2001: Bush, Delay nix $350m for Grid & Palast on why this is Bush' fault!!

http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/03/08/15_blackout.html

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In June of 2001, Bush opposed and the congressional GOP voted down legislation to provide $350 million worth of loans to modernize the nation's power grid because of known weaknesses in reliability and capacity. Supporters of the amendment pointed to studies by the Energy Department showing that the grid was in desperate need of upgrades as proof that their legislation sponsored by U.S. Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA) should pass.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration lobbied against it and the Republicans voted it down three separate times: First, on a straight party line in the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, then on a straight party line the U.S. House Rules Committee, and finally on a party line on the floor of the full House .

As AP reported at the time, the amendment would have amendments that would have doubled the bill's money for energy assistance for the poor to $600 "provided $350 million to support loans to improve the capacity of transmission grids. 'It's pure demagoguery,' House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said in a brief interview regarding the Democratic amendments. 'If Democrats had an energy policy, they'd have had one in the last eight years. They have no credibility on this issue whatsoever. They are responsible for the energy crunch more than anybody I know.' Spotlighting the high political stakes, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., took the unusual step of issuing a written statement about the committee's energy votes. He said President Bush and Republicans are 'committed to helping the Big Energy special interests' and accused them of obstruction." .

FY02 energy and water bill – 6/25/2001

FARR AMENDMENT: Electric Power Grid Improvement Loans
AMENDMENT DESCRIPTION:
Total cost: $350 million
Authorize the Secretary of Energy to make loans and loan-guarantees for the purpose of improving existing electric power transmission systems, reliability or capacity. These loans must be repaid in full within 25 years, such that the long-term cost to the government is zero.
BACKGROUND:
- GROWING DEMAND NOT MATCHED BY GROWING TRANSMISSION CAPACITY: Over the next 10 years, the Department of Energy predicts that demand for electric power will increase by 25%, requiring more than 200,000 megawatts of new capacity. However, under current plans electric transmission capacity will not be nearly enough to keep pace.
- CALIFORNIA’S PATH 15 ALREADY PROVES THAT BOTTLENECKS ARE A PROBLEM: Path 15 in California consists of two 84 mile 500 kilovolt transmission lines between the northern and southern parts of the State. There is complete agreement that Path 15 is a major bottleneck that contributes to blackouts in the State, costing the consumers $222 million in 2000 alone. The one-time cost to fix the Path 15 problem is $250 million, which would increase transfer capacity over Path 15 by approximately 1500 megawatts. The Secretary of Energy himself testified, that constructing the 3rd Path 15 line within the existing pathway would increase system reliability, reduce the likelihood of blackouts, and lead to greater competition and lower prices.
- EXISTING BILL UNDERFUNDS EFFORTS TO ADDRESS BOTTLENECKS: The supplemental bill before you today includes $1.6 million, not requested by the Administration, for the Department of Energy to study the power grid problem. While that’s a positive first step, the fact is that the project has been studied for years and there is consensus among all parties that upgrades are desperately needed – and needed now.
- AMENDMENT WOULD DEAL WITH ENTIRE GRID: This amendment is designed to deal with all of the major power grid vulnerabilities.

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(Washington, DC) - Rep. Sam Farr tried to offer an amendment to an appropriations bill today that would provide funding for electric power grid improvements. The Republican-dominated Rules Committee refused to allow the amendment on the bill.

"One thing that's aggravated the energy crisis in California is the antiquated power grid infrastructure," Rep. Farr said. "Power gets generated in Southern California and squeezed up an 85-mile stretch of high-voltage wires in the Central Valley called Path 15. The demand for energy in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco far outstrips the capacity of Path 15, which is a dangerous bottleneck and needs to be overhauled."

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And what about Arnold Schwarzenegger? Read on:

"In order to counter the virtual public consensus that deregulation ought to be dumped, Ken Lay, during the spring of 2001, began a series of high-powered meetings to salvage the deteriorating argument for his energy scheme.... He met privately with Vice President Cheney in the days leading up to the administration's publication of what became an extremely Enron-friendly National Energy Plan. Successful on the national front as a result of his longstanding relationship with key Republicans, Lay hoped to regain his footing in California by forging ties with prominent Republicans in the state. In May of 2001, Lay convened a private meeting with junk bond king Michael Milken, Los Angeles' then-Mayor Richard Riordan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, at which Lay reportedly presented his vision of solving the state's energy deregulation crisis by, absurd as it sounds, expanding deregulation. The meeting, about which the public still knows very little, may become a major issue now that Schwarzenegger is no longer just a Republican movie star..."

Now Bush wants to "review" the electrical grid problems. Well, he only need look in the mirror and call Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney to get to the bottom of the issue. With those three people in hand, he won't have to look any farther for the primary culprits in our government.

And when he's finished, he might have John "KGB" prosecute the real villains behind all of this -- including the past problems in California -- starting with Ken Lay.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

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AND

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

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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."

It was like a committee of bank robbers figuring out how to make safecracking legal.

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California fell first. The power companies spent $39 million to defeat a 1998 referendum pushed by Ralph Nadar which would have blocked the de-reg scam. Another $37 million was spent on lobbying and lubricating the campaign coffers of legislators to write a lie into law: in the deregulation act's preamble, the Legislature promised that deregulation would reduce electricity bills by 20%. In fact, when San Diegans in the first California city to go "lawless" looked at their bills, the 20% savings became a 300% jump in surcharges.

