Sarah
2003-08-22 22:28:03 UTC
© Copyright 2003, From The Wilderness Publications,
www.copvcia.com.
All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an
Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.
[August 21, 2003, 2350 PDT, (FTW)
-- Although FTW will not endorse any Presidential candidate who does
not address all the issues of Peak Oil and Gas, Bush Administration
Complicity in 9/11, Trillions of Dollars Stolen from the US Treasury,
and criminal misrepresentation of Iraqi intelligence before the US
invasion, we do like to give praise where praise is due. Two and a
half decades ago, young Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich stood his
ground, alone and defiant against deregulation of the power industry,
corporate greed, and in the best interests of his constituents. Not
only did he show courage, he paid a big price for it. What's more, he
survived.
If anyone has earned the right to speak out on an issue that threatens
the future of this country it is Dennis Kucinich. If anyone has earned
a right to remind people of this history, it is Dennis Kucinich. Now,
if he would just join with Texas investment banker and Bush energy
advisor Matt Simmons [Behind The Blackout] in not only slamming
deregulation but addressing Peak Oil and Gas issues and also take on
the bubbling revelations that show that the administration held the
door open on 9/11, lied about Iraq, and hold the government
accountable for the money we need to fix things and develop
alternative energy sources, we might just have a leader worth
following to hell and back. We're going there anyway. - MCR]
===================================
Lights Out on Deregulation
By Dennis Kucinich
With and estimated 50 million Americans and Canadians left without
power and in some cases water, common sense requires us to reflect on
the absurdity of deregulation of public utilities. In the first case,
the right of utility franchise is vested in the people. We give
utilities permission to operate, and enable them to set up a profit
making business in exchange for the promise of affordable and reliable
service. In 1992, investor owned utilities pushed the Democratic House
to pass HR776 which granted electric utilities broad powers. The bill
was supposed to restructure the electric utility industry to spur
competition.
Utilities used deregulation to effect a series of mergers limiting
competition. In order to accelerate profits, cost cutting ensued,
involving the layoff of thousands of utility company employees,
including some who were responsible for maintenance of generation,
transmission, and distribution systems. A number of investor-owned
utilities stopped investing in the maintenance and repair of their own
equipment, and, instead, cut costs to enhance the value of their stock
rather than spending money to enhance the value of their service.
A prime case in point is FirstEnergy Corp, late of Ohio. FirstEnergy
formed through a merger of utility companies which owned nuclear power
plants which often were neither used nor useful, and as a result
incurred huge debt. FirstEnergy's predecessor, The Cleveland Electric
Illuminating Company (CEI) in the 1950s and 60s was a high performing
blue chip stock until they invested in nuclear power. FirstEnergy has
tried without success to keep online a very troublesome nuclear power
facility at Port Clinton, Ohio, the Davis-Besse plant. Davis-Besse is
currently shut down and has been for some time. FirstEnergy and
federal regulators failed to properly monitor the operations of the
plant, resulting in conditions where the plant's reactor vessel was
threatened with a breach when boric acid ate into the head of the
reactor.
Millions of people in the Midwest and the water supply of our entire
Great Lakes region were at risk because of First Energy's negligence,
improper maintenance, and actual cover-up of the degradation of the
reactor. Furthermore, federal regulators determined that
notwithstanding the peril which was presented to one of the largest
populated areas of the United States, FirstEnergy's financial
condition necessitated the continued operation of the flawed reactor.
The regulators put profit ahead of public interest.
If there was ever an example of an unholy alliance between government
and industry, this is it. If there was ever an example of the failure
of necessary regulation by the government of an investor-owned
utility, it is found in the government's failure to regulate
FirstEnergy, because now, according to published reports by the
Associated Press, CNN, and ABC News, the blackout which affected an
estimated 50 million people began in the FirstEnergy system.
