Palast-1 Year Later-Power Outage Traced to WH

[realFedUp]

http://www.gregpalast.com/

One Year Later -- Power Outage Traced to Dim Bulb in White House
ZNet, updated
Saturday, August 14, 2004

by Greg Palast

One year ago today, the lights went out. Even when the Big Blackout ended, the power pirates who have us by the bulbs kept us in the dark, fibbing, fabricating and faking their way through a series of bogus excuses for a disaster created by greed overload.

Instead of fixing the system, the fix is in. We now know that goof-ups and bone-headed moves started the power outage rolling … but it's spread, from a few tree branches out of Ohio to a third of the continent, occurred because power companies -- First Energy and Niagara-Mohawk to name two -- had slashed staffing and maintenance.

The under-manning and the under-spending all occurred beneath the banner of "deregulation." In the bad old days of bureaucrats with thick rule books, the government told the power companies exactly how much to spend on repairs. Under "deregulation," the rules went out the windows and repair cash was carted off as special dividends to stockholders.

George Bush's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is allowing the power companies to reach into our wallets and take out more cash to add wires to the transmission system -- in effect replacing the loot these guys carted off in the last ten years of deregulation. "But that won't keep the lights on," says Oppenheim, former Assistant Attorney General in New York in charge of investigating utilities. "It's not a lack of wires or lack of power plants that caused the blackout. The Administration is adding complexity to an overly complex system … all to avoid acting on the obvious conclusion: deregulation has failed."

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[realFedUp]

1. and NYT editorial...

(of course, this bill can't stop the Enron, Dynergy,
El Paso and Reliants from scamming....)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/14/opinion/14sat3.html

August 14, 2004
The Blackout in Congress

oday is the first anniversary of the biggest blackout in North American history. It is also an occasion to reflect on how little Congress has done to make sure that the electric power industry does not repeat the same sloppy mistakes that triggered a chain of events that eventually left 50 million people in the United States and Canada without power.

For nearly a year, a few lonely souls, chiefly John Dingell in the House and Maria Cantwell and Jeff Bingaman in the Senate, have tried without success to win a vote on measures that would require mandatory operating standards for the nation's utilities and give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the authority to impose penalties on companies that ignore those standards. The standards that now exist are administered by an industry group and are voluntary.

These bills would not address other, more controversial issues that Congress and whoever occupies the White House will have to deal with in years to come: whether the national power grid should be managed differently, how much we ought to invest to make the system more efficient and even the larger question of whether deregulation has worked the way its architects hoped it would or whether it has simply made companies less accountable.

What the bills would do is make sure that companies trim the trees around their power lines, keep their computers and other machinery in good working order, and maintain good communications with neighboring power systems. Such common-sense housekeeping tasks are what FirstEnergy, the Ohio-based utility singled out by a joint American-Canadian task force as the main culprit in the blackout, apparently failed to do.

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