harsh realities of the Republican megabill, H.R. 1, and maintains state cuts to vital public supports, like Medi-Cal, enacted as part of the current-year budget,” the California Budget & Policy Center pointed out. “Governor Newsom’s reluctance to propose meaningful revenue solutions to help blunt the harm of federal cuts undermines his posture to counter the Trump administration.” The statement said that the proposed budget “will leave many Californians without food assistance and healthcare coverage.”
So far, key facts about Newsom’s policy priorities have scarcely gone beyond California’s borders. “National media have focused on Newsom as a personality and potential White House candidate and have almost completely ignored what he has and has not done as a governor,” said columnist Dan Walters, whose five decades covering California politics included 33 years at The Sacramento Bee. “It’s a perpetual failing of national political media to be more interested in image and gamesmanship rather than actual actions, the sizzle rather than the steak, and Newsom is very adept at exploiting that tendency.”
Walters told me that Newsom “has generally avoided direct conflicts with his fellow millionaires, such as discouraging tax increases, and has danced between corporations and labor unions on bread-and-butter issues such as minimum wages. He’s also quietly moved away from environmental issues, most notably shifting from condemnation of the oilindustry for price gouging and pollution to encouraging the industry to increase production and keep refineries operating.”
Newsom angered climate activists last fall by signing his bill to open up thousands of new oil wells. Noting that “Newsom just championed a plan to dramatically expand oil drilling in California,” the Oil and Gas Action Network said that he “can’t claim climate leadership while giving Big Oil what it wants.” Third Act, founded by Bill McKibben, responded by denouncing “Newsom’s Big Oil backslide” and accused the governor of “backtracking on key climate and community health commitments.”
Great efforts to curb the ubiquitous toxic impacts of PFAS “forever chemicals” hit a wall in October when Newsom vetoed legislation to ban them in such consumer items as cookware, dental floss, and cleaning products. “This bill had huge support from both within the state and beyond, and yet, apparently, the governor was interested only in the one sector opposing it—the cookware industry,” said Clean Water Action policy director Andria Ventura. The organization put the veto in context, observing that “the governor seems determined to move away from his pro-environment past.”
As with the environment, so with workers’ rights. In 2023, Newsom vetoed a bill to provide unemploymentcompensation to workers on strike. In 2024, he vetoed a bill to help protect farmworkers from violations of heat safety regulations, while temperatures in California’s agricultural fields spike above 110 degrees.
The latest Gallup polling of the party’s rank-and-file indicates a wide ideological gap between Newsom and the party’s base. Fifty-nine percent of Democrats described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal,” while 32 percent said “moderate,” and 8 percent “conservative” or “very conservative.” And the trendline is striking: Democrats’ self-identification as liberal or very liberal has doubled in the last two decades.
It might be tempting to believe that Newsom’s services to corporatism and the rich are less important than the possibility that he would be an adept Democratic nominee to defeat the GOP ticket in 2028. But pursuit of such “moderate” politics was harmful to Democratic turnout in 2016 and 2024. Newsom’s current political attitude is similar to the timeworn approach that undermined the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.
Newsom says he’s eager to pitch a big tent for the Democratic Party, declaring that he welcomes the likes of former US senator Joe Manchin as well as New York’s socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani in the fold. “I want it to be the Manchin to Mamdani party,” Newsom said in November. “I want it to be inclusive.” He did not mention that during the Biden presidency, while in the Senate, Manchin wrecked prospects for transformational Build Back Better legislation and other measures that would have benefited tens of millions of Americans.
It’s telling that Newsom and former president Bill Clinton, a longtime backer, have voiced profuse mutual admiration. Interviewed after he came off the stage with the former president in a joint appearance at a Clinton Global Initiative event a few months ago, Newsom praised “the ability to reach across the aisle.” That formula is a throwback to what propelled Clinton into the presidency with a pledge to find common ground, only to toss the working class overboard from the Oval Office. The disastrous results—made possible by Clinton’s reaching “across the aisle”—included passage of the NAFTA trade pact, the “welfare reform” law that harshly undermined poor women with children, the mass-incarceration-boosting crime bill and the media monopoly-enabling Telecommunications Act.
Launching his podcast “This Is Gavin Newsom” a year ago, the host began warmly showcasing extremist bigots by featuring Charlie Kirk as his first guest. When Kirk was assassinated in September, Newsom lavished praise on him, tweeting: “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” From the governor’s office, Newsom issued a statement that explained: “I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate.”
