Kansans in for another Sizeable Rate Increase from KCPL (Updated)

by Allen Williams



I received a card several days ago from KCPL notifying customers of another pending rate increase (Docket No 18-KCPE- -480-RTS) before the Kansas Corporate Commission (KCC). What is proposed for those using 1.366 kilowatt-hours in summer months or 833 Kilowatt-hours in winter will see a $7.29 per month increase excluding property tax rebasing and $9.19 per month including property tax rebasing.  It’s approximately a 4.5 percent increase while inflation is only 2.9% that will go into effect Dec 2018. The KCPL 'justification' lists the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as a reason for a decrease in KCPL's revenue requirement."  The rate proposal sounds like an opportunity for the utility to cash in on the Trump tax cut and recover lost revenue from not being able to hire illegal aliens. 

Ratepayers should keep in mind that KCPL is part of not only Westar but Great Plains Energy also.  Retirees and low income people will be hard pressed to pay the higher rates which should work well for cities like Overland Park who have the desire for upward development.

What was promised from the first KCPL merger?

Fox4KC reports:  “They moved out right at the time KCP&L was changing its billing, aimed at improving the amount customers on budget billing paid per month.  So the Dehnckes got hit with a higher monthly amount plus the yearly adjustment for what their past payments hadn't covered. The result was a whopping $900 bill. "I never had an electricity bill that high. I thought that was a misunderstanding," Dehncke said.”

KCPL already gets additional rate surcharges from ECA Energy cost Adjustment) for FUEL expenses between Billing Cycles, EER (Energy Efficiency Rider you Pay for inefficiencies KCPLdoesn't), PTS (property tax surcharge),TDC (time of day power usage between months). And lest we forget, local government also profits from KCPL rate increases with Overland Park Franchise fee, Overland Park Sales Tax (1.125%) and Johnson County Sales tax (1.475%)

KCPL has forced acceptance of their Smart meters which feature two way communications that would allow them to adjust their cost factors like ECA, EER at will.  According to the Daily Telegraph Smart energy meters are giving readings up to six times too high, a study finds.  You won’t get any credit from the utility, 5000 Utility Customers Class Action Lawsuit Claiming Overbilled 30% to 582%, you will have to sue.

According to the Topeka Capitol Journal: “Officials at Westar Energy and KCP&L say the two companies' merger will provide 15 years of rate stability, and they reject the idea that lawmakers are confused by the complexities of utility regulations.”

That promise didn’t take long to break, just nine years later they’re looking for another major increase. Don't think you can cut electric usage and save money, it just spurs further KCPL rate requests.

The Topeka Capitol Journal further notes; “[Kansas Industrial Consumers Group, which represents large-scale energy users are] ..some of the biggest users of electricity in this state. And their rates, overall, are about 40 percent less than what you and I pay and other businesses pay as consumers. And those dollars, that rate decrease for them, comes directly out of our pockets. Somebody pays for the cost of the system."

Please, utilities aren’t benefiting this industrial conglomerate out of their own pockets. The industrial group has negotiated a better deal based on the large quantities of power consumed.  Lawsuit threats also help to swing a better deal which means the residential consumer is going to wind up paying.

What was promised in the second KCPL merger?

The goal of any energy conglomerate is to control supply as a regulated monopoly and to generate profits as stated in the MERGER TO FORM LEADING ENERGY COMPANY, January 2018 Investor Update.  Great Plains is part of the Sustainable Energy program which includes the UN’s sustainable development program.  The sustainability includes expensive wind power turbine purchase and use at KCPL’s Spearville location as a condition of not being sued by the Sierra club. By the way, KCPL has to pay the people who add power to the grid with their wind turbines which means consumers have to reimburse KCPL.

“the expected financial and operational benefits of the merger to the companies and their shareholders (including cost savings, operational efficiencies and the impact of the anticipated merger on earnings per share..”

Projected net savings from the investor update for the Great Plains Energy conglomerate were stated as 27.8 million in 2018, 110.3 million in 2019 and 143.5 million in 20120.

But these saving were never intended to benefit consumers, they were promises made to the utility investors.  So consumers will have to make good on those promises of investor returns as a condition of being a KCPL customer.  It boils down to the ratepayer being on the hook for company ROI with the full blessings of the utility oversight board.

