The program ran tonight.   It was about the California energy crises.  It proposed to answer the following two questions: How did energy go from a low priice to a high one?  Why is California having rolling  blackouts? 

        The program didn't answer either one.  What it did do was try to shift  the blame from those who created this mess to those who are fighting to solve it.  Here's the truth. 

        Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Democrats in the U.S. Congress working  with California Democrats who control the state legislature and the governor's office labored hand in hand with the Greenies for many years to accomplish it. 

        What is the specific thing they did to cause the problems? 

        They ignored the fundamental law of economics called "supply and demand."  In doing this, they proved again why the old Soviet Union collapsed, why Cubans have to bring their own lightbulbs to the hospital and why the citizens of North Korea are starving. 

        The Big Lie told in this program is that current energy shortages which are responsible for current high prices, are the result of "deregulation." 

        For the umpteenth time, CALIFORNIA DID NOT DEREGULATE THEIR POWER STRUCTURE !!! 

        THE CALIFORNIA POWER SYSTEM IS A DEAD RINGER FOR NEW YORK CITY RENT CONTROLS !! 

        GET IT ? 

        NOBODY WANTS TO BUILD A LARGE POWER PLANT IN CALIFORNIA BECAUSE WITH PRICE CONTROLS THEY WILL GO   BROKE DOING IT !!!  AND EVEN IF THEY HAD DECIDED TO DO IT AS A PUBLIC SERVICE THEY WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN  ALLOWED TO BECAUSE OF CALIFORNIA'S RIDICULOUS POWER PLANT SITING REGULATIONS !!! 

        GET IT? 

        The Big Truth avoided in this program is that while lying about  "deregulation" they avoided sending camera crews to document all the new large power   generating facilities in California.  Had they devoted twenty minutes of the program to this subject, the audience would have had to stare at a blank screen, because during the Clinton administration and the tenure of California Governor Davis, not one has been built. 

        Not one power generating facility the size of California's Diablo Canyon, a nuclear plant which has the same generating capacity as the Columbia River's   Bonneville Dam.  Not one of those has even been started during these years.

        Instead of telling the truth, the program tried to blame eight years of misfeasance by Democrats on four months of the Bush administration, focusing, as predicted in Oregon Magazine, on what they see as profiteers with ties to the president and vice president. 

        (These are the same reporters who didn't notice that Clinton's largest corporate campaign donor,  Loral, benefited greatly when Clinton removed   certain national security technologies from the care of the Defense Dept. to the Commerce Dept., which then allowed the sale of technology to the Chinese [and so North Korea, Iran, etc.] that provides said dictatorships with MIRV capabilities a decade in advance of what they might otherwise have attained.) 

        (These are also the same "journalists" who  praised Clinton, who, standing there on the rim of the Grand Canyon, announced the permanent lockup beneath his new Utah park, of the second largest  deposit of untapped  low sulphur coal in the western hemisphere!  The same "journalists" who didn't tell you that a major source of illegal foreign Clinton campaign donations, the Riady family, was thus enriched because they own another such field of low sulphur coal in their part of the world -- which is being dug up and sold to the Chinese for their new low sulphur coal-fired electrical generators in the recently-finished plant in southern China. If my information is correct, it is the largest such facility on the planet, and you, in part, subsidized its construction while California was heading for lights out!) 

        Citizens of Oregon, if you do not understand that supply and demand rules,  no matter what governments do, you are fools.  If you cannot grasp that when four people want the same gallon of gasoline instead of one person the price is driven up, you deserve to be a victim.  If you do not comprehend that the reason cars became affordable for the average citizen instead of just the rich was that Henry Ford, a private industrialist interested in profit, produced a thousand times the numbers of cars that the custom coach builders did, you belong in the dark.. 

        We were told decades ago by the political brothers of the people who produced this PBS program that fossil fuels were in ever-decreasing supply and that nuclear power plants were highly dangerous. 

        At present there are more than four hundred nuclear power plants in operation on the planet, and we have had to date one single nuclear event which killed people and damaged the landscape.  It took place in a socialist state which regulated that power system completely.  More people will die in the next twelve months from swimming pool accidents in America than have been killed by nuclear power plants in the entire history of the industry. 

        At present the total supply of fossil fuel known on the planet exceeds by a factor of between five and ten the estimates given by the Greenies of those past days.  The known supplies of fossil fuels aren't less than four decades ago, they're greater! 

        Citizens of Oregon, if your children are to have jobs, and their children have futures, they will need power.  If they are to have power, generating facilities will have to be built.  These generating facilities will have to utilize fossil fuels and nuclear power, both now as clean and safe as their abundantly available  fuel sources. 

