Asking Ken Silverstein for Help

Dear Mr. Silverstein,

Your post The Mission Statement is very objective, interesting and useful. All of your posts have enlightened my curiosity on good journalism. I think that my humble work on electricity without price controls (EWPC) deserves your help to be “read by a wide swath of interests.” To get a quick idea, please consider the GMH essay Electricity for the New Millennium.

There are now more than 100 EWPC articles on EnergyBlogs.com. Can you help by writing a professional journalistic article on EWPC? Please continue your assetment by considering the most recent articles EWPC’s Tipping Point and its follow up I Have a Dream Too.

As “… the columns both deserve and need to be critiqued,” I don’t understand the point in your statement “I’m not trying to appeal to or anger any one constituency.” I don’t understand it because, to me, it contradicts what you affirmed about dialogues in your post Journalism 101: “… it is my most sincere intention to be able to reach readers and to make them thirst for more information -- to, in essence, be a catalyst for more dialogue.” My point is that now people can learn from the emergent future, via generative dialogues that expose very rich conflicts, that might anger constituencies, such as can be seen in the EWPC article The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

From your post Packing Heat, I envision that EWPC “… battle to persuade the general public and ultimately Congress needs to take place in the marketplace of ideas. That discussion should not be censored in any way….” At it happens “… the lobbyists representing the various stakeholders are all roaming the halls of Congress trying to win support for their causes,” but the EWPC cause, that goes against the conventional wisdom, that emerged at the beginning of last year has not been considered at all.

In contrast to your post Trading Mentality, I am concerned of the utilities shareholders (people), to read “… there never has been and nor will there ever be any excuse for the shenanighans that [stopped] … the traders ... A few people [in the utilities] got very rich [by stopping progress in order no take risks at all]. But, the whole episode dragged down just about everyone else . . . it's important to punish those who lost their morality to avoid another era that [still] runs totally amok.” Consider please the EWPC article High Leverage Shake-Up in California.

On your post A Little Humility, you wrote that “Enron may have been ‘important,’ but -- eventually -- in my eyes it was just some faceless company that had no humility.” Would it be possible that Enron was just a very greedy casualty of several “faceless company [read California utilities] that had [even less] humility.”? Going back to 1996, before the debacle, please consider the EWPC article Slicing the Last of the Regulated Monopolies, which is an update of a New York Times article, by McKinsey & Co, director, Lester P. Silverman.

On that last post, I am 100 percent with your statement “What's that ole saying? You better be kind to people on the way up because you are going to see them on the way down. I take no pleasure in watching anyone's downfall, much less the fall of an entire company and all the implications that come with that. But, it really didn't surprise to me to learn that its success had really been a facade and that the company name eventually became synonymous with corruption.”

Best regards,

José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio, Ph.D.