The Corporate Media's Censorship of the historic public vs. Private Power battle.
The following piece is based on work from numerous sources and represents the research I personally done while working on as unyet published book. The scope of how the media has censored this country's historic public vs private debate over electricity is classic in that nobody seems to understand how all of these massive development projects exist all over the country other than the fact that republicans have opposed them from the beginning. Yet, thanks to a huge national battle there they are! TVA, BPA, CVP, LA Water and Power, SMUD, etc. If enough people hear the fact that there is a 70 year battle to shut out any fair coverage of public powever vs. private, it could once again be used to leverage control back from the private industry that has no intrust in serving the best interests of the public. After the 1928 stock market collapse, FDR was able to rally enough political force to install major regulatory changes in the way this country did business that lasted up until 2005. Unless energy strategists and environmentalists act we could be endangering the country to another depression unless we reinstate the two critical New Deal laws Republicans recently killed. When the next big energy crisis hits will we be ready to rally the public to turn the tide of corporate rule over our energy policy?
There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that this country has two very different versions of where things need to go about energy policy. Private corporations have had exclusive control of this country's energy agenda since the death of FDR, other than a short period during Jimmy Carter and the OPEC crisis. The problem lies with the fact that our energy policy is in private hands that only gives us second hand access to how this country produces and uses energy. This issue plays a key role why we are seeing a greater disparatey between the very wealthy and the rest of society.
The recent pro-industry drilling agenda of the Bush administration is a good example of of this. Anyone who has been involved in energy policy can tell you what we are up against. At the peak of the 2001 energy crisis in California t
he SF Chronicle published an article that exposed the fact that the state's major utilities were behind the destruction of the popular renewable energy programs of the 1980's. Just like the recent Bush drilling tactic followed a huge spike in prices, Californians were manipulated by unscrupulous industry tactics that killed any energy debate other than the industry agenda.
Don't swiss brokerage numbers...
MSNBC's Keith Olberman (June of 2008 release) exposed Enron's secret 2000 Gore vs. Bush election crisis amendment that deregulated online energy markets. It was that Enron waiver that has played a key role in gaming up the current price of gas. Olberman laid out
Wendy Gramm's role as the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under GHW BUSH that first opened up the door for Enron's speculative agenda on energy markets. She would then leave the Commission to take a job on
Ken Lay's board at Enron. Gramm's husband is former Senator
Phil Gramm(r-Texas), who until after this piece had broke had been
John McCain's top financial adviser. Yeah, the same guy that made the "Americans are a bunch of Whiner's" statement. After leaving the Senate, Gramm would go on the board of
Union de Banques Suisses, the largest bank in Switzerland and the company that bought up Enron's energy market business after they went bankrupt. But the piece fell short of looking closer at the bigger picture.
Has anyone noticed the rather interesting fact that the Bush nuclear renaissance erupted worldwide, not just in the U.S. Unless we unravel this Gordian knot we may not see what hit us when their next salvo hits.
Australia's Sharon Beder put it together with
her book "Power Play: The fight to control the world's Electricity". The book is a summary of the last 100 years of electricity and its evolution here in the U.S. But should anyone be surprised to realize that with the advent of the World Trade Organization, one of its first global campaigns was the deregulation of electric energy markets worldwide. If you get the picture here, doesn't this begin to sound a lot like Darth Vader's (Dick Cheney) trade federation?
The country's democrats mounted full scale counter attack when Bush called for the overhaul (destruction) of FDR's Social Security Act. But where were they when the republicans erased two of the other most important New acts -
The Glass Steagall Act and the
1935 Public Utilities Holding Company Act?
Today, there isn't more than one person in a thousand that would know what these two laws were and that they were two of the biggest political battles during FDR's News Deal.
Oh, and did I mention that it was Texas Senator Phil Gramm that led the fight to kill the Glass-Steagal Act in 1998-9?
But what is so important about the Glass-Steagall Act and why would after 66 years on the books Phil Gramm and the republicans want to repeal it? Well, its part of one of the most censored stories in this country's history, and its about time that everyone person who cares about the future finds out about it.
