Social Murder in Action: Public Utilities in the Burn Down

I've lived in Kansas City, a small town in New Mexico, and Saint Paul. All three places had terrible winters. In New Mexico, up in the high desert, it got so cold that ice formed inside my windows, but only because I put a stockpot of water on the stove to boil, in the hope that I could raise the humidity enough that I didn't have to worry so much about nosebleeds from the dry cold. I had never had that in Kansas City, nor even up in Minnesota, where the houses are built for it and the people band together to shovel snow.

Last night – Monday night, I should say – as the temperature in Missouri dropped down into the negative teens Fahrenheit (-10 F is -23 C, for those who use the metric system), Edgar and I noted that ice was forming inside our windows. That being said, we were the lucky ones. Our power never went out, and – drafty as our garret apartment is – we thankfully have radiator heat (the environmental cost of natural gas, of course, being a whole other problem).

Downtown Houston lit up like a Christmas tree, while the residential neighborhoods around it lie dark.

I want to discuss the rolling blackouts that Evergy – the local electrical utility – engaged in during the President's Day Arctic Vortex, and how it constitutes social murder. While the situation in Missouri and Kansas is nowhere near the level of things in Texas, which produced a number of dramatic photographs (and which is dismissed by many because Texas went red, something that many people worst-served by the state aren’t responsible for,) it was still awful.

These rolling blackouts did hit some parts of Kansas City and the surrounding areas, with the south Hyde Park area being hit with a 45 minute blackout (which was the only one I was able to directly confirm through social media). I'm noting that my area was fine, and many of the wealthier Kansas-side suburbs being fine. Raytown, however, a less-affluent and more racially mixed Missouri-side suburb, was hit fairly hard. There are elements of what I called Mesopolitical Geography in here, though I should probably have rendered it as Political Mesogeography. Whichever.

This is the same electrical utility that donated a total of $2,500 to seditionist traitor Josh Hawley in 2019, out of a grand total of 23,500 donated to congress people ($22,000 of it going to Republicans.) This is out of a total of (if I'm reading this document correctly,) about 364,000 dollars in donations. You can check out the file for yourself if you want, though it strangely only covers 2019. Of course, there's an important issue here – how many people died or suffered health problems due to the rolling blackouts Sunday through Tuesday morning, and how many of them could have lived if those donations went towards increasing capacity and maintaining the grid, instead of lining the pockets of elected officials.

A somewhat different picture emerges from looking at Opensecrets.org, giving less complete but much more up-to-date information, suggesting that there is a sharp divide between the behavior of the Evergy PAC and the preferences of the Employees – notably the top recipients (Roger Marshall, Ann Wagner, and Roy Blunt – all Republicans) received $7,500, $7,000, and $6,000 from the PAC itself, but only $13 total from individual contributions through the PAC.

There were nearly 100,000 people without power as of Tuesday morning, and I only checked after it got warm enough for me to get out of my bed. As far as I can tell, this is about 1/16th of the company's total customers.

Wind microgenerators in England — it looks good, but isn’t going to cut it for our energy demands.

This, of course, raises the question of why an electrical utility with a regional monopoly is allowed to donate money to political candidates at all. No one is really able to use a different service at the moment (solar and wind microgeneration just aren't there quite yet), so this essentially serves as an extraction of wealth from the citizens of Missouri and Kansas, delivered to elected officials that – in many cases – do not live in these states.

I've had a slightly negative attitude towards Evergy for a little while now – slightly more than you tend to towards your utilities for failing to deliver basic services – if only because they send out their employees to ring bells for the Salvation Army in the holiday season. It might surprise you, but being married to a queer person (thus being in a queer relationship, even if you don't strongly identify that way; it's complicated), and having an affinity for Syndicalism (best typified by the IWW) does not generally make one well-disposed towards the Salvation Army.

So, I did some quick research. I'm doing this idly, but I do teach research skills. You have to keep your skills sharp, after all.

