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| 5/17 |
| 2003/8/15-18 [Politics/Domestic/Election, Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:29366 Activity:high |
8/15 New York power outages: another fine victory for deregulation.
\_ you're a genius. have a cookie.
\_ Look at the bright side. MS Blaster won't spread as fast. (Or is
that the dark side?)
\_ You're a nut. It had nothing to do with deregulation.
\_ Is that you, Pete Wilson?
\_ It may or may not. But you are correct in that OP is jumping
to conclusions. I blame that evil schemer, Dr. Chaos!
\_ http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0815-07.htm
\_ Palast is that ultra-leftist kook who thinks that Bush
stole the election in Florida.
\_ I don't think Palast is a complete kook, I read his book,
his main point is that voting machines in predominately
white counties in Florida would "spit back out" what it
considered an improperly filled out ballet and in
predominately black counties in Florida the voting machines
were configured to just meekly accept an improperly
filled out ballot, remarkably different behavior than
in the former example. He doesn't claim gwbush is
directly responsible for this but someone or some
organization was, probably the same people who came
up with the great idea to hire a private firm to
knock a bunch of ex cons off of the voting rolls in Florida,
which is fine I guess except no one bothered to check their
work and a lot of people were unable to vote on election
day. - danh
\_ Nice troll, dan. From here on down none of this has
a single thing to do with the power outage, power
deregulation or anything else. While you're trolling
from the left you might go check out the various trolls
from the right who would tell you about the leftist
media cheating the voting in the panhandle, the military
who got screwed in (D) controlled counties, how those ex
cons weren't allowed to vote by law, that the (D) had a
phone bank running in Texas(!!!) calling old people to
tell them they'd voted for Buchanan before anything had
even happened meaning they were planning on contesting the
election on the butterfly ballot but only if it didn't go
their way, and that the full state wide recount had bush
losing by three (3!!!) votes in a single scenario because
(pay attention) those nice rich white areas with all those
fascist republicans using their fancy shamncy voting
machines had the same error rate as the punch cards once
someone looked at them by hand, and most of the errors
were in Gore's favor. Now that you've trolled the motd
with the partisan crap and I've counter trolled it and
a few other below have all added their bit of strict
partisanship, let's let it go and move on. You've got
another election to lose coming up and your party would
be better served if you directed your energy to the
future instead of the past. Besides, who the hell wanted
Gore in office on 9/12 anyway? Not even Gore.
\_ bush did steal the election in Florida
\_ Excellent. Well backed statement. You got
into Cal? You're on the football team?
\_ Even though a later count confirmed he had
a narrow lead?
\_ 1) some counts had him winning some
had him losing. (In fact the general
thought is if just a palm beach recount
Bush won, if a Florida wide recount Bush
lost. 2) once it didn't matter
anymore the counts were a lot less
thurough. 3) Bush stole the elections pre
counts by agressivly denying the rights
of people to vote by falsely declaring them
felons and knocking them off the voter
roles.
\_ about (1): 'general thought'? Without
numbers you can think all you want...
but it's just partisan wishful thinking.
CNN ran a story a month after
the recounts, saying an unofficial
recount completed, and would have given
Bush the victory anyways. That
unofficial recount had some nice
advantages (for instance, since it wasn't
important, neither democrats nor
republicans tried to influence it in
an illicit way, so it's as close to
impartial data as you will get).
(2): Do you have anything more than
anecdotal evidence to back this up?
If anything, I expect the recounts to
be more, not less accurate, if special
interests no longer breathe down the
necks of those poor volunteers (see (1)).
\_ Recounts mainly consist of checking
the numbers at the main office against
the local numbers. No ballot checking,
no actual recounting.
(3): Do you have any data to back this
up?
\_ Check the New York Times, Washington
Post, etc. This, for obvious reasons
was given very little attention in
the press, but the abuses by Katherine
Harris and Jeb Bush against the voters
are documented.
standard many times over... Is it your defense
\_ google for "bush florida black
voter roles felon" and you will find a lot
of articles talking about just this issue
http://www.commondreams.org/views/121000-106.htm
is one.