        If you buy the bucket of PBS you were fed in this program, opting for massive regulation including price controls, you will end up with the power  equivalent of a New York City Apartment -- a rat and roach infested power grid that will leave you with one light bulb operating for one hour per night. You will have to get on a waiting list for electricity just as New Yorkers have to get on a waiting list for an apartment! 

        You will, in other words, get exactly what you deserve for casting your lot with people who despise capitalism and treasure a never-ending vista of  government bureaucracy. 

        Go ahead and believe the man who says, "Hi.   I'm from the government and I'm here to help." 

        Believe it all the way back to the cave.  (LL) 

                           ***

Ironpants Forum: S.A.N.E. Sensible Adult Net Environment: Bush Energy Foe Barbara Boxer -- What A Hoot!

 By accessdenied on Friday, June 15, 2001 - 07:38 pm:

Bush Energy Foe Barbara Boxer Invested in Cheney's Company

Bush energy policy critic Sen. Barbara Boxer, D -Calif., is heavily invested in two energy companies that are key players in California's energy crisis - as
well as an oil services firm formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. 

"Boxer's holdings, with her husband Stewart, include up to $100,000 in El Paso Corp. stock," reported Friday's San Jose Mercury News. "The firm is the subject of an inquiry into whether it used control of a natural gas pipeline to drive up prices [in California] last year." 

Boxer also has investments in Mirant, a power wholesaler formerly known as Southern Energy, Diamond Offshore Drilling in Houston and Haliburton Energy Services Corp. 

Before last November's election, Cheney had been chief operating officer of Haliburton for seven years. 

During the campaign, Boxer was sharply critical of Cheney, even as she raked in profits from the company he ran. 

Be Prepared!  On Tuesday, June 05, Public Broadcasting’s 60 Minutes clone, Frontline, will air a program about the California Energy Crises.

The producers and reporters, all of whom are incapable of figuring out the wattage requirements of a device if they are told the values of current and voltage, will explain to the nation that the problem is due to profiteering by power brokers, particularly those in Texas.

What they won’t tell you is that the Democrats in California, from the Governor’s office to the state legislature, did not deregulate anything except purchasing options on the spot power market.

By resisting the construction of new power plants in a state with increasing power needs, and forcing utilities to buy on the spot power market, which
is a kind of Wall Street for electricity, but maintaining regulation of consumer prices, they and they alone put their state in the mess it’s in right now.

This program will be a coverup for the Democrats and a political attack on Bush and Cheney.

I tell you this without having seen a single scene of the presentation because I know
that regular visitors to Iron Pants are fully aware of the politics of California and PBS.

If those two don’t lie to you, who will?

Monday night
ABC Began Shoveling First!

Chris Burie substituting on the
award winning program Nightline for Ted Koppel managed to host a program
that didn’t contain one single true statement.  Is the man stupid or a liar?  God only knows.

Nightline Monday night pushed the shovel into the liberal manure pile with a program that was a pack of misinformation and outright lies from beginning to end.

After watching this piece of 
journalistic tripe, millions 
are swallowing crap in 21”
lumps, believing they now
know who is at fault, yet
this program didn’t mention
a single valid point related to
the true issues involved.  What it did do was exactly what I predicted for Tuesday’s PBS Frontline on the topic.  It made dozens of  hints that the  relationship between Bush and Cheny and a giant Texas power broker, smelled a little too much of, well, sorry to say a filthy word on TV, but – profit. 

There wasn’t a single
conservative reporter on the
program.  The New York Times, perhaps the most biased  of all the blatently liberal newspapers in the nation, was well represented, however.

Here’s a closing quote by a
“reporter” who will be seen
on the PBS program.

“Watch your heating bills and
don’t think this can’t happen to you.  The power companies are beginning to become aware that
what’s happening in California could have an impact on the  future of deregulation in the country.”

This man gets paid to say things that misleading and that stupid.  Someone should duct tape the idiot to a mast and explain to him that California never deregulated the power industry.  It shut down all new power plant construction and maintained price controls on
consumer billing.  The only thing it “deregulated” was the former restriction on how much their electric companies could PAY for electricity!!

If they hadn’t, California would have had a rolling blackout that lasted for months!

I blame this situation on the 
American people, who 
obviously are so stupid
they have become like sheep,
waiting to be both fed and
sheared.

It is embarrassing to live in a
country where the general
populace is so intellectually
vapid. 

(The Oregon energy situation)

A reader response to the Frontline editorial

I enjoyed the editorial regarding the FrontLine story on the California energy crisis. I would venture one step farther and say that it was the regulation of the industry in the first place that has created the energy crisis. 

A free and competitive market for energy would have created advanced technology, affordable prices, and choices for the consumer. 

Instead, we have high barriers to entry for would-be competitors and old, inefficient technology. Government intervention in markets that should be free is bad for everyone (except those profiting from the regulations).

JS