The praise raises the question: how far right would someone need to be before no longer meriting Newsom’s admiration for “passion”? Clearly, Kirk wasn’t far right enough to be disqualified. He only said things like asserting that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” proclaiming “we made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s” and castigating Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and others as affirmative-action hires: “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
Newsom’s show has continued to give a friendly platform to such extreme right-wingers as Steve Bannon and Ben Shapiro. In effect, Newsom is engaged in a podcast form of triangulation—by turns validating and disputing his guests’ attacks on progressivism.
On no issue is Newsom more out of step with the Democratic electorate than US support for Israel. Last summer, a Quinnipiac survey found that 77 percent of Democrats believed Israel was guilty of genocide in Gaza—but last month Newsom said the opposite, declaring “I don’t agree with that notion.” Like most Democratic officeholders who combine their denial of genocide with support for the nonstop weapons flow to Israel, Newsom lays blame narrowly on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that he is “crystal clear about my love for Israel and condemnation of Bibi.” The same Quinnipiac poll found that fully three-quarters of Democrats were opposed to sending further military aid to Israel, a position that Newsom refuses to take at the same time that he dodges questions about the right-leaning Israel lobby group AIPAC.
Newsom can expect a direct challenge from another California Democrat likely to be on debate stages when the party’s presidential campaigns get underway next year. Congressman Ro Khanna said of Newsom in January: “He doesn’t want to offend the AIPAC donors. He doesn’t want to offend the donor class. And that explains his position on going to give Netanyahu a blank check right after October 7, on not being willing to ever call out the funding we were giving, and not willing to call out that clearly it was a genocide, and then not willing to challenge the billionaire class on tax policy.”
For anyone who wants a truly progressive Democratic Party, Gavin Newsom is bad news.
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Newsom praised “the ability to reach across the aisle.” That formula is a throwback to what propelled Clinton into the presidency with a pledge to find common ground,
I think the quote is wrong handed, should be reach around the aisle /s
And by the way the pledge to find common ground has given us two versions of the republican party and the heroes are not reagan or bush the 1 but rather karl rove and tom delay. :/
Newsom once-upon-a-time supported the shutting down of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, a rusting disaster waiting to happen. But he has changed horses, and now wants to re-start it, even though there is ample evidence that solar and wind power are decidely a better deal for rate payers. And, of course, no one is threatened by radiation from their neighbor’s solar panels. Could donations from the reprehensible Pacific Gas and Electric have a hand in Gavin’s come-to-Jesus moment?
Rate payers? So Cal Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric monopolies set rates for most of the state, and we in California are getting gouged more than any other state (except maybe Hawaii). The so-called PUC rubber-stamps rate increases and I don’t see any politicians in Sacramento trying to clean up the institutional corruption. The antiquated and dangerous electrical infrastructure should have been modernized many decades ago. (PG&E willful negligence has caused many fatal fires in California)
Instead, the ratepayers are footing the bill for the lawsuits, PR and advertising, as well as the pay packages of CEOs worth tens of millions annually. This incentivizes more corruption. Unless the corruption is cleaned up, ratepayers will be gouged hard, no matter if the energy comes from clean or dirty sources.
Newsom was responsible for the bill that forces ratepayers to pay for fires caused by poor maintenance by criminal investor-owned electric utilities.
At my Eastern Sierra house, Gavin Newsom is keeping us in the dark. After the Round Valley Fire and the big burns in LA, SCE’s Risk Management Department woke up and realized they hadn’t been maintaining their power lines in a safe condition to withstand high winds coming off the Sierra, and might be held responsible.
So they hit on a solution — just shut our power off whenever the wind blows, while they slow-walk repairs for years. That way, they can keep the quarterly cost figures low enough that their owner, Edison International, could even declare a stock buyback to offset the impact of their employee compensation program for executives on their stock price. Newsom’s PUC knows this, but does nothing to compel SCE to meet their legal service requirement, and makes excuses for them.
That’s Gavin Newsom’s California.
True, the institutional corruption and rot has metastasized, and I don’t see any change, no matter who the next governor is. We bought a generator that powers the whole house a few years ago because of the frequency of both planned and unplanned power outages, even here where fire danger is relatively low, compared to interior areas. (Mendocino Co., near coast).
I understand why remote pacific island chain Hawaii has slightly higher rates than PG&E, but California has the electricity infrastructure of a developing country, with some of the highest electricity rates in the world. Kleptocracy?
Or maybe Plantationocracy.
The state has carbon emissions standards to meet and shutting the plant down would have ment they could meet those requirements.
Diablo canyon has not been shut down and therefore not restarted.
It accounts for about 10% of Californias energy and 17% of low carbon energy.
