That Clicking Sound Is the Lights Going Off

The latest bill from Edison has a base rate of 13 cents per kilowatt-hour and a top rate of 25.993 cents/kwh. That clicking sound you hear is the lights going off at every large power-consuming business in California. The government can nationalize the power plants and dictate fair rates, or it can wring its hands, continue with the lies and watch the bottom fall out of the economy. Dress the lies up any way it can, but there is no “faking” the amount of the check we have to send the power companies each month--it now exceeds our property taxes and is almost one-half the mortgage payment!

Keith Keating

Carlsbad

My cockiness in having the DWP, and therefore no chance of California blackouts, was shattered recently, when our electricity in Whitley Heights was cut off for 26 hours. Give me the possibility of an hour or two of rolling blackouts over the incompetence of trying to fix a contractor’s error any day. As fate would have it, I was closing on a quarter-million-dollar deal, when my pal on the other end of the phone heard something reminiscent of the sound of New York City being nuked, as my portable phone shut down.

Melanie Morningstar

Los Angeles