At any rate, the best you can say is
there is some uncertainty, not that
BUSH WITHOUT A DOUBT STOLE THE ELECTION.
You are a partisan moron, btw.
\_ one thing i think we should all agree
on, though, is that regardless of who
"really" won the 2000 election, the
voting process in america has some
*very* serious problems that need
to be dealt with immediately.
if the 2000 election were a scietific
experiment to determine who should
be president, the only result one
could publish would be "inconclusive."
that should not be allowed to happen.
i think all of our time would be
better spent trying to work towards
read the decisions.
better election process in the future
than getting all worked up about 2000.
\_ The USSC decision was 7-2 in favor of Bush. He
won, period. All the demagoguery and race
baiting can't change that fact. Of course,
if you start divining the will of the
voter based on some completely arbitary
standard many times over... Is it your contention
that Democratic voters are so stupid
they can't fill out a punch card? Voters should
be required to pass an intelligence test
and if you are a net recipient of money from
the government you can't vote.
Read the damn USSC decision.
\_ http://www.supremecourtus.gov/florida.html
\_ the 7-2 case said that Florida could decide what
to do. Florida followed Florida election law
and was looking at every ballot to look for
things like hanging chads. The case went back
to the Supreme Court and this time in a 5-4
case the court said that Florida's election
laws be damned, they were awarding Florida
to Bush. Get your history right.
\_ I set this trap deliberately to see if
you read the decision - you obviously
did not. The USSC decision was 7-2
that the recounts were unconstitutional
under equal protection and due process.
Look for your own intellectual honesty
read the decisions. Article 2 of
the Constitution dictates plenary
power to choose electors resides with
the legislature - not the unelected
state judiciary. Everything you wrote
is wrong and is rebutted in the
several decisions.
\_ just out of curiosity, are you refering
to "Per curiam opinion in Bush v. Gore;
Rehnquist, C. J., concurring; Stevens,
Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ.,
dissenting" from the supreme court
link above? i'll go read it, but i want
to make sure it's not a red herring.
\_ Armchair quarterbacks in politics need to find a life...
\_ laugh while you can, monkey boy! soon the liberal media
will start reading the motd and their vast conspiracy
will crumble when they are exposed to the Truth at last.
\_ Too late:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=257&row=0 |
| 5/17 |
|
| www.commondreams.org/views03/0815-07.htm I came up against these characters -- the Niagara Mohawk Power Company -- some years back. You see, before I was a journalist, I worked for a living, as an investigator of corporate racketeers. In the 1980s, "NiMo" built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers. To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators. And that's why, if you're in the Northeast, you're reading this by candlelight tonight. After LILCO was hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to ELIMINATE the rules. Rather, in 1990, one devious little bunch of operators out of Texas, Houston Natural Gas, operating under the alias "Enron," talked an over-the-edge free-market fanatic, Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, into licensing the first completely deregulated power plant in the hemisphere. And so began an economic disease called "regulatory reform" that spread faster than SARS. Notably, Enron rewarded Thatcher's Energy Minister, one Lord Wakeham, with a bushel of dollar bills for 'consulting' services and a seat on Enron's board of directors. The English experiment proved the viability of Enron's new industrial formula: that the enthusiasm of politicians for deregulation was in direct proportion to the payola provided by power companies. The power elite first moved on England because they knew Americans wouldn't swallow the deregulation snake oil easily. The USA had gotten used to cheap power available at the flick of switch. This was the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1933, caged the man he thought to be the last of the power pirates, Samuel Insull. Wall Street wheeler-dealer Insull creator of the Power Trust, and six decades before Ken Lay, faked account books and ripped off consumers. To frustrate Insull and his ilk, FDR gave us the Federal Power Commission and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act which told electricity companies where to stand and salute. Detailed regulations limited charges to real expenditures plus a government-set profit. The laws banned "power markets" and required companies to keep the lights on under threat of arrest -- no blackout blackmail to hike rates. Of particular significance as I write here in the dark, regulators told