Privatizing Puerto Rico's power grid just made things worse

You better sit down for this news. Privatizing a utility only made things worse in Puerto Rico.
I know! How could that be? I mean privatization of the Texas power grid worked so well.
However, things have been just a bit bumpy with Puerto Rico.

A phalanx of armed deputies wearing bulletproof vests descended on the corporate offices of the company hired to fix Puerto Rico’s antiquated power grid. They were looking for Luma Energy chief executive Wayne Stensby, who had been labeled a fugitive by local lawmakers for refusing demands to turn over documents related to the company.

When armed deputies are looking for the CEO of the company in charge of fixing the utility, then chances are things have got a bit complicated. So what happened?
After Hurricane Maria destroyed roughly 80% of the island's power grid, the federal government decided that the solution was turning this critical public service over to a for-profit company. Thus we witnessed the birth of LUMA.

The hiring of Luma last year marked a new beginning for the island: a 16-year, $1.5 billion experiment with privatization. Luma, a venture created by two energy companies — Alberta, Canada-based ATCO and Houston-based Quanta Services — was contracted to distribute electricity to 1.5 million customers and make badly needed upgrades to the power grid. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has allocated nearly $10 billion in taxpayer funds for the effort. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), the state-run utility provider, now only manages the generation of electricity.

Sounds good so far. The U.S. taxpayer forks over $10 billion, and the private company forks over...how much money did LUMA fork over again?

Usually, when you do this kind of business, you expect that the company brings money to the table. Do you know how many dollars Luma brought to the table? Zero.

Zero. They spent zilch. So that seems fair, doncha think?
No? Well, at least everything was transparent and above the board.

While its parent companies are publicly traded and required to share details about their finances with investors, Luma was set up as a private consortium, with little obligation to disclose details about the business to the public. The company has relatively few assets of its own and plans to maintain and improve Puerto Rico’s power grid solely from federal funds and by raising new revenue from customers.

OK. So basically the taxpayer is forking over ALL of the money, while the private consortium does absolutely nothing but skim profits, and reward their executives large bonuses. Great.
Well, at least they are finally fixing the power grid. That's something.

According to your reporting, the blackouts on the island actually worsened in the months since Luma's work began. Is that true? Why is that?

MARTINEZ MERCADO: Partially. But we know that PREPA, being the one in charge of the power plants, has been responsible for most of the blackouts. But during our reports, we found out something very important. Luma's first reliability report confirmed that the company lasted - needed more time to restore electricity during the first three months of operation when compared to PREPA. And for example, during June, July and August, it took 333 minutes to Luma to repair the service. If you compare it with PREPA the year before, it was only 155 minutes. Those numbers are both bad because the average in the U.S. is only 82 minutes. So people wait a long time before getting their service restored, and during Luma, it doubled.

Lemme see here. Worse service. No public oversight. Taxpayer money being wasted. Corporate greed. What am I missing? Oh, yeah! Corruption.

Later, two FEMA employees who led power restoration in Puerto Rico were charged with bribery and fraud for allegedly helping its replacement, Cobra Energy, win contracts to fix the island’s collapsed system.

Also one former governor of the PPD party was doing lobbying activities for Luma.
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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

Later, two FEMA employees who led power restoration in Puerto Rico were charged with bribery and fraud for allegedly helping its replacement, Cobra Energy...

REALLY?!?

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

zed2's picture

it likely had noothing to do with Trump, Biden wud have had to do it too and it would have seemed like insanity to we democrats.

Look at the roots of power privatization scams - with Notorious ENRON. GATS was promoted heavily by ENRON, the most corrupt corporation in 1990s Amerika.

They dont get any more corrupt. This article is by John Nichols in The Nation. See how they were involved with the trade deal scheme involving the WTO!
Here:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/enrons-global-crusade/

A good intro to the legal issues involved is this course from the UN.

https://unctad.org/webflyer/course-dispute-settlement-module-313-wto-gats

GATS turns jobs into bargaining chips. Lowering wages and trading jobs here for concessons elsewhere.

paying back the developing countries wealthy for the misdeeds of the past that we were not even involved in.

Its like reparations for the past Many public bucks magically end up in the pockets of nepotistic, corrupt Indian billionaires. Like the Guptas state capture of/in South Africa..

Once public services sectors -entities that were in the past union entities in many cases, may under the new world order, may often have to be dismantled and run by Third World companies to help their leadership stabilize, if their wages are low enough they get a reward for being low income in the contracts, the jobs..