While I agree with the decision, I am anti Gavin. He’s a disaster. Pg&E was his largest donor and so California bailed them out vs taking it over. Because it would have looked bad to the donor class but great to the voter class.
I don’t think he stands a chance in the primary. He’ll be torn apart over California tax rate, energy rate, homelessness, budget deficit and so on.
Thank you. The fact that Newsom has played Aquarius for PG&E for decades needed to be mentioned.
Just last week he opposed breaking them up – I wonder why?!!??
The dems are just playing theater. The time to change ownership was when they were completely bankrupt after the paradise fire when they had all the power, at this point it will never happen. Instead the dems gave them billions and billions to bail them out. The CEO at the time when she retired maybe a year later got 30 or 40 million dollar package, just incredible. She should have been put on trial.
Yes, we must equally criticize both factions of oligarchy. But the Gaviner is slicker, and apparently more handsome than the current kakistocrat in the WH. After the disastrous leadership of Orange Judas, Newsom will no doubt be very popular among the mainstream D crowd. This reminds me of Obama after Bush Jr.
Bill Newsom godfather to Paul Getty III. Gavin born into privilege, wealth and connections. Why is this not surprising?
Supporting and pandering to authoritarian, right-wing, Zionists is quite typical. Solomon points out that he is “out of step” with the D “electorate”. But the cruel joke of our phony PR democracy can be illustrated when Bill Clinton was warned that he would alienate his base by deregulating financial crime, signing NAFTA, the Crime Bill, so-called welfare reform, etc. He reportedly replied with a chuckle: “whadda they gonna do? Vote Republican?” The cruel joke is on us, but folk done forgot already. Short memories and Stockholm Syndrome apparently afflicts around half the country.
Same goes for Newsom, I am told that he is tall, rich and handsome, and he is a slick-talking BSer. He’s a perfect corrupt politician.
My PMC friends would vote for Hitler just to get rid of the current Hitler. We are screwed.
My liberal goodthinker friends are exactly the same — anything will be better than the Orange Order, they feel. Getting them to change is a tall order, but you can cause enough cognitive dissonance to get them to really think.
Virtue signalling is a big part of being a goodthinker, and so is confusing moralism with politics. They like to think of themselves as The Good voting for The Good. But factual articles like this one show that the people they support are anything but Good, and that causes problems for them. (The Dem communication consultant meme that you’re a Trump supporter if you vote anything but Dem was created to overcome this difficulty.)
During the Biden campaign, I got a lot of mileage out of calling him a war and human rights criminal, for which here is a solid factual basis during just the Iraq and Terror Wars, and telling my friends, “OK, you’re voting for him because you don’t like Orange Man, fine, but you are voting for a war criminal — the criminal is your candidate.”
Here they squirm and prevaricate, but you can hold them to it until they finally admit to making a political calculation about who they are and what they want. Now we’re beyond moralism. If my friends are gay, or women, or people of color, they have some basis for saying that things will be relatively better for them under the Dems. Consider with them that they may have a good case for making a deal with a monster, but allow them to understand that they are doing it even though they are allowing others — who might also be part of their group — to die or suffer. And they are morally owning that.
It’s important at this moment not to strike a morally superior tone (you’re not a liberal goodthinker, after all), but instead to take the position that we are confronted by a huge political problem that we must solve together, one which voting for the Dem will not solve. From here, you can begin to talk about what to do, even though you may not get them to change overnight.
” They are morally owning that” can work if you are equally prepared to admit that you are morally owning your choice to get-elected a President ( or whatever) who will make life and survival itself worse for gays or women or people of color . . . which is a lot of people for you to morally own your readiness to make life worse for. Are you prepared to own your moral choice to do that to that many people whom you are privileged to not be one of?
Maybe I am; but I am not pretending to be their moral superior. The moralism is a red herring to lead us down a trail away from getting all of us what we need.
Did the Dems end qualified police immunity after Black Lives Matter? Pass a federal abortion code? An Equal Rights Amendment? Is support for these issues meaningless unless accompanied by a vote that swings your state’s electoral votes toward a Dem? Is voting the only way to make any progress and get people their rights? We need to work together to get it done.
No, the Dems didn’t do any of that, nor will they. And moral posturing should indeed be deleted from our thoughts and practices.
The unique problem posed by Election 2024 was the basic fact of Project 2025 ready to go and all Trump’s sincere promises made-and-kept to mass-deport millions of non-white immigrants both illegal and legal, to functionally destroy what was left of citizen/consumer/environmental/health/etc. regulatory protection, to destroy what was left of voting rights, etc. etc.