utilities exactly how much they had to spend to insure the system stayed in repair and the lights stayed on. Bureaucrats crawled along the wire and, like me, crawled through the account books, to make sure the power execs spent customers' money on parts and labor. If they didn't, we'd whack'm over the head with our thick rule books. Did we get in the way of these businessmen's entrepreneurial spirit? Most important, FDR banned political contributions from utility companies -- no 'soft' money, no 'hard' money, no money PERIOD. In 1992, just prior to his departure from the White House, President Bush Senior gave the power industry one long deep-through-the-teeth kiss good-bye: federal deregulation of electricity. It was a legacy he wanted to leave for his son, the gratitude of power companies which ponied up $16 million for the Republican campaign of 2000, seven times the sum they gave Democrats. But Poppy Bush's gift of deregulating of wholesale prices set by the feds only got the power pirates halfway to the plunder of Joe Ratepayer. For the big payday they needed deregulation at the state level. There were only two states, California and Texas, big enough and Republican enough to put the electricity market con into operation. The power companies spent $39 million to defeat a 1998 referendum pushed by Ralph Nader which would have blocked the de-reg scam. Another $37 million was spent on lobbying and lubricating the campaign coffers of legislators to write a lie into law: in the deregulation act's preamble, the Legislature promised that deregulation would reduce electricity bills by 20%. In fact, when San Diegans in the first California city to go "lawless" looked at their bills, the 20% savings became a 300% jump in surcharges. As the number one life-time contributor to the George W. With just a half dozen other companies it controlled at times 100% of the available power capacity needed to keep the Golden State lit. For example, in the shamelessly fixed "auctions" for electricity held by the state, Enron bid, in one instance, to supply 500 megawatts of electricity over a 15 megawatt line. That's like pouring a gallon of gasoline into a thimble -- the lines would burn up if they attempted it. Faced with blackout because of Enron's destructive bid, the state was willing to pay anything to keep the lights on. It took until December 20, 2000, with the lights going out on the Golden Gate, for President Bill Clinton, once a deregulation booster, to find his lost Democratic soul and impose price caps in California and ban Enron from the market. But the light-bulb buccaneers didn't have to wait long to put their hooks back into the treasure chest. Within seventy-two hours of moving into the White House, while he was still sweeping out the inaugural champagne bottles, George Bush the Second reversed Clinton's executive order and put the power pirates back in business in California. Enron, Reliant (aka Houston Industries), TXU (aka Texas Utilities) and the others who had economically snipped California's wires knew they could count on Dubya, who as governor of the Lone Star state cut them the richest deregulation deal in America. Meanwhile, the deregulation bug made it to New York where Republican Governor George Pataki and his industry-picked utility commissioners ripped the lid off electric bills and relieved my old friends at Niagara Mohawk of the expensive obligation to properly fund the maintenance of the grid system. And the Pataki-Bush Axis of Weasels permitted something that must have former New York governor Roosevelt spinning in his wheelchair in Heaven: They allowed a foreign company, the notoriously incompetent National Grid of England, to buy up NiMo, get rid of 800 workers and pocket most of their wages - producing a bonus for NiMo stockholders approaching $90 million. Heck, no, not to us in the field who've watched Bush's buddies flick the switches across the globe. In Brazil, Houston Industries seized ownership of Rio de Janeiro's electric company. The Texans (aided by their French partners) fired workers, raised prices, cut maintenance expenditures and, CLICK! Californians have found the solution to the deregulation disaster: re-call the only governor in the nation with the cojones to stand up to the electricity price fixers. Gray Davis stood alone against the bad guys without using a body double. Davis called Reliant Corp of Houston a pack of "pirates" --and now he'll walk the plank for daring to stand up to the Texas marauders. Just before he landed on the deck of the Abe Lincoln, the White House was so concerned about our brave troops facing the foe that they used the cover of war for a new push in Congress for yet more electricity deregulation. This has a certain logic: there's no sense defeating Iraq if a hostile regime remains in California. Sitting in the dark, as my laptop battery runs low, I don't know if the truth about deregulation will ever see the light --until we change the dim bulb in the White House. See Greg Palast's 14 award-winning reports for BBC Television and the Guardian papers. Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, " 16 The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" (Penguin USA) and the worstseller, " 17 Democracy and Regulation," a guide to electricity de... |
