People Power!
Harold Meyerson Makes The Case for Public Ownership of Utilities
PLUS: Bill May Be Gone, But Those Wacky FauxGates Live On
by Tamara Baker

Feb. 5, 2001 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- If you haven't started reading the LA Weekly, I suggest that you do so without delay.

A classic muckraking alternative weekly, the LAW lays it down with tons of style and verve, featuring incisive writing by folks by Johnny Angel, who monitors the wild animals over at FreeRepublic.com so you don't have to risk having their cootie-cookies in your hard drive.

This week's issue features one barn-burner of an exposé on the whole deregulation scam, as practiced in California. As the author, Harold Meyerson, notes:

If we are in a crisis of supply and demand, though, why are the lights still on here in L.A.? After all, no part of the state saw its economy dip so low in the early- and mid-’90s as Los Angeles, where the end of the Cold War fairly halved the size of our then-largest industry, aerospace. And nowhere has demand grown more, as the local economy has turned from bust to boom, than here in Los Angeles. We consume power like nobody’s business: L.A. today is home to the greatest concentration of manufacturing in the nation, and, come to think of it, we stay up nights a lot later than they do in Turlock. If California is truly experiencing a wave of underproduction and overconsumption, Angelenos should be just now lighting their candles and cursing the darkness.

Why is this not the case? Because as Meyerson states,

"what California is confronting is a crisis not of supply and demand, but of deregulation, of free-market mania, of ideology run amok. That the lights are still on in Los Angeles is pretty good evidence that publicly owned power companies such as our own DWP can keep the lines humming, even as deregulated private power companies can plunge a city into darkness if their profit margins are too low."

Meyerson then shows how the privately-owned Edison plants in California pulled off an incredible scam that was meant solely to placate Edison's majority shareholders, and charged extortionate rates even as the publicly-owned DWP charged fair rates, made a fair (not extortionate) profit for doing so, and never threatened to turn off the juice even once.

Keep an eye on what's happening in California, people. This may well determine what happens to the rest of us: whether we have freely-flowing inexpensive power for all, or whether we will shiver expensively in our wrecked, power-starved economy so that certain robber barons may emulate Bill Gates' lifestyle.

And keep your other eye on the radical right and their media friends.  It's amazing: President Bill Clinton has left the Oval Office for the last time, yet the Republicans and their media cohorts just can't let go of him.

Members of George W. Bush's illegal junta, speaking only 'on background' (so as to prevent responsibility for their lies coming back to haunt them), yammered hysterically about the Vandalism Committed in the White House by That Evil Bill Clinton, and were seconded (though not named) by junta mouthpiece Ari Fleischer. However, their nominal boss, the Shrubbery himself, was oddly reluctant to mount an official investigation, even when outgoing President Clinton asked him to do so. An excellent Slate piece by Joshua Micah Marshall explains the junta's behavior, and what it says of the Beltway press that they bought the bogus story in toto:

So, yes, there were some pranks. But there's nothing unprecedented about the old administration pranking the new administration, as subsequent reports indicated. When Clinton-Gore staffers showed up for work in 1993, they found offices in disarray, computers disabled, and office furniture helpfully decorated with numerous Bush-Quayle bumper stickers. It appears that in this transition, the White House press corps took a similar situation and hyped it into a full-bore scandal without requiring one White House staffer to go on the record about specific vandalism or to provide any physical evidence.

...The story here wasn't Clintonite shenanigans. It was the new White House's smearing of their predecessors and Fleischer's refusal to put up or shut up when it came time to start giving details. >>

Hardly had former Texas Governor Bush's minders finished sending that smear on its way when an orchestrated hue and cry developed over Bill Clinton's pardoning fugitive financier Marc Rich. (Never mind that, unlike Shrub's daddy's 1993 pardon pals, Iran-Contra criminals Poindexter and Weinberger, Mr. Rich never sold weapons to the Ayatollah, or cocaine to inner-city children in Los Angeles, or gave proceeds from such sales to illegally finance the nun-raping, village-burning Contras.) 

Lost among the hollering were two articles, one from the New Yorker magazine, the other from the New York Daily News, mentioning that even as Cheney's sock puppet was tsk-tsking in his pseudo-Texan drawl over the whole affair, Cheney's own chief of staff was connected in a manner that would prove embarrassing to the junta, should the press ever decide to pick up the story:

Vice President Cheney's own chief of staff argued vehemently for clemency on behalf of fugitive financier Marc Rich for many years, according to The New Yorker magazine.

