privatization – Under The Table

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser May 2013)

“Unless you become more watchful in your states and check the spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that the control over your dearest interests has passed into the hands of these corporations.” Andrew Jackson

Yes, I read the unattractive little slips of paper that come with our monthly PG&E bill, and I have no doubt PG&E hopes most customers will toss these little slips without reading their tiny print. Why? Because most of the little slips announce rate increases for things customers should not have to pay for. There is a government entity called the CPUC, which stands for the California Public Utilities Commission, that is supposed to protect the consumer from unnecessary and unjust rate increases, but the CPUC does not protect us because they are in bed with PG&E, literally, and approve anything and everything that PG&E wants to do.

Last month’s bill contained notices of public hearings at which PG&E customers can express their thoughts and feelings about PG&E’s latest proposed rate increases that will garner the private utility company 1.2 billion dollars by raising our electric bills 5.2 percent and our gas bills 15.3 percent. But wait. Because of the nationwide fracking insanity, America is now exporting vast quantities of natural gas to Japan and elsewhere, so PG&E should be lowering gas bills, not raising them, and that same cheap gas is making the generation of electricity cheaper, too, so our electricity rates should be going down, not up. But that won’t stop the CPUC from approving PG&E’s request for rate increases. And what are we going to do about this crime?

Well, I wrote a letter to the CPUC reminding them that they are supposed to be serving the public, not facilitating PG&E’s thievery, and that the rate increases are outrageous and uncalled for. I also sent a copy of my letter to our governor Jerry Brown and asked him to make a fuss about PG&E’s latest proposed theft. No responses so far, and I won’t hold my breath waiting for any. You can write letters, too, or attend public hearings, but that won’t do any good.

Then with this month’s bill came a notice of Phase Two of PG&E’s proposed rate increases, which seems to say they will raise our electric rates even more than the previously noted 5.2 percent—something more like 8 percent. Why? Because they are greedy and amoral and want more and more money all the time and there is nothing we can do to stop them. In many California communities PG&E has a suffocating monopoly on the delivery of electricity, and in the absence of any sort of help from our government, the public is helpless to resist.

“Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?” James Thurber

In related news, my phone line went dead on Friday evening, while Marcia’s phone line remained vibrantly alive. Why me, Lord? In any case, since the blessed line ceased to work on the weekend I had to wait until Monday to report the outage to our friendly local MCN (Mendocino Community Network) through which Marcia and I get our phone and internet service. Within a few hours after my call to MCN, a cordial fellow arrived to check our lines and determine that the problem was not my fault. He said that AT&T, the owner of the telephone lines, would have to fix the problem since it was AT&T’s line that was not hooked up properly.

So a few hours later, a taciturn AT&T guy arrived and I told him which number was dead and which was alive, and he nodded and checked the connections in the box on the side of our house and went away and came back and climbed a pole and went away and came back and spent about two hours doing whatever he was doing. Then he announced there was nothing wrong with Marcia’s line, which we already knew, and that it was my line that was dead.

“Yes,” I said, trying to remain calm. “That is what I told the fellow from MCN, and he confirmed that. And that is what I told you when you arrived.”

“Well,” he said, shrugging, “MCN put in an order for me to check the number I checked, and since you’re not an AT&T client we can’t fix the other line until MCN puts in an order for that other number.”

“But I told you which number was dead and which was live,” I said, doing a little jig of annoyance. “And you acknowledged that information and then spent two hours looking into the situation, so I don’t see why you can’t…”

“Somebody, probably me, will come back tomorrow or the next day,” he said, shrugging. “But since you’re not an AT&T customer, I can’t fix the line until MCN puts in an order for the other number.”

And I thought to myself Herein lies the problem with monopolies and the privatization of essential services, which was followed by the thought I wonder if this some sort of punishment for changing our local service to MCN and not continuing to pay the usurious rates charged by AT&T for that same local service?

The sad truth is that PG&E can triple or quadruple our rates any time they want to, and we would have no choice but to pay them unless we want to live without electricity. Indeed, we recently paid a large initial ransom and continue to pay a monthly penalty for not having a Smart Meter radiating us twenty-four hours a day, and our rates were increased to pay for the Smart Meter program (and our rates did not go down after all the radiation devices were installed.) Remember: PG&E is a private company, not a public utility, and therefore we should not have to finance their infrastructure costs on top of paying our monthly energy bills; but we do.

In the case of telephone service, I doubt that AT&T likes sharing their lines with little locally owned companies that provide excellent service for much less money than AT&T charges for similar service. Sadly, when we dared switch to MCN for our local phone service, AT&T punished us with huge fees for stopping service at our previous residence, transferring service to our new residence, and hooking up with MCN. We had no choice but to pay those entirely arbitrary and exorbitant fees if we wanted to avail ourselves of the much more affordable local and long distance phone service, as well as groovy fast internet, all from MCN.

Alas, we do not have an MCN equivalent to provide us with greener and less expensive electricity than PG&E provides, and that is because PG&E and Southern California Edison spend many millions of our dollars every year influencing legislators and running entirely false ad campaigns to make sure alternatives to their monopolies have little chance of succeeding, and they do so with the collusion of the CPUC and the legislature and our governor. Can you say corporate oligarchy? Or if that is too abstract, how about a king and his vassals plundering the peasants whenever they feel like plundering?

