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
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.
But they dare not launch the scheme in the USA.
Rather, in 1990, one devious little bunch of
operators out of Texas, Houston Natural Gas,
operating under the alias "Enron," talked an
over-the-edge free-market fanatic, Britain's Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher, into licensing the first
completely deregulated power plant in the
hemisphere.
And so began an economic disease called
"regulatory reform" that spread faster than
SARS. Notably, Enron rewarded Thatcher's
Energy Minister, one Lord Wakeham, with a
bushel of dollar bills for 'consulting' services and
a seat on Enron's board of directors. The English
experiment proved the viability of Enron's new
industrial formula: that the enthusiasm of
politicians for deregulation was in direct
proportion to the payola provided by power
companies.
Continues.........
gregpalast.com |
