The Energy Racket

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What does energy have to do with us?

Are we not able to get electricity from "the grid" and fill our vehicles' tanks with various types of hydrocarbon combustibles - all for a reasonable price?

Energy is one of the areas where a potentially desastrous monopoly is controlling what goes and what doesn't. Potentially desastrous because monopolies have the nasty habit of charging whatever the market will bear, and wiping out the competition wholesale. Contemplating our energy future under such a monopoly leads to nasty visions of having to make an economic decision whether to take a drive or turn on the washing machine. It also means that we're losing out on the positive side - what could we do with a cheap and practically unlimited supply of energy? I leave that to your imagination.

In any case, energy is not something to leave to the big players. That's a sure recipe for desaster. On the other hand, our own, personal choices and decisions will shape our energetic future.

Industry cannot possibly go against the wishes of the end user for any length of time. Competition will spring up and take the monopoly out of business. Sometimes there are "accelerating events" such as the recent Eastern US power outage. People start thinking seriously about where their energy comes from and whether there are any alternatives.

A discussion of this and other interesting food for thought can be found in the Integrity Research Institute's Future Energy eNews - latest edition - to be published August 25, 2003.

An article by Jon Rappaport of www.nomorefakenews.com is also interesting. Rappaport comes to the conclusion that the great blackout event was intentional - not just a freak surge in the grid as government investigators seem to suggest.

FURTHER UPDATES ON THE GREAT BLACKOUT

AUGUST 19. I now have a number of credible reports from people within the area of the blackout. These reports indicate that car radios went out just prior to, or as, the blackout started. Also, I have reports of people in three different states---Ohio, Michigan, and New Jersey---hearing sounds like thunder about the time the blackout began. One person in Ohio discovered two interesting things just after the outage descended: a digital clock in the house which had a fairly new battery suddenly displayed a series of non-numerical symbols instead of the time; and the fuse box was too hot to touch.

In light of these reports---and the failure of the mainstream press to take notice of them---we now have to inquire into the failure of many cell phones in the affected areas. This has casually been explained as a "jamming" caused by too many people making calls at once.

One witness in Toronto states that as she and many other people stood outside during the initial evening hours of the blackout, planes were heard flying overhead and the effects of chemical spraying were
felt---stinging eyes, etc.

The fact that electronic devices not connected to the power grid went down or behaved strangely points to an event that took place outside the grid and affected it.

What would that event be?

So far, no sources report significant solar flare activity, although I have a statement that an ACE satellite, which monitors solar activity, stopped relaying data shortly before the blackout. Such a satellite is obviously built to function in the face of solar flares so it can register and transmit data.

However, all in all, the most compelling explanation for the blackout is a directed and intentional electromagnetic pulse originating from outside the power grid. There is no other way to describe such a pulse than as a weapon.

We come to the official investigators' description of the ten-second happening that supposedly triggered the whole blackout. It occurred within the Lake Erie loop portion of the grid, and it involved "an
oscillation." More specifically, 300 megawatts of electricity flowing eastward suddenly turned into 500 megawatts flowing west. As a result, many parts of the system shut down, to avoid damage to equipment.

I have been seeking assessments about these ten seconds. Is it an unusual happening? Yes. Why did it take place? Was it because, as the official investigators suggest, some power generator behind the 300
megawatts suddenly failed. "creating a vacuum"---and because electricity takes the path of least resistance, those megawatts promptly turned around and filled the vacuum behind them?

Apparently, there are canceling safeguards to keep such a thing from happening. Further, a turnaround of 800 megawatts total and 180 degrees in direction is a HUGE event. One that most likely would not be explained by other than some external force applied to the grid from the outside.

A power engineer has suggested I think about these ten seconds using the analogy of a car. I am driving down the highway at a fast clip and then suddenly I'm driving the opposite way at an even faster clip.

If we infer that an electromagnetic weapon was used last Thursday, we can ask, WHO BENEFITS?

Well, there are many levels of answer. But, as I have been writing for the last several days, at one level the beneficiaries are those corporate and government leaders joined together at the hip who are re-creating the whole power industry in the atmosphere of so-called "deregulation."

