Rooked again

Buried in the newly-passed and widely-decried energy bill that's giving big energy companies such a hard-on is a provision that will abolish a 70-year old consumer protection law. The Great Falls Tribune (MT) for Friday has the story.

It's called the Public Utility Holding Company Act (PUHCA) of 1935, which was designed to prevent massive consolidation of electric and natural gas utilities.

The law also includes strict monitoring of utility investments, to prevent companies from siphoning the wealth of utilities into risky investments that go bad, leaving investors or rate-paying customers holding the bag.

Montanans are well aware of the dangers involved, having experienced them twice in the past seven years. First, the state's dominant utility, Montana Power Company, went bankrupt "with startling swiftness" after overinvesting in telcom companies. Then NorthWestern Corporation, the company that bought most of Montana Power's operations, made similar bad investments and also went bankrupt.

The final outcome for Montana electric and natural gas ratepayers isn't clearly known yet, but they're certainly not paying lower rates because of it.

The problem for Montanans was that the federal law applies to holding companies operating across state lines while the Montana companies were intrastate. So ratepayers had no protection against get-rich-quick schemes hatched by their utility companies. And now, neither will anyone else.

Of course, we get all the usual fuss and blather about how this is actually just the greatest thing ever. Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT), noting that the bill provides some extra authority to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, says it "provides even stronger consumer protections than currently exist." Meanwhile,

[t]he private utility industry strongly favor repealing PUHCA. It says the repeal would encourage new and "much-needed" investment in utilities, to upgrade transmission lines, develop new power plants or offer other services for customers, and encourage competition.

"Companies could merge their areas of expertise to meet the demands of customers in Montana and elsewhere," says Jason Cuevas, a spokesman for Edison Electric Institute, the industry's main lobbying arm.

So this will generate investment, improve services, promote mergers while simultaneously creating competition, and add to consumer protection, all at the same time! Wow! Who would have thought it possible?

Of course, we're actually heard all crap before. Every time some industry wants to be free of regulation, to be free of a responsibility to anything other than the bank accounts of their fat cat investors, they trot out that same lines. And it just never seems to work out that way. Lynn Hargis, an energy lawyer at Public Citizen, who said "Enron is just going to look like small potatoes compared to what's ahead," added that

she can't help but notice how the repeal of PUHCA has been promoted with the same promises made prior to utility deregulation: More competition, more services, lower rates, etc.

Those promises haven't come true, she says: "It's very disheartening at this point. ... There will be a reaction from consumers. It's just going to come too late."

And we're screwed again. And again by Dummycrats near as much as GOPpers; 75 Dums in the House voted for that sucker of an energy bill along with 25 in the Senate, in each case providing the margin of victory. Among the Senators going the extra mile for Big Business were "liberals" such as Evan Bayh (IN), Dick Durbin (IL), Tom Harkin (IA), and the libs latest wet dream, Barak Obama (IL).

When are we going to learn about the Democrats that yes, there are individual exceptions, but as a group they are not on our side?