Did Bush & Cheney "Order" The Great Blackout? by Cheryl Seal
Baltimore Indymedia, 17 August 2003 -- www.globalresearch.ca 19
August 2003 The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/SEA308A.html
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The timing was way too convenient - just days to weeks before
crucial votes on Bush’s sweeping energy plan and Clear Skies
Initiative - both designed to dramatically overempower and expand
the fossil-fuel-driven electrical power generating industry. After
all, if the 9/11 disaster got G.W. the Patriot Acts, why shouldn’t a
massive power outage get him "Energy Acts"? The timing of the
Thursday blackout was amazingly coincidental. It occurred just weeks
before Bush plans to shove a sweeping energy plan through Congress
that will not only force America to be ever more dependent on fossil
fuel for decades to come, but will turn the American electrical
utility system into a giant megacorporation sans competition, sans
recourse by consumers.
It also occurred just as Bush’s sick-joke of an alternative to the
Clean Air Act, ‘The Clear Skies Initiative’ was facing a very
uncertain future -as of August 5, Bush had resorted to using the EPA
website as a ‘sales promo’ for the plan (see
http://www.epa.gov/clearskies/) to try to drum up public support he
was highly unlikely to obtain. The Clear Skies scheme, hiding behind
its deceptive corporate euphemism, would give the electrical power
generation industry a license to pollute: According to David Doniger
of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Clear Skies will allow
power plant carbon emissions (the top greenhouse gas) to increase by
up to 16 percent between 2000 and 2010 -and this at a time when the
ravages of global warming are becoming alarmingly obvious and air
pollution related asthma among children have been steadily climbing.
Says Vivian Stockman of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition: "If
there were requirements for truth in government labeling, the ‘Clear
Skies ’ initiative would be called ‘Clear Lies.’ This is just
another sadly typical case of doublespeak, which the administration
uses in attempts to hide the truth about its environmental
policies."
The Bush energy plan, also up for consideration in Congress, is
nearly as bad, aiming just a little lower, at the pocket instead of
the lungs. Here’s how the New York Times put it in their August 15
edition:
"The focus of the energy bill has been on a controversial plan from
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to rewrite power grid rules
and require U.S. utilities to join super-regional grid groups...The
industry needs about $50 billion to $100 billion in new investment,
according to the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry
funded group in Palo Alto, California."
What this would mean, physically, is the construction of an
unbelievably massive, unbelievably ugly network of giant new power
lines marching across the countryside. This means that millions of
acres of land could be claimed by the federal government as ‘public
domain.’ Your nice little suburb or farmhouse could soon be sitting
in the shadow of power lines and/or switching stations.
What this will mean, economically, is disaster for the consumer.
Bush plans to deregulate the industry as well as calling for tens of
billions in grid ‘upgrades.’ To the average electrical engineer, an
upgrade would no doubt mean a renovation of an existing utility. To
Bush, an ‘upgrade’ means handing his corporate pals billions of
dollars and a license to screw the public, environment, and future.
In fact, when the Farr Amendment was introduced in 2001, calling for
funds to be devoted to real grid upgrades, guess who killed it? Yep:
Bush & Co. In any case, does anyone not a permanent resident of
Romper Room seriously imagine that this will not translate into
skyrocketing power bills -a cost that will hit the poor, the ill,
small business, and strapped local governments the hardest? What
truly shows the Bush lie in his quest for new power plants is that
there is NO POWER SHORTAGE. There is in fact a SURPLUS of power in
the U.S. It is just the distribution system needs an
overhaul -which
can be done with sophisticated computerized distribution centers and
interfaces that more efficiently shunt power from place to place.
What is truly ironic is that this week’s power failure occurred in
the area where the power industry had been most deregulated! In the
Mid-Atlantic, by contrast, the grid was able to protect itself from
the cascade and customers remained unaffected. Yet Bush will without
doubt start pushing immediately for deregulation as part of his
famous ‘energy plan.’ By the way, isn’t this the same ‘energy plan’
that featured a list of still-secret names? An energy plan that will
be sold using, as an incentive, a massive blackout that held
millions hostage for dozens of hours, and headed up by a list of
shadowy corporate figures whose names are being withheld from the
public in violation of federal law? Yep, sounds like the Bush Reich
to me.
