Enron Shutdown of Power Plant Didn't Mean Diddly Squat to California Crisis

Enron Shutdown of Power Plant Didn't Mean Diddly Squat to California Crisis Written by Wayne Lusvardi and Charles B. Warren Tuesday, February 08, 2005 - from ChronWatch.com

A tape currently being bantered around in the media by an attorney for Shohmish County Utility District of an Enron trader asking a plant operator to shut down a 52 megawatt (MW) Las Vegas power plant at the peak of the California energy crisis on January 17, 2001 apparently indicts Enron of wrongdoing in the mind of the public. Is there another story behind this story?

"Being a politician means never having to say you're sorry. You don't have to say, 'I never should have voted to subsidize that ridiculous Enron project in India.' ... After all, they're greedy businessmen and you're a selfless public servant." -- Harry Browne

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." -- Thomas Sowell

Enron, of course, is exactly the kind of corporation which could not exist in pure capitalism or under the U.S. Constitution applied with only literal meanings of the commerce and welfare clauses. As a creature, in effect, of politicians and lawyers, the same kinds of politicians and lawyers who sold the bastardized meanings of the commerce and welfare clauses to a gullible public, it was deliberately converted from a small pipeline company into an international conglomerate by conniving scoundrels who designed it from the beginning to use the power of their favor-selling politician friends to give it government contracts, subsidies, monopoly powers, and favorable regulations to force prospective customers to do business with them, essentially at gunpoint. Obviously, this is is fascism, not capitalism, and what you get more and more of when you work to transform what was once the rule of clear-cut law into the rule of men (especially agenda-driving, nuance-inventing judges and lawyers) .

"With the recent release of the soon-to-be-infamous 'Enron Trader Tapes,' media pundits are once again propagating the myth that big business is evil and must be reined in by (still more) government regulation. A closer look at the facts should make it clear that the gouging of California energy customers and taxpayers was orchestrated by government, for government, and that shenanigans like those discussed on the Enron Tapes are impossible in a free market." -- Ace Baker, HERE

I always wonder how incredibly historically illiterate the fourth estate is when they don't remember that EVERY single type of powerful government, whether it was a monarchy or a fascist or communist dictatorship, or all-pervasive welfare state, saw corrupt politicians give abusive, government-protected monopolies to their incompetent, unscrupulous friends.

"Clinton realized that America could not economically afford the Protocol Gore negotiated. The Clinton-Gore Energy Department found Kyoto would lead to $400 billion a year in lost output. ... Gore tries to throw Enron on the back of the current administration. But it was Enron Board Chairman Kenneth Lay who sold Clinton-Gore on Kyoto's cap and trade system. Gore, Clinton, and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin met with Lay on Aug. 7, 1997 to go over goals and procedures for the Kyoto session. ... The corporate smoking memo here was not that from an ExxonMobil adviser to oppose Dr. Watson, but the Enron internal memo saying Kyoto 'would do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory initiative'." -- Ken Adelman, HERE.

ENRON: The story is about Bad Business AND Worse Government. It's HERE.

Enron gamed the system, but the system was a distorted regulatory nightmare set up by California politicians. Enron was corrupt, and deserved punishment, but 99% of the energy problem was created by the California regulators.

As this article says, it was a matter of protecting union jobs, putting artificial price caps on energy charges at the retail level to placate the voters, refusing to allow new powerplants in "my back yard," even trying to put the power plants in other counties yet continue to collect the property taxes on them.

No new plants were built. The distribution network was not beefed up. The state is just as vulnerable today as it was during the crisis, and nothing has been done to fix it.

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