Hi Julien,
Seth: Electricity deregulation in California is many things. One is the
squeezing of the working majority by the capitalist minority. This process,
as Nestor notes, has been underway around the world for some time.
Americans can learn much from what Nestor shares with us.
Julien: What you are writing about isn't a deregulation creating still more
benefits for the wealthy at the expense of the poor. If electricity was
really deregulated, the prices that consumers and businesses must pay could
be hiked in order to pay the electricity producers, and that would be at the
expense of the poor.
Seth: The price to produce electricity has been deregulated while the price
consumers pay has remained regulated. But the devil's in the details. The
utilities have gotten an emergency 9% rate hike for the electricity they
sell. Plus, they will get public money to pay for the difference between
the selling and producing price of electricity.
Working-class poverty amid "prosperity" has been the hidden story of the
Clinton-Gore "boom." US workers� buying power has been falling relative to
the prices of the goods and services their labor produced. Two examples.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors has reported that 83% of 25 cities surveyed
had increased requests for emergency food assistance in 2000 versus 1999.
Most of those requesting the emergency food had low-wage jobs. In a recent
Children's Defense Fund study (US), every third kid lived in families that
can't buy food after being forced off welfare.
Julien: Also, you seem to be ignoring the problem of overconsumption. At
least your article denies it. Why did the problem only arise this winter?
Imagine PG&E and Edison were nationalized... Where would the cheap
electricity come from? Natural gas (and other commodity) prices go higher
not to satisfy some evil capitalist but because there is too much demand.
Some people will have to live on without all the electricity they want.
Currently most of these people do not live in the USA. Do you support that
or do you think that Californians should curb their energy consumption? And
how can this consumption be curbed if not through big price hikes? (I am not
denying that there has been price manipulations nor that there is an
insufficient amount of electricity producing plants in California relative
to its electricity demand but none of those problems will be solved by
nationalization of PG&E and Edison.)
Seth: Electricity consumption is actually down over the past year versus the
previous year in CA. What's changed is the "market," for reasons Mark and
Nestor explained. In short, the producer, not the consumer, has increased
his power over everybody else. The class that owns the forces of
production calls the shots. Also, the article I posted offers a "liberal"
criticism (in the US sense of seeking to toss out the bad apples instead of
replacing the barrel of rotted apples). That said, in Sacramento where I
live, we have a municipal utility district that is not under the gun of
financial capital as are the investor-owned utilities. Here. electricity
rates are 25% less that PG&E's. Public ownership of utilities "works" in
that respect. Yes, the US needs to curb its consumption of energy. The
social question is who bears the brunt of the adjustment? Given the current
balance of class power, the super rich and corporations will give their
answer. And as Bob Dylan sang, you don't need a weatherman to tell which
way the wind blows. And it's blowing capitalism for the short term. The
silver lining is that more people in the US are seeing the obvious--the
accumulation of too much money in too few hands, and all that follows from
this.
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