| www.commondreams.org/views/121000-106.htm You'd almost think it was deliberate by Gregory Palast Hey, Al, take a look at this. Every time I cut open another alligator, I find the bones of more Gore voters. This week, I was hacking my way through the Florida swampland known as the Office of Secretary of State Katherine Harris and found a couple thousand more names of voters electronically 'disappeared' from the vote rolls. They had the right to vote, but they never made it to the balloting booths. When we left off our Florida story two weeks ago, The Observer discovered that Harris's office had ordered the elimination of 8,000 Florida voters on the grounds that they had committed felonies in other states. Harris bought the bum list from a company called ChoicePoint, a firm whose Atlanta executive suite and boardroom are filled with Republican funders. ChoicePoint, we have learned, picked up the list of faux felons from state officials in - ahem - Texas. In fact, it was a roster of people who, like their Governor, George W, had committed nothing more than misdemeanours. For Harris, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his brother, the Texas blacklist was a mistake made in Heaven. Most of those targeted to have their names 'scrubbed' from the voter roles were African-Americans, Hispanics and poor white folk, likely voters for Vice-President Gore. We don't know how many voters lost their citizenship rights before the error was discovered by a few sceptical county officials, before ChoicePoint, which has gamely 'fessed-up to the Texas-sized error, produced a new list of 58,000 felons. In May, Harris sent on the new, improved scrub sheets to the county election boards. Maybe it's my bad attitude, but I thought it worthwhile to check out the new list. One elections supervisor, Linda Howell of Madison County, was so upset by the errors that she refused to use the Harris/ChoicePoint list. How could she be so sure the new list identified innocent people as felons? Because her own name was on it, 'and I assure you, I am not a felon'. Our 10-county review suggests a minimum 15 per cent misidentification rate. That makes another 7,000 innocent people accused of crimes and stripped of their citizenship rights in the run-up to the presidential race. Hillsborough (Tampa) county statisticians found that 54 per cent of the names on the scrub list belonged to African-Americans, who voted 93 per cent for Gore. Now our team, diving deeper into the swamps, has discovered yet a third group whose voting rights were stripped. The ChoicePoint-generated list includes 1,704 names of people who, earlier in their lives, were convicted of felonies in Illinois and Ohio. Like most American states, these two restore citizenship rights to people who have served their time in prison and then remained on the good side of the law. Florida strips those convicted in its own courts of voting rights for life. But Harris's office concedes, and county officials concur, that the state of Florida has no right to impose this penalty on people who have moved in from these other states. If they have the right to vote, why were these citizens barred from the polls? I put the question to David Bositis, America's top expert on voting demographics. Once he stopped laughing, he said the way Florida used the lists from a private firm was, 'an obvious technique to discriminate against black voters'. In a darker mood, Bositis, of Washington's Center for Political and Economic Studies, said the sad truth of American justice is that 46 per cent of those convicted of felony are African-American. In Florida, a record number of black folk, over 80 per cent of those registered to vote, packed the polling booths on November 7. Behind the curtains, nine out of 10 black people voted Gore. Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project, Washington, pointed out that the 'white' half of the purge list would be peopled overwhelmingly by the poor, also solid Democratic voters. The dead-wrong Texas list, the uncorrected 'corrected' list, plus the out-of-state ex-con list. I bet the busy Harris, simultaneously in charge of both Florida's voter rolls and George Bush's presidential campaign, never thought of that. We have discovered a fourth group of Gore voters also barred from the polls. On the other end of the line, heavy breathing, then a torrent too fast for me to catch it all. This was not a ChoicePoint whistleblower telling me about the company's notorious list. It was ChoicePoint's own media communications representative, Marty Fagan, communicating with me about my, 'sleazy