> RMS is actuallly liberal> and the fact he doesn't talks about private propertyhttps://www.stallman.org/archives/2003-may-aug.html#22%20August%202003%20(Kucinich)>Dennis Kucinich, who is now running for president, started his political career by opposing privatization of electric power in Cleveland. If you were blacked out last week, vote for Kucinich! https://web.archive.org/web/20030821013031/http://kucinich.us:80/powertothepeople.htm""" […] In 1992, investor owned utilities pushed the Democratic House to pass HR776 which granted electric utilities broad powers. The bill was supposed to restructure the electric utility industry to spur competition.
Utilities used deregulation to affect a series of mergers limiting competition. In order to accelerate profits, cost cutting ensued, involving the layoff of thousands of utility company employees, including some who where responsible for maintenance of generation, transmission, and distribution systems. A number of investor-owned utilities stopped investing in the maintenance and repair of their own equipment, and, instead, cut costs to enhance the value of their stock rather than spending money to enhance the value of their service.
[…]
Early in my career, in the 1970s, I watched FirstEnergy's predecessor, CEI, as it was hard at work trying to undermine the ability of the City of Cleveland to operate its own municipal electric system. CEI conducted a tireless crusade to attempt to put the city's publicly owned system, Muny Light, out of business. Muny Light competed against CEI in a third of the city and provided municipal power customers with savings on their electric bill of 20-30 percent. It also provided cheaper electricity for 76 city facilities and thousands of Cleveland street lights, saving taxpayers millions of dollars each year.
An antitrust review revealed that CEI had committed numerous violations of federal antitrust law in its attempt to put Muny Light out of business. CEI worked behind the scenes to block Muny Light from purchasing power from other power companies. CEI became the only power company Muny Light could buy from. At that point, CEI sharply increased and sometimes tripled the cost of purchase power to Muny Light. And, as a result, Muny Light began to lose money.
CEI used Muny Light's weakened operational and financial condition (which they created) as evidence of the public system's lack of viability and as proof that the only way the people of Cleveland could have reliable power was for the city to sell its electric system to CEI.
Throughout this period, the Cleveland media, which received substantial advertising revenues from CEI, crusaded against the city's ownership of a municipal electric system. In 1976, after years of work to undermine Muny Light, CEI finally succeeded in getting the mayor and the council of Cleveland to agree to sell Muny Light, giving CEI a monopoly on electric power in the Cleveland area and enabling CEI to greatly expand its rate base to get more revenue to pay for its rapidly mounting expenses associated with building nuclear power plants.
[…]
The Muny Light issue came to a head on December 15, 1978, when Ohio's largest bank, Cleveland Trust, the 33rd largest bank in America at that time, told me that
they would not renew the city's credit on 15 million dollars worth of loans taken out by the previous administration unless I would agree to sell Cleveland's municipally owned utility to CEI.
On that day, by that time, the sale of Muny Light was being promoted by both Cleveland newspapers, virtually all of the radio and TV stations in town, the entire business community, all the banks, both political parties, and several unions, as well as a majority of the Cleveland City Council. All I had to do was to sign my name to legislation and the system would have sold and the city credit "protected."
The chairman of Cleveland Trust even offered 50 million dollars of new credit if I would agree to sell Muny Light. """