Hiding Data – DeSantis Staffed Public Service Commission Drops Requirement for Electricity Companies to Tell How Many Disconnections Due to Non Payment

March 7, 2023 | Sundance |

It’s a local Florida story and multi-faceted. However, for the bigger national audience the issue that should be considered is thatRon DeSantis and the Florida Republican party took $9+ million in campaign contributions from state energy providers, then approved the biggest electricity rate hikes in Florida.

Additionally, and more obscure in the outcome, thePublic Service Commission (Public Utility Commission, or PUC), after being filled with DeSantis appointees, informed the electricity providers they no longer needed to report the number of residents who were disconnected from utility service due to nonpayment.

One could make the intellectual and political argument, the scale of disconnection -which is quite alarming- would be averse to the interests of Governor DeSantis seeking a higher office.

Like much of the country,electricity rates in Florida have skyrocketed with the increase in natural gas prices. However, unlike much of the country, most Florida residents have only one option for electrical utility power. The rate of disconnection in Florida amid lower income and working families is far greater than almost any other state.Florida is quickly becoming a class-driven society with haves and have-nots.

FLORIDA – […] In November 2021, Florida’s Public Service Commission (PUC) issued a memorandum allowing electric utilities to stop disclosing their shutoff data. The memorandum, which reversed the commission’s September 2020 decision to collect the data to track the pandemic’s effects on utility customers, came after DeSantis stacked the board with his appointees. The move came less than a month after commission members approved the largest electric rate hike in Florida’s history, resulting in a 20 percent increase in costs to residential ratepayers.

Now it’s impossible to know how many customers have been disconnected from their electric utilities for being unable to pay their increasing power bills. If that disconnection rate continued, noted the report, NextEra would have shut off 1.2 million customers in 2022. But we do not know the total, because the DeSantis-appointed Florida PUC allowed them to hide the data.

[…] In early December, the Bailout Watch report noted,Florida regulators approved a fuel rider, or a cost increase tied to the price of fuelallowing utilities to pass the cost of higher fuel prices to consumers, without affecting their enormous profits. Company executives have been handsomely rewarded for such political wins. Top executives at NextEra gave themselves a 59 percent raise between 2020 to 2021. (read more)

One of the reasons I became confident last year that RonDeSantis was planning a 2024 presidential bid, was the one-and-done-nature of his focus.

Florida working class residents are under extreme economic duress as a result of unavoidableincreases in energy costs (home cooling), massive increases in insurance costs (tripling of homeowners, doubling of auto), skyrocketing housing costs (largest in nation).

Throughout 2022 GovernorDeSantis focused almost exclusively on social issue constructs, and the economic policies of Florida -while more challenging to address- have been exclusively unattended. From the 30,000 ft level, the disconnect in executive priority becomes more explainable when you consider the management team was assembling apolicy strategy for media and public consumption.

Throughout my research and review on the managers and background of DeSantis team, it just became obvious (mid-summer ’22) there was a longer-term plan in the background, created in the latter part of 2021 and everything thereafter -asevere emphasis on social issues- was a political management and national branding approach. If you overlay the hindsight timelines, including the PUC story, one can see the proactive political construct to control any negative issues.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/03/07/hiding-data-desantis-staffed-public-service-commission-drops-requirement-for-electricity-companies-to-tell-how-many-disconnections-due-to-non-payment/

BEWARE, Here Comes the Intel Community Laying Groundwork for FISA 702 Renewal

March 6, 20231/2

Ugh, it makes me sick to see these schemes as they are constructed and yet feel helpless to stop them from organizing. Remember which media outlets push the PR campaigns of the U.S. Govt. (1) CNN drives Dept of State; (2) Washington Post drives CIA; and (3) NYT/Politico advance the interests of the domestic intelligence apparatus.

With that in mind, here comes the Intelligence Community laying the groundwork for reauthorization of the FISA-702 surveillance system on American citizens.

They are so damned transparent in their agenda, the stenographers have even dropped “FISA,” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as the term within the construct. Now they are just calling it “702 reauthorization.”

(VIA POLITICO) – The intelligence community has a critical congressional ally in its bid to reauthorize a sweeping warrantless surveillance program. However, even he thinks its officials aren’t making a convincing enough case.

“One of the things the community’s got to do a better job of is explaining, in practical non-classified terms, how valuable this tool is,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in a recent brief interview. “And they’ve not done that as well as they should.”

Warner sits at the heart of what will be a months-long, knockout debate about whether to reauthorize the warrantless surveillance program, known as Section 702, by the end-of-year deadline. The program is designed to gather the electronic communications of foreigners abroad, but has the potential to sweep up those of Americans.

The Virginian, who argues continuing the program in some form is essential but is open to changes, will have his work cut out for him. Influential and newly emboldened House Republicans have made it clear they won’t let Section 702 stay alive without significant changes — if they support reauthorization at all — amid an all-time-low relationship with the Justice Department and the FBI.

And the intelligence community can also count Section 702 critics among House Democrats and senators in both parties, many of whom believe this is their best chance to force more limits on the program. (read more

As most people are now aware, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) sits at the epicenter of how the surveillance state is weaponized against American citizens. It is the SSCI who helped create the surveillance network, and it is the SSCI who now seek to defend the unconstitutional system they have created.

Pretenses are being dropped, and you will note how in this reauthorization schedule they are dropping “foreign” communication with American citizens, as a limitation on the authority they have already usurped. Yes, it is factually true the ‘foreign’ aspect was always a ruse, a false premise, that granted the Dept of Justice, National Security Division (DOJ-NSD), and FBI legal authority to conduct intrusive Title-1 surveillance on any American citizen.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/03/06/beware-here-comes-the-intel-community-laying-groundwork-for-fisa-702-renewal/

>>18464659

2/2

Well beyond the “cell phone metadata,” in the era of your portable transponder having internet and social media connection, just about everyone has metadata connected to a foreign person or entity. Use the Twitter app on your phone, you are connected to foreign entities. Use Instagram or Facebook, WhatsApp or Telegram, same/same/same/same.

TicTok? Fughetaboudit. The auspices of only looking at U.S. persons engaged in foreign contacts is totally moot.

The “702 authorities,” which is an innocuous term for a “U.S. Person“,permit DHS, DOJ, FBI and any national security apparatchik to open up your data and check you out. This is the reality of the modern era. This total surveillance reauthorization is what the SSCI wants to permit.It must be stopped completely. It cannot be “reformed.”

4th Amendment – “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Either you are secure from federal search of your “private papers,” as outlined in the United States Constitution, or you are not.

There is no aspect of this “702” nonsense, where a secret court grants a secret authorization, to engage in secret surveillance, by some secret entity of government – which might be a contractor, just to “see if” you might be doing something suspicious, or against the interests of the federal government.The premise behind “702” reauthorization is unconstitutional.

How strongly do I feel about this?

I will openly campaign against any politician or candidatewho does not fully endorse the elimination of FISA 702 Authorization in sum and total. I don’t care who the candidate is, or what his/her political affiliation might be.

I am sick and tired of having to construct communication systems, to engage in ordinary conversation and/or communication, knowing the biggest challenge is to construct the system to defend ordinary people against unconstitutional searches and seizures.Ironically, this includes the very commenting system you are using to share any opinion of this outline. This domestic surveillance system just needs to be stopped.

Steps off soapbox.

Love to all, but sheesh this is frustrating….

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/03/06/beware-here-comes-the-intel-community-laying-groundwork-for-fisa-702-renewal/

https://twitter.com/DarrenJBeattie/status/1633119439913664517?s=20

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1633261155903848448?s=20