disgusting journalism' in reporting on it. I was curious about this company that appears - although never say never in this game - to have chosen the next President for America's voters. Its board dazzles with Republican stars, including billionaire Ken Langone and Home Depot tycoon Bernard Marcus, big Republican funders. Florida is the only state to hire an outside firm to suggest who should lose citizenship rights. The company's Florida subsidiary, Database Technologies (now DBT Online), was founded by one Hank Asher. When US law enforcement agencies alleged that he may have been associated with Bahamian drug dealers - although no charges were brought - the company lost its data management contract with the FBI. Hank and his friends left last year and so, in Florida's eyes, the past is forgiven. A new, gentler voice giving me ChoicePoint's upbeat spin. Harris's crew lit this database fuse, then acted surprised when it blew up. Swedlund says ChoicePoint had a professional responsibility to tell the state to test the list; ChoicePoint says the state should not have used its 'raw' data. Until Florida privatised its Big Brother powers, laws kept the process out in the open. This year, when one county asked to see ChoicePoint's formulas and back-up for blacklisting voters, they refused - these were commercial secrets. ChoicePoint complains that I said Harris signed their contract. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Common Dreams 19 NewsCenter A non-profit news service providing breaking news & views for the progressive community. |
| www.supremecourtus.gov/florida.html Opinions 10 Orders 11 Visiting the Court 12 Public Information 13 Jobs 14 Links FLORIDA ELECTION CASES Petitions, Oppositions, Replies, etc. Gore 16 Index of exhibits to stay application in No 00-A504 17 Supplemental memorandum in support of stay application in No. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board Briefs for Amici Curiae No. Butterworth as amicus curiae in support of respondents Gore et al. Wasserman as amicus curiae in support of neither party 73 Brief for Florida House of Representatives et al. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board Opinions 95 Per curiam opinion in Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board 96 Per curiam opinion in Bush v. |
| www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=257&row=0 Corporate America 10 Globalization 11 The Bush Family 12 Power Companies 13 Tony Blair 14 Exxon Valdez 15 Media & Free Speech 16 Pat Robertson 17 Small Towns 18 En Espaol 19 Book Reviews 20 9/11 21 Iraq 22 Latin America 23 Interviews & Chats Watch/ Listen to Palast You may need to download the 24 RealOne or 25 QuickTime players to open these files 26 BBC TV: Iraq: Palast & Gen. Garner 27 BBC TV: Bush blocked Bin Laden probes 28 BBC TV: Theft of the Presidency 29 BBC TV: Bush Energy Plan: Policy or Payback? Interview 4/03 32 Live on KSFR Santa Fe 33 CounterSpin Interview 34 Democracy Now! Special 36 At St Joseph of the Worker 37 Live In Paris Palast Links 38 Information for Whistleblowers 39 Democracy & Regulation by Greg Palast, Jerrold Oppenheim & Theo MacGregor 40 BBC News 41 Guardian Unlimited/ The Observer 42 Buzzflash 43 Michael Moore 44 Arianna Huffington 45 Media Channel 46 BushWhackedUSA 47 BartCop 48 Jim Hightower and 49 Rolling Thunder Tour 50 TruthOut 51 Failure is Impossible 52 Agitproperties 53 Everything You Know Is Wrong 54 Guerrilla News Network 55 Meria Heller 56 Peter Werbe 57 Mike Hersh 58 LiberalOasis 59 Voter March 60 Citizens for Legitimate Government 61 This is Hell! Radio 62 We All Count 63 Citizens' Network on Essential Services 64 The Montage Art of Winston Smith 65 John Francis Peters Art 66 ZNet 67 Florida Fights Back! Friedell 75 Venezuela Analysis 76 Coldtype POWER OUTAGE TRACED TO DIM BULB IN WHITE HOUSE --- The Tale of The Brits Who Swiped 800 Jobs From New York, Carted Off $90 Million, Then Tonight, Turned Off Our Lights ZNet Friday, August 15, 2003 77 E-Mail Article 78 Printer Friendly Version by Greg Palast I can tell you all about the ne're-do-wells that put out our lights tonight. I came up against these characters -- the Niagara Mohawk Power Company -- some years back. You see, before I was a journalist, I worked for a living, as an investigator of corporate racketeers. In the 1980s, "NiMo" built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers. To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators. And that's why, if you're in the Northeast, you're reading this by candlelight tonight. After LILCO was hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to ELIMINATE the rules. Rather, in 1990, one devious little bunch of operators out of Texas, Houston Natural Gas, operating under the alias "Enron," talked an over-the-edge free-market fanatic, Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, into licensing the first completely deregulated power plant in the hemisphere. And so began