Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [60]
Both Britain and the United States have been slow to act regarding this growing plague. Make sure, if you have to eat a burger or a steak, to cook that sucker until it’s black. The leaner the meat, the better your chances.
Me? I’m going to stop eating all beef unless someone can prove to me that the PBB I’m hauling around in my innards can vaporize the damn human-brain-eating mad cow parasites.
I’ve thought about just moving to California and becoming a vegetarian. No—wait! Not California. Talk about a place with ecological mayhem afoot everywhere you turn. If the Golden State isn’t being hit with earthquakes, it’s being burned to the ground by uncontrollable wildfires. Whatever the fires don’t destroy, the mudslides finish off. If the state isn’t experiencing a major drought, then it’s being hit with La Niña, El Niño, or El Loco. The West Coast is a crazy place to drop a bunch of humans: I’m convinced that nature never intended for our species to settle there. It just isn’t constructed ecologically for our survival. No matter how much sod you lay down over desert sand or how much water you pump from the Colorado River a thousand miles away, you can’t fool Mother Nature—and when you try, Mother Nature gets really shit-faced.
The Indians figured this out early. Some scientists say there was more pollution in the Los Angeles basin when tens of thousands of Indians and their campfires were there than there is now with eight million cars on its freeways. The Indians couldn’t stand the way their smoke just hung in the air, trapped by the mountains. And when the earth moved and split apart, they got the message and got the hell out.
But not us, California is our dream. Thirty-four million people—one-eighth of our population—are crammed along a strip of land between a mountain range and an ocean. This means manna to the energy companies: thirty-four million suckers to take advantage of.
Welcome, Rolling Blackouts!
Back in the good old days, California’s electricity was supplied by regional monopolies whose rates were set by the state legislature. Then, in the mid-1990s, deregulation was touted as a, way for the companies to escape the high costs they’d incurred by building nuclear power plants—and as a way to make much more money. One of the most vocal advocates for deregulation was Enron—a major contributor to the Republican party, and George W Bush in particular.
Deregulation went into effect in 1996, thanks to a piece of legislation that took a whopping three weeks to pass and included a $20 billion bailout payment to the California utilities—most of which was used to cover their bad investment decisions of the past. For four years prices were frozen—at above-average levels—but so was competition, which is supposed to increase in a deregulated market. There was a block in effect against new power plant construction, so Californians grew more dependent on out-of-state, independent providers for their power. Thus, on and off for the past year, power has been bought on the daily spot market—at outrageously inflated prices.
Today utility customers not only pay more, they’re forced to go through certain parts of the day without electricity. But it’s not because there isn’t enough power. The Independent System Operator, the California agency that oversees the transmission of electricity, has access to about 45,000 megawatts of power—the amount needed for summertime peak demand. The power companies are holding back as much as 13,000 megawatts of this power by going off-line (for reasons they don’t have to divulge). The Wall Street Journal reported in August of 2000 that 461 percent more capacity