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-- Bush and the Blackouts
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| Originally posted by DaveSaenz I'm also amazed that Renegade would take the time to learn so much about the policies, and politics of the US (not to mention write a novel of a post).   |
Nice reply Renegade. I would just like to point out that I'm not sure this particular issue could or should result into another Bush scandal, but I wouldn't be surprised if further information reveals the necessity for such. However, like most things being swept under the rug by this administration and GOP controlled Congress, I doubt much would be done as a result:
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| GOP-controlled Congress Has Stifled Partisan Inquiries Bush unscathed by investigations By Susan Page USA TODAY Tuesday 19 August 2003 Here's why Special counsels are now a thing of the past, and GOP-controlled Congress has stifled partisan inquiries WASHINGTON -- The urge to investigate defined the capital during the Clinton years. But no more. For nearly a decade, special counsel inquiries and adversarial congressional hearings dominated the headlines, etched bitter partisan lines, led to the impeachment of a president and made the nation's political debates resemble hand-to-hand combat. Now, some things have changed. The law that provided for special counsels has expired. President Bush's fellow Republicans control both houses of Congress. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has stepped back from challenging the White House after losing a court case that sought to open the records of Vice President Cheney's energy task force. The result: The White House is better able to control information and prevent a nagging controversy from becoming a full-blown crisis. It's harder for Democrats to demand answers and easier for administration officials to dismiss their charges as political posturing. Fairly or not, Bush faces less of the daily barrage that prompted President Clinton to set up a parallel press operation for investigative inquiries and made Clinton's White House seem at times like an embattled enclave. Not since the early years of Lyndon Johnson's tenure has a president had more breathing room. ''It's made an enormous difference, and it's helped Bush in governing,'' says Larry Sabato, a political scientist who studied the pursuit of Washington scandals during the Clinton years. ''When a president is seen as besieged and entangled in controversy, he really can't get very much done. But when a president commands the central institutions of American politics and has few institutional checks, he can range more widely and hover above the fray.'' That doesn't mean partisanship has evaporated or even eased. The charge-and-countercharge on cable TV shows and interest-group ads continue, and Democrats' frustration with the White House is palpable. A sense among Democratic regulars that party leaders haven't done enough to challenge Bush is boosting the presidential prospects of insurgent Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont. But the president's Democratic critics now face a much steeper challenge to force the administration's hand or drive the capital's agenda than Republicans had during the Clinton administration. As the minority party in Congress, the Democrats can't schedule a congressional hearing, issue a subpoena, demand a special counsel or rely on the GAO to obtain information that the White House doesn't want to give. Predictably, the parties disagree on whether this a good thing. ''When the Republicans ran the Congress and Clinton was in the White House, there was no accusation too small for them to pursue,'' says California Rep. Henry Waxman, the senior Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee. ''Now that President Bush is in power, there's no scandal so large that they have any interest in examining it.'' He says he'd like to have hearings on the no-bid contract awarded to Halliburton, Cheney's former company, to rebuild oilfields in Iraq, for example. But White House spokesman Scott McClellan says Bush has delivered on his campaign promise to ''change the tone'' in Washington. ''The American people want us to be forward-looking and want us to work together to get things done, not to continue to settle political scores from the past or score political points,'' he says. ''There is an ugly side of Washington's recent past, and Americans will not look kindly upon partisans or presidential candidates who seek to exploit unsubstantiated rumors or innuendo for political gain.'' It's still possible to request a special counsel to investigate accusations that raise potential conflicts of interest for the Justice Department. But the question is now left to Attorney General John Ashcroft's discretion. So far, Ashcroft hasn't appointed any. And, with a handful of exceptions, congressional Republicans have avoided holding hearings that might embarrass the president -- on precisely who was responsible for including disputed intelligence claims in the State of the Union address in January, for instance. In contrast, by the end of Clinton's first term, Republicans on the Government Reform Committee had issued 40 subpoenas and held three hearings into the firing of workers at the White House travel office and four into the release of confidential FBI files on past officials to a junior White House aide. Five special counsels had been appointed by judicial panels to pursue allegations against Clinton and his Cabinet. One was named in 1995 to investigate whether Henry Cisneros, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, lied to the FBI about the size of payments he had made to his mistress. Cisneros left the government in 1997 and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in the case in 1999. That inquiry, after pursuing related allegations, is only now closing down. The final report is expected to be submitted this fall. It is the last of the Clinton era to conclude its work. A blunt weapon There's little nostalgia for the special counsel law, enacted after the Watergate scandal and allowed to expire in 1999 without protest from either party. Critics say the law became a blunt weapon that propelled marginal accusations into lengthy investigations and maligned innocent people. The Clinton-era special counsels cost taxpayers nearly $133 million. During the Bush administration, several special counsels have been requested: Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., asked for a special counsel to investigate campaign contributions to Republicans by Westar Energy, a Kansas utility seeking exemption from some regulations. Environmental groups wanted an inquiry into whether the No. 2 official at the Interior Department violated ethics laws to help his former lobbying firm. Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., requested one to pursue possible conflicts of interest in the administration's inquiry into Enron's collapse. Each time, the Justice Department declined. (Ashcroft recused himself from the Enron case because he had received Enron contributions as a Senate candidate.) Most Democrats are less concerned about the need for criminal investigations than they are about congressional review of policy, though. Only the majority party can schedule hearings and require testimony. Most committee chairmen, Republican or Democratic, aren't inclined to use those tools to irritate the president when he is from their own party. So Democrats now express outrage and demand answers through press releases, op-ed articles and open letters, hoping for news coverage or a public groundswell. Lobbying by relatives of people killed in the Sept. 11 terror attacks persuaded congressional Republicans and the White House to agree to an independent commission that Democrats wanted, for instance. Persistent media coverage has driven disclosures about those controversial 16 words in the State of the Union. Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a presidential hopeful and former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he would love to convene hearings into the ''misleading statements'' by Bush and others about whether there was credible evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Niger that could be used in a nuclear weapon. ''Were they the result of intelligence agency failures? Or were the agencies acting appropriately but the information they provided was manipulated?'' he asks. ''I would want to hold a hearing on that.'' Democrats also want to explore: * The administration's refusal to declassify a section of the congressional report on the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The 28 pages reportedly detail possible Saudi involvement. * The help that the Federal Aviation Administration gave in May to Texas Republicans who were trying to track down Democratic state legislators. The Democrats had flown to Oklahoma to avoid a special session on redistricting. * Allegations that the administration has distorted scientific findings to justify political decisions involving missile defense, environmental protection and other issues. Last week, Waxman issued a 40-page report on the subject. A White House spokesman dismissed it as partisan sniping. ''We still have our voices and our ability to speak out when we see things we don't like,'' says Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, another presidential contender and the senior Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. But he says ''it would be a lot different'' if Democrats could schedule hearings and call witnesses. ''They'd be under a lot more pressure than they are today.'' Stuart Roy, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, has no sympathy for the other side: ''You have Democrats feeling irrelevant, and the only way they can make themselves feel more relevant is to engage in the politics of personal destruction.'' To some extent, partisans in both parties have switched sides. Democrats like Waxman who decried investigations of the Clinton administration now express frustration about lacking the tools to get answers from the Bush administration. Republicans like DeLay who defended the Clinton-era inquiries now dismiss proposed investigations as political grandstanding. An agency defanged When the General Accounting Office sought information about Cheney's energy task force, the White House refused. Administration officials said they were determined to rebuff what they saw as an incursion on the president's constitutional authority. The GAO then filed its first-ever lawsuit against the White House demanding the information. But in February, the agency announced it was dropping the case after losing a round in federal court, although the watchdog group Judicial Watch is continuing its lawsuit on the same issue. The head of the GAO, David Walker, said he wouldn't sue the administration again unless he had the approval of the House and Senate oversight committees -- committees that control the agency's budget and are now ruled by Republicans. ''Much of this is the result of unified government,'' with the White House and Congress under one party's control, says Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution, who arrived in Washington as a speechwriter for President Eisenhower and has been studying capital affairs ever since. Bush's unchallenged position at the head of the GOP and the discipline imposed by Republican congressional leaders have magnified the advantages. Bush is in an even stronger position than the last two presidents who had unified governments. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress during the first two years of Clinton's presidency, but Senate Armed Services Chairman Sam Nunn nonetheless held critical hearings on administration policy toward gays in the military. Democrats controlled Congress throughout President Carter's tenure, but his relations with Congress, even his fellow Democrats, were famously prickly. The first President Bush and President Reagan had to deal with opposition control of one or both houses of Congress throughout their terms. Both administrations faced several special counsel investigations. The current President Bush had a Democratic-controlled Senate for less than two years, after Sen. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., left the GOP in May 2001 and until Republicans regained control in the 2002 elections. If Bush wins a second term in 2004, many political analysts predict he'll be presiding over unified government again. Hess says that favorable landscape gives Bush an opening for the sort of fundamental policy changes made by such consequential presidents as LBJ and Franklin Roosevelt. Bush's grand ambitions include a new national security policy of pre-emption against foreign threats, the creation of individual investment accounts in Social Security and more tax cuts. Veterans of the Clinton administration are wistful when they consider the contrast. ''There were countless investigations, and we ended up consuming enormous resources that otherwise would have been spent on trying to move the president's agenda forward,'' says John Podesta, former White House chief of staff. The Bush team has a big advantage, he says: ''I don't think the bloodhounds will be out.'' http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/...13/5402556s.htm |
