by Joe Snyder
This website brought to you in part by the following sponsor:
Find out how to advertise here - Email us! [email protected]
The price of electricity is soaring in California, yet the giant power companies are threatened with bankruptcy. Many people do not understand why. The answer is, and the villain is, Deregulation.
As soon as greedy market forces were allowed to work (so say the liberal voices) those heartless capitalists drove up prices. People said: "Bring back the cool, calm days of inefficient monopolies under government control." But in fact, the biggest villain is botched deregulation, not as bad as in Russia, but pretty bad.
What happened is, California’s politicians deregulated halfway, the worst way. Wholesale prices were freed from controls, but retail prices were not. Consumers appeared satisfied they were protected, but the utility companies, which thought wholesale prices would go down forever, were given permission to buy on the spot market. Legislators believing they were protecting consumers prohibited long-term contracts, which are hedges against sudden price fluctuations.
This "halfway"decision ran into that old problem – supply and demand. The good times of the 90’s sharply increased demand for electric power. At the same time all sorts of obstacles were put in the way of increasing power supply. Result: rising prices, calls for rationing, utilities going broke, government intervention that frightened off private investment.
Then there was the problem, the real villain, of those people who say: "Not in my backyard " to power generating plants. Voters recently rejected a new power plant that they claimed would spoil the looks of their neighborhood. Such viewpoints, plus red tape, are the reasons no major power station has been built in California in 10 years!
Contrary to the thinking of many California residents, power does not come from the plug-in on the wall. Environmentalists recoil at the suggestion of nuclear power, now a safe and clean source of electricity, or the use of cleaned-up coal, to lower the price of natural gas that cleans it.
Thank goodness , we live in a community that whenever everything else fails, we can rev up our own power plant and supply power to keep us going.
*********
A couple of political items, please. I thought it strange that a man who left a drowning girl in a submerged car in a lake, would put on such a disgusting show during the hearing of Senator John Ashcroft for Attorney General of the United States. Senator Edward Kennedy displayed the worst possible deportment while questioning Ashcroft, hardly befitting to his family’s heritage and his brother John’s sacrifice for his country. There was no dignity in it at all.
I am not a fan of Senator Ashcroft, but I thought it strange that so many who honored Senator Joe Lieberman’s faith during the election, would now attack Ashcroft’s commitment to his.
Jesse Jackson, we learn, fathered a child from a woman other than his own wife. I feel sorry for Jackson’s family and his nation-wide following upon learning that their esteemed leader has violated his marriage vows of "to love, honor, and cherish ‘till death do us part." Whether a man is a preacher or a truck driver, infidelity is spelled the same way.
A-d-u-l-t-e-r-y.