Power Failure

Americans are facing an increase in electricity rates thanks to deregulation.

Illinois residents have seen a jump in electricity rates recently. NewsHour correspondent Elizabeth Brackett looks at the debate over deregulation and freezing rates in Illnois.

Which of course Albertans have faced since 2001.

A number of industry watchers, including Alberta Energy Minister Mel Knight, have been forecasting higher electricity costs for Albertans even before the Ed Stelmach government announced a new $15-per-tonne tax on carbon dioxide emissions.

And that's come on top of a $4.5-billion bill Alberta consumers are being asked to pay for desperately needed new transmission infrastructure.

Hydro Quebec rated Edmonton's residential electricity rate the fifth highest out of 11 cities in 10 provinces in 2006.

Here is the irony deregulation was supposed to create competition and thus fund infrastructure expansion. Instead it has cost consumers more, reduced competition creating power oligopolies and no new transmission infrastructure has been created.

Service, well we have increasing brown outs and black outs now thanks to deregulation. Something we now share with California.

EPCOR has begun rolling blackouts, cutting power to certain areas on alternating days to help conserve energy. It's not a terrible idea, but it makes day to day living a pain. There's no official schedule anywhere, so you just kind of have to guess when power in your area is going out.

However city owned EPCOR has increased its profits thanks to deregulation.

But these profits have not benefited consumers or tax payers, they have been shoveled into an income trust created by EPCOR. This is the real meaning of deregulation;

Epcor recently acquired TransCanada Power Limited Partnership, which now operates as Epcor Power L.P. The merger included the integration of 11 new power generation facilities located in Ontario, New York, British Columbia and Colorado. The new publicly-traded subsidiary is the largest publicly-traded company based in Edmonton.

EPCOR Power L.P. (the Partnership) is a limited partnership organized under the laws of the Province of Ontario, which owns and operates a portfolio of power generation assets in Canada and the United States.

The Partnership's mission is to be Canada's premier income fund, providing a growing, stable cash distribution to unitholders. This will be accomplished by being growth-oriented while providing unitholders with reliable long-term cash flows. Superior operating and commercial management practices will be applied to a quality portfolio of energy assets.

	Stock Quote: EP.UN
		$26.12

See:

What's That Smell?

Blowing in the Wind

Citizen Klein

The Wild West Buyout

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And New York Has Rent Controls

Unlike Alberta, but once again what is good for the big Apple appears to be good for Alberta. This is what globalization looks like, the neo-con agenda writ across the globe. The current housing crisis in Alberta mirrors that of New York City.

Developmentalism in the Big Apple

Cost of living has skyrocketed in New York, but under fatcats Giuliani and Bloomberg, the working man’s wage has not

By Steven Wishnia

Rent in New York City costs 10 times more today than it did 30 years ago. Working-class wages haven't followed suit.

From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present
By Kim Moody
New Press · $26.95

Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Urban and Industrial Environments)
By Julie Sze
The MIT Press · $24.00

Thirty years ago, you could easily find a one-bedroom apartment in a middle-class neighborhood in New York City for $150 a month. Today, it would cost more than $1,500—more than what Yankees slugger Reggie Jackson, then baseball’s highest-paid player, paid in 1977. His Fifth Avenue apartment with a balcony overlooking Central Park cost $1,466 a month. And the minimum wage hasn’t gone up to $27.82 an hour.

How we got to this point is the subject of Kim Moody’s From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present (The New Press). Moody analyzes how New York’s business elite exploited the ’70s fiscal crisis to destroy the city’s “social-democratic polity” and impose the neoliberal agenda that has dictated “restraint on social spending, privatization, deregulation, and most importantly, the reassertion of class power by the nation’s capitalist class.”

New York City Housing Bubble - 'The BIG Picture'

See;

Housing

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Molsons Strike

Excuse me but this is 2007 and the economy is booming. So why the claw back mentality of the past? Because Alberta has the weakest labour laws in Canada encouraging employers to be assholes.

Claw backs began in Alberta a decade ago when King Ralph pushed privatization and used the debt and deficit hysteria to punish public sector workers with claw backs in wages and benefits, which had been prompted by Safeway's claw back bargaining with UFCW across North America.

