[ilbegone]

Villaraigosa's astounding willful ignorance and determination to push on despite all the facts beating him about the head and shoulders is unbelievable.

His city is broke, I believe his falling apart utility is the only significant contributor to city revenue left, and Villaraigosa and his city council play the part of lemmings in a mad tragicomedy about rates, money transfers, sell offs, lease backs, and "green power" as well as meddling in Arizona's affairs.

I understand DWP has bewildering array of perhaps the lowest electrical rates for housing in the country, and I believe certainly so when compared to neighboring utilities and municipalities.

I have no idea of what the figures are now, but I recall that 20 years ago Edison was required to buy alternative (green) energy at the highest avoided cost of constructing new generation facilities, which I believe was something as preposterous as 4 or even more to 1.

The investor owned utilities were forced to sell off generation capacity by out of touch state politicians in Sacramento who believed that deregulation would force "competition" and lower rates, but all that was accomplished was pulling down the collective pants of Californians who were raped unmercifully by out of state carpetbagger power brokers while FERC gleefully stood by and watched.

That melt down is a large part of why we have our state budget deficit problems now - goofy f-ing politicians thought they would break the utilities by forcing them to buy power high and sell it low, but the utilities shoved it back on the politicians - PG&E by heading towards bankruptcy court and Edison by shifting its capital to legally separate subsidiaries (out of reach of legislative jack asses) and telling the state that it had to finance the over cost from then on or the lights were going off.

I believe that when Edison was forced to divest its generation facilities, the dogs were sold to out of state jackals and profitable facilities were spun off to legally separate subsidiaries.

In the meantime, DWP - a governmental municipality rather than a corporation such as SCE and not forced to divest its generation - made a killing selling overpriced power to the state.

Ok, off my soap box.