If they bid cheap enough. They may get a special deal on wages too. We cant keep them out by requiring they pay higher US wages. When at home they may pay a lot less, that is discrimination, if it has the effect of keeping them out.
Remember affirmative action, maybe you are too young to remember, but in the past they used to have programs to aid American, (yes, they helped US businesses and no other country, which would be impossible to pull off today) poor, women and minority owned businesses, now they have the LDC Services Waiver.

---- Have people looked into clawing back any payments that have been made to this company during the outage?

This is being done a lot with thee corporations. Imagine clawing back the money lost during the Enron debacle..

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news...

This is relevant

https://www.tni.org/en/puertorico

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@zed2 So this is what reparations/affirmative action leads to on the grand scale???

Looks suspiciously like Versailles Treaty logic, to say the least (since its kinship to "Blood Libel"/"Sons of Ham" logic barely even needs to be said).

How ironic, and how telling, of course, that so many people will be livid at what's happening here, as long as the're under the impression assume Trump's to blame. Reveal this to them...and then what?

For all its fetishization of "the power of narrative" (Campbell, Sachs, and Pratchett must surely all be thrashing in their graves), NewTruth's having a REAALLLLL hard time keeping its story straight....

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

zed2's picture

Water is not blue gold, it is not like oil, corporations for the mining, taking and selling..

https://www.tni.org/en/search/language/en?search=remunicipalization

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zed2's picture

The description starts around page 215 see "Hayekian concept of ordoliberalism" descrition is found on Page 215, the explanation of why these things were meant to bind nation-states to prevent protectionism is around there..

The one thing the Global South nations have is cheap, degreed labor (college grads) They are willing to pay to work here in the US, basically, they are asked to pay bribes overseas to be placed in the US. Parents do it. So the young people are primed to expect a path to citizenship here. So they plan to come here and start buying real estate.

The handwriting is on the wall, Americans are being forced out.l We dont have the commodities to keep up.
, basically thats the lure of free overseas labor. Its a lot like bonded labor. Or modern day slavery. The US corporations and corporations elsewhere really want that free high skill labor. To hire people with that much education normally might cost many times more. So they would like to replace the workforce o take advantage of this unusual historic profit opportunity, get it. Why did coronavirus come along now? Given this situation, I am suspicious. Because of its timing.

This isn't some little thiong, its global, "the largest redistribution of wealth in history" former WTO DG said in his book. And its all upward. Not to the poor. And from Slobodian's book which omits a great deal, we can see that its been cooking since the 1930s, in central Europe.

This is destroying lives on a large scale.

Also Chakraswami Rhagavan (RIP) has written extensively about it and the prehistory of the WTO's genesis.

He is the former editor of SUNSonline. He now is associated with Third World Network. He was actually at the Punta Del Este event in September 15-20 1986 where the supposed compromise biding our "services" magically appeared. It clearly was what I say, a dirty deal between the oligarchs of North and South to cut the South oligarchs in on the huge profits from brokering others labor. Its an unusually high profit these temping compoaies make and nobody really has called them out on it.

Also these toung guest workers are RICH, nobody can say they are poor with a straight face. You can tell by how well they dress and by the fact that they often drive very expensive cars and dress in bespoke clothing "fine linen". They sometimes come here looking to additionally buy real estate (which often is bought but then left empty, not rented out) for their families. Se the video. I am seeing these ghost houses here in NJ too. Also people are upgrading homes to sell them. They can get millions of dollars if they are bigger. This is pricing out families with children. We have millionaires living here. My former next door neighbors were discreet millionaires. (I didn't know that, it only emerged after they left.)

In the midst of this shortage we see empty houses. There are empty houses. People on the other side of the world are buying them. They just sit empty. People are being priced out and their jobs are being sold off. Young people need cosigners even just to rent. In other words, their parents have to buy them for them.
Germany is also seeing the same kinds of insanity.

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zed2's picture

They all require a high level of math literacy. If you are not at least math literate you don't have a chance of making enough to buy or rent on most of these cities now.

Start in childhood. The inexpensive Raspberry Pi 4 comes with a free copy of Wolfram's Mathematica. This is a huge help to learning math. Find it and the full download of Raspberry Pi OS software including Mathematica at https://raspberrypi.org

Adults as well as children can benefit greatly from access to FREE tools like their MagPi magazine.

