Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

The failure of energy deregulation

Read this lead sentence from Tom Johnson’s piece in today’s Star-Ledger and tell me that New Jersey’s energy deregulation program is operating as advertised:

For the second consecutive year, New Jersey consumers will see double-digit increases in their electricity bills come June.

The numbers look like this:

Jersey Central Power & Light customers will see their bills jump by 14 percent, or $13.30 a month, pushing the average monthly bill to $106.72. Customers of Public Service Electric & Gas, the state’s largest utility, will be hit with an 11.7 percent increase, or $10.86 more a month, increasing the average monthly tab to $103.65.

The Asbury Park Press reports that the increase will fall under the microscope of state Public Advocate Ronald Chen:

State Public Advocate Ronald K. Chen said his office is commited to examining
the state’s system for buying electricity.

The “announcement by the Board of Public Utilities that there is yet another substantial increase in the cost of electricity in New Jersey is going to hit families and business hard,” Chen said in a statement.

The issue, at base, is whether the deregulation plan crafted several years ago is the boon to consumers that its sponsors claimed at the time.

That was the question I raised nearly four years ago in a Dispatches column, and it remains the questions today. My utility bills have jumped by about 50 percent over the last half dozen years, driven partly by the steep increase in natural gas, but also by the end of electricty rate caps.

New Jersey’s approach has been a disaster for the collective pocketbook of consumers. The debate needs to be reopened and reregulation placed back on the table. A deregulated marketplace might be the best approach — though I doubt it — but the system we are working with now certainly is not.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Remember the nuclear option

I know I was in the minority on this point among liberals and progressives, but back when the Senate was preparing to vote on several Bush court nominees I wrote a column calling for the end of the Senate filibuster.

My argument was a simple one: The filibuster thwarts, rather than defends, democracy, giving the minority too much power over the Senate.

The filibuster is, as the self-professed “liberal Democrat” Timothy Noah wrote … on the online magazine Slate, a conservative instrument designed to thwart the will of the majority. The Los Angeles Times, in an editorial, echoes this: “The filibuster is a reactionary instrument that goes too far in empowering a minority of senators,” the paper wrote.

At the time, Democrats were threatening to use the method to prevent some noxious Bush nominees from rising to the federal bench. Liberals were calling loudly for all Democrats to stand firm, their 45-vote bloc allowing them to prevent the majority from closing out debate, which would mean that no vote could be taken and the judicial nominees would remain in limbo. (Disclosure: I had the same argument in an earlier column, before thinking the issue through.)

Republicans were livid and were calling for the “nuclear option” (a poor choice of words in a time of war), in which the party would just change the rules and eliminate the maneuver. Thanks to a group of so-called moderates, it never happened. A compromise was reached and some of the nominees were confirmed.

The compromise ended two debates — one on the judges and the other on the legitimacy of the filibuster.

The filibuster is back in the news these days, as the Republicans, now in the minority, are resorting to the very tactic they decried just two years ago in an effort to prevent debate over a nonbinding resolution opposing the Bush surge plan for Iraq.

Democrats should take note and remember their history. They may have successfully used the filibuster to keep some nominees from getting through, but conservatives also have been successful in the past — Southern Democrats used it from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s to derail civil rights legislation.

Basically, if there were no filibuster, the Senate would be debating war and not whether to debate.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.