The first google image search result for “Midwest Values” that wasn’t just those words or something posted by a newspaper in Tennessee. I’m reminded of this recent Citations Needed Episode

In addition to what I found out above, I also determined that Evergy is what is known as an Investor Owned Utility. This, essentially, means that they're a private firm with a regional monopoly. In addition to this, when a hedge fund told them to build more wind power generators or sell, they rejected the idea of selling, declaring a desire to maintain local (but certainly not public) control of the energy company, stating that it has “Midwest Values” (seriously, read the Kansas.com article up above, it's slathered with meaningless pablum and, nauseatingly, makes me agree with a hedge fund).

Apparently, one of these “Midwest Values” includes cronyism: Public Utilities, conceived of as natural monopolies (because it would be hard for two water companies or power companies to operate side-by-side) are managed by a “Public Utilities Commission.” In Missouri and Kansas, these commissions are both appointed by the Governor. Interestingly, to bring it full-circle, New Mexico has a publicly-elected Utilities Commission.

The Missouri Public Service Commission was formed in 1913, largely to manage railways, and gradually took over the management of water, electric, sewer and telephone service. As a body, I can't tell if it was always partisan, but it is obviously a partisan body now: Ryan Silvey, the chairman, is a former republican state senator, as is commissioner Scott T. Rupp, and Commissioner William Kenney. The democrat members are Jason Holsman and Maida Coleman, the former of whom was a staffer for Republican John Ashcroft (better known, nationally, as George W. Bush's Attorney General).

I'm not going to do the legwork to research the parallel commission in Kansas, but knowing what I know about that state, I'm going to guess it's just as bad. Given the pattern of donations from the corporate PAC and the dynamics of its regulation, I would be surprised if this sort of thing weren't happening. Missouri is an awfully regressive state in this way: we're one of the few in the country that has laws on the books specifically forbidding the formation of publicly-owned municipal broadband (something that I've been meaning to make my own personal white whale in this pandemic: it's impossible for students to attend online classes when they have to sit outside a Taco Bell or whatever to access wifi).

All of this comes back around to something that I've been beating a drum about for a while – the things that we need to live have been made horizons of extraction by private interests. The lights that allow you to see at night, the water you drink, the gas that heats your home in the dead of winter: for you, these are necessities. You can't do without them. To the owners, they are a tool that they can use to extract a profit from you.

And if you can’t deliver up resources for extraction, then everything will be done to drive you away.

Under the economic model that we operate within, you are not allowed these necessities unless you can pay for them, and this money will be siphoned up to enrich those who own the apparatus of extraction. They will then use the means that this affords them to ensure that things remain exactly as they are. Even if you're a fan of the free market – which, honestly, I'm not – you can't see this as a fair situation: it's a natural monopoly and, as such, should not be allowed to fall into the hands of a private individual or a small group of the same, because it affords them influence that would allow them to distort that market. If the electrical company or water company can shut off service to you – or use money that you must pay them for use to fund something that you detest – then you don't have the freedom to choose.

The only answer here that makes any sense is democratic, regional control of any utilities that operate in a region, separate from state or municipal management, with proper limits in place on any elected officials to prevent an entrenched managerial class from emerging. This should obviously include the power, water, sewage, and telecommunications utilities. Personally, I think it should include all things necessary for the continuation of human life (add in food, housing, and healthcare), as well as things that have the potential to drastically impact the outcome of one's life (education and criminal justice), but I understand that may be a bridge too far for some people.

I feel that this is a relatively uncontroversial position: the means of continuing human life should not be used to make a profit from people.

The other option is what we have now, under which the power company would leave 100,000 people without electricity on a morning that dropped below -10 degrees Fahrenheit because the grid we have isn't built to withstand the demand placed on it, and yet spends hundreds of thousands of dollars – yearly – on political donations. Or a water utility might pump poisoned water into thousands of homes for years, causing long-term damage to an underserved population that has generational effects. Or a global pandemic results in some people simply not having internet access, creating unequal access to education and employment.

Perhaps I'm too much of an optimist, but it's my opinion that perhaps we shouldn't do that.

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