You wouldn't know it today, but Franklin Roosevelt won the presidential election of 1932 based on a public power vs. private power campaign. Every so often Americans hear a soundbyte of
FDR's famous inaugural speech that at one of the darkest moments in this country's history that fear itself is what the country needed to shake itself from. Most of the rest of that speech and his campaign was founded upon the country's anger at corporate america at that moment in time. And folks, there were some really solid reasons that anger that some would not have us remember.
In a nationwide political battle that stretched from Morgan and Edison's Pearl street station to the creation of the world's largest hydroelectric power system (Central Valley Project) in California, this country had witnessed one of the most vicious dirty battles this country has ever seen.
And it was the Glass-Steagall Act that helped stop the corporate forces that were waging that dirty battle against public control of electricity. After years of investigation the Federal Trade Commission put together an 80 plus volume report investigating the syndicated brokerage fronts that were using bank money to take proxy control of this country's largest companies.
It was Karl Thompson's Confessions of the Power Trust that documented the details of the report and and the FTC's findings. A story that so very few have ever heard. Yet, there can be no doubt that Franklin Roosevelt knew of the report. It spelled out the agenda of how big money was being used to attack the wonderful alternative to privately electric generation, led by JP Morgan and his
General Electric Company. I'm not gonna spill all the details of my research or Mr. Thompson's book, but one story must be told that has immense implications right up to the present. After JP Morgan bought out Thomas Edison in 1892 to form the General Electric Company, he would create the Electric Bond and Share Group as a vehicle for the retirement money of the companies workers. In 1927 when the FTC started its investigation it was the largest holding company in the country holding proxie control of dozens of major U.S. corporations and the largest group of electric companies in the world, along with control over companies in Asia, Central and South America. A brief reminder here. Morgan was the largest investment banker in the U.S. who had played a major role in guilded era of railroads, that organized the U.S. Steel, AT&T, not to mention General Electric. But it was also Morgan who was playing a huge role behind the National City Company's syndicated brokerage front that was on the verge of creating a new electric monopoly company. National City Company is known today as CitiCorp. And it was Morgan and National City that sent Chicago's Commonwealth Edison down in the largest bankruptcy in electric history until Ken Lay.
In 1932 Sam Insull the head of Commonwealth Edison and its Middlewest holding empire into the office of National City desperately seeking a loan that would stave off bankruptcy. As Insull sat waiting for enter, top Morgan people would walk into president Mitchell's office and demand that the loan not be given to Insull. Insull and Morgan had not been on the best of terms. It was Insull who had been in charge of Edison Electric and had built it up as a major company prior to Edison selling it to Morgan. It was Insull who had come up with the winning strategy to allow state control of electric companies over Morgan's angry insistance that government play no role in regulating the budding electric industry during its earliest years.
But Insull who was no innocent lamb would quit his 65 plus chairmanships on boards and flea the country when his empire went down leaving hundreds of thousands of families who had invested their life savings in his stock promotions, sending the Chicago and much of the middle west into an even worse depression.
It would be the Insull empire collapse that would be FDR's top campaign platform issue that won him election barely 6 months later. And FDR wasn't making any idle threats when he spoke about changing things when taking office. Few today know the depths of the hatred for what he stood for. Few will know that there was an attempt on his life just weeks before taking office. The mobster with the gun had his hand hit at the last second killing the mayor of Chicago rather than Roosevelt. The banks in fear of the coming changes started pulling the country's gold out of the country that he stopped the day he took office, ordering the country's banks closed. And on May 21st 1933 it would be this country in the long forgotten
Pecora hearings where it was disclosed that Morgan was an agent for the Bank of England, paid no taxes showed his disdain for the little man.
It would be Morgan who finance the formation of RCA, NBC and the immense
Time Magazine empire that Henry Luce would use to promote one of Electric Bond's top men, Wendell Wilke to later run against FDR in a later presidential campaign. It would the Pecaro hearings that gave FDR the public support to put in place the lass-Steagall Act that Phil Gramm took off the books in 1999. The act of breaking up the broker banker syndicate would send over 300 vice presidents in charge of many of the largest companies in the world scurrying out the door of National City Company in 1933.
