The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) issued a 58-page repot, entitled "Hoax: How Deregulation Let the Power Industry Steal $71 Billion From California," showing that the contrived California "energy crisis" of one year ago was a coordinated plan with the Legislative votes for taxpayer bailouts of the energy companies, as FTCR pointed out at the time. The report is in PDF format at:http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/utilities/rp/rp002169.pdf
errorThe Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) issued a 58-page repot, entitled "Hoax: How Deregulation Let the Power Industry Steal $71 Billion From California," showing that the contrived California "energy crisis" of one year ago was a coordinated plan with the Legislative votes for taxpayer bailouts of the energy companies, as FTCR pointed out at the time.
The report is in PDF format at: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/utilities/rp/rp002169.pdf Its Table of Contents is as follows:
Executive Summary..............................................2 I. A Chronology of the California Deregulation Debacle ......................................5 II. The Myth of the Energy Shortage............................................11 III. Turning Off the Juice: What Really Caused the Energy Crisis........................23 IV Turning On the Juice: The Crisis Vanishes..................................32 V. The Legacy of the Deregulation Debacle..................................42 VI. The Way Out of the Deregulation Debacle ........................................................53 VII. Conclusion ................57
According to FTCR's press release, at http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/utilities/pr/pr002170.php3 The press release highlights the following points of the report as follows:
(1)"The rolling blackouts, which occurred on generally low-demand days, were not caused by a shortage of power plants, but by energy companies looking to maximize their prices and profits."
(2) "Throughout late 2000 and 2001, when prices skyrocketed, California used less electricity than prior years, in which prices were stable and there were no blackouts."
(3) "Californians overpaid $8.5 billion for electricity between January and October of 2001 alone -- and will overpay at least another $20.5 billion over the next decade. "
(4) "While the U.S. entered a recession during the first half of 2001, power companies, such as Enron, Duke and Reliant, reaped unprecedented windfalls."
As FTCR states, "It wasn't a shortage, it was a shakedown."
Chapter 3 reveals the lies, as this excerpt indicates:
III. Turning Off the Juice: What Really Caused the Energy Crisis “The rolling blackouts in California are more likely intended to soften up the Legislature and the voters to the need for rate increases….The ‘unthinkable’ rarely will be permitted to happen.” —Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB), in a January 18, 2001 memo to clients
"The story of deregulation is not one of supply and demand; it is the story of greed. Power companies, in an unregulated world, no longer observe the standard "obligation to serve" historically incumbent on regulated utilities. The obligation for the unregulated power companies is solely to the shareholder, compelling the companies toward opportunistic actions such as the gouging that devastated the California economy."
"State data demonstrate that California’s demand for electricity never exceeded, nor even approached, the state’s capacity to produce power. Throughout the energy “crisis,” there were more than enough power plants to generate the electricity California required. There was no “shortage” of power plants in California. But state data show that the energy companies that control the plants manipulated the supply of electricity to create spot shortages."
No story on energy is complete without mentioning Enron, whose extended Board of Directors is the election-frauding Bush Administration. The report covers Enron's role in stealing California taxpayer dollars as follows:
"Enron, whose proselytizing for deregulation (backed by a huge national lobbying force and massive campaign contributions) got the company in on the ground floor in state after deregulated state, hardly generated a megawatt of electricity. It profited, as a middleman, from buying and then selling electricity as others trade gold or pork bellies. But in their overarching greed, the executives of this HMO of the energy industry cooked the books in order to show greater profits than the company’s operations were actually achieving."
Not only did the entire Legislature, Democrat, Republican and "independent," vote for deregulation, but Democratic Governor Gray Davis was and is an ardent supporter of deregulation and the energy companies. With the above revelations in mind, can you say "Goodbye Gray Davis?"