Back to the amazingly coincidental blackout. As soon as it happened,
Bush didn’t miss a beat. Three minutes into his truly cheezy,
semi-lucid statement on the night of August 14 (he acted as if
someone had either just waked him up or sobered him up and shoved
him before the cameras) he was calling for ‘upgrades.’ After a major
disaster of any sort, most leaders, be they mayors or presidents,
don’t bring that sort of thing up as their first issue. The human
element comes first -for the sake of political correctness if
nothing else! What if, standing next to the destroyed WTC towers,
Guiliani’s first comment had been, "Guess its time to get busy
building better towers!"? You would expect that sort of colossally
insensitive comment after a disaster only from a sharkish
contractor...The sort who are now circling Iraq ...not to mention
the Congressional halls where Bush’s energy plan will soon be
debated.
But make no mistake (to use a favorite White House phrase) Bush’s
comment on 8/14 was the statement of a sharkish contractor. He was
making sure, early on, to inject the notion that the power grid
system failed because the whole thing needs to be upgraded and the
only way to upgrade (we will soon be hearing) is through the Bush
energy plan.. He and his henchman will, without doubt, repeat this
fallacy over and over in coming days, just as they did the Al-Queda-
Saddam lie.
Yet Bush, while worrying about contractor-benefiting upgrades,
failed to even at least offer to cancel his fund-raising dinner for
Arnold Schwartzenegger and come back East. This action suggests he
is either more outrageously out of touch with the requirements of
being a leader than we already assumed, or that he knew the power
outage would be a short-lived, non-catastrophic event. Afterall, if
he did not know this to be so, then, as a good leader, he should
have assumed things could get worse before they got better and
planned accordingly.
The very fact that Bush was in California the moment of the blackout
seems orchestrated to me -as if the event had been staged as a crude
way to both distance Bush from the ‘scene of the crime’ and to draw
attention back to the California energy crisis. In the
simple-mindedly devious world of Karl Rove and other White House
schemers, if you hit the public over the head hard and long enough
with the same lie or with the pairing of two images (Al
Queda-Saddam, nukes-Iraq, California-blackouts/energy crisis), they
can, like so many heifers, be steered in any direction you want.
Another suspicious point in the blackout scenario is New York City
Republican Mayor Bloomberg’s ABSOLUTE PROMISE on the afternoon of
8/14 that the power would be back on by Friday. How could anyone
possibly predict this with such certainty -would even dare to, in
Bloomberg’s position of public trust...unless, of course, the knew
the cause for the outage was readily correctable - a temporary
glitch in the system, rather than severe physical damage somewhere.
This is a diagnosis power engineers were not willing to make even
hours after the outage began. Yet Bloomberg made this bold
prediction within an hour of the blackout’s start. That he was wrong
is simply proof that the best laid evil plans of mice and morons
sometime go astray.
The New York grid has a very sophisticated system for responding to
failures at any given point in the system to prevent any cascade
effect. As the engineers are now saying - it shouldn’t have
happened. Not without help, anyway. By the way -if we are all forced
to be on the same super grids, what happens if there is a real
disaster? We (as communities) all go down together? No thank you! I
don’t think any of us wants to become a domino.
All through the night of August 14-15 power engineering experts
across the country were already weighing in on the mysterious giant
blackout in the Northeastern US on radio talk shows and Internet
postings. It shouldn’t have happened, they said -not with the
‘checks and balances’ built into that system. Lightening? No
tangible sign of such an event, say eyewitnesses in the vicinity of
the Niagara Falls Mohawk power plant -in fact, the conditions
weren’t even right. Yes, a ‘point blackout’ could have happened, but
a massive cascade? Something is fishy here. Such has been the
repeated assessment.
