Deregulation SUCKS!

Someone's reading these rants.

I know because I'm being investigated by the California Public Utilities Commission. Really. No jive.

The evidence came in a referring URL logged by another site. It showed a Google search on my name from a computer at CPUC. Really. No jive.

I'm honored. It appears that the Great State Of California is giving serious consideration to my idea of generating electricity by roasting rabbit shit. Either that or they're afraid someone will try it.

It WOULD work, you know. It's called biomass, and people have done it elsewhere using chicken droppings. Since most of California's chicken shit is in the state capitol, I came up with the revolutionary notion of using bunny output instead.

Let's think about rabbit poo for a second. It's not all that heavily processed. It doesn't look a whole lot different from what went into the lagumorph's other end mere minutes before. Mostly the bunny has served to compress absolutely astonishing volumes of biomass into conveniently useable little pellets. Perfect for Bunny Bean Power and Light.

Bunny rabbit owners will agree with me that this resource is also unusually plentiful. As I said last month, before my formal investigation by state authorities, it would not break the leaky bank to send trucks around for the stuff. You'd see them everywhere, with their long hoppers and tight canvas covers. Oh, a few people would probably consider this the invasion of the Black Helicopters, and vow never to give up their shit until dead, smelly hands were pried from it, but we'd still have plenty. Rabbit poo is like this. It's extremely renewable. Along with eating and making little rabbits, it's what bunnies do.

Bunny Bean Power and Light is very easy to engineer. It's far more straightforward than the convoluted electricity market the politicians put together as the only viable alternative. Unlike this latter, it ignores no laws of physics, or even of commerce. You don't have to use a bad-acid version of eBay to buy your electrons, while your wires melt because you're not allowed to generate the alternating moving charges yourself. You just heat the bunny poo, making plenty of methane and other, somewhat more pungent, gases. These burn almost as well as the more expensive stuff that comes out of pipelines from Texas. Once you get the system going, the waste heat serves to roast the next pile of shit. Poopy goes in one end, and electrons come out the other.

Everyone will surely agree that this is a considerable improvement over California's current deregulation system, where political and philosophical poopy go in one end, but nothing comes out the other. No electrons. No money. No progress. Not much of anything, really. Zilch. Politically produced power blackout in 5 minutes, save all work!

Shit.

It's the answer of the Zeroes.

And it's a GOOD one.

Deregulation SUCKS!

Everything you believe is wrong.

Deregulation doesn't work.

Competition is anti-competitive. The big fish eat all the little ones, then nibble on each other.

Neo-liberalism is paleo-conservatism.

The only markets worth trusting sell groceries, and I'm not even too sure about them.

Giving the rich more money has the net social effect of giving the rich more money.

In business, bigger is not better. It's bigger.

More is more.

Look, someone's gotta say all this stuff. The little kids are all absorbed in their video games so beneficently provided them by huge globe-sucking brain-eating media conglomerates, so I'll just have to spoil the parade and shout it out myself:

That's right. There's no there, there. He's not wearing anything. He has no clothes on. He has goosebumps, his fat, hairy belly is starting to turn blue, and his dick has retracted like Jerry Seinfeld's frightened turtle. He's starkers. He's in his birthday suit. He's streaking the empire. He's bare-ass, buck, totally NAKED. His deregulated tailors sold an air-suit, then ran back to their sweatshop in Viet Nam.

Actually, though, in the case of deregulation, the nude emperor is none other than Margaret "The Cow" Thatcher. Yes, THAT Margaret Thatcher, the one who worked for Her Majesty's Government in Britain for some years. THAT Maggie. Naked. Nude. Posing for Life Drawing 101. Starkers. Birthday suit. Buck nekkid. Margaret Thatcher, nude, nude, nude.

What an image. I think I have to stop writing and be sick now.

(Place Commercial Here)

OK, I'm back. That helped.

