Meanwhile, wholesalers such as Enron, Dynegy, and Reliant Energy are making out like the bandits they are. Most of these outfits are headquartered in the South, many of them in Texas. Bush has steadfastly refused to consider capping wholesale energy costs. Instead, he wants to drill for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and pull the plug on laws safeguarding the environment. It owns Centragas, a 357-mile distribution system for natural gas in northern Colombia.
Workers pay the price.
While the CEOs and politicos light one another's fires, poor and working people are left out in the cold and the dark. Rolling blackouts were bad enough. The jump is partly due to an emergency nine percent hike instituted for electricity, but largely because the rates for natural gas have skyrocketed. Deregulation, which nearly half of the country's states are in different stages of adopting, is also hurting industry workers via layoffs and speedup. Many people first got electrical service through a struggle for public power at the beginning of the 20th century.