If you cant afford the $45 (usually $35) to buy a Raspberry Pi (tiny Unix computer, the ultimate Swiss ARmy Knife among tech gifts, it can be turned into almost all kinds of devices. Want to accomplish some goal, use an RPI. I bet you can. Ask me).

If you cant afford it but have some old doorstop computer collecting dust?

The free Knoppix 9.1 DVD offers a bootable and installable disk image (both i386 and amd64 binary formats) that contains thousands of free applications. You can run it right off the DVD without installing anthing. Or have your changes persist using a flash disk.

Or, use a super cheap thin client. They can be found for less than $30. And can run almost all desktop software.

Its a special Linux distro an experiment to cram as much on a single DVD as is possible. I installed it to a 32 gb flash drive and its a whole computer on a dvd that will keep you engaged for days or even months..

It includes lots of science applications. Linux is Unix and unix is fun. Unix is the OS used by scientists around the world.

Children need head starts to be able to make the right decisions as they grow up. College is wasted on children who don't have the knowledge they need to understand their work. They need a head start. Raspberry Pi has reams of educational materials, all free. I have followed it from the very beginning because I have a huge interest in science education. Transformative tools and computer science education.

https://www.tni.org/en/article/how-tisa-strolls-off-with-our-services

You will be forced out by the high wages being paid to others. This is why the big corporations desperately want to import free or almost free guest labor from these Indian temp firms.

The big Indian IT firms are even willing to commit extensive fraud, risking all sorts of bad things, to do it. (in 2008 it emerged that 80%of the work visa applications submitted for work in the US to the US consular office in one Indian city were fraudulent on some way. Please read the cables, they were overwhelmed with the workload. (Hyderabad, Wikileaks cable collection,) The bribes their parents paid would have to be paid back to the parents if the visas were canceled, now that would be quite the sight..Were these visas audited many people here now might be disqualified based on misrepresentations of material facts. But if their companies really stood up for them and despite the problem that had done well, that might be overlooked. Anyway, these people are kept in limbo by these work visas which require they remain working for the same temping company, which basically "owns" them.

60 hour weeks are not unusual, Its not unusual (because of the difficulty of finding housing, even) for people to literally live at work. (I have even done this for days at a time, in the past)

In some service sectors, (IT and computing, especially) millions of jobs are being repaced in large numbers and they have figured out how to hide the real numbers, they just spread it out over nine months. People are tasked with training their own replacements. Its a huge loophole that avoids the WARN Act and also burdens job seekers with e hassle of going to totally FAKE job interviews.. and gets the former or temp firm employer out of paying the leaving workers any retraining or additional benefits. In exchange they must train the indian job outsourcers/converters who train the Idian employees how to do that job from India..or wherever. Phillipines, Bangldesh, wherever.. (usually India)

The media propaganda machine is telling us that people are quitting en masse, thats because the government is wanting people to quit, so thier fake cover story looks true. Also, neoliberalism is a disaster for most the world's people. AND THEY WANT TO HIDE THAT UNDER FAKE COVER STORIES.

The fact is they planned for decades to outsource the nation. They made a deal to do that.

To fire the country? Look at the cost difference.

Also the fact that the temp guest workers are stuck staying in jobs for years.. The firms string them along with promises on green cards..

They cannot change jobs. Why do you think Trump was selected by the machine to be President in 2016. Its an inside joke. "Youre fired, America"

They want the Americans who must be paid much more and can switch jobs at will, to leave their jobs, simplifying the replacement of the workers wit foreign workers working over the net and being paid peanuts.

This was a global deal, its supposed to be a huge global thing. I have documented this extensively on my web site.

They want to replace the US workforce. Thats what TISA is all about. The trade deal that was associated with Biden, in the Obama years.

They never stopped negotiating TISA, it appears to me. (They said they had)

"The Great Deception".

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOphIpddRAk]

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@zed2

The inexpensive Raspberry Pi 4 comes with a free copy of Wolfram's Mathematica.

Since you brought up buying a Raspberry Pi, I'm going to assume that you're a full-blown geek like me. I just recently bought, and set up my first Raspberry.
That wasn't too hard.

Here's where I could use some assistance: The reason I bought it was because I wanted to set up a Pi-Hole on my home network so that I could screen out ads and commercials.
Have you ever done something like that? Or do you know someone who has?

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zed2's picture

How did the obligation materialize?

lok up and familiarize yourselves with the past concept of the so called "New International Economic Order" (NIEO)

The establishment of the EEC and NAFTA and what the regional trade integration efforts were trying to do. Give limited subsets of countries permission to practice protectionism, under certain conditions. For example, extreme poverty.

