Greg Palast is an investigative reporter who has recently written about the
Texas power debacle (among other things). His piece is entitled “Texas Gets Lay’d: How the Bush Family Turned Off the Lights.”
Palast covers Texas’ history of deregulation and ability it gives the power companies freely to engage in extreme price gouging.
Not only was this crisis anticipated, not only did the power companies refuse to prepare, now those same companies are charging exorbitant prices for power they have failed to deliver.
You can’t make this stuff up. It’s called crony capitalism — and how much capitalism is not tied to cronyism in one way or another?
Below is an excerpt, or you can read the entire article by clicking on the title above:
Maybe because Texas gave us that wet-lipped huckster Ted Cruz, you think the state deserves to freeze in the dark.
I get that, but it’s not their fault, a least not the victims burning family heirlooms to stave off frostbite.
“What happened was entirely predictable,” power distribution expert attorney Beth Emory said of the blackouts. She told me this twenty years ago, after the first blackouts in Texas and California, following the cruel experiment called “deregulation” of the power industry.
Until 1992, the USA had just about the lowest electricity prices in the world and the most reliable system.
For a century, power companies had been limited by law to recovering their provable costs plus a “reasonable,” i.e. small, profit. But in 1992, George H. W. Bush, in the last gasps of his failed presidency, began to deregulate the industry.
“Deregulate” is a misnomer. “De-criminalize” describes it best. With the “free market” supposedly setting the price of power, Texas-based Enron was freed to use such techniques as “Ricochet,” “Get Shorty,” and “Death Star” to blow prices through the roof when weather shut down power plants. (This week was not the first game of Texas Gouge’m.)
Enron was not the only Lone Star power pirate. Houston Power & Light was “ramping” plants up and down at odd hours which whistleblowers said was deliberate.
Bush’s son “Shrub,” Texas Gov. George W. Bush, signed a law in 1999 forcing the state’s hapless customers to accept any price the “free” market dictated. Enron’s CEO Ken Lay showed his appreciation by becoming Baby Bush’s number one donor for Dubya’s presidential ambitions.
This week, wholesale electric prices in Texas, normally $50 per megawatt-hour, busted over $9,000/MWHR. Again. It happens with every cold snap and heat wave. One shop owner, Akilah Scott-Amos, showed the Daily Beast her electric bills which blew up from $34 per month to $450 for a single day.