The 3 member KCC board is made up of political appointments by the Kansas Governor.  It’s a cozy opportunity for various consultants to make their way on to the commission as in the case of Michael C. Moffet, a Lawrence Kansas communications consultant appointed by then Governor Kathleen Sebelius. Consultants are not tantamount to citizen ratepayer oversight of a regulated monopoly and what do communications consultants know about utility management?

The commission makeup is therefore less inclined to regard the complaints of ordinary citizens as in “the Kansas Corporation Commission denied a request to offer public comment [regarding injection wells in Douglas County at that hearing from a Mission Hills woman who has argued that the permitting process being used does not comply with federal rules under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

No public comment is necessary even if federal laws are violated. You can ‘trust’ the respective companies to provide all the ‘necessary’ evidence.

Comments on the proposed KCPL rate hike will be accepted through Oct 17, 2018 up to 5:00pm

Correspondence may be addressed to KCC Commission, Office of Public Affairs and Consumer Protection, 1500 SW Arrowhead Road, Topeka, KS  66604-4027 or call at 1-800-662-0027 or the commissions website at www.kcc.ks.gov

There is a petition for an independent audit to verify KCPL numbers claimed for the rate increase.  For those of you who have had enough as I have please sign the online petition at online petition.










Report: Comey Misled Congress. His FBI Examined Less Than 1% of Hillary Emails

by Cillian Zeal


When he appeared before Congress to explain his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, former FBI Director James Comey assured America that his wizards had worked day and night to make sure that most of Hillary Clinton’s emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop had been scrutinized before Election Day to make sure voters knew the facts.

“And then they worked night after night after night, and they found thousands of new emails, they found classified information on Anthony Weiner,” Comey said.

“Somehow, her emails are being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information, by her assistant, Huma Abedin. And so they found thousands of new emails and then called me the Saturday night before the election and said thanks to the wizardry of our technology, we’ve only had to personally read 6,000. We think we can finish tomorrow morning, Sunday.”

And so they found that most of it was “duplicates” and nothing new was being found. He assured us all that he had “reviewed all of the communications” and everything was kosher. Or as kosher as it was in the summer, when it wasn’t terribly kosher but you know, whatever. Case closed, right?

Well, not so much. On Thursday, RealClearInvestigations published a piece which revealed “virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.”

I mean, that could be said about so much that’s Comey-related, but this is particularly interesting.

So, firstly, as for that wizardry stuff: “a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information.” That’s less than 1 percent.

Or that whole thing about them working shifts like Bullitt protecting Johnny Ross: “Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.”

The day before? That’s not coincidental at all. It’s almost as if they were rushing to reach a predetermined conclusion which would never happen because James Comey is a man of honor.

“Most of the emails were never examined, even though they made up potentially 10 times the evidence” that had been examined in the case which had originally “exonerated” Clinton, an official with knowledge of the investigation said.

“Yet even the ‘extremely narrow’ search that was finally conducted, after more than a month of delay, uncovered more classified material sent and/or received by Clinton through her unauthorized basement server, the official said,” RealClearInvestigations revealed.

“Contradicting Comey’s testimony, this included highly sensitive information dealing with Israel and the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas. The former secretary of state, however, was never confronted with the sensitive new information and it was never analyzed for damage to national security.”

It’s almost like Comey was convinced Hillary would win and didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize it. But it’s not like an FBI official would do something because he was convinced someone would win. No one of his stature would do that, though, right?

“Even though the unique classified material was improperly stored and transmitted on an unsecured device, the FBI did not refer the matter to U.S. intelligence agencies to determine if national security had been compromised, as required under a federally mandated ‘damage assessment’ directive,” RCI noted.

“The newly discovered classified material ‘was never previously sent out to the relevant original classification authorities for security review,’ the official, who spoke to RealClearInvestigations on the condition of anonymity, said.

“Other key parts of the investigation remained open when the embattled director announced to Congress he was buttoning the case back up for good just ahead of Election Day,” they noted. “One career FBI special agent involved in the case complained to New York colleagues that officials in Washington tried to ‘bury’ the new trove of evidence, which he believed contained the full archive of Clinton’s emails — including long-sought missing messages from her first months at the State Department.”

