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Workshop Talks
January/February 2001
Powerless before greed
by Htun Lin
In California we are experiencing a disaster, a disaster causing layoffs,
production shutdowns, traffic chaos and accidents, people stuck for hours
in elevators, patients' lives endangered by medical equipment shutting off.
For the foreseeable future California is going to be under the threat of
rolling blackouts.
All this was caused not by a natural disaster but by the effects of the
ideology of deregulation of the energy market. A collusion of sellers
artificially withheld energy to boost prices up to six fold. Now the two
major utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and Southern California
Edison, are saying they are bankrupt. They are demanding a bailout with
higher rates and state help.
PG&E Corporation had restructured itself with the approval of Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission. Its profits from electrical production are
now shielded from the mounting debts of its regulated subsidiary.
In the 1970s the government called this kind of artificial shortage an
embargo. Later, in 1989, it even went to war over oil in the Persian Gulf.
Now the cartel is domestic and includes Texas energy giants like Enron
whose CEO contributed a half million dollars toward their share in the Bush
oval office takeover. In return, Bush blamed California by declaring
California's crisis "a result of a faulty law."
Another example of a man-made crisis generated to increase profits, is an
equally serious crisis in health care where I work. It has not received
much attention during this energy crisis. Last December the money managers
at Blue Cross could not come to an agreement on a reimbursement rate for
health care provided by the Sutter chain. Sutter has so consolidated health
care in the Bay Area by incorporating financially troubled hospitals like
Alta Bates and Summit into their chain that they have become the "PG&E" of
health care in northern California. (See "Mass California hospital strike,"
August-September 2000 N&L)
This dispute between two levels of health care finance management caused
the disruption of health care for hundreds of thousands of northern
Californians. Many patients now have to trek 50 miles to the nearest
contracted provider. It has been clear to us health care workers, fighting
managed care's restructuring for the last decade, that all these crises and
shortages have been manufactured. They come out of an ideology based on
relations between things, commodities and capital, and not people.
In health care they eliminated hospital beds, closed emergency rooms, and
denied care as much as possible. Their shortages were manufactured to
increase profits. To workers, both health care and energy are basic life
necessities for survival and not mere commodities for investor speculation.
STATE OWNS DEBT ONLY
Many leftists are now excited because the virtual bankruptcy of
California's two main utilities means the massive involvement of the state,
which they hope will take over ownership. Even capitalists are for
"socialism" when they are bankrupt and want a state bailout. That will mean
the bankrupt companies and all their liabilities, as well as the new
extorted energy prices, will be the responsibility of California workers
and consumers through taxes and higher utility rates.
Restructuring has allowed PG&E's parent company to stash away its profits
while the state bails them out. Separation of the utilities from the
financial centers extracted huge surplus value from workers by controlling
production and supply while pressuring for even higher consumer rates.
Similarly, restructuring in health care allowed the HMOs to make huge
profits while hospitals and providers are financially strapped, causing
staffing shortages and service cuts.
No doubt the "flaw " which energy CEOs and Bush see in the deregulation law
is the rate cap which hinders further price increases charged to consumers.
There are consumer advocates like Harvey Rosenfeld from Nader's group who
similarly see a "flawed deregulation plan." They merely blame the
utilities for having written it. We are already paying in real life
consequences when the lights go out or when hospitals have to close, and we
will keep paying.
WILL WORKERS CONTROL?
Beyond state ownership or consumer advocacy is the question: will workers
have control of their work to provide for human beings as the first and
last priority? Only workers can get beyond the attitude that what is
objective is "bond ratings" and intercapitalist "credit ratings" instead of
human needs and our own ability to fill those needs.
The recent collapse of the energy system as well as the health care crisis
here gives us a glimpse of just how capitalism, carried to its logical
conclusion, will self-destruct, taking a huge human toll along with it.
Workers built these utilities. Workers run these utilities. We know they
are absolutely necessary to life.
No law that either regulates or deregulates will abolish the abuses we are
facing. No law will abolish capital and the logic of the social
abstraction, value, that drives this behavior. The so-called free market is
regulated according to the dictates of capital and its need to expand, and
to increase profits even to the point of its own demise. Only workers
together, taking control of their own labor, will allow us to get beyond
these recurring crises of capital.
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