“The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.” Ralph Nader

In my most recent yet-to-be-published novel, one of the main characters is the co-founder of a worker-owned cooperative that installs solar panels on the rooftops of a very sunny California town at no cost to the rooftop owners. When we meet our hero, he and his cohorts at Sky Blue Solar Farms have installed state-of-the-art solar panels on nearly all the rooftops of the medium-sized town. The profit split for the sale of the surplus solar electricity back to the grid is 50% for the homeowner, 30% for the township, and 20% for Sky Blue Solar Farms; and the township has grown so rich from the sale of surplus electricity that they now provide the citizenry with fabulous free public transportation, a superb and absolutely free community college, a vast community farm growing superb organic fruits and vegetables and grains, excellent free health clinics, and, of course, a booming economy—all of this made possible by simply changing the laws governing the production and sale of electricity that currently hold sway in California and do not allow such wonderful fictional things to come true.

But such fiction would swiftly become reality if we could change the current laws that serve the greedy few and penalize the rest of us. That, I think, is the most frustrating thing about so many of the obstacles to a transformative technological and societal and ecological revolution: the solutions are readily available but the kings and their vassals are loathe to relinquish their mean-spirited monopolies.

(This piece was originally published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser under the title “John Trudell and Me”)

John Trudell made an appearance at the Caspar Community Center a few weeks ago. I have listened to his provocative CD DNA a number of times, and I have admired him in the movies Thunderheart, Smoke Signals, and most recently as Coyote in Dreamkeeper. His impromptu 90-minute talk reiterated much of what he says on DNA, with one fabulous (for me) digression about Obama. This digression stated almost word-for-word what I have been saying to people for some months now, but coming from Trudell such intuitive analysis was greeted with applause rather than the snorts of derision that tend to greet my elucidations of “what’s really going on here.”

Trudell is big on thinking. As he says again and again, when we’re believing, we’re not thinking. When we limit ourselves to believing something, we close our minds to the possibility that the thing we believe in may have changed or disappeared. Trudell is skeptical that we have a democracy in America. If we believe we have a democracy, we will be closed to the possibility that we never had a democracy or that our democracy may be swiftly turning into something else.

In his digression about Obama, Trudell asked us to consider the possibility that Obama was installed as president by the ruling elite to further their ongoing agenda, just as Bill Clinton was crowned in order to complete the stalled works of his predecessor George the First. These works included the passage of NAFTA, the dismantling of Welfare and other aspects of the social safety net, the hastening of deregulation (of everything), and the demolition of unions. Trudell did not say what he thought Obama was installed to do, but he asked us to think of the economic meltdown and the government response to it as part of a larger plan, a plan that is working precisely as it is intended to work. He does not think the meltdown and the ensuing breakdown of our local and state governments are merely the repercussions of “some bankers making mistakes.” He thinks the overlords have installed Obama to oversee the next steps of their plan, though he did not specify what he thought those steps might be.

So I’ve been thinking about everything with new zeal, feeling validated by Trudell, and this morning my wife Marcia said something that crystallized much of what I’ve been thinking about. We were talking about the seemingly moronic proposal by the governator and his Republican minions to close our state parks. Such a plan makes no economic sense in the short or long term. It will hurt low-income vacationers. It will hurt local economies nurtured by state park use. And, Marcia said, it sets the stage for the privatization of the parks.

Think. All those wonderful state parks left unattended. Here come the armies of the newly impoverished to squat therein. What can be done? Call out the gendarmes. No gendarmes available due to budget cuts? Call out the National Guard and then privatize the parks. Lease them for, oh, a hundred years to private companies who will manage/protect them with private security forces. Entry fees will have to be exclusively high and those entering cannot be on any list of any sort of suspect. And then to pay for all this (to protect the park for future generations, of course) luxury homes must be built, tennis courts and a golf courses installed, with chic bistros riverside and lakeside and oceanside so the campers/residents won’t have to travel beyond the walls to dine. There will, of course, be high walls encircling the enclaves, er, parks. Far fetched?

Not at all. Consider the latest leaks reported in the mass media. It now appears Obama won’t have enough support in Congress, even among Democrats (imagine that?) to include a public option in any healthcare proposal. In which case, the healthcare situation will worsen and create more recruits for the army of the poor, as will the firing of eighteen thousand California public school teachers, a firing that will leave most inner city schools in California understaffed and essentially unmanageable, except as de facto jails. Oh, yes, and Obama himself has just announced he wants to cut over 300 billion dollars from Medicare and Medicaid, thus impoverishing many thousands more.

Meanwhile, there’s no budget shortfall for the military. In the absence of decent paying jobs, military recruiters are swamped with volunteers and we are swiftly growing a huge and robust military for wars abroad and quelling unrest at home.

As Trudell said several times during his talk, “I’m crazy, okay. I’m just talking. I don’t know anything. I’m just saying…think.”

School just got out for the summer, the kids shouting their goodbyes from the school bus trundling through Mendocino. And a year from now, school, what’s left of it, will be getting out again. If you believe the economy and our schools will be better than they are now because the experts on NPR and in the mainstream media say the economy seems to be stabilizing and a recovery is on the way, you are, to quote John Trudell, not thinking.