My own first observation last night was how very ‘accommodating’ the
outage was of Wall Street: the lights did not go out until the stock
market closed for the day. And it happened on a Thursday, as if to
insure that travel would have a good chance to resume by the weekend.
Now that widespread suspicions are being raised about the cause of
the blackout, and the restoration of power is taking longer than
Bloomberg, et al. predicted, the Bush camp is changing its tune. On
the morning of August 15, Bloomberg asserted that the whole thing
was Canada’s fault! I’m just surprised they didn’t try to blame
France.
I suspect the plan was only supposed to just last a few hours, just
long enough to create high anxiety and chaos (without high anxiety
and chaos, Bush cannot remain unimpeached for long), and make a
nifty case for the Bush energy plan and Clear Skies Initiative. But,
just as the ‘smart bombs’ in Iraq were not so smart after all, the
Bush blackout plan has not proved to be such a sweet off—and-on
operation. Instead, it is going to cost America a packet -in fact,
probably at least as much as all the money just returned in tax
cuts.
Of course, the prolonged nature of the blackout in New York could
have a more sinister cause: Could it be that the plucky, unperturbed
response of New Yorkers wasn’t what the Bush Reich was hoping for?
And that the prolonged blackout in miserable heat is just the
Reich’s way of putting the screws to their victims, pushing them to
the desired point of desperation where they will gratefully (Bush
hopes) ‘sign away their firstborn?’ My bet is that New Yorkers are
made of sterner stuff than this and the Bush scheme will still fail
to bring them to their knees.
What Zapped the Northeastern Grid? An Electromagnetic Pulse -or a
Failure to Follow the Rules?
So what modus operandi could someone use to disable the entire
Northeastern power grid? The favorite conspiracy theory being
fielded so far is an EMP, or electromagnetic pulse. As of the night
of 8/16, the Freeper brigades were out in force, trying to divert
public attention by planting outlandish and outlandishly varied
theories via call-ins to radio shows and postings on the Internet.
However, the US Military has being seeking to develop EMP weaponry
capable of disabling aspects of enemy infrastructure, especially
communications systems. A strategically targeted ‘zap’ by such a
weapon could, theoretically, have achieved the desired effect.
Here’s an excerpt from ‘Above Top Secret,’ a website dedicated to
recording such developments as EMP:
"Commercial computer equipment is particularly vulnerable to EMP
effects, as it is largely built up of high density Metal Oxide
Semiconductor (MOS) devices, which are very sensitive to exposure to
high voltage transients. What is significant about MOS devices is
that very little energy is required to permanently wound or destroy
them, any voltage in typically in excess of tens of Volts can
produce an effect termed gate breakdown, which effectively destroys
the device. Even if the pulse is not powerful enough to produce
thermal damage, the power supply in the equipment will readily
supply enough energy to complete the destructive process. Wounded
devices may still function, but their reliability will be seriously
impaired. Shielding electronics by equipment chassis provides only
limited protection, as any cables running in and out of the
equipment will behave very much like antennae, in effect guiding the
high voltage transients into the equipment. "
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/ebomb.html
A far less exotic scenario is that someone at one of the
northeastern power stations caused the cascade simply by failing to
follow the
rules -intentionally
or unintentionally. As one engineer put it during an interview on
August 15, in the deregulated system , the rules are now ‘suggested’
rather than mandatory. Even if caught, the guilty party would not be
technically culpable.
In any case Bush and Co. have a lot to answer for. Maybe it’s time
they started.
THE ENERGY PLOT THICKENS....
Now, to another important aspect of the contrived ‘energy crisis’
and the issues surrounding it. Ironically, I had started the
following article several hours before the blackout, on the morning
of the 14th. August 14 Decision by Bush Administration Panders to
the Ohio Valley Coal Industry -Leading Supplier of Coal to the Power
Industry
"Daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County, Down by the
Green River where Paradise lay? I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too
late in asking, Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away."
