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Recent Stories
March 26, 2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
26, 2003
Energy Scams
Bilking California
for Billions
By JASON LEOPOLD
The
sky-high electricity and natural gas prices in California between 2000
and 2001 that bankrupted the state’s largest utility and caused
several days of rolling blackouts was the result of widespread manipulation
by several Texas-based energy companies with close ties to President
Bush, federal energy regulators ruled Wednesday.
The energy companies, Dynegy Inc., Reliant Resources, Enron Corporation,
all of which contributed heavily to Bush’s presidential campaign,
must now refund California billions of dollars in profits it reaped
between January 2000 and June 2001. Other energy companies, including
Mirant and Williams Companies, were also identified for taking of advantage
of loopholes in California’s newly deregulated energy market to
boost their profits and ordered to pay refunds.
In addition, FERC harshly criticized Reliant Resources for manipulating
natural gas prices at the Southern California trading hub known as Topock.
In FERC’s staff report to Congress, Reliant is accused of dominating
the Southern California gas market, raising prices there and selling
at the top of that market.
FERC commissioners also said they planned to strip the wholesale trading
privileges of Enron, Reliant and a unit of BP PLC because of their manipulative
trading activities during the energy crisis.
California’s electricity crisis wreaked havoc on consumers in
the state between 2000 and 2001, resulted in four days of rolling blackouts,
and forced the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric,
into bankruptcy. California was the first state in the nation to deregulate
its power market in an effort to provide consumers with cheaper electricity
and the opportunity to choose their own power provider. The results
have since proved disastrous. The experiment has cost the state more
than $30 billion.
But despite Wednesday’s favorable ruling for California, state
officials said they aren’t celebrating. That’s because FERC
is only ordering energy companies to refund California $3.3 billion.
However, the state still owes about $3 billion to suppliers, meaning
that California stands to receive about $300 million. Davis said the
state wouldn’t take a penny less than $8.9 billion, the amount
California claims it was overcharged as a result of the crisis.
Steve Maviglio, Davis’ press secretary, said California would
appeal any ruling that fails to refund the state the full $8.9 billion.
Wednesday’s ruling, the culmination of FERC’s yearlong investigation
into the dysfunctional Western energy markets, is a major blow to Bush
and Vice President Dick Cheney both of whom publicly denied in the Spring
of 2001 that energy companies such as Enron and Dynegy were acting like
a cartel and withholding much-needed electricity supplies from the state
in order to increase the wholesale price and their companies’
profits.
In May 2001, during the peak of California’s energy crisis, Gov.
Gray Davis met with Bush at a Los Angeles hotel to ask for federal assistance,
such as price caps, to rein in soaring energy prices. Bush refused,
saying California legislators designed an electricity market that left
too many regulatory restrictions in place and that’s what caused
electricity prices in the state to skyrocket.
That same month, the PBS news program Frontline interviewed Cheney and
he was asked whether energy companies were using manipulative tactics
to cause electricity prices to spike in California.
“No,” Cheney said during the Frontline interview. “The
problem you had in California was caused by a combination of things--an
unwise regulatory scheme, because they didn't really deregulate. Now
they’re trapped from unwise regulatory schemes, plus not having
addressed the supply side of the issue. They've obviously created major
problems for themselves and bankrupted PG&E in the process.”
It should be noted, however, that a month before the Frontline interview
and Bush’s meeting with Davis, Cheney, who chairs Bush’s
energy task force, met with Ken Lay, Enron’s former chief executive,
to discuss Bush’s National Energy Policy. Lay, whose company was
the largest contributor to Bush’s presidential campaign, made
some recommendations that benefited his company financially and Cheney
included some of Lay’s suggestions in the energy policy. The energy
policy was released in May 2001, a couple of weeks after the meeting
between Bush and Davis and after Cheney’s Frontline interview.
Moreover, in March 2001, while the energy policy was being drafted,
while Davis was accusing energy companies of withholding electricity
supplies from the state and while Cheney was meeting with Lay and other
heavyweights in the energy industry, Tulsa, Okla., based-Williams Companies
entered into a confidential settlement with FERC agreeing to refund
California $8 million in profits it reaped by deliberately shutting
down one of its power plants in the state in the spring of 2000 to drive
up the wholesale price of electricity in California.
The evidence, a transcript of a tape-recorded telephone conversation
between an employee at Williams and an employee at a Southern California
power plant operated by Williams, shows how the two conspired to jack
up power prices and create an artificial electricity shortage by keeping
the power plant out of service for two weeks.
Details of the settlement had been under seal by FERC for more than
a year and were released in November after the Wall Street Journal sued
the commission to obtain the full copy of its report. Similarly, FERC
found that Reliant engaged in identical behavior around the same time
as Williams and in February the commission ordered Reliant to pay California
a $13.8 million settlement.
In a bit of poetic justice for the state, however, many of these energy
companies are now struggling financially. Enron is bankrupt and Reliant,
Dynegy and Williams, once the darlings of Wall Street, have seen their
stocks plummet from a high of $70 in 2001 to just above $2 a share Wednesday.
Today's Features
March 26, 2003
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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