I've been familiar with First Energy and the challenge of utility
monopolies for over 30 years. Early in my career, in the 1970s, I
watched FirstEnergy's predecessor, CEI, as they were hard at work
trying to undermine the ability of the City of Cleveland to operate
its own municipal electric system. CEI conducted a tireless crusade to
attempt to put the city's publicly owned system, Muny Light, out of
business. Muny Light competed against CEI in a third of the city and
provided municipal power customers with savings on their electric bill
of 20-30 percent. It also provided cheaper electricity for 76 city
facilities and thousands of Cleveland street lights, saving taxpayers
millions of dollars each year. In the 1970s, CEI applied for a license
to operate a nuclear power plant. The license application triggered an
antitrust review. The antitrust review revealed that CEI had committed
numerous violations of federal antitrust law in its attempt to put
Muny Light out of business. The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board of
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in an extensive investigation,
determined that CEI blocked Muny Light from making repairs to its
generator by lobbying the Cleveland City Council to place special
conditions on Muny Light Bonds which made the bonds more difficult to
sell, thereby depriving the city of revenue it needed to repair its
generators in order to provide its own power. The delay in repairs to
the generators caused Muny Light to have to purchase power. CEI then
worked behind the scenes to block Muny Light from purchasing power
from other power companies. CEI became the only power company Muny
Light could buy from. At that point, CEI sharply increased and
sometimes tripled the cost of purchase power to Muny Light. And, as a
result, Muny Light began to lose money. CEI used Muny Light's weakened
operational and financial condition (which they created) as evidence
of the public system's lack of viability and as proof that the only
way the people of Cleveland could have reliable power was for the city
to sell its electric system to CEI. The antitrust review cited one
incident when during a period of inclement weather, Muny Light asked
CEI for a special transfer of emergency power. The transfer of power
was conducted in such a way so as to cause an outage on the Muny Light
system. CEI used the incident as further proof of the city's inability
to operate a municipal electric system. Throughout this period, the
Cleveland media, which received substantial advertising revenues from
CEI, crusaded against the city's ownership of a municipal electric
system. When the federal government came to review CEI's practices,
CEI executives appeared at a city council committee meeting to declare
that they had no interest in the acquisition of Muny Light even as
they worked behind the scenes to put Muny Light out of business.
In 1976, after years of work to undermine Muny Light, CEI finally
succeeded in getting the mayor and the council of Cleveland to agree
to sell Muny Light, giving CEI a monopoly on electric power in the
Cleveland area and enabling CEI to greatly expand its rate base to get
more revenue to pay for its rapidly mounting expenses associated with
building nuclear power plants. At that time, I was clerk of the
Cleveland Municipal Court, a citywide elected office. I organized a
civic campaign to save Muny Light. People gathered signatures in
freezing rain to block the sale. I ran for mayor of Cleveland on a
promise that if elected, my first act would be to cancel the sale of
Muny Light. I won the election. I cancelled the sale. CEI immediately
went to court to demand that the city pay 15 million dollars for power
which it had purchased while CEI was running up charges to the city.
The previous mayor had intended to pay that light bill by selling the
light system and simultaneously disposing of a 325 million dollar
antitrust damage suit. My election not only stopped the sale, but kept
the lawsuit alive. CEI went to federal court to get an order attaching
city equipment as a means of trying to destabilize city services as
still another desperate effort to try to try to create a political
climate to force the sale. I moved quickly to pay the bill by cutting
city spending. The Muny Light issue came to a head on December 15,
1978, when Ohio's largest bank, Cleveland Trust, the 33rd largest bank
in America at that time, told me that they would not renew the city's
credit on 15 million dollars worth of loans taken out by the previous
administration unless I would agree to sell Cleveland's municipally
owned utility to CEI.
On that day, by that time, the sale of Muny Light was being promoted
by both Cleveland newspapers, virtually all of the radio and TV
stations in town, the entire business community, all the banks, both
political parties, and several unions, as well as a majority of the
Cleveland City Council. All I had to do was to sign my name to
legislation and the system would have sold and the city credit
"protected." The chairman of Cleveland Trust even offered 50 million
dollars of new credit if I would agree to sell Muny Light.
Where I come from it matters how much people pay for electricity. I
grew up in the inner city of Cleveland. The oldest of 7 children. My
parents never owned a home, they lived in 21 different places by the
time I was 17, including a couple of cars. I remember when there were
5 children and my parents living in a 3 room upstairs apartment on
Cleveland's east side. My parents would sometimes sit in the kitchen
at one of those old white enamel top tables, which, when the surface
was chipped, was black underneath. When they counted their pennies, I
could hear them clicking on the enamel top table. Click, Click, Click.