There’s a long list of Comey mistakes in RCI’s investigation, and it’s worth pointing out that RCI is one of the more objective sources that there is. What they point out is that Comey either misled Congress about the extent of the problem, was misled by his own staff or outright lied.

This appears to come dangerously close to perjury, considering what we now know about the matter. What they did was simply disregard the investigation because they wanted it closed before the election, lest they be accused of negatively affecting Clinton’s chances for election.

Whoops.



The White House under Trump

submitted by LeRoy C


On Friday, the Trump administration released their annual report to Congress on White House Office Personnel.  It includes the name, status, salary and position title of all 377 White House employees.

The report also said that Trump decided not to take a dime of his salary; instead he donated it to an amazing cause! See below.
 
The report also showed that President Trump is far better at saving money than Obama was. The total annual White House salaries under Trump are 35.8 million vs. $40.9 million under Obama, a savings of $5.1 million.  Here are some other key findings:
 
There are 110 fewer employees on White House staff under Trump than under Obama at this point in their respective presidencies.
 
Nineteen fewer staffers are also dedicated to The First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS).  Currently, there are only two staffers dedicated to Melania Trump vs. 22 staffers who served Michelle Obama (FY2009).
 
However, it's what the report said Trump did with this salary that has everyone talking.
 
Instead of taking his salary, Trump donated all $400,000 to the Department of the Interior where it will be used for construction and repair needs at military cemeteries!  AMAZING! It's so great to have a President who loves our brave military men and women so much!
 
Oh, and where's the media coverage of this? That's right, they don't cover anything decent that the President does...

The Real “Fake News” from Government Media

By Scott Lazarowitz



Image credit: Pixabay

Facebook has announced its campaign against “fake news.” But, according to some workers’ own admission, conservatives are being censored.

And Google also wants to censor “fake news.” But Google also was shown to treat conservative websites, but not liberal ones, as “fake news.”

The same thing seems to be going on with Twitter. And again, conservatives are complaining.

But who is to decide what is “fake news”? Who will be Facebook and Google’s sources for real news?

In 2013 the U.S. Senate considered a new shield law to protect journalists. In the lawmakers’ attempts to narrow the definition of a journalist, some Senators including Sen. Dianne Feinstein only wanted to include reporters with “professional qualifications.”

“Professional” publications such as the New York Times, the “Paper of Record,” would apparently be protected.

So one can conclude that the New York Times can be a source of “real” news for Facebook or Google, despite all the Times‘ errors, screw-ups, and corrections, right?  According to one NYT former reporter, the Times has been a “propaganda megaphone” for war. Also a partner with the CIA to promote Obama’s reelection bid.

Or CNN, “The Most Trusted Name in News” which wins its own “fake news” awards with its errors, screw-ups and corrections.  During the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, there were collusion s between then-CNN contributor and DNC operative Donna Brazile, who was outed by WikiLeaks in her giving candidate Hillary Clinton questions in advance for a CNN Town Hall.

Other emails that were leaked to WikiLeaks informed us that reporters obediently followed instructions from the Hillary Clinton campaign on how to cover the campaign. These include reporters from the New York Times such as Maggie Haberman who said the campaign would “tee up stories for us,” and Mark Leibovich, who would email Clinton flunky Jennifer Palmieri for editing recommendations.

And Politico reporter Glenn Thrush asked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta for approval of stories on Clinton. Thrush was then hired by the New York Times. After Thrush was then suspended from NYT over allegations of sexual misconduct, the Times ended the suspension, stating that while Thrush had “acted offensively,” he would be trained to behave himself. Hmm.

But all this from the 2016 campaign reminded me of the “JournoLists,” the group of news journalists who participated in a private forum online from 2007-2010. The forum was to enable news reporters to discuss news reporting and political issues in private and with candor, but also, it was revealed, to discuss ways to suppress negative news on then-2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama.

For instance, according to the Daily Caller, some members of the group discussed their criticism of a 2008 debate in which Obama was questioned on his association with the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Nation‘s Richard Kim wrote that George Stephanopoulos was “being a disgusting little rat snake.” The Guardian‘s Michael Tomasky wrote that “we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy.”

