Op-Ed: Enron`s PGE-Plunder UN-Returned, UN-Explained

PUC Provides Complexities But No Defense

Salem-News.com

(Salem) - I`ve always believed any tax-dollar paid by any citizen or business --large-or-otherwise-- should end up with that same dollar put to work by the taxing unit.

That is why Legislators enforce taxes: To pay for legal, wise, demanded state purposes and services like education, health care, police, fire, safety, roads, and clean water.

Potent power-supply, under public control, is unavoidably instrumental for all those others. It literally lights up every one -- as well as many Oregon homes, hospitals and businesses, by PGE.

Our legislators are charged with unavoidable responsibilities to govern all power suppliers operating in Oregon. If anything --at any level, including national-- interferes with that primary responsibility, our Oregon electees must make sure our own interests are powerfully protected -- no pun !!

Yet it surely appears that PGE snatched regular and repeated amounts for a broad array of taxes from each and every customer so affected, over many years; and passed on very little of those now-desperately-defended `takings" to any taxing authority.

Those huge amounts, in the millions on millions, are also plainly and very painfully --NOW-- both shameful and amazing, surely natural and normal when one learns not a single dollar ever got paid out to most of the taxing authorities.

Most Oregonians remain not only amazed, but also deeply resentful, surely agreeing with my `shameful" characterization.

For those researching power-supply and other rapacious business situations nationally, the Enron-rise, fueled sky-high so rapidly in Oregon, is a classic example of where power really lies:

With the corporation, behind solid phalanxes of confusing corporate confabulation, presented precisely to deny and defy the public responsibilities represented by the PUC.

The PUC is a state agency, empowered by state-level law, without real power to confront and offset grand-scale, national-level, `no-overall-control" corporate predation, of unprecedented level and impact -- but now clearly visible and documented.

Surely `the big picture" of precisely that kind of snatch-grab-run operation emerges from the public record of the ongoing Enron trials; encompassing the very operations at the heart of this Oregon massive mis-deal; and covering multiple millions of tax-dollars which should surely have shot rapidly into Salem for large reasonable impacts on desperate Oregon needs.

Perhaps the PUC needs `to protest less and protect more" against any continuing corporate confabulations, starting with the next PGE rate-rise:

`Coming soon to your friendly state regulation agency."