When I was in the board room with the Chairman of Cleveland Trust
Bank, I was thinking about my parents counting their pennies and I
could hear those pennies hitting the enamel top table. So, I said no
to the sale of Muny Light to CEI. At Midnight, Cleveland Trust put the
City of Cleveland into default. Later, it was revealed, that Cleveland
Trust and CEI had four interlocking directors. Cleveland Trust was
CEI's bank. Together with another bank, Cleveland Trust owned a
substantial share of CEI stock and had numerous other mutual
interests. Public power was saved in Cleveland. I lost the election in
1979 with default as the major issue. Cleveland Trust changed it name
to AmeriTrust. The new mayor changed the name of Muny Light to
Cleveland Public Power.
In 1993, the City of Cleveland announced that it was expanding Muny
Light. It was the largest expansion of any municipal electric system
in America. I had been long gone from major elected office. In fact,
after the default, most political analysts considered my career over.
I had been asked many times by other politicians why I just didn't
make the deal and sell the light system, especially when my career was
on the line. I believe that there are, in fact, some things more
important than the next election.
When a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer reached me to tell me
about the expansion, I was on a beach in Malibu watching the dolphins
play. Cleveland was the farthest thing from my mind. After I left City
Hall, I couldn't get a job in Cleveland, I almost lost my home, and my
marriage fell apart. But I had no real complaints, because, according
to a US Senate Subcommittee studying organized crime in the
Mid-Atlantic states, I had survived, through sheer luck, an
assassination plot. There was something comforting looking out on the
Pacific and watching the waves glisten in the sun.
So when a reporter told me that people were saying that the expansion
could not have happened without my making a decision to save the
system, I thought "that's nice." People in Cleveland began to say that
I was right not to sell Muny Light and they asked me to come back. So
I did. I ran for State Senate in 1994 on a slogan "because he was
right" with little rays of yellow light shining behind my name on my
campaign signs. I was one of the few Democrats to unseat a Republican
incumbent that year in a state election.
Two years later, I was one of the few Democrats to unseat a Republican
incumbent to gain election to Congress. My campaign signs had a light
bulb behind my name with the words "Light up Congress." Today, I'm
running for President of the United States and I want to light up
America, and a good place to start will be to shed light on a
deregulation process that has abandoned the public interest.
Dennis J. Kucinich
On the road to Davenport, Iowa
This entry and my personal blog are licensed under a Creative Commons
License.
posted by [ Dennis Kucinich ] on [ Aug 17 03 at 10:20 AM ] to [ ]
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001424.shtml
www.copvcia.com.
All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an
Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.
[August 21, 2003, 2350 PDT, (FTW)
-- Although FTW will not endorse any Presidential candidate who does
not address all the issues of Peak Oil and Gas, Bush Administration
Complicity in 9/11, Trillions of Dollars Stolen from the US Treasury,
and criminal misrepresentation of Iraqi intelligence before the US
invasion, we do like to give praise where praise is due. Two and a
half decades ago, young Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich stood his
ground, alone and defiant against deregulation of the power industry,
corporate greed, and in the best interests of his constituents. Not
only did he show courage, he paid a big price for it. What's more, he
survived.
If anyone has earned the right to speak out on an issue that threatens
the future of this country it is Dennis Kucinich. If anyone has earned
a right to remind people of this history, it is Dennis Kucinich. Now,
if he would just join with Texas investment banker and Bush energy
advisor Matt Simmons [Behind The Blackout] in not only slamming
deregulation but addressing Peak Oil and Gas issues and also take on
the bubbling revelations that show that the administration held the
door open on 9/11, lied about Iraq, and hold the government
accountable for the money we need to fix things and develop
alternative energy sources, we might just have a leader worth
following to hell and back. We're going there anyway. - MCR]
===================================
Lights Out on Deregulation
By Dennis Kucinich
With and estimated 50 million Americans and Canadians left without
power and in some cases water, common sense requires us to reflect on
the absurdity of deregulation of public utilities. In the first case,
the right of utility franchise is vested in the people. We give
utilities permission to operate, and enable them to set up a profit
making business in exchange for the promise of affordable and reliable
service. In 1992, investor owned utilities pushed the Democratic House
to pass HR776 which granted electric utilities broad powers. The bill
was supposed to restructure the electric utility industry to spur
competition.
Utilities used deregulation to effect a series of mergers limiting
competition. In order to accelerate profits, cost cutting ensued,
involving the layoff of thousands of utility company employees,
including some who were responsible for maintenance of generation,
transmission, and distribution systems. A number of investor-owned
utilities stopped investing in the maintenance and repair of their own
equipment, and, instead, cut costs to enhance the value of their stock
rather than spending money to enhance the value of their service.
