Day: June 19, 2001

In early June California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said of Enron Corp. Kenneth Lay,

I would love to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi my name is Spike, honey.’

The sad thing is that our culture has been so debased that an attorney general joking about subjecting someone to prison rape likely will be quickly forgotten. Lockyer should have resigned or been forced from office over such a cavalier statement about rape (which is a serious problem for prisoners of both sexes).

Salon’s Joe Conason is the latest writer to mythologize Los Angeles’ public energy utility.

The myth is that the city’s Department of Water and Power never went private and therefore avoided all of the mistakes of the market, blah blah blah. The reality is a bit more absurd.

As part of the bizarre restructing of electricity markets in California, municipal utilities retained the right to buy federally subzidized hydroelectric power from the federal government at rates that are far below the spot market-determined prices that the private utilites have to pay.

So the utility has been buying cheap, subsidized energy from the federal government, and then selling it back to California utilities at the spot price. California might as well have given them the right to print money. According to a Los Angeles Daily News report, the LA Department of Water and Power earned $100 million so far this year alone from such sales.

The DWP also has some of the common sense advantages that were taken from private utilities such as the ability to enter into long term contracts for power that allowed it to maintain low long term prices for power for LA residents.

If a private company acted as brazenly as the DWP has, folks like Consan would be outraged at such naked profiteering due almost entirely to government subsidies. Instead this ripoff of taxpayers is held up as a model way of running a public utility.

Remember when the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and promised to end farm subsidies. Of course they chickened out and now agricultural subsidies are back with a vengeance.

According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, European estimates put U.S. agricultural subsidies at an astonishing $32.2 billion this fiscal year, up from a mere $4.6 billion in 1996. Not to be outdone by the Clinton administration’s expansion of such subsidies, The Bush administration budget prposes an additional $79 billion in farm spending over the next 11 years.

The European Union nations, by the way, are even worse, spending about $90 billion last year to subsidy agriculture. All of which does an excellent job of ensuring that poor farmers in the developing world cannot compete with Western agriculture, and diverts money that could be spent more efficiently into the agricultural sector.

Source:

Farm subsidies and collapsing prices. National Center for Policy Analysis, May 29, 2001.

A personal web site I am always impressed with is Mark Rosenfelder’s Metaverse which is located at http://www.zompist.com/. Rosenfelder is one of those people who puts stuff on his site that make me go, “Cool, I wish I’d thought of that.”

A linguist by training, Rosenfelder has an amusing look at foreign language phrasebooks for American tourists, They Thought You’d Say This. According to Rosenfedler, for example, the Berlitz Russian for Travellers actually includes this phrase, which I’m certain most Americans would find extremely helpful: I want a specimen of your urine. Ja vozjmu u vas mochu na analiz.