Enron circled California and licked its lips. As the number one life-time contributor to the George W. Bush campaign, it was confident about the future. With just a half dozen other companies it controlled at times 100% of the available power capacity needed to keep the Golden State lit. Their motto, "your money or your lights." Enron and its comrades played the system like a broken ATM machine, yanking out the bills. For example, in the shamelessly fixed "auctions" for electricity held by the state, Enron bid, in one instance, to supply 500 megawatts of electricity over a 15 megawatt line. That's like pouring a gallon of gasoline into a thimble -- the lines would burn up if they attempted it. Faced with blackout because of Enron's destructive bid, the state was willing to pay anything to keep the lights on.

And the state did. According to Dr. Anjali Sheffrin, economist with the California state Independent System Operator which directed power movements, between May and November 2000, three power giants physically or "economically" withheld power from the state and concocted enough false bids to cost the California customers over $6.2 billion in excess charges.

It took until December 20, 2000, with the lights going out on the Golden Gate, for President Bill Clinton, once a deregulation booster, to find his lost Democratic soul and impose price caps in California and ban Enron from the market.

But the light-bulb buccaneers didn't have to wait long to put their hooks back into the treasure chest. Within seventy-two hours of moving into the White House, while he was still sweeping out the inaugural champagne bottles, George Bush the Second reversed Clinton's executive order and put the power pirates back in business in California. Enron, Reliant (aka Houston Industries), TXU (aka Texas Utilities) and the others who had economically snipped California's wires knew they could count on Dubya, who as governor of the Lone Star state cut them the richest deregulation deal in America.

Meanwhile, the deregulation bug made it to New York where Republican Governor George Pataki and his industry-picked utility commissioners ripped the lid off electric bills and relieved my old friends at Niagara Mohawk of the expensive obligation to properly fund the maintenance of the grid system.

And the Pataki-Bush Axis of Weasels permitted something that must have former New York governor Roosevelt spinning in his wheelchair in Heaven: They allowed a foreign company, the notoriously incompetent National Grid of England, to buy up NiMo, get rid of 800 workers and pocket most of their wages - producing a bonus for NiMo stockholders approaching $90 million.

Is tonight's black-out a surprise? Heck, no, not to us in the field who've watched Bush's buddies flick the switches across the globe. In Brazil, Houston Industries seized ownership of Rio de Janeiro's electric company. The Texans (aided by their French partners) fired workers, raised prices, cut maintenance expenditures and, CLICK! the juice went out so often the locals now call it, "Rio Dark."

So too the free-market cowboys of Niagara Mohawk raised prices, slashed staff, cut maintenance and CLICK! -- New York joins Brazil in the Dark Ages.

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Sitting in the dark, as my laptop battery runs low, I don't know if the truth about deregulation will ever see the light --until we change the dim bulb in the White House.

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Could someone post media links and email them all and all the campaigns with these facts?

Will Dean and Kerry bring up the 2001 electric grid defeat? I think it's devastating but no doubt the media whores will cover this up. Usually Bush doesn't have to worry about that. But this time the lights went out in the media capitol of the world and one overheated editor just might OK this even if it means his job...

IMAGINE PRESIDENT KERRY!!

with this also!

Maybe he'll called on it in this new journalistic climate.

Didn't Bush say to the press yesterday that he had been concerned about the aging power grid? How does that square with opposing loans for modernization that will eventually cost the federal government nothing?

On par for the past few years.

When will Americans say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH?

Great article.

will they manage to pin the blame on the Clenis™?

said he doesn't remember meeting Ken Lay.

Right,he can't remember the Ken Lay meeting so let's drop it.

When Shortsarebigger appears on Press The Meat, Russert will never ask him about Ken Lay, that's for sure!

How much do you want to bet that this info is never reported in the media or mentioned by any democratic presidential hopeful?

Conservatives voted down supplemental $$ for security for our Embassies around the world - right before Osama bin forgotten attacked our embassies. I did not hear a word about it on the news. Not a word.
Liberal media my ass.

...as well as letters to the White House, to congressional representatives, etc.

I should tell you that Bush is talking again about modernizing the grid, and one fawning member of the press corps actually asked Bush if his energy plan would have been able to prevent at least some of the problem. The press has gotten to be the Lickspittle Brigade of late, for the most part.

Anyway, DON'T LET THE WHITE HOUSE SPIN THIS. We've been down this road before. The Bush administration asked for lower amounts of counterterrorism program funding in 2001, just around the time the September 11th attacks took place. Following that, news articles revealed that the administration had ignored advice from the previous administration about the threat from terrorism. The press dropped the story after a while and it's back to cooing about "a popular wartime president."

Meanwhile, the anti-Bush protesters appear from the California coast to South Africa. So much for his popularity.

"In May of 2001, Lay convened a private meeting with junk bond king Michael Milken, Los Angeles' then-Mayor Richard Riordan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, at which Lay reportedly presented his vision of solving the state's energy deregulation crisis by, absurd as it sounds, expanding deregulation. The meeting, about which the public still knows very little, may become a major issue now that Schwarzenegger is no longer just a Republican movie star"

What does Arnold know about this "National Energy Plan" that the rest of us are barred from hearing about?

Why were people discussing energy with an actor????

Im sure Rush,Fox and Rove news are working around the clock right now trying to blame the Democrats and Clinton to squak on the airwaves 24/7..Lord knows Brianwashed Joe Freeper wont belive that the great god Bush has done anything wrong