The California electricity situation is greatly reminiscent of the British privatization situation. That country's post-WWII socialism was clunky, inefficient, and bureaucratic, but mostly it was missing out on a whole bunch of great opportunities to give more money to the rich. Well, Maggie and John and Tony sure fixed THAT problem.

Today we see, with dire clarity, the result of British deregulation/ devolution/ privatization. Britain is no longer inefficient and wasteful. It's just dead in the water. Somewhere between 5000 and 500,000 people will spend the rest of their lives waiting to find out if they are already doomed to a horrible death from bovine brain rot. While they wait, other consequences of corporate farming have presently created whole counties where nobody is allowed to set foot outside. People are piling up the rotting corpses of animals and setting them on fire. They're getting diseases from the daily smoke. In most of the world, cruise passengers are required to clean their shoes before they get off British ships.

Poor Britain is at a total stop, unsteerable, tossing in the 30-foot seas. Tourists are jumping ship. The crew is becoming seasick. Bwahhhhh, splash. I may only be a naive American speaking, but I think I'd prefer a line at the power company to a line at the loo, as my stomach gets ready to do what deregulation always makes it do.

Unfortunately, these nauseating lessons came too late to save California. Sometimes we have a great notion. Other times we think up total bullbananas, and guess which one we churned out this time. Acting on the advice of such altruistic disinterested observers as Edison, Duke, and Enron, we put the free market to work on our electric prices. We entrusted nothing less than the entire future of the state to the immanent and self-evident "wisdom of the free market" as it's called on more than one big-energy web site.

At this point, you're most likely thinking I'm smoking those funny fat little cigarettes that we make out here. What do I mean, markets that think? I've gotta be hallucinating.

Well, I'm not. Do a Google and see for yourself. I just got 37,000 hits, and nearly all of these people are most definitely under the impression that free markets have wisdom. That they think. That they're the socioeconomic version of Gaia. That they generate a deep, powerful harmony straight from the Divine.

I've been trying to check this out. Every time I drive past the grim, monolithic, corporate erections downtown, I ask this imposing center of unfettered commerce if there is a God. Downtown hasn't answered me yet. It's not wise. In fact, it's even too stupid to laugh and say, "There is now, serf!"

Not that I expected any different. I know from sad experience just what free markets think. They think suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck suck. They have the exact same thoughts as a mosquito, which under certain conditions will suck blood until it explodes all over everything. Suck suck suck suck suck suck suck. Just keep going. Get it. Get it all. Free markets suck.

I mean, get over it, people. You've been had. The mosquitoes are running the blood bank. Deregulation is nothing more than a trendy government buzzword for legal market manipulation. It's the same thing most kids learned in the third grade. Let's say you had a 5-cent lemonade stand. You caught on pretty fast that you could threaten to beat up any other kids who wanted to sell cold drinks, and when the summer came you could get fifty cents for the stuff every time.

Now, Mommy probably got wind of your game, and told you in no uncertain terms that good children didn't play that way. Which, of course, was true. They didn't, and they still don't. However, energy companies and their bought-off pols have no such scruples. In fact, it's hard to tell one from the other, as they all get in on the action. The president of the United States sucks. The vice-president of the United States sucks. Even the guy who lost, oops, I mean won but then lost, sucks. Everyone sucks. The mosquitoes have come home to roost.

Our state's hard-won budget surplus, which was supposed to belong to us, is headed for Texas. It won't fix our schools. It won't fix our roads. It won't hire cops. It won't save forests. In fact, it won't do a damn thing for us, even though we paid into it, because it is GONE. It has been sucked. Mostly, it'll buy more fur coats like the ones you saw at the inauguration. Except for the protests, that inaugural REALLY sucked.

In fact, it's currently estimated that every man, woman, child, and small dog in this state will ultimately get sucked for about $10,000 of their own money to fix this mess. And you know where that will wind up. Hint: it's the name of an old prime time TV soap opera. No, not Fresno.

Thank you, Maggie, thank you Pete Wilson, thank you California PUC, and thank you, wise multinational business. As long as the power stays on, I'll keep writing about how great you are.

After all, you