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Complexity has been added to complexity in the unfolding PURA mess. And we all know, do we not, that political fraud of every kind nests comfortably in complexity, awaiting a resolution that resolves little?
PURA is Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. Until the elevation of Marissa Gillett to the commission’s top position, PURA was, according to statute forming it, a (six) member commission whose mission was the regulation of public utilities.
The commission was from its inception imperfectly formed. There are presently three members serving on the PURA board. Gillett, Governor Ned Lamont’s handpicked chairman is, most political watchers will agree, a disturber of the peace, but she has the unqualified support of Lamont and gatekeepers in the Democrat dominated General Assembly, chief among them Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney of New Haven and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff of Norwalk. When these three work in concert, alternative voices are silenced and numbers rule.
Most recently, State Senate Republicans decided to walk out of the General Assembly in protest rather than participate in a vote renominating Gillett to her position as head autocrat of PURA.
For months, largely owing to a drift towards political autocracy, newspapers have warned us that a crunch was coming. Under Gillette, PURA, reformed and reinvigorated, no longer resembles our daddy’s PURA. Daddy’s PURA exercised control over energy prices through gentle persuasion by means of advisory measures. Gillett exercises control over energy prices by dictating prices through regulatory mandates. She rules with a bat rather than a soft voice. Her guiding principle may be put in the form of a question: What is the point, after all, of establishing a Public Utilities Regulatory (emphasis mine) Authority that eschews price regulation?
Naturally, energy distributors in Connecticut, as well as all other businesses in the state, resist price controls or any lethal attempt to repeal through dictates the immutable laws of a free market economy. Price controls didn’t work for Tricky Dick Nixon, and they will not work for Gillett – unless Gillett and her supporters are able to repeal the economic laws governing a free market system or, better still, unless the governing authority is able to abolish free markets altogether. The father of fascism, Benito Mussolini, described the process of replacing free markets with a central authority when he was asked to define fascism: “Everything in the state,” Mussolini obliged, “nothing outside the state, nothing above the state.”
One can only speculate how Lamont, presumably pro-business, permitted himself the socialist luxury of setting prices for businesses. Bad advice makes for bad politics and bad business. Energy consumers in Connecticut can only hope that a just court decision will rescue them – and Lamont, and Gillett --from the predictable consequences of ruinous policy decisions.
Compliance with statutory directives will play a large part in the case brought against PURA court case by Connecticut‘s energy distributors. It seems obvious to non-jurors that if the PURA Commission is not in compliance with the enabling stature that created the PURA board – and it is not – decisions made by a non-compliant board cannot be in compliance with the law.
Gillett has her supporters and detractors.
Connecticut’s energy distributors are in the process of suing Gillett’s PURA for the following reasons. Energy distribution is not energy production. The proper free market way to lower costs is to increase the production of energy, but the distributors targeted by Gillett do not produce energy. We must punish the producer of milk, not the milkman, if we wish artificially to reduce the price of milk. The real price of a product or service is properly set by producers and buyers in a free market. Price control through the force majeure of government simply distorts creative and responsible free market contracting between sellers and buyers. Then too, the statute that created PURA requires that decisions be made by a five member commission. Presently, there are three neglected members on the PURA board, and those bringing suit argue that since the PURA commission is not in compliance with statutory law, neither are unilateral decisions made by Gillett. In addition, those suing PURA allege that the illegal three commission board is little more than a false Potemkin village front designed to cover and obscure the non-statutory decisions made by Gillette.
All such claims likely will be vented and verified during the pending court action, assuming that Connecticut judges chosen and seated by majority Democrats are not mere appendages of the dominant party in power.
Following an affirmative Gillett renomination vote in the Senate -- minus Republicans -- Looney claimed, according to a Hartford Courant report, “he was ‘an agnostic’ on whether the PURA board should be expanded to five members. The board, he said, works well with three members, adding that he is satisfied with Gillett’s work.” Looney added, “The fact that the utilities don’t like her [Gillett] is proof she is doing a good job.”
Perhaps Looney meant to say the utilities distaste for a political command economy is proof that there should be no free market in Connecticut that meets the energy needs of his political constituents. Politicians, we know from bitter experience, do not always say what they mean or mean what they say.