The choice we had was between Brezhnevian stagnation with Harris or Yeltsinian burndown with Trump. Just enough people preferred Yeltsinian burndown with Trump that now Yeltsinian burndown is what we have had for a year with three more years to go. We all remember what Lambert Strether taught us about the duet between the Ratchetublicans and the Dempawlocrats.
If Harris had been elected we would be kept Pawled-in-place where Biden left us.
Now, if a DemPrez is elected in 2028 we will be kept Pawled-in-place where the Ratchetublicans have taken us by that time. We will have nothing left to build on, build back from, and no way to build it.
Electing Harris would have given us 4 years of semi-peace-and-quiet time for people who saw and understood the need for a Political Weapons-System Strike Force to invest that 4 years in building it up. If the Ratchetublicans are massively purged out of the House and Senate, then their Yeltsinian burndown may be slowed down just enough to give ” us” ( whomever “us”, if anyone, turns out to be) time to semi-rest, semi-recover, get semi-undisoriented and begin growing that Strike Force or Strike Forces.
The moralistic movement to “abandon Harris” was based on pure moral-superiority posturing and was all about the “abandon Harris” people performing their self-proclaimed moral superiority. That is also part of the moralism we don’t need.
If they do it again, they will earn the Left the undying hatred ( true hatred) of Black America for decades to come, and maybe the same level of undying hatred from other tens of millions of semi-marginalized persons and peoples in continuing danger from the Ratchetublican Conspiracy to turn America into the Gilead Republic Plantation of their dreams. People who don’t believe it now will learn to believe it in due time. Why not believe it in time to avoid and prevent the worst of it?
Somehow my reply to your comment was posted to the comments on the February 7 Links page.
Don’t forget the illegal Citi-Travelers merger under Clinton and his subsequent ending of Glass-Steagall. This, eventually, contributed a fair amount in bringing us to the 2008 bank/insurance failures still rippling in today’s economy. Many articles, like this one, conveniently leave this out when discussing Clinton’s legacy.
Just to correct the history, as a finance pedant.
Glass-Steagall was irrelevant by the time it was formally revoked. Commercial bank Credit Suisse bought investment bank First Boston in 1988 (no typo).
The ONLY reason for its formal revocation was the Citi-Travelers deal and I am pretty sure the deal did not close before the Glass-Steagall termination.
I recall a Citi-Travelers deal honcho (at the time), when asked about its legality, a year in advance of the Glass-Steagall termination saying: we expect the law to change.
I’m sorry I can’t be more precise.
NYT:
I read a long time ago, that when Tom Hayden was planning to run, as a democrat, for the california assembly, that he was surprised to learn that every dem candidate had to virtually swear fidelity to israel in order run as a democrat. Since that time, I’ve had little use for any of them. Tinseltown is located, for certain, right smack dab in the center of the zionist entity, and it’s churning out horror movie after horror movie. gavin newsome has the look of a certain dracula, telegenic, and lean and hungary.
This article has given me a lot of insight about Newsom that main stream media has ignored. If he ran I was going to vote for him. That no longer is the case.
Newsom strikes me as a phony who has no real accomplishments beyond starting with that silver spoon.
He has a long list of expensive failures finally being publicized, and keeps trying to BS the people with unctuous deflection. A defective weather vane.
Yuck.
> But they gave while he was a relative unknown,
“early money is like yeast”
—
Are there any progressive-minded (as in “universal concrete material benefits”) funding entities thinking in these terms?
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/01/gavin-newsoms-keeping-it-all-in-the-family/
Useful graphic
Almost any article about Gavin Newsom’s political background and career should lead with that graphic.
One question I’ve had and haven’t seen much about is his relationship with the big tech companies. That’s probably a deeper dive into the dynamics between the California old money and tech scene.
Dont forget his total subservience to California’s oligarch farmers.
https://www.nefariousrussians.com/p/gavin-newsom-oligarch-valley
An essential article for understanding California politics and the California ruling class!
As a card carrying Californian, I know precious little about Gavin, other than he seemed to acquire Fetterman’s funnymen to do satire for him.
Thanks for this. I’ll be bookmarking it for later use. I can already see people in my circle doing the “he’s not perfect but he’s not that bad” thing. I’m afraid Screwball’s comment above is going to be the story going forward.
Isn’t he a past participant in the future leaders program of the World Economic Forum?
As a Californian who has watched Gavin Newsome’s career with both interest and repugnance I know how awful he is.
A glib sociopath with severe dyslexia who has been raised since birth to serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful.