A prime case in point is FirstEnergy Corp, late of Ohio. FirstEnergy
formed through a merger of utility companies which owned nuclear power
plants which often were neither used nor useful, and as a result
incurred huge debt. FirstEnergy's predecessor, The Cleveland Electric
Illuminating Company (CEI) in the 1950s and 60s was a high performing
blue chip stock until they invested in nuclear power. FirstEnergy has
tried without success to keep online a very troublesome nuclear power
facility at Port Clinton, Ohio, the Davis-Besse plant. Davis-Besse is
currently shut down and has been for some time. FirstEnergy and
federal regulators failed to properly monitor the operations of the
plant, resulting in conditions where the plant's reactor vessel was
threatened with a breach when boric acid ate into the head of the
reactor.
Millions of people in the Midwest and the water supply of our entire
Great Lakes region were at risk because of First Energy's negligence,
improper maintenance, and actual cover-up of the degradation of the
reactor. Furthermore, federal regulators determined that
notwithstanding the peril which was presented to one of the largest
populated areas of the United States, FirstEnergy's financial
condition necessitated the continued operation of the flawed reactor.
The regulators put profit ahead of public interest.
If there was ever an example of an unholy alliance between government
and industry, this is it. If there was ever an example of the failure
of necessary regulation by the government of an investor-owned
utility, it is found in the government's failure to regulate
FirstEnergy, because now, according to published reports by the
Associated Press, CNN, and ABC News, the blackout which affected an
estimated 50 million people began in the FirstEnergy system.
I've been familiar with First Energy and the challenge of utility
monopolies for over 30 years. Early in my career, in the 1970s, I
watched FirstEnergy's predecessor, CEI, as they were hard at work
trying to undermine the ability of the City of Cleveland to operate
its own municipal electric system. CEI conducted a tireless crusade to
attempt to put the city's publicly owned system, Muny Light, out of
business. Muny Light competed against CEI in a third of the city and
provided municipal power customers with savings on their electric bill
of 20-30 percent. It also provided cheaper electricity for 76 city
facilities and thousands of Cleveland street lights, saving taxpayers
millions of dollars each year. In the 1970s, CEI applied for a license
to operate a nuclear power plant. The license application triggered an
antitrust review. The antitrust review revealed that CEI had committed
numerous violations of federal antitrust law in its attempt to put
Muny Light out of business. The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board of
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in an extensive investigation,
determined that CEI blocked Muny Light from making repairs to its
generator by lobbying the Cleveland City Council to place special
conditions on Muny Light Bonds which made the bonds more difficult to
sell, thereby depriving the city of revenue it needed to repair its
generators in order to provide its own power. The delay in repairs to
the generators caused Muny Light to have to purchase power. CEI then
worked behind the scenes to block Muny Light from purchasing power
from other power companies. CEI became the only power company Muny
Light could buy from. At that point, CEI sharply increased and
sometimes tripled the cost of purchase power to Muny Light. And, as a
result, Muny Light began to lose money. CEI used Muny Light's weakened
operational and financial condition (which they created) as evidence
of the public system's lack of viability and as proof that the only
way the people of Cleveland could have reliable power was for the city
to sell its electric system to CEI. The antitrust review cited one
incident when during a period of inclement weather, Muny Light asked
CEI for a special transfer of emergency power. The transfer of power
was conducted in such a way so as to cause an outage on the Muny Light
system. CEI used the incident as further proof of the city's inability
to operate a municipal electric system. Throughout this period, the
Cleveland media, which received substantial advertising revenues from
CEI, crusaded against the city's ownership of a municipal electric
system. When the federal government came to review CEI's practices,
CEI executives appeared at a city council committee meeting to declare
that they had no interest in the acquisition of Muny Light even as
they worked behind the scenes to put Muny Light out of business.
In 1976, after years of work to undermine Muny Light, CEI finally
succeeded in getting the mayor and the council of Cleveland to agree
to sell Muny Light, giving CEI a monopoly on electric power in the
Cleveland area and enabling CEI to greatly expand its rate base to get
more revenue to pay for its rapidly mounting expenses associated with
building nuclear power plants. At that time, I was clerk of the
Cleveland Municipal Court, a citywide elected office. I organized a
civic campaign to save Muny Light. People gathered signatures in
freezing rain to block the sale. I ran for mayor of Cleveland on a
promise that if elected, my first act would be to cancel the sale of
Muny Light. I won the election. I cancelled the sale. CEI immediately
went to court to demand that the city pay 15 million dollars for power
which it had purchased while CEI was running up charges to the city.