Energy Secretary Abraham has awakened from his slumber long enough to put a $50 billion price tag on rebuilding the grid to make it thoroughly modern.

On its face, I find this estimate fatuous. If we really have been laboring under a "Third-World grid" all this time, we would already have had a number of nationwide blackouts.

Even the lead investigator, Mr. Gent, rejects that derisive characterization of the grid.

No, the billions of dollars are going to form a gift for power utilities and construction firms that have friends in high places. To say nothing of energy traders who deal, every day, in buying and selling energy futures.

One of those friends is George Shultz. George is a master fixer and negotiator in the political realm. He has recently been moved in to bring Arnold S up to speed on "economic issues" in the CA gubernatorial campaign.

CA, of course, has been hit very hard by corporate energy pirates, and George, as a former secretary of state and, more importantly, the head of Bechtel---a giant construction firm that specializes in power facilities---is going to move CA toward a future of more energy building and re-building projects.

Government gifts and consumer rates will fund these projects. The consumer will not be treated to lower energy bills.

The blackout was a perfect op for setting up a "money oscillation" in the direction of private corporations who want to build new energy projects.

On August 18, Bloomberg Financial News reported that, "for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., North America's biggest power failure may validate their bet on the $13 billion-a-day energy trading market."

This trading market registered a brief upward spike in prices of 800 PERCENT following the blackout.

A commodities trader interviewed for the article predicted that, in the next 20 years, such blackouts will be the norm.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs can only hope.

We should realize that many of the bonds, the sale of which are currently keeping the state government of CA from declaring bankruptcy, are underwritten by Goldman. This means Goldman is guaranteeing the bonds will be sold to its customers---and so they have been.

Now, Goldman is ALSO, in various ways, underwriting the future of energy companies in CA.

Do you think Goldman perceives a connection between its underwriting the state government and the energy companies?

The success of the latter helps insure the success of the former.

There is, in all this, an immense boondoggle underway.

I have, in front of me, an as-yet unconfirmed statement that, on the day prior to the blackout, "the share trading volumes and price appreciation moves in stocks" of various companies that would see upward stock-price spikes in the event of such a blackout showed some interesting activity. That would not surprise me. It would be one more vector in the boondoggle.

Based on the evidence so far available to me, I'm making the judgement that the August 14 blackout was an intentional event.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com

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Future Energy eNews

August 25, 2003

Special Blackout Edition

1) Getting By Without the Grid - TIME discusses the obvious future energy answer that everyone else is ignoring ... power parks, net metering, democratizing energy, moving our own electrons, grid for backup only ... but the horse traders may lose business.

2) Sun on Roof, Yen in Pocket - Japan now generates half of the world's solar power and has overtaken the U.S. as the leading producer of solar panels. Be the only home on your block that doesn't blackout in broad daylight.

3) Europe and America to Develop Hydrogen - Cooperative venture on paper only.

4) Reasons Not to Switch to Hydrogen - Leaks destroy ozone layer; too expensive; CO2 released in manufacture of hydrogen.

5) Renewable Portfolio Standard Analyzed by REPP - Non-profit group finds costs and benefits to be equal on a solar PV installation.

6) Space Elevators may be closer than imagined - NASA has a space transportation idea that will take 20 years before it is finished.

1) Getting By Without the Grid: Politics of Power

by David Bjerklie and Mitch Frank/New York, Rita Healy/ Denver and Laura A. Locke/ San Francisco, TIME, August 25, 2003, p. 36

Can America free itself from the grid and democratize energy?

There's nothing like a multistate summertime blackout to get environmentalists and industry groups throwing spitballs at one another. Extreme greens wag told-you-so fingers and dream anew about a grid-free country, with homeowners generating their own power courtesy of clean, renewable energy sources. Industry types speak instead about building new nuclear or conventional power plants or muscling up existing ones—and delivering all the juice through a modernized distribution system.

In this instance, both sides are right—to a degree. While centralized power will probably always be with us, the best way to upgrade the energy grid may well involve doing away with some of it, democratizing energy production by handing the job off to communities, blocks and even private homes.

Long before last week's blackout, environmentalists and industry researchers had begun evaluating the idea of "power parks"—communities or mere groups of homes that