Power and the great inequality
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
Last week in Florida the state’s biggest electric company, Florida Power & Light (FPL), and the entities that gobble up huge chunks of the company’s power output – mostly big corporations and government agencies – reached a very sweet deal.
FPL will cut a proposed rate increase by hundreds of millions of dollars for the tiny number of electricity hogs and make up for any potential loss in profits by screwing the millions of small household consumers who will see their electric bills rise.
Under the agreement “between Florida Power & Light Co. and groups representing large commercial and federal agency customers…” there will be “a cost shift from high end users to residential and small business customers,” according to the state’s consumer advocate, Public Counsel J.R. Kelly, quoted in the Miami Herald.
Kelly’s statement is dead on. According to FPL’s own figures, when the rate changes take effect next January, “while residential bills will go up, rates for most commercial customers are expected to remain flat or down 3 percent.”
According to The Miami Herald, “The Florida Industrial Power Users Group, South Florida Hospital and Health Care Association and Federal Executive Agencies have agreed to the proposal.” No kidding; they were the ones sitting at the table with FPL and the ones who will benefit from the lopsided bargain, unlike the vast majority of the monopoly’s 4.6 million customers, who were not consulted but will be gouged so that FPL can offer cheap electricity to big corporations and large government bureaucracies.
Kelly, the consumer advocate, was half right when he said that the proposed rate changes are “absolutely absurd and not fair in any way to ratepayers.” The “cost shift” from a handful of corporations, which in recent years have been reaping huge profits and are sitting on mountains of cash, to the state’s hard-pressed residential customers coping with high unemployment, a drastic decrease in the value of their homes, and a wave of foreclosures and evictions is the epitome of unfairness.
The real estate crash hit the Florida middle class especially hard, making it as endangered as the famed Florida panther. Now FPL is poised to deliver the kill shot and drive it into extinction.
But, to rewrite a line from Aretha Franklin, in 2012 America, what’s fairness got to do with it? For at least three decades, we have been living under policies that systematically comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. In the wake of ever more regressive taxes, corporate union busting and outsourcing and off-shoring of jobs to domestic contractors and foreign countries to take advantage of cheap labor and powerless workers, what is absurd is to expect fairness from our corporate overlords and their political minions.
Woe onto those few with the temerity to challenge the unwritten rules of this corporate-political juggernaut. According to the Herald’s reporting, two years ago the five-member Florida Public Service Commission, which decides on rate changes, “sharply cut rate increases sought by FPL and Progress Energy Florida. Within months of that decision, the Florida Senate refused to confirm two of the commissioners and a nominating panel, which is appointed by legislative leaders, declined to interview two others for reappointment. The ousted commissioners and then-Gov. Charlie Crist [a Republican] said it was retaliation for rejecting most of the rate increases.”
The dandy deal just announced between the power monopoly and its biggest clients at the expense of about four and a half million residents of the state is just one additional bit of data among mounds of evidence that we are living in the time of the Great Inequality. The rise of the Taliban of the fictional free market, the Tea Party, which has taken over the Republican Party, already has made things worse. And the zealots for capitalism at its most savage envision a grimmer future still.
The upcoming Republican National Convention will crown the Romney-Ryan ticket, which favors “cost shifts” from the have-nots to the haves that put Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and FPL to shame. A victory by these forces would be a true American tragedy. That’s why Obama, who has not presided as the staunch progressive we expected given his earlier political track record, and who too often has lacked the aggressiveness and the adroitness to break through the bad faith and the clever traps laid by the Republicans, is still our best and only hope.
