The Department of Business Oversight is nothing more than the amalgamation of the Department of Corporations and the Department of Financial Institutions. Since these agencies and their antecedents go back to the Board of Bank Commissioners which was founded in 1878, I don’t think you can call it a new bureaucracy. Go back to sleep.

A new report by state regulators says PG&E has collected millions of dollars from ratepayers for improvements it never made. From Steve Johnson, Joshua Melvin and Paul Rogers in the Mercury News.

“The report by the California Public Utility Commission’s safety division also disclosed that PG&E in recent years has collected more than a half billion dollars from ratepayers for system improvements that were never made or that exceeded the amount of money it was authorized to earn. That finding, from an audit, could make it harder for the utility to saddle its customers with 90 percent of the cost of its $2.2 billion pipeline-renovation plan, as it recently has proposed.”

“Much of the report repeats previous findings by the National Transportation Safety Board and an expert panel the commission appointed to look into the accident, which killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes. But the disclosure about the audit sparked outrage among some elected officials.”

“It is truly unconscionable that PG&E was allowed by the CPUC to steal ratepayer monies that should have been spent on safety and, instead, was put in the pockets of PG&E shareholders,” said Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough. “All these monies identified in the audit should be returned to ratepayers, presumably as a credit against the work that PG&E should have done, but didn’t.”

Really? The State does?

Maybe, *maybe* the state has some interest in the “hands” part. Maybe.

But corralling guys who don’t know where to keep their eyes, how about we move all the guys who CAN to Rhode Island, and then give the ladies a choice on where to live. With a bunch of men with small dogs and guys with long white canes, or in the rest of the US with guys who are under the age of embalmment.

Its a real pity, because back when CA was a conservative state, when Reagan was governor, they were one of the most prosperous, best run, and most forward looking states in the nation. It just goes to show how quickly leftist government can ruin even the most prosperous areas.

Of course if Obama stays in for another term, the whole country will become like CA.

I have to disagree: If California had a pro-business governor, he would abolish some of those regulating departments and agencies, the regulations they inflict, and free their employees to find productive jobs in the profit-seeking sector.

Establishing another bureaucracy is not pro-business: it simply establishes yet more bureaucracy for business to have to deal with, and needs yet more taxes to pay for it.

Stop requiring business to quantify and justify their employee race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation ratios. Stop demanding that they conform to politicians’ demands of the day. Tell employees that if they dislike their employer, go find a new one. If a black owned company doesn’t want any Asian employees, fine: let them discriminate. Bigots have rights, too, and using the force of government to break them to your will is fundamentally anti-American. That’s right: fundamentally anti-American.