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| Originally posted by Renegade You also forgot to mention 4a): "Congress is looking into the federal government's handling of problems at a nuclear plant owned by FirstEnergy". Now, as I say, at this early stage there is still no definitive proof that there is a connection between the federal government and the failure to identify faults in the property of FirstEnergy (the prime suspect in the cause of the blackout) but the evidence at this stage, I feel, is good enough to call into question the Bush administrations role in the entire ordeal. The NRC (a government funded agency headed commissioners hand-picked by president Bush himself) knew that there were problems with FirstEnergy's nuclear plant yet allowed it to continue running depite safety concerns. To quote the CNN article: Seems strange, does it not, that the NRC would ignore major problems with a nuclear plant that just happened to be owned by one of Bush's major campaign donors? Now, if it turns out that this original evidence is misleading, and the federal government can be cleared of any responsibility in the power failure then fine, I'll quite happily retract what I'm saying. But, again, given what I've presented from the evidence available, I fail to see how this speculation is in any way unreasonable. |
The plant was shut down by federal regulators.| quote: |
CLEVELAND, Aug. 21 � The huge gray cooling tower of the Davis-Besse power plant stands along Lake Erie like a monument to nuclear energy and industrial might. That it has been idle for more than a year, though, makes it a testament to something else, according to former employees and the federal regulators who ordered it shut down. The dormant plant, for them, is an example of neglect and poor management by its owner, the FirstEnergy Corporation, which allowed hazardous conditions to fester so badly that a catastrophic accident may have been only months away. The shutdown of Davis-Besse � the plant, outside Toledo, was taken off-line after acid nearly ate through the reactor lid � is the most extreme example of shortcomings in how FirstEnergy runs an empire with 4.3 million customers across New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/22/n...ml?pagewanted=1 |
I would also like to add that I feel the primary issue has been touched on but not directly considered as a real culprit to the problem here: deregulation. It is one of the biggest problems I have with this Administration and it's respective chickenhawks running things amok. To quote Wenonah Hauter from publiccitizen.com (yes it's a liberal site, in case you're wondering):
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| FirstEnergy, Deregulation and the Bush Administration FirstEnergy may have been the spur of the power outage, but deregulation deserves the overall blame. The Bush administration has pursued a policy of energy deregulation long before the August blackout, and now that policy has come back to haunt us. Bush�s energy deregulation is making America vulnerable for two reasons. First, the United States� transmission system was designed to accommodate local electricity markets, not the large, freewheeling trading of electricity and movement of power over long distances under deregulation. Sending power over a much wider area strains a transmission system designed to serve local utilities. Second, deregulation at the state level means utilities are no longer required to reinvest ratepayer money back into the transmission system, as deregulation replaced that orderly planning with reliance on "the market." But the market has been unwilling to make the necessary investments in transmission. In particular, the market has not functioned properly since loopholes were punched in the Public Utility Holding Company Act (PUHCA) over the past decade. PUHCA, slated for full repeal by the Republicans in both the House and Senate energy bills, is the last federal regulation that requires giant energy companies to disclose crucial financial details and limits the types of non-electricity investments they may make. If PUHCA is repealed, a wave of mergers will likely result, leaving a handful of companies (like Southern Co., ExxonMobil and FirstEnergy) in control of our electricity � with no effective regulators looking over their shoulders. In the case of the August blackouts, the deregulated wholesale markets of the Midwest and Northeast � typically cited as models for national deregulation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission � failed in their ability to provide reliable and affordable power. As a result, wholesale prices remain higher than under regulation, and nearly 96 percent of the 40 million residential consumers in the remaining 15 deregulated states lack access to competitive electricity suppliers. This is the world of energy the Bush administration and its financial supporters envisioned. Of course, no one wanted a regional blackout. But no one was there to prevent it, either. |
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| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 I would also like to add that I feel the primary issue has been touched on but not directly considered as a real culprit to the problem here: deregulation. It is one of the biggest problems I have with this Administration and it's respective chickenhawks running things amok. To quote Wenonah Hauter from publiccitizen.com (yes it's a liberal site, in case you're wondering): |
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Already, there is one major legislative proposal on the table, while many more are expected. The Clinton administration last week unveiled its latest legislative push for deregulation, proposing that consumers be able to pick their own electric provider by January 2003. http://www.opensecrets.org/alerts/v5/alertv5_13.asp |
You're absolutely right Occ, and you nailed the major beef I had with Clinton. I realize that the gal I cited was referring to Bush and the convervatives, but I am opposed to many deregulatory matters regardless of which side of the aisle it comes from. Taken as a whole, however, deregulation has a much greater Repub. backing, as would be expected. Those Dems. who sway with towards deregulation are usually the wishy-washy Dems. that are often the punchline of Republican jokes on liberals being clueless (and I would agree to a certain extent).
