While gas prices remained above $3 per gallon and the oil companies were making the biggest profits ever off of enraged motorists and homeowners, California and New York were gripped by electrical power failures and blackouts this summer, the peak electricity demand season. This is the result of the electric power deregulation at the federal and state level that Enron achieved a decade ago, leaving consumers with higher prices and questionable reliability.

Electrical utilities were heavily regulated on the state level before deregulation took place under both Democratic and Republican administrations, spearheaded by Enron. These utilities, while not completely publicly-owned, had a legal obligation to serve all consumers and to reinvest some of their profits in maintaining and improving electrical power generation and transmission. As a result, the U.S. had a relatively reliable system of electricity.

This system was smashed as corporate raiders like Enron demanded deregulation in order to let the “market” regulate the power system through competition. The rest is history. Since 2000, the Northeast and Midwest as well as California have faced serious blackouts. States like California were blackmailed by Enron, which jacked up prices. With regulation removed, Wall Street and the power industry refused to invest money into low-rate-of-return investments like transmission lines and distribution networks.

Like other industries that were deregulated, decent jobs as well as reliability were destroyed. Con Edison of New York eliminated a large part of their experienced, unionized workforce. With reliability budgets slashed in order to deliver higher profits for investors and Wall Street, faulty or antiquated equipment like transformers became more likely to be replaced after, rather than before, they were damaged.

Another blow to the deregulated electrical utilities was that the system was originally designed to provide electricity locally. Enron and other energy broker companies made billions out of trading electrical power over huge distances, putting increasing strain on the system. Instead of increased efficiency via the market, the inefficiencies have increased in the search for profit. The bipartisan energy bill passed by Congress last summer stuck consumers with funding $100 billion for construction of new long-distance (and extremely inefficient) transmission lines that serve the big energy marketers.

This is what the giant energy companies get for their $47 million in campaign contributions to Congress since 2001 (virtually equally distributed between the two business parties). Consumers and workers in the utility industry are the victims of the policies of deregulation and so-called market efficiency.

Instead of being passive onlookers to these scandals, it would be a great way for the labor movement to show itself defending working families by launching a massive campaign to demand profiteers like the big criminal shareholders of Enron (or Exxon and the other oil giants) have their assets confiscated and be brought under public ownership with democratic workers’ control and management, accountable to consumers rather than Wall Street profiteers.

This should be part of a program to demand that the states and cities bring under public control electrical generation assets that were privatized during deregulation; the massive profits of the energy and oil industry should be reinvested in clean energy like wind and solar power, as well as in education of the public about energy efficiency.

This can be linked to a demand to take profit out of all vital services, and return to the idea of providing first-class public services like healthcare, child care, education, public transport, telecommunications, and energy. Such a program on a nationwide basis, alongside the need for massive rebuilding of blighted urban areas and environmental cleanup, could create millions of unionized, well-paid, secure jobs.

The only way such a program can be achieved is for working people to run independent candidates who would reject big business and defend a program that represents the interests of working people: a democratic socialist alternative to the chaos, inefficiency, and theft ingrained in the capitalist system.