Deadliest corporate crime in US will end with 84 guilty pleas

Father who lost daughter in California wildfire wants PG&E to ‘feel my pain.’

On Tuesday, PG&E Corp. will plead guilty 84 separate times to involuntary manslaughter the deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history. That admission in a California courtroom will mark the end of one portion of the power company’s legal travails after its equipment sparked the largest wildfire in state history, consuming the town of Paradise. Many who lost loved ones or homes to the 2018 conflagration may not find much comfort in the utility paying a $4 million fine. But for some, a small measure of justice will come from witnessing PG&E’s comeuppance in court. “It doesn’t bring my daughter back that’s the bottom line,” said Tom LeBlanc, whose stepdaughter, Kimberly Wehr, 53 years old and disabled, was killed at her home in the Camp Fire on Nov. 8, 2018. At the same time, Leblanc said in an interview, PG&E’s plea “means something because they’re admitting the guilt.”

The plea is unparalleled for a publicly traded company. Over a period of about 40 years that prosecutors in the U.S. have tried to charge companies for killing people mostly without success the closest comparison is BP Plc’s manslaughter plea after 11 workers were killed in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion. “This was extraordinarily difficult for PG&E to swallow,” Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey, who investigated the fire and negotiated the plea, said in an interview. For the company it amounts to conceding that “the evidence will show beyond a reasonable doubt that we killed 84 people and burned down a town by a criminally reckless fire,” he said. The utility already has agreed to settle claims from insurers, individual fire victims and local government agencies for more than $25 billion. It also received a $1.9 billion penalty from the California Public Utilities Commission. The criminal case is the company’s last unfinished business as it races to exit from bankruptcy in the wake of a series of wildfires in recent years. PG&E calls the plea agreement “an important step in taking responsibility for the past and working to create a better future for all concerned.” “We want to do right by the victims and the communities,”''' the company said in a statement.

And yet, as fire season returns, trepidation runs as far and wide as PG&E’s 125,000 miles (200,000 kilometers) of electrical grid about whether it has been sufficiently punished, and reformed, to prevent it from causing another deadly blaze. The plea agreement has been roundly criticized on social media and by a former victim representative in the company’s bankruptcy case, Karen Gowins, as barely a slap on the wrist.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/deadliest-corporate-crime-in-us-will-end-with-84-guilty-pleas/ar-BB15vbbr?li=BBnb7Kz

PG&E Reaches Plea Agreement on State Charges Related to 2018 Camp Fire; Reaffirms Commitment to Get Victims Paid Fairly and Quickly and Continue Butte County Rebuilding Effort

https://www.pge.com/en/about/newsroom/newsdetails/index.page?title=20200323_pge_reaches_plea_agreement_on_state_charges_related_to_2018_camp_fire_reaffirms_commitment_to_get_victims_paid_fairly_and_quickly_and_continue_butte_county_rebuilding_effort

>>9629361

Thinking this is far from over…

A Deadly Mosquito-Borne Illness Is Brewing in the Northeast

In springtime, when the swamps behind the Mosman’s family home filled with fresh water, Keith, the eldest son, and Scott, his younger brother, would tramp barefoot through vernal pools in search of turtles, snakes, and frogs, returning hours later dotted with mosquito bites from the scourge that bred among the red maple tree roots. It was the 1970s, and Raynham, Massachusetts, where the Mosmans lived, was still a rural town. As the boys grew older, paddocks gave way to strip malls, apple orchards to housing developments. One year, their father filled the swamp in the backyard to build a swimming pool. By the time Keith and Scott started their own families, the area was more or less a satellite suburb of Boston. But while the landscape of their childhood summers disappeared, the mosquitoes didn’t. They would still descend in June and not let up biting until the first frost in mid-fall. Keith and Scott both worked outside, so mosquitoes were just a fact of life during the intense, humid summers — a minor nuisance to be endured. Until last year.

On the first Friday of September 2019, Keith received an urgent call from Scott’s girlfriend. His brother had, without warning, collapsed on the floor in a violent seizure, foaming at the mouth. Paramedics had taken him to the ICU at Morton Hospital in Taunton, Massachusetts, where medical staff stabilized him but could not figure out what was causing his rapid deterioration. Two days later, Scott was transferred via helicopter to Rhode Island Hospital, where an MRI scan revealed inflammation of the brain. Doctors performed a spinal tap and sent the sample to a lab for testing. Around one week later, a specialist delivered the diagnosis: Scott had contracted the eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) virus, which caused a severe brain infection. How had he caught such a devastating virus? A mosquito bite. Keith had heard about the EEE virus, as it was called, on the radio throughout the summer but hadn’t paid much attention. In fact, Massachusetts was in the middle of its worst EEE outbreak in almost a century. There is no vaccine or known treatment for the virus, and while transmission is very rare, the infection is around 400 times deadlier than the flu. Those who contract EEE will die approximately 40% of the time; those who survive often suffer neurological impairment for years to come. Since the disease was first recorded in humans in 1938, there have been fewer than 100 cases statewide. Scott’s diagnosis brought the tally to 10 cases in 2019 alone, with mosquito season not yet over.

These numbers, of course, would soon be eclipsed by the outbreak of a novel coronavirus that spread unabated across the globe in late 2019 and into 2020. But in the summer of 2019, the EEE outbreak — which also spread across Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Michigan — interrupted the rhythm of everyday life in the Northeast. In a preview of the lockdown this year, public health officials made recommendations to take shelter indoors and avoid certain activities at dawn and dusk, while fear spread through communities and on social media. The outbreak was tracked closely by entomologists and epidemiologists in the region. Some proposed that the season was consistent with the historical behavior of the virus, which has arrived in sporadic peaks across the Eastern Seaboard since at least the 19th century. Others suggested that a changing climate might have had something to do with it.

https://onezero.medium.com/a-deadly-mosquito-borne-illness-is-brewing-in-the-northeast-d3283c71c6a0

>>9629530

Not sure if any anon remembers, but I recall, Chelsea tweeting about mosquitoes in addition to bees a year or 2 ago..

>>9629589

I agree on that level..they do have the ability of recycle, reuse, down to almost a science, at least if one is not awake and paying attention, kek

>>9629612

>>9629612

Not Cuban anon, a very close resemblance this pic was in the Times,

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates.html?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8001677/Barclays-customers-question-Jes-Staley-contact-Epstein-writes-RUTH-SUNDERLAND.html

>>9629754

No doubt in my mind, he has some demons in his closet, that will emerge..he's far too vocal, in addition he's suddenly been make quite a few appears to "soften" his self centered arrogant cocky attitude.