His qualifications for higher office consist of good hair, good teeth and a distinctive voice…and being a sociopath.
Newsome and Hegseth sort of look alike. (I needed a moment of silliness.)
reading this piece about Newsom brought this Chris Hedges short you tube to mind. Guess which camp he fits into. https://substack.com/home/post/p-184937376
Kudos! A most astute analysis.
I consider myself an easy going moderate person. What I want is collective ownership of the means of production, that’s all. Is that too much to ask? Reach across the aisle? Sure, the aisle being between the citizenry and the firing squad circling the sociopath PTB, and their creeps.
One thing the country will need by 2028 is a clear break from Trumpism. If the Dems want to run a candidate like Newson who claims he and his billionaire friends will be better than Trump and his billionaires friends were, then the country is going to be in worse trouble.
We need a dramatic break from Trump on the level of Hoover v FDR or even more radical.
Well . . . that’s what legitimate primaries would be for, if they are permitted.
But if you are given a choice between ” stop the Trumpism in mid-Trump” versus ” All the Trumpism full hyperspeed ahead toward the Final Conclusion, which will you choose? Because you will get one of those two choices regardless.
didn’t need to read this article as the headline was entirely adequate.
governor nuisance is such a piece of work …
Newsome and Vance as the frontrunners in 28? The perfect lose-lose option. Why even bother to vote when the vote will not matter?
…and then JD Vance spoke…in that creepy JD Vance way of speaking, with that creepy look of smug certainty on his face, in absolute disregard of the reality of the human tragedy they are creating… and reminded me why it would still be important to vote…even if those are the only 2 choices available in 28.
Newsome would be bad. But I have the eerie feeling that Vance would be apocalyptic bad. At least a Newsome presidency would give us the opportunity to live to fight another day. And that is worth fighting for.
I agree. And that is why I will vote for Newsome/Harris or Harris/Newsome or whatever combination the Dempawlocrats conspire to give us, so as to buy some time-delay before the resumption Project Twenty-TwentyVance. The time would only be useful if put to actual use, but if no time is even bought or borrowed, then there will be no time to even be put to use for any purpose.
First, the good: Newsom signed a bill authorizing local public banks in California. Jerry Brown vetoed it. Some are underway along the coast now. See https://www.publicbankeastbay.org for one example.
But the article is correct. Newsom is trying to straddle the oligarchy and peasants, and just looks like a clown doing it. PG&E was ripe for a public takeover, and Newsom neatly avoided it. JFYI, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) sells electricity for 35-40% less than PG&E, and its C-Suite personnel aren’t consulting with criminal attorneys about the possibility of facing charges of negligent homicide for their many maintenance omissions that goosed PG&E’s profits.
He’s just an empty suit, like Clinton. Incidentally, one of Clinton’s worst decisions was conspiring with Newt Gingrich to turn AFDC into TANF. 76% of those who needed public assistance got AFDC. 26% got TANF. Attacking the poors, deregulating the Wall Streeters…pretty much part of the program
I don’t know who is worse, Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom but I do know that Newson failed to place PG&E under public ownership when that privately owned utility company was on its knees in bankruptcy court after it murdered ratepayers. Had he done so, California ratepayers would be paying a lot less for their energy.
Like Harris, Newsom is a completely corporate captured neoliberal DEM who will betray us because he has.
Energy gouging is in more places than California, A for-profit utility corporation monopoly is gouging customers covering most of Maryland and Delaware (Exelon parent, subs Delmarva, BGE, Pepco). The monopoly in my area, eastern shore Maryland has given us double and triple rates since January 2025 with more increases coming. I believe this problem is more evident on both coasts so that would mean Democrats generally. Newsom is not alone in taking the donor money and out here the sentiment is let them eat propane heaters or freeze to death. Folks out here say vote red to fix the problem, by turning back on the coal plants. The Democrats like all politicians employed short term thinking with green energy rhetoric and actions that closed the bad polluting plants supposedly leaving us with over charging monopoly power purchased from other states. I don’t know what happened to the green stuff. There is no political will to force municipal take overs or putting together consortiums or whatever you might call it, to generate power locally. It can be done – there are a few lone non-profits doing it in a few towns but most of these counties are very poor. They don’t even have money for sand or salt to treat the roads during ice and snow storms in my town in Caroline County. No one is coming to save us – not Newsom or Vance of course. We can hope some unknown humanist will pop up before 2028 but I’m not counting on it.
As Mahatma Gandhi once said: ” You will have to be the unknown humanist you wish to see pop up in the world”. Or words to that effect.