Palast-Power Outge Traced to Dim Bulb in White House

[realFedUp]

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=257&row=0

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
WebLog
Friday, August 15, 2003
by Greg Palast

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."
-continued-

[rocktivity]

1. This story should be placed on every doorstep in California

Anyone who can read it and still want to replace Davis with a Republican is stark raving stupid.

rocknation

[realFedUp]

2. I see this story is already in every forum here....

lol.
Well, GMTA

[realFedUp]

3. Easterners suffering blackouts would be furious

if they thought that they were manipulated by Enron,
Dynergy, Reliant, El Paso....

Californians were. Do you understand now the outrage?

[Cassandra]

5. I understood the outrage...

even when my lights were on. (Which they are now, since 6 pm, YAY!! )

[dpbrown]

4. This is an awesome editorial

I've passed it on to everyone I know.

Dan Brown
Saint Paul, Minnesota

[pfitz59]

6. Will Cheney finally release his energy meeting minutes?

Where's Big Dick on all of this?

[tokenlib]

7. Why the recall is such a sham.....

Gray Davis is getting burned for republican sins.. Corporate deregulation has been a rotting corpse thrown into the laps of consumers. Deregulation has cost consumers dearly--and will cost us more in the future. Palast illustrates a simple truth--that the repukes have obscured very well from the masses.