Super rich are gobbling up publicly owned utilities Why?

January 4, 2006 (FTW) – The largest financial powerhouses in the

nation have been gobbling up publicly owned utilities since George W. Bush signed the new energy bill last fall. It is not just that ownership of these life-essential services is being concentrated in a few rich and unregulated hands.

Since the passage of lace w:st="on">Americalace>'s most recent energy bill on August 8th,(205) many public utilities have been acquired by some of the wealthiest people on the planet. With the loss of public regulation that came with the repeal of the Public Utility Company Holding Act as part of that measure, these publicly owned utilities are being converted into liquid giants that can be used to acquire other utility companies, or to trade ever-diminishing energy resources for profit.

What is going on is these the super rich are buying energy companies and every ounce of extra capacity is being sold off, the electricity generating capacity will be under-maintained, or discontinued to maximize cash on hand for the next buyout. What we are watching is the start of a bidding war over diminishing energy resources.

Energy investment banker Matthew Simmons commented that the reason more generating capacity and refineries weren't being built was because the "return on investment
was uncertain." Why? The rising cost of energy. The market price of natural gas hit $15 per million British thermal units (Btu) last week, well over double what traders paid last year…

Simmons: Following the 1965 blackout when NERC was created there was a mandate that publicly owned and regulated power providers had to build new plants. Every five years, ten per cent was added to the generating base.

The electric grid system needs to be designed for a 100-year cyclical event of peak demand. Experience has taught us that weather is the chief culprit in peak demand events. If you don't prepare for this, you are asking for a massive blackout. New plants generally aren't built unless they are mandated, and free markets don't make investments that give one percent returns. There was also no investment in new transmission lines…

As deregulation was implemented in the 1990s, it was argued that it would open up vast quantities of energy in neighboring states. In the first five years of the decade, only four per cent capacity was added over the entire period. In the second five years, only two per cent was added.14

Out of options. Hundreds of factories will be similarly forced to lay off workers or freeze or cut wages because of high natural gas prices this winter, says the National Association of Manufacturers. Many large companies, like chemical giant Dow, have moved major operations overseas near cheaper fuel.

In the future, Big Oil just might shut off the power selectively to any Enemies of the State it wishes: especially those who are too loud. Only after civil unrest, will government step in, and then only to try and prop up the façade of a sustainable paradigm of infinite growth.


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9/11 connection

Mayo Shattuck, III has just shepherded the largest single utility merger in
American history in an $11 billion deal that will create the largest utility company in the nation, with a market capitalization of $28 billion. The new company, formed from Constellation Energy Group and Florida Power and Light, will operate in many states – and thus remain exempt from state regulation.

Shattuck is today the President and CEO of Constellation Energy Group, one of the firms that gained access to Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force

Shattuck was the man who, as head of the Alex. Brown unit of Deutschebank, knew and approved of massive insider trading in United Airlines stock just before September 11th,,2001. Mayo Shattuck resigned suddenly on September 12th, the day after the attacks. He was midway through a three-year, 30-million dollar contract as the head of the Alex. Brown unit of Deutsche Bank.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies of most industrialized nations monitor
stock trades in real time to warn of impending (terrorist) attacks.

Deutschebank/Alex Brown, which was headed until 1998 by the man who
is now the executive director of the CIA, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard.

The current executive vice president of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) for enforcement is David Doherty, a retired CIA general counsel.

source via Mark Nagel

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Get ready for peak water and peak food

01 January 2006 -- America is, on average, a damp nation - the lower 48 states see 4,200 billion gallons of rainfall every day. But averages deceive; water is in short supply in the Southwest, where growth is fastest and rivers are already over-tapped. Even back East, we use so much water that supplies can run short. The Ipswich River near Boston now "runs dry about every other year or so," according to Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project. "Why? Heavy pumping of groundwater for irrigation of big green lawns." In drought years like 1999 or 2003, Maryland, Virginia and the District have begun to fight over the Potomac - on hot summer days combining to suck up 85 percent of the river's flow.

Overall food production around the world has begun to sputter; after fast growth in the decades following World War II, says Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, the last 10 years have seen a steady erosion in the amount of grain grown per capita. And since wheat and rice and corn are all world markets, the need for imports elsewhere could drive up the cost of food here at home. The Chinese, in particular, are constantly converting farmland to factory sites (even as they learn to eat more meat), and they have plenty of American cash stored up to pay for any shortfall. But if they do so, the first casualties will be the world's really poor nations, already reeling from increases in the price of fuel.

Global warming will almost certainly stress water supplies in dramatic ways: In the western mountains, for instance, where the snowpack serves as a natural reservoir for the winter's precipitation, more rain and earlier melt will mean less storage. The same rise in temperatures will almost certainly make farming harder. Earlier snowmelt means more parched fields by midsummer - and when the temperature rises into the mid-90s for long stretches, crops like corn begin to have trouble fertilizing. The summer of 1988 was the warmest yet across America's grain belt, and yields dropped as much as a third.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/010306EA.shtml

PROFESSOR YU YONGDING, AN ADVISOR TO THE PEOPLES BANK OF CHINA, HAS WARNED OF THE DANGER OF A U.S. DOLLAR COLLAPSE AND THE EFFECT ON CHINA, in a statement the {China Securities Journal} published Jan. 1. Professor Yu warned that the United States might stop raising interest rates in 2006 and "guide" the dollar downward. This would put pressure on the yuan. But even "more seriously, China's economy would take a big hit if the U.S. dollar weakened sharply due to such factors as a bursting of the U.S. property bubble," he said. "The loss for China's foreign exchange reserves would be extremely serious." China has at least $769 billion in foreign exchange reserves. Yu has made statements before that the dollar is vulnerable as long as the United States ran a huge current account deficit.
Yu also said China's economy could grow around 9% in 2006, if the government is able to increase internal demand to offset slowing export and investment growth."Because China's fiscal situation is relatively sound, the government has relatively great leeway to use expansionary fiscal policy," Yu said.
[source: Shenzhen Daily, Jan. 2]

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