Class war was declared by Safeways and other employers beginning in the eighties prompted by the anti-union attacks of the neo-conservative regimes of Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney. It continued for over a decade across North America, as Kim Moody documented in his book an Injury to All.

Today with a provincial labour shortage, low interest rates, increased stock prices and productivity, Molsons Coors wants to go back to the past.

Todd Romanow, national representative for the Canadian Auto Workers union, accused Molson of stubbornly insisting on rolling back wages and pensions to 1980 levels for new employees.

"Beer is supposed to be for happy times, right now it is not," said Dave Wilton, picket captain with the Local 284 Canadian Auto Workers.

Employees, like Wilton, are ticked off that wages of future hires are rolled back from $29 to $22 an hour.

And while company spokesman Ferg Devins said the rollback is still competitive within the Alberta market, Wilton doesn't agree because he said the company is making a lot of profit.

The contract would also pass on some of the pension costs in a "defined contribution" of 3% of annual salary by new workers, and cut sick days of all employees from nine to six.

With the current hot Alberta economy, anyone getting paid at the proposed new rate won't be able to afford decent housing in Edmonton, he said.

Meanwhile in Calgary the climate change denying CEO of controversial Talisman Energy retires with a golden parachute.

Mr. Buckee retires with fantastic wealth, having cashed in stock options worth $24-million in 2005 and 2006. The rest of his options were valued at $52-million, as of Dec. 31, along with a $1.4-million annual pension whose total value is pegged at $23-million.

So who says class war is a thing of the past.

With the onset of the crisis, Moody's narrative becomes largely the bleak account of an even bleaker reality. He describes all the strategies devised by capital to impose the new rules on American workers: the dispersion of production to smaller units around the U.S., direct investment in production abroad, the "outsourcing" of work overseas, concentration (forcing small, isolated plants to confront big conglomerates with many sources of revenue), and the breakup of "pattern bargaining" on an industry-wide scale. By the late 1970's, business was also engaged in a new political activism capable of defeating pro-labor legislation in a Democratic congress and which, by pressure on the future "Reagan Democrats", helped to set the Reagan agenda even before Reagan. Because the UAW was the very model of postwar business unionism, Moody rightly underscores the Chrysler bailout of 1979-80 as a major turning point. To save Chrysler fom bankrupcty, the UAW made a series of concessions in exchange for such dubious benefits as a seat for union president Doug Fraser on Chrysler's board of directors. Whereas Fraser had, in 1978, denounced the "one-sided class war" being waged by business on working people, he and other labor leaders hailed this contract as a "breakthrough". It WAS a breakthrough-- for management. By the early 1980's, the precedent of the Chrysler contract had opened the floodgates for a "tidal wave of concessions" everywhere. Even companies with no apparent squeeze on their profits sensed the new balance of forces and demanded, usually successfully, the renegotiation of unexpired contracts, obtaining major concessions on wages, benefits and work rules. It was the biggest rollback for U.S. labor since the post-1929 Depression years, and it is not over. As Moody points out, the "realism" of business unionism faced with demands for concessions does not even achieve its minimum stated goal of saving jobs.

Business was way ahead of both the "business unionists" and the rank- and- file in taking advantage of the new situation. Even today, when the depth of the crisis has impressed itself on nearly everyone in both camps of capital and labor, the business unionists cling to the discredited practice of a bygone era. They have shown aggressiveness and imagination only in combating rank-and-file attempts, such as the P-9 strike in Austin, Minnesota, to break out of the suicidical "business as usual" mentality of mainstream organized labor. They have responded to the weakening of unions by complaceny, by organizing the limited constituency of middle-class service workers, by intimidation of rank-and-file insurgents, or by formless mergers of unions with little in common as a bargaining unit. Confronted with the challenge to organize the vast new proletariat in dead-end and low-paying service jobs, business unionists react wth the same condescension and lethargy that the bureaucrats of the AFL showed toward tthe unorganized mass of production workers in the 1930's, prior to the rise of the CIO.

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