Personally I think that deregulation of the energy CAN be a good thing in principle but has been quite unsuccessful in practice. California was a piss poor example simply because its power industry was deregulated at a time when there was insufficient supply to meet the demand, and as such, prices rose in response. Over time I think that a deregulated energy market (with government oversight during the initial phases) can result in a more efficient industry, however, deregulation needs to be implemented SLOWLY with careful monitoring. Eventually competition will put inefficient and overly expensive energy suppliers out of business. At which point the only government role at that point would be to enforce environmental standards. Anyway here's an interesting look-see at states that have deregulated and how successful/unsuccessful they have been in keeping prices down.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/infr.../power/map.php3
That's a good article, and I find myself somewhat in agreeance with deregulation in theory. However as you pointed out, in practice it's another issue. And I do have to ask you about this quote:
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| Originally posted by occrider California was a piss poor example simply because its power industry was deregulated at a time when there was insufficient supply to meet the demand, and as such, prices rose in response. |
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| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 That's a good article, and I find myself somewhat in agreeance with deregulation in theory. However as you pointed out, in practice it's another issue. And I do have to ask you about this quote: Is this a denial of what the Texas energy companies really did to the people of California - things like deliberately shutting down grids and deliberately forcing mass quantities of electricity through smaller holes, so to speak, (like forcing a rushing river of water through a small pipeline), and walking away with $60 billion from the whole fiasco? I guess to a certain extent you are right, supply didn't meet demand, but you certainly can't deny the deliberate acts of Ken Lay and others who purposely created low supply in order to price gouge CA. |
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| Originally posted by occrider No it's not a denial that the power companies did dick over california consumers. I'm saying that because the system was corrupted, it is a poor example of what should happen with deregulation. The federal government should have been on hand to ensure that companies did not engage in monopolistic pricing practices during the conversion phase. Once more companies enter the energy market (a probable lengthy process given the time it takes to build power plants) those monopolistic practices wouldn't work since consumers would simply switch over all their business to other price competitive firms. Thus, perhaps I should have said that California is a good example of how deregulation CAN be abused but a poor example of the benefits of a fully deregulated energy industry. |
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| Originally posted by Renegade Okay, I tried writing a response last night, but Internet fucking Explorer froze about 40 minutes into writing it (that's what I get for trying to load pdf files I guess). Let's try again: |
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No, FirstEnergy are being investigated for causing the blackout. Read from the last article I provided: |
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| Your point being? Not to drag this into a debate along party lines, but at least the Democrats recognised the problems with the current system and attempted to introduce a bill (voted down by the Republicans) to rectify the problem: http://www.thedailyenron.com/docume...32640-93614.asp Meanwhile, despite warnings from the NERC, the Bush administration continued to ignore the issue: [quote] Well now who's making basless speculation? |
... No seriously I was making baseless speculation to make a point. Before writing my reply to you I had a point: To make the bill look evil and Bush look good (not because I necissarily think like that but just because u think the opposite ) And so I read your article and made up a baseless speculation (which to my suprise) actually made some very good and strong points, and (IMHO) made a stronger argument that the FERC is bad and Bush is good, then your conspiracy. | quote: |
| Do you know that the FERC has strong ties with the industry, or does the preface "for all I know" give your grasping-at-straws approach away? |
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| Not really. In fact the new proposal takes the power away from the state, offering instead the creation of "regional transmission organizations to control the flow of power over state lines and oversee the upgrade of the transmission system". I can't say whether such a proposal would open the doors to more "Enron style energy trading" but I can say that the creation of these regional bodies would have gone long way towards preventing the decay of of the transmission lines in Ohio, as it takes autonomy away from the major companies. |
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Now you're starting to get it. |
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| I'll ignore the rest of the part surrounding this quote as I feel that I've addressed it above, but I must take issue with this. So the first rule of Aussie politics is that "Bush doesn't equal good" hmmmm? |
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