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   Vol.65/No.3            January 22, 2001 
 
 
Nationalize the energy companies!
(front page editorial)
 
The labor movement needs to respond to the power shortages, rate hikes, and skyrocketing fuel prices that are creating a disaster for working people by demanding government expropriation of the power and energy companies.

These monopolies control a resource vital to society. But they are in the business of making profits, not of providing energy. Through their drive for ever-higher profits they have created a situation endangering the lives and livelihoods of millions of workers and farmers, as well as small business-people.

They must be taken out of private hands, nationalized, and run as public utilities for the benefit of the majority rather than the interests of a handful of super-wealthy capitalists, bankers, and bondholders. Working people, especially on the West Coast, where the crisis is most acute, would respond massively to calls by the labor movement for a campaign of mobilizations calling for the nationalization of this industry.

In addition, immediate relief is needed to ensure that not a single person goes without heat, electricity, or cooking fuel. The crisis has exposed the outrage of the cutbacks by the Clinton administration and the Republican-controlled Congress in already meager government programs for those needing assistance to pay rising fuel bills.

The unions and farmer organizations can demand that massive government funds and stores of fuel be made available to all those in need. Any worker laid off due to the energy crisis, such as workers at Kaiser Aluminum plants in Washington State today, must receive their full wages as long as they are out of work. Farmers, many of whom are already on the edge of insolvency, must be given assistance to keep dairies, pumps, trucks and tractors, and heating and cooling equipment running.

Taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel--which fall the hardest on working people--should be eliminated to provide immediate relief to independent truckers, farmers, and fishermen. Rate increases should be rolled back now.

The anarchy of capitalism, especially in times of world economic crisis, brings with it the potential for such sudden, devastating--sometimes seemingly inexplicable--outbreaks of shortages, wild price hikes, or sudden collapses of prices or production. The one inexorable result is to make workers and farmers pay for each crisis through rate hikes, currency devaluations, unemployment, or spiraling inflation. The measures advanced by big business and their representatives in the Democratic and Republican parties in response to these crises, such as those proposed by California governor Gray Davis, aim to bail out or otherwise protect the interests of capitalists in industry and banking. Working people need to advance our own interests and mobilize to see that our demands on the government are carried out.

In California, PG&E and Southern California Edison, once seen as stable companies and a place for safe investment by banks and bondholders, are now threatened with bankruptcy. They have been caught in a price squeeze between skyrocketing wholesale prices for natural gas and electricity and what they are able to charge customers under state regulatory measures from which only months ago they were making handsome profits. Giant banks such as J.P. Morgan and Bank of America, with deep lines of credit out to these companies, are suddenly threatened.

The immediate demand of these wealthy businessmen and bankers, carried out by the state government in California, is to push the burden onto working people through rate hikes. But even some capitalist politicians, bankers, and bondholders propose some form of state intervention, recognizing that rapid measures are needed to prevent capitalists in one sector of industry from disrupting the largest state economy in the country. No matter whether there is "regulation" or "deregulation," however, the end result will be massive profits continuing to flow to these monopolies and the banks that stand behind them.

Nationalization of the energy companies is the opposite of the bailouts of the owners of the corporations through measures such as state sales of bonds, assumption of debts, or paybacks for "losses" to the consumer. Under a nationalized industry there must be full public knowledge about all aspects of the operation. The energy industry's books, which today are kept secret, must be opened to public scrutiny. Workers in the energy industry can use their position and knowledge to make sure all the facts are put on the table. Public, elected boards, independent of the government, should run the energy industry, with workers exerting control of job conditions and production.

The scare over energy "shortages" is accompanied by moves to erode environmental regulations, which industry and government spokespeople blame for high energy costs. The Bush administration appointee for the Department of Interior, for example, is pressing for opening up wide swaths of nature preserves in Alaska to oil company exploitation.

Along with this are proposals to bring closed nuclear power plants out of mothballs, such as the powering up of the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York. The ruling rich will seek to justify building new nuclear power facilities, something they have been prevented from doing since the widespread protests in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the exposures of the dangers of these disasters waiting to happen--like the 1979 Three Mile Island catastrophe. All nuclear plants should be shut down now and a massive government cleanup effort launched to deal with the as yet unresolved problem of radioactive waste produced by each facility.

Such a struggle by the labor movement could draw a deep response from coal miners and other working people in mining communities. There is absolutely no need for an energy crisis, among other reasons, because there is plenty of coal that can be burned cleanly and safely to produce electricity. The technology exists and is in use to eliminate harmful emissions at coal-fired plants, but big business resists using it because it cuts into their profits.

Expanding coal production under safe working conditions would employ tens of thousands in mining jobs. With union power in place at every coal mine, coal can be taken out of the ground under safe conditions, turning back the employers' drive to deal blows to the United Mine Workers by setting aside safety, increasing productivity at workers' expense, and lengthen the workweek. The crisis forced on working people by the energy monopolies will be repeated in industry after industry until workers and farmers can mount a revolutionary struggle to replace the capitalist government with one of our own. A workers and farmers government will be a mighty weapon in the struggle to nationalize all the holdings of the capitalists, a step that will finally make it possible to rationally organize production and distribution of the wealth created by working people in a planned way for the benefit of all humanity.
 
 
Related articles:
Cause of energy crisis: monopolies' profit drive
Companies in Washington State profit from rate increases and plant closings
BP Amoco exposed on West Coast oil and gas price-rigging scheme
 
 
 
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