Socialist candidate demands full investigation about blackout (WSWS)

John Christopher Burton, socialist candidate for California governor, demands full investigation into eastern US blackout
John Christopher Burton
16 August 2003

The failure of the electrical system that has left 50 million people throughout the Northeast and Midwest without power or adequate water supplies demands a full, open and public investigation. One crucial fact has already been demonstrated by the events of the past two days: the economic and social crisis in California is not simply a California question. Rather, it is an expression of a crisis whose scope is national and international. The breakdown of the social infrastructure, with all of its calamitous implications for ordinary people, is an indictment of the existing economic and political system.

It is too early to determine the full extent of the damage—in terms of lost jobs, crippled small businesses, the health and well being of millions of people—that will result from the latest collapse of the energy system in the US. There can, however, be no doubt that many lives will be shattered and others will be lost.

Whatever the immediate cause of the blackout, it is bound up with the systematic deregulation of the energy industry and removal of any form of serious public control over the corporate giants that dominate it. The same conditions that enabled Enron and other companies to drive up their profits by socially destructive and criminal means, plunging California into a nightmare of rolling blackouts and brownouts and depleting the state treasury, remain in place. Plant and equipment have been left to age and decay, and any form of rational and socially responsible organization has been sacrificed to the anarchic workings of the market and the drive of individual corporations and big investors to enlarge their personal fortunes.

America’s biggest-ever power failure must be added to the destabilization of California’s economy as an object lesson of the insanity of a system that subordinates the needs of modern society—with all of its vast and complex requirements—to the amassing of private wealth and corporate profit.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/aug2003/elec-a16.shtml