Spencer Ackerman, then with the Washington Independent and now of the Daily Beast, wrote, “If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

The Nation‘s Chris Hayes wrote, “Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor.”(But has Hayes criticized Obama’s assassination program, or Obama’s bombings or the blood on Obama’s hands? Just askin’)

In an open letter, according to the Daily Caller, several of the JournoList members called the ABC debate a “revolting descent into tabloid journalism,” because of the moderators’ legitimate questions on Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

So, in today’s Bizarro World, objectively questioning a candidate on a controversial issue is now “tabloid journalism,” but making things up like “Trump-Russia collusion” and repeating the propaganda over and over – that’s not “tabloid journalism.”

The JournoLists also included reporters from Time, the Baltimore Sun, the New Republic, Politico, and Huffington Post.

Now, are those the sources of “real news” that Facebook, Google and Twitter want to rely upon to combat “fake news”?

And who exactly were the “JournoLists” promoting? Obama?

Regarding Obama’s own crackdown on actual journalism, Fox News reporter James Rosen was accused by the feds of being a “co-conspirator” with State Department leaker Stephen Jin-Woo Kim in violating the Espionage Act.  Rosen’s correspondences with Kim were seized by Obama’s FBI, along with Rosen’s personal email and phone records. The FBI also used records to track Rosen’s visits to the State Department.

Apparently, then-attorney general Eric Holder went “judge-shopping” to find a judge who would approve subpoenaing Rosen’s private records, after two judges rejected the request.

Commenting on James Rosen and the FBI’s abuse of powers, Judge Andrew Napolitano observed that “this is the first time that the federal government has moved to this level of taking ordinary, reasonable, traditional, lawful reporter skills and claiming they constitute criminal behavior.”

And there was the Obama administration’s going after then-CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, possibly for her reporting on Benghazi and Fast and Furious. Attkisson finally resigned from CBS news out of frustration with the company’s alleged pro-Obama bias and with CBS’s apparently not airing her subsequent reports.

In 2013 CBS News confirmed that Attkisson’s computers had been “accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions.” In 2015 Attkisson sued the Obama administration, claiming to have evidence which proves the computer intrusions were connected to the Obama DOJ.

In Attkisson’s latest lawsuit update, after her computer was returned to her following the DOJ Inspector General’s investigation, her forensics team now believes her computer’s hard drive was replaced by a different one.

Now back to “fake news.”

After Donald Trump locked up the Republican Presidential nomination in May, 2016, there were significant events in the next two months. Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele colluded to get opposition research on behalf of Hillary Clinton, the FBI applied for FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign associates, and Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner had a possibly set-up meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower.

Also within that same period, the DNC claimed that its computers were hacked but the DNC wouldn’t let FBI investigate. The Washington Post published an article claiming, with no evidence presented, that “Russian government hackers” took DNC opposition research on Trump.

It was very shortly after the November, 2016 Presidential election that the Washington Post published an article on a “Russian propaganda effort to spread ‘fake news’ during the election.” To escalate the media’s censorship campaign perhaps?

The campaign against “fake news” coincided with Obama minions at FBI, DOJ and CIA apparently panicking over a possible Trump presidency and allegedly abusing their powers to attempt to take down Trump.

So the news media seem to be on a crusade to fabricate “Trump-Russia collusion” and repeat it over and over, and to vilify, ignore and squash actual investigative research and reporting on what exactly the FBI and DOJ bureaucrats have been doing. Call such real investigative reporting “fake news,” “conspiracy theory,” and so forth.

In the end, Facebook, Twitter and Google might want to reconsider relying on the mainstream news media led by the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN, and instead include citizen journalists and non-government-sycophant media to provide news and information.

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has noted that the Founders generally viewed the freedom of the Press to apply to every citizen to print, publish or express accounts of events. We really need to highlight that kind of old-fashioned, honest journalism.

Scott Lazarowitz is a libertarian writer and commentator. Please visit his blog.




Scott Lazarowitz is a libertarian writer and commentator. Please visit his blog. The article is republished under a 2018 Creative Commons License.