The previous mayor had intended to pay that light bill by selling the
light system and simultaneously disposing of a 325 million dollar
antitrust damage suit. My election not only stopped the sale, but kept
the lawsuit alive. CEI went to federal court to get an order attaching
city equipment as a means of trying to destabilize city services as
still another desperate effort to try to try to create a political
climate to force the sale. I moved quickly to pay the bill by cutting
city spending. The Muny Light issue came to a head on December 15,
1978, when Ohio's largest bank, Cleveland Trust, the 33rd largest bank
in America at that time, told me that they would not renew the city's
credit on 15 million dollars worth of loans taken out by the previous
administration unless I would agree to sell Cleveland's municipally
owned utility to CEI.
On that day, by that time, the sale of Muny Light was being promoted
by both Cleveland newspapers, virtually all of the radio and TV
stations in town, the entire business community, all the banks, both
political parties, and several unions, as well as a majority of the
Cleveland City Council. All I had to do was to sign my name to
legislation and the system would have sold and the city credit
"protected." The chairman of Cleveland Trust even offered 50 million
dollars of new credit if I would agree to sell Muny Light.
Where I come from it matters how much people pay for electricity. I
grew up in the inner city of Cleveland. The oldest of 7 children. My
parents never owned a home, they lived in 21 different places by the
time I was 17, including a couple of cars. I remember when there were
5 children and my parents living in a 3 room upstairs apartment on
Cleveland's east side. My parents would sometimes sit in the kitchen
at one of those old white enamel top tables, which, when the surface
was chipped, was black underneath. When they counted their pennies, I
could hear them clicking on the enamel top table. Click, Click, Click.
When I was in the board room with the Chairman of Cleveland Trust
Bank, I was thinking about my parents counting their pennies and I
could hear those pennies hitting the enamel top table. So, I said no
to the sale of Muny Light to CEI. At Midnight, Cleveland Trust put the
City of Cleveland into default. Later, it was revealed, that Cleveland
Trust and CEI had four interlocking directors. Cleveland Trust was
CEI's bank. Together with another bank, Cleveland Trust owned a
substantial share of CEI stock and had numerous other mutual
interests. Public power was saved in Cleveland. I lost the election in
1979 with default as the major issue. Cleveland Trust changed it name
to AmeriTrust. The new mayor changed the name of Muny Light to
Cleveland Public Power.
In 1993, the City of Cleveland announced that it was expanding Muny
Light. It was the largest expansion of any municipal electric system
in America. I had been long gone from major elected office. In fact,
after the default, most political analysts considered my career over.
I had been asked many times by other politicians why I just didn't
make the deal and sell the light system, especially when my career was
on the line. I believe that there are, in fact, some things more
important than the next election.
When a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer reached me to tell me
about the expansion, I was on a beach in Malibu watching the dolphins
play. Cleveland was the farthest thing from my mind. After I left City
Hall, I couldn't get a job in Cleveland, I almost lost my home, and my
marriage fell apart. But I had no real complaints, because, according
to a US Senate Subcommittee studying organized crime in the
Mid-Atlantic states, I had survived, through sheer luck, an
assassination plot. There was something comforting looking out on the
Pacific and watching the waves glisten in the sun.
So when a reporter told me that people were saying that the expansion
could not have happened without my making a decision to save the
system, I thought "that's nice." People in Cleveland began to say that
I was right not to sell Muny Light and they asked me to come back. So
I did. I ran for State Senate in 1994 on a slogan "because he was
right" with little rays of yellow light shining behind my name on my
campaign signs. I was one of the few Democrats to unseat a Republican
incumbent that year in a state election.
Two years later, I was one of the few Democrats to unseat a Republican
incumbent to gain election to Congress. My campaign signs had a light
bulb behind my name with the words "Light up Congress." Today, I'm
running for President of the United States and I want to light up
America, and a good place to start will be to shed light on a
deregulation process that has abandoned the public interest.
Dennis J. Kucinich
On the road to Davenport, Iowa
This entry and my personal blog are licensed under a Creative Commons
License.
posted by [ Dennis Kucinich ] on [ Aug 17 03 at 10:20 AM ] to [ ]
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001424.shtml