Deregulation failure may end

People agree: Utility deregulation is a bigger failure than, well, everything.

We knew it was a cause of the electric woes that have plagued America this decade. Take California, for instance. (No, don't literally take California. We need it.) For decades, California's electric industry was overseen by the legislature to ensure better service and affordable rates. This stopped in 1996 under the right-wing rule of Gov. "Poopypants Pete" Wilson. Wilson wasted $20,000,000,000 of the taxpayers' money to bail out utility monopolies for their previous stupid mistakes. Then, after electric rates were frozen at artificially high levels for 4 years, power companies were pretty much deregulated altogether. Greedy electric monopolies went offline, reducing electricity supply and driving up prices.

This also led to the blackouts that afflicted the Golden State. However, areas that used public utilities instead of relying on the corporate ogres were immune to the blackouts.

Peep Ohio. Utilities there are supposed to be regulated by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio - PUCO, or Puke-O, as we call it. In recent years, Ohio's corrupt Republican machine has packed Puke-O with corporate-friendly commissioners. The situation got so bad that Puke-O is ranked in the top 5 most anti-consumer utility commissions out of all 50 states.

Ohio's lack of oversight over money-grubbing utilities caused the Northeast blackout of 2003. This failure was ushered in when a tree branch touched a power line (after an electric company failed to trim its trees). This finally put into gear the development of new federal rules to levy stiff fines on electric companies that dodge national standards for making the power grid more reliable - but the rules came too late to prevent that crisis. In Ohio, however, utilities and their Puke-O friends were undeterred and did what they could to keep on deregulating.

But whaddya know! Now, for the first time in years, Ohio's governor is…a Democrat! The scoundrels of the Republican machine didn't know what hit 'em following last year's election. (But it was funny.) So now the truth finally emerges. The truth being that the Buckeye State's deregulation "experiment" has been a colossal disaster.

Pretty soon, these deregulation policies will be coming to a close. And in the past few years, Ohioans sure have suffered! (That's an inside joke from the 1988 presidential campaign.) Almost everybody agrees that deregulation was a disaster that brang higher costs and worse service, and that state oversight over the industry must be reestablished.

So the moral of the story is: Poop all over rightism. It's useless.

(Source: http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070820/NEWS01/708200362)