Articles

All The Health Insurance Companies’ Men Attack

Whenever health insurance companies face real political pressure they know it’s best to change the messenger. Their executives and spokespeople clam up and turn to paid surrogates who attack reformers in order to take the public’s eye off the ball: health industry price gouging.
 
With the heat turning up nationally for California single payer proposal Senate Bill 562 (Lara),  which threatens to upend industry profiteering, the same paid attack dogs who came out against regulating skyrocketing health insurance premiums are back.
 

Backlash Against Fossil Fuel Electricity Turning Into Movement

The exposure of massive overcapacity built into California’s electric plants, approved by a corrupt Public Utilities Commission (PUC) at ratepayers’ expense, is driving a new backlash against natural gas powered electricity plants in Oxnard, as well as possibly Huntington Beach, Los Alamitos, and LA Department of Water and Power plants too.
 

Reopening Aliso Canyon Gas Reserve Is Litmus Test For CA Senate Democrats

Four Democrats currently have the power to determine who really runs the state of California’s fossil fuel policies—policymakers or a major energy company named Sempra.

The litmus test: Whether these Democrats vote for SB 57, a bill authored by Henry Stern that requires the state and Sempra’s subsidiary Southern California Gas to reveal what caused the biggest methane well blowout in US history before the Aliso Canyon gas reserve is allowed to reopen.

Frack Pack Prevails At The Fair Political Practices Commission

What we just learned from a 14-month investigation by the state’s political ethics watchdog is that political insiders get to invest in companies over which they have influence, meddle in regulatory appointments, and manipulate policy to their own benefit. Then, this frack pack gets off scot free.

Civil Rights Groups Call For Public Hearing Into Auto Insurance Price Discrimination

It took a voter revolt 29 years ago to force the insurance industry to start pricing auto insurance in California based on how well and how much you drive, instead of who you are or where you live. Before that, drivers in inner cities and other “undesirable” zip codes (read: low-income, minority) had to pay a fortune for auto insurance, if they could buy it at all. Prop 103’s insurance reforms changed that. Or at least they were supposed to.

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