After two more years of investigation the 1935 Public Utilities Holding Company Act would be passed to lock current electric companies in state controlled regions, and ordering the dismantling of the giant holding companies of the Electric Bond(EBASCo) group and several others. It would be EBASCo that would fight PUHCA in court for another decade before finally being forced to dismantle its empire. Today, it is now part of the military contractor Raytheon.
It was Thompson's book and those hearings that documented scandal after scandal that represent the very tactics that we see today of use red baiting tactics, not to mention the take over of the nearly the entire country's publishing industry to stop the people of this country from hearing the truth that city's like Los Angelse, Seattle and Cleveland had prooved that publicly owned electric systems could be cheaper and serve the public far better than privately owned companies. Instead of public debates on public vs. Private ownerships the corporate public relations industry took on its first nationwide campaign of smearing public power as a communist conspiracy to take over the country.
It would be Morgan's NBC radio network that would be used to promote the private PR tactics across the country. From the renaming of Hoover dam to the largest public works projects the world had ever seen, FDR would change the face of this country forever with the TVA, BPP and CVP projects. But his crowning glory was the formation of the Rural Electric Cooperative initiative that would finally bring electricity to the rural and poor areas of the country that the private companies refused to serve. This included most of the midwest, and southeast.
But one project stands out like no other. It was California's Central Valley Project (CVP) that would play a central role in making California the most powerful economic force outside of Wall Street in this country. Conservative forces that had ruled the state had no interest in letting FDR or any other big government agenda weasel in on their interests. The state's powerful Southern Pacific Railroad empire, which included Pacific Gas & Electric Company would wage all out PR warfare against the construction of the CVP. But they failed thanks to the dynamic leadership of FDR's republican lawyer Harold Ickes who had been put in charge of the Interior Department.
What makes the story of the CVP so bitter is what happened as the project came to its completion in 1945. FDR had died and Truman had pushed Ickes out of power. In a move that PG&E had learned many years earlier when it used its Southern Pacific resources to steal the Hetch Hetchy system from the public in July of 1925, the company filled a subcommittee of friends to cut all the funding for the massive Friant and Shasta dam's transmission system. With no funds to transmit power to the planned cooperatives across northern California PG&E would build the transmission lines up to the dams, forcing the government to contract with PG&E to transmit the power. It killed the cooperative movement, quickly making PG&E the largest electric company in the country. Guess who PG&E's bank of record was up to the passage of the Glass-Steagal Act? Yup, you guessed it. National City Company.
And it would be PG&E that would go bankrupt over Enron's invasion of California 65 years later because President Clinton gave Enron the only executive waiver of the 1935 PUCHA law that locked electric companies into regional areas of the country.
Today, more than ever, its time to bring back the long lost story of how the corporate media and its historic predecessors mounted a nationwide media campaign to stop the popular public campaigns that peaked under FDR to deliver cheap electricity to everyone in this country. The public power and water campaigns of long ago resulted in the corrupt water companies of the past all disappearing, to be replaced by public water programs. We could bring up the collosal manipulation of those programs in the west by corporate Agribusiness, but that's another story. Today, few would know of the battles that started a century ago against the greed and corruption of our country's natural resources and in particular the battle over electricity. For decades, republicans have championed annual legislative campaigns to privatize every single public works project in the country with the TVA, CVP, and even the Dept. of Energy on their list.
As the older democrats who remember the real battles of the New Deal slowly faded from public life so has any public memory of those battles, thanks to the corporate media and the companies who have been waiting for 70 years to bring back the agendas of the Guilded Age, with the destruction of Glass-Steagall and PUHCA.
Isn't it about time to recognize the fact that it is only a matter of time before the very same promises that the 1996 Telecommunications Act were never kept, flooded the banks with the money to reconstruct AT&T, we can be assurred of the fact that a new super company will soon emerge from the Market insiders who will use a new national electric company to drive off oversite and public control at the state level.
finish with the Nebraska refusal to go for Insull PUC strategy.