Energy companies’ rip-offs and our friends’ donkey-f**king

(weekend blog) Two stories this weekend:

1. Energy companies ripping us off

With British gas hiking its prices by about 12% there have been lots of stories in the press about whether the Government could find some way of capping energy prices. The energy companies, of course, insist that there is already competition in the energy market so people can switch supplier if they want. And anyway the companies claim they only make a few pounds per household and therefore any price controls would “hurt investment” and other such garbage.

What amazes me is that there doesn’t seem to be a single mainstream journalist who understands the trick the Big Six energy companies are playing on us. So, I’ll just remind any readers who don’t understand the game the energy companies are playing.

There are two parts to our energy industry – generation (producing the energy) and supply (getting the energy to our homes and businesses). With me so far?

In the supply part, there is competition and you can switch suppliers if you want and save a few quid. But power generation requires massive investment to build power stations and so there is little to no competition. What the Big Six energy companies do is make huge profits on energy generation (where there is no competition):

Here’s similar information from a different study:

Then by leaving small profit margins on the supply part, the Big Six energy companies achieve three things:

• this discourages too many competitors from entering the market
• this makes switching almost a waste of time for many people as they save so little
• this allows the Big Six to claim that they make very small profits on supplying energy to us (while not mentioning the huge profits they make on generation)

And here some other facts about the UK energy market:

1. Our often foreign-owned energy companies make four to five times as much profit in the UK than they are allowed to make in their properly regulated home markets

2. They are so profitable in the UK that Scottish Power’s Spanish owner Iberdrola could lend its American subsidiary £800m leeched from its UK customers, as the American subsidiary needed the money to meet investment commitments it had made to US regulators

3. Since 2006-7, the useless UK regulator Ofgem’s budget increased from £18.6m to over £33m and yet due to Ofgem’s pathetic efforts, the UK is one of the most profitable energy markets in the world.

4. As you’ll see in the diagram below (I apologise that I have used this before), our energy companies keep pushing up prices whether the wholesale prices they pay rise or fall:

2. Our friends f**king donkeys

And now on to this weekend’s important story – a story you’re unlikely to see on the BBC or C4 News or in the mainstream media.

In Morocco, fifteen minors who sexually assaulted a donkey in the small rural town of Sidi Kamel in the communal providence of Sidi Kacem have been treated for rabies infections received from the animal.

The sexually frustrated ‘children’ and teenagers stayed at the Mechraa Belksiri Hospital for one week to receive rabies vaccinations after the animal transmitted the disease to them, explained Moroccan daily Al Akhbar in its August 10 edition. The incident has put the families of these fifteen young people into distress and horror, reports the daily.

Local authorities have been alerted and are searching for anyone else who has “approached” and “admired” the obviously attractive animal too closely, in order to limit the risk of rabies spreading among the inhabitants of the region. The owner of the donkey has been ordered to slaughter the animal before it tempts any more locals into acts of love

And here’s what seems to be a video taken by a US drone with infra-red camera where the American operators are admiring that ancient Arab custom of giving your favourite donkey a bit of a knee trembler:

https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=cad_1371380791