Frank Rich is right

I had just gotten back from a poetry reading at the library — Emanuel di Pasquale, Frank Finale and Sander Zulauf read as part of a series I organized at the South Brunswick Library for the township Arts Commission — and was going to watch last week’s “Grey’s Anatomy” on tape. While rewinding, however, I came across Thursday’s episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which my wife tapes everyday.

If featured Frank Rich talking about his new book, “The Greatest Story Ever Sold” and the concept of truth and the health of our democracy.

Check it out.

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

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

The cost of electricity

It looks like the promise that electricity deregulation would lead us all to smaller bills and better service is finally being shown as the false promise it always had been.

The New York Times, in the first of a multi-part series on electricity deregulation, is pretty blunt in its assessment:

A decade after competition was introduced in their industries, long-distance phone rates had fallen by half, air fares by more than a fourth and trucking rates by a fourth. But a decade after the federal government opened the business of generating electricity to competition, the market has produced no such decline.

Instead, more rate increase requests are pending now than ever before, said Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, the association for the investor-owned utilities that provide about 60 percent of the nation’s power. The investor-owned electric utility industry published a June report entitled “Why Are Electricity Prices Increasing?”

This is no surprise to those of us who saw the deregulation of electricity as a dangerous gamble in the first place. When Congress began working on ways to open the industry up to competition, critics pointed out how easy it would be to game the system (enter Enron) and how low-income consumers were likely to be left behind. New Jersey made efforts to protect low-income consumers and allowed aggregation, but not on the scale that would have been necessary to make it worthwhile and with enough restrictions that it was destined to fail.

So only a couple of companies have entered the market and prices have inched up, with most consumers staying with their longterm providers.

And this is in the Northeast in a state that has a stable power grid and is unlikely to face the kind of problems that the Southwest has dealt with (again, see Enron).

There is no good answer to all of this, unfortunately, though it is important that we stop looking at the provision of electricity the way we look at the sales of sports coats. Electricity — like healthcare — is a necessity in the modern world (don’t believe me, talk to the people from Queens who were without power ealier this year). Leaving it to an unfettered market invites instability and leaves consumers at the mercy of investors.

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

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

The nuclear weapons game

I’m not sure that there was any other recourse but to impose sanctions on North Korea, but I’m not confident that they will work and I am sure that the so-called military option would be a deadly mistake.

It might seem fruitless at the moment to cast blame in all of this, especially given the history — both North Korea and the Clinton administration failed to meet the requirements of their own agreement, but the Bush administration exacerbated the situation with its rhetoric and its petty decision not to sit face to face with North Korean leaders. Granted, Kim Jong-il is not particularly stable and trusting him would be foolish, but public condemnations and inclusion in the “Axis of Evil” only inflamed the situation and created more of an incentive for the dictator to move forward with weapons.

Perhaps more important in all of this is the seeming willingness of President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the administration to use American nukes. This kind of public stance — on several occasions they have talked about using nukes — by the world’s sole superpower can only leave those less-powerful nations identified as dangerous (Iran, North Korea, Syria, any Arab nation not willing to toe the administration’s crooked line) looking for an equalizer. That’s why it makes it difficult to argue with the North Korean ambassador when he calls the Security Council’s action a “double standard” (this is not an endorsement of the North Korean position, only an observation).

Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, said this year that “the international community seems almost to be sleepwalking” down a path where states, after long living without nuclear arms, now feel compelled to revisit their logic.

He warned of a new arms race — not one of superpowers, but of regional powers. “Perhaps most damaging of all,” he concluded, “there is also a perception that the possession of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction offers the best protection against being attacked.”

The goal needs to be not only nonproliferation — which means stopping the spread of nukes to new nations and possibly to terrorist groups — but a pulling back from the precipice, a relegation of nuclear weapons to the dustbins of history. I admit that the technology will always be there, but an international effort designed to make the world nuclear-free, while probably little more than wishful thinking, is something that could change the way all of us think about the weapons. The president is right when he denounces the spread of nukes to rogue nations, but he is wrong not to realize that all who seek nukes and all who have them and those who contemplate using them are rogue nations. It is a double standard and one that only encourages their spread.

Only the United States can lead on this issue, because we are the biggest nuclear power on the block. It is up to us to demonstrate our own resolve by reducing our stocks of weapons and stating publicly that they will not be used except in the most extreme of defensive circumstances — and not even then. We can help remove the need for the equalizer from the world stage.

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

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.