an economic disease called "regulatory reform" that spread faster than SARS. Notably, Enron rewaded Thatcher's Energy Minister, one Lrd Wakeham, with a bushel of dollar bills for 'consulting' services and a seat on Enron's board of directors. The English experiment proved the viability of Enron's new industrial formula: that the enthusiasm of politicians for deregulation was in direct proportion to the payola provided by power companies. The power elite first moved on England because they knew Americans wouldn't swallow the deregulation snake oil easily. The USA had gotten used to cheap power available at the flick of switch. This was the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1933, caged the man he thought to be the last of the power pirates, Samuel Insull. Wall Street wheeler-dealer Insull created the Power Trust, and six decades before Ken Lay, faked account books and ripped off consumers. To frustrate Insull and his ilk, FDR gave us the Federal Power Commission and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act which told electricity companies where to stand and salute. Detailed regulations liited charges to real expenditures plus a governmen-set profit. The laws banned power "trading" and required companies to keep the lights on under threat of arrest -- no blackout blackmail to hike rates. Of particular significance as I write here in the dark, regulators told utilities exactly how much they had to spend to insure the system stayed in repair and the lights stayed on. Bureaucrats crawled along the wire and, like me, crawled through the account books, to make sure the power execs spent customers' money on parts and labor. If they didn't, we'd whack'm over the head with our thick rule books. Did we get in the way of these businessmen's entrepreneurial spirit? Most important, FDR banned political contributions from utility companies -- no 'soft' money, no 'hard' money, no money PERIOD. In 1992, just prior to his departure from the White House, President Bush Senior gave the power industry one long deep-through-the-teet kiss good-bye: federal deregulation of electricity. It was a legacy he wanted t leave for his son, the gratitude of power companies which ponied up $16 million for the Republican campaign of 2000, seven times the sum they gave Democrats. But Poppy Bush's gift of deregulating of wholesale prices set by the feds only got the power pirates halfway to the plunder of Joe Ratepayer. For the big payday they needed deregulation at the state level. There were only two states, California and Texas, big enough and Republican enough to put the electricity market con into operation. The power companies spent $39 million to defeat a 1998 referendum pushed by Ralph Nadar which would have blocked the de-reg scam. Another $37 million was spent on lobbying and lubricating the campaign coffers of the state's politicians to write a lie into law: in the deregulation act's preamble, the Legislature promised that deregulation would reduce electricity bills by 20%. In fact, when in the firstCalifornia city to go "lawless," San Diego, the 20% savings became a 300% jump in surcharges. With just a half dozen other companies it controlled at times 100% of the available power capacity needed to keep the Golden State lit. For example, in the shamelessly fixed "auctions" for electricity held by the state, Enron bid, in one instance, to supply 500 megawatts of electricity over a 15 megawatt line. That's like pouring a gallon of gasoline into a thimble -- the lines would burn up if they attempted it. Faced with blackout because of Enron's destructive bid, the state was willing to pay anything to keep the lights on. It took until December 20, 2000, with the lights going out on the Golden Gate, for President Bill Clinton, once a deregulation booster, to find his lost Democratic soul and impose price caps in California and ban Enron from the market. But the light-bulb buccaneers didn't have to wait long to put their hooks back into the treasure chest. Within seventy-two hours of moving into the White House, while he was still sweeping out the inaugural champagne bottles, George Bush the Second reversed Clinton's executive order and put the power pirates back in business in California. Enron, Reliant (aka Houston Industries), TXU (aka Texas Utilities) and the others who had economically snipped California's wires knew they could count on Dubya, who as overnor of the Lone Star state cut them the richest deregulation deal in America. Meanwhile, the deregulation bug made it to New York here Republican Governor George Pataki and his industry-picked utility commissioners ripped the lid off electric bills and relieved my old friends at Niagara Mohawk of the expensive obligation to properly fund the maintenance of the grid system. And the Pataki-Bush Axis of Weasels permitted something that must have former New York governor Roosevelt spinning in his wheelchair in Heaven: They al... |