Welcome to the Frozen Economy
July 16th, 2008If I refer to Southern California as a death trap, what do the population centers of the North East represent?
Via: Business Week:
The Polar ice cap may be melting, but the U.S. economy is frozen, starting right here in my small town. Gradually rising levels of dismay at the gas pump and in the supermarket gave way to paralytic shock last week when “lock-in” notices from the local fuel company arrived. This year’s advance price for home heating oil is nearly twice what people paid last year. A collective gasp of disbelief from my tough, resourceful Maine neighbors echoed across the meadows and up the rocky coast. Many claimed they would never sign the contract. “What’s your alternative?” I asked a friend.
“I don’t have one,” he muttered.
In the days that followed, a new quality of dread settled over the place like soot, as people weighed their options. Heat or food? Gas or electricity? Medicine or mortgage payments? What to give up? What to cut back? The conversations were everywhere. In the supermarket, I heard one man tell another: “When I was a kid, you woke up, went into the bathroom, and broke up the ice in the toilet. Now my kids will have to do the same. America is moving backward.”
My neighbors are like deer caught in the headlights: frozen in fear as something sinister, implacable, and wholly unanticipated lurches toward them. A reckoning has begun to unfurl like a dark flower, slowly at first, then gathering urgency and force. This is not a short detour after all, but an untraveled road to an unknown place from which there is no return, no escape…and we are not prepared.
Research Credit: JoKerHill
What I thought would happen a couple of years ago is finally happening; traffic is down 22% this year on our 1 highway (95), most business are down however a few are doing better. Call it a stock pickers market! Those that are doing better tend to service the wealthy who are apparently still spending. We also have a large canadian presence so the weak dollar actually helps in that regard. For reference I own a hotel in southern maine, we are up year over year largely due to canadian tourists.
Here in the U.S.(pre-Bush) we used to have a LAW, the Public Utilities Holding Act (PUHCA)- this link provides an analysis,
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/ftproot/electricity/0563.pdf with regard to electricity generation. But the key is the EPACT of 1991. As one might recall, this policy was formulated in a closed door meeting that the U.S. General Accountablity Office,(GAO) for the first time in its history, supeonaed 9sp) the U.S. Government for records of its deliberations, and Cheney invoked Executive Privelege, and access was denied.
The beauty of the repeal of PUHCA is that Enron’s, trading in natural gas arose, and well, sheesh, as U.S. taxpayers, we get to absorb the cost of these folks now being able to gamble in the markets again, and just as in the 1930’s – the conditions from which the PUHCA law was written I think we are experiencing the beginning effects of a free-for-all unregulated energy industry. Actually, industry could give two shits about you and me and our utility bills.
Its a free for all out there, and I think the only solution is to vote the bums out. We can’t do anything else (except maybe apply to our utilities for amnesty). Good luck.
I’ve worked for a water and sewer utility and we cut peoples’ service off after they didn’t pay their $4.85 bills for 90 days. That was many (20 years) ago.
I don’t know what the answer is.
I bought a wood burning stove to heat the bottom level of our home several years ago. Every time I see the bill for our natural gas heat I want to throttle someone. The person that comes to mind is the trader who lost billions on his trades in natural gas (longs or shorts, I don’t recall). But yeh verily, the corporations will regain the bottom line on their balance sheets from that one wager, and yeh verily, they couldn’t care less who freezes, starves, goes broke or blind in the process of doing so.
Repeal of PUHCA means utility providers no longer have to put back their earnings into improving utility lines, etc.
They can take your money now and buy shares in well, whatever they want to.
We live in a “world” created not for and by the people, but in world where the laws have been re-written to benefit corporations who want to rock and roll our world and our lives.
I say vote the bums out. Re-enact PUHCA.
Vote the bums out?
Won’t do any good.
“Meet the new boss! Sames as the old boss…”
–The Who