-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! CONGRESS ACTION: April 22, 2001 ================= CALIFORNIA DREAMING: A decade of environmental obstructionism and political pandering has led to a severe energy shortage in power-hungry California. So what do the politicians propose to do to encourage increased energy production? Why, launch an all-out war against energy producers, of course. The following lead from the Los Angeles Times sums it all up: "Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante wants to empower the state to throw power producers in jail. Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer is offering a $50 million reward to anyone who helps him prosecute them for fraud. Senate leader John Burton is calling on the governor to commandeer their plants." That will certainly encourage new electricity production for California. Legislation has been proposed to make it a felony for energy companies, described by California's politicos as "pirates" and "cartels", to charge "unreasonable" and "unjust" prices, and that would impose "windfall profits" taxes. "Unreasonable" and "unjust" prices, of course, can be interpreted to mean anything; and to the leftists pushing California's agenda, any corporate profits at all can be considered "windfall profits". Plans are underway, allegedly, to encourage the construction of numerous smaller capacity gas turbine generating plants on an emergency basis, and the politicos claim to have streamlined California's onerous permitting process to get the systems on-line to supply peak power to California for this summer. But those turbines take time to build, they are in short supply, the natural gas supply system to power them is already strained. And the siting of those turbines is running into the usual roadblocks from the usual suspects -- one prospective site, for example, is claimed to be totally unsuitable because it is too close to the habitat of an endangered species. The priorities of radical environmentalists are clear -- the well-being of humans takes a back seat to the well-being of endangered species. California has several other plans in the works to compensate for their years of neglect. One strategy is to demand that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) revoke the right of utility companies to sell the electricity they produce to the state at market-based wholesale prices. In other words, Californians want the federal government to impose price caps on the power that the utilities sell to the state at the wholesale level. Such price caps will do nothing to encourage the production of additional power; in fact, price caps will have just the opposite effect, reducing the incentive to produce more power by requiring utilities to sell their power at prices that guarantee they will lose money. It was just such a risky scheme of price caps at the retail level that caused the bankruptcy of one utility company in the state already, and threatens the financial health of other California utilities. The governor also has a plan for the state to allocate funds to "bail out" the financially strapped utilities, a move that is being resisted by some state legislators despite the fact that it was their own short-sightedness and the regulatory morass they created that caused the financial troubles in the first place. The state, when it allegedly "deregulated" the utilities, only deregulated half way, allowing the free market to dictate wholesale prices that the utilities paid for power for re-sale, but refused to allow those companies to price electricity at market rates to retail customers. The net result was that as the cost of power increased, the utilities were prohibited from passing on price increases to their retail consumers. When a company has to pay higher and higher prices for raw materials, but is forced to keep selling its product for a low price, the result is inevitable -- losses mount until bankruptcy becomes inevitable. Now we can expect the guilty politicians and compliant media to portray the proposed state financial bail out as "corporate welfare", and an ignorant public will rise up in pre-programmed indignation against bailing out the "greedy" utility companies. POISONED WATER: Environmentalists and lock-step leftists are trying to claim that President Bush wants to poison drinking water, and some ignorant people actually think that Bush wants them to drink poisonous levels of arsenic. Unless you drink distilled water, all drinking water has some level of various impurities in it, including arsenic. The issue is not whether the water you drink is 100% pure -- none is, and it would be prohibitively expensive, and totally unnecessary, to make it so -- the question is whether the levels of impurities in the water are in any way dangerous. So what is the current level of arsenic deemed to be harmless? The present standard is that drinking water can contain no more than 50 parts per billion (ppb) of arsenic. That is the standard that Bush is allowing to remain in force. What level of arsenic was deemed to be harmless during the 8 years of the Clinton/Gore administration? Precisely the same level -- 50 parts per billion. Yet for some reason the media seems to have missed reporting on the tens of thousands of people who were poisoned by arsenic during the Clinton/Gore administration. That's because there weren't any. And for some reason the screeching environmentalists and the brain-dead public didn't clamor that Bill Clinton and Al Gore were trying to poison the drinking water with their 50 ppb standard. Yet in the final days of his last term, among his final blizzard of Executive Orders and hasty regulations, Bill Clinton decided to reduce by fiat the allowable level of arsenic from 50 ppb down to 10 ppb. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) studied the issue and suggested a lower standard should be considered, but didn't specify an acceptable level. All Bush has done is to suspend Clinton's arbitrary standard while the science is further examined. But to radical environmentalists, science always takes a back seat to emotionalism. Yet even that extreme left-winger and Clinton zealot Michael Kinsley has been forced to conclude (in a Washington Post editorial titled "Bush is Right on Arsenic. Darn!") concluded that "10 parts per billion clearly is overregulation." Why? Because there is no science showing any benefit to reducing the level from 50 ppb to 10 ppb, and such a reduction would be enormously expensive. Virtually every city and town water system in the nation would be forced to spend millions of dollars reducing the arsenic levels, incurring enormous costs for no demonstrable benefit. If money was available in unlimited amounts, we might say, so what? But there is not an endless supply of money, as any local politician struggling with a local budget will hasten to point out. For the millions spent by a small town on a phantom benefit to their water supply, how many teachers or police officers could be hired? How much repair could be made to aging schools or public infrastructure? Further, a study by the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies concluded "We find that the rule probably will result in a net loss of life." (emphasis in original) So why did Bill Clinton suddenly decide to reduce the permissible level of arsenic by 80%? Was he mistaken? Misguided? Absolutely not -- he knew precisely what he was doing. And anyone could have predicted exactly what happened. When Clinton tossed the arsenic hot potato to Bush, Bush could have either let the regulation stand, or he could have done just what he did and suspend the regulation. If he let the new rule stand, it would have been the Bush administration that was castigated by local politicians for imposing unnecessary costs on their local budgets. If Bush suspended or revoked the rule, it was obvious that extremist environmentalists, who harbor an undying love for government regulation and a visceral hatred for anything republican or conservative, would seize on that action and portray it as impending doom from arsenic poisoning. Naturally the mainstream media would echo the baseless charges of the environmentalists, and they certainly could be counted on not to point out that the 50 ppb arsenic standard was precisely the same under Clinton as under Bush. And so the myth was born that President Bush wants to poison drinking water by increasing the permissible level of arsenic. And the final piece of the puzzle is the brain-dead public, taking up the charge and running with it, blaming Bush for increasing the level of arsenic in their water. The next time you hear someone whining about how dangerous Bush is for trying to poison their drinking water, have some sympathy -- you are hearing the voice of an ignorant pawn being masterfully manipulated by scheming leftists whose only goal is to destroy the Bush presidency by any means necessary. In honor of this weekend's 31st celebration of "Earth Day", environmentalists are in full hysteria against Bush. "From arsenic in our drinking water to industrial development in protected places, the first three months of the new administration produced a stunning litany of anti-environmental proposals that threaten our health, our communities and our world famous wild places," proclaimed the president of the Wilderness Society. Greenpeace plans Earth Day protests against what they call the "Toxic Texan". Environmental organizations now routinely release statements demanding that Bush halt what they call an assault on the environment. They have it wrong -- President Bush is assaulting the extremism of an environmental movement that has exceeded all bounds of reason; a movement that has crossed the line from intelligent and reasoned conservation and pollution control, into outright fanaticism with an utter disregard for the human losses or financial costs that their agenda imposes. WILL OF THE VOTER: For the last several years, a frontline cause of African-American leaders has been to try to erase any cultural remnants of the Southern Confederacy, with the claim that any honors paid to the cultural legacy of the South in the Civil War is evidence of ongoing racism in America. The most visible symbol of that cultural legacy is the blue battle cross with 13 stars of the Confederate flag contained in some southern state flags. Other states, such as South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, have caved in to pressure and threats of boycotts from the NAACP, and they have removed or reduced the prominence of the Confederate symbol on their state flags. This week, Mississippi was the first state to put the issue to the voters of the state. The results are in -- the voters of Mississippi decided, by an overwhelming margin, that the old flag will remain. And apparently, it wasn't just whites who voted to keep the flag. According to the 2000 census, whites comprise 61% of the state population; yet 65% of voters favored keeping the old flag. That despite the major push by many state political leaders, the media, and the NAACP to change the flag. After the vote, one activist who fought to retain the original Confederate symbol on the state flag summed it up: "We've had enough of people from out of state telling us how we should think." But telling other people how to think is something that leftists view as their own personal entitlement. The only remaining question is whether African-American leaders, including the NAACP, who have been so vocal in claiming that the "will of the voters" was thwarted when President Bush won the election, will accept the will of the voters in Mississippi. That question has, unfortunately, already been answered. In the Washington Post, the head of the Mississippi NAACP was quoted as saying that he would meet with the group's national officials before deciding "on a specific course of action for the State of Mississippi". He was further quoted as claiming that "Mississippi wants to remain in the eyes of the world a racist state." N.A.A.C.P. president Kweisi Mfume issued a statement proclaiming "It is too bad that the voters of Mississippi have chosen to stay buried in the past instead of moving forward into the 21st century. That not withstanding, the NAACP will not give up its fight to remove from public property any and all symbols that celebrate the twisted philosophy of bigotry and hatred in this country." So it seems that the much-lauded "will of the voters" is only relevant to some people when that "will of the voters" agrees with them. FOR MORE INFORMATION. ======================== AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies: http://www.aei.brookings.org/ AEI-Brookings arsenic regulation study (abstract with link to full report in pdf format): http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/abstract.asp?pID=115 Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/ Mississippi population: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/28000.html NAACP website: http://www.naacp.org/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Mr. Kim Weissman [EMAIL PROTECTED] *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. 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