Bailout Watch et al. (1/30/23)
This week on CounterSpin: Powerless in the United States: How Utilities Drive Shutoffs and Energy Injustice is an ongoing project from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Energy and Policy Institute and Bailout Watch. It tracks utility service disconnections and corporate profiteering—because, it turns out, they’re flip sides of a coin.
You and I may think that in disastrous weather conditions (with no signs of stopping), and a pandemic and low wages and a hike in prices, it’s a time to acknowledge workers’ sacrifices and support them. Silly us. Actually, it’s a moment for powerful companies to raise prices on consumers—not to recoup losses, but just to raise profits, as their shareholder speeches will proudly reveal—and why would that gouging stop at life-saving vaccines or medicines? Why not also shut off the power to the homes of struggling families? Seriously, why not? If Wall Street will reward you for it, and corporate media won’t call you out or even seriously, humanistically report on what you’re doing? Or even easier, one might think, argue for the basic transparency that would allow that reporting?
Electric utilities have disconnected US households more than 4 million times since the beginning of Covid, preceding the Russian war on Ukraine. At the same time, shareholder payouts went up by $1.9 billion, increases that could have paid those households’ bills five times over. Our guests’ work illustrates how energy bills take up more and more of families’ earnings, and how the actions of corporations take a tough, in some cases life-threatening situation, make it worse, and then hand it off to their allies in the press corps, who they know will present it as “business as usual if regrettable,” but, above all, nothing worth looking in to or talking about seriously.
Our guests aren’t just complaining; they have ideas about what’s needed to address the situation. Shelby Green is research fellow at the Energy and Policy Institute. Selah Goodson Bell is energy justice campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. We’ll hear from both of them this week on the show.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the police killing of Tyre Nichols.
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This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.