-Appalachian Folk song
When it came to handing more power over to the already-bloated media
through the proposed changes in FCC regulations, the Bush
administration gave the public the bum’s rush, allowing barely 6
weeks for comments and refusing to extend the public input period.
Now, the coal industry is trying to fight proposed regulations that
would protect the ravaged Appalachian environment from the
devastating effects of lopping off the tops of mountains to cheaply
extract the coal there. This hideous practice is ruining formerly
pristine mountain streams and rivers. It isn’t too surprising that
there have been extremely few public comments OPPOSING the proposed
protective regulations.
So what does the Bush administration do? It extends the deadline
period. Not by the paltry two or three weeks the FCC issue got, but
by over four months (130 days) to January 4, 2004. That will give
the corporazis plenty of time to mobilize their Freeper brigades,
who will do their damnedest to ‘stuff the ballot box.’
Of course, the Bush case justifying ‘topping’ is based on the
supposedly urgent need for more and cheaper coal to fuel new power
plants. And, the need for new power plants, of course, has just been
oh-so-conveniently ‘highlighted’ by the mysterious power blackout.
This event, with astonishingly opportune timing, occurred the very
day it was announced that the time for ‘comments’ on the mountain
topping had been extended. No doubt Bush & Co. imagined that the
public would rush right out and clamor for mountain top coal as a
way to avoid another blackout.
To read about just how deep into the pocket of the coal industry this
administration read the following article, a reprint from last
Spring. Peabody Coal Company Barons Top Cheney's Secret Energy Task
Force List
http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/3847/index.php
CURIOUS TIMELINE
August 5: Bush’s Clear Skies Initiative, designed to all but
overturn the Clean Air Initiative and give power-generating
utilities a license to spew the worst greenhouse gases into the air,
unrestricted, faces a stiff uphill battle in Congress in the coming
weeks. The Bush EPA creates what amounts to a sales pitch for the
Initiative in its website. But opposition to the initiative is
building, especially with the summer’s abundant evidence of global
warming.
Morning of August 14: In the Ohio Valley, in the coal-mining
district, the coal industry has aggressively been seeking to block
regulations prohibiting them from trashing the environment by
loppipng off the tops of mountains to mine coal - a practice that
has been devastating rivers and streams, and desecrating the
landscape. But, so far, the public input period for regulations has
yielded an overwhelming majority of anti-mining comments.
Morning of the 14th: the Bush administration allows the period for
public comment to be extended, outrageously, until January 4.POINT
TO REMEMBER: The number one consumer of coal from the Ohio Valley is
the ELECTRICAL GENERATION INDUSTRY.
Morning August 14: Bush in California, distancing himself from the
Northeast by 3,500 miles and placing himself at the site of the last
massive electricity crisis, a crisis that proved to have been
largely engineered by Ken Lay and other energy barons looking for
easy billions.
Afternoon of August 14: an inexplicably huge blackout hits the
Northeast, including the Ohio Valley.
Evening, August 14: Bush makes a three-minute statement that
includes a call to upgrade the national power grid (and by
extension, of course, the energy generating system, regulations and
all). He will repeat this call every single time he speaks for the
next 24 hours (and no doubt beyond)
Evening of August 14:Several possible causes for the blackout are
being fielded, but many people in the industry express suspicion
that it was "engineered."
Afternoon of August 15 It now being suggested in the mainstream
media that the power outage originated in the OHIO VALLEY.
Here’s hoping that the future timeline does not include an entry
citing the fear-driven, no-questions asked passage of the Clear
Skies Initiative and Energy Plan by Congress.
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"Power Outage Traced to Dim Bulb in White House: The tale of the
Brits who swiped 800 jobs from New York, carted off $90 million,
then tonight, turned off our lights. " Greg Palast at
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/PAL308A.html
"Refresher" from 2001: Bush Energy Plan to Heavily Feature
Coal-Fired Power Plants...burning Ohio Valley Coal
http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/05/17/bush.coal/
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© Copyright Cheryll Seal 2003 For fair use only/ pour usage
équitable seulement