FYI Ping
I would definitely like for him to run again for political office sometime in the future.
Gee, no names of who pushed that deregulation down the throats of the unwitting masses.
I can think of a few names. ;-)
Thanks for posting.
It was a situation ripe for the harvest.
A commodity (energy, specificly electric energy) was artificially restricted by laws that prevent the expansion of generation capacity within California.
The demand continues to grow, at a known and even anticipated rate, all the while that the source of energy continues to grow more scarce. California has to import energy from neighboring states where there are far fewer restrictions on how electric energy is produced.
The energy supply through the grid can only come IN from outside at a limited level. Maximum is maximum, and any breakdown of the grid is magnified in its effects. There are competing demands for this same energy in other states, where it is being generated. Still, California does nothing to assure a greater in-state capability of producing energy.
Opportunity for the futures trading organizations. Happily they trade the futures in energy delivery back and forth, and as it looks like all the other peak sources are drying up, the prices continue to bid higher and higher.
Does all this have an oddly familiar sound to it? Substitute petroleum for electrical energy, and the United States for California.
Production of petroleum is artificially restricted here in the United States, when the demand is known and expected to increase over time. The United States is forced to import petroleum from regions where there are far fewer restrictions on extraction and refining the crude petroleum.
The crude can only come IN through a limited number of port facilities. Once here it is doled out to the various distribution lines, and because the refinery facilities are limited in how much they can expand, a greater and greater partion of the petroleum stock is imported as already refined. But other areas of the world also have a growing need for petroleum and refined products. Still, the United States does NOTHING to assure greater domestic production of crude oil.
Opportunity for the futures trading organizations. Happily they trade the futures in energy delivery back and forth, and as it looks like all the other peak sources are drying up, the prices continue to bid higher and higher.
Only, it’s not Enron doing this trading this time. Enron is out of the picture. All the principals are either in prison, or hopelessly locked out of ever being any kind of player again.
There ARE some big dogs out there still running, most notably the Soros International machine. Their structure of shell companies and wholly owned subidiaries make what Enron once was look like a kid’s lemonade stand. These people go in and do stock manipulations, currency trading and just plain cutthroat business practices, that bring the economies of whole countries down. It is not by accident that one of their biggest “wholly owned subsidaries” is the US Democrat National Committee. What Soros International is doing, is taking advantage of the artificial scarcity of petroleum worldwide, and bidding up the prices, trading between several of the different dummy corporations they have set up, for future delivery of oil contracts, oil that is not even out of the ground yet. They can run these prices up an down like running a yo-yo on a string, just by movement of a relatively few of these contracts. Crowd panic in the various trading floors around the world does the rest.
Eventually, like it did with Enron, when they tried to “corner the market” on energy flowing to California, this house of cards will collapse. When it does, anybody holding a contract for which they paid premium price to get, will see its real value drop to a half or a quarter of what they bought it for. A lot of smaller investors, and entities like institutional funds, will be left holding the bag. The big player here, Soros International, will just collapse a bunch of the dummy corporations, declaring them “bankrupt”, and whatever losses result, they can absorb them, where the smaller investors suckered into the trading scheme cannot.
The big plan right now is to keep the bubble in the price of crude expanding until AFTER the Democrats have swept into a majority in both the House and Senate, and Barack Obama is assured of the Oval Office. The tight squeeze will be, has been, blamed on the Republicans, but that is in itself an absurdity, as the initiatives to expand the energy supplies here in the US offered by George Bush have been stymied at every turn by a recalcitrant DEMOCRAT House and Senate, a co-ordinated effort to score a one-two punch on the Bush Administration. George Soros still has a totally deranged view of the entire Bush family, for reasons not apparent to most of the world, but probably well known in the circles at the top.