On Sat, Oct 19, 2002 at 12:34:03AM -0700, Doug wrote: > My opinion, continually being reinforced by the emerging evidence, is > that without deregulation and devious, colluding, corrupt energy > companies, we would have barely noticed the shortages experienced in > '99-'00 however real they were.
What I read some time ago is that they bungled the deregulation. That the last-mile power companies were still regulated, but the upstream suppliers to those power companies were deregulated (i.e., if end-user demand goes up, the end-user power companies are not able to raise prices the way they could in a free-market, but they pass the increased demand onto the upstream suppliers who DO raise prices, and the end-user power companies get crushed in the middle). If that is true, it is clearly a recipe for disaster and the other things you mention are just opportunistic businesses doing everything they can, legal or no, to take advantage of the already bad situation. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
