1 word: ENVORNMENTALIST....missing the 'mental' part.
We need to return to middle ground. Too many extremist on both sides of the
issue.
Larry A. Barnes
-----Original Message-----
From: John Lee [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2001 12:07 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: California mess (was: Vast RW Conspiracy
(was: encryption/compression))
So how did California get bushwacked so hard? What took so long for them
to act to change/reverse direction? Are my elected officials this
cognitively challenged? Am I in danger of my state government being so
outnegotiated that I suffer?
John Lee
At 12:50 PM 7/26/01 EDT, Wirt Atmar wrote:
>My comment last week:
>
>>I suspect that the entire energy mess in California has been one giant
>>conspiracy by Texas Republicans to make Gray Davis, the Democratic
governor
>>of California, look bad.
>
>...got me a lot of private email during the last weekend. I only had time
to
>respond to one correspondent and time to now to respond to the list. I
wrote
>this in part last Saturday:
>
>=======================================
>
>Dynegy, Reliant, El Paso, and Enron all have their headquarters just steps
>away from Haliburton's headquarters in Houston. [Vice President Dick
Cheney
>was the former chairman of Haliburton.] Of all of these, it's Enron that's
>most in control.
>
>Enron doesn't produce anything. It's a gaming house, which they politely
>refer to as a brokerage firm, filled with computers and Ph.D.'s in
>mathematics and economics. And it's Enron that's profited most from and
done
>the most to create California's mess.
>
>While it would be completely unfair to say that Enron created the
>deregulatory environment that they're now profiting from, it is wholly
>justified to say that early on saw the opportunity that was presenting
itself
>to massively profit from it. While the people at Enron describe themselves
as
>steely-eyed capitalists, most people who understand the situation would
tend
>to call them "major league a**holes," to use Cheney's elegant phrase.
>
>The Bush Republican Party of Texas is centered in downtown Houston, in a
few
>block area called "Energy Gulch". Not only have these energy companies
>funnelled obscenely massive amounts of money into the Republican Party,
>they've also managed to lubricate legistators in the various state and
>national governments to alter trade and commerce rules in their favor.
There
>is no clearer definition of "soft money" corruption that this.
>
>While the various states, especially in the West, have eagerly entered into
>deregulation measures over the past decade, based heavily on the promises
>made by these energy companies, they didn't fully understand what they were
>being offered. The Republican government of California during Pete Wilson's
>tenure was the original instigator of energy deregulation in California.
The
>state officials who made these deals and passed their laws were in essence
>trusting amateurs who either naively believed in a free-market economy or
the
>promises of extremely cheap energy now find themselves up against sharks.
>
>Nonetheless, it's a game that's time is nearly over. After California's
>experience, almost every western state that was on the road to
deregulation,
>including New Mexico, with either Republican or Democratic legislatures,
has
>begun furiously backpedaling, saying the hell with the Bush wing of the
>Republican's party advice.
>
>Nonetheless, in terms of apologetics, you can still get the smokescreens of
>"it's all the conspiracy & paranoia kooks" from the arch-conservative end
of
>the Republicans. In that regard, my favorite senator is Larry Craig of
Idaho.
>He had this to say:
>
> http://www.senate.gov/~craig/con_feat.htm#editorial
>
>as did the president of Dynegy, Chuck Watson:
>
> http://www.dynegy.com/dcfiles.nsf/Files/cw040501.pdf/$File/cw040501.pdf
>
>The "shortage of supply" that Watson mentions was a manufactured event, not
a
>natural phenomenon. As an integral part of the California deregulation, the
>cooperating power companies (and the two largest in California, PG&E and
SCE,
>participated) were forced to sell off their generating facilities. These
>plants were bought by the Texas companies and Duke Energy of North
Carolina,
>which are now massively profiting from what appears to be an enforced
>shortage.
>
>The most likely outcome of all of this is that California will likely
>"nationalize" a significant proportion of its state-internal power
production
>facilities and build the necessary remainder under its own auspices, run as
>government facilities in the manner that Los Angeles runs its power
>production facilities, basically removing all effective out-of-state
control.
>
>========================================
>
>While many of you will immediately want to write in response, after I wrote
>the above text, which was based wholly on my understanding of what is going
>on, I searched around on the web to find any sort of documentation to
confirm
>my understanding. Although I found a great deal of material, these two
recent
>articles by the (generally quite conservative) Washington Post and by the
>Sacramento Bee are worth reading with great care:
>
> http://detnews.com/2001/business/0103/10/business-197824.htm
>
> http://www.sacbee.com/news/special/power/050601california.html
>
>I would tend to believe that the Sacramento Bee series of articles on the
>subject are very likely to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
>
>In the Washington Post article, Kenneth Lay, the chairman of Enron, decries
>the balkanization of the western power grid. As he says: "Right now they
want
>to kind of build a wall around their state," telling the utility companies
>that California's power may not be exported, Lay said. But California
depends
>on power transmitted from outside its borders. How can it insist on a
one-way
>trade? Lay said.
>
> "Lay acknowledged that the idea could spread. "Different states are
trying
>to put barriers on any power in their states leaving their state," he said.
>"You can't have interstate commerce that way."
>
>In one sense you can say that Enron is merely capitalizing off the
>circumstances that have presented themselves, and perhaps surprisingly, the
>single most important enabling technology for Enron was the rise of the
>internet. Enron is the world's largest B-2-B business. What they do (both
>legitimately and in terms of market manipulation) simply couldn't be done
if
>it had to be done by telephones and people calling one another. The spot
>market just couldn't be made to move quickly enough.
>
>However, the balkanization of the western grid is a way of breaking Enron's
>grip on the market and the reason why Lay is upset. Enron's one-year rise
of
>80 billion dollars in gross revenue may not last much longer. If you own
>stock in Enron, it might well be a good time to sell. The western state
>governments simply aren't going to allow what happened to California to
>happen to them as well.
>
>Wirt Atmar
>
>* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
>* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *
>
>
* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *
* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *
|
