Our beloved government in their infinite wisdon deregulated the utility companies.....they said that owning the power plants and selling the power was a monopoly and they forced them to sell the power plants. This meant that the utilities had to buy their power to sell us...the government also mandated that the utilities were not allowed to pass any of the increased cost of buying the power on to the consumer(us). Not all the power plants owned by the utilities were bought and ended up being moth balled. No new power plants were built...this left us reliant upon companies outside our state. Well....the utility companies have not been paying their bills to the outside companies....they say they are broke. The alternative power sources...solar, wind etc. did not grow enough to take up the slack of the moth balled power plants as expected....in short..we are up a creek without a paddle. The utilities have asked our current Governor...not the one who got us in this mess to begin with...to allow them to increase our utility bill by 33% in 2002 and 76% in 2003. Of course, we don't want that to happen and legislation needs to be passed to do this. In short...we want the power but don't want to pay for the state's mistakes...we pay exhorbitant state taxes already....what good is it doing us????

Bush forced the outside power sources to sell the power to California for two more weeks without any of them getting paid or even having hopes of getting paid in the future...so we have power for a little while...but then what???...no one knows.

Fun, isn't it?