This demand should be coupled with a call for a massive public works program to rebuild the deteriorating power grid and related infrastructure—the result of the profit drive by the utilities—and to create thousands of sorely needed jobs.

The power monopolies control a resource vital to society. But they are in the business of making money, not of providing energy. Keeping rates high to maximize profits is done partly by ensuring that the supply remains below the growing demand for energy. That’s why construction of power plants has slowed down, not because “people don’t want them in their backyards.”

Monopolies such as New York’s Con Edison or Ohio-based FirstEnergy, which own large parts of the power grid, do not find it “cost-effective” to invest in regular maintenance of transmission lines or ensuring the proper functioning of alarm systems that alert controllers of line failures. Such profit-motivated decisions guarantee there will be more breakdowns and blackouts.

Through their profit drive, these companies have created a situation that increasingly endangers the lives and livelihoods of millions of workers and farmers, as well as small businesspeople. They must be taken out of private hands and nationalized—run as public utilities for the benefit of the majority rather than the interests of a handful of super-wealthy capitalists, and with their books open for public scrutiny.

The source of this crisis is not “deregulation,” as liberal politicians and pundits argue. All moves to “regulate” the industry have been done within the framework of accepting the bosses’ profit prerogatives, and thus serve only to cover up the real problem—the continuing private ownership of a resource as indispensable to humanity as energy.

To approach this question from the standpoint of the interests of working people, we must start with the world, not the narrow framework of the USA. For example, the labor movement must reject the imperial, chauvinist arrogance of big-business politicians and media who complain that the United States and Canada have a “Third World power grid” that must be fixed. Their view is that “we” should be concerned about blackouts when they affect “civilized countries” but not when they are a reality for countries in the “Third World.” But our interests as workers and farmers are completely tied to those of fellow working people worldwide, and are counterposed to their interests—those of the imperialist exploiters in Washington and Ottawa.

Blackouts, lack of energy and drinking water, acute transportation problems—which New Yorkers and other residents of the citadel of imperialism got a taste of in mid-August—are commonplace in most of the world. Roughly 2 billion people, one-third of humanity, have no access to modern energy sources for lighting, heating, or cooking. Altogether, the imperialist countries of North America, Europe, and the Pacific, with 14 percent of the world’s population, consume 57 percent of the electricity. This glaring global inequality, perpetuated by the workings of the world capitalist system, must be addressed.

Electrification and modernization of power grids is a more pressing need for the semicolonial world than for the United States or Canada.

To address this situation, labor should join in the fight to demand the cancellation of the foreign debt of the semicolonial countries. It needs to promote affirmative action measures to redress the effects of many decades of plunder of the natural resources and labor of the majority of humanity by a small number of super-rich ruling classes that have divided the world among themselves and want to keep it that way.
 
 
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Blackout hits northeast U.S. and Ontario  
 
 
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