Lewis Libby, before joining the Bush White House to work for Cheney, spent eight years as one of Rich's "most aggressive lawyers" and argued his case before Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White as recently as December 1999, according to the magazine.

Oooops!

But even that FauxGate wasn't enough: They had to create GiftGate and RentGate, too! (Too bad for them that Bill moved quickly to neutralize both of these new FauxGates with class -- and, in the process, show up the GOP for the petty creeps they are.)

Now, why does the GOP still feel the need to go after Bill Clinton? You'd think they'd be happy, right? Their boy stole the election and got away with it, so far at least. Why are they so antsy?

The answers may well be found in this recent poll taken by CBS News and published on January 19th:

In the days leading up to George W. Bush's inauguration as the nation's 43rd president, the American public is optimistic about the next four years but not necessarily enthusiastic about a Bush presidency. 

Americans are divided about whether Bush shares their priorities, and questions about the legitimacy of the election continue to exist. Furthermore, a majority thinks it won't be Bush, but others, who will really be running the government during his presidency.

Ouch! And remember, folks, this is during Bush's 'honeymoon period'. The media may praise him to the skies, but the public isn't so sure about him.

...Immediately before his inauguration, Bush is considered to have legitimately won the election by a majority of the American public -- in this poll, 51 percent. But 43 percent still say he did not.

And that 43 percent has shown itself to be vocal as hell.

Part of the problem for Bush may be that he is not widely viewed as being in charge of his presidency. Fifty-three percent think that other people will really be running the country, while 38 percent think Bush will be in charge of what goes on most of the time. One month ago, slightly more people expected Bush to be in charge.

No duh!

Anyone with a brain who watched the post-election maneuverings knows that Shrub can't be trusted, much less expected, to be in charge. We all watched as Shrub's minders went to great lengths to keep him from unmediated contact with the press or with anyone outside of his inner circle. The fact that they had to haul Dick Cheney out of his hospital bed, barely a day after his 4th heart attack and the resulting stent surgery, and shove him in front of the camera rather than disturb the Shrub's ranch time, tells you all you need to know about who will really be running the country in George W. Bush's name.

And yes, it's time, once again, for me to finger yet another of the Golden Lawbreakers who helped Shrub steal the Oval Office, and who, if one of Bill Clinton's recently-overturned executive orders had been allowed to stand, would have been kept from cashing in on its investment in the Shrub IPO:

#5: Anthony J. Alexander

Mr. Alexander is the president and chair of FirstEnergy Corporation of Akron, Ohio.

According to Texans for Public Justice (http://www.tpj.org/pioneers/anthony_alexander.html), Alexander was an Ohio Edison executive before it merged with two utility companies into FirstEnergy. He also heads Ohio’s electric utility trade group. 

As TPJ says, 

In these roles, he initially fought to protect his company’s electricity monopoly and then lobbied heavily to influence the terms under which the legislature deregulated Ohio’s electric markets in ’99.

Sounds like Enron, doesn't it?

Wonder what Ohioans are paying for their power these days?

Here's where the stinky anti-trust graft comes in:

Ohio Edison spent $9.3 million on dozens of lobbyists and consultants in ’97 alone. It paid $453,700 to Gov. George Voinovich’s ex-Chief of Staff Paul Mifsud, who pleaded guilty in ’97 to concealing a $100,000 home remodeling discount that he received from a state contractor. It paid $76,000 to ex-Mahoning Valley Sanitary District Director Ed Flask, whom a state audit revealed had taken $1.9 million in consulting fees from vendors whom Flask hired at the sanitary district. Ohio Edison paid $124,000 to Sen. Roy Ray, who then sponsored a bill to bail out Ohio Edison and other utilities of the costs of their uncompetitive nuclear power plants.

And if that wasn't enough:

Alexander’s lobby phalanx also defends his company’s right to burn filthy coal that pollutes the air with sulfur dioxide, causing acid rain and respiratory ailments. In the early ‘90s, Ohio Edison operated the ninth-worst source of sulfur dioxide in the EPA’s Midwest-based Region 5.

Makes you all choked up just thinking about it!

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