These exceptions might under some conditions and in limited scope subsidize things. Or be given temporary exceptions to international economic rules.. They are the replacement for national affirmative action programs in Australia and US and perhaps other countries wher there are historically mistreated groups, like minorities, women, etc. who received special differential treatment under limited conditions, even though it violated the international law of development.

Don't take my definition as definitive, there is a body of stuff you need to understand..

1955 african asia conference..

and the decolonialization period. .. And the start of the Nonaligned Movement. (NAM)

Also read The late Chakraswami Rhaghavan's essay for the group of 77 on GATS and financial services I think a site specific search on google on g77 would be helpful. g77.org) on GATS and financial services.

Where is the NIEO documentation?

There is a lot on the G77 and UNCTAD.org web sites.. If you limit your search to those sites.

For example, I recently tried to steer people to UNCTAD's short course on wto dispute settlement under the GATS. (services) Not the GATT which is on goods trade, not services.. The creation of the NIEO stumbled but the programme to create it was a set of false assumptions could drive his process and the sacrifices which the rich countries were being asked to force on heir people and businesses..

WTO is to bring services, most of the world economy into the international trading regime. The powers that be did not share the debates with people..

. Because the restructuring of international relations that is being undertaken and it changes everybody's life more than anything has ever changed our lives before. Its where the declaratory lawmaking occurrs. See the video before's main body to get an overview of its "reforms" which upends the global system, potentially upending many business practices..

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zed2's picture

You can use your raspberry pi for a firewall, sure.

Using iptables and the new ipfilter if you only rarely need to change your rules, or one of the firewall distros, if you need a firewall GUI.

if you are using Linux.

You could likely alternatively run FreeBSD and use its packet filter too. Which is better. But the choices of firewall guis is fairly limited on aarch64 - which you would want to use (rather than the 32 bit older OS architecture armhf get the full advantages of BSD. How much bandwidth do you need?

Thats the important question. If you are a small business or individual you likely dont need 10GBE yet. (laugh)

You likely use 1gbe or less, right? Then you could use a firewall distro if it supports your architecture. Or buy a PCIe capable "thin client" as I mentioned before, or similar.

Lots of IT companies big and small would love to rent you a proprietary box and then manage it for you, but that can get very expensive.. fast. Not what I would do..

You could use your RPI now as a firewall, either in a router on a stick configuration which only needs one NIC, or use a USB3 nic, which gives you a second network interface going at 1 gigabit.

Otherwise you need to have a PC with the appropriate number of interfaces.. and a good NIC, intel NICS are reputed to be superior for high throughput firewalling. So you need a power efficient old or new pC with a spare pcie slot. Then get a quad or double ethernet card..preferably a newer one.

The new RPI 4 is pretty fast considering its size and price... And its very energy efficient. The RPI compute module4 would be the way to go. DFRobot makes a firewall friendly tiny router with the compute module 4. a postage stamp size module that contains a RPI4 well suited for almost any tiny sized computing task, even cluster computing.. Its cheap too. See the video by Youtube user Jeff Geerling

Yu could alsouse VYOS. Or many others. Or just the included utilities mentioned before and config files, if you only change it rarely. That would likely work okay for 99% of us.

However I would strongly suggest the AMD64 platform (not RPI) for the most choice between firewall distros. BSD has advantages over the Linux kernel too.

PFsense is the most recognized firewall distro. It is not available on ARM at all. Opensense is working on it and soon will probably support a small number of ARM boxen.. Ine is the Banana Pi. another is the RPI 3+4 Opnsense is a newcomer but open, fairly full featured, and unlikely to go commercial soon. PFsense is in transition hard to say whether it will remain free..
Opnsense has an add on sensae, to do more sophisticated intrusion detection sensae

You will need a better machine for your firewall box to handle anything high bandwidth without slowing to a crawl.. You could use any PC with a spare PCIe slot.

There are overpriced boxen made especially for this, quotom, protectli brands. But as I said servers now can be had for a song.. because of often excessive power draw. hoose wisely though and you can avoid it.

If you have a PV system you could run your computers totally off of DC.

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@zed2 Pi-Hole product
It's on Debian Linux.
The trick is integrating it with my home network. My home router doesn't allow customizing the DNS settings.
So I was going to turn DHCP off the router and use my Raspberry Pi for DHCP, then it could push out any DNS settings I want.
However, it would also break my router when it comes to using it for wifi. So I didn't want to do that.

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