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Re: OUTAGE TRACED TO DIM BULB
Yes, it is interesting to note that the failure apparently was in the
transmission line system which is the principal remaining totally
regulated aspect of electricity production and distribution in the US.
Cheers,
Maury Siskel maury@webtexas.com
_______
PP=PPP
============================
Scott Wilson wrote:
> FYI,
> Forwarded from NukeNet newsgroup. Any thoughts?
>
>
>
> ------ Forwarded Message
> From: "Dennis F. Nester" <theroyprocess@cox.net>
> Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 09:06:43 -0700
> To: "Nukenet" <nukenet@envirolink.org>
> Subject: [NukeNet] OUTAGE TRACED TO DIM BULB
>
> Like most things...the story is more complicated
> than we think.
>
> Dennis
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> http://www.gregpalast.com/printerfriendly.cfm?artid=257
>
> 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
> by Greg Palast
> Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller, "The Best Democracy
> Money Can Buy" (Penguin USA) and the worstseller, "Democracy and
> Regulation," a guide to electricity deregulation published by the
> United Nations (with T. MacGregor and J. Oppenheim).
>
>
>
> 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. The jury ordered
> LILCO to pay $4.3 billion and, ultimately, put them out of business.
>
> And that's why, if you're in the Northeast, you're reading this by
> candlelight tonight. Here's what happened. 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. They called it "deregulation."
>
> It was like a committee of bank robbers figuring out how to make
> safecracking legal.
>
> But they dare not launch the scheme in the USA. 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.
>
> more....
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
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