USA: Price Gouging the Poor to Death

With fully a third of the American population now living on less than $21,000 a year and the cost of living continuing to skyrocket, it should come as no surprise that basic necessities like nutritious food, decent housing, medical care, and winter heating are priced outside the means of so many.

In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, both working families and the unemployed – whose numbers continue to defy economists’ calculations – are feeling the pinch of benefit cuts, wage freezes, forced furlough days, and austerity measures designed to gut social programs and government aid. With fully a third of the American population now living on less than $21,000 a year and the cost of living continuing to skyrocket, it should come as no surprise that basic necessities like nutritious food, decent housing, medical care, and winter heating are priced outside the means of so many. In the middle of one of the coldest winters in decades, it is a crime that so many are struggling just to keep warm – even as for-profit utility companies report record profits.

The number of US households seeking assistance with heating and cooling bills in the past year increased by 25% over 2008, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association report for 2009. Literally millions of households across the nation have received notice this year that punitive fines will be charged to their accounts for non-payment and millions more (over 300,000 in New York alone) have had their heat or power shut off as energy and heating assistance programs’ funding has been axed in one state after another. Heating assistance is yet another victim of city and state budget cuts and one more way the working class is being made to pay for the bosses’ economic crisis – sometimes with tragic results.

In what is becoming a terrifyingly familiar story, newspapers and media outlets all over the US have issued one report after another of families who have lost their homes and even their lives to fires caused by the desperate measures which many are being forced to resort to in order to keep warm. For example, the elderly family who died in a house fire in Detroit earlier this winter, likely sparked by the overtaxed space heaters they were forced to use to beat the freezing temperatures. Or the three children who died last year in Toledo in a house fire, caused by the candles the family had to use to light their home since their power had been shut off. Or the 63-year-old woman and her 90-year-old mother who were found in their home dead of frostbite and exposure in Kalamazoo. The list goes on and on.

All this has come despite the multi-billion dollar aid package promised by Congress to help state and local municipalities provide relief to those at risk or already suffering utility shutoffs. Why? Because throwing a little money at the problem simply isn’t enough, and even that is being taken away now. In several states, assistance programs are cutting staff in response to budget shortfalls, and eligibility requirements to receive aid have tightened up at precisely the time when more people need help. Even the amount of government money available to each qualifying grant applicant has been reduced.

It seems that at the exact moment Fox News pundits are defending the “rights” of corporations to pay out massive bonuses to their executives, America’s elderly, poor and working class are being told to tighten their belts, yet again! Meanwhile, President Obama says of JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs: “I don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system.”

So what is the solution to all of this? The skyrocketing rates and heartless practice of shutting off utilities is a development of the trend over the past 30 years for local and state government to privatize formerly municipal utilities, selling them to the highest corporate bidders for a profit, then de-regulate the industry at the behest of the same corporate lobbyists and big campaign contributors.

As we have explained previously in the pages of Socialist Appeal, the deregulation of the utilities sector is “a direct attack on working people.” Those words ring all the more true today, and reminds one of the adage, “you can’t control what you don’t own.”

Energy is indeed a necessity, and for-profit corporations must not be allowed to profiteer on the backs of beleaguered working class consumers.

For this reason, the Workers International League calls for the drastic reduction of energy costs through the nationalization of the energy companies as part of a democratically planned economy to care for human needs – not profits – which will ensure everyone has affordable access to gas, electricity, heating oil and other basic necessities.