TV Nation; Confessions of a Rug Addict; Xmas Spiced Beef; Blame it on the Pot-Growers
How wrong Minow was!
Courtesy of television, these days we have a vibrant democracy of well-informed citizens that would be the envy of Pericles. I was wandering through a shopping mall in Eureka the other day and came upon a gaggle of citizens looking raptly at a bank of tv sets in Radio Shack. Suddenly they raised howls of excitement. The verdict on the Seminole County absentee ballots had just come through. The Eurekans continued to watch attentively, commenting knowledgeably to each other as law professors from Georgetown and Yale did battle over the meaning of the Florida constitution, the U.S. Constitution and the thoughts of Madison and Hamilton.
I drove from Eureka 15 miles down the road to the smaller town of Fortuna. In the woodstove store Steve Machado was also crouching in front of his tv set. He, too, began braying in triumph. The Florida state Supreme Court had just handed down its verdict ordering a handjob on votes in various counties. Machado then launched into a dissection of the forensic style of David Boies, laced with speculations about the constitutional implications of any intervention by either the Florida legislature or the U.S. Congress.
So much for Minow's wasteland. It was probably the O.J. trial that whetted the popular appetite for forensic and political drama.
We've come to that moment in the boom/bust cycle when we noninvestors get our revenge. For years I've listened to the triumphant chortle of friends watching their stocks soar and nest eggs fattening. A couple of years ago I did find enough spare change to buy a $2000 Roth IRA, and dashed down to the local Schwab office in Berkeley to get it in by the deadline. The Roth IRA is the one you pay taxes on in the year you invest the money. Then, in your late 60s, as brain fog descends, you can take out your superprofits tax-free. So I paid taxes on the two grand and received expert counsel on how to invest the money. But the mere effort of giving it to Charlie Schwab exhausted my investing powers, and the money is, so far as I know, still sitting in the Schwab general fund making money for Mr. Schwab, Mrs. Helen Schwab and the five little Schwablettes, but not me. Every month or so for a year I got envelopes from Schwab, but soon the excitement wore off and I've stopped opening them.
I suppose I could forward them to William Roth, who has time on his hands since the voters of Delaware evicted him last Nov. 7 from his Senate seat, and so far as I know the margin was insufficiently close for him to challenge the vote count in the Delaware courts. Schwab has given up writing to me altogether.
As I told this to Strausbaugh it occurred to me that I could lend status to our idle chatter by making this into a General Declaration of Interest re: Investments, by Columnist to Editor. William Safire used to do this, gravely informing his readers of his investments, thus alerting them to all the possible conflicts of interests of which he might be guilty. I think he's given up this practice. In my case the $2000 in the Schwab general fund is my only commercial relationship to the stock market, so if you suddenly come across diatribes against Schwab in this space, you'll be able to guess the reason why.
The only other shares I've ever owned were 500 in a Canadian mining company called Kerromac that my Aunt Helen gave me when I was 10. The reason my eyes are bad now is no doubt because, year after year through my teens, I used to prowl through the stock index in the London Times trying vainly to find Kerromac, presumably some scam that blew up about 15 minutes after my aunt reported the gift.
So of course I had rich sport with Strausbaugh, proclaiming the prudence of my approach to any excess funds, which is to spend them at once, thus avoiding any possibility that the NASDAQ can get its hands on them. Every man has his weakness, and in my case it's rugs, mostly faded Moroccan rugs from earlier in the last century, in various hues?scarlet, crimson orange and other tints?of pale cochineal.
Cochineal? A natural dyestuff consisting of the females of Coccus cacti, an insect that feeds on various cacti, most especially the nopal. In old Mexico cochineal collectors would brush the insects from the leaves of the cactus into bags, dip them in boiling water or dry them in an oven, then grind them up, with about 70,000 grains to the pound. The best crop was the first of the season, consisting of young, unimpregnated females.
Cortez brought cochineal back to Europe along with the wild turkey, after receiving orders for the dye from the Spanish court in 1523. And yes, back in those good old days of the Spanish Empire, there were eager young señors, just like the e-kids at Wired, writing excitedly about the Long Boom, and the prospect of 500 years of prosperity, if not freedom, and most definitely not a better environment.
As for spiced beef, it was one of the Christmas staples of my Irish childhood. Every December every butcher had?still has?piles of spiced beef, which is a piece of bottom round, rump or thick flank. It's delicious, like a kind of amped-up pastrami. Why not make some yourself for Christmas? It's not too late. Get an appropriate chunk of beef without much fat, maybe 4 pounds in weight. Mix up a half-pound of sugar, half-pound of salt, a teaspoon of mace, with similar teaspoons of black pepper and cloves, plus a little less cayenne or a little more paprika. A few crushed juniper berries too. You can add a quarter-teaspoon of potassium nitrate (saltpeter) too if you want to get a pinkish tinge to the meat, though this isn't necessary.
Put all this in a crock or stainless-steel saucepan and roll the meat around in it, then put it in a cool spot or even the bottom of your fridge for about 10 days. Turn the meat once a day. It will start to smell alluring after two or three days. Then wash the meat off and put it in a pot of water with a carrot or two and an onion and simmer it for three to four hours. You can eat it hot or let it cool (out of the water) and have it cold. The stock isn't worth keeping. In separate pots boil your carrots, onions, parsnips and potatoes.
Unlike the upper Midwest or Northeast, winter is not the peak power demand season for California, and state regulators and officials appear to have been caught by surprise. That's why the supposed shortages have the politicians and energy bureaucrats in such a frenzy of finger-pointing. The head of the Independent System Operator, the overlord of the state's power grid, has lamented the profusion of holiday lights, noting that the state Christmas tree alone gulps up as much power as 15 Bay Area homes. Others suggest that there were temporary glitches in a few power plants, repairs to improve air quality and a lack of rain for hydrodams. A Pacific Gas and Electric spokesperson sternly declares that people have their thermostats up too high.
The search for culprits is getting so desperate that now even dope growers are being tagged for the blame. Under this scenario, pot-farmers have been driven literally underground by the drug war, setting up indoor operations in their basements, illuminated by banks of grow lights that suck the Western power grid dry. This theory bumps up against the inconvenient fact that up here in the Emerald Triangle of southern Humboldt and Mendocino Counties, the Bordeaux region of the cannabis connoisseur, indoor marijuana production is an off-grid operation, powered by diesel-fueled generators or solar collectors.
But if indeed this turns out to be a blackout Christmas, the California legislature has only itself to blame. The current power crunch is the entirely predictable result of the mad rush to deregulate the energy market, which the California political establishment has pushed for so remorselessly. The real Christmas villains here then are the big utilities and energy companies, ever ready to sock it to consumers at the most vulnerable time. The laissez-faire system is an invitation for market manipulation, price gouging and bullying. This is the natural inclination of the energy giants. And it's precisely why states and the federal government moved in the first decades of the last century to control the mercenary instincts of these companies through a firm set of regulations.
But over the last 25 years, these restraints have been steadily peeled away, starting with Jimmy Carter's deregulation of the natural gas industry in the late 1970s. In 1996, the California legislature snuck through an energy deregulation bill that stripped state regulators of much of their control over energy prices and services and paid off the utilities for their failed investments in nuclear plants few wanted in the first place. SoCal Edison and PG&E got their multibillion-dollar bailout and almost immediately started gouging ratepayers.
Now they and their apologists are blaming dope growers and Christmas. In fact, the more energy you need, the higher you must pay. Except, of course, for the big industrial consumers. They get cut-rate deals and the rest is passed on to the residential consumer.
This is the inexorable logic of energy deregulation. Before the California bill passed in 1996, environmentalists and consumer advocates warned that in a deregulated market where profit was the sole motive the reliability of the energy system would be placed at risk. It didn't take long to prove them right. A summer of power outages and price surges has been followed by an autumn of plant closures and shortages. The energy producers are now asking for tax breaks and exemptions from environmental regulations to get their new plants online sooner. Gov. Davis has already bowed to their wishes, ordering state regulators to expedite the permitting process for new power plants.
The deregulation craze has given birth to a whole new scheme of energy profiteering. The power grid now resembles nothing so much as the frenzy at the Chicago Board of Trade, with energy arbitrageurs buying up spot futures in Southern California kilowatts. Enron, the energy conglomerate with close ties to the Bush team, has even opened an operation that will buy and sell weather futures?a kind of Vegas-style bookie shop that will place bets on whether it will be a cold or moderate winter, whether El Niño or La Niña will come knocking again. As California goes, so goes the nation.
We are told repeatedly that the national energy transmission system is literally linked together in a giant web, a kind of Super String theory for electric lines. One shiver anywhere in the network will be felt by all. It's also a convenient excuse, where rough winters in Buffalo can be blamed for rate hikes and shortages in San Diego or Seattle. "California's electricity supply and cost crisis is a metaphor for the economic and social disruptions most in the U.S. should expect as the trade and technology globalization initiatives started by the Clinton administration mature," says Larry Tuttle, director of the Center for Environmental Equity, an energy watchdog group in Portland, OR.
With a recession looming ever closer, and people's wallets likely to get thinner, the deregulation could